Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  Andris felt a sudden sinking feeling. Crime of the century? he thought.

  What crime? What on earth have^ I got myself into? They'll hunt me down to the ends of the rotting earth for this'. "Who exactly are you?" he asked, belatedly, as the woman squatted down beside him.

  "MerelZabio," she replied, bracing herself. "My grandfather was your uncle Theo. This is the difficult bit don't crush me!" Andris stared up at the gap he had made in the ceiling. It looked awkwardly narrow, in spite of all the stuff that had come tumbling down when he moved the beam about. He wasn't sure that he could fit into it, and he wasn't sure that there would be anywhere to go if he did. The ledges to either side of the hole would undoubtedly be fragile; they might well collapse under his weight as soon as he was up there.

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  was trying to

  get into the cell- yet. Some of the prisoners must be taking on the guards who had lain in ambush for them. Even those who were reluctant must have had little choice about getting involved.

  There was no sound of clashing steel- which implied that the blades the guardsmen carried were far superior to the weapons ranged against them but the soldiers didn't seem to be winning an easy victory on that account.

  Sheer confusion must be making things very difficult for everyone concerned.

  I'm doomed, he thought, as the woman adjusted her position, preparing herself to be used as a stepping-stone. If they catch me now, I'm done for. It won't even be the wall this time- it'll be that rotting gibbet.

  He stepped on to his new-found cousin's back and reached up for the edges of the hole, trying to move as swiftly and as smoothly as possible so as to minimise her burden. He took a firm grip, but the moment he tried to transfer his weight from foothold to handhold the substance crumbled and he had to leap clear.

  Merel Zabio moved half a met closer to the door, and made herself small again. Again he stepped on to her back and reached up for the ragged edge of the hole. This time, the edge hadn't been weakened by the gluttonous seepage of the solvent. It didn't crumble but he still didn't dare put his whole weight on it.

  "Stand up!" he commanded, as he steadied himself.

  "Push!"

  It couldn't have been easy for her, given that he was so nearly a giant, but she was kin to him and she was no frail flower. She heaved with all her might, gasping with the effort. He knew that she would only be able to bear him up for a few seconds, and he knew exactly what he had to do. He reached out with his two arms, groping for the edges of the water-ranks placed to either side of the hole. He knew that he had to grip them both at the same time, or risk unbalancing one of them to the extent that it came crashing into the cell and he couldn't be certain that he wouldn't bring them both crashing down -- but it was the best chance he had. He guessed that the tanks couldn't be so very deep, and he just had to take it on trust that their rims would be reachable.

  He found one, then the other . . . and nearly slipped back as Merel Zabio collapsed under him- but when she fell away, he found himself safely suspended. He swung his legs up, groping with his feet for the edge of the hole, and found it. He sent his feet 109

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  scurrying along the-n^rrow

  corridor between the tanks, gaining enough support to iuTow him to inch his hands forward along the rims. Within thirty seconds he was lying full length along the narrow corridor between the rows of the tanks, with his head and shoulders above the hole. He had only to turn over and reach down, dangling his arms to catch his cousin.

  "Take hold!" he said.

  He already knew how heavy his kinswoman was, but it was still a shock when he had to bear her full weight at the end of his arms, and a momentary stab of panic threatened that the rest of the ceiling would surely come down, spilling them back on to the floor of the cell.

  Fortunately, she was as agile as he, and every bit as determined. As he lifted her she swung herself up, and got her legs up on the further ledge, squirming along it just as desperately as he had. When they were both up, she told him to back off, so that she could work her way past the hole, supporting herself on the two tanks to either side.

  It was very dark in the space between the tanks, and there was no room to stand up. He scrambled along the narrow alleyway on his hands and knees, and the woman fell in behind him.

  "Don't go too far!" she told! him.

  "Go to the left, between the rows of tanks."

  Mercifully, the attic space ii which they found themselves was not completely dark. Starlight leaked in through a number of slender cracks in the ill-maintained roof. Once his eyes had adjusted, Andris found that it was just possible to see the silhouettes of the tanks and to, pick a path between them. As soon as it could be managed, the woman squeezed past him.

  She evidently knew how to find the trapdoor which let workmen up into the space to carry out repairs. It wasn't possible to follow a straight path, but it didn't take long to get to the place she was aiming for.

  The trapdoor was closed, bolted below, but that was no problem. She didn't have to ask him to use his superior strength- she took a heavy-bladed dagger from her belt, inserted it through the narrow gap beside the bolt so that she could use it as a lever, and exerted a steady pressure. The screws holding the bolt in place yielded easily enough.

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  leading down to a

  corridor that must have been on the same level as the prison but didn't seem to be connected with it. At the far end of the corridor was a sturdier flight of stairs.

  "May be a problem there," she said, dropping her voice to a whisper again as she pointed to the downward-leading steps.

