by R. T. Kaelin
“Where are you—?”
Her worry-filled question cut off as Matis plunged back into the water. He swam back to the doorway, through it, and into the hall. To his left the stranger’s body floated at the edge of the magelight’s glow, looking like a playman’s puppet hanging from unmoving strings.
Matis swam to the man and grabbed his arm. The man’s eyes were open wide yet unfocused. A necklace had drifted free of his shirt, a strip of leather with a white stone hanging from it. Matis’ gaze locked on the pendant. His eyes went wide. It was carved in the shape of a lion’s head in the midst of a roar.
He stared at the pendant, the man’s face, and then back to the pendant before tugging the stranger back to the door. He reentered Delia’s cell and headed for the pocket of air. Relief flooded her face as he neared. Matis stuck his head into the bubble and dragged the stranger’s head in as well. There was no room for them all to fit.
Delia, her gaze on the stranger’s slumped head, asked, “Who’s that?”
“The one who got me out. He got a lot of us out.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know.” Matis grabbed the necklace hanging from the man’s neck, and held it so Delia could see. “But look at this.”
Her eyes went round. “It can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“They were all captured. Everyone said so.”
Holding up the necklace, Matis said, “I’m thinking everyone was wrong.”
“Is he dead?”
Matis placed an open palm on the man’s chest. After a moment, he muttered, “I don’t feel a heartbeat.”
“I thought they couldn’t die.”
“Apparently that part of the story is wrong, too.”
Delia’s gaze moved back to the stranger, a determined glint in her eyes. “Get as close as you can, Matis.”
“Why?”
His answer came not from her, but from the bubble of air shrinking.
“Delia? What are you doing?”
“I can’t hold this and help him.”
“Help him? He’s dead.”
“I need to try something.”
“No you don’t! We need to go!” The bottom of the air pocket was at Delia’s waist. “He’s gone! Dead! And we will be, too, if we don’t go! It’s a blasted long swim back down the hall and every moment we waste—”
“Blast it, Matis! Stop yelling! I can’t concentrate!”
Matis shut his mouth. Panicking, he debated whether he should just grab Delia and start swimming. The bubble’s lower boundary was at her chest, the top grazing her sandy brown hair. There was barely room for Matis’ and the stranger’s head.
“At least tell me what you’re doing.”
Delia was staring into the seawater, her face twisted up in concentration. When she did not answer, he slipped a hand around her wrist. “Delia. Please. We have to go.”
Her gaze shifted to the man. An instant later, the stranger began convulsing in Matis’ arms. Delia reached up and grabbed the man by both sides of his head. “Keep his face in here!”
“What are you—”
“Do it!”
Gnashing his teeth, Matis grabbed the man’s long hair to steady the head as water began pouring from the stranger’s mouth and nose in a steady stream. A small pool formed at the barrier’s bottom rather than rejoin the sea. After several heartbeats, the flow suddenly cut off and the convulsing stopped.
“That’s all of it,” muttered Delia, her gaze fixed on the man’s face. She patted his cheek. “Come on…”
There was no response.
She slapped the man across the face, hard. “Wake up!”
“Wake up?” muttered Matis. “Delia? He’s dead. No matter how hard you—” He stopped short. The man’s right arm had jerked, smacking his side. He looked to Delia. “Did you do that?”
“Do what?”
The man moved again, this time drawing in a deep, gasping breath. He blinked twice, his eyes quickly focusing on Matis’ face. “What happened?”
Matis was too stunned to respond. It seemed the part of the legend about them not dying was true.
The stranger’s gaze shifted to Delia, then to the small bubble of air, and then back to Delia. “Air mage?”
Smiling wide, Delia nodded once. “And Water.”
“Lucky for me, I suppose.” Looking between them both, he asked, “You two ready to go?”
“Yes,” mumbled Matis.
“Absolutely,” added Delia.
Eyeing the bubble, the stranger asked, “Don’t suppose this can come with us?”
Shaking her head, Delia said, “Sorry.”
“Then everyone take a deep breath. I want to get the Nine Hells out of here.”
Once all three had drawn in a large lungful of air, the bubble disappeared and the world went quiet.
Matis, his twin sister, and the stranger swam for the door. And freedom.
*
Big Apple, Small Serpent
by Ari Marmell
On March 25th, 2011, an adolescent Egyptian cobra disappeared from its exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. After almost a week of intensive searching, zookeepers finally managed to recover the itinerant reptile.
Or so they thought.
Through a sea of shadow, punctuated by only sporadic islands of dim, artificial illumination, she fled the only world she knew.
The floor beneath her was somehow soft and gritty at once, the color of dirty granite but the consistency of rough fabric. The walls were a dull, neutral hue—rather like observing the world through the thinnest layer of shed skin. The scents were overwhelming: a hundred different reptiles, a thousand humans. Each flicker of her tongue was shorter, sharper, more panicked.
