The Serpent Sea

by Martha Wells

  Moon leaned back against the cushion and took a drink of wine, just in case he didn’t have his expression as under control as he thought. If the Raksura had had anything but a distant kinship with the Fell, the leviathan’s inhabitants would have long since found out about it.

  “Not at all.” Ardan turned to her, his expression serious. “The Fell are thieves, predators, parasites. They build nothing, make nothing, grow nothing, have no art, no written language. They loot their victims’ habitations for everything they need. You saw the artwork in the Raksuran hive. Creatures who could create such as that have no need to steal.”

  Karsis sat back, thwarted from starting an argument. Negal said, wryly, “Then it’s a pity your men destroyed some of the images, removing the inlay.”

  “Not many.” Ardan eyed him. “And they were punished.”

  Karsis took a sharp breath, Esom and Negal looked grim. Orlis set the pastry he had been nibbling down on his plate, as if the memory had taken away his appetite.

  Moon took it that the punishment had been extreme and effective. He was surprised the hunters hadn’t found more bodies. But at least they were back on the right subject. “I take it you weren’t interested in the gems and metal.” He glanced around, pointedly indicating the room and the wealth it represented.

  “No, you’re quite correct, I already have more of that than I need.” Ardan lifted his goblet and studied the purple-tinted glass pensively. “I am the youngest magister in the city. I took my father’s place when he died, several turns ago. The competition between myself and the others, as well as our duty to see to the city’s survival, drove me to seek knowledge and avenues to greater power.”

  Yes. Moon held his breath. If Ardan would elaborate, mention the seed, if Moon could ask to see it…

  Then Ardan set his goblet aside and glanced up as Bialin approached the table. “Ah, I believe my other guests have arrived.”

  

  The other guests turned out to be a large group of wealthy local groundlings and their servants and hangers-on. The big chamber rapidly became well-occupied.

  They seemed to be in a contest to outdo each other with the richness of their clothes. There were silks in every color, sheer gauzes, black and gold brocades. There were also some traders, all looking much more prosperous than the ones who had come to sell trinkets today. There was apparently nothing else to do in this city in the evening except go to parties in the big towers or drug yourself unconscious in the wine and smoke bars.

  Servants put out more food and drink, but people didn’t sit to eat. Instead, they walked around to mingle and talk. Moon was able to fade into the background as the crowd grew, watching and being watched in turn.

  There didn’t seem to be much to discover. The conversations Ardan had were all brief, all apparently casual. The point of all this seemed to be showing his wealth off to the other groundlings. At the moment Ardan stood with a richly dressed old man, surrounded by a small audience of lower-ranking groundlings. Ardan was at ease, as usual, but the old man simmered with anger.

  “Trader Niran.”

  Moon glanced around even before he remembered that was supposed to be him, which was why he had taken the name of someone he knew. It was Bialin, who motioned urgently for him to follow. “The Magister would like to speak with you.”

  “Who’s that with him?” Moon asked.

  Bialin pressed his lips together in dissatisfaction at Moon’s lack of instant obedience, but answered, “Lethen, another magister.”

  Moon followed Bialin over to the group. Unlike Ardan, Lethen was ruinously old. The pearly surface of his skull was dulled and worn, disturbingly like raw bone. Deep lines were etched around his mouth and eyes, and his blue skin had an unhealthy, pale tinge. He was dressed in blue and gold brocade, and leaned on an ornate ivory cane. He had blue gems somehow mounted in the age-yellowed base of his skull cap. Judging by his pinched expression, the process had been painful.

  As Moon and Bialin arrived, Ardan said to Lethen, “Trader Niran has brought me word of another site of interest.” He nodded to Moon. “Show him the bracelet, if you would.”

  Moon pulled the cuff of his shirt up and held out his arm. The red gold gleamed on the entwined serpentine forms.

  Lethen leaned in to look and his hands tightened on his cane. His nails were like gray horn against his lined blue skin. He said, tightly, “I see.”