  "Those take us down to a barrack-room. It ought to be empty, given that every guardsman in the citadel should be fully occupied in chasing his tail and picking his way through the rubble left by the petards, but you can't depend on anything in this place. Once we get through the barrack-room, it's still a long way to the stables. Checuti's carts will probably have gone by the time we get there, so we'll have to make our own arrangements to get through the City Gate. Our only ally is confusion, but there'll be a lot of that. Stick close to me, and for Goran's sake be careful. If we're caught, we'll both end up waist-deep in Princess Lucrezia's poison garden with five-sim thorns in our guts."

  "What do you . . . ?" Andris began- but he had no time to finish the question. Merel Zabio was off down the ladder, and by the time he reached the floor of the corridor he had to scurry to catch up with her.

  Well, he thought, there's no stopping now. It's full steam ahead and damn the consequences. This was not a comforting metaphor. He had once seen a steam engine at work, and although it had not actually blown up while he was watching he had thought it the greatest folly which the human mind had ever devised, whose loss from the lore could not have been reckoned. a sin by any sane man. in

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  A,"

  15 ucrezia's mind was so full of thoughts inspired by what _iHyry Keshvara had said to her that even when she finally retired to bed she made not the slightest attempt to go to sleep. She simply lay there in the comfortable darkness, wondering what kind of magic lands might lie to the south of the Forest of Absolute Night. In spite of what Ereleth had often said about the Lore of Genesys being no less vulnerable to corruption than any other aspect of traditional wisdom she could not help but consider it the best place to look for guidance, and in the deepest midnight she lit a lamp so that she could consult a written version she had borrowed
from the king's library.

  L

  The book was not old- no (more than a year- but there was no way of knowing how many times the words within it had been copied by faithful scribes.

  Rumour spoke in terms of hundreds of thousands, but she knew well t'enough what inflationary tendencies rumour had. It was probable, she judged, that the figure could be cut by a considerable order bf'magnitude- but even if one thought in terms of tens of thousands, each reproduction carried out at intervals of a year or two, the words themselves must be unimaginably ancient. The majority of civilised men believed that the whole thing was a set of fictions, invented by the men of old to explain an origin of which they had no true memory or record, hut even if that were not so Hyry Keshvara was surely right to argue that no relic of what was described there could possibly have survived into the world of today. And yet the words somehow retained their magic, even after all this time. Lucrezia found the passage she wanted easily enough, and read it through. She had read it before and had often heard it read by others, but she had not been trained in the Art of Remembrance, and could not remember it well enough to recite it aloud without the aid of the written page.

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  The place where humans first came into the world, the text read, was named Idun by the people of the ship, in memory of a place which never was but was remembered and revered nevertheless. The people of the ship built a city there, but their sons and daughters were not permitted to live long in the city.

  "You must go forth into the world and multiply," the forefathers said to the people of the world.

  "You must go to every region which will support you: to every forest, every plain and every seashore. You must build cities of your own wherever you can, and protect them as best you can against corrosion and corruption.

  Where you cannot build cities you must follow other ways of life, but you must leave no land alone, even in the farthest reaches of the world, for the purpose of human life is to fight evil wherever it may be found."

  When the city of Idun crumbled into dust, as the cities of the world are ever wont to do, the forefathers made no attempt to rebuild it.

  To their remaining sons and daughters they said: "Go follow your brothers and sisters into the regions of the world, for we have other work to do here before we leave. Where there was a city we shall make a garden, but it will be a garden of poisons. Do not forbid your descendants to visit this garden, but bid them beware of it, for they will be wise to avoid it for many generations."

  The garden of Idun became the source of many evil and dangerous things, for which reason the people of the world called it Chimera's Cradle, hut they also named it the Navel of the World, to remind themselves that they too were chimerical beings. The best of the new chimeras spawned and cradled in the garden followed the people of the world as they dispersed themselves through the forests and the plains, but the worst of them tainted the region around the garden.

  The people of the world complained of this injustice, but to no avail.

  "Even that which has never been known before may yet be created," the lore masters said, 'but it cannot be designed. The cradle in which it will be hatched and nourished must give birth to evils too, but in the end evil will be defeated and Order will prevail. "

  The people of the ship gave what earthly gifts they could to the people of the world, but the most precious gift of all was one they did not have to give and that was an incorruptible stone. Aboard the ship, there were many kinds of stone that had been "3

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  incorruptible there^ but corruption had no

  dominion aboard the ship and incorruptibility was easily achieved. In the world, alas, corruption reigned supreme.

  "The war against evil will be hard fought in the world," the lore masters told theirs sons and their daughters, 'but war is the mother of all weapons, and the war against evil is the mother of the weapons by which evil shall one day be defeated. There is as yet no incorruptible stone in all the world, but it will not always be so.

