“Got you!” My mind whirling with self-preservation and not much else, I launched myself at the intruder, tackling the creature to the ground. Somehow, the target was smaller than I thought it would be. And squishier than I thought a rakkhosh should be. Then I realized there were a bunch of yellow feathers shooting into the air from my arms.
Wait a minute, this wasn’t a demon.
“Why in the world are you strangling Tuntuni?” It was Neel, having followed me through the woods. “I know he’s a pain, but I really think you’re overreacting.”
The bird was a disaster. Bleary-eyed, missing feathers, and with some leaves stuck in one wing.
“Oh no! I’m so sorry! Are you okay?” I disentangled my hands from around the bird’s neck and tried to smooth some of his ruffled feathers. “How did you get here?”
“What … do … you … call … a … bird … who’s … out … of … breath?” Tuntuni panted.
I petted and cooed at the obviously shell-shocked bird, but Neel asked, “What?”
“A … puffin!”
“Shhh …” I soothed the little yellow bird I’d just almost killed. “No more bad jokes now. Save your breath.”
“Have … you … ever … tried … to … keep … up … with … a … flying … horse?” he wheezed. “I’ve been flying all night!”
“Why were you following us?” Neel demanded.
“Only … because … the Raja … insisted.” Tuni coughed. “Doesn’t trust you to finish the job, Princie … thinks you’re as much of a slacker as I do.”
“You’re here to spy on us?”
“I’m here to make sure you ding-dongs do the job right!” Tuntuni squawked. “But I didn’t think I’d have to chase a pakkhiraj, hide from those boy-crazy rakkhoshis, and then get attacked by you, Princess! The Raja is going to have to give me a serious pay raise after this—I mean, benefits, stock options, hardship pay, the works!”
“All right, all right,” Neel said. “Don’t get your tail feathers in a bunch.”
Tuni pointed a yellow wing over my shoulder. “Hey, dummies, what’s that?”
“Where?”
Neel and I both turned to where the bird was pointing. I didn’t understand what I was looking at. The ground looked like it was moving.
“That doesn’t seem right,” I said.
Without a word, Neel grabbed my hand. Not romantic or anything. Just hard. Really hard.
“Ouch!” I tried to pull away, but Neel ignored me.
“Move!” he ordered, yanking me back toward the horses. He ran almost full-out, pulling me along, until we reached a grove of trees to the side of the lake, with Tuntuni squawking beside us.
Snowy and Midnight lifted their heads to greet us, but then whinnied—shrill and fierce. The noise shot a ripple of fear down my spine. I just had a chance to grab my weapons from Snowy’s saddle when, with flapping wings, the horses took off into the distant sky, the golden and silver spheres still tucked in Midnight’s saddlebags.
“Wait, the horses …”
I stumbled after Neel, my legs tripping over themselves. He wasn’t letting go of my wrist and I couldn’t seem to get my balance. We finally stopped beside an old gnarled tree with a lot of knobbly branches, and I looked at him, confused.
“Kiran, hurry!” Neel shoved me up the rough trunk of the tree. “Grab that branch!”
He was starting to really freak me out.
“What is going on?” After I managed to pull myself up to the lowest branch, Neel clambered up behind me. Then, with a panicky glance toward the ground, he dragged me to a branch even higher than the first. When he finally let me sit, I turned on him.
“What the—” I stopped short as a shaking Tuntuni crash-landed on the branch next to me. Some more of his tail feathers were missing.
“Look down, Kiran,” Neel said. “Look!”
I squinted to see what he was pointing at. At first, I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me. I could swear the grass was moving. Then it seemed like the very ground itself was slithering. With a queasy start, I realized what I was seeing.
“Holy moly, there are thousands of snakes down there!” I met Neel’s own wide-eyed stare with my own.
“Maybe hundreds of thousands.”
Tuntuni shuddered. “Oh, I hate snakes!”
From my perch on the tree, I could scan the area all the way around the lake. And what I saw made my skin crawl. From every direction, scores of snakes were slithering their way toward the lake. They occupied every square inch of land. Cobras, pythons, boa constrictors, asps, rattlesnakes, and a lot of kinds of snakes I’d never seen before and couldn’t identify. And didn’t want to identify. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, thin ones. There were so many snakes that the aggressive ones crawled over the slower ones. Some of those who got crawled over didn’t get up again. It was like a snake stampede.
“They’re nocturnal,” Tuntuni chirped. “They hunt at night and go to sleep in the daytime. It’s morning, so they’re all coming home.”
The bird was right. The sun had risen even higher in the sky, and as its rays reached across the entire surface of the lake, the water itself became almost transparent. And then an elaborate, arched doorway opened on the water itself, and the snakes streamed down through the passage.
“There’s the entrance to the Kingdom of Serpents.”
“We’re going to have to go down there, right, to get the python jewel?”
Neel nodded, our past argument apparently forgotten in the face of our certain deaths.
“We can’t; we’ll get poisoned by all those snakes,” Tuni protested.
“Pythons and boas don’t have poison, they just squeeze you to death,” Neel corrected, chewing on a fingernail.
“Details!” Tuni squawked. “All I know is we’re going to die, I tell you! We’re going to die!”
I tried to calm the bird down by telling him a joke.
“Hey, Tuni, do you know what they call a bird who can open doors?”
“A para-keet?” Neel suggested distractedly.
“No, a kiwi!” I said, but poor Tuntuni just kept burbling, “We’re going to die, we’re going to die,” at regular, demoralizing intervals.
It took more than an hour for the snakes to all slither down through the open doorway in the lake. The sun was fully in the sky before we made our way down to solid ground again. In fact, there were still a few snakes slithering their way toward the lake when we came down, but we had to risk it. Neel figured that the doorway might close up again after all the snakes had gone within.
He was right. No sooner had we followed—at a little distance—the last few snakes down the secret entrance than the doorway of water closed behind us.
It was dark as midnight below the surface of the lake. I held on to the back of Neel’s shirt as I basically stumbled through the archway and down the long flight of stairs. As unpredictable as it made him, I was grateful for his warm rakkhosh constitution. His back was like a little heater on my hand, a relief in the cold and clammy cavern under the lake.