The Serpent's Shadow em-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  He suddenly developed a much more pronounced version of his limp, and staggered, leaning on his walking stick, to the white-painted doorway. He stood there just a moment, then reached out and rang the bell.

  It was answered, with great alacrity, by a stonyvisaged, gray-haired man arrayed in pristine white chalwars and tunic, who looked him up and down with the same disconcerting thoroughness that Lord Alderscroft had used.

  Peter hastily removed his cap. "Knee went all wonky," he said with great earnestness. "The doctor free?"

  The Indian gentleman gave him a second head-to-toe examination, then nodded, though grudgingly. "You may wait," he said, as if conferring the Victoria Cross, and motioned Peter inside.

  There was only one other patient waiting on the benches lining the hall, a young woman with a distinctly worried expression wearing a very cheap imitation of a fashionable gown (taffeta instead of satin, and trimmed in ribbon already fraying), who kept twisting her handkerchief in her hand as if to wring it dry. Peter studiously ignored her, keeping his eyes on the floorboards, as the Guardian of the Door kept watch over them both. They were very clean floorboards, that much he saw. There was a faint astringent scent in the air, but no odor of sickness.

  A moment later, one of the doors into the hall opened, and a woman with a baby in her arms emerged. There were signs on her face that she had been weeping, and her eyes were still red, but her face was wreathed in smiles. "God bless 'ee, Miss Doctor!" she whispered; to whom these words were addressed, Peter was left in doubt, for between the bulk of the lady herself and the shadows of the doorway, he could only make out an imperfect form.

  "Never hesitate to bring her in again, Delia," said a low, pleasant voice. "I've got plenty of stockings and other things needing mending, and I'd be just as happy to barter your skills for mine. Just take her home, put her to bed, and come back for the mending when you've got someone to watch her. Gupta will have it for you."

  The patient—or perhaps, more correctly, the patient's mother, bowed her head in a brief nod of relief and agreement, then the shadowed figure caught sight of the first patient as "Delia" hurried out the door that Gupta (Peter presumed the man was the "Gupta" previously mentioned) held open for her with a more polite bow than he had offered to Peter.

  The girl sprang up off of the bench as soon as Delia had cleared the way, and the shadow exclaimed, "Oh, Sally, not again!"

  Whereupon Sally burst into tears and fled into the inner sanctum, leaving Peter wondering just what sort of "not again" could be going on here. His imagination supplied him with plenty—and the likeliest, given the girl's tawdry, cheap taffeta dress, rouged cheeks, and kohled eyes, gave him a moment of queasiness.

  Good God.

  However, before his first impulse to flee had managed to manifest itself, Sally reappeared, all smiles again. Whatever had been transacted within that surgery, it had not taken as long as—well, what he had feared would have taken. "Yer a bleedin' saint, ye are," the girl said as fervently as the mother had. "I gotter get back—"

  "Off with you, before that blackguard manager docks you for not being at rehearsal," replied the doctor, making a shooing motion and coming fully into the light. "And don't forget that if I'm not here, I'm generally at the Fleet, and you can come to me there."

  This was Peter's day for shock, it seemed. It was not merely enough that the Doctor M. Witherspoon was female—nor that she attended to women no lady would be seen associating with—nor yet that her Door Dragon was Hindu.

  No, there was no doubt whatsoever in Captain Peter Scott's mind, he who had made the voyage to and from Calcutta any number of times, that Doctor M. Witherspoon was, if not fully Indian herself, certainly of half blood.

  He rose to his feet, drawn by the sheer force of her personality. Stunningly attractive, despite the severe black twill skirt and suit coat, with its plain black blouse buttoned up to the chin and what must be a luxuriant fall of raven hair tightly wound into a chignon atop her head without the tiniest strand awry, she would have made him stare at her anyway. Skin the color of well-creamed coffee, enormous eyes so brown they were nearly black, and the faintest hint of sandalwood perfume coming from her, she made it impossible, for a critical moment, to remember what it was he was supposed to be here about.

  Which was, of course, his undoing. For he stood with his weight distributed equally on both legs, and had risen without a hint of a groan or the help of his stick.

  She pierced him with those eyes, like an insect to be studied, and he felt a flush creeping up from his collar.

  "Well," she said at last, "you certainly aren't having any difficulty with that leg now, are you?"

  He swallowed, with some trouble. "No," he replied, in a very meek voice. "At least, no more than usual."

  "Then shall we come into my office and discuss why you really came to see me?" she asked, her voice as icy as the wind off the North Sea. "Or would you prefer to leave now—bearing in mind that my patients have a number of very large, very inhospitable friends of their own, who would not care to see me or my practice inconvenienced?" He ducked his head, squared his shoulders, and followed her direction— into the mysteries of her office.

  He was not entirely certain that he was going to come out. At least, not in the same state—mental or physical, he was not sure—in which he had gone in.

