Serpent's Silver (5 page)

Chapter 5

New Familiar Faces

The outlaw’s camp was nothing more than a small collection of tents, several of them ragged and flapping with great holes. The land was as barren as most desert, but a few prickly plants of assorted sizes grew, and a fence of sorts had been made around the camp by dragging in some of the larger specimens and forming them into a line. There was no material here for proper shacks of the type used in the mountains.

A man with a broad chest came forth to meet them. He was a startling sight. He was the very image of the opposition leader in Rud who had supported Kelvin: Morton Crumb. Except for his whole, round ears.

“This is Matthew Biscuit,” Jac said, making the introduction. “Matt, this is Kian Knight from a far and distant land.” Jac dropped off the horse and assisted Lonny down; Kian dropped down by himself.

“This’un’s Lonny Burk from Fairview. She was going to be the sacrifice. Between us, Kian and I slew a really big serpent. You should have seen him fight!”

“Silver?” Matt asked, interested.

“What else? Of course silver. But far too big. We’d need a dozen good horses just to drag it here. Besides, you know the flopears will be out.”

“No doubt.” Matt frowned. “What’s he doing here?” He jerked his thumb to indicate Kian.

“What are you doing here, lad?” Jac demanded.

Kian took a deep breath. “My father and mother came to this frame from a world almost like it. We haven’t any silver serpents, but we have golden dragons there.”

“Dragons?” Biscuit sounded offended. “Them’s legendary beasts! Story-book stuff.”

“So are serpents big enough to swallow war-horses. Back home, I mean. In the frame I come from.”

“Frame? What’re you talking about?”

Kian swallowed. “If you don’t know—you may think I’m making this up. There are worlds made up of tiny specks my father calls atoms, and much space between these atoms, just as there is between stars. Most everything is space, considered this way. So worlds and universes lie side by side, interpenetrating, sometimes overlapping, touching slightly here and there. Each universe, each world connecting in adjoining universes, only a little different from each other. Our world’s people have pointed ears, while another world’s people have round ears. One world has silver serpents, while another has golden dragons.”

“Bosh! Superstitious junk!” Matt declared. He seemed quite angry. “The rulers want us to believe that nonsense so’s they can keep us repressed.”

“But it’s so! I know it is, because my father originated on a world where they have horseless carriages and moving pictures and talking boxes and all sorts of strange things. Then there’s the alien Mouvar, who left a chamber from which roundears could travel to other worlds. Mouvar the Magnificent, we called him. He lived long, long before my time, and he left my home frame after a battle with a local sorcerer. The sorcerer was later destroyed by my brother.”

“By your brother?” Matt sounded even more skeptical.

“Yes. The roundear Mouvar predicted would, well, he predicted a lot for him in my home frame. He slew dragons in his youth, as the prophecy says, and he rid his country, Rud, of its sore—a tyrannous government.” He did not think it necessary to add that for all purposes his own mother had been that government.

“It sounds as if you had very much the same setup as here,” Jac said. “We too have a tyranny. Our leader, King Rowforth, has to be overthrown someday. You don’t suppose you could give us some tips?”

“I’m afraid not. I was—” Kian hesitated, knowing that he must not say that he had been on the wrong side. “Not really part of it. My brother could help you, or my father, if we can find him.”

“You think he’s here? In our world?”

“I hope so. I read the instructions carefully, and I know the setting on the machine hasn’t been changed for centuries. I feel this is where my parents went. Certainly this must be where Mouvar went. You have legends about him?”

“We have Mouvar,” Jac said. “Or at least we had. Strange old man, it’s said. He performed some miracles and then sort of vanished. Some say he’s still around, but no one knows.”

Kian felt a thrill of hope. Mouvar—the original Mouvar?—here? With Mouvar’s help anything should be possible. But then according to legend Mouvar had been defeated by Zatanas, and if that was so, Mouvar was less powerful than Kelvin.

“Of course there’s our local magician, who claims him as an ally,” Matt put in. “He’s prattled about him for years. He’s shut up about him lately, though—ever since Rowforth took his daughter to wed. If you ask me, all his talk was just a scheme to make that happen. The one opposition leader in the land—and his daughter just happens to have beauty that kings would trade their thrones for. He makes out fine now, old Zotanas does, but he’s not conjuring much. Word is that he’s a permanent guest at the palace and King Rowforth’s main helper.”

