by Tom Deitz
Calvin pulled out his Rakestraw and studied it meaningfully. “Mine oughta do just dandy.”
“Probably the best choice,” David agreed. “Best I understand these things.”
“I’m open to suggestions, Cal,” Alec went on, “concerning ritual, and all.”
“Well,” Calvin said, puffing his cheeks. “Every other time we’ve sat in a circle with our knees touchin’, held hands, and you or Liz did the rest. I’d say we do that again. Oldest to the west, I guess, ’cause it’s closer to Death—that’d be you, Sandy—sorry, old gal. Youngest to the east—Alec, I suppose. Dave, you and me’ll have to flip for the others.”
“Or I could take north,” David countered. “This is Cherokee mojo we’re talkin’ about here. And my main adventure in that World was in the north just like you fought Spearfinger in the south.”
“Good point. Okay, so are we ready?”
Alec sighed again. “I reckon.”
The next few moments were spent arranging themselves on the floor. A round rag rug filled the space between the bunks and desks—a dorm-warming present from Sandy, as it happened. It was exactly the right size to encompass the four of them sitting cross-legged with their knees touching—bare knees, as was preferred, and which was the case anyway, since everyone except Calvin was in shorts, and he’d never put his jeans back on after awakening.
Alec set the pot containing the ulunsuti in the center. Before continuing, though—and unlike the earlier times they had used the oracular stone—Calvin reached into his backpack and drew out a wooden pipe ornamented with hawk feathers and as long as his forearm. With it came sprigs of herbs and a small turtle shell he inverted into a bowl.
“Best to clear the air first,” he said in a low voice, whereupon he proceeded to fill the pipe with one of the herbs—Nicotiana rustica, he informed them: sacred tobacco—and once it was lit, to blow its smoke to the four quarters, plus up and down. That accomplished, he censed them all with a smoldering bundle of the cedar he had cut, and as an afterthought, handed a bit of that same cedar to the other three. Finally, he set the remnant to smolder in the bowl, which he placed to the west. When he had finished, Alec took the pot in one hand, unstoppered it, and carefully tipped its contents into the other.
A white leather bag slipped out. He took it, and with a frown furrowing his brow, opened the drawstring and let something fall onto his palm.
The ulunsuti—the jewel from the head of the uktena—looked somewhere between a fist-sized raw diamond and a blob of melted glass. It was transparent, but not so much that one could see through it without distortion. And it was split by a darker septum of red.
“Ready when you are,” Alec murmured breathlessly. “To prime the pump, I mean.”
Calvin set his mouth, took the knife, and in one swift motion drew it across the palm of his left hand. Before the blood could more than well to the surface, he clamped it atop the stone Alec still held. It didn’t hurt, really, but Calvin felt an uncomfortable sucking sensation, as if the stone fed not so much on the blood, as on the life essence of which it was a part. He didn’t remove it, however, until the feeling had subsided, at which point he slowly eased back his hand.
The stone shone as clear as ever, but the cut was only a thin pink line. His other gashes seemed likewise to have shrunk. Even his ribs felt better.
All but Alec clasped hands and stared at the stone, as Alec fixed it with a look of intense concentration. Not a trance, like Liz did, nor like he sometimes managed, or like Sandy’s meditations occasionally precipitated. This was more a focusing, a contest of wills played out invisibly.
No one breathed. No one dared.
Then, very slowly, the room receded. For an instant Calvin saw the septum of the ulunsuti glowing like fire. And then, abruptly, it was gone, replaced with…
…a forest…night…streamers of Spanish moss above a too familiar stream identifying the location as south Georgia…a Power Wheel scribed into sandy soil…
…eyes: green eyes: a sensation of cold…
…a blasted plain, dark sanded, the sky like sunset…a range of mountains lit with sunset fire glimmering far off…
…and then a—a face—or a mask, it was hard to tell which. Not human, though, but a cat’s: mountain lion, it looked like, but darker, more silvery. And as Calvin stared, fascinated, its lips curled back. But instead of the expected snarl, there came words. “Trust the woman,” it demanded, its voice between a growl and a hiss. “Trust the woman—or be damned.”
