by C. E. Murphy
Aidan remained below the vortex, his hair purely white and his voice hoarse from shouting. Hoarse like a raven’s, like he was taking Raven Mocker into himself and we were running out of time. I didn’t know how we could run out of time when we had our spirit animals to help, spirit animals who could stretch and slow and speed up time, but we were running out and I had no answers.
My father, exasperated, roared, “Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, get your ass over here!”
To the best of my knowledge, he had never used my full legal name before. He’d never called me Siobhán. I wasn’t sure he’d known he’d khow to pronounce it. Hell, I hadn’t been sure how to pronounce it until fairly recently, even though I’d looked it up dozens of times. Shevaun Grania, that’s what it sounded like, except coming from my father it also sounded sort of like the voice of God. I was hopping to it, getting my ass over there, before I even knew I was moving.
Dad put his hands out, palms up. I put mine on top of them instinctively. He exhaled a huge sigh of relief, and without asking or explaining, transferred the weight of the power circle to me. I hadn’t even known that was possible. He waggled a warning finger under my nose and stomped away, giving the distinct impression that I’d been wasting valuable time.
The circle fluctuated with the change of keepers, but didn’t fade in any way. I felt the strength of everyone inside the circle helping to keep it viable: Sara, Les, even Ada, who’d woken up at some point. The poor military guy was only putting out stress and confusion, not positive energy, but with the power circulating through me I could hear Ada’s murmur, her explanation to him about what he could do to help. I’d known she was a good woman before she’d wanted to adopt Aidan, but I was increasingly impressed with her resolute awesomeness. Morrison, like the others, was expending energy, but he was also carving something with a Swiss Army knife and a huge amount of concentration. Watching him reminded me of the carving he’d done in his own garden, the tiny figurine that had proven to be me, and my heart lurched.
Dad knelt in the center of the circle, taking up a number of branches that had been cut free from trees when the chopper went down. He pulled a knife from the back of his jeans, which surprised me in that I was surprised to be surprised. Of course Dad had a knife. He probably had an entire survival kit tucked into pockets and sleeves, because that was my father. He sharpened four sticks to deadly points in record time, then pulled a leather pouch out from under his shirt. I rolled my eyes at the sky because he was proving my point, but in rolling, saw Aidan again, and lost all humor.
By the time I looked back at Dad two seconds later, he’d taken a pinch of tobacco from the pouch, and Morrison was throwing him the thing he’d been carving: a small, rudimentary pipe. Dad packed the tobacco in and lit it with a match that came from the pouch, then sprang to his feet and strode from one side of the circle to the other, driving his stakes deep into the earth. By the time he was done, the pipe was smoking pretty well, leaving the rich scent of tobacco to follow him. He stopped in the middle of the circle, took a piece of black cloth from a pocket, and wrapped the pipe in it, giving it an air of permanence despite having just been carved.
The smoke created a drifting barrier inside the power circle, a secondary circle that reinforced the first one. Dad tipped his head back, blowing a deep lungful of smoke toward Aidan, the wights, and the shrieking portal. The first breaths barely touched the wights before they ripped themselves away from the circle and came, en masse, at my father.
It was all the excuse the military guy needed. The wights had taken themselves out of the shielding provided by Aidan’s presence, and the guy’s first shots took three of them out. For an instant they clashed together, chaotic indecision at its finest. Dad puffed another huge lungful of smoke at them and one shriveled in the air, collapsing into a dusty pile. Aidan’s chanting grew increasingly determined, and I struggled not to hop in place. I wanted to help. I wanted to do something. Never mind that I had no idea what to do and that everything I’d tried thus far had backfired. I wasn’t accustomed to being left holding left ho the ball, or in this case, holding the power circle. Close enough.
As if feeling my impatience, Aidan’s shouting strengthened and the vortex sped up, testing the bounds of the power circle. I curled a lip and dug in. I might’ve been left holding the ball, but that didn’t mean I would let myself get sacked. Or something like that. Football metaphors were not my strong point.
Three of the wights had the good sense to abandon the attack on Dad and retreat to the safety Aidan offered. Less than they hoped, though: the moment they were close enough, he stretched his hands out and sucked them dry, gobbling up every last bit of magic that kept them functioning. Black light shot through the vortex, expanding it downward, since that was the only direction it could go. Aidan didn’t drop, though, only became more central to the expanding darkness. My heart started hammering in overtime as I wondered what happened when he became enveloped by the vortex.
Dad, in a voice much stronger than Aidan’s, began a counter-chant. He called on spirits I knew nothing about: men from the Lower World, a Red Man and a Purple Man. The Purple Man had a familiar feel to him, a Trickster feel that reminded me of Coyote. He came from the sky, dancing backward and covering his eyes with one hand as he shouted and teased at Aidan. The Red Man came from below, strong and generous of spirit, and drew arrows from his bones to fire at the vortex above.
One struck Aidan, and he fell.
It was a chance. I took it.
*
Aidan’s garden was shockingly vulnerable. Not surprising, I guessed, since it had been invaded by the Executioner and very possibly by Raven Mocker himself. The Executioner would have very little need to guard its own personal space, though I thought Raven Mocker had a lot more self-awareness. Especially if Raven Mocker was the Master, but that thought wasn’t worth pursuing. I could deal with the Executioner. Raven Mocker was a bigger fish to fry. I took a breath, trying to understand my surroundings, and put my money on Aidan’s possession being mostly Executioner: I had no sense of a personal vendetta, no active will beyond drinking down the available power. The Executioner’s hunger was only a funnel, passing what it took on to the Master, and what was left of Aidan’s garden had that transitory feel to it.
The walls had fallen. More than fallen. They had become ragged edges of a flat earth, with once-rich soil collapsing into nothingness while rivers of water poured over the sides. Every drop that passed wore away more of the garden’s area, and it ran relentlessly.
So did rain, pounding from vast black clouds against earth so water-laden it sucked at my feet, trying to hold me back. Dark shadows were illuminated by rapid explosions of lightning that struck time and again at shattered trees. Somewhere in there, I told myself: somewhere in there, a kid was huddling, holding a candle against the dark. All I had to do was find him. If the Executioner had no particular sense of self, it shouldn’t be that hard. It seemed logical that something without a sense of self wouldn’t think to disguise something that had a sense of self.
An eleven-foot-tall metal monstrosity of spikes and plate mail, bearing a sword larger than I was, erupted out of the darkness and put paid to that thought.
I nearly fell off the edge of the world, trying to escape it. Dirt crumbled under my fingers as I scrambled back to solid land. One of my knees dropped alarmingly before I lurched myself forward and crawled, then ran, for the garden’s center at s centetop speed. The Executioner lumbered after me, sending whole yards of earth falling away into the void as it ran. This was going to have to be a fast fight, or there would be nothing left of Aidan’s garden to recover. I got to what appeared, in the darkness, to be about as central a location as was to be had, and turned to face the Executioner with two fists full of healing power.
If nothing else, the magic provided light, but that proved less heartening than I might have hoped, since I could now see clearly how badly damaged the land was. I didn’t know how lush Aidan’s gar
den had been to start with, though I was betting it was in much better condition than my own. Even if it was as uninspired as mine to begin with, though, the fraying landscape had taken an appalling amount of damage. I breathed, “C’mon, kid,” and lobbed a ball of power into the Executioner’s gut, hoping to wake in Aidan a vestigial remembrance of what it was like to be one of the good guys.
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 Execsity theutioner 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 la I was tte, 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.