Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  Phar nodded his grizzled head as he spoke, to emphasise the points he was making. The old man's bright eyes and massive but fine-bridged nose made him look oddly bird-like, and the nodding head compounded the impression. His thin-lipped mouth became almost invisible when he pursed his lips but when he spoke, revealing his long front teeth, he also looked more than a little like a rat.

  "It's not my fault the king's men are here in such force," Andris complained.

  "It's Checuti they're after. I was caught up in the affair entirely by accident."

  "They don't know that," said Phar wearily.

  "Just stop wasting time and show me what you can do. Then we can decide where we go from here."

  "Draw the map, Andris," Merel advised. She was standing behind Andris's chair, in the only part of the attic where anyone could comfortably stand, beneath the arch of the room's only window.

  "We have to trust him. We don't have any alternative, do we?"

  "I know you haven't done this for a long time," said Phar, softening his tone considerably now that he had won the initial argument.

  "But the lore that's pumped into us when we're young is never lost. It's just a matter of getting into the right frame of mind. You can do it, Andris. Once a mapmaker, always a mapmaker."

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  Andris was quick to nod his head.

  "I know I can do it," he said, with all the convicfWh he could muster.

  "I can't guarantee that the territory will match the map, but I can draw what I was taught to draw. Even without the right tools, I can make a fair stab at it." He lowered his gaze again to the empty parchment. He sat very still, and tried to cast his mind back over the years. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself back in his schoolroom- the schoolroom in the palace of Ferentina, which was the finest in all that land. In the dark arena of his consciousness he sketched the high windows, the thick carpet, the book-lined shelves and the ornamented desk. He recalled the faces of his tutors, selecting out the lean and sallow face of the master of the Arts Geographical who had devoted years to the thankless business of engraving his secrets on the ungrateful layers of Andris's maturing mind. He i. conjured up the precise tone of that dry, cracked voice.

  Nothing that is properly stored is ever lost, he heard the imaginary voice say. What we make a part of you now will be a part of you forever. It is to sustain the lore that the human being has been gifted with such a protracted childhood and such an impressionable mind. Provided that the initial impression is deep enough, forgetfulness is an iriipossible sin.

  "Stupid windbag," Andris muttered. Aulakh Phar, realising that the words were not meant for' him, did not take offence.

  It was as though the voice were a string attached to Andris's hand.

  The hand reached out, "unbidden by any conscious volition of his own, and he had only to imagine the voice saying: South of the equator, line zero. The Navel of the W,orld. The key to the design is the five-pointed star, crossed by the curved bow, whose arrow has flown into the Nest of the Phoenix. The apex of the star is the Corridors of Power in the Dragomite Hills, and its heart is the Lake of Colourless Blood . . .

  His hand moved back and forth, as if moved by an alien will, making dots and curved lines. His little finger darted hither and yon as it measured and manoeuvred. He opened his eyes by the merest crack to watch the scurrying pen, so that the sight of the emergent pattern might blend in with the imagistic guide-path laid down by his tutor's voice. Andris marvelled at the momentum of it all: the way it flowed within him like a river of darkness, and the way it flowed out of him like a sputtering fountain, scarring the file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (207 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:21 AM]

  page with ink. It required very little effort on his part to maintain the tempo and the rhythm, and he hardly hesitated at all. The second point is the Crystal City, the third is Salamander's Fire; the fourth is the lair of Serpents and the fifth the Pillars of Silence. The shaft of the bow is the greatest river in all the world and the string the line of its flood-plain.

  The arrow's fl etchings are the Silver Thorns and its shaft is the Gauntlet of Gladness; the Nest of the Phoenix is the Navel of the World, the arrow's buried head Chimera's Cradle, due east of that the Cities of the Plain .

  Andris paused to look at the marks which he had scratched, and filled his pen again. He added a deft stroke here and a ragged blot there, and tried to ignore his uneasy awareness that it wasn't quite right. He drew a framing line at the top of the parchment, and another to the right. Then, not quite satisfied but fearful of losing his impetus, he laid the pen down and took up the first and coarsest of the three brushes. It was far too coarse, and his hand was a bigger and clumsier thing now than it had been when he was half-grown, but he tried with all his mind to think in a delicate way.

  The upper frame is the Forest of Absolute Night, said the voice inside his skull, as he swept a purple that was far too blue across the upper part of the parchment. He washed the brush and deftly dried it.

  To the right is the Spangled Desert. He applied a yellow that was far too bright, with no silver in it at all, wincing at the garishness of it. To the left is the Grey Waste. He used a delicate shade of blue for that, but it was quite wrong.

  The Dragomite Hills extend like the curve of a dove's wing in flight, the inner voice went on, as he applied pale green. The Soursweet Marshes follow the curve of the bow, whose grip is the Lake of Colourless Blood.

  He used pink for the marshes and red for the lake, ignoring the incongruity.

