Choose Your Enemies Carefully

by Robert N. Charrette

  "You too. I should have known."

  "Payback time, furface."

  The wendigo dodged to one side and a whirring metal disk rushed through the space he had occupied. The weapon buried itself in the wall over Sam’s head. He looked up. It was a spoked wheel with a series of wickedly sharp curved blades along its perimeter, ft was a signature design, a shuriken in the shape of a Katherine's wheel.

  "Hart," Sam croaked.

  He could just catch glimpses of her beyond the bulk of the wendigo. She was a wraith in black leather, night to the day of the wendigo’s white fur. Her right hand was cocked back, another of the shurikens ready to throw. In her left she carried a heavy pistol. Having watched the fruitless attacks of Willie’s drones, Sam knew the gun would do little harm to the wendigo. The wendigo himself seemed contemptuous of it as well; his attention focused on the hand that held the throwing weapon. It must be the metal. Some awakened beings had allergic reactions to certain metals.

  For long moments the two opponents feinted. Each seemed unwilling to commit to a move that might open an attack line for the other. Hart's hand blurred forward suddenly, unleashing a glittering star toward the wendigo. He shifted to his right fast enough that the shuriken whizzed past. He had anticipated her throw, but had not foreseen the diving roll to her right that she made as soon as the throwing weapon left her hand. He checked his charge and started to turn to her new location. Hart fired from the floor and the wendigo ’s right hand vanished in an explosion of blood and shattered bone fragments.

  The wendigo’s howl nearly deafened Sam. The sound, which should have been full of pain, carried nothing but outrage. He thought he heard the scream re-echo through the residence as the monster recovered from his surprise and charged Hart.

  Trying to stand, Hart missed with her next two shots. The bullets blew craters in the wall. As Sam had done, she tried to duck under the sweep of the wendigo’s arms. Also like Sam, she wasn’t fast enough. One arm caught her in the hip and sent her spinning into a bookshelf. Covered in blood, she collapsed in a pile of books, artifacts, and simsense cartridges.

  In two steps the wendigo reached her, but instead of going for her, he grabbed the top of the bookcase with his remaining hand and tugged. The heavy wooden shelves creaked as they leaned out from the walls, the anchor bolts squealing as they pulled free from their moorings. The shelves crashed down just as Hart scrambled out of their way on her hands and knees.

  "Do something, dogboy!" she shouted at Sam. "Throw a spell! Call a spirit! Do something!"

  What could he do? He had called a spirit already and the wendigo had corrupted it and turned it back against him with contemptuous ease. What could he do against such powerful magic? He was just a Dog shaman.

  He was—

  He was in a forest glade in the middle of a city, sitting on the grass. A mongrel sat by his Side.

  "Dog!" Sam exclaimed.

  "Man," Dog said, mimicking Sam’s intonation. "I was wondering when you’d get to me."

  "I thought you were always with me?"

  "I am. You’re just not always with me."

  "I don’t know what to do, Dog. Tell me," Sam pleaded.

  "Tell you? You’re the one out in the world, man. You’ve got to make your own decisions. You wanna be a pup all your life, that’s okay. I can live with it, but you can’t, ’cause it ain’t gonna be a long life if you don’t wake up and smell the world like it is.

  "The world smells like death."

  "That’s the wendigo talking. I thought you were a man."

  "I am."

  "So show me," Dog yelped. "The men I know don’t give up so easily. Fight it, man."

  "I don’t know how," Sam complained.

  "If you don’t despair, you do."

  Somewhere else, the wendigo advanced on Hart. She drew a dagger from her belt. The orichalcum symbols inlaid in the blade’s side glowed slightly, the power of that most magic of metals would enable the blade’s kiss to wound the wendigo. But it was only a dagger; he had talons and fangs, and was more than twice her mass.

  "He’ll kill her," Sam said to Dog.

  "Yup," Dog agreed jauntily. "Then you. Then lots more people. You gonna stop him?"

  "What can I do?"

  "Where’s your faith? Us dog types believe in you men types."

