Serpent's Silver (8 page)

A serpent!
Kian thought, and shuddered so hard he chimed.

Chapter 8

Gone

As the boat moved slowly around the bend, propelled by the current and St. Helens’ expert rowing, Kelvin reflected that he had previously seen all this through Heln’s eyes. But did spirits have eyes? Rather, did a disembodied mind have eyes? If a mind could separate from the body, how was that different from the spirit?

Well, perhaps the distinction wasn’t essential. He
had seen,
and this remained eerily familiar. But this time he was in his physical body and would not be able to float free of any danger in the manner her astral self could.

He watched the softly glowing walls and continued to muse in a way totally unlike himself.

“Houcat got your tongue?” St. Helens asked.

“Sort of.” The man used the same Earth expressions as his father. All his life Kelvin had been familiar with houcats, but had never seen one with anyone’s tongue. He had concluded that the expression was intended as alien-frame humor, so naturally it didn’t make much sense here.

“You thinking about what I was telling you? About what we’ll do about Aratex?”

Kelvin had to reorient his thoughts. He had been mainly watching for the turn into the side passage and the chamber, letting his thoughts muse on about Heln and their out-of-body trips. “You mean the Aratex affair? Their boy king and the witch Melbah and the troops you want to recruit?”

“I mean the Aratex revolution. Haven’t you been listening to me? Don’t you want to displace that kid dictator, get rid of the witch, and unite Aratex with Rud? Aren’t you a little bit enthused?”

“I’m afraid I don’t like it, St. Helens.”

“Why not? You’ll be running things. You with your dad’s help, and my help, too.”

“I don’t like war. The glory of slaughtering people is lost on me. I don’t feel that when I fight it’s fair. I’m not a natural warrior, but as long as I have the gauntlets there’s not a champion anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms who can win against me.”

“That’s bad?” St. Helens was incredulous. “Seems to me you should be glad the gauntlets exist.”

“Sometimes I feel as though everything is an accident. I never wanted a prophecy and I certainly didn’t want round ears. My sister, Jon, was always more battle-minded than I.”

“Quite the little Viking, isn’t she?”

“She always had the spirit,” Kelvin admitted. He had heard of Vikings from his father: some sort of warrior who had lived back on Earth. He wondered if St. Helens had been one.

“She and Mor Crumb seemed enthusiastic. Lester sounded as if he’d come around. But it’s your choice. It’s not for me to talk the Roundear of Prophecy into anything.”

Then what was the man trying to do now? Talk him out of it? Ha! “I’ve never been comfortable with that title.”

“It’s you. You slew dragons and you rid your country of a sore. Now that the queen isn’t oppressing Rud, it’s time to move on to another line of that prophecy. Next line: ‘Joining Two.’ Only two words, but clear enough.”

“My mother used to say, ‘It’s as true as prophecy.’ “

“That’s it, lad. As true as prophecy. It’s your destiny, like it or not. Manifest destiny, I say.”

Something was bothering Kelvin, in addition to the man and his attitude. Suddenly he put his finger on it. “I thought you were like my father.”

“Lot like him, lad, in what counts,” St. Helens agreed. “Different in what doesn’t count.”

“He never believed in magic.”

“And right he was. It’s all just sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors and illusion. But the credulous folk believe, and that gives it its power.”

“But prophecy is magic. So why do you accept that?”

“I
don’t
accept it, lad’. Except to the extent that it influences people. What they call self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Then how can I have any manifest destiny?”

“Because the people believe,” St. Helens said earnestly. “Because they accept it. So we have to make it come true. You’re the one they think will do it, so they’ll follow you. It won’t just happen on its own—you have to
make
it happen. Otherwise you’ll ruin their belief in the prophecy, and the whole thing goes down the tubes, and our one best chance for making things better is gone. That’s why you have to do it.”

Kelvin was dismayed. He had thought he had caught the man in an inconsistency, and instead St. Helens had made the case stronger yet. He trailed a hand in the water and watched silvery bubbles form off his fingertips. The air smelled damp and green here, probably from the lichen. As damp as his hopes of reprieve.

“You know you’ll come to it,” St. Helens prodded. “You’ve got to. It’s our, eh, your manifest destiny, just as I said.”

