The Serpent's Shadow em-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  After that, though, came a pistol shot, and the sounds of fighting: blows of fist, foot, or lead-pipe on flesh; grunts and yelps; scuffling feet; bodies hitting walls.

  Peter's group waited in cover, Peter's heart racing and his body tense with strain, to see how the initial attack went. Almsley's men were to clear the dacoits from the door, and if they could, carry the fight far enough into the building that Peter and his crew could get inside undetected.

  The door remained open, now sagging by one hinge. The sounds of fighting grew more distant and muffled.

  Gupta nodded, and the remaining three dashed across the street, the owl flying in close formation behind Norrey. They darted inside the shattered door and found themselves in an antechamber that had probably once served as an office for this warehouse, lit by a pair of gas fixtures above the fireplace. Now, it was clearly serving as a guard room. Two of the guards still remained on the floor, two dacoits in dark cotton tunics and bloused pants, with the characteristic scarlet strangling cords at the belts and scarlet scarves around their heads. One was unconscious, the other dead. Beyond them was an open door. There were no furnishings besides a couple of chairs that would serve only for kindling at this point.

  The owl waddled up behind them from the outer doorway, and Gupta took her up on his fist. Norrey put Sia and Singhe down on the floor and accepted Mala and his glove from Gupta. The mongooses nosed the bodies sprawled amid the broken chairs, then looked up at Peter.

  "Forward" Rhadi whispered. Peter nodded at the open door, through which the ongoing sounds of struggle still came, but distantly.

  "Through there," he said, as Rhadi bobbed agreement. Gupta drew his broad, curved sword and went through first.

  They entered a huge and mostly empty room. A faint glow of light came from the room behind them and the ceiling far above; just enough to give them the sense of the size of the room, but not the shape nor the contents. The ceiling light was more like a smear of foxfire than an actual light, and Peter thought that he recalled the thugee cult using foxfire or something like it in lieu of other illumination to strengthen their night vision. A faint, darker rectangle opposite them marked what might be a door on the other side of the cavernous warehouse.

  "I don't like this place," he muttered. He couldn't put his finger on it, but there was something wrong here, as if this warehouse was something more—

  And that was when two enormous cobras, shining with a sickly yellow light of their own, suddenly reared up between them and the next doorway.

  The door behind them slammed shut.

  "Hell!" he shouted, frantically scrambling backward, heart pounding and every nerve thrilling with atavistic fear. Norrey screamed; Gupta shouted something in Urdu. Both of them stood frozen against the unholy glare surrounding the cobras.

  Peter had never seen snakes this size. Rearing up on their coils with hoods spread, hissing, they were easily as tall as he. They were black, completely black, without the characteristic "eyes" on the backs of their hoods, each scale outlined in yellow phosphorescence. He fumbled for the revolver Almsley had given him as they swayed, hissing, their malevolent little eyes glittering like tiny rubies.

  But Sia and Singhe were faster than their human companions.

  Backs humped, fur bristling, teeth bared, they advanced on the cobras stiffly. The serpents, in their turn, were alerted by the movement, and fixed their attention on the mongooses.

  "Right," Rhadi whispered into Peter's ear.

  Moving slowly—for although the cobras had fixated on their hereditary enemy, the humans were all still in reach of those deadly fangs—Peter inched forward to touch Norrey's sleeve. She shook off her paralysis to look out of the corner of her eye at him; the hell-glare surrounding the snakes at least gave them some illumination to see each other by. He jerked his head to the right; she managed to ease herself backward until she had her back against the wall, then edged crabwise along it. Her movement took Gupta's attention from the cobras. He saw what she was doing, and did the same. And finally Peter backed up, to discover by touch that the door that had been there was there no longer.

  If they were still in the warehouse—and the wall behind him felt like the rough wood of the warehouse wall—something had significantly changed. As they stood there, watching cobras and mongooses challenge each other, the place began to fill with mist that glowed with the same, faint yellow-green as the phosphorescent smear above them. The brightest light surrounded the two cobras as they swayed back and forth, eyes fixed on the mongooses bobbing and dancing in front of them, never stopping for a single moment. Then Sia and Singhe froze for one moment—

  The cobras struck, twin lances of death hurtling through the thickening mist at the mongooses. Who weren't there.

  The mongooses leaped straight up, the instant that the snakes struck, and came down with all four sets of claws ready to grab, landing right behind the cobra's hoods. They latched on and each sunk a set of sharp little teeth into the neck at the base of the snake's skull where the head met the hood. And they held on for dear life.

  The cobras went into a frenzy of thrashing, trying to throw them off, trying to batter them against the wall and floor. And as they thrashed, traveling inexorably away from Peter, they began to grow—

  But before the mist thickened and then swirled between Peter and the terrible combat, he caught a glimpse of something else. It might have been hallucination; it might have been illusion. But he thought he caught sight of faces and bodies overlaying the forms of enormous cobras and mongooses. Wrestling against a pair of blue-faced demons were a pair of beings he thought he recognized. Could one of them have been the god Rama—and the other, the goddess Sita?

