by C. E. Murphy
I didn’t dare open my eyes, for fear Coyote would be gaping at me. I wasn’t exactly Ms. Formality, but my little speech was heartfelt, which was a long way from the bastion of refusal I’d been six or twelve months ago.
In the silence that followed I became aware of my drum, its rhythm steady enough that it seemed to define the boundaries of the world. The earth rattled softly with its thrum, mountains picking up the reverberations and rattling them through me. Even the air shimmered with the beat, dancing against my skin. Trees rustled in time with it, and I thought if I opened my eyes the sun itself would skip to the drum’s sound.
Instead, though, I drew in closer to myself, concentrating on how my heart fell into time with the external beat. My blood pulsed with its time, red brightening and dimming in my eyelids, until slowly the dimmer aspect became black, and then so too did the bright. I could barely hear the drum anymore, could barely even hear my own heartbeat, assuming they weren’t one and the same. Sparks danced against my eyelids, tiny colorless fireworks that were alien and familiar at the same time.
The drumbeat turned to hope in my chest, filling me until I had no sense of my body left. I floated, nothing more than a spark myself, and then the spirit animals came darting through the dark to investigate me.
Most came only once. A badger dug his way by, stopping to snuffle me and then move on. I thought I’d seen him before; he’d come to consider Gary as a companion. The fleet deer that leaped by me, though, had not, and I was unsurprised when its spirit-white form continued on. Solid stodgy badgers seemed a more likely fit for me than quick-hearted flighty deer.
Others came and went, spilling by in a river of possibility, and I became slowly aware of the one animal who returned again and again. It wound its way toward me as if it were the riverbed, long thin lines of white glowing and fading away. Once, twice, three times, and the fourth it stayed. I said, “You—well, one of your brethren, anyway—came the first time, too. In the false quest.”
A rattlesnake folded himself up to strike, narrow head held motionless as he met my gaze. “There isss no sssuch thing assss a falssse quessst, ssshaman. There are only falssse prophetsss. We come becaussse your ssspirit isss true, and alwaysss wasss, even when you were led assstray.” He dipped his head and I mimicked the gesture, profound thanks sending a chill over me.
“I mussst tessst you,” he said. “Sssee if you are worthy. Thisss will hurt,” he warned, and struck.
———
Hurt didn’t begin to cover it. I’d taken a sword through the gut more than once, had been punctured through the hand—also more than once, now that I thought about it, and overall any lifestyle that involved being gutted and stabbed repeatedly really needed a good hard look taken at it—and I’d fought off an ancient serpent’s poison while in the form of a thunderbird.
The rattler’s bite managed to combine all of that into one excruciating wound. My hand, where his fangs had sunk into me, throbbed so hard I thought it would explode. Poison scored my veins, stripping them of blood. They shriveled inward, constricting my heart, and agonizing sickness threatened to split my belly open. I gasped for air and instead wheezed toxins, my throat burning raw.
I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do to prove myself worthy. Playing the stoic seemed like the obvious answer, but with screams ripping my voice box to shreds, I was clearly not taking that road. A spasm seized me, flinging me down and arching my back until bone cracked, but when tears spilled along my cheeks they burned too, poisoned water. Stoic was right out.
That left me with two choices. I could heal myself, or I could die. I didn’t think dying would prove anything, and I’d managed to survive poisonings before. It was a complex process involving separating blood from poison and pushing the venom out. Water in the gas line was how I thought of it, and it was time-consuming and uncomfortable.
I think I actually said, “Oh, fuck this shit,” out loud instead of keeping it safely behind my teeth. Then again, my teeth were rotting and falling from my mouth thanks to the contamination swirling through me, so they weren’t keeping much behind them anyway. I reached deep inside myself, past the belly-twisting bleak horror my life had become, and seized hold of the healing magic that was part and parcel of who I was now.
Nobody’d ever mentioned if shamans had any real use for spell working, for a focus of magic through words. Then again, nobody had mentioned a lot of things, and I’d found words to be handy a time or two. I set my raw bleeding gums together, snarled, “Physician, heal thyself!” and commanded my magic go.
