“Shall I go and turn him over to the guard? Or castrate him myself?”
“Take him somewhere else first,” one of the other women pleaded. “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”
The Other Half of My Soul
Part 2 of 11
My latest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.
Sunday after breakfast, Taylor wanted to go hiking into the highest-magic area. “During the surge there might even be enough magic for a portal spell here at our campsite, but it’ll last longer if we find the highest-magic spot we can.” So we rubbed on more insect repellent and sunblock, secured our campsite against bears, and set out. We stuck to the trails at first, as long as they were taking us toward the high-magic area, but when the trail curved around away from it, Taylor insisted we leave it; I followed her cautiously, hoping we wouldn’t run into any park rangers.
We hadn’t been able to get reception on our phones, but Taylor said she could contact Mr. G. by magic once we got into the magic-rich area. “Or here at the campsite, too, but I want seclusion to cast the spell.” When we stopped to rest in a clearing ten or fifteen minutes from the trail, she declared she was ready to try that.
She hefted the mage’s staff she’d made in her sophomore year, which she’d been using as a walking-stick on our hike, and tapped several points around a circle. I sat on a fallen log and watched. After a few minutes of her muttering mystic incantations, she suddenly got a look of surprise on her face, and said: “Professor, this is Taylor Kendricks... I wanted to ask you something about Leslie’s link with Serenikha... Yes... Sorry if this is a bad time... Thank you. Well, it’s this: what do you think would happen if Leslie and Serenikha meet in person?... I mean, through a portal like the one you made last October... Yes, we’ve got a big magic surge here in Yosemite... That’s why I’m using magic, because my cell doesn’t get reception here... No, sir, I calculated it myself. I haven’t done a precise measurement yet but it feels like eight or nine hundred thaums per square meter, almost enough for a portal spell... Yes, sir, of course I’ll make sure... Oh... That’s good to know... We’ll keep that in mind... Thank you, professor. Good day.”
Her eyes lost the distant look they’d taken on during the conversation, and she focused on me again. “She says it should be safe for you to visit Serenikha, but you probably shouldn’t sleep within a couple of hundred yards of each other, since your link gets stronger when you dream. And she wants me to make a series of measurements of the magic levels here and back off on making the portal if they don’t show the trend I calculated for them back in Spores Ferry.”
“Lao,” I said. She took it as the affirmative it was without inquiring as to its exact meaning, and I didn’t realize until later that I hadn’t spoken in English.
“So I’m not sure this is the best site for the portal, but I’m going to make my first measurement here, and then we’ll move on a little way and make another one. You can log the measurements on the map.”
That kept us busy for the rest of the day. We returned to our campsite exhausted and ate a little more before crawling into our tents just after sunset. But Taylor was confident that we’d found an ideal spot for the portal, one where it would last a day and a half at least based on the rate of changes in magic levels.
I told Serenikha about that during our dream that night.
“I so look forward to seeing you!” she said. “I’ve spoken with the captain of the guard. They are expecting you, but you should know the passwords as well: tomorrow it is ‘Light of the thunder-stone’ and the next day it will be ‘Where the carp hid himself’.”
I repeated them until I was sure of them. “We’ll probably be there tomorrow.”
Monday morning, we hiked into the woods not long after breakfast, and reached the clearing Taylor had selected an hour later. “This is it,” she exclaimed, after casting a measurement spell. “The magic level’s almost high enough for me to start opening the portal.”
We changed from our hiking clothes into the kimonos; Taylor’s old kimono was a little small on me, but she worked an enchantment to make it fit. She worked another measurement spell every twenty or thirty minutes for the next few hours, and seemed satisfied with the results. We ate the snacks we’d brought with us and made short excursions here and there between measurements.
Finally she looked around and said: “Okay, I think this is the best spot for the portal. Sit over there somewhere and give me room to work.”
I did as I was told, sitting down on a stump and opening my pack to take out a bag of trail mix. I watched Taylor work, clearing the leaves and needles from the ground in a small space, and then pouring a thin line of powdered chalk in a circle, and walking around it clockwise and counterclockwise, tapping her staff at its edge, again and again.
