Serpent's Silver Read online

  "OW!" St. Helens cried. He held his cheek, looking startled as well as pained. Then a cloud of renewed anger crossed his face. "Why, you young snot!"

  As St. Helens started to rise from his seat, the gauntlet slapped the top of his head, crushing his stockelcap flat, and pushed him back down. The boat rocked; water lapped the top of the gunwales.

  "You stay here, St. Helens," Kelvin said. He now fully appreciated the enormous advantage the gauntlets gave him. They were making a man of him—a man of prophecy that did not exist without them. "I'll go on alone. You go back and tell the others what happened."

  "No, sonny, no!" St. Helens gasped. "I was foolish to have doubted you. I was going by appearances. To me you look and act like a boy."

  Kelvin's gauntlets were already exerting the small amount of strength required to move the lever on the round door. With no squeak whatever, the huge metallic thing rotated, revealing, as in a vision, the sphere's interior. Lights of an alien magic lit up the chamber as brightly as day. In the center of a table waited the parchment. Beside it lay the levitation belt Kian had scorned to take. Next to them, the closet with what to Kelvin appeared to be clocks.

  Kelvin found that he was actually feeling heroic. Getting the upper hand over his father-in-law accounted for it.

  He began reading the parchment. He skipped over the sections concerning the chamber and its other contents as well as the message he had read through Heln's eyes. What he wanted to learn about, and quickly, was the transporter to other worlds.

  "Wait, son!" St. Helens cried from beyond. "We're kin—remember?"

  Kelvin glanced up from his reading, annoyed. "We're not—"

  "I'm Heln's father, at least. If you don't want me along, that's your right. But let me inside with you, please."

  "You can stay where you are."

  "No, I want to see the chamber. I'm from Earth, remember. I might be able to tell things you can't."

  What harm would it do? St. Helens was no worse than many of the men Kelvin had commanded during the fighting for the kingdom of Rud. And St. Helens was his wife's sire. He might hate the thought, but he couldn't deny it.

  "All right. Come on in." He took off his laser, perhaps unnecessarily, and placed it on the table next to the parchment. Now just let St. Helens try something as foolish as he had in the boat! One wrong word from that coarse smoothie mouth and he'd point the laser at him and order him home. No way to treat decent kin, perhaps, but this was St. Helens.

  Obediently, even meekly, St. Helens climbed from the boat and joined him in the chamber. Possibly, just possibly, he had learned. At least the chamber didn't object to the man's entrance; he was a legitimate roundear. At times Kelvin had wondered; after all, surgery on pointed ears could make them look round.

  "You've got your nerve, St. Helens."

  St. Helens looked around, wide-eyed, at the chamber's few contents. "Always have had, son. Nerve is why I'm here. Your old man knew."

  Kelvin decided to ignore him. His gauntlets were bothering him now by feeling warm. Since there was nothing to fear from his father-in-law, he bared his hands and dropped the hero-savers beside the levitation belt.

  He went back to studying the parchment. The instructions were simple in the extreme: "Set the dials, then walk into the transporter. A living presence within the transporter will activate it."

  "Hmm, maybe so," Kelvin said, looking at the closet. How long since the dials on the outside of the closet had been moved? He took a step away from the table, thinking to examine them.

  A sudden movement by St. Helens startled him. He started to turn, but in that moment St. Helens acted. A ham of a fist struck the side of his face. Stars exploded. He reached out, took a wobbly step, stumbled, and collapsed forward. Falling, part of him realized, into the waiting transporter.

  Into—

  Purple flashed inside the closet. It was deep and bright, yet almost black. St. Helens blinked as the color vanished, and with it Kelvin.

  "Gods!" St. Helens said, awed more than he had even been before in his life. "Gods!"

  He shivered from head to toe. I shouldn't have done that! I shouldn't have! But dammit, the kid needed a lesson! Better him than me. Better get out!

  He glanced at the parchment, written in those hen-scratchings that he had never bothered to learn to read. Then down at the levitation belt and the gauntlets.

