SHADOWRUN: Spells and Chrome (shadowrun)

by Anthology

  Dear God, it's like discovering Gan Eden. His fingers toyed with Rachel's mezuzah, its metal too warm, its energies awakened to the mana infusing the valley. And for the first time in what felt like forever, he heard the whisper of a voice that he recognized as Rachel's: Because, my love, this is what it would be like to be free…

  His breath hitched in his throat. Rachel? Are you…?

  "Daniel?" Startled, he tore his astral gaze from the trees-and there she was, right beside him, the fiery sunburst of her aura like a beacon in the long night of his soul…

  Alana touched his arm, shattering the illusion. "Hey, you okay?"

  "Fine," he said, drawing in a long shuddering breath. He banished his astral sense and the mundane sprang up around him again. "I'm just tired. How much longer?"

  "We're here." She stabbed her light at a hummock of red and brown rock. "There was a huge tsunami in 1946. Steamrolled everything in the valley. Before then, this place was a major breadbasket. Taro fields, guava, mango, you name it. After the tsunami pulverized everything, the people just never rebuilt. The major temples were reduced to the functional equivalent of anthills. You want to see anything approaching what they were, you have to go further south to the Kohala Coast. But the tsunami also uncovered this heiau-at least, that's what I think. It's not in any of the historical or academic literature, and the Menehune know nothing about it."

  He stepped carefully, playing his light over rough-hewn rock walls that rose twelve meters at their highest point. The structure was roughly rectangular at its base but sloped inward as it climbed. More like a crude representation of a volcano than a pyramid, he thought, which made sense.

  Nimble as a goat, Alana led the way up a scramble of boulders. He followed, negotiating a three-meter drop at the summit to what he saw was an open expanse marked by more rock mounds.

  She pointed her light at the rock below their feet. "That's coral, which is kind of weird this far inland. The way these things were built, slaves would've passed the rocks and coral in one continuous line from the ocean. If a rock were dropped or touched the ground, the slave would be sacrificed and the rock dropped far out to sea."

  He calculated they were maybe six klicks inland and whistled. "That's a lot of slaves."

  "Several thousand. We're on the west side, and so this-" her light picked out a rock tumble that rose to chest height, "-is probably the tele, the altar. But that's not what's so weird. Look at the rocks."

  He did, and realized that what he'd thought were marks weathered into the rock by time and the elements were something else entirely. He touched a divot with tentative fingers, tracing a design of a vertical gash crisscrossed by two horizontals and surmounted by a small round divot. Head, arms and legs… "It's a man. Rock carvings."

  "Petroglyphs, yeah, but here's the truly weird thing. The stones were supposed to be pristine. Yet every stone-and I mean, every single visible stone-is marked. This temple is one of a kind. And look here." She swung her light at a tall pillar standing east of the altar. The gleam playing over its etched surface was weird and smoky.

  "What is that?"

  "This," she said, running a reverent hand over the pillar's surface, "is an oracle tower, an anu'u and no, I don't know any like this and especially none made out of a single piece of pure obsidian, solid volcanic glass. And look at these carvings. They're so delicate. Can you imagine how long it took, how much care was involved?"

  Years, he thought, but he felt no special power emanating from this stone, saw nothing to indicate this was a focus, or that there might be something else hidden in its crystalline matrix. (He'd heard of such things: legends of skilled adepts able to detect the aura of the tiniest of insects entombed in amber. The theory went that since, by definition, DNA was organic and all organically-based organisms channeled mana, not only an aura but the flush of a metagenome ought to be present.) But there was nothing here. On the other hand, his talents didn't run that way.

  He said, "Okay, so what does all this have to do with you?"

  "Here." She circled around the pillar then angled her light halfway up the glassy surface to pick out a faint, egg-shaped blotch riddled with small pits. "That's the sign for the Big Island and this big one with that sketchy pyramid is Maui with Haleakala, which would be visible from the western rim of the valley."

  Frowning, he pointed to a scatter of distinctive triangular wedges arrayed like the numerals on a clock. "What are these things between the islands?"

