Choose Your Enemies Carefully

by Robert N. Charrette

  "The one who blocked my path to the totem realms."

  "Ah. You use the past tense, implying that you have breached the barriers I set in your mind. This is unfortunate. When I touched your astral form on the Solstice, and learned who you were, I sought to save you from yourself. You have been very persistent, as I should have expected from one with so strong a will. Perhaps I was not so foolish to worry about your ability to pierce the mask."

  Sam shuddered as the wendigo spoke. All lingering thoughts that the Man of Light was something he had dredged from his own subconscious vanished. His mind had been violated, his memories subverted by the wendigo. He felt sick and revulsed. He felt hatred.

  "You bastard! I’m not a toy for you to play with. I’m a man, you godless, soulless beast! You fragged with my mind just to frighten me away from the power I needed to stop you."

  "Stop me? A pup like you?" The wendigo laughed. "That's rich. But then, she said you had a strange sense of humor."

  The muscles in Sam’s face went slack. He felt chill all over as he remembered his not entirely strategic reason for selecting Hyde-White as the first target. "Janice," he whispered.

  "Of course, Janice. You knew she was here, didn’t you?" The wendigo paused to study Sam’s expression. "I see you did. So it was she who motivated you to come after me. So much for noble motives. It does always seem to be kinbonds that motivate the hunters. I, of all people, should not have forgotten the power of that draw."

  Indignation fueled Sam’s anger. "How dare you call yourself a person? You’re a murderer, an eater of human flesh, and a corrupter of minds. You have forfeited any claim of humanity. God as my witness, you have forfeited your right to life."

  "What right have you to judge me?" The wendigo pointed an accusing finger at Sam. "You are of the blood of man, a scion of the long line of corrupters of the earth itself. The human race has fouled its nest since its infancy. Humanity is the true despoiler, and I am relieved that I am no longer a part of that desecration. Were you able to understand your place in nature as I do mine, you would see the truth.

  "By blood, I am born of the earth and I act as my blood directs. By temperament, I have responded to the atrocities your precious humanity has visited upon its collective mother, and have learned to call the corrupted spirits of the earth. I will see the vermin of humanity scoured from the face of the planet they have defiled. I will turn the corruption back upon the real evildoers. All you need to do is look around yourself to see that I speak the truth. If you were truly moral, you would join my crusade."

  Sam felt the tug of the wendigo’s words. He, too, hated what man had done to the environment. He felt his despair and frustration curdle into rage over the thought of the betrayed trust. Then, he remembered the filthy feel of the wendigo’s previous presence in his mind and shouted. "Liar! You twist the truth to suit yourself, and I won’t fall for it. You're the corruptor, the seducer, the defiler, and the despoiler. You’re evil by nature, and I will destroy you."

  The wendigo let out a low growl through clenched teeth. Then his lips closed down over his fangs, and he smiled.

  "If I am evil, what of your sister?"

  "I won’t let you hurt her."

  "Hurt her?" The wendigo laughed. "I have no reason to hurt one of my own. You are her past and I am her future. She no longer belongs to your world, but to mine. Forget her."

  That was something Sam would never do. He felt guilty enough over how little he had accomplished in finding her. "Where is she?"

  "She is safe from your misguided attentions. When Glover told me of the disturbance at ATT-Multifax, I thought it best to take precautions."

  "What have you done with her?"

  "Brought her into the fold."

  "No!"

  "Oh, yes."

  "No!" Sam screamed again. He threw himself away from the wall and summoned his magic. Howling the words of Dog’s song, he poured his will into the effort of summoning a spirit. As soon as he felt a presence, he demanded service of it.

  A luminous mist rose from the floor. Streamers of mist floated from the walls to join the cloud beginning to swirl in the space between Sam and the wendigo. The mist thickened, becoming almost liquid in density, and poured upwards to form a shape as if filling a mold. The last of the vapor joined the hulking shape, and the whole thing became more solid, taking on the texture of poured concrete.

