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  Serpent's Blood The First Book of Genesys

  by

  BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Serpent's Blood The First Book of Genesys

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  <^. i FORTHCOMING TITLES FROM

  BRIAN STABLEFORD IN THIS SERIES Salamander's Fire Chimera's Cradle file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (2 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:19 AM]

  SERPENT'S BLOOD The First Book of Genesys Brian Stableford BCA1

  LONDON NEW YORK SYDNEY TORONTO

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  A.

  This edition published 1995 byBCA by arrangement with Random House Ltd.

  Copyright Brian Stableford 1995 Brian Stableford has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  CN 1477

  Printed and bound in Germany by Graphischer Grofibetrieb PoBneck GmbH A member of the Mohndruck printing group

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  Part One In Xandria, linked together

  by chains of coincidence

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  A.

  Humans were made by a world other than the one they know, close kin to it but not the same. No man of the world will ever see the world which made him, and yet it can be glimpsed in dreams. No memory of the world which made the human race survives in this world, nor is there any account of it in the sacred lore, but what is written in the blood can never be wholly erased, and the flickering flame which lights the most intimate dreams can never be utterly extinguished. No man born of this world can know what a moon or a mountain is, but there are men nevertheless who see the moon while their eyes are firmly shut, and drink of precious folly, and there are men who climb mountains while they lie abed, dizzied by sublime heights. This world has no changing seasons, but there are seasons in the rhythm of our being. The tides which surge in our blood are greater by far than the petty tides which stir our shallow seas. The world's seas are briny, but not as briny as the blood of men. Our blood marks us children of other and unimaginably distant seas, and this is true even of those who have Serpent's blood in them. The world's seas are shallow but the water of our being is deeper by far; it marks us children of a great and unfathomable abyss, and this is true even of those whose hearts are warmed by Salamander's fire. There are seasons in the affairs of men, and always will be, despite that the men who live in the world we know were born and will be born again from Chimera's Cradle.

  The Apocrypha of Genesys

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  a ndris myra sol had been a prince in Ferentina

  until he was six years old, but now had been six years a vagabond. Exactly half a lifetime had passed since he quit his own land, and the anniversary was not a happy one. He had told himself a thousand times that it was neither fear nor the fear of brotherly love turning to hatred which had driven him away from his home. He had told himself a thousand times what a fine thing it was to be a citizen of the world rather than the scion of a single tiny nation, but he was past believing it now. Six years had taught him what it meant to be without home, without property and without a goal in life. In six years he had suffered every penalty of aimlessness, but he wasn't so foolish as to imagine that things couldn't get worse.

  Andris sat on a crooked chair beside a rickety table beneath the internal staircase in a harbour side inn called the Wayfaring Tree in the city of Xandria and cursed his miserable luck. He was alone and friendless. The ale he was drinking was uncommonly dark and suspiciously salty, matching his mood with uncanny precision. The legs of the chair had become so soft and spongy by courtesy of the corrosions of five different kinds of wood rot that it threatened to cave in beneath his bulk- which was, admittedly, unusually large by Xandrian standards. The surface of the table was peppered and blotched by no less than eight kinds of rot, three of which were unfamiliar to him, being quite unknown in milder climes. One of these appeared to be feeding on the stain which had been used to colour the wood, mottling the tabletop with a strangely discomfiting pallor.

  Andris had no idea what kind of wood it was, and couldn't put a name to any of the eight kinds of rot, familiar or unfamiliar. His travels hadn't taught him a great deal, but they had amply demonstrated the truth of the old adage file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (7 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:19 AM]

  that it did no good to learn the names and habits of different kinds of rot because there would always be a new kind eating away at your possessions whenever you turned around.

  That, in a nutshell, is the story of my life, he reflected. In fact, that, in a nutshell, is the story of everybody's life, even though the vast majority of men fail to notice the fact- especially those who are privileged to live in a vast and vainglorious city like Xandria.

  Andris didn't like Xandria. He liked it even less than all the other ports which he had visited as he had made his slow way southwards across the Slithery Sea, and he was already regretting his decision to come here chasing a rumour which could hardly be expected to live up to his hopes even if it were true.

  Xandria was huge, and it had a city wall in frank defiance of what common men held to be the limits of practicability even in more temperate lands where stone had the grace to crumble at a relatively slow pace. Xandria's inhabitants thought they were the most civilised people in the world. Few of them had ever heard of Ferentina, but even those who had would undoubtedly consider it to be a stagnant backwater in the flowing stream of human history. In Ferentina, though, even tiny inns had solid chairs, tables whose four legs were all precisely the same length, and' serving girls.

