by Kevin Hearne
Chapter 11
A pair of horns blast behind me, I am chilled with a premonition of my own death, and I wish for the thousandth time that Atticus were here. Did he find horns to be harbingers of death and sorrow? I cannot ever ask him now.
Instead of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” I always hear “Taps” at funerals, and somehow the collective sorrow of so many final farewells builds in my mind, a great Jungian unconscious flood of tears and roses thrown on caskets and folded flags given to widows by a pair of crisp white gloves. That horn that plays in the John Williams score after Luke Skywalker finds the smoking ruins of his aunt and uncle—such a mournful sound, full and hollow at the same time, a surfeit of emptiness. And the call to charge never rouses me but rather signals that someone is going to die a violent death soon—or, if it starts a race or contest, it means there can be only one victor.
The horns that blasted behind me were dim, nasal, and stuffy sounds that nevertheless meant the goddesses were gaining on us, and they weighted down my legs, which were already straining, not from fatigue but from dolor. These were the sounds of horns and hunting that, according to myth, brought Actaeon to Diana as she was bathing. He’d been lost in the woods and thought that by following the sounds of horns he’d be saved. But Diana had turned him into a stag and set her hounds on him instead. Those horns had called him to his death.
Is she still sounding the same horn all these centuries later?
And is there anything more horrifying to the hunted than the sound of horns? Even the baying of the hounds is not so terrible; they are animals and following their instinct and training. But the murderous intellect behind the horn, the creature coldly orchestrating my doom—that’s what makes me feel like prey and sets icy wings of fear fluttering inside my throat.
I probably would have given up already if it weren’t for Oberon. And he is probably thinking the same thing regarding me. In truth, we are running only because Atticus would have wanted us to. I think we are only marginally more scared than we are depressed, and we aren’t running as fast as we had been before. The urgency is gone. I don’t see how I can survive this if Atticus and the Morrigan couldn’t. The powers of a Druid are awesome, but the powers arrayed against me are too numerous and in a different league. I’m not going to quit, but I feel like I’m on a soccer team losing 3–0 with ten minutes left on the clock. While winning in that scenario is still theoretically possible, I don’t see a way to make it happen all by myself and I half-wish that the end would hurry up and get here, banishing the dread of its approach.
We crossed the border into the Netherlands, and the elemental directed me to turn sharply to the southwest to avoid the bulk of cities by the sea. We’d have had to turn south at some point anyway to reach the French coast.
It’s odd, sometimes, how a border can seemingly change the character of the land. The German landscape had been sharp, clean, and precise, whereas the Dutch, even at night, had a bit of a gauzy filter over it, as if the ghost of Rembrandt had pulled his brush across it to soften the edges just a little bit. The colors I saw in my night vision, too, appeared subtly textured and mixed by the master, not so stark as they had been in Germany. Or perhaps it was no different at all, and only my melancholia made it so.
Noting the change of direction, Oberon said in a subdued tone,
He let some time pass, and all we heard was the pounding of my hooves and the pads of his paws on the earth. They beat out a rhythm of cycling thought, the percussive notes repeating Atticus over and over if you were inclined to hear it that way, and we were. Then he said,
The horns sounded again. Perhaps my imagination magnified the sound a bit.
Oberon abruptly quit running, and I had to stop too. We were in the middle of a large barley field.
My instinct for self-preservation spoke up. It told me I could survive this. I could drop Scáthmhaide, abandon Oberon, and turn into a peregrine falcon. I could fly straight across the channel to England, find a tethered tree, and shift away to safety. They couldn’t have pandemonium going on over there too, I thought. Somewhere in the New World, maybe even back in Arizona, I’d bind my amulet to my aura the way Atticus did, and then the playing field would be a bit more even.
Except I’d never be able to live with the guilt. And I’d never have the stomach to fight again if I didn’t fight now.
The ears drooped.
I raised my right front hoof.
We ran, and I consulted the elemental about a suitable place to defend ourselves. Images of the path ahead flashed through my mind until I saw a likely spot.
//There / That place / Query: Where is that?// It was a small precipice—only fifteen or so feet high—but if we could get our backs to it, we would have a relatively unobscured line of sight and no one would be able to sneak up on us. There were trees on top of it, but at the base a small clear space before the trees broke up the view—and the approach was on a gentle slope as well, so we’d have the high ground.
//Remain on current path// the elemental said. //Will guide//
//Query: Distance to destination?//
Elementals are not excellent at using human units of measurement, but I figured it was about eighty miles to the southwest, skirting cities and keeping to rural areas as much as possible. If we sped up, we could make it in a couple of hours.
Chapter 12
Our minds are all that defend us from the horror of the void. The majority of the time we simply think about something—anything—else, and that itself is an act of defiance against the vast nothing of the universe. But minds break down and stop thinking sometimes. They feel instead: A looping, gnawing monster eats away confidence and goals and even a sense of duty until we are in a dry bleak place of ennui, unable to focus on the minutiae that used to keep us moving. Tongues taste chalk and ashes, and eyes see only gray washes occasionally penetrated by bright stabs of panic.
Depression is a prison to which you have the key except you never think to look for it.
I do not know how long I stayed in the gray, afraid of the nothing and cycling through the long list of my trespasses. I cannot conceive of a judge who could grant me forgiveness. There are some shames I can never outlive. What good would it do to continue? Had I not brought enough ruin to the world—especially in the recent past? But it was the panic that saved me. Panic that Granuaile and Oberon would die. I could not bear to have their deaths added to the vast number that already weighed down the scale of my spirit.
