Just before she was well out of earshot, the derro shouted something. She wasn’t entirely sure the word was in her language, and it didn’t seem to mean anything in particular, but it rang in her head as she rode the river down deeper into the dark.
The word had sounded like “fishmeat.”
Chapter Fifteen
The trio of came crawling out of the pool, hauling their repulsive, shimmering bodies onto the stone floor of the cavern. Yes, Julen thought, I’ve eaten my last seafood dinner. Nothing but meat and greens and fruit for me from now on, and the livelihood of the hardworking fishermen of Delzimmer be damned. The Kuo-toa seemed more curious about him than openly aggressive, though who could say for sure? They had the heads of fish. Their expressions were the very definition of inscrutable. Still, the best-case scenario was they’d ignore him and leave him to starve to death. It seemed far more likely they’d murder him outright, or try to enslave him, though how would they drag him through their underwater tunnels without him dying in the process? Presumably they had some magic to address the problem.
Pondering such things helped him keep the paralying fear at bay, more or less, though what did it matter if he were paralyzed? He was chained, which was almost worse.
Someone came hurtling over the waterfall and landed in the pool with a titanic splash. Could it be Bug-eater, having changed his mind about taking the scenic route, come to rescue Julen from slavery in order to press him into another flavor of slavery? From his angle on the cavern floor, next to the bloodstain that was the only thing left of his dream-interpreting captor, he couldn’t see much at all to prove his hypothesis. The kuo-toa all turned, though, not so much whirling on the balls of their finned feet as dragging their bodies around in a half-circle to face the pool. They were obviously amphibious, but their bodies were clearly made more for moving underwater. They’d probably be graceful swimming around under the surface of some horrid lightless sea, but on land they moved like fish with legs, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
Someone came gasping to the surface of the water and started splashing toward the edge of the pool, and Julen couldn’t help but feel envy. He could have made a decent showing when he fell in the water too, if he’d been unbound. The kuo-toa grunted and squealed and raised their weapons, and the person dragging themselves up out of the water looked up, and saw them, and looked past them, and saw Julen.
It was Zaltys. She was dirty, even after her dunk in the river, and so loaded with supplies that she looked like a human pack mule, and her hair was wet and plastered to her face, and her eyes were wide and, if they weren’t terrified, it was only because they hadn’t yet finished looking surprised.
She’d never looked more beautiful to him, not even in his dreams. The kuo-toa hurled harpoons at her, and she promptly vanished. A nice trick, doubtless courtesy of her fancy new armor. The harpoons splashed harmlessly in the water, and as the kuo-toa reeled them back, peering into the depths to see where their prey had gone, they started to sprout arrows from the backs of their heads. Julen looked up, and Zaltys was standing over him, having emerged from the shadows of the cavern, dropped both her packs at her feet, and drawn her weapon. Her bow seemed no more substantial to his eye than a twist of black smoke against a twilight sky, but the arrows looked precisely like what they were-spinning shafts of death.
The kuo-toa thrashed, exactly like fish caught and tossed to the floor of a boat, gradually going still. They didn’t stink like dead fish, yet, but Julen assumed it was only a matter of time. “Nice to see you, Cousin,” he said, the casual tone he tried for rather spoiled by the croaking sound of his voice. He wasn’t thirsty, precisely, given the gallons of river water he’d swallowed, but the strain of expelling all that water from his body had torn up his throat.
“Good to be seen.” Zaltys kneeled, tugging futilely at his shackles. “Magical chains,” she said. “I have no idea how they work, there’s not even a keyhole.”
“I noticed. A shame I lost my pack. There was a knife inside.”
Zaltys held up a pack by its sodden shoulder straps. “This pack?” She opened it, and drew out the sheath. “This knife?” Drawing the blade, which flashed green in the dim light. “Where did you get this, anyway? Borrow it from your father’s desk drawer?”
Julen shook his head, rattling his chains. “See if it’s magical enough to cut through these, would you?” As Zaltys slipped the blade into the link of a chain, he explained that they had a secret benefactor who’d left the blade and a source of fresh water in his pack, among more mundane supplies. “Any guess who it might be?”
“No idea. No one knew about my plans.” She jammed the blade in and began twisting the hilt.
“Then how did you find the pack?”
“Attached to a dead derro in a tunnel,” she said.
“The labyrinth man,” Julen murmured. Zaltys ignored him. “How did you come to find me, then?”
“Another derro. A live one. He told me you were down here. Well, he didn’t tell me, exactly, but I inferred.”
“Did he have glowing bug guts in his beard?”
“The very one,” she said. “I gather you two met.” She grunted and gave the dagger a final hard twist.
The link holding his wrist shackles to his ankle shackles gave way, and Julen stifled a scream as he was, finally, able to stretch out his limbs. The agony of releasing his cramped muscles was simultaneously horrible and delicious. Zaltys ignored his contented, pained moans and broke the links closest to the shackles on each ankle and both wrists, carefully coiling up the remaining chains and stuffing them into a pack-Julen’s pack, he noticed. Well, that was fair. She’d been carrying a lot of extra weight. It was his turn. “In case we can use them for something later,” she said. “Not sure I can do anything about the shackles themselves, unless you want me to risk jamming this knife between your wrists and the metal …? No? I thought not.”
Julen stood up, continuing to stretch and bend and work his protesting muscles. “It’s fine. Chunky metal bracelets and anklets are all the rage among the fashionable youth in Delzimmer this season. So what now? Retrace our steps and flee with our lives?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve come this far. Might as well see it through, otherwise we’ve just wasted a lot of time.”
“If you insist.” He shouldered his pack and looked toward the dead kuo-toa, wondering if they should rifle their bodies to see if they had anything worth stealing. The idea was distasteful in the extreme, not because of any inherent moral hesitation when it came to robbing corpses-he was a member of the Guardians, after all, whose unofficial motto was “Do Whatever’s Necessary”-but because the kuo-toa were just so loathsome.
“What do you call those, then? Come across them in your books?”
“Kuo-toa,” Julen said. “Fish people.”
“Ha. Fishmeat. They’re the fish, and I was supposed to be the meat. Some joke.”
“You lost me,” he said. “But that’s all right. I’ve been down here long enough to be used to being lost.”
“These fish people. Are they dangerous?”
Julen nodded. “Reckoned to be one of the most dangerous of the races dwelling in the Underdark, though really, none of those races are what you’d call harmless. Apparently they’re prone to plagues of madness that can sweep through a whole community like the flu-or fin fungus, I suppose. These seemed sane enough, but who can guess what’s happening in a fish-person’s mind?”
“Communities. So this isn’t likely to be some isolated family group, then, that just happens to live in this pool.”
Julen shook his head. “I don’t think so. Hunting or scouting party, I’d guess. The pool is probably connected to a bunch of subterranean tunnels.”