  In Andris's view, there could be no firmer proof of the^ un civilised nature of a city and its people than the fact that the city contained, and its people gladly patronised, inns which did not employ serving girls. In the Wayfaring Tree a man had to carry his own ale, which was dispensed through a hatchway of such parsimonious dimensions that merely waiting to be served could easily take ten minutes. Andris didn't know why this was, but he was prepared to assume that it had something to do with the innkeeper's fear of being mobbed, choked and beaten black and blue when his patrons tasted the ale he served.

  In spite of the poor quality of the ale, the inn was crowded. Most of its patrons were sailor men from the various ships which were moored in the harbour, but there was a party of local bravos huddled about a table set in a covert on the other side of the staircase which led up to the rooms in the upper part of the house. Occasionally one or other of these bully-boys would dart a glance through one of the gaps between the slats of the stairway, as if to

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  see whether Andris was trying to listen to their whispered conversation. The implied suspicion made Andris feel direly uncomfortable, even though he had not the least interes
t in whatever villainy they might be plotting. He wished that he had someone to talk to, so that he could immerse himself in a conversation of his own, but none of the sailor men were from the ship that had brought him to Xandria, and his tentative enquiries regarding the possible whereabouts of one Theo Zabio had so far met with no response. The table in the covert was not the only one from which glances were occasionally directed at Andris. At the other side of the room, close to the door which gave access to the waterfront, sat a group of ambers, whose skins were almost as pale as his own. He knew that this was mere coincidence, and that these other men were so- called dark landers from the great forest in the far south of what the Xandrians were pleased to think of as their empire. In all probability, he supposed, most of the other people in the room who were gold ens all, though some were so dark as almost to be reckoned bronze- took him for a dark lander in spite of the cut of his clothes. They had been very good clothes once, but six years of mending and patching had turned them into ragged travesties.

  In order to avoid the possibility of making accidental eye-contact with curious and suspicious gazes Andris studied the ceiling beams with a critical eye. In a place like this, every guest had good cause to wonder whether the ceiling of his bedroom might collapse while he was peacefully sleeping in his bunk. The beams looked solid enough, but it was easy to see where fresh paint had been applied to conceal the tell-tale blotches of softening decay.

  The stone pillars which supported the ends of the beams looked sturdier, with relatively few cracks and crevices, but there was clear enough evidence of patching for the informed eye to notice.

  The whole lot could go at any time, Andris thought, with a silent sigh. And there's a cellar too, subject to steady seepage if the taste of the ale's anything to go by. The whole edifice might crumble into its own soggy bowels, taking every one of us with it. Paradoxically, the uncheerful thought made him feel slightly better. The idea that all Xandria would one day crumble into dust and slide into the every-hungry sea made his personal plight seem less remarkable.

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  His contemplation of the ceiling ended abruptly as his attention was caught by the unmistakable sound of trouble, borne kind of argument had started between the dark landers and the sailor men at the neighbouring table.

  Insults were being hurled back and forth in several different accents.

  Mercifully, no one was getting up to wave fists, let alone draw blades.

  Andris judged that it would probably die down soon enough. In any case, he was close to the bottom rung of the staircase; he could dash up to his room at a moment's notice should there be any need so to do.

  He stared into the murky depths of his ale. The tankard- which was glass, albeit of a crude kind- was showing the effects of some mysterious species of blight. The vessel didn't seem likely to break, but he didn't suppose that the bloom made the ale taste any better.

  His contemplation of the tankard's interior was interrupted by a sudden awareness that he was no longer alone. He jerked his head up to confront the man who was now standing beside the empty chair opposite his own. Andris would doubtless have offended the other with the fierceness of his stare had the man not been blind, but his eyes had been wrecked by some kind of disease which had turned the pupils milk-white and the whites blood-red. He was thin, and his clothes were in rags but he carried himself with a certain dignity and his ancient face was not unhandsome, apart from the terrible eyes. j "May I tell you a story," the ancient whispered, 'for the smallest and oldest coin you have. " ', Is this what I will be when I grow old?

  Andris thought, with a twinge of panic. The few coins which he had left were all small, and none had been minted within the last two years.

  "It'd be a bad bargain,"

  he confessed.

  "You'll find richer men elsewhere in the room."

  "I hear them," the old man said.

  "But here there is silence, and sickness of heart. Here there is a need which I might meet." His accent was one which Andris did not know; he too must be a stranger in Xandria.

  Could he really judge the sickness of a heart from the quality of a pool of silence?

  "Perhaps there is," said Andris, not ungrudgingly.

  "Tell me a story, then- but tell me no tales of Xandria's noble kings and valiant heroes. I'd far rather hear a tale which might remind me of my childhood in a distant land."

