The Iron Druid Chronicles 6-Book Bundle

by Kevin Hearne

  Asking Oberon to stand sentinel outside, I entered the hogan with Granuaile to survey the interior. Hogans are not particularly large buildings, only about 250 square feet inside, but they’re important to ceremonial life and thus crucial to the beginnings of large enterprises like this one. This hogan was one of the more modern plans, built in an octagonal shape; the walls were fairly free of gaps, since they were constructed with precut logs, and the roof was a latticework of beams covered over with black plastic sheeting at this point, a four-plane design. Tomorrow the roof would be finished and covered with mud, insulating it well, and the exterior walls would be covered too. I thought it interesting that this particular hogan included no windows; circulation came solely from the door and the round chimney built at the meeting of the various beams. In the center of the floor was a fire pit, and Frank Chischilly was hunched down over it, tending a small fire. Lava rocks were arranged closely around it, and Frank had sprinkled some herbs on them. The burning herbs sent fingers of fragrant white smoke up through the chimney.

  He shot a glance up at me and then spoke to Granuaile. “We’re going to stay in here tonight,” he said. “Safer that way.”

  Granuaile noted the profound lack of facilities. “Guess I’d better visit the privy before sundown, then.”

  “Yep. We’ll be startin’ the sing as soon as everyone’s ready.”

  “Anything I can do to help?” she asked.

  Frank’s eyes flicked over to me. “Well, if you happen to know any way to keep out or repel evil spirits,” he said, perfectly serious, “that would be helpful.”

  That was an interesting challenge. “What kind of evil?” I asked, not knowing precisely what to ward against.

  Frank stared at me in disbelief and then spat into the pit before asking, “Ain’t there only one kind?”

  “No, there’s all kinds of evil, just like there’s all kinds of good. What I need to know is where the source is. We’re not dealing with the Christian hell here or rakshasas from the Vedic planes. Where is the evil coming from? This plane or somewhere else?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean now. The spirits come from First World.”

  “That’s Black World, right?” I asked. I knew some of the basics of the Navajo faith, but I was by no means an expert. Their creation story follows the Emergence pattern, where people emerge into this world after climbing through several subterranean levels, evolving as they go. According to what little I knew, our plane is Fourth World, which is sometimes called Glittering World or White World. Granuaile appeared lost but didn’t interrupt to ask.

  “Yep, that’s Black World,” Frank said.

  “How’d they get all the way up here?” I wondered.

  “Answer to that depends on who you ask. You want my guess?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I think they been here all along, since the world was first bein’ made. We know that monsters an’ spirits from the lower worlds came here to Fourth World in the beginning. But Changing Woman sent her sons, Monster Slayer and Child-Born-of-Water, to kill ’em all. I think they got most of the monsters—they left old age, hunger, cold, and poverty behind on purpose.”

  “Ah, but they didn’t take care of all the spirits, right?”

  “Right. Those spirits from First World, they were spirits of the air, but mostly ornery insects—angry beetles, ants, locusts, dragonflies, and the like. They got kicked out of all the other worlds for fightin’ all the time, always wantin’ to dominate someone else. Most of ’em got turned into real bugs, but some didn’t and remained spirits. And the way I figure it is, when a soul turns as black as Black World, these old spirits find them a comfortin’ touch of home, and if they’re called to move in, they will. That’s what a skinwalker is: a mean asshole with a meaner spirit squatting inside.”

  Oberon said.

  “Hmm. All right, I’ve never dealt with anything like this before, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  The hataałii didn’t say anything, merely nodded and turned his attention back to the fire. Granuaile and I exited and rejoined Oberon outside. We walked off a short distance and spoke in low tones so that no one could hear, save perhaps Oberon.

  “You have a way of warding against skinwalkers, sensei?” Granuaile asked.

