The Serpent Waits

by Bill Hiatt

  I let go of the staff. I held back the tears as best I could, though at least one slid down my cheek.

  Lucas’s arms held me tighter. I didn’t try to break away. David was still holding the staff a short distance away, but I didn’t try to reach for it. What would have been the point?

  “I knew you’d make the right choice,” Lucas whispered into my ear. The feel of his warm breath on me, the feel of his strong arms around me, were all that kept me from hysterical weeping.

  “Did you know it would turn out this way?” asked Eva.

  “I couldn’t be sure—but I couldn’t find a single future in which Hafez was defeated without Amenirdis’s willing cooperation,” said Sophia. “Nor could I see one in which Amy led any kind of life without it.”

  “That’s closer than I like to cut it,” said Tal. “I’m not going to argue with success, though.” He looked at me with uncertain eyes. I could see distrust and pain in them, but I could also see uncertainty. “Amenirdis, will you help us defuse Hafez’s doomsday device?”

  “Give her a minute,” said Lucas. “This is hard on her.”

  To my surprise, Tal nodded, and the others made small talk while Lucas held me.

  “How did you find me? I felt sure the magic would keep you from finding anything you sought.”

  “That’s what it felt like. I tried to move in your direction and ran into a wall. I knew there hadn’t been a wall between us, that I had moved in the opposite direction from you. I concentrated with all my heart on moving away from you, and the spell moved me toward you, instead. Hafez isn’t half as smart as he thinks he is.”

  “That’s what I did as well,” said David. I had forgotten he was standing so nearby. Amy would have been self-conscious about someone watching Lucas hug her, but it felt so natural being in his arms that I wasn’t bothered. Let David stare at us if he wanted.

  “How…how can you stand to hold me?” The question cut me like daggers, but I had to know what was in his heart.

  “I believed Amy when she said you were genuinely sorry. Who would know better? I believed Sophia when she confirmed that. I believed you. You didn’t know how catastrophically the power of Set would touch us. As for the rest, you thought you were doing the right thing. Do you know better now?”

  “I…I’m not sure.”

  “An honest answer. I’ll be honest with you, too. I don’t know how to feel about you right now. But we’ve all done things or thought things that turned out to be wrong. Hell, you saw most of them yourself.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know. I’m just saying give it time. Help us end Hafez’s threat. Help us get back home. That will go a long way toward convincing me—convincing everyone—that we can trust you. That we can call you friend.”

  “While we’re waiting, I have a question,” said Shar in a voice loud enough to make me think he was dropping a hint. “Other Khalid swapped my sword for a fake—one that seems to have been created with faerie magic. “Who else could have created the counterfeit if not Ceridwen? I’m told Hafez’s magic feels very different.”

  “I have not seen anything about that, though now that you have asked, I’ll try to find out,” said Sophia. “But Ceridwen has no obvious motive for such a thing. If she wanted to help Hafez, there’d be better ways than such an elaborate triple cross.”

  “That’s what I thought originally,” said Shar. “But what if Ceridwen was out to get Hafez and us? She could have used us to beat him and is now working on a plan to beat us.”

  “Are you still hung up on that?” asked Magnus. “Which part of ‘We read her completely unshielded mind,’ are you having trouble with?”

  Sophia raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t seen any visions about that, either, but I doubt Tal and Magnus could both be wrong if they were able to probe her mind. Anyway, your theory doesn’t feel right. Someone copied the sword, but it wasn’t Ceridwen. I’m sorry I can’t yet be sure of more than that.”

  “When we go back to Awen, we’ll be cautious,” said Tal. “Not much else we can do until Sophia has identified whatever other threats there might be.”

  “In the meantime, perhaps Amenirdis has recovered enough to help us,” said Magnus. Coming from anyone else, that would have sounded harsh. From him, it was almost gentle.

  I put a finger on Lucas’s lips before he could protest. “What would you have me do?”

