"If she is helping the ghost dancer," Timov said, "maybe we shouldn't be hunting him."
"Helping the bonesucker?" Yaqut hissed with anger. "You damn fools—the poppet is a ruse. The ul udi squat in Duru right now. She's their poppet."
Facing Yaqut, his stare flat, Hamr looked at the sinewy old man. He reached out, took the straps that crossed the hunter's narrow chest and roughly reversed them to show the rows of teeth stitched there. "This is all you want, old man. More teeth. Another dead bonesucker."
Without warning, Yaqut swung his short lance up hard between Hamr's legs.
Hamr moved faster, blocked the blow with a downward swat, and with one hand grabbed the straps and lifted Yaqut off his feet. His other hand seized the hunter's lance and twisted the weapon free. He threw Yaqut to the ground and pressed the length of the lance across the man's throat.
"We're not hunting the ghost dancer anymore," Hamr said and forced a gagged cry from the mutilated face. "We're going to find Duru. You can either come with us—or you can die here."
He rose and held the short lance over the felled hunter.
"Kill him!" Timov said in a hot whisper. "If you don't, he'll kill you!"
Yaqut sat up, and returned Hamr's steady stare. "We will find Duru," he said flatly.
"Swear it by the Beastmaker," Hamr said. "Swear you will harm none of us."
"No, Hamr," Timov warned. "He's too dangerous!"
Hamr ignored Timov. He did not want to kill Yaqut. The hunter's skills might save their lives if evil spirits had possessed Duru and the ghost dancer indeed proved their enemy. And with winter approaching and no tribe to shelter them, he needed the old hunter.
Yaqut sensed this, and relief pervaded him. "I was wrong to strike at you, Hamr," he muttered. "I swear by the Beastmaker, whose vision path we call life, that I will do you and the others no harm." But the bonesucker, he thought, I'm going to kill him. My life is his death.
Hamr threw the lance into the ground beside Yaqut. "So be it. Let's leave this hateful place. If we must face the Moon Bitch again, let's not do it here."
Without the horse, the satchels and pelts had to be carried among them, in four packs. The lion skin also burdened Hamr. He rolled it up still damp and half-cured.
Following the cold in the tracking stone, the hunters and the witch climbed into the hills of big pines. By nightfall, they had come to the ditch of a withered creek. The crystal pointed south along the stony streambed, colder than ever to the touch. Not far ahead, perhaps around the next bend, the ghost dancer lurked—close, yet too far to pursue in the gloom.
The sun hung briefly among the trees, and the hazy air became milky as fog lapped the hillsides. On a fragrant carpet of marjoram, among sprinkles of blue asters and red buttons of amanita, Yaqut built a fire.
While Hamr stretched his lion-skin, Kirchi and Timov prepared the berries and nuts they had gathered during their trek, and skinned Yaqut's fox.
Wolves howled far away, owls hooted, insects chirped from the sour grass. Wrapped in warm pelts before the fire, the wanderers ate in silence. The gibbous moon shone through the trees in hazy shafts and lit the knee-deep shallows of the fog.
And then, the night noises stopped. Iridescent silence suffused the woods. Fog spilled out of the creek bed and rose like a dustdevil. Hamr stood up. In his hand, he held his spear, the Moon Serpent lashed to its tip.
Wild, white-rimmed eyes snapped open in the rising fog. Timov squealed weakly and instantly regretted it. He crouched behind the fire, commanding himself to be brave. Yaqut rolled backward into darkness. Kirchi stood behind Hamr and snatched two flaming brands from the fire.
The Moon Bitch emerged from the haze with a bull-heavy roar, and the fire fluttered green, then charred black. Kirchi threw the burning brands at the apparition. They flared emerald through its empty shape and out again, and landed in the creek bed.
With a show of sharp fangs, the Moon Bitch lunged. Hamr stabbed at her with his glass-tipped spear, and the Bitch batted it aside, heaving him to the ground. Kirchi fell back under the baleful gaze of the monster. The Moon Bitch's horrid mouth grinned like a lizard's.
