The guards wouldn’t let the Knowing One in to the women’s quarters, though, until he transformed himself into a woman, or maybe put on an illusion of being a woman; I had a suspicion it was the latter, given how fast the change was effected and the way “she” walked.

The Other Half of My Soul

Part 4 of 11

by Trismegistus Shandy

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.

Dinner that night was not the huge, elaborate event I’d attended during my previous visit, when Serenikha’s uncle Ravadh had made me impersonate her at several public functions (including the first half of her betrothal with Pientao). There were only a couple of dozen people present, several of the ladies we’d seen in Serenikha’s chamber or in the baths, plus Pientao and a matching number of men, most of whom I vaguely recognized from images in our shared dreams but hadn’t met during my previous visit. We were seated alternately man and woman, with Pientao at the head of the table and Serenikha to his right, then a mage who was introduced as the Knowing One between Serenikha and Taylor, one of Pientao’s cousins between Taylor and me, and so on around the table.

When Serenikha introduced us to Pientao just before dinner, he said: “Leslie? Oh, yes, Serenikha’s told me to expect you. I told the guards to let me know when you arrived, though, right after they showed you to your rooms.”

“We, ah, didn’t arrive at the main entrance of the palace,” Taylor said, and Serenikha explained how the portal had opened up in the wrong place because of our link interfering with Taylor’s spell. She didn’t mention the little detail that we’d appeared in the baths while she and most of her ladies were naked, though.

“Oh. Well, it’s good to meet you again. Somehow I thought you were a human man, though?” He glanced at Serenikha.

“I usually am; my sister transformed me so I could visit with Her Highness without any suspicion of impropriety.”

“Good. I mean, I trust her, but you know what the palace is like: it produces more gossip than imperial edicts.”

I suspected some of that gossip would sooner or later reach him with some garbled version of our arrival in the middle of Serenikha’s bath; hopefully we’d be gone by then.

During dinner itself I didn’t have much chance to talk to Serenikha or Pientao; I talked some with my neighbors on either side, Pientao’s cousin and a naga nobleman whose name I’ve since forgotten, and some with Michiko and her fiancé Teruyama, across the table. Musicians were playing at the other end of the room, which was nice in a way, but the music kept me from hearing anyone who wasn’t right next to me. I tried to be a good conversational partner, answering a lot of questions from the naga nobleman about America and Earth, and finding unexpected support from Teruyama, who said he’d visited our world twice. But I was more than a little distracted, thinking about the portal and whether Taylor would be able to get it open again.

The Knowing One wanted to come with us to the baths to see the portal. The guards wouldn’t let him in to the women’s quarters, though, until he transformed himself into a woman, or maybe put on an illusion of being a woman; I had a suspicion it was the latter, given how fast the change was effected and the way “she” walked. She, or he, followed me and Taylor to the baths, talking shop with Taylor in terms that were mostly over my head, though I’d picked up a few things from listening to the Gray One and Taylor over the years.

“I think the problem is that the magic level on the other side of the portal has dropped a lot faster than I expected,” Taylor said.

“What was it when you opened the portal?”

“Fourteen hundred thaums per square meter, and still rising. I needed at least eleven hundred thaums to open a basic minimal portal, but more to get it to open usefully wide and stay open long enough for a decent visit...”

By this time my tail was completely banded with blue and green, but I hadn’t said anything to Taylor about it; she needed to concentrate on the portal. If we could get home to a lower-magic area, that should break the transformation by itself.

Taylor pointed with her staff to the spot in midair where the portal had been, and the Knowing One peered closely at it and nodded. “Let’s see you try to dilate it,” she said, and Taylor started working, while the Knowing One and I backed up to give her room.

She chanted and waved her staff in complex spiraling motions, and the portal began to open again. But it didn’t get very far, maybe eight or ten inches, before it narrowed almost to invisibility again. She kept working, a determined expression on her face, and got it to open a couple of feet wider this time, only to have it close down.

“I think I see,” the Knowing One said. “Shall I give it a try?”

“Go ahead,” Taylor said.

She didn’t use a staff, but I think the large pearl she took from around her neck might have served the same purpose; she waved it in the air in patterns similar to the ones Taylor had used, but she chanted something different. (I’d heard Taylor do that portal-chant three times now and though I didn’t understand it, I could recognize it by now.) But this time the portal didn’t even open two inches before it closed again.

