Mountain Echoes wp-8

by C. E. Murphy

  Daniel Raven Mocker smiled, folded his wings around himself, and leapt straight up, smashing through the power circles and disappearing into the night.

  The circles shattered, magic ringing like gongs. Fragments of power exploded everywhere like a grenade going off. The bits that hit me settled into my skin, absorbing, renewing my strength, but when they hit the nonadepts in the group, they knocked them silly. The entire inner circle, and Morrison, were flattened. The Red and Purple men disappeared, no longer bound by the circle and magic to this place. Dad clutched a tree to stay upright, his gaze betrayed and astonished as he looked skyward.

  I looked too, blank with confusion. Danny couldn’t be gone. I hung up on that thought, even though it was blatantly wrong. He had to be up there somewhere, soaring on raven wings. I croaked, “Raven?” and my spirit animal appeared, looking like he’d gone three rounds with Mike Tyson. I shut my mouth on asking him to go after Danny. Wiping myself out always seemed bad enough, but wiping my spirit animals out was guilt-inducing. Raven croaked in return, then went back inside my head where it was nominally safe. I couldn’t blame him.

  Dad, faintly, said, “He shouldn’t have been able to do that,” which made me laugh. Not a happy laugh, but a laugh. Dad tried glaring at me, but didn’t have enough oomph left for it to carry any weight. “That ritual is meant to kill a Raven Mocker, Joanne, and there were two power circles. He shouldn’t have been able to break through.”

  “Most Raven Mockers aren’t packing a few genocides worth of life force, Dad. Or death power. Whatever. We…” I didn’t want to say it aloud, certainly not while meeting his eyes, so I looked up again, trying to find the shape of wings against the stars. “We lost.”

  “Nah.” Aidan spoke from beside me, sounding exhausted but certain. I squeaked and turned toward him, hands pressed over my mouth. His skin had returned to normal, except tired bruises beneath his eyes, but his hair was still bone white. I didn’t need the Sight to catch a glimpse of his aura, a kernel of power burning bright within him. He put a hand on my shoulder and shoved himself to his feet, wobbling a little before dropping his chin to his chest and whispering, “Nah. Not yet.”

  Eyes closed, he extended his hands, arms crossing at the wrists, like he was holding himself in the loosest hug possible. Like he was gathering someone else close: gathering Ayita, maybe, and when I thought it, I could nearly See it, his other half, the shared spirit that gave him so much strength. A slim girl, taller than Aidan but looking very like him, with the same cheekbones and jaw, but with a nose that was a little more like mine. I Saw her resolve, the same strength of character that she shared with her grandmother, the resolve that had let her face death in a time and way of her choosing. That, I thought, was the spark that the Executioner hadn’t been able to defeat: that was the chance Aidan had been given, that would allow him to survive. He hugged Ayita more tightly, and she stepped within him, their auras igniting into brilliance.

  Renee and Dad’s walking stick appeared on Aidan’s arms, coming up from the bones. The third, Aidan’s own, rose up from his hands, balancing itself delicately on his extended fingers. Power dropped through them, magic so heavy it seemed to lower the floor of the valley. I was glad to be kneeling, for fear otherwise I would have been flattened. Dad did drop, kneeling, as well, and nobody else had gotten further than sitting anyway. Aidan was the only one left standing.

  The earth beneath us frosted, white magic creeping over leaves, over branches, over the wrecked helicopter and beyond. My breath turned to fog, though my skin didn’t feel cold. Magic carried silence with it, washing away the memory of battle sounds and making the valley serene. Aidan gathered his arms a little closer to his chest, embracing the walking sticks, then lifted his arms.

  Soft white magic heaved upward, the ice-like frost rushing to treetops and to the distant sky beyond. I saw Raven Mocker then, a far-off shadow against the spreading brilliance. His wings cut the air, loud enough to be heard now that silence held sway everywhere else. He didn’t want to fight. He wanted to escape, so he could wreak havoc in the world beyond. He wanted to escape so I would have to hunt him, and so my attention would be split in a dozen directions. I gathered the idea of a net, knowing I didn’t have enough strength to pull him back even if I managed to catch him, but hating not to try.