Its eyes met Calvin’s then: yellow and slitted—though he knew big cats had round pupils. But as he stared, the colors shifted, the yellow grew paler, the dark pupil eased toward red. And all at once Calvin was once more staring at the ulunsuti.
No one spoke, as if all feared to shatter a moment which had obviously passed yet was in a more subtle way omnipresent.
Finally Calvin risked a heavy sigh. “That wasn’t very comforting.”
“Not if you saw what I did,” David replied with a gulp.
“What…did you see?” Alec wondered shakily.
“I’m feeling brave,” Sandy managed. “I’ll go first.”
*
“Well, gee,” Calvin grumbled a quarter hour later, when David had finished recounting his version, “this is a real pisser. I mean we obviously all saw the same thing. Only…it was so damned inconclusive! I mean, I don’t know a thing more than I did! Like, I don’t know if that was the present, the past, or the future—or whether all that was happenin’ all at once, or sequentially, or what.”
“I got a sense of sequential,” David supplied hopefully, but his expression betrayed doubt.
“It looked,” Alec said carefully, “as if you were gonna have to make some kinda choice. But then along came Mr. Thundercat—and I don’t have a clue what that’s supposed to mean.”
“‘Trust the woman?’” Sandy supplied.
“You got it,” Alec replied. “Only who was he? And…which woman?”
David lifted an eyebrow. “Cal? You’re the expert.”
Calvin could only shrug. “Who he—it—was, I don’t know—unless it was one of the Ancients—the Ancient of Panthers, I assume. But what he was doing responding to your ulunsuti, I have no idea.”
“And the woman?”
“It could mean me,” Sandy replied instantly. “In which case it means you have to trust me to come along.”
“Assumin’ one’s to believe the first panther that meanders through a vision,” Calvin countered.
“Assuming.” From Alec.
“So what now?” David yawned—surprisingly unperturbed for someone who’d just had his consciousness zapped half a dozen places, plus seen an animal speak.
Calvin checked his watch. “Well, whatever else gets done, there’s still the small matter of my promise to Brock, which has to be dealt with. After that…maybe the thing to do is to straighten that out, then check back with you guys tomorrow. How ’bout that?”
David eyed him warily. “It sounds logical, which means I don’t trust it. What’s to keep you from goin’ off on some other tangent soon as you finish with Brock?”
“Nothing,” Calvin told him. “Except that while there was a clear reference to night in a place in south Georgia I’ve seen, there was nothing else in the vision that indicated any time frame at all.”
“Good point,” Alec agreed. “And one we hadn’t considered.”
“So…?” From Calvin.
Sandy took his hand. “So I guess we decide first of all whether we drive another five hours tonight and try to find a place to crash at three in the morning, or deprive these lads of the last of their study time by spending the night here and heading out in the wee hours.”
Calvin rolled his eyes. “Uh, the last time I counted on that, Kirk let me oversleep by three hours.”
“Fine,” Sandy countered instantly. “So you sleep, I’ll drive.”
“What about us?” David wondered. “I mean, I know you don’t want us to g
o with you, but we’d—that is, I’d—really like to help.”
Calvin laid a hand on his shoulder. “You can help. You stay here, stay out of trouble, and run interference for us—which there may very well be. And if you guys don’t hear from us by tomorrow night, contact my cousin Kirkwood. And if you haven’t heard anything a week after that, try to get hold of Uki.”
As if in response, thunder rumbled from a sky grown suddenly dark and grim.
“The sooner we leave, the less rain we have to drive in,” Sandy sighed, and rose.
Once again, and closer, came the thunder.
