Kwasin almost stumbled mid-stride. For an instant, he thought he had seen a naked female figure standing tall upon one of the stone monuments, lit up in the fleeting brilliance of another heavenly flash. The figure had held forth what looked like a crooked, snake-headed staff. Or it could have been a real snake. He could not be sure. The whole thing might have been a false apparition, conjured in his mind by the unnerving images of Kho and the coiling pythons upon the tall, black stones.
He made it to the monument but paused only briefly behind it. Then he was running again, this time toward the shore, jumping over the rocks and small boulders that littered the scape between the barrowlike mounds. If any sling-stones whirred past him, he did not notice.
Cold rain sprinkled Kwasin’s face as he ran. A moment later, the darkened heavens clamored with fury, and in the next, a deluge of hail and sleet assailed him in what was surely a bad omen. The sungod Resu—who, in his rage at his mother and ex-lover Kho, had sided with King Minruth in the bloody civil war—was also the god of rain.
A javelin hurtled at Kwasin out of the dark but its deadly point missed him, thudding into the muddy ground before him. Kwasin jumped over the weapon and veered to his left toward where he judged the javelin had come.
Then he saw the thrower emerge from behind a mound not twenty strides away, winding up his sling for a throw.
Kwasin looked for cover, but seeing none, roared in competition with the heavens’ din and charged the slinger. Kwasin knew it was a desperate act, but maybe the sight of the furious seven-foot-tall giant charging forward would cause the slinger to flee or to fumble his throw.
The tactic had worked for Kwasin in the past, but the slinger who confronted him now seemed frustratingly cool and levelheaded. He continued to whirl his sling as Kwasin closed upon him, tightening the revolutions of the weapon’s cradle to compensate for the changing proximity of his target.
Blood drained from Kwasin’s face. He would take the full brunt of the projectile at close range.
Suddenly, the man reeled. The sling-stone shot out of its cradle, flying off harmlessly into the night.
Kwasin ran forward and examined the man, who had pitched forward into the slick, gravelly mud, facedown and unmoving. For a moment, Kwasin saw no wound upon the man. Then, running his hand over the man’s back in the freezing rain, he felt something protruding from the skin: a thistle-fletched bamboo dart, impaled deeply.
He grabbed the fallen man by his long hair, lifted up his head, and placed a hand before the man’s nose and mouth. Though frigid rain pelted Kwasin’s palm, he felt warm, shallow breaths upon it.
The dart was doubtless tipped with a paralytic.
Kwasin dropped the man’s face into the mud and looked about. Perhaps he had not imagined the woman atop the monolith after all.
After dispatching the man, Kwasin got up and again made for the shore. This time, however, he proceeded at a cautious jog, his roving eyes seeking to penetrate the gloom of night and storm.
Kwasin arrived at the shore to find it unoccupied except for the two empty skiffs. Grinning darkly, he went to work with his ax smashing great holes in the bottoms of the boats, all the while keeping watch inland, though he could no longer see farther than a few yards in the storm-wracked night. Finished with his sabotage, he looked out to sea, wondering what had become of the bireme that had landed the party of marines on shore. Doubtless she was having a hard time of it on the storm-lashed waves, and he could only hope her captain had taken the vessel back out to sea to avoid being driven onto the shallows.
A man’s throaty cry turned Kwasin’s attention away from the sea and back inland. Still thwarted by darkness, he took off rapidly toward the ruins and the direction of the shout, his great ax held ready in both hands.
When he came to the top of the slope he could just make out the form of a woman in the murk of the ruins ahead. Her long, dark hair whipped wildly in the wind and in her hands she held a long tube. In a crouched stance, she crept forward toward a crumpled form several paces before her on the ground. The form could have been an outcropping for all Kwasin could tell, but in context of the cry he had heard only moments earlier, the scene told it all: the woman had struck down a marine with her blowgun and she was quietly advancing to ascertain whether her dart had fully immobilized its target.