  "At least I can take the laser. At least that!" he said.

  His hand shook as he picked up the familiar weapon, checking its setting and safety. It would do. Do for old Melbah and, if necessary, for the brat king and an entire army.

  He felt a little better now. The weapon put him in command.

  He would like the levitation belt. He could work out how to use it, he was certain. Take that with him into Aratex, levitate above Conjurer's Rock, and scorch the old crone's feathers. That would end things fast!

  The gauntlets lay like severed hands on the belt. If he was to take one, he might as well take all.

  Reaching down, not letting himself think about it, he grabbed up the gauntlets and quickly slipped them on. He stood for a few moments trying to feel something, anything, but his hands felt just like his hands. Interestingly, the gauntlets had stretched over his hands for a perfect fit: hands twice the size of Hackleberry's.

  "Damn," he said. "Damn!" He flexed and unflexed his fingers, feeling stronger second by second. They would work for him, these fancy gloves; he knew they'd work for him! He would succeed now; he'd have to. With a levitation belt, a laser, and the gauntlets, he had to be very nearly invincible.

  Placing the laser under his shirt and stuffing the levitation belt down beside it, he reflected that he was now as well equipped as he could imagine. Unless the old witch had an atomic rocket hidden, she was finished.

  Feeling good about his suddenly improved prospects, St. Helens left the chamber, closed the door, and climbed back into the boat.

  CHAPTER 9

  Lonny

  THE MORNING SUN WAS partway up, its warming rays lighting the sparsely spaced rocks and plants of the Barrens. Facing the rays, feeling their warmth, Lonny Burk tried to lose her thoughts in the physical sensations of the sunshine, the very light breeze, and the sand she was trickling between her fingers. None of it worked. She was still thinking about him: about Kian Knight and what he was doing for them. She knew he had consumed one or more of the berries, and she knew why.

  A scorpiocrab the size of two of Kian's hands darted from behind a pile of horse droppings, snapped its pincers, moved its eyes in and out on their stalks, and then disappeared behind Jac's tent. They had been in there for an unusual length of time and it worried her. She hated to think of him lying there, his perfect body unmoving and lifeless while his inner self went out to the flopears. It was so much like death, this astral traveling.

  Jac wanted her. She had no doubt of that! Why couldn't she desire him instead of the stranger? She knew Jac was a good man, a fine thief, and a true patriot who wanted to overthrow their king. Such a man should be a logical catch for a girl from Fairview. He had even been in the serpent valley to save her, and of course he had done that, with Kian's help. She had seen him looking at her, appraising her, as the tax collector led her out of town on what had been her father's favorite horse. It could have been the horse that interested him, but she knew it wasn't. Thus Jac had gone alone to try to rescue her, to steal her as he stole the skins. Then Kian had come, Jac had rescued Kian, and Kian had behaved madly or heroically or both and rescued them all. Then they had come here, and now things were proceeding much too quickly. She had hoped to love Kian once, just once, before his leaving.

  But Kian hardly seemed aware of her. When he had charged down to rescue her, she had assumed, naturally enough, that he was somehow smitten with love for her, for why else would he have taken such a terrible risk? He was handsome and evidently from a far realm, and that fitted so nicely with her notions of the ideal man that she had responded instantly. Of course she had urged h
im away, crying to him, "Leave! Oh, leave!" without really meaning it, and of course he had seen right through that and become more determined than ever to rescue her. Somehow she had known that he would be brave and kind and gentle, each when it counted, and then when he had acted with such total mad bravery, actually running up the serpent's neck and ramming in the spear—well, there had been no doubt in her mind or heart.