Chapter XI: Scene of the Crime
(east of Whidden, Georgia—Monday, June 18—midmorning)
“Are you sure you can still find the place?” Sandy yawned as Calvin braked her Bronco to a halt at the end of an almost-overgrown logging road—one of the hundreds that threaded the pine forests of Willacoochee County like fracture lines in a slab of green glass. The look she fixed on him was his least favorite: the subtly doubtful/delicately superior one she affected in lieu of reminding him outright that she was older and more educated than he—and that, just possibly, she saw his back-to-nature/live-off-the-land resourcefulness more as testosterone-enhanced, ego-surfaced adolescent male braggadocio than true, gut-level competence. Granted, he hadn’t suffered that look in a while; but what on earth had awakened it now? God knew they’d lived together for nearly two years, never mind the camping trips, the hikes in the woods, even that one foray into Galunlati. Surely she should trust his woodcraft after all that.
And if not…well, he’d just have to live with it. He could bitch, or he could prove her wrong. And in any event, the last thing he needed on a day when he wanted to play things calm and careful was an argument. Still, he couldn’t suppress a scowl as he flicked off the lights and wipers, turned off the ignition, and opened his door.
Sandy saw it, bit her lip. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I oughta know better, oughtn’t I? It’s just that—well, I guess your stress is rubbing off on me, or something.”
Calvin shrugged with deliberate nonchalance and hopped to the ground. Heat bit at him, and blood-warm stickiness that wove through the remnants of morning drizzle, all legacy of the storm that had escorted them from Athens less than twelve hours before. “No big deal,” he muttered, wiping his forehead.
Sandy shut her door and joined him at the back of the vehicle, hunched over, as was he. The sky was gray-white, the trees silvered, the air still, save for the soft rattle of rain on pine needles and palmetto fronds. They were already sweating.
Calvin grinned ruefully as he commenced off-loading a pair of backpacks. (He’d reluctantly left the cycle in David’s custody.) “Well, gee, I guess I oughta be glad something’s rubbin’ off,” he said, “seein’ as how I really need to abstain until this is over.”
Sandy retrieved the smaller of the two packs and hoisted it onto her shoulders. “Now that might make an interesting experiment!”
He secured the other pack and slammed the door. “What?”
“To attempt a precisely controlled ritual or bit of magic at different intervals after sex.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He laughed, with another grin, as he joined her on the damp ground beside the road. “It’ll give me something to look forward to.”
Sandy yawned again. Calvin did, too. They caught each other, snickered. Tension was disarmed. “Told you you should’ve let me drive,” she said—and yawned once more.
“I was too wired. ’Sides, I’ve had more sleep than you the last day.”
“And you’ve pushed yourself a lot harder.”
“Any coffee left?”
“I’ll check.”
Whereupon Sandy returned to the driver’s side of the Bronco, opened the door, and rummaged around on the console. An instant later she returned with a thermos, the cup already unscrewed from the lid. Calvin held it while she poured, took a long, grateful sip. It was good stuff: the last of the batch they’d brewed in the motel room up in Hinesville where they’d spent the night—morning, better say—after their five-hour, rain-plagued sprint from Athens. The four hours of sleep they’d grabbed there at Sandy’s insistence had helped a lot, too (she’d suggested, rightly, that whatever he was about was better served with him fresh than stiff and sore from sleeping in the truck or the woods, and that she’d be better company that way as well). But he still felt like he was hitting about a cylinder shy of all eight. It wouldn’t do to let that show, though; wouldn’t be cool to let Sandy know he was less than perfectly confident.
One final pause to toss back the now-lukewarm coffee and to pull the hood of his army surplus raincoat over his head, and he caught her eye. “Well, old lady, I reckon we’d better get goin’.”
“Well, old man,” she echoed, “I reckon we had.” And followed him into the woods.
*
“At least it’s stopped rainin’,” Calvin noted absently a quarter of an hour later, as he paused to divest himself of his raincoat. Sandy mirrored him, set her pack on a fallen cypress log, and shucked out of her top layer of clothing, to stand sweating in jeans, hiking boots, and Black Crowes T-shirt. Calvin was identically clad save that he wore Frye boots and a black T-shirt emblazoned with a diving falcon.
