Venom in Her Veins

“We call it the Causeway,” the slaver said, and tittered. “It’s the cause of no end of trouble. Some great monster crawled through here, clawing its way through the rock, in the long long ago. Left a path so wide and broad and clear that fools think it’s safe.”

Another titter, and Krailash cuffed him on the side of the head.

“Just lead.”

They followed the Causeway for more than an hour, the passage angled steeply down all the while. The derro muttered about all the things that might kill them, and no number of cuffs to the ear or hissed orders could make it shut up for long. The sense of impending danger was so intense that Krailash began wishing something would attack them, just to break the tension. Spending too much time in the dark could make one go mad, Krailash thought. No wonder the derro were insane.

“Welcome to the depths,” the slaver said at one point, and giggled. “No more simple Upperdark for you. No basements or mineshafts or quarries or pitiful surface scratchings in the earth, no, no. We’re two miles down, at least, and some of the things that live here think the sun and stars are just stories told to frighten children. Can you feel the wonderful weight of all that stone above us?”

“Shut up,” Krailash growled.

Finally, after another long period of silent trudging and tense watchfulness, their prisoner pointed to a dark mouth of stone off to one side. “There. That’s the passageway.”

The hole was narrow enough that Krailash wasn’t sure he’d make it through without a pickaxe to widen the way, but by twisting his shoulders, he shoved his body through. He dragged the derro in after him by its chain, and pushed it to the front. The others filed in and gaped around. They were in a cavern obviously carved over centuries by long-gone flowing water. Bulging crystals emerged from the walls, some of them glowing with faint purplish light, and towering stalagmites rose from the floor. The party continued into the cavern for a while, and the slaver got more and more agitated as they went. “This way, this way!” The derro bounced on its heels, so eager to move forward that Krailash immediately feared an ambush, and tugged its chain, drawing it up short.

“There’s something strange about this one,” Alaia said, squinting at one of the stalagmites, far larger than the others they’d passed. “I don’t think it’s made of stone. It seems to be … How strange. Helmets, and rusting swords, and a cart wheel, and the belly of a wood stove, held together with something sticky, like sap. Something made this.”

A distant noise impinged on Krailash’s consciousness. The Underdark was not a very quiet place, really: the echo of footsteps reverberated hugely; there were rumbles of distant earthquakes or, more likely, creatures burrowing all around them; and the constant trickle and drip and roar of subterranean water was a rising and falling background hum. But the new sound was not like any of those: it was a buzz, like a swarm of small insects close by your head.

Or a swarm of very large insects rather farther away.

He jerked the tittering derro’s chain. “What is this place?”

“You’ll know soon enough,” it said. “It’s a swordwing nest.”

Krailash stared at the hideous prisoner. He’d never encountered a swordwing, but he’d once adventured with a dwarf named Halbert Hammerfist who had. The dwarf liked to boast of how his party had broken through the wall of a dungeon into a cavern and found it alive with hideous flying monsters. They’d slain the creatures, and found their nest, which was filled with treasures and relics looted from a thousand murders. Upon further questioning, the dwarf had gloomily admitted that everyone else in his party had died within moments of the swordwings’ initial attack, and that he himself had survived only by expending a wish he’d been granted by a djinn. Hammerfist had carried an axe with a viciously serrated blade he’d fashioned from the arm of one of the swordwings, and that blade had lent credence to his otherwise improbable description of the monsters. Human-sized insects with four immense wings each, bodies covered in chitinous armor of razored spikes, with limbs that were living weapons, capable of slicing a man in two right through his armor. Darting so fast in flight that they seemed to teleport-it was possible they did teleport-and attacking in coordinated teams, they were death on the wing, and the dwarf reckoned they were the most dangerous things he’d ever encountered in a lifetime of adventuring aboveground and below.

“Swordwings,” Krailash said, and shook the derro. “Are you mad? We’ll all die! You too!”

“Yes,” the derro said placidly. “But I’ll die down here in the dark where I’m supposed to, not under some horrible sun.”

Krailash lifted his head as the sound of buzzing intensified, and started to shout a retreat, but then the derro looped its leash-chain around Krailash’s throat and began trying to strangle him to death.

Chapter Thirteen

What struck Julen the most profoundly was how dark the Underdark wasn’t. Oh, at first it had been all shadow and mineshafts and abyssal depths, and his captors didn’t bother with torches or sunrods, but in the past hour he’d counted at least four separate kinds of natural illumination: glowing fungus; crystals lit with an inner light; patches of shining cave wall that must be the glowstone he’d read about; and disgusting, many-legged insects, big as mice, that swarmed over especially damp portions of the caverns and glowed like fireflies, but larger. As they descended ever deeper, Julen began to think the areas of absolute darkness were rarer than those in which there was some form of light. True, none of those lights were bright enough to read by, or even to tie your bootlaces by, but when deprived of light for too long, the human eye could make great use of even the faintest illumination, and with effort could turn a candle into a lantern and a lantern into a sun.

Not that he much liked what he saw. The two derro dragging him along were remarkably boring captors- they’d even stopped singing. They’d paused once, in what Julen sensed was a dark immense cavern, and barked harsh phrases into the air, to no response that Julen could discern. Perhaps they’d been negotiating with some crawling horror, or just reassuring sentries that they were friend not foe. From there they’d moved into gradually better-lit passages, and he’d determined that they were shorter than himself, and thinner, wearing filthy and scuffed leather armor, armed with chain whips, and with dirty white shocks of hair. He couldn’t speak to their facial features because they hadn’t once turned to look at him. That was good, since he was still leaving chalk marks for Zaltys to follow, but it was hard not to feel like a sentient sack of potatoes. Julen was considering-not seriously, but just as a thought experiment-trying to escape, just to make something happen, when the two derro stopped at a place where two tunnels branched off in separate directions.

This particular bit of cavern, a chamber the size of Alaia’s wagon, was aswarm with those greenish glowing bugs, and Julen’s body crushed the ones that didn’t scurry away fast enough as he was dragged along. When their bodies burst, the smell was foul, and he would have gagged, but that would have meant opening his mouth, and the possibility of one of these insects crawling over his tongue was too horrific to contemplate.

One of the derro crouched, grabbed one of the bugs, and took a bite out of it as if chomping into an apple. He chewed, flat long face almost thoughtful, as green fluid ran down into his filthy beard. After a moment he gestured, negligiently, toward the leftmost of the two tunnels that opened off the bug-filled space.

“Too slow,” the other derro said, in perfectly comprehensible Common. “Other way’s faster.”

The bug-eater responded in the thudding, sonorous tones that Julen assumed were Deep Speech, and gestured more forcefully.

His companion sneered. “Don’t care. I’m not afraid. I’m hungry.”

Bug-eater offered his handful of leaking, still-twitching insect, and the argumentative derro slapped it away. “I want meat that screams. Meat that can ask me not to eat it.”

The bug-eater gestured to Julen, who had never imagined that such a casual wave of the hand could make his bowels clench and his muscles tense and the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

“Nah. Young, strong, better for other things. Slime King wouldn’t like it if we ate him.”

Bug-eater shrugged, pointed to the leftmost tunnel, and said something else in Deep Speech.

“Fine, but I’ll get there faster, and I’ll have the slave, and you’ll just have bug juice on your face, ha!”

That argument did not dissuade Bug-eater, who headed into the tunnel and vanished from sight. The last