  Somewhere else, the wendigo smashed the dagger out of Hart’s hand. The disarming move cost him a deep gash in his forearm, but he seemed content with the trade. His return strike was an open slap that caught Hart on her right temple. She tried to roll with the blow but the force was too much. She went down.

  "She’s got no hope, Dog."

  "She’s got you. Show some spirit, man."

  Sam felt utterly stupid. Dog had been telling him what he had to do all along, and he was just being dense. The wendigo had turned the building’s spirit because it was primarily the spirit of the place; and places, no matter how pure they had been, could be corrupted. Places were just things made to be used. But people were more than things. Certainly they were physical bodies, but they were more as well, hearts and souls. Hearts could be corrupted too, but the soul’s purest essence was not so easily swayed. Confused, tricked, and misled for a while, perhaps; but not forever, as long as there was hope and faith and belief in the ultimate goodness of life.

  The wendigo had embraced death and despair, but even his creed was tainted with hope. Though the wendigo called Blight his totem and walked a toxic path, he still saw a hopeful end. He used his corrupt tools in his warped fight to rid the earth of what he considered a plague. His was a terrible path, but ultimately a misguided one. For the shaman, Sam suddenly felt pity. For the wendigo nature of the being he felt no such pity. The being it had been deserved the pity, but that being had long since died inside the great furred body.

  Sam opened himself to the spirit world. Brighton Centrum was full of people, full of life. He avoided the dark corners and sought the light. In a rundown squat of a shack cobbled together in the mall space of a section scheduled for reconstruction, he found what he wanted. Nurtured by the love and hope of a family who had taken all the drek that life had thrown at them and stayed a family, a spirit dwelled here. It was a little grungy around the edges, but it had never known despair.

  Sam sang the song Dog had taught him, wooing the spirit. At first it seemed deaf to his pleas, but at last it heard the song and stirred. Sam coaxed it from its place with flattery and fed it his strength. The spirit drifted through the distanceless space and joined him. Sam rejoiced. He spoke to it of the urgency of his need. Its aura pulsed, flaring in indignation and rage as he told it of the wendigo. The spirit allowed him to sculpt its raw purity into a concentrated crystal of diamond clarity and adamantine strength.

  All the while, Dog sang counterpoint.

  As Sam returned his consciousness to the mundane world, the wendigo pinned Hart beneath his foot. He leaned forward, putting his weight onto her chest. Sam heard her ribs crack. He feared for her life, but he was not distracted from the song. If he gave in to the fear, all hope would truly be lost.

  The spirit forged of man’s nature manifested as a small child. It was dirty and wore ragged castoff clothing. It held a pipe in its right hand which it smacked grimly into the palm of its left.

  "Yo, furball!" it called.

  The wendigo turned his head at the new interruption. His eyes narrowed and nostrils distended as he drank in the power of the spirit.

  "You gotta go, furball," the spirit said.

  The wendigo moved faster than Sam had ever seen him do before. The foot that had been crushing the life out of Hart swept around toward the manifestion. The spirit blocked with one hand on either end of the pipe, stopping the blow dead. The spirit then slid its upper hand down to the lower, raised the pipe above its head, and slammed it into the wendigo’s still-raised leg. The room shook as the wendigo crashed to the floor. The splintered ends of bones protruded from his leg.

  The spirit's assault didn’t slow. I
ts pipe blurred up and down, pummeling the wendigo. The spirit’s strength was magical, unconstrained by its physical appearance. The wendigo was no match for its fury. Soon, he lay helpless.

  The spirit drove the end of the pipe through the wendigo’s left shoulder and into the floor. With two swift hammer blows of its tiny fist, it bent the pipe over, forming a staple that pinned the wendigo to the floor. The fight seemed to go out of the wendigo and he lay limp on the floor. He watched fearfully as the spirit knelt on his chest and placed a hand on either side of his broad head. Their eyes locked, and the wendigo screamed.

