Serpent Mage (24 page)

“The creation of the four worlds was successful, as was the imprisonment of our enemies. We took the mensch and brought them to havens of peace and safety. Such a world was Chelestra.

“This world was the one of which we were the proudest. It hangs in the darkness of the universe like a beautiful blue-white jewel. Chelestra is made completely of water. On the outside, it is ice; the chill of the space around it freezes the water solid. Within Chelestra's heart, we placed a seastar, which warms the water and warms as well the durnai, hibernating, living beings that drift around the seasun. The mensch call them seamoons. It was our intent, after the mensch had lived here many generations and become accustomed to it, that they should move onto these seamoons. We would remain here, on this continent.”

“This isn't a seamoon?” Alfred looked confused.

“No, we needed something more solid, more stable. Something that more closely resembled the world we left behind. Sky, sun, trees, clouds. This realm rests on a huge formation of solid rock formed in the shape of a chalice. Runes cover its surface with intricate patterns of force both outside the stone and within.

“Inside the cup is a mantle of molten rock, covered by a surface crust not unlike our original world. Here we formed clouds, rivers and valleys, lakes and fertile land. Above all arches the dome of the sky that keeps the sea at bay while letting in the light of the seasun.”

“You mean,” said Alfred, awed, “that we are now surrounded by water?”

“The turquoise blue you see above you that you call sky is not sky as you know it, but water,” said Orla, smiling. “Water that we could share with other worlds, worlds such as Abarrach.” Her smile faded. “We came here, out of despair, hoping to find peace. We found instead death, destruction.”

“We built this city with our magic,” Samah continued. “We brought the mensch to live here. For a time, all went well. Then, creatures appeared, coming up out of the deep. We couldn't believe what we saw. We, who had made all the animals of all the new worlds, had not made these. They were ugly, horrible to look on. They smelled foul, of decay and putrefaction. The mensch called them dragons, naming them after a mythical beast of the Old World.”

Samah's words created images in the mind. Alfred listened and saw and was carried back with the head of the Council to a far distant time….

… Samah stood outside, upon the steps of the Council Chamber, and gazed in anger and frustration down upon the newly made city of Surunan. All around him was beauty, but he took no comfort in it. The beauty, instead, seemed a mockery. Beyond the high, glistening, flower-covered city walls, he heard the voices of the mensch beat against the marble like the pounding of a storm-tossed sea.

“Tell them to return to their homes,” Samah ordered his son, Ramu. “Tell them all will be well.”

“We told them, Father,” Ramu replied. “They refuse.”

“They are frightened,” Orla explained, seeing her husband's face harden. “Panicked. You can't blame them. After all they've been through, all they've suffered.”

“And what about all
we've
suffered. They never think of that!” Samah returned bitterly.

He was silent long moments, listening to the voices. He could distinguish the races among them: the raucous blaring of the humans, the flutelike laments of the elves, the booming bass of the dwarves. A terrible orchestra that, for the first time in its existence, was playing in concert, instead of each section trying to drown out the other.

“What do they want?” he asked finally.

“They are terrified of these so-called dragons. The people want us to open the gates to our part of the city,” Ramu told him. “They think they will be safer inside our walls.”

“They are just as safe in their own homes!” Samah said. “The same magic protects them.”

“You can't blame them for not understanding, Father,” Ramu replied scornfully. “They are like children, frightened by the thunder, who seek the safety of the parents' bed.”

“Open the gates, then. Let them in. Make room for them where you can and do what you can to keep the damage they cause to a minimum. Make it clear to them that it is only temporary. Tell them that the Council is going out to destroy the monsters and, when this is done, we expect the mensch to return peacefully to their homes. Or as peacefully as can be expected of them,” he added in acerbic tones.

Ramu bowed and went to do his father's bidding, taking with him the other servitors to assist.

“The dragons have done no great harm,” said Orla. “I am sick of killing. I entreat you, again, Samah, to try to talk with them, find out something about them and what they want. Perhaps we can negotiate—”

“All this you said before the Council, Wife,” Samah interrupted her impatiently. “The Council voted and the decision was made. We did not create these creatures. We have no control over them …”

“And so they must be destroyed,” Orla concluded coldly.

