Venom in Her Veins

Her mother sighed. “For a certain value of ‘all right,’ I suppose so. He went through terrible ordeals, things we can’t even imagine. But Glory was able to soothe him a bit.”

“What will happen to him now?” She thought of the broken men she saw sometimes in Delzimmer, begging for coins by the harbor or just sitting, blank-faced, in empty doorways. Would that be Rainer’s fate?

“He was lost and injured while in the employ of the family,” Alaia said. “So the family will care for him, just as we would for a laborer crippled in the fields or a soldier maimed in our service. He’ll always have a livelihood in our employ.”

“He won’t … He can’t become a guard again.”

Alaia shook her head. “He was one of Krailash’s best men, but that was long ago. If he recovers fully and he wants to-but no. I think, once the family physicians and healers have made sure he’s not too ill, he will be given some less difficult task to do. A position in one of the households, or working in the gardens or kitchens. And if he’s not up to even that much work … Don’t worry, he’ll be kept comfortable.”

Comfortable. Zaltys imagined him sitting in a chair at a window, staring out at some peaceful vista, his mind broken. “Where is he now?”

Alaia gestured vaguely northward. “I sent him back to Delzimmer on horseback with a couple of the guards. Having him here in the camp, talking about slavers stealing people away into the darkness … I didn’t want him worrying the laborers. And, besides, I’m sure he wants as much distance between himself and this jungle as possible.”

Zaltys touched the hilt of the knife at her belt. “But shouldn’t we be worried about slavers? Glory said whoever took Rainer might be looking for him-”

Alaia put her pen down and massaged her writing hand, wincing as she pulled each finger and made the knuckles pop. “Glory enjoys making people worried and uncomfortable. But, yes, I’ve posted more sentries around the camp, and Krailash is letting his people know they should be alert. If any nasty creatures do come boiling up out of a hole in the ground, we’ll drive them back. Now, my darling daughter, if you don’t mind, I need to write a few more letters, to arrange for Rainer’s care back in Delzimmer.” Alaia shooed her away, so Zaltys folded up her chair and left the wagon.

She decided to go looking for Krailash, but she found Julen along the way, squatting in the shadow of a supply cart, an array of glittering bits of metal spread out on a cloth before him. Zaltys crouched down beside him, though she stayed out of the shade. Unlike most of the other people in camp, she didn’t mind the heat of the sun pounding down on the clearing. “What’s all this?”

“Lockpicks,” he said, holding up a narrow twist of black metal and squinting at it. “I had to leave home in a hurry, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget anything.” He sighed. “Not that there are any locks worth speaking of to practice on out here. What with the general lack of doors. My skills are going to get all rusty out here in the wilderness. I don’t know how I’ll pass my practical exam this fall. At least I’ll be able to keep up with my poisons and knife-throwing-no end of nasty creatures out here to kill, at least. And I’m sure I’ll be bitten by dozens of horrible animals, which can’t hurt in developing my resistance to poisons. Did you know in the Guardians we eat tiny amounts of poison for breakfast every day, to build up immunities? We’re supposed to carry a ridiculous array of antidotes and anti-venoms with us too. I must say, I prefer the bits of the job that involve knives.” He rolled up the cloth of lockpicks and tucked it away in a small traveler’s pack.

“You Guardians and your toys,” Zaltys said, shaking her head.

He snorted. “This from a woman with a clutch of magical arrows in her quiver?”

She laughed. “Where have you been keeping yourself all day?”

Julen looked around, then beckoned her closer. Zaltys obligingly leaned in. “I was belly-down on the roof of your mother’s wagon, my ear right next to the chimney, eavesdropping,” he said.

Zaltys widened her eyes. “You were spying on my mother?”

Her cousin had the good grace to look sheepish, but only for a moment. Then he frowned. “That’s what the Guardians do. We listen to things we aren’t supposed to overhear. We gather secrets.”

“Spying on your own family, Julen, that’s low.”

“Ah. So you don’t want to know what I found out then?”

Zaltys settled down beside him, leaning against a cartwheel. “Well. I didn’t say that. They were talking about Rainer?”

“They were,” he said. “And talking with Rainer too.” Julen played with a thick silver coin, walking it across the backs of his fingers, making it appear and disappear. He really did have agile hands. The Guardians had to practice their skills just as much as Zaltys had to practice archery, she supposed. “I don’t know. I think the man might be mad. He said he escaped the place where he was imprisoned, and wandered lost in the tunnels for a while, until a snake led him to the surface.”

Zaltys grunted. “That’s unusually helpful, for a snake.”

“Yes. I think he probably hallucinated the snake, but who knows? He didn’t make much sense at first, but then …” He frowned. “Someone talked to him. I can’t remember who.”

Glory, Zaltys thought.

“Anyway, after that, he got more lucid, was able to answer questions, explain what happened to him. Zaltys, did you know he held you in his arms when you were just an infant?”

She blinked. “Rainer? He was one of the guards who found me? But why didn’t my mother tell me that? Or introduce me to him?”

Julen shrugged. “I’m not sure. I don’t really understand it. The day Rainer was taken by slavers-it was the same day they found you.”

“You’re sure?”

“That’s what he said. ‘After we found the baby, they dragged me down.’ ”

“I wonder if the slavers who took him were the same creatures who killed my village?” Zaltys said.

“Ah. They … Zaltys, the story I always heard was that you were found among the dead, the only survivor of a massacre.”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. No one liked to talk to Zaltys much about the day she’d been found, saying it was a sad and tragic time, but she’d managed to extract that much information from them: that she was the sole survivor of a murdered village.

Julen shook his head. “But that’s not what Rainer said. He was telling them what happened, and he started with the day he was taken, and there was nothing about finding any other bodies. He and Krailash heard you cry out in the jungle, and they went to investigate, and found you in the ruins, but no one else. There were bloodstains on the stones, and the teeth of monsters broken and scattered on the ground, but your people weren’t massacred. They were enslaved, Rainer says. Taken by the same creatures who took him.”

Zaltys shook her head. “No, that’s not … That’s not how it happened, that’s not what they told me. Julen, I’ve visited the grave site, it’s this great heap of dirt and stone, they buried my whole village in a pit.”

“People lie, Zaltys,” Julen said gently. “Serrats more than most, maybe.”

“But why? Why tell me my family was dead?”

“Maybe it was easier?” Julen said. “Kinder? To let you think they were dead, instead of down there, in the Underdark. With the derro. Rainer and Krailash were making sure the slavers were gone, and when Rainer got separated from Krailash for a moment, the harvesters sprang on him from a crack in the ground, bound him with shackles, and pulled him into the caverns below.”

“Derro,” Zaltys whispered. She’d heard of them, of course, but they were a bogeyman, a threat, moon-white underdwellers said to hide in dark basements and enslave disobedient children, who would be forced into an eternity of shoveling coal into hellish furnaces if they didn’t attend their etiquette lessons or failed to address a family elder with proper respect. She hadn’t really considered that they might be real. “If he … wait … did Rainer see my family down there?”

“He didn’t say. And your mother didn’t ask, at least, not that I heard. Rainer said there were other human slaves, though, along with snake people, bullywugs, kuo-toa, and creatures he couldn’t identify. The slaves labored in mushroom fields, harvesting food, and were used as live bait to catch horrible blind fish the derro like to eat, and sent in to do war against the enemies of the derro, which are, I gather, everyone in the world. Rainer says the