Kingdom Keepers VII by Ridley Pearson Page B

narrow; she moves to a patch of smooth ground, collects sticks and debris, and then sits, cross-legged, clearing a space before her. With the sticks, she builds a small teepee enclosing a pile of brown leaves in the center. She holds another stick upright and begins spinning it between her palms down into a tuft of dried moss that she has placed on a log before her. She hums a mystic’s melody, her eyes clamped shut, patiently working the stick.
    A puff of smoke. She stokes the ignited tinder with a whisper, blows the burning moss off the log and into her teepee construction. The leaves catch fire. Soon, the stack is burning. She feeds the teepee more twigs.
    Eyes squinted, Tia Dalma continues to hum. She adds a steady, repetitive stream of strangely accented French words, a chant, a looping incantation. It sounds vaguely religious—something a priest might murmur from the altar.
    The leaves of nearby mangrove trees stir in a wind centered on Tia Dalma and her flickering, flashing fire. The mangroves’ lower branches are supported by aerial roots, connecting limb to earth. Soon, the limbs appear to swell and bulge, as if they have swallowed something too large for consumption.
    As the lumps that are swelling the tree limbs collide, the roots break free from the ground. The surface of the bare brown wood becomes scaly. Some lumps begin as ovals, then form into diamond shapes. Neither roots nor runners, the lumps now reveal themselves to be the heads of six-foot-long pythons, draped languidly from every branch. They fall to the ground and slide silently toward Tia Dalma, stopping short at the fire. The snakes seethe and coil, intertwining in an unruly mass.
    Slowly, the witch doctor lifts her arm and points at the rents in the earth. The snakes separate, moving in pairs and groups of three, sliding away from the fire like the spokes of a wheel. They slither over the edges of the holes and disappear. They are Tia Dalma’s antennae, each a scout on a search-and-rescue mission.
    The fire flickers and dims; the swirling wind calms. But the crouched figure remains unmoving and silent, her eyes closed, her head hanging down slightly. To the uninitiated, she might appear to be asleep, but such an assessment would prove a grave mistake. She is far from asleep; to the contrary, she is unusually attuned to her environs; she knows the location of every creature down to the smallest insect. She can hear the plants breathing, the giant stones of the temple still cracking in the aftermath of their heavy falls. Were you to approach uninvited, those steps would be your last.
    An hour passes. Two. Or perhaps it is but a matter of minutes, for the fire still glows. What begins as a rumble quickly grows. The massive temple stones quiver like terrified children.
    First come the bats, escaping from the holes amid the fallen stones in a fluttering veil of black. Next are moths, rats, and mice, swarming up in desperation as an ungodly sound chases them to the surface. Spiders, centipedes, roaches, and every creeping, crawling thing move like a slurry from the pits, fleeing for their tiny insignificant lives from the enemy: the source of that horrid sound.
    Tia Dalma’s eyes flicker open. She uncurls her body from its corpselike posture and turns her head to see the pythons she has summoned now streaming from the depths. She hears what no other could, their hissing voices announcing in a unified chorus, “He comes!”
    Indeed, the triangular tip of a black wing rises like a tattered sail from one of the many holes. The enormousness of the protrusion gives an inkling of the size of the Beast below.Like the twisted, gnarled roots of the surrounding trees, Chernabog’s claws emerge. A mixture of veins, skin, and muscle depleted of nourishment, the four bent and bony appendages belie the power lurking within. Despite being trapped for three years in the temple underground, living a brutal existence devoid of light, sound, and souls, this creature is