Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome

by John Helfers

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I kid you not. Somewhere on this island, someone’s got a jawbone; someone else has a couple fingers. That’s how they did it. More often, though, the bones were wrapped in tapa and slotted into hidden niches along high cliffs. The way they used to do it, a volunteer was lowered over the side and placed the bones, and then the kahuna cut the rope.”

  “Ouch. Talk about taking a secret to the grave. Let me guess: the daughter changed places and went over the cliff with her lover’s bones.”

  “And cut the rope, yup. Only she didn’t die on the rocks. She started sinking and then all of a sudden this huge shark appears, grabs her ankle and tows her far down the Kohala coast. Lets her go near Pelekane Bay. When she tries wading back out, the shark won’t let her and she goes ballistic. The shark finally says: Don’t you know me? It is I, Kimo, your dead love, and I tell you now that you are not done with life. Let go of my bones, my love, and live.” She gave a rueful smile. “Silly, right?”

  “I don’t think it’s silly at all. Did she? Let go, I mean.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, the shark disappeared. Later, she discovered it had left a tooth embedded in her ankle.” She tapped the charm around her neck. “At least, that’s the claim. Afterward, she ordered that a shark heiau, a special sacrificial altar, be constructed in the bay to worship the shark-god. The altar’s gone now but wearing the tooth, having the tattoo … makes me feel connected, you know? To history, to the land.”

  Their food came. The fish was very good—snowy white, firm and juicy—but in his fatigue Daniel only managed a few bites. Alana forked up the last of her rice and fish in about three minutes, looked at his plate, said, “You going to want all that?”

  It was something Rachel would’ve said: “Daniel, sharing food’s a sign of true love.” “Bullshit, you just want my French fries.”

  “Please.” He thumbed his plate toward her. “Don’t be shy on my account.”

  “I’m hungry. You ever had hospital food?”

  “Not in recent memory.” He waited until she’d slowed down then said, “When are you going to ask?”

  She looked up, jaws working. Held up a finger. Chased her food with the last of her tea, then said, “I figure you’ll tell me when you’re ready. Or ask me, or whatever … So.” Wiping her mouth, she crumpled her napkin, let it fall to her plate. “Shoot. You want to know what happened, right? Well, I don’t remember. What’s your interest, anyway?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “And what—” she began, but Auntie trundled over, gathered their plates, inquired if they wanted dessert. He said, no, just coffee, and when Auntie was gone, Alana folded her arms on the table. “What’s that?”

  “I’m a kind of investigator.”

  “Police?”

  “A private concern.”

  “Occult?”

  He waited for the Rebbe to interject something, but his brain was, mercifully, silent. “You could say that.”

  “But not exactly.” When he nodded, she said, “Why would what happened to me be of interest to … well, I guess you’d say, your employer, right? Saeder-Krupp? Why would Lofwyr care?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She stared at him a good ten seconds then shrugged. “I guess not.” She scraped back her chair and stood. “I’ve got to pee. Get the coffee to go and let’s blow this crackerjack joint.”

  “And we’re going …?”

  Her smile was tight, with no humor in it. “To the Land of the Dead.”

  • • •

  The access road into Waipi’o Valley could only be reached from the east, which meant they had to backtrack, dropping out of the high country into Waimea before turning northeast toward the coast. Ten klicks shy of Honokaa, they headed west, following the main drag all the way to a very abrupt end. By then, the sun was slipping away, but Daniel had seen enough on the approach to realize that they were headed into a region of soaring, nearly vertical cliffs and deep, impenetrable valleys.

  “Jesus, you weren’t kidding when you stressed that dead part.” He eyed the faraway ribbon of a waterfall. A three-hundred-meter tumble, easy. “You can’t be serious.”

  “As a heart attack. The ancient Hawaiians called the valley Milu after an old chief who was the king of the dead. The valley’s one of two places on the island where you’re supposed to be able to access the shadows. Those cliffs are where a lot of the kings are buried, right in the rock. See that beach down there?” She indicated a crescent gash of black sand two kilometers long. “Water’s like glass, but the undertow and rip currents’ll kill you.”