It erupted through me, silver-blue light brilliant against the darkness. Poison splashed out of me and sizzled into nothing. Pain faded instantly, my bones whole again, my body no longer wracked with pain. Something glittered in my vision, a glimpse of fractured, spiderwebbed glass. Bits of the web were sealing up, coming closer to the center. Then the image faded, replaced by a growing sense of astonishment.
I’d known almost since the beginning that real shamanic healing didn’t have to go through all the tiddly steps I took, all the metaphorical stretches that I used to convince myself any of it was possible. Knowing it, though, and experiencing the pure blowout of power, the instantaneous transformation from broken to whole, were two very different things. I took a deep breath, marveling at how it didn’t hurt, how my lungs weren’t melting inside my chest, and sat up beaming.
Snakes were not creatures well-known for their expressive faces, but my rattler managed to look pleased anyway. “That was sssatisssfactory. Ssstrength you have, ssshaman. Ssstrength, but little sssense. You would be wissse to heed the raven.”
Bemused, I said, “Yeah? I’m trying. What do you bring to the table?” and winced at my own lack of gratitude. “I mean, um…”
“You mean asss you sssay. Sssnakesss, like you, are sssimple creaturesss. We ssstrike when it isss necssesssssssary. It isss sssomething I like about you. Asss for my giftsss, they are plain to sssee, if you ussse a little sssenssse.”
I wasn’t sure I liked being a simple creature, but I did like how his forked tongue got all excited and tangled around a word like “necessary,” with all those ess sounds. I bet if I could get him to do the “she sells sea shells” tongue twister he’d get such a hiss going he couldn’t ever stop. I also bet he wouldn’t appreciate it at all, and bit my lip against trying. “The healing,” I said instead. “I couldn’t do it like that before.”
He inclined his head quite elegantly, and I reached out, tentatively, to see if snakes liked being scratched on the jaw. This one evidently did; he preened and tipped his head like a cat, leaning into the scritch. “There isss more. It will come to you when you need it mossst.”
“More? Instantaneous healing is kind of a lot.”
“Yesss, but it isss not all of what you are.” His snaky eyes lidded contentedly and he began coiling down on himself, clearly ready for a nap. “Sssoon you will sssee.”
“I can’t wait to find out.” I even sort of meant that. “One more question. How come you talk to me? Raven doesn’t.”
The rattler swayed his head to the side, examining me as if I were a fool. “Becaussse ravensss can talk in your world, sssilly ssshaman.” He bumped me with his blunt nose, and I awakened to the Lower World, and chaos.
———
It wasn’t the wendigo, if I wanted to count small favors. There was none of the blood stench, none of the bitter cold, none of the almost-human drive for food. Instead, Coyote staved off wolves, for a metaphorical if not literal description.
I had some familiarity with the demon denizens of the Lower World, having accidentally released them into Seattle one time. Coyote faced them and their brethren: chimeras of terrible form and shape ranging from vicious-toothed, segmented worms to giants whose bodies were twisted with hate. One of those, a stone giant called an a-senee-ki-wakw, locked gazes with me as I woke, and I saw from the depths of rage in its eyes that it knew me. I’d released it and then I’d put it back, and it intended on
having its revenge. They all did, and knew they only had to go through Coyote to get to me.
Now would be a good time for whatever other gifts the rattlesnake had offered to show up. I drew my sword and rushed forward to join Coyote in battle. He was bleeding and his jaws were red, and my appearance at his side was shock enough that he snarled and turned on me for an instant before he knew who I was. Then relief sagged his features and he turned back to the demon spirits, hunched low in preparation for attack. “You need to get out of here. We can’t kill them, not here, but they won’t stop hunting until your spirit has been extinguished. You really pissed them off.”
“It’s a feature.” I fell into step with him, backing up, but the holler wasn’t built to scramble out of backward. “You go first. Get up there so you can give me a hand out.”
