Venom in Her Veins

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?”

“We’ll see.” Zaltys lifted open the heavy trapdoor with a shriek of hinges that echoed hugely in the enclosed space. A wooden ladder extended down into the depths.

“Me first,” Julen said cheerfully, and began descending, swallowed in moments by the dark, which seemed almost as thick and substantial as syrup. Zaltys went after him, pausing briefly, then grasped the ring on the underside of the trapdoor and closed it after her. Better to leave no trace of their passage if they could avoid it, as there might be derro about. Allowing themselves to be captured might be the fastest way to find out where the slaves were held, but it would almost certainly inhibit their ability to free the other slaves once they arrived.

The ladder went down for a long time, and the sunrod was awkward to hold while climbing, and only illuminated the walls of a narrow shaft, so Zaltys finally said, “Look out below, I’m going to drop the light.”

Julen grunted his assent, and Zaltys twisted around on the ladder and tossed the sunrod past him. They both looked down as the light moved, revealing that they were barely halfway down the ladder, and illuminating branching side tunnels dotting the shaft. They gave Zaltys a shudder. Anything could be inside them. The sunrod finally clattered to the stones below, its magical light undimmed by impact, but it didn’t reveal much: enclosed space, and, presumably, tunnels leading away. Still, it provided a glow for them to move toward, and that was something. Zaltys was already starting to think of light as a precious resource. The sunrod would burn for only another four or five hours, and she only had three more in her pack-she hadn’t imagined that she would need more than a day’s worth of light, but that had been based on the notion that it was just some small local system of caverns and tunnels. After what Julen had told her, and what she’d observed for herself so far, she suspected the Underdark was far vaster than she could comprehend.

And dangerous too. But the jungle was dangerous, and Zaltys thrived there. What terrors could the dark hold to rival the vine horrors and monstrous spiders and immense serpents and lunatic apes she’d fought and bested in the world above?

They reached the bottom of the ladder, Julen waiting impatiently for her to come after him. He picked up the sunrod and stepped forward, Zaltys following, down a short corridor that dead-ended at a low-ceilinged, rounded corridor that seemed more burrowed than hewn and stretched off in both directions. “Which way?”

Zaltys kneeled, examining the rock in both directions, finally saying, “This way seems more traveled. Do you see the scuffmarks of-”

“That’s fine, I don’t need to know the dugeoneering theory behind it,” Julen said. “I have faith in you.” He went down the right-hand corridor, still holding the light, and Zaltys followed. They both ducked their heads, because even though the roof of the tunnel was taller than they were, it wasn’t much taller, and there was a sense of immense pressure and weight all around them. The weight of the whole world above.

“You know,” Julen said, “this is a lot less terrible than I expected. The accounts I read talked about grell and carrion crawlers and gelatinous cubes and rust monsters inhabiting the Upperdark, but I guess the derro have scared away everything but themselves. Maybe this won’t be so-”

And then he yelped and disappeared through a hole in the floor. Zaltys gasped as the light he held vanished with him, dropping to her knees and feeling her way forward with her hands until she found the edge of the pit and the shreds of black cloth that had been used to conceal it. A trap, doubtless meant for exactly the sort of interlopers they were. She peered down into the hole, which was about ten feet deep. Julen groaned, sitting up and rubbing his head, the dropped sunrod casting harsh shadows across him.

“Hold on, I’ll lower a rope,” she said, but while she turned her face away to dig in her pack, Julen cried out.

She looked back down the hole, and saw a small, lithe figure dressed in black kneeling on Julen’s back. The creature, no bigger than a child, had wild hair sticking up in filthy tufts, and giggled to itself in an incessant, almost monotonous way. Julen arched his back, wriggled like an eel, and struck out with a knife, filling one of the monster’s eyes with a steel blade. He wrenched the knife free and started to stand up, but then something buzzed through the air. Zaltys could see a short dart sticking out of Julen’s neck, and he put his hand to the wound before swaying and falling back against the rocks. Some kind of poison, or if he was lucky, just a tranquilizer to knock him unconscious.

Zaltys almost leaped down, but three more of the creatures surged into the hole and began binding Julen’s