  He used a deeper green for the area south of the marshes, through which ran the fl etched-arrow symbol called the Silver Thorns. He had few colours left to draw the wide-winged phoenix fluttering above her nest, but he blocked the shadowy figure in another shade of purple, and coloured the plain to the east and south of it in green. Then he added in the remaining rivers, in dark blue.

  He cleaned the brush for the last time, and set it carefully aside.

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  Then he took up the. pen again and dipped it in the ink pot He continued for three or four minutes more, dotting and dabbing, adding labels. Finally, he stopped. He looked up at Aulakh Phar, who had been watching him with intense concentration.

  "That's enough," he said.

  "It's the best I can do. The colours are all wrong, but it's good enough to show that I know what I'm doing."

  Phar sucked his teeth for a moment or two, then nodded.

  "Well," he said, 'either you really have the lore or you're the best actor I ever saw. But you'll have to interpret these labels for me. Initials won't do. "

  Andris cleared the nib of the pen on a piece of rag, and glanced around at Merel, who was smiling in relief.

  "I'm not sure the labels mean very much," he said cautiously.

  "They're mostly just vivid names -- mnemonic devices, intended to fix things in the memory. PS, for instance, is Pillars of Silence- but what, exactly, the Pillars of Silence might be isn't part of the lore. Not my lore, at any rate."

  "Let's not worry about the meanings for now," Phar said, pointing to another label.

  "This NW is the Navel of the World?"

  "That's right."

  "What do the NP and CC close by it refer to? What are these curious symbols here, here and here, which don't seem to be letters at all?"

  "I've no idea what the glyphs'mean," Andris admitted, carefully not answering the first part of the question, on the grounds that a wise man ought to keep a little information up his sleeve, 'but I can tell you that out of all the maps committed to my memory, this and the one which describes the country further to the south are the only ones that have them. It's strange, though, that the Navel of t
he World should be so far south. You'd expect it to be at the equator, wouldn't you? "

  "What's the equator?" Merel Zabio asked.

  "A line around the middle of the world, like a belt," Andris told her, pointing it out on the map.

  "Here it is, running through the Forest of Absolute Night and into the Spangled Desert. The zero line cuts it here, due north of the Lake of Colourless Blood. That's where the Navel of the World ought to be, not hundreds of kirns to the south and way off to the west."

  "Why is there a line around the middle of the world?" Merel asked.

  "Who put it there?"

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  "It's not a real line," Andris told her.

  "It's just a map makers thing - part of the framework which contains the maps. There aren't any..."

  He never finished the sentence. There was a sudden hammering on the door which was, of course, barred on the inside and a stentorian voice shouted:

  "Open up in the king's name!"

  "Corruption and corrosion!" Phar groaned.

  "I thought this place was safe! The innkeeper's a boyhood friend of Checuti's. You can't trust anyone these days."

  If the complaint extended any further than that, Andris didn't hear it. He had begun to move before the challenge was halfway through and was already scrambling past the old man's chair. Merel had opened the window behind her and was clambering up on to the sill. Andris paused only to snatch the map from the table, scattering the paint pots and inkwell far and wide, before he followed her.

  The window was rather small, and because Andris was uncommonly large it was by no means easy for him to scramble through it, but fear lent urgency to his attempt. With the aid of Merel Zabio, who grabbed his left wrist and hauled while he was still using his right hand to ram the hastily furled parchment into his shirt, he somehow managed to wriggle out on to the steeply slanted tiles. He glanced back at Phar then, but the grey-haired man was shaking his head, signalling to Andris to close the window while he called out to the men who were clamouring at the door that he was coming. The pace at which he went to let them in was, however, far slower than the waiting men would presumably have liked. Andris made haste to be out of sight before the bolt was drawn.

  The opportunity which Andris's imprisonment in Xandria had given him to accustom himself to heights proved, alas, to have done him little or no permanent good. It was one thing to look down from a securely barred window with one's feet solidly planted on a sturdy floor; it was quite another to scramble over a sloping roof, on tiles which seemed everywhere to be crumbling, with nothing but a shallow and thoroughly rotted wooden gutter to interrupt his fall should he slip.

  Panic nearly froze him, but Merel still had hold of his arm and was pulling him along. He had no alternative but to go.

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  Andris had no id^a- of the external shape of the inn, because Merel had hurried him along the lane, through the rear door and up the stairs while his head was voluminously hooded, giving him no opportunity whatsoever to look around. He had to hope that she had paid enough attention to its architecture to know whether there was any plausible way down to the ground.

  As soon as his kinswoman let go of his hand he paused to make sure that the map was as secure as it could be. Rolling it up so hurriedly and so untidily and stuffing it inside his shirt was sure to have done a good deal of damage to its colours, but he fully intended to cling on to it as hard and as long as he could, given chat it was his only chance of buying the help he needed to get him safely out of Khalorn. By the time he got going again Merel had taken a long lead, but he scurried after her, determined to catch up.

