Lies of Light

12

7 Ches, the Year of the Sword (1365 DR) The Nagaflow

"We feel anger,” Svayyah said for all the assembled naja’ssara to hear. “We feel great, grave, crippling anger, and that anger is directed not toward this dista’ssara before you, but for one of our own.”

The source of her frustration glowered back at her from where he hung suspended, almost motionless in the cool, murky water. Six more of their kind swirled around them, their attentions struggling between the accused Shingrayuand the human, Ivar Devorast. Their tension began to heat the water, and Svayyah’s red-orange spines grew redder still.

“Anger?” Shingrayu replied, literally dripping venom from his fangs into the water with each sneered syllable. “What does Svayyah know of anger? Let us tell our tribe-mates of anger.”

Svayyah brought to mind a spell that would heat the water around Shingrayu to so scalding a temperature that his scales would slough from his body. But rather than cast it, she said to the other water nagas, “This dista’ssara, this human, is known to us. We have given it our word. We have made an agreement with it.”

She looked at Devorast, who floated in. the bubble of air she’d made for him with his arms folded across his chest. She could read nothing in his face, but his irritation came off him in waves that nettled at her sea-green scales.

“We care nothing for an agreement with this low monkey of the dry cities,” Shingrayu spat. His serpentine body twitched, and he moved forwardonly a foot or twobut Svayyah reacted to the threat by enveloping herself in a protective shield of magic. It lit around her with a pearles-cent glow, reflecting off the particles of dirt that floated in the water. “You made this agreement, Svayyah.”

The other half dozen water nagas writhed at the sound of that word: you.

“We close upon the place where words fail,” Svayyah warned him.

“Discussions were had,” Zaeliira cut in. Her blue-green scales looked dull and old in the meager light from the surface and the glow of Svayyah’s shield.

“Zaeliira has been swimming the Nagaflow for eight centuries,” said Shuryall, “and however weakened by age, Zaeliira may be, all naja’ssara heed the counsel of Zaeliira.”

“We make our own way,” Shingrayu hissed. “We are Ssa’Naja.”

“Shingrayu went above the waves and brought violent magic to the naja’ssara in the employ of Ivar Devorast,” Svayyah accused. “Does Shingrayu deny this?”

“Is there denial?” asked Zaeliira, who appeared to smart from Shingrayu’s comment.

Shingrayu pulled himself out to his full length, an impressive eighteen feet, and drew his scales in tight so that he seemed to blaze green in the murk. “We see prey and we eat. We see invaders and we defend. We see insult and we take offense. We see Svayyah’s ambition and we protect ourselves and our ways. There will be no serpent queen here.”

The other nagas raced through the water at the sound of those words, whirling faster and faster around the bubble Devorast floated in until it began to turn in the water. He held out his handsthose freakish appendages of the dista’ssaraand steadied himself. Svayyah waited for him to speak, but he said nothing. He met her eyes finally, and she fell into his gaze in a way she couldn’t understandin a way that almost made her believe that Shingrayu had been right all along.

“What this dista’ssara works will be of great benefit to all the naja’ssara of the Nagaflow and the Nagawater,” she said, shouting into the tempestuous waters.

The other nagas began to calm, but Shingrayu remained just as rigid.

“Ivar Devorast comes here of his own will,” Svayyah went on, “and entirely at our mercy. Should we but wish it, the water would rush in to fill his human lungs and take him to whatever afterlife awaits him. He braves this, for a work.”

“A work?” Shuryall asked.

“We have heard of this thing the dista’ssara seeks to build,” said the young and impetuous Flayanna. “It will bring human after human, ship after ship to our waters.

Human filth. Shingrayu speaks and acts true. We should also like to go to these dista’ssara and kill.”

“If Flayanna wishes to kill Svayyah first to do so, then we stand at the ready,” Svayyah challenged, knowing the younger naga would back down.

Flayanna wouldn’t look at her, and only swam more slowly in a circle around Devorast.

“If this human wishes it,” Shingrayu said, “let it ask us all, not only Svayyah, who is no queen here.”

“Again, that word,” Svayyah growled. She twitched her tail to bring herself closer to Shingrayu. “Speak it once more, and it will be the last word to pass Shingrayu’s poison tongue.”