  The air seemed charged with electricity, but Sam knew it was magic. He slipped into his astral senses and saw the storm of mana that raged between the spirit and the wendigo. Glowing like a sun, the spirit poured golden light from its eyes into the wendigo’s dark orbs. At first, all that glorious light fought against streamers of darkness that emanated from the wendigo’s eyes and wrapped around the twin columns of light as if to smother them. Seconds later—or was it hours?—the dark wrappings started to fade until they finally turned translucent and drifted away like smoke. The body of the wendigo began to glow from inside as the golden light poured into him from the spirit. The spirit grew dimmer as the wendigo grew brighter and brighter, until Sam could no longer bear the intensity. Just before he dropped back to his mundane senses, he thought he saw a shape within the wendigo’s form. But the glare made it too hard to be sure.

  On the mundane plane, the wendigo’s body looked shrunken, a bag of skin over a frame of bone. The spirit stood by the side of the body and pulled the pipe free.

  "The darkness is gone," it said in a voice only Sam could hear.

  "You have done all that I could ask, spirit. I can think of no better way to thank you than by giving you your freedom."

  "You would do this for me? I still owe you services."

  "We fought a common foe. You owe me nothing, and I ask nothing more of you. You are free."

  "Honor to you, man," the spirit said as it faded from sight.

  Sam could have followed its departure astrally. He wanted to. He desperately wanted to know where the spirit would go. But somehow that didn’t seem right.

  He crawled past the husk of the wendigo toward Hart. Her breathing was ragged and shallow, and he hurried even though he knew that he was aggravating his own injuries. Pain seemed a small price to pay to be by her side. He touched her face with his hands and found that she was crying. She stirred at his touch and opened her eyes. It took her a few seconds to recognize him. Once she did, she tried to raise her arm.

  "Wrist," she gasped.

  Trying not to hurt her, Sam unsnapped the cuff and rolled back her sleeve. Sam recognized the name and logo of DocWagon on the circuit board embedded within the clear plastic band she wore. The base color of the board was platinum.

  "Don’t leave home without it." She tried to smile at him, but the effort to talk had exhausted her waning strength.

  He pressed the stud that would summon the medical service.

  His own injuries sapped his strength, but he knew that unless he did something foolish, he would probably live. He was not so sure about her. After all she had done to keep him from stopping the wendigo, she had risked her life to save him and give him the time to call the spirit.

  "Why?" he asked.

  "I wish I knew."

  She passed out.

  43

  By the time Janice reached the residence floor, everything was quiet. That made her nervous. She had heard his last scream. It had been so full of pain that she feared for his safety. How could anything have happened to him? He was stronger than any norm shaman.

  She skirted the hole on the entryway floor. Unlike in the elevator shaft, there was no strong residue of magic. The destruction here was purely physical.

  The doors of the formal entrance were open. Through them wafted the faint odor of blood. Tense and alert, she padded through the archway.

  There were a lot of scents in the air, but all were faint; the floor’s climate control system was busy pumping warm air out the shattered northern window wall and diluting the concentrations below the level she could track. Still, she identified the scent of strangers lingering in the air. One, a male, was vaguely familiar, but the other, a female, was new to her. There was also the ozone tang of machines like the one that had almost struck her in the elevator shaft. That odor was strong enough to indicate that there might be several of the things; they didn’t have enough individuality for her to tell if there had been only the one or if more might be lurking about. The machine had been small enough to hide effectively.

  The one scent she most wanted to smell was the most elusive.

  A high-pitched, sequenced beeping reached her. It was beyond the range of a norm hearing, or even an elf’s. It was clearly a signal. She knew of nothing in the residence that would emit such a noise; the device must belong to the intruders. She listened carefully, then shifted position and listened again. The sound seemed to be originating somewhere east of the sanctum. She moved cautiously toward the source.

  As she drew nearer, her apprehension grew. With the air flow moving toward her the odors, all of them, grew stronger. Dan’s was among them. But her momentary flare of relief was snuffed by the realization that the intruder’s signal continued. Dan would not have let it continue if he were able to stop it. Worse, she sensed a lingering tingle of magic.

