Venom in Her Veins by Tim Pratt Page A

“You were spying on my mother ?”
    Her cousin had the good grace to look sheepish, but only for a moment. Then he frowned. “That’s what the Guardians do . We listen to things we aren’t supposed to overhear. We gather secrets.”
    “Spying on your own family, Julen, that’s low.”
    “Ah. So you don’t want to know what I found out then?”
    Zaltys settled down beside him, leaning against a cartwheel. “Well. I didn’t say that . They were talking about Rainer?”
    “They were,” he said. “And talking with Rainer too.” Julen played with a thick silver coin, walking it across the backs of his fingers, making it appear and disappear. He really did have agile hands. The Guardians had to practice their skills just as much as Zaltys had to practice archery, she supposed. “I don’t know. I think the man might be mad. He said he escaped the place where he wasimprisoned, and wandered lost in the tunnels for a while, until a snake led him to the surface.”
    Zaltys grunted. “That’s unusually helpful, for a snake.”
    “Yes. I think he probably hallucinated the snake, but who knows? He didn’t make much sense at first, but then …” He frowned. “Someone talked to him. I can’t remember who.”
    Glory , Zaltys thought.
    “Anyway, after that, he got more lucid, was able to answer questions, explain what happened to him. Zaltys, did you know he held you in his arms when you were just an infant?”
    She blinked. “Rainer? He was one of the guards who found me? But why didn’t my mother tell me that? Or introduce me to him?”
    Julen shrugged. “I’m not sure. I don’t really understand it. The day Rainer was taken by slavers—it was the same day they found you.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “That’s what he said. ‘After we found the baby, they dragged me down.’ ”
    “I wonder if the slavers who took him were the same creatures who killed my village?” Zaltys said.
    “Ah. They … Zaltys, the story I always heard was that you were found among the dead, the only survivor of a massacre.”
    “Yes, that’s right,” she said. No one liked to talk to Zaltys much about the day she’d been found, saying it was a sad and tragic time, but she’d managed to extract that much information from them: that she was the sole survivor of a murdered village.
    Julen shook his head. “But that’s not what Rainer said . He was telling them what happened, and he started with the day he was taken, and there was nothing about finding any other bodies. He and Krailash heard you cry out in the jungle, and they went to investigate, and found you in the ruins, but no one else. There were bloodstains on the stones, and the teeth of monsters broken and scattered on the ground, but your people weren’t massacred. They were enslaved, Rainer says. Taken by the same creatures who took him .”
    Zaltys shook her head. “No, that’s not … That’s not how it happened, that’s not what they told me. Julen, I’ve visited the grave site, it’s this great heap of dirt and stone, they buried my whole village in a pit.”
    “People lie, Zaltys,” Julen said gently. “Serrats more than most, maybe.”
    “But why ? Why tell me my family was dead?”
    “Maybe it was easier?” Julen said. “Kinder? To let you think they were dead, instead of down there, in the Underdark. With the derro. Rainer and Krailash were making sure the slavers were gone, and when Rainer got separated from Krailash for a moment, the harvesters sprang on him from a crack in the ground, bound him with shackles, and pulled him into the caverns below.”
    “Derro,” Zaltys whispered. She’d heard of them, of course, but they were a bogeyman, a threat, moon-white underdwellers said to hide in dark basements and enslave disobedient children, who would be forced into an eternity of shoveling coal into hellish furnaces if they didn’t attend their etiquette lessons or failed to address a family elder with proper respect. She hadn’t really