Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  "Don't imagine that the fact that I'm down here will make any . . ."

  The soldier's voice trailed off as his attention was caught by something.

  Andris followed the direction of his stare to the wall above the shelf on which the howls were set. The substance of the wall was moving and changing.

  It was as if the wall grew two lumpen breasts with grotesque teats, which, promptly began to dribble something milky into the two bowls.

  Cerri made a disgusted sound.

  "That's groSs," he said.

  "Can you eat that stuff, after watching thatY " Actually," Andris said,

  "I'm too hungry to be squeamish. After all the unearthly stuff we ate in the dark lands and some of the horrors in Fraxinus's nor very rot proof jars I'm really not that particular."

  As the wall regained its normal smoothness he went over and picked up the bowl. The 'milk' was creamy and warm, and had the nicest odour he had encountered in many a ten day He raised it cautiously to his lips, tipped the bowl, and took a cautious sip.

  It tasted wonderful.

  "I'll have yours if you don't want it," he told Cerri but once the captain had tasted the stuff he was in no mood to give it up. When 406

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  the bowls

  were empty they were quick to replace them, but the teats had vanished into the wall again.

  "That was the best prison food I ever tasted," Andris said regretfully.

  "Considering what they charged for that slop in Belin's citadel, I'd say it was worth at least. . ."

  He stopped abruptly as the captain's restless gaze was caught and held yet again, this time by something behind his own head. Even before he moved from the ledge, Andris knew that the wall was opening up behind him, forming yet another vertically-lipped mouth, and he felt a sudden pang of fear at the thought of being swallowed and devoured.

  He threw himself over to Cerri's side of the room, twisting his awkwardly huge body as he did so, to see what horror was coming through the hole. His undisciplined imagination was already forming a picture of jagged rot-yellowed teeth and an avid, sticky, forked tongue . . .

  But what he actually saw was far worse than that.

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  A.

  II

  lucrezia hugged ereleth with all the passionate relief of one who has just been visited by an unexpected miracle. Although the princess was entitled by rank to treat her thus, Ereleth did not react with unalloyed pleasure and took care to escape the embrace as soon as possible.

  "Hardly quarters befitting a queen," the old woman remarked, looking around the narrow cell, at its ill-defined ledges and its strange decorations. The door-slit had closed behind her, and that wall now appeared as seamless as the others.

  "They're the best I've had in some considerable time," Lucrezia assured her mentor.

  "If you've travelled more comfortably you've been fortunate. But that doesn't matter- I was never so glad to see anyone in my life! Have you really come all the way from Xandria in search of me? You wery brave enough to come into the Dragomite Hills . . . even into the heart of the nest!"

  She did not add / would never have suspected that you were capable of such affection in case it sounded faintly insulting, although it was perfectly true. ' "On the other hand," Ereleth said, with a sigh,

  "I don't suppose the mound-queen's quarters are any more salubrious. These people have the concept of royalty, but they interpret it after their own eccentric fashion."

  "Oh, I don't know," Lucrezia said, deflated by Ereleth's failure to acknowledge anything she said. Kcsentment encouraged her to pretend an understanding of which she was far from confident. "The politics of this place don't seem to be all that strange, save for the total absence of human males."

  "I fear they might be stranger than you imagine," Ereleth said, sitting down on one of the sleeping-ledges and brushing dirt from her sleeve.

  "In fact, I suspect they might be stranger than the queen 408

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  herself

  imagines, if my brief interview with her just now provided an accurate display of her intelligence."

  Lucrezia felt a stab of envy at the revelation that Ereleth had seen the mound-queen in her absence. Was she to be ignored now that Ereleth was here?

  Or was it simply that the mound-queen had wanted to question Ereleth before she had a chance to discover what Lucrezia had already told her?

  "She intended to kill Fraxinus and all his men," Lucrezia said. "To prevent her doing that I had to promise that we would help her -- and that we would be far more valuable to her as partners in a contract than as captives working under threat."

  "So I gathered," said Ereleth negligently.

  "Her reaction to the evil circumstances which have overtaken the nest is, I think, as instinctive as the response of the drago mite workers. She doesn't understand what's happening, and seems unable to think of anything but formulating a plan which might allow the nest to be transplanted to a safe place. She's desperate, but she's also desperately uncertain. Even if this blight isn't the beginning of the end of the world her instincts may be sadly misdirected. If, on the other hand, this is one of the crises which the secret commandments anticipate, her schemes are utterly futile."

  It was by no means the first time Lucrezia had heard Ereleth talk in this teasingly enigmatic fashion, but it seemed utterly inappropriate to the present circumstances. It would have been pleasant had Ereleth been openly glad to see her or, at the very least, more appreciative of her own gladness.