  I shook my head. “Not specifically. I’ve never been down to First World or run into a skinwalker before. It’s been centuries since I’ve had to deal with any sort of Native American magic. I’ve been hiding in cities to stay away from the Fae, and all the shamans or holy men are hiding out on the reservations.”

  “When was the last time you dealt with any?”

  “Well, there was this rain god of the Maya who gave me a bit of trouble.”

  “The Maya! Do you know what happened to them?”

  “Not for certain, but they might have left this plane. They had a priest who could do it. But this is a completely different belief system,” I said, waving back at the hogan, “and so the rules of the magic are different as well. If I wanted to work up something to ward specifically against a skinwalker, I’d have to confront it first and see the pattern of it in the magical spectrum. General wards against magic from another plane may or may not work. And that’s the problem with wards, Granuaile.” I figured I might as well embrace the teachable moment. “You can’t ward against everything, and sometimes the bad guys will win through or around it despite your best efforts. So you know what happens in that case?”

  “The bad guys win?”

  “What, automatically? Getting past your wards means you’re instant toast?”

  “Well, no, I’d fight first.”

  “Exactly. You fight. The problem is you don’t know how.”

  Granuaile huffed, her pride wounded. “I’ve taken some kickboxing lessons.”

  I grinned at her. “Ah, you have? Bring it.” I set myself in a defensive stance.

  My apprentice scowled at the idea. “You’ll use magic.”

  “I promise I won’t. Not even a little—”

  She didn’t lack for initiative. She pivoted and shot a kick at my gut before I finished the sentence. I pivoted as well and her toes grazed my belly, no more. I knew she was the athletic sort, but I hadn’t seen her exert herself until now. She was fast. Lunging in, I socked her in the stomach before she could recover and she staggered back, wheezing. I didn’t press my advantage, and she didn’t seem eager to continue.

  “You know a bit more than kickboxing, don’t you?” she said.

  I nodded. “Considerably more. We could do the whole Pai Mei thing if you want, but I’d rather not hurt you and I don’t have the flowing white beard to pull it off respectably.”

 

  It will drag on the ground and get dirty every time you go to smell something or eat. It will be a mess.

 

  Thank you. Hound 4, Druid 3.

 

  “That’s all right, sensei, I’ll take your word for it,” Granuaile said, clutching her stomach. “Do I have to carry water up the mesa or something? Wax my car? Paint the rocks?”

  “No,” I said, smiling at the movie tropes. “I don’t think I need to break your will. But we do need to train your muscles and get you accustomed to fighting with weapons.”

  “I’m going to need a sword, then?”

  “We will train with swords, yes, but I don’t think that will be your best weapon. Your size and reach will put you at a constant disadvantage in a sword fight. I think a staff would be better for you, and we will see what you can do with a throwing knife.”

  “How will a staff and some throwing knives help against some brute who bull-rushes me with his shield up? Or a smart guy with a gun?”

  “An excellent question. Every weapon has its drawbacks. We’ll prepare you for all kinds of antagonist
s.”

  “What about automatic weapons? Can you pull a Neo and dodge bullets?”

 

  “Nope. I cheat if I have the time. I dissolve the firing mechanism with a spell of unbinding.”

  “And what if you don’t have the time?” That was an even better question—a dawning ray of paranoia that should be encouraged. “What about snipers?” she added, and I almost burst with pride. I settled for clenching my fist and drawing it down close to my body.

  “Yesss! I ask myself that question every day and everywhere I go. Well done. And the answer is, you look around.” I pointed up at the buttes above us to the north and south. “I can’t stand where they’re placing this hogan, because we’re in the ideal spot to get picked off. You have to see the snipers before they see you, take cover, and then unbind their toys into hunks of useless metal.”

  “But if you don’t see them in time, or if they have one of those fancy plastic guns, you can’t do anything.”

  “Right. Except duck. Druids aren’t invincible, or else there would be more of us around.”

  Granuaile turned to consider the hogan, which was lined in the red glow of the setting sun.

  “So how do you create a ward, anyway?”

