Scion of the Serpent Read online

  He made himself as comfortable as possible, put his head down, and waited for full darkness.

  To his surprise, he actually dozed off for a while, and when he awoke, it was dark as ink outside. It was time.

  He’d memorized the route back to the temple. Years of practice navigating Odji in darkness or fog, without lamps or torches, had made him proficient at such movement, though the streets were unfamiliar to him.

  He hesitated at the edge of the plaza surrounding the temple. At several points along the tops of the wall, in the towers, and around the front entrance, huge oil lamps burned. Even behind the eyes of the great statue of Set lanterns burned, so that the orbs shone with a terrible red glow that looked down on the entire city.

  But the plaza was mostly dark, and, crouching low, he made his way across using the occasional statue or fountain for cover, waiting to listen for any sign of guardians. Finally, he reached the wall, but of course, the crack was not there. Such precise navigation was impossible under the circumstances. He would have to feel along the wall until he located the opening.

  He looked around at the spires of the city, visible only as dark silhouettes against the stars, and judged that the crack should be to his left. He headed that way, keeping his hand against the stone. He’d traveled perhaps twenty paces before finding it.

  Quickly he rigged his gear, tying the grappling hook to a short piece of rope, which he coiled over his left shoulder. He pulled his dagger from under his tunic and tucked it in his belt, then slung his bag over his right shoulder.

  It was time to climb. He reached as high as he could, wedged his right hand into the opening, then clenched it to wedge it into place. He put his left sandal into the opening, twisting it to secure it in place, and pushed himself up.

  He felt the unfinished edge of the stone dig into the skin of his hand and upper foot. He would be scraped and bleeding well before he reached the top, but the dark stone should hide any traces remaining by sunrise. Carefully he jammed his other hand into the crack, then his other foot.

  Step by painful step he worked his way up the wall. It was so dark, he could only guess his height by looking out at the skyline. He was relatively sure he had gotten high enough to kill him if he fell. Well, that’s reassuring. Get it over quickly.

  Still he climbed, on and on. Then his fingers found a horizontal crack in the stone, one his sharp eyes had spotted earlier in the day and noted as a reference point. He should be high enough to use the grapple. He shifted his grip to free his left arm and carefully unfurled the rope. He couldn’t see the projecting stonework or the grate at all. He’d have to throw by memory.

  He let the hook out on an arm’s length of rope, then swung it in a circle, cringing at the slight whistle it made as it flew through the air. Now!

  He flinched as he heard the hook clatter against stonework, and his fist slipped slightly in the crack. The hook didn’t fall back, but he couldn’t be sure if it was secure. He tried to pull on the rope, but as he did, he felt his fist slip again, ripping the skin on his knuckles. Then his foot slipped completely out of the crack. His fist held for a moment, then ripped free as well.

  He held on to the rope, still slack in his other hand, and struggled to squelch the cry of alarm trying to claw its way out of his throat.

  The rope went tight, almost ripping itself from his hand. He flailed with his now-free right hand, and grabbed the rope with it as well. He slammed into the wall, hung there, spinning in the darkness.

  It was a strain to hold on, but after a minute or so he caught his breath and was able to slip his toes through the loop he’d earlier tied into the end of the rope. He pushed himself up, supporting most of his weight with his foot, then was able to slip his other foot into the loop as well. Carefully, he reached out and found the grate, hooking his fingers through the opening and using it to stop his dizzy spinning.

  That’s better. Still, he could hear the hook grinding against the stonework above as he moved. He had no idea how well the hook was set. He wouldn’t be even remotely happy until he was safely inside the air shaft.

  Feeling along the bottom of the grate, he found something that might be a latch. He reached for his dagger. His hope was that the grates would be designed to hinge out for cleaning. He dug the point of his dagger into the opening and pried. The grate seemed to shift slightly upward in its frame, but it didn’t open. Annoyed, he pried again, harder this time.

  He was so occupied, he didn’t hear the approaching footsteps until they were almost under him. He glanced down to see two guardians of Set, one carrying an oil lamp, walking patrol around the outside of the building. They talked quietly, clearly unaware of his presence.

  I’ll just hang here quietly until—

  Suddenly, with a dry scraping noise, the grate began to fall out of its frame, not swinging out at the bottom as he’d expected, but falling freely out from the top! He tried to catch the falling grate, or at least slow it so that he could keep it from clattering down on the guardians below. As he did, the weight of the grating pushed him away from the wall.

  There was a little scraping noise, the rope went slack, and he fell free, his fingers still hooked into the grating.

  He only fell a few inches before the grating stopped, pointing straight out from the building, and he hung there by his fingers. He felt the wind of the grappling hook fall past his head as the rope slid across his face. Instinctively, he grabbed the rope with his teeth before it could get away and fall to the flagstones below.

  “What was that?” It was one of the guardians.

  “Just bats,” said the other guard. “You’ll get used to it. There are whole colonies of them living inside the air shafts. They’re what the little snakes eat”—he chuckled—“most of the time.”

