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.
