Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers)

by C. E. Murphy

  The Executioner’s sword lit on fire.

  “Oh, that’s just not fair.” The whole image was straight out of a twelve-year-old fantasy reader’s nightmare, a Frank Frazetta death rider of the apocalypse. And it was happy to murder me until I was dead, whereas I couldn’t afford to return the favor for fear of taking Aidan out along with it. Someday I was going to get to fight something and there would be no collateral damage, but this was not that day. Worried about Aidan or not, though, I drew my sword. I wanted to at least be able to parry if that thing came my way.

  Which it did, a slow heavy swing that a sloth could have avoided. Good thing, too, because not only did it light the trees it hit on fire, but it also cut them all in half. Four of them. With one blow. I watched them slide to the earth, fwip fwip fwip fwip, and listened to the fire go out in a series of hisses and pops as the severed trunks slid into the sopping ground.

  The Executioner was so ponderous it had to spin all the way around with the weight of the blow, which gave me time to watch the trees fall down and still get out of the way when it came back around. I ducked the next blow and ran inside its reach. It roared, dropped the sword while still wheeling from its second slash, and tried scraping me off its plate armor.

  That was harder than it looked, given how many spikes decorated the armor. Ankles, knees, hips, for heaven’s sake, who needed hip spikes? Or a spiky belt, for that matter, or shoulder and elbow spikes? If it tilted its head more than two degrees left or right it would pierce its own brain with the spikes. On the other hand, all the pointy bits made a pretty good ladder, and I climbed its eleven-foot self in a couple of long strides. I’d dropped my own sword, but that was okay, because it was magic and I just had to call it again for it to appear. I bet the Executioner was going to have to bend over and pick his up, and I bet if I kicked its heiny it would fall flat on its face and stick in the ground thanks to all those spikes.

  That actually sounded like a better game plan than the one I was trying. I filed it away for future reference, planted my feet on the Executioner’s spiny belt, grabbed hold of one shoulder spike for balance, and hauled its pointy helmet off. I expected to see Aidan in there, all big-eyed and alarmed-looking, like a tiny goblin in a great big mech suit.

  Instead a black slash of nothing erupted from the armor and tried to suck my head off.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I yelled and let go and fell six feet to the ground, landing with a splat and a grunt. The Executioner’s armor collapsed around me, pointy bits offering considerably more danger than its big flaming sword had. It reformed without the armor, looking far more like the ax-wielding thing it had been in the mountain holler, and I realized belatedly that the Frazetta suit had perhaps been Aidan’s way of trying to protect me. His way of slowing the Executioner down, so I could fight it more easily. And I’d blown it.

  I would have to make time for recriminations later. In the meantime, if Aidan wasn’t at the heart of the Executioner’s armor, that meant he was around here somewhere else, maybe holding out as a separate entity of his own, deep in the sanctuary of his own garden. That meant I could fight this thing without worrying about hurting the kid, and that made everything a lot easier. I bounced to my feet, drew my sword and called my shield. We were in a sacred place, in the heart of somebody’s soul, and I figured my psychic weaponry should be stronger here than anywhere else. Nerved up by this belief, I didn’t try to dodge when the Executioner swung his ax.

  It slammed into my shield so hard my eyeballs wobbled. I tipped over and reconsidered my game plan on my way to hitting the ground. By the time the impact knocked the breath out of me, I’d decided that running away was the only smart choice. It wasn’t a viable choice, of course. But it was the smart one. The Executioner’s ax smashed down. I rolled sideways, swallowing a squeak of relief as it buried the ax so deeply in the earth that for a few seconds it couldn’t get it free. While it struggled, I unwound a single strand of magic from the idea of a net, and flung the rope at the Executioner’s ankles.

  It wrapped around them, whiplike, and I hauled back with all my strength.

  Its feet went out from under it. I leapt to mine and gave a blood-curdling shriek as I went for a killing blow, which would have worked except the Executioner dissipated and left me with my sword stuck in the ground next to its ax. That was absolutely not fair. I yanked the sword out and the Executioner reappeared on the ax’s far side, where it got a better grip and hauled it free, too. We stood there a couple seconds, sizing one another up. It wasn’t eleven feet tall anymore, but it thrummed with magic, still drawing in new strength from Aidan, from the wights, from the fight that was promising to shape up back in the Middle World. It was made from what seemed like a nearly endless source of power, and I’d only just barely been jump-started. If I thought about it, I was doomed.

  Fortunately, it didn’t give me much time to think. It swung, I parried, and for a minute or so, it was epic. My teeth rattled when it clobbered me, its skin glowed and broke apart in blue chunks where I slashed it, lightning fell from the sky in vast sheets, thunder rolled across the landscape. I couldn’t for the life of me count the number of blows, or track how fast we struck at one another.