Timov, who had pressed himself flat to the earth beside the fire and peeked out from under his arms, watched the abomination rise above Kirchi, claws splayed to wipe out the life of the witch who had betrayed her. Instinctively he leaped at the red-haired witch, meaning to tackle her and sweep her out of the path of the slashing claws. As he struck her and she fell, the talons ripped through his flesh and stabbed into his heart.
Hamr had grabbed his spear, and he hurled it into the wraith's eye—the glaring, vindictive eye of Neoll Nant Caw. Pain stabbed through the wraith and echoed across the Forest in a thousand screams. Collapsing under her own cries, the Moon Bitch's massive body withered to a puddled mess of luminous syrups.
Amidst the shrinking slime, Hamr's spear stood straight up, its glass tip poised above the ground. When it collapsed, the glowing steam shriveled to a splat of fire and, at its center, the crone's glaring eye.
Hamr snatched the spear before it hit the ground and drove its tip into the eye. A green flash clouted the darkness, and a greasy smell whooshed upward and dangled in the breeze, until the wind forked and carried that vileness away.
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Neoll Nant Caw shrieked and heaved backward to the ground under a blast of cold air. Windfall leaves gushed through the tunnels of the Forest and flooded into the clearing. In a gale of leaf litter, the cry of the Moon Bitch resounded across the clearing.
The three witches, who had mounted the power for the wraith, dropped their crystals and ducked into the burrow. When the scream died away, they peeked out and espied the crone's hand and part of her leg, where she lay buried in brown mulch.
"Is she alive?"
"I feel her. Her light is weak, yet she lives."
"Don't touch her. Get the crystals."
"My ears ache."
"My every bone aches. Had we grasped the crystals a moment longer, we'd have died with the Moon Bitch for sure."
"We must get the crystals away before we move her. She could yet fall into the sky."
Neoll Nant Caw heard the witches' voices tightly bundled, bobbing in a sea of silence. Their words and the world around her seemed a mirage—the leaves piled on her face, the hard earth under her, all transparent, part of the emptiness. She floated at the brink of her body, a lazy ghost, knowing that the void before her plummeted into death.
The old woman might have plunged headlong into that peaceful silence, except that she had collided with another soul. As the Moon Bitch, she had tried to slay Kirchi for betraying her and instead had caught Timov in her claws.
His body of light hung above her now, a twitching star at the purple cope of the sky. If she let herself fade into silence, he would fall into emptiness with her. He carried blood too valuable to lose;.The ul udi could come down to earth through him and make new crystals. Even now, the Bright Ones communicated with him. Far away, she could hear their eerie music coursing through the blue air and could see the youth's star trembling to its rhythms.
Over the years Neoll Nant Caw had learned enough from the ul udi of the lightning in her own flesh to pull back from the void. She concentrated on the voices of her sister witches, ignored the lightness expanding in her bones.
"One of us should go get her slaves. They will tend to her."
"Leave her be. She must bind her light first. Come away and bring the crystals."
"What about Baat? She gathered us here to save him from the hunters."
"Forget him, sisters. He's old. He'll die soon anyway."
"And the wanderers from the south—the girl and the boy who carry ul udi?"
"So Sister Caw says. But she, too, is old and may have seen what she wanted to see at the end of a long, bitter life. People can't carry ul udi. Only the Old People could do that and they are almost gone."
"Then we should take the crystals to our dells and use them for teaching the peopl
e instead of attacking our own hunters."
"Yes, Sister Caw is old. We must prepare for her loss."
Neoll Nant Caw drew her attention away from the witches. Death did not yet own her. She focused on the mirage itself: the heat shivers of pain in her muscles, the comforting grip of the earth under her, and the bisque of decayed leaves filling her sinuses with their odor. This dream held her life in place.
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Kirchi placed her three undamaged moonstones on Timov's chest so that they touched and formed a triangle. Their power coursed weakly without the fourth, and she had to lean close to find the mica-glints of energy that formed images.
"What do you see?" Hamr pressed close behind her.
Sapphire gleams gathered briefly to an image of Timov in a void. He had been knocked out of his body and had fallen into the purple luminosity of the auroral sea above their heads. Firepoints flickered around him, and then he vanished.
