Murder by Magic (16 page)

Austin’s backyard was as crowded as Galen had ever seen it: Cherig had seen to that. There had to be thirty people here, Galen thought nervously, not counting the policemen with the herpetologist. That one policeman was here, but he was keeping back. After all, he hardly needed to watch to know what was going to happen.

She wanted more time to practice. Cherig insisted, though: it had only been three days, but the snake planets were in transit to the waterfall constellation, and it had to be done now. So far as Galen knew, Cherig was just making it all up, but maybe that was unfair to Cherig. Galen didn’t like the woman, but at least she seemed sincere about her religion.

If you could call Taber religion,
Galen thought bitterly; and heard the annoyed shifting of coils across the grass, behind her, to her left, where the policemen were waiting for the service to begin.

It was cool twilight in the back of Austin’s house, and the coarse grass of the lawn was prickly beneath Galen’s bare feet. Austin had had feet like leather, but the snake had bitten her on the hand, in the webbing between her thumb and her forefinger. Austin’s entire arm had been swollen to grotesque proportions, but she had apparently been dead for at least twelve hours by the time Cherig found her, coming to pick up some gear she’d dropped off for temporary storage.

Cherig struck the wood blocks together sharply. The people gathered on the lawn quieted down and settled themselves to watch. There was no time like the present to be started. She wanted to get this over with; the Taber ritual furniture in array in the worship space made her nervous. Galen clapped her hands three times and then three times twice more, and then Galen stepped into the ritual space. The cool earth felt soft against her bare feet after the painfully coarse grass, dry and stubbly in the late summer heat.

The half-harp was waiting on its stand on the bare earth. Galen drew her hand across the strings, letting the sound soothe her. Austin had been her friend, even though they had never agreed about the King-snake. Austin had died horribly. The snake that had done it was not at fault, but had to be removed, for everybody’s safety and peace of mind.

The silence behind her deepened as she stroked the half-harp, starting the call. Three notes, very simple; the snake wouldn’t hear at all, not as a human would understand it, but vibration was vibration whether transmitted through the air or through the ground. The snake would come to see what had been brought for his supper. He had had no milk for days now. He might be hungry.

“Up-tempo,” Cherig admonished Galen from behind. Galen had offered Cherig the chance to conduct the rite herself—to display her talents in a positive environment. Cherig had declined. No, Cherig was looking forward to a spectacular public failure on Galen’s part, to strengthen her own position; as if Galen had any ambitions in that direction.

She kept her tempo the way she liked it. Snakes liked periodicity. She could hear Cherig’s exasperated sigh at her left shoulder; she didn’t care. She heard the slithering sound of the King-snake’s approach, behind her, behind Cherig, and listened to see whether Cherig would say anything. Didn’t Cherig hear?

Come on, you bastard,
Galen thought, but with a touch of genuine desperation.
You always said you wanted me back. Here I am. Take me. Make it work, for Austin’s sake.
She touched the strings of the half-harp, and the sound vibrated in her ears like an itch that was almost scratched but needed just a little—just a little—just a little bit more. She started to hum with it, drumming with her feet on the cool damp earth to call the snake.

“Sigils,
please,
” Cherig said from behind her.

Galen stooped over the low altar in front of her and took up the little leather bags of corn flour and wheat flour, rye flour and ground malted barley, making the sign around the altar with lines of ground grain. She was beginning to feel good, even with Cherig here. The snake had started to crawl up her spine. She’d sworn she would never deal with him again, but for old times’ sake, maybe this once. It had been so good. Once.

Don’t you think it’s time you called?
Galen heard the words and danced herself down onto her knees to bow down low to the ground and whisper to the bosom of the earth.
Let the snake come, Mother. Please. Open up the gate, and let me pass through to him, so that we may consort together, and I may gain in wisdom to serve your children better.
She had the eggs ready; she had decorated them herself with paprika and ink, determined not to succumb to the temptation that the Taber rite represented. She would do it clean.