  "That is a location. Those wedges are the signs of the shark."

  "Like your tattoo."

  "You got it. Each island has its own shark-god. For example, the Big Island's is Ukanipo. But I've never seen petroglyphs arranged quite like this and these." She indicated two concentric circles as wide as Daniel's hand just below the shark petroglyphs. "Look at what's chiseled in the center."

  He did-and his jaw fell open. "Oh my God."

  "Uh-huh. The Hawaiians carved a lot of weird shit," she said. "But never, ever a dragon." • • •

  "You went looking for a rift in a seamount." They sat in a bed of hapuu at the base of the ruined temple. He studied her profile in the dim light of the crescent moon, but a fan of her hair hid her face. "You said you didn't remember what happened."

  "I don't, not everything. But no one ever asked me where."

  "Split hairs often?"

  "Look, I'm an academic. This is huge. The only dragon we know of to come through a rift is Ghostwalker. But if I can prove other dragons came through other rifts… It's the discovery of a lifetime."

  "And it cost a man his, someone you said you loved."

  "Don't you fucking judge me. I don't need a guilty conscience; I've got one, thanks." She blew out an angry breath. "I've kept my end of the bargain. Now you keep yours. Why the fuck are you here?"

  So he told her-some of it. She listened without interrupting until he fell silent, and then said, "Your people want to close it?"

  "That's right. I told you: We repair the world. Tikkun olam. Yeah, okay, Ghostwalker came through, but so do shedim. If it's there, even if the rift's intermittent, it's my job to seal it. I guess we use what you'd call magic, but for the Rebbe, it's a gift, a channeling of energy from someone, something else."

  "God?"

  "Call it whatever you want. Mana, life force… When we invoke that kind of power, it has to be for the right purpose."

  "Read: godly, right? Great, a religious nut."

  "And what you did wasn't a little nutty?"

  "That was my job."

  "This is mine."

  "But don't you see? You're no different from the guys who want all the metahumans to crawl back under a rock. Who are you to decide what should be in this world, and what shouldn't? How do you know this isn't the way the world is supposed to be? Hell, didn't angels talk to people all the time? Weren't there miracles and giants and demons?"

  "And the First Born of Man gave to him the names of the djinns and lilin and the shedim gave them iron to bind spirits and their letters for protection, so the remnant concealed themselves in the remotest mountains and in the depths of the ocean," he said. "That's from an old Hebrew legend, a Midrash."

  "Meaning?"

  "That evil is all around and contained, but that sometimes it breaks free. It's my job to bind it again."

  "Don't dodge the question. What gives you the right?"

  "We have a code."

  "So do hired assassins." She snorted. "Who is this rabbi of yours?"

  "He's… Well, he saved my life. Or maybe he helped me see that we're all broken in one way or another, just like the world."

  "Take a good look around. Does this valley look broken to you?"

  A flare of anger. "Listen, don't give me any of your self-righteous bullshit. You can't imagine my life, what I've done, how it was after my wife vanished. My world changed just like that. One second you're having coffee and the next, everything's gone."

  She wasn't cowed. She was a brawler, like Rachel. "So yo
u and your people go around fixing the world, repairing the breaks, sealing rifts-but it'll still be the same old tired Earth, right? Just one with a lot of bandages. It's like trying to reverse time, wake up in the morning younger than you were when you went to sleep. You can't do it. If I was a shrink, I'd say that you guys are trying to fix yourselves. Frankly, that sounds pretty damned futile. There's always more pain."

  "Sure, but you got to have hope. You said it: You think you're never going to smile again. One day, you do-or you trick yourself into thinking you can. Maybe… I don't know, maybe it's the same damned thing. But I can't just do nothing. If I sit around accepting the world the way it is, I might as well have put that bullet into my…" He bit off the rest.

  They said nothing for a time. In the quiet, the wind stirred eucalyptus with a papery rustle. Finally, she murmured, "Do you remember the day you did? Really smiled again? Felt like, okay, this is good, I can go on?"