  Anok hung like a deadweight over their heads, trying to still his pounding heart and the whistle of breath in and out of his nose. The rope was clenched tightly in his teeth, but he couldn’t tell how far the grappling hook was hanging. For all he knew, one of the guards was about to walk right into it.

  But the men continued on their way without incident. He watched them, his fingers slowly going numb, until they disappeared around the end of the building.

  The moment they were gone, he commanded his agonized muscles to pull him up. It was torture, but he was finally able to get one elbow over the edge of the grating, then the other.

  He’d been completely wrong about the grates. They did hinge out for cleaning, but they were hinged at the bottom, not the top. He could only hope that both hinges and grating would be strong enough to continue holding his weight as he climbed on top.

  He managed to swing up and hook his left foot onto he frame of the grating, then to push up and roll completely on top of it. He lay on his back, taking the rope from his teeth and reeling in the hook, careful not to make any more noise. He tucked the rope and hook back into his bag, then carefully climbed into the shaft.

  As the guard had predicted, Anok found the floor of the shaft covered with a slippery layer of bat guano, which in turn was full of squirming insects that lived off the dung. He tried to ignore the nasty sensations as the stuff oozed around the edges of his sandals and between his toes, invisible crawling things scurrying across his feet. Fortunately, the shaft was just tall enough that he could move in a low, ducklike, crouch, and it wasn’t necessary to crawl through the muck.

  If it had been dark outside, it was darker still in the shaft. Only a little way into the tunnel, it made no difference if his eyes were open or closed. He traveled for some distance as the way slanted upward, until the wall, which he’d been following with his fingertips, vanished from under his left hand. As he’d been expecting from his study of Dejal’s map, he’d come to a branch in the tunnel. He took the narrower path to the left, taking him toward the front of the building.

  As he moved past the junction, he couldn’t help but notice that the layer of guano and the insects that went with it vanished, to be replaced by dry, dust
y stone. The way to the bat colony must lie down the other passage. He was happy about that. Not only did it make the going easier and less unpleasant, but stumbling into the colony and disturbing any bats not out feeding would undoubtedly cause a commotion, which in turn might summon the guardians.

  Presently he became aware that there was—if not light—then a pale absence of total darkness. But if there were a source of illumination, he couldn’t determine where it was. He took one of his baby steps forward, and his foot found only empty space.

  He stumbled forward, off-balance, unable to catch himself. He dived forward into the unknown and found himself slamming into the stone floor of the shaft, with only his lower legs dangling over empty space.

  He scrambled the rest of the way across the gap, got onto hands and knees, and peered down the opening. There, at the bottom of a shaft several times the length of his body, he saw a dim rectangle of light and a glint of gold. After his eyes adjusted, he realized that the shaft was several times as long as he was tall and that it opened into the ceiling of a room below, which was faintly illuminated by the flickering light of some torch or lamp. Far down near the floor of that room, he could see the edge of some golden object. It was entirely possible, he guessed, that he was looking down into the main chamber of the temple and at a bit of the golden snake that formed the altar of Set.

  He felt the edge of the opening. There was a ledge on either side just deep enough that he could have gone around, or the opening was narrow enough that he could have easily bridged it with his prone body if he’d known it was there. But the map didn’t show it.

  Or did it? He recalled now a number of markings that he hadn’t recognized on the map, each a box with a cross mark through it. He hadn’t understood what they were at the time. Now he was relatively sure they marked a vertical shaft.

  He muttered a quiet curse. Not only could the map kill him if it were inaccurate, it could also kill him if he simply failed to understand it.

  Reluctantly, he decided it was time to light a candle. He reached into his bag and pulled out a beeswax candle, along with a metal holder that he looped around his thumb to catch any telltale dripping of wax. Next he found his flint, steel, and a small wad of tender. Working only by touch, he lit the candle.

  He saw two interesting things in rapid succession. The first was the snake.

  It was a tiny thing, as long as his arm, but slender like a whip, thinner than his little finger even at its widest point. It was also milky white, almost transparent, its eyes, which seemed strangely to be studying him anyway, were sight-less and pink. As he watched, the snake slithered into a loose coil, all the while keeping its eerie, blind eyes toward him.

  He’d heard the guard say something about snakes eating the bats. Any bats that could get through the grating were doubtless tiny, but it still seemed surprising that such a slender snake could swallow one. Slowly he reached for the snake.

  It waited as his hand grew closer.

  Then, faster than the eye could follow, it struck, its tiny mouth clamping painfully onto the web of his thumb. As Anok yanked his hand back—too late—the snake’s body whipped with surprising power. Then the snake dropped away, taking a tiny mouthful of his flesh with it.

  He cursed—too loudly, he belatedly realized—and shook his wounded hand. He felt no burning or tingling that would suggest the snake was venomous, but the tiny wound bled profusely. He wiped his hand on the front of his tunic and immediately regretted it. It would be conspicuous later, if anyone noticed it while he was trying to leave the inner city.

  He looked at the wound, a small but neat semicircle missing from the web of his thumb. By holding his thumb tight against his palm, he was able to stop the bleeding.

