by Tom Deitz
Brock looked confused. Then: “Oh, I see. Everybody who comes here is somebody who first incarnated in, like, Indian places. Like Calvin’s dad: he was part Cherokee. And Don’s friend, Michael—didn’t he have Indian blood, too?”
“Cherokee,” Sandy affirmed, surveying the darkness beyond the gate speculatively. “What must one do to pass?” she added.
“Be dead.”
Brock was still scowling. “But…what about Don? He wasn’t dead—but he came here anyway—I think.”
The old woman frowned. “He was dead in his soul. And he came with one of the dead.”
“And…what about us?” Brock blurted out, and Sandy could have—not killed him, but maybe flayed him alive.
“What about you?”
“We… have business in Tsusginai,” Sandy admitted. “May we pass for a little while?”
“Are you dead?”
“No.”
“Do you bear the blood of those whose place this is?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you come in the company of one of the dead?” Sandy shook her head.
“Then you may not pass.”
Brock’s eyes narrowed. “What if we just ran by you?”
“I would unmake the Road.”
“The whole road?” Brock burst out incredulously.
“Enough that you could not follow it.”
Brock shrugged at Sandy. “Looks like we’re stuck.”
Sandy grimaced and began backing away. “So it seems.” She inclined her head toward the old woman. “Thank you, grandmother, for your wise and honest counsel.”
“Peace go with you until the end of all days,” the woman replied.
“So what do we do?” Brock muttered as they headed back to the edge of the sky vault.
“I’m not sure.” Sandy sighed. “But if you’re up for a risk, I may have an idea.”
“I’m all ears,” Brock told her.
“Good,” she whispered back. “’cause you may have to be.”
*
…the buck was still ahead, but she was closing. She saw the white flicker of its tail as it fled; observed by instinct the tense and flex of muscles in its narrow legs as it ran; smelled as much as saw the sand kicked into clouds in its wake. She could hear, too, the heavy panting as it strove to outdistance her, the muffled click of hooves on whatever solidity underlay the drifting sand. And she could smell its fear, mingling with the oddly smoky odor of earth, and, more distantly, the scent of humans. But the bitter smell of panic was most pervasive, was what sent her loping onward: a lean cat-shape, muscular, poised, and capable.
She was bloodlust, hunger, and drive—and hot desire to fall upon her quarry, to feel her fangs in its throat, its steaming blood in her belly.
She was also Sandy Fairfax, and this was a mask she wore, for a specified time, for a particular reason. And while she wore it, she had to balance, to grant the beast its freedom, yet retain control. It took finesse—perhaps more than she could muster—to both summon and suppress the urge to kill.
She was closer now: maybe too close. Close enough for the final lunge, but not yet near enough for the other.
But she saw it—clearly, where had been haze and the tunnel vision of pursuit. It reared before her, suddenly huge: a dark arch of stone above purple-gray-black sand, down which a body-wide ribbon of gold lay gauzed by drifting black dust.
…reared before her, and the deer passed under…
…reared above her and she too dived beneath.
Movement stung the corner of her eye, then: the crone, abruptly all alertness. Her head snapped up fast as a striking rattler. Her fingers drew lightning in the air. The buck coursed faster, misstepped, staggered, as if the Track had turned to mud where a foot touched down, then gathered itself and leapt across something she could not see. Its flight arched long and high.
She followed, felt the sand go soft as she too flung all her strength into forward motion. The heavy muscles in her hips and legs bunched and strained as she released them, pushing out with feet and claws to maintain what purchase she could on what was becoming gone.
The sand dissolved beneath her belly. But the deer was straight before her and she forgot human and let base instinct carry her on.
…on…
For an instant, fear beyond anything she had ever dreamed filled both sets of reflexes as the ground evaporated, so that for far too long she hung suspended above a colorless, shapeless void. Only the Track remained, no more than a glimmer of dust.
But ahead was the buck and clear ground.
