The Serpent Bride

by Sara Douglass

  Then they turned black, as if girding the pyramid’s waist in bands of iron.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Palace of Aqhat, Isembaard

  An Icarii? An Icarii? What the fuck have you done to me, Axis?”

  “Isaiah—”

  “I trusted you. I trusted you! And this is how you—”

  “Isaiah, I am not to blame, I—”

  “Don’t tell me that. I saw you talking with Ezekiel the other night. What were you plotting, eh? I can’t imagine you wanted my throne. What then? Ishbel?”

  “I had nothing to do with it, Isaiah!”

  The two men glared at each other, bodies rigid with anger and shock, faces tight with emotion, then Isaiah turned away, muttering an obscenity.

  He’d known that Axis had nothing to do with the attempt on his life (and he was almost certain who had ordered it), but Isaiah was angry, furious, and he’d needed someone at whom to lash out.

  His chest was still streaked with blood from his wound, which was now stitched and daubed with antiseptic. He’d been lucky. The arrow had struck him square in the chest, but it had hit a section where the golden collar draped down from his shoulders.

  Although the arrow had penetrated the metal links, it had only superficially wounded Isaiah.

  Without the collar he would have been dead.

  It almost did not matter. Aqhat was in crisis.

  Such a brazen assassination attempt, in the middle of a Spectacle, with every high-ranking witness Isembaard could produce, was a disaster for Isaiah. He relied on his image of total strength and invulnerability to maintain control over the military and over the vast and disparate elements of his empire.

  To have an assassin penetrate into the very heart of his power, to have an assassin so brazenly and so easily evade all security, utterly undermined Isaiah’s credibility.

  Everything was made so much worse by the fact the assassin had not been caught. He had simply…vanished.

  Within moments armed men had hustled Isaiah, Ishbel, and Axis off the rooftop and down into Isaiah’s private chambers via a back entrance, Isaiah having recovered enough from the shock of the arrow strike in his chest to shout orders at his generals.

  It was there, in Isaiah’s private quarters, as Zeboath stitched and cleaned his chest wound, that Axis told him the assassin had been an Icarii bowman. Ishbel had since gone to her own chamber to rest, and Isaiah had angrily pushed Zeboath aside, telling him to get out of the chamber.

  “I was not responsible,” Axis said.

  “It was an Icarii,” Isaiah said, although his voice had lost much of its accusation. “One of your people. Is that what you did when you went north to fetch Ishbel, eh? Make contact with the Icarii? Suggest they might like to assassinate me?”

  “If I’d wanted to assassinate you,” Axis snarled, “I would have done it privately and I would have done it well.”

  Isaiah stared at him, then his body subtly relaxed. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Axis to relax slightly, too.

  “It wasn’t me, Isaiah,” Axis said.

  Isaiah made a gesture with his hand, as if to wave away the fact he had accused Axis in the first instance, then poured himself a goblet of wine, draining it in a couple of swallows.

  “Why an Icarii?” he said, wondering what Axis would say. “Why would an Icarii hunt me? Are they assassins for hire now?”

  Axis hesitated.

  “I’m not entirely sure it was an Icarii,” he said.

  Ishbel had dismissed her attendants, and now sat in a chair, rubbing at her aching back.

  She felt dreadful. She hadn’t been feeling well all day—nauseated, headachy, weak—but all those troublesome irritants had magnified fivefold after Isaiah had fallen atop her in the Spectacle Chamber. Her legs were now so wobbly they could scarcely hold her, and her head throbbed as if the arrow had cracked her skull instead of Isaiah’s chest.

  But, thank the gods, he was alive and relatively well. For a long, terrible moment immediately after that arrow had struck Isaiah, Ishbel had thought he was dead.

  She decided to rise and fetch herself some iced wine, but as soon as she moved she gave a gasp as a band of fire encircled her body.

  Her hands instinctively clutched at her belly, then she tried once more to rise in order to walk the fifteen or so steps to the bellpull to summon aid.

