The Black Bouquet

She had no intention of standing still while she tried. With the torch soaked and useless, Miri wanted to reach a place where something else shed light before her spell of illumination ran out of power. Nocking another arrow, she retreated down the tu

Then she gasped as something alien touched her mind. It was like a bitter chill freezing the inside of her head, or rather, it wasn't, but that was as close as she could come. She'd never felt the repugnant sensation before, and she knew no words to describe it.

She was still trying to shake it off when something hissed in the darkness ahead. A huge black viper, longer than she was tall, slithered into view. It was crawling directly toward her.

She shuddered. Whimpered. Recoiled a step. Her arrow nearly slipped from her fingertips and off the bowstring.

She knew it shouldn't be that way. She'd never been afraid of snakes before. The force that had pierced her mind had poisoned her with an u

By sheer force of will, she made herself stop retreating. She controlled her breathing, drew the bowstring back, and let her arrow fly.

The missile drove into the viper's body just behind its head, pi

When it did, she realized that some other threat could easily have crept up on her while she was so frantically intent on the viper. Reaching for another arrow, she turned, and a cudgel streaked at her head.

Two of her foes had stealthily closed the distance. Unlike the accomplice who'd brought Miri there, neither could have passed for human. The one with the club had a manlike shape but scaly reptilian hide. Its fellow, who wielded a rawhide whip, reared on an ophidian tail instead of legs. Both were the same gray-brown as the dirt walls and floor. Somehow, this chameleonlike ability to change color extended even to their clothing and weapons, and it explained their success at hiding in plain sight.

They were yuan-ti, a race comprising a sinister blend of snake and human. Until that moment, Miri had had the good luck never to encounter the species before, but by all accounts, she could scarcely have blundered into graver peril.

She blocked the cudgel with her buckler. The impact clanged, and it stung her forearm. The whip sliced at her legs, and she tried to parry with her bow. Perhaps she succeeded to a degree, but the flexible braided leather whirled around the length of wood and stung her even so.

The bow was the wrong weapon for close quarters. She dropped it and scrambled backward, meanwhile snatching for the hilt of her broadsword. Hissing, exposing their fangs, her assailants lunged after her. She glimpsed other yuan-ti, no two exactly alike but each a fusion of man and serpent, racing up behind them. The inside of her mind went icy cold, reinfecting her with terror, and she purged it by bellowing a battle cry.

She dodged the whip and parried the club. She backed into the tu

At the sight of the straight, double-edged blade, her foes hesitated. In a moment, they'd spread out to flank her and work together more effectively, except that Miri saw no reason to give them the chance. She sprang at the reptile-man with the club. It swung the weapon, but she discerned the blow was going to miss and simply continued her own attack. The broadsword sheared into the yuan-ti's chest. The creature started to collapse. She yanked the blade free, pivoted-

– and was too slow. The whip lashed her sword arm, the impact painful even through her reinforced leather sleeve, and spun around it. The legless yuan-ti yanked the coils tight and jerked her forward. The creature raised its offhand, which sweated a clear slime, to grab her.

Had Miri been panicked, or simply a less experienced fighter, she might have dug in her heels and resisted. But she knew she didn't have time to play tug-of-war. If she immobilized herself that way, one of her other foes would overwhelm her. So she didn't resist the pull. To the contrary, she scrambled forward as fast as she could, and when the whip slackened, she regained the ability to wield the broadsword.

Unfortunately, by that time, she was in such close proximity to the yuan-ti that the harsh smell of its acidic secretion stung her eyes and nostrils, so near that it was difficult to bring her blade into play. The serpent-man grabbed her shield arm, and her armor started to smolder and hiss. She twisted the limb from its grasp, bashed it in the face with the buckler, then hammered the top of its head with the broadsword's heavy nickel pommel. Bone cracked, and the yuan-ti went down. She frantically freed herself from the coils of the whip and turned to meet her next foes.

At which point, she almost laughed at the futility of all her struggling, because for the first time, she had a sense of just how many of them she was facing. A dozen at least. Conceivably even more.

The yuan-ti surged at her. Poised on guard, she chanted the opening words of her guild's death prayer, beseeching Mielikki to welcome her soul into the House of Nature.

A voice cried out in a sibilant language, presumably the yuan-ti's own. The snake-men halted, though their attitude remained as threatening as before. Some reasserted their ability to blend into the background, which plainly worked best when they weren't moving. It was unca

"You see how outnumbered you are," said the same voice, but in the common tongue. "You can't win, but we don't want to kill you. If we did, we'd come at you with blades and arrows instead of clubs, nets, and whips."

"What do you want?" Miri asked.

"Someone is smitten with you," said the yuan-ti's spokesman. "So much so that he put out the word, he'll pay well to anyone who arranges a rendezvous."

Miri was accustomed to plain speech, and it took her a moment to puzzle out what had actually been said.

"You're slavers?" she said. "I'm a free woman, no enemy of Oeble, and no outlaw. You have no right to lay hands on me."

Some of the yuan-ti laughed.

"I'm afraid," said their leader, "that down here in the Underways-well, anywhere in Oeble, really-we hunt whom we please, without much worrying what the rules say."

"I came into the tu

"That's nice, but in our trade, it pays to do business with folk you already know. Less is likely to go wrong. Now be sensible and throw away your sword."

"No," Miri said. "We don't do that in the Red Hart Guild."

"How brainless, when you have no hope of wi

"But I do. I'll slay more of you before you take me down, and each of those kills will be a victory. Every one will make the world a little cleaner."

She lunged and cut. The broadsword slashed open the throat of a snake-headed yuan-ti before it even realized the battle had resumed.

She spun just in time to spy another creature-a serpent-woman-puffing on a blowpipe. Miri sidestepped, and the dart, which was no doubt drugged, flew wild. She hacked at the yuan-ti, half severing its scaly hand at the wrist. The slaver shrieked and recoiled. Miri leaped out from under an outflung net with lead weights and fishhooks attached to the edges, and then stamped on it when it dropped to the ground, thus preventing the brute on the other end from pulling it back for another cast. The slaver let go, and its limbs and torso so flexible it seemed to have no bones, it curled itself into a posture resembling a human wrestler's stance. Acidic jelly smeared itself across its hide, it pounced, and she whirled out of the way, simultaneously slamming the edge of her buckler into its spine. Evidently it had vertebrae after all, because one of them cracked.