Scitheron bowed his head. “As you will, most low. I will make the sacrifice at the midday feeding.”
“Mmm,” the low priest said. “No. Better to do it now.” She showed her fangs. “Not that I expect you to disobey-you have always been obedient-but I can see it troubles your mind. Finish the task then, and you can move on. Besides, it’s an act for the shadows, as all gifts for Zehir must be.”
Scitheron flickered his tongue in assent and slithered to one of the low buildings, a rare structure that still had portions of its roof. It was the nursery, where the youngest yuan-ti slithered and wrestled and twined, and where one child mewled and waved her brownish, soft, unscaled limbs around, gazing about her with disturbingly round-pupiled eyes in her strange flat face. He picked her up, and she cooed at him. Her skin, at least, was not as delectably warm as the furred creatures of the jungle-she resembled a human, apart from a few patches of scale here and there, but she still had a serpent’s blood.
“Forgive me, child,” he said. “Forgive me, Zehir.” Cradling the girl in his arms, he emerged from the low building and slithered across the plaza toward the pit of their sole remaining anathema, the last living god-touched member of their sect. The other yuan-ti watched him as he went, some making the sign of the fangs when he passed.
Scitheron was halfway to the pit when he heard the screams. They were not the screams of his people-who were, anyway, not screamers by nature, preferring to do even their dying in silence-but the screams of attacking warriors. He almost dropped the child in his fright, but he kept her close to his underbelly as he slithered quietly back toward the plaza. He called on his god’s power to drape him in a clinging shadow to hide him from enemies, and peered from the jungle’s growth.
Horrors had descended on the plaza. Humanoids, most shorter than Scitheron, wearing black leather armor. Their flesh, where it showed, was as pale as the underside of poisonous mushrooms. They cackled as they swung their war picks, the harvesters among them wielding magical black iron shackles that wound around the limbs or tangled the coils of the yuan-ti who attempted to flee.
Derro, Scitheron thought.
The baby mewled, softly, and Scitheron covered her mouth with his hands. The invaders couldn’t have heard the child’s sound over the violence happening in the plaza, but if she cried out again, Scitheron would snap her tiny neck to preserve himself, child of destiny or no. The derro were one of the most feared races of the Underdark, which meant the sinkhole that had opened in the floor of the main temple a few days before was more than merely an accident of nature-it was a breach point, allowing insane horrors from the depths to attack in their midst.
The abomination guards had fought back, and they lay dead on the stones of the courtyard. The settlement’s lone cobra striker spat venom in the face of one of the slavers, the enemy’s flesh melting away, but the attacker only cackled wildly and lashed out with its club. Derro were insane, tainted by their association with aberrant creatures and their devotion to the outer horrors of the so-called Far Realm, where madness was sanity and reality ran like melting wax. Another derro unleashed bolts from a small, lethal repeating crossbow into the striker’s flared cobra hood and scaled throat, felling the brave warrior. For the most part, though, the derro didn’t kill-they weren’t there for murder. They were there for slaves, and indeed, many of the harvesters were already dragging away writhing prisoners. The only ones dead were the guards, the abominations, the striker, and the low priest, who had attempted to call on the power of Zehir to protect the settlement, with some success, as the crushed bodies of a few derro around her attested. But it hadn’t been enough, and crossbow bolts had pierced her in a dozen places, cold blood oozing onto the stones.
The battle, such as it was, wound down. Some of the more thuggish derro, armed only with clubs, gathered up their dead, and the bodies of the fallen yuan-ti too. Of course, Scitheron thought sourly. Why leave good meat for the jungle beasts?
There was only one hope. It wasn’t much of a hope. But he could go back and free the anathema from its pit. The god-king was mad, but it still had some connection to Zehir, and perhaps some vestige of loyalty to its people would lead it to strike against the derro? The tales of anathema in battle were legendary, and some of their crumbling frescoes depicted such clashes in gloriously gory detail.
Scitheron could move faster without a mewling infant in his arms. And if the anathema didn’t help him, if he ate him instead, this ape-faced girl might be the last remnant of this particular sect of the serpentfolk. Not that she was likely to survive on her own, among the jungle creatures, but he’d do what he could. He set her gently behind a pillar and covered her in a scattering of broad leaves. She cooed at him again, her eyes bright, her limbs waving uselessly.
This errand might be useless too, but it was the best he could do.
Scitheron approached the pit, but stopped before he reached the great barred roof that covered the anathema’s prison and lair. Voices were speaking, in the guttural tones of Deep Speech, the language of the dwellers below the earth. Scitheron knew some words in that tongue, and thought he heard “treasure” and “king.”
Well, the anathema was something of a treasure, and something of a king, but-
A derro screamed, and Scitheron smiled. The foolish slaver must have lifted the trapdoor that opened into the pit, where sacrifices were given, and become a sacrifice himself. Scitheron slithered closer, and saw one of the derro gazing down into the pit, where, by the sound of things, his fellow was being messily devoured. Scitheron had no weapon, but he was a cleric of Zehir, and he raised his hands to call the power of his god to rack the remaining derro with the pain of a thousand coursing venoms.
Before he could speak the dark prayer, another derro lunged into his vision, cackling, white hair caked with blood, a war pick in one hand and a set of shackles in the other.
Scitheron prayed for death, but Zehir did not oblige him, and he was beaten to the ground, bound, and dragged away. One of his eyes was swollen shut, but with the other, he watched as a derro opened its filthy breeches and pissed a stream down into the anathema’s pit, cackling all the while, and then slammed the trapdoor shut.
So ends this holdfast of the faith, Scitheron thought. The only one of his people left-apart from the trapped anathema-was the girl child, and she would almost certainly be killed by some passing jungle beast before the sun reached the crown of the sky. So Zehir wills, he thought, and saw the faint hint of sunlight touch the sky just before the derro dragged him through the door of the temple to the yawning pit in the floor that led into the devouring darkness.
Before they threw him into the shallowest part of the Underdark, he thought he heard, faintly, the child’s long and lonely cry.
Chapter Two
The gathering party was collecting blossoms in the first blush of dawn’s light when they heard the child’s cry-sharp, brief, and loud. Krailash frowned, and the three humans under his protection looked up from their work, eyes wide over the white cloth masks that covered their noses and mouths, heavily gloved hands pausing in their work. The dark blue flowers they picked, growing on lush green vines that thoroughly entwined the broken pillars and all the nearby trees, filled the air with their sweet, subtle scent as the women and their guards listened to the silence, and then the cry came again.