Zotanas here; Zatanas at home. Zotanas alive; Zatanas destroyed by Kelvin. Kian shook his head; there were just too many angles. It was getting harder and harder not to be confused.

“Well, I certainly don’t believe in your almost identical worlds,” Lonny Burk said. As comely as he had first thought her, Kian also found her a bit annoying at times. “I heard those stories when I was a child, but until now nothing has ever shown up to confirm them.”

“Mouvar. Mouvar showed up,” Kian pointed out. Why did pretty women seem to have an innate ability to irritate him?

“Maybe he did, and maybe he’s just a story.” She looked at him quizzically, and he had the feeling that she knew something, despite being a woman and a recently intended sacrifice. Why did she choose to disbelieve him? He had come to rescue her, after all.

Glancing around the camp, frustrated, he was surprised at the faces he almost recognized. Men whose aspects he had seen around the palace during his youth. Some of them he identified with guardsmen. They had been loyal to his mother the queen, but enemies of his father and Kelvin. Could all of this similarity be mere chance? He shuddered, thinking about it. He wished he were elsewhere—at least until he had figured out more about this situation. He would just have to watch his step.

A very small man running on the short legs of a dwarf came from a nearby tent and up to them. Quickly this person took the reins of the war-horse, and led it to a spot near the fence where he tethered it to a ring set in a large rock. He clambered up on the rock and moved the horse around while he wiped it down with a rag. Then, rushing to the tent, his legs blurring with the speed, he turned quickly and called, “Happy return, Master!” just as he plunged inside. A moment later he returned, carrying a sack of grain for the horse on his bent but adequate back.

“Queeto!” Kian said. Queeto—the dwarf apprentice to the magician Zatanas. Destroyed, along with his evil master, by Kelvin and a great cleansing fire.

“What’s that?” Jac asked.

“Queeto. The dwarf.”

“Heeto, here,” Jac said. “You knew him well?”

“Not very.” He did not care to elaborate. Queeto had been a most misshapen creature in both body and mind, as evil and fearsome as his magician master.

Jac called his attention to the way the dwarf was patting the horse’s muzzle and feeding it by hand. “That one’s a saint. Kindest person I ever saw. Hardest-working person I ever knew. Cheerfulest, best-natured person ever. Was he in your world as well?”

“Not exactly a saint,” Kian said, thankful that he did not have to tell the embarrassing truth.

“How do you plan on finding them?” Jac asked.

Kian jerked his attention away from the dwarf and back to his host. “What? Oh, my parents. I have a plan. Unless, of course, you can help me.”

“What’s your plan?”

Kian told him about the dragonberries and showed them. “You have anything like these in Hud?”

Jac shook his head. “Never heard of ‘em. But they sound like something that might eliminate the need for a lot of spy work.”

“They did.” He proceeded to tell about Heln’s spying on the evil queen and magician during the war. Carefully he avoided mentioning that they were his mother and grandfather, and that he himself had fought on their side.

“When you going to take one?”

“I thought—” He swallowed, made uncomfortable by the thought. “Maybe when I had somebody to watch me. My heart will stop beating. My breathing will stop. I’ll took as if I’m dead.”

“I’ll watch,” Jac said. “Come along to my tent.”

Kian followed him. In a few moments he was stretched out on a bearver hide on the floor of the tent, holding one of the small dark berries up to the lamplight. Nothing much to do now but to go through with it, though he dreaded the prospect. Not giving himself a chance to think, he popped the berry into his mouth.

He tasted a taste that made him want to retch. He fought off the urge, then swallowed.

There was nothing for a moment. Wasn’t it working? He felt a guilty relief. But if it didn’t work, then how would he search for his father?

Then he noticed that the top of the tent was nearer than it had been. Had a supporting pole broken? He turned his head and looked down.

There was his body below, lying deathly still. The bandit stood peering down at it, frowning. The berry had worked! He was out of his body! He had felt no pain at all. In fact, it had happened so readily that he felt wonderful.