  There was an undercurrent here, a strong one. Lethen wants Raksuran treasure? Or he knows about the seeds and wants one? Moon wondered, and watched Lethen regard Ardan with a bitterness bordering on hate. Ardan definitely had some hold over him. Just to stir the pot a little, Moon said, “Do you want me to tell him what I found in the ruin?”

  Ardan flicked him a look, part surprise and part amusement. “Not necessary.” He gave Moon an ironic nod. “You may go.”

  Tugging his sleeve down, Moon wandered away, circled the nearest statue-pillar, and stopped just within earshot. He was mildly surprised to find Karsis already there, eavesdropping. She glared at him, not very pleased to be caught.

  Sounding as if it was a wonderful joke, Ardan was saying to Lethen, “So, will you mount your own expedition to the coast?”

  Lethen snapped, “I want you to allow another trading clan access to our harbor.”

  “Your wants are immaterial.” Ardan was clearly bored with the change of subject. “There’s no need.”

  “There is need. My artisans can’t produce anything when they can’t get raw materials.”

  The boredom was turning into annoyance. “I’ll consider it.”

  “There’s no need to keep this stranglehold—” Ardan was already walking away, stubbornly pursued by Lethen.

  Karsis let out a frustrated breath. “Well, that was pointless.” She flicked a grim glance at Moon. “Eavesdropping makes me feel like I’m at least trying to do something.”

  “Ardan controls the traders?” Enad had said something about trade rights, that things would be better if the magisters gave them to more traders.

  “Most of them. He controls their ability to find the island,” Karsis corrected, and stepped out to watch Ardan move away. Moon thought she was being far too obvious about it. She must not do much hunting on her people’s isolated plateau. “The leviathan moves at random. The traders all have magical tokens that allow them to find it again. They have a monopoly, and can charge whatever they like for their goods and foodstuffs.”

  “What about the other magisters?” Moon followed her. Ardan headed toward the far end of the room, past the pool and the fountain, where a set of stairs went up to a gallery along the back wall. There was an archway up there, surrounded by elaborate scrollwork carving, an entrance to another grand hall. Guards were posted, but Moon had assumed they were there to keep Ardan’s involuntary guests from slipping away.

  “Several of them have died off from old age, from what we’ve heard. Ardan is the most powerful.” Karsis sounded bitter about it. “He seems to be instrumental in keeping the beast from sinking, or shaking the city off.”

  “But he can’t put it to sleep again, or send it back to the coast of Emriat-terrene.”

  Karsis made a faint derisive noise. “Why would he bother? He has everything here just as he likes.”

  Ardan climbed the stairs to the gallery and vanished through the archway. “What’s up there?”

  She sighed. “Another exhibit hall full of his acquisitions. Those are apparently more precious to him than the ones downstairs.” Her tone turned contemptuous. “I suppose you’ll be helping him to add to it with this ruin of yours.” She hesitated. “He will kill you, you know.”

  Moon’s attention was on that tempting archway, so carefully guarded. He turned to her abruptly. “Is that where he keeps the seed? The wooden thing you found?” His expression must have been too intense because she fell back a step.

  Sounding uncertain for once, she said, “I don’t know where he keeps it.” She recovered quickly and lifted her chin.
“Why do you want to know?”

  Yes, why do you want to know? Idiot. He said, “I wanted to see it, make sure it’s the same as what we found in the ruin.”

  “I see.” She studied him a moment. “What do you know about these seeds?”

  At that point, Esom arrived, saving Moon from an answer that probably would have been suspiciously inadequate. Esom took Karsis’ arm firmly and said, “Karsis, Negal needs to speak to you.”

  “What? Oh—” Esom tugged and Karsis went reluctantly. Moon took the opportunity to vanish into the crowd. He had some planning to do.

  

  Ardan’s withdrawal must have been a signal, because it wasn’t much later in the evening when the invited guests began to leave, and Bialin and his guards herded Moon and Negal’s group back down to their quarters. As the stairwell doors were securely locked behind them, Negal turned to Moon and said, low-voiced, “Guards walk the halls at odd intervals. We are not locked in our rooms, but movement is discouraged.”