  No fight in her voice now. His chest burned. "Yeah, I do."

  "When?"

  "Today. Now." The words were out before he could recall them-or maybe he didn't want to. He saw only her aura now, so bright and alive, and his Rachel was dead and there was nothing he could do to bring her back. Yet there was this woman and this place and no one-not even the Rebbe-listening, and the need for her hummed in his veins. "Here. With you."

  When she didn't respond, he felt like an ass. "Fuck, I'm sorry. I'm tired. I shouldn't…"

  "Shut up," and then he felt her warm breath slant across his neck. She lifted her face and he sighed into her mouth, and when he dropped his hand to the swell of her breast, she made a sound deep in her throat.

  A little later, when she cried out and called him by another man's name, he was past caring. • • •

  She lay with her head on his chest. "How did she die?"

  He massaged her scalp. Her hair was silken, her scent spicy. "The plane vanished. No wreckage. No bodies. Nothing."

  "A rift?"

  "I'd like to think so because then she could still be alive on some other metaplane, but…" He paused. "You remind me of her. It's weird."

  "Yeah, tell me about it." She pressed her head against his chest again. "When I saw you, I thought: Lee. How strange is that, that we both have the same experience?"

  "Strange." He laughed. "You're talking to a guy who does magic."

  "Like, all kinds?"

  "Some, but I'm also kind of specialized. I… bind. Sure, I can conjure-banish, hurl a couple energy bolts, stuff like that-but the Rebbe recruits us for our special talents. Binding is mine. I pull and contain wild or free spirits."

  "Exorcism."

  "Sort of. The process has its roots in old Torah mysticism. I bind. Most often it's a spirit, but sometimes it's binding as in sewing, or knitting rips between one metaplane and the next. That legend I told you? Same principle: The Kabbalist literature's riddled with stories about shedim bound in mountains, or deep in the oceans."

  "And you guys put them back? But how do you contain it until you can…?" Abruptly, she pushed up and stared down into his face. "You. You're the vessel. You're the bottle they put the genie into."

  "For a while, yeah. You know, it's really not as horrible as you think." That was a lie; it was awful, like being pregnant with some kind of beaky monster gnawing at his insides. Only the Rebbe had the power to dispel, so until Daniel returned to Safed, he endured. Every encounter depleted him, left him weak as a kitten and his mana stained by evil. The Rebbe said that he was a living embodiment of a quelippah, the shell within which evil might be contained and then purified. Daniel's life with Mossad, the secrets he'd carried and the people and metahumans he'd killed, had toughened him-or marked him, he was never sure, and he still suffered. Given his past, maybe that was okay.

  "What about reincarnation?" she asked.

  "What about it?"

  "Do you believe in it? Because I got to tell you, what you do, this binding stuff, taking in spirits… it feels the same."

  Was it? He had never summoned a spirit, though he knew the mashiva, the summoning incantation. But summoning was forbidden to him as it was to all the Rebbe's followers. Not that spirit possession was undesirable: He knew many in the Rebbe's circle who continually strived to make themselves pure enough to become ibbur, to host the soul of another. There were stories from long ago of acolytes who dug shallow graves alongside the tombs of the righteous and prayed to be so invaded if only for a short time. But the Rebbe was clear: Their job was to repair the world, to perform tikkun olam using the one, true Kabbalah and not the bastardization of the tradition practiced by the goyim.

  Besides, he would never be pure enough. Not after all he'd done.

  He said, "Well, I get what you're driving at, but it's totally different. My tradition calls it gilgul. But that can only happen to the very good and if the host spirit is willing to give up its place in the body. I'm not very good."

  "But look at us. We've both lost people we love, and we've been drawn together to this place."

  "Alana, I'm not Lee. There's only me in here."

  "I know that. I'm not asking you to be Lee. I can never be Rachel. But there's something between us. You feel it, right?"

  He gathered her in his arms. "I feel you. Has it occurred to you that we're seeing the reflection of what we want and not what's real?"

