Mountain Echoes wp-8

by C. E. Murphy

  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, certainly 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 prsaileaessed 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 locat anmewhion. 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 p
ut 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 mean, 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!”

  I stammered through “I’m of the People, of a far-away tribe,” to expressions of growing disbelief. One of them said something to the effect of, “You speak the language of the People poorly.”

  I nodded in embarrassment. I would no doubt speak it poorly by their standards anyway, given that the language had almost certainly changed over the past few hundred years, but my lack of fluency made it a lot worse. I wished to hell I could reach back in time and waken the depth of immersion speech I’d had whain sd over en I was about eight. There’d been a year or so there when Dad and I spoke almost exclusively Cherokee, until I turned into a brat and started refusing. I wanted to kick my younger self, which was not an unusual sentiment for me. This time, however, I had Renee, and gave her a hopeful mental poke. Not so much for the kicking myself, but maybe for the awakening long-dormant language memories.

  She gave me a priss-mouthed look, but then she slipped into what felt like a meditative state, as if she was centering herself to bring up what I needed. I whispered, Thank you, and in the meantime tried scraping together what I did remember on my own. “We’re lost.”

  A snicker that was pure body language and no sound at all ran around our group of captors. I muttered and tried again. “I’m a shaman—”

  Suspicion and clarification settled on them in equal parts. It wasn’t particularly couth, in my mental image of things, to go around announcing one was a healer, and I thought they might feel similarly. People who actually claimed to be shamans were possibly more likely to be sorcerers. On the other hand, the expected unexpectedness displayed by a shaman probably went a long way toward explaining my bizarre costuming.

  The next round of rapid speech went completely over my head. It ended with the spokesman pointing interrogatively at Morrison as a headache began pounding behind my left eye. I had understood Méabh, who had stepped out of the other end of time speaking ancient Irish. I had understood Lugh and Nuada and I understood Cernunnos, none of whom spoke English as a matter of course. I had no idea why I couldn’t understand these men.

  Except I hadn’t been able to understand my cousin Caitríona and Méabh when they’d both started speaking Irish. The magic translator had shorted out somehow then.

  And I spoke Cherokee. Not a lot, but apparently enough for the magic to figure I was okay on my own. It took everything I had not to clutch my head and rattle it in frustration. Instead, I hissed, “Can you understand them?” to Morrison, who nodded in rightful bewilderment.

  It would not help our case for me to stomp around in circles shouting imprecations at myself and my magic. Instead I took the deepest, most calming breath I could, and suggested, “You talk to them, then.”

  “Me?”

  “Just try, Morrison. I think they’ll be able to understand you. It’s this sort of field effect. It worked with Caitríona and Méabh in Ireland, anyway.”

  Morrison’s expression suggested I had begun speaking a foreign language, but he turned to the Cherokee spokesman and said, “No. I’m her companion, a…” He shot me another look, obviously wondering if shamans typically had handlers who helped keep their feet on the ground.

  They didn’t, as far as I knew. The spokesman, however, didn’t seem to think a handler was a particularly strange thing for me to have. He spoke again, rapidly. Morrison’s shoulders went back and this time the look he cast at me was faintly alarmed. “No. Yes? I don’t know. Walker, they want to know if we’ve been touched by the gods, if that’s why we look so pale. If I say no are they going to kill us?”

  “They’re not able to kill us.” That, at least, I was firm on. “And tell them no, pale-skinned people aren’t gods, they just come from far away.”

  “Are you trying to change history, Walker?”

  “Yes. I’ll let you klom farnow if it works.”

  Morrison made a sound of actual amusement and said exactly what I’d said, in English, except the Cherokee spokesman understood him when he clearly hadn’t understood me. I wanted to hop up and down with frustration. Magic was stupid. Cool and awesome and amazing, but also stupid. Morrison and the spokesman exchanged several sentences, including mine and Morrison’s names, and—this much I caught—the spokesman’s, as well. He was Gawonii, and I was beginning to think he was the guy smart and brave enough to have shot at me.

  “They think they should take us back to talk to their shaman. What do you think?”

  “I think it won’t…” I stopped, then reconsidered. “I was gonna say I think it won’t get us any closer to finding Aidan, but I could be wrong. Just because I can’t track magic doesn’t mean their shaman can’t. Ask if they’ve seen any other newcomers. No, never mind, if they’d seen those wights they’d be trying to kill us, not talk to us. Yeah. Tell them we would be honored to meet their shaman.”

  That, at least, was a right thing to say. Two dozen satisfied Cherokee warriors formed up around us, and marched us three hours upstream down the river I’d just followed downstream. It was late afternoon by the time we got back t
o the village, and now that we were safely captive, every single person turned out to give us a once-over.

  The children thought we were hysterical. They darted between the warriors, snatching at my coat and Morrison’s jeans, tugging at shoelaces and making quick grabs at our gun holsters. Morrison smacked one kid’s enterprising hand as it got too close to his pistol. The boy yelped, then skittered back with the air of a child uncertain if he should be infuriated or thrilled. He, after all, had actually touched one of the strangers, which I figured had to be worth quite a lot of street cred.

  The adults were equally curious, but far more wary. The men escorting us said what they knew about us—that much I could follow—and it was clear many of them weren’t certain if they believed we weren’t gods or spirits of some kind. I wasn’t sure if claiming we weren’t helped or hurt us, but I did know for damned sure I was not going to reinforce the idea by agreeing to it.

  The deeper we got into the village, the older the crowd became. There weren’t nearly as many elders as I expected, and it was clear the younger men and women were fiercely protective of them. Finally the gathering split, revealing a woman whose presence was so powerful that if she’d been carved of stone and unable to move, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  She was strong-boned, her hair threaded with white, and if she had been beautiful in her youth it had faded into something more enduring than beauty. Rock seemed more bending than she, and oaks more swayable. She stood with an alacrity that belied the weight of stone within her, and made chattering sounds to shoo our warrior escort back. They scampered like children, losing none of their dignity as they did so, and the medicine woman stalked a slow circle around us. More than stalked: I didn’t need to trigger the Sight to feel the power she laid down, creating a barrier with her will alone. It rang of keeping things in, and I did not want to test my mettle against it.