Venom in Her Veins (34 page)

“Voo. Geen. Ortals.” Krailash’s face was smashed, and he was trying to stand up, with Alaia doing her best to hold him down. The fact that she, a hundred-and-ten-pound human, managed to hold a three-hundred-pound dragonborn down suggested his injuries were grave.

“Mother, heal him, please,” Zaltys said, “he’s suffering.”

She shook her head. “I can’t, Zaltys, I wish I could. My powers have, ah … It’s complicated. If we can get him to the surface—”

“Ortals!” Krailash tried to shout, and blood spurted from the remains of his mouth. His eyes were wide and intent.

“Is he saying ‘portals’?” Julen said.

“Probably,” the Slime King said. Zaltys turned, and Iraska was there, holding the arrow that should have killed her in her hand. All the portals above the field and over the settlement had somehow formed together into a single vast orb, which hovered just behind her, big as a manor house. The yuan-ti in the field were cowering and covering their heads, hiding from its terrible blue-green light.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Iraska snapped the crystalline head off the arrow and slipped it into her sleeve, then broke the arrowshaft in her hands, dropping the pieces. “You shot me with a shard of the Living Gate, which once formed a wall between the realms of madness and the Astral Sea.
Impressive. But that crystal kills aberrations—not necessarily mortals. All you did was banish my balhannoth. Which was a bit like halfway dying myself. I hadn’t realized how deep into my body and my being its tendrils had extended. But that’s the Far Realm for you. So subtle and insidious it makes the cunning of Zehir seem like a brass band falling down the stairs in comparison. Shame you wasted the arrow, Zaltys. If you’d loosed it into my portal, I bet it would have closed up.” She walked closer, the gate hovering behind her, and Julen threw a knife, but the portal flared bluer, and a rosy pink tentacle lashed out of the portal and dashed the blade aside. Even with her balhannoth dead, Iraska still had the support of creatures in the Far Realm.

“That was my last dagger,” Julen said quietly. “Oh, well. Good effort, everyone.”

“You can still join me, Zaltys. Turn on these fools. You can be a hero, the sole survivor of the massacre that killed the rest of the Travelers. I can show you the pathways of power. I don’t want to let my friends from the Far Realm come through this portal just yet. We haven’t quite come to terms, and they’d much rather emerge in a more populated place anyway, like Delzimmer. Especially since your family has been preparing the way all these years by poisoning so many citizens with terazul flowers, turning the addicts into unwitting pawns of the realm of madness, just waiting to be activated. When we invade, the taint in their blood will transform them into aberrations.”

Zaltys looked at her mother, eyes wide—the terazul were connected to the Far Realm? Alaia wouldn’t meet her gaze.

Iraska went on. “They’re gluttonous, you see, and prefer a larger meal, and more chaos. But if you force my hand, I’ll open the gates now. Well?”

“Run, Zaltys,” Alaia said. “Use your armor, slip through shadows. Get to the surface. Get the Guardians. Tell them to avenge us.”

“There’s another way,” Zaltys said, and jumped at Iraska.

Only to fall on her face when Krailash seized her ankle with one of his hands. He spoke, and though the words were a bit mushy coming from his ruined face, she could understand him: “My duty.”

The dragonborn heaved himself from the cavern wall, axe in hand, and barreled straight for Iraska. Her eyes widened, and a tentacle licked from the portal, but he swung his axe almost casually and severed it. Krailash struck Iraska with his head lowered and his shoulder out, lifting her off her feet and driving her into the portal. His own momentum carried him through the portal with her, and they both vanished.

The portal writhed and sparked and twisted, curling in on itself, losing length and width and depth until nothing remained but a wisp of greenish vapor and a chemical stink like something from an alchemist’s shop.

“The arrowhead,” Zaltys said. “She still had it in her sleeve, the piece of the Living Gate.” She shook her head. “The portals are closed. And Krailash …”

“He gave his life to protect the family,” Alaia said. “I wasn’t sure he would. I’m ashamed I ever doubted him.”

