Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  "Nobody's said anything to me about it. All I know is that the women who took the princess met up with drago mites and the princess has been taken into one of the mounds. What could there possibly be to add?"

  "Well, sir," said Purkin tactfully, 'that's pretty much what we were thinkin'. As far as the men can see, sir, the princess is either dead or as good as. They thiqk - and I'm inclined to agree, sir- that our last chance of ever igettin' the princess back vanished when she went into that mound. "

  "I see," Jacom said, and waited for the sergeant to go on.

  Purkin nodded his head, as though Jacom had agreed with him. "It's like this, sir," he went on, still trying-- not altogether successfully --to employ maximum tact.

  "This Carus Fraxinus seems to us to be a decent sort. Good employer, adventurous without being' reckless, determined without being' stubborn. The men feel, sir- meanin' no disrespect that as the princess is beyond our reach now ... in any case, sir, they wouldn't feel right if they were to leave Fraxinus in the lurch, with him being' under strength an' all."

  "Or to put it another way," Jacom said dully, 'they reckon the time has come for the final phase of the mass desertion. What you're trying to tell me is that you're no longer members of the king's guard, and no longer under my orders. From now on, you answer to Carus Fraxinus. I'm on my own. "

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  "Not on your own, exactly," Purkin hastened to reassure him. "Just .

  . well, sir, I'm not sayin' anyone else is takin' charge, but. . .

  That's OK," Jacom said, feeling that there was not the least need for any further beating about the bush.

  "Message understood. No problem.

  As of now, I resign my commission. As of now, you can stop calling me sir.

  From this day forward, I'm just a common or garden merchant-adventurer in exile, just like everybody else. One of the boys. "

  He had not anticipated the relief he would feel when he said all that. Nor had he anticipated the look of sheer amazement which possessed Purkin's face.

  "Sir . . . ?" Purkin said. He had nothing to add; he was at a loss for words. He had expected a flaming row, a fierce argument or at the very least an animated discussion. He had not expected meek surrender.

  I've made a mess of it again! Jacom thought. Whatever I do, it's wrong. If I'd tried to shout and bluster he'd have despised me for not being able to see what's what. Because I didn't, he thinks I'm a coward. What in the world am I supposed to say?

  "You can call me Jacom now," he said aloud, determined that he must at least maintain a civilised front. He didn't bother to ask whether Purkin had a first name. Captain or not, he was still the son of a landed gentleman. He didn't suppose that Fraxinus would pay him a higher wage than anyone else the merchant had been scrupulously even-handed with his generosity to date but that didn't mean that he had to address his new fellows as if they were old friends.

  Xandrian propriety still meant something, even in the rotten heart of the Dragomite Hills.

  "I'll tell the men it's sorted," Purkin said, refraining from the use of any name or title. As an afterthought he added: "Thanks." Then he marched off, in properly military fashion, along a trail that was already well worn although it took him wide of the area they had cleared while making camp.

  The fungi which grew on the mounds were soft and flimsy at the best of times, easily trampled and crushed.

  The diseased mulch to which almost everything had now been reduced was easily flattened out. The marks of Purkin's previous circuits stood out very clearly in the sparkling starlight.

  Jacom relaxed again. Once the bitterness occasioned by Purkin's 375

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  reaction to his capitulation had eased he was left with no particular sense of loss or defeat. He had, after all, simply acknowledged a truth which had been manifest for some time.

  He looked up as he caught a slight sound from the slope which veered sharply upwards some ten or twelve mets in front of him, but he couldn't see anything moving there. He turned his head slightly to concentrate all his attention into his sense of hearing, but the constant murmur emanating from the camp and from the place where the horses and donkeys were tethered made it impossible to separate out the sound of anything which might be moving beyond the brow of the nearest ridge.

  There was a good deal of restlessness in the camp in spite of the lateness of the hour. No one should have been unready for sleep, given that they had been on the move for nearly twenty hours, with only a brief rest in the midday, but the ex-guardsmen must have been waiting for Purkin to bring a response to their cautious ultimatum, and they were presumably rejoicing in the good news.

  Jacom walked forward a few mets, crossing the ragged line marked by Purkin's footfalls. There was ample light to display the slopes which were in his direct line of vision, but the undulations of the mounds were so sharp that a hidden army could have been massing within half a kim. He told himself that he was being oversensitive, but he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickling with growing alarm. He felt certain that something was out there.

  He touched his forehead reflexively, where he had anointed it with Phar's magic salve to whose odour' the drago mites were supposed to react by turning tail. So far, 'he had no cause for complaint against it, but how could he be sure-that it was really the salve that was keeping the monsters at bay?

  A few thin clouds had drifted up from the western horizon to streak the star scape with shadows, and the light suddenly seemed far less than perfect. He took another step forward, peering anxiously into the darkness. He drew his sword, weighing it carefully in his hand, but he made no move to raise the alarm, because he had no clear sensory evidence that anything was wrong.

