The Magus Chronicles

The Pythoness - Part Two

Despite the modern paraphernalia, within the elevator enclosure it still felt like a temple. Strings of beads and cloth hung like veils, partitioning parts of the room from others and covering the metal and concrete walls. Fires in trash-cans made braziers, tended to by silent figures. There were a few altars of cardboard, with what were clearly offerings of cards, stuffed animals and fake flowers. A few broken pipes stuck into the room, and thin streams of water emptied themselves into a weird brooke that flowed out into a drain. 

And there were animals. Stray cats wandered, perched atop cages. Rats munched on piles of fruit that had clearly been left out. Pigeons cooed in the pipes above their heads. A few stray dogs lay piled together near the door. A bulldog was brushed by a man with only one hand.

All of this lead up to a raised platform in front of the central elevator, made from plywood stacked across tires. A great hole in the middle of the platform gushed steam with a constant whoosh. The steam didn't smell foul, or like fire smoke. It smelled like burning herb. Octavian felt strangely hazy. The space that he tried to contain at all times, the place where visions came from, yawned like the abyss, and he couldn't be bothered to close it.

Behind the smoke moved a figure it was almost impossible to discern, between the foggy air and the hazy light and darkness. A few people sat on and around the platform, like guards, or acolytes, but there were no supplicants.

"Simone." A voice whispered through the air, between fog and shadow. "You brought her."

"I did, Pythoness." Simone climbed up onto the platform and crawled behind the smoke to the side of the person. The person came more into view as they came closer, and stopped a few feet away.

The woman was old, and obviously blind. Her head was shaved, her skin the brown color of a walnut. Her features were creased and lined, her white eyes staring, skin sagging on her cheeks and chin. In her lap she held an enormous green python. It heaped itself over her in thick coils. Simone gently lifted its head into her arms. It slithered partially over Simone's shoulder, and then back the other way. The blind Pythoness leaned forward through the smoke.

"The Savage Bishop," She said after a moment, her voice rasping. Octavian could understand that if she had been breathing this smoke her whole life. "The First and the Last. The Finder of the Lost. The Unfollowed. The Crowner of Kings. The Wonder-Crafter. The Maker-Unmaker."

Percy recognized those titles (they had to be titles) from when Glory has lain dying in the diner. Moreover, he recognized the pattern the pythoness spoke them in. They were not old words, they were familiar. Like a long polished poem, or a much told story. His eyes went to the graffiti that was briefly illuminated behind the Pythoness shaved head. They were a strange overlay of words and symbols that he couldn't understand through the thickening of the smoke. He felt a little dizzy.

Glory stepped forward from their little knot, and walked to the vulnerable space in front of the platform.

"Are you a priestess?" She asked, her voice rising above the quiet. "Are you a seer?"

"I am the last true seer." The pythoness pronounced it into the smoke, her white eyes floating in it like twin moons. "The other sybils and prophetesses have fallen - the sacred fires have died. I am all that remains. I alone see destiny."

For a moment, Livia thought that blind gaze (could there be a blind gaze?) turned on her, but it quickly reverted to Glory, who reached up her hands.

"You will see more than I do," Glory said. "Can you see these?"

The Pythoness lifted a hand from beneath the undulating snake on her lap. It was swollen with arthritis, half frozen in a claw.

"I cannot see it," the Pythoness said. "But I can feel them. That curse is in my mind. I felt it from miles away. And now it burns in front of me. You cannot understand how powerful it is, to bind you."