The Serpent Waits

by Bill Hiatt

  Praying again to Amun, I drew on my own life force—an enormous risk, but one I had to take. If I used the staff skillfully enough, my life force would be restored before it could be drained too far. If not, well at least I had improved the odds that when Ma’at weighed my heart, my sins would have been lightened enough for me to pass her stern test.

  I withdrew the power of Set, and his sandstorm died away. Every grain vanished as if it had never been. That did not heal the raw wounds I in my carelessness had inflicted on Taliesin and his warriors, and they might not have enough power to heal themselves. I invoked the magic of every Egyptian god with even the slightest connection to healing, ending with Hathor, who had restored sight to Horus after Set had blinded him, and Isis, who had restored life to Osiris after Set had butchered him. I gathered the power, feeling my heartbeat weaken as I did so, and sent it washing over them and me like the Nile flooding and invigorating the nearby land.

  To complete such a powerful spell, the staff drank deeply from my life force, but I had not been wrong to trust in the gods. Though I fell to the ground as it drained me, the gentle waves of healing restored me before it was too late.

  Perhaps it would have been better to have died then.

  Now I would have to face the consequences of what I had done.

  Intertwined Dilemmas

  Even before I could rise to my feet, they were upon me.

  “Get the staff!” yelled Tal—as if I or it had any power left to do harm. To spare myself the indignity of having it torn away from me, I flung it to the ground. Morfran was quick to retrieve it.

  “That magic stinks of ancient Egypt,” said Ceridwen, “and Hafez is not here.” She looked at me with as much hatred as she had contemplated Tal while she was in the grip of the spell.

  “There’s no question about who…who did that to us,” said Magnus, towering above me like an angry emissary from the gods of vengeance.

  “I have no right to ask anything, but I request only this—that I be permitted to explain myself.”

  Tal was standing over me now, his angry expression for once the true twin of Magnus’s. “We’re well past the point where any of us want to hear anything you have to say.”

  He raised his hand, and the spell Arianrhod had placed in Amy’s mind flared to silvery life, gripping me in tentacles, pulling me away from control of the body.

  No! I tried to scream the word, and my mouth opened, but no sound came out. My control over my body was as distant as the moon. I could feel Amy’s presence, but I couldn’t feel the body at all.

  “Welcome back, Amy,” said Tal, looking into my eyes as if to make sure I was the one looking back. I stared down at the floor, more embarrassed than I had been in my whole life.

  “I don’t know how any of you can look at me, much less welcome me back.”

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” said Tal. “You offered, at considerable risk to yourself, to let Amenirdis take over. When you realized what she was doing, you fought her—more effectively than most people could have, I might add. Is that not so?”

  I nodded, though I still couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye. “I did what I could. Obviously, it wasn’t enough.”

  “It was hard to tell from the flood of emotions and memories through the links, but it felt as if you did enough to help save us,” said Viviane. “Amenirdis seemed…conflicted to me toward the end. You helped make up her mind.”

  “From Amenirdis’s point of view, it seemed as if you deserved more of the credit yourself. You gave up your protection against her magic to help the others. That enabled Eva to break free and get some positive energy going. I think it was Eva’s courage that actually swayed her.”

  “It’s nearly always a group effort with us,” said Gordy. “The problems we face are too big to be handled by anyone alone. You did your part, Amy.”

  “But I…I mean, what Amenirdis did to you was a terrible violation…unspeakable. If it means anything, the magic got away from her. She didn’t intend the effect to be so drastic, so total.”

  “It means nothing,” snapped Magnus. “We could have killed each other—or ourselves. And the only reason she used the magic was to get away from us, right? To abandon us here so she could screw up every conceivable universe. To—”

  “None of which is Amy’s fault, either,” said Tal, putting a hand on Magnus’s shoulder.

