The Serpent

by David Drake

  I gestured the passengers aboard, figuring to board last myself. At the port Lady Irene turned back to me and demanded, “Which are my quarters?”

  “Milady, there are eight identical compartments,” I said. “You are welcome to whichever one you choose. There are no real common areas so Guntram and I will take cells across the aisle from one another so that we can sit on our couches and discuss what we’re working on, but no one will interfere with you.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Irene said. “I won’t interfere with any of you either.”

  Apparently she was just demonstrating her independence and ill-temper, both of which I would have taken for granted. I sighed but reminded myself that Lady Irene was doing me and the Commonwealth a favor.

  Guntram was carrying a small case onto the boat. I offered him my arm to cling to as he mounted the steps but he smiled and said, “I think I’m all right, Pal. I’m just bringing a time keeper of sorts and a scattering of elements that we might find useful in reconstructing it.”

  I smiled. That was the sort of thing I hoped Guntram would bring. Working with another Maker was wholly different from working by yourself. Guntram and I meshed very well together. There was no rivalry: we were both consumed by the task itself. It was particularly a matter of uncovering the elemental bones of what the artifact had been originally. A Maker in a trance is tracing out the pattern of what a damaged artifact had been. I guess a few exceptional Makers can even intuit what the original could have been to make it better for its intended purpose: I’m pretty sure Master Louis could do that with weapons.

  For understanding what an object had been before millennia of wear, there were few more skilled than Guntram. Every time I worked with him I gained by learning how to see deeper into vanished reality than I had been able before.

  Lady Irene had chosen the endmost compartment on the port side, opposite the dogs.

  Osbourn was in the front starboard cell, opposite the one where Baga would sleep when he wasn’t guiding the boat. I suspected he’d want to make Midian in a single reach, though it was long enough that it would be reasonable to break it into two days.

  I gestured Guntram into the compartment next to Baga’s and took the one across from him. That left a pair of empty compartments between Lady Irene and the rest of us. I doubted that would make her happy, but it was as much as I could do.

  “Boss?” said Baga, turning in his seat in the far bow. He touched a control and the hatch closed.

  “Take us to Midian as soon as the boat’s ready, Baga,” I said.

  CHAPTER 12

  Midian

  The boat was designed for travel, not comfort. The individual compartments weren’t large enough to hold a gathering and the bow area with the boatman’s seat had only enough extra space to allow passengers to enter through the hatch. Guntram and I used the aisle between us as a work space.

  Using the boat instead of hiking the Road saved a great deal of effort, but it didn’t make the journey itself any less boring—just shorter. When Guntram and I weren’t actually at work on the artifact, Lord Osbourn sat at the edge of his compartment and chatted with us.

  Lady Irene remained closed in her compartment the whole time. There was no reason she had to interact with the rest of us, but it seemed to me that a little friendliness wouldn’t have been out of place. I hadn’t bothered to show her where the door’s mechanical slide bolt was concealed. I could easily have bypassed the compartment’s electronic lock through the control console. I can’t pilot a boat the way Baga or another boatman can, but all the vessel’s other functions were mine to control.

  The artifact Guntram had brought was a moon phase predictor, but it seemed to have been designed for a thirty-one-day month. I couldn’t imagine any use for it Here—for all I knew things are different in Not-Here. That’s not a question I’ve ever thought to ask the Beast with whom I’m on friendly terms.

  It provided Guntram and me with good experience and passed the time as usefully as sleeping or staring at the walls of our compartments. I came out of my trance having added a dusting of aluminum oxide to the crystalline Matrix. Baga must have heard me moving because he turned in his seat and said, “We’ll be on the ground in a few minutes, sir. You want to rouse the others yourself, boss, or do you want me to do it?”

  Guntram was stirring already. I’d have slipped back into a trance if I’d needed to. Shaking a Maker out of his trance by the leg worked, but it was likely to be a nasty shock My dog Buck had nuzzled my ear when he was a puppy. Because it was a shock—like being dumped in a cold stream—it had brought me back so suddenly that I’d reacted much more harshly than I’d have done if I’d been fully conscious. Buck had never done that again.

