Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  Alas, he was already too late. He was immediately swallowed up by the violence.

  Andris stood up, the first thought in his mind being that he ought to protect the blind man.

  "Quickly," he said.

  "Up the staircase!" But the blind man didn't move- because, of course, he didn't know where the staircase was. Andris stood up and reached out his hand, intending to take the blind man by the arm and lead him away to safety, but he was rudely interrupted. Other men had their eyes on the steps and their thoughts on escape, including the bravos who had huddled about the table in the alcove beneath the slanting staircase.

  All of a sudden those men were jostling Andris and his companion, trying to shove them both out of the way. The blind man's chair was overturned and the table too.

  The table knocked the blind man over as it fell, spilling Andris's sour ale all over his grey rags.

  The insult and injury done to the meek story-teller inflamed Andris's anger rather more than the loss of the unappetising beer, but he still had sufficient presence of mind to curb his temper. When he turned to grapple with the men who were ambitious to swarm up the stairway he had no intention of hitting or hurting anyone; like the guardsman he merely wished to restore a semblance of order to the incipient chaos.

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  He never got the chance to speak or to take constructive action. The biggest of the conspirators- who was a little wider than Andris, though not as tall- was already intent on thrusting him out of the way. He barged forward and sent Andris ^spinning sideways, away from the bottom stair.

  Andris would probably have tripped over one of the lesser men and fallen down had it not been for the fact that he met another man coming the other way, who had apparently been hurled with even greater force. This proved to be the guardsman who had tried unsuccessfully to break up the fight as it started.

  Andris grabbed hold of the guardsman and the guardsman grabbed hold of him, as both of them struggled to stay upright. Their eyes met for a moment and Andris saw- or thought he saw- a glimmer of understanding. At any rate, the guardsman made no attempt to strike Andris, and they released one another at exactly the same time. They wanted to turn in opposite directions- Andris towards the stairway and the soldier towards the area where half a dozen amber dark landers were lashing out among a crowd of thirty or forty gold ens now including at least one more guardsman- but neither of them was able to follow his intention through. The big man who had shoved Andris had picked up the table at which Andris had been seated, and he brought its heavy top across in a vicious arc aimed at the heads of the amber and the guardsman. ; Andris, who had the advantage of being able to see it coming, ducked.

  The guardsman, who was looking the other way, took the edge of the table square on the back of his head.

  The guardsman went down as if he had been pole-axed. Andris would have escaped unhurt if only the table had not had its legs still firmly attached, but one of them caught him in the ribs as he tried to shrink into an impossibly small space, and jarred him horribly.

  While he gasped in pain the big man turned the table sideways, lifted it up-rather inelegantly, but with considerable dexterity- and brought it crashing down on the fallen guardsman.

  Had the table's edge struck the man's head again it would have killed him, but it struck his leg instead. Again, one of the table-legs- of which only two now remained attached- hit Andris, this time just beneath the hip.

  The impact redoubled Andris's agony and spun him around, 10

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  with his limbs

  in a terrible tangle. When he fell, trying unsuccessfully to embrace his ribs with one hand and his thigh with the other, he somehow contrived to fall upon the upended tabletop, which was now sandwiched between his own body and that of the soldier. The wind had been knocked out of him, and he had to fight desperately hard to draw air into his reluctant lungs.

  He was still there several minutes later, cursing his luck and nursing his injuries, when two other guardsmen seized him, and told him that he was under arrest. By this time, the men who had been fighting for access to the stairway had disappeared, having presumably made their escape. The stricken guardsman and the blind story-teller were both stretched out on the flagstoned floor, unconscious and barely breathing.

  It occured to Andris, somewhat belatedly, that he might be in deep trouble.

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  A.

  Z the dark lander suffered his fifth and final seizure shortly after the nineteenth hour. That, at least, was the time according to Ereleth's red-striped candle; a glance out of the window at the brightly shining stars suggested to her that the candle might be as much as half an hour slow, but she certainly wasn't about to summon an astronomer to make an accurate time-check. Witchery was work that required to be done in secret- preferably in a high attic with a single narrow window and a low dark-beamed ceiling, just like the room they were in.

  The last seizure was by no means as spectacular as the earlier ones.

  The dark lander had nothing left in his stomach to bring up but clotted blood, and insufficient strength in his aged muscles to sustain violent convulsions. His colour was quite ghastly. Being a dark lander he had started out pale, but now his flesh was almost ds white as his hair, the colour of new sailcloth. His open eyes were bulging out of their sockets, like two great glass beads with a bad case of vitric rot.

  Ereleth didn't waste much time watching the dying man's convulsions.

  She was far more interested in watching the Princess Lucrezia's reaction to his unlovely death.

  So far, Lucrezia's response had been all that could be expected, and Ereleth was not disappointed now. The expression in the young woman's eye was one of fascinated but dispassionate interest; her gaze was intense but clinical, and her lovely features were flushed with a purely intellectual excitement.

