"Enough banter," the crone groused. "You ride a horse. That has not been seen here before. It drew us out of our burrow. If you'd come on foot, the wolves would have dealt with you as they do all strays—which, I can see now, would have been best."
"Your wolf attacked us," Hamr said.
"Only because you passed our fence bearing weapons," the crone replied. "You still bear weapons. Did Yaqut not tell you? This is witch ground. No men tread here but as our guests or our slaves. And neither bears weapons."
"I think the Evil Face would be just as pleased if the wolves had killed them," the young witch said.
The aged one concurred with a nod. "Yaqut despises strays as much as he hates the Old People. Why has he let you live this long?"
"He would have killed us," Timov answered, "but my sister knew his name from a dream."
The wisps of the old woman's eyebrows lifted, and she looked to the younger one, then turned an owl's stare on Timov. "A dream?"
As Timov told the witches the dreams of the ghost dancer, the women listened, eyes bright with surprise and understanding. When he finished, they regarded him carefully for several long moments.
"Leave your weapons here," the crone said finally, "and come with us."
"Wait," Hamr said. "You sent a wolf against us. You were ready to turn us away, because we don't know your customs. Now you order us to part with our weapons. We have yet to know who you are."
The crone smiled, her mouth pegged with yellow teeth worn almost to the gums. She rested her longstaff against her shoulder and put a gnarled hand on Hamr's spears. "We are witches. And we are more than you will ever know. If you want our help, leave your spears and your knives behind." Her smile thinned away. "The Invisibles are astride you. Given the chance, they would gut us hollow. Leave your weapons."
Hamr saw no alternative. He stabbed his spears into the earth and flicked his knife point-first into the ground. Timov did likewise and dropped his sling and rocks. They followed the witches between two tall staves mounted with the skulls of Bear, Wolf, and humans. Femur bones hanging beneath the skulls clacked in the wind soughing down from the hills.
Past small stacks of cobbles and heaps of gravel arranged in symmetrical patterns, the clearing ended. The bunker from where the women had emerged rose out of the weed-matted hillside like a stone outpost. Dark trees screened its cave-hole entrance.
As they passed, Hamr and Timov peeked in. They glimpsed beyond parted curtains of braided vines to the cavern-depths, where nut-oil lamps glimmered far inside the hillside.
The men, who had gathered kindling and large gourds from the Forest, squatted now beside the fire-pit, mashing acorns with pestle-rocks. Like the witches, they wore garments of plant-fiber: breech-thongs of woven grass, tree-bark sandals. They did not look up as the witches and their guests walked by.
Hamr stooped in mid-stride to look into the eyes of these strong-boned, blond-bearded men, so busy doing woman's work, and met stares blue and empty as the sky. He tapped Timov's shoulder and jerked a thumb at the tranced workers.
Timov nodded, already aware that those men existed not as themselves in this place of danger. He pleaded with a silent look for Hamr to stay close and not challenge the strange women.
Hamr frowned and wished he had questioned Yaqut more thoroughly about the powers of these witches and their weaknesses.
They stopped before a black and highly reflective pool under an overhang of rock banded with red jasper. Swans, perched like butterflies on their mirrored images, glided away.
"Kneel," the crone commanded.
Hamr and Timov knelt on the muddy lip of the pool. Waterbugs skittered across the slick surface.
From within the pleats of her grass robe, the old witch withdrew a clear glass dagger.
Hamr pulled back, ready to rise. The witch put the claw of her hand on his shoulder and steadied him. What she held, he recognized, was not a dagger but a large, oblong crystal with sharp facets.
She pressed it against his brow—between his eyes. It felt warm from her body and pinched but did not cut his flesh. He felt foolish.
The crone removed the crystal and stepped to Timov. He could see from Hamr's derisive frown that he had nothing to fear, yet apprehension stirred in him.
The long crystal touched his brow—and a pang of icy pain pierced his skull. His vision grew black though his eyes stared wide. A scream left his mouth and carried him with it, out of his body, into the sky.