  PETER sat—carefully—on the single chair facing the doctor's desk, in a room that appeared to serve as study, initial consultation room, and office. The doctor studied him, her expression as serene as a bronze Buddha, and just as unreadable. He decided to show a bit more spine than he had for the past few moments, and studied her as well. Neither of them broke the silence; only the usual street sounds filtered in through the glass of the window facing the street—footsteps, hoofbeats, voices, and the occasional cough and chatter of a motorcar.

  One day all our hansoms are going to be replaced by those wretched autos, Peter reflected, as a particularly noisy vehicle chugged by, drowning every other noise as it did. And on that day—perhaps I'll move to the Isle of Man, or of Wight, or the Scillys—or some place equally remote. God, how I hate those things!

  As he continued to gaze unabashedly at the doctor's face, taking in the nuances of her features, he became more and more certain that his first guess about her parentage was correct.

  Eurasian, no doubt. With the surname "Witherspoon" there wasn't much doubt which parent was the English one; the only question was—how on earth had this woman, of mixed blood, managed to become a doctor? The task was difficult enough for an English girl! Who had sponsored her and given her the necessary education? The London School of Medicine for Women?

  No, that surely wasn't possible; she looked too young. She must have begun her studies in her teens, and the London School wouldn't take a girl that young.

  I don't think that I would care to stand between her and something she dearly wants. I would probably find her walking over the top of me to get it.

  The office revealed very little of the doctor's personality, other than the fact that she—or her servants—were fanatically neat. Bookcases lined the wall behind her except for a space where a door broke the expanse, bookcases polished until they gleamed and filled with leather-bound volumes. Her desk, spartan and plain, held only pen, pencil, paper in a neat stack, an inkpot, and a blotter. There was one small framed print on the wall behind him, but he didn't dare turn around to look at it, not with those black eyes fixed on him. Printed wallpaper might be Morris; he wasn't sure; it was warm brown, yellow, and cream, exactly the colors he'd expect from an Earth Mage.

  Nothing on the desk to help—no pictures, no trinkets. And nothing with writing on it. So she was the kind who put her patients' records out of sight before they even left the office. A careful woman; a wise woman, given what she'd implied about her last client.

  Ah, but what he sensed, now that he was within the enclosure of her protective magics, made him long for fifteen minutes left alone in this—or, indeed, any�
� room in the house. It wasn't just the force of her personality that left him a little stunned, it was the strength of her magic. Strangest of all was that she wasn't using it. She was certainly old enough to have learned as much as he about the arcane; certainly powerful enough—but the magic she had invested in the walls was held together mostly by the main strength of that power. If those spells had been put in place by an Elemental Apprentice, they'd have fallen apart before the mage turned around. She had taken a bit of this, a bit of that, and a heavy dose of willpower to create protections that were effective in their way, but with all the grace of a pig in a parlor, and all the symmetry of that poor bloke they called "The Elephant Man." This was patched-together, mismatched, unaesthetic, ugly magic, and not the elegant creation she should have been able to weave. This, he would bet his soul, was not a clumsy, inelegant, or inept woman. This was not by her choice; she'd done what she could with instruments flawed and warped.

  But there was one little bit of nice work there— tangled in among the rest, like a shining silk thread running through a skein of ill-spun yarn, was a whisper of magery Peter would dearly love to learn to cast himself.

  Turn your eyes aside, it whispered to those beyond the walls who looked with the inward eye and not the outward. There is nothing here to interest you, there never was, and never will be. Seek elsewhere for your quarry; it is not here.

  Peter couldn't fathom it, and didn't know where to begin a conversation with this woman. As it happened, he didn't have to.

  "Well, I would judge, Mr. Scott, that no one sent you here from one of the many well-intentioned religious organizations who are trying to 'save' young ladies like Sally without any plans for providing her with an alternate source of income," the doctor said at last, leaning forward slightly and resting her weight on the arms laid across the top of her desk.

  Peter didn't bother to ask her how she knew that; anyone with her potential would have intuition so accurate she might just as well be able to read minds.

  Besides, it didn't take Conan Doyle's fictional detective to read a man's personality from his outward appearance.

  And to put the cap on it, I didn't storm in waving a Bible either.

  "My leg is dodgy," he offered, in hesitant truce. "Just not as bad as I made it out to be. Nobody's been able to do anything for it."

  Now she leaned back, a slight frown crossing her face. "I wouldn't think they would be able to," she replied. "But you, sir, are not my usual sort of patient, and you would not have heard of me or my office from any of my usual clients. I would like to know why you appeared on my doorstep today."

  Peter wasn't a Water Master for nothing—and now that he was inside the lady's boundaries, her unseen friends in her fountain had no qualms about tossing him just the bit of information he needed.

  "Fleet Clinic," he said shortly—and knowing that his appearance, a bit down-at-heel though it was, put him a great deal more than a touch above those who stumbled into charity clinics, he added, "Used to be a ship's captain on the India route. I ran into one of my old lads looking better than he had in ten years, and the old boy told me about how you fixed him up. Thought I'd look you up and see if you had any notions about the knee." Now he shrugged. "Reckoned it couldn't hurt to see, eh? Worst you can do is tell me what every other sawbones has."