And after an eternal instant, her front paws struck…
…sand. She had found solidity.
But kept running, as did the deer, though its pace had slowed, even as she strove vainly to restrain that which she had freed too fully there at the last. It had saved her, then; she dared not let it damn her now.
But at least the earth was solid. Not until she had run a hundred paces more, however, did she finally pause to glance back. The Track was still there, glimmering beneath its film of black sand, while around her sand curved up into layered striations of many-colored stone like the sides of a canyon. Above, a gray-purple haze passed for sky but clearly wasn’t.
Fortunately, those images distracted her enough to banish the worst of the beast. She slowed automatically, the better to examine it, then noticed something else and bent to shake a forgotten encumbrance from her neck. It plopped to the sand, where it glittered. Behind her she heard the muffled click of uncertain hooves approaching.
Her nose told her buck, and the beast awoke again.
She closed her eyes, looked down, saw salvation sparkling on the sand. She slapped it between her paws, pushed, felt pain and the gush of blood that stirred the beast once more.
Closed her eyes…felt far more pain…and opened them again as human.
The deer was looking at her hopefully, but clearly afraid; as if instincts likewise warred behind those huge dark eyes. She stepped toward it, then hesitated, abruptly sick at heart. It had no hands! Therefore, it could not regain its shape as she had done.
But before she could determine an alternative, it reached out and licked her, wrapping its tongue around the hand that held the scale. She stared at it incomprehensibly. Then: “Oh, I see!” Whereupon she relinquished her hold.
The deer took the scale in its mouth. She looked away discreetly, busying herself with once again digging her clothes from the pack. “You can stay that way a little longer,” Brock called shakily a moment later. “Gotta get my britches on.”
She nodded, busy restoring her own modesty. “That was a close one,” she called back—and almost jumped, so startled was she at the sound of her own voice. “Je-sus—that thing almost had me. Which means I almost had you.”
“Nah,” Brock snorted. “I’d have outrun you. Deer are made for distance, panthers are sprinters.”
“Yeah,” Sandy grunted, finishing up and resecuring the pack, but retaining the war club. “But what about underwater panthers?” The sound of a zipper told her it was okay to turn around. She did.
Brock shrugged in the midst of putting on his shirt. “Who knows? All I know is that was a brilliant idea.”
“Crazy guess, more likely,” Sandy gave back. “I didn’t know if I got enough of ’Kacha’s blood in my mouth back when we transferred to matter; nor that having to look for her a couple of times since then was enough of an adrenaline jolt to bind her pattern—nor that I’d turn into a panther instead of…her. For that matter, suppose I’d pulled a Calvin and gone off chasing Tsistu? Where would you be then?”
Brock started, looking for a moment genuinely afraid, but then all his youthful bravado came flooding back. “It was a risk. So’s life.”
“Too big a risk, though,” Sandy replied. “Definitely too big, and one we don’t dare run again.”
Brock only shrugged again.
Sandy glared at him. “Don’t give me that!” she snapped, feeling two days’ w
orth of tension suddenly rise to a boil—or was it (as recent evidence indicated) a much more predictable, if no less annoying “complaint” arriving atypically early?—probably as a result of too much shapeshifting, she suspected. “That…thing there’s only got a finite number of charges, don’t forget.”
“I’m not likely to,” Brock shot back as he retrieved the scale and its thong from where he’d laid them on the ground. “Seeing as how you remind me about every two minutes!”
“Better than getting stuck in animal shape and not being able to get back—which could happen at any time, kid! And it’s Cal’s scale. I’m not sure we have the right to use his resources the way we have, given that we just did what we did for a pretty selfish reason.”
“To save our skins was selfish?”
“To keep from waiting,” Sandy countered. “We could’ve stayed where we were.”
“’Cept that we don’t know for sure Cal’d even come back that way—or ’Kacha. Or how long we’d have had to wait there—with no food.”
Sandy merely glared at him. “The old woman has to eat something.”