Sunlight scorched his sight. Through the glare, he could see again, and what he beheld set panic leaping where his chest should have been. He soared and, below, he eyed the black pool with its swans and, on the slick bank, Hamr and the witches bending over him.
He lay sprawled on his back, a thick foam oozing from his slack mouth. He cried out and emitted no sound. Yet he heard noise. A massive droning vibrated across the sky. It moaned through him like the groan of the bull-roarer that the Thundertree had used to terrify him days ago.
He was dead. The witch had killed him. His spirit had leaped free of his body, and now he ascended from the appalling sight of himself dead, eyes sightless. He lofted into clouds, and the clouds shredded around him to mist. They burst apart into sudden blue reaching a zenith of indigo.
He looked back, aghast at the abruptness of his departure, unready for the afterlife. He surveyed under him the vastness of the Forest shrunk to nubbly lichen. The land had become a sprawling splotch of mold, veined with silver rivers and streams, pocked with bright lakes beneath cloud plateaus and jagged, radiant peaks of snow. The sight mysteriously soothed his shock, and he surged even higher, no longer afraid.
Mists swarmed in the mountain valleys, and mighty rain clouds churned among the icy summits. Violet cumuli, stabbed with lightning, towered against blue emptiness, casting enormous shadows across the rocky chasms.
Sadness came to him with the realization that soon the rain would fall where his body lay. So quickly, so implacably, his life had ended—and now, he flew upward to the spirit realm.
His whole being hummed with the sky’s deep vibrancy. Yet he could not take his sight away from the earth. He strained to see through shreds of clouds to where the dense forest gave way to chaparral—taiga Cyndell had called it—and he glimpsed, far off, across the taiga, wide, brown plains of tundra. Glaciers glinted on the brink of the planet like stars fallen to earth.
The land began to tilt, to bend. On the distant, bellied horizon, the sea appeared, agate blue shattered by the sun's fierce reflection. The land extended not flat after all but curved, just as the storytellers of the Blue Shell had said: The land arched like the back of a tortoise.
Amazement muted to awe as the bright sky fell away, and Timov hurtled into the cave of night. The sun had shrunk to a small white shell, and hard points of stars nicked the darkness. Underneath him, the earth's giant blue tortoise shell glowed with a silver haze.
The massive droning in the sky now sharpened to voices, frenzied voices sounding closer and louder: A hole! A hole. A hole for an axle!
Needle through the brain!
Chill! Shiver! Spasm!
Iciness penetrated Timov as the fleeting warmth of his life seemed to flee into the vast darkness. He looked to the sun, to feel again its warmth—but the sun was small, perfectly round, and with no heat at all. He quaked with cold.
A hole for an axle! Pierce him!
Pierce the needle through his brain!
Shuck the flesh! Shuck it!
Timov convulsed with cold, wanting to press his hands over his ears to shut out the harsh voices. But he had no hands, no ears. He had no brain to be pierced, no flesh to shuck. Unless—
The cold burned, wrenched him with the deep torment of a storm-twisted pine even as he realized he was not dead, not yet. He was dying! Somehow, his spirit still clung to his body far, far below.
He almost lives! Catch him!
Spasm! Convulse! Die!
Die, Timov! Die! Catch him!
The battering v
oices intended to kill him. They occupied the cold, twisting hurt tearing him from his body. He had to get away from them. Down—down through the agony, back to the misty dew of the turtle's shell, down to earth and his body.
The evil voices darkened to thunder.
Catch him! thunder boomed.
Laughter roared out. Thunder bellowed like bulls. Darkness glared. And Timov, clenched in spasm, screamed a fractured scream.
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"Catch him!" the old witch yelled. She squatted over Timov's chest, the crystal shaking violently in her hand, as if pushing itself away from the boy's skull.
From out of his mouth, white ooze flowed. The discharge gathered into a reptilian shape beside his face, then slithered through the grass, away from the water's edge. "Catch him, Kirchi!"