  It was only a moment that he saw them, or thought he did.

  But then the mist came up and carried the combat away—or it moved away from him—and even the sounds of hissing and thrashing faded and were gone.

  "Right,'" Rhadi insisted in his ear, and Peter started, then felt his way along the wall and resumed his journey.

  What next? he wondered, as he caught up with the other two. There would be something next. He knew it by the thickening, suffocating mist, by the oppressive sense of being watched, by the increasing taint of inimical magic. He recognized this mist now; it was close kin to the fog that had smothered Maya's body, but tangible and "real" to the ordinary senses.

  He put Charan up on the shoulder opposite Rhadi.

  The langur buried both his hands in Peter's hair and clenched his prehensile toes in the fabric of his shirt. The parrot clung on like a tick with his little claws. Nothing was going to dislodge either of them short of a hurricane.

  Now it was not only heat, but humidity creeping into the fog and unpleasant scent, the dankness of the swamp, fetid and clinging. If Peter hadn't known he was in a warehouse in the heart of London, he would have been certain he was groping his way through the jungle, up to his knees in swamp water. The warehouse wall was slick with damp, and his hand occasionally brushed a patch of something slimy.

  His foot splashed into a puddle. He looked down, and barely made out standing water along the wall. A few steps and it was ankle-deep, with swirls of something greenish and unpleasant floating on it.

  "Ew," Norrey complained ahead of him.

  "Sahib," Gupta whispered in Urdu, "I do not wish to frighten the child, but this is not natural. This building has taken us to some—other place. Or else it contains that place. Or else this is all an illusion."

  "I think you're right," Peter whispered back.

  The question was, how to behave? If it was illusion, would it be best to try to disbelieve in it and break it? What if it wasn't? He wasn't certain that he wanted to contemplate how much power it would take to bring the priestess' world to London—or London to India.

  But there was a third option, that this was neither wholly real, nor wholly illusion; that the priestess had brought them to her version of the Elemental Worlds. That would require far less power—though it was still
considerable.

  The mongooses were certainly acting as if they believed the cobras were real. We'll do the same.

  "Keep going," Peter urged both of his companions. "Still right. Follow the wall."

  "I 'ear something—'issing—" Norrey began.

  And a trident buried itself in the wood of the wall between Peter and Norrey.

  They both leaped apart with curses, and a dark-skinned woman with a mouth full of pointed teeth reared up out of the mist, hissed at them and yanked the trident free. Another lunged up beside her, both of them aiming their trident weapons at the men, and grinning fiendishly, both glowing with the same hell-light as the great cobras.

  Peter fumbled and dropped the revolver in the water; something lashed at his feet and sent it flying off into the darkness. It was then he realized that these women were not exactly human.

  In fact, from the waist down, they were enormous snakes.

  The second moved sinuously toward him through the mist—and both attacked the men with their tridents, ignoring Norrey, making sharp jabs to separate them. Gupta held his attacker off with his sword. It tried to catch the blade in the tines of the trident and twist it away, but he parried its attempts, cursing freely. Peter dodged and ducked the lightning jabs, circling toward Gupta and getting Norrey behind them both, until Gupta managed to pass him one of the long knives in his belt.

  Steel clanked on steel; Rhadi and Charan plastered themselves against his neck as he fended off the blows of the wicked weapon. Fortunately, neither of these creatures seemed to be particularly good fighters, but that didn't make their peril any less, for besides having to fend off the tridents, Gupta and Peter had to beware the lashing tails that threatened to knock them off their feet.

  "Duckl" cried Norrey behind them; he and Gupta dropped to their knees without question, splashing down into the swampy water—

  Nisha and Mala arrowed over their bent heads, screaming their war-cries, heading straight for the heads of their demonic opponents. The women slithered backward, hissing in alarm; both birds were growing larger—enormously larger—with every wingbeat. Nisha had turned a snowy white, and glowed so brightly it made Peter's eyes water; Mala had become something else altogether, an enormous multicolored bird with a raptor's beak and tearing talons, fully large enough to ride on—

  As they closed with the monsters, the mist came up and swirled them away before Peter had a chance to see more than that. But that glimpse was all Gupta needed.

  "Vishnu—" the old man breathed prayerfully. "Laksmi. The Gods are with us—"

  "Well, there's at least one that's still against us," Peter snapped. "Keep going, before that witch we're after comes up with some other surprise for us!"

  A few steps back in the direction of the wall, and the water was gone, the floor dry once more. The mist thinned a little, and they made their way back to the wall while they could still see it. Was that a good sign, or a bad one? As the mist dissipated, it took the light with it, leaving them in darkness again. They reached the wall in the nick of time before it vanished altogether, leaving Peter blinking and feeling uncomfortably helpless. Without the revolver, his only weapon was Gupta's knife, and he wasn't a particularly good knife fighter. He groped for the support of the rough wood behind him.

  Was Almsley coming up against any of this?

