The Serpent

by David Drake

  “As for the enclosure being Ancient workmanship, I can only say that it’s not like any Ancient artifact I’ve seen,” Guntram said. “I literally could not touch it in a trance. It was perfectly visible when viewed from Here: a gray impermeable ringwall about three hundred feet in diameter with a clear panel about ten feet long in a section of it. We could see Marlene through it but she couldn’t speak to us. I don’t know whether she could see us or not.”

  “But in a trance?” I pressed.

  “Nothing,” Guntram said. “Neither the clear portion nor the gray. There were metal servants inside who fed Marlene and Master Hector when he was present. Sometimes Hector vanished through a rectangular frame in the back of the visible area of the enclosure. Men who’d been watching the site longer said occasionally they could see other buildings in the background of the frame.”

  “The final upshot is that I told Lord Stokes that I’d failed, and we came back to Dun Add. Lord Stokes’s Maker was quite pleased at my failure.”

  Guntram rubbed his left wrist with the tips of his right fingers. “Master Beddoes is very skilled,” he said, “but I don’t warm to him.”

  “That’s all very odd,” I said. “Not about Beddoes, a thoroughly unpleasant fellow he seemed to me. Though I’ll honor him for his skill.”

  “There’s another thing,” Guntram said. “Marlene was stolen twenty-five years ago.”

  “That’s what Stokes said,” I agreed.

  “The woman in the enclosure can’t be more than eighteen years old,” Guntram said. “The age she was when Lord Stokes married her.”

  “Umm,” I said. There was no comment I could usefully make, certainly not at this distance. “On another subject, I brought a Lady Irene to Dun Add and I suggested that she might introduce herself to you while I was gone. Did she?”

  “No one did,” Guntram said. “What would the purpose be?”

  “Irene is a Maker of sorts,” I said. “I’m going to see if she can help Lord Stokes’s problem, but I’d be interested in your opinion.”

  Guntram shrugged. “I didn’t help very much on Midian,” he said, “but I’m happy to visit Lady Irene with you. I’ve never met a female Maker.”

  I stuck my head out the window to see where the sun was. I’d planned to be heading home by now, but May knew I had several people to see before I left the palace. For that matter, I could bring Guntram home for dinner. I was sure Fritz, our chef, could find something for an extra guest who didn’t eat much anyway.

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go now.”

  * * *

  Guntram wasn’t as frail as I’d feared. I suppose I was still remembering the condition he’d been in after he escaped a cyst in which he’d been imprisoned for months. He was old, of course, but the trip to Midian had returned him into a proper mental state and that had made a noticeable difference in his physical state as well. I’d thought of hiring a sedan chair to get him the short distance to Lady Irene’s lodgings, but Guntram didn’t need any help at all.

  Irene was on the second floor of the building she rented from Lord Clain. “Want a hand?” I offered politely.

  Guntram smiled and said, “The stairs of the palace have kept my legs in quite good condition.”

  I won’t claim that he skipped up the masonry stairs, but frankly neither did I. The door at the stairhead was ajar but instead of going in I rapped on it and called, “Lady Irene? This is Pal of Beune with a friend.”

  When I heard footsteps approaching I pushed the door gently open and said, “Milady, this is my friend Guntram, a Maker of great skill who hoped to meet you.”

  She, wearing a simple tunic, had entered the anteroom from the larger room beyond. She gave me a sour, disgusted look and said, “You brought him here to test me, I suppose. Well, what do you plan to do?”

  “Milady,” I said. “There’s no testing involved. I saw what you did. I brought my friend so that he could see it also.”

  I wasn’t really surprised by Irene’s reaction; it was in keeping with the negative attitude she’d displayed since I first met her. I couldn’t blame her: nothing I knew of Master Sans or Irene’s father suggested to me people with positive attitudes. I regretted that, however: a cheerful outlook on the world had always struck me as a more profitable attitude even when the hope turned out to be misplaced.