“It’s still there,” she said, “but probably we’ve used up the ambient magic in the region on the other side, trying to get it open. We’ll need to let it build up again... we should try again tomorrow at dawn.”

“There’s plenty of magic here, right?” I asked. “Is there maybe a way to send some of that magic through the portal, to make up for the lack of it over there?”

Taylor looked startled, and the Knowing One said, “I don’t know. I’ve heard of these portals but never seen one, and I’m not sure how they work... but it’s worth a try. We’ll have to wait at least a few hours before we can even open it enough to send power through, though.”

“Let’s meet back here at midnight,” Taylor proposed, and the Knowing One agreed.

We started back to the dining hall, where most of the other guests at Serenikha and Pientao’s dinner were watching the after-dinner puppet show. “Weren’t you going to contact the Gray One next, if you couldn’t get it open?” I asked. “You could ask him if sending magic through the portal would work.”

“I will,” Taylor said, “after I rest a few minutes.”

We caught the tail end of the puppet show, and then the party broke up. Some of the women who didn’t live in the palace went home with their husbands or brothers; others returned to the women’s quarters with us, and we wound up in Serenikha’s parlor, all except Taylor who said she was going to our room to contact the Gray One. I’d offered to come with her, but she said she wanted to be alone; I was afraid that meant she’d be bluntly talking with him about bad news she didn’t want me to hear, but I tried to put those fears aside and focus on hanging out with my best friend.

My resemblance to Serenikha was getting pretty noticeable now; I’d had to loosen and refasten my sari to accommodate my slightly larger breasts, and not long after we settled down onto couches and cushions in Serenikha’s parlor, Bhavalikha said:

“What did you do to your scales, Leslie?”

“It’s a spell Taylor worked — it’s making me more like Serenikha.”

She looked closely at me. “Yes, I can see it in your face now too; you look like her cousin Radhena, but I didn’t notice any resemblance earlier.”

“She does, doesn’t she?” Serenikha said. “The Tenacious One said that her spell to turn Leslie into a nagini was doing that because Leslie’s soul and mine are coiled together.”

“It’s not doing anything to you, my dear, is it?” Bhavalikha looked apprehensively at Serenikha, who laughed.

“Oh, no, and I suppose it won’t do Leslie any harm after she goes home. You don’t have enough magic to transform people there, do you?”

“Nowhere near enough.”

“But Kinuko says there is more magic in the other world every year,” Michiko said. “Is this intertwining of your souls affecting you more than it used to?”

“Well, more now than ever, because we’re in the same world together,” I said. “But over the last few years — maybe so.” We were sharing dreams more often this last year than we’d done while I was in high school, but most of that was because Taylor had helped me get into the highest-magic dorm on campus.

None of us knew enough about magic to say anything more substantive than that, but it didn’t keep Michiko and an elf named Theremisia from offering more speculations, some of which made me twitch my tail uncomfortably, and Serenikha too. After a little too much of that, she said suddenly: “Who is for riddles?”

Several of the women eagerly cried out, none more than Michiko, and we took turns offering riddles which the others tried to guess. I wasn’t very good at it, as a lot of the riddles required a cultural context which I didn’t have quite enough of despite my link with Serenikha, but once or twice I had an intuition about the answer that turned out to be right, though I’d been too diffident of my own reasoning to speak up. When my turn came, I offered them one of the riddles from The Hobbit, the one about mail-armor that doesn’t clink. Michiko got it at last, though it kept them guessing for a while.

Then the party broke up, and we straggled back to our rooms. I found Taylor already asleep, so I couldn’t ask her what she’d learned from the Gray One. I took off my sari and slid in beside her, and was soon asleep despite my worries.

I woke up to find Taylor picking up her staff to go. “You can rest,” she said. “If I get the portal open I’ll send a servant to get you.”

“No,” I said, “what if you can only keep it open for a couple of minutes?” I hastily dressed, grabbed our luggage, which we’d hardly touched, and followed her to the baths.

The Knowing One, again in the guise of a white-haired but unwrinkled woman, was waiting for us. “Have you seen anything?” Taylor asked.

“Nothing definitive. I wanted to wait for you. It does look stronger than it did a few hours ago, though.”

“Let’s try it,” and she started waving her staff and chanting. I slithered over to the wall and sat back on my coiled tail.

I watched them work, and thought. Another idea occurred to me, something to suggest if this didn’t work, but I didn’t want to interrupt them with it now. Then just as the portal began to open slightly, I noticed a dampness in the front of my sari. I felt it and realized it was just over my right nipple, and there was a fainter dampness in front of the other nipple... I put a finger to my sari, then held it up to my mouth and licked it. Milk.

