Venom in Her Veins (9 page)

Julen chose to sleep out with Zaltys in the middle of camp, under the stars, where, as he said, “I can at least dream about the hope of a breeze.” After they laid out their bedrolls and stretched out, it wasn’t long before Julen said, “How can you
sleep
with all that racket?”

Zaltys frowned. The hammering of the carpenters had stopped, the shouting and
clang
of the guards practicing their weapons was over, and the camp was as quiet as it ever got. “What do you mean?”

“The birds, the growls, the hoots, the bugs—this jungle is louder than the streets of Delzimmer during the Midsummer Festival!”

Now that he mentioned it, Zaltys could discern those sounds he mentioned—the howls of monkeys, the buzzing music of bugs, the deep croak of a million frogs singing, the occasional growl of a predator and squeal of dying prey, all mingling into the wall of noise that was The Jungle. “I like it,” she said. “I find it peaceful. Restful. The truth is, I have trouble sleeping back home in the city without it.”

Julen groaned. “It’s true what they say. The Travelers are mad. I won’t be able to sleep a moment because of all this din.”

Ten minutes later, listening to her cousin snore on the other side of their campfire, Zaltys stared up at the pinpoint stars and hoped no dreams would come. They weren’t
in
the jungle yet, after all, not really, and sometimes the dreams didn’t come until she was deeper into the wild. But when she finally succumbed to sleep, she did dream, though it was more real than the dreams she had in the city, more akin to the visions terazul users were said to experience: visions beyond reality, revealing a deeper strata of the true universe.

Zaltys walked through the stone plaza of a ruined city, the old structures lit by flickering torches. Fragments of torn clothing and smears of blood were the only signs of some recent violence, and her ranger’s eye revealed to her what had happened: a group, taken by surprise by overwhelming force, and dragged away.

She’d had this dream before, and knew how it would go, but she was powerless to stop its progress. She left the plaza, walking along a rutted path through the trees, until she finally reached a curious circular bit of stonework set in the ground. There were fist-sized holes in the stone at regular intervals, and a closed trapdoor in the center, and Zaltys knew it was the lid of a pit, or dungeon.

As always, Zaltys lifted the trapdoor, and looked down.

What she saw in the pit varied, though it was never pleasant. Sometimes she saw a writhing mass of snakes somehow forming a vaguely humanoid shape, with hissing hands reaching up to grasp her. Sometimes she saw a man with the hood of a cobra, dressed in a flowing black robe, with fingers that ended not in nails or even claws but in fangs dripping venom. Sometimes she saw a naked
baby, crying out in the darkness at the bottom of a deep chasm.

This time, she saw the shadow serpent, and it wafted up toward the trapdoor like smoke on an updraft, its body coiling and spiraling as it came.
We are family
, the serpent whispered in her mind.
And nothing is more important than family
. The serpent opened its vast jaws, tongue flickering out to touch her face, and—

Zaltys jerked awake. The night was cool, though not cold—it was never cold so close to the jungle, which was nice, actually. No matter how many blankets she piled on herself during Delzimmer winters, she could never get warm, and so she spent months at a time feeling sluggish and torpid. Only time next to a roaring fire helped restore her during city winters. Her mother said she was more susceptible to cold than most because her people came from the jungle.

She rolled over, and found herself face-to-face with a snake. Its eyes gazed into hers, and its tongue flickered, not quite touching her, before it slithered off into the night.

It took a long time for Zaltys to sleep again, but when she did, there were no dreams.

“Wake up, lazyhead.” Zaltys nudged Julen in the ribs with her foot. He groaned and turned over, trying to pull his bedroll over his head. “Come on, unless you want a cart to crush you.”

He sat up, blinking, and looked around at the bustle of camp. Tents had been struck and carts loaded before
dawn’s light fully overtook the sky, animals hitched and ready to start pulling, scouts sent in advance and behind and out to the sides to make sure no spies from rival families were trying to track the caravan’s progress. There were a few spies every year. They were invariably captured, given false memories by Glory to send their employers in the wrong direction, and set free to return home to sow disinformation.

Julen stared at her for a long moment. Then said: “Breakfast.”

“Ha. If you want breakfast, you have to get up with the rest of the camp. We’re moving out now. I’ll show you which dangling fruit is safe to eat on the way.”

He groaned and stood up, running a hand through his hair, which didn’t improve its disarray. “Where are we going?”

“Onward into the jungle, Cousin.”

“This
is
the jungle.” He pointed in the direction of some trees, as if illustrating his point.

“This is the
edge
of the jungle, the end of the rocky soil. Today we go into the jungle proper.”

“Fine. Where do I sit?”

Zaltys shook her head. “Mother says I’m to show you how things work here. That means you’re coming with me and some of the scouts to make sure there are no nasty surprises waiting for us up ahead.”

He stretched his arms overhead and worked the kinks out of his neck. “I don’t suppose I have a choice.”

“I suppose you
could
defy mother, one of the three heads of the family,” Zaltys said thoughtfully. “It would be interesting to see what the consequences would be.”

“Show me to my horse,” he said.