“The Council has spoken.”

“The vote was not unanimous.”

“I know.” Samah was cold, still angry. “And to keep peace in the Council and in my home, I will talk to these serpents, learn what I can about them. Believe it or not, Wife, f, too, am sick of killing.”

“Thank you, Husband,” Orla said, attempting to slide her arm through his.

Samah stiffened, held himself away from her touch.

The Sartan Council of Seven left their walled city for the first time since they had arrived in this new world of their own creation. Joining hands, performing a solemn and graceful dance, the seven sang the runes and called upon the winds of ever-shifting possibility to carry them over the walls
of the center city, over the heads of the wailing mensch, to the nearby shores of the sea.

Out in the water, the dragons awaited them. The Sartan looked on them and were appalled. The serpents were huge, their skin wrinkled. They were toothless and old, older than time itself. And they were evil. Fear emanated from the dragons, hatred gleamed in their red-green eyes like angry suns, and shriveled the very hearts of the Sartan, who had seen nothing like it, not even in the eyes of the Patryns, their most bitter enemy.

The sand, which had once been as white and gleaming as crushed marble, was now gray-green, coated by trails of foul-smelling slime. The water, covered with a thick film of oil, washed sluggishly up on the polluted shore.

Led by Samah, the Council members formed a line upon the sand.

The dragons began to slither and leap and writhe. Churning the seawater, the serpents stirred up great waves, sent them crashing to shore. The spray from the waves fell on the Sartan. The smell was putrid, brought a horrid image. They seemed to be looking into a grave in which lay moldering all the hastily buried victims of sinister crimes, all the rotting corpses of the battlefield, the dead of centuries of violence.

Samah, raising his hand, called out, “I am head of the Council, the governing body of the Sartan. Send one of your kind forward to talk with us.”

One of the dragons, larger and more powerful than the rest, reared its head out of the water. A huge wave surged to shore. The Sartan could not escape it, and were drenched to the skin, their clothes and hair wringing wet. The water was cold, chilled them to the bone.

Orla, shivering, hastened to her husband's side. “I am convinced. You are right. These creatures are evil and must be destroyed. Let's do what we have to, quickly, and leave.”

Samah wiped seawater from his face, looking at it, looking at his hand in awe and perplexity. “Why do I feel so strange? What is happening? As if my body were suddenly made of lead, heavy and clumsy. My hands don't seem to belong to me. My feet cannot move—”

“I feel it, too,” cried Orla. “We must work the magic swiftly—”

“I am the Royal One, king of my people,” called the serpent, and its voice was soft and barely heard and seemed to come from a far distance. “I will speak with you.”

“Why have you come? What do you want?” Samah shouted above the crashing of the waves.

“Your destruction.”

The words twisted and writhed in Samah's mind as the dragons twisted in the water, dipping their serpent heads in and flinging them back out, flailing and lashing their bodies and tails. The seawater foamed and boiled and surged erratically over the shore. Samah had never faced any threat as dire as this one and he was uncertain, uneasy. The water chilled him, numbing limbs, freezing feet. His magic could not warm him.

Samah raised his hands to draw the runes in the air. He began to move his feet in the dance that would paint the runes with his body. He lifted his voice to sing the runes to the wind and the water. But his voice sounded flat and raucous. His hands were like claws, tearing the air. His feet moved in opposing directions. Samah stumbled, clumsy, inept. The magic washed away.

Orla tried to come to her husband's aid, but her body unaccountably failed her. She wandered across the shore, her feet reacting to a will that was no longer under her control. The remaining members of the Council staggered along the shore or tumbled into the water, like drunken revelers.

Samah crouched in the sand, battling fear. He faced, he guessed, a terrible death.

“Where did you come from?” he cried in bitter frustration, watching the dragons surge into shore. “Who created you?”

“You did,” came the reply.

The horrible images faded, leaving Alfred weak and shaken. And he had only been a witness. He could not imagine what it must have been like to have lived through the incident.

