Seshru sensed the change in him, and her features turned colder than wind-carved ice. 'Do not imagine you can hide from me.'

Torak met her stare and held it.

With the speed of a striking snake, she brought her face close to his. 'You cannot defy me! Not while I have this!' In her fingers she held something small, caught in the coils of a green clay serpent.

Torak's belly turned over. The pebble he'd made for Renn.

'Have you any idea of the power this gives me?' she hissed. 'With this I blighted your souls! You have no will of your own. You belong to me!'

Her fist tightened on the pebble and Torak's heart clenched.

She opened her fist and he breathed again.

She laughed, and on her breath he smelt the carrion stink of the root which turned her mouth black. How could he have thought her beautiful? Her spirit was hollow, and where her heart used to be there was only a shadow, like the dark stain where a carca.s.s once lay.

Now she was casting off the lid of the basket, and a viper was sliding over the edge. Silently, silently it flowed into her lap. Its zigzag markings were stark down its glistening silver length, and its lidless red eye was fixed on its mistress.

Seshru picked it up and it wound itself about her arm, its black tongue flickering out to meet hers. 'Keep very still,' she told Torak. 'Their bite is worse than any you will encounter in the Forest. Their bite can kill . . . '

A second viper, black as a moonless night, poured from the basket, and Seshru showed it the pebble. As its forked tongue flicked out to taste it, Torak gasped. He had felt that tongue on his skin.

'You wanted this, spirit walker,' breathed the Viper Mage. 'You put yourself in my power. You left the stone for me to find.'

'No,' he whispered.

Her eyes pierced his souls. 'Then why make it?'

'A a present,' he stammered.

'For whom?'

'- A girl.'

'Why take it back?'

'To tell her I was gone.' He tried to push Renn's image from his mind, but the Viper Mage was faster.

'Her name is Renn,' she said. 'Who is she?'

With a huge effort, he dragged his gaze from hers only to settle on the greenstone axe.

Seshru was on it in a heartbeat. 'Fin-Kedinn's. She's Fin-Kedinn's child.'

'- His brother's.'

There was a moment of stillness. Then the Viper Mage turned her back on him and sat, staring at the Lake, while the snakes in her lap twined their sleek coils about each other.

'- His brother's child,' she said tonelessly. 'Of course. He would have cared for his brother's child.'

Torak couldn't bear to hear her mention Renn.

But Renn is far away, he told himself. Renn is safe.

'No.' Seshru twisted round again. 'She is here on the Lake. I saw her in a boat with a boy, a tall boy with yellow hair. But they can't help you now.'

Was she telling the truth? Were Renn and Bale looking for him, or was it another of her lies?

'Why do you want me alive?' he said. 'What do you want?'

'You know what I want.'

'My power. You want to be the spirit walker.'

'I have that already. I can make you spirit walk whenever I wish. I want more. I want the fire-opal.'

To hear her name it . . . Her voice breathed life into the image in his mind. He saw its pulsing red heart.

'It it was lost in the ice,' he said.

'Don't lie to me,' said Seshru. 'I am a Mage, don't you think I have ways of knowing? When your father shattered it, three pieces were left three! One held by the Seal Mage, one taken by the black ice. One remains. Your father must have told you before he died.'

'No.'

'He hid it. He hid it and he told you where, as he lay dying '

'No '

'- as he lay in agony, his life bleeding away, his guts ripped out by the demon bear '

'No!' he screamed.

Clawing the nightshade from her brow, she flung it on the fire. Blue smoke wound about her, pungent, dizzying.

Powerless, Torak watched her open a pouch at her breast and dip in her finger. He tried to resist, but she held his jaw and smeared a stinking black sludge on his lips. Grasping the dark viper in one hand, the silver in the other, she brought them to her mouth and whispered a charm. Then she placed both snakes on his chest.

He didn't dare breathe. He felt their cool softness gliding over him; the tiny contractions as their scales gripped his flesh. He felt their tongues on his skin. Seshru observed his terror with the dispa.s.sionate gaze of a serpent watching its prey.

'Your body can't move, but your souls can. Your souls will go wherever I command. Your souls will do whatever I want.'

The black sludge was bitter in his mouth. Lights flashed behind his eyes, sickening spirals of light.

He saw the dark hair of the Viper Mage floating like snakes about her white face. He felt his souls ripped from his marrow. He screamed . . .

. . . silently, his black tongue tasted the air.

The last thing he heard before he became snake was the voice of the Viper Mage, commanding him to find Renn.

TWENTY-NINE.

Faster than thought, the snake slithered down the rockface.

