Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

Soon they reached the ruined temple, and Quelamia stepped inside briefly to look at the pit, but quickly returned. She looked quite troubled-which, for her, meant merely a line appearing briefly on her forehead-and directed Krailash to walk some distance away from the structure. “Stay close to me, dragonborn,” she said, raising her staff. “I would not have you hurt.”

The eladrin lifted her staff, and a wind rose from nowhere, making her long hair blow back and her pale green robe flutter. The trees towering above them groaned, and Krailash looked up in alarm as the canopy of leaves and branches directly overhead began to blacken and turn to smoke, revealing a nearly perfect circle of blue sky as neat as a hole cut in a sheet of paper. Quelamia mouthed syllables that seemed to crash and rumble as they left her mouth, less words than the sound of volcanic rumbles and eruptions, and points of reddish light appeared in the sky. The lights glowed brighter and grew in size, and a high-pitched whistle like a dozen boiling teakettles commenced as they approached. Krailash instinctively crouched and lifted his shield before him when the first flaming chunk of anvil-sized rock smashed into the roof of the temple with a deafening boom. The trees all around them rocked back in the wind of the first impact, but Krailash felt nothing, and as he lowered the shield he could see particles of debris pattering harmlessly off the invisible dome of force that protected Quelamia and himself. Still she chanted, and more meteors streaked down, a storm of burning rock that smashed the temple into rubble. Krailash allowed himself to gaze in wonder, enjoying the sight of such powerful magic unleashed: better than the fireworks shot off above the gulf in Delzimmer to celebrate the Feast of the Moon Festival.

After a few moments the falling stars stopped coming, the unnatural wind blowing Quelamia’s hair ceased, and she lowered her staff, gazing at the devastation before them. Where the temple had stood was only a depression in the earth, filled with rubble. Quelamia approached, head cocked, and then slammed the base of her staff into the ground, where it stuck. Krailash knew from past experience that nothing would move that staff, unless Quelamia willed it; the branch was as a solidly rooted as a five-thousand-year-old oak. The wizard held out her hands before her, palms facing each other at shoulder width apart, and then gradually pushed her hands together.

The earth on either side of the temple moved together as if pushed by great unseen hands, huge humps of dirt and rock and broken bits of city piling up and sliding sideways and filling the shallow indentation where the temple had been. Quelamia plucked her staff from the ground and strode around the temple site, dragging her staff’s base in the dirt and scoring a line of charred rock that circled the area entirely. Once the circle was closed, she nodded. “There. Nothing will come out of that hole again. Of course, there are other openings-the Underdark has a thousand mouths, all hungry-but I doubt there are any so large, or so close to us. I worry less about lone monsters wriggling through cracks in the rock. That hole was large enough to let through a legion of duergar or drow.”

“And to take down an entire village.”

“Mmm,” Quelamia said. “Yes. You said they raided a human settlement?”

Krailash nodded. “Only the girl child was left behind.”

“Interesting. There are yuan-ti nearby-I can sense them, or at least the old and ravenous things they keep in the pits below their ruined settlements-but I’m surprised to hear there were humans.”

Krailash shrugged. “You know humans. They settle everywhere , even places more sensible races know to avoid.”

The eladrin nodded. “That they do. And yet here we are, following a human into just such a place. What does that say about us?”

“It says that even sensible races have to make a living,” Krailash said, and the eladrin gave him one of her rare and fleeting smiles.

The shaman’s spirit companion, a dire boar the particular color of the underside of a threatening storm cloud, nosed its way silently through the undergrowth, nose snuffling, obviously searching for something.

“Up here,” Zaltys said, and loosed an arrow.

The shaft of the arrow stuck in the soft jungle ground a foot away from the boar. The feathered fletching of the arrow, taken from a colorful jungle bird, stuck up jauntily.

The spirit boar groaned in a weary, put-upon way, and stepped closer to the base of the tree where Zaltys was perched. The boar jerked its head back, toward the direction of camp, its intent clear: follow me.

“What does mother want now?” Zaltys nocked another arrow. It was surprisingly difficult to shoot straight down with any accuracy, but she’d been practicing, and the next shot speared a wriggling blue-and-red serpent as it slithered past, pinning its head to the earth.

The pig snorted, scratched at the earth-leaving long furrows in the dirt, because the spirit companion was only insubstantial when its mistress Alaia wanted it to be-and gesturing again with its head.

“This is supposed to be my free time,” Zaltys grumbled. She unstrung her bow and clambered down from the branches of the vine-encrusted tree, dropping to the ground and bending to retrieve her arrows. She was aware, intellectually, that her family was so wealthy that she could fire arrows into the air for a year without stopping and never put a noticeable dent in the annual ammunition budget, but in practice, she could no more leave a good arrow lying on the ground than she could go a tenday without sleeping. Besides, she was a member of the Travelers, that branch of the Serrat family that actually went out into the world every year. They weren’t wasteful and decadent like the year-round city dwellers who made up the Trading Serrats, or focused solely on results without consideration for expenditures like the spies and enforcers of the Guardian Serrats (whom most of the family secretly called the Cutthroat Serrats, though they only cut the throats of those who threatened the family. Or might threaten it someday. Or who got in the way of the natural flow of commerce). The Travelers spent months in the field, ensuring the continued health and wealth of the family’s core business in the most direct way, and they had to be smarter, thriftier, more efficient, and more responsible than the rest of the family.

Or so her mother had taught her, and after sixteen years as the heir apparent of the Traveling branch of the family, Zaltys had learned her lessons well. “Lead on, pigmother,” she said, and Alaia’s spirit companion set off toward the camp. Zaltys looked around the jungle as she walked, but she didn’t see any bodyguards lurking in the bushes. That either meant she’d finally convinced Krailash she didn’t need protecting, or he’d assigned bodyguards who were better than usual at being stealthy. Probably the latter.

They were almost two tendays from the city, just on the outskirts of the jungle, and camped a good distance from the haunted city of Ammathtar, so the only threats were occasional jungle beasts. The defenses around the camp weren’t as elaborate as they would eventually become, for there was just one outer ring of supply and transport carts, surrounding an inner ring where the more high-ranking principals of the camp lived. The laborers were left to pitch their own tents, entirely too close to the animal pens for olfactory comfort, Zaltys thought. She went past the elaborate treehouse on wheels-grown, rather than carved-that was the wizard Quelamia’s home, pausing to knock the living trunk with her knuckles for luck. She squinted at the squat black carriage where the psion Glory lurked when she wasn’t needed, which was most of the time. The majority of other inhabitants of the caravan couldn’t see Glory’s wagon-or Glory herself-at all, or, more accurately, forgot what they’d seen immediately afterward, but Zaltys was one of the few Glory was forbidden to mentally handicap, since she needed to understand all the workings of the caravan in order to take over its operations someday. Zaltys slapped the windchimes hanging by Glory’s door, setting up a clattering-the chimes were bone, not metal, carved in patterns that became more disturbing the longer you looked. Glory’s door opened, and the tiefling peered out suspiciously, then sighed when she saw Zaltys. “I thought you were playing in the woods all afternoon,” she said.