The Serpent's Shadow (45 page)

The narrow little street in which Maya lived, heavily overshadowed by the buildings on either side with the dome of St. Paul's looming over all in the distance, was remarkably quiet today. The only vehicle on the pavement was a milk float returning empty to the dairy. There were some small children, toddlers, playing together on a doorstep, but other than that, no other people were about. There was traffic and the sounds of people two or three streets away, but not here. Peter rang Maya's bell and it seemed unnaturally loud in such quietude; after a moment, he heard Gupta's footsteps within, and the door opened.

Maya's chief servitor appeared within, his white tunic and bloused trousers spotlessly correct, even though he must have been working in the kitchen all morning. “The doctor will be—” Gupta began, and stopped, a look of surprise on his weathered face, when he saw who it was, for Peter should have known (as in fact, he did) that Maya was not in this afternoon.

“I didn't come to see Doctor Maya, Gupta,” Peter said, before Gupta could gather his wits. “I came to see you. May I come in and speak with you?”

“Of course, sahib,” Gupta said politely, a mask of calculated indifference dropping over his features. Peter wasn't worried. This was only Gupta's public face. He thought it was likely that once Gupta was in a place where he felt comfortable and in control, the mask would come off again.

So when Gupta hesitated between going in the direction of Maya's office and her conservatory, Peter smiled disarmingly, and said, “Why don't we go to the kitchen?”

The mask flickered for a moment. Then Gupta bowed his head and turned to lead the way to his sanctum.

With the break in the weather, the kitchen was now cozy rather than stifling, and Gupta acknowledged Peter's appreciative sniff at the scent of baking bread with a slight smile. The mask was beginning to crack.

Gupta nodded at a stool, and Peter sat himself down beside the kitchen table, scoured spotless, scored with the knife cuts and marks of the preparation of many, many meals. Gupta poured two cups of tea from the kettle he always had ready, and offered Peter the milk and sugar, though he himself took neither.

Peter waited until Gupta took a second stool before he spoke; he put his tea down on the table and looked straight into the old man's eyes, and asked, “What enemy is it that has followed Maya from India?”

Gupta started; the mask shattered. “What is it you know?” the old man demanded harshly—and now Peter saw, thinly veiled, the warrior that hid within the butler and servant—the bodyguard that Peter had always suspected he truly was.

Peter took a sip of tea, as if he had not seen so much when the mask came off. “I know that when she came here—and I discovered her—she had done her best to create defenses against something. I know that you were certain she needed those defenses. And I know—” he hesitated, then plunged in further. “—I know that there is something in this city now, that kills by night, crushing the breath from men. These are all
pukka sahibs,
Englishmen, many officers of the Army who once dwelt in your homeland and, I presume, did harm to your people there. Or at least, whoever sent this thing to kill them, thought that they had done harm.”

Gupta's eyes widened at this last intelligence, and he sucked in his breath in a hiss. “And it comes—when?” he asked urgently. “In the hot night?”

Peter shook his head. “In the fog,” he said. “Always with the fog. The fog creeps in, and men die alone, suffocated, as if something had crushed the life from them.”

And that opened the floodgates.

Within the next hour, Peter got all of Maya's life history, as well as that of her mother and as much of her father's that Gupta knew. He also got the history of the woman he supposed must be regarded as Maya's aunt—the devotee of Kali Durga, the sorceress Shivani, who had sworn eternal enmity with her own sister when she married an Englishman, and presumably was still the enemy of Surya's daughter.

All of this poured forth in a torrent of mixed English and Urdu that taxed Peter's knowledge of the latter to the limit. Sometimes he had to make Gupta stop and explain himself. But in the end, he knew as much as Gupta did—and had just as much reason to be alarmed.

And yet—“Do you think our defenses have stopped her?” he asked doubtfully. “I've taught her all I know about shields, and there are some things that she knows that are as good or better than anything I showed her.”

“That—and the little ones—the pets,” Gupta added, when Peter looked puzzled. “I think—” He hesitated, then plunged boldly on. “I think that they are more than pets.”

Peter waited, keeping his expression quietly expectant. At this point, he wasn't about to discount anything the old man said. There were long traditions of “familiars” among the families in whom the talent for magic ran deeply, even in this island nation.

Gupta paused for another moment, then continued. “I do not know what they are. They were Surya's; they were grown when she first obtained them, and I do not know from where they came. So. She was fourteen years then; Maya was born when she was twenty. That is six years. Maya is now more than twenty. So how is it that none,
none
of these ‘pets' look more than three or four years at most?”

“Uh—I don't know.” He wasn't sure how old Hanuman langurs lived, or parrots—but falcons certainly didn't live to be more than twenty, nor, he thought, did peacocks. Nor did mongooses. Certainly
all
of the animals should be showing the signs of great maturity by now, if not of old age! So they were not “familiars” as he knew them. What were they?

“Right. They are not pets, but at the moment, it doesn't matter what they are, since they are our creatures.
But what is killing those men?”
That was the important question.

“It must be some thing of Shivani‘s,” Gupta replied. “And I think it must take the form of a snake. One of the great, crushing snakes, perhaps?”

Peter nodded. “A constrictor—a python—and that makes sense.”

“The cobra is holy,” Gupta agreed. “I do not think she would risk invoking the form of a cobra by magic, just to slay a few sahibs. But even a python would not dare to cross paths with Singhe and Sia—for surely
they
are as magical as it is. If Shivani could have attacked Maya in this way, it would have happened some time ago. So Maya is safe from it.”

