Guardian of the Dead

by Karen Healey

  I screamed a war cry, desperately denying that I was about to die.

  ‘Down,’ Mark said behind me, magic burring through the eerie calm of his voice and I dropped awkwardly to the gravel. White light crackled over my head and tore the taiaha from my enemy’s hand.

  He was shocked for one second too long, and fear gave me speed.

  With screaming muscles and throbbing back I rose, big hips twisting, and sank my left foot into his gut. He folded over as sweetly as any opponent in the ring, and I flowed smoothly into the axe-kick I would never use in a proper match – one with pads and headgear and no one trying to kill me or my friends. Remorseless, my heel in its heavy black shoe crashed down on his bare skull.

  He flopped facedown onto the asphalt path, blood from his wounded leg spreading watery pink over the frost.

  I twisted to face my next opponent, sobbing, but the silver-haired woman was gone, vanished back into the mists.

  ‘Run,’ Mark said calmly, and together we pelted up over the bridge and up the theatre steps, where Iris was watching, and holding the door open for us.

  Mark dragged the couch in front of the glass door and then slumped onto it with Iris. We were dripping every- where, and our breath hung white in the frigid air of the green room.

  ‘Showers,’ I said. ‘Showers and fresh clothes.’

  ‘What clothes?’ Iris said vaguely, and then sat up, indignation cutting through the fatigue. ‘Ellie! Not the costumes!’

  ‘It’s that or hypothermia,’ I said ruthlessly, and went hunting through the dressing rooms. Mark was easy – Demetrius was stouter and shorter, but a close-enough fit, and his Edwardian layers would be warm enough. Iris could wear one of the fairy bodysuits, and Carrie’s skirts and blouses. Kevin’s Theseus costume wasn’t finished; I had to settle for the trousers and rough shirts and jackets of the rude mechanicals. Typical.

  I gave them their clothes and sent them into the two shower stalls. Mark went in willingly enough, but Iris hopped out again in a moment, looking at the floor. ‘I can’t quite manage the buttons,’ she said, trying to laugh. ‘My fingers are too shivery. Sorry, but could you lend me a hand? Or some fingers?’

  I could. Her skin was clammy and cold against my hands, like meat from a refrigerator, a sensation that had always made me nauseated. Underneath the stark black-and-white of her outerwear, she wore a scarlet camisole-and-panties set, small yellow flowers embroidered around the neckline and waist. I didn’t feel up to peeling them off her, and her fingers were too numb to manage it, so I turned the shower on and helped her in, underwear and all, to sit on its floor.

  ‘You’re still wet too,’ she called through the curtain, over the creaking in the pipes.

  I was. My hair was drying at the edges, wisps escaping to fly witchily about my head. ‘I’m next,’ I said, false cheery.

  ‘What happened after I ran?’

  I grimaced, and told her how Mark and I had escaped that final assault.

  ‘Did you kill him?’ she asked, her voice matter-of-fact.

  I’d been wondering that myself, with a distant queasiness. ‘Probably not. It’s pretty hard to kill with one blow.’ I swallowed, remembering the litany of possible injuries I’d so blithely recited to Carrie, when she’d wanted to fake kicking Carla in the face. ‘But it happens. I don’t know.’

  She shut the water off with another clanking from the pipes, and thrust the curtain aside, her pinkening face appearing around the edge. ‘I shouldn’t have made Mark take me along.’

  I blinked. ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘I slowed you down. I don’t even have magic.’

  ‘Stop that. You were great.’

  Still looking gloomy, she wrung the water out of her hair and took the threadbare theatre towel I handed her.

  ‘I haven’t been very fair to you,’ I said, as I unzipped Kevin’s jacket. I moved carefully; the cold had numbed the wounds in my back, but movement made everything throb and sting again. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Inky strands of wet hair clung to Iris’s cheeks. She pulled them back impatiently and wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘Ditto.’

  I had the horrible impulse to ask what she had thought of me, or said about me, and what she thought about me now. Instead, I sealed the apology with a smile, and waited until she smiled back and politely turned away, letting me peel off my clothes like a sodden second skin.

