Lord Kaa was caught up in a terrible internal struggle; for what and with whom, Krysty had no way of
knowing. The powerful muscles of his neck and shoulders were corded. His lips curled back from tightly clenched teeth. The battle had begun the moment he had unpeeled his middle eye.
It was a conflict he didn’t seem to be winning.
Krysty was confused by her own emotions as she watched him suffer the torments of an invisible hell. There was a terrible beauty to him-not just his size and massive musculature, not just his skin, not just the third eye that decorated his forehead. She sensed something inside him, something vulnerable, something pure. She couldn’t even describe whatever it was to herself because she didn’t have the right words, images, context She only knew what it made her feel to be near him.
Awe.
The creature who called himself Kaa was unique. The folktales of Death lands, which Krysty had learned by heart at her mother’s knee, encompassed a wide range of mutated species, real and imaginary, with attributes and powers equally diverse, but such a being as this had never even been hinted at.
Though there had been no jack, no gain in it for him, Kaa had freed her from the captivity of the norms. He had freed all the slaves of Willie ville. It was unheard-of.
And somehow he had managed to unite the stickies and other mutie races into a cohesive fighting force, which was impossible.
“What do you think’s wrong with him, Jak?” Krysty asked. “Do you think he’s dying?”
“Lion says he’s chilling,” the teenager said, “in his sleep.”
Krysty hadn’t heard the lion talk, but she knew that didn’t mean he couldn’t She wondered if only Jak could hear him.
“He’s chilling norms out in the ville?” she asked
“No. Can’t ck nothing to norms with head. Chills them with his M-60. Does things to stickles with brain, though. Look at those guys over there. Shaking them apart.”
That’s what it looked like to Krysty, too. The four stickies’ bodies were jerking and snapping, and white foam was pouring out of their mouths.
When she glanced back at Kaa, she was relieved to see that he had stopped his thrashing. He sat up and, bracing his back against the brushed steel of the safety-deposit boxes, pinched his third eye shut The battle was clearly done, but at a cost. Kaa let his chin sink onto his chest for a few seconds. When he raised his head, she saw there was anguish, perhaps even a touch of despair, in his face.
The first words out of his mouth formed a question, and a strange one at that
“Have you ever chilled someone you loved?”
“No,” she said, “I haven’t.”
“I did, just now,” he told her, “with my mind. I chilled a trusted friend who betrayed me, because he couldn’t overcome his nature. Because I was too weak
to protect him from it. The predarks had a word for such weakness. They called it hubris. I didn’t realize until now, because I was blinded by pride, that there were limits to my gifts. It never occurred to me that my control might be finite, that six thousand stickies were too many to contain when there was blood mist in the air.”
“I don’t understand,” Krysty said.
“My paladin, Rogero,” he explained, “committed the ultimate crime against the moral order of the new people. He willfully and for his own pleasure caused the death of a fellow mutant He did this while connected to every other stickle mind in my legion. Once he started the chilling of the field slaves, I. couldn’t make him stop. I couldn’t siop the stickies with him, either. Soon their blood lust would have infected the whole army. I had no choice but to terminate the life of one I loved, as son, brother, friend, also in full view of the others. I didn’t do it to make a point, as an object lesson to my troops. Stickies don’t learn through pain, their own or that of others. Pain is their sacrament, Angelica.”
When Krysty looked puzzled, he said, “I know all this is strange to you. I know and I apologize. You and I have much to talk about. There is much that I do not understand myself. Much that puzzles me. I know you will be able to help me sort it out”