  I left the dogs in their compartment for now; when we made land I’d let them out but for the moment they’d be excited to learn what was happening and likely to bounce around. Until we landed, nothing was happening.

  That left me the problem of what to do with Lady Irene. The ill-tempered part of me thought of opening her compartment from the control panel. She wasn’t wrong to worry about being cooped up in a boat with a number of men; though I might wish she realized Lord Osbourn and I were perfectly honorable.

  Instead I rapped on the door with my knuckles and called, “Lady Irene! We’ll make landfall shortly!”

  I wasn’t sure how soundproof the compartments were. If she didn’t appear shortly I’d open the door after all; but without ill intention.

  “Here we go, sirs,” Baga called cheerfully. The boat touched down. There was no sound, but a sudden lack of vibration marked the contact to those who’d experienced it before.

  “Welcome to Midian, sir,” I said to Guntram as his eyes focused and his expression fell into its habitual pleasant smile.

  “Welcome back, you mean,” Guntram said, smiling more broadly. “It was on Midian that I trained to become a Maker with Master Perry, more years ago than I care to remember. Master Perry was a kind and good man, though he’d be the first to say that he was never more than a journeyman Maker. I built a great many weapons and shields back then for the Count’s army.”

  “I didn’t realize you were ever an armorer, sir,” I said, surprised to the point of incredulity.

  Guntram shrugged. “Money has never been my goal,” he said. “But I needed to earn enough to live. Besides, at the time the Count was building up his army and needed weapons very badly. It was long before Jon and Clain cleaned the gang of robbers out of Dun Add. The Counts of Midian kept their node safe with a band of soldiers and then walled the city. Count Erlick ruled in my time and took a long view.

  “I left Midian as soon as I was able to,” Guntram continued. “I was never very good at making weapons and I was bored with the work. Master Perry let me experiment with other artifacts that came in and encouraged me to go off to any marked node where safety didn’t require a large number of armed men, and the baubles I was making had a ready market.”

  “But Master Perry didn’t go with you himself?” said Lord Osbourn, who’d been listening to us. So had Irene, who was standing in the aisle outside her compartment.

  “Perry liked making weapons,” Guntram said. “And frankly, he didn’t have the imagination to do what I was doing. I asked after him when you and I came to Midian last month and learned he’d died many years ago.”

  I opened the hatch, then bowed slightly and said to Lady Irene, “Milady, will you please let the dogs out?”

  She obeyed without comment. Sam shoved his way past us to the hatch and out into Midian. Christiana, far more polite, followed instantly. I gestured Osbourn out ahead of me and said, “I don’t expect any problem, but I’ll go next in case there is.”

  I could have used the ship’s hardware to check the surroundings—and would have done so if I’d had any doubt about our reception. Midian differed from most nodes with human populations. Normally nothing much was visible on landingplace. Here Master Hector’s enclosure, the reason we were here in the
first place, was right on the edge of the Waste. Baga had brought the boat in so close that I could have hit the clear section with a rock if I’d wanted to.

  Besides the enclosure, a walled city was built right down to the edge of landingplace. The central portion of the masonry wall was higher than the rest and was pierced by a gate, now open. I remembered what Guntram had said about the way Midian developed: the counts had started with a powerful military force, then supplemented that with a castle.

  The usual straggle of housing and shops that normally fringed a landingplace didn’t exist here, though there might be the equivalents inside the gates. The counts had made Midian safe for development and trade long before the Commonwealth had made the region in general safe.

  I noted that Midian hadn’t joined the Commonwealth, presumably because the counts had solved the insecurity problem to their own satisfaction without sending taxes to Dun Add. About twenty warriors wearing bright blue tunics were watching us and another ten or so were coming toward us through the city gate.

  The guards already here were gathered around what at first I took for an oddly shaped standard on a ten-foot pole. When I looked more closely I saw that it was the head of a giant shrew like the pair I’d killed in the Underworld.

