Powers

by James A. Burton

  Or maybe Buddha-nature conquered Kali-nature. Either way, a win. He slumped down to sitting on the dead leaves and forest duff, running his fingers through his hair. Combing some other dead leaves out of it. Sweat chilled on his back and under his arms and he shivered with it. Aftermath of combat. Unnecessary combat. The worst kind, as far as he was concerned, as if any kind was good.

  Maybe she’d never lived in a land with bears in it. Never learned their language, their bluffs and real threats. Never learned that they were gods, too.

  More likely, she’d been afraid the bear would steal her blood vengeance. Not nearly as sweet, if your enemy dies by some other hand. Some other paw.

  He looked up. She was still glaring at him, stance saying that she really, really wanted to kick his ass into next week. The way he felt, he’d almost welcome the chance to thump her.

  She spun on the balls of her feet rather than her heel, always a warrior, always keeping balance, and stalked across the sunset-dappled clearing and halted, still stiff with anger, and reloaded the shotgun from whatever inner stash of ammo she carried. Then she scanned the forest around them, shotgun at rest against her hip, looking anywhere except at him. She did not ask for the pack and more shells. He wasn’t going to dig them out, unasked.

  Albert levered himself off the ground, leaning on the cane, and then limped across to the dead bear. Close up, he could verify the scales, dark brown verging on black, dull rather than glossy, with raised rib lines as if they’d grown reinforcing along the way. Where he’d slashed, it looked like they were a quarter-inch thick or more. And that was the throat, where a bear wanted flexibility. He laid his hand on fading warmth and blood between the ruined ears and muttered a few words that came to him, asking forgiveness in a language that he hadn’t used in centuries. Didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear himself. The stars could.

  Then, “Go well, Brother Bear.”

  Never give insult without intending it.

  But he couldn’t stay long enough for a proper wake and chanting the spirit along its journey. Gloom gathered in the clearing, full dark would come fast, and they didn’t want to be out in it. They hadn’t seen any fireflies since the gateway-cave, but assumed the beasts were nocturnal. They made camp each evening before sunset. Her miniature tent might not be much, but it seemed to be enough. So far.

  A glow curved across the edge of his vision, zeroing in on the dead bear, and he jerked back. Firefly. That was damned fast, coming upwind on the scent of death.

  Albert backed away. Another glow arrowed in, this time from upwind, that didn’t make sense. And another. He spun around. One came straight at him, he was between it and the corpse, and it flew . . . around him.

  Scavengers. Given the choice, they went for dead meat rather than live. Trapped in the cave and starved, they hadn’t had a choice. Probably selective breeding for aggression, too.

  I could hate the people who run this place. Easy. Really, really hate them.

  The fireflies could communicate. A colony, spreading out to forage, call the others when you found something juicy? Like bees and the honey dance?

  They came from every direction. Settling to feed in the darkening twilight, they made the corpse glow. More colors than yellow, here—red, orange, yellow-green, blue. They swarmed above it as well, dancing in the air. He picked out those groups of three again, the threes of three and the threes of threes of three, moving in unison. The mass of them made flames in the night air.

  A king’s funeral pyre, a burning dragon-ship.

  He stared, frozen. Then moved one step, two steps, closer. Closer. They chewed the scales, edge in, as well as the wounds he’d made. They seemed to ignore him. He could pick out individuals and follow them. Each trio contained three different colors. They fed. They danced their patterns in the air. They settled to the ground. They came together. They separated and the glows faded.

  They were mating.

  New life out of death.

  No clue how that worked, with three. Two males and a female? The other way around? Three different sexes, with the three different colors? Three different ages with different roles?

  He backed away again and found a tree in the darkness. He sat, back against its strength to hold him up. He watched the fireflies and wept. More came, and more, and more, the later ones from further away, most likely. A bear corpse, a bear wake, would have to be a rare gift.