  She stopped before one of the studies where blood spattered the floors and walls. Beyond the hallway in one of the large living areas, she could see a crater in the wall. From somewhere out of sight around a partition, she could hear a male voice whispering assurances. It was not Dan’s voice. She crept forward.

  She reached the corner, and her wary peering rewarded her with a sight that tore her heart. Dan’s body lay sprawled on the floor. His limp form was emaciated, his bones pressing against his once-glossy pelt. The white fur was fouled and matted with blood. A great, gaping wound covered his left shoulder, and his right hand, the hand that had stroked her so tenderly, was missing. It had been jaggedly severed and was nowhere in sight.

  Her caution and fear were swept away. She rushed from concealment and threw herself on him. He was so still. She didn’t want to believe he was dead, but her eyes could only see the blood and the wounds. Her ears could not hear him breathe, and her touch found only chill. He was far colder than he should be. Tears streamed from her eyes, blurring her sight. Her ears filled with the sounds of great sobs which she knew were her own. She felt him cold under her hands and wanted to deny what she felt. It was not possible, he couldn’t be dead.

  "Fragging drek, Twist. It’s got a mate."

  The words broke through her grief. Those words were meant for the norm shaman and whispered from his earpiece receiver, but she heard them. She raised her tear-blurred eyes and looked at the intruders for the first time.

  The woman lay against a wall, unconscious and nearly dead. The man was the shaman she had seen raising the spirit against Dan. He was battered and covered with blood. Though his face was screwed into a rictus of pain, he was struggling to prop up his torso. In one hand he held a dagger of red-gold metal, but he seemed otherwise unarmed. Save for his magic, she reminded herself. One of the machines sat near his head; the gun barrel of the tiny turret pointed directly at her.

  These were the ones who had taken Dan from her.

  She sat back on her heels, noting as she did that the machine’s gun tracked her motion. Ignoring them she passed a gentle hand along Dan’s face. They had closed his eyes. Her fingers lingered on his lips. They had stolen his smile. She let her hand trail down to his chest. They had stilled his heart.

  She focused her intent, wrapping herself in the illusion that she was as she had been, grieving over Dan’s body. Beneath the image, she crouched in readiness.

  They would die.

  She leapt.

  Her illusion vanished as she moved. The killers finally reacted, but, they were too late.
The gun turret could not swivel fast enough to track her. The shaman was too weak to come close to matching her speed. She was already in the air and soon she would rend them.

  She slammed into an invisible wall, and her lethal pounce was converted into an ignominious tumble to the floor. She felt her mind teeter on the brink of madness—the magical barrier tasted of Dan.

  As she turned to his body, she found his head turned slightly in her direction. His eyelids seemed to be open, but she could not see the glitter of his eyes.

  She returned to him and kissed his lips. Her joy faltered. He was cold, and his chest remained still. And yet, with no air in his lungs to force the sounds out of his throat, he spoke.

  "I could not let you do it."

  She probed with all her senses and only confused herself. He was there but not there. She wanted him alive. Her tears fell upon his face but not a muscle twitched. She didn’t know what to do.

  "No kindeath. The blood is too strong. It taints. It’s so heavy. It taints. For you, my darling, I fear it would be fatal."

  She combed his mane with her talons. "Be quiet, my love. I shall sing the healing songs for you."

  "No songs. The meat is finished, and the feaster is no more. From the brink of the dark I heard you weep for me, and your tears, your love, let me save you this once."

  "Save me? I would have killed them for you."

  "No," his sepulcral voice insisted. "Promise me. Forswear the kindeath."

  "What are you saying, my love? What is this kin-death?"

  "Promise."

  His voice had become fainter and echoed hollowly, but she recognized his force of will in the demand.

  "Anything. I promise. No kindeath. Whatever you want. Just come back to me," she pleaded.

  "The Dog shaman. He is your brother."

  With that dire pronouncement, Janice felt him leave and knew that all Dan Shiroi had been was gone. Forever. She poured her anguish into her scream.