  "This is real." She brushed her lips against his. She pressed his hand to her breast. "I'm real. Maybe this is our fate-to be here, to be together."

  "Alana, I can't…"

  "Why not? If the rift's there, it's been there off and on for centuries. Millennia. You could stay here. We could."

  He was tempted. To be free of the ever-watchful presence of the Rebbe, even if it was a shackle he'd donned willingly. (Had he? Could any man a hair's breadth from suicide be said to be in his right mind?) Free of the world and its demands. Just… free. Could the Rebbe even project into this valley? He didn't know, though he thought not; surely, the Rebbe would've come looking for him already and since he hadn't… God, he deserved some happiness. He was so tired, but… "I'm sorry, but I can't." He took her face in his hands and kissed first one cheek and then the other, and tasted salt. "You know I can't. Don't you see? I'd be exchanging one prison for another. We could never leave. As soon as we're within range of a node…"

  "Shadowrunners do it."

  "What kind of life is that? Alana, I have to finish what I've begun."

  "No, you don't have to. You want to." She straddled his body, her hands flat on his chest. Her shark's tooth was an ivory teardrop in the hollow of her throat. "There's an old saying amongst my people: Kupau wau i ka mano… I am finished to the big shark, all consumed by the big shark, I am finished."

  "Your people celebrate becoming dinner?"

  She twisted a handful of his chest hair. "Don't be a smart ass. Sharks are single-minded, they don't stop. You're like that. You're consumed. You've given yourself over to this Rebbe of yours…"

  "Yes, but not for tonight," he said, and held her close. "Tonight I give myself to you. I give myself to us."

  "Then stay with me as long as you can," she murmured into his mouth, "and love me. Love me."

  IV

  May 9

  He was cold. His head hurt. His chest felt like he'd broken every single rib in maybe three places. He tried pulling in air. Had a panicky instant when nothing came but then did, only hard, like he was sucking air through a straw. Jesus… His brain was woolly, his thoughts mushy… was he running out of air? How long was he out? A lancet of pain, and he moaned.

  "Easy." A man's voice. "Take it easy."

  "Daniel?" A woman. Far away, like they'd stumbled onto a bad bandwidth. "Daniel?"

  "Ungh," he croaked.

  "Daniel." Then to someone else: "What's wrong with him?"

  The man: "He clocked himself pretty good. Still bleeding."

  "Oh God." Alana pressed her hand to Daniel's head just behind his left ear.

  "Ow," Daniel said.
/>   "Hey now," said the man. "That's better."

  Speak for yourself. Daniel's eyes slowly cranked open and for a second, he thought maybe his head injury was way worse than he thought because, except for a single ball of excruciatingly bright light spiking his eyeballs, everything was shadowy, inky black.

  Then he got it. They were still in the water. In a cave. Well, a lava tube. Same diff because they were still screwed.

  "Get that fucking light out of my eyes before I break your arm." He was appalled by how he sounded: weak and sick.

  The light angled down, and then Alana said, "Daniel, you hit your head pretty hard. There's a rip in your suit, and you're taking in water."

  "Uh-huh." Talking made him dizzy, and trying to move made him want to throw up, but he let her help him sit up. The lava tube was cramped, with just enough room to hunch and turn but not much more. His buoyancy had changed now that his suit was heavier, and every movement made the darkness spin. Thank God his vest was waterproof…

  The man, again: "How are you feeling?"

  "Like shit." He slicked his lips, winced as a squirt of fresh blood coated his tongue. His stomach lurched, bile burned the back of his throat, and he thought: Fuck, no, not into my facemask. He swallowed back a mouthful of puke, grimaced. "Who are you?" He answered his own question: "Harriman?" He threw a glance at Alana, regretted it when his stomach rebelled at the sudden movement. "You've got to be shitting me."

  "No bullshit." She touched the other man's arm, and Daniel's chest went just a little tighter. "I didn't believe it at first either."

  "I don't," he said flatly. But when he viewed Harriman with his astral sense, the man's aura was there. Not real bright, but… He said, not very charitably, "You ought to be dead."