by C. E. Murphy
Aidan gave me a perfectly filthy glare and stomped away without saying another word. Ada shrugged at the world in general and followed him. Sara was right: they went up the holler instead of heading toward the hedges we’d scraped our way through. There had to be another, easier pathway in, probably via a different mountain. Well, I was going to show it to Sara once I found it, whether the rest of them liked it or not.
“Or will we?” Carrie asked the moment Aidan was out of earshot.
I pursed my lips and turned back to the Nothing. It didn’t scare me as badly as before, but I thought that was bravado and suspected if I scratched it, panic would knock me over again. “The big advantage to waiting for Aidan is he’s too young to be scared senseless of that stuff. It’s hard to believe the world might actually get eaten when you’re twelve. Not much sense of personal mortality yet, and that entrenched self-confidence might help wipe it out.”
“But…?”
“But he’s twelve and if something goes wrong I’d rather he wasn’t here to be part of it or feel like it was his fault.”
“Could work the other way,” the old lady said philosophically. “Could be that if he’s not part of it and something goes wrong, he’ll blame himself.”
I examined that from the attitude I would have had at his age, and said, “More likely he’ll blame me.”
“True.” She snapped her fingers, making me jump to her beat, and I scurried into place at the northern edge of the power circle, where I’d been before. Carrie marched down to the southern edge, taking Aidan’s place, and we tapped the shoulders of the people in those positions, asking to be let in.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure I should be letting Carrie participate any more than I wanted Aidan to. Five minutes ago she’d been having a heart attack. I had every confidence in her new-found well-being, but that didn’t mean it was an especially good idea for her to go throwing herself right back into battle. On the other hand, Carrie Little Turtle was every bit as intimidati cas go sheng to the adult me as she’d been to the teen me. I was just slightly too scared to suggest she sit this one out.
Besides, she was one of the elders, along with Les Senior, who had presented me with my drum. It meant we shared an affinity, and while that wouldn’t be anything like as strong as my magic pairing with Aidan’s, it was still a bonus. My walking-stick spirit animal was settled in now, a sense of eagerness building within her, like her whole purpose was invested in doing something about the Nothing that was a slash in time. I’d seen walking sticks neatly slice and fold up leaves for consumption, and had the vivid idea that was exactly what Renee was going to do with the Nothing. Suddenly buoyed, I flexed my magic through the circle, checking to see if everyone was willing to follow my lead.
Their power responded, falling in line behind the ripples I sent through. No one seemed to have a need to put themselves forward, no one presenting a history of shamanic practice that I should heed. There were shamans in the Qualla, but if this had been going on for three days, they had to be spelling one another as the focal point for the circle. I suspected Aidan had been playing that role for this particular circle until my arrival. Later I might feel guilty about being the interloper, but right now I was just glad everybody was willing to let me and Renee hone the magic to a fine point and obliterate the bad stuff.
The imagery was easy, with the spirit stick’s input. She was utterly serene in her self-confidence, in her certainty of what she represented. Odd little details floated up from her as the magic began to parcel up the Nothing, cutting it away and reducing it to uselessness. She, and other stick bugs like her, had had wings once, but that in no way reduced the eternal sameness of their structure. They had needed wings in the past, and might need them again in the future, but it didn’t change what they were. It was a mere flick of a…and I couldn’t imagine a spirit animal, much less a stick bug, was actually using the words or images, but the sense I had was a mere flick of DNA, whether wings came or went. The wings were inherent, and therefore unchanging. She was as her mother had been, and her mother’s mother, all the way back to the beginning. That, too, spawned a bizarre language choice for an insect: parthenogenesis, females breeding without males, begetting more females, all the way back to the beginning. Renee was eternal, imperturbable, and unflappable. The Nothing, built on pain and rage and death, had nothing on that calm confidence in always.
