Such beasts were treacherous, and seemed not entirely natural. They could be enormous, twice the length of a man, serpents in shape but shadowy in substance, and they had the trick of traveling from one spot to another without crossing the intervening space. She’d never seen one up close, only glimpsing them twice in her past travels, and usually deeper in the jungle. Stories said they were remnants of some forgotten yuan-ti settlement, pets left behind when their masters died or moved on. Their venom was supposed to be unspeakably virulent-legend said that a limb bitten by a shadow snake would turn shadowy and insubstantial itself, not so much rotting away as gradually fading from reality-but Zaltys wasn’t overly worried about the possibility of a bite. She’d never been bitten by a snake, despite literally countless encounters with them, and anyway, the caravan had an ample supply of anti-venoms.
She put her hand on Julen’s shoulder, making him pause. They crouched among the thick-limbed trees near a clearing, where the vine-encrusted head of an enormous statue crowded the trees aside. “There,” Zaltys whispered, pointing.
Julen squinted. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s dim, but it’s there, just a coil of shadow in the shade of the statue.” The shadow snake was either hiding or waiting in ambush, as its kind preferred to attack from concealment. Zaltys could appreciate that. It was a tactic she favored herself.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Julen said.
Zaltys reached back to her quiver, feeling the fletching of the arrows, looking for one in particular. Her mother and Quelamia had provided her with a few arrows that had special qualities. One was tipped with the tooth of a salamander; another had an arrowhead made from a crystalline shard of the Living Gate, whatever that was; a third was coated in the slime from a basilisk’s eyes. Her fingers found the one she was looking for: feathers stiff with cold, so chilled they almost burned her finger. She drew the arrow, its head a vicious triangle of pure ice, and nocked it in her bow.
“You’re shooting at shadows,” Julen said, still squinting. Krailash and the other guards were crashing through, coming closer, and the shadow snake coiled itself, preparing to strike. With its ability to shift from place to place, it could bite everyone in the party before they had a moment to fight back. Unless Zaltys could stop it.
She drew the arrow, looking beyond the length of the shaft at the grayish-black serpent, and loosed.
The arrow left a trail of vapor in the air as it flew, and it struck the snake just below its jaw. The arrowhead shattered on impact, chips of magical ice striking the shadow serpent in the head and throat, and a web of cold and frost grew, pinning the snake to the statue. The serpent twisted wildly and flickered, becoming insubstantial in patches, but Quelamia’s magics wouldn’t permit it to phase out of solidity and escape, not without tearing its own throat out in the process.
“Now I see it,” Julen said, stepping into the clearing after Zaltys. “Nice shooting, Cousin.”
“Wait for it to die before you get too close,” she said, watching the snake writhe, body flapping like a banner in a high wind. “They’re lethal in their death throes.”
Why do you kill me, child of Zehir? the shadow snake said, fixing her with its eerie twilit eyes.
Zaltys stared. “What-did you …?”
Julen looked at her oddly. “Did I what?”
“I thought I heard …” But she hadn’t heard it, exactly. The snake’s voice had spoken in her head, the way Glory could when she pushed her thoughts into Zaltys’s mind-generally because the psion was too lazy to walk across the camp to speak to Zaltys in person.
You killed one of my friends, Zaltys thought, though it wasn’t quite true-she didn’t even know the name of the guard who’d died, and Krailash would have mentioned if it was someone she knew. But the dead guard was someone who worked for the family, which meant she had a responsibility to him.
But we are death from the darkness, the shadow snake said. Its writhing slowed, and though there was no light to fade from its eyes, the darkness in its eyes became less malevolent and more merely empty. We are poison and surprise. We are children of …
The snake died, and seemed less eerie and dangerous in death, becoming merely a giant snake with grayish-black scales. Julen was poking at the serpent with the blade of his knife, opening its jaws to look at the fangs within, and Zaltys had to bite back the urge to tell him to stop, that it wasn’t respectful to prod the dead, but of course, it was just a beast, though possibly a magical one. Had Zaltys imagined the voice in her head? The things the serpent said, they weren’t so dissimilar from the things she sometimes heard in her dreams.
Krailash appeared with his guards then. “Ah, you beat us to the kill,” he said. “I suspected you would.” He nodded to Julen. “Are you skilled with a knife, young man?”
Julen flipped the blade up into the air and caught it by the hilt in his other hand without looking. “What do you think?”
“I think juggling isn’t the same as cutting,” the dragonborn said dryly. “But if you’ve any skill as an anatomist, feel free to cut out the eyes and fangs of the beast there, and skin it too. The wizard in our caravan can use the components of a shadow beast in her rituals, I’m sure. Leave the meat, though. I wouldn’t want shadowflesh in a cookpot. No telling what sort of indigestion that might give you.”
Zaltys again resisted the urge to object. Why should cutting up a shadow serpent strike her as a desecration?
Julen sighed. “Butchery isn’t as fun as other things, but my father made me dissect all sorts of things so I’d know the best place to strike with a blade, so I’m sure I can manage this.”
“Good. Zaltys, you’ll keep him company?” And keep watch over him, was the unspoken portion, or so Zaltys assumed.
“Yes, Krai.”
“Excellent. See you both back at camp. Don’t linger-the parts will spoil if we don’t get them to Quelamia soon.”
Zaltys sat on the statue’s jutting snout and watched as Julen deftly cut into the serpent’s head, levering out its eyes. He dropped the orbs into a leather pouch and set that aside. The ice from her arrow was already melting, and the shaft fell to the ground, where Julen kicked it aside. “Don’t do that,” she said, letting some of her confusion emerge in the form of annoyance. “We don’t have an infinite supply of arrows out here.”
“Right, sorry.” Julen was intent on his work, pulling the serpent’s body free of the ice and stretching it out to its full length on the ground. “Didn’t think about it. It’s so strange, this creature doesn’t even bleed. Means I won’t need to change my shirt, at least, which is good, since I only brought three others, and you’ve reminded me that I can’t just send my valet out to get more … barbaric.” He sawed off the snake’s head-Zaltys had to look away-then crouched and sliced neatly along the center of the snake’s belly from the base of the headless stump to the cloaca. He put the knife aside, grasped the snake’s skin in both hands, and pulled with gentle, even pressure, peeling its skin back in a single piece. Once the skin was pulled almost entirely free of the flesh underneath, he used the knife to cut through the last clinging shreds of fat and muscle, and held up the shadow snake’s skin. It was a large, single sheet of snakeskin, and it fluttered oddly, seeming to absorb light and fuzzily emit darkness. “Hate to roll this up, but I don’t see how we can carry it loose. Give me a hand?”
Zaltys nodded, trying not to let her reluctance show, and helped Julen roll up the snakeskin into a bundle small enough to carry. Once he had it in his arms, and the pouch of eyes and teeth at his belt, he said, “Okay. Keep me from getting eaten by tigers, because I don’t have a free hand.”