  “You’re a key part of the process of stopping Hafez from wiping out all life in the valley. You need to figure out how to make the staff disarm his spells so we can take care of that.”

  The idea of touching the staff right now made my skin crawl. I wanted to forget my connection to Amun. I wanted to linger in Lucas’s arms until the memories faded. I knew I couldn’t do that, though.

  I reached out and touched the staff. David tightened his grip on it, but under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame him.

  I called on the staff’s power but felt no response from it. It was dead wood in my hands.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Sophia.

  “I don’t—wait! When I had my vision of Amun, he left me my magic but told me I would no longer be a god’s wife of Amun. I was too overwhelmed at the time to realize the implications.

  “It was my god’s-wife status that gave me access to the staff’s power. With that status gone, I can no longer wield the staff.”

  “What?” Sophia, already pale, looked bone-white in the glow from the staff.

  “You mean you didn’t foresee this?” asked Shar.

  “No. I foresaw that Amun would convince Amenirdis she was on the wrong path, but this? No, I never saw this.”

  Hundreds of thousands of people would die—and it would be my fault.

  Unexpected Rescuer

  “On the good side, now Hafez can’t use the staff to tear down the barriers,” said Gordy. “He needed a god’s wife for that.”

  “Yes, but we’ve got a ticking time bomb we just lost our only way to defuse,” said Shar. “Hafez won’t destroy the whole universe—but he will destroy the Santa Maria Valley.”

  “If we keep him prisoner, the spells trigger automatically in less than a day,” said Jimmie. “If we free him to stop the explosion, we have to give the staff back to him. With the staff, he might have the power to beat us, or at least escape. We’d have to stay here forever to keep him from coming after Sophia, Ceridwen, our counterparts—”

  “And he’s immortal,” said Sophia. “It would only be a matter of time before he found another god’s wife.”

  “It sure is a good thing that I anticipated this problem,” said Magnus smugly.

  Tal raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I persuaded Amenirdis to ordain me a priest of Amun while she was still a god’s wife. That means I can use the staff.”

  “You…oh, now I see. You knew Amenirdis was in control all along. And you liberated her not to stop Hafez, but to gain access to the staff so that…”

  Tal’s voice trailed off despite his anger. I knew it was because he did not wish to speak of Magnus’s plans in front of Eva.

  “You never fail to think the worst of me, do you?” asked Magnus. “The fact is that Amenirdis did save us, and at the time she looked like the only option. Scowl all you want. All of that is true—and you know it. It’s also true that Amenirdis’s agenda wasn’t the same as ours. You’ve made that point yourself. Since the staff is our only way home, it made sense for one of us to be able to use it, just in case.” Magnus walked over and put his hand on the staff. The hieroglyphs flared at his touch. “And now I can. I had to trade my silence for that, but I kept a close eye on Amenirdis to make sure she didn’t get out of line. What have I done wrong?”

  “If you don’t understand, there’s no way I can explain it to you,” said Tal. His face was expressionless, but his tone betrayed his anger. “Every time I think I can trust you—”

  “Tal, that’s enough,” said Sophia in the tone of a mother gently
chiding her son. “You and Magnus have much to discuss, but now is not the time. Besides, what he did may well work out for the best.”

  “And Magnus may need to practice with the staff before using it to defuse Hafez’s spells,” I said. “I am familiar with Egyptian magic. Magnus is not.”

  Tal looked at me, then at Magnus, then at Sophia. He had the look of a man who, expecting to rest after an arduous task, finds that even more is expected of him.

  “Portal out to Awen?” asked Carla.

  “Not until we know for sure what Celtic sorcerer created that fake sword, and whether or not that person could get to us at Awen,” said Tal. “I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s possible Hafez’s talk about allies was more than just a bluff, and, given his ability to ransack other universes, it opens up an alarming number of possibilities. For example, what if Hafez at some point brought back a Ceridwen from another universe? The one in ours is dead, but he could have had thousands to choose from. Such a counterpart could slip through the defenses at Awen the same way Other Khalid did.