  Then he saw the shadows moving over the ridge: the shadows with eyes.

  Their bodies hardly reflected the starlight at all, but their eyes 376

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  were

  moist enough to gleam, and the faint hint of light seemed quite uncanny. For a moment he had the illusion that the eyes were human eyes, no more than half a dozen paces away, but he knew that they were much larger and much further away. Unfortunately, they were coming closer all the time.

  There was nothing remotely human about the shadow behind the eyes- and he could now make out the insecrile pattern of their movement. He could even see the huge jaws- huger by far than those of the ordinary drago mites he had grown well used to seeing on the slopes.

  These were not workers, but the rarer creatures Koraismi had pointed out to him and called 'warriors'.

  He opened his mouth, but as he was formulating his alarm call it was overtaken by another voice. Herriman, who was posted on the far side of the encampment, yelled out a split second before him, and quite took his breath away.

  Corruption and corrosion! he thought. The bastards are all around us!

  The camp had come to life with a vengeance now as everyone reacted to the alarm, running this way and that to grab weapons and take up defensive stations around the wagons and the rope enclosure where the anxious horses were. Jacom, with his sword in his hand, began to walk slowly backwards. He dared not turn to run because that would have meant taking his eyes off the shapes silhouetted against the stars, which were still increasing in number.

  It somehow seemed that while he moved slowly and purposefully they moved slowly, with equal care.

  He realised that the warrior drago mites weren't charging. This was no attack: they were simply massing on the slope, making their presence felt but keeping their distance.

  It's Phar's magic salve! he thought. It really works. They're not attacking us.

  He had backed
up far enough by now to bump into another man, who reached out a hand to steady him.

  "Careful, captain," a voice murmured in his ear.

  "Look where you're going." It was Andris Myrasol.

  Jacom shook off the steadying hand. He was seized by a sudden perverse conviction that all this was the fault of the big amber. If he hadn't been in the Wayfaring Tree that night when Herriman got hurt, none of this would have happened. No sooner had he 377

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  thought this than J^pm felt ashamed of

  the injustice of it, but he couldn't keep a certain churlishness out of his tone as he said: "Not captain any more, Prince Myrasol. Had they only come yesterday, I could have died an officer and a gentleman, but not now. That's life, isn't it? First you lose everything, then you die. The rot sets in before you're even born."

  "We're not dead yet," the amber muttered, his voice hardly above a whisper.

  "They haven't come to kill us. They've come to move us on.

  They haven't quite got us where they want us yet. "

  Jacom turned to look up at the big man's pale face.

  "What the filth are you talking about?" he demanded, bitterly angry at the thought that this mere vagabond might understand what was happening far better than he did.

  "I'm not sure about the ones we saw further north," Myrasol said, 'but these warriors have a guiding mind behind them a mind with plans and projects of its own. We're close to the Corridors of Power, where something lives . .

  . still lives, I presume, in spite of the thing that's laid waste to all of this . . . which is more than a mere mob of unearthly insects. We have something it wants, I think. I only wish I knew what, and what it will cost us to deliver it. "

  "You're mad," Jacom opined, wondering why he had such an ingrained habit of saying things he didn't mean.

  "Maybe," Myraso! conceded.

  "But it seems to me that they're sane enough, and they seem to think we need an escort, to make sure that we go exactly where they intend us'to go. You might as well sheath that sword, captain it's about as much use against that lot as a sewing-needle."

  How can he take it all so calmly? Jacom wondered. Maybe he thinks he's as good as dead already, with F^releth's worm eating him away inside hut he's no worse off than the rest of us. We're all as good as dead. I've been as good as dead since . He let goof the unhelpful train of thought, and concentrated on the huge moist eyes of the drago mite warriors, which were glimmering faintly in the light of the sea of stars.

  "According to Aulakh Phar," he said, keeping his voice absolutely level and calm, as the lore less code of heroism somehow seemed to require, 'they're all female. Did you know that? All female, all sterile. He thinks each mound has its own gigantic 378

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  queen, buried deep beneath the surface, but

  no one's ever seen one and returned to tell the tale. No one knows for sure.

  "

  "Maybe this is our chance to find out," Myrasol said drily, reaching out with one of his absurdly long arms to take his scrawny cousin by the shoulders, and draw her into his protective clasp.

  "Rather you than me," Jacom riposted, confident that he could maintain the tone for as long as appearances demanded it.

  "If it's all the same to you, Prince Mapmaker, I'll just help to mind the horses. After all, I'm not an officer any more. From now on, I can skulk in the rear with everybody else, as safe as safe can be."

  Unfortunately, he knew only too well that, in the present circumstances, as safe as safe can be, wasn't very safe at all.

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  <^8 lucrezia was certain, afterwards, that she had never truly lost consciousness, but that thought and sensation had somehow been suspended for a while in a timeless void, never allowed to lapse or even to relax. The image of the drago mite eyes remained with and within her throughout that phase of her existence, as if some vast supernatural being were holding her beneath its external gaze, forbidding any kind of escape.

