The Serpent Bride Read online

  Living darkness writhed among the golden bands.

  Very slowly, every step hesitant, Maximilian walked over to it. He had never touched it, and hoped he never had to. His father had never touched it, nor his father before him.

  If ever Maximilian had to lift that crown to his head, then it meant that the end of the world had risen, and was walking the land.

  To Maximilian’s profound relief, the crown looked just as it had every other time Maximilian had studied it. The darkness (that same darkness which writhed through the Persimius blood) lived, yes, but it did not seem aware, or awake. It merely waited, as it had been waiting for thousands of years.

  Maximilian allowed himself a sigh of relief, his shoulders finally relaxing.

  Perhaps Ishbel’s connection with the Mountain at the Edge of the World and its current association with a serpent was coincidence merely. He should not worry.

  But he should, perhaps, be highly careful.

  Maximilian turned his back on the crown, and collected his ring, preparatory to leaving the chamber.

  But just before he climbed back into his bedchamber, Maximilian turned and looked once more at the dark crown. He frowned, something stirring in his mind.

  Cavor had never been inducted into the mystery of this chamber.

  Why not? Everyone had believed Maximilian dead, so why hadn’t Cavor been inducted into this mystery?

  Maximilian stood there a long time, the rings silent, before he turned abruptly on his heel and left the chamber.

  And the crown of Elcho Falling.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Serpent’s Nest, and the Palace at Ruen

  Ishbel sat in her bare chamber, staring unseeing at her hands clasped in her lap.

  Tomorrow she was to leave for Margalit. The early negotiations with Maximilian had been successful. He was willing to consider the offer of the “ward” of the Coil—Ishbel’s mouth curled slightly in a smile—as a wife. She’d entertained doubts that Maximilian would even come this far, but he had, and so now she must leave.

  Maximilian was sending a deputation to Margalit to meet with Ishbel and to hash out more detailed negotiations. The negotiations could still break down—Ishbel could almost smell the wariness in Maximilian’s initial interest—but they could just as easily progress further, and Ishbel needed to ready herself to commit to marriage.

  Ishbel had indeed largely resigned herself to marriage with Maximilian. She still had no idea why the Great Serpent thought such a union would help avert the threatening disaster, but she would do as he (and as this curious frog god) wished. Ishbel had spent the last few weeks discovering all she could about her potential husband, but that was little enough. There had been more details about his harrowing seventeen years spent as a prisoner in the gloam mines, some interesting tales about how he’d been released and how he had defeated Cavor in battle, but very little information about the man himself. Ishbel discovered that Maximilian was respected across the Central Kingdoms, that he had a good relationship with the kings of Pelemere and Kyros, and that his small kingdom of Escator was, indeed, crippled by debt. Ishbel had decided that Maximilian was likely harmless enough, and that his worst fault (apart from some as-yet-undiscovered socially embarrassing habit) was likely to be a mild dreariness engendered by his long imprisonment.

  He certainly had done nothing to set the world afire since his restoration to the throne of Escator.

  Ishbel had also steeled herself to accept the sexual intimacy of the marriage. She would endure, if that was what the Great Serpent needed of her.

  Additionally, she would endure the necessity of deferring to her husband. She, the archpriestess of the Coil, who had hitherto bowed only before gods.

  What Ishbel feared most was the actual leaving of Serpent’s Nest. It had been her only home, her entire world, for most of her life. The mountain was her safety and her comfort, and it shielded her from the horror of the world beyond.

  For an instant a memory resurfaced of her mother’s whispering corpse, and Ishbel jerked a little, fighting to keep it at bay.

  She was not looking forward at all to her journey to Margalit. Ishbel would be traveling only with a company of guardsmen from Margalit itself. No one from the Coil would be accompanying her. Ishbel understood the necessity for this. She needed to distance herself from them and become the Lady Ishbel Brunelle rather than the archpriestess of the Coil, and Ishbel could not do that if any of the Coil or their servants traveled with her.

