Venom in Her Veins (14 page)

And began to wonder if she was having a dream,
that
dream, because apart from her headless guide, it was exactly like her recurring nightmares: walking down the path, toward the pit. The stone grate was more moss-encrusted, chipped, and weathered than it was in her dreams, but otherwise it was the same, a circle easily a dozen feet across with a trapdoor of old, rusted metal set in the center. The shadow snake slithered into one of the holes in the grate—a hole far too small for it, too small for anything bigger than a human finger, but the ghosts of shadow snakes were apparently untroubled by mere physical reality.

Did she dare open the trapdoor? She stepped onto the grate, testing it with her foot first and finding it reassuringly solid. Was it, perhaps, some other entry to the Underdark? Were the visions a message from some god or another, meant to help her save her family?

“So hungry. So thirsty.”

That voice didn’t sound inside her head, but from the depths of the pit. It was a dry, dusty, rattling voice. “Who’s there?” Zaltys said.

“Child of Zehir,” the voice said. “You have neglected your old king. I hunger, and my hungers hunger. Where are the people?”

She’d asked her mother who Zehir was, the first time the name was spoken in her dreams, and her mother had frowned. “A god of darkness and deception,” she said, “beloved of poisoners and assassins. Nothing you need to concern yourself with.” The family deity was Waukeen, goddess of merchants and trade, though Alaia also kept a shrine to Mielikki, goddess of the forest and of rangers. As a shaman, she had little use for gods in general, since her connection to the primal magic of the world was rather more direct, but as she said, a little reverence couldn’t hurt, and shows of piety reassured the workers. But they were good deities—or at least deities unopposed to goodness—while Zehir …

“Why do you call me a child of Zehir?” she said. “I don’t worship … that.”

“You are an instrument of the god, as am I,” the voice whispered. “You even come to me arrayed in shadow. You are death from the dark. You are poison and revenge. Set me free, and we will conquer. Set me free, and I will raise you high. Set me free, and we—”

Zaltys fled, running away from the pit. Krailash knew a lot about the yuan-ti—she gathered some of them, far away from here, had once killed a number of his friends—and he spoke, sometimes, of the serpentfolk
who’d once lived in this jungle, and the horrible god-monsters called anathemas that they kept trapped in pits even as they venerated them. The voice must belong to such a beast, or something even worse, and she couldn’t let it hypnotize her or confuse her or fill her head with lies. No doubt it whispered to anyone who came close enough, and it was surely the source of her dreams, as well. Perhaps being a native of this jungle, however long since removed, made her unusually susceptible to the creature’s powers. But she was strong; she was an heir to the Serrat family. She could not be tricked that way.

When she finally reached the false grave, shaken by her encounter with something from her dreams, she found someone waiting for her. “Julen,” she said. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.”

Julen sighed and drove down the shovel again. “Of course it’s dangerous. Just walking through the jungle to get here was dangerous—I trod on something that tried to eat my boot. But here I am. I can’t let you go alone. I’m surprised I got here before you, though.”

Unwilling to mention the snake and the pit, she said, “I had to write a note before I left. I told you, this isn’t your problem, I’m going to save my family—”

“You’re my family,” he said. “So your family is also my family. ‘This-and-thus,’ as my father says, whenever he wants me to understand something is self-evident.”

“My mother will kill me if anything happens to you.”

“Your mother will have my father kill
me
if she finds out I let you go into a nasty hole in the ground without trying to stop you. So take me along and let me keep trying to talk you out of this.”

Zaltys crossed her arms. “No. I won’t let you go. Not even if I have to tie you up and leave you here.”

“You don’t have any choice, Cousin,” he said cheerfully, lying on his belly beside the hole, peering into the depths and probing around with the shovel. “You can’t tie me up for long. I’m trained by the Guardians—we’re tough to tie down. And even if you could, say if you knocked me unconscious first, you can’t leave me asleep
or
tied up out in the jungle. I’d be eaten by something. And if you try to leave without me, I’ll start yelling, and the scouts will hear me, and come over, and Krailash will haul you out by the scruff of your neck.”

“This is blackmail!”

“Yes.” He rose and tossed the shovel aside. “I’m blackmailing you into letting me
help
you. I’m a monster. Listen, Zaltys. What do you know about the Underdark?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, then shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s deep. It’s big. It’s dark. Wet. Dank. Slimy. Drow live down there, and other things, I guess. Derro, apparently.”

“Right. You don’t know anything. But you know my brother Malon makes all our trade arrangements with the dwarves and the drow, he’s been down underground
loads
of times, and I’ve heard all about it, not even including what I read in the books and scrolls my father’s forced on me. I know a few things you could stand to find out. What do you know about glowstone?”

“Stone. That glows.” She heard the petulance in her own voice, and hated it.

“Ha. And wormrock? It’s not rock made out of worms, I’m afraid. How about Ghaunadaur, the Elder Eye?”

“Some kind of monster god, isn’t he?” she said, vaguely remembering horror stories told by other kids. “Lives underground?”

“He’s one of the gods worshiped in the Underdark. Not that I expect us to run into
him
, or Lolth either, but it’s good to know about the presiding deities, don’t you think? How about darkrock? The Upperdark and the Lowerdark? Purple worms? Fungal altars? Doomlight crystals? Aboleths?” He shuddered. “I
hope
those are nothing but stories and legends, but if they’re not …”

“Fine, you know more than I do. Though I don’t know how much things you learned from books or stories will help us in the dark.”

“They can hardly hurt us,” he said. “And I’ll note you’re saying ‘us,’ now, too.” He gestured to the hole. “I made a better opening to the cavern underneath. What do you say we lower a rope and get this over with?”