  “Wheeled the battle-crane

  “Over bodies of slain

  “Of blood drank its fill

  “Sated fight-gull’s bill . . . ”

  Egil Skallagrímsson came to his tongue, unbidden. More followed from the sagas, the Eddas—praise for the fallen, the valor of warriors, the might of their kings and the wealth of their lands. He chanted the Old Norse of the skalds, since his own strength lay elsewhere. Albert sang his bear-kin off on the next voyage.

  Whatever that was.

  He watched all night, until the multi-colored “fire” faded into dawn and Brother Bear lay as a pile of bones. Nothing ate him.

  Not even a mosquito. He shook himself and groaned to his feet using the tree behind him as brace and leaned on his cane, a cane again instead of a god-killer, and he needed it. Damned near everything ached, from his hair down to his toenails. He stared at three narrow rips across his right sleeve and on to the belly of his jacket. Claw marks. He hadn’t seen them in the gathering darkness, hadn’t felt the blow that caused them. Brother Bear had come that close to gutting him, even blind and dying.

  The clearing waited around him in the dawn calm. Crows called in the distance, he had no idea how far, but his hearing seemed to still be getting better. He wondered how crows found any carrion to scavenge, in a land with fireflies. But crows ate damn near anything.

  Across the clearing, she sat in lotus in front of another tree-trunk. She’d been crying too, he saw it in the streaks in the dirt on her face.

  He limped over to her. She did not look up.

  Instead, she held her notepad up to him.

  Please forgive me. I didn’t know. I thought the bear was going to kill you.

  He stared down at her. This was going to get awkward. When you ask God to forgive you, He’s supposed to do it. That’s part of the bargain.

  Depending on the exact theology involved, of course. Some gods aren’t big on the forgiveness bit. They prefer wrath and eternal torture. Even for problems they caused in the first place.

  He took the pad and wrote. You’ll have to forgive yourself. You can’t push that job off on someone else.

  He knew that one too well.

  She read his note. She nodded. Head still down, she tucked the pad away and reached a hand up to him. He took it and pulled her up as she unfolded from her lotus and then steadied her as she staggered and worked her legs into a semblance of function. She’d been sitting like that all night? Penance?

  Self-flagellation was simpler. They’d come across and dodged plenty of thorn-bushes if she felt the need.

  She bent down, a reminder of how much taller she was than him, and kissed him on the forehead.

  That scared him, probably scared him more than if she’d pulled a gun on him. He didn’t remember what a kiss from Kali meant, but it couldn’t be good.

  But she wasn’t Kali, not really. He did remember what the kiss of the mountain winds meant. Frostbite. Hypothermia. Death.

  Kiss the ice goddess and die. Men who survived could be maimed for life, scarred cheeks and ragged ears, missing fingers, toes, even whole hands or feet.

  She pulled away from him, dropped his hand, and turned to pick up her shotgun from where it lay next to the tree. Turned back and drew interlocking triangles in the air with her free hand. The Seal.

  That way, he pointed, going by the sandalwood “smell” rather than the Seal’s own buzz.

  It felt closer, enough that he thought, he hoped to think, they’d reach it in another couple of days of trudging. That was going by the way the feel of its distance had changed as the
y walked, extrapolating. The weakening had a different feel than distance, not one he could explain even to himself, but he could tell. It almost came down to the pitch of a harp-string as the harper tightened its peg. The buzzing in Albert’s teeth changed pitch as the Seal weakened, as the crack widened and lengthened across that ancient iron, he could see it in his mind.

  Anyway, the distance they’d already covered was greater than the distance that remained. Whatever that meant. Simple distance didn’t mean that much, to feet on the ground and headed across the grain of the land.

  He knew he could be twenty feet from the Seal and not be able to touch it. That depended on what guards Mother had set on it. She wouldn’t leave something important to chance. He knew her better than that.