Calm yourself… Be hunter, not prey… Calm… Calm…
She knew it was night, though she’d never seen the sun. The flow of men and women past her tiny world had ebbed to almost nothing, and the artificial lights had grown faint. Still, there would be people—the Keepers, if none others—and she fled from the slightest hint of what might or might not be footsteps, her body twisting in a series of sweeping curves, her scales rustling across the odd fabric floor, the…
“Carpet,” as she’d heard them call it.
Twist, turn, she needed a place, any place, to rest, to hide, to prepare herself for what was to come. Around another corner, and what was that?
She reared up, hissing, to her full if unimpressive height, hood spread and fangs glistening, before she recognized that the large creature before her—a turtle?—was not real. Just an effigy, sculpted of metal, to entertain and be admired by passing humans.
It smelled of minerals and mammalian sweat. Deflating and feeling more than a little foolish—snakes cannot blush, by and large, but she might have been the first—she swiftly passed it by.
Pools of dim light seeped from other exhibits, other prisons; an array of snakes and lizards, turtles and gators, watched her pass. She noted strange squiggles beneath each enclosure, and wondered how humans could make such small tracks with such large feet.
Finally she found a tiny crack in the wall, a promise of sanctuary. Comforting darkness closed around her—and more than darkness, warmth. She heard water rushing through the metal pipes, luxuriated as the radiating heat warmed her scales and the rebounding echoes cloaked whatever incidental noise her tiny body might make.
Here, she was safe. For a while.
It was time.
She arched the front of her body upward, her head dipping back down in a peculiar, serpentine genuflection. Tongue flickering, straining to recall the words as she’d learned them, she began.
I will make the Nile swell for you,
Without there being a year of lack and exhaustion in the whole land,
So the plants will flourish, bending under their fruit.
She didn’t even know what a “Nile” was, but that’s how the words were supposed to go.
The land of Egypt is beginning to stir again,
> The shores are shining wonderfully,
And wealth and well-being dwell with them,
As it had been before.
She wasn’t certain what a “shore” was, either, and she only knew “Egypt” because the Keepers referred to her as “Egyptian.” Again, though, that was how she’d learned the words, and she knew better than to alter them now.
A second time she repeated the litany.
A third.
A fourth…
A dry gust brushed her face. It blew away the musk of reptiles and mammals, the moist aroma of the pipes, replacing them with the sharp tang of sand. She heard the ripple of a distant river and the call of far-off birds.
A figure appeared before her, somehow visible even in the darkness. It wasn’t as though the image glowed; it was simply so real, more solid even than the world around it, that no light was required to see it. It was mostly human—and female, if the snake knew her scents as well as she believed. The woman’s attire was like none of the peculiar garments the snake had seen on the human passers-by, but was instead a fitted sleeve of oceanic blue, patterned very much like a serpent’s scales.
That pattern blended perfectly with her neck, which was made up of scales. For the “woman’s” head was that of a cobra, darker in hue—and certainly larger—than the little snake’s own, but otherwise identical.
“Renenutet,” the snake hissed, prostrating herself flat.
The larger head swiveled, locking eyes with the smaller. A great tongue flickered, rasping in the silence.
“It has been several thousand years since any has called upon me with such devotion,” the goddess hissed, stretching her shoulders until a series of pops ran down her spine. “Who are you, child?”
“I am She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands, goddess.”
The larger reptilian snout twisted in a very un-serpentine smile. “And a fitting name it is. How did you learn my hymn, She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands?”
“He-Who-Lurks-in-Deep-Holes-Awaiting-Small-Mammals passed it to me, goddess. He learned it from his mother, She-Whose-Hood-Casts-Broad-Shadows-in-the-Sun.”
“I see. And what would you have of me, child? You understand that I have little power in this… modern world.” The word sounded in her mouth like the worst sort of curse. “Freedom?” the goddess continued. “Your domain here is small, true, but I think happier than most.”
She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands allowed herself to sway side to side, much like a human shaking his head. “Not so much as you might think, goddess. I would love to see the wider world. The others are content here, but I? I want to know more than a few body-lengths of dirt and branches, more than an endless sea of faces passing by, staring at me through… through…” Her entire body humped upward in what was, to a creature without shoulders, the only possible equivalent of a shrug. “The transparent wall,” she finished, unable to find the word.
“Glass,” Renenutet offered gently.
“Yes. That. Still, I might tolerate it—my curiosity, the constant eyes—if I were happier here. But…” She trailed off.
“Do the humans mistreat you?” The goddess’s eyes burned abruptly bright in the shadowed chamber, illuminating the twisted array of pipes in which they sat ensconced. The air around them began to warm, as though with the approach of a distant fire or the rising of a desert sun.
“No, no!” hissed She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands. “Most of the Keepers are kind enough, for humans. They keep our bedding fresh, and provide frequent mice.”
“What, then?” the goddess demanded.
“Most are kind, great Renenutet. But there is one, one who makes our lives difficult. He waits until we are asleep and then pounds on the transp—on the glass, to see us jump. When he brings mice, he teases, yanking them aside so that we must lunge and perform for the watching humans.
“It is… Well, it’s hardly intolerable, but…”
“No,” Renenutet disagreed. “There is no cause for you to endure such disrespect. Why not simply bite the brute and have done?”