“That portal didn’t close,” Julen said, pointing to one Zaltys hadn’t noticed before, hovering near the cave wall. “Why didn’t it join with the others?”

“It is very old,” one of the yuan-ti said, slithering over, wringing his oddly humanlike hands. “The other slaves, some of them have been here for much longer than we have, and they said this portal has always been here. It was opened by the first Slime King long ago.”

“Are those terazul?” Zaltys said, squinting. “The vines, coming out of the portal … Those are
our
flowers, aren’t they? That’s what Iraska meant, isn’t it, about us poisoning the people of Delzimmer—about us
preparing
them.”

“Zaltys,” Alaia said carefully. “I didn’t know. I swear. I had no idea they came from the Far Realm.”

“You do
now
,” Zaltys said. “So what do you propose to do about it?”

“I propose we leave before the other derro come back. I propose we take your, ah, original family members back with us, and then return to camp, and go home. I’ll tell the other ranking members of our family what I’ve found out, and I’m sure they’ll do the right thing. Given some time and preparation, we can diversify the business a bit better, make some investments, and ease out of the terazul trade.”

Julen snorted. “No offense, Aunt Alaia, but do you think the Traders will care that the flowers come from the Far Realm? They’ll just start saying the drugs are ‘imported from an exotic faraway land’ and charge twenty percent more per dose.”

“We should destroy the flowers and close that portal,” Zaltys said. “The things I saw in that derro city, the cruelty, the madness—it’s all the influence of the Far Realm. And we’ve been getting rich off selling people poisonous flowers from that place. We have to stop. It’s wrong.
Iraska’s gone, but how long before another Slime King rises and opens more portals? Maybe the next one will succeed in attacking Delzimmer, and if we’re still selling the flowers, we’ll be paving the way for that invasion. We have to do what’s right.”

“Life isn’t that simple,” Alaia said. “Right and wrong, Zaltys, they’re
complicated
ideas, not all situations are so simple.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes that’s true. I know. But not this time. Julen. Go and get me the green knife, and the straightest bit of bone you can salvage from the cage.”

He went obediently to the mound of vegetation covering the poor altered quaggoth, plucked the knife from the mess, and went in search of a suitable shaft.

“If you do this, you ruin us,” Alaia said quietly. “You ruin the family.”

“If I don’t, I really am that madwoman’s great-granddaughter, and I have no desire to follow in her footsteps—to be a herald for monsters from beyond the back of the stars. The family can get into some less poisonous business. They certainly have the capital to finance it.”

“They won’t see it that way, Zaltys. We’re used to doing things a certain way, and the terazul trade is central to—”

Zaltys turned to her, put her hands on her mother’s shoulders, leaned forward, and kissed her on each bloody cheek. “You raised me to revere family, and I do. But you also raised me to do what’s right, and to protect the natural world. What kind of daughter would I be to you if I didn’t learn those lessons?”

She turned her back on her mother, so she wouldn’t have to see the suddenly very old-looking onetime shaman weep. She looked at her cousin. “Do you object to my plan?”

He shrugged. “I’m seventh in line to run the Guardians, which means I may as well be thousandth in line. No real future there. And someone with my skills will never go hungry. So, sure—let’s do the right thing. But do you think this will really work?” He was attaching the end of the green knife to a long, slender shaft of a bone with a bit of leather cord. Zaltys was impressed; he’d figured out what she had in mind.

“Someone gave you that knife. It certainly seems to hum with primal power, and primal power exists in opposition to the aberrations of the Far Realm. I’m a little bit afraid the dagger might have come from, ah—” She glanced at the yuan-ti. “A certain god who shall remain nameless. But if it works, what choice do we have?”

“Loose at will,” he said, and handed her the improvised arrow. It was a ridiculous thing—so top-heavy with the dagger tied to the end that it would simply spin and hit the dirt, with no fletching to make it fly straight even if it
could
fly, and the thighbone of some underfed Underdark denizen didn’t make a suitable shaft.

But what else were magical bows for? Krailash said he’d seen this one fire a spear once.