The short shadows of midday were lengthening as Taylor spoke her incantations, gathering and shaping the power all around us. The portal still wasn’t visible when I felt a sudden wave of amusement and burst out laughing, for no obvious reason; moments later I realized that Serenikha had just heard something funny. Taylor shot me an annoyed glance, and returned to concentrating on the portal.
And then it became visible, a swirling darkness at the center of the chalk circle, growing gradually more coherent: a circle or, I soon realized, a sphere hanging in the air and not quite touching the ground. It seemed like the entrance to a long tunnel, and at the far end I could barely make out a spot of light. Even though I was expecting it, I felt surprise and shock, and wondered if that was spillover from Serenikha too; I’d have to ask her later if she’d seen or heard something surprising about now.
“That’s it,” Taylor said, striking the edge of the circle with her staff one more time. “Let’s go.” And she stepped into the chalk circle, and another step took her into the tunnel; she seemed to grow rapidly smaller until I could barely see her. I picked up both our bags and followed her.
How long it took us to pass through the tunnel, I don’t know. I say “tunnel” but there weren’t exactly walls around us; it was only that I had a sense of motion, though I wasn’t walking. The spaces around us were open and in the distance, in various directions, I could see dimly-lit images of myself and Taylor, distorted as in funhouse mirrors. The real Taylor, or at least an image of her that was correctly proportioned, was far ahead of me, and beyond her was a point of brighter light; that was what I seemed to be heading toward.
Part of the reason I can’t remember the passage very well might be that I was distracted by a numb, empty feeling, like something was missing. I was still trying to analyze that feeling when I caught sight of clearer, sharper images up ahead; moments later I found myself stepping forward, completing the motion I had begun in the clearing in Yosemite.
I stepped onto a mosaic-tile floor under a high roof. The empty feeling was gone. Taylor was right in front of me and I had to sidestep to avoid running into her. We were surrounded by women, young and old, nagini, kitsune, human, elf and others — most of them naked and immersed in pools of water, and the others apparently in the process of getting dressed or undressed. Several were screaming. But all that was background noise, because my attention was immediately and inescapably drawn to a young nagini with blue and green banded scales, coiled up near the edge of one of the pools: Serenikha. Her attention was no less fixed on me. “Leslie!” she called out over the noise of the other women screaming, “I didn’t expect you quite so early.”
I would have asked Taylor why she’d opened the portal directly into the women’s baths in the Dragon Emperor’s palace, instead of to a secluded place on the outskirts of the capital as she’d planned, but she was uttering frantic incantations and I didn’t want to interrupt her. “I didn’t expect this either,” I said. “I’m sure Taylor can explain, but —”
Just then one of the larger human women, who was mostly dressed, grappled me and locked my arms behind my back, twisting me so I faced toward a wall, away from Serenikha and most of the other women. She started frog-marching me toward the door, but Serenikha yelled: “No, leave him alone — well, you can blindfold him, I suppose, if it makes you feel any better...”
“Sorry,” I said to my captor, “we really didn’t mean to intrude this way.” She didn’t reply, but held me while a kitsune in a green nightgown approached me and tied a large piece of cloth around my eyes. It wasn’t designed as a blindfold, I think, because it covered not only my eyes but almost my whole face.
Then Taylor’s incantation suddenly ceased, and she spoke up in Draconic: “I apologize for the intrusion, Your Highness, ladies of the court. I am the Tenacious One, a wizard of that other world all of you have heard of and some of you have visited, and this is Leslie Kendricks, the Princess Serenikha’s soul-twin. She has been expecting us.”
“Yes, that’s right, everybody calm down,” Serenikha said. “Sienpai, let him go!”
“He’s a man, Your Highness, he’s not supposed to be here,” my captor, apparently named Sienpai, replied. “Shall I go and turn him over to the guard? Or castrate him myself?”
“Take him somewhere else first,” one of the other women pleaded. “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”
“There’ll be no castrating anybody,” Serenikha said firmly. “Let him go. That’s an order. — But Leslie, you’d better keep your blindfold on until I tell you.”