Galen sang and Galen chanted, but nothing was happening, and she could sense the confusion of the spectators even as she fought to concentrate. It wasn’t working. She couldn’t do Taber. Taber couldn’t be cleanly done. She offered whiskey and gunpowder and cayenne and nothing happened except that the sky grew darker as twilight deepened, and Cherig sounding bored and contemptuous behind her paced her ritual with clear disgust, fatalistic resignation.
Of course you can’t do it, Galen. You don’t have what it takes to dance Taber.

But Austin hadn’t, either. It took hatred and resentment and frustration to call out the Kinsey snake, and Galen had never wanted that energy in her life. She didn’t want that energy in her life now, but the snake had her. He rose halfway up her spine, and she began to see the red mist in front of her eyes and took the dish up in her hands with savage abandon.

She’d never dealt in blood in her whole life, though when she’d been much younger, she had flirted with it—blood, and the King-snake, beautiful and savage and destructive, the joy there was in being absolute mistress of her own environment even at the expense of those around her. Austin had known the call; she’d wisely turned her back to it. How could Austin have lost her moral compass—

It wasn’t the snake’s fault,
the King-snake whispered to her.
Cherig left him half-wild.
Galen couldn’t quite grasp his meaning, but she didn’t care; she had more important things on her mind. She had to be careful. There was so much power here, it could go wrong so easily; but she was drunk on him.

She spilled his drink out across the picture she had made, the crude geometric lines appropriate to the sigil of the King-snake in the Taber rite. She heard him, but in front of her now, and she could hardly believe it—she hadn’t thought she had it in her to dance Taber, especially with so little preparation. The snake was coming. Galen knelt down and sang to him, passionately longing for his forked-tongued kiss, and saw him coming through the underbrush to taste his dish. The snake.

He looked just like Austin’s cheerful self-contained Folliet, just like him. But a Folliet snake would never come to a Taber working. So he wasn’t a Folliet snake, after all; he was a Kinsey snake, he had killed Austin.

“Shit,” Galen heard Cherig say behind her. “I don’t believe it—” Of course Cherig didn’t believe it. Cherig would never have expected Galen to have what it takes to call the snake out in a Taber rite.

Or was there another meaning behind Cherig’s curse? Galen wondered; but she didn’t have much time to think about it, because as the snake came out of the underbrush to coil itself around its dish and taste the offering to bless it, the herpetologist reached over Galen’s shoulder with his viper hook and snagged it around the body just behind its head.

Nobody had taken the herpetologist by the hand to lead him in; Cherig hadn’t warned her. The sudden break in the ritual space shattered the chords of the sacred dance. The collapsing energies struck Galen like a blow to the stomach; the snake was gone. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. There were things to say, charges to deliver, energy to direct—an incomplete ritual was the worst hangover she had ever had. What had happened to Cherig?

The tall policeman raised her gently by her elbows, helping her up off the ground, walking her through to the house with his arm around her to support her and to shelter her, settling her down in her favorite of Austin’s chairs in the front room. She didn’t see Cherig anywhere, but it wasn’t Cherig’s fault, not really. She should have planned for this, Galen realized, half-addled. She should have realized that the ritual would not run its course. And now she owed the King-snake for having spoiled his ritual; she, who wanted nothing to do with him.

She hadn’t believed it could have been a Kinsey snake, not even with the evidence she had seen, Austin’s agonized form and the coroner’s report. She hadn’t believed that Austin had really done it. And she hadn’t believed that she could, either. Nor had Cherig, Galen was sure of that. Where was Cherig?

Now Austin was lost to her so much more completely than the mere fact of her death in the body. An Austin who could have been seduced into the Taber rite wasn’t Austin at all.

Galen wept with the sorrow of her bereavement. The women of Austin’s circle gathered around her and wove the safety net, catching the rogue energy that she had to purge from her body in sticky-threaded chant, seeing that it harmed no one.

Now she’s not sure,
the King-snake said very quietly, for her ears alone.
She knows she traded snakes safely when she found Austin’s body. But now she has to go and check again. And it is her fault that my priestess is dead.
King-snake was always talking in riddles. Galen didn’t have the energy to wonder what he was on about. She curled up in the chair and went to sleep, with women chanting soothingly around her.