  I glanced at Lady Irene and saw that she’d already recognized the object. Her lips squeezed even more tightly together. She held the bundle of yarrow stalks firmly in her arms.

  I said, “Guntram, I’m going to talk to the guards. Want to come with me?”

  “That’s the Count, coming out the city toward us,” Lord Osbourn said.

  “I want to talk to the guards about where they got the shrew head there,” I said. “I don’t much care about waiting for Count Stokes, to tell the truth. I saw enough of him in Dun Add to last me a lifetime.”

  I approached the guards, who seemed alert but not as cautious as I would have expected. My own equipment was concealed; Osbourn wore his openly in a leather bandolier. Neither of us was a swaggerer and there were only two warriors and an old man approaching a group of twenty armed men; even so there was a potential threat.

  “Good afternoon, Captain Tsetzas,” Osbourn called from behind me, reminding me that while I was a stranger to the guards, my companions had been to Midian very recently. “I hadn’t seen your standard before. How did you come by it?”

  “Kilt it, like you’d expect, milord,” Tsetzas said. “We get things trundling in from the Waste pretty often, though I don’t guess it happened while you were here before. Master Beddoes says he thinks it’s because of this fort—” he crooked his thumb at the enclosure “—drawing them in, so if you can get it open you’ll have the thanks of all of us here.”

  “Yes,” said the Count, who approached it with his Maker Beddoes at his heels. “That rat killed two men and a couple passing by who were here from Richter to buy a load of art glass.”

  “It was hell for quick,” Tsetzas volunteered. “It got Michals when he tried to run it off the civilians and then Wolfram before any of us knew what was happening, but Wolfram caught it straight through the body before it killed him. Then we pretty much hacked it apart from the back.”

  “I suspect Wolfram would have run away if he hadn’t realized the rat was too quick for him,” Stokes said. “But since you’ve come back, Lord Osbourn, how do you propose to improve on your previous failure?”

  “The failure was mine, Count Stokes,” Guntram said. “And we’ve brought a female specialist in hopes of rectifying that failure.”

  “Then you’re a fool as well as a failure,” Master Beddoes said. He was turned away from us to look at our images in a hand mirror, which I could sense was an Ancient artifact. My first thought was that the mirror would speak the way the one I took from Lady Claire had on Allingham, but instead I saw the pockets of my tunic glowed softly red.

  “Lord Pal,” Beddoes said, “you are carrying Ancient artifacts.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “I am a Champion. Captain Tsetzas, I’m going to bring my weapon and shield out of my pockets just to display them.”

  Tsetzas nodded politely and stepped away from me; I brought my weapon and shield into view and held them up so that Beddoes could get a clear view of them.

  He said, “But in your purse there—” pointing to my belt wallet “—what is that?”

  “Bronze and silver coins but not many,” I said. “And a piece of hard cheese.”

  Then I remembered the key I’d found in the dead man’s hand at Boyd. “Just a minute.” I put my equipment away and rummaged in the wallet till I came up with the key, which I’d meant to give to Guntram but had forgotten until now. I showed it to Beddoes.

  He tried to snatch it away from me. “Sir,” I said. “You’re discourteous. And you’re making me angry.”

  “Beddoes, you’re a very fine Maker,” the Count said, “but remember your manners when you’re dealing with nobles.”

  “This is an object which was found in the Waste and came into my possession,” I said, being needlessly precise by not saying, “I found this in the Waste. I intend to give it to Guntram here because I’ve not been able to identify it.”

  I really hadn’t spent much time on it, though I doubted whether examination deeper than the quick scan I’d given it on Boyd would have taught me anything useful.

  I didn’t give the key to Guntram now because I was afraid Master Beddoes would try again to snatch it away and would succeed by overpowering Guntram. I could certainly get it back, but I might seriously injure—or kill—Beddoes needlessly in doing so. He was obviously high in the Count’s favor, and I had a duty to the Leader not to offend him needlessly. That didn’t give Beddoes complete immunity from my actions, but if I could avoid a cause of offense easily I would do so.