Then, to his horror, he perceived amid the shadows a dark, man-sized figure moving up just behind the woman. Kwasin bellowed a warning but it was too late. The woman screamed as the shadowy figure enveloped her. The bamboo tube of the blowgun clunked hollowly as the woman flailed it against an adjoining pillar in an attempt to repel her attacker. Then the tube clattered to the stony ground. The woman grunted as if struck and went limp.
Kwasin was already running into the ruins at the first glimpse of the woman’s attacker, but by the time he arrived at the spot, he found the man had slipped into the shadows, apparently dragging the woman with him. For a moment, Kwasin bent low and looked for prints in the muddy ground, but the black night made the endeavor impossible. He got up and began running frantically from monument to monument, rapidly circling behind the stones in search of the marine and his captive.
As Kwasin stepped momentarily out of the rain beneath the protection of a half-toppled monolith, something cold and soft slithered across his ankle. He froze. Looking down he saw a grotesque and bloated wormlike form glide across the black ground, its pale skin patterned evenly with darker diamondshaped markings. The priestess’s python, free of its mistress, must have sought out the relative dryness provided by the vaulting pillar.
He shuddered, thinking of his mother’s death by snake bite when he had been but ten years old. While the serpent that had struck and killed his mother had not been a python, the pictographs on the surrounding monuments unnerved him. That, and the dreams that had assailed him since his return from the Wild Lands—horrendous visions of his mother’s death, played over and over until he thought he might go mad. What did they mean? Might the nightmares presage his death in the ruins of cursed Miterisi?
But adversity, rather than daunting him, more often served Kwasin as a catalyst to overcome what he considered self-weakness. And so, biting back his revulsion, the giant leaned over, lifted up the snake, and looped it over his great shoulders. Despite the cause of his mother’s death, he held no deep fear of snakes. It was only Goddess-forsaken Miterisi that now unsettled him in this regard. Following his mother’s death, he had frequently forced himself to handle serpents, much to his cousin Hadon’s dismay, who awoke all too often to find a slithering companion in his bed.
This last thought brought a grin to Kwasin’s face, and thus distracted, he almost stumbled into a narrow opening in the ground that he had overlooked in the dark. A fortuitous lightning flash, however, prevented the accident, and also revealed a distinct handprint in the mud that ringed the stone-lined, circular hole. The marine had taken his captive down into the underground chamber—perhaps an ancient storage bin for grain or some other harvest—in the hope that he could wait out the giant who sought to slay him. The man had apparently taken the woman as a fail-safe—if Kwasin cornered him, the man would threaten to kill his hostage.
For a moment, Kwasin considered his options. He could move one of the small boulders that littered the site overtop the opening and thus seal the marine in a living tomb. This would require the least risk and effort on his part, but he would also be entombing the woman who had risked her life to defend him. He could also drop down into the hole, hoping the element of surprise would aid him. The marine, however, would be waiting below to dispatch Kwasin with his sword. But it was a third option that Kwasin found the most appealing.
Slowly and carefully, he knelt down beside the hole and uncoiled the python from his shoulders. As the snake slithered down an arm, Kwasin lowered the creature toward the opening in the ground. The python paused briefly; then, finding a ledge of rough stone cropping from one side of the hole’s interior, it slid down into the earth.
A fleeting guilt tinged Kwasin’s conscience as he thought of the woman, a guilt he quickly cast off. To live, one often had to do unpleasant things, even if that meant risking the life of a potential ally. Besides, he had seen the woman handle the snake when she stood illuminated by lightning atop the stone pillar—the python appeared to be her familiar. Had he not also seen the oracle at Dythbeth seemingly command her sacred serpent before his very eyes upon the occasion of the pronouncement of his exile to the Wild Lands? The priestesses of Kho—and this woman was certainly one—seemed to have an affinity with their ophidian pets. Surely the woman’s own snake would not harm her.
But doubt returned as Kwasin stood above the hole, the rain running in small waterfalls off the colossal column of black stone. For a long while he stood there waiting, until the fury of the storm abated to a gentle drizzle and he began to wonder if the man had indeed crawled into the pit. Then, at last, it came—a choked-off male scream of utter terror.
