Venom in Her Veins by Tim Pratt

Author:Tim Pratt [Pratt, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: fantasy, Fiction, Epic, General
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Published: 2012-03-06T06:00:00+00:00

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.

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