The other nagas swam then, not too fast, but with a purpose. They gave the two combatants room. They knew what was going to happen. And Svayyah knew that the future of the canal would rest with her. If Shingrayu killed her, Devorast would never live to see the surface again. He likely wouldn’t outlive the last dying spasm of Svayyah’s own heart.

“There will be no canal to bring human excrement into our home waters, Svayyah,” Shingrayu said, his voice heavy with challenge. “There will be no Queen of the Nagaflow.”

Svayyah opened her mouth wide, showed her fangs, let her forked tongue taste the familiar waters, and shrieked her challenge at the damnable Shingrayu. The sound, amplified by magic, sent visible ripples through the water. The other nagas pulled even farther back. When the wave front hit Shingrayu, he closed his eyes and withstood the battering force. The side of his face he’d turned into the Shockwave burned red, and a welt rose fast to mar his smooth skin. Though his eyes were closed tightly, his tongue slipped through a fast incantation.

Shingrayu opened his eyes to watch three jagged bolts of lime green light slice through the water, leaving not a bubble in their wakes. They crashed into Svayyah’s spell shield with force enough only to sting her, but the shield unraveled fast, drifting away into the water like a cloud of luminescent sediment.

Svayyah closed the distance between them with a single lash of her muscular body. In the brief moment that passed before their bodies met, Shingrayu rattled off another spell.

Svayyah wrapped her serpentine body around Shingrayu’s, and the first touch sent a nettling ripple through her veins. The touch of the other naga was painful to her. Scales stood out from her flesh, and the ridge of long spines on her back leaped to attention. A painful cramp raced up the entire length of her body and slammed into her jaw.

But she felt it coming, and before it got there, she opened her mouth wide again. Perhaps confident that his shocking grasp would fend her off, Shingrayu left his all too vulnerable neck open. Svayyah’s fangs pressed down, and the lightning touch of his spell clamped her jaws closed like a vise. She bit so deeply into Shingrayu’s neck that she felt her teeth come together. She couldn’t swallow, and couldn’t release the hot mouthful of flesh. The blood in the water, like black-red smoke in the air of the surface world, burned her eyes and filled her nose so she could neither see nor smell. The sound of her own blood whooshing through veiiis and arteries as clamped tight as her jaw drowned out all other sounds.

Holding her breath, Svayyah writhed against Shingrayu as though they were mating. The series of cramps that wrapped her ever tighter around her adversary threatened to snap every bone in her body, and Svayyah steeled herself against that certainty. A loud snap, then the second and third, came to her not through her ears but through her scales. She thought at first that her bones had begun to break under Shingrayu’s magic, but there was no pain.

It wasn’t her bones that were breaking.

The effect of Shingrayu’s spell fled all at once. Svayyah uncoiled, out of control, like a string from around a child’s toy. She floated away from Shingrayu and spat the mouthful of his throat out into the water between them. She coughed and shuddered, just trying to breathe.

Shingrayu drifted limp, but his eyes were open. He blinked and opened his mouth to speak. He had something to say, but couldn’t get the words out. His lips twitched. Intelligence and intent left his eyes first, then the life itself fled.

Svayyah continued to gasp for a breath as the other water nagas circled closer.

“Svayyah says that this is a great work this dista’ssara does,” Zaeliira said. “Does that make this human a great being? Does it make it senthissa’ssa?”

Does it? Svayyah thought.

She turned to Devorast, who’s expression had not changed at all. She felt a sense of inevitability from him. It wasn’t that he knew she would kill Shingrayu, but something elsesomething that depended in no way on what she did, what Shingrayu did, or what any of the naja’ssara did.

“Are you, Ivar Devorast?” she managed to whisper through a throat still struggling open. “Is Ivar Devorast a teacher worthy of emulating?”

“Well?” Zaeliira pressed.

Svayyah turned to her kin and said, “If he builds it.”

She had spoken like a human, and had done it on purpose. The phrasing was not lost on Zaeliira at least.

“Very well,” said the aged water naga. “Let this dista’ssara build its great work. If it succeeds, it will have proven itself senthissa’ssa. Do the naja’ssara of the Nagaflow and Nagawater agree? All of like mind on this?”

Each of the other five nagas signaled their agreement and one by one swam off to their own business. Zaeliira and Svayyah shared a look, then she too swam off at her own slow pace.

Svayyah looked at Devorast in his bubble and shook her head. He had done precisely what he should have, and Svayyah found herself wholly unable to believe it.

He hadn’t said a thing the whole time.