Serpent's Blood

by Brian Stableford

  "Firsst humanss did not undersstand, you ssee," Mossassor said, on one of the occasions when it strove to make good its word.

  "Did not know sstealthy wayss of chaoss. Did not know sslyness of prossessess of sshange. Sso wisse, sso young. My anssesstorss knew ssat only life sstandss againsst dissolution, only per manens- se iss reproducssion, ssecretss musst be hidden in flessh. Your forefathers made ssity, mine sshowed them how to make garden. Iss debt for ssat, you undersstand. Iss debt you owe. Iss not your fault you hardly remember . .

  . you have no ssecretss hidden in flessh, Kesshvara. Only humanss wiss Sserpent'ss blood have ssecretss. Too few . . . always too few.

  Sserpent'ss blood and Ssalamander'ss fire iss ssere, but not enough.

  When all iss well, no ssecretss. When catasstrophe co mess ssecretss ssurfasse. Ssee? "

  Hyryr didn't see, although she felt that she had caught a fleering glimpse of the beginnings of an explanation, but her attempts to elicit more exact information Only served to reveal that Mossassor didn't quite see either.

  The jsource of the Serpent's supposed wisdom really was some story that had been handed down across the generations like the Lore pfGenesys, undoubtedly corrupted by errors and perhaps irredeemably garbled. "Given that Serpents were- according to Mossassor's account good at forgetting things, this was not entirely surprising.

  The main difference between human lore and Serpent lore, so far as Hyry could judge, was that Serpent lore spoke of something new happening in times of strife the surfacing of some secret 'hidden in the flesh' of Serpents and of those humans who had the mysterious thing called

  "Serpent's blood'. Mossassor thought that some such secret was already awakening in its own flesh, and would become clearer with time and appropriate stimulation. Its companions evidently felt no such stirrings and Sssifuss at least was sceptical about Mossassor's -- but they appeared to owe some kind of debt to Mossassor, which they were discharging by accompanying it on its quest.

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  Hyry pressed the Serpent as hard as she could for a more detailed account of what it imagined to be happening to the world as a result of the strange blight that was consuming the Dragomite Hills, but it had told her as much as it could. When it had reached the limits of its limited understanding it had only one more thing to say, which was: "Iss human word for ssurfassing of ssecretss in flessh, I ssink.

  You will know what it meanss if I ssay. I ssink iss pronounssed pee-doh-gen-ess-iss. Iss right? You undersstand now? "

  Unfortunately, Hyry Keshvara had never heard of any such word. It sounded like the kind of word that Aulakh Phar might know, or Carus Fraxinus, but to Hyry it meant nothing at all. Its etymological relationship to Genesys seemed obvious enough, but what the prefix might signify she had no idea.

  Hyry's spirits were by no means uplifted when she saw the Dragomite Hills, and it was quickly apparent to her that Mossassor's companions were deeply disturbed by the devastation which the mounds had suffered. Ssifuss condescended for once to express an opinion in human language, so that she might appreciate the extent of its anxiety.

  "Iss bad," it said.

  "Iss ferry, ferry bad." She didn't attempt to contradict or reassure it.

  They continued into the hills for some six or eight kirns before Mossassor decided that they were finally secure from the possibility of a dark lander attack.

  "Ssafe now," it said, to Hyry as well as its companions.

  "Ssleep."

  "This isn't going to be easy," Hyry told it.

  "We didn't have any chance to stockpile food and water while we were moving so quickly through the forest. We'll starve or die of thirst long before we get to the other side and we're surrounded by desperate drago mites

  "Not be afraid," it replied.

  "Ssome dragomitess have Sserpent'ss blood. Dissasster makess ssem sshow it."

  Hyry wasn't at all sure that this judgment was entirely reliable -and neither, it seemed, were Ssifuss and Ssumssarum. They did, however, lay themselves down to sleep, giving every indication that any and all other questions could wait until they had fully recovered their strength and composure.

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  snatches whenever the

  Serpents had stopped in the forest, she found it annoyingly difficult to sleep now, beneath the iridescent brilliance of the myriad stars. She dozed off several times only to wake again; although she lost all track of time she never quite lost touch with the world. The stink of the hills was always in her nostrils, and the silence seemed oppressive after the ceaseless rustlings of the forest.

  So deep was the silence, in fact, that every slight and momentary sound struck her ears like an alarm. Twice she sat up and looked wildly about, only to see a worker drago mite on a surprisingly distant ridge. She had seen such creatures half a dozen times in the forest, but always in retreat, and the Serpents showed not the slightest fear of them. She wondered whether the rum ours about Serpents having the ability to control drago mites might be true.

  Perhaps, she thought, they had the power to secrete aromatic compounds like the one Aulakh Phar had, which acted as an olfactory instruction to drago mites to return to their nests.