Kwasin grinned. His inspired decision had been the right one. After all, in cursed Miterisi, was it not best to ally with the local snake god than to fight against him?
A short time later the woman crawled slowly up out of the dark mouth in the earth, the whitish-scaled, diamond-spotted python draped over her back and coiling around a shoulder and arm. She was indeed a priestess, as evidenced by the jewel-studded ceremonial dagger sheathed upon her shapely hip. She must have recovered the blade from her captor after the snake had strangled him.
Kwasin made the sign of Kho and the priestess’s strong white teeth glistened back at him in the darkness.
He had been about to speak but stopped himself abruptly. Did the woman’s canines look a little too long, a little too sharp? A little too... snakelike?
Kwasin frowned at himself, then laughed—a trifle nervously, he thought. No, it was just these cursed ruins playing tricks on his mind once more. When he saw the woman in the bright daylight he was sure she would appear as ravishingly and humanly beautiful as the darkness of the night hinted.
“What are you looking at?” the priestess said. “We must hurry. Now that the storm’s abated, the shipmates of the sailors we’ve killed will likely come ashore looking for their men. Let’s go!”
The woman reached out for his hand, but Kwasin hesitated. When the woman had spoken, had he merely imagined that her tongue flicked out from between her luscious lips in a most unmistakably reptilian fashion?
Kwasin frowned again. Then, uttering a half-facetious—and half-serious—prayer to Kho, he took her cold, tiny hand in his own warm, giant one and headed out into the night.
* * *
Kwasin awoke the next day in the little temple that rose from the center of the sacred grove of the pythoness. Through the little window beside his bed of sleeping furs, he could hear the gentle tinkling of the creek that wound around the temple and through the forest. With a heavy sigh of contentment, he flung aside the furs, sat up, and regarded the lithe form of the priestess that lay sleeping beside him.
The sight of the naked woman aroused him, but not enough for him to wake her for more lovemaking. Although the priestess was of uncommon beauty, that beauty also was of uncommon strangeness. The darkness had not deceived him about her teeth—her canines had indeed been filed to points resembling those of a serpent’s fangs. He lightly touched the numerous scrapes on his shoulders and chest where she had raked him with those teeth while in the throes of passion.
A chill ran through him as he recalled his night with Madekha. Her movements during foreplay had been eerily snakelike, and though she had kissed him as lovingly as any warm-blooded woman, he could not mistake the soft hissing between kisses. But then, he should not have been surprised—what did one expect from the high priestess of the Spotted Python Totem? And he could not say he did not enjoy himself at the time.
The woman reached out to pull the furs back over herself, then groaned lightly and opened her eyes with a silent yawn. Seeing Kwasin, she smiled.
“Sinuneth welcomes you this morning, O Giant Warrior.” The priestess now looked past Kwasin to the pile of furs and linens piled up at the head of the oak-framed bed.
Kwasin’s skin crawled as he slowly turned his gaze to where she looked. Then he jumped up out of the bed, cursing loudly.
The priestess’s diamond-spotted familiar glided out from the deep mass of coverings to coil caressingly around its mistress’s outstretched arm.
The woman laughed and said, “You did not seem to mind Sinuneth’s company last night.”
“You mean the snake was in our bed while we—” Kwasin bellowed another curse and began donning his lion-skin kilt.
“I don’t advise you to leave the temple by daylight.” Madekha let the snake slither from her arm and back onto the bed, then arose and continued. “If a worshiper from the village sees you, it might get back to T’agoqo and his jealousies will be all the more enflamed. Though he and his fellow priests have thus far resisted King Minruth’s blasphemies, I hold little faith they will continue to do so. T’agoqo has only maintained a thin façade of faithfulness to Kho because he desires me and I have dangled out the thread of hope. He knows he will never have me if he publicly turns against the cause of the Goddess, but if he learns I am harboring a legendary criminal and that I have invited him into my bed...”
Madekha arose and rang a small iron bell, and before long two young, raven-haired priestesses entered the chamber. “See to his needs,” she ordered them, and then regarded Kwasin.