  By the time I came out, Mark had found the theatre’s first-aid kit and presented me with more salve for my scratches, bandages for Iris’s torn foot, and a bottle of painkillers. There wasn’t any food or heat, but we had light, and places to sit, and a complete lack of frightening murderers, and that turned out to be enough for now.

  Mark stood in the corner while Iris sorted old curtains and cloaks from her perch on the couch. He was running his fingers over the white tuft of hair on his charm bracelet and frowning.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked, feeling the painkillers take hold with a great rush of relief.

  ‘I guess so. I can’t get a fix on him.’ He half smiled. ‘I’m running on fumes, really. The bracelet’s good, but I’ve been using it hard. It needs to fill up again.’

  I nodded seriously. ‘Like Green Lantern’s ring.’

  He shot me a startled glance, and then his whole face relaxed. ‘Well, I don’t need to recharge it with a magic lantern. It only needs time; it should be fine by noon tomorrow. Plus, I can use it on things that are made out of wood.’

  ‘Hey, that’s only Golden Age Lantern,’ I said. ‘Modern Lanterns can use it on anything.’

  ‘Geeks,’ Iris said amiably, and curled herself into a pile of material ends like a sleek cat.

  ‘Here,’ Mark said, and offered his wrist to me. ‘See what I mean?’

  I could feel myself flushing again, but I reached for the bracelet, trying not to brush against his skin. As soon as I touched the metal I could feel it; the sense of power exhausted, like a laptop switching to power-save mode. But there was no sense of personality, just the thrumming power of a useful tool. The bracelet had been made for Mark, but not by him, and it would work for anyone. It would work for me.

  My fingers traced around the curve of his wrist, and I discovered that my fingers could divine what each charm was for. This plastic lightning bolt had called the crackling magelight that had torn the patupaiarehe’s taiaha from his grasp. The rusty steel key could muddy the memory and encourage forgetfulness. The pebble would turn flesh to stone.

  Mark was watching me. ‘You can tell which is which?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said, suddenly aware that I was, more or less, holding his hand. But he didn’t try to take it back. I kept talking, in the hope that he wasn’t fully aware of how I reacted to touching him. ‘And the whole thing’s like a power source, right? You can use it to power other spells that don’t already have charms.’

  He nodded. ‘I think you have a knack for objects of power. Like this, or that paper you made. That’s why contact with the bracelet woke you. It’s a valuable talent.’

  ‘There’s this mask,’ I began, reminded, but there was a sharp rapping at the greenroom door, and I jolted at the sound, dropping Mark’s wrist. The figure of the woman on the other side of the glass was indistinct through the grimy glass, but still recognisable.

  ‘Mark,’ Reka demanded through the glass. ‘Mark, let me in.’

  Iris slid out of her nest to stand on one foot, looking grim.

  ‘Go away!’ Mark shouted.

  ‘It’s about your father,’ she insisted, and Mark jerked, and looked at me.

  I picked up a piece of wood left over from building the backdrop frame. ‘Go on.’

  He dragged the couch out of the way and stood ready as the door swung open. My hands clenched on the wood as she stepped across the threshold.

  I felt her power blow across my skin like the hot breath of some massive beast, half saw it shimmer around her like steam rising from baked asphalt after summer rain. There was blood on Reka’s
right hand, oozing from the split skin on her knuckles, and her left arm was in a makeshift sling. Two of her long claws were broken off jagged.

  I stilled as Reka’s eyes met mine. Her face was drawn tight with pain. I had seen her angry, afraid, and surprised, but never unbalanced. Now, she wavered.

  ‘You,’ she said, and for a moment I thought my presence was the cause of her unnerving lack of cohesion.

  Mark moved to stand at my left shoulder. I could feel his exhaustion like a damp wind, as tangible as the scratches down my spine, now flaring at the sight of Reka’s broken nails. If she attacked now, we would die.

  Her blank green eyes swept over my shoulder and settled firmly on Mark’s face. The wet gleam in her eyes was not supernatural.

  With real horror, I realised Reka was crying.

