The bard's startled perplexity, on beholding the Eye at his feet -- not darkness, sun be thanked, although it cannot wholly ease his doubts -- ebbs as the eerie new presence rises, uncoiling its menace within the hut. In the sweltering heat of the swamp, a coldness settles in the air. To keep from flinching away, Crow clings to pride in his professionalism: a lifeline against the sudden, dragging weight of primordial resentment -- a feral grudge against the upstart genus Man -- which the unseen presence bears in its wake.Suddenly there is more than one voice chanting--or is it only that Chicken Bone's voice has changed? Something has entered the room; you cannot see it, but you feel its presence, darker and more ominous than that of the storm outside.
Though he knows but little of loa, and less still of the rituals which invoke their presence, the wave of dark emotions heralding the visitant's arrival resonates with a familiar syncopation. Like Crow's, the voodan's magic is that of manifested passions and persuasion, not rote ceremony or procedure; an analogous wellspring of liberated feeling is shared between them, for all that Chicken Bone's power pours in from without, and the bard's ushers out from within.
(The commonality is subtle, but it saves him. Had the spy not sensed that it is not truly blood which feeds this bayou-birthed magic, but loosed devotion for which sacrifice is but a catalyst, the long-suppressed terror Buchvold mistakes for fury might have claimed him, despite amnesia's refuge! But the evils that had ruled and devoured Crow's past were not to blame for this snake-toothed malignancy.)
The chilling voice's inhuman sibilants bring another twinge to the bard's wrists, but his placement within the tableau sets both Draxton and the voodan in his field of view. Thus, the bard can see at once it is not to him that Chicken Bone's words -- or were they, really? -- are directed. Nor can their intended recipient be accounted any great surprise: while he has good hopes for Kingsley, and even the Borcan has his strengths, no act of Serd's to date had debunked Crow's first-meeting intuition that the merchant from Richemulot is already damned."Ton...gensssss..."
After a confused moment you realize that Chicken Bone is speaking, but this is not his voice; he is staring at Serd, arm raised and pointed at him--in accusation? Or merely in indication?
Recollecting that the veve at his feet suggests his own damnation is not set in stone, the spy glances down again. Thus, he witnesses how the light of the Eye bleeds and flows away, drawn to Chicken Bone as the old voodan falls, contorts as if in seizure, then relaxes as the Oracle's spirit displaces le serpente.
Breathing out in relief -- though fairly certain, by now, that his blood's gift has not bound him to evil, hearing is believing -- the bard bows low to the voodan's new inhabitant, and a whispered Romèrsi passes his lips, in unbidden gratitude that his sacrifice has gone to Destiny's avatar, not some malign spirit of the mire.After a moment he rises, slowly, and speaks again, in a thin, cracked voice more like his own--but still subtly different.
"Excuse-moi, m'sieurs, madame," he says, making the faintest suggestion of a bow. "Deduis que me cherchez?"