Zaltys laughed. “Go into the jungle ahead of the caravan on horseback? It would be interesting to see the consequences of
that
too, except a dead horse isn’t all that interesting.” She smacked him on the back. “I hope you brought your good boots. We go on foot, ahead of the trailbreakers, to make sure there’s nothing unpleasant waiting for them.”

“Like more shadow snakes?”

Zaltys tried not to let her face betray any emotion. “Those are very rare,” she said. “But there are other things. Giant insects and spiders. Jungle cats. Carnivorous plants. Farther to the south—deeper than we ever go—there are supposed to be yuan-ti, but I’ve never met any. They say there used to be a small tribe of them near our route once, but they’ve been gone for ages.”

“No people?” Julen said. “None of your, ah, original family?”

Zaltys shrugged. “There are tribes of halflings, but I’m a bit tall to pass for one of those.” She grinned. “Quelamia thinks my people were either a very small, unknown tribe, or maybe just refugees who fled the upheavals and ended up living in the jungle for a while. They didn’t last long, I guess. Certainly they didn’t leave much of a mark.”

“Who, or what, do you think …?” He looked away.

“Killed my family?” She kept her voice light. “Hard to say. Could be any number of things. Krailash found me crying among the trees, the only one left alive, so I don’t know who killed the others. I don’t guess it matters. Dead is dead.”

“Huh,” Julen said.

Zaltys knew she was somewhat notorious in the family, so it was understandable that he was curious about her origins. At least he’d become more polite—when they’d been young children playing together he’d once stared at her intently and blurted out, “Why come you’re so
brown
?” Adoptees weren’t unheard of, and were even considered to strengthen the family by bringing in fresh blood—for one thing, they could marry their cousins without a greater-than-usual risk of bearing idiot children—but hers was certainly the most unusual adoption in recent memory. The only other truly colorful adoptee still living was her great-uncle Gustavus, a lycanthrope that the Guardians had adopted in hopes of using him to frighten rivals; everyone was surprised when he showed an aptitude for bookkeeping instead, and they’d sent him to the Traders in exchange for a pair of sociopathic twins boys with no affinity for retail who’d later perished in a trade war with the Longspear cartel in Chavyondat. “Sorry,” Julen said. “I don’t mean to stir up bad memories, or …”

“I was an infant when they found me, Cousin. I don’t
have
any memories from that time. As far as memories go, I’ve been in the family as long as you have, and I’ve never known another life. I’m curious about my people, of course, but … they’re all gone. I’m just lucky I have a new family to call my own.”

“We’re happy to have you, Cousin,” Julen said, a little awkwardly. Then he sighed. “Even if you do have a bizarre fondness for sleeping without a roof overhead.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Zaltys said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Julen replied.

The caravan proceeded. Julen was in no danger of surpassing Zaltys’s skill as a ranger, but she had to admit that, interbranch family rivalry aside, the Guardians knew how to train their operatives. He pinned a platter-sized spider to a tree with a throwing knife—smirking at Zaltys and saying, “See, I have ranged weapons too,”—and helped her and the other forward scouts slash down a carnivorous vine that had grown across the barely-visible caravan path, showing no hesitation even when the bloodlike sap sprayed everywhere. He was clearly better suited to creeping through alleys, but he was adapting fairly well to the jungle environment.

“It’s not so different from the city in terms of sight-lines,” he mused as they ranged off to one side of the path to make sure there were no lurking hazards waiting to ambush the caravan. The trees there weren’t as big as elsewhere in the jungle, but that meant more sunlight could filter down, and as a result the jungle’s fecundity was explosive, with smaller trees and plants growing so close together Zaltys sometimes had to turn sideways to slip between the trunks. “Down in the oldest part of the city especially, the houses are built so close together the alleyways are too tiny for grown humans to pass through at all, and the streets curve and twist, limiting your sight-lines. There are places where the roofs overlap, blocking out the sun.” He glanced up at the green canopy above. “Of course, in the alleys, the worst you have to worry about is a mugger, not—I don’t know—giant flesh-devouring beetles.”

“The beetles aren’t so bad,” Zaltys said, pushing aside a low hanging branch and its freight of poisonous white flowers.

“Oh? So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to face out here, then?” Julen said.

Zaltys considered. “It’s hard to say. Deeper in the jungle you’ll want to keep an eye on the trees above you as well as the ground below. There are apes who’ll drop down from above and start pummeling you—we’ve even seen a few wearing fragments of old armor, guards of some abandoned ruin or another, I guess. They killed four of our scouts a few years ago. Krailash says there used to be yuan-ti near the prime terazul harvesting location, but he hasn’t seen any of them in years, and I’ve never seen one, myself. Lots of snakes, but no snake people. I’m sure there are worse things farther from the caravan path—chokers, drakes, trolls and goblins, who knows, maybe even a dragon—but most thinking creatures learned to avoid this route long before I was born. Between mother, Krailash, Quelamia, and Glory, we’re a lot more formidable than just about anything we’re likely to encounter among the trees. All we get are the mindless creatures, blood-sucking vines and giant spiders and the like. It’s a shame. It would be nice to have a challenge.”

“Really?” he said, hacking at a thorn-encrusted vine. “And I was just thinking it would be nice to have a hot bath.” He paused. “Who’s Glory?”