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  "I can't promise to awaken old memories," the ancient said, 'but I'll tell you the oldest tale I know. You might have heard it in the cradle even though you come from the far side of the world. " " I'll settle for that,"

  Andris agreed.

  The old man sat down. He held himself very straight although the years must have weighed heavily upon him. He was at least thirty but it was evident that he still had pride in his work. He seemed to have been thoroughly versed in his dubious Art. When I'm old as well as destitute, Andris thought, J won't even have stories to trade for the coins I beg.

  "There is no destiny," said the old man softly, in the sonorous tone of one reciting words learned in the distant past and recited many times before.

  "The future cannot be foretold, but the world is pregnant with many possibilities. Some will be given birth and suckled with nourishing milk, and the strongest of these will grow to be things which are new not merely in the world but in the universe.

  "What will be new cannot be foreseen, but its shadow might be glimpsed in the fertile imagination.

  "There once came a Serpent into Idun, which brought the gift of a tree whose fruit had knowledge of good and evil, and the forefathers bought the tree with promises they could not fulfill. / will make you a gift of my blood, the Serpent said, and hope that you will use it wisely. The forefathers accepted the gift, and made a further promise they could not fulfill. We shall return this gift a thousand fold they said, if only we can use it wisely.

  "There also came a Salamander into Idun, which brought the gift of a tree whose fruit had knowledge of another kind, and the forefathers bought the tree with coin the Salamander could not spend. I will make you a gift of the fire in my heart, the Salamander said, and hope that it might warm you. The forefathers accepted this gift, and gave the Salamander another unspendable coin. We shall return this gift a thousand fold they said, if we can only feel its warmth. " Serpents die, and Salamanders too, and the people of the world brought death with them when they first descended from the sky, but if ever the world is devoid of Serpents or Salamanders men will have cause to mourn. Better by far that the promises their forefathers made might one day be fulfilled, and the coin they paid

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  might one day be spent. Milk that is

  given to the nourishment of Serpents and Salamanders is already owed, and does not go to waste.

  "There is no destiny. The future cannot be foreknown, but the human mind is pregnant with many designs, some of which may be realised if only the necessary instruments can be devised and forged. " We cannot know today what we might discover tomorrow, but the scheming mind should make what provision it can. Remember this, for it is a truth as vital as any in the lore. "

  For a second or two, Andris didn't realise that the recitation was over. Was that the whole of the story f he thought. Was it a story at all? The blind man clearly believed that it was; he now had the manner of one who had just imparted a valuable secret. Andris reached into the money-pouch attached to his belt, and took a coin at random.

  He held it out to the old man for several seconds before it dawned on him that the gesture was futile. He reached across the table to pick up the man's left hand with his own, and solemnly placed the coin in the palm.

&nbs
p; "It's neither Xandrian nor fresh," he admitted apologetically.

  "Thank you," said the old man.

  "Was the story to your satisfaction?

  Had you heard it before, long ago? "

  "Only the beginning and the end," Andris told him, 'and not all parts of a story. We cannot know today what we might discover tomorrow, but the scheming mind should make what provision it can is a popular saying in my homeland, but the passages concerning the Serpent and the Salamander are new to me. In Ferentina, no man has ever seen a Serpent or a Salamander. I hear that Serpents, at least, can sometimes be seen in Xandria. "

  "They never come to the city," the old man said, 'but I have heard that they can sometimes be seen in the western regions of the empire. " He stressed the words heard and seen very faintly. " If your story is from the Lore of Genesys," Andris said thoughtfully, 'it's strange that I've never heard it in full. I thought the storytellers of Ferentina were thoroughly versed in that particular set of legends."

  "It's from the Apocrypha of Genesys," the blind man informed him.

  "We had many forefathers, and they gave us more gifts than most of us know.

  Goran made the lore for everyone, but his

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  brothers took care to communicate

  their own wisdom to a select few."

  "Oh," Andris said un enthusiastically

  "You mean the secret commandments and all that occult rubbish." He regretted it immediately, realising that if the blind man could recite mock mythology with evident respectfulness he might be a firm believer in all that occult rubbish. He would have apologised, but at that moment the argument between the dark landers and their neighbours erupted again, and this time there was little time wasted in mere insult.

  Within a few seconds- far more quickly than Andris would have thought possible- the dark landers were on their feet, lashing out this way and that with hands and feet alike. Three tables and a dozen chairs went tumbling over, followed by a cacophony of shattering glass. Through the open doorway of the inn rushed a member of the king's guard, red-skirted and brightly helmed. He hadn't drawn his sword; his empty hands were raised in a placatory fashion, and his clear intention was to nip the trouble in the bud.