  Rattler was alive in the back of my head, pouring speed into my body, and Raven soared around the Executioner’s head, pulling at its barely present hair and plucking at its eyes. I wouldn’t have expected Raven to be able to affect it, but it was a creature made up of death magic, and Raven was my guide between the living and the dead. Renee lent the same clarity of sight I’d had driving Petite: time slowed as I fought, until the play of the Executioner’s misty muscles triggered an awareness in me of where it would strike next. I started being there before it finished the blow, getting inside its guard and smashing not just with sword but with shield, every hit driving healing power into it. I started feeling like the fantasy hero who would have fought the armored monstrosity the Executioner had first appeared as. It was fantastic, confidence and assurance building in me. The Executioner finally retreated, then ran, trying to escape me. I yelled and gave chase, crashing around the remains of Aidan’s garden.

  Earth crumbled under my feet with each step. Under the Executioner’s, too, falling away faster and faster until I realized we were on an island in the midst of a boiling blackness. All that remained of the garden was a single broken oak tree, its roots dangling raggedly through shallow earth. There was suddenly nowhere left for either of us to go. Huge chunks of bark fell from the tree as I chased the Executioner around it, both of us slamming against the rotting wood in our haste. Then a root gave way beneath it and it fell, silent in the storm’s roar.

  I flung myself after him with both hands wrapped around the rapier’s hilt. It felt very cinematic, the earth collapsing behind me, my body arched dramatically and the sword raised above my head for a downward blow. The Executioner was unprotected, its chest open to me, vulnerable.

  It grinned.

  After I’d thrown myself from the bridge was not a good time to realize I’d made a mistake. Cold coursed through me, stuttering my heart. The Executioner wasn’t even trying to save itself, just leering as it fell. I twisted to look at what we’d fallen from: a lonesome dying tree, all that remained of Aidan’s garden.

  All that remained of Aidan’s garden.

  The Executioner was a distraction. A distraction, and I was a moron for allowing myself to be distracted. Yes, of course it was something that needed to be dealt with, but I had been taught time and again that fighting wasn’t the only way to deal with something. Aidan hadn’t needed me to come stomping in here and slay the monster with a sword. He’d needed healing, a lifeline to which he could cling and draw himself back out of the dark.

  I screamed and pitched the sword downward. Threw it with all my strength, like it was a spear. It slammed into the Executioner’s chest, blue healing magic cracking the monster apart.
In that same moment I let myself forget about it, and twisted in the air, gathering magic. For the second time I threw not a net, but just a strand, trying to reach the dying oak that now seemed an impossible distance away. It fell short, terribly short, my imagination failing me: I couldn’t throw that far.

  Raven caught the rope in his claws and showed me what wings were for.

  He flew against the storm, through lightning and falling earth, against driving rain that would pound any lesser bird out of the sky, and he swung the rope around the tree’s thick trunk. Gunmetal light flared against the tree, showing me its scars as the rope sealed to itself, making a sturdy loop that would hold my weight. I drew myself up the magic fist by fist, hands stinging with the remembered feel of rope burns.

  There were clods of earth still clinging to the oak’s roots when I reached it. Nothing more than that: it was essentially drifting alone, dying in a vast nothingness. I wrapped my arms around it as far as they would go, until my heart was pressed against the shattered tree. I pressed my cheek against it, too, whispering, “C’mon, kid. Take what you need,” and opened up the whole of my magic, no shields, no armor, no protection.

  All the lights went out.

  * * *

  For a few long hideous seconds I thought I’d blown it. I thought I was too late, that the Executioner had won. That I’d sacrificed Aidan’s life in the name of chasing a phantom bad guy all over the mindscape, and that I was going to have to live with that. I couldn’t even cry. I couldn’t breathe, much less sob. The air turned to ice in my lungs, blood frozen in my chest, the magic I clung to cold and dead under my hands. I forced my fingers into the tree’s bark, jamming a pulse of power into it. I knew I should be reaching for a line to ham it up: live, damn you! Live! Anything to ease my fear, but the thought carried no laughter, no release. I couldn’t draw air to cry out, Noooooooooo! like a proper movie hero would. All I could do was empty my chest a little more, and slam another pulse of magic into the tree. And another, blind eyes staring into darkness like I was waiting for the blip on a cardiac machine’s screen. And another, waiting for a doctor to say it was too late, and call the time of death.

  On a cold day in Hell.

  Resolve burned through the ice in my body, fire wakening not the humor I was desperate for, but a flat determination that was considerably scarier. I would quit when Hell froze over, I would stop trying when the world fell down, I would give up at the death of the universe, and even then Cernunnos would have to drag me kicking and screaming into the great beyond. I jolted power into the tree again, and again, and again, until somewhere deep in the heart of it, something responded. A flicker of a pulse, not coming back from the dead but daring, fearfully, to expose itself. A spark against the darkness, that’s all it was. White magic, twin auras bound together to hold out against the night. Scalding tears slid down my cold cheeks and melted into the oak’s rough bark. I whispered, “C’mon, kid. Come out here again. Let’s make this right.”

  That was asking too much, but that was okay. I knew the glimmer of light was in there now, which meant the rest of it could heal. I had, once before, given what I could to a dying land. I reached deep to do the same again, searching for what I could in order to help rebuild Aidan’s garden. It had been easier with Cernunnos: his world had only been dying, not nearly destroyed. The physicality of it had remained, but there was so little left to the garden that its substance had to be entirely remade.