  “The enclosure wall in Midian I was viewing didn’t exist when I went into a trance,” Guntram said. “Pal’s description of the way you access the Underworld reminds me of this.”

  She hopped to a basket in a far corner and took her sheaf of yarrow stalks from it. She saw us approaching and said, “I don’t need these but they make it easier.”

  She tossed the stalks down on the floor, but the air above where they lay shattered jaggedly in the fashion I’d seen before. I took my shield and weapon out—I didn’t know what might have moved into the Underworld since Irene and I had left it.

  The workroom looked just as it had when I left it. So far as I could tell, no predators had moved into the forest to replace the giant shrew I’d killed there. I turned and called back the direction I’d entered from. I couldn’t see Irene or Guntram but I called toward the discoloration in the air, “It’s all clear. You can come through.”

  Nothing happened for a long moment so I patted the discoloration to make sure that it didn’t hide something solid now. It didn’t, so I stepped back through into the second floor room in Dun Add. “I left the passage open so that you could come back,” Irene said as she picked up the stalks she’d cast.

  “Thank you,” I said, realizing that I should have explained what I was doing before I left the others. Without Irene I couldn’t have gotten back to Dun Add or out of the enclosure where Master Sans’s workroom was located. I’d seen no sign of food inside.

  To Guntram Irene said, “There. Do you believe me now?”

  “I never doubted what Lord Pal told me,” Guntram said in his usual matter-of-fact tone. “What I’d hoped was that I’d see how you accomplished it. I have no more idea now than I did previously.”

  “Guntram,” I said. “You viewed the enclosure on Midian. Do you think Lady Irene here can enter it?”

  “Pal,” he said, “I can’t begin to answer that, because I don’t understand how the enclosure is constructed or the method of Lady Irene’s talent either one. But I think it’s worth a try if the lady’s willing.”

  I turned to our hostess. “Lady Irene?” I said. “Are you willing to visit Midian where a young woman has been imprisoned for many years and help me and Lord Osbourn to free her? It would be a favor to the Leader and to me.”

  Irene tied her bundle of yarrow stalks together again with a blue silk ribbon. “Yes,” she said. “Why is the girl being held?”

  “I don’t know the details,” I said, “but the short version is that a Maker wanted to marry her. When she decided to marry another man, the Maker stole her away and imprisoned her.”

  “Yes,” Irene said. “I am certainly willing to help free her.”

  “Tomorrow at noon, then,” I said. “We’ll meet at my boat on landingplace. And Guntram, let’s go back to my house for dinner.”

  * * *

  Dom was standing at the front door. He ducked inside when we appeared, but instead of May coming out to greet us, Lord Osbourn did. “I was about to come looking for you,” he called. “Very glad to see you, Pal.”

  “Things took longer than they might have,” I said.

  The front door opened again and May came out. I kissed her and said, “I’ve brought Master Guntram for dinner. Is that a problem?”

  “Not at all,” she said and ushered us into the house. “Fritz is roasting a large ham. I’ll tell him to prepare extra profiteroles for dessert. He says the strawberries are very good this spring.”

  May guided us straight up to the third floor banqueting room. We didn’t entertain very often, which I know she regretted. I didn’t exactly dislike other people, but I usually preferred to be alone. May w
as gregarious, and she was extremely proud of being the companion of a well-regarded Champion and a friend of the Leader. I didn’t give her much opportunity to display her status.

  We weren’t well suited to one another—except that we loved each other. I’d become wealthy and she could buy pretty much what she wanted—except my time. On which subject, I said as we mounted the stairs, “Guntram and I will be going out to Midian tomorrow to try to free a woman from captivity. We’ll be taking Lady Irene.”

  “You’re taking me as well, I hope,” Lord Osbourn said from behind. “I’d like to see it done right.”

  “As indeed will I,” said Guntram. “The failure wasn’t yours, Lord Osbourn.”