“We have much to discuss, O Kwasin. You are a criminal, exiled by the oracle at Dythbeth for crimes against a daughter of Kho, and we must address that fact before we speak any further. But we are also in a Time of Troubles, and even the Goddess must seek aid where she can find it.” She motioned to the priestesses to escort Kwasin from the chamber, but as he passed through the doorway she called out to him.
“Behave yourself with my priestesses,” she said as he turned back. “They will clean you up and take care of your desires, but if you harm them in any way, you will awake in Sisisken’s dark house before you even know what has struck you.”
Kwasin smiled innocently and traced the sign of Kho with his fingers, but deep inside he felt troubled at the snakewoman’s words.
* * *
A little over two hours later, Kwasin met with Madekha beneath a portico behind the temple overlooking the well-tended grove to Terisikokori, the local pythoness goddess. The storm had passed and the strong, late morning sun shone down through the trees, causing the leaves that had blown to the ground during the previous night’s torrent to glisten with a golden light. Already the day’s oppressive heat fought to break through the shade of the trees.
Above, Kwasin heard the cry of datoekem, then spied one of the large, white-winged gulls arcing overhead through the trees. It reminded him of the proximity to the shore of the temple and the adjoining village of Kaarkor. Madekha had told him the seagirt cliffs of the Saasanadar lay not a quarter mile north of the hallowed grove.
With a nod, Madekha dismissed her attendant, who had come with news of Khowot’s recent eruption and the devastation it had once again wrought upon the capital. It seemed that Minruth blamed the disaster on the prisoners who had just escaped from his prison, proclaiming their breakout had precipitated a great shouting match between Kho and Resu. But though the prisoners had made their getaway, Minruth asserted that Resu had won out in the end, for had not the god of the sun and rain quickly brought the blessed showers that saved much of the city from the fires that threatened to destroy it? Still, Resu was angry that the escapees had succeeded, and if they were not caught soon, the sungod would punish the mortals in the capital for their incompetence. Further, Minruth had sworn vengeance on any city, village, or individual that came to the aid of Kwasin and the other escapees. The priestess was taking a great risk by harboring him.
“You look refreshed,” Madekha said, not unpleasantly, though her face betrayed worry at her attendant’s news. “But then
you will need to be, for you have much work ahead of you in the days to come, O Kwasin.”
“It is not my intention to stay here, O Priestess,” Kwasin said. “I can’t tarry here and fight your battles. Those I have yet to face lie westward, on the road to Dythbeth, where I intend to clear my name.”
Madekha smiled grimly. “There is truth in what you say, but do you think you can just walk into Dythbeth and demand forgiveness from Queen Weth?”
Kwasin said nothing. He had not truly thought out his plans for accomplishing his goal once he arrived at his birth city. Not that he had had the time to do so since his flight from the capital.
“But the oracle did pronounce that you would be permitted to return to the land when Kho so decrees,” Madekha went on. “I, of course, am not in a position to speak for Kho on this matter, but that is not to say I cannot aid you. After all, you saved my life in the old city, although it is true I would have been in no danger had it not been for you. But it was my decision to enter the ruins of Miterisi all the same, prompted as I was to go there by a vision from the sacred pythoness herself, and I don’t regret slaying the followers of Minruth’s new order. I owe you... well, if not a favor, then an opportunity.”
As the priestess spoke, Kwasin had the sinking feeling he was about to be pulled into a business of which he wanted no part. What she said next convinced him of it.
“Much has changed across the land even since you returned from your exile and were imprisoned. Minruth’s profane revolt has spread to the outermost corners of the empire. While it is true that Dythbeth yet holds out against the sun worshipers, the cities and towns all around her are falling fast. And though the rural areas and mountain villages remain in large part stolid against the ambitions of Minruth and his wicked priests, that is not to say they have gone untouched. One such village—profaned by the blasphemers, and very dear to me for reasons I will soon explain—lies in the path of your journey westward across the island: the village of Q”okwoqo.”