  Then Jac and Kian had talked, each not wanting to rush to free her in the presence of the other. Men were like that; they considered it a weakness to get openly emotional about women, so they pretended they didn't care. Finally Kian had come to chop away her chains, and she had thanked him effusively and told him she was a virgin—that was another thing about men, their interest in this detail—and he had rubbed her wrists while she thrilled to his touch. She had been about to find a pretext to embrace him, perhaps arranging to fall so he would catch her, and then their lips would meet—but Jac had come up too soon. Jac had acted indifferent, and so had Kian, as if neither had had anything to do with saving her life (there was that man syndrome again), but they had saved it, and that was what counted. She really had nothing to regret, considering that she had almost been eaten by the serpent, yet somehow she wished that the timing had been just a shade different, so that she could have gotten close enough to Kian to break down his masculine reserve and make her preference known.

  She thought back to when she was three years old. Her parents had been working in the field, powerless to avoid this service, and she had been left playing in the yard. In front of her was a stand of trees, screening off their view and hers. Thus she had stumbled while running, the way she had done off and on since as long as she could remember. She fell hard, and was helped to her feet, crying. Her helper, she saw, hovered in midair, and had a very large head and a greenish skin. The fingers of his hands where he held her were webbed.

  "I am Mouvar," the being had said, "and you have a destiny." Then he had flown with her secure in his arms above the fields and the farms. From above she had watched her parents toiling, and the wild creatures moving at the edge of the forest. He had taken her over Serpent Valley, and she had looked down to see a flopear approaching a large serpent. "Someday you will be brought here, but that will not be the end. You will meet someone here and you will love him and then he will leave you and return to a distant world. Remember this when you are grown, for that, too, need not be the end if you do what you can."

  Then the being, so different from anyone she had known, took her back to her backyard and put her down. He rose into the air and up into the clouds. It was a hot day, and when she told her story her parents had believed she had been sun-struck. For years she had tried to dismiss the memory as a dream, and had stoutly denied the prediction. People spoke of other worlds from time to time, and of Mouvar, and always she pretended she did not believe. If Mouvar did not exist, the man she was to love could not return to another world. (She ignored the corollary that the man might never come at all.) For too long a time she had lived with this persistent memory, and tried to abolish it.

  Indeed, it could have been a dream! She could have been struck by the sun, or by the shock of her fall, and suffered a vision concocted from wisps of stories she had heard. What little girl didn't dream of becoming the object of distant love? So probably her parents were right, and the persistence of the memory was simply because of her secret longing for just that sort of thing.

  But when she had been chained out as sacrifice for the serpent, that memory had blazed forth again, undimmed by time or reason. Now she had to believe, because it was her only hope of rescue! She had been brought here, and it must not be the end. It was the place of the vision, and Kian had come, and he could be the man! She remembered now that the vision had not said she would lose him, just that he would leave her but that it need not be the end. Now she had a better notion of what she should do, for she knew herself to be a pretty woman, and men liked that. So if she could just capture Kian's heart before he went far away, then maybe he would change his mind and stay. It certainly seemed worth the try, and even if it wasn't the vision, it was worth doing. Because the dream might not be real, but her love was, however foolishly based. It wouldn't be foolish anymore if she could only—

  Jac stuck his head through the tent flap and called for the dwarf. Heeto came running, his short legs blurring in the way they had as they carried him from the horse he had been grooming to his master's tent.

  "Heeto, bring a shovel!" Jac said.

  "Master, is he—"

  "He must be. It's been far too long."

  "NO!" It burst from her involuntarily. "No, he can't be dead!"

  Jac looked at her with a stricken face. "I don't want him to be, but facts are facts. If he was going to come alive he'd start breathing. It's been too long. He took one berry, same as before, so we know how long it takes."

  "Wait! Wait, because he will come around!"

  "You seem certain."

  "I am!" she said, hoping that her vehemence made up for her uncertainty.

  He studied her, perhaps coming to understand the secret of her heart. If Kian died, there would be no one for her but Jac. But not if Kian died because Jac had buried him too soon. "You want me to wait until he deteriorates?"

  "Yes! Yes, wait that long!" For that would happen long before her love died.

  "The ants will be coming. And the flies."

  "I'll watch! I'll keep them off him."