  Before I even tried to cast it, Aidan’s auras became blinding, lighting the whole of the valley, and an echo ran through the mountains. Power reverberated, awakening a touch I knew. Barely knew, but I recognized it. After a moment I placed it, too, and, stunned, looked to the hills.

  My whole life I had wanted to be rescued by the cavalry. That scene always got me in the movies, even when I knew it was coming. Especially when I knew it was coming. The moment where the hero is desperately outnumbered, about to die, but he smiles and looks up, and that makes the bad guys look, too. The sheer cliffs are always empty in the first moment, but then they begin to appear. The ferocious chief on a painted horse. The resentful, respectful warrior whose life the hero saved at the beginning of the film. They’re the first to appear, and maybe it’s just that they’re there to stand witness to a hero’s death.

  But no: then the others come. Dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands, all lining the cliffs, all surrounding the gulley where the hero isn’t about to die after all, because if he does, the bad guys will die with him. I’d stayed up until all hours of the night watching old Westerns I’d seen time and time again, just to watch that scene again. I loved it beyond reason, and I had always wanted to be part of it.

  They were ghosts, this cavalry. They didn’t ride, but stood. Stepped out of the trees as light and silver, as facelver, ass and names from the past. Aidan, focused by the three walking-stick spirits, called them, guided them, and welcomed them into the present. They were so many, and so old, that the valley chilled with their presence. A power circle came to life beneath their insubstantial feet, burning more brightly and gaining speed as it passed beneath each ghost. The entire horizon came alight, every dip of the valley peopled by the serene dead, and when it reached the place it had begun, an old woman stepped forward.

  I knew her. I’d had no idea we were in that same valley, my sense of the hills far too limited to notice that. But of course we were: of course, because it was a place where Cherokee had lived once, and it was sympathetic to the youth coming to find a way back toward tradition. There were no coincidences, and just this once I was glad for it. A laugh broke in my chest, bringing tears to my eyes. I whispered, “Greetings, old one,” and the ancient shaman smiled at me from the distance.

  “This pain is ours,” she said. “This pain is old, and it is ours. We have waited, Walkingstick. You gave us what knowledge you could, and we have waited to repay that gift. We have stayed long past our time to rest, to take this pain back to the time it was born of. We will not let it poison our children after they have rebuilt from so little. This pain is ours, and we will die from it, but you will live. Live well, and do not forget us.”

  My father didn’t know where I drew my power from, but I had nothing on the magic the old shaman threw down. She rebuilt the power circle, sending magic widdershins, redoubling its strength as the Cherokee ghosts began to sing their death songs.

  Far above the valley’s hills, Raven Mocker’s wings began to shed their sooty feathers, his strength being drawn into the ghosts. Soot and ashes fell faster, breaking away. Danny careened toward the earth, trying to control his fall. He was too far to hear if he cried, or maybe he was brave enough not to, while pieces of his wings fell to the earth like melting wax, as the ghosts called home their pain.

  Chapter Thirty

  I looked away when Danny fell, not, in the end, as brave as he was. I still saw the impact from the corner of my eye, a flare of white where he hit. We would have to find the body later, but for now the despair and anger riding us all began to fade. There were hundreds of people in the forest now, the modern Cherokee who had come up ready to fight the military and now who stoo
d silent and stunned in the wash of magic and in the presence of their ancestors.

  The old shaman stomped one foot, unraveling the power circle she had built. The ghosts faded as the magic came undone, each retreat lightening the valley’s weight a little. She remained a few moments longer, looking over a valley full of people who were in spirit her children. I got to my feet awkwardly, feeling stiff and uncomfortable. She looked at me and I spread my hands. “I need to come back with you, if you’ll let me.”

  Her iron-gray eyebrows rose. I gestured at Sara. “The magic took her husband to your end of time. I need to try to save him. I don’t know if I can, but I promised I’d try.”

  Aidan spoke for the first time in what seemed like hours. “Lucas? What happened to Lucas?”

  Our hesitation in answering was answer enough. His breath rushed out of him and his hands turned to knots at his sides. “I can hold it open until you get back.”