  I started with my own, because it was all I had. The tall stone walls slowly breaking down, the precisely cut grass only just starting to grow wild around the edges. Tidy trees, carefully laid stone walks leading to a small pool fed by a waterfall. It had all been so particular, but there had been one thing about my garden that broke my own evidently deep-set mental ideas of what my soul looked like. There had been a robin to call out and tell me of a door hidden behind a fall of ivy, because it couldn’t be a secret garden without a hidden door.

  I knew what that door opened onto. It opened into a vast gestalt, a place where other inner gardens could be reached from. In my experience, there were miles of empty land between one garden and another, huge amounts of territory to traverse to reach someone else’s soul.

  But there didn’t have to be, and so this time when I dug up the key and opened the door, my garden’s limited greenery spilled through into the darkness that had become Aidan’s inner sanctuary, and gave it something to start with.

  Trees began unfurling on his side of the door the very moment it opened. Their roots sank into the blackness, creating rich earth as they grew, and lush bluegrass sprang up. The relentless rain that had fallen provided water for the sudden growth, though all the sunlight that shone through still came from my garden. In a fit of recklessness I cast a net and caught my own garden walls in it, pulling stone down in lumps that reminded me of fallen Irish castles. More sunlight washed into Aidan’s garden, the narrow doorway-size path broadening and allowing more and more life to take root. I tucked the secret door’s key into my pockets and got busy knocking more walls down, alternating between pulling and kicking. Dust rose and fell again, mortar crumbling to bits, and with every stone that crashed to the earth on my side, Aidan’s garden reclaimed some of its vibrancy.

  My own garden began reshaping itself with enthusiasm, once the strongest barriers were down. The quiet little waterfall shifted deep into the ground and rose again as a river that sped through a half-familiar landscape. Woodhenges broke free from the earth, marked with petroglyphic storytelling. I dearly wanted to go read them, but my garden was rumbling too much, land shifting and changing beneath my feet, and the changes rolled right into Aidan’s space, where they individualized themselves according to his tastes. Beyond the henges, my space grew into low Appalachian mountains and Irish fields; on Aidan’s side, a fine rash of poison oak grew up, threatening to anyone who came in uninvited. It went on and on, until all that separated his garden from mine was a hand-built stone wall of about hip height.

  I waited, hoping, but he didn’t come to the wall. The oak tree stood in the distance, still recovering: its black bark shone with strength, and new leaves budded, but its height had been broken, and I had no idea if it could recover. I didn’t know if I should stay and encourage it, or if it was better to let it rebuild on its own. I was still hesitating when Aidan stepped out of the tree and came toward me.

  He looked more fragile within the confines of his garden than in the world outside. No surprise, given what he’d been through, but I thought it was more than that. His image of himself reminded me of Billy Holliday, whose garden self was more delicate and lightly built than the big man who lived in the Middle World. Billy had been a child when his sister died and their bond made her choose to stay with him. Aidan and Ayita had both been infants when their souls had become one.

  He wasn’t feminine. It wasn’t as if here at the heart of his soul he reflected only what Ayita had been. It was more evenly balanced than that, their spirits so well-melded that either’s strengths could come to the forefront at any moment. But in the Middle World he seemed fairly serious, and here there was more sense of impishness, as if Ayita’s presence was willing and able to wink at the world. And I thought maybe right now she was the stronger of the two, because he was the one whose physical form was undergoing the transformations and power surges brought on by the Executioner’s presence and the opening vortex. She wasn’t protected, exactly: their two spirits were too completely one for that. But she had given up her physical body a long time ago, and I thought that might be strengthening her spiritual presence now.

  He sounded exactly like himself, unbroken voice as easily feminine as masculine. “Your garden looks better.”

  I laughed, taken aback, and humor sparkled in his eyes. “Well, it does.”

  “It does. So does yours.”

  “Eh.” He wrinkled his nose, looking around. “Not better than it was before. I didn
’t mean for this to happen. I’m not one of the bad guys.” A tremulous note shook his voice, like he was hoping I would confirm that, and wasn’t absolutely certain I would.

  I shook my head. “No, kiddo, you’re not. This kind of crap...happens. It happened to me, too.”

  “Why does it happen? I mean, if we’re the good guys...”

  “Because good guys put on white hats and let themselves be shot at,” I said softly. “Because sometimes it’s hard to tell if people are good or bad, and it’s our job to assume they’re good until they’ve gone so far overboard there’s no hope of bringing them back. I believe that doesn’t happen very often, but it happens.”

  “This magic was never good. The Nothing, the hole in time, the monster inside me, it wasn’t ever good.”

  “The monster infected you, Aidan. It wasn’t inside you. Big difference. And you’re right, this magic was never good, and it got to you because of me. Because you’re powerful, and because it would be a big win for the bad guys if they brought you over. But I don’t think that’s even possible. I’ve never seen anybody human who burns as bright as you do.”

  He perked right up. “You’ve seen people who aren’t human?”

  I grinned. “Quite a few of them. I’ll introduce you sometime.”

  Solemnity rolled back into place. “You mean, you’ll introduce me if we get out of this alive.”