Riding the Serpent's Back (73 page)

He remembered, too, the time back at Porphyr Hill, just after Joel’s attack on Chi: Herold’s insistence that Leeth should be despatched to tackle Donn, his looks of fear whenever Oriole’s name was mentioned. Herold had been adamant that they did not want mages involved in this battle. Mages were dangerous and selfish, he had insisted. “Can’t you see?” he had cried. “You can’t let mages go interfering in all this, you just can’t!”

Leeth had been suspicious, Red realised. “What about you?” he had asked, and Herold had tried to deflect the question by claiming to be different.

Red started to watch Herold with new purpose. So intense! So obsessed! He became certain that Herold would not get into such a state on the behalf of another. He was doing it for himself. Mages only ever worked for their own interests.

“Why are you here?” Red asked him, late one night, when the mage was too exhausted to fight. “What’s your real reason?”

Herold looked at him, suddenly wary, and Red knew he was right. “What do you think?” the mage asked.

“The power? A battle between you, Donn and Oriole? Is that what it is?”

Herold shrugged. “Believe what you will,” he said in a weak voice.

“Whose side are you really on?”

Herold laughed, his throat dry. “My own, of course,” he said. “Aren’t we all? You? You’re not here for the good of humankind, exactly, are you? You’re here to satisfy your own ego. You want to strut back into the camp as the man who helped the man who destroyed Samhab. Don’t deny it! You’d only make even more of a fool of yourself.” Now, Herold leaned towards him. “What does it matter, eh? I get what I want, you get what you want and if it works Samhab will fall and Chi gets what
he
wants. Survival is all, remember. You have my word that my goals are not incompatible with your own.”

Red looked away. A mage’s word was worth nothing – he knew that.

And now he knew the real reason Herold had chosen him as his assistant. Monahl was too close to him: she would have seen through his pretence in an instant.

He had chosen Red because he took him for a fool.

He turned away. Suddenly he couldn’t bear the mage’s presence, it made his skin creep.

It was a game no more, he knew. Their mutual hostility was confirmed. At last it was for real: it was Red against Herold.

~

He studied him minutely from that point on. Know your enemy.

Herold was aware of this, of course. It seemed to amuse him. If Red had stopped treating life as a game, Herold seemed suddenly to have started.

They worked on for two long days. Herold chipped away at the rocks until there was barely a space remaining un-marked. He instructed Red to go over everything, renewing the paint and chalk where it had been smudged or chipped away.

Finally, Red could take no more.

“What is it?” he cried. “Will you tell me what is going on?”

He had not realised how close he was to plunging into madness, but now that it had broken through he felt a sense of relief. It was there, in the open: he had finally cracked.

Herold looked at him, about to tease him until it seemed he realised that this was a new kind of outburst. He stared at Red, and slowly began to smile. “I do believe,” he said, “that you are about to break under the strain. You have my respect, Red Simeni: I had anticipated that you would crack far sooner.”

Red stepped towards him. “I’ve had enough,” he said, in as menacing a tone as he could muster. He was so tired! “Enough of your snide remarks. Enough of your ambiguities and your bending of the truth. D’you hear?”

Herold raised his fists mockingly. “You wish to fight?” he said. “I warn you: I’m very good.”

Red froze in horror. That phrase was familiar.

Then the mage arched his eyebrows in an expression Red knew so well. He laughed now, a cruel, harsh rattle of a laugh. Then, in another giveaway gesture, he tipped his head and stared at Red down the length of his flaring nose.

Oriole!

After so long: Red had dropped his guard and now the bitch had trapped him. Had ‘Herold’ been one of Oriole’s guises all along, or had she merely assumed his role at some point? It hardly mattered – she had to be stopped.

Something glinting nearby on the floor caught Red’s eye. The sacred blade!

He lunged for it and swung it through the air to fend the mage off.

He knew he had chosen his weapon well when he saw the panic in his enemy’s eyes.

The mage backed away and Red followed until they had traversed the chamber. Soon, Herold came to stand with his legs pressed up against the holy altar.