  ‘Oh, my son,’ she said, voice suffused with pain. ‘Your father is dead.’

  BODY-SHAPED BOX

  YOU—’ MARK SAID, and knocked agony into my back when he pushed me aside to get at her.

  His first blow was a tight-fisted punch to the ribs, and it took her by surprise. Badly aimed and careless, it must have hurt, but not so badly that she couldn’t sidestep the second, nor block the third. She moved around his clumsy strikes as if it were all some complex dance she was leading. When he tried to kick, awkward and low, she caught his foot in her slim hand and flipped him easily onto his back.

  He landed hard, breath breaking out of him.

  ‘I did not kill Robert!’ she snapped.

  I tried to help Mark up, but he staggered away to stand alone. ‘When we came here,’ he said. ‘While I showered—’

  Reka jerked her chin at his bracelet. ‘I told you not to put so much trust in your toys,’ she said brutally, and I wanted to hit her myself. ‘Your grandfather told me you had run from them, and I came to help you. You were not at your home.’ She rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead. There was a dark stain on her wide copper sleeve. ‘But Robert lay outside.’ Her voice lifted fiercely. ‘They should not have touched him. He was mine!’

  She spoke as of a prized possession that had been despoiled by vandals. But Mark had loved his father, and not just as a beautiful means to an end. He stumbled, clutching blindly for the wall to keep steady.

  I braced him under the elbow, ludicrously reminded of bumping into him only a few days ago, when the worst I’d had to worry about was helping out with Kevin’s play. Now it was all murder and monsters. It wasn’t the sort of thing they advertised in the Mansfield prospectus.

  ‘Mark,’ Reka said, insistently.

  ‘Can’t you leave him alone for a minute?’ I snapped.

  She shook her head, ignoring her own tears, and darted back out onto the steps. She reentered the greenroom backward, dragging something with both arms.

  It was the male patupaiarehe I’d knocked down, deadweight in Reka’s grip. His throat was a torn crimson mess, and the side of his head was crushed, bloody pieces of scalp and worse jiggling obscenely as his head bounced along the worn floorboards.

  Well, I thought, cold all over, that answers Iris’s question. I hadn’t killed him. I hadn’t gone for the throat, nor broken the skull. But I’d left him there, unconscious, for Reka to find, and turn a breathing body into this atrocity.

  ‘Now I will know what he knows,’ Reka said, self-satisfied. I had just time to wonder how she intended to get information from a corpse before she dipped her hand into the hole in his skull and raised the befouled fingers to her mouth.

  Iris yipped, high and breathy. My head spun and I staggered backward. Mark made some inarticulate sound of protest, cut off by Reka’s surprised look.

  ‘I need to know,’ she said.

  Mark grabbed my shoulder, and it was all I could do not to scream at the contact. He shuffled me back through the stage door, collecting Iris on the way.

  We shut the soundproofed door on Reka’s grisly feast and huddled in the darkness of backstage.

  ‘That was—’ Iris whispered, and then went fumbling for the lights at the stage manager’s desk. When they came on, I could see the tears tracking down Mark’s face.

  ‘Oh, Mark. I’m so sorry about your dad,’ Iris said.

  I wrapped both arms around him, ignoring the twinges in my back, and held on.

  ‘Hello?’ someone called from the theatre entrance. It was the elderly security guard.

  Iris took a deep breath and smoothed back her damp hair. It was eerie, watching her face reposition itself into a bright and smiling mask. ‘Stay here,’ she whispered, motioning to a pile of rolled-up canvas in the wing, and went out into the theatre. After a second her voice came back, all sweet apologies; they were just doing some costume work in the greenroom, of course she’d lock up when they left, sorry for the bother.

  I hadn’t eaten in hours. My head hurt and my back throbbed. I didn’t want to be this vulnerable anywhere near Reka, but I was too tired to be sensible. I lay down beside Mark as he sobbed into the dusty canvas, tucking my feet around his, looping my arm over his waist. My thoughts were fuzzing around the edges, as if my body had given in and said No, enough, no more, be still.

  I fell, sore and sad, into deep and silent sleep.

  I woke up when Mark tried to slide out from under my arm.

