“Why were you following us?” Neel demanded.
“Only … because … the Raja … insisted.” Tuni coughed. “Doesn’t trust you to finish the job, Princie … thinks you’re as much of a slacker as I do.”
“You’re here to spy on us?”
“I’m here to make sure you ding-dongs do the job right!” Tuntuni squawked. “But I didn’t think I’d have to chase a pakkhiraj, hide from those boy-crazy rakkhoshis, and then get attacked by you, Princess! The Raja is going to have to give me a serious pay raise after this—I mean, benefits, stock options, hardship pay, the works!”
“All right, all right,” Neel said. “Don’t get your tail feathers in a bunch.”
Tuni pointed a yellow wing over my shoulder. “Hey, dummies, what’s that?”
“Where?”
Neel and I both turned to where the bird was pointing. I didn’t understand what I was looking at. The ground looked like it was moving.
“That doesn’t seem right,” I said.
Without a word, Neel grabbed my hand. Not romantic or anything. Just hard. Really hard.
“Ouch!” I tried to pull away, but Neel ignored me.
“Move!” he ordered, yanking me back toward the horses. He ran almost full-out, pulling me along, until we reached a grove of trees to the side of the lake, with Tuntuni squawking beside us.
Snowy and Midnight lifted their heads to greet us, but then whinnied—shrill and fierce. The noise shot a ripple of fear down my spine. I just had a chance to grab my weapons from Snowy’s saddle when, with flapping wings, the horses took off into the distant sky, the golden and silver spheres still tucked in Midnight’s saddlebags.
“Wait, the horses …”
I stumbled after Neel, my legs tripping over themselves. He wasn’t letting go of my wrist and I couldn’t seem to get my balance. We finally stopped beside an old gnarled tree with a lot of knobbly branches, and I looked at him, confused.
“Kiran, hurry!” Neel shoved me up the rough trunk of the tree. “Grab that branch!”
He was starting to really freak me out.
“What is going on?” After I managed to pull myself up to the lowest branch, Neel clambered up behind me. Then, with a panicky glance toward the ground, he dragged me to a branch even higher than the first. When he finally let me sit, I turned on him.
“What the—” I stopped short as a shaking Tuntuni crash-landed on the branch next to me. Some more of his tail feathers were missing.
“Look down, Kiran,” Neel said. “Look!”
I squinted to see what he was pointing at. At first, I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me. I could swear the grass was moving. Then it seemed like the very ground itself was slithering. With a queasy start, I realized what I was seeing.
“Holy moly, there are thousands of snakes down there!” I met Neel’s own wide-eyed stare with my own.
“Maybe hundreds of thousands.”
Tuntuni shuddered. “Oh, I hate snakes!”
From my perch on the tree, I could scan the area all the way around the lake. And what I saw made my skin crawl. From every direction, scores of snakes were slithering their way toward the lake. They occupied every square inch of land. Cobras, pythons, boa constrictors, asps, rattlesnakes, and a lot of kinds of snakes I’d never seen before and couldn’t identify. And didn’t want to identify. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, thin ones. There were so many snakes that the aggressive ones crawled over the slower ones. Some of those who got crawled over didn’t get up again. It was like a snake stampede.
“They’re nocturnal,” Tuntuni chirped. “They hunt at night and go to sleep in the daytime. It’s morning, so they’re all coming home.”
The bird was right. The sun had risen even higher in the sky, and as its rays reached across the entire surface of the lake, the water itself became almost transparent. And then an elaborate, arched doorway opened on the water itself, and the snakes streamed down through the passage.
“There’s the entrance to the Kingdom of Serpents.”
“We’re going to have to go down there, right, to get the python jewel?”
Neel nodded, our past argument apparently forgotten in the face of our certain deaths.
“We can’t; we’ll get poisoned by all those snakes,” Tuni protested.
“Pythons and boas don’t have poison, they just squeeze you to death,” Neel corrected, chewing on a fingernail.