  But the instant Ishbel tried to put weight on her legs she collapsed to the floor, unable even to shriek as agony of incredible magnitude encircled her body.

  At DarkGlass Mountain, the black bands encircling the pyramid throbbed and glittered, as if they rhythmically expanded and contracted.

  “What?” said a voice. “Has someone managed to get in before me?”

  Ishbel thought she vaguely recognized the voice. She managed to roll over, toward the voice, grateful that someone was here, then gasped once more, this time in mingled pain and horror and shock.

  Ba’al’uz stood a few paces away.

  She almost didn’t recognize him. His clothes hung in dusty tatters, and likewise his skin—as if the man had been exposed to so much sun his skin had dried and then shredded away from his face and the exposed parts of his limbs.

  There appeared to be an ugly cur skulking about his heels, but surprised as she was to see Ba’al’uz and in such a state, Ishbel gave it no notice.

  Already in shock from the continuing viselike bands of agony contorting her abdomen, Ishbel’s mind couldn’t quite make sense of what she was seeing. Ba’al’uz? Here? Why? And what had happened to him to—

  More viselike agony, and Ishbel screwed her eyes shut and moaned.

  “Are you giving birth?” Ba’al’uz asked, quite pleasantly.

  “I need help,” Ishbel said. “Can you fetch me aid, please. I beg you, Ba’al’uz, please, I need—”

  “I am the only aid you will ever see,” said Ba’al’uz, “and even that not much aid at all, I think.”

  Indescribable pain gripped her. Ishbel wanted to scream. Her mouth hung open, but even breathing was impossible with this much agony consuming her, and to make a sound was utterly beyond her.

  The fingers of one hand scrabbled desperately at the cold floor.

  She felt the baby shift within her.

  She heard Ba’al’uz laugh, softly and pleasantly, and mutter something, as if he were talking to someone else in the room.

  Then she heard the unmistakable sound of a sword being drawn from its scabbard, and she looked up.

  “What do you mean, not an Icarii?” Isaiah said. “You have just finished telling me that—”

  Axis made a gesture of frustration. “It looked like an Icarii—but there was something…wrong. Something different. Gods, Isaiah, I saw him for an instant only, and that from a distance. I can’t give you anything more than that. I’m sorry.”

  “You are of little help to me, Axis.”

  “I am trying my best for you, damn it!”

  “What I need, Axis, is—”

  Right at that moment the Goblet of the Frogs, sitting on the low table in the center of the chamber, screamed in formless terror.

  Isaiah heard it, and Axis sensed it, and both felt it to the core of their beings.

  Isaiah stopped midsentence, staring at Axis.

  Then he blinked.

  “Ishbel,” he said, and ran for the door.

  Ishbel supposed she had managed to rack in a little air, for otherwise she should now be dead, but breathing was of little matter to her now.

  The baby was being born too rapidly for her body to cope. She was rendered virtually soundless save for the occasional gasp, and incapable of moving save for her desperate writhing.

  All Ishbel wanted to do was to get away from the frightful apparition of Ba’al’uz, now standing over her, his eyes gleaming, his sword held ready. All she wanted was for someone to rush in and discover her, and save her, and make this pain stop, make this pain stop, oh, gods, make this pain stop…

  She tried to rea
ch out for the Great Serpent, tried to use the power of the Coil, but Ishbel had not so much as thought about either the Coil or the Great Serpent for what seemed like weeks now, and in her current extremity both seemed very far away, and untouchable.

  Then, suddenly, the baby was being born, and Ba’al’uz was reaching down.

  At DarkGlass Mountain, the bands of black encircling the pyramid now raced for the shafts which fed light into the Infinity Chamber.

  Within moments, every one of the bands of black blood had slithered into the shafts, and were sliding toward the Infinity Chamber.

  Isaiah didn’t even pause to order the armed men waiting outside his chamber to follow him. He ran, using every particle of strength and speed and agility he commanded, through the corridors toward Ishbel’s chamber.

  Axis was a step behind him, and then a bare step behind Axis came the dozen or so armed men whose commander’s desperation had been order enough.