  There came a knock at her door, and Aziel entered. He came over to Ishbel and sat down beside her on the bed. Wordlessly he picked up her hand, kissed it, then kissed the side of her forehead.

  “You will come back,” he said softly, and Ishbel blinked away her tears, and nodded.

  She would return.

  Since the night he’d looked at the map, Maximilian had either avoided Vorstus, or had avoided speaking to him alone. Maximilian simply did not want to give Vorstus the satisfaction of a reaction.

  It irritated Maximilian that Vorstus had not simply come to him and said, “Maxel, an offer of a bride comes out of the Mountain at the Edge of the World. A woman associated with a serpent god, no less. What do you think about that, then?”

  Instead, Vorstus had decided to play games.

  It took Vorstus eight days before he knocked one evening at the door to Maximilian’s bedchamber as Maximilian was preparing for evening court.

  Maximilian waved away the servants, then indicated Vorstus should take a chair. “What can I do for you, Vorstus? You are normally cloistered in your library at this time of night.”

  “What did you think of Serpent’s Nest, Maxel?”

  Maximilian tugged at the cuffs of his linen shirt, making sure they sat comfortably under his heavy velvet overjacket. “I’d wondered why you did not come to me directly, Vorstus, instead of cloaking this offer in mystery. You know more than you are saying. What?”

  “All I know is what I have told you. No one was more shocked than I when I saw that Serpent’s Nest is what was anciently called the Mountain at the Edge of the World.”

  Maximilian shot him a deeply cynical look. As abbot of the Order of Persimius, Vorstus was privy to almost all of its secrets.

  “All I know is what I have told you,” Vorstus repeated quietly.

  “How coincidental that the Mountain at the Edge of the World is now dedicated to a serpent god.”

  “Perhaps just a coincidence.”

  Maximilian stopped fiddling with his attire and looked at Vorstus directly. “Is Elcho Falling stirring, Vorstus?”

  “I don’t know, Maxel.”

  “I am sick of hearing your ‘I don’t knows’!”

  “I—”

  “Listen to me, Vorstus. I know that you were instrumental in aiding my escape from the Veins, and for that you know I am grateful. But I am not going to spend my life mired in debt to you, nor am I going to put up with you stepping coyly about something that has the power to destroy this entire world. Gods! Have I not had enough darkness in my life? Or do the gods demand something else from me besides losing seventeen years, seventeen years, Vorstus, to those damned, damned gloam mines? Have I not suffered enough?”

  “If Elcho Falling is waking, Maximilian Persimius, then you must do what needs to be done.”

  The patronizing idiot, Maximilian thought. “Ah, get out of here, Vorstus.”

  Maximilian waited until Vorstus had his hand on the door handle before speaking again.

  “One more thing, Vorstus. You know of the Persimius Chamber?”

  Vorstus gave a wary nod.

  “You know what it contains?”

  Another wary nod.

  “But you never took Cavor there. You never inducted him into the deeper mysteries of the Persimius throne.”

  Vorstus now gave a very reluctant single shake of his head, and Maximilian could see that his hand had grown white-knuckled about the door handle.

  “I was standing in the Persimius Chambe
r the other night, Vorstus, and a strange unsettling thought occurred to me. Here you are, Abbot of the Order of Persimius, and the only one apart from the king and his heir who knows what truly underpins the Persimius throne. But for seventeen years, when everyone save Cavor thought me dead, you never once took the opportunity of inducting Cavor into the mysteries? Should you not have done that? I can perhaps understand you waiting a year or so, hoping for a miracle, but seventeen?”

  “I always had faith that you—”

  “You knew, for those entire seventeen years, Vorstus, that I was alive. That is the only reason you did not induct Cavor into the mysteries. You knew I was coming back.”

  “I—”

  “Get out, Vorstus. Get out!”

  When the door had closed behind him, Maximilian walked to a mirror and stood before it, seeing not a reflection of himself, but of the bleakness that had consumed him within the Veins.