“Details!” Tuni squawked. “All I know is we’re going to die, I tell you! We’re going to die!”
I tried to calm the bird down by telling him a joke.
“Hey, Tuni, do you know what they call a bird who can open doors?”
“A para-keet?” Neel suggested distractedly.
“No, a kiwi!” I said, but poor Tuntuni just kept burbling, “We’re going to die, we’re going to die,” at regular, demoralizing intervals.
It took more than an hour for the snakes to all slither down through the open doorway in the lake. The sun was fully in the sky before we made our way down to solid ground again. In fact, there were still a few snakes slithering their way toward the lake when we came down, but we had to risk it. Neel figured that the doorway might close up again after all the snakes had gone within.
He was right. No sooner had we followed—at a little distance—the last few snakes down the secret entrance than the doorway of water closed behind us.
It was dark as midnight below the surface of the lake. I held on to the back of Neel’s shirt as I basically stumbled through the archway and down the long flight of stairs. As unpredictable as it made him, I was grateful for his warm rakkhosh constitution. His back was like a little heater on my hand, a relief in the cold and clammy cavern under the lake.
“You know, I was ten when I found out what my mother was,” Neel whispered as we stumbled along, one stair at a time. “I always knew the other queens didn’t like her, but I thought they were just jealous because she was the senior rani and her son would be king.”
“Um … maybe we could exchange life stories later …” I hissed back. Neel was exhibiting a less-than-ideal sense of timing. We were climbing down a magical under-a-lake staircase into a kingdom filled with killer snakes. This really wasn’t the time for a heart-to-heart chat about our childhoods.
But Neel just kept rambling. “When it came out that she was a rakkhoshi in disguise, they wanted to exile both of us, or maybe kill us.”
The dank underwater air, not to mention my own overwhelming sense of doom, was making me shiver, and I wondered if all this gabbing was Neel’s way of dealing with his own nervousness.
“Okay,” I hissed as we kept climbing down. “I’ll bite. I’m guessing, since you’re here now and we all know your mom’s alive and kicking, that your father stopped people from killing you?”
“Yeah, but he threw her out of the palace and made Lal crown prince instead of me.”
Ah, so that’s how it happened, I thought, my eyes just barely adjusting to the darkness. The Raja had unfairly discriminated against Neel because of who his mother was. I felt a new sense of sympathy for the half-demon prince. His family life was a lot more complicated than I knew.
“So I guess after that, your mom got angry and ate everything in sight?”
“Basically.” We were nearing the bottom of the stairs. “The thing was, she’d promised herself she would live a human life when she fell in love with my father.”
“And she felt betrayed, after all that sacrifice.”
“I had to banish her from our lives, otherwise my father would have found a way to kill her for sure.”
When you got right down to it, the Rakkhoshi Queen hadn’t been treated very fairly. Not that it was an excuse for eating people, but it was an explanation.
As we got to the bottom of the stairs, the darkness grew steadily lighter—from black to gray and then ash. There was a light coming from somewhere ahead of us. As we went down the last step onto the muddy floor of the cavern, the light grew even b
righter.
“There it is!” Neel whispered.
I looked where he was pointing. Wow. The light in the cavern was coming from a huge jewel in the middle of the otherwise empty room.
“It must be the python jewel.” I stepped forward. “It’s beautiful.”
“Just grab it, Princess, and let’s get out of here,” Tuntuni said, his claws digging painfully into my shoulder.
“Why is nobody guarding it?” Neel pulled me back behind him into the shadows. “Wait, something’s not right.”
We stood a couple of minutes in a dim corner below the staircase. Neel was directly in front of me, so I didn’t see what he did, but I did hear his intake of breath.
“What?”
“Well,” Neel whispered back, “there’s good news and bad news.”
“Good first.”
“Good news is—that probably is a python jewel, so it’ll work to read the map.”
“And the bad?”
“Bad news—it’s being guarded by the most humongous python I’ve ever seen.”
I peeked from behind his broad back and had to stifle a yelp. Tuntuni dug his nails in harder. I couldn’t blame him.