“Don’t count on it,” Brock snorted, finishing his last shoelace. “But I tell you what: seeing as how we can’t go back now—or that it’d be stupid to, anyway—what say we call a truce? I mean, we don’t really have any choice but to go ahead, do we?”
Sandy grimaced sourly. “Not really. But one thing: no more shapeshifting unless it’s a matter of life or death. And you give me the scale until we reconnect with Cal.”
“That’s two things,” Brock grumbled, even as he complied. “And that presupposes we do reconnect.”
***
“Well, hell,” Brock sighed an indeterminate time later as he slumped to a halt. Sandy trudged up beside him and tried to mask a gasp as a particularly virulent cramp caught her. They’d been traveling single file—not because it was necessary; the Track was wide enough for two to walk abreast, though not with a lot of room to either side—but because of the psychology of the place: the subconscious desire to stay as close to the center of the only marker they had, yet likewise as far away from the walls, which, though they looked like striated stone might not be—and beyond which, she suspected, based on a couple of things Cal had told her, lurked nothing.
“Hell,” Brock spat again, under his breath.
“An apt choice of words, unfortunately,” Sandy agreed, surveying the landscape before them. It wasn’t the rough-walled but arrow-straight tube canyon they’d had no choice but to follow, lo, those many…miles, if that word had relevance here. But that was as much good as she could think about their current situation.
Nope, it sure wasn’t the canyon anymore—only because they had suddenly found themselves on the edge of a widening of the Track into a roughly circular depression maybe a hundred yards across. But at least it had the feel of somewhere to it, as opposed to the nowhere of the Tracks, and Sandy was pretty sure they’d reached the edge of another island World. Granted, it was hard to tell in the perpetual twilight, but there seemed to be a difference in the sky—though a check back showed nothing more certain than the pervasive gray-purple haze.
The problem was threefold.
First, as best she could make out, both by sight and the cessation of the subtle energizing that had been pulsing up through her feet, the Track had ended. Or if it continued straight, it was into a wall of solid stone.
Second, with straight ahead no longer an option, they still had too many choices, for easily a dozen arroyos opened off the perimeter of this place, some narrow, some wide, but all equally promising—or threatening.
The third problem was that the whole surrounding area, including what she could see of those canyons that fed off of it, was paved not with dust and sand, but with stones. Which meant no prints to follow.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Brock asked helplessly, already starting to prowl around the perimeter.
“I’m thinking that we’re in deep shit,” Sandy told him frankly. “Very deep.”
“I’m thinking that Cal and ’Kacha are in deep shit, too,” Brock replied in a low voice. “I’m thinking that if Tsistu was just playing with them, he’d have dropped the chase by now and sent ’em back.”
Sandy nodded grimly. “I was thinking the exact same thing.”
“And we can’t track ’em through here,” Brock added. “Or I can’t—not on stone.”
Sandy shook her head. “I can’t either.”
“So what do we do, then?”
“What we do,” she told him, “is think.”
“Great!” Brock spat sourly.
“Could be worse.”
“It could?”
She shot him a thoughtful, speculative smile. “Brock, my lad, it’s time you learned some magic.”
Chapter XVII: Thunders, Black and Red
It’s time you learned some magic.
Brock gaped stupidly. Sandy had said that. Not Calvin, who was supposed to be the hot-shot shaman, but his buddy’s practical, no-nonsense girlfriend! Shoot, she was a high school physics teacher, for Chrissakes, which ought to put her headspace about as far from mojo as anyone could get. Learn some magic, huh? Yeah, sure.
On the other hand, that’s what he’d come stateside for. And though part of him wanted to concede that what he’d experienced already in the way of shapeshifting and Worldwalking absolved Calvin of his obligation by any reasonable standard, one could also argue that his sometime master hadn’t taught him any magic at all; that he’d experienced it, but not learned it. And if Sandy agreed to lay some on him, too, why that still left Cal down one promise—technically. And two of a good thing was better than one any day of the week.