  The third time Hyry sat up, however, she was certain that the sound was different, and close by, and threatening. She was right. Had the night been cloudy she might not have been able to pick out the men who were skulking *in the shadows, but the flame stars were wonderfully bright, and her eyes were sharp. It was not a good night for a sneak attaci^.

  Without a moment's hesitation she rolled over and began to shake Mossassor.

  It awoke almost immediately.

  "Darklanders," she said.

  "They came over' yonder ridge not a minute ago. Five hundred mets away, at the most. I couldn't count them, but it looks like a full war band Thirty, maybe forty."

  "Sshouldn't do ssat," Mossassor said, in a peevish tone.

  Hyry sympathised with its annoyance. She too would have laid odds against the dark landers coming out of the forest. Their normal fear of drago mites had obviously been eroded by their 'victories' in the forest and the sorry state of the mounds.

  Ssifuss and the others were awake now, gathering up their meagre luggage.

  "I'm certain that I can talk them into going back now," Hyry said urgently.

  "They won't hurt me I'm sure of that."

  "No/' said Mossassor determinedly.

  "Musst come."

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  matter and

  insisted on exercising her own judgment, but the fact that it was not human somehow made it easier to defer to its command.

  Unfortunately, the way forward in the direction opposite to that from which the dark landers were coming was uphill, and they had to toil up a very awkward slope. Before they reached the ridge that would hide them their pursuers came over the rim of the shallow hill immediately behind them, and caught sight of them perhaps for the first time in several days. They responded to the sighting with an ebullient chorus of war-cries.

  They can't stop me shouting, Hyry thought, and half turned to call out: "Go back! You have no business here!" Their only response, alas, was an increase in the fervour of the shouts with which they urged one another forward.

  "Run!" Mossassor urged, and Hyry knew that there was no alternative but to obey. The dark landers might be even more inclined now to loose off their various weapons at the earliest possible opportunity, going for a quick kill and yet anoth
er easy 'victory'.

  The Serpents were strong and long-legged, good runners even at the worst of times, but they were not so speedy on uneven ground as they were on level terrain. The weight of their tails, which kept them nicely balanced while they ran on Hat ground, seemed to be an inconvenience here, whether they were heading up or down. They were awkward and ungainly, and they tended to skid and slip on the oily patches which spotted and streaked the hills like some leprous infection. In the forest, Hyry had often found it hard to keep up with the Serpents in their faster paces, but her booted feet found better purchase here than their naked ones and her tailless body was far more adaptable to the task of scrambling up or half-sliding down precipitous slopes. Before they had travelled a thousand mets nearer six hundred as a bird might have flown it was obvious that the agile dark landers were gaining.

  A couple of arrows bounced at their heels. Hyry knew that it would need a very lucky shot to prick one of them, but the dark landers must have known that even the slightest injury would deliver up a victim ready for the slaughter.

  "We're not your enemies!" she shouted back.

  "You have no reason to do this." She still felt stubbornly sure that if she could only get them to listen she could make them understand that they were making a mistake, but they would nor reply to her.

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  If only they would pause for just a moment, she thought breathlessly.

  Savages they might be but they're human, thinking beings who have no real reason for engaging in this mad hunt.

  It was all true. The violation of the dark landers territory had not been a real invasion; they had nothing at all to fear either from drago mites or from Serpents . . . but none of that seemed to matter.

  The dark landers like the Serpents they were chasing, had been overtaken by an acute sense of crisis and by the awareness of what they took to be omens of the world's end. They, like Mossassor, wanted to feel that they were doing something, even though they had only the vaguest notion of what it was that they ought to do. If only they could be persuaded that the appropriate thing was not to kill strangers on sight, but rather to join with them in a quest for a mysterious and long-lost garden . . .

  What am I doing here? Hyry thought. If only Checuti had missed me on the road, and I had joined forces with Fraxinus in Khalorn, as we had planned .

  . . where is he now, I wonder? Somewhere in the hills, making his patient way across them, with everything around him under his wise and careful control. . .

  Then, while she was still taking some satisfaction from her superior agility and the efficiency of her boots, she leapt on to a patch of decaying fungus that was slicker and more liquid than the rest, and skidded horribly. She wind milled her arms, trying to stay on her feet, but it was no good. Had she had a tail she might have reached out with it to make a tripod, and thus steadied herself, but she was only human. ' She fell, as heavily and as awkwardly as mere humans were ever wont to do, and found herself rolling down. a slope, her head spinning literally and figuratively. When she came to rest she was supine, and felt that every bone and sinew in her body had been wrenched and jolted.

  Mossassor was suddenly with her, reaching out to her. She knew that it was alone, that its companions were far too wise to stop for her sake, but she had no breath to scream at it to be gone, and she could only thrash about, ungraciously and ungratefully, with her bruised arms. She was trying with all her might to command the creature to go, and go with all possible haste, but it didn't understand.