  “But…but your private thoughts—”

  “Surprisingly enough, similar things have happened to us before. Basically, we’ve all seen each other naked—psychologically, I mean,” Khalid said, blushing slightly. “I hope what you saw and felt through the links doesn’t scare you away, but we’re pretty open with each. You didn’t see anything about any of us that the rest of us didn’t already know.”

  I couldn’t miss Jimmie’s nervous look at Eva or the fact that his arm wasn’t around her. He had felt her conflicted emotions, which I doubted he had fully understood until that moment.

  “Well, we knew those things in the sense that we knew what we did in the past,” said Viviane. “We all need to keep in mind that doesn’t reflect who any of us are now. Everyone carries around remnants of past events and feelings, if only in their subconscious minds. Everyone has the occasional temptation they would never actually act on, the occasional insecurity they know isn’t a real concern. What the magic did was bring all that mental garbage to the surface. That isn’t really who any of us are, at least not now. The takeaway is not that those thoughts are part of us, but that, even with them amplified to overwhelming levels, we still overcame them. There would have been bloodshed otherwise—serious bloodshed. I’m proud of all of you for holding on to your humanity in the midst of such a concerted attack on your minds.”

  Michael smiled at her. “I think working in a high school for so long rubbed off on you. You sound just like a teacher.”

  “And meanwhile, Amy is still sitting on the floor,” said Lucas, pushing through the crowd to offer me his hand and help me up. He smiled at me as he did so, and I felt a little better.

  “I’m sorry,” said Tal, shaking his head. “I’m still a little rattled. Anyway, you understand what we’re saying, right? Yeah, that was a terrible experience, but none of it was your fault, and we’re all good now.

  They were all recovering, but their pallor, the way Jimmie still looked worriedly at Eva, and the way Shar and Alex didn’t look at each other at all made they doubt they were all good. I nodded anyway. No sense in sparking more uncomfortable conversation.

  “Now that that’s cleared up, we’ve got a lot of work to do—if you’re up to it.”

  “Work is just what I need right now.”

  The busier I could make myself, the less I needed to think about Amenirdis and what she’d done. I was touched by how quickly my new friends were willing to absolve me from blame. Ceridwen did glare at me coldly, but I tried not to think about that.

  I’d rather focus on signs that everything really was going to be OK—like Morfran slipping his arm around Nancy as easily as if he’d known her forever. His turn to have some happiness was long overdue. Judging from what I’d felt from Nancy earlier, she was probably overdue as well. No one could deny they made a cute couple. Well, Morfran would have looked good with anybody. With the curse gone, he was hands-down the best-looking guy I’d ever seen. He had the face of an angel. It was as if God had retouched it until it was perfect. Not a hair was out of place. Not a single blemish marked his perfect skin. The perfect blue of his eyes would make the sky jealous. I couldn’t see much of his body underneath his leather armor, but there was no reason to think it wasn’t equally perfect.

  Not that I was interested in him myself. He made my heart beat a little faster, but my reactions to him couldn’t have been much more than hormonal at this point. They could be easily dismissed. I needed to bring order to my chaotic life far more than I needed an imaginary love affair with a man who wasn’t even from my world.

  Now, Lucas, who was fro
m my world—he was a different story.

  The fact that Amenirdis had felt the same way about Morfran made me a little queasy. Come to think of it, we were both attracted to Lucas as well. Gross as it was to contemplate, we had the same taste in men.

  Or did we? Were my own responses being colored by hers? We had shared memories, emotions, thoughts. We had tried to unite to save the others. The bond was imperfect, but I could still feel its echoes. Could I ever again be sure a reaction was entirely mine?

  As we moved back to the middle of the sitting room, I was flooded with sensory data I had missed before. The room reeked of blood and dead lion, and the pile of carcasses made it look like some kind of slaughterhouse in hell. The mangled lion remains were accompanied by smaller baboon bits. The furniture closest to the door lay in scattered fragments partially visible beneath the carcasses. Ceridwen shook her head in dismay over the mess.