The red-haired witch stood aghast beside her elder, staring with unbelieving eyes at the white effluvia snaking through the grass.
"The crystal!" the crone shrieked. "Use your crystal!"
With a trembling hand, Kirchi drew a dagger-length of quartz from under her grass robe and pursued the wriggling coil of vapor. She jumped and stabbed at the earth with the crystal until, when she stood, the milky white rock had become black.
The old witch's crystal pressed against Timov's forehead stopped vibrating, and the crone sat down heavily on his chest, forcing the air from his lungs. A loud gasp shook him, and his staring, sightless eyes relaxed, focused.
"Hamr!" he called out when he found the crone astride him.
Hamr knelt so the boy could see him. "I'm here, Timov. You're all right now. The witches took an evil spirit out of you."
Timov's pale face shivered. "I heard them. I heard the spirits. Voices like bulls. Hamr—I was with them! In the sky."
"Yes," the crone agreed. Her wrinkle-webbed face had flushed with her exertion. "In the sky. That is where they live. And they come down at night and feed on the pain of the dying. Lucky for you we put the crystals on you by day. At night, you would never have come back."
"I thought you said the evil was invisible," Hamr blurted. "I saw it. It looked like a white snake."
"Not a snake, but a piece of the boy's life that the spirit took with it to escape. The Invisibles have no shape."
The witch got off Timov, and Hamr helped him sit up.
"It was horrible," the boy said in a thin voice. "Cold. High up above the Turtle's back, it's horribly cold."
"Gets colder yet when you die and the Dark Traces get you," the witch said knowingly. "Kirchi, show him the evil."
Kirchi snapped alert from where she had been standing, staring at the black crystal. Though the old witch had prepared her with many stories and, in trance, she herself had heard the evil voices, never had she seen one embodied. She held the black rock away from her body, glad to pass it to the old one.
The crone waved it before Hamr. "Listen." She held the rock to his brow, and a chill crawled across his scalp. A whisper sounded deep in his ears, You will die!
Hamr jerked away, and the crone snickered. "What did it tell you?"
"What I already know," he answered gruffly.
The witch showed her yellow tooth-stubs, and winked. "You understand this spirit." She hurled the black rock high into the air, and it splashed into the pool.
"Can it escape?" Timov asked anxiously.
"Water locks it away from the others. In time, the great ice will come again and bury it and the many more I have cast there before it. They will not return to the sky—not for a long, long time. But time means little to them. And there are many others up there, indeed many others."
Timov stood up heavily, as if rising out of water. His hands clasped his body. And he knew gratitude for the warmth of the sun and the lavish algal odors of the pool. Stunned by the events that had carried him to this strange moment, he stood silently with the old woman.
His mind went back: He had truly soared above the Turtle's back and into the void. The spirits had actually spoken with him. Anything might happen now—and yet the world looked the same as before. He watched a swan unfold its wings and walk several paces across the water to a shadier feeding place.
"Now you are free of the Dark Traces," the old witch said. "But they will come for you again."
Timov's stare hardened into fear, and he squinted at the crone. "They will?"
"You have the blood of a ghost dancer in you."
Timov turned away abruptly, remembering what the priestess had told him last night. Though he had dismissed it at the time, he now found the truth of it hard to deny. He felt dizzy with the prospect of the evil spirits returning for him. He looked imploringly at Hamr, who shifted his weight uneasily, met his gaze with a sad shrug.
"What can I do about it?" Timov muttered bitterly. "This has never happened to me before."
The crone put one hand to the side of the boy's face and gazed at him compassionately. "You can be proud. You have a gift. The Invisibles visit us all. You are among the few who can visit them."
"I don't want to! I never wanted to." He grew silent, then added sullenly, "And my sister? What about her?"
"She is like you," the old woman replied. "That is why Baat took her. The spirits recognize her."
The crone stepped back from Timov and looked to Hamr. "You will never hunt down the ghost dancer."
"It's not the ghost dancer I want, old woman," Hamr replied. "Will you help us get Duru back?"