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  her lungs

  opened with a horrid, agonising abruptness and let her breathe again. I can handle them! No audible words came out of her gagging throat.

  The starlit space above her seemed to fill up with blurred shadows, looming from every possible direction, and it seemed that her tear-filled eyes were telling her that it was all over: that Mossassor was doomed and so was she.

  But then she realised that no amount of blurring could turn those nightmare shapes into angry dark landers and that what she was seeing was a host of drago mites which was welling up out of the ground to either side of the place where she lay. The huge creatures were scampering past her on both sides, the noise of their multitudinous feet becoming thunderous, as they headed off Mossassor's pursuers.

  The dark landers were shouting at one another again, but these shouts weren't war-cries or exultant encouragements these were screams of fear and howls of anguish.

  By the time Hyry was able to sit up the drago mites had formed a protective phalanx before and to either side of the place where she and Mossassor were.

  One glance was all it required to show her that there was nothing at all accidental about their array. This was no mere coincidental confusion of three independent groups. The drago mites had come forth from their devastated nest purely and simply for the purpose of screening a Serpent and a human woman from their foolish enemies.

  The drago mites were mostly workers, with only a handful of warriors among them, but the dark landers were in no mood to make nice distinctions. They turned tail and fled, pausing only to launch a brace of badly flighted javelins and that, Hyry felt sure, was only because the men carrying them had been direly anxious to disemburden themselves in order that they might run faster.

  Something very strange is happening here, Hyry thought, as Mossassor rested a reassuring hand on her shoulder. The whole world and the order of things within it has been turned upside- down. I am a part of it, but I can't understand what's going on. Can anyone, I wonder Is there someone, somewhere -or perhaps something which is in control of all these miracles, laying them out one by one like a logical train of thought, carrying us all towards our magical destiny?

  She wished that it might be so that there might be someone in 37^

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  charge of

  this mad adventure who could and would see to it that the adventure came in the end to a satisfactory conclusion . . . but she knew, in her heart, that it was not so, and that whatever weird destiny had taken her in its unkind grip was every bit as blind and helpless as she was.

  There was a human word for what was happening, apparently but she had no idea what it meant.

  When she had breath enough, she laughed.

  Then the drago mite workers turned around, to direct their huge and fully open eyes at her or, to be strictly accurate, at Mossassor.

  "Not be afraid," Mossassor advised her, with an insistence that did not seem entirely sincere.

  "Iss good, thiss. Iss very, very good."

  She wondered if Ssifuss and Ssumssarum would agree, if and when they found out what had happened in their wake.

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  7 jacom knew that he should have been glad to be able to see the stars.

  He should have been able to rejoice in the fact that the clear skies had given the expedition a chance to make better headway than it had during the previous two nights. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite persuade himself to see things that way. He couldn't shake off a dolorous awareness that every kim that passed underfoot took him further away from the land of his birth, further reducing his chances of ever seeing that land again.

  The Forest of Absolute Night had been bad enough, with its perpetually eerie light and its sly un earthliness but the Dragomite Hills seemed infinitely worse. The landscape seemed to him to be the very essence of corruption: the plain crumpled into a nightmarish ragbag of ups and downs, lavishly dressed with putre
fying slime. He felt that he had been riding into the maw of death for days on end, and had almost reached his destination.

  Purkin, who was patrolling while Jacom and Herriman stood watch to the left and right of the rear end of the column, stopped beside him, eyeing him uncertainly. Jacom, fearing that his state of mind might be embarrassingly obvious, tried to pull himself together.

  "No sign of any movement, sergeant," he said.

  "The good weather doesn't seem to have brought the drago mites out of their burrows."

  "No sir," said Purkin dutifully. He remained where he was, as if he were waiting for something.

  "I still don't know any more than I did at nightfall," Jacom said petulantly.

  "If anyone bothers to tell me what's going on, I'll pass the message on."

  So far as he knew, Dhalla had concluded her secret conference with Ereleth several hours ago, but ifEreleth had formed any plans 373

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  she certainly

  hadn^ taken anyone else into her confidence. Nor could he imagine any kind of plan which Ereleth might make.

  "Thought that boy of yours might've heard something' more, sir," the sergeant wondered aloud.

  "He's asleep," Jacom said.

  "It's been a long day."

  "Some of the men think she might go into the mounds," Purkin reported hesitantly.

  "They figure she might think that 'cause the drago mite-tamers were all women, and 'cause they killed all the men but not the princess, she and the giant might find a welcome of sorts."

  "She's no coward," Jacom observed, 'but she'd want a better argument than that before walking into the drago mites den. Anyone would. "

  "The men were wondering if... well, maybe the giant didn't just track the women. Maybe she caught up with them. Talked to them."

  "I don't think so," Jacom said wearily.