"The ul udi have him," she said.
"Then he's dead." Yaqut spoke matter-of-factly from where he crouched beside a tree, searching the darkness for wraiths.
Kirchi held her breath and steadied her gaze. She pushed her will into the plasma-field of the peephole, trying to see deeper into the sky, to where the Bright Ones had taken him. The window opened too small.
Her attention fell back to earth, and she glimpsed ragged firs and crooked shadows of the Forest. A young girl appeared, sitting at the edge of a trench, her eyes and hair as dark as Timov's and Hamr's.
"Duru!" Hamr shouted, and the image faded.
Kirchi hastily arranged the stones and breathed on them again, to no avail.
"That was Duru!" Hamr said in amazement and bent closer over Timov's body to stare at the moonstones. The vision had vanished. In its absence Hamr felt his need: If he lost Timov and Duru, nothing of his past would remain. A moan escaped him.
"Timov's not dead," Kirchi whispered, peering into Timov's tranced eyes.
"Then where is he?" Yaqut asked, gruffly. "He's not sleeping." Kirchi ignored him and looked at Hamr. "Timov has fallen into the sky."
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The sun set among mountainous purple clouds, and wind bursts carrying the smell of rain whooshed through the trees. On a sheet of birch bark, Duru collected chestnuts she had baked among embers and set them steaming at the edge of the ditch, where Baat lay. She hoped their toothsome smell would ease him awake, but he did not move. His large body lay curled on itself.
"Baat," Duru called in a voice heavy with concern. Is he ill? Is he dying? Anxiety prickled through her as she tried to figure out what to do: Stoke the fire, heat rocks, drop them in a hollowed burl filled with water, saxifrage, and lupine seeds. That is what Cyndell or Mother would have done—make a medicinal broth. But will that help a ghost dancer? Surely it will, she decided, for he had known how to heal her gashed leg. Their medicines are the same.
She had no hollowed root burl, and finding herbs in the thin moonlight would not be easy. She called again, "Baat. It's night. You've slept all day."
Baat heard her, but he was afraid to move. His mind squirmed, maggoty with the Dark Traces he had called with his hunger music. The lion's death had defeated their evil intent, and now they writhed inside him, wanting carnal satisfaction, demanding the bloodlust he had promised.
Rage with the hunger of the lion, the Dark Traces echoed his prayer. Come down through me. Be lion's flesh. Be lion's hunger.
If he lay perfectly still long enough, they would grow bored and go away. He had invited them with his hunger music. He had called them into himself. They shared one flesh now, until they chose to leave. The People possessed means of driving them off. Alone, he was helpless.
"Baat," Duru called again and lowered herself into the ditch. As she neared, the amethyst light encasing him streaked red, and she hesitated.
"Are you all right?" she whispered. "Can I help you?" She remembered seeing oak galls not far away and thought she could find them again in the dark. With the saxifrage and lupine seeds, they would make a strong medicine. Before making the broth, she must know if it would help him.
Timidly, Duru extended her hand and touched the glassy glow around Baat. It felt hot, like glue, like blood, and she snatched her hand back. The red glow came with her and began to burn her fingers.
A voice out of the glow opened in her head: You will die!
Duru eked a small cry. At the sound of her fear, maniacal laughter exploded around her. She scurried to climb out of the ditch. In her haste, she grasped a dead branch that looked like a root in the dark, and it gave way. She fell backward and landed on Baat.
The giant reared up, powerful teeth bared around a ferocious roar.
Duru leaped away. Her fright propelled her swiftly up the slope of the ditch, and she sprawled over the brink, the ghost dancer's glowing hand clawing the space behind her. Her foot landed on the chestnuts she had placed at the edge and sent her flying back into the ditch.
Baat watched from inside his horror as the Dark Traces powered his body with the Lion's hunger. Every effort he made to stop himself rebounded with the mocking singsong, Come down through me! Be lion's hunger!
Duru rolled to her back and beheld Baat burning! Red clots of fire crawled off his enraged face and spun out into the dark. She wriggled backward, felt a rock under her hand, and heaved it.