“How much farther?” Sandy wondered.
Calvin studied the sky, then the surrounding landscape. The clouds were scudding away to the east—rapidly, though the forecast was for more and harder rain that night. Meanwhile, the air had a new-washed feel to it, with the sun lancing hot and clear on leaf and trunk alike. He could almost hear the woods steaming—God knew he was: his bandana was soaked through, and not with rain. The pines had shifted to a mix of hardwoods, mostly oaks and poplars; there were fewer palmettos, and more dogwoods, oleander, and wild black cherry. The breeze brought two dominant odors: the sickly sulfur-sweetness of a pulp mill somewhere to the north, and the more subtle scent of coastal marshes not far eastward.
“We’re close, I think. I didn’t see this part in daylight much, but it looks pretty familiar. There were some sites I wanted to…avoid, ’cause of their vibes, so I’ve kinda taken a roundabout way. But unless I miss my guess, we oughta be no more than a quarter mile west of Iodine Creek, which is where I camped. Once I hit that, I can scout both ways until I find my old campsite.”
“Or we could each take a direction, which would be quicker.”
“Have it your way,” Calvin said, and soldiered on.
*
Fifteen minutes later, Calvin eased between a particularly large mass of palmetto fronds and the glossy leaves of a wild magnolia, and breathed a sigh of relief. “How’s that for dead reckoning?” he asked Sandy as she panted up behind him. “Spot-on, first time out.”
Sandy squeezed around him, and together they surveyed the location.
Yep, this was it, all right: the secluded creek bank, screened by palmetto and oleander to the west, with a low bank to the north giving way to a gentler slope here on their end. The creek itself was maybe ten yards across and head-deep (he knew from experience) at center; the opposite shore overhung by red cedar and live oaks, the latter bearded with Spanish moss. Marsh began a short way beyond them.
And right there was the huge live oak beside which he’d made camp when he’d stopped here a year ago, hoping to get his head straight about magic, never imagining that Spearfinger was already in his world, tracking him and leaving corpses in her wake. He’d slept there, built his asi—his sweat lodge—yonder— Were those bare sticks lodged in that palmetto what remained of it? Probably not, given that the area had caught at least one hurricane last season.
But where was Brock? The kid had been very specific: they were to meet at this place (because it had power), today (because it was the anniversary of their first encounter), this time (ditto). So where was he? Nowhere in sight, that was for sure. Calvin hunkered down, scanning the earth beneath the tree in search of the footprints he was certain the boy would not have thought to hide.
Nothing.
Sandy joined him.
Still nothing.
“How long do we wait?”
“I’ll give him till dark,” Calvin replied. “Then I’ll ask you to stay here while I go back to the Bronco for the rest of the gear. We’ll camp here for two days—or I will. After that, I’ll leave him a note and split, obligation fulfilled. Then I’ll—Shit!”
Calvin slapped a hand automatically atop his head, where something hard and sharp had smacked it from above with sufficient force he half-expected to find blood. But even as he touched his hair, an object bounced to the ground. He laughed ruefully when he saw it: an acorn. “Damned squirrel!” he gritted.
Another hit. A very precise one.
He looked up, squinting into the green gloom of the leaves.
And saw the elf.
Or that was his first impression of the slim boy he could just make out lounging along a nearly horizontal limb fifteen feet above his head. Certainly there was a definite feralness about the white skin, the jet black hair, the full and very merry red lips. Nor was the effect lessened by the lad being barefoot and shirtless.
“Took you long enough,” a clear adolescent voice called, with a hint of British lilt overlying a southern drawl.
“Brock, you asshole, get down here!” Calvin snapped, feigning anger.
“Yessir, sir,” the boy replied promptly—and rather than climb down, simply slid off his limb and dropped the whole distance. He landed in a springy, bent-kneed crouch an arm’s length in front of Calvin. Calvin reached out to steady him, even as he hopped back reflexively.
“Well, you’ve sure changed,” Calvin observed as Brock rose, grinning.