“Perhaps.” Kelvin felt even further out of sorts than usual. “But really, one step at a time. Once Father and Kian are back in this frame, then—” He paused, took a deep breath, not liking where his father-in-law was leading him.

“Yes, son, yes?” How eager he seemed.

“Then I will think about it.”

“You’ll
think
about it? Is that all you’re going to say? Can’t you at least say that I’m right?”

Kelvin shook his head. “Not until I have thought.”

St. Helens eased up on the oars. His face got very red as he stared into Kelvin’s. Anger pulsed just below the surface.

“Am I to understand, Hackleberry, that you might not go with me into Aratex?”

“I might not,” Kelvin agreed. It was only his honesty speaking, not his good sense.

St. Helens’ eyes grew hard and his expression harder. When he spoke it was with a threatening lowered tone. “How would you like it, sonny, if I were to abandon
you?
I could row the boat back and leave you to go on to the other frame alone. Leave you to search all by yourself for your relatives. How about that?”

Kelvin’s heart leaped.
Oh, thank you, Gods! At last something is going right!

“St. Helens, that would be wonderful!”
Just what I hoped for! That you would go back!

St. Helens erupted. He swore fearsome Earth oaths that John Knight had sometimes used, and some he had never used. He banged a fist repeatedly against the air, seemingly trying to hammer a nonexistent spike. He swore on and on for what felt like a very long, uncomfortable time. No wonder he was named after a volcano.

Unfortunately, he did not row back the way they had come. Apparently that threat had been a bluff.

“There’s The Flaw!” Kelvin exclaimed. It had appeared just in time. “Bear to the left, St. Helens. We have to keep away from it. That’s our passage over there.” He pointed to where the water branched from the main channel. The spot was unmistakable.

St. Helens sat at the oars. His lips firmed. He folded his arms on his chest and rested his beard.

The man was stubborn and dangerous, Kelvin thought. St. Helens would try to force a promise from him by waiting as the terrible roaring falls loomed closer and closer. He could see stars shining up from the dark anomaly like cold, hard eyes: the occasional bright spark streaking through the blackness that waited to swallow them.

“Row, St. Helens!”

St. Helens took no heed. His expression was that of a statue carved from ice.

The danger was real. The gauntlets, propelled by his knowing, acted. With a swiftness that startled both St. Helens and himself, his hands grabbed the oars. It was awkward rowing from the bow, but the gauntlets were expert.

“LET GO OF THOSE!” St. Helens roared, grabbing for the oars. He caught them below the gauntlets, but his resistance was like nothing to them; the gauntlets just kept pulling, moving Kelvin’s arms and shoulders and torso as required. St. Helens, heaving back with all his strength, was yanked forward to the extreme limit of his arms. He paled noticeably, as though his blood had drained.

Guided by the gloves, the oars bit into the water, turning the boat around, so that now Kelvin was in position to row it effectively. He did so.

“You surprise me,” St. Helens gasped. He struggled for a moment, his face reddening again, and then again white. “I—I see now that you’re the true, the one, the only Roundear of Prophecy. You, not I.”

“Do you, St. Helens?” Kelvin asked, surprising himself with his own level voice. “Considering that you don’t believe in magic?”

The boat was now crawling into the passage. Just ahead was Kian’s tethered boat on a small ledge. The gauntlets pulled their boat up beside it and tethered it to a waiting ring.

St. Helens seemed to have recovered from his surprise. “Look, lad, you’ve no call to get smart-mouthed about—”

Quite independent of Kelvin and what he might have done had he been making the decision, the right gauntlet swung wide and whacked his father-in-law on the side of the head, interrupting his statement.

“OW!” St. Helens cried. He held his cheek, looking startled as well as pained. Then a cloud of renewed anger crossed his face. “Why, you young snot!”

As St. Helens started to rise from his seat, the gauntlet slapped the top of his head, crushing his stockelcap flat, and pushed him back down. The boat rocked; water lapped the top of the gunwales.

“You stay here, St. Helens,” Kelvin said. He now fully appreciated the enormous advantage the gauntlets gave him. They were making a man of him—a man of prophecy that did not exist without them. “I’ll go on alone. You go back and tell the others what happened.”