“Even if Maya is safe in
here,”
he asked, urgently, “What about when she's out
there
?
”

Gupta could only shake his head.

Shivani ground her teeth in anger, and paced back and forth in her room, her bangles and anklets chinking softly with each step, her sari swishing around her feet. She was so enraged she could not have spoken if she had tried. It hadn't worked! All that effort, all the preparation, all the hours spent in extracting the tiniest atom of power from that wretched man Parkening, and it
still
hadn't allowed her Shadow to penetrate the girl's defenses! Now the Shadow was spent, unable to go forth even to replenish itself from other sources, and still the girl's very existence mocked her! All her carefully laid plans were stalled, because of this one miserable girl!

She could not get near the girl, either directly or indirectly by means of her dacoits, without alerting her to the peril she lay in and probably causing her to bolt for yet another far country. That would spell the end to
all
of Shivani's plans; she could hide herself and her men in London, but
not
in barbaric New York! Who had ever heard of Hindus in New York? No, above all else, the girl
must not
know how close Shivani was to taking her!

So close—so agonizingly close, and yet no closer than before. The traitor was protected physically and magically within her dwelling, and she never ventured out of it alone—by day she was in the protection of crowds, and on the rare times when she traveled by night, she was with cab drivers, other doctors, or that man.
That
man, mostly. And he,
he
was fully protected by magic she did not understand, and was wary of. It would be one thing, were she to deal with him on
her
terms; quite another to attempt to take him on his.

No native could get within striking distance of the girl without her noting and probably reacting before a strike could be made, for she avoided the presence of her own countrymen—other than her personal servants—as if she knew that those of the homeland could be dangerous to her. Oh, perhaps one could simply
kill
her with an English gun, at a distance—but that was not the point! The point was for Shivani to recover the
power
this girl had, and to add it to her own, so that she could continue to wreak vengeance on the sahibs! Even more to the point would be to enslave her spirit so that Shivani could force
her
to help in Shivani's crusade! To merely
slay
her would be sheer futility and criminal waste!

She stood up, and paced the floor.
If
she could get a drop of the girl's blood—or
if
she could somehow get one of several special potions into her—the girl could die however she died, and it would still be possible to steal her spirit and power. But how could that be accomplished? Her dacoits had tried, and failed, to invade her home. She guarded every hair that fell from her head with obsessive care, and she never ate or drank anything that was not from the hands of her servants or prepared in English kitchens by English cooks.

Perhaps—perhaps she was not studying her enemy thoroughly enough.

She stopped pacing, and strode instead to the table on which her mirror rested. The mirror-slave was so much more tractable now that Shivani kept the mirror completely unshrouded. As tenuous as his grip on sanity was, she deemed it prudent not to push him any nearer to the brink.

She picked it up and retired with it to her favorite corner. Curled up among her cushions, with insect netting shielding her from flying pests that came in the open windows and a cool breeze to calm her and set the wind chimes singing softly, she spoke to the eager face, changing with the swirling darkness in the glass, that looked up into hers.

“Show me more of the girl,” she commanded. “What has she done today and yesterday, outside of her house?”

She didn't have to be any more specific than that. The slave knew very well who
she
was, and immediately showed her the girl walking out of her own doorway, perhaps to get a cab or find a ‘bus.

But this time, Shivani paid no attention to the girl herself; now she concentrated on her surroundings. She ordered the slave to show her the street where the girl lived.

Not a wealthy place, though not quite as impoverished as this slum where Shivani had hidden her people. Narrow buildings of brick and stone, gray and brown, crammed together, three and four and even six stories tall—the girl's little white-stone house seemed shrunken by comparison. The men here wore rough, workingman's clothing, dungarees and flannel shirts and heavy, laced boots. The women, with their aprons and shabby little straw hats, their checked shirtwaists and skirts worn shiny in places, were well enough off to show no visible patches or mends, but clearly did not often see a new garment. Working poor; hoping for better, but not likely to ever see it, and far too foolish-proud to turn to charity or crime to save themselves.

So, so, so. This situation had some promise. She wasn't protected
all
the time. “Show me the next portion of her day,” she directed. The slave showed the girl catching the ‘bus which took her deeper into the slums, to the place where her clinic lay. Shivani shook her head when the path led there. There was no hope of getting at her in that place. She had already tried to send her dacoits to the neighborhood of the clinic, hoping that among the thieves and bandits, they would be, if not invisible, at least inconspicuous. A vain hope; the thieves and bandits were fiercely territorial, the beggars acting as their eyes and ears, and the dacoits were swiftly driven out of hiding places and sent off with a pack of brats in full cry at their heels. In the teeming warrens where the girl had gone in her foolish quest to help the poor, there were no unclaimed hiding places, and any interloper was assumed to be another bandit trying to cut out a territory for himself. Shivani had not appreciated until that moment how lucky she had been to find this habitation in the quarter where the immigrant Jews had collected; there were few outright thieves here, and one set of foreigners was invisible in the midst of the hordes of villagers uprooted from places like Russia and Belarus, Slovakia and Serbia. Most here were Jews, who were incurious about any other race. Her people were no darker in complexion than some of these, nor were their accents and customs any stranger. So long as they kept to themselves, the neighbors did the same.