"Gramercy for your story, man," she murmured. "And now we shall see whether you are a better man than those pygmies of Mulvanians, with their tools like toothpicks, no? Come!"
Three hours later, Princess Yargali lay on her side, facing the window by which Jorian had entered and breathing slow, deep breaths. Jorian slid quietly out of the huge bed. He quickly donned his garments, except for his boots, which he thrust into his sash.
Then he searched the bedroom for the Kist of Avlen. The candle in this room had burnt down and gone out, but enough light came through the doorway from the living room, where a pair of butter lamps still burnt, for his purpose. He found that none of the chests ranged around the walls was that which he sought. Nor did there seem to be any closets or secret compartments in the walls. A search of the princess's bathroom proved equally fruitless.
At last Jorian discovered the Kist in the most obvious place: under Yargali's bed. It was a battered little chest, about a cubit and a half long and a cubit in height and depth, with an old leather strap buckled around it to reinforce its brass clasps. It lay under the side of the bed away from the window. Jorian had lain on that side after making love to Yargali. Evidently he would have to pull the chest out from under the bed from that side, tiptoe around the bed to the window, and let himself out.
Moving as if treading on razors, Jorian knelt beside the bed. Slowly he pulled the Kist towards himself by one of the brass handles. It did not prove very heavy. Fingerbreadth by fingerbreadth, almost holding his breath, he teased the chest out from under the bed. At last it lay before him. Grasping the two handles, he stood up and stepped back.
Then, to his utter horror, the princess Yargali muttered in her sleep and rolled over. Her eyes opened. She cast off the coverlet, exposing her huge, brown body with its exaggerated curves.
"Sssso!" she said.
For an instant, Jorian—still a little drunk from Yargali's wine—was rooted to the spot. In that instant, Yargali changed. Her body elongated; her limbs shrank. The dark-brown skin changed to an epidermis of olive-green scales, with a reticulated pattern of russet and yellow stripes. Her face bulged out and became a long, scaly muzzle. A musky odor filled the bedroom.
She was a serpent—but such a serpent as Jorian had never heard of outside myths and legends. The head, as large as that of a horse, reared up from the pile of coils. A forked tongue flicked out from the jaws. In the middle, the serpent's body was as big around as Jorian's waist.
Sobered abruptly and shaking himself out of his momentary paralysis, Jorian thought with lightning speed. If he tried to run around the bed to get to the window, he would come within easy lunging distance of the head. If he had only caused Karadur to send the rope up to one of the living-room windows, he could have fled that way; but now his retreat was cut off. Too late, he remembered Goania's warning against bedroom windows. If he tried to get out the living-room windows, he would probably give himself a fifteen-cubit fall on the marble of the terrace and break a leg or a neck. The stonework outside was smooth, and there was no ivy to climb by or tree into whose branches to leap.
As the serpent poured off the creaking bed and came for Jorian, he fled into the living room. There were two exits from this parlor. One door, he supposed, opened into the third story of the adjacent hall; there was probably a guard on the far side of it. The other, whose door stood ajar, revealed a descending flight of stairs, down which Yargali had earlier come on her way from her apartment to the ballroom.
Jorian raced across the living room and through the door at the head of the stairs. Down he went; and after him, hissing like a giant's kettle, poured Yargali—all forty cubits of her. The thought crossed Jorian's mind that, in assuming her serpent form, the princess had at least deprived herself of her ability to shout for help.
The ballroom was dark but for one small oil lamp, which burnt on a bracket. The king's servants had unrolled the huge rug that covered the marble when the floor was not being used for balls.
Jorian dashed to the nearest of the long windows opening on the terrace. The window had, however, been not only closed but also locked. The feeble light showed him the keyhole. Yargali's serpent head appeared from the doorway at the foot of the stairs.
Given a few minutes, Jorian was sure he could pick the lock of any of the long windows. Given time and no interference, he could probably batter the glass panes out of the window and burst his way through. But the panes were small and the leads between them were stout and closely set, so that this operation would take many blows with some heavy object, such as a chair, and the noise would fetch the guards who stood outside the big doors at the end of the ballroom.
If he tried to get out one of his pick-locks and pick a window lock, Yargali would seize him from behind, throw a coil around him, smother him in her serpentine embrace, and swallow him little by little, head first like a frog. Now Jorian saw why no one had succeeded for five hundred years in stealing the Kist from her somewhat casual guardianship.
As Yargali's head came towards him, her forked tongue flickering, Jorian set the Kist of Avlen down upon the carpet. Seizing the corner of the rug, he heaved and tugged his way down the side of the ballroom, past the long windows, pulling the carpet with him. It buckled into folds and became frightfully heavy to move, since the whole thing weighed several times as much as Jorian. A smaller or weaker man could not have moved it at all. But, straining and sweating and with muscles cracking with the effort, Jorian hauled the whole carpet down to the far end of the ballroom, where he left it in a crumpled heap.
Then he picked up the Kist—which had come along with the carpet —and went back to one of the long windows. Yargali had now slithered all the way down the stairs and out on the bare, brown marble floor. But here, lacking any roughness or solid objects to exert a horizontal force against, she found herself unable to advance further. Her vast serpentine body rippled; wave after wave flowed from her wedge-shaped head to her tapering tail, but to no avail. Like a flag fluttering in the breeze, she moved but did not progress. Hissing in a fury of frustration, she doubled the speed and violence of her writhings, but her scales slithered futilely back and forth on the polished marble floor.
Meanwhile, Jorian picked the lock of the window at the far end, slipped out with the Kist, and closed the window behind him. He ran to where the magical rope still stood upright on the pave and uttered the simple cantrip that nullified its spell and brought it tumbling down in coils.
A quarter-hour later, Jorian rejoined Karadur outside the main gate, around the elephant mill out of sight of the sentries. He whispered:
"Have you all our gear? My sword? Thanks… Curse it, you forgot my hat! They'll give it to their hound-elephants to smell. Oh, well, no matter, I have this silly cap. Can we make a sling of your magical rope, so I can carry this damned chest on my back?"
Karadur fingered the rope. "Aye, might as well. The rope's magical powers are exhausted, and until it be ensorcelled again it is no more than a common rope."
Another hour saw them riding southward on the road up the left bank of the Pennerath. Jorian told Karadur the essentials of his adventure. The wizard asked:
"How did you ever think of that extraordinary expedient for immobilizing Yargali, my son?"
"I remembered when I was a boy, I caught a harmless little snake and kept it for a few days. Then I went with my father to the house of a squire of Ardamai, where my father was installing a water clock. And whilst I was there, helping my father, the serpent escaped from my purse and fell to the squire's polished hardwood floor. The squire's wife carried on like a crazy woman until I removed the poor little snake, and I was sent to bed that night without my supper. But I remembered that, on this floor, the snake had been unable to move from here to there for want of traction, and so was easily caught. And I thought it might work the same way with the black wench."