Remo sensed what was really happening. The demon within him was only playing with the giant snake. It intended to toy with the creature, and when the entertainment value had at last been exhausted, it would slaughter the python in fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. This was somehow the final step toward the ultimate perversion of Remo's body. An inexplicable rite of passage.
And Remo felt a deep, helpless shame that his perfect body was being corrupted by this ancient demon.
He could not allow it to happen.
The snake slithered about his ankles once again. This time the demon within Remo anticipated the attack. He didn't fall.
While the inner presence was concentrating on the
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external pressure of the predator snake, Remo willed himself loose.
The thick hide wrapped around his chest.
Remo forced himself outward, pushing back to where his mind belonged. As he concentrated all his energy on a single, minuscule effort, he imagined sweat appearing on some internal brow. It was a small thing. But it would be proof that Remo was not totally helpless.
The snake pulled itself up around his neck and bobbed unsteadily in a gawking position a foot before the pale white face of its prey. A long flat tongue darted hungrily from its lipless mouth.
Remo pushed outward. Farther, farther.
The snake brought its alien snout closer. The huge coils below tightened.
With a phenomenal effort of will, Remo forced his index finger to twitch. The movement was quick and sharp. He felt the rough texture of the snake's hide against the pad of his finger.
He felt.
There was a flare of surprise from the presence within him.
Remo pushed again—hard. His hand twitched spas-tically. It rubbed along the interior of the coiled snake.
Something close to panic rose from the spirit of the Pythia within him. It was an inner remonstration. The Pythia had frittered away precious time when it should have first concentrated all of its efforts dispelling the last vestiges of consciousness from its latest vessel.
The rebirth was incomplete. To become the true Pythia, it had to kill the snake. And if the Pythia failed,
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Apollo could not assert his presence in the modern world.
Both hands moved freely now. The shoulders rolled in a shrugging motion, pushing the snake down farther.
The spirit of the Pythia had underestimated Sinanju. Underestimated its power because of the weak-minded Tang so many years before.
The Pythia had assumed that the Remo-vessel was as corruptible as the others. But his training in Sinanju had made Remo stronger.
It could not fail its master, not now. Not when it was so close.
The Pythia forced its will upon its vessel once more.
Remo's hands wrapped around the python's throat. The Pythia squeezed.
The thin, merciless reptilian mouth dropped open as the creature gulped helplessly for air. It thrashed its head, but could not prevail. The giant tail swung around defensively, looping around Remo's ankles.
Remo had had possession of his body only briefly. With a murderous lunge the demon within him had reasserted itself. It felt as if his spirit had been knocked backward into his own mind. Remo concentrated harder, trying to assert mastery over his own body once more.
As the life ebbed from its heavy, limp frame, the tail of the snake began twitching reflexively. It was dying. And Remo was the instrument of its death.
Remo suddenly felt the huge thing he had sensed on the other side of the bleak internal horizon loom into view. The thing was giant. It strode across the barren terrain of his thoughts like a colossus. It was
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nearly larger than his mind could conceive, greater than his consciousness could encompass. It was a vague mountain of pure evil. And it was moving toward him.
At that moment Remo realized that it would not be possible to defeat the thing within him in this place. He could quell it, stall it. But it could not be beaten.
Not while it still dwelled within him.
It would first need to be removed.
With a sudden desperate leap, Remo forced his spirit outward. In a flash of blinding energy he was in control of his body once more.
His limbs jolted at the sudden surge of energy in his muscles, and Remo, still wrapped in the loosened coils of the deadly python, dropped in a heap to the cage floor.
In a struggle that wasn't visible externally, but that exploded within him with a force more powerful than a supernova, Remo seized his essence from the spirit of the Pythia, taking hold of his own mind like a tenacious climber scrambling for a handhold above the precipice of his own darkest fears.
Desperately he held on to his body with his mind, with his will, with his very soul.
The snake, jarred loose by Remo's actions, relaxed its coils from around its slender prey, to slither off into the leaf-choked shadows, apparently deciding that its meal was no longer worth the effort needed to conquer.
Sweating and shivering, Remo climbed to his feet.
His mind had touched that of the creature within him—and he now knew what it had intended all along.
The Pythia was as much a servant of Apollo as the
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vessels were servants to the Pythia. And the giant evil thing that had moved toward him in his thoughts was the spirit of the sun god himself, ready to take possession of Pythia's latest vessel.
East would meet West within him.
Remo felt the mocking presence at the periphery of his thoughts once again and knew it to be Apollo.
He couldn't beat him. He had quelled the spirit of Apollo for now, beaten the Pythia twice in as many days, but he couldn't fight this battle over and over again. It had taken all his inner strength to stave off the Pythia this time. Next time Remo couldn't hope to win. Not until he banished the spirit that lurked within the darkest recesses of his own mind.
The spirit had slithered into his mind via the smoke and steam of the Pythia Pit, and instinct told him that any hope of separating their intertwined minds resided in the rocky hillock of the modern Delphic temple far to the west.