  We reached the dining room. Elise was at the door and Dom inside carving the ham. May has told me repeatedly that we need more servants for this sort of situation. We have formal dinners very rarely, but that’s still more often than I would like. Our compromise is that May has freedom to hire extra staff whenever we’re having a real party. When we’re having a few friends in like tonight, our three permanent servants are plenty. I could afford more people, but it offended my sense of rightness.

  Dom brought around a tureen of fish soup from which Elise filled the bowl at each place. Fritz was a wonderful cook. I could have lived very happily without Dom and Elise, but Fritz’s cooking was well worth not only his expense but the hassle of a servant.

  “I’d be happy to have your company,” I said to Lord Osbourn, “but I don’t believe Master Hector will require two Champions to defeat, do you?”

  “Nothing like that,” Osbourn said. “Besides, Count Stokes’s men killed him before we left Midian.”

  “They did?” Guntram said, putting down his spoon untasted. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah,” said Lord Osbourn, tilting up his bowl for the last of his soup. “When you pointed out the city you could see in the mirror in the enclosure, Stokes put men to watching it. One of them recognized the place as on the next node over from Midian so he sent a squad there to catch him. I guess they were hoping to get into the enclosure that way. They didn’t and they killed Hector besides, so they couldn’t ask him.”

  “Idiots,” Guntram muttered. “I could’ve told them that the back entrance wouldn’t have been obvious to a layman.”

  “That’s probably what they thought also,” I said. “Which is why they didn’t tell you after they’d failed.”

  People usually didn’t like to be told they were idiots, Especially when they thought the same themselves.

  “It doesn’t make your job harder, though, does it, darling?” May said.

  “No, no,” I agreed. “I’m counting on Lady Irene, which may be foolish, but all the better ideas have been tried. If she fails, Jon loses a chance to put one over Count Stokes. He wants that and I want to give it to him. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”

  I let Elise give me brassicas from Dom’s platter. Quite a lot of what I’ve become accustomed to eating was unknown to me on Beune. That’s probably good, because Mom was such a terrible cook that she regularly ruined meals. The brassicas were firm but tender, whereas memory told me that if Mom had cooked them they’d have become green mush.

  Mom was a good woman and a good mother. It can’t have been easy in a rural village raising a son who not only was a Maker but also had ideas above himself, but she was also on my side and backed me to the extent she was able. But she couldn’t cook.

  She’d have been very proud to see me in Jon’s court, but it was her death that freed me to go to Dun Add. I sold our plot of land to our neighbor, and that gave me the support on the Road—and even enough left to support me when I hiked back to Beune after I’d failed miserably in Dun Add.

  I don’t spend much time with priests, but when I think of Mom—my stepmother, actually—I wished I had more belief, because Mom deserved the kind of afterlife she believed in.

  I looked across the table to Osbourn and answered the question he’d asked on the stairs: “We’ll have five adults and two dogs in the boat. She’ll handle that load easily since Guntram and I rebuilt her.”

  “There’s not another boat in all Here that could!” Osbourn said proudly.

  “Well, there’s one more,” Guntram said, “the one Pal and I rebuilt on Beune. Lord Pal owns that one also.”

  May reached over and rubbed my shoulder firmly. She said, “My Pal is remarkably talented.”

  That sort of comment in front of my friends really embarrassed me, but it was better than overhearing Mom’s friends telling her that it was too bad her son wasn’t trying to make something of himself.

  Some of those friends were alive. I doubted they remembered now what they’d been saying when I was ten, but they’d been right in a way: I’d been determined to become a Champion of Mankind. If I’d been foolish enough to tell anyone my plans, they’d have thought me as crazy as if I’d said I was going to learn to fly by flapping my arms.

  I’d have thought the same myself if I’d known what I later learned. The loud-mouthed bully who’d beaten me to a pulp on my first visit to Dun Add had been a particularly persuasive teacher.

  Dom and Elise brought the ham around. It was a simple meal—far too simple for Fritz’s wishes, but perfectly prepared and the sort of meal I wanted but which I’d never have tasted if I’d remained in Beune.