Zaltys nocked it, and as soon as the arrow touched the bowstring, it stopped feeling like an improvised spear and started feeling like an arrow. She aimed, drew, and loosed, and the knife-tipped arrow sailed into the portal where the terazul vines emerged.

Nothing happened. “Damn,” Julen said. “All right, we can at least cut the vines off from their roots in the portal. I’ll see if I can scale the cavern wall.”

The vines trembled. The portal pulsed. Something pushed its way partly through the portal, and afterward, no one could agree on exactly what it had looked like. Zaltys thought it had the head of a fish, while Julen insisted it was more like a bird, and Alaia said it looked like the snout of a mole. Whatever it was, it had far too many eyes, and its mouth was open, and the terazul vines came from
inside
that mouth, as if they were its tongue—which, given the strangeness of the Far Realm, was entirely possible. The hideous snout was wrapped around with brilliant green leaves, still growing at a ferocious pace, and the creature howled as vegetation choked and bound it.

The creature pulled its head back in, and the portal vanished, just as the larger portal had before. The cut-off ends of the terazul vines drooped where they clung to the cavern wall, and the blue flowers began to shower down, wilting and turning brown as they fell.

“Done,” Zaltys said, and turned to the yuan-ti, who were looking at her with something she uncomfortably identified as awe. “I am Zaltys Serrat, adopted daughter of the Serrat family, natural born daughter of—”

“It’s the girl child,” the yuan-ti who’d spoken to her earlier said. His tongue, long and forked, flickered wildly. “Zaltys, I am Scitheron. I knew you when you were a babe.” He turned to the other snakefolk. “This woman, she is the pureblood, the infant left behind when Iraska sent her people to enslave us. She’s come back! She’s come back to save us!”

“Now maybe you can save me,” Zaltys said. “I don’t suppose any of you know the way out?”

“No,” the yuan-ti said. “But I think that snake is trying to get your attention. Perhaps it is a messenger of our great god Zehir, who chose you as the instrument of our salvation?”

Indeed, the pale serpent was back, coiling and uncoiling itself impatiently, and when Zaltys looked at it, it began to slither away from the fields and the settlement. “Wait,” Zaltys said. “Do any of you yuan-ti speak the language of the Underdark?”

“Deep Speech?” Scitheron said. “I do.”

“Tell these slaves we’ll set them free if they don’t hinder our escape.”

“They are beasts, daughter of Zehir,” Scitheron said, “foul creatures who do not keep the true faith.”

“Please, just tell them?”

Reluctantly, Scitheron spoke to the kuo-toa, and bullywugs, and quaggoths, and the others, and then returned. “They are impressed by your ferocity. While some hate humans, they hate the derro who enslaved them far more, and say they would rather hurt them than you. They wonder, would it be all right if they tried to kill the rest of the derro, or do you demand that pleasure yourself?”

“They should do whatever they think is best,” Zaltys said.

“You know, they aren’t family,” Alaia said. “And they might turn on us. You don’t owe them freedom.”

“No one should be a slave,” Zaltys said. “To anyone.” Julen helped her strike open the cages with clubs made
of bone, and most of the slaves—the ones who weren’t drugged—emerged, some tending to their sick, others racing toward the settlement. None tried to attack Zaltys—indeed, they seemed afraid of her. But she
had
helped kill the Slime King. Did that make her a liberator, or was she herself the Slime King now? Ascension by assassination seemed likely to be the derro way. If so, she didn’t want the title.

The pale serpent still writhed impatiently, so Zaltys lifted her pack—only to have one of the yuan-ti who had legs take it from her wordlessly and strap it on his back. She nodded her thanks, and the creature nodded back, its black inhuman eyes impossible to read. One of the other yuan-ti handed her a clutch of her spent arrows that he’d retrieved. Treacherous murderous evil chaotic adherents of Zehir—perhaps. But capable, it seemed, of performing acts of simple gratitude.

“Let’s leave this place,” Zaltys said, and they followed the slithering snake on its long and winding journey back out of the Underdark, the screams of the slaves attacking the settlement receding gradually behind them.