  “You can think of it like a Boolean search on the Internet. You begin by defining your boundary—‘all life is okay in here’—and then you layer on the exclusions. ‘And not frakkin’ Cylons and not douche bags and not Imperial Stormtroopers.’ ”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s what a ward is. The tricky part is defining your terms. How does the ward know the difference between a douche bag and a boy from Scottsdale?”

  “Oh, I see.” Granuaile nodded. “They’re practically synonymous.”

  “Right. Much of the time spent constructing wards is devoted to defining your terms magically. And you can’t define the magical signature of something until you’ve run across it once and laid your eyes on it in the magical spectrum. So I have no ward against skinwalkers. Trying to construct one now would be the equivalent of a null program.”

  “But you do have a ward against douche bags?”

  “Alas! Turns out they’re not malignant magical creatures at all, just naturally occurring phenomena, an evolutionary mutation of modern society.”

  Granuaile cocked an eyebrow at me. “Evolutionary? You’re suggesting that douche bags are naturally selected?”

  “Sure. Vestigial remnants of hunter behavior manifests itself as douchebaggery in males when confronted with the emasculating role of modern man, where they are no longer expected to provide food, shelter, or even spiritual guidance for their families but rather stay out of the way until it’s time to perform in the bedroom.”

  “Really?” Granuaile cocked a single eyebrow at me, her voice drenched in wry skepticism.

  “Maybe. I just made that up.” I turned to Oberon. “I should get a point for that.”

 

  “I don’t think so, sensei. Sounded pretty pointless to me.”

 

  Once the equipment was stowed, Darren Yazzie’s whole six-man crew—each of whom I assume was handpicked by Coyote—was going to spend the night on site as part of Chischilly’s Blessing Way ceremony. They unloaded a couple of coolers from their trucks and moved them inside, lit up a few kerosene lanterns for ambient light, and popped open some sodas. They had bedrolls and joked with one another about who was going to snore the loudest. Darren announced he was going to make a quick run into town to grab a couple of party trays full of veggies and some more ice, which was acknowledged only by Sophie; she smiled fondly at him, and I got the sense that he was doing her a favor. Frank didn’t hear him at all, absorbed as he was with arranging his jish for the ceremony.

  “Why do they need to stay?” Granuaile asked. “I mean, I get that it’s a necessary part of the ritual, but why?”

  I shrugged. “My guess is that they lend their strength and energy to the protections. The more people present, the stronger the blessing. Or the binding. I’ll be watching as it progresses.”

  Frank started singing as soon as he was ready, while there was still a touch of dark rich blue in the western sky. As I’d thought, this didn’t produce immediate silence among the crew. They may have quieted down a bit, and a couple of them were paying attention, but it was casual interest. The ceremony was conducted in Navajo—a language I do not speak aside from a few stray words—but Frank was singing and working on a sandpainting on top of a sacred buckskin. It would be one of the Holy People, though I wasn’t sure which one yet.

  I turned on my faerie specs to see what magical energies, if any, were being employed, and discovered that Frank was doing something much more complicated than I expected.

  To a Druid’s eyes, all magic, regardless of origin, is an exercise in binding and unbinding. Other systems differ from Druidry in what they’re able to bind and how, and usually they call on different energies from Gaia’s, but all those circles and pentagrams and sacrifices accomplish a binding of some sort. Customarily there is a religion involved and a generous helping of faith. Shamanistic systems, like those of many Native American faiths, often seek to bind people more closely to the spirit world for healing and protection or else unbind them from the influence of a malign spirit. I find them all fascinating and a little bit scary, because, except for my own shape-shifting—which involves my own spirit—I have no influence on the spirit world. A Druid’s bindings are physical. But what Frank was doing was occurring almost entirely on the spiritual level.