  “You knew where I was,” Maximilian whispered, “and you left me there for seventeen years.”

  Much later that night, still unsettled and unable to turn his mind away from Elcho Falling, Maximilian sat in his darkened bedchamber, rested his head against the high back of the chair, and closed his eyes.

  As he had visited the Persimius Chamber on a previous night, so now Maximilian visited another of the mysteries his father had taught him.

  The Twisted Tower.

  The crown of Elcho Falling carried with it many responsibilities, many duties, and a great depth of dark, writhing mystery. Each king of Escator, and his heir, had to learn it all in case they one day had to assume once more the crown of Elcho Falling.

  There was an enormous amount of information, of ritual, of windings and wakings, and of magic so powerful that it took great skill, and an even better memory, to wield it. There was so much to recall, and to hand down through the generations, that long ago one of the Persimius kings, perhaps the last of the sitting lords of Elcho Falling, had created a memory palace in which to store all the knowledge of Elcho Falling.

  They called it the Twisted Tower.

  Maximilian now entered the Twisted Tower, recalling as he did so the day his father had first taught him how to open the door.

  “Visualize before you,” his father had said, “a great Twisted Tower, coiling into the sky. It stands ninety levels high, and contains but one door at ground level, and one window just below the roofline. On each level there is one single chamber. Can you picture it, Maxel?”

  Maximilian, even though he was but nine, could do so easily. The strange tower—its masonry laid so that its courses lifted in corkscrews—rose before him as if he had known it intimately from birth and, under his father’s direction, Maximilian laid his hand to the handle of the door and opened it.

  A chamber lay directly inside, crowded with furniture that was overlaid with so many objects Maximilian could only stand and stare.

  “See here,” his father had said. “This blue and white plate as it sits on the table. It is the first object you see, and it contains a memory. Pick it up, Maxel, and tell me what you see.”

  Maximilian picked up the plate. As he did so, a stanza of verse filled his mind, and his lips moved soundlessly as he rolled the words about his mouth.

  “That is part of the great invocation meant to raise the gates of Elcho Falling,” said his father. “The second stanza lies right next to it, the red glass ball. Pick that up now, and learn…”

  Maximilian had not entered the Twisted Tower since his last lesson with his father, just before his fourteenth birthday when he’d been abducted. That lesson had, fortuitously, been the day his father had taken him into the final chamber at the very top of the Twisted Tower. Despite it being well over twenty years since he’d last entered, Maximilian had no trouble in re-creating in his mind the Twisted Tower, and traveled it now, examining every object in each successive chamber and recalling their memories throughout the height of the tower.

  As he rose, the chambers became increasingly empty.

  It began at the thirty-sixth level chamber. This chamber was, as all the chambers below it, crammed with furniture, which in turn was crammed with objects, each containing a memory. But occasional empty places lay scattered about, marked by shapes in the dust, showing that objects had once rested there.

  Maximilian turned to his father. “Why are there empty spaces, Father?”

  His father shifted uncomfortably. “The memories held within these objects have been passed down for many thousands of years, Maxel. Sometimes mistakes have been made in the passing, objects have been mislaid, memories forgotten. So much has been lost, son. I am sorry.”

  “But what if we needed it, Father? What if we needed to resurrect Elcho Falling?”

  His father had not answered that question, which had in itself been answer enough for Maximilian.

  Now Maximilian entered the final chamber at the very top of the tower.

  It was utterly barren of any furniture or objects.

  Everything it had once contained had been forgotten.

  Maximilian stood there, turning about, thinking about how the chambers had become progressively emptier as he’d climbed through the tower.

  He was glad that he had remembered everything his father had taught him, and that he could retrieve the memories intact as he took each object into his hands.

  But, contrariwise, Maximilian was filled with despair at the thought that if, if, he was to be the King of Escator who once again had to shoulder the ancient responsibilities of Elcho Falling, he would need to do so with well over half of the memories, the rituals, and the enchantments of Elcho Falling forgotten and lost for all time.

