The Serpent Waits

by Bill Hiatt

  “We don’t have much choice,” thought Tal. “Viviane, do what you can do to obscure us. Add a layer to the don’t-notice-us spell.”

  “That’s not going to conceal us from someone really powerful,” thought Viviane.

  “No, but Hafez knows we’re here, anyway. If the versions of us in this world never discovered their supernatural potential, there aren’t likely to be any other really powerful sorcerers around.”

  I should have been used to the unexpected by now, but I was still surprised when I started rising from the ground in response to Tal and Magnus’s singing. Floating on magically charged musical notes, we maneuvered around the eaves of the garage with some difficulty. Once free, we moved somewhat higher. The night was cold and windy, but once we were on the way, Tal’s melody switched subtly, and the air around us warmed.

  “Is there anything he can’t do?” I asked Khalid.

  The half djinn smiled. “Damn little. That knowledge potion he took so many lives ago changed the way his brain works. He can learn unfamiliar magic or even improvise new spells much faster than anyone else we know of—well, except Magnus.”

  His volume dropped so noticeably at the end that I reflexively glanced in Magnus’s direction. He seemed occupied by his music and his magic.

  I opened my mouth to ask what Magnus’s deal was. Despite how much he looked like Tal, he was much more abrasive. I couldn’t help wondering why the others tolerated his attitude.

  Khalid raised a finger to his lips. Maybe he was just concerned about breaking Tal’s and Magnus’s concentration, but I couldn’t escape the feeling he didn’t want to talk about Magnus so close to him. That ratcheted up my curiosity several notches, but I had enough experience as a reporter to know that too much pressure can make a source clam up. Khalid would tell me what I wanted to know eventually, but I was going to have to let him do it in his own time.

  I made the mistake of looking down, Watching the shadowy landscape flow past beneath us like a great, dark river was enough to give me an anxiety attack.

  “I guess I should have told you not to look down,” said Khalid. “We’re so used to flying I kind of forgot you weren’t.”

  “How far away from Summerland are we?” I asked, trying not to sound too queasy.

  “About eighty-three miles,” said Stan. “At the highest safe speed we can manage with so many non-flyers, that’s going to be about a five-hour trip.”

  “Or more,” said Carla. “Someone’s following us.”

  I looked in the direction she’d looked and saw patches darker than the surrounding night sky flying in our direction. For some reason, I thought about the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz and snickered.

  Unfortunately, as the creatures following us shifted direction with us, they were more clearly lit by what moonlight there was—and the flying monkeys seemed benign by comparison.

  Our pursuers had the bodies of lions on steroids and the heads and wings of enormously oversized hawks. Worse, they were flying much faster than we were, closing the gap between us and their claws and beaks.

  “Griffins?” asked Gordy.

  The name popped into my head as if I had always known it. “Axex.”

  I felt a headache throbbing to life—at the worst possible time.

  “Whatever they are, I’ve got this,” said Khalid.

  “We don’t know they’re hostile!” thought Tal so loudly his words throbbed in rhythm with my headache.

  I thought he was being overly optimistic. The creatures sailing toward us might be unfamiliar, but they didn’t look friendly. They did look as if they were getting ready for dinner.

  Tal must have reached the same conclusion. He drew his sword and painted a wall of flame between us and the approaching axexes. Before they could fly around it, he had expanded and reshaped it to create a ball of flame all around us, like a fiery force field. Everyone who had weapons had drawn them. Khalid looked impatient—he had an arrow ready, but no way to aim it.

  The axexes cried out in frustration, a sound halfway between the call of a hawk and the roar of a lion.

  “What’re they doing?” asked Michael.

  “Surrounding us on all sides, including above and below,” said Tal as if he could see through the flames.

  “Fry the suckers!” said Magnus. “We can’t risk aerial combat with so many non-flyers, and we can’t just float here and try to wait them out.”

  Tal looked in my direction. “You know these creatures—or was that information from Amenirdis?”

