Riding the Serpent's Back (77 page)

Someone was still laughing.

Then she saw that there were two men on one of the horses: one of them, a slight figure, was naked, his body painted gaudily, with smudged writing all over his arms and legs. This was the one who was laughing, cackling madly.

“What do we do with him?” asked one of the Ixitans. “We found him lying in the open, just like this. Can’t get any sense out of him at all.”

Monahl was wearing the priest’s clothing she had kept under the maid’s outfit – the soldier was clearly taking her at face value.

Then she looked more closely at the maniac.

“Red!” she gasped.

For a moment, he responded, his mad cackle faltering. She rode across and reached out to hold his hand. “Red,” she repeated. “It’s me: Monahl of Camptore. Your sister, Red. What’s happened? Where’s Herold?”

Suddenly, he stopped laughing in mid-flow and stared at her through slit eyes. “She’s dead,” he hissed. “I killed her. The bitch-Oriole is dead!” And then he started to laugh again.

She looked at the man who was holding him. “Where did you find him?” she asked.

He pointed across to the west. “About a leap that way,” he said.

“I have to get there,” she said. “This is Red Simeni. Chi’s brother. Do you understand? You have to get him back to Porphyr.” She looked back to the west. “But I must see where you found him.”

~

Two of the Ixitan soldiers escorted Monahl, while the rest of the party headed south.

“Here?” she asked. The men nodded.

They had brought her to a shallow valley, scooped out of the Heartlands. The ground was dry and stony, scattered with cacti and a little thorn scrub. Just like any other place in this barren wilderness.

She dropped down from her horse and looked about.

“Mind,” said one of the men. He was pointing a short distance away. “There’s a hole over there. Don’t know how deep.”

Monahl approached it cautiously. There was a crack in the exposed rock, stretching along the centre of the valley. It was about a handspan wide.

“Could easily break a leg in a hole like that,” said the man.

Monahl stared at the crevasse. She knew Herold had found a cave of some sort, but no man could fit through such a narrow gap as this.

She sat down, legs crossed, and rested her head in her hands.

This was the place. She knew this had to be the place.

She closed her eyes and he came to her instantly. She saw him in a cavern, lit by dimly flickering candles. He was on his knees, slumped back against a knob of rock. Smiling.

He was cast in stone, she realised, and then she saw the dagger driven through his chest and into the lump of rock behind.

“Don’t grieve, child,” he said. “I am at peace.”

“Red did this to you, didn’t he?” asked Monahl.

Herold gave a barely perceptible nod. “Don’t blame him,” he said. “I made him do it. I had to. It was the only way I knew to unravel the pact.” His eyes flicked down, to the handle of the dagger, sticking up from his chest. “The blade carved from the wall at Divine. It carries the Charm of that city’s pact.”

With a flick of his eyes, he indicated the rock he was joined to. Now Monahl saw the shape of bones, cast into the stone. “Before I brought Red here,” said Herold, “I summoned the bones of your great-grandmother through the underworld of Michtlan. They carry the Charm of the pact of Zigané, for which she gave her life.” He closed his eyes for a long time, then opened them and continued. “And this. The blood of a mage. All together, we turned the pact.”

Now Monahl knew why Herold had not chosen her to assist him: she would never have killed him like this. “You knew from the start that this would happen if I persuaded you to leave Divine,” she said.

He blinked, and gave a slight nod. “I’m sorry, child,” he sighed. “It was the only way.” Slowly, a stone arm shifted position, and he moved a hand to rest on the bones behind him. “In death, I am reunited with my love, Monahl. My bones, and Jobahl’s, are locked together for eternity.”

The vision started to blur, and Monahl clung on, desperate to prolong it.

“Don’t grieve, child.” The voice, fading, receding. “In death I am happier than I could ever be in life.”

He was gone, and all that remained was a vague after-image of Herold, locked to the bones of his long-departed love.

Monahl opened her eyes.

The two Ixitan soldiers were still there, watching over her.

“Let’s go,” she said. “It’s over. It’s all finally over.”

When Leeth headed south again with Monahl and some of the others, things were starting to find some sort of order.

The cat-people disappeared into the jungle almost as abruptly as they had appeared; indeed, it was almost as if they had slipped out of people’s memories, too, they were so rarely referred to in the many later accounts of the battle.

Chi was in Tule, leading a delegation to negotiate a settlement with the remains of the Embodiment’s hierarchy. “This is only the beginning,” he told Leeth, before they parted again. “A new start.” Leeth had already heard cynics relating the new start to the traditional belief that a new birth should always be grieved, because it inevitably led to a new death, in the course of time. Chi had not been exaggerating the difficulty of his task: the fighting might be over, but the negotiations would be long and hard. Leeth was glad to be getting away from all that.

Red had stayed in the north, as he gradually returned to his senses. Nominally, he was part of Chi’s delegation, putting to use his experience of high-level diplomacy, but really he was just there so Chi could keep an eye on him and ensure his healing continued. In one of his more lucid spells, Red had got a faraway look in his eyes. “I thought I might start an inn,” he told Leeth. “Somewhere on the Rim. Somewhere quiet. No distractions. No snakes.” And then he had started to cackle again.

Shortly after his return to Edge City, Leeth sought out Cotoche. “She went to the Falls,” one of the Raggies told him. “You’ll catch her if you hurry.”

Right until he saw her – a lone figure, ahead of him on the trail – he had no idea how he would react. Suddenly, he couldn’t bring himself to hurry after her. It was all over now. He felt an overwhelming sadness that things should be like this. What had happened in the past was so distant now, so remote.