  I’d have been happy with the life of a Maker in Beune, at least if I’d somehow gotten Guntram as a teacher. I wouldn’t have been as good as Guntram was, but nobody I’d met was that good except in narrow specialties. Guntram was a generalist, interested in everything—whether or not it was practical. I had the same kind of mind. I had to go to Dun Add to become a Champion, but I didn’t know what that meant either until I came here. It meant discomfort and danger, which I’d expected even when I was a kid (though expecting and feeling danger were very different things).

  Also I’d had no notion then of how it felt to kill another man. I’d done that often enough now to realize that I hated the experience.

  But that too was sometimes a Champion’s job.

  “How do you propose to go about the process, Pal?” Guntram asked. He was enjoying the meal as much as I’d hoped he would. Food at the palace refectory was pretty good, but Fritz’s meals were a stage beyond simply keeping body and soul together.

  “We go to landingplace on Midian,” I said. “I gather the compound holding Marlene is quite close by.”

  Osbourn and Guntram were nodding solemnly.

  “I’m tempted to see what Lady Irene can do to the enclosure as soon as we arrive but that would be discourteous and might harm the Leader’s desire to take Midian into the Commonwealth, so I’ll announce myself to Lord Stokes and let Irene get on with her business. This is a very fast, simple affair the times I’ve seen her do it, and I’ll hope for the same now.

  “If Lady Irene succeeds,” I went on, “I’ll take Lord Stokes’s request to join the Commonwealth but I’ll tell him a team from Dun Add will be out to negotiate the details. He’ll probably want a number of advisors with him. I could carry him back to Dun Add, but not his whole negotiating council.”

  “What if he reneges on the deal after he’s gotten what he wants?” May asked.

  “I don’t expect that to happen,” I said truthfully. “But if he does, there was a reason for two Champions to have gone along after all.”

  Lord Osbourn laughed.

  Stokes had made his arrangements with the Leader himself. I’m sure Jon would send a large enough force to enforce the bargain if necessary.

  I didn’t hope that Stokes would try to cheat us the way Osbourn obviously did; but I didn’t expect us to need help from Dun Add to keep Stokes to his bargain either.

  * * *

  I joined the others at landingplace a little before midday. Baga had brought Sam down from the palace stables well ahead of time. Baga had a weakness for wine, but he was neither drunk nor hung over when he greeted me. Sam was much more enthusiastic, but enth
usiasm wasn’t in Baga’s nature.

  Nor mine, to tell the truth.

  Lord Osbourn had brought down his dog, Christiana, a beautiful golden retriever. She and Sam got along so well that they could have shared a compartment on the voyage if we’d been short of space. My boat had eight separate compartments so there was plenty of room for five grown humans and two dogs, but good feeling among the dogs was almost as important as it would be among the human members of the party.

  Speaking of which, Lady Irene had arrived with one servant—a girl of about fourteen who’d brought a bundle of extra clothing. Irene carried only her bundle of yarrow stalks, now in a wrapper embroidered with a circle of young women flinging a straw doll into the air from a blanket.

  I thought that perhaps Irene intended to bring the girl along. It would have been all right, but instead she sent the servant back into Dun Add.

  The controlling limitation in how much a boat could carry was not space or weight but rather life force—though no human I’d talked to really understood how the boats calculated that. The Ancients were no longer around to ask.

  Most boats had degraded over thousands of years and could no longer carry the complement they’d been designed for. My boat had compartments for eight people, but before I’d rebuilt it and replaced all the missing trace elements three adult humans and a dog had been its maximum capacity. It took a Maker to bring a boat back to specification. Most boatmen didn’t even know how to call up the repair menu that was part of each boat’s fabric. I’d had Guntram leading and guiding me the first time I’d worked on a boat. Without that I’d have been as much at a loss as Baga was. He was a skilled boatman, but if the vessel was having a problem he could only guess at a solution.

  “She’s ready to go,” Baga announced from the open port. “Whenever you want!”