The witch sucked in her lips and considered this. Her tongue flicked, tasting the air like an asp. "Do you have something of hers?"
"I have her satchel."
"Then get it."
Timov and Hamr started toward the horse, where the satchel hung, and the crone hissed at Timov to stop.
"Little man—stay here." She clutched a twisted cord of bine about her neck strung through a chunk of crystal, and lifted the rock from under her robe. "You must stay near the crystal till your spirit sets back into your body—otherwise you will fall out again and die."
Timov nodded. "Go ahead, Hamr. I'll be all right."
Hamr leveled a fierce stare on the hag. He had been watching the red-haired Kirchi covertly and had seen the apprehension in her fox-bright face. She was as fearful of the old witch as they. "If any harm comes to this boy, your wolves will not stop me from spilling your blood," he warned.
The witch met his stare coolly. "You have come to me for help—and now you threaten me? Take the boy and go! Why would I want him?"
"To enslave him as you have those men," Hamr said, inclining his head to where the two workers squatted, mashing acorns.
"You speak with an empty voice," the witch said. "Get the girl's satchel, or take the boy and go."
"Get Duru's things," Timov insisted. "I'm okay now. Just a little groggy."
Hamr had been trying to see the ghost dancer traits in Timov, incredulous that his Aradia's ancestors had been sired by monsters. He wanted to doubt, but he had seen the spirit drawn from the boy's body, had heard its wicked voice in the stone. So what? he defied himself. The Beastmaker had shaped them all from mud, ghost dancers and people alike.
Resolved to the unimportance of this fact, he placed a reassuring hand on Timov's shoulder. He did not care if the boy’s ancestors had been toads, this lad belonged with him as a clansman. After fixing a stern gaze of warning on the crone, he jogged off to where Blind Side of Life waited on a hillock beyond the stone fences.
"How did he come to master a horse?" Kirchi asked, watching him disappear.
Both women looked to Timov. His insides had unclenched in his gladness that the crone had not raised her longstaff to send her wolves after Hamr. Nervously, he began the story of Blind Side, and as he told it, the old woman leaned closer, as if to hear better.
With the striking speed of a serpent, her hand shot out. The crystal chunk in her grasp gently brushed the boy's brow.
Darkness surged over Timov, and he collapsed.
"Quickly now," the old woman commanded, "get him into the burrow. I will rid u
s of Hamr."
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Lashed to a fir all night, Duru had worked hard to loosen her bindings but to no avail. The ghost dancer had secured her with devilish knots that tightened the more she fought them. At last, she lost sensation in her hands and feet and hung there in the dark, pressed to the tree by the taut vines.
The monster had gone off, either to hunt or to circle back and see that no hunters followed. No ordinary man would dare trespass the darkness of the Forest, she knew—except her Hamr. Over and over, she muttered prayers to the Great Mother to protect him.
Mosquitoes raged in her ear, stinging her exposed flesh where her bodypaint had come off in her struggle with the giant. Owls talked to each other, and the frayed howl of a lone wolf curled on the wind, sharpening the ice-barb in her chest.
Baat squatted in the darkness watching Duru. The harsh voices of the ul udi had worn down his determination to protect her from them. Now only silence occupied him. Even the chill fire from the sky had dulled on his flesh, leaving him dark as any beast of the night.
Slowly, he got up and gathered enough food to offer her a meal—yet, he waited before he returned, listening to her muttered fear, watching her tears fall as she strained against her bonds.
You've done well, Hollow Bone, the gentle voice of a Bright One whispered.
Baat shook his head, incredulous. "How can such a frail and frightened smallhead help me?"
Someone must—and soon, no matter how frail. Have you not noticed the thinning streams? The ice appears in the north already. You must leave at once for the door of the mountain.
"The leaves have only begun to change," Baat said in a hush. "Surely, there is time."
No time. Already you may be too late.
"But what can I do? She is frightened of me. She will never consent to help me."
Loosen her bonds. The blood is cut off in her hands and feet.
Hunting the Ghost Dancer Page 19