  She thought at first, when time began again, that she would soon recover herself completely, but that was an illusion. The balance of her mind remained horribly awkward for a further and much longer interval, while paralysis still held limited sway over her limbs. She was not incapable -of movement, but her body felt so heavy that the greatest force she could exert was hardly able to twitch a finger or a toe. This, second phase of her captivity was worse than the first.

  ' She was aware of a long journey through the Forest of Absolute Night, and the green fringe-forest, and a further trek across the nightmarish slopes of the Dragomite Hills, but her perception of these surroundings was oddly distorted. In the-peculiar existential state in which she found herself it seemed that one impression did not have to be tidied out of the way into the storeroom of memory before another could take its place; the images overlapped and overlaid one another, becoming facets of some monstrously complicated and ever-growing crystal, building into a vast confusion in which daylight and starlight, darkness and purple radiance, leaf-mould and green grass, greasy mud and clear water, gnarled twigs and bulbous death caps the slitted eyes of drago mites and the tiny eyes of mound men the stink of horse-sweat and the staleness of spore-laden air, up and down, inside and out, everything and nothing were all woven together into a horrid chaotic vortex.

  3 So

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  While this accumulation occurred she could neither speak nor move nor weep, but she was capable of a kind of self-sensation and a kind of emotion, whose produce likewise built in a sort of mad crescendo, in which terror and horror, mortal dread and panic formed a great web of sublime anxiety.

  Her awakening from this phase of the experience was more ordinary, because it brought her back to what she thought of as a normal state of being. It was no surprise, though, to find that she felt desperately and overwhelmingly tired. Returned though she was to the possibility of commonplace thought and speech, the only desire of which she was immediately capable was the desire to leave it again, in order to enjoy a more natural kind of absence: to sleep, and thus, authentically, to rest. For this reason alone she had to face a third and final awakening, which was almost a rebirth.

  After this third awakening she remembered that she had spoken, briefly, and had heard words spoken to her, but that it had been too dark to see where she was or who had been with her. She had taken food and water, too, but the taste of them was quite gone. If she had dreamed while she was asleep she had forgotten her dreams utterly but she had not forgotten that awesome never-ending moment in which she had been trapped when the drago mite stung her, nor that frightful crescendo which had followed her partial recovery from the effects of the sting, when she must have been drugged repeatedly to keep her docile. Her memory of all this was peculiar in the extreme, for she had no sensible way to accommodate it within the familiar narrative that she had so far made of her life, but it was all there.

  That, she thought wonderingly, when she had the leisure to do so, was the true gateway to adventure, the threshold decisively separating my old life from the new. I am free at last to go beyond the horizons of ordinary experience, to venture into unimagined realms, to discover the unexpected.

  This is what I have always sought, under the spur of my Serpent's blood; this is what I have always longed for without knowing what it was I needed. This is the prize, the treasure, the sacred gift which was required to make me complete. What now? How does it begin?

  She opened her eyes and looked around.

  She was in a dimly lit chamber whose ceiling, floor and walls
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  and it shone,

  albeijt^unevenly, from every visible surface. The mottled walls were covered in the fungus which the warrior women had carried in their lamps; this was its natural habitat. The air was very warm and humid; it was almost as if the walls were sweating and the corridors breathing.

  The three human figures which loomed over her, peering down at her curled up and recumbent form, appeared at first to be less than solid. It was as if they were shadows detached from the fleshy forms which once had cast them but that was merely an optical illusion.

  As her eyes adjusted to the strange light she was able to make out their features, and realised that they did indeed have real substance. They were very real, very ordinary people.

  One of them was Jume Metra; the other two were differently dressed, smaller in build and less stiff in their posture. Lucrezia guessed that these were humans of a different caste: workers, not warriors.

  As she became accustomed to the glowing walls she saw that the chamber she was in had not a single corner anywhere; all its angles were rounded. Three passages led away from it, but none of them was in the same plane as the hollowed-out 'floor' on which she lay. The floor was not entirely bare, but such patchy light as it emitted was mostly obscured by numerous untidy heaps of armour and piles of indeterminate debris. Inhere was no furniture of any kind.

  If these were the legendary Corridors of Power, Lucrezia thought, they hardly warranted such a dignified name. She was determined that she must not be afraid, even though she knew that she was in the secret depths of a drago mite nest.

  "Can you speak?" asked Metra, not ungemly.

  "I can," she answered. Metra helped her stand, but she shook off the assistant arm as soon as she could. Her limbs ached, but she reminded herself that she was a princess, and an ambassador of Xandria. She must display all the fortitude she could.

  The clothes she stood in were those she had been wearing when she had been captured. They were disgustingly filthy. She was glad to discover, though, that she still had her belt and pouches. Her secret armoury was safe. Her head spun and her empty stomach bewailed its condition in waves of paradoxical nausea, but she ignored all that.