Venom in Her Veins

belt was also gone, but the throwing knives were still hidden in his sleeves. No help now, in this bump-and-drag situation, but of potential use later.

There was something else up his sleeve: the piece of pale blue chalk he’d found in his pack. He’d secreted it there with some idea of marking their descent through this labyrinth so they could find their way up again.

“It’s not a labyrinth,” the derro dragging him said in an unsteady, high-pitched voice, like a drunken child’s. “Common mistake. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has only a single path. It’s a circuitous path, takes a long time to traverse, and there are lots of twists and turns, but there are no branch paths, no moments of choice, no dead ends-you can’t get lost in a labyrinth, you can just get bored. A labyrinth is a means of meditation, or a way to make a minotaur’s mealtime more entertaining for the watchers. But this, this is no labyrinth. There are paths here with a thousand branches, that all end in death. It’s more like a maze, though not one of your silly garden mazes with hedges. This is a maze that spreads out front and back and to and fro and up and down, all bridges and pits and overs and unders. You can’t map it because there are things here that eat maps and maps that eat mapmakers and things that eat appetites.” The voice lapsed into silence.

After a long moment, Julen said, “You can read minds?” That seemed the only answer, unless Julen had been muttering about labyrinths aloud, and he was fairly sure he hadn’t fallen that far from the heights of his Guardian training.

“What? No one can read minds. There are no minds to read except mine, because mine is the only real mind, and none of you things that pretend to have minds can possibly read a mind like mine.” There was a sound of a scuffle, and the derro who’d spoken squawked in pain. The relentlessly scraping forward motion stopped, and the chains holding Julen went slack. He considered trying to escape, but he would have had to crab-scuttle along the tunnel, and he wouldn’t have made it far, even if the derro were apparently fighting among themselves.

The chains tightened again, and Julen’s movement resumed, and he bumped against a leather-clad body curled on the ground, catching the rank whiff of spilling entrails and fresh blood.

“I see death. It’s a labyrinth of light and dark,” the fallen derro whispered as Julen was dragged past him, and then exhaled its final breath.

Madness, Julen thought. The remaining two derro ahead of him began to sing in a croaky but harmonious way in what he thought was a Dwarvish dialect. But no one tried to take his chalk, so he shook his sleeve until the slim cylinder fell into his hand, and left intermittent marks on the ground as he was dragged. The chalk glowed, faintly luminous, which suggested it was magical, which further suggested it wouldn’t be easily wiped off. He hoped. Leaving Zaltys a trail to follow was probably his best hope of survival, at least until some other opportunity presented itself. Assuming she hadn’t been captured too. What if she was counting on him to save her?

It seemed an unlikely prospect, given her capabilities, but the idea that Zaltys might need him strengthened his resolve to escape, even more than the prospect of being tortured by these chattering, cackling, singing lunatics.

Zaltys was justly proud of her tracking skills, but they weren’t doing her much good at the moment. She had excellent night vision, but that required some stray beam of light somewhere for the eye to capture and amplify. Underground, she was beyond the reach of starlight. There were sunrods left in her pack, but she didn’t want to give away her position. The derro had stopped giggling, but they must still have been relatively close by, assuming she hadn’t crept right past a branching tunnel. There was a terrible stink there, too, as if she were crawling through a sewer, though there was no particular dampness.

Her foot, sliding along the stone before her to feel the way, hit something heavy but yielding, and metal clinked against leather.

There in the dark, she closed her eyes. If it was a dead body … if it was Julen’s body … Was the salvation of family members she’d never met worth the death of a cousin she knew and liked and even, now that she thought about it, loved?

Crouching, she ran her hands along the body, feeling for the face. Coarse hair, stiff and clotted with filth, touched her fingers. The hair was far too long to be Julen’s; he kept his clipped unfashionably short because, he said, long hair was a liability in a fight. Zaltys, who was a bit vain about her own long dark hair, agreed in theory, but settled for pinning and tying hers up most of the time.