  The way led generally downward, but not continually so. First a slow slope through dense forest, then faster slope with scrub cherry, hawthorn bush with its wicked two-inch spikes, ravine and rocks and a tangle of briars—looked like raspberries but not fruit season—then slippery moss and a creek of algae-greased stones tipping underfoot, trying to spill him. Climb out again, skirt a tangle of fallen rotting tree-trunks that looked like windstorm blow-down or a giant’s game of jackstraws, climb down to another wider creek with a wade and more leeches looking for lunch and another climb—they’d have an easier path if they headed just about any way but the one they followed, the one his sense of the Seal told him to follow.

  That would be Mother at work. She knows where we had to come from, where we’ll be trying to go. She hid the Seal wherever reaching it would be hardest. As soon as she knew Legion had dragged me into this, she grabbed the Seal and moved it and planned her new defenses and told me to leave it be. I can just see her bending over a map and drawing the straight lines she knew I’d have to take and cackling like an evil witch out of fable at the thought of us taking this route or that between the gate and the Seal.

  And then offering that rail line as bait, an easier way, level and clear and headed in the right direction. If Mother offers an “easier way”—

  Mel is right. “That bitch” would fit just fine.

  Across another ridge, down into another ravine, larger still, he could probably call it a valley and not be wrong. He hated this uphill and downhill, it played hell with his hip, with his calf and thigh muscles. He could walk for miles in the city or on level ground, but rough land just took it right out of him. Mother knew that. He wondered what she had planned for further on, once she’d worn her victims down.

  A swamp, maybe, worse than a river or lake because you can’t take a boat. Assuming you could find a boat, steal a boat, in lands where no one lives. The ocean, maybe, hiding the Seal on an island far offshore in treacherous waters filled with sharks. Whatever.

  I’ve never been worth a damn in boats. I need to set my anvil on solid ground.

  She knows I can’t swim.

  Can Mel?

  They topped another ridge, looked down through trees over a steeper slope still. One he didn’t want to have to climb down. Sharp rocks and loose soil and slippery moss and a tangle of brush.

  At the bottom, a river. Naturally.

  Not a big river, as rivers go, no Lower Rhine or Mississippi, but a couple-hundred yards of flat water and serious current, he could see ripples from the rocks and gauge that from here. He saw buoys marking a channel, throwing their own wakes on the water. Which meant boats.

  Of course they’d use boats. Rivers meant easier, safer access in a land where building roads was dangerous and difficult.

  He looked down again, trying to sort out the bottom of the slope in his head. From this distance and angle, it looked like it dropped to bare gray rock and then steepened into dark water. They stood on the outside edge of a bend, where the current struck head-on and had eaten right down to bedrock.

  No floodplain, no landing.

  Choosing this route, choosing the sandalwood rather than the buzzing, led them to a dead end. He still could “smell” the sandalwood, on the far side of the water.

  Which side are you on?

  XVIII

  This looks like the best choice we have, Mel wrote.

  Albert looked down at her “best choice.” The slope of bare gray rock and tangled brush looked a little less steep than some of the routes they’d studied, steeper than others. None of it looked good to him. He wasn’t a rock climber. And his hip hurt. And that river looked cold. It looked . . . sinister—dark gray-green with milky eddies and boils like something that flowed straight and gritty with rock-flour from a glacier, although some of that was reflecting the gray sky overhead. He was pretty sure they were about to get wet from above as well as below.

  The major difference he could see, between this particular bit of canyon edge and the half mile upstream or down they’d scouted, was it had a couple of possible places to stand on the way down and a little pocket of grass and trees and dirt at the bottom reaching to the river’s edge. The rest of the stone face fell straight into water and looked like it headed down from there to a considerable depth.

  Mother had laid out her plans well, aiming the shortest distance between two points right over a river gorge rather than just a valley. Jumbled hard dark stone, basalt looked like, and tangled blow-down timber blocked them at either end of this section. Going around that would take them a mile or more back into the forest, rough going if possible at all, and wouldn’t guarantee a better view at the end of it.

  Of course, they could have followed the railroad. Which meant following Mother’s script. He didn’t find that attractive. It probably led to a choke-point of some kind, army garrison or whatever, and Major Trouble.