Just as Neel had said, a gargantuan python was prowling the room, slithering in broad circles around the stone. It was so big, it made that rakkhosh from my front lawn look like an overgrown garden gnome.
My fingers and feet felt like ice. The cold of the cave had seeped into my bones, making me shiver from the inside out. Saving my parents, Lal, and Mati depended on us getting to the Mountains of Illusions. And us getting to the Mountains of Illusions depended on us being able to read the moving map. And us being able to read the moving map
depended on us getting that stupid python jewel—and somehow getting by that huge snake. But there was no way we could possibly do that and still be alive.
My stomach clenched and my teeth started to rattle so much I was afraid the snake might hear them. I was having trouble getting in enough air and started seeing black spots in front of my eyes.
“Breathe, Kiran.” Neel turned around, placing a warm hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got to keep it together. We need that jewel. Our families are counting on us.”
His words melted a bit of the brain freeze that was paralyzing me.
“How are we going to get it without that thing noticing?” It seemed impossible.
“It’s impossible!” The talking bird was totally histrionic. “Impossible, I tell you!”
“We’ll let the python notice, that’s how we get the jewel.” Bringing his lips to my ear, Neel whispered his completely insane idea. I realized that it just might work. Problem was, if it didn’t, we’d all be snake chow.
“Are you sure?” I asked again, trying to keep my teeth from rattling.
“It’s the only way I can think of,” Neel muttered. “Believe me, if I could think of a better plan, I would have suggested it.”
“We’re all going to die, we’re all going to die,” Tuntuni mumbled, a yellow wing over his eye.
“Shut up, Tuni. Just stick to the plan.” Neel grabbed the bird and plunked him on his shoulder.
With a crooked smile he said, “Just don’t screw up, okay, Kiran?” And then Neel stepped into the light of the python jewel.
It took the serpent a minute to notice him. “Hey, snaky!” Neel waved his arms, distracting the snake away from me, and away from the jewel as well.
Then Tuntuni, who was now flying around in high circles near the ceiling, started singing a childish snake-charming song:
“Baburam Sapure
Where do you go, Bapure?
Come on, Baba, come and see
Snakes for you and snakes for me.”
As Neel had planned, the python hissed and turned away from the treasure it was protecting. It slithered rapidly toward Neel. I crept out of my hiding place and toward the jewel. I was supposed to grab it while Neel distracted the serpent. The problem was, Neel hadn’t calculated how much faster the snake would be able to travel over the muddy ground than I was. As I tried to run toward the jewel, my feet got more stuck in the cloying silt. No matter how hard I tried to urge myself forward, the ground didn’t seem to want to let me. Oh, this was bad. Very bad.
“Come on, snaky, is that the best you can do?” Neel taunted, even as the python gained ground toward him. “You need a little snake charmer to teach you a lesson?”
Tuntuni sang:
“These snakes are alive
In your basket they thrive
Bring me one or two
And I’ll beat them black and blue.”
So far, Operation Distract and Annoy was working, but at this rate, there was no way that I would make it to the jewel before the snake reached Neel. In fact, it was on him now, and even though he fought its parries with his sword, he couldn’t seem to injure it. Tuntuni carried on singing near the ceiling but seemed too afraid to help in the fight.
With a hiss, the snake almost knocked Neel over. I struggled to hurry, but the cavern floor’s muddy surface was like walking through molasses. My thighs burned from the strain of fighting to move faster and faster. But I hadn’t progressed anywhere near where I needed to go. At this point, I was still closer to Neel and the serpent than the jewel.
Then the snake grabbed a hold of Neel, wrapped itself around him, and began to squeeze. It was obvious how much stronger the animal was than the half-demon prince. Neel was struggling. He had kept a grip on his sword and tried to injure the python with its slashes, but the snake’s skin was unbelievably tough. The sword barely made a dent. Tuntuni, to his credit, made a few haphazard dives down from the roof, flapping his wings in the snake’s eyes, but he couldn’t break the python’s concentration now that it had its prey. Neel’s face got redder as the snake squeezed.