On the other other hand…
“What…kind of magic?” he asked carefully.
Sandy started to speak, then winced as if in pain. “Something…you can do better than I can at the moment, if what I know about Cherokee magic’s reliable,” she replied finally. “I suspect it’s something you’d do better than me anyway,” she added. “Besides, it’s what Cal had decided to teach you.”
Brock shifted his weight and lifted an eyebrow, prompting, yet trying not to seem too impatient. Behind her—all around—irregular breaks in the striated stone sides of the depression marked the entrances of numerous small arroyos. He could scarcely resist the temptations to explore them—prowl them all and see to what new wonders they led.
Or—he shuddered, then blushed because Sandy had seen him—what those canyons might lead to them. “So what’s the deal, then?” he wondered with calculated nonchalance.
“The Finding Ritual,” she replied. “Cal told me he was pretty sure that’s what Don used to locate Michael—except that he thinks it worked too well and summoned Mike himself, instead of just showing in what direction he was. But I think that, either way, we oughta try it now. If we’re lucky, it’ll have the same effect it had then and draw Cal to us. At worst—well, hopefully it’ll at least show us which of these blessed canyons to try.”
Brock nodded, still trying hard to keep his cool, though he could already feel a restless anticipation welling up inside. “I’m waiting.”
Sandy had squatted and was rummaging in the pack that held Calvin’s clothes. “Ah-ha!” she cried a moment later. “I thought he took it off.”
“What?”
She held out a leather bag half the size of her hand, fringed at the bottom, and with a length of leather thong making a loop at the top, rather like the one that held the uktena scale. “His medicine pouch”—as she carefully loosened the opening, then proceeded to peer inside. Brock noticed that she touched as little of the actual bag as possible. “I don’t know as much about this stuff as I ought to,” she continued. “I’m not like you; one reality’s enough for me, preferably one that makes sense. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t picked up some things—or read some stuff.”
Brock crouched beside her. She wasn’t touching the contents either, he observed. But she did seem
to have located what she wanted, for she was obviously manipulating something toward the opening by the expedient of squeezing the outside of the bag with the barest pressure of fingertips. “Hold out your hand,” she told him abruptly.
He did—and felt a tiny jolt as something heavier than expected plopped into his palm: a red-brown stone, roughly the size of his little finger, with a length of twisted cord knotted around the middle.
“Why’d you do that?” he ventured. “Not touch it, I mean?”
Sandy colored unexpectedly. “Because, as of those two rounds of shapeshifting, it’s got to be…that time of month a week early. And according to the traditional Cherokee worldview, which at the moment I feel inclined to respect, women in that condition are supposed to avoid contact with men and with ceremonies or objects that involve male power. I think it’s cause our natures are so fundamentally…different, probably ’cause of the procreative thing. Or else it’s the old purity thing: men are men, women are women, and ne’er the twain shall meet.”
“But Cal—”
“Cal’s male, and this stone is part of his power. You’re another male, therefore if we’re gonna be able to use it at all, you’re the lucky boy. Don’t worry, I’ll coach.”
Brock nodded warily. “I’m listening.”
And did, as Sandy explained what sounded like a fairly simple ritual involving spinning the stone in a circle until its line of arch tended in one direction.
“The only problem,” she concluded, “is that I don’t know the words of the formula that’s supposed to activate it. I’ve only heard it in Cherokee—and I only know a word or two of that.”
Brock’s brow furrowed.
“I think I know a way around that, though.”
His brows shot up. “Oh?”
She nodded. “I know the sense behind a lot of the formulas, if not the actual language. And I know enough about the theory of magic to know that formulas exist in part as a focus of will. Which I guess means that if you try to do the right thing, it may happen—especially here, in what’s already a magical place.”
Brock regarded her uncertainly and sat back on his haunches, fingering the cord but not touching the stone. He thought the shadows had shifted on the fractured walls around them, but couldn’t be certain.