Free Third Watch by Anne McCaffrey

with interest as she stepped forward again.
    “Bring your hurt to me,” she told the snake. “Press that part of you to the bars and I will heal you.”
    The bored-looking keeper roused himself, but Pircifir planted himself between the man and the serpent.
    The snake shifted, her scales rippling as she coiled herself so that the outer coils filled the back of the cage while her head and the coil containing the lump pressed against the bars. She regarded Khorii with a tragic expression, which Khorii hoped did not mean that the snake regretted that as soon as it was healed it would, as in the story, be compelled by its serpentine nature to bite her. While Khorii was fairly certain that the measures she’d outlined to Grimalkin would save her life, she also thought being bitten by something that size would hurt a lot.
    The coil pulsed slowly. It was dry and smooth except for the irregular lump, where the scales poked up along it. Some of them had rubbed off, revealing dark, ichor-filled sores.
    Shushing the serpent again with her mind, Khorii motioned it to press farther forward. When it was close enough, she dipped her head to touch the lump with her horn. The snake hissed again, and Khorii assured it that she was not going to poke or prod the tumor with her sharp-looking horn, but that it would make the hurt go away.
    She felt the snake’s head swaying above her and was startled momentarily when a drop of something wet fell past her nose and sizzled on the street just beside her foot. Glancing up, she saw the fangs protruding slightly from the snake’s mouth, venom dripping. A few feet away, she heard Grimalkin hiss in surprise, and she held out her hand to him, warning him not to come any closer.
    Khorii knew the secretion of the venom had been involuntary, and the snake rippled with what could have been apology. She touched the tumor with her horn while the snake concentrated on trying to refrain from dripping venom.
    She felt the tumor begin to uncoil its wadded cells inside the snake’s body as it began to disintegrate, then she realized why the serpent looked so sad. This was not a real tumor, but the calcified bodies of the snake’s young that she had ingested before she was captured. Instead of reabsorbing into her body normally, they had congealed in a lump, then grown hard and putrid inside her and sickened her.
    Khorii jumped back as the snake’s mouth yawned. Grimalkin grabbed her shoulders, Ariin her arm. But when the serpent opened its mouth wide, it was to let out a terrible belch of the worst imaginable stink as its body finished digesting the mass, and the coil became smooth again.
    The snake wound its long body in a tight coil and regarded Khorii with those beautiful eyes again. Then it slowly dipped its head, as if bowing in appreciation of what the young Linyaari had done for it. And all during this time, the man who was supposed to be tending the snake watched the entire event with his mouth hanging open. Then, when the snake belched, he fainted dead away.

Chapter 6

    G rimalkin and Pircifir did not actually stick around for the snake’s complete recovery. The keeper who had been in charge of stimulating the snake was still passed out, either from fright or the stench of the belch. The visitors thought it best not to revive him. The stench followed them into the next exhibit, the incredible morphing tunnel.
    The interior of the tent was bare—no cage, no keeper, not even a flutter in the sides of the tent. The fabric was stretched incredibly smooth and tight, from the slightly raised floor to the conical ceiling.
    “Where is it?” Pircifir asked.
    “Hurry, hurry, hurry, step right up and see if the floor comes away on your boot,” Ariin suggested.
    He gave her a quizzical look as she set her boot deliberately on the material raising the floor of the tent up off the street. Her foot came away with a sucking sound and she held the sole up to show him that it was covered with a sticky mucus.