The mage tried to laugh, but the sound was hollow. Slowly, he raised one hand, the forefinger out-stretched.

Red watched the hand, the finger, as it rose. Soon it would be pointing at him. Already his feet felt as if they had grown into the floor. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the look of triumph growing on Herold’s face.

His enemy started to speak. “All I have to do is—”

Red jerked forward, raised the knife.

Herold dropped to his knees, trying to twist out of the line of attack.

Red was ready for him and adjusted his lunge. The mage cried out as the blade drove deep into his chest. He looked surprised, as if something impossible had just happened.

Red leaned hard on the knife, driving it deeper and deeper. When it had stopped moving, he pulled himself away and slumped to his knees sobbing.

He made himself look up. The knife had driven right through Herold’s chest until it had emerged at the back and sunk deep into the rock-and-bone altar.

Red looked at the mage’s face, startled at the rapid succession of expressions flickering across it. Finally, the facial muscles relaxed, and the features settled into a faint smile.

Red couldn’t make himself move. He felt drained, his soul shattered.

Then he sensed a change in the hum of energy rising up from the rock. A shifting, some deep-seated alteration. Soon, the buzz became an audible groan and the chamber was filled with the sounds of the disturbed rock.

The pact, he realised. Somehow the pact had been disrupted.

He stared at the dead mage, the knife fixing him to the rock-and-bone altar which was now bathed in blood.

Something was changing.

He reached out and the mage’s body was cold already. Hard. It was turning to rock.

The ground started to tremble and the candles arranged around the walls flickered.

Red came to his senses. He ran across to the oval mouth of the chamber, seized the swinging rope ladder and started to climb.

When he emerged, he saw that in the time he and Herold had been underground the nomads had moved on. All they had left behind was a single horse, tied to a clump of scrub.

And then the ground rolled and rumbled as the earthquake that had been restrained for so long broke loose. Red was thrown to the ground, and the horse that had waited all this time suddenly broke free and galloped away in a panic.

He rose to his feet and was immediately thrown over again. He decided to stay down, hugging the ground until the worst was past. He pulled his knees up to his chin and lay on his side. He started to giggle, and soon he was laughing madly, unable to control himself any longer.

Leeth rode hard on the horse Chi had given him. He thought sadly of Sky. Desperately, he hoped that the injured courser had somehow survived her wounds and – unburdened by Leeth – escaped the Zochi jungle. But he had no way of knowing: he had severed the bond between them in the belief that she should die free. He wished she was with him now.

For the first time, he pushed his shape-changing abilities to their limit to aid his passage through hostile territory. Back in the Zochi, his brief shift into the form of a jaguar had been induced by sheer panic. This was different. This was a conscious decision, something he forced upon himself. He tried several different guises before settling on that of an old woman: unthreatening, unattractive to a young soldier. The most dangerous times came when she was challenged about the horse. “It’s my master’s and if you lay a finger on it he’ll have your balls, he will!” Her cover story was that she worked in the household of a Senator from Annatras: her master was a good man and he’d given her the horse and a month’s liberty – now over – to tend to her daughter in Khalaham, who had gone down with the ophidy. Mention of the snake-plague and the sight of her mourning-red headscarf almost always protected Leeth from harassment.

It was strange, living in such an immobile old body, with the flesh hanging loose, the sad, deflated dugs dragging down from her chest. But the strangest thing of all was how it simultaneously felt so natural. It would be easy to slide into a permanent acceptance of this new form, to believe that it had always been so.

He travelled for twenty days, resuming what he remembered of his original form only when he was deep in the northern pine forest, far beyond the upheavals of the Rift.

As he followed the overland trade routes which cut through the mountain passes of the Rim, he thought over and over about what lay ahead.

Donn had said he would kill him if he ever tried to enter his home again before he was deemed worthy to share the old mage’s company. Was he now worthy?

He searched inside himself to see if anything had changed.

He had survived a number of attempts on his life, and a near-fatal illness. But did that make him a better person, or merely a lucky one?