After a short time, she glanced over her shoulder. She saw him, gave a start, then ran back into his embrace. He held her tight for as long as he dared, all his certainties dispelled so easily.

Then she pulled back and looked at him. Before she could speak, he said, “He’s well, and in Tule, putting the final seal on our victory.”

She hugged him hard, and he felt the wetness of her tears soaking through his shirt.

He released her and they walked slowly on, towards the Falls. As they went, he explained, as best he could, what had happened.

“Donn had been orchestrating it all for so long,” he said. “Before he died he asked me if I was worthy, if any of us were worthy. I thought he was telling me it was all some kind of test: his way of making sure the next generation was worthy of his legacy of Talents. The last game of a dying mage.”

She studied his expression. “But Chi disagreed,” she said softly, perceptively.

He nodded. “He thought that might be a part of it, but yes, he disagreed. When I told him what I saw in Laisan – that Donn and Oriole were the same person, and that Donn had therefore been steering and manipulating both sides of the conflict – he just nodded and said it explained a lot of what had puzzled him. ‘A great mage doesn’t simply die,’ he said. ‘He has to go in a way that will live on in legend. Our father has been manufacturing the conditions he required for his own downfall: a release of earth-energy, a breaking of ancient pacts and a renewal of others, the passing on of his gifts to a new generation.’”

Cotoche was not convinced. “But if he’s been orchestrating everything in such detail, and for so long, then how do we know we have done the right thing by playing his game?”

Leeth stopped and took Cotoche’s hands. “Donn saw to it that his death was the start of a new age,” he said. “A new flourishing, a spreading out of the people of the Rift. My father’s death has been blessed by the gods.”

Cotoche still looked puzzled, and so Leeth moved his hands to her shoulders and turned her so that she was facing the Burn Plain.

The mist of the Falls was not as thick today, and as they looked out the reason soon became apparent: the lava had crusted over, the water was no longer dropping directly onto molten rock.

Leeth watched Cotoche’s eyes roving over the newly hardened landscape, just as his own had done hours before when he had first seen this sight. That was when he had said goodbye to Monahl. “I’m going home,” she had told him. “Home to see my daughter.” And then she had smiled. “And I’m going to walk there.”

Now, he watched as understanding of the transformation penetrated Cotoche’s mind.

“It’s the beginning of a new Era,” he said. He waved a hand towards the Burn Plain. “We have a whole new continent to discover.”

Cotoche smiled through her tears. “Is it really as stable as it looks?” she asked.

Leeth laughed. “Come with me,” he said. “Let’s go and see.”

Keith Brooke
's first novel,
Keepers of the Peace
,
appeared in 1990, since when he has published six more adult novels, six
collections, and over 60 short stories. For ten years from 1997 he ran the
web-based SF, fantasy and horror showcase
infinity plus
, featuring the work of
around 100 top genre authors, including Michael Moorcock, Stephen Baxter,
Connie Willis, Gene Wolfe, Vonda McIntyre and Jack Vance. In 2010
infinity plus
was relaunched as an ebook imprint.

His novel
Genetopia
was published in hardback by Pyr in February 2006 and was
their first title to receive a starred review in
Publishers Weekly
;
The
Accord
, published by Solaris in 2009, received another starred
PW
review and was optioned for film. His novel,
The Unlikely World of
Faraway Frankie
, came out from Newcon Press in April 2010. His most recent science-fiction novel,
alt.human
(published in North America as
Harmony
), was shortlisted for the
Philip K Dick Award.

Writing as Nick Gifford, his teen fiction is published by Puffin, with one
novel also optioned for the movies by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish's
Caveman Films. He writes reviews for
The Guardian
, teaches creative
writing at the University of Essex, and lives with his wife Debbie in
Wivenhoe, Essex.

For full details of Keith Brooke's work, including his range of ebooks,
see:
www.keithbrooke.co.uk
.

Keith Brooke at
Amazon (US)
and
Amazon (UK)

Novels

Keepers of the Peace

Expatria

Expatria Incorporated

Lord of Stone

Piggies
(as Nick Gifford)

Flesh and Blood
(as Nick Gifford)

Incubus
(as Nick Gifford)

Genetopia

Erased
(as Nick Gifford)

The Accord

The Unlikely World of Faraway
Frankie

alt.human
(published as
Harmony
in North America)

Collections

Head Shots

Parallax View
(with Eric Brown)

Embrace: tales from the dark side

Segue: into the strange

Faking It: accounts of the General
Genetics Corporation

Liberty Spin: scientifiction

Memesis: modifiction

Edited

Infinity Plus
(with Nick Gevers)

The Sub-genres of Science Fiction:
strange divisions and alien territories

Keith Brooke at
Amazon (US)
and
Amazon (UK)

science fiction, fantasy,
horror and crime ebooks for Kindle and other formats
by top authors, including:

Keith Brooke, Eric Brown, John Grant,
Anna Tambour, Kaitlin Queen, Garry Kilworth, Iain Rowan, Neil
Williamson, Robert Freeman Wexler, Lisa Tuttle and others.

“If Roald Dahl had written
science fiction, he would have written this kind”

“twists and turns galore ... the
taut tale-telling rattles along at good speed; and the solution to the mystery
is both startling and satisfying. Recommended.”

“very inventive and clever...
five stars for entertainment value.”

“a story of scope and vision, as
intricate as a snowflake... astoundingly believable”

For full details of infinity plus ebooks see
www.infinityplus.co.uk