He barked a protest and the twisted giant surged forward, slamming a huge first into the ground. The drumbeat faltered, then sped up, shaking the earth as if somewhere out in the real world, Gary knew what was happening and was trying to help. “Coyote, go! I’ve got the reach weapon!”
He snarled again, but my logic apparently swayed him, because he suddenly turned tail and raced up the back side of the holler. The demons, eager for their prey, leaped as one, converging on a single point.
Me.
I twitched to the side, faster and more graceful than I knew I could be. My sword lashed out, whipping like a saber, and blue power flared along it to score a mark against the giant’s hide. One of the others, a flint-winged monstrosity, turned on a wing tip and jumped at me again. I flattened against the earth, rolled, and came up again in a fighting stance, all while my brain was still shrieking in panic and waiting to get crushed. “I am not your enemy!” My staccato shout bounced off the holler’s walls until the only word left was enemy. The a-seneeki-wakw seemed to feed on it, getting stronger and taller with each repetition. I darted back and forth, avoiding scorpion tail stings and gnashing worm teeth sheerly by the grace of God, while Coyote stood above me barking his fool head off.
I wanted to scurry up the hill after him. I really did. But aside from the fact that I didn’t think I’d make it, the blinding need to do something about these creatures, the simple wish to succeed in defeating something, since the wendigo kept kicking my ass, had grown stronger than the impulse to run. The misses got narrower, and I got angrier, until I flung down my rapier and bellowed, “Fine! You think you can take me? Come and get me, motherfuckers!”
It was awesome. I felt like Samuel L. Jackson, right up until the motherfuckers came and got me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I didn’t know there was anywhere below the Lower World to get dragged down into. It turned out there was, and the best word I had for it was Hell.
The Lower World, for all its bizarre proportions and colors, was a comparatively friendly place. Dangerous, sure, but I’d yet to encounter a plane of existence that wasn’t. The Lower World, though, didn’t shove knives into my chest when I breathed. It didn’t smell of sulfur and brimstone and fire, and it didn’t reflect a gory sky in its obsidian surface. There was no sun, but where there was light, it shone dull red through dark translucent rock.
Demons roamed the gleaming black earth. They fought each other, they bled, they rose again. Some reached for the bleak sky, trying to claw their way free. There were rents where a few had succeeded: where a handful had been sufficiently inspired by my presence to tear through to another realm.
Peculiarly, now that they had me, they seemed reluctant to attack. My sword was lying on the ground in front of me, glowing so brightly it hurt my eyes. It struck me that the blade was really the only source of light. I could see the sky because of its brilliance, and where black stone looked red, the rapier also reflected there. I squatted to lift it, and the monsters shrank back, mewling and twisting their gazes away.
Demons didn’t strike me as particularly smart, but my limited experience suggested they wouldn’t, of their own volition, have brought me somewhere that I had the upper hand by dint of a glowy sword. Slowly, semi-consciously, I looked to my left. Followed the beat of my heart in that direction, half knowing, half dreading, what I would see.
A cavern, black maw in a black mountain, made one dark shadow against another. It looked warm, somehow. Warm and not exactly inviting, but more comfortable than a jagged plain filled with things that wanted to eat me.
“Oh no.” My voice came out light and shaky, an alien thing in a world made for screams. “No. I’m dumb, but not that dumb. And I don’t believe you’re Lucifer, God damn it, even if this is Hell.” I didn’t believe it was the devil because I didn’t believe there was any way, on any level of reality, that I could ever go head-to-head with The Devil Himself, and I knew someday I was going to have to face the thing under the mountain. Therefore, it couldn’t be the devil. Cogito, ergo sum.
Rich laughter rolled from the cavern, deep enough to make glassy rock crack and shatter against the ground. I bared my teeth, feeling very much like a mouse facing down a lion, and repeated, “No.”
The earth rumbled, a scrape of stone on stone. A trapped sound, I thought with a tiny surge of hope. My mother’d done a thorough job of kicking the Master’s ass, if he couldn’t wriggle free from his mountain cave even in what looked to me like the depths of Hell. It gave me a little confidence, and a little, compared to what I’d had, was a lot.