  “It feels as if Amenirdis is waking up again,” said Viviane. If that’s true, we really have to get out of here.”

  My headache was getting worse. Was my past-life self about to take over?

  Tal’s forehead furrowed in concentration, and our flaming walls slowly expanded. He must have been trying to gradually push back the axexes.

  “What’s that going to accomplish?” asked Magnus. “They aren’t leaving. Light ‘em up—or give me White Hilt, and I’ll do it.”

  “Wind storm, Magnus!” said Tal as if he hadn’t heard the suggestion to roast the axexes.

  “Are you nuts? We can’t both be doing other magic and keep everybody in the air. Carla can’t do it alone. Anyway, it’s going to be hard to work the wind around your shield.”

  “I’ll manage for a few minutes,” said Carla. “So can you, Magnus, if you’d just stop complaining and do it.”

  My headache had escalated into a full-blown migraine. The mental conversation was too loud. The fire was too bright. I had to shut my eyes to think at all.

  “These aren’t griffins—” began Magnus.

  “Just do it!” roared Tal so loudly that I thought my head would explode.

  I closed my eyes again. I wanted to be far away from all the light and noise, but there was no way to escape it.

  “Yes, there is a way. I am the way.”

  The mental voice sounded unlike any of the people with whom I was networked.

  “Sleep and allow me to do what I was born to do—what we were born to do.”

  “Hold on!”

  At first, I couldn’t tell who was shouting. Then I realized it was Viviane. She was shouting at me.

  I knew what she wanted me to do, but it was getting too hard to do it. My head was pounding like a drum. My eyelids felt like lead weights. My arms and legs felt even heavier, as if they encased in concrete.

  If the original Amenirdis took over, would I ever be myself again? Or was my current self just an illusion, a package waiting to be opened? That was it! The time of opening had arrived.

  I was barely aware of Viviane getting closer until she grabbed me by the wrist.

  “You have to fight this!” she yelled. Her voice sounded like a faraway whisper. I could see the concern in her face, but I felt no reaction to it. What I might have felt, who I had been—it was all slipping through my fingers like desert sand.

  I felt Viviane in my mind. She was trying to stop what must be, but she was too weak to do such a thing on her own, and the others who had magic were too busy keeping the party in the air and the axexes at bay to help her.

  “Amy! Amy!” she shouted.

  I felt the power of Amun surging within me. I pushed the one called Viviane out of my mind. Then I ripped out the tendrils of the thing called network that had bound me to the others.

  The other one—Amy—had needed these strangers. I had no such need.

  “I am Amenirdis, god’s wife of Amun, divine adoratrice. Amy is no more.”

  When One Door Closes, Another Opens

  I needed to bring my Amun, my lord, into this world, but first I needed to end the chaos around me.

  What to do with this unruly mob of people who were fighting against the axexes? It would have been easier if they were not here, but they had helped my other self who used to occupy this body. Her memories told me as much. For her sake, I would spare them if I could.

  I yelled to the axexes a command to cease fighting, but something
blocked my order. They were coated with a kind of jarring magic that annihilated any attempt at reason and bound them to the will of some upstart sorcerer.

  Soon enough he would taste my master’s wrath, but I had to eliminate his minions first. The one called Taliesin had raised an impressive fire shield. The one called Magnus had raised enough wind to tear the axexes out of the sky. They just kept coming back, though. I invoked Amun’s power over the wind and took control of the air around us before Magnus could stop me. I used it to blow Taliesin’s flames at the creatures who would not obey my lawful command.

  The flames roasted them in a way befitting the fury of a god. They fell to earth like stones, smoking and screaming as they went.

  “What are you doing?” Taliesin yelled at me.

  “That’s not her,” the one called Viviane yelled back. “It’s Amenirdis.”

  I could feel the force keeping us in the air diminish, and we descended. I thought of flying away on the wind. It was the easiest way to be rid of these people. However, they might have tried to pursue me. I would reveal to them the truth. They would not dare detain me after that.