  Merel had scrambled up to the ridge of the roof, where she found an adequate handhold with which to steady herself, and began moving along it. She signalled to Andris, instructing him to follow, but it was by no means easy to obey and when he did try to imitate her he sent three or four broken tiles skidding down the || roof. The shards pattered down on the ground, which was enough to make them rattle alarmingly. If any of their pursuers had been stationed below, it would be perfectly obvious where they were- but if anyone heard the falling tiles he did not cry out.

  "Don't look down," Merel advised needlessly, as he continued to follow in her wake in his own far clumsier fashion. He managed to get his left leg over the ridge of the roof, so that he might sit astraddle as he inched himself along; the position was uncomfortable, but it felt secure and no more tiles went-sliding away.

  "We'll go to the end," Merel decided, gesturing forwards and whispering theatrically across the three mets which separated them.

  "The roof slopes down again from the point, and the roof of the stable's just a short drop below the gutter. If you can refrain from wanton destruction for just five seconds you might get down on it without going clean through.

  With luck, there'll be some1 thing close to the outer wall of the stable to provide a step. If not, we'll just have to jump. I'll go first."

  She moved off, crouching low but actually walking on the vertiginously tilted surface. Andris followed, still using his arms to inch himself along while his legs dangled down to either side. By

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  the time he ran out of ridge Merel

  was already lowering herself on to the stable roof, supporting herself by clinging to the creaking guttering. It bore her weight, albeit reluctantly, but Andris could tell that it wouldn't be able to support his. He remained in a sitting position as he slid himself down the triangular section of tiling, inflicting less damage on the tiles than he had expected, but the slope was so steep that the further he went the faster he went, and when he reached the guttering there was no way he could halt himself.

  The guttering split beneath him, and he was precipitated into empty space, legs extended and arms akimbo.

  Had he landed feet first on the stable roof he would undoubtedly have splintered the wood, and might easily have sent splinters deep into his flesh, but he managed somehow to adjust his position so that he landed on his buttocks, spreading the shock of the impact along his legs and his back.

  Although his back was much better now, the long spear-cut having healed quite well, it was not ready for this kind of maltreatment; the pain was terrible.

  The timbers groaned and gave way, but they didn't shatter. Jarred by the impact, and sickened by the agonising wrench of his back muscles, Andris was unable to do anything for a few seconds but lie still, arms and legs outstretched, trying desperately to collect his strength and his wits.

  By the time he was able to sit up Merel was out of sight. He squirmed across the slightly slanted beams to the edge of the stable roof. He was now little more than three mets from the ground, but even that seemed like a long drop, and he looked around for something which might allow him to take it in two steps. There was a water-butt placed to catch the spillage from the guttering, and he moved towards it, writhing like a snake.

  He had no wish to take a bath, so he knew that he would have to be very careful in placing his feet and balancing himself. He adjusted his position with the utmost care, and lowered himself over the edge of the roof in painstaking fashion, lying face down while he slid his legs over the edge inch by inch.

  He groped with his dangling feet for the two sides of the butt, and found it.

  He tested its solidity as best he could; not until he was fairly certain that all was in order did he transfer his weight, and he did so as briefly as possible. He completed the manoeuvre by 209

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  executing a jump and turn of

  which- h
e was immodest enough to think a trained acrobat would not have been utterly ashamed.

  Unfortunately, the turn part of the manoeuvre brought him face to face with a man very nearly as big as he was, who was holding a very impressive dagger in an unmistakably hostile position. There were two other men behind him.

  Merel Zabio was nowhere to be seen. Oddly enough, his first reaction was not fear or despair but blatant outrage.

  "I know you!" he exclaimed in astonishment.

  "You're that bastard who . . ."

  "Be glad that I am," the big man interrupted, with no more than a slight grimace of annoyance.

  "If I were the king's man, you'd be in real trouble."

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  "I can see the house," whispered Luca, who had climbed a tree in lorder to peer over the intervening wall. There are lights inside they not asleep. I can see one man silhouetted in the window. I think there are others inside, but I can't tell how many."

  "How many men does Checuti have with him?" Jacom asked the man who had met them behind the lodge in the park. He was small and lean, very light on his feet- and very nervous now that he had brought them to their destination.

  "How should I know?" the guide complained.

  "I'm not one of them- I'm just an honest man who happens to owe money to an honest merchant. Maybe three, maybe thirty. But I can assure you they ain't going' to lie down an' go to sleep. He only came into town to see someone.

  He won't hang around once he's finished talking. Don't bank on there being'

  coin hid in there, 'cause there probably ain't."

  "It's a big house shaped like an elongated H, with outbuildings in both yards and a big barn off to the right," Luca reported.

  "The house must have at least two doors. The wall doesn't go all the way round but there's a fence probably rotten in places but I can't see from here. It's a real maze we don't have nearly enough men to cover the exits."