  My suspicion that everyone would play a part in the ritual was confirmed; whether they knew it or not, whether they were actively participating or not, some portion of their energy, their spirit, was contributing to the protection of the hogan. It took no effort on their behalf; Frank was gathering it, channeling it, and redirecting it, and he was doing this through his singing and his sandpainting. Since I had never seen this ceremony performed by any other hataałii, I didn’t know if it was normal—but I suspected Frank might be in a league of his own. In my sight, the energy flowed from the others in multicolored undisciplined globs toward Frank’s sandpainting, and then it flowed outward from there as fine white rays of light. These rays shot toward the base of the walls. The ceremony wouldn’t be complete until the fourth day, according to Frank, but his preliminary songs during construction and his current singing was already energizing a rudimentary protection along the base—and a good thing too. Oberon, who was inside with us, barely had time to warn me before the attack began. I was about to pop open a can of liquid sugar when his ears pricked up and he growled.

 

  A bestial feline scream rent the night and a crunching impact shuddered the north wall of logs, rattling the roof and eliciting more than a few curses of surprise. It was quickly followed by another impact directly behind where I was standing, which enveloped me in a cloud of sawdust and shot splinters into my back.

  Chapter 7

  As any war veteran will tell you, there is a vast difference between preparing for battle and actually facing battle for the first time. You can be told that reading Victor Hugo will sap your will to live, but you can’t understand what that means until you’ve read a few chapters and your eyes have glazed over and someone has to revive you with a defibrillator. Sophie and the six crewmen might have understood intellectually that skinwalkers possessed superhuman strength and speed, but to see it in action freaked them out a little bit. The creatures had nearly punched through the walls on their first try.

  Frank Chischilly cast a pleading eye over at Sophie and kept singing. He couldn’t stop what he was doing without stopping the flow of magic; he had to keep singing, had to keep sandpainting.

  “Keep on with the ceremony!” she bellowed. “Join in, help Frank where you can. It is our best defense.” They nodded, and some
of them offered up their voices along with Frank when they knew the words; the choruses were repetitive.

  Any idea what’s outside? I asked Oberon.

 

  I turned around, thinking I would ask Coyote, only to discover that he wasn’t in the hogan at all. Come to think of it, the last time I remembered seeing him was right after I told him off.

  “Where’s Mr. Benally?” I asked one of the workers.

  He shrugged. “He left a while back.”

  “Gods-damned sheep-loving tricksters,” I muttered. Always figuring out ways to get other people to fight for them. But then I got a chill. What Coyote feared wasn’t death but what the skinwalkers would be able to do if they acquired his skin. His absence indicated he thought there was a very good chance for the skinwalkers to get hold of it tonight—which meant we were all in movie trailer territory, where that guy with the low, twelve-pack-a-day voice informs you that you’re “in a world … of terrible danger.”

  I was on the east wall near the door, opposite Frank. I moved around to the north side of the hogan as the attacks resumed on the logs there. They were absurdly percussive; the sound reminded me of small battering rams. I could hear wood cracking, splintering, chunks of it flying away outside, and saw the trauma reflected inside. If they were doing this with nothing but flesh and bone, then they were operating on the strength level of vampires, and the walls wouldn’t last very long. I activated two charms on my necklace, squatting down and peering through a gap that had developed between the logs. The first charm was night vision, so that I could see what was out there. The second was faerie specs, because this was my first chance to get a handle on how the skinwalkers’ magic worked.

  It took me a while to find them; they were moving so fast that they blurred in my vision. Once I did spot them, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at; each was a gruesome mash-up of three different creatures, and if Frank hadn’t told me about the old spirits from First World, I wouldn’t have been able to interpret what I saw. The physical form causing all the damage was a bobcat, warped and mutated into ferocity beyond its natural bent—so that was the skin they were currently wearing. But underneath that skin, I saw something dark and scabrous, a mottled horror of crouching, insectile menace with orange eyes; underneath that, crippled almost beyond recognition, subsumed to the other two and its nobler nature quashed beneath a blanket of bile and aggression, was a human.