  We landed gently in a place that was lush and green as the Nile Valley after the annual flood, though the nearby creek was nothing like the Nile. I would be glad when I could return to my own land and be among my own people.

  Around us smoked the carcasses of the renegade axexes. Taliesin looked at them with emotions I did not understand. Then he turned his gaze upon me.

  “You didn’t have to kill them.”

  “They were under an evil spell,” I said slowly. This one must have been of limited intelligence to have not perceived the truth already. “They would have persisted if I had not acted. Your strategy against them was not effective.”

  “Amenirdis, you need to allow Amy to take control of that body. It is hers. Yours is long gone.”

  My initial assessment was right—this Taliesin was little better than a half-wit, for he had no comprehension of the way the world worked.

  “If this body is not mine, then how am I in it? It can only be by the will of Amun, whom I serve. It is not my place to question his will—nor is it yours.”

  “It is our experience that sometimes the will of…higher powers is not always what it seems to be,” said Taliesin. He was not hostile, but he lacked the appropriate deference to me as sister of the pharaoh and god’s wife of Amun.

  “I know not what you thought you experienced. I only know the truth, and the truth is that Amun-Ra rules all.”

  As I spoke, I looked at him with the sight Amun had bestowed upon me. What I saw was shocking.

  Far from being a half-wit, this Taliesin was an incredibly old soul—and a powerful one at that. His lives related to unfamiliar history, but through Amy’s memories, I was able to make sense of them.

  Taliesin had served a leader called King Arthur, but he was far older even than that. Within him, I saw Hephaestion, a general of the Alexander who conquered Egypt long after my time. I saw Patroclus, who fought before Troy. I saw the grandson of Samuel, Heman, who became a seer for King David of the Israelites. Back and back the lives went, hundreds of them.

  He did not worship Amun, nor any of the other gods, Egyptian or Greek. Incredibly, in this life, he seemed to be a worshiper of the god of the Israelites. The heresy of Akhenaten—only worse!

  I probed Amy’s memories, and I realized a hideous truth. Aside from a group who called themselves Kemetists, no one worshiped the gods I knew in this strange world. In the anxious crowd that encircled me, I saw the Judaism with which I was vaguely familiar, but I also saw evidence of strange new faiths, Christianity and Islam, all dedicated to the worship of the strangely limiting one god.

  It was clear I had my work cut out for me. I needed to summon Amun into this world at the first opportunity. He would set things right.

  What was I to do with these others, though? Deluded as Taliesin might be, he was a strong sorcerer. Nor was he the only powerful soul in this group. I looked within the one named Carla and could see a mighty sorceress called Alcina, who had contrived to live from the time of Arthur to that of Charlemagne—and beyond. Within Viviane, I could not discern previous lives, but I did see a link to an ancient lake of great power. The one called Shahriyar held within him Alexander the Great and Achilles. The one called Stan held King David. The one called Alexandros held Ascalaphus, a king of Orchomenus in Greece.

  Tal was demanding my attention. I would continue my study of this group later.

  “When a soul is reincarnated, it develops a different persona in its new life. That persona—that person—is the one who is entitled to the body.”

  “Yet it is all one soul,” I replied. “The persona is incidental. However, let us not bicker over trifles.”

  “Free will is not a trifle to us,” said Stan, and I felt David stir within him.

  Of David, I knew little, but I well remembered the tales of how the Hebrew sorcerer Moses had defied the gods of Egypt. I did not understand how such things could be, but now seemed a time to exercise caution.

  “I am grateful for the support you gave to Amy while she was in your care, and I have no wish to fight with you. Can we not postpone the discussion of who should control this body and turn to consideration of our common enemy?”

  “And who might that be?” asked Magnus.