Of course. Serenikha was nursing little Sakhi, so as the spell made me more like her, I’d started lactating. I wondered if my face looked like hers already; was there a mirror around here...?

By this time Taylor had the portal open, but only about three inches wide. The Knowing One was standing beside Taylor and a few feet to her left, chanting and waving her left hand while she held the big pearl in her right, and light was pouring out of the pearl into the portal. But from the expressions on their faces, I wasn’t sure it was going right. I spotted a large mirror over by another wall, but just as I uncoiled and started slithering over there to take a look, the portal suddenly flared larger, and I stopped dead. It wasn’t expanding smoothly in its spherical form as I’d seen it do before, here or in the clearing back in Yosemite; it was reaching out ragged tendrils, ranging from a few inches to over ten feet long, most of which receded into the central mass as quickly as they extended. And there was a humming noise I hadn’t heard the earlier times, which fluctuated deeper and higher in pitch as the tendrils flared and retracted. Taylor and the Knowing One backed away from the portal, but kept working on it. Now the tendrils were waving around, and Taylor yelled “Stop feeding it!” The light stopped coming from the pearl a few seconds later, and moments after that, the portal collapsed and vanished.

Everything was quiet. Taylor and the Knowing One kept looking at the place where the portal had been; after a few seconds, Taylor lowered her staff to the ground and the Knowing One put the pearl necklace back around her neck.

“What happened?”

“Feeding extra power into the portal destabilized it,” Taylor said. “It wouldn’t have been safe to go through it like that... and once we stopped feeding it, it collapsed. There’s nothing left to work with; we’ll have to make another portal in a month or two when the conditions are right.”

“So... what did I miss, earlier? When you talked with the Gray One?”

“He said he’d never tried feeding power through a portal, but it might work. I still think it might, if we had a portal that wasn’t on the verge of collapse to begin with.”

“Did he say anything about this transformation spell? By the way, do I look exactly like Serenikha already?”

“Hmm... no, but you’re more like her sister than her cousin. You’ll probably be her twin by morning. The Gray One said it shouldn’t be a problem if we could get the portal open again — when we went home, the spell would dissipate without enough magic to sustain it and you’d go back to normal. But since we’re staying here... he told me some things to check on, some diagnostic tests to run. We’ll do that in the morning, after I get some sleep.”

“All right.”

We left the baths, and in the corridor outside we found not only the night-shift guards, but a couple of sleepless women, including Sienpai.

“What happened?” she asked. “We heard a loud noise from the baths, and then shouting...”

“We tried to open the portal and it didn’t work,” Taylor said. “We’ll be imposing on Her Highness' hospitality for a while longer, I suppose.”

“Oh,” I said, “could I get some breast pads? Or a sari designed for nursing mothers? My nipples are leaking.”

Taylor and the Knowing One had told the eunuch guards that there was no more reason to keep people out of the baths, but they said they couldn’t stand down until Her Highness said so. The next morning Taylor slept late, having worn herself out working on the portal, so I quietly got up and went to the baths; but I found several other women waiting, some of them arguing with the guards, who said they couldn’t let anyone in but a mage unless the princess said so. When I arrived, someone said: “Your Highness, tell them to let us in —”

But Shiyama interrupted, and said: “You’re Leslie, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. She nodded.

“I could tell by your hair and nails. Serenikha had the servants take out her hair ornaments and re-plait it before she went to bed, but it looks like you slept in them. And you’re still wearing yesterday’s nail polish, which went with your old pink and yellow scales.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t figure out how to get them out and I’m not used to having servants.” And I hadn’t worn nail polish since I was a little boy, too trusting of my willfully gender-blind parents to realize that it would get me laughed off the playground.

When Serenikha arrived, I told her what had happened, and she dismissed the guards so everyone could go in and bathe. “I’m sorry you aren’t able to go home,” she said, “but I’ll try to make your longer visit a pleasant one. We can go on an expedition into the countryside, or at least out into the city. And if you stay another month, you will be here for Wushao’s wedding; that is to be the event of the season... And we can have so much fun being twins!”

“Yeah,” I said, “about that... I don’t just look like you. Does Sakhi nurse more on the right side than the left?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“Because I seem to be leaking more from my right breast.”

“Oh! Would you like to nurse Sakhi?”