He felt he had settled more deeply into the person he was: he was starting to reconcile himself to his growing abilities, he was learning to control and use the shifting, learning to recognise the danger signs that might presage another crisis.

But more worthy?

The only way to find out was to confront Donn. Test the mage’s response.

He tried to stick to more practical matters. He had successfully negotiated the militarised zone of the Rift: now all he had to do was get in to see Donn. He remembered the gatekeeper, smiling at him through his enormous moustache. “I wouldn’t,” he had said, when Leeth had approached the barrier across the causeway that first time.

The only other way in was via the narrow obsidian bridge which he had only been able to cross when Donn had taken pity on him: he knew he would be unable to cross it alone.

Somehow he had to get past Donn’s gatekeeper.

~

He looked down along the track towards the causeway. Beyond, the perfect creamy-white cone of Donn’s volcano-home thrust itself up from the jagged rocks of the beach. It was a fine, blue-skied day, yet the sea around the volcano was rough, driven by some undetected wind.

The blue of the sky was marred only where black smoke rose from the vents at the top of the volcano.

Leeth looked up as a pair of black-backed gulls flew screeching over his head. He thought of Donn’s Charmed flock of birds, then stopped himself. It would be so easy to give in to his fears.

He twitched the horse’s reins and made his way slowly down the track.

His body ached with every move, every breath. He felt so tired, so much so that even his thoughts seemed more sluggish in this shifted head of his. He ran a hand through his wispy beard, across his hawk’s beak nose.

So tired.

At the sound of the horse, the gatekeeper stepped out of his shelter behind the outcrop of rock.

Leeth stared impassively at the man’s startled face.

“Master!” said the gatekeeper. “I...”

Leeth arched his eyebrows in an expression he remembered from Donn’s guise as the courser-trainer, Muranitharan Annash. He had studied the old man so closely when he had visited before, but still there was so much to remember!

“Raise the barrier.”

“But...”

Leeth fixed him with a stare.

The gatekeeper hesitated, then bowed his head. “I’m sorry, master. You surprised me. A change of plans?”

Leeth remained silent. Let the man interpret it as anger if he wanted. It was all so much effort in this frail old body. So tiring. Now he appreciated why Donn had been so irritable before.

The gatekeeper went to the barrier and swung it wide open. “Are we expecting a visitor, master? Is that why you’re looking like that?”

“No,” Leeth snapped. “No visitors. Let nobody by until I leave.”

The gatekeeper nodded, and stepped back to let Leeth pass.

Leeth understood what the gatekeeer had meant:
Looking like that
. Herold had been right when he had mocked Leeth for believing Donn’s frail old man act: that was just another guise. A shifter need only look like that for a purpose. And that purpose had been to deceive Leeth into believing that Donn could only passively observe what was happening.

Herold had been right: Donn was more involved than they had believed.

Leeth suddenly had the awful impression that they were all pawns in a battle between the two mages, Donn and Oriole, over the power of Samhab.

Or was it three? Was Herold using Chi and the others, just as Donn and Oriole appeared to be?

He rode towards the volcano, concentrating on his form, his act. He had come so far: he couldn’t betray himself now.

~

The housekeeper was waiting at the mouth of the main entrance to Donn’s subterranean home.

He looked flustered and uncertain. “A change of plans?” he said, when he had helped Leeth down into his wheelchair. “Is it a change of plans? But I have everything ready.”

Leeth wheeled himself into the entrance hall and was surprised to see it had been stripped of its previous finery.

As it started to dawn on him that he had come too late, he drove himself on, arms pumping as he headed deeper into the heart of the volcano. Everything of value had been removed.

Donn’s absence looked as if it was to be a permanent one.

The housekeeper scampered along in his wake.

Eventually, they came to the wide, open-sided cavern that looked out over the choppy sea.

Leeth rolled along it until he came to the lava pool. Its surface had been smooth the last time Leeth had been here, but now it seethed and bubbled. He could see shapes, but the details were hard to distinguish.