  By contrast, the features of the giant who stood on the far side of the couch looked as if they had been carved out of stone; her eyes too might have been made out of glass. The giant was no longer a stranger to this room, although she had to duck under the beams every time she took a step, but she had not become used to such 12

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  sights; her awe and her anxiety remained as powerful as ever. But she was only a guard, not an apprentice witch.

  Lucrezia is the one, Ereleth told herself, feeling that the statement was the final confirmation of something she had known for a long time, something which had long been determined. This is the best and truest instrument that I have forged. This is my appointed heir.

  She's no child of Belin's, despite that he's her father, but something wholly and exclusively mine. The last thought brought a slight frown to her face, because Belin naturally saw things differently. According to Ereleth's spies, he had recently taken advice from his pettifogging ministers which bade him arrange a marriage for his twenty-second daughter even though she was still forty days short of her seventh birthday: a marriage to the prince of Shaminzara.

  Ereleth had not the slightest idea why Sharminzara should suddenly have entered so forcefully into the ministers' calculation of the delicate balance of political power within Xandria's sphere of influence, but she had made it her business to find out what kind of place it was. According to the patient tally men who kept count of the empire's possessions, Shaminzara was an isle fully five hundred kirns distant, which measured barely sixty kirns by fifty-five, so desolate as to be well-nigh treeless. It had only a single harbour and was reputed to be a favourite haunt of pirates. It wasn't the kind of place in which a young queen might be ab
le to develop her own ambitions; nor was it the kind of place in which a young witch might find adequate scope for the exercise of her Art.

  "Did I not tell you?" said Ereleth softly, lacing her fingers together and cracking her ancient knuckles.

  "Dead in five hours. A small enough dosage to be easily disguised, and no known antidote. It never fails."

  The princess made a slight sound of disgust.

  "It took him five hours," she said warily.

  "He must have been at least twenty-five, and he spent the last fifteen of them working on the wall. The only reason the seneschal released him to us was that he was no longer capable of lifting a fair-sized pebble or mixing smooth cement. He wanted to die. We need far better subjects if these experiments are to be reliable. If I'm ever to use the Art in earnest I need to know how to measure the effect of the poisons on men who are strong and desperate to live."

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  "Your father has better uses for men like that," Ereleth said wryly.

  "We all have- or would have, given half thecnance." She laughed lewdly.

  "In this case, believe me, the condition of the subject makes no difference."

  Privately, however, she thought: The child has a good mind. She is determined to take nothing on trust which can be tested.

  Not one of her sisters showed such promise- but those who have Serpent's blood have a natural aptitude for witchery.

  Ereleth, who had never borne a child herself, had been mentor lo half a dozen of Lucrezia's half-sisters before her; the tricks of poisoning and the corollary tricks of healing the poisoned- had long been considered valuable in the Xandrian royal family. Custom dictated that every king of Xandria should have at least one witch-wife, and should always let it be known-discreetly, of course- that any one of his daughters might have been trained in such skills. The alliances sealed and cemented by their marriages were just that bit stronger when tinged with a little anxiety. Many teachers, Ereleth knew, would have construed the princess's scepticism as an insult to their teaching, and to the lore itself, but Ereleth too had never been prepared to take entirely on trust that which had been handed down to her by her own mentor. The experiments which she had undertaken in the course of a long lifetime had disclosed several significant inaccuracies in the traditional lore, which she had been careful to take aboard. She was too clever and too proud to be one of those over-devout lore keepers who assumed that if reality would not conform with what she had been taught then reality must be at fault; she was, after all, a keeper of the secret commandments, loyal to a higher authority than the king of Xandria.

  Ereleth's own mentor, in the course of her diplomatic career, had never had cause to use more than half a dozen of the several hundred poisons whose properties she 'knew'. She had lived in quiet times, and had not been blessed with the gift of curiosity. Ereleth had lived in quiet times too, but she had always taken care to make more liberal and varied use of what she knew, partly for art's sake but mainly to make sure that what she had been taught was actually true.

  It was all very well to have a profound respect for the first commandment of Goran the Forefather "The only sin is forgetfulness' but the lore was no more immune to disease 14

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  and decay than anything else in the world. The most insidious form of forgetfulness was surely the slow poison of cumulative error which was gradually corrupting every one of the Four Hundred Arts. The stink of the dead dark lander was becoming overpowering, but Lucrezia's fascination kept her by his side. Ereleth noted that the princess was still prepared to lean over the corpse in order to make minute inspection of the effects of the poison she had fed him. Her curiosity was indefatigable.

  The giant maintained her position too, but in her case it was duty and determination that would not let her turn away. Ereleth approved of duty and determination in servants; they were qualities as valuable in their way as intelligence and curiosity in lore keepers

  This particular guard- her name was Dhalla -- was the one Ereleth co-opted to help in all her quiet work. Lucrezia liked her, and the fondness seemed to be reciprocated.