“...Could I?” I’d wanted to, but it seemed too intimate a thing to ask, even of so close a friend as Serenikha.

“Right after we bathe!”

But it wasn’t right afterward. Taylor slithered in to the baths looking bedraggled, and answered a few more of Serenikha’s questions than I’d been able to. No, she didn’t know exactly when the next magic surge would let us go home. Yes, the transformation spell might last a lot longer than intended if it had gotten really tangled up with our psychic link, but she didn’t think it was that bad. Probably it was still a separate spell that was being influenced by the presence of the link.

After we returned to our rooms to dress, we gathered for breakfast in Serenikha’s “small” dining room — there were nearly as many people present as at last night’s dinner, all of them women. Dhamarikha brought Sakhi in after a few minutes, and did a double take when she saw me and Serenikha next to each other — a lot of people had been doing that.

“Good morning, Sakhi!” Serenikha said, and I added: “I hope you’re hungry.”

Sakhi didn’t hesitate between us; she reached out her arms toward her mommy. Serenikha loosened her sari and let her nurse, and then held her out toward me; Sakhi looked at me with wide eyes for a few moments before she uncoiled her tail from around her mommy’s arm.

“Remember me, little one? Uncle Leslie? I look different today, but surprise! I’ve got milk for you this time.” I loosened my sari and let her nurse.

She was hungry. Man, I think if Taylor had bespelled every woman in the court to lactate all at once, that baby would have done full justice to the menu.

Taylor smiled and shook her head. “That’s another thing I never thought my little brother would do before me.”

“You just know that if we tell Mom and Dad about this, they’re going to take it as an occasion to ask us when we’re going to settle down and give them grandchildren.”

“Good point. They won’t hear about it from me... But, you know, when you’re finished with that we really should go cast those diagnostic spells and figure out what’s up with the twin-transformation thing.”

So when Sakhi had sucked every drop of milk she could out of me, I handed her over to Michiko, who said she hadn’t held her for several days, and Taylor and I returned to our room.

She drew another chalk circle, and had me coil up in it, and slithered around tapping the circle with her staff, much as I’d seen her and the Gray One doing for several types of spell. After a few minutes I felt a tingling in my right cheek, then saw little flecks of light in the corners of my eyes, and heard a ringing in my ears, and tasted something like bitter tea; I reported these sensations, as Taylor had asked me to, and at some of them she nodded, at others she looked perplexed. Finally my left breast glowed softly amber through the thick cloth of my new maternity sari, and then faded.

“Well,” Taylor said, as she put down her staff and rested. “...You can break the circle now.”

“Give it to me straight, doc; am I gonna live?”

“You’ll probably outlive all the kids in your dorm,” she said. “But you’ll spend your last few centuries as a nagini.”

“Oh, I already knew that.” Mr. G. had told me that whenever Serenikha or I died, whichever was first, we’d pop into the other one’s body, probably ending up in a sort of time-share arrangement. It was a weird thing to look forward to, but I figured I had several decades more to get used to the idea. “But what about this transformation spell?”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “The transformation spell is apparently getting tangled up with your link to Serenikha. Maybe the Gray One could disentangle it, but I don’t think I should try. And it looks like that might have made it permanent; at least it’s not going to wear off as soon as it normally would. It will keep you in sync with Serenikha as long as you’re both in a high-magic area — such as almost anywhere in this world. Once we go home, you’ll revert to your old self; but over the next few decades, as magic levels in our world rise, you’ll have to avoid high-magic areas if you want to remain human and male, and eventually you’d have a hard time finding low-magic areas anymore.”

“Not sure why I’d want to, since I’d age so much slower as a nagini.”

“Even after magic levels in our world rise as high as they are here, I expect a nagini slithering down the sidewalk would draw some attention. Not to mention that during the transitional period, you might be switching back and forth several times a day as you go to work and go home, or even just staying in one place while magic levels fluctuate.”

“Well, maybe I’ll migrate over here.”

“You seem to be taking this very calmly.”

“It’s not as weird as the stuff I’ve already had to get used to, really. And the consequences are decades away — most of them anyway. If Serenikha doesn’t mind me being her twin, why should I?”

“Why indeed?”

“And I figure I’ll get a second opinion from the Gray One when we go home. You could be wrong, right?”

“Quite possibly. The Gray One gave me that diagnostic spell, but... some of the results were just weird, not anything he told me might happen. We’ll see.”

I'll post part five next Monday or Tuesday, probably.

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