She stepped closer to her cousin, torn between frustration and affection. “Julen, I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Then we’re in agreement.” He touched her cheek and grinned. “I don’t want me to get hurt, either.”

Zaltys went down the rope first, followed by Julen. They couldn’t see anything much at all, and Julen whispered, “First decision: do we make a light? It might call attention to us.”

“We won’t get far if we can’t see. And if the light does bring a derro to us, so much the better—we can force it to tell us where the slaves are kept.” She took a sunrod
from her pack and struck the golden tip against the rough stone floor. Light flared at the end of the iron rod, illuminating the space around them. The sunrods were an alchemical marvel, or else magical—she wasn’t sure. The light they cast was steadier than torchlight, but sunrods were less useful than torches for setting enemies or their dwellings on fire. You couldn’t have everything.

The cavern was the size of the great hall in the family meeting house, full of rubble and dust. The shovel Julen had lost earlier was on the ground. He folded the shovel and tied it to the outside of his pack. It was unwieldy, but Zaltys thought it was a good idea—they might need to be able to dig down here.

“There,” Julen said, pointing. A tunnel, partially obscured by fallen rocks, led off from one end of the cavern—the end that led back toward the caravan site. “I wonder if we’ll end up underneath our own campsite?” he said.

“We’ll see,” she said, and led the way, holding her sunrod aloft. They moved a few rocks aside, widening the opening, but once they stepped into the tunnel, it wasn’t as claustrophobic as Zaltys had expected. “Looks like an old mine shaft,” she said, pointing out the squared-off shape of the passage.

“Should have brought one of the dwarf craftsmen from the camp. They know about mines.”

“I don’t think there’s much to know, except: a long time ago there was a mine. This passage was used for something else more recently, though. A passageway for slavers, coming up from wherever. Is there, I don’t know, a derro city?” The notion seemed outrageous. They were in a
hole
in the ground.

“There are cities down here, supposedly, but a lot deeper than this,” Julen said doubtfully. “The Underdark isn’t mapped—some say it can’t be mapped, that tunnels are constantly collapsing and new tunnels being formed by purple worms and umber hulks and intelligent creatures excavating passages. But there are three, sort of,
regions
. The Upperdark is the part of the Underdark you can reach from the surface world, or from mineshafts and basements. And while there are monsters there, the drow and derro and other people—if you can call them people—who live down here don’t like to settle so close to the surface. They come up sometimes to escape danger, or to, ah, forage.”

“Or take slaves,” Zaltys said.

“Yes. But their settlements are in the Middledark. Below that is the Lowerdark, and the books I read didn’t say much about that, apart from the fact that it’s deep, and big, and full of terrible things. As for derro cities, I’m sure they have settlements, but I’m not sure about cities.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’re mad. Rainer said so, and the books agree. Can an insane race build cities? Keep a city alive? It seems impossible.”

“Mad, huh? Then they won’t put up an organized defense, although they must have organized a little if they do slave raids. What else do you know about them, since we’ll be fighting them soon, like as not?”

“I wasn’t researching them in particular,” Julen admitted. “But, let’s see … Some say they’re the offspring of men and dwarves. Others say they’re a race of their own
that became terribly degenerate and offended the gods, only to be cast down into the Underdark for their transgressions—whatever those were. Some of them worship aberrations. Things that came here from some other place. You’ve heard of the Far Realm?”

“Some plane or another, right?” Zaltys had never paid much attention to the tutors when they started going on about the other planes of existence. Why should she care about anything like that, when her tutors knew less about the interior of the jungle than Zaltys did herself? If they were so ignorant of
their
world, how could they know anything about worlds entirely distant?

“Ye-es.” Julen sounded doubtful. “I guess so. But it’s a realm of monsters beyond ordinary monsters, creatures that claw and tear at reality itself. I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds bad. Sometimes creatures from that world make it to this world, and terrible things happen. Supposedly the Underdark is more full of such creatures than most, and even though the derro are despised by all the other intelligent races down here—drow, duergar, everyone—they sometimes ally themselves with creatures from the Far Realm. Like aboleths. Such aberrations tend to live way down deep, though—or else we’d see their influence on the surface world more.”

“You think we’ll have to go that deep?” Zaltys hadn’t really thought that far ahead. She’d thought, if Rainer made it back to the surface, the slaves couldn’t be
that
far away, but Julen said the old guard had wandered for years in the darkness, so who could say? “I can track anything,” she said, peering at the tunnel as they walked onward and—increasingly—downward. “But there’s just
nothing to track. I don’t think anyone’s come through here in years. There’s no sign of—”

“Life,” Julen said weakly.

They’d reached the end of the tunnel, and discovered another room, that one a hub of sorts with mineshafts branching off in half-a-dozen different directions. A small wooden table sat in the center of the room, scattered with bits of bone and shards of metal beside a neatly coiled black whip. They entered cautiously, looking around. “Someone has been here, much more recently,” she said, noting a few wooden bowls crusted with old—but not ancient—food.

“The mines,” Julen said. “I don’t know who built them, if they’re a remnant of one of the old jungle empires or something built by dwarves or duergar, but the derro are using them as shortcuts to the surface. The mineshaft that opens close to the terazul fields was sealed with rubble, so they stopped using it, but these tunnels must lead to other places, all over the jungle. I bet Rainer made his way up here, and went down one of these. They could go for miles, but they must reach the air and light eventually.”

“So how do the derro get here?” She looked around the cavern, and found, under a pile of old rags, the edge of a metal trapdoor. Zaltys stared at it, thinking of the trapdoor over the anathema’s pit, until Julen noticed her.

“Guess that’s our door to the deep. Or the middle, anyway. We might be able to track the slavers this way, don’t you think? Surely a big crowd of derro crashing through leaves traces you can follow?”