Krailash sagged to his knees, the spirit strength draining away, his injuries catching up with him. “Never seen anything like that before,” he murmured.
“I’d never done it before,” Alaia said, touching his arm. “Probably the second most powerful magic I know. My teacher called it the Sea of Serpents.” She shook her head. “I don’t much like snakes, even if they aren’t real snakes, exactly.”
“Those snakes saved your life,” Krailash said.
“Both of our lives,” she corrected.
“I’m not so sure,” the dragonborn said. He closed his eyes, sinking into a warm and enveloping inner blackness that no weapon he’d ever studied could combat.
Chapter Fourteen
Julen had heard drowning was actually a very peaceful way to die, second only to dying of exposure in a snowstorm, where, as he understood it, the snow actually began to feel soothing and warm, and you simply dropped off to a sleep from which you never awoke.
He’d never actually seen snow, so he couldn’t speak to the pleasantness or unpleasantness of such a death, but he felt quite qualified to state that drowning was, in fact, a truly horrible way to die. Drowning while chained with no possibility of saving oneself through heroic physical effort was even worse for being more psychologically debilitating. Drowning, while chained, in the crushing blackness of the Underdark, while also failing to help the cousin you were in love with, seemed to him perhaps the worst way to die of all.
He tried to hold his breath at first, of course, hoping the derro would save him somehow. Julen was supposed to be a slave, after all, a valuable commodity, and letting him die in a pool of water seemed irresponsible. It was certainly bad business. Julen thought fleetingly that a member of the Traders would never allow such wastage, which was a point in their favor. But derro were mad. Maybe his captor had drowned as well, or simply been distracted by a passing prey animal or a shiny stone, and forgotten all about his prisoner.
Holding his breath was hard, because the shock of hitting the icy water had driven the air from his lungs, and he felt the need to suck in air almost immediately. After what seemed an hour but was probably no more than a minute, blackness began to creep into the edges of his vision. That surprised Julen, because the bottom of the pool was already black, utterly lightless, but there was a greater blackness encroaching. Then a new sensation began, like his chest being squeezed in the hands of a giant, and his eyes prickled and burned, and his brain felt hot in his skull.
And he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. He sucked in a breath, and water filled his nostrils and his throat.
After that it was actually rather peaceful, though only because he lost consciousness.
The peace didn’t last long. Someone struck him hard on the back and he vomited water, no longer ice cold, but warmed from being inside his body. Julen gagged, shuddered, and convulsed, the muscles of his abdomen clenching and unclenching painfully, and he stared at the puddle on the stones before him. He was on his belly, still chained, in a not-entirely-dark cavern, and he was alive, though he felt like he’d been turned inside out, and every breath was like a rasp being drawn across his innards.
“Good strong boy,” his derro captor said, and smacked him on the back again, hard. “You’ll make a good worker. You died a little there, I think. See anything interesting, in death? Any secrets? I like secrets.”
“A snake,” Julen said, remembering as he spoke. His voice was a serrated croak. He couldn’t think of any snake gods, though his aunt the shaman had mentioned a World Serpent once or twice, some kind of primal spirit, he gathered. Was that what he’d seen? It seemed rather darker than that. And insofar as he’d been able to read its expression, the creature had seemed amused by his death-a malicious pleasure, not wise understanding. The vision he’d seen was more like a snake made of shadows, not unlike the one Zaltys had killed and he’d skinned. Perhaps it was simply that snake’s ghost, waiting beyond death to take revenge on Julen’s own spirit. Happy thought.
The snake in his vision had been a lot larger than the shadow snake, though. And it had looked much smarter, and more hungry.
“Snake? Hmm.” The derro continued thumping him on the back, though less violently. “The serpent is a great symbol. Mythic ancestor of great heroes. Devourer and progenitor, cyclical manifestations, the transformation of death into life. Seer, healer, sea monster, tempter, death in the dark, worm with pretensions, keeper of earthly knowledge, wellspring of poison. A vision of snakes can mean almost anything.” He shrugged. “I was a savant once, before I was a slaver. My gift was to interpret the dreams of the Slime King. But the Slime King doesn’t sleep, so they gave me shackles and a whip and sent me to do useful work instead.” He jerked Julen’s chain and began dragging him again, around the perimeter of the dark pool. The light there came from red crystals, so faint they’d been invisible under the water, but bright enough to see by once he’d been saved.
Julen realized his path was totally obscured. Zaltys was an excellent tracker, but even she wouldn’t be able to trace his passage down a waterfall. He was well and truly trapped with the lunatic and his mad people. Death was almost literally the best thing he could hope for.
Then his captor sprouted an arrow from his throat, gurgled, and fell. “Zaltys!” Julen shouted, exalted.
But it wasn’t Zaltys that rose up from the pool’s black water, and when the derro’s corpse began moving, he realized it wasn’t an arrow that had killed his captor, but a harpoon-a harpoon being reeled toward the pool by its wielder, who watched Julen with huge, watery eyes.
Suddenly the derro, which at least looked vaguely human and sometimes spoke his language-even if they said things that didn’t make sense-didn’t seem so bad. The creature with the harpoon was joined by three others, emerging from the water silently.
“Kuo-toa,” Julen whispered. The drawings he’d seen in the books on the Underdark in the family library didn’t do the creatures justice. “Loathsome fish-things,” that was how they’d been described, and while they bore enough resemblance to ordinary fish to assure he’d never enjoy a seafood dinner ever again, they were as big as humans, with hands that could grip weapons, and fangs protruding from their jaws. The one with the harpoon pulled the derro into the pool-the same pool where Julen himself had so recently drowned. Those things had been underneath him? The pool must connect to some subterranean network of rivers traveled by the creatures. No wonder it was considered a dangerous route. Bug-eater had been wise to take the long way down. It was faster, and maybe even fun if you weren’t chained up when you went flying from the river into the pool, but you ran the risk of being captured by fish-monsters who worshiped unheard-of gods.
Zaltys was sufficiently energized by her successful massacre of the floating jellyfish monsters that she almost wanted to shout for the derro to come out and face her, thinking she could pretty easily put them down too, but good sense won out over suicidal self-confidence. She didn’t worry about the light of her sunrod, assuming that, by that point, she’d fallen so far behind Julen’s captors that there was little chance of running into them, and reluctant to plunge herself into darkness again. Light was hard to give up once she had it. She soon realized the sunrod wasn’t strictly necessary, though. Even beyond the reach of her light she could see patches of illumination as she wound through tunnels with her snake companion.