It fought, though. Holy crap, did it fight. Everything that had hit me in the moment I saw it redoubled: the lonely ghosts, last of their people, who simply stopped eating when everyone around them had died. Worse, sometimes: the ones who could not quite bear to die themselves, and lived empty and hollow, a single red man among the whites. Good Indians, the dead kind, or the ones who gave up on tradition and lived as the white men did, in soulless houses and crammed into clothes that kept the world off the skin. They were pinpoints of agony against a backdrop so bleak it could barely be comprehended, thus making individual pain all the more exquisite.
The memory of empty villages rose up within me, of empty plains discovered by European settlers who never understood just how many people had died long before their arrival. Disease traveled faster than hordes of men, leaving nothing—Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, like the Nothing trying to eat its way through the holler—leaving nothing in its place, nothing to discover except a sense of superiority, that the poor pathetic natives of this new world had never even explored and peopled these amazing broad lands. I kept canderefore unwinding my hands from fists, trying not to feed the Nothing with my own rage and frustration: that was half my heritage disappearing into the wind, and even today most people didn’t grasp just how many Natives had died when the West discovered the Americas.
My heartache had nothing on Carrie’s. Carrie was old, old enough that it had been her grandparents, people she remembered, telling her stories of loss. Her memories extended to people who had been born in the middle of the nineteenth century, people who had watched family walk away on the Trail of Tears. So many of them had died, and the Nothing wanted to finish the job.
In the space of a heartbeat, I realized that was exactly what the Nothing wanted, and made a desperate attempt to throw a shield between it and the people trying to contain it.
The Nothing, all parceled out into the sharp thin blades and deadly edges of Renee’s imagery, sliced through my shields and drove deep into the hearts of the Cherokee elders.
*
Not into me. My shields, my personal shields, were sacrosanct. I had gone through too much hell and breakfast lately to let them falter, but I was not prepared to shield seven others with such vigor, not with so little notice. Knives bounced off me, shattered, turned to splinters of black and disappeared, but so many more of them drove through the elders and burst out of their spines, sucking the Nothing out the other side.
The Nothing pulled their life forces with it as it fled. All the magic we’d been working, all the effort and passion we were pouring in to wiping the Nothing away: it had been waiting for us. Why it had taken so long to respond, why it hadn’t attacked when Aidan and I were working together and raising the power usage to a whole different level, that I didn’t know, but I knew we’d been set up, and that we were now taking the fall.
No. I did know. We hadn’t been set up.
I had been set up.
I’d said it to myself already: there was no chance the problems in Carolina were cropping up a few days after the mess in Ireland just by coincidence. Between my mother, Gary and myself, we’d taken out some major talent on the Master’s side over the past couple weeks, and in the midst of all that I’d let it slip that I had a son.
The Nothing hadn’t struck at Aidan because it was waiting for me, and the mind behind it had lulled me into a goddamned sense of self-security. It had given me the chance to almost defeat it, taken me off the defensive, and then hit like a pile driver when I thought I had it in the bag.
That all fell into my mind at once, like crystal drops from heaven, so utterly
clear I could’ve killed myself for not seeing it coming. But I had bigger problems right then, and at the same time I was recognizing I’d been had, I was also rushing into action.
I threw a second shield up, pouring all the power I had available into it. It splashed into full live-action color behind the elders, a desperate attempt on my part to hold their life force inside a sphere where I might have a chance at putting it back where it belonged. The shield was as strong as I could make it with my attention split: I was also running hell-bent for leather toward Carrie with the conviction that if I could save her, I’d be off to a strong start for saving the others. She was the one I’d just healed, after all. She was the one I should have the deepest connection to.
She was barely fifteen feet away, and by the time I got to her, her body was cold. Cold. Not just breathless, not just without a heartbeat, but cold, like she’d been dead for hours. Part of me knew it was already too late and the rest of me went two directions at once. I slammed a fistful of healing power into her chest, trying to jump-start her heart, and at the same time I plunged recklessly into the Dead Zone, shrieking for Raven’s assistance as I went.