“I have heard tales, goddess, repeated to me by He-Who-Lurks-in-Deep-Holes-Awaiting-Small-Mammals, and others as well. Tales of what happens to any who harm or slay a human. Not just serpents, or even reptiles, but any creature under the Keepers’ care. Such creatures are taken away and never heard from again.”
“Monstrous!” Renenutet rose to her full height, and the room now glowed as bright as the exhibits at noon. “To treat you thus! I should tear their houses down around them, and leave them buried in rubble! I—”
“Goddess, please!” She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands bowed beneath the weight of the divine glare, but kept her eyes locked on Renenutet’s own. “Most of us are content enough here. It may not be dignified, but at least it is safe. We’ve all heard of the many floods of people, the great metal monsters, the shining towers that blot out the sun. It frightens many of us. It frightens me. I still wish to see it, to escape the minor cruelties of the one Keeper, but that is my choice. I cannot make it for the others.”
For one seemingly endless moment, Renenutet glared—and then, with a single nod of her flared and hooded head, her gaze relented, the growing heat eased. “Very well, child. I can tell you how to accomplish all that you desire. Listen closely…”
Long did the goddess speak, and She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands listened. “Understand one more thing,” Renenutet said finally. “Once this is done, even I cannot undo it. Be certain, be absolutely certain, that this is what you want.”
“I… I don’t…” She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands swayed unsteadily, her tongue a flicker of fleshy lightning. She thought fearfully of the masses of humanity, the mammalian stench, the stone roads with their metal inhabitants about whom she had heard so much. And she almost refused.
But she thought, too, of the tiny enclosure in which she’d lived her entire life; of trying to stretch out when she was old and long, and being unable to do so. She thought of the cruel Keeper and his petty torments.
She thought about the fact that she, descended from the serpents of a desert land, had never seen the sun.
“I am certain.”
* *** *
The next hours passed in patient, particular, and sometimes painful preparation.
Time after time, She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands slithered back to her enclosure, squeezing through the tiny gap through which she’d initially made her escape. Each time, she gathered a mouthful of dirt and water, then spat up the globule of mud once she’d returned to her hidden sanctum. Dragging herself through the sludge, she drew faint lines, curves, and angles upon the floor, all precisely as the goddess Renenutet had instructed.
The work was slow and frustrating, each mouthful of mud sufficient only for drawing a few inches of the many intricate symbols: “Hieroglyphs,” Renenutet had called them. With each trip, She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands grew ever more tired; worse, she risked being spotted by the Keepers. By now, they had assuredly noticed her absence.
She flexed, straining, until she passed the waste of her most recent meal. This became part of her palette, enabling her to complete several curves and inclines of the design without resorting to more mud. And when that, too, proved insufficient, she flitted through the shadows around the pipes until she found a small, jagged protrusion. Rubbing against it, she carefully opened a shallow cut along one side, contributing her own blood to the collection of inks and materials.
Finally—finally—it was done. She lay exhausted in the center of the intricate hieroglyph. The floor seemed to hum around her, vibrating with a peculiar power, the dirt and grit bouncing in a sporadic dance.
All she could do was wait.
Wait as the voices and the f
ootsteps of Keepers and other searchers came and went, obscuring the light glowing from beyond her sanctuary. Wait as they brought out the bedding from her own enclosure, pungent with the scents of home and the aroma of plump, fuzzy mice. She grew hungry, and tired, and her second thoughts had long since been chased away by fifth, sixth, even seventh. Still she waited.
Waited until she heard that voice, plucked that scent from the air, and knew he was near. The bad Keeper. He was close, and he was alone.
She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands darted from the shadows just long enough to let herself be spotted, rustled the bedding enough to make a noise that even the hulking, clumsy mammal could hear, and then she was off, darting back into the chamber of darkness and pipes.
He might have surprised her, might have gone for help; it would have thrown her whole scheme awry. Yet he did no such thing. Maybe he wanted the credit for finding her to himself, maybe he wanted to be certain he’d truly seen her, or maybe he had some crueler mischief in mind. Whatever the reason, he pushed open the chamber door, its hinges creaking, and crept inside—careful, alert, but alone.
For an instant, She-Whose-Scales-Glisten-and-Rustle-as-They-Scrape-Across-the-Sands wavered. If this worked, there was no going back. If it didn’t, she would surely be taken away, as all the tales had warned.
The bad Keeper took one final step, until he loomed beside the nearly invisible hieroglyph, and there was no more time for hesitation.
Hood spread and jaws agape in a vicious hiss, the cobra struck.
* *** *
The air reeked of sweat, hummed with thankful laughter and congratulations.
A crowd of men and women gathered around the Egyptian cobra enclosure, every one of them relieved that, after the amused eyes of the nation had been upon them for almost a week, they’d finally succeeded in recapturing the roving serpent. They watched as one of their number, protected by heavy gloves, gently lowered the fugitive back into her home, and they celebrated.
All but one.
At the rear of the crowd, a single man stood alone. His features were slack, his eyes hooded as though distracted by distant thoughts. He absently rubbed his left hand over his right forearm, again and again.