The Serpent's Shadow

But then the mist came up and carried the combat away—or it moved away from him—and even the sounds of hissing and thrashing faded and were gone.

'Right,'' Rhadi insisted in his ear, and Peter started, then felt his way along the wall and resumed his journey.

What next? he wondered, as he caught up with the other two. There would be something next. He knew it by the thickening, suffocating mist, by the oppressive sense of being watched, by the increasing taint of inimical magic. He recognized this mist now; it was close kin to the fog that had smothered Maya's body, but tangible and 'real' to the ordinary senses.

He put Charan up on the shoulder opposite Rhadi.

The langur buried both his hands in Peter's hair and clenched his prehensile toes in the fabric of his shirt. The parrot clung on like a tick with his little claws. Nothing was going to dislodge either of them short of a hurricane.

Now it was not only heat, but humidity creeping into the fog and unpleasant scent, the dankness of the swamp, fetid and clinging. If Peter hadn't known he was in a warehouse in the heart of London, he would have been certain he was groping his way through the jungle, up to his knees in swamp water. The warehouse wall was slick with damp, and his hand occasionally brushed a patch of something slimy.

His foot splashed into a puddle. He looked down, and barely made out standing water along the wall. A few steps and it was ankle-deep, with swirls of something greenish and unpleasant floating on it.

'Ew,' Norrey complained ahead of him.

'Sahib,' Gupta whispered in Urdu, 'I do not wish to frighten the child, but this is not natural. This building has taken us to some—other place. Or else it contains that place. Or else this is all an illusion.'

'I think you're right,' Peter whispered back.

The question was, how to behave? If it was illusion, would it be best to try to disbelieve in it and break it? What if it wasn't? He wasn't certain that he wanted to contemplate how much power it would take to bring the priestess' world to London—or London to India.

But there was a third option, that this was neither wholly real, nor wholly illusion; that the priestess had brought them to her version of the Elemental Worlds. That would require far less power —though it was still considerable.

The mongooses were certainly acting as if they believed the cobras were real. We'll do the same.

'Keep going,' Peter urged both of his companions. 'Still right. Follow the wall.'

'I 'ear something—'issing—' Norrey began.

And a trident buried itself in the wood of the wall between Peter and Norrey.

They both leaped apart with curses, and a dark-skinned woman with a mouth full of pointed teeth reared up out of the mist, hissed at them and yanked the trident free. Another lunged up beside her, both of them aiming their trident weapons at the men, and grinning fiendishly, both glowing with the same hell-light as the great cobras.

Peter fumbled and dropped the revolver in the water; something lashed at his feet and sent it flying off into the darkness. It was then he realized that these women were not exactly human.

In fact, from the waist down, they were enormous snakes.

The second moved sinuously toward him through the mist—and both attacked the men with their tridents, ignoring Norrey, making sharp jabs to separate them. Gupta held his attacker off with his sword. It tried to catch the blade in the tines of the trident and twist it away, but he parried its attempts, cursing freely. Peter dodged and ducked the lightning jabs, circling toward Gupta and getting Norrey behind them both, until Gupta managed to pass him one of the long knives in his belt.

Steel clanked on steel; Rhadi and Charan plastered themselves against his neck as he fended off the blows of the wicked weapon. Fortunately, neither of these creatures seemed to be particularly good fighters, but that didn't make their peril any less, for besides having to fend off the tridents, Gupta and Peter had to beware the lashing tails that threatened to knock them off their feet.

'Duckl' cried Norrey behind them; he and Gupta dropped to their knees without question, splashing down into the swampy water—

Nisha and Mala arrowed over their bent heads, screaming their war-cries, heading straight for the heads of their demonic opponents. The women slithered backward, hissing in alarm; both birds were growing larger—