  “If we don’t peel off the road. That’s almost straight down. I’ll burn out my brakes. We’ll never get back out.”

  “This is a rental, right? So, let them worry about it. Trust me, you burn out the brakes, and they’ll leave the thing where it dies. Costs a small fortune in nyuen to tow anyone out. Anyway, it’s only a twenty-five percent grade, most of the way.”

  “Only, she says.”

  “Well, some of it’s forty-five.” She gave him a tight grin. “Look, the answer’s down there. I’m offering to show you.”

  “Why are you being so good to me?”

  “Because I like you. Besides, I want to go home, and you’re my ride. It’s either that, or I take a horse.”

  “The shrink said that only about fifty guys live in the valley.”

  “Yeah, yeah, and they’re all named Dave.” An eyeroll. “So, you want to see this, or not?”

  Personally, he was tempted to suggest astral projection, but she was a mundane, so … “Shit.” He dropped the four-wheel drive into low and first. “This had better be good.”

  The road was short but fabulously steep: a single serpentine lane for most of the way, and in rotten condition. Worse, just as he lipped the edge, Alana said that this was one of the only places on the Big Island where you couldn’t access the Matrix: “No nodes within spitting distance.”

  “And you live down here?” He was sweating, resisting the urge to ride his brakes. “What do you do? Hunt with a bow and arrow?”

  “I like the quiet.”

  “I thought the Menehune weren’t exactly the welcoming type.”

  “I guess I’m just special,” she said.

  • • •

  There were no lights at all, no houses he could see. To his right, he had the impression of a vast drop-off, and he heard the distant growl of the sea thundering against the shore. When the road finally leveled out, he let go of a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Sweat plastered his shirt between his shoulder blades.

  But that’s when he noticed something else: the slight fizz in his ear was gone. No nodes. The silence was jarring, a sound all its own.

  She studied him through the gloom. “It hits everybody the same way first time around,” she said. “Lee was really restless for awhile, like if he couldn’t check his e-mail every five seconds, he didn’t know what to do with himself.”

  “Uh …” Inwardly, he was irritated that she read him so well. Never could fool Rachel either. “I’m fine.”

  She gave him a look that said she thought otherwise, but instead she unbuckled. “You got a flashlight in that pack?”

  • • •

  He had two, as it happened—with a great deal more specialized gear she didn’t have to know about.

  • • •

  The day disintegrated ten minutes after they left the rental. The night, choked with stars and a crescent moon, washed over the sky in a black tide. Their path through the woods was virtually nonexistent, a narrow cut that turned and twisted through thick stands of eucalyptus forest, thickets of wild ginger and lush hapuu ferns. He smelled water and the sweetness of lemon and strawberry guava, and when he followed his light over a suspension bridge fording a swift stream, the churn of water over rock threw up a fine, cool mist. The auras of the plants, a chorus of tree frogs, the inexorable rush of water—so much mana gathered together in one place …
/>
  Dear God, it’s like discovering Gan Eden. His fingers toyed with Rachel’s mezuzah, its metal too warm, its energies awakened to the mana infusing the valley. And for the first time in what felt like forever, he heard the whisper of a voice that he recognized as Rachel’s: Because, my love, this is what it would be like to be free …

  His breath hitched in his throat. Rachel? Are you … ?

  “Daniel?” Startled, he tore his astral gaze from the trees—and there she was, right beside him, the fiery sunburst of her aura like a beacon in the long night of his soul …

  Alana touched his arm, shattering the illusion. “Hey, you okay?”

  “Fine,” he said, drawing in a long shuddering breath. He banished his astral sense and the mundane sprang up around him again. “I’m just tired. How much longer?”

