Brian Stableford - Serpents Blood

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Serpent's Blood The First Book of Genesys

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

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

LONDON NEW YORK SYDNEY TORONTO

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

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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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

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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 interest 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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Brian Stableford - Serpents Blood

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