  Anok had never heard of a snake devouring flesh before. Most serpents swallowed their prey whole. Some might strike with their fangs, but only to inject poison, not to strip away meat. Given his wound, though, he supposed nothing he knew of snakes outside Set’s temple might be so certain therein.

  Movement caught his eye, and he spotted the snake slithering away down the tunnel with surprising speed, its pale head still smeared with a red sash of blood. Good riddance!

  It was as he turned his head and moved the candle to follow the fleeing snake that he noticed the other interesting thing. He was sitting next to a human skeleton.

  He reflexively scrambled away from the thing, but quickly realized that it was harmless, nothing but a collection of old dry bones with just enough desiccated tendon left to keep it from falling completely apart. Except for some thick pieces of leather and a few metal buttons and hooks, even its clothing was gone. A short sword of poor quality was still belted loosely around the spine, and a shoulder bag lay spilled on the floor nearby, revealing a few picklocks of metal and bone, a short saw with two ivory handles, some rope, and a grappling hook not unlike Anok’s.

  There was one other item as well, a golden ring in the shape of a snake, with ruby eyes. He had seen priests of Set wear similar rings, but this one had been in the bag, not on the skeleton’s finger.

  A thief then.

  But what killed him? The corpse lay with one cheek against the wall, a skeletal arm still draped protectively across the face. The stone underneath was discolored, probably by the fluids of decay, but he saw no signs of dried blood leading up to that point. No guard would have killed him and left him there, and there was no sign he was wounded elsewhere. There were no sword wounds on the skeleton itself and no signs of a hidden trap that could have killed the thief.

  Anok’s injured thumb throbbed, and he again rubbed the hand against the front of his tunic. The blood had already soaked through, making the silk stick to his breastbone, in about the same spot where his father’s medallion had so often hung. But it seemed as though he felt a curious itching there, as if he were allergic to his own blood.

  That realization got his attention. Poison? But the itching was only on his chest. His hand, other than the bleeding and entirely expected pain, was fine. I’m getting worked up over nothing. It’s just some old bones and a little snake, while real danger is all around. He chuckled quietly, and, as if to convince himself how little the bones bothered him, he picked up the golden ring and added it to his bag. Then he stepped carefully over the bones and continued on his way.

  With the candle, the going was much quicker, and as he progressed, his trust of the map grew. He had a destination now, a hidden spot just out of sight of the entrance where he might be able to rig an easier access point for his next visit. Several times he encountered vertical shafts in the floor, but they were easily crossed, since he could see them. He had only to be careful not to reveal his candle flame to anyone below.

  It was after he crossed one of the gaps that he heard the sound.

  At first, he though he’d imagined it, but he stayed quiet, his ears straining against the silence. There it was again. A rustling noise, like someone running his fingers through dry grass. The source of the noise wasn’t clear. It seemed to come from all around him.

  But then it was gone. He remained motionless for several minutes but heard nothing. Finally, he began to move again.

  He came to another tunnel junction and turned right. As he did, he heard the sound again, louder than before.

  Something moved on the floor in front of him.

  He reached for his sword, but stopped.

  It’s just one of those damned snakes!

  It lay in the middle of the stone floor, its body forming an undulating curve along the stone, its head lifted as though watching him. Though the snake was motionless, still Anok heard the noise from ahead.

  He stepped forward, and as the light of the candle advanced into the gloom, he saw another snake. And another. And another. Until finally the tunnel seemed, despite what the map had said, to terminate in a dead end.

  He cursed. Then he cursed again.

  The wall was moving!

  Nor was it the sliding movement of some mechanical trap. The wall was
throbbing, shifting, flowing, as though alive—

  It was! Snakes! Those slender white snakes. Hundreds of them. Thousands. More than Anok could count. As many as stars in the sky.

  All alive.

  All moving as one.

  The wall of living flesh began to advance toward him, not with any regular motion, but in a series of surging waves, as snakes seemed to fall off the front into a heap on the floor, which was almost instantly swallowed by the moving mass of serpents behind it.

  As it moved, it swallowed up some of the lone snakes lying there. Two of the ones nearest him seemed agitated into action. They slithered forward rapidly, rearing up and striking at the exposed flesh of his legs.

  He grabbed one out of midair, taking it between his hands and ripping it in two.

  But even as he dropped the broken snake to the floor, its fellow sank its needle-sharp teeth into the flesh of his calf. The snake thrashed briefly, then fell away to crawl back toward the approaching mass.

  He cursed Set and all his foul creations. A few of the snakes would barely hurt him, but if the mass of them set upon him all at once—

  Long ago, Teferi had told him a tale passed down through his family, of a river in the dark jungles of Kush, where schools of tiny, sharp-toothed fish swam. No man dared enter that river, for it was said that those fish could strip a man, or even a cow, down to bare bone in just minutes.

  Anok had laughed at such an absurd story.

  He wasn’t laughing now.

  He backed way from the approaching mass. Its progress wasn’t so rapid that it presented any real danger. There was ample time to escape.

  Then the snake that had just bitten him, with its visibly bloody head, joined the mass and disappeared among its squirming fellows. There was a sudden agitation in the mass, radiating out from the point where the lone snake had entered, as though the snakes had just been given exciting news.