He appeared, his beaky face as grim as I’d ever seen it. The Dead Zone resolved around us. There was an unusual emptiness to it, a distance that went deeper than its near-infinite size and its endless, featureless blackness. Raven hung in the air before me, banging his wings to hover there, and said, “Quark,” so intensely I half thought it was an actual word.
It wasn’t, and the next wing-flap keeping him hovering also smashed my ears, boxing them while he shouted, “Quark!” again. Every wing-beat from there drove me back a step, until I realized he was sending me home and blurted, “But her soul…!”
Raven gave me as flat and angry a look as he could, and what faint hope I had slithered away. I’d watched the Nothing rip the life essence out of everybody, but when people died their souls passed into the Dead Zone, there to be found by whatever gods or spirits they believed would carry them through to the next world. That was how it worked.
Except Carrie’s soul hadn’t passed through the Dead Zone. I’d almost managed to bring somebody back once, when her life essence had been ripped away but her soul had passed into the Dead Zone. That time, the woman had been so startled by her death that she hadn’t even registered it as violent, and had simply moved along. This time I didn’t have even that much chance. Carrie’s soul had been flayed right out of her body along with her life essence.
If I was really lucky, there were enough pieces of her soul sticking to the insides of my shields that I could put it back together. I stepped back out of the Dead Zone as fast as I’d gone in. Carrie’s body was arching under my hand, exactly like my healing power was a burst of electricity trying to restart her heart. That was how little time had passed. I looked up, the Sight raging full-on, and my stomach fell.
My shields hadn’t held the stolen life forces in. My brain scrabbled around that, trying to understand why, and landed on a six-year-old’s answer, the kind of thing that fixes itself in a kid’s mind and the adult never quite lets go: of course the shields hadn’t held. Their essence had been gobbled up by Nothing, and everybody knows you can’t hold nothing.
This was not the kind of deeply held childhood belief that would get anybody on the entire planet except me in trouble. I vowed that I would later stab an ice pick through the part of my brain that was still six, and got up, shaking with anger, to face down the Nothing.
It had taken everything it was built on, all the wounds and pain born of genocidal history, all the raw power of life it had just obliterated, and it sharpened itself on the whetstone of the fresh terror spiking from everyone else in the holler. It whipped around, no longer a Nothing, but instead becoming something honed, a personification of not just death, but murder. An executioner, an executioner’s ax. It wasn’t that anthropomorphized, but that was the sense of it, its weight ready to fall.
And there were so many people in the holler for it to fall onto. Dozens of them, everyone who had come up from town an c frh=“1em”d from across the county to try to help heal the crying mountain. There was so much power here, and so much good will, and it was ripe for the plucking. My shields, strong as they were, would be spread too thin across this much space. I could not protect them. Not by fighting. So I did the only thing I could think of.
I dropped my shields.
Chapter Eight
The Executioner went still, like a giant gray smear of evil suddenly catching its breath. I wasn’t sure how sentient it was, though I had considerable faith in the sentience behind it. It was its Master’s dog, just like the Morrígan had been, just like all the others had been. And the Master really ought to be smart enough not to fall for me making myself vulnerable this way, but the fact of the matter was, if he’d done it to me, I’d have gone for his throat, too, never mind what the smart thing was. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when the Executioner swung toward me, slow and ponderous like a thing trying to fool me with its slow ponderousness.
It was not a Nothing anymore. My brain wasn’t going to pull that trick again. I could catch an Executioner. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it once I caught it, but that was a problem for later. Hopefully not much later, but later. I flexed my hand, waiting for just the right moment, and when it moved, I drew a rapier out of thin air.
An elf king had made it for a god, and I’d taken it away from the god. Like any decent magic sword, it had useful qualities, like being summonable from the ether, rather than having to carry it around a modern world. But like any decent magic sword, it also had flaws—or I did. For the past year I’d been alternating between learning how to use it and paying the price for not having my healing magic and my warrior’s path in balance. For most of the time I’d owned it, I could either fight with it, or I could fill it with magic. I couldn’t do both without suffering significant backlash.
