The Serpent's Shadow

Norrey. They darted inside the shattered door and found themselves in an antechamber that had probably once served as an office for this warehouse, lit by a pair of gas fixtures above the fireplace. Now, it was clearly serving as a guard room. Two of the guards still remained on the floor, two dacoits in dark cotton tunics and bloused pants, with the characteristic scarlet strangling cords at the belts and scarlet scarves around their heads. One was unconscious, the other dead. Beyond them was an open door. There were no furnishings besides a couple of chairs that would serve only for kindling at this point.

The owl waddled up behind them from the outer doorway, and Gupta took her up on his fist. Norrey put Sia and Singhe down on the floor and accepted Mala and his glove from Gupta. The mongooses nosed the bodies sprawled amid the broken chairs, then looked up at Peter.

'Forward' Rhadi whispered. Peter nodded at the open door, through which the ongoing sounds of struggle still came, but distantly.

'Through there,' he said, as Rhadi bobbed agreement. Gupta drew his broad, curved sword and went through first.

They entered a huge and mostly empty room. A faint glow of light came from the room behind them and the ceiling far above; just enough to give them the sense of the size of the room, but not the shape nor the contents. The ceiling light was more like a smear of foxfire than an actual light, and Peter thought that he recalled the thugee cult using foxfire or something like it in lieu of other illumination to strengthen their night vision. A faint, darker rectangle opposite them marked what might be a door on the other side of the cavernous warehouse.

'I don't like this place,' he muttered. He couldn't put his finger on it, but there was something wrong here, as if this warehouse was something more—

And that was when two enormous cobras, shining with a sickly yellow light of their own, suddenly reared up between them and the next doorway.

The door behind them slammed shut.

'Hell!' he shouted, frantically scrambling backward, heart pounding and every nerve thrilling with atavistic fear. Norrey screamed; Gupta shouted something in Urdu. Both of them stood frozen against the unholy glare surrounding the cobras.

Peter had never seen snakes this size. Rearing up on their coils with hoods spread, hissing, they were easily as tall as he. They were black, completely black, without the characteristic 'eyes' on the backs of their hoods, each scale outlined in yellow phosphorescence. He fumbled for the revolver Almsley had given him as they swayed, hissing, their malevolent little eyes glittering like tiny rubies.

But Sia and Singhe were faster than their human companions.

Backs humped, fur bristling, teeth bared, they advanced on the cobras stiffly. The serpents, in their turn, were alerted by the movement, and fixed their attention on the mongooses.

'Right,' Rhadi whispered into Peter's ear.

Moving slowly—for although the cobras had fixated on their hereditary enemy, the humans were all still in reach of those deadly fangs—Peter inched forward to touch Norrey's sleeve. She shook off her paralysis to look out of the corner of her eye at him; the hell-glare surrounding the snakes at least gave them some illumination to see each other by. He jerked his head to the right; she managed to ease herself backward until she had her back against the wall, then edged crabwise along it. Her movement took Gupta's attention from the cobras. He saw what she was doing, and did the same. And finally Peter backed up, to discover by touch that the door that had been there was there no longer.

If they were still in the warehouse—and the wall behind him felt like the rough wood of the warehouse wall—something had significantly changed. As they stood there, watching cobras and mongooses challenge each other, the place began to fill with mist that glowed with the same, faint yellow-green as the phosphorescent smear above them. The brightest light surrounded the two cobras as they swayed back and forth, eyes fixed on the mongooses bobbing and dancing in front of them, never stopping for a single moment. Then Sia and Singhe froze for one moment—

The cobras struck, twin lances of death hurtling through the thickening mist at the mongooses. Who weren't there.

The mongooses leaped straight up, the instant that the snakes struck, and came down with all four sets of claws ready to grab, landing right behind the cobra's hoods. They latched on and each sunk a set of sharp little teeth into the neck at the base of the snake's skull where the head met the hood. And they held on for dear life.

The cobras went into a frenzy of thrashing, trying to throw them off, trying to batter them against the wall and floor. And as they thrashed, traveling inexorably away from Peter, they began to grow—

But before the mist thickened and then swirled between Peter and the terrible combat, he caught a glimpse of something else. It might have been hallucination; it might have been illusion. But he thought he caught sight of faces and bodies overlaying the forms of enormous cobras and mongooses. Wrestling against a pair of blue-faced demons were a pair of beings he thought he recognized. Could one of them have been the god Rama—and the other, the goddess Sita?

It was only a moment that he saw them, or thought he did.