  That was good to know, and unexpectedly generous of Negal. Moon didn’t want to feel like he owed these people anything, but he managed to thank Negal without irony.

  Orlis and Karsis were already moving away down the hall, both seeming tired and dispirited. But as Negal went to join them, Esom stopped Moon and said, with stiff aggression, “And in case you found yourself curious, Karsis sleeps in my room.”

  Moon had no idea why he was being given this information. Hoping to discourage further disclosures, he said, deadpan, “That’s nice for you.”

  Esom stiffened even further. Through gritted teeth, he said, “She’s my sister.”

  It occurred to Moon, belatedly, that Esom was trying to warn him off approaching Karsis for sex. Groundlings, Moon thought in sour disgust. It must have shown on his face, because Esom’s expression turned defensive and confused. Moon just walked away toward his room.

  He closed the door and sat down on the bed, wincing at the faint odor of scent-concealing oils that came up from the blankets. After all the smothering perfumes upstairs, his sense of smell was next to useless. He pulled his boots off, lay down, and waited.

  Listening to the groundlings’ conversations upstairs had netted a little more information. Ardan was more powerful than Moon had thought, and everyone there had been afraid of him, hating him, or courting him, or a combination of all three. Moon would have thought a magister’s business was to make magic, but Ardan seemed intimately concerned with the working of the city and its trade concerns.

  After a time, he heard the others stop moving around. Various doors shut. He hadn’t noticed earlier how dead the tower was to sound; he could be the only one alive in it. He thought of the colony tree, how despite its size you could feel it move and breathe and rustle, sense the faint presence of all the smaller lives inside it. Stop it, he told himself, annoyed. He refused to be sick with longing for a place he had barely spent two nights in.

  Sometime later, out in the foyer, the heavy door to the stairwell opened, someone walked through, and the door was closed and locked again. Quiet footsteps moved away down the hall. That was the guard who patrolled the public rooms on this level. There had been no click of a key, so another guard in the stairwell had unlocked and locked the door for him. But Moon wasn’t planning to use the stairs.

  Moon listened to the guard make several slow circuits of the level. Finally the man’s steps returned to the stairwell door, there was a quiet knock, and the door opened and closed again. Presumably the guard wouldn’t return for a while. Moon shoved off the bed and reached the door. He eased it open silently, stepped into the corridor, and pulled it shut behind him. The corridor lights had been turned down until they gave off only a dim light and a faint trace of mist. Shifting in a blur of motion, he bounded down the corridor. He kept his claws carefully sheathed so they wouldn’t click against the tile and betray him.

  The first thing he did was rapidly search the rest of this level. He found two other corridors, both with closed doors. By the sound of breathing, only three rooms were occupied. He couldn’t tell which two held Negal and Orlis, but a low whispered conversation marked the one with Esom and Karsis. There were two other open sitting areas, and a larger room with a cold bathing pool, but no other doorways to the stairwell, and no windows.

  He whipped back through the door into the big common room. The vapor-lights here were still bright, lighting the empty room and making him feel exposed to the entire tower. Ignoring the sensation, he went to the hearth, stepped over the rim, hooked his claws into the mortar between the sooty stones, and wriggled up into the chimney.

  Climbing the dark shaft, he peered upward. His eyes adjusted quickly, but there wasn’t much to see. The chimney wasn’t straight and shunted sideways at intervals to work its way up through the tower. He passed openings for several other connected shafts, too narrow for even a slender Raksura to climb down. At least it was a sign that all the hearths in this side of the tower connected to this central shaft.

  When he was high enough to be above the big meeting room, he hit a junction with another large shaft. Hah, he thought, quietly satisfied at guessing right, and climbed headfirst down it.

  He reached the bottom, where it opened into the hearth near the far end of the large chamber. He hung his head down and peered cautiously out, every nerve alert.