“Princess, do something, the slacker’s gonna die!” Tuntuni shrieked.
Save him!” Tuni yelled. “How am I gonna break it to the Raja if the prince croaks?”
Neel’s plan was based on the fact that pythons aren’t poisonous; they squeeze their prey to death. And he’d figured, as a half demon, he should be able to withstand a little squeezing until I nabbed the jewel. Problem was, neither of us calculated the silt floor.
I struggled to move, but every step was such an effort. Neel was still wrestling with the enormous serpent. Muscles of steel or not, how much longer could he stand this monstrous snake? There was no way I was going to reach the jewel in time.
Okay, that was a really dumb plan. Time for a new one.
In the struggle, the python’s tail flailed around the room. It landed with a thump right next to the spot where I was struggling with the cloying ground. I made a split-second decision. It was now or never.
I jumped with both feet on the python’s tail. Feeling my weight, the snake lifted up the back of its body, trying to dislodge me. But I just lay down, and slid down the snake’s body as if it was a huge Slip’N Slide. It was rough, slimy, and scaly on my skin but much easier than running through the muddy quicksand of the cavern floor. I landed with a thump about midway up the giant serpent’s body, and, trying to imagine I was doing nothing scarier than riding Snowy, I hung on for dear life with my thigh muscles. I reached back to my quiver and chose one of the “special” arrows Neel had made me prepare before we left his kingdom. He’d shown me how to attach a long, thin rope made out of a super-strong Thirteen Rivers material to some of my arrows. At the time, I couldn’t figure what I’d need them for. But now I was glad for his forethought.
My fingers were slippery with sweat and I fumbled with the bow a little. The snake was bucking and writhing underneath me, and it wasn’t that easy to concentrate.
“Take your time, there, Prin-cess,” Neel gasped from somewhere within the python’s coils. He was turning an unbecoming shade of purple.
“Hold on to your pants, cowboy!”
I finally managed to nock the arrow onto my bow. My stomach churned as I rode the thrashing snake, and I could only
pray there wouldn’t be a repeat of the famous corn-dog incident. Neel’s life was dependending on my archery skills. No pressure or anything.
My hand shaking, I shot the arrow straight up above the snake’s head, into the cavern ceiling. Would the arrowhead be strong enough to pierce the hard stone? Bingo! It went in, leaving the rope dangling behind it like a comet’s tail. I didn’t even have time to test it to see if it would hold my weight. I just used it like mountain climbing gear to clamber up the rest of the snake’s slippery body to the top of its head.
“Show-off!” Neel choked out. Even with me climbing all over its body, the snake hadn’t stopped squeezing.
“Go Princess, go Princess, go-go-go Princess,” Tuntuni chanted.
“Remind me to thank you for the arrows after I save you!” I shouted to Neel.
I was straddling the snake’s head now, trying to stab it. But just as its skin had been too tough for Neel’s sword, my arrows couldn’t make a dent. I grabbed the dangling rope from the arrow still stuck in the ceiling and made a quick noose, which I slipped over the snake’s neck. It held! The snake hissed and thrashed around. In the process, it actually dropped Neel. He fell with a thump on the soft earth.
“Go!” I shouted at Neel.
I didn’t even bother to see if he was all right. How long would one magical rope hold this massive, super-strong snake? I shot an arrow into another part of the ceiling, making another noose out of the dangling rope and looping it over the snake’s head. I kept going like that: shooting an arrow into the ceiling, grabbing the rope, threading it under the snake’s chin, and then starting all over again. In this way, I tied the snake with a halo of ropes each attached by a different arrow to the stone ceiling.
One huge bonus of all the ropes was that the snake couldn’t move its head as much. Which was a relief, because I was still sitting astride its neck and could feel my breakfast in my throat.
Of course, the respite wasn’t for too long. The snake’s muscular body bunched and swayed as it tried to free itself, or at least ditch me onto the floor.
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