  The floor groaned under the weight of the manifested building spirit. Between its wide, humped shoulders there was a knob that might have been a head. Two pits of darkness opened in the knob, and Sam felt the spirit’s attention settle on him.

  The spirit’s stare unnerved him even more than the realization that he had succeeded in summoning it. The spirit’s intensity, underlaid by hostility, scraped stainless steel fingernails on the chalkboard that was the inside of his skull. The spirit was insistent; it wanted his orders, for only by discharging its duties could it leave the physical plane.

  "Destroy the wendigo," he told it. "End the blight on the city."

  The spirit turned away abruptly. Spreading its arms, it advanced on the wendigo. Each step sent tremors through the floor.

  Sam had expected that his enemy might show some fear at this sudden manifestation of power. He was disappointed. The wendigo began to vocalize. The sound started as a deep rumble in the massive chest and occasionally burst forth in a feral growl. The stench of putrefaction increased as the wendigo also spread his arms wide.

  The spirit lumbered forward and raised one blocky, fistless arm to smash its victim. The wendigo stood his ground. His only action was to convulse his outstretched fingers closed into fists.

  The spirit froze as pain flared in Sam’s head. The mystic bonds by which he directed the spirit tattered and tore. He tried to re-form them, but they slipped through his grasp.

  Across the room, the spirit turned. The smooth, seamless lines of its form had become more jagged, and its facade was pitted and marred. Like lurid tattoos, graffiti and slogans of violence defaced its surface. It took a step toward Sam. Portions of its outer covering flaked away as it moved. It stalked toward him, leaving footprints of garbage and sludgy residue.

  The wendigo gloated. "A poor choice, puppy shaman. Cities are one of the great blights that man spreads across the earth. Know now, if you had not already discerned it for yourself, that Blight is my totem. I have embraced the toxic defilement of the earth to turn it back on the source of the pollution. This cold, concrete tower has no true hearth. By its nature, the spirit you have summoned is more my servant than yours. All you have done is given me the tool for your destruction."

  42

  Janice was worried as soon as she heard the explosion. Her failure to get through on the telecom only intensified her concern. Suddenly Dan’s uncharacteristic request, that she carry a message to a business partner who lived on a lower floor of the tower, made sense. It had just been an excuse to get her out of the residence.

  She detached her spirit and sent it upwards through the building. Dan was there and well, but he was being menaced by a hostile spirit. The shaman who had summoned it was there as well, fully capable of more mischief. Since she hadn’t yet learned the secrets of casting magic through her astral body, she fled downwards and returned to her physical body.

  Hoping to reach the residence in time to help her lover, she ran to the elevator lobby. In her excitement, she fumbled her first try to enter Dan’s code. She got it right on the second try, but there was no response, not even a call acknowledgment.

  The shaft was the only one with direct access to the residence floor. Frustrated, she slammed her fist into the door. The metal buckled. She hit the door again and a gap appeared between the two panels. She dug her fingers into the space and pulled until she forced the seal. As the pressure lock released, her strength proved too much for the structures. The left panel buckled and jammed, while the right folded and slipped out of its track. She flung the useless thing behind her.

  The shaft sme
lled of magic, making her fur rise.

  She stuck her head out over the abyss and looked down. The bottom of the shaft was obscured in a dust cloud. That puzzled her until she realized that there were no cables in the shaft. Someone had sabotaged the elevator, and there would be no car arriving to carry her to the residence.

  She leaned into the opening she had forced, keeping her balance with one hand gripping the frame of the opening. With her free hand, she grabbed the rungs of the emergency service ladder and tugged. To her relief, it seemed solid enough to support her weight. Careless of the jagged metal edges protruding in her way, she swung into the shaft. The gashes she sustained began to heal as she started to climb.

  * * *

  The elevator doors on Hyde-White’s residence level buckled and blew inward with explosive force. There was no roar of explosives, only the metallic scream of tortured metal and the shattering pop of plastics. Hart knew magic when she encountered its effect.