“No, sonny, no!” St. Helens gasped. “I was foolish to have doubted you. I was going by appearances. To me you look and act like a boy.”

Kelvin’s gauntlets were already exerting the small amount of strength required to move the lever on the round door. With no squeak whatever, the huge metallic thing rotated, revealing, as in a vision, the sphere’s interior. Lights of an alien magic lit up the chamber as brightly as day. In the center of a table waited the parchment. Beside it lay the levitation belt Kian had scorned to take. Next to them, the closet with what to Kelvin appeared to be clocks.

Kelvin found that he was actually feeling heroic. Getting the upper hand over his father-in-law accounted for it.

He began reading the parchment. He skipped over the sections concerning the chamber and its other contents as well as the message he had read through Heln’s eyes. What he wanted to learn about, and quickly, was the transporter to other worlds.

“Wait, son!” St. Helens cried from beyond. “We’re kin—remember?”

Kelvin glanced up from his reading, annoyed. “We’re not—”

“I’m Heln’s father, at least. If you don’t want me along, that’s your right. But let me inside with you, please.”

“You can stay where you are.”

“No, I want to see the chamber. I’m from Earth, remember. I might be able to tell things you can’t.”

What harm would it do? St. Helens was no worse than many of the men Kelvin had commanded during the fighting for the kingdom of Rud. And St. Helens was his wife’s sire. He might hate the thought, but he couldn’t deny it.

“All right. Come on in.” He took off his laser, perhaps unnecessarily, and placed it on the table next to the parchment. Now just let St. Helens try something as foolish as he had in the boat. One wrong word from that coarse smoothie mouth and he’d point the laser at him and order him home. No way to treat decent kin, perhaps, but this was St. Helens.

Obediently, even meekly, St. Helens climbed from the boat and joined him in the chamber. Possibly, just possibly, he had learned. At least the chamber didn’t object to the man’s entrance; he was a legitimate roundear. At times Kelvin had wondered; after all, surgery on pointed ears could make them look round.

“You’ve got your nerve, St. Helens.”

St. Helens looked around, wide-eyed, at the chamber’s few contents. “Always have had, son. Nerve is why I’m here. Your old man knew.”

Kelvin decided to ignore him. His gauntlets were bothering him now by feeling warm. Since there was nothing to fear from his father-in-law, he bared his hands and dropped the hero-savers beside the levitation belt.

He went back to studying the parchment. The instructions were simple in the extreme: “Set the dials, then walk into the transporter. A living presence within the transporter will activate it.”

“Hmm, maybe so,” Kelvin said, looking at the closet. How long since the dials on the outside of the closet had been moved? He took a step away from the table, thinking to examine them.

A sudden movement by St. Helens startled him. He started to turn, but in that moment St. Helens acted. A ham of a fist struck the side of his face. Stars exploded. He reached out, took a wobbly step, stumbled, and collapsed forward. Falling, part of him realized, into the waiting transporter.

Into—

*

Purple flashed inside the closet. It was deep and bright, yet almost black. St. Helens blinked as the color vanished, and with it Kelvin.

“Gods!” St. Helens said, awed more than he had even been before in his life. “Gods!”

He shivered from head to toe.
I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have! But dammit, the kid needed a lesson. Better him than me. Better get out.

He glanced at the parchment, written in those hen-scratchings that he had never bothered to learn to read. Then down at the levitation belt and the gauntlets.

“At least I can take the laser. At least that.” he said.

His hand shook as he picked up the familiar weapon, checking its setting and safety. It would do. Do for old Melbah and, if necessary, for the brat king and an entire army.

He felt a little better now. The weapon put him in command.

He would like the levitation belt. He could work out how to use it, he was certain. Take that with him into Aratex, levitate above Conjurer’s Rock, and scorch the old crone’s feathers. That would end things fast.

The gauntlets lay like severed hands on the belt. If he was to take one, he might as well take all.

Reaching down, not letting himself think about it, he grabbed up the gauntlets and quickly slipped them on. He stood for a few moments trying to feel something, anything, but his hands felt just like his hands. Interestingly, the gauntlets had stretched over his hands for a perfect fit: hands twice the size of Hackleberry’s.