The Serpent's Shadow (30 page)

She realized that she had already made up her mind, and shrugged. Action was always better than delay to her mind. Better to act now than regret she had not done so when the time to act was long past.

She summoned her body servant again, and gave directions that she would be in the temple, and must not be disturbed for
any
cause. Then she left her apartment and descended the stairs to the basement, knowing that nothing and no one would be allowed to approach her until she rang a bell to summon a servant or left the temple herself.

The basement had been the obvious choice from the beginning for the temple room; Kali Durga's temples were often underground in India, the stone walls, floor, and laid-stone ceiling of the basement room provided adequate soundproofing, as last night's sacrifice had proven. The charcoal braziers used to warm the place kept any trace of damp at bay. Shivani rather liked the feeling of being enclosed in stone, although there were some among her followers who found the basement temple stifling. There were no windows or exterior entrances to betray the presence of the cellar, and no obvious way down into it from the ground floor. Shivani's clever builders had installed a cunningly hidden door in the back of a closet used to hold cleaning implements. A secret catch gave access to a spiral staircase descending to the antechamber, and the entrance to the temple itself was by means of a second secret door in the antechamber. Two hidden doors were always better than one. There was nothing to show that the antechamber—which held a number of rejected furnishings from Shivani's apartments and from the temple—was not the only reason for the staircase to exist. The secret door in the closet pivoted in the center, and brooms and mops were hung up on it; the secret door into the temple proper also pivoted, and some of the furnishings rested on a clever platform attached to it, so that there was no clue that there was a door there.

Once inside the temple, Shivani locked the door behind her, and went about lighting lamps and incense, until she was satisfied with the atmosphere. Then she retrieved a box from an alcove behind one of the fabric hangings at the rear of the temple, placed it beside a black iron brazier in which incense smoldered atop a bed of coals, and took her own place on a cushion behind it. The brazier stood between her and the statue of Kali Durga, and before she began her night's work, Shivani made a profound bow in homage to her Goddess. The statue stared impassively into the space above Shivani's head, the Goddess' ornaments glinting brightly from among the flower garlands.

There was no outward sign that there had ever been a sacrifice last night; all the residue of the occasion had been neatly cleaned away. Shivani had not asked what had become of the remains of the child-whore, and did not particularly care, so long as they did not come to light in a way or place that drew attention to her and her followers.

But to the inward eye, the temple was aroil with the dark energies that Shivani and her Goddess required, and Shivani licked her lips as she settled herself into a lotus position, for the very presence of those energies made her feel electrified and powerful, ready to accomplish almost anything.

She closed her eyes, set her hands palms down on her knees, and began to hum her spell, as the incense she required, compounded of fragrant herbs, blood of previous sacrifices, and snake dung, coiled around her.

She inhaled the pungent smoke deeply, building within her mind the shape of the Shadow Serpent, its huge, wedge-shaped head, its slowly flickering tongue, the cold yellow eyes, the loop upon loop of cool, scaled weight. The Shadow was not in the image of the cobra, but in that of the constrictor, for it did not kill by poison but, like the thugee, by strangulation. She summoned each tiny detail of the creature; how sinuous and silky smooth the muscular body felt as it slid over the arm or the leg, how the heavy head would lie in her lap as it waited for its directions. As she built the details within her mind, she began to spin the substance out of the air, the smoke, and the power that lay in sullen swaths within the temple.

A weight began to grow in her lap, as a cold place formed within her where her own energies were draining away. She accepted this; the Shadow was as much
her
shadow as it was a thing of magic. When she herself prowled the Outer and Inner Realms, it was often in this very shape. She was the mother of the Shadow, and like all mothers, it was her body that gave her “child” birth and sustenance.

As the weight in her lap increased, so did the subtle sense of pressure and support around her. She felt the energies assuming a new shape, coiling around her, taking on a form that was not—
quite
—material.

Still she continued to chant, keeping her mind firmly fixed upon the form she called and the words to give it life and being. Tension built within her as the words spiraled in tighter and tighter turns, the energies following them, tighter, faster, until, with a flick of her mind, as if she spun a cord, she bound and released them with a single, sharp syllable.

Then she opened her eyes and smiled down at the heavy, blunted triangle of shadow that lay in her lap, at the coil upon coil of misty scales that encircled her body.

This child of her spirit looked up at her from slitted eyes of smoke and fire, waiting.

Now she opened the box and took out a small, folded piece of paper from among the dozen or so lying therein. As the Shadow stirred and slowly moved its head from her lap, she dropped the paper into the brazier.

There were men that Shivani had specifically singled out from among her first list of those she would be revenged upon; men that she knew had served her land and people particularly ill. Some were petty administrators who took delight in abusing their power, some soldiers who had wrought private atrocities in small on the persons of their servants. She would not—yet—go after larger game, in no small part because she wanted the great sinners to
know
that she was coming, that vengeance was at hand—to know, and to fear, until fear left them small, shivering, and helpless. She wanted them to see what took them and know
why
it took them, to know that they were doomed long before doom actually descended.

She only required that these lesser fish die, and in dying, feed her, her child, and her Goddess.

So it would be the Shadow who took them.

These men were all surrounded by such protections as kept the thugee at bay—stout walls, many servants, police, and money. Oh, the thugee could easily slip inside those walls, past the servants and the police, strike, and escape, but the
money
ensured that these men would not die as the drunks and the dregs died, without notice. No, assuredly, a wealthy man strangled in his own household
would
be noticed, and there would be searching, and memories of other such deaths in India, and then the hunt would, inevitably, come here.

That would not do at all. Whether or not there was any evidence, men of India would be hailed into a British jail, and no doubt some of them would be hers. She could ill-afford to lose any servants, and those who had supported her intentions back home would swiftly cut her off if she came to the notice of the
sahibs
and the government.