  Toylike, a four-wheeled silver thing rolled out from under one of the lobby’s low tables and took up station in front of the opening. As the machine pulled into place, its turret swiveled to point a gun barrel into the shaft.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the drone began firing its weapon in shrill hiccups of short-duration autofire bursts. Hart heard bullets spanging off metal and concrete, but there was another sound as well, a high pitched whang which a norm would be unable to hear. The source of the sound appeared, as Glover drifted out of the shaft. Flares of light accompanied the strange sounds as bullets struck an invisible shield that protected the archdruid.

  The drone briefly ceased fire as Glover drifted over it and touched down on the thick carpet. The drone revved its motor and began to circle him, firing bursts at different portions of his anatomy in a random timing sequence. Glover watched contemptuously as the drone sought a weakness in his defense. On the third circle, Glover lashed out with his foot, deflecting the drone’s course. Before its onboard expert system could compensate, the little machine hit a piece of debris from the doors and bounced into the air. It came down on its right front fender and toppled forward. Its momentum was so great that it rolled right through the open doorway of the elevator shaft.

  "Pathetic gadfly," Glover sneered as the machine vanished from sight.

  Hart dropped her invisibility spell and pointed her pistol at Glover.

  "Shouldn’t have dropped the levitation spell, arch-druid. You don’t have an invitation to this party." Glover started at her words, but recovered quickly. "I have no further need for it and I don’t need any invitations, elf. You are no impediment to me. I presume you were watching and saw how ineffectual guns are against a magician of my skills and power."

  "I saw."

  "You don’t seem properly impressed."

  "Oh, I was impressed. That bullet shield is a real powerful trick, but I’ve got a few of my own."

  She dropped her aim to the floor by his feet and pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession. The first explosive bullet shredded the carpet and pitted the floor. Its concussive force tossed the archdruid from his feet. The second bullet chewed through the flooring and into the subflooring, and the third punched through the ceiling of the floor below. The destruction was so rapid that the stages were indistinguishable to the eye. When gravity reclaimed Glover, it pulled him through the new hole. As he passed through the opening, Hart saw the shock and surprise on his face, but he looked physically unhurt. She was surprised at the effectiveness of his protection spell.

  Hart approached the gap cautiously, carefully testing the footing before trusting her weight to the weakened floor. Looking over the edge, she saw Glover lying on top of a pile of debris. His clothes were dusted over by late-falling chunks and settling dust. She had hoped the fall would kill the archdruid; it hadn’t. He was dazed though and had dropped whatever spells he was maintaining. As a mage herself, she knew the strict concentration necessary to maintain powerful spells.

  "Are you awake. Archdruid Glover?"

  He groaned. Conscious, but not composed enough for magic.

  "I actually came loaded for bigger game, but a good hunter never passes up an opportunity."

  She fired three more times. Without the protection of his spell, he was just meat. Then, he was no more.

  * * *

  Sam crashed into things as he ran. He needed time to gather his wits. Walls and furniture that were impediments and bludgeoning obstacles to him did nothing to slow the corrupted building spirit; it just walked through them as if the object wasn’t there. The only things it detoured around were plants and the thieves’ cache of art objects scattered around the residence. Fortunately, the spirit was moving more slowly than he. as its summoner, knew it could. Under control of the wendigo, the spirit seemed inclined to play with its prey.

  Gunfire from one of the drones reminded Sam of Willie. The plan had called for her to concentrate on dealing with physical threats while he handled the magic. Her drone’s lack of success against the wendigo in his Hyde-White guise had put the monster in Sam’s purview. Sam hoped she was doing better against the security guards who were probably storming up the stairwells by now.

  Collision with a musty tapestry told him where he was in the maze of the residence. The wendigo’s sanctum was hidden behind the hanging. Its magical barrier would probably stop the spirit, but the small room would be a trap where the wendigo could deal with him at leisure.