  He shrugged. Mel was the mountain goddess. He had to assume that she knew climbing. He scribbled his foremost thought on his pad and poked it under her nose. I’ve told you I can’t swim?

  She responded with a visible snort.

  They could actually talk, if they had to. If they shouted directly in each other’s ears. Jotting notes still came out ahead. She flipped her notebook back to the all-purpose page, getting rather wrinkled and smudged by now.

  Pack.

  He shrugged out of it and set it in front of her. He hadn’t poked around inside of it—that would be like searching her underwear drawer—and didn’t know what other miracles she could draw from the depths. A helicopter? Or, both more compact and more true to her heritage, a magic carpet? But if it held infinite resources, they wouldn’t have run out of food.

  Rope. She pulled out the hank of parachute cord they’d already used, no new revelations. It wasn’t long enough to reach the bottom of the gorge, but those knobs and ledges below them started to fit together in his mind. Drop down to that one, use it as an anchor to the next, then to the next.

  Yes, she knew what she was doing. At least that far.

  If the rope is as strong as she said it is. If it doesn’t rub on a sharp outcrop and chafe through. If. If. If.

  And if I trust her not to drop me headfirst on the rocks. She wants me dead. Blood pays for blood.

  Insha’Allah.

  Which he did not write down. She’d told him to lay off the cultural references.

  She was scribbling. Tie on. Walk down. Stop on that ledge and untie. She pointed. He nodded. I’ll keep tension on the rope. Don’t fall—this will hold your weight but it won’t take impact loads.

  That reassured him a hell of a lot.

  He looped the rope around his chest this time, wanting the pull higher on his body, as she anchored herself to a tree with the other end of the line. He tucked his cane inside the loop to have both hands free. Then, backing up step by step, he edged out on the bare gray stone and worked downward. He could walk down, back down, using the brace of the rope to keep his feet off at an angle to his body. The slope started at maybe forty-five degrees, the limit of what he could walk on without the rope but it got steeper below.

  I’ll stand out like a cardinal in full ceremonial regalia in a whorehouse if a boat comes along the river right now
.

  That thought hurried him along, as well as the reminder from his hip that this wasn’t any more fun than walking. Worse, even. It moved from a throbbing ache to a jab of fire each time he took his weight on that side. Something about the angles, maybe.

  He reached the ledge. He knew there had to be a lot more rope left, but he assumed that she knew what she was doing. If she didn’t, they were fucked anyway. He untied, trying not to think about her just pulling up the rope and walking away to leave him to starve and die of thirst in the middle of the rock face . . .

  Well, I can always just step out and roll down to the bottom and splatter all over the rocks or fall in the river and drown. Faster, either way.

  But she said she’d tried the falling on rocks thing, and it didn’t work. Can gods drown?

  She’d pulled the rope up, all right, but it was coming down again with the pack. Which kinda sorta implied that she was going to follow it.

  I’m not sure that makes me feel any better. She’s been acting funny today. As much as I can tell with somebody I’ve known for less than two weeks now.

  As if time was any sort of reliable measure, with Legion buggering around in it.

  He untied the pack and watched the line snaking back up across the rock face. She was coming down then, moving about three times as fast as he had across the rocky slope. He understood why she’d had him stop well short of the length of the rope. Less than half the length, to be more precise. Because she was using it doubled, slung around the tree at the top, so she could pull it down after. Clever woman.

  Or maybe it’s such a common move in climbing that she didn’t even think about it. An automatic part of analyzing a slope, like me looking at a fire in the forge.

  She was standing behind him on the small ledge with brush and one scrawny weather-beaten tree. Listening to her winds, and yelling “Down!” loud enough for him to hear and emphasizing it with a push that could have shoved him off the ledge if she’d half tried. He tucked and froze behind thin shrubbery as she sprawled flat behind the tree. Reaching out, she pulled the pack in behind her.