  Isaiah reached Ishbel’s chamber in a matter of moments. There was a guard standing outside, clearly alarmed by the sudden arrival of Isaiah, Axis, and the soldiers.

  “Your sword, fool,” Isaiah snapped, then snatched it from the guard without pausing to wait for him to react.

  Then he was inside, and staring at a tableau that, for the rest of his life, he would never be able to forget.

  Ba’al’uz—a terribly disfigured Ba’al’uz, but Ba’al’uz nonetheless—straightening up from a bloodied Ishbel sprawled on the floor, a baby in one hand and a sword in the other.

  A dog at his heels, an ugly street cur, baying and yapping as if it wanted the baby for its own.

  Isaiah ran for him, but it seemed as if every step he took was in slow motion.

  He took one step, and Ba’al’uz raised the child before him.

  He took another step, and Ba’al’uz lifted his sword.

  He took yet another step, hearing a distant roaring, which he only very dimly realized was himself, and Ba’al’uz took the baby’s head off with one clean sweep of the sword.

  Another step, and Ba’al’uz was turning toward him, an expression of half surprise, half pleasure on his face.

  “I did it,” he said. “Kanubai is born.”

  And then Isaiah took his final step, and he raised his own sword, and he smote Ba’al’uz’ head from his shoulders with such force it flew across the room and smashed against a far wall.

  Isaiah took off the dog’s head with the return swing of the sword.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DarkGlass Mountain, Isembaard

  The Infinity Chamber rang with blackness and death and blood. Manic shadows writhed about the shattered chamber, and as, firstly, Ba’al’uz’ sword struck, then the two strikes from Isaiah’s sword, blood spattered in great, terrible gouts across the walls of the chamber.

  There came a roaring, as if a giant, far, far below, was taking a massive intake of breath in order to bellow.

  The room began to stink. Gaseous fumes and malodorous clouds billowed through the chamber, and the blood staining the walls appeared to thicken and then coagulate, before slumping to the floor in sickening, gelatinous masses.

  Then, from far below, the giant bellowed, and the crack opened into a rent, and the abyss opened into the Infinity Chamber.

  In the River Lhyl, the frogs cowered, and Isaiah, bending over Ishbel in his palace, looked up briefly, the tragedy deepening in his eyes.

  The shadows continued to writhe, gaining strength and thickness with every frenzied turn about the Infinity Chamber. The formless, soundless bellow came once more, this time stilling the shadows.

  As one, they fell to the floor and were absorbed by the masses of coagulated blood.

  All was still.

  Then, something…

  The separate pools of blood were now one, and now were no more.

  Instead, there lay on the floor of the darkened Infinity Chamber the form of a dog-headed man.

  Kanubai.

  He rolled over onto his back, still weak, but far, far stronger than he had been in an infinity of time.

  And flesh! Flesh! The blood of the child, the dog, and Ba’al’uz had all combined, and Kanubai was now infused with the matter and power of all three.

  Best of all, most delicious of all, he was now made flesh with the blood of his enemy, so that he could become his enemy, and his enemy could no longer have any power over him.

  Kanubai raised his muzzle, and sent a thin howl shrieking about the chamber.

  Thousands of leagues to the north, the Skraelings heard, and wept for joy.

  Kanubai whispered to them, and his whispers were magic, and the Skraelings began to alter.

  About Kanubai, as he lay on the floor of the Infinity Chamber, the glass mountain gloated.

  Finally, it had the tool of its revenge.

  Many leagues to the north, Maximilian suddenly awoke from his sleep. He stared into the night, riddled with cold and shock.

  Kanubai had just risen.

  Maximilian had been fast asleep when something in the Twisted Tower shifted, fell over, and shattered. It had been a simple glass vase, but Maximilian had learned that it was an object to be feared.

  Its death would herald Kanubai’s rise.

  Gods, Maximilian thought, how can I ever manage? How can I ever be what is needed to defeat Kanubai? And where are my helpers, my servants? Where Light, and Water?