It tasted the scent of cricket and fern. It felt the scurrying of ant and shrew. Air, leaf, water, prey, light it ignored them all. Its mistress had sent it after richer quarry.

The rocks burned with the heat of the vanished sun, and the snake took in that heat as it pa.s.sed. Noiselessly, it slid off the rocks; the water enfolded it, and it took in the chill of the Lake.

The snake felt this change, but that was all it felt. No pleasure or discomfort, eagerness or fear. Those feelings it recognized, because it tasted them on the struggling prey and on the mountains of warm meat which shook the earth but such feelings were not snake.

This made the souls of the snake very strong: pure intent, unclouded by emotion. Torak would not have believed such strength could exist in so slender a body. His own souls were weak from the poison; he couldn't turn the snake from its purpose. He could only shiver inside its small, cold brain as it sped through the Lake, deadly as an arrow.

He felt the coolness of weed and water flowing over his coils. His lidless eyes knew the flash and flicker of fish. Then he was out in the heat again, and the scent of pine was thick on his tongue. The sand was rough, he gripped it with his scales. Raising his snake head, he tasted the scent of raven.

The hot bird swooped its cries m.u.f.fled by air, then piercingly loud as it thudded to earth. The snake darted into a hole and prepared to strike.

He felt the raven hop towards the hole. It smelt him, but it couldn't reach. Frustrated, it pecked the tree-root which sheltered him. The ground shuddered as it flew away.

When the threat was past, he emerged. He crested the mossy hillside of a log, slithered under bracken taller than trees. At last he caught the scent of slumbering male, and beyond it, the sweeter scent of female.

Torak's souls fought to get free to turn the snake from its purpose but it glided on, relentless. And now as he slid under leaf and over stone, he felt waves of heat from sleeping flesh.

Bite, bite. The voice of his mistress wove in and out of his snake mind.

Again the part of him that was Torak tried to turn the creature, but his muscles would not obey.

Bite, bite.

His coils gripped a naked foot, slid up a pale calf; over soft elk hide and rough wovengra.s.s, into a band of warm raven feathers heaving in sleep. His snake head recoiled from the markings on the wrist so like his, yet different but beyond, his cloven tongue tasted uprotected flesh.

No! shouted Torak in the cold snake brain. No! This is Renn!

The snake stretched its jaws wide its fangs unfolded from the roof of its mouth and pointed down they filled with venom, ready to strike . . .

Bite, bite.

Torak woke.

Above him the clouds spun, jolting him on a sea of sickness. Gradually, he became aware of the sound of the spring. At his side the Viper Mage sat motionless, her face as white as bone. The vipers were gone.

'It is done?' she said.

He nodded.

She breathed out. Rising to her feet, she gazed across the Lake. Then she turned, and he could tell that she wasn't seeing him, but was looking through him to the power he could give her.

'Until now, 'she said, 'not even I understood the strength of the spirit walker.' Returning, she knelt, and her long hair brushed his chest as she brought her face close to his. 'Think what I can do with such power! I can learn the darkest secrets. I can bend all, all to my will!'

Torak shut his eyes. That made the churning worse. He tried to sit up but although movement was returning to his limbs, he remained weak as a fledgling.

Seshru pushed the sweat-soaked hair back from his forehead. 'This is the will of the World Spirit! This is why it sent such a gift to me! With the spirit walker and the fire-opal I shall rule! All creatures, all demons will fear me and obey!'

Sickness engulfed him. Clumsily, he raised himself on his elbow and retched.

With her icy hand, the Viper Mage pressed him to her breast. 'Great power is bought with suffering, I know. But now you understand. You belong to me.'

Exhausted, he slumped against her.

'Say it,' she whispered, and her breath was hot and foetid on his skin. 'Say that you belong to me!'

He gazed up at her, and she was very beautiful. Even her black smile was beautiful.

He said, 'I belong to you.'

THIRTY.

Renn was shaken by her dream about the viper.

'What did it mean?' said Bale as they loaded the skinboat.

'I'm not sure. But it was in colour, so it must be true. I think . . . '

'Yes?'

'I think it means she has him now.'

Bale stopped with his paddle in his hands. 'You said the Magecraft had worked.'

'I said I thought it had. You can never be certain.'

He considered that. 'Well, I've got more faith in you. And in Torak.'

Renn didn't reply. She hadn't told him about the real viper she'd glimpsed as she'd started awake. What would have happened if those ravens hadn't chased it away?

Oh, Seshru was cunning! She'd cut Torak off from the clans, from his friends, even from Wolf and now she had him to herself, on this Lake which she was taking for her own. Somewhere, she was laughing at them all.