  “What happenes if he does that?” Sara’s voice cracked, and she didn’t look at us when she asked the question, but at the old shaman instead. “What happens if we hold this time rift open? Can we save him?”

  “Does he live, in my day?”

  I shook my head, lips compressed. The shaman frowned. “Then perhaps. Maybe if his soul is still his own, or if you reach him before death takes him, perhaps he could return. But it would be dangerous. We do not die out of time, Walkingstick. We die when we are meant to. I think his soul is already lost, if he is dead in my time. I think he would return to life a sorcerer, and this battle today would be for nothing.”

  “I have to try. I’ve dealt with sorcerers before. Maybe I could…” I trailed off, because really, dealing with body-snatching sorcerers in the past hadn’t gone all that well for the host bodies.

  “No.” Sara slumped, hands useless in her lap. “No, you don’t, Joanne. If the risk is having to do this all over again…he wouldn’t want that. I do.” Her voice broke, harsh and miserable. “I want you to go save him, I want to make all of this unhappen, I want to go home and be happy again, but if a sorcerer stole his soul and came back in his place…Lucas wouldn’t want you to try. He wouldn’t want to risk it. He would say it was a good life and to let it go. So I have to, too, don’t I. Because what’re you going to do if you go back and save him but it’s not really him? Kill him again?”

  That was possibly the worst prospect I’d ever been presented with, and I’d been given a lot of unpleasant choices over the past year. Sara glanced at me and actually laughed at my expression. Not a healthy laugh, but a laugh. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. No,” she said to the ancient shaman. “No, go home. Sing for him, too, even if he wasn’t of your People. And don’t ever cross my path again.”

  The last was to me, and I couldn’t blame her for it at all. I nodded, though she wasn’t looking my way. Sara got up, brushed her knees free of debris, and left the ruin of her life along with all the rest of us.

  Most of the rest of us. Les cast Morrison and me a look, then followed Sara. Ada lurched to her feet and ran for Aidan, catching him in a hug that made him grunt and squeak with protest. Not much protest, though: he hugged her back, face buried in her shoulder, while my Dad sat down hard and rubbed his hands over his eyes. Gosh. I wondered where I’d gotten that habit from. After a minute, he said, “So this is your life, Joanne?” into his palms, but I was busy crawling toward Morrison and didn’t want to answer. Dad didn’t seem to expect an answer, either, and for a few minutes we all simply sat there, wrung out, with no thoughts for the future.

  The poor military guy finally broke the silence. Not by asking what the hell had just happened, which would have been legitimate, but by saying, “I’m going to have to radio this in. They’ll already be wondering why we haven’t reported. You probably won’t have long to get your people out of the valley.”

  I couldn’t help asking, “What are you going to tell them? And, look, I’m sorry, but what’s your name?”

  “Lieutenant Dennis Gilmore.” Lieutenant Gilmore rightfully looked as though he’d seen ghosts, and like he didn’t want to give the only answer he could. “I’m going to tell them that we had an encounter with the epidemic’s source and were able to eliminate it, but at great personal cost. We’ll send out a search team for the body, and I will identify it as our target.”

  That reminded me. I closed me. Ied my eyes, breathed, “Jesus,” and opened them again. “Lieutenant, I’m really, really sorry, but you’re going to have to burn Captain Montenegro and everybody else who died out here tonight. By sunrise.”

  He turned his wrist over, looking at a watch, then looked through broken trees at the starry night. “Four hours. We can do that, ma’am, but it’ll complicate things if the tribe is still in the woods.”

  “Won’t it complicate things if they all come back to town, too? The CDC—”

  “Ma’am, the CDC is not going to let this go. But if we can obtain the source and return it to the CDC, I believe that once they’ve satisfied themselves that the epidemic has run its course, they’ll leave Cherokee town and the Qualla Boundary without unduly disturbing its residents. The sooner you get them home so blood tests can be run, the sooner we’ll be out of your hair.” He sounded so professional I wanted to cry for him. His entire team was dead, and he was holding it together admirably. I wondered what he would let himself remember.