  “I…I have seen nothing like that,” said Sophia. “But I have not seen all. No one could.”

  “No one expects you to,” said Tal. “We’re grateful you’ve given us as much information as you have.

  “Stan, give Ceridwen a call and tell her about our suspicions. She and her family could be in danger. If she knows to do it, it should be easy to scan for herself, and assuming she doesn’t find a counterpart or other unaccounted for Celtic magic, she should start reconfiguring the house’s defenses to prevent anyone, even herself, from entering and to prevent any changes from being made from outside. That’s tricky work, but I think she’s up to it. Tell her we’ll rejoin her once we’ve had a chance to check for external threats. Since we’re exhausted, that could take some time.”

  “We need sleep before we can do that effectively,” said Carla. “But where can we go if not Awen?”

  “I have a suggestion,” said Sophia. “This world’s Tal lives in an apartment near UCSB. Tal’s father…Tal’s father’s counterpart is away on business. My house is empty. It’s big enough to accommodate the whole group in a pinch. I’d…I’d like to go there.”

  “That should be reasonably safe,” said Shar. “This isn’t like our world, where Ceridwen had the whole town under all kinds of magic surveillance. In this world, she was imprisoned before she’d had time to build such capabilities. If Hafez has her counterpart up his sleeve, that counterpart would have no such network to exploit. And she wouldn’t know Sophia is the seer, so she has no reason to look for us at Tal’s house.”

  “But if such a counterpart is really here and in league with Hafez, he knows who the seer is, and by now perhaps the counterpart has found a way to communicate with him.”

  “Ceridwen says no,” said Stan, who was still on his Sage Phone. “Awen is secure, but she’s going to take your advice and modify the security system. We can call when we’re ready to go back.”

  “Then Sophia’s house it is,” said Tal. “I can use her memories of the place to open a portal to it.”

  I was surprised to discover that it was nearly sunset when we arrived at Sophia’s. Being in the labyrinth must have scrambled my time sense.

  “Those of us who’ve been running too long without sleep need to get some,” said Tal. “The protection against magical attack we applied before should be effective for a while. We’ll put some additional protection around the house, just in case, and a couple people should keep watch at any given time.”

  My body was crying out for sleep, but I was restless. Perhaps my mind was having difficulty keeping up with all the changes. I no longer knew who I was.

  While the others sorted out the sleeping arrangements and guard duty schedule, I watched Sophia. Though she was in the house where she used to live, it was no longer her home. In her distress, which she tried to mask, I saw an echo of my own.

  Family photos were displayed on the wall next to the stairs, and a few early ones included her. She’d been gone for more than twenty years, though, so most of them didn’t. They were almost all of Tal and his father—a Tal who had never even known his mother. I could see her heart tearing as she watched the photographic record of her own family receding from her, growing in a different direction than they would have if she’d been with them.

  The downstairs part of the house reminded Amy of what she would call a man cave. The colors were predominately dark brown, gray, and black with no sign of any pastel shade and only an occasional off-white. Electronics dominated most rooms. The living room, for instance, had a big-screen TV that dwarfed the furniture and a stereo system with speakers big enough to cause earthquakes in the next county. Sports memorabilia were sprinkled throughout the room. When Tal first walked in, his eyes widened in a way that told me the home where he grew up was quite different.

  Sophia passed through the room like a ghost who had escaped from Duat. Her fingers brushed across some of the furniture she walked past, but she looked at all of it as if it had no meaning for her, as if she had stumbled into the wrong house.

  “It’s lights-out in five minutes,” said Lucas, sitting down next to me on the black leather couch.

  “Lights out? Oh, never mind.” Normally, I recognized any word or phrase Amy knew. That time, there had been a lag. I really need to sleep, but I still didn’t want to.

  “What are the…sleeping arrangements?” I asked.

