by C. E. Murphy
Morrison and I had come into the valley close to its southern end. The village site had been closer to the northern end. I was somewhere in the middle now, and Aidan was nowhere to be seen. Neither were the wights, which was something, at least. Not a good something, but something. I wished I knew what year it was, then straightened up. Renee?
It is before the time of tears.
Before the time of tears. The Trail of Tears. The Cherokee had been forcibly relocated in 1838, but they were the last of the Five Civilized Nations to be moved. The first had gone in 1831. But the people I’d seen didn’t look like they’d had any European contact. They were isolated, so it was possible they’d just been overlooked, but I asked how long before the time of tears?
She sighed. I supposed eternal bugs were not deeply concerned with the piddling details of human history. After some consideration, she said, The sickness has only begun to come, which I thought might narrow it down to somewhere in the late 1600s, but could be as early as 1493, for all I knew. I still said, “Thanks,” out loud, then sighed as deeply as Renee had. “I don’t suppose you know where Aidan went.”
My sister is distant. The path between us is dark. She is ill. Perhaps dying.
My heart went into triple time. “Does that mean Aidan’s dying? Raven?” He was the expert on life and death, after all. He klok-klok’d a couple of times and gave a shiver of wings, leaving the impression that no, it didn’t necessarily mean Aidan was dying, but it meant Aidan was certainly not well. I restrained myself from saying I could’ve figured that out without help. I tried to calm my heartbeat, and put the question of Aidan aside for a moment.
“What about Morrison? Renee, did he... Did we... Did everything in this valley slide come loose from time?” It had sure felt like it. I wasn’t at all certain things beyond the valley hadn’t also come loose, but that was more than I could deal with right now. Renee nodded complacently and I let go a shuddering breath. Morrison was here somewhere. He was not dead, lost, eaten or any of the other potential bad things that could have happened in a time slip. I just had no way to contact him.
I couldn’t help taking my phone from my pocket and checking for a signal, just in case. There wasn’t one, of course, nor was there any other sign of life from the damned thing, because it, like me, had gotten soaked in the river. I wished for a cup of rice, then realized I had salt in my backpack. Wet salt, which would do me no good.
My stomach clenched with sudden hope. I also had the shotgun and a small pack of live ammo. I slithered the holster off, checked the gun over, then unloaded the packed salt ammo and replaced it with shotgun cartridges. I didn’t want to go hunting. I just wanted to make a really big, very modern noise in a quiet preindustrial valley. If Morrison was out there, he could respond in kind. And then if he had any sense he’d stay put. Actually, if I had any sense, I’d stay put, because Morrison clearly had a lot more woods know-how than I did, but it was pretty much a given that I had no sense. I raised the shotgun, sighted, and blew a hole the size of my fist in a hickory tree about twenty feet away.
The report sounded roughly like the fall of Jericho. It would have been loud even in the modern day, with the distant but discernible drone of airplanes and car engines as part of the background noise. Here, now, with nothing but the wind and birds, it was terrifying, and that was speaking as the person who’d caused it. I staggered a bit with the gun’s kick, lowered it, and rubbed my shoulder.
An answering pistol shot cracked the air. I howled triumph, thrusting the shotgun at the sky like a rebel leader, and did a dance of relief. Then I packed everything up, slung the coat and pack on, and headed south along the riverbank. Maybe Morrison would think to come down to the water. It was the easiest meeting point for two people who had no way to communicate.
I’d gotten almost no distance at all when another sound ricocheted through the valley. It wasn’t nearly as loud as the gunshots, but much steadier and quite sharp, like rocks being knocked together. I stopped, ears perked, and listened.
Dat dat dat dat. Brief pause. Dat. Longer pause. Dat. Another longer pause. Dat. Another longer pause. Dat, brief pause, dat, long pause. Dat, long pause, dat dat. Considerably longer pause. Dat, long pause, dat dat. It went on like that while I stared helplessly up the mountains.
