Venom in Her Veins

Zaltys didn’t spend much time in museums back home; she preferred exploring ruins in the wild to seeing fragments of ruins neatly brushed clean and mounted in glass display cases. She’d only been to Delzimmer’s centers of art and history once or twice, and this place was similar, though there was usually less blood on the floor of the museums back home. Beyond the pillars of the front steps was a wide, open area punctuated by low stone display pedestals, holding an astonishing array of strange bric-a-brac, with derro savants in robes strolling around, peering at the exhibits, and scratching on wax tablets with styluses. The savant bustled them along fairly rapidly, so Zaltys couldn’t look at any of the exhibits too closely, which was probably a blessing.

They passed a messy pile of gems, with clods of earth clinging to their shining facets; a scale replica of the Collegium itself made entirely of neatly stacked and balanced coins-probably looted from surface-world slaves, and worthless as currency there; and a petrified dragon’s egg as big as a derro, with various incomprehensible signs and sigils scratched into its surface-either mystical writing or graffiti, Zaltys wasn’t sure.

But the most striking exhibits were the exemplars of various Underdark races, taxidermied specimens dressed in the bloody remnants of their own armor (if they were races that wore clothes) and standing in lifelike- and usually warlike-poses on their pedestals. They passed a kuo-toa clutching its harpoon, and one of the jellyfish things Julen had called grell dangled from the ceiling on wires. Julen murmured the names of the ones she didn’t recognize: A bullywug leaning on its spear. A myconid with its helmetlike mushroom-cap head, holding a club of gnarled, hardened fungus. A swordwing with one of its arms and one of its wings missing. A beholder, not resting on a pedestal but jammed on top of a pointed stick, so from a distance it appeared to float, its eyestalks drooping and blind. An illithid, its long brown robes rather charred, its horrible mouth-tentacles singed as well. Something even Julen didn’t recognize, a humanoid figure with its skin flayed away, bits of armor fused directly to its exposed muscles, holding a whip made of linked spinal vertebrae, the jutting bone spurs sharpened to spikes.

As they passed that one, Zaltys saw its eyes move in its immobilized face, tracking her, and she realized it wasn’t dead and stuffed but somehow alive and petrified, frozen in stasis by magic and made into a living statue. Zaltys shuddered. The creature was horrifying, yes, but no monster deserved a fate like that. How many of the other exhibits had been alive too, and she simply hadn’t noticed? What kind of creatures could create a museum like this?

Zaltys had come into the Underdark to rescue any of her family that survived. That remained her mission. But if possible, she would also flush the derro out of the bowels of the earth as well.

“From this angle you can see the face of the aboleth,” the savant said, and pointed up.

Zaltys and Julen tilted their heads back. Julen gasped, and Zaltys let out a low whistle. An eel-like shape, thirty feet long and dangling tentacles and whiskers and shredded fins, was suspended from the ceiling by metal chains, and from their position, near the back of the central chamber, they could indeed see its face if one could call it a face, with those vertically-aligned, dead eyes, that lip-less mouth, those whiskers the thickness of a man’s leg.

“An aboleth,” Julen said. “They’re supposed to be the most fearsome creatures in all of the Underdark.”

“Nonsense,” the derro savant said briskly. “You’re thinking of the derro. Though that particular aboleth was a sort of honorary derro for a while-it used to be Slime King.”

Julen glanced at Zaltys, licked his lips, and said, “Is the current Slime King also an aboleth?”

“The Slime King is derro,” the derro said. “By definition. The highest of the high of the Slime Clan, who are the best of all the derro, just as the derro themselves are the best of all the races.”

Zaltys pointed to the thing hanging from the ceiling. “When that creature up there was Slime King, was it derro? By definition?”

“That’s what I just said,” the savant said, scowling, and the eyes on her robe began to blink furiously. “Why can’t you listen?” She jerked around on her heel and stalked off toward a doorway at the back of the Collegium, and Zaltys and Julen followed, because what else could they do? If they tried to leave, they might be allowed to walk right out, but more likely they’d be killed, or frozen and perched on pedestals. Bug-eater was still trailing along behind them, still aiming his crossbow generally in their direction, so cooperation seemed the wisest course.