  I looked closely at him and had to fight my shock. He was Taliesin—and yet was he not. His soul resembled Taliesin’s enough to almost be its twin, though I had never heard of twin souls. The resemblance was marred by a darkness in him, as if he served the forces of chaos. Why did the others tolerate his presence?

  “Do you not seek Amen Hafez? Did he not bring all of you and this body into this…what did you call it? Parallel universe? I too seek him, for if it was he who summoned the axexes. He does not serve Amun, despite his name.

  “Would it not be better if we set aside our differences and together sought the downfall of this Hafez and our return to our own world? Leaving aside the question of right, I can help you far more than Amy could have.”

  “We cannot leave aside the question of right,” said Stan. “However, perhaps a postponement…”

  His voice trailed off, and they exchanged knowing looks with each other. I regretted having torn out of myself the links through which I might have heard their conversation. It was clear they were conversing mentally—which meant they were speaking to each other of things they didn’t want me to hear.

  Let them play such a game if they would. I would tolerate their strange actions and beliefs—as long as they did not get in my way.

  “We will accept your offer to join forces—with the clear understanding that, once Hafez is defeated, we still need to resolve the disposition of your body,” said Taliesin. Now that I knew the stature of his previous lives, I was somewhat less offended by his presumption in addressing me as an equal.

  “Of course.” I tried to smile as if I were Amy. If he suspected my sincerity, he gave no sign.

  “We’d better get back in the air, hadn’t we?” asked the one called Jimmie.

  Taliesin looked around. “Any cleanup to do?”

  “The axex bodies seem to have disintegrated rapidly,” said Carla. “There are a few burn marks on the surrounding vegetation, but not likely enough to get people to ask the wrong questions.”

  “Then let’s get going as fast as we can,” said Tal.

  “May I assist?” I asked. “Amun has given me the power to command the winds.”

  “Your assistance would be most appreciated,” said Tal. “With someone else to help us stay airborne, we might be able to move faster, make up some of our lost time.”

  “What’s the rush?” asked Michael. “We’re going to get there in the middle of the night. Wouldn’t it be better to get there in the late morning? Hafez isn’t as likely to be home.”

  “It isn’t likely we can find what we need in the house,” said Viviane. “Hafez is going to have the staff with h
im, and even if he didn’t, we don’t know how he uses it to jump from one parallel universe to another. We need him, so we can force him to send us back.”

  I looked at Michael and found him almost as shocking as Magnus. There was no unusual darkness within him, but he too was Taliesin in some sense, though he appeared to be about four years younger. In contrast to Tal, he had no magic, but his body worked strangely. As far as I could tell, any injury he sustained would heal almost immediately. Whatever he was, he was no ordinary mortal.

  After summoning the wind that would help to propel us, I had some time to study the others once we were riding the clouds.

  The one called Jimmie made me shudder a little, not because of any past life, but because he had been dead and come back somehow. No mortal was supposed to be able to return that way from the House of Osiris. His prior death clung to him in ways I didn’t think he was aware of. Was he too an agent of chaos? I would watch him with a wary eye.

  When I looked at the one called Lucas, I realized I had touched him briefly when I had awakened earlier. His ancestry wasn’t entirely human, though I wasn’t sure what kind of nonhuman kin he had. I did sense the past life within him that was somehow linked to the orisha, Chango. How could I have mistaken Chango for Amun? I told myself I erred because I had been only partially awake. I could not afford to make such a mistake again. Amun might take offense.

  The one called Umbra was also not easy to figure out. Amy had been told that Umbra was human but raised by some sort of shadow people. I had never encountered her like, and she had frightened Amy. She was someone else to watch with a wary eye.

  The others all seemed human and nonmagical as far as I could tell. I could not be entirely certain, however. They all carried weapons and wore armor, both invisible to mortal eyes, that clearly were magical. Such powerful artifacts might make detecting some subtle magic of their wearers much trickier.

  I became aware of Taliesin watching me. No doubt, he was gauging my capabilities as I was gauging those of his team.