Of course Morrison knew Morse code. Of course he did. Of course he would try to communicate with me that way. Except I knew the same two letters in Morse code that everybody else in the world did, S and O, dot dot dot and dash dash dash, and that was the sum total of my knowledge. He banged out an O, but one letter out of several was not enough to illuminate his meaning. Feeling helpless, frustrated and remarkably uninformed, I started down the river again. Morrison kept banging away for a while, including a pause long enough to suggest he was wiping the slate clean and starting over, and then did the whole thing a second, then a third, time. Then he went silent, either waiting for my response or assuming I’d understood and was doing as he’d instructed.
Or possibly murdered horribly by natives led to his location by his activities, but I was fairly certain murdered horribly would be accompanied by at least some gunshots, so I stuck with my previous assumptions and made my way south as fast as I could. At least I might be able to get some sense of where we’d been, and head up the mountain from there, hopefully to locate him. I’d pick up some rocks of my own when I thought I was far enough south, and start playing Marco Polo.
As far as I could tell, no one from the settlement had chosen to follow me. That was a relief. We had enough to worry about without adding potentially, and understandably, hostile natives to the mix. Renee, can you get us back home?
I can guide you. The power is yours alone.
I’d gotten used to Raven’s playfulness and Rattler’s snarky tongue. I was not prepared for a pedantic spirit animal. I shifted my eyebrows upward in a sort of snooty ooh-la-la response, and had the distinct impression a bug glared at me from the inside of my own head. Well, as long as between the two of us we could get home, I wasn’t going to worry about that aspect too much. Finding Morrison and Aidan could take top priority. I stopped a few times to drink from the river, wondering vaguely what kinds of interesting bugs were in it, and whether healing magic would flush them out or if I should be boiling this stuff. I guessed I’d find out.
I heard it before I saw it, a soft crashing through the woods. There were still deer and the occasional report of mountain lions in the Appalachians in my time, so I slipped behind a tree and stood as quietly as I could, waiting to see what would burst out of the trees. I was hoping for a puma, since I’d never seen one, when Morrison stepped out of the branches. He had a wary hand near his gun, and an intent expression on his face. I squeaked and whispered, “Morrison!”
His shoulders visibly relaxed and he moved his hand away from his gun. I scooted around the tree and hugged him as he said, “Walker. Thank God you understood me. I didn’t know if you knew Morse,” into my shoulder.
“I don’t. What did you tell me to do?”
“Head downriver.” He set me back, hands on my shoulders and his eyes as disturbed as I’d ever seen them. “Where the hell did you go?”
“Oh. I was doing that anyway. I hoped you might think of it, too.” I frowned. “Where did I go? Downriver, just like you sa—”
“You disappeared, Walker. You turned north, your face went blank, and a few seconds later you...I don’t know what happened.” The strain in his face came out in his voice. “The air rippled. Not as badly as it did later, but it rippled and the sun jumped in the sky. I don’t know how much time I lost. But from the moment the air changed, you were gone. I saw your magic for a few seconds. I don’t know what it was doing, but it looked wrong. Dangerous. Like you stretched and snapped away. What the hell happened?”
Watching him try to maintain composure put stepping out of time on my short list of things to never do again, cert
ainly not in front of a witness. I hadn’t thought about what it would look like, or what might happen to people moving through normal time while I took a shortcut. I suspected losing a few minutes was the least awful potential side effect, and that much, much worse ones could be in store. I’d cut maybe a couple of hours of travel time by doing the leapfrog. If I’d skipped a century, the ripple might have turned Morrison to dust.
It is likely, Renee said, and I pressed my fists to my mouth, feeling sick.
“I was in a hurry,” I whispered behind my hands. “Aidan was fighting the wights. I had to get to him. I’m sorry.” I was not about to explain how badly I could have screwed him up, but I would never, ever do it again. “I’m sorry.”
Morrison, bless him, accepted the apology with a nod and cut to the important business: “Did you save him?”