  “Still in progress. I love these people, but sometimes straightening out the simplest things is like negotiating world peace. Tal, trying to be a gentleman, offered the four bedrooms to the ladies. Eva suggested gently that such an arrangement was sexist. Magnus implied she was just trying to get a room with Jimmie in the vain hope that they might finally have sex, and the conversation went downhill from there.

  “Sophia drifted through the room long enough to say that she didn’t want the master bedroom—too weird for her—and that she probably wouldn’t sleep anyway. She and Michael, who doesn’t really need much sleep, are on the first watch. Gordy and Carla are on second. How the sleeping bags Tal scrounged out of the garage get divided up I left the others to haggle over. I thought you and I could sleep right here. Would you be comfortable on that couch? I could sleep in the chair over there.”

  I glanced over at it. “That doesn’t look very comfortable. I wish there were room enough on the couch for both of us.”

  Lucas chuckled. “Isn’t that supposed to be my line? Unless one of us wants to sleep on top of the other one, the couch is out of the question. Frankly, if we slept that way, I doubt I’d sleep at all.”

  “If you were going to sleep sitting up anyway, why not sleep next to me? I’d sleep better if I knew you were near.”

  Lucas sat down next to me. “Why, Amenirdis, I believe you’re trying to seduce me!”

  I stiffened. “I meant no offense—”

  He raised a hand. “I was just joking. I thought you could use a little humor. Anyway, a man whose heart was already taken might say no, but I can’t imagine any man would be offended by your attention. Of course, a man would want a little more privacy than a house filled with people, at least one of whom isn’t above spying on us. A man might also want a time when you and he aren’t both half dead from fatigue.”

  I knew that he was looking at me and seeing Amy. He was talking to her even though he knew I was the one in control of the body at the moment. I felt too tired and uneasy to care. “Can you put your arm around me?”

  He slid closer and wrapped an arm around me. The warmth and nearness felt good. Right now, they were probably the only things that would.

  I wasn’t sure how long I slept. It was dark when I woke up, so at some point, Lucas must have slipped away for a minute to turn off the lights, but he was next to me now, his arm still around him. His slow, even breathing meant he was still asleep.

  I should have been, too. I was still tired. What had awakened me?

  I could hear a key rattling in t
he front door. Mr. Weaver was supposed to be out of town, and the Tal of this world lived at UCSB, though he’d attended a party in town yesterday evening. Who could be coming in?

  Someone—Gordy, I thought—crept through the room on his way to intercept whoever was at the door.

  “Lucas,” I whispered. “Wake up. Someone’s coming.”

  He awakened almost instantly. “What? Who?” He freed his arm and turned toward the front door.

  I heard the door open and the sounds of a scuffle. “Gordy, what the hell?”

  The voice was Tal’s, but not the one I knew.

  “Surprise!” yelled Gordy at the top of his lungs. “Hey, everybody, Tal’s here!”

  “I…I haven’t seen you much since high school, man. How’d you even get in?”

  “This is bad,” whispered Lucas.

  “Your dad gave me a spare key when I told him we wanted to plan a surprise party for you.”

  “Uh, I’m not one to turn down a party, but it’s late—practically morning—and how’d you know I’d even be here? I was in the area and thought I’d crash for a few hours, but Dad couldn’t have known I was going to do that.

  “And I…I heard you joined the army after two years at SB Community College. That’s not a military haircut.”

  “Uh, well, I’m not in the military anymore.”

  Lights flicked on nearby. Lucas got up cautiously and turned on one of the living room lamps. Footsteps pounded on the stairs.

  Gordy and the other Tal stepped out of the entry hall and into the living room. “Who are those guys?” asked Other Tal, pointing to us.

  “Friends of Shar, I think.”

  “Shar? You mean like Sassani, the football player? I don’t know him any better than I know you. I don’t get why either one of you would randomly throw me a party.”

  Lucas trotted over to shake his hand, and I followed.

  “It was my idea,” said Stan, the first to make it down the stairs. “Kind of like a surprise informal high school reunion.”