The police came back early in the next afternoon, with the snake and the herpetologist in tow. “There’ll be a report in the evening papers,” the senior policeman said. “We’ve removed the Kinsey snake from the pet shop. This one’s Miss Austin’s Folliet, after all.”

Yes, the snake looked like Austin’s Folliet; he was smiling sleepily at her, wanting to go back into his backyard. But to have a dish of milk first. “I don’t understand,” Galen said. Her body ached from head to foot; as she had feared, this was the worst hangover she had ever had. This if nothing else would have convinced her that the Taber rite was not for her. “If Folliet isn’t a Kinsey snake, what killed Austin?”

The policeman exchanged a glance with the herpetologist, who shrugged. “Your associate was keeping a Kinsey snake at the pet store, it seems,” the herpetologist said. “One of the part-time employees found it on her body in the back room when she opened the shop this morning. This snake—” The herpetologist lifted Folliet out of his travel cage and handed him to Galen. “This one I took last night, this snake is legal. All I can think is that she thought she could just switch the snakes to pass the audit. It didn’t work very well in the long run.”

And he didn’t want to talk about it. So much was obvious. There were things unspoken that Galen didn’t understand; the policeman excused himself and left her alone with Folliet, who nosed around her face looking for milk. Austin used to hold milk in her mouth for Folliet. Galen wasn’t about ready to go that far; but if this was truly Folliet, if Folliet was an honest snake, why had he come to a Taber rite?

She carried Folliet out to the back, stopping in the kitchen as she went through for some milk. Pouring him a dish, a plain dish, an honest kitchen dish, Galen set him down beside the willow for him to find his favorite place.

The sound of the scales hissing in her ears from behind her did not surprise her. “What happened?” Galen asked the still air. “I don’t understand.”

You did your part,
the King-snake said.
Cherig was willing to put my priestess at risk to hide the snake. Now the balance is restored.

Reality blinked away from Galen’s eyes like the membrane across the eye of the snake, and she saw it all. Cherig’s snake. Austin dead when Cherig came to smuggle Folliet home and take her Kinsey back, after the auditors had gone. The Taber furniture, so that was what Cherig had been storing here; a cover-up. It was hard to tell the difference between Kinsey snakes and Folliet snakes, especially in a hurry.

When Folliet had come to Galen last night, Cherig had run to check, to be sure, to confirm for her peace of mind that she’d retrieved the Kinsey snake: and it had killed her. “Austin never touched the Taber rite,” Galen said, more glad than she could explain. “It was a frame.”

She heard his scales whispering across the ground. There was a shadow on the far side of the willow tree: a tall white man, with long hands.
My priestess is avenged, Galen. And Folliet has always liked you. Who will sing to him now?

Folliet had finished his milk and crept away to nap. Galen looked out over Austin’s back lot, remembering how it had been when she was much younger. It hadn’t been the King-snake’s fault. He could still move her when he took her. He’d proved it. “Well,” Galen said, “I suppose I could give it a chance.”

A breeze lifted the skirts of the willow tree. The King-snake passed, leaving her with a contented floating feeling in her body and the only very mildly mocking sound of his words in her ear.
I knew you’d come around. We’ll do very well together, I can promise you that, priestess.

He’d used her, yes, but he did have a right to protect his own.
Priestess.
She was Austin’s heir in fact, perhaps Austin had always wanted her to reconcile with the King-snake.

Galen picked Folliet’s dish of milk up off the ground and went into the house.

Double Jeopardy

M. J. Hamilton

M. J. Hamilton began crafting fantasy at an early age. While other little girls dreamed of becoming nurses or mommies, M. J. wanted to grow up to be Tinker Bell. When wings failed to sprout from her back, she turned her creative mind to writing.

And she taught her all her mysteries and gave her the necklace, which is the circle of rebirth.

Y
ou must pass the amulets to your successors within twenty-four hours to prevent any permanent damage to the balance of good and evil. Full responsibility is yours until your duty is fulfilled.”

I really didn’t want to assume full responsibility. I didn’t have a choice. I adjusted the receiver on my ear and met my grandmother’s steady gaze. “I’ll honor my vows.”