The Serpent's Shadow (29 page)

To that end, among others, tonight's sacrifice. She would use the power she gained to throw confusion among them. If she could not penetrate the shining walls of their strongholds, she could make it so that they were loath to venture beyond. She would strew their path with dissension, with reluctance, with doubt. There would be no direct attack upon them, only the subtle and ever-burgeoning poison of mistrust; no mighty blows to shatter defenses, only the acid of hesitation to eat at their foundations. For her purposes, that was as good as attacking them directly. She only needed for them to hold their own hands while they bickered among themselves for as long as it took her to become as firmly entrenched as they. Then if they could not agree to unite, she could defeat them singly.

The knives were ready, the restraints in place upon Kali Durga's altar. The little whore would be long in dying, for the Death of a Thousand Cuts was designed for this very purpose: to keep the victim alive as long as possible, and to make every living moment filled with unbearable pain from which there was no escape.

And Kali and Her votary would drink in the dark power of her agony, and thrive, and grow.

 

The girl breathed her last at dawn. Greatly pleased, if not sated, Shivani put her knives aside for the servants of the shrine to clean, and retired to her chamber.

She permitted her body servant to take her blood-drenched clothing, to wash the sticky residue of the night's work from her flesh, and to attire her in a loose, silk robe. The servant brought food and drink, sweet rice balls and fragrant tea, and she sat beside the table on which they were placed as if in a dream. While a dawn breeze played in at the window and incense perfumes disguised the alien scent with familiar fragrances, she reclined into her cushions, and listened to the music of wind chimes hanging wherever a breeze might find them. She ate and drank without noticing what was in the cup or on the plate, her mind busy with intricate plans that she spun out of all the myriad possible turnings ahead of her.

This was where her enemies always made their mistake. The moment that they achieved some triumph, they rested, thinking they could afford leisure. The moment of victory was
not
a time to rest, except so long as it took to spring into action again once one had one's bearings for a new direction.

In only one thing had she not made any progress. She was still no closer to discovering the whereabouts of her sister's child than she had been when she arrived in this city.

The girl had hidden herself well. She was nowhere that Shivani had expected to find her, not among the Hindu expatriates, not among the families of the men with whom her cursed father had served. If she was a physician, it was not in attendance to the people her father had tended among the enemy soldiers or the petty pushers of paper.

Therefore—since it was unlikely she had chosen some other way to make her livelihood—once again, Parkening might well be of service to her. There could not be two female physicians newly come from the Raj in London; even if the creature could disguise her half-Indian parentage, there were not that many
female
doctors about.

But she would have to be careful, very careful, in what she told Parkening. If he got the notion in his head that Shivani wanted the girl, he might try to take her himself, and hold her as a bargaining counter. That would give him power that Shivani was in nowise prepared to let him achieve.

No; go slow with this one. It were best to drop the most subtle of hints and see where the man's reactions led her.

Almost without thinking, Shivani dropped her hand into the basket at the side of her chair, and she felt the handle of the scrying mirror slip into her palm.

She smiled to herself with great amusement and pleasure. So, the slave of the mirror had tired of being wrapped in black silk, trapped in a limbo without sense, sound, or sight, and was willing to cooperate. She clasped her fingers around the handle and brought the mirror out.

The distorted features of the mirror-slave gazed back at her from the black glass. She breathed slowly and easily through her nostrils, marking what went on in the glass. The slave's face shifted as though seen through an imperfect pane, his features melted and twisted. He was having difficulty holding onto his sense of self.

Her smile broadened as she noted this; so much the better for her purposes. The less he was able to keep hold of himself, the less he would be able to fight her, and the more malleable he would be to her will.

“So, my faithful servant,” she greeted him mockingly. “Have you found the one I seek?”

He opened his mouth in a soundless wail. She shook her head at him, and pursed her lips in cruel disapproval.

“Perhaps I should put you back in the basket—” she began, with a sadistic parody of doubt.

No!
he begged.
No—please
—
I have been lost, so lost, I can scarcely find my way
—When she made no move to drop the mirror back among the folds of silk, the face brightened pathetically.
Put me in the sun!
he pleaded.
Put me where I can see the street. If I can find my way, perhaps I can find her.

“A useful suggestion, at last!” she replied, and considered it. “Yes, I think I will, bodiless one. It will be an interesting experiment. But your task was to seek signs of her in the spirit realms—and have you nothing to tell me?”

There were some hints at first, he said in despair. Traces of magic like yours, but crude, and when I thought I had found where they came from, they slipped out of my hands. It was like trying to catch a river
—
where they were strongest, they vanished faster. And now there is nothing like your power to be found at all.

“No?” Could it be that the girl had died?

Unlikely. If such a thing had happened, Shivani would have known, would have felt it. There was the shared blood between them that had warned Shivani of the child's flight from India once the careful web of deception and protection that Surya had spun was gone. If the girl had met with an accident, Shivani would have sensed it.

No,
the spirit insisted.
Nothing now. Only the towers of darkness and shadow that I dare not trouble, and those of light that I cannot look inside, and all of those, I know. The green of Water Masters, the blue of Air, the red of Fire, and the warm gold of Earth; there is nothing of the magic of your kind here anymore.