  “We’re here.” She stabbed her light at a hummock of red and brown rock. “There was a huge tsunami in 1946. Steamrolled everything in the valley. Before then, this place was a major breadbasket. Taro fields, guava, mango, you name it. After the tsunami pulverized everything, the people just never rebuilt. The major temples were reduced to the functional equivalent of anthills. You want to see anything approaching what they were, you have to go further south to the Kohala Coast. But the tsunami also uncovered this heiau—at least, that’s what I think. It’s not in any of the historical or academic literature, and the Menehune know nothing about it.”

  He stepped carefully, playing his light over rough-hewn rock walls that rose twelve meters at their highest point. The structure was roughly rectangular at its base but sloped inward as it climbed. More like a crude representation of a volcano than a pyramid, he thought, which made sense.

  Nimble as a goat, Alana led the way up a scramble of boulders. He followed, negotiating a three-meter drop at the summit to what he saw was an open expanse marked by more rock mounds.

  She pointed her light at the rock below their feet. “That’s coral, which is kind of weird this far inland. The way these things were built, slaves would’ve passed the rocks and coral in one continuous line from the ocean. If a rock were dropped or touched the ground, the slave would be sacrificed and the rock dropped far out to sea.”

  He calculated they were maybe six klicks inland and whistled. “That’s a lot of slaves.”

  “Several thousand. We’re on the west side, and so this—” her light picked out a rock tumble that rose to chest height, “—is probably the tele, the altar. But that’s not what’s so weird. Look at the rocks.”

  He did, and realized that what he’d thought were marks weathered into the rock by time and the elements were something else entirely. He touched a divot with tentative fingers, tracing a design of a vertical gash crisscrossed by two horizontals and surmounted by a small round divot. Head, arms and legs … “It’s a man. Rock carvings.”

  “Petroglyphs, yeah, but here’s the truly weird thing. The stones were supposed to be pristine. Yet every stone—and I mean, every single visible stone—is marked. This temple is one of a kind. And look here.” She swung her light at a tall pillar standing east of the altar. The gleam playing over its etched surface was weird and smoky.

  “What is that?”

  “This,” she said, running a reverent hand over the pillar’s surface, “is an oracle tower, an anu’u and no, I don’t know any like this and especially none made out of a single piece of pure obsidian, solid volcanic glass. And look at these carvings. They’re so delicate. Can you imagine how long it took, how much care was involved?”

  Years, he thought, but he felt no special power emanating from this stone, saw nothing to indicate this was a focus, or that there might be something else hidden in its crystalline matrix. (He’d heard of such things: legends of skilled adepts able to detect the aura of the tiniest of insects entombed in amber. The theory went that since, by definition, DNA was organic and all organically-based organisms channeled mana, not only an aura but the flush of a metagenome ought to be present.) But there was nothing here. On the other hand, his talents didn’t run that way.

  He said, “Okay, so what does all this have to do with you?”

  “Here.” She circled around the pillar then angled her light halfway up the glassy surface to pick out a faint, egg-shaped blotch riddled with small pits. “That’s the sign for the Big Island and this big one with that sketchy pyramid is Maui with Haleakala, which would be visible from the western rim of the valley.”

  Frowning, he pointed to a scatter of distinctive triangular wedges arrayed like the numerals on a clock. “What are these things between the islands?”

  “That is a location. Those wedges are the signs of the shark.”

  “Like your tattoo.”

  “You got it. Each island has its own shark-god. For example, the Big Island’s is Ukanipo. But I’ve never seen petroglyphs arranged quite like this and these.” She indicated two concentric circles as wide as Daniel’s hand just below the shark petroglyphs. “Look at what’s chiseled in the center.”

  He did—and his jaw fell open. “Oh my God.”

  “Uh-huh. The Hawaiians carved a lot of weird shit,” she said. “But never, ever a dragon.”

  • • •

  “You went looking for a rift in a seamount.” They sat in a bed of hapuu at the base of the ruined temple. He studied her profile in the dim light of the crescent moon, but a fan of her hair hid her face. “You said you didn’t remember what happened.”

  “I don’t, not everything. But no one ever asked me where.”