My shoulders slumped. “No. He tried saving me, instead, and the wights got hold of his magic. And I think I didn’t get him shielded well enough yesterday. I think the Executioner left a mark on him, and once the wights plugged into that...”
“That’s what happened with the valley? With the shock wave? I saw your power again—why can I see it now?”
“I don’t think you can, mostly. But it takes on a visible element sometimes. When I’m using a lot at once.”
Morrison looked relieved, which seemed fair enough. He wasn’t magically adept himself, and for all that he’d taken my gifts in very good stride, I doubted a lifetime of being able to see my magic at work was really what he’d had planned. “You were trying to stop that ripple. What was it?”
“A time-quake.” It was a terrible, stupid word, but I didn’t have a better one. “The Nothing, I told you it was born from the genocides on this continent, right? Right. It wanted to open that up, spread it around the modern day. And it turns out Walkingsticks—my family—have an affinity for sliding through time. So getting their claws into Aidan may have let them rip a hole open right back to the source.”
Morrison closed his eyes a moment. I all but heard him going through his paces, working his way around to being able to say, “Are you telling me we’ve traveled through time?”
“Um. Yeah.”
He opened his eyes again, expression very steady and eyes very blue. “To when?”
“I don’t know exactly. Somewhen between 1492 and 1831.”
“That’s a lot of time, Walker.”
“I know. Probably more on the 1492 end, but...your vaccinations are up-to-date, right?” He gave me a look and I mumbled, “I thought so, but I had to ask. My spirit animal says it’s before the sickness came, but I’m not sure how much sense of human time scale she really has.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. He pulled his hand over it, wiping the smile away, but it crept back into place. “You realize you sound insane.”
“Me? You’re the one who told me when I called and woke you up at 3:00 a.m. that I shouldn’t worry about my cell phone not working when I tried calling Gary, since he had been lost in time. I might sound crazy, but you’ve adapted to it. You adapted faster than I did.”
“Walker, after working with Holliday for four years, when you turned up with magic it was either accept it or leave the job. If you and I are here, why isn’t Aidan?”
“I don’t know. Every time I’ve gone hopping through time I’ve stayed in the same place physically.” Except that wasn’t true, as manifestly demonstrated just a few short hours ago, when I’d skipped through both time and space in my attempt to rescue Aidan. “Shit.” I stepped away, looking up the river like there would be answers somewhere in the soft haze. “Aidan’s magic opened the time loop, but if the wights or the Executioner were in control, then they may have focused on another location. Somewhere they could suck up a lot of power, pain and death. Then all they would have to do is go home again and release it.”
“What would that do?”
“Bad things. Humans are like rats in cages anyway. It doesn’t take much to set us off. If you dumped a continent’s worth of pain and anger on top of our high-tension lives already, I’d think we’d be looking at riots and murder in the streets.”
“Is that how it happens?” Morrison sounded genuinely curious, enough so that I looked back and wrinkled my nose.
“I don’t know. Maybe sometimes. Mostly it’s probably just natural reaction, something getting pushed a little too far and society breaking down. But it doesn’t take all that much to break it down, so if thousands of people were pushed just a little bit further than usual thanks to black magic with cruel intent behind it, then yeah, I think it could happen that way. We’re susceptible, and there are people and things out there who want to take advantage of that.”
“To what end?” Morrison shrugged when I frowned at him. “Criminals want something, Walker. To lash out, to have something they don’t, to protect someone, to prove themselves. They’re like anyone else, right? They want something. What do spirits or monsters want?”
“Freedom.” The word popped out before I thought about it, but that gave me some confidence in it. “The freedom to inflict pain or increase their power. That’s what Herne wanted, to take Cernunnos’s place at the head of the Wild Hunt. Immortality, freedom from mortal shackles, whatever you want to call it. Power. Virissong wanted the same thing. When he couldn’t get power in his earthly guise he...” I waved my hand, indicating I used the next words loosely. “He sold his soul to the Devil and became a sorcerer. He got trapped in the Lower World and wanted out to pursue the gain of power in the Middle World. All of them, everybody who’s walking to the Master’s beat, that’s what they want. Dominance over a subjected world. A lot of them don’t seem to realize they’re just stepping stones, doing things that nourish the Master. Or maybe they don’t care.”