  The vapor-lights had been turned so low they were nearly out, and the place seemed even more cavernous, the statue-pillars looming life-like in the shadows. He tasted the air and caught lingering scents of perfume, stale food, and wine. Nothing moved, and it was almost unnervingly silent.

  He slid out of the chimney and stepped down off the big empty hearth, lifting his spines a little to dislodge some of the soot. Ghosting across the marble floor, he bypassed the stairs to jump up to the railing of the gallery.

  The hall beyond the archway was smaller than the one down on the second level of the tower, with no alcoves. Ardan’s acquisitions hung on the walls or stood on plinths. It was all artwork, wall carvings, pieces of sculpture, the gems and metal glinting faintly in the dim light. Moon walked through rapidly, reached the end, then turned back. He forced himself to move slowly, to look at each display more closely. It has to be here. It wasn’t sitting by itself on a plinth, but it might be stuck in with one of the other objects.

  He stopped abruptly as the skin under his spines prickled with unease; he wasn’t alone in here anymore. He turned, slowly.

  Barely ten paces away a mist hung in the air, and something formed rapidly inside it.

  Moon snarled under his breath. He had forgotten Ardan’s magic. Groundling guards were probably posted in any area where the inhabitants of the tower might move around during the night. In the chambers that were supposed to be empty, the guards could be more deadly. The mottled green shape that emerged from the mist stood almost as tall as Moon. He could see the outline of long arms and clawed hands, but no head. That could be a problem, he thought, and crouched to spring.

  It snapped into solid form, a bulbous muscular body with barely a lump for the head. Its eyes were small, yellow, and mean. Then a huge mouth opened, more than half the width of the body, and displayed an impressive array of yellow fangs. It surged forward and Moon sprang to meet it.

  As it reached for him he grabbed its arm, swung up and slashed its face with his feet and free hand, then leapt away. Quicker than thought, it slapped him out of the air.

  Moon bounced off the stone floor, then caught a blow to the head that knocked him back into a plinth. The creature charged toward him again, its goal apparently to grab him and stuff him into its huge mouth. Scrambling back, he thought, I don’t have time for this, and bolted out through the archway to the gallery. Instead of going over the balustrade, he jumped straight up in the air. As the creature barreled out after him, he dropped and landed on its back. It roared, loud enough to deafen him, and reached back to claw at his head. Moon sunk all four sets of his own claws into the creature’s rubbery flesh and bit
down on the back of its lumpy head.

  Still roaring, it staggered forward and tumbled over the rail. It hit the floor first and rolled, but Moon held on with grim determination. Even as it crushed him between its back and the floor, he kept his jaws clamped down. Its tough hide gave way abruptly and he got a mouth full of foul blood. The thing tasted terrible, like rot and mold. It bucked, thrashed, and finally went limp. Moon shoved it off him and staggered upright. He spat out blood, stumbled to the fountain, and scooped up a double handful of water to scrub the acrid stuff off his face. Then he looked up at the gallery.

  Three—no, four more misty shapes formed in the air. The creature’s death must have triggered the appearance of reinforcements. Damn things, how many does Ardan have? He could stay here and take them all on, until the groundling guards and Ardan showed up. It wouldn’t buy him any time to look for the seed. He turned back for the hearth and crossed the floor in long bounds.

  A groundling couldn’t have killed that creature. If Moon got down to the guest quarters again and shifted, he might be able to bluff this out. They wouldn’t know they were looking for a Raksura. He hoped.

  He reached the hearth, scrambled up into the chimney, and climbed rapidly back to the central shaft. At the junction he hesitated. He could keep going up until he found the outlet to the outside, if it was large enough to get through, if it wasn’t sealed by the barrier that protected the outside of the tower. No, he had to take the chance to stay and keep looking for the seed.

  He climbed down quickly and quietly until he heard a scrabbling noise, claws scratching against stone, somewhere above him. Moon continued to climb, and tasted the air as he went, but the stink from the creature’s hide still clung to his scales and he couldn’t scent anything. He glanced down and saw he didn’t have far to go. Faint light marked the opening into the guest-level hearth perhaps twenty paces below him.