The savant led them to a stone stairway that spiraled down for a few dozen feet before ending in another doorway. A wide hallway lined with open doors extended straight as a ruler before disappearing into gloom. There were lights down there, in the form of flickering smokeless torches set at irregular intervals, but they cast only small pools of light. “Straight down the end of the hallway,” the savant said. “And mind you don’t stray into the side rooms. They are sovereign microkingdoms, each populated and ruled by a single derro doing particularly interesting experiments, and if you pass over their thresholds you are subject to their absolute rule, which means, in practice, that horrible things would happen to you. As long as you stay here in the hallway, which is subject to the Slime King’s rule … Well, horrible things will probably still happen to you, but not as quickly.”

Zaltys couldn’t resist looking into the first few doorways they passed. What would a “sovereign microkingdom” of the derro look like? The first just had a naked derro, body covered in a calligraphy of scars, snoring on a pile of inexpertly-skinned pelts, flies buzzing around him. In the next, a robed derro sat at a work table, furiously sketching on pieces of thin hide with a chunk of charcoal grasped in his fist, and he would have looked like any scholar anywhere if not for the fact that one of his arms was missing, replaced by a long, ropy tentacle that lashed and twitched and writhed seemingly of its own accord.

The third chamber was the one that made Zaltys turn her face resolutely forward, focused only on the hallway in front of her, all curiosity burned out of her. A derro in a blood-stained apron worked in that room, a pair of long metal tables set up in the center of his sovereign space. On one table lay the partially-dissected body of a beholder, perhaps the same one they’d seen captured in the square earlier, and the derro chirurgeon was snipping off its eyestalks with a pair of large shears. On the other table lay the body of a hairy humanoid figure-perhaps a quaggoth? — also partly taken to pieces. But the dead quaggoth had beholder eyestalks attached to its head, and the stalks were moving, waving lazily like underwater plants undulating in the current, and when one of the eyes looked at Zaltys as she passed, she could tell it was horribly aware.

Zaltys couldn’t imagine seeing anything more disturbing-until, abruptly, she did. Just be glad you didn’t see a human on the table, Zaltys thought. It could have been one of your kin. Unless they were all killed long ago.

The hallway finally ended in another doorway, and another stairway spiraling down. The savant seemed to notice Bug-eater for the first time. “Do you want to go down there too?”

Bug-eater shook his head firmly, bowed rather elaborately to Julen and Zaltys, and strolled away-not down the hallway, but into one of the open doors of the side rooms. Screams immediately emerged from the room, though whether they were Bug-eater’s screams or the screams of the sovereign derro inside or the screams of some other entity entirely, Zaltys didn’t know. The savant took no notice, leading them down the stairs.

“We could take her,” Julen whispered to her. “They never even bothered disarming us.”

Zaltys nodded. “I’m not sure killing her does us any good, though.”

“True. But I don’t mind telling you, Cousin, I’m pleased to have the option.”

The option didn’t last long. At the base of the stairs they found a solid wooden door reinforced with iron bars-the first closed door they’d seen in the Collegium-guarded by two hulking humanoids armed with short swords. It took Zaltys a moment to realize they were derro, since they were taller than she was and almost as broad across the shoulders as Krailash, but they had the spiky white derro hair and the long faces and pointed chins Zaltys had grown all too accustomed to seeing. The distinctive derro eyes were hidden by blindfolds made of strips of dark cloth. Zaltys wondered what they were-experimental subjects made more strong by the dark arts of derro chirurgeons? Merely derro heads attached to the bodies of larger humanoids? And why the blindfolds?

The last question was answered quickly. The savant drew a long needle from the sleeve of her robe. The eyes all over her garment stopped blinking, and stared at Zaltys and Julen fixedly. “Now then,” the savant said. “You’re almost ready to meet the Slime King. I just need to remove your eyes first.” She stepped toward them, needle glittering.

The grell philosopher was full to bursting from eating his dead, and he’d hidden away the bits of their flesh he couldn’t devour yet to keep them safe from other predators, but these two were too delicious to pass up. A scaly thing and a hairy thing, and he was under no orders from an interloper god or a mob of derro scum to give these two safe passage. (There were other things in the cavern, a snuffling thing of smoke and a small snake, but he was interested in the meatier specimens.) The scaly thing was big and strong and