Very interesting. She knew already that there were myriad auras of power playing about the strongholds of alien magic, but she had not known that the various colors denoted anything in particular. “Tell me more about these Masters and their colors!” she demanded sharply.

The mirror-servant was only too happy to tell her all he knew. From him she learned of the Elementals, their peculiar magics, and the Masters who commanded them. When he was done, she was altogether astonished, for the pattern of magic here in the West was so utterly unlike, and yet at its roots oddly similar to, the magic that she knew. She knew of the colors of magic, of course, including colors that did not appear in this Western tradition. There was the darker-than-red color that was often incorrectly termed “black” that corresponded to the blood-born power Kali Durga and her votary relied on—and the darker-than-violet color she had only seen used by great mystics of temples devoted to gods other than her own, great savants who were often referred to as holy.

Green, she associated with healing; red with passions and emotions. The golden-yellow that her mirror-slave identified as Earth Magic was that which she interpreted as both fecundity and death, just as Kali Durga was the goddess of both. Blue was the magic of intellect, and reserved for the most involved of spellcasting, the sort that required hours or days of calculation, intricate diagrams, and carefully cast horoscopes. But conversely, it was also the magic of forgetting....

It was all so very fascinating that she quite lost track of her original intentions and continued to question her slave for some time, as the sounds of traffic and people from outside grew louder, and the sun rose farther above the horizon. Finally, she was caught unawares by the impulse to yawn hugely; it broke her concentration, and she realized how far advanced the hour had become. She was overdue for sleep, and well satisfied. Her slave was cooperating at last, her plans were well set in motion, and there was nothing much between her and her goals but hard work.

“You have done well, for once,” she told the pathetic creature in the mirror. “And I shall grant your request.” She stood, paused to stretch lazily, and took the mirror to the window, where she propped it up with two jars from her cosmetics table, facing down into the street. There was no chance it would fall, not with a pair of carved stone jars keeping it in place, and even if it did, it would fall back into the room, not down into the street.

She yawned again, closed the curtains against the light, and sought her bed in the sweet-scented gloom.

When she woke again, it was with a nagging sense of a task left uncompleted. She frowned into the darkness, as she realized
what
it was that had been left undone.

Her sister's child, of course; she had intended to work magic with her new-won power designed to drive her quarry out of hiding as well as garner yet more power to the altar of Kali Durga. The sacrifice last night had given her enough magic to conjure the Shadow Serpent, if the weather could be induced to cooperate.

The weather ... that was the question. The Shadow Serpent depended upon mist and fog to give it form. In the summers of India, hot and dry, no such thing was possible, so the Shadow was not a creature she depended overly much on, preferring to trust to her followers to accomplish the same tasks it would have. What would the early mornings here bring? Shivani realized that she had no real idea, for
she
had never yet been awake at that hour—but her own servants would be able to tell her.

She swung her legs over the side of her bed, and clapped twice, quickly, summoning her body servant. When she was dressed and the curtains were opened wide to the night, the servant brought the mirror to her, carefully avoiding looking into its black surface. And when Shivani gazed into it, there was nothing to be seen.

Well! Perhaps the mirror-servant had spoken nothing less than the truth; by knowing where the mirror lay in the physical realm, he would know where to pursue her errands in the shadow realm that lay beneath the surface of the physical. She decided against summoning him; it might well be that he was on some profitable “scent,” and she would leave him to it.

“Bring me Jayanti,” she ordered her body servant, and the woman bowed low and scuttled away to fulfill the command. A moment later, the head of her dacoits appeared in the open doorway to her chamber. He bowed deeply, then went immediately to his hands and knees, and crawled into her presence.

“I would know what weathers there are in the hours between midnight and dawning in this land and city,” she told him brusquely, seating herself in her favorite chair. “Most importantly, when is there like to be mist and fog?”

Without raising his eyes from the carpet, he told her. “When the day has been fair, but not over-warm, and there has been no rain for a day and a night, then the air is cool and clear from sunset to sunrise. When there has been rain, but the day has been cold, the night is like to be also, and there will oft be more rains before dawn, but no mist. Only when there has been rain and the day is warm and the air full of moisture, but the night itself is cool, will there be a fog between midnight and dawning. And that is perhaps three days out of ten.”

“It is well,” she told him, already tired of seeing only the back of his turban. “You may go.”

He left, scuttling backward on hands and knees like a four-legged crab until he reached the doorway and vanished through it into the corridor beyond.

Shivani considered her options. She could wait until the fogs came, and hope that she had power enough to summon the Serpent then—or she could summon it now, knowing it would not appear until the conditions were right, and knowing that the power to create it would fade a little with every night that passed that it did not appear.

She might not have another sacrifice soon as perfect for the alignment of the stars as the last had been, and a little of that power would trickle away every day that she did not use it. On the other hand, once summoned, it would be no difficult thing to
replace
the power that drained from the Serpent in the time that it did not manifest.

Besides, she already had everything she needed to set the Serpent on some of those foes she could not touch with the thugee. Allowing the Serpent to take
them
would increase the Serpent's powers, without the need to do anything more on her part.