  "It is as well to be comfortable in the presence of death, my child,"

  Ereleth said approvingly.

  "Ours is classified as an Art Political rather than an Art Chemical, and its exercise has as much to do with reputation and mystique as it has with healing or execution, but a poisoner must not be over wary of the fruits of her endeavours. Learn to love the stink of putrefaction, provided that you are the cause of it."

  Lucrezia straightened herself, and smiled. She had a deceptively sweet smile. Like her mother- who had died in childbed trying to bear Belin a second son, when Lucrezia was less than a year old- she was slender, with finely drawn features, but she was wiry and had a good measure of strength to support her perennial stubbornness. Her eyes were dark, almost black in the lamplight whose yellow radiance supplemented the white light of the blazing stars, but they gleamed with a moistness which a mere man might mistake for tenderness. "Get rid of that," Ereleth said to Dhalla, pointing to the dead man. "He has told us all he can."

  Dhalla promptly knelt down to fold the corpse into the white shroud on which it lay. She picked it up without any evident effort. She had to set it down in order to unlock the door, and then again to close the door behind her, but she did her work with consummate efficiency.

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  "I need a stronger man than that for the other test, Lucrezia said pensively, as the sound of Dhalla's footsteps on the stair died away.

  "Only one of the Hyry Keshvara's seeds remains, and while the one to which I gave the dog refuses to bear flower or fruit I dare not waste the third on another diseased and enfeebled wreck of a human being. I must persuade my father to release a suitable host."

  Ereleth approved of the direction her pupil's train of thought had taken, and of the spirit that inspired her, but she could not help but feel a slight pang of anxiety about this particular experiment.

  Because Keshvara traded with the Apu she had long been a useful supplier of the materials Ereleth required to maintain her stock of potions, many of which originated in the dark lands Ereleth had encouraged Lucrezia's acquaintance with the woman, and had been pleased by the way in which the princess's admiration for the adventuress had nourished the discontent which inevitably afflicted the daughters of a Xandrian king as they grew to adolescence within the constricting security of the citadel's Inner Sanctum.

  But she had not expected Keshvara to bring gifts of an unprecedented and highly unusual kind, and strange stories with them. It was not that she could not see the possible significance of such an event, nor that she had no confidence in her own competence to respond to such a challenge, but Lucrezia's education was far from complete. One more year might make all the difference. On the other hand, if the king really were planning to send her to Shaminzara . . .

  "The bush might take a year to put forth flowers," Ereleth pointed out.

  "I fear that you might not have the time to see it bloom. Rumour has it that your father has plans for you."

  "My father's plans be damned," Lucrezia retorted carelessly.

  "I've not the least intention of being shipped off to some petty island kingdom in order to be locked away in a prison narrower by far than this one, to serve as child bearer to some brutal protector of pirates. I'm worth infinitely more than that."

  Ereleth was slightly taken aback by this- not because she disapproved of the sentiment but because Lucrezia hadn't had to ask what she was talking about.

  The princess must have begun to cultivate her own network of spies-presumably working through her maidservent, Monalen, and Dhalla. Ereleth won
dered whether she ought to caution her pupil against indiscretion. The 16

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  room was secure against eavesdroppers, but such sentiments should not have been spoken aloud within the Sanctum. She decided that there were more important things which needed to be said.

  "I will do what I can to persuade the king's ministers that you are too young to go to Shaminzara and might do far more for the empire in days to come if you were allowed to complete your education. All that is true- but there are other reasons why it is necessary that you and I should not be separated now.

  There is work for us to do."

  Lucrezia could not, of course, know what she meant but Ereleth was nevertheless surprised by her reaction.

  "I'm heartily sick of that work too," the princess said, with defiant frankness.

  "I've a burning desire to do something new, something of my own. You can have no idea of the fervour which thrills me when I listen to Hyry Keshvara telling me of her adventures in the Spangled Desert and the Forest of Absolute Night. How I envy that woman!"

  "You shouldn't," said Ereleth mildly.

  "It's one thing to travel the world as a princess, with men-at-arms beside you and the implicit might of Xandria behind you, and quite another to travel as a petty trader, ever vulnerable to robbery and rape."

  "Keshvara seems to evade such fates readily enough."

  "Keshvara is by no means handsome and by no means rich," Ereleth pointed out.

  "I disagree." Lucrezia's voice had all the stubborn authority of a princess born and bred.

  "She may not dress in silks and she wears her hair uncommonly short, but she has fine, strong features- hers is not a conventional womanly beauty, I'll grant, but her face is finer by far than the one worn by that supposedly handsome popinjay of a guard-captain who persists in staring at me from his lofty coign of vantage while I work in the garden. As for riches, she has the wealth of knowledge and experience, and a desperately keen eye for precious things. Did you see the way her eyes lit up when she described how she came across the seeds from the far side of the Dragomite Hills?