  Jac shook his head. "That won't be pleasant. Perhaps Heeto—"

  She pushed by him into the tent. Kian lay there on a bearver hide, apparently quite dead. She sat down, crossed her legs and arms, and waited. Jac, accepting the way of it, silently squeezed her shoulder once and then left.

  As time passed and no life returned to the body before her, she reached over and took up his pouch. She tipped it up and four of the berries rolled out into her palm.

  She gazed at them, appreciating their nature. These were otherworld berries, and they caused a round-eared person to do an astral separation. Apparently roundears were rare in Kian's world. They were common here; did that change things? Would the berries work for a local roundear as well as they did for him?

  She had to do something, according to the vision. She had thought it was to make him love her, so he would return, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe she had to bring him back. From whatever realm his spirit had gone to. Suppose, just suppose…

  Quickly, not thinking further about what she did, lest she reconsider, she pushed the berries into her mouth. The taste was strange, though not unpleasant. She hesitated only a moment, then swallowed.

  In mere heartbeats she began to feel that she was in fact leaving her body. She saw the top of the tent much too close. Then she was outdoors, and the sky was as blue overhead as her own eyes in a mirror. There were soft, wispy clouds.

  It this was another vision, it was a fine one! But she was gambling that it wasn't. "Kian, Kian—I am coming for you," she said voicelessly. "Whether this be death or astral separation, I am doing what you have done. I am coming to where you are, Kian. We'll be together, maybe for always."

  The world drifted by, and Serpent Valley. She shuddered, again with no body, knowing what had almost happened in that valley. She had guessed that Jac would come to save her, but had not been sure whether he would come in time, or whether he would choose to free her before the serpent arrived. If the flopears were watching, and saw him do that, they would kill him. Once the serpent came, they would not watch, because they honored the serpent's privacy during special moments such as feeding. So what had been her chances, really? She had had to believe in her private prophecy, because it couldn't happen if she got eaten first. She had had to believe that she would somehow survive—and indeed she had. But she had doubted, too, and now she understood how deeply she had doubted. Jac had not come in time; Kian had. There was the key to her emotion.

  Then she passed another, connecting valley and went right through cottages, rock
walls, and deep through the ground.

  She was in a room. It was an ordinary enough room with a bed. There was a man in the bed, but he was not Kian. Could this be Kian's father, whom Kian had sought? Did this mean that Kian, the man she loved, was after all dead?

  There was something in the room that seemed to her not to belong. It was a spiral serpentskin chime such as Kian had asked about. She felt drawn to it, but could not fathom why. It seemed to her that she hovered beside the object, seeing its silver brightness and scaly beauty. Why was she here? Why, when it was Kian she wanted?

  She heard footsteps outside. Two flopears entered: a girl and a man. "Here he is, Herzig," the girl said, indicating the chime.

  The male flopear stared at the chime, not touching it. "You're certain?"

  "Yes. He's in there. He can tell you himself."

  "You in there, mortal?" Herzig said to the chime.

  "He's sulking," the girl said. "Spirits sulk when trapped. Maybe he think if he be silent you not think he there."

  "You would know, Gerta. I wish I did. I can't talk to spirits the way you can."

  "That no matter. I do it for both. You take out?"

  "Might as well. The ancestor needs a tenant."

  A spirit trapped in the chime? Lonny hardly needed to guess whose spirit that might be! But how had it happened, and how could Kian be released?

  She followed the male Herzig as he carried the silent chime out of the stone house, with Gerta coming along. They crossed a yard and entered a shed. Here lay the long body of a serpent, its head and one eye covered with a heavy greenish glop.

  "Almost healed, not yet activated," Herzig said. "Better a flopear spirit, but mortal spirits also need rest."

  "Not get rest," Gerta said with a smile. "Not in ancestor."

  "No, perhaps not. Not if they don't like being there. But given time—several hundred or a thousand years—a mortal spirit will be the same as a flopear ancestor. It can take that long to become, though usually much faster."