This, though—

The Shadow slowly raised its massive head, supporting the weightless weight on a pillar of transparent scale and muscle as thick around as her body. The head hovered above the brazier, and the Shadow breathed in the smoke from the burning packet. If one of the thugee could get in and out of a rich man's house to kill him, one could as easily get in, and out again, bringing out a thing of little apparent value to a sightless Englishman. A bit of hair from a hairbrush, perhaps. From the faint stink as it burned, that was what this particular screw of paper held. The Shadow took the scent and the substance into itself; as the smoke became one with the Serpent, the scales of body and head took on a transient bluish cast for just a moment.

A true serpent had an acute sense of smell. This Shadow's senses were even keener, and it could track a single victim in a city of millions, once it had the scent.

When the last ghost of glowing paper ash evaporated in the breath she blew over the coals, she selected another packet, and dropped it in the brazier. Eight times she did this, and eight times the Shadow breathed in the scent and the smoke, and incorporated them into a memory that nothing would fade.

When the eighth packet was altogether gone, the Shadow lowered its head. It had taken in all it could hold for the moment. Later, when it was stronger, she could give it more victims at a single sitting, but for now, eight was all it could manage.

It knew its job; how not? It was spun of her spirit. It did not wait to be dismissed, but loosed the coils from about her body where it had clung for support even as it supported her. Without a backward glance, it slithered away toward the altar, moving far quicker than anything that large had a right to.

As it lost contact with her, and with the incense smoke, it began to fade. As its nose touched and passed through the door into the antechamber, it was scarcely a shimmer, a shape in the air.

Then it was gone.

Shivani sagged a little with fatigue, but her spirit rejoiced. The Shadow was strong, much stronger than she had thought it would be, for its first summoning in this strange, cold country. Eight victims! She had not expected it would be able to take so many!

Of course, she would have to call it to her each night that it did not feed, to give it of her own substance—and it would not be able to feed unless the fogs and mists came, for those would give it the body it needed, of water and air and smoke.

But the fogs
would
come, and then—

The Shadow would feed. And having fed, it could return to her, and she would send it out to find her sister's traitorous daughter.

13

M
AYA bound her head with a strip of toweling to absorb the inevitable drops of perspiration from her forehead, then donned an enveloping apron that had been bleached in lye, then boiled. There was no proper sink for the surgeons to wash at in the female operating theater, only a basin and a pitcher of water, but she scrubbed her hands and arms as best she could anyway, using the harshest soap obtainable. The atomizer was full of carbolic acid to disinfect, and she would see to it that before this operation was over, it was empty.

“Maya,” said Doctor O‘Reilly, as he dried his scrubbed hands on a scrupulously clean towel, “thank you. This is not an easy case of mine that you've taken.”

She turned to smile wanly at the Irishman, who, not being a surgeon, was acting as her anesthetist. O‘Reilly's expression betrayed his strain despite the concealment of his red beard and mustache; he was only too correct that this was “not an easy case.”

“After the way you helped with that little problem of mine, I could hardly refuse, now, could I? Besides, you know what anyone else would do with this girl.”

“Take appendix, uterus, and child, without a second thought,” O‘Reilly said grimly. “And she a good Catholic girl, and this her first child! It would break her heart.”

“If she lived through it,” Maya replied, just as grimly. “Doctor, if I can save this girl without removing anything but what's diseased, you know I will.”

The patient in question, who was one of O‘Reilly's, a young Irish woman who had been brought in thinking she was miscarrying of her first child, was in fact in the throes of an attack of acute appendicitis. She
might
come through this attack without surgery to remove the diseased organ, but neither her doctor nor Maya thought it at all likely. When this had been made plain to her—and the fact that she must have surgery immediately—her first thought had been for her unborn child. She had begged Maya, clutching Maya's skirt with both hands, to save her baby.

She was with her priest now, for even now the removal of an appendix was a risky procedure. If it had burst—if it was perforated—and the infection had spread within the body cavity—well, there was very little chance that she would survive. Her seven-month pregnancy made things doubly complicated. Maya hoped that the priest was human enough to give her absolution before she must go under the knife; whatever such blessing meant or did not mean to the girl's immortal soul, it would surely make her calmer.

As O‘Reilly had pointed out, any other surgeon would simply excise the uterus and its contents without a pause, simply to remove that complication. After all, the girl was a charity patient, a nobody, and if she complained, no one would care. It wasn't as if she was a woman of good birth who was expected to produce an heir for a family with money or social standing. She'd even be better off without the handicap of breeding a brat a year—

Or so the male Protestant physicians would say. And never mind how
she
would feel.

The Female Operating Theater, located in the attic of the Female Wing, was stiflingly hot now that it was late into July. Why they couldn't have used the regular operating theater—

The excuses made no sense, for they were only that, excuses. But at least, being at the top of the building, there was not as much room for observers here—and the light was excellent, for the theater had been provided with two broad skylights.

Since it was Maya who operated here today, it was Maya who made the rules for this case. She had abolished the practice of leaving the bloodstained aprons on hooks to be used and reused until they were stiff. Aprons were bleached with lye and boiled, then wrapped in clean paper and stored here until use. After the conclusion of an operation, used aprons were taken away immediately to be boiled and bleached again. Water was never left in the pitcher; it was brought fresh before each surgery. Physician
and
assistants scrubbed hands and arms up to the elbow—in Maya's case, higher than that—and the carbolic atomizer was as much a fixture as the ether mask. Maya used only her own personal set of surgical implements, because she made sure to keep her own scalpels sharp and sterile, and didn't trust those left for the use of others.