  Reka was standing over us. In the daze of my awakening, I thought I could see the cannibalised power around her like smudges on a charcoal drawing.

  I sat up slowly, muscles creaking, and was grateful that Mark didn’t stand or move away from me. Instead, he took my hand in his own and squeezed.

  Iris appeared from the stage. She must have slept in the theatre seats. Her hair had left red marks on her cheek, like the delicate threads of a leaf skeleton. From her approving smile, I was pretty sure she noticed our linked hands.

  Reka ignored her, staring directly at Mark, and at me next to him. She looked smug, so I was gratified to see that she’d taken the sling off, revealing that two of the fingers on her left hand were bruised and swollen, probably broken. I’d done that.

  ‘Did you find out what they’re planning?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and tapped her right hand against her thigh. ‘They meant to kill you for your foreign power, Mark.’ She frowned at me. ‘Her too.’

  ‘I guessed that,’ he said, watching her steadily. ‘What’s going on? Do I need to carry the fight to them? Go up north?’

  She snorted. ‘Hardly. They plan to wake Te Ika a Mui from his slow decline. They mean to tug at Mui’s hook and bring his fish into the fast fury of the final death throes. The North Island is no place for you.’

  Mark went very still. Iris gasped.

  ‘Te Ika a Mui is the North Island,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘Yes,’ Reka said impatiently.

  It hit me like a blow. ‘Oh, God. An earthquake.’

  Every child knew the score, from school projects and news reports and countless alarm drills: New Zealand balanced precariously over a fault line, and the next killer quake was only a matter of time. The Wairarapa earthquake had lifted acres of land straight out of the sea. The 1931 Hawke’s Bay quake had killed hundreds in my hometown and destroyed most of the city. In my mind’s eye I saw Napier’s graceful Art Deco buildings collapsing as the earth roared and danced. I saw my friends’ bodies, sprawled under the rubble of the high school.

  Mark was shaking his head slowly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Worse than that.’

  ‘What could be worse?’ I demanded.

  ‘Mui’s fish is old,’ Reka said. ‘He will not survive such violence, to float in this present stupor. The earth will not merely quake, Eleanor Spencer. The land will crumble and sink, back to the depths from which it was drawn out. You see, Mark, you cannot carry your foolish fight north. You must stay here, and be safe.’ She folded her arms across her chest, as in the gesture of a successful closing argument.

  I sat there, in the dusty grime of the theatre, holding the hand of a myth, and wondered if three million human deaths would s
o occupy the guardian of the dead that the patupaiarehe could reclaim the immortality they had lost.

  And if even one of them had ever baulked at the cost.

  We were still with the shock for a little time.

  ‘I have friends in the North Island,’ Iris said eventually.

  ‘Me too,’ I forced out, through numb lips. ‘My cousins, my hometown—’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to one-up you—’

  ‘I know. It’s just too big.’

  ‘Yes,’ Reka said. ‘Too big to fight.’ Some of the smugness was vanishing from her voice as she watched Mark’s motionless face. ‘Mark?’

  His hand was sweaty in mine. ‘I’ve been learning,’ he said hoarsely. ‘As much as I could. I could—’

  Reka’s remaining poise shattered. ‘You could do what? They’ll kill you! Eleanor knows nothing, and you’re half-crippled. You can’t even enter the mists, and you plan to face them alone?’

  Mark got up. ‘Not alone,’ he said.

  She sneered at him. ‘Will you go to the one you asked to cure you? You seemed unsatisfied with that bargain!’

  ‘There are plenty beside him,’ he said patiently. ‘You just never bothered to learn about them.’

  ‘Men of every creed and race,’ Iris sang weakly. She giggled nervously when we all looked at her. ‘From the national anthem. One of the later verses. I always thought it was weird that it’s such a peaceful song. “Guard Pacific’s triple star from the shafts of strife and war.” ’

  ‘“God defend New Zealand,” ’ I said. ‘But since he’s not around right now, it’ll have to be us.’ It sounded good, but my voice felt oddly disconnected from the rest of me. I kept having to remind myself to breathe.