  “Split hairs often?”

  “Look, I’m an academic. This is huge. The only dragon we know of to come through a rift is Ghostwalker. But if I can prove other dragons came through other rifts … It’s the discovery of a lifetime.”

  “And it cost a man his, someone you said you loved.”

  “Don’t you fucking judge me. I don’t need a guilty conscience; I’ve got one, thanks.” She blew out an angry breath. “I’ve kept my end of the bargain. Now you keep yours. Why the fuck are you here?”

  So he told her—some of it. She listened without interrupting until he fell silent, and then said, “Your people want to close it?”

  “That’s right. I told you: We repair the world. Tikkun olam. Yeah, okay, Ghostwalker came through, but so do shedim. If it’s there, even if the rift’s intermittent, it’s my job to seal it. I guess we use what you’d call magic, but for the Rebbe, it’s a gift, a channeling of energy from someone, something else.”

  “God?”

  “Call it whatever you want. Mana, life force … When we invoke that kind of power, it has to be for the right purpose.”

  “Read: godly, right? Great, a religious nut.”

  “And what you did wasn’t a little nutty?”

  “That was my job.”

  “This is mine.”

  “But don’t you see? You’re no different from the guys who want all the metahumans to crawl back under a rock. Who are you to decide what should be in this world, and what shouldn’t? How do you know this isn’t the way the world is supposed to be? Hell, didn’t angels talk to people all the time? Weren’t there miracles and giants and demons?”

  “And the First Born of Man gave to him the names of the djinns and lilin and the shedim gave them iron to bind spirits and their letters for protection, so the remnant concealed themselves in the remotest mountains and in the depths of the ocean,” he said. “That’s from an old Hebrew legend, a Midrash.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That evil is all around and contained, but that sometimes it breaks free. It’s my job to bind it again.”

  “Don’t dodge the question. What gives you the right?”

  “We have a code.”

  “So do hired assassins.” She snorted. “Who is this rabbi of yours?”

  “He’s … Well, he saved my life. Or maybe he helped me see that we’re all broken in one way or another, just like the world.”

  “Take a good look around. Does this valley look broken to
you?”

  A flare of anger. “Listen, don’t give me any of your self-righteous bullshit. You can’t imagine my life, what I’ve done, how it was after my wife vanished. My world changed just like that. One second you’re having coffee and the next, everything’s gone.”

  She wasn’t cowed. She was a brawler, like Rachel. “So you and your people go around fixing the world, repairing the breaks, sealing rifts—but it’ll still be the same old tired Earth, right? Just one with a lot of bandages. It’s like trying to reverse time, wake up in the morning younger than you were when you went to sleep. You can’t do it. If I was a shrink, I’d say that you guys are trying to fix yourselves. Frankly, that sounds pretty damned futile. There’s always more pain.”

  “Sure, but you got to have hope. You said it: You think you’re never going to smile again. One day, you do—or you trick yourself into thinking you can. Maybe … I don’t know, maybe it’s the same damned thing. But I can’t just do nothing. If I sit around accepting the world the way it is, I might as well have put that bullet into my …” He bit off the rest.

  They said nothing for a time. In the quiet, the wind stirred eucalyptus with a papery rustle. Finally, she murmured, “Do you remember the day you did? Really smiled again? Felt like, okay, this is good, I can go on?”

  No fight in her voice now. His chest burned. “Yeah, I do.”

  “When?”

  “Today. Now.” The words were out before he could recall them—or maybe he didn’t want to. He saw only her aura now, so bright and alive, and his Rachel was dead and there was nothing he could do to bring her back. Yet there was this woman and this place and no one—not even the Rebbe—listening, and the need for her hummed in his veins. “Here. With you.”

  When she didn’t respond, he felt like an ass. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m tired. I shouldn’t …”

  “Shut up,” and then he felt her warm breath slant across his neck. She lifted her face and he sighed into her mouth, and when he dropped his hand to the swell of her breast, she made a sound deep in her throat.