With a quick swipe, he deflected the missile. Bellowing, he lurched toward her, flames spluttering around him like blood spray,
Sobbing with fright, Duru shielded herself with her arms—and perceived blue fire gleaming from her hands.
The ghost dancer's eyes noticed it too. Baat recognized the power of the Bright Ones streaming through the young smallhead. He called the serene energy into himself to counter the fury of the Dark Traces.
His face still fixed with rage, he stopped. Slowly, his expression dulled. He sat down. Jaw slack, eyes drowsy, massive arms resting limp at his sides, he hunkered in a shrinking aura of red light.
Duru put her hands on his. And the blue radiance condensed to a shining window in his chest.
In the azure glow, shadows materialized into a close-up image of gravel. The field of stones shimmered with movement. Duru discerned that the gravel units consisted of people, a large crowd milling on the tundra, seen from above.
They flowed in one direction, then turned in unison to stream the other way—dancing. The crowd danced, and as she looked closer, she discovered that they teemed as a throng of red-haired people like Baat.
Music poured out from bone flutes, drums, and clappers, and the People moved in a frenzy, bobbing to the rhythm.
Duru moved with them, caught up in the urgent power of the dance. When the crowd shifted to the left, the music jangled out of tune, and the dancers gyrated faster, afraid and angry. Moving to the right, the music brightened, and fear and wrath changed to twirling rapture.
The People danced the ul udi down to Earth. The Bright Ones and the Dark Traces merged into the passion of the dancers. A flinty smell charged the sweaty air and lofted with the heat of the packed bodies.
In the blue fire, Duru rose with their heat and met the cold of space above the churning People. The music dulled away. And another tuneful energy took up, eerie with longing and beauty, synchronized with the beat of the dancers but trembling with silences and long, strange notes.
Fear gripped Duru as she experienced the alien presence of the ul udi. She moved back to the dancers, down from the cold and into the heat of the People.
The crowd had dispersed, scattered like pollen across the hushed brightness of the sky. She drifted alone under the blue heavens, listening down all the length of the wind for the music of the People.
With a jolt, Duru realized she was not alone. She shared presence with Baat, listening in his memory for the music of his tribe—music he would never hear again. All at once, the death of his people meshed with Duru's own great losses, and she partook of his suffering. Far away and getting closer, she heard the whimpers of his chil
dren as they died, heard Baat's answering cries, and her own sobs for Mother, Aradia, and Cyndell.
The pain lifted the edges of the trance, and she sat again in the night before Baat's thick body. His chest still glowed with the radiance that the Bright Ones had sent through her to calm him.
In the blue fire, Duru glimpsed the webby fire of the auroras and the vaulting gleam of stars. Cold curled around her again, and she trembled at the sound of that wind beating her upward, full of wailing voices.
The sun appeared, a wingspread of orange fire perched on the blue edge of the Tortoise shell. She floated into its enfolding bright silence, and joyful warmth suffused her. Out of the solar glare, a shadow swelled and became Timov floating in watery distance. Gempoints of light glinted around him.
Duru called out, and instantly found herself back in her body, staring into the misty shine in the hollow of Baat's chest. Timov vanished, and the blue luminosity darkened to violet night. Drowsiness attacked her, and Duru struggled to stay alert.
She leaned backward and looked away from the ghost dancer, until the chill wind rattling down through the treetops refreshed her, and she could focus her eyes.
A slender figure had congealed out of the shimmerings of moonlight—an old woman with ragged lengths of hair. The wraith of Neoll Nant Caw drifted closer, her face bright as milk, the crinkles of her age like veins in marble.
The last, violet gleam of the Bright Ones' energy blinked out, and the ghost dancer sagged in sleep. Now the pressures of the darkness at last overwhelmed Duru, and she swooned to the ground.
Her last sight held the crone shredding to vapors, leaving only her head floating briefly in the darkness. Flame lit her face. Her mouth gaped wide, rayed with needle-fine teeth.
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Hamr labored over Timov until dawn showed among the trees. He sat on the boy's chest, the way he had for those who had drowned, pushing wind out of his lungs and then breathing it back into him.
Hunting the Ghost Dancer Page 29