“Sure thing,” I said, and belatedly added “Your Highness.” Sienpai let go of my arms and muttered close to my ear, “I’ll be watching you close, boy.”
“Tay— ah, Tenacious One,” Serenikha said, “could you lead your brother over to the bench there and help him sit down? We can talk while I dry off and get dressed, and then I’ll take you to the guest rooms I’ve had prepared. You look tired from your journey. — And you, Michiko, stop that screaming. One would think you’d never seen a man before.”
(In retrospect, I think Serenikha had been infected by my own casual attitude toward nudity, from being raised by Mom and Dad. It wasn’t something she learned back home in her father’s kingdom, still less since she’d moved here.)
The last of the screams gave way to intermittent sobs as Taylor took me by the hand and helped me find a seat. Serenikha spoke again in a more normal tone, but between the makeshift blindfold that completely covered my ears, and the background noise, I couldn’t hear everything she or Taylor said. I sat quietly and tried to look inoffensive.
A couple of minutes later Serenikha said, “Come — I’ll show you to your rooms.” Taylor took my hand and I stood up, following her until Serenikha said, “You can take off the blindfold now.”
I removed it, realizing it was actually one of those sari-camisoles that nagini wear to cover their breasts. We were in a hallway outside the baths, one that seemed familiar from the dreams I’d shared with Serenikha if not from my previous visit to the palace five years ago.
Serenikha led the way, and several other ladies of the court walked with us, including Sienpai and a young kitsune. “Tenacious One, you’ll be in the women’s quarters, down this way, not far from my own chambers. Leslie, I arranged a room for you in the men’s guest quarters — it should be quite far enough from mine, according to what the Gray One said.”
“Are you not going to punish him in any way for intruding in the women’s baths?” Sienpai said. “Or this mage?”
“I’m sure it was an honest mistake,” Serenikha said, and Taylor added:
“I thought I had the portal focused on Kinuko’s garden on Chrysanthemum Street. But I guess Leslie’s link with you was so strong, there in that high-magic area, that it influenced the spell and made the portal open up right where you were.”
“See?” Serenikha said. “Nothing to worry about. Besides, Leslie used to be me, I mean he borrowed my body for a while, so you haven’t got anything he hasn’t had before.”
“I’m truly sorry to have intruded,” I said to Sienpai and the other women. “I’d like to make amends if I may... Taylor, you said that —” She gave me a brief glare, and I remembered she was calling herself the Tenacious One here. I gave her an apologetic look and went on: “— ah, when you came here in the body of a young mage in the Gray One’s homeland last semester, you learned to cast a transformation spell...?”
“Yes...? Oh. I see what you’re getting at.”
“Would it satisfy you, Sienpai, if I were to take the form of a nagini for the duration of my visit?”
She looked flummoxed. “I... I suppose so.”
“I can do that,” Taylor confirmed. “Just give us a quiet place to work and a quarter of an hour.”
“I know just the place,” Serenikha said.
I had more than one reason for asking Taylor to transform me. One, as a man I wouldn’t be allowed to hang out with Serenikha as much or go to all the places she normally went; we’d only be allowed to meet in certain places in the palace. Two — since I’d arrived here, my legs had started to feel weird, like they ought to be a snake-tail. It wasn’t nearly as bad as when I’d temporarily wound up in my own body while still having Serenikha’s body-image, while the Patient One was meddling with the Gray One’s spell, but I feared it might get that bad if I spent much time near Serenikha. And three, of course, I hoped it might mollify Serenikha’s friends whom I’d offended.
Serenikha showed us to a small room off the next hallway. “Will this be acceptable?”
Taylor nodded. “We’ll be out again in a few minutes.” I followed her in, and she shut the door behind us.
“You’d better take your shoes and socks and underwear off,” she said, “or they’ll get torn up when your legs transform.”
“I’ll just take all this off,” I said. “The kimono would hang way down my tail and get in the way.” I still had the sari-camisole they’d used as a blindfold.
While I was undressing, Taylor took off her own shoes, socks and panties, but left her kimono on for the moment. She had me stand in the center of the room, and she poured out more chalk-dust in a circle around us. Then she started tapping her staff at various points around the circle and uttering incantations. In a pause between incantations, she said: “This is going to feel weird. Don’t freak out, okay?”