  We have planted the garden ofldun so that the incorruptible stone might one day be born from the Pool of Life, nourished by milk and blood. When that day comes, your children's children must seize and use the stone, and turn the evil of corrosion to the good of inscription. "

  "That is what Carus Fraxinus and Hyry Keshvara hope to find,"

  Lucrezia whispered aloud.

  "They may deny it- they may not even know it- but this is the lure which attracts them. They are setting forth in search of the garden of Idun itself, of Chimera's Cradle and the Pool of Life. They do not know the meaning of what is written here, any more than I do, but they know that it means something." When she had closed the Book Lucrezia dressed herself fully. She clasped her many-pouchejd belt about her waist- not because she had any need of it, but becjause Ereleth had told her a thousand times that it was too dangerojus a thing to leave aside.

  She tiptoed down the long stairway as quietly as she could, and came eventually to the room beside the door of the tower, from which the night-guard kept watch. Dhalla was by the window, as she was honour-bound to be, intently staring out into the darkness. When the giant heard the door opened she turned swiftly around, her huge hand reaching out for the spear that was propped up against the wall. As soon as she saw who it was, though, her hand dropped away again.

  "Highness," she said, politely inclining her head. She did not seem surprised; she was accustomed to Lucrezia's nocturnal wanderings. "Is all well?" Lucrezia asked, as she crossed the room to join Dhalla at the window.

  She did not doubt for a moment that all was well, but she felt obliged to ask.

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  "I don't know, highness," the giant replied uneasily. Lucrezia started in astonishment.

  "What's wrong?" she said. "Perhaps nothing--but there are two sentries missing from their posts, and the patrol is taking three rimes as long as normal to complete its round.

  I called out to the guardsmen to ask them what was happening, but they told me I must be silent, because they had some secret operation in progress.

  After that, I heard someone moving in the darkness, but I dared not sound a challenge. I've seen men moving stealthily, over by the stables. They're probably just playing their usual boys' games, but I don't like it. At least three of the lamps which usually stay lit all night have gone out, and there's no sign of the lamplighter. "

  Boys' games was Dhalla's term for almost everything the king's guard did: their ceremonies, their drill and their occasional training exercises.

  Lucrezia was profoundly uninterested in boys' games of every shape and form, but she didn't like to see the giantess so anxious.

  "It's probably nothing," she assured her.

  "True," Dhalla agreed.

  "But I wish the captain would pass by, so that I could ask him what's happenng. There's never any sense to he had from his boorish men."

  "I've been thinking about what Hyry Keshvara said," the princess told the giant.

  "About the amber being a mapmaker. If he really can draw a map to guide Keshvara and her friends to the place where Chimera's Cradle once was, we have to make sure he does it. We'll have to handle the matter carefully, though- we don't want him to think that he's in a position to strike bargains, or to realise how desperately he might need to."

  Dhalla said nothing in reply to this. Whether that was because she thought it was nonsense or simply because she was preoccupied by her own anxieties there was no way to tell.

  "What Keshvara really wants, of course," Lucrezia added, 'is for me to hand the amber over to Fraxinus -- but I can't do that. I'd like to help her, of course, but I can't g
o back on the agreement I made with my father. "

  Dhalla continued staring out into the shadows.

  "What do you see out there?" the princess asked, rather petulantly.

  "I see nothing," Dhalla replied uneasily.

  "It's what I hear that troubles me. I'm almost sure that someone was at the door- and " J

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  something's goingDp in the stables. If the guardsmen are playing practical jokes again . . . "

  "Practical jokes aren't important," Lucrezia said firmly.

  "What I'm trying to talk to you about is. Please listen to me, Dhalla." In any normal circumstances, Dhalla would never have disobeyed such a direct command, but all she did was hold up her hand. Her whole body had stiffened.

  "Go, highness, I beg you," she said.

  "You should not be here. Please, highness!"

  Lucrezia had not the slightest intention of going anywhere. If something really was about to happen, she wanted to have the best possible view.

  "Something's wrong," Dhalla said, more positively than before.

  "The guardsmen should have gone past by now. I'm sure something's happening in the stables."

  "It's just part of their secret operation," Lucrezia said, hoping now that it might not be true and feeling a thrill of excitement at the thought.

  "Boys' games."

  "No," Dhalla said.

  "It can't be. I ought to raise the alarm ... I ought at least to find out what's happening."

  "Find out what's happening," Lucrezia advised.

  "That's best. Look before you leap."

  "Please, highness," Dhalla sjaid, moving back from the window,

  "I

  wish you would rouse my sisters while I go to see. Tell them that they must guard the door. " , " I will, if you think it necessary," the prihcess said, savouring another sharp thrill of excitement at the thought that Dhalla surely must be right.