“But the dragon-snakes did not kill us that day, as you may have surmised,” Samah concluded dryly.

He had related his tale calmly enough, but the usually firm, confident smile was thin and tight. The hand that rested upon the marble table shook slightly. Orla had gone extremely pale. Several of the other Council members shuddered, one let his head sink into his hands.

“There came a time when we longed for death,” Samah continued, his voice soft, as if he spoke to himself. “The dragons made sport of us, drove us up and down the beach until we were faint and exhausted. When one of us fell, the great toothless mouth closed over the body, dragged the person to his feet. Terror alone put life in our bodies. And, at last, when we could run no more, when our hearts seemed as if they must burst and our limbs would no longer support us, we lay in the wet sand and waited to die. The dragons left us, then.”

“But they came back, in greater numbers,” Orla said. Her hands rubbed the marble table, as if she would smooth out its already smooth surface. “They attacked the city, their huge bodies battering into walls, killing and torturing and maiming any living thing they found. Our magic worked against them and we held them off for a long time. But we could see that the magic was starting to crumble, just as did the rune-covered walls surrounding our city.”

“But why?” Alfred gazed from one to the other in shocked perplexity. “What power do these dragons have over our magic?”

“None. They can fight it, certainly, and they resist it better than any other living beings we have faced, but it was not, we soon discovered, the power of the dragons that left us helpless and defenseless on the beach. It was the seawater.”

Alfred gaped, astonished. The dog lifted its head, its ears pricked. It had fallen asleep, nose on paws, during the recital of the battle with the dragons. Now it sat up, looked interested.

“But you created the seawater,” said Alfred.

“As we—supposedly—created these dragon-snakes?” Samah gave a bitter laugh. He eyed
Alfred shrewdly. “You
have
not
come across
anything like them in other worlds?”

“N-no. Dragons, yes, certainly, but they could always be controlled by magic, by mensch magic even. Or seemed to be,” he added suddenly, thoughtfully.

“The water of the sea, this ocean that we named ‘Goodsea’”—Samah spoke the word with irony—“has the effect of completely destroying our magic. We don't know how or why. All we know is that one drop of the seawater on our skin begins a cycle that breaks down the rune structure, until we are helpless—more helpless, in fact—than mensch.

“And that is why, in the end, we ordered the mensch out into the Goodsea. The seasun was drifting away. We lacked the magical energy to stop it; all our power had to be conserved to fight the dragons. We sent the mensch to follow the seasun, to find other seamoons, where they could live. The creatures of the deep, whales and dolphins and others the mensch had befriended, went with them, to help guard and defend them from the dragons.

“We have no idea whether the mensch made it safely or not. Certainly, they stood a better chance than we did. The seawater has no effect on them or their magic. In fact, they seem to thrive on it. We stayed behind, waiting for the seasun to leave us, waiting for the ice to close over us … and over our enemy. We were fairly certain, you see, that the dragons wanted us. They cared little for the mensch.”

“And we were right. The dragons kept up the attack on our city,” Orla continued, “but never in numbers sufficient to win. Victory did not seem to be their goal. Pain, suffering, anguish—that is what they wanted. Our hope was to wait, buy time. Each day the sun's warmth lessened, the darkness gathered around us. Perhaps the dragons, intent on their hatred for us, did not notice. Or perhaps they thought their magic could overcome it. Or, perhaps, at the end, they fled. All we know is that one day the sea froze and on that day the dragons did not appear. On that day, we sent a final message to our people in the worlds beyond, asking that in a hundred years they come to wake us. And we went to sleep.”

“I doubt if they ever got your message,” said Alfred. “Or if they did, they couldn't have come. Each world had its own problems, it seems.” He sighed, then blinked. “Thank you for
telling me. I understand better now and I… I'm sorry for the way I've been acting. I thought…” He stared at his shoes, shuffled his feet uncomfortably.

“You thought we had abandoned our responsibility,” Samah said grimly.

“I've seen it before. On Abarrach…” Alfred gulped.

The Councillor said nothing, looked at him expectantly. All the Council members were looking at him expectantiy