  He did not sleep again that night.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Palace of Aqhat, Isembaard

  Ishbel refused to believe what she had just witnessed.

  That could not have happened.

  No. She was in agony from the birth, she had lost much blood, she was in shock.

  She could not have just seen what her eyes insisted she had seen.

  Maximilian’s baby was safe. She would find it in a moment, on the floor perhaps, cold and bruised but alive.

  Maximilian’s baby was alive. It must be. It must be, oh, gods, it must be alive…

  Isaiah was shouting…

  At Axis, who had just appeared behind Isaiah’s shoulder.

  Shouting something about Zeboath, and Axis, after giving her one long appalled look, turned and ran, shouting in turn at the armed men who had crowded into the chamber.

  Yes. Zeboath. That’s who she needed. That’s who her baby needed. Zeboath was good. Ishbel felt an overwhelming rush of affection for Isaiah. Isaiah knew what to do. He had killed Ba’al’uz. She was very grateful to him.

  Now, if he could just help her to sit up. If he could just hand her the baby, then all would be well.

  “Ishbel…” Isaiah dropped the sword, and Ishbel winced at the noise of it clattering to the floor.

  He bent down to her, gathering her into his arms and lifting her as easily as if she had been the baby.

  “My baby,” she said. “Please, Isaiah, give me my baby.”

  He turned about so that she faced away from Ba’al’uz’ body and that of…

  Ishbel began to moan, and Isaiah held her close, and rocked her back and forth, murmuring to her as gently as if she were a baby herself, and Ishbel began to weep.

  Zeboath passed a trembling hand over his eyes.

  He had just spent an hour with Ishbel, now settled in a chamber distant from the bloodied mess where she’d given birth, and he felt drained and barely able to talk.

  “Well?” said Isaiah.

  They were standing outside the closed door of Ishbel’s chamber, he, Isaiah, and Axis.

  “Ishbel is well enough,” said Zeboath, “considering what she has just gone through. The birth was sudden, and thus very painful, but it did her surprisingly little damage. Often, you see, when babies come this quickly, they—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Isaiah. “Ishbel is well?”

  “Well enough in body,” said Zeboath. “But in spirit…”

  They stood in silence a moment, each remembering the frightful, bloody scene where Ishbel had given birth.

  “She keeps
asking me for the baby,” Zeboath said. “She says she wants to hold the baby. But how can I give it to her? Gods, I can’t sew that head back on! And I can’t give her…I can’t give her the…headless…I can’t…”

  Axis put a hand on Zeboath’s shoulder. “You have done more than enough, Zeboath. Thank you.”

  Zeboath took a deep, shuddery breath. “If it is any consolation, I do not think the baby would have lived, anyway. It was early, yes, even though by a month only, but its lungs had not formed, and its body was severely malnourished. Both Ishbel and I had been worried about its lack of movement over these past weeks. I think perhaps the drugs and poisons Ba’al’uz gave Ishbel during the journey through the FarReach Mountains…”

  “You told her this?” Isaiah said.

  Zeboath nodded. “She needed to know, Excellency.”

  Isaiah sighed. “Yes. She needed to know. I thank you as well, Zeboath. You have done your best for both of us today. Axis, can you supervise the clearing of Ishbel’s chamber? Take away Ba’al’uz’ body and that of the damned dog and burn the damned things. And, ah, speak to the palace chamberlain about a burial for the baby. Tell him that I want a full ceremony at dawn tomorrow. The least we can do for Ishbel is to farewell the child in full due. Then meet me back in my private chamber. We need to talk.”

  Axis nodded, and left.

  “Is Ishbel awake?” Isaiah asked Zeboath.

  “Yes. I have given her an herbal draft to sedate her, but she is still awake.”

  “Good,” said Isaiah.

  Ishbel lay completely still on her bed in the darkened chamber, weeping great silent tears that rolled down her cheeks and soaked into her pillow.

  For the first time in weeks she was thinking about Maximilian. All she could think about was how much he’d wanted this child.

  A family of his own. Children of his own, when for so many long, terrible years that concept had been a dream beyond reach.