  I dropped the key back into my wallet, which I strapped closed again.

  Partly to take myself out of the situation, I looked around to see what Lady Irene was doing. She’d left the boat and had wandered over to the clear portion of the enclosure. I remembered what Tsetzas had said about the enclosure drawing monsters from the Waste. If another shrew appeared suddenly, Irene would have no more chance than those merchants from Richter had. I took my weapon out of my tunic again and started for Lady Irene.

  If she’d been a different sort of person I’d have called to her. I was pretty sure that this—like most any interaction—would put Irene’s back up, so I just walked quickly toward her instead.

  “Lady Irene,” I said when I’d gotten close enough to speak in a normal voice. “The guards warned me that this enclosure holding Lady Marlene draws creatures from the Waste like those which infested your niche in the Underworld. See the head which they’ve mounted on a pole?”

  When I turned to gesture toward Tsetzas I realized without pleasure that Master Beddoes was following me closely.

  “I’d as soon that you stuck close to me or Lord Osbourn,” I said. “In case another shrew enters. You recall how nasty they were in your Underworld.”

  “Lady Marlene has drawn worse things than these rats,” Beddoes said. “Six months ago there was a thing like an odd-shaped block of crystal that moved the way knuckle bones tumble when you toss them. The guards tried to attack it but their weapons wouldn’t bite. I had a tool that shattered it to sand—an Ancient artifact that I’d rebuilt.”

  “How did you come to have that?” said Lord Osbourn.

  “He built it,” I said, “or heard about it and bought it to break into the enclosure. But it didn’t work because there’s nothing to feel in a trance. When Master Guntram—” he’d come up with us now “—and I were trapped in cysts there was part of the fabric that we couldn’t touch.”

  We were standing very near the enclosure now. I dropped into a waking trance and gave it an instant’s probe. There was nothing, just as I expected. Oddly enough that actually made me feel more hopeful of success. This was the same sensation as I’d experienced on barriers in the Underworld before Lady Irene opened them.

&
nbsp; I transferred on my attention to the enclosure as my eyes saw it Here. We were standing by the clear portion. Lady Marlene, on the other side of the barrier, was dark-haired and beautiful. She looked younger that I was.

  “Can she see us?” Lady Irene asked. Then she added, “She seems very young.”

  “She was eighteen when we were married,” Count Stokes said. He sounded defensive, as well he might be. “That was twenty-five years ago, of course.”

  “Does the enclosure act to prevent aging?” said Guntram.

  “We don’t know what the bloody enclosure does!” Beddoes snapped angrily. “You’re here to get her free of it. Maybe you should get down to business now.”

  I didn’t lose my temper, but I looked steadily at Beddoes. It wasn’t his business to give anyone orders. He pressed his lips hard together and turned his face away. “I’ve always assumed she can see us,” Stokes said. “At any rate, it makes no sense that she should keep coming to the clear portion if to her it was just a gray mass as featureless as stone.”

  The portion of the enclosure nearest us was open to the sky, but farther back was a roofed structure with sidewalls but none in front. I could see into it. A frame the size of a bevel glass stood in the rear. Through it I could see a city square. That must have been the way Hector entered and left the enclosure.

  “He was a Maker of remarkable skill,” Guntram said. “I would very much like to speak with him.”

  “He was boasting of his power,” I said. “It’s always stupid to make others angry and envious. Though I don’t understand Marlene’s father choosing a landowner over such a powerful Maker for his daughter’s husband.”

  “Master Hector was a commoner!” Count Stokes said. “My ancestry goes back to the Kings of Kish!”

  “That was probably just what her father thought,” I said. Stokes probably thought I was agreeing with him.

  I know that I was illegitimate. I’m pretty sure that my mother was a noble’s mistress. Folks started calling me a noble with no evidence—and I’ve let them go ahead and do that.