  Probably not. With her physical guards busied elsewhere, and no way to divide her forces once they were engaged, the priestess must have called up her supernatural protections to deal with the second invasion. With any luck, she didn't even know where they were exactly, or how many of them there were — only that there was another enemy to be driven out or killed.

  "Right," Rhadi said, loud enough for all of them to hear; Gupta grunted agreement.

  "Got a door!" Norrey exclaimed a moment later.

  "Cor—this hain't the door we was lookin' at before. 'Ang on a mo—"

  There was a scratch, and ordinary, yellow light flared up from the match that Norrey held in her hand. Beside her was a perfectly normal door, past it was a storage closet. Peter swallowed disappointment.

  "Ai!" said Rhadi, before Peter could speak. He suited his action to his words, flew across the closet to the far wall, and landed on a broom. And there was a click. The broom moved, and the wall pivoted in its center, showing a set of spiral stairs that led down into what looked like a storage cellar. That was all they saw before the match burned down to Norrey's fingers and she dropped it with a curse.

  "Down!" said Rhadi insistently from his perch on the broom.

  "I will stay here to guard your back, sahib," Gupta said after a moment. "I do not know what you may encounter there, but we know this place here holds evil things."

  " 'Old still, old 'eathen," Norrey told him. There was the sound of a blade being drawn. "There. Oi'm a dab 'and wit' a sticker. Oi'll bide 'ere with ye. Naow, ift gets loight agin, yew gimme one o' them popguns, eh?"

  "I shall, little mem'sab," Gupta promised. "Go, sahib! Time flies!"

  Peter didn't need any further encouragement; he groped his way into the closet and put his hand under Rhadi. The parrot pulled himself up to Peter's shoulder again. Peter felt his way past the hidden door, then worked his way carefully, a step at a time, down the staircase in utter blackness. As the stairs took another turn, he saw a thin, faint line of light somewhere at the bottom. If there had been any other light, even the glow of fox fire or Norrey's match, he'd never have seen it.

  "Door," Rhadi agreed.

  He groped his way down the stairs toward that beckoning thread of palest yellow, that suggestion of illumination. The stairs ended; floor began. The strip of light was just higher than his head, suggesting the top of a door. "Carefull" Rhadi warned, and instead of rushing toward it, he felt ahead with his foot, encountering something—a bucket, a box—immediately.

  The hero trips over a bucket and breaks his neck. He went to his hands and knees and groped his way through the litter to the wall, only to find junk piled up against it.

  But Rhadi ran down onto his arm and hand, and tapped his beak lightly on the wall. "Hand," he said. "Up!"

  There's another secret catch. Peter moved his hand up a trifle.

  "Morel" Rhadi insisted. Then, "Right! Morel" He felt the bird lean forward; there was a loud click.

  The wall, junk and all, swung outward.

  He threw up his hand to ward off the flood of light and the billow of harsh incense smoke that came at him. Squinting through the glare of many lanterns, he made out the figure of a woman in a red sari, an altar with something golden flickering above it that trailed a faint silver cord out through the wall beyond, and the poisonously beautiful statue of Kali Durga, glittering with enough gold to make every pickpocket in London wealthy.

  The woman had not been expecting an intruder— or at least, she had not expected anyone other than her own people—for she had not yet turned to see who had triggered the secret door.

  Peter cursed his clumsiness in losing the revolver. As inexperienced a shot as he was, one bullet would have finished it all.

  Peter!

  The sound of his own name rang in his head in familiar and beloved tones, and without thinking, he answered.

  "Maya!"

  Unfortunately, he answered aloud.

  Now the woman whirled, scarlet skirts swirling around her bare ankles, and she hissed in shocked surprise when she saw him.

  I'm getting very tired of things that hiss—

  He stood up, and attempted to look like the brave hero in a thrilling story. "My men have taken your dacoits, priestess," he said in Urdu, hoping he could end all this without further conflict. "You are defeated. Break your magics and go, and I will allow you to flee my country."

  She drew herself up, and smiled at him. Despite the fact that she was a handsome woman (and looked far too young to be Maya's aunt), he did not in the least care for that smile. There was so much hate in it that he had to force himself not to flinch. "I think not, English," she said in b
uttery tones. "I have something that you and I both want, but I will keep it, and you will die."

  Rhadi screeched and fluttered away and Charan leaped from his shoulder, as something shadowy and huge oozed out of the darkness of the closet behind him. Charan and the parrot both screamed as the shadow of a python at least a hundred feet long flung enormous coils about him before he could move, and began to squeeze.

  Peter! The golden shape flickered and fluttered above the altar like a bird trapped in a cage. Peter fought for breath as the cold muscles closed in on him. The priestess laughed.

  "The traitor has succeeded in keeping me at bay for much longer than I thought, and I was angry," she mocked, dark eyes flashing with glee. The shadow snake crushing Peter loosed its hold a little, just enough for him to catch a strangled breath, but nowhere near enough to escape. "But now I see that Kali Durga has rewarded me! I shall have your death and hers—and she will see you die, and you will know that she is to die, and your mutual agonies will be such—blissssss—''