  But, he realized, what would halt the spirit would blind it as well. In a desperate burst of speed, he cut around to the side of the sanctum, placing its barrier between him and the spirit. A groan like overstressed steel told him that the spirit had lost sight of him. If it hadn’t been limited by the manifestation, he would never have been able to pull off this little trick. Sam ran down the first hallway and cut right, trying to keep the sanctum between him and where he thought the spirit was. The longer he could keep it up, the further away he could get. Breathing heavily and lungs burning, he stumbled into one of the few enclosed chambers of the residence floor.

  For now, he could run no more. He leaned his back against a wall and let himself slide down to the floor. Opening the seal on his leather jacket, he reached inside and closed his hand on the tooth. Peace, he told himself. Peace to find the center. His breathing slowed and his fear-fogged thoughts began to focus.

  He envisioned the building spirit clumping toward him. He visualized the strings of power that bound it to the building. Tracing their flow from the essence of the structure, he followed the threads to the spirit’s manifestation. Because he had summoned the spirit, he knew how those mana threads were twined and knotted as they stretched to twist through the boundary of astral space. Without such a connection, the spirit would not have been able to manifest on the mundane plane. Sam felt along the strands of power, seeking to untangle them.

  Sooner than he expected, a groping, handless arm thrust through the partition. A second limb followed, then the rest of the spirit emerged through the wall. It was only a meter away. Sam could smell the mold and rotting garbage odor of it as it cocked one arm back to smash him.

  He tugged on the astral strings.

  The manifestation jerked. Sam tugged again, harder. The spirit staggered back a step and lost a bit of its substantiality. Digging mental fingers into the strands of power, Sam pried and pulled. As he unraveled the binding of the spirit’s form, its physcal shape lost coherence, returning first to the liquid mist and then to nothingness. He had banished his summoning.

  It was a short-lived victory.

  The wendigo trotted through the door to the chamber. He betrayed no surprise. Having been in control of the spirit, he would have felt its dissolution.

  "An excellent banishment, if unexpected. You rebuke my nonchalance, and rightly so. She is coming and it will be better for all of us if you are dead by then." The wendigo bared his fangs and advanced, taloned fingers extended. "It is time for the end,"

  Sam knew he was no physical ma
tch for the three-meter monster, but he scrambled to his feet, anyway. He crouched, presenting a smaller target. He hoped. The wendigo was stronger and faster than he was. Staring death in the face and having no better idea, he dove forward, surprising the wendigo and slipping beneath the outstetched paws. But Sam was not fast enough to escape unscathed. The wendigo whirled and raked Sam across the back, slicing fringe into a scattering of leather scraps and cutting through to shred the jacket and its lining. Four rows of fire burned into Sam’s upper torso. The impact knocked him to the floor and beneath of the sweep of the wendigo’s second swipe.

  Sam rolled away, trying to gain enough room to get to his feet again. Pain seared through him as he flexed his muscles to keep moving. Each time his back hit the floor, the agony spiked.

  An immense vise closed on his right ankle and he knew his maneuver had failed. The wendigo lifted him by his ankle and he dangled in the monster’s grip. The Ares Predator slipped from its holster, whacking Sam’s elbow as it fell. His arm went numb.

  "I thought you were Dog, not Rabbit," the wendigo scoffed.

  Inexplicably, the wendigo howled in pain and flung Sam away.

  Sam was parallel to the floor when he hit the wall. Pain exploded in his chest and he blacked out for a second. He came to on the floor. His ears were ringing and he felt like he was going to vomit. His left leg was twisted underneath him. He felt no pain from it, but by the angle, he knew it had to be broken. It hurt to breathe, causing sharp stabbing pains in his chest. Ribs broken too, he thought. No more running now.

  The wendigo was clawing at the back of his left shoulder as if madly trying to scratch an itch. He roared in rage and pain. Sam heard a metallic click, and the wendigo straightened up, one arm wrapped across his chest to hold the opposite shoulder.

  "Over here, furface."

  With the ringing in his ears, Sam thought he did well to recognize the voice as female.

  The wendigo turned to face the newcomer's voice. Sam could see blood leaking from beneath the blackskinned hand. Even through the scratches that the wendigo's own talons had made were closing as Sam watched, the monster still bled from the weapon wound.