  “Why did those animals have to be so physical?” she mumbled to herself. When she glanced over at Morfran, her mood shifted so noticeably that it was like sunshine at midnight.

  “My son, at least you are still free of the curse. I would have burned the house down just to achieve such a miracle.”

  “So far, I am,” Morfran said. His smile could have inspired my unartistic hands to paint.

  “The change may not be permanent,” said Viviane. “The curse was disoriented by being unable to connect with Morfran. It was hungry for its victim, and we managed to fool it into going after Hafez, but if it gets close to Morfran again, and he’s not protected as he is now, it could flow back.”

  Ceridwen wrapped her arms around him. “We will see that such a thing never happens.”

  “Since Hafez is not in this universe right now, he’s safe for the moment,” said Tal.

  “Don’t count on that being true for long,” said Magnus.

  “The staff is here,” I said, pointing to it in Morfran’s hand as if Magnus had missed it. “He can’t get back without it, can he?”

  “Anything’s possible, and this is a guy who knows how to play the long game. He must have studied us for months before bringing us here. He might have panicked, I suppose, but otherwise, it’s difficult to imagine him plunging into another world, knowing he had no way back. He went through after losing the staff, remember. I’d bet he has some other way of getting back, at least from wherever he went.”

  Tal nodded. “That’s a good working assumption. That means we need to be ready for another possible attack. He has magic other than the staff to fall back on—and we don’t know how many allies he has.”

  “I should rebuild the house’s defenses at once,” said Ceridwen. “But I only have a few hours to clean up this mess before the servants return in the morning. I can hide some things, but not…not this.” She waved her hands at the blood-stained carpets and carcasses. “Oh, and there’s the front door, too—and the security men. There would have been two or three of them on patrol. I know I heard screams.”

  “Carla, can you check out front?” asked Tal. “They’re probably injured at the very least.”

  “I’ll help,” said Khalid. “I’ll do a flyover and see if Hafez affected anything else on the grounds.”

  “Good idea,” said Tal. Khalid was out the door before Tal had a chance to finish the sentence. “Stay invisible!” Tal yelled after him. “You, too,” he said to Carla. “All we need is somebody seeing you, maybe confusing you with the Carla in this world. Uh, wait, you can’t go outside right now. We’ve still got shadow assassins to worry about.”

  “If the security men are bleeding out, they won’t wait until dawn,” said Carla. “I’ll cast a light spell, make it look like some kind of external lighting on the house. Khalid can cover me from the air, just in case.”

  “Eva and I will go with you,” said Jimmie. “Apollo’s sword and Artemis’s arrows should both be pretty effective against them.”

  “I will come as well,” said Umbra. “I may sense their approach before you notice them.”

  “All right, that sounds reasonably safe—but I want you back inside at the first sign of trouble,” said Tal.

  “I’ve not dealt with them, but could shadow assassins have followed you so far and for so long?” asked Ceridwen.

  “We may have lost them temporarily when we went to Annwn, but they’ll be looking for us, and they can spy through any shadow, no matter how small. They can also travel by shadows, which means we need to protect this house against them.

  “Magnus and I can show you how to do that. We can also help rebuild the more general defenses.”

  Ceridwen did a very poor job of hiding her skepticism.

  “Don’t worry,” said Tal. “We’re very familiar with the security arrangements in the Awen of our own world. We helped make a number of improvements, in fact.”

  “That’s clearly first priority—but what about all this mess?”

  “Let me see to that,” said Viviane. Much of it can be portaled away, and I know how to reach brownies to help with the cleanup—at least if they work the way they do on our Earth. I’ve got some able-bodied men to help with that as well.”

  “Sure,” said Gordy. “We’ll all pitch in. Sleep is so over-rated.”

  Viviane chuckled. “We should still have a little time to sleep after—if we get started fast enough.”

  “I’ll help,” I said, but I immediately regretted opening my mouth. I should do something, of course, but the idea of lugging bloody animal carcasses and severed limbs around turned my stomach.

