Something is off.
An old beer hall sits farther up and across the street, a place Ilapara knows well. Music and drunken voices should be coming out of that place, even with a hostile mystic in town, if only because alcohol has the tendency to dilute fears.
Today it’s dead silent.
Gripping her spear with both hands, she steps over a murky rivulet and onto the street, straining her ears. But all she detects is the sigh of her own breath and the crowing from above.
“Is something wrong, Ilapara?” Salo says.
She turns around. He looks so unsuspecting, this boy, this naive creature of the Plains, with his straw hat and loincloth and staff and spectacles. He shouldn’t be here.
Ingacha raises his head, flaring his ears. She walks to him and checks the cinch of his saddle. “Where did you leave your mount?”
“Outside town,” Salo says. “I didn’t want to bring him in. Why?”
“We’ll ride Ingacha to wherever you left your mount; then you’ll go as far away from here as you can. Understand?”
He stares at her. “You’re not making any sense, Ilapara.”
“There’s no time to explain. You need—”
A sudden ruckus comes from within the walls of the livery yard. Then she spots something gray and shimmery slipping out the gates: it’s coming up behind Salo and it’s long and meandering and fiendishly fast and it’s rearing its head and it’s about to strike and its fangs are a foot long, so she pushes Salo out of the way—
No, she shoves him with her free hand so forcefully he tips over with a yelp, but her attention is solely on this thing that’s coming, because its jaws are yawning open and its fangs are dripping with venom, so there’s no time to think, no time for anything at all but movement, movement or death.
So she moves. She strikes with her spear, whipping its point down and thrusting forward into the advancing maw, and by the time her mind has caught up to her body, an upper jaw is impaled upon the sleekness of her aerosteel weapon.
A human upper jaw, attached to the body of a giant serpent.
She recoils in horror, pulling her spear out. As the creature falls to the ground, she sees that no, actually, this is really just a horrifically huge cobra with no resemblance to a human at all. Then it writhes on the ground, and the maze of markings on its serpentine head comes back into view. She almost screams because her sight is proven false again, and dear Ama, that actually is a human head on the serpent, complete with a beard and bright reptilian eyes. Familiar eyes.
Terror strikes her as she finally understands what she has killed. This creature could be nothing but an ilomba, a serpent of Blood craft sent by a mystic to kill her. Its master carved his Seal onto its hood so she would see his face when she saw the markings. Now it is writhing and tossing mindlessly on the ground, and he saw through its eyes that she killed it.
Off to her side, Salo is fumbling about for his spectacles on the ground, which were dislodged from his face when he fell. The animals in the livery behind them are still in uproar. Ingacha’s huffing and brandishing his horns angrily, scratching the earth with a foreleg like he wants to charge. A second sinuous horror has slithered out of the beer hall through a first floor window, advancing with its head reared high, its hood spread out, threatening.
Ilapara charges toward this second monster, careful not to look at it directly, and this might be the most terrifying thing she’s ever done, but her heart’s beating steadily, and she’s in total control of her body. The magic of the Seal on the serpent’s head gives it a constant and dizzying shift in appearance; one second she sees a horrible snake with foot-long fangs, the next a human face with reptile eyes. Worse, the two looks seem to merge, and the face unlocks its jaws unnaturally, like it could swallow her whole.
They meet in the middle of the street, and it lunges for her with its jaws wide open, its face rapidly shifting between cobra and man and a horrid hybrid of both. She rolls to her right just in time to avoid its lethal fangs, and quickly she whips her spear outward, gritting her teeth when she feels its cutting edge biting into the ilomba’s side. It hisses in anger and flings its tail toward her, but she’s already ducking and pivoting on her feet to bring her spear around for another blow. She feels the slightest resistance before her weapon pulses with Storm craft from its enchanted witchwood core, and then a chunk of the serpent’s head is parted from its body in a spray of blood—only for the rest of it to twist around so fast she doesn’t notice its long tail lashing through the air until it has smashed her across her chest, knocking her back.
She flies and then hits the ground with the grace of a flung doll. She gasps for breath. Wet mud clings to her head scarf as she forces herself to keep moving, stumbling up to her feet while using the blunt end of her weapon for balance.
“Ilapara! Watch out!” Salo cries.
She looks, and along the crescent street of beer halls, shacks, and the livery’s wooden paling, the largest ilomba yet is closing in from the west.
Her heart sinks into the pit of her stomach, and her knees almost fail her, but not because of the snake; she has killed two of these things already, and she would face another without fear. But another monster has drawn her gaze westward along the same road, a galloping blue-eyed abomination of a cat with a mane of metal spines flared out in anger, and this she knows she cannot oppose.
“Get out of the way, Ilapara!”
Somehow her feet move just as the cat leaps into the air. She raises an arm, bracing for death, but death does not come. Instead, the giant cat has pounced upon the ilomba, not her. Then she notices the saddlery attached to the cat and understands.
By Ama, that’s the Siningwe totem in the flesh. Salo really is a mystic.
The fight between totem and serpent is brief. The ilomba attempts to coil itself around the cat, but the cat bats it away with its metal paws—and gets punished for it with several quick bites laced with deadly venom, all of them to the neck. But they only seem to anger the cat further, for it snaps its jaws into the serpent and twists, severing the spine. The ilomba goes limp in the cat’s maw and is promptly tossed to the ground.
When something bursts out of the gates to the livery right then, Ilapara whirls round with her spear, ready for anything.
Then she lets herself breathe a sigh of relief. “A rather convenient time to show up, Tuksaad.” She begins to stride toward Ingacha, who didn’t run away even when he should have. “Where’s your mount? We need to leave—now. There could be more of these things.”
Tuksaad’s eyes are black as ink and cold as steel. Pearls of blood spatter his face. He’s wearing that little smile of his, but it’s dispassionate, coolly calculating. Ilapara’s sure he went in unarmed, but he’s carrying a long blade in one hand, slim and slightly curved, with a golden gleam. Might be her eyes are playing tricks on her, but it looks somewhat translucent.
Ilapara braces her foot on one of Ingacha’s stirrups to mount him. “The disciple who rules this town controls these things remotely. That means he’s nearby. We don’t want him finding us.”
“I sensed them.” Salo’s straw hat is askew on his head. His eyebrows are arched high with panic, and dust now covers half his body. “I sensed them, but I wasn’t paying attention. I thought they were people or . . . something else, something harmless. I didn’t think—oh, dear Ama, there were two in the yard, weren’t there.” He looks to Tuksaad. “Are they dead? Where’s the liveryman?”