  Perhaps, she thought, the queen was mortally afraid but did not care to show it. Some people, she knew, did become excessively business-like as a defence against fear--if one could call being irritatingly mysterious'

  business-like'. Lucrezia had always resented Ereleth's tendency to allude to a secret wisdom which she allegedly possessed but would not share. The princess had to remind herself now that she had every possible reason to thank her teacher and would-be rescuer, and to be tolerant of her mannerisms.

  "What have you said to the corpulent queen?" she asked, that being the most neutral question she could think of.

  "Very little, so far," Ereleth replied.

  "There's no need to be afraid, child- I reasoned out what you must have said to her, and was careful not to contradict it. It should be easy enough to persuade 409

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  her that she needs 1%,she's half-persuaded herself of that already."

  "The problem is," Lucrezia put in, 'that she's so thoroughly persuaded of it that she kept talking about my becoming one with them. I don't know what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. "

  "Nor I," Ereleth conceded.

  "Do you have any idea, perchance, why she is attended by two drago mite drones? The warriors who came to the surface seemed to expect that I would bring two drones with me when I declared myself a queen, and they accepted humans readily enough."

  "I've seen no human males here," Lucrezia said.

  "Who came with you?

  Fraxinus and Phar? "

  "Andris Myrasol and Captain Cerri," Ereleth informed her, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  "The mapmaker and the guard-captain? What in the world . . . ?"

  "It would take too long to explain. You must be careful of the captain your father exiled him and all his men from Xandria until he could bring you back.

  His men have gone over to Fraxinus, but they might be tempted back again.

  You need have no fear of the amber, though; he khows what yo
u intended to do with him; but he's not in a position to bear grudges and he won't interfere with our purpose." , "What is our purpose, exactly?" Lucrezia asked uneasily. She didn't quite understand what Ereleth meant about the guard-captain.

  "To return to Xandria?"

  "Certainly not," Ereleth said.

  "Unfortunately, the mound-queen does seem to want to go north, to some desolate corner of the provinces.

  You advised her against it, I believe that was quick thinking. "

  "It was also good advice," Lucrezia said, to demonstrate that she wasn't a fool.

  "She wants to begin raising a new range of Dragomite Hills, but her chances of doing that within the bounds of the empire would be very slim. Even if I didn't have other very good reasons for wanting her to go elsewhere, I'd still have counselled her against trying it."

  "Very true, daughter," said Ereleth. She was probably being sincere, but it still sounded sarcastic to Lucrezia's sensitive ear. "Belin would never tolerate drago mites establishing a niche even in 410

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  the most distant and

  desolate region of his precious empire, of course; he'd see it, rightly, as the thin end of a very nasty wedge.

  That's hardly relevant to our present predicament, though. The question is, how do we convince her that she ought to go west instead? "

  "Don't you mean south?" Lucrezia asked.

  "To begin with," Ereleth conceded.

  "But once we're out of the hills, we ought to go west or south-west. There are serpents in the Grey Waste, and there's a place on Myrasol's map called Serpent's Lair; our first destination must be one or the other, no matter what Fraxinus thinks best. Unlike the amber and the fat thief, he's not committed to obey me for the moment, but I'll have time to repair that difficulty if only I can get us out of the mess we're in right now."

  "Are you sure, house-mother, that my objectives coincide with yours?"

  Lucrezia could no longer leave the question unvoiced.

  "I know that you've come a very long way to find me, but. . ." She trailed off, realising that it sounded horribly ungrateful.

  Ereleth smiled crookedly. Her thin face looked decidedly eerie in the wan light: like the face of a phantom.

  "What are your objectives, daughter?" she asked softly.

  "Checuti told me what you said to him, of course . . . but all that seemed a little vague, and Keshvara's dead now. What would you do now, if you had a choice? " Her tone was calculated to inform Lucrezia that she did not have a choice, and not merely because she was a prisoner of the mound-queen, but it was not a rhetorical question. Ereleth's eyes were fixed upon her face with avid curiosity.

  "If I could," Lucrezia said,

  "I'd join Carus Fraxinus. I'd do what Hyry Keshvara intended to do find a way, if one exists, to the Pool of Life and Chimera's Cradle."

  "Why?"

  "Why not?" said Lucrezia defensively.

  "That's no answer. I ask you again: why?"

  "I'm not going back to Xandria, let alone to Shaminzara," Lucrezia said calmly.

  "That's not the kind of life I want. I could never have been happy following that kind of path through life, even if none of this had ever happened. Now

  . . . well, I've had a terrible time these last few ten days with hardly a moment's comfort or solace, but it feels . . ." She groped for words, but couldn't find them.

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  "You don't know^yhy," Ereleth said, but not with the air of one triumphantly winning an argument.

  "You can't. But you're right. You could never have been happy within Belin's scheme of things. You have Serpent's blood, which would always have been restless in your veins.

  In a crisis any kind of crisis it becomes more restless still.

  Everything that has happened since Hyry Keshvara brought those seeds to you has intensified that restlessness. You're not alone, daughter.