  As if he could read my mind—which, come to think of it, he could—Tal said, “Amy, you’re with us. I’d like to keep a close eye on your condition.”

  “That’s fine with me,” I said. I didn’t have a headache or any other sign of Amenirdis trying to reemerge, but I didn’t want to take chances.

  Ceridwen led us up a floor to a room set up as an office. Like the rest of the house before the attack, it was immaculately clean, betraying no sign of having been unused for more than twenty years. Only the absence of modern electronics would have been a giveaway.

  Ceridwen sat behind a heavy-looking wooden desk, and the rest of us pulled up chairs.

  Gordy’s wisecrack about sleep was beginning to resonate with me. The moment I sat down, I started feeling drowsy. I wanted to ask Tal whether it was safe to nap, but he, Magnus, and Ceridwen were so intensely focused on setting up defenses that I felt uncomfortable interrupting. I leaned forward so that it wouldn’t be as easy for me to drift into sleep without realizing it.

  I found myself drifting in and out of the discussion. I understood more of it than I expected to, but a lot of the technicalities were beyond me. I still remembered Amenirdis’s thoughts about magic while she was in control, but I had no access to any of her knowledge she hadn’t thought about during that time. Anyway, Celtic magic was different from Egyptian magic. I felt like someone who had studied Spanish but somehow ended up enrolled in an advanced French class.

  The actual magic didn’t help me stay awake. The chanting was soothing, as was Magnus’s lyre-playing to amplify the power.

  A translucent image of the house formed over the desk. The image became mistier as protective magic settled around it. I could still see the underlying house, but the magic shielding around it thickened to the point at which it was more visible than the structure it was protecting.

  The shield had been white in the beginning, but now it flashed with different colors. I presumed the flashes represented different specific protections being added.

  “Are you seeing all that?” asked Tal.

  “What?” I asked. I must have dozed off despite my best efforts. The casting was complete, but I could still see the image floating above the desk.

  Tal pointed. “You know, the magic. Can you still see the magic?”

  “Yeah. What does that mean?”

  “That depends. Any sign of Amenirdis?”

  “Not that I’m conscious of.”

  “Mind if I check?�
�

  I still wasn’t used to the idea of people rummaging around in my head, but I tried to think of it as like a doctor’s exam.

  “Go ahead.” I felt the familiar tingle, but that was all.

  “Can you feel me in your head?”

  “A little.”

  Tal leaned back in his chair. “The good news is that Amenirdis is still securely held in place. The bad—well, not exactly bad news—”

  “Just spit it out,” I said. “I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

  “The fact that you can see magic and feel me in your head suggests you’re developing magic of your own. It’s very weak right now, but it has the potential to grow stronger with time—and training, if you want.”

  “This isn’t just a leftover from Amenirdis?”

  “Cut off as she is right now, no, it’s not some echo of her presence. It may have been at first, but it isn’t anymore.”

  “Welcome to the club,” said Magnus.

  I don’t know what I expected to happen. On some level, though, I must have been thinking my life would go back to normal. Hafez would be captured, Amenirdis banished, and the rest of us returned to our world. But now, even if all that happened, my life would never be normal again. The weight of that realization made it difficult to breathe.

  “Are you all right?” asked Tal.

  “I just need a little time to think.”

  “And sleep, too, I imagine,” said Ceridwen, sounding almost maternal. “We’re pretty close to being able to do that. I just need to see how the cleanup is progressing.”

  “I should check, too,” said Tal, getting up from the chair. “If the doors still need hinges, I could probably fix that.”

  “I didn’t realize you were also a door-hanger,” I said.

  “I’ve been a lot better with my hands since I accessed the memories of one of my previous lives, Hephaestion. He was one of Alexander’s main generals—but he was also a son of Hephaestus. Hephaestion had a lot of little skills he never used in his life, but they’ve sure come in handy in mine.”