I didn’t know what the creature in the stone was, besides an enemy. He commanded the banshees, feeding on the blood of their victims. Feeding on their souls, maybe, though I had the impression that was an act of desperation on his part, after my mother and I had thwarted his more usual dinner plans. He was weak, but he was interested in me, and I was going to have to deal with him someday.
Personally, I wanted that someday to be as far away as humanly possible. The monster in the mountain commissioned death cauldrons and frightened gods. I was in no way a match for him.
He knew it, of course. He’d caught my attention, or I’d caught his, the very first time I’d used any kind of power as an adult. I’d known instantly that I was part of some game to him, and that if he could destroy me while I was young and stupid he’d be happy to. He almost had, too, but my dead mother had taken him to the mat, and ever since he’d been lingering at the edges of my mind, unable to break through.
I didn’t like that he kept turning up in the shadows. It made me think I was being investigated for weaknesses, and I had more than enough to show. It also made me afraid that Sheila MacNamarra’s smackdown was losing its hold. If he worked his way free before I was up to full speed, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be just me who suffered.
On what constituted a positive side, the best he could do right now was send minions—assuming they were his minions, and not just foolish demons who hadn’t thought through their attack clearly enough—to drag me around and try to scare me. I was, by increments, becoming less scared and more pissed off. I leveled my sword at the cavern, willing power to carry my words to him. To weigh him down, too, as much as I could. Mom had pinned him. I should be able to reinforce that, at least. Silver and blue coalesced in the blade, almost humming, then leaped forward in a surge to rush the mountain like a locomotive. “You aren’t ready for me yet, buster, and I’m not ready for you. One of us is going to pull a trump card sooner or later, but until then, quit dicking me around. I’m not in the mood.”
His presence retreated under the weight of my power, and all the amusement I was accustomed to sensing from him went flat. Triumph blared through me.
And was followed hard by a tremendous heave from my bound enemy. The whole mountain range shook, earth roaring protest at rough treatment. Glass exploded everywhere as the Master’s rage surged outward as if it were suddenly a living thing given body of its own. My own puny magic went thin and terrified, riding the upswell, trying frantically to pin it back down.
It couldn’t, but neither could he quite break through my silvery power clinging furiously to the earth and
keeping him from bursting through. All my bravado went up in smoke, and I whispered, “Raven, please, get me out of here.”
The sky broke open under enormous talons. Red light bled through, sending demons squealing and scattering. My raven dived through the tear in the heavens and caught my shoulders to drag me back into the worlds I knew.
———
Coyote and Gary were both kneeling over me when I opened my eyes. Coyote had two black eyes, a split lip and a host of other small injuries I couldn’t see. I felt them, though, as wrongnesses in his aura, in his power. Without thinking, I clapped my hand against his face.
His yowl of pain turned to a gurgle of astonishment as I pushed a torrent of healing power through him. The bruises cleared up, cuts sealing over, and it was only as a distant second that I thought of patching the paint job on a vehicle; the metaphor hadn’t been necessary. He fell back on his rear, prodding at himself, and raised wide brown eyes to me. Gary did just the opposite, leaning forward all bright-eyed, like he couldn’t wait to hear what had happened.
“A snake,” I said before either of them asked. “A snake, like on my drum. They’re symbols of healing, did you know that? It, I mean, he, it, um. Just cleared away all the cobwebs, kind of. Whoomp, no more messing around with metaphor. I can just do it.” Oh God. I needed a swoosh, now.
“They’re symbols of renewal,” Coyote said in a deliberately pedantic tone. “They can also represent shape-shifting, Jo. The shedding of the old skin, coming into the new….”
I sat up. I didn’t know when I’d fallen over, but I sat up. “He said there were other gifts I’d discover when I needed them. Maybe shape-shif…” Nope. I couldn’t get through the sentence “Sorry. I just don’t believe people can shape-shift, Ro. Maybe when you’re traveling through the other worlds, yeah, okay, because I usually end up a mole or something when I’m trying to get to my garden, but not for real.”