Relief washed through her. This was some dead derro then, probably, but killed by whom? Julen himself? It was possible. She searched the body as best she could by feel, going cautiously in case there were hidden barbs or bare poisoned blades. Hanging from the dead man’s rather bloody belt she found the wicked shape of a repeating hand crossbow, loaded with a full case of five bolts, and extra ammunition besides. She had some of the classical archer’s contempt for crossbows, considering them too easy to use and dismissing their lighter bolts as incapable of the penetrative power of an arrow loosed from a conventional bow, but a crossbow that small would be easier to use at close range, so she let practicality overcome distaste and hung it from her own belt.

She continued her search, trying to think of it as an act akin to skinning an animal instead of looting a corpse, hoping to find a candle-end or a full canteen. She was surprised to find a heavy pack instead. Opening the strap, she felt around inside-there was a sheathed knife, neatly coiled rope, what felt like a small glass bottle, clothes, tasteless field rations, a full adventurer’s pack, just like the one Julen had been carrying. Why would he kill one of his captors but leave his pack behind? Perhaps she was misreading the situation. There were surely numerous other ways to die down here. If only she had some clue, some mark of passage.

Ahead of her, so faint she thought at first it was some hallucination brought on by her eyes straining for light in a lightless place, she detected a streak of pale blue on the floor. She approached it, going on hands and knees, putting her face inches from the floor, and it was unmistakable: a luminous chalk mark an inch or so long. A message from Julen? It seemed like the sort of thing a Guardian-trained spy might use, to leave messages and subtly mark a passage.

She kept moving, and soon found more chalk marks. Not bright enough to illuminate her surroundings, but unmistakable to her light-hungry eyes. Zaltys moved more quickly once she had a trail to follow and was surprised when the tunnel gradually grew lighter. Patches of bluish-green fungus spotted the cavern walls, fed by rivulets of water that oozed down, pooling in depressions on the floor. The light, though dim, was miraculous after so long in the limitless black, and Zaltys studied her surroundings. The tunnel was rounded and curving, rather like being inside the body of an enormous worm-a hideous thought. Multiple splashes of water on the stone indicated the passage of other creatures who’d tromped heedlessly through the puddles recently. Zaltys realized she might soon be faced with the choice of striking down Julen’s captors, or following them at a distance to see where they went. It would be nice to have his help, if only to make him carry his own pack, as the weight of all the supplies was slowing her down. It would also be nice not to be alone down there.

But she wasn’t alone. A snake, as white and unmarked as a derro’s eyes and easily as long as she was tall, slithered through one of the puddles and lifted its pale head toward her, tongue flickering. “How long have you been following me?” she whispered, because she was certain, somehow, that it was no mere passerby out hunting cave rodents. The snake looked away from her, moved smoothly a short distance down the tunnel, then paused, as if waiting for her.

“You could at least offer to carry something for me,” Zaltys muttered, and set off again. The tunnel gradually opened up, the walls moving away and the ceiling rising, and though there were still patches of luminescence, they were farther away, and dimmer as a result. At least she no longer felt as if she were crawling through a gopher burrow-there was a ceiling up there somewhere, but it no longer brushed the top of her head if she didn’t crouch.

The snake was almost invisible again, just a faint pale ribbon, but it seemed to be following the chalk marks just as much as she did-until it abruptly stopped, coiled up on itself, and flopped on its back.

Some snakes played dead when threatened, but there was no threat that Zaltys could sense-nothing on either side of her, nothing behind, nothing in front.

Guardian apes. Not that she literally thought there were apes down there, but she’d told Julen, in the jungle, that temple guardian apes would drop on you from the trees above, that in the wild you had to be aware of the world above as well as the world on all sides, and why would that be any different there?

She lifted the hand crossbow and swept it up over her head in an arc, rapidly working the reloading lever and firing off all five bolts in seconds. Something above her screamed-the sound was like tortured metal, not like any