“The Master.”
“My enemy.” It sounded equally preposterous and resigned. “He’s a death magic. Maybe the death magic. I don’t know. He almost took Cernunnos out a while back, and Cernunnos is a god. I hadn’t thought anything killed gods.”
“Heroes do.”
For some reason that made my heart hiccup. I wet my lips and shook my head. “He’s not a hero. Death is necessary. I don’t like it, but I understand it. Cruelty, power mongering, murder, hatred...I have to believe we could get by without those things. That they’re what feeds something like the Master. If he was just about death, fine, I wouldn’t like it, but I’d see why he was necessary. But Cernunnos is a death god, Morrison. He rides to collect the souls of his faithful. He has a purpose. He provides sanctuary and guidance to his followers. The Master might give his minions a task, but it’s always to his own empowerment. He’s reductive. Everything he takes is at a cost to another, like he’s stomping out the light just because he can.
“I can’t defeat him.” I wasn’t kidding myself about that. I put my palm on a nearby tree, feeling the life in it. “I can’t go around the world and clear out the pettiness and hatred and entrenched warfare from every single person. Even if I could, unless we all attained some kind of mystical enlightenment, I’d imagine the whole cycle would start over again. But I can kick him in the teeth. That’s what my family does, apparently. We keep kicking him, and every time we do, I guess maybe it makes a little more space for light in the world. Seems to me like that’s worth it.”
“You’re a romantic, Walker.” Morrison folded his hand over mine on the tree trunk, then folded me into his arms.
I snorted. “Yeah, but don’t tell anybody. Anyway, so if I want to stomp him down, I guess what he wants is to wipe me out, too. This is a generational thing. If he can wipe out my family, either side, both sides, of it, then he’s got that much more room to spread misery and pain around the world.”
“So it’s personal.”
I breathed laughter. “Yeah, I guess so. God.” I straightened, horrified. “God, Morrison, is my family causing this? I m
ean, I know he’s been trying to get at me since before I was born. What if having us to focus on is keeping him going?”
“What if having you to focus on is keeping him from wreaking havoc somewhere else? That’s not something you can tackle, Walker. All we can do right now is find Aidan and fix this thing. So. How do we find Aidan?”
Any hope of answering that was wrested away as two dozen Cherokee warriors melted out of the forest and made it very clear that we, like kids playing cowboys, had been captured by Indians.
Chapter Fifteen
Morrison breathed, “Walker...” and I said, “Stay calm,” just as softly. Realistically, between my shields and our weapons, even two dozen warriors couldn’t hold us. They had no idea how badly they were outnumbered, and I had a gut-deep reluctance to show them. “We’re not in any danger. Be cool.”
Morrison’s chin tucked in and he shot me a disbelieving sideways look. That was as far as it went, though. He even very cautiously raised his hands, as did I, in what I hoped was not only a universal, but also a time-honored way of saying, “Look, Ma, no threat.”
Our captors’ dark eyes all immediately focused on the pistol exposed by the movement of Morrison’s coat, and on the heavier shift of my back holster and shotgun. One of the men took a step forward. I snapped, “Thla!”—no in Cherokee.
I could not have shocked him more if I had turned green and sprouted feathers. He froze, staring at me, and the entire group started jabbering at once.
My Cherokee was not good. I was badly out of practice to begin with, and in these circumstances, literally out of date. I got the gist of what they were saying, but hell, so did Morrison, who had no Cherokee language at all. The gist was “How the hell does this woman—is it a woman with that weird short hair? Yes, it’s a woman, you idiot, how the hell does this woman with her ugly weird clothes and ugly short hair and ugly pale skin know the language of the People? Hell if I know! Ask her!”