My eyes opened onto darkness, which was not precisely heartening but an improvement over the gray. Adrenaline coursed through me as I attempted to get my bearings. Cold earth shifted under my right side, and I winced at the pain this small movement caused in my head. Stretching out with my left arm and feeling the boundaries of the space with my fingers, I quickly discovered that I was in a small chamber underground, obviously with some rudimentary air circulation. Fragarach rested in front of my face in its scabbard. Beyond that I had no idea where I was, except that Granuaile and Oberon weren’t with me. We had been running for our lives. Why was I not running? Why had I been reviewing my life with such self-loathing?
//Query: Carpathia?//
//No. Saxony//
Saxony was a German elemental. Why was I in Germany? We’d been in Poland, and Hugin and Munin had visited us. Then we’d run, and … yes, we had crossed into Germany. There had been that attempt to find an Old Way to Tír na nÓg, and then we found that envelope on the tree—Oh.
//Query: How did I get here?//
//Fierce Druid placed you here / Thought you deceased//
I blinked as I processed the fact that elementals had decided to refer to Granuaile as Fierce Druid. //Query: Then why do I have space and air to breathe?//
//I provided / Druid had not moved on//
No, I hadn’t. And apparently I didn’t rate an adjective in front of my title. I was just plain old Druid.
//Query: What happened to me?//
//Projectile impact to head//
Someone had shot me? So that’s why my head ached. My fingers trailed up to my head and gently traced their way around it. There was a dimple near my left temple that hadn’t been there before, and it was tender. I was sure the exit wound on the other side had been heinous, but I didn’t want to lift my head and probe it. I was still healing.
I let my hand drop down to my necklace, where I groped for the last charm on the left side of my necklace, the one I’d never used before.
“Guess you worked after all,” I said.
Granuaile had asked me what it was for once. I told her it was my version of a soulcatcher. I’d made it in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. I was a medic for the Russians during that time and saw what musket fire could do, what it meant for an old Druid who had protections against magic but not against high-velocity hunks of lead. I’d seen guns before that, of course, but had avoided them as best as I could. Joining the Russians had been a sort of fact-finding tour, with the sterling bonus that I got to wear those fun furry hats.
I decided I’d be able to survive most any hit to the body, given time to heal, except for a direct hit to the heart. I could armor myself against that. Shots to the head, however, presented a rather monumental problem. Brain death didn’t allow one time to heal, and the brain was the warehouse for the spirit. Punch a hole in that and you’d shuffle off your mortal coil right away.
Keeping your coil unshuffled was the problem. Healing of the gross physical body could happen on autopilot as long as my tattoos had contact with the earth; I didn’t need to consciously direct that, and it technically didn’t require a beating heart. But keeping my spirit anchored to my body with a hole in my head—well, that was tougher and, as it happens, entirely necessary to keep the healing happening.
It was sometime during the process of binding my cold iron amulet to my aura that I realized I was really altering the nature of my spirit, and if I could do that to my spirit, I might be able to do other things as well. I spent years perfecting my other charms, until I decided in the nineteenth century to attempt the soulcatcher. (Despite the recent name I’d given to the charm, I am reluctant to use the word soul—it has some pretty awful baggage with it, the kind that’s been roughed up quite a bit and thrown around without any regard for what might be inside.) As I told Granuaile once, I had no idea whether it would work or not; to test it, I’d have to die.
And I guess I had died. With rare exceptions, people who get shot in the head do that. Granuaile wouldn’t have buried me if my heart had been beating. So the charm had worked precisely as I had intended.
All of my charms are triggered by mental commands; without them, I’d have to speak the words aloud every time for every binding, as Granuaile does. But you can’t very well trigger a mental command when your brain has been blown out. So I had triggered it back in the nineteenth century and hoped I’d never have occasion to discover whether it worked or not.
The charm executed a series of bindings, three of which were conditional: The first one bound my spirit to my corporeal form even if my heart stopped beating, a sort of soul cage using the framework I’d already established by binding my amulet to my aura; the second took a snapshot of my physical brain every five minutes, accounting for every synapse and neuron, and that had been ongoing since I triggered it in 1812; the third was a healing command, automatically drawing upon the earth (so long as my spirit remained) to he
al my head in accordance with the last stored image of my brain, down to the last cell; and once those had been accomplished, the fourth slammed my spirit back into its mortal coil—my brain—and got everything working again. The theory was that my heart would start pumping, the lungs would start breathing, and I’d hopefully rise from the dead without fangs or a shambling gait and with my personality and memories intact.
So much could have gone wrong. Getting decapitated, vaporized in a giant orange ball of flame, or losing so much blood that I couldn’t ever get the heart pumping again. Getting shot on the roof of a building with no hope of contacting the earth. Heck, falling in the field in such a way that none of my tattoos touched the ground would have been disastrous all by itself. The charm was by no means fail-safe insurance against death. But the effort I’d spent on it had clearly paid off.
The gray wash abruptly returned to my vision, the black pitch of the earth fading. What would I do with a new lease on life? Find new and gruesome ways to doom everyone alive? Speak without thinking, make Faustian bargains with witches and frost giants? Save Granuaile and Oberon now, only to see them die at the hands of Loki later? That would be unkind. It would be more merciful to leave them to Artemis and Diana, who favored the quick kill.
I would never have allowed myself to think that way in the company of others. But one is never so alone as in the grave. I could feel all this and no one would overhear or suspect. For all that we may sometimes despise our fellows and be driven to rages and petty revenges, I think we are even darker creatures when we are alone. We can learn to fear our own thoughts more than the lash of the whip or the slap in the face.
At least that is how I imagine it is for people cursed with self-awareness.
Two regrets pulled me out of the gray. If I did nothing, I would never see Granuaile’s freckles again. Or those green eyes. Or smell her strawberry lip gloss … Well, okay, it was more than two regrets. Three. Three regrets. And damn if Oberon didn’t deserve a poodle or some kind of companion besides me. All right, four regrets. Probably more, the longer I thought about it.