But he had a job to do. He thought of moving outside—and abruptly he floated through the tent wall without making contact, and emerged at the front.

There was the fire—and there was Lonny, looking back at the tent with a scared and anxious expression. Evidently she was concerned about him, and that gratified him. Not that he had any personal interest in her, despite her beauty. Or did he? She had tried to warn him away from the serpent, and that struck him as a pretty selfless attitude. Maybe—

He brought himself back to business. How did Heln do this? Oh, yes: concentrate on a person. On a face.

A face came to mind: a woman’s oblong visage, of clear complexion, framed by hair as red as the sheen of a dragon, with eyes the color of green feline magic.

Instantly he was transported, moving past hills and villages as if flying, to a palace high on a river bluff. The palace was almost like the one in which he had grown up, though the Rud structure had been on low ground, with an underground river almost beneath it. Then he was inside, moving from room to room so blurringly swiftly that he was unable to note their details.

He stopped.

There was the face: his mother’s beautiful face. She was seated on a divan. Beside her, holding her hand, was a tall, straight, elderly man with dark gray hair. His grandfather.

Both were gone from his home frame, one departed, the other dead—yet here they were alive and unhurt. His mother and his grandfather, oblivious of his presence. He was shaken, despite having no body to shake.

He could hear them speaking. His mother—or was it really she?—had been crying. Zatanas—or was it he?—had evidently been comforting her.

“Please, please, my child. Remember who you are. You are Zotanas’ daughter, and the queen.”

“But—but he—how can you permit him, Father? How?”

The old man sighed. “I told you, my magic is only for little, good things. I can help keep him controlled, but I’m powerless to destroy him.”

“Oh, Father. Father, if only you could stop him!”

“Hush, dearest, you are speaking of your husband the king.”

“But he’s so—so evil!”

“I know, and he’s getting more so all the time. Bringing flopears here was bad enough, but offering to share his rule with them if they would help him conquer is worse. I have nothing, I fear, to combat it.”

Hearing the words, Kian was finally able to realize that the woman and man were not his mother and grandfather. Both had round ears, while his relatives had ears as pointed as anyone in Rud. But this was Hud, he had to remember, and here things were different. Yet they did have the faces.

How long would the berry last? He had wanted to find his mother, but he had zeroed in only on her face. Did that mean that she wasn’t in this frame? Or did it mean that the berries worked only on natives? He could not decide, and he knew there was little time.

His father. Think of his father.

He visualized John Knight’s face as well as he could. The walls of the palace disappeared and he was above hills and rivers and farmlands, moving with that unreal velocity of thought. Then he was back in the valley where he had killed the serpent. He moved along the ground, everything blurring, and then through a rock wall and into an area where flopears abounded. Their ears—but he was already past them. Along and through a rock doorway in a cliffside. He halted.

There, on a bed, pale and unshaven, was John Knight.

“Father!” Kian cried. “Father, you’re alive!”

The man’s eyes flicked back and forth, but he did not open his mouth.

“Who’s that? Who spoke?”

Astonished, Kian saw the other person in the room: a young flopear female. Yes, those ears really were flopped over. What a sight!

The woman moved over to the bed. She raised a straw broom in her hands and looked around the room threateningly. “You leave, bad spirit!” she cried. “You leave!”

She had heard him! He had no body, he was present only in spirit form, he could make no physical sound, yet there was no doubt that this odd woman had heard.

Should he speak again? Should he try to let her know that he was visiting his father? She seemed protective. Could she mean John Knight harm?

Kelvin’s wife, Heln, had discovered that dragons were sensitive to the astral state and could hear her when she spoke in the astral state. The odd-eared folk here must be similarly sensitive.

“Go away!” the girl insisted. “Leave here! Leave before I get help! Herzig can capture you, you know! He can imprison you, put you in tree or serpent! You want that, spirit?”

“No. No,” Kian said. Her manner was so fierce he thought it best to placate her. Yet he still felt he would like to tell her who he was, and that he meant no harm.

“Then go instantly!”

He went. It seemed the politic thing to do. Obviously she could hear him, and so her threat might have substance, too.