  As he'd hoped, the charity clinic where she worked was probably so overwhelmed with poor working men and women that she'd have seen dozens of sailors among her patients since she set up practice, and wouldn't remember any particular one. She lost her frown, and her expression became one of skepticism rather than suspicion.

  "And you have no objection to being treated by a woman?" she asked.

  He gave a short bark of a laugh. "I've got no objection to being treated by a Zulu witch doctor if he could do something with this knee," he retorted, with honesty that finally won her over. He was pleased to see a faint smile cross her lips, and the intelligent amusement he'd sensed lurking beneath her stern surface showing in her eyes.

  "In that case, Captain Scott," she said, plucking her pen from the inkwell and holding it poised over the paper, "why don't we begin at the beginning? Just what happened to that knee to make it turn against you, and when?"

  Maya used her note taking to conceal some observation of her possible patient of a very different sort— for there was something of Power about him, and that had surprised her so much that for a brief time she had been unable to do more than stare at him.

  Another woman might have found him unremarkable in any way whatsoever. He certainly wasn't handsome, not by any stretch of the imagination. His dress was neat and clean, but no finer than that of any other man in her working-class neighborhood. Sailors always ended up with a commonality of features, given the beating their faces usually took from the elements, and Peter Scott was no different there. His face could easily have been sculpted from ancient, withered leather, and though the chin was firm and the brow was high, his mouth set in lines that suggested more smiles than frowns, there was little in the ruin of it to show if he had been handsome in his youth, or otherwise. Only a pair of remarkable green eyes, an emerald color with a hint of blue, peering at her from among a nest of wrinkles caused by much squinting against the sun and storm, served as any sort of distinguishing feature. He'd had the good manners to remove his cap, which he held easily in hands that were relaxed—but why did they remind her of the paws of an equally relaxed and well-fed tiger? His hair, some color between yellow and brown, had begun to sport a streak of gray here and there. Not a young man— but not an old one either.

  Then there was the scent of magic. . . .

  Magic! Here, in London! She would have been less shocked, had she hailed a cab only to find a camel and not a horse between the shafts.

  What was he doing here? If he was a mage, surely he could do as much for his own ailments as she!

  Is he looking—for me? That thought made her hand shake for a moment, so that she inadvertently blotted her notes. She exclaimed over her "clumsiness" and took the opportunity offered in repairing the damage to swiftly check her defenses.

  They were intact. And although this man brought to mind the well-fed and sleepy-eyed panther—yes; panther, and not a tiger—she did not think she was in any danger. Not directly, at least, and not at this moment.

  "Stand and walk for me," she ordered, both to study his movement, and give herself time to think. "How much pain does this afflict you with?"

  "What a reasonable man would expect—not that my friends would ever accuse me of being reasonable," he replied, with a quick lift of his brow, inviting her to share the joke, and another glint of sapphire in the green of his eyes when he turned to look at her. "When the weather's fine, I get along all right; when it's foul, so's the knee and my temper both. And when it storms—"

  For a moment, the briefest of moments, Maya saw the panther extend his claws and show a gleam of white teeth.

  "—when it storms, then God help the man that crosses me."

  Then the panther pulled in his talons, hid his fangs, and became the sleepy cat again. Peter Scott smiled, shrugged, and invited her to share his little "joke."

  Except—it was no joke. And I do not think it was a rainstorm he was referring to.

  "Please, take a seat again," Maya gestured. "I wouldn't care to be the one to put you or your knee to the test of that."

  She tapped the feathered end of her quill against her cheek as she considered him. Dared she take him as a patient? Prudence shouted "No!" This man could be—was—dangerous. He'd shown that side, however briefly, and she had no doubt that he had done so deliberately, calculatedly. He had Power.

  And it was that power that made him so tempting, so very, very tempting.

  "You must learn the magics of your father's blood," Surya had said, so many times, when Maya had begged for the least, the littlest hint of instruction. "It is that which flows through you, and not the magics of mine." And now, here was a mage of her father's blood. . . .


  Presented, oh so conveniently, so very opportunely—

  A trap? Or a gift? How was she to tell the difference?

  She had not asked for a sign, but one arrived on its own two feet to give her the answer she needed.

  No part of the house was forbidden to Charan, although he seldom ventured anywhere but the conservatory, her bedroom and, occasionally, the kitchen. Yet, with no warning, no prompting, no hint whatsoever, the door—which must have been improperly closed, creaked slowly open. And there, clinging to it with his tiny hands, his great, solemn eyes fixed on the stranger, was Charan himself.

  "By Jove!" Scott exclaimed, with as much pleasure as surprise. "A Hanuman langur!"

  He was still seated, but leaned down so that he no longer loomed over Charan's head, and extended a hand. "Hello there, my fine fellow!" he said, in a coaxing tone that had none of the overly hearty tones of someone who is feigning interest in an animal or child. "I don't suppose you speak English, do you? My Hindu's a bit rusty. Would you care to come and make my acquaintance?"