“Okay.”
When she resumed her incantations, and touched each of my feet in turn with the tip of her staff, my flesh started to melt and flow. It did feel weird, weirder in a way than it had felt to wake up in Serenikha’s body five years ago, but it also felt strangely right; that nagging feeling of a split tail went away and I didn’t even lose my balance for a moment as my tail merged and extended further behind me. “Don’t mess with the chalk circle!” Taylor warned me, and I coiled my tail under me. The changes spread up my torso from there, my hips widening, my waist narrowing, belly-button disappearing, skin darkening, breasts forming... I couldn’t see my face changing, but I felt it.
“There,” Taylor said, “now my turn.” I’d guessed what she was going to do from the way she’d taken off her shoes and so forth; she repeated the process with herself, and made herself into another nagini. She still looked almost the same from the waist up, except that her skin and hair were darker. Our scales had the same pattern, alternating coral-pink, yellow and teal.
“I thought it would be odd to introduce ourselves as sisters if I were a human and you were a nagini,” she explained as she broke the chalk circle with her staff.
“It would raise a few eyebrows, maybe,” I said, working on winding the sari-camisole around my breasts and over my shoulders. “Just one question before we go face the world in our hot new nagini bodies.”
“Yes?”
“The Tenacious One?” I raised my own eyebrow curiously.
“The other magic students gave me that name,” she said proudly. “Do you like it?”
“It fits well enough. A lot better than ‘The Patient One’, anyway.” We shared a bitter laugh over that; the naga mage’s impatience was primarily responsible for mine and Serenikha’s tangled souls.
We picked up our luggage and slithered out into the hall. There was a young kitsune girl there; she bowed to us and said: “I am Michiko. Her Highness asked me to show you to your room, when you were finished...”
“Lead on,” I said.
She led us down a couple of hallways to a large bedroom, with a bed large enough for three or four humans or at least two naga, as well as a couple of low sofas and a lot of cushions along the floor next to a couple of low tables. There was an open archway to another parlor or sitting room beyond.
“This is to be your room, O Tenacious One,” Michiko said, bowing again. “Leslie Kendricks, since you have graciously agreed to sacrifice your manhood to express your anguish at violating the maidenly modesty of Her Highness' ladies-in-waiting, Her Highness has given orders that another room in the women’s quarters is to be prepared for you. However, it will not be ready for an hour or so. In the meanwhile, she begs that you will deign to share your sister’s chamber for the moment.”
Taylor and I glanced at each other. “It’s fine with me if you want to share,” Taylor said, “now that we’re both girls. This is a huge room; I’d feel kind of lost in it...”
“I know what you mean,” I said, “but I have a feeling you’ll be sharing it with several servants a lot of the time.” I’d spent several days in a suite this big at the naga embassy during my first ill-fated trip to this world, and I’d had a couple of servants and a chaperon assigned to me in my guise as Serenikha. “Can you let Serenikha — I mean, Her Highness — know that we’re okay with sharing?”
“I shall tell her of your wishes, Leslie Kendricks.” She bowed again and withdrew.
Taylor rummaged through the wardrobe and cabinets, and found another sari-camisole; she changed out of her kimono into that, or tried to. She got mixed up with it, and I had to help her wind it and tuck it in.
“I can’t believe I need my little brother to show me how to put on a bra,” Taylor muttered, and then, looking at me curiously, “I can’t believe you still remember how to put one of these on after five years.”
“I don’t think I’m remembering from my last trip, exactly. It’s probably my link with Serenikha, giving me access to her grooming skills the way I can speak her languages.”
She nodded. “Now that you’re close together, I’d like to study your link some more. Professor G., I mean the Gray One, she taught us about you last semester — she didn’t use your names, of course, but I knew who she was talking about. She said there’s never been anybody else quite like you, though a bunch of mages have tried forging psychic links between people and had varying degrees of success.”
“Feel free to look all you want, but don’t touch. It works okay how it is, I don’t want us to start randomly swapping bodies again or something.”
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors more than other retailers.)