But that was yesterday’s news.
Today the sword blazed blue, my power searing through it. Healing power invested in an edged weapon made for powerful mojo. For a moment I thought what to do with the Executioner after I’d caught it was going to be moot. An adrenaline rush of battle thrill erupted within me, and I met the creature halfway, more than ready to spike it.
To my complete shock, the Executioner chickened out.
It split in half, gray cloudy body ripping down the middle and both sides passing so close by that I felt the cold misty rush against my cheeks and arms. I spun around, howling in childish offense as it reamalgamated and fled up the mountainside.
Fled toward Ada and Aidan, just now cresting the path leading from the holler.
For the second time in as many minutes I dropped every personal shield, but this time I threw everything I had up the path, willing it to get there before the Executioner did. Aidan’s name echoed around the mountain, cried out not just by me but by half the valley’s population.
Sound and shields and evil all hit him in nearly the same instant. He and Ada both turned as voices screamed warnings, and I couldn’t tell if they fell because the Executioner hit them or because my shields slammed into place so hard as to knock them to the ground. I knew the Executioner hit my shields: I felt the impact reverberate in my bones, and caught a taste of whiplash as it struck back at me, too, forgetting or not caring about the dist f frh=widance. I sucked back just enough magic to instigate rudimentary shields and it gave up. Not, I thought, because it couldn’t have taken me, but because Aidan was potentially more poorly shielded, and it was hungry for as much power-bearing life force as it could suck down.
I was halfway up the mountain when Ada Monroe slammed a four-foot-long hickory log against the Executioner’s spine.
It misted to pieces again, and the log crashed against the shields I was holding around Aidan. A roar of approval chased me up the mountain, my own voice fronting it as the leading shout. The Executioner came together again, its ax-like aspects increasing as it prepared to strike Ada
down. She swung her hickory bat again, and to my astonishment, I Saw power streak the air. Green, the determined, resolute color that most buildings and protective structures were imbued with. It hit the Executioner with more force than I’d have expected, and by that time I was only ten steps away. I launched myself at it in a superhero jump, fully intending to slam my sword into its shady skull from above.
It howled in fury and for the third time, fled. I cast the sword aside as I came down, seized Ada’s shoulders when I landed, and bellowed, “You! Are! AWESOME!” into her face. Then we both dropped to our knees on either side of Aidan, whose brilliant, multivariegated aura was spinning wildly with fear, surprise, confusion, pride, anger and a dozen other emotions I couldn’t focus on long enough to name.
Pride won out, at least temporarily, because he, too, was bellowing, “MOM! DID YOU SEE THAT! YOU’RE AWESOME!” at Ada, and smacking at both of us as we tried to make sure he was all in one piece.
I couldn’t See any indication that the Executioner had ripped any life force away from him, but his aura was so overwhelming I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to tell. I just didn’t know him well enough. I looked up at Ada, meeting her eyes, and we both blurted, “Is he okay?” at the same time.
“I’m fine.” Aidan sat up, suddenly remembering his dignity. In remembering, he looked so much like my friend Billy’s thirteen-year-old son I giggled. Aidan glowered at me and I wiped laughter away.
Once it was gone I remembered the chaos left in the valley below, and all hope of humor faded. I got up and stared down the path I’d taken, realizing it was not humanly possible for me to have climbed the distance I had in the time I had. Rattler?
Ssspeed is an easier gift in the otherworlds, he answered wearily, but when necesssssary…
“Thank you,” I whispered aloud. “Thank you.”
I felt his pleasure in the acknowledgment, and let the poor snake drift back into resting. I badly needed to spend some quiet time in a drum circle, letting it fill me up and replenish my spirit snake. I’d done a little of that work in Ireland before Sara called, but not nearly enough. It wasn’t looking especially promising to get any done in North Carolina, either. I let out a long, slow breath, and murmured, “I’m sorry,” to everyone in the valley.