  [ Part Two ]

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lake Juit, the Tyranny of Isembaard

  Lake Juit, as old as the land itself, lay still and quiet in the dawn. The sun had barely risen, and broad, rosy horizontal shafts of soft light illuminated the gently rippling expanse of the lake, and set the deep reed beds surrounding the lake into deep mauve-pocked shadow.

  A man poled a punt out of the reed beds.

  He was very tall, broad-shouldered, and handsomely muscled, with a head of magnificent black tightly-braided hair that hung in a great sweep to a point midway down his back. He wore a white linen hipwrap, its simplicity a foil to the magnificent collar of pure gold and bejeweled links that draped over his shoulders and partway down his chest and back.

  He was Isaiah, Tyrant of Isembaard, and the lake was surrounded by ten thousand of his spearmen, while on the ramshackle wooden pier from where he’d set out waited his court maniac, the elusively insane (but remarkably useful) Ba’al’uz.

  Ba’al’uz narrowed his eyes thoughtfully as he watched his tyrant. One did not expect one’s normally completely predictable tyrant to suddenly decamp from his palace at Aqhat, move ten thousand men and his maniac down to this humid and pest-ridden lake, saying nothing about his motives, and then get everyone up well before dawn to watch their tyrant set off by himself in a punt.

  Ba’al’uz had no idea what Isaiah was about, and he did not like that at all.

  Isaiah poled the punt slowly and steadily forward. He did not head out into the center of the shallow lake, but kept close to the reed beds. Occasionally he smiled very slightly, as here and there a frog peeked out from behind the reeds.

  As Isaiah got deeper into the lake, he watched the dawn light carefully, waiting for the precise moment.

  He poled rhythmically, using the regular movements of his arms and body to concentrate on the matter at hand. What he was about to do was so dangerous that if he allowed himself to think about it he knew he would turn the punt back to the wharf and the watching Ba’al’uz.

  But Isaiah could not afford to do that. He needed to concentrate—

  At one with the water.

  —and he needed to focus—

  On the Song of the Frogs.

  —and he needed to draw on all the power he contained within his body—

  And allow i
t to ripple, to wash, and to run with the tide.

  —and he needed today to be successful, because without that which he’d come for, Isaiah knew the task of the Lord of Elcho Falling would be nigh to impossible, and the land itself would fail.

  Besides, he knew this would annoy Ba’al’uz, and annoying Ba’al’uz always brightened Isaiah’s day.

  Above all, Isaiah was here because he needed something from the lake very, very badly, and he did not think the world would survive if he did not get that for which he’d come.

  The sun was a little higher now, and nerves fluttered in Isaiah’s belly, threatening to break his concentration. His hands tightened fractionally on the pole, and he forced himself to focus.

  The air, clear a few minutes ago, was now damp with mist seeping out from the reed banks.

  Frogs began to sing, a low, sweet melody, and one or two of them hopped onto the prow of the punt.

  Isaiah closed his eyes briefly, overcome with the sweetness of their song.

  Then, hands tightened once more, eyes opening, he drew down on the deep well of power within himself.

  Isaiah spoke the words that were needed, and the moment the last one dropped from his mouth the air about the entire lake exploded in sound and movement as millions of pink-and scarlet-hued juit birds rose screaming into the dawn light.

  On the wharf, Ba’al’uz crouched down, arms over his head, and shrieked together with the birds.

  About the lake, ten thousand men thrust their spears into the air, and screamed as one with Ba’al’uz.

  On the lake, Isaiah poled into the reed banks, into magic and mystery, and into the strange borderland between worlds. Then, while the air still rang with the harsh cries of bird and man, as the frogs screamed, and as the sun suddenly topped the horizon and flooded the lake and reed beds with light, Isaiah dropped the pole, reached down into the water, and lifted a struggling, naked man into the punt.