  I don't have the alien blood in my veins, but I do have custody of certain secret commandments. Even people who have neither aren't entirely immune from the effects of this strangely pregnant sense of disaster, this notion that the world we know is undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. It's in us all to some degree, you see. It's written in our flesh. It leads many to destruction, and always will, but some of us find the right balance of desire and wisdom, impulse and control. You and I, princess, with proper assistance from others witting or unwitting might be able to do what this awkward legacy was intended to impel us to do. "

  "And what," said Lucrezia patiently, 'is that? "

  "According to the commandments handed down to me," Ereleth told her, 'we must find a Serpent. Not just any Serpent, but a Serpent with . .

  well, they certainly don't call it human blood, for they had it long before we did' but they can hardly call it Serpent's blood either, for fear of confiiision. A Serpent with some special magic incarnate in its flesh, usually dormant but ever ready to be expressed when the times are. ripe.

  The Serpents have their own lore, you see, and their own secrets. They have lived in the world far longer than humans, and were adapted CO its ways by a long process of evolution millions of years, according to the lore, although the figure might not be literally meant.

  "The forefathers learned certain lessons from the pattern of the Serpents'

  adaptation, which they built into the scheme of Cienesys.

  Whether they had learned those lessons well enough, or applied them with adequate skill they could not know. The secret commandments aren't prophecies, and they make no promises; they offer hope rather than certainty, beginnings rather than ends.

  "When we've found the right kind of Serpent, we must find the right kind of Salamander. Then, and only then, we shall have what we need in order to go or to return, as the secret commandments insist on putting it to the Pool of Life."

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  "And what then?" Lucrezia asked sceptic ally All this is myth, she reminded he self Ereleth knows well enough that the fringes of the lore have accumulated all manner of quaint fantasies. If she believes in her secret commandments, it is because they're the only thing she owns which allows her to think of herself as a superior being, a true queen of witches. Her belief is no evidence of their truthfulness

  "Then it begins," Ereleth told her.

  "I told you we aren't dealing with prophecies or promises. There is no destiny. The future cannot be foreknown, but the human mind is pregnant with many designs, some of which can be realised if only the necessary instruments can be devised and forged. What we have to do with, you and I, is the devising and forging of instruments."

  Lucrezia recognised the saying Ereleth had quoted. It was sometimes bandied about the corridors of Belin's citadel, and had been a favourite of more than one of his ministers. The design which preoccupied them was, of course, Belin's empire the impossible empire, as they liked to call it, boasting of their ability to do what had never been done before. When they spoke of necessary instruments they meant treaties and terms of trade, methods of transportation and building . . . and, of course, the thirty-and-one queens of Xandria and their plethora of royal children. Ereleth evidently had a very different context in mind; but she too thought of people-including herself-as instruments.

  Lucrezia wasn't sure that she liked the idea of being a mere instrument; she had always wanted to be something more than that. She hadn't had the least desire to be an instrument of Belin's empire, and she couldn't see that there was any greater merit in being an instrument of Erelcth's secret commandments or of her own Serpent's blood.

  My restlessness is my own, she thought, seizing the idea as firmly as she could. Whatev
er there is in my flesh to give it birth, it is my own. I am its master, not its slave. I have no need of secret commandments to tell me what I am or where I must go. Hyry Keshvara would have agreed with her wholeheartedly of that she felt certain.

  To Ereleth, she said only: "I see. " It was, at best, a half-truth but at least she now knew, at long last, what Ereleth's secret commandments instructed her to do, and why the witch-queen had always taken a special interest in her.

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  "If the amber's qa^p is to be trusted," Ereleth said, 'there are Serpents and Salamanders to be found south of the marshes. There is safety in numbers, and Fraxinus is a tolerably clever man as well as a leader who commands respect from his followers. He'll be very useful to us, if we can keep him and bind him to our will. The question which faces us immediately, however, is how soon we can extricate ourselves from the clutches of the mound-queen. We must strike some kind of bargain with her, even if we mean to break it. We must offer her some seeming guarantee of our good faith. We must decide now what we shall say to her when we see her again which will be soon enough, for she insists that time is pressing. She could hardly refuse me permission to see you and make sure that you were well, but she is impatient to come to some decision as to what can and might be done for her people and for the drago mites whose nest they share.

  "She is under great pressure, I think, from her drago mite allies, although I can't make any judgment as to her exact relationship to them. The nest is in a parlous state, and I can only presume that it might be invaded at any moment by warriors from another nest. The internecine wars in which the drago mites are now engaged are wars of extermination that's surely why the queen is so desperate."

  "If that's so," Lucrezia pointed out, 'we too have every reason to want to be out of here as soon as possible. Perhaps we should promise her anything at all, simply to start things moving. Even if we had to go back to the forest before we can resume our own course . if the worst came to the worst, perhaps we ought to agree to that, as a way of buying time. "