Mercedes Lackey EM 3 The Serpents Shadow

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them, never stopping for a single moment. Then Sia and Singhe froze
for one moment-
The cobras struck, twin lances of death hurtling through the
thickening mist at the mongooses. Who weren't there.
The mongooses leaped straight up, the instant that the snakes struck,
and came down with all four sets of claws ready to grab, landing
right behind the cobra's hoods. They latched on and each sunk a set
of sharp little teeth into the neck at the base of the snake's skull
where the head met the hood. And they held on for dear life.
The cobras went into a frenzy of thrashing, trying to throw them off,
trying to batter them against the wall and floor. And as they
thrashed, traveling inexorably away from Peter, they began to grow-
But before the mist thickened and then swirled between Peter and the
terrible combat, he caught a glimpse of something else. It might have
been hallucination; it might have been illusion. But he thought he
caught sight of faces and bodies overlaying the forms of enormous
cobras and mongooses. Wrestling against a pair of blue-faced demons
were a pair of beings he thought he recognized. Could one of them
have been the god Rama-and the other, the goddess Sita?
It was only a moment that he saw them, or thought he did.
But then the mist came up and carried the combat away-or it moved
away from him-and even the sounds of hissing and thrashing faded and
were gone.
"Right,'" Rhadi insisted in his ear, and Peter started, then felt his
way along the wall and resumed his journey.
What next? he wondered, as he caught up with the other two. There
would be something next. He knew it by the thickening, suffocating
mist, by the oppressive sense of being watched, by the increasing
taint of inimical magic. He recognized this mist now; it was close
kin to the fog that had smothered Maya's body, but tangible and
"real" to the ordinary senses.
He put Charan up on the shoulder opposite Rhadi.
The langur buried both his hands in Peter's hair and clenched his
prehensile toes in the fabric of his shirt. The parrot clung on like
a tick with his little claws. Nothing was going to dislodge either of
them short of a hurricane.
Now it was not only heat, but humidity creeping into the fog and
unpleasant scent, the dankness of the swamp, fetid and clinging. If
Peter hadn't known he was in a warehouse in the heart of London, he
would have been certain he was groping his way through the jungle, up
to his knees in swamp water. The warehouse wall was slick with damp,
and his hand occasionally brushed a patch of something slimy.
His foot splashed into a puddle. He looked down, and barely made out
standing water along the wall. A few steps and it was ankle-deep,
with swirls of something greenish and unpleasant floating on it.
"Ew," Norrey complained ahead of him.
"Sahib," Gupta whispered in Urdu, "I do not wish to frighten the
child, but this is not natural. This building has taken us to some-
other place. Or else it contains that place. Or else this is all an
illusion."
"I think you're right," Peter whispered back.
The question was, how to behave? If it was illusion, would it be best
to try to disbelieve in it and break it? What if it wasn't? He wasn't
certain that he wanted to contemplate how much power it would take to
bring the priestess' world to London-or London to India.
But there was a third option, that this was neither wholly real, nor
wholly illusion; that the priestess had brought them to her version
of the Elemental Worlds. That would require far less power-though it
was still considerable.
The mongooses were certainly acting as if they believed the cobras
were real. We'll do the same.
"Keep going," Peter urged both of his companions. "Still right.
Follow the wall."
"I 'ear something-'issing-" Norrey began.
And a trident buried itself in the wood of the wall between Peter and
Norrey.
They both leaped apart with curses, and a dark-skinned woman with a
mouth full of pointed teeth reared up out of the mist, hissed at them
and yanked the trident free. Another lunged up beside her, both of
them aiming their trident weapons at the men, and grinning
fiendishly, both glowing with the same hell-light as the great
cobras.
Peter fumbled and dropped the revolver in the water; something lashed
at his feet and sent it flying off into the darkness. It was then he
realized that these women were not exactly human.
In fact, from the waist down, they were enormous snakes.
The second moved sinuously toward him through the mist-and both
attacked the men with their tridents, ignoring Norrey, making sharp
jabs to separate them. Gupta held his attacker off with his sword. It
tried to catch the blade in the tines of the trident and twist it
away, but he parried its attempts, cursing freely. Peter dodged and
ducked the lightning jabs, circling toward Gupta and getting Norrey
behind them both, until Gupta managed to pass him one of the long
knives in his belt.
Steel clanked on steel; Rhadi and Charan plastered themselves against
his neck as he fended off the blows of the wicked weapon.
Fortunately, neither of these creatures seemed to be particularly
good fighters, but that didn't make their peril any less, for besides
having to fend off the tridents, Gupta and Peter had to beware the
lashing tails that threatened to knock them off their feet.
"Duckl" cried Norrey behind them; he and Gupta dropped to their knees [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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