  Dad stood up. “We’ll get them home and we’ll get the blood tests underway. Thanks for your understanding here, Lieutenant.”

  “I can give you half an hour.” Lieutenant Gilmore went to the bodies of his fallen comrades, standing over them in silence. Dad gestured to the rest of us, and we got up to abandon the valley together.

  *

  Choppers flew overhead when the collected tribal members were barely out of the valley. Not all of the fight had gone out of them, nor would it ever, I thought; there was just too much bad blood between Natives and the government. But they’d been there when the ghosts had come to lay the pain to rest, and that went a long way toward sobering even the most hot-headed of them. Sara and Les were among them, but I stayed well out of their way, trailing near the back with Morrison. Dad, who’d taken up a position of leadership, eventually fell back to join us, and repeated the question he’d asked earlier: “Is this what your life is like, Joanne?”

  “By and large, yeah. You get used to it. Kind of.” I drew breath to lay down the accusations and the arguments we’d already started once, then sighed and let it go. He should have told me about my heritage a long time ago, no doubt about it. But he hadn’t, and that was the hand I had to play. There were no do-overs, no matter how badly I might want them. Eventually I said, “You were pretty awesome back there, actually. Those Lower World guys, that was kinda great. You should, um. You should teach me how to do that, huh?”

  “I’d like that.” Dad hesitated as much as I had, then repeated himself. “I’d like that. Does that mean you’re going to stay awhile?”

  My hand crept into Morrison’s. “Probably not. Morrison’s got to get back to work soon, and I have to go find a job.”

  “I thought you worked for the police department.”

  “I quit a couple weeks ago. This—” I lifted my hand in Morrison’s, gesturing a circle with both of them. I meant the motion to encompass the entire magical mess we’d just gone through, but realized that our entwined fingers were just as much a part of this as the magic was “—this was starting to get in the way of the job.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Slay demons and fix cars, probably. Isn’t that what most people want to do when they grow up? Oh, God, my car. I have to go get Petitego get P. I am not leaving her on the mountain for another night.”

  Dad pursed his lips and glanced at the throng of people heading down the hills. “They won’t miss us. Come on, I’ll take you across the mountains.”

  “Are you sure? Because I’m not exactly Ms. Fitness. It might be faster to—”

  “Change sh
ape and run?” Morrison asked blandly.

  “…I’d been going to say, ‘Go down to the highway and hike back up.’ Are you volunteering to go for a run on the wild side with me, Morrison?”

  “I thought you and your dad could go. Family bonding time.”

  The amazing thing was he said it with an utterly straight face, as if perfectly serious. My father, however, wrinkled his eyebrows at us both. “Shapechanging is a spiritual transformation, Mr. Morri—”

  I twitched. “Captain.”

  “Mike.”

  Dad waited a moment to see if we were going to argue about that, then said, “Mike,” cautiously. “Spiritual, not literal. People can’t shapeshift.”

  Morrison said, “Oh, I see,” while I tried so hard not to laugh that tears spilled down my cheeks. Dad looked increasingly offended, until I finally gasped and wiped my face, then patted his shoulder. “You sound just like me, Dad. Just like me. Okay. Tell you what, let’s go for a hike. Morrison, you coming?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll catch up with you in town.” Apparently he thought we really did need some bonding time, which was probably true. I kissed him, took the empty shotgun back just in case we met any wights that needed clobbering, and Dad and I slipped off to the west while everyone else headed downhill.

  For bonding time, it was remarkably silent, punctuated mostly by my swearing as I clambered over things that Dad just seemed to melt over. I really didn’t know what to say to him, nor he to me, at least not until the sun broke behind us. Once we were in the full gold and pink light of morning he stopped to study me until I became uncomfortable from it. “What?”

  “I haven’t seen you in years, Jo…anne. I just wanted to get a look at you in daylight, without a war going on around us. You grew up nice.”

  “I’m working on it, anyway.” I put my hands in my jeans pockets, shoving the long coat out of the way to do so. It made me feel like a superhero again, which once more made the coat easily the best money I’d ever spent. “You’re not going to turn out to be a horrible monster now, are you? Because this is usually about when that would happen.”