by C. E. Murphy
Its stubby wings drove it upward in short, twisting bursts as it strove to reach me, its Enemy, in turn. I could sense fury and hatred pouring off it, helping to fuel its passage through the sky, and knew as long as I kept it angry I had the advantage. It was in the lake below that it would come into its own, where its long serpentine form would play in and out of the water with ease while I struggled with the weight of liquid on my wings.
Backwinging, claws extended, shocked me with the force of gravity denied. It tore my breath away, making me want to laugh, wide-eyed, like a child, but the thunderbird was in control, and it had no time for my youthful glee. Wind slammed against the undersides of my wings, supporting me as my claws pinched into—no, around—the serpent’s body. Irritation surged through me, that I hadn’t drawn blood, but even so, I had the thing in my talons and flung myself skyward, wings crashing heavily against the air.
The monster in my claws twisted and struck, spires on its back rigid with rage. One bite landed and I screamed as venom shot through the wound. The sound shattered the thickness of the air, cracking the sky with its strength. I released the serpent, watching it fall away beneath me, struggling to keep aloft with its vestigial wings. I struggled as well, burning heat of poison cauterizing my blood. As a bird I had no jaw to set, but the same feeling of resolution washed through me. The bite had to be ignored, and the Enemy defeated. I turned on wingtip again, and thought, rather incongruously, hey.
Hey. I was a healer.
Hey. I had something the spirit creature didn’t.
Water in the gas line. The idea came easily, silver-sheened power rising through me even though my body wasn’t my own. I wondered briefly where the hell my body was, and if it was alive, because I didn’t see how I could’ve actually shape-shifted into a gigantic bird. The mass equation just wouldn’t work, even taking hollow bones into account. Then my heartbeat faltered as the first of the tainted blood came to it, and I stopped fucking around with little details like physics and started worrying about staying alive.
It would have been easier with a siphon, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea well enough to make it work. Hell, it would’ve been easier if I could see what I was doing, but I didn’t think asking the thunderbird to nip in for a quick landing so I could step out of its body and take a look inside it would go over well.
Instead I clung to the idea of water in the gas line, one liquid floating on top of the other. Blood below, poison on top: I could tell when it began to work because the pain intensified, pure venom corroding the vessels and veins it touched. I figured the next few seconds might make me a little dizzy, but as the thunderbird folded its wings and went into another dive, it seemed as good a time as any to risk it.
It took pressure to squeeze the poison out, like a thin tube with a semisolid matter in the bottom, the liquid on top squishing its way forward. I was right: dizziness crashed through me, and instead of diving I suddenly realized I was just plain falling. The thunderbird’s heartbeat hung motionless for a terribly long time as I squeezed water from the gas line with all my concentration.
And then the poison was gone and the thunderbird somehow managed to pull out of its plummet, smashing into the serpent with such force that we all tumbled down toward the lake, tangled together. I flared my wings, slowing the fall as best I could, while the serpent wrapped itself around me, trying to crush my wings back to my body. It reared its head back, jaws agape, and lunged forward again.
To hit thin silver shielding that sparked and lit with its contact. Snakes weren’t normally much for expression, but as it flinched back I was sure I saw astonishment in its eyes. I let out a cackle of sheer delight. It erupted from my throat as a skree, making the air around me seem to collapse again.
I tore at the serpent’s face with my beak, and as it twisted away, rolled onto my back. Panic shrieked through me, warning me of my vulnerability, but it loosened the serpent’s coil from around most of my body. I rolled again, dug my claws into the Enemy’s belly, snatching it out of the air, and climbed for the sky again.
There was no sunlight left. Thick heavy clouds filled the air, like all the muggy heat of the last several days had finally coalesced together. It was my weather, thunderbird weather, and I felt the bird’s thrill of pleasure as we dragged the serpent into the clouds. Its fragile wings would be easy to rip off, its unprotected belly simple to tear open. The steaming entrails would be a feast.
I gagged. I didn’t even know birds could gag. No, I guessed they could, because mommy birds gagged up dinner for baby birds. I felt badly for the baby birds. Swallowing bird bile was not high on my list of things to do again. At any rate, I was sure eating snake was a fine thing for a bird to do, even a thunderbird, but I needed to do more than that. The coven, with my help, had opened up the passage for not just Amhuluk, but for all manner of creatures that were probably wreaking further havoc on an unsuspecting Seattle. I needed to undo that, or nothing was ever going to get straightened out. I swallowed against bile again, and tried my hand—or throat—at speaking a word with a bird’s voice box.
It came out like thunder. Amhuluk, the serpent’s name, the one I hoped was true and would force it to answer all the way from the depths of its being. Nakaytah, three millennia dead, had offered up the tool I needed to capture the thing and drag it, kicking and screaming, back into the Lower World.
Wriggling and screaming, said the snide little voice at the back of my mind.
Snakes don’t have legs.
It’s a good thing I didn’t know where my real body was. I might’ve convinced the thunderbird to go bite my head off.
The serpent in my claws convulsed, then surged forward, reckless action that let it strike at my throat. Silver sparkling shields flared up again, protecting me, but it had learned. Its goal wasn’t to bite through me, but to grasp my neck in a crushing grip with its mouth. I shrieked, more from fear than pain, my claws opening to scrabble at the serpent’s body. Its weight pulled my head down and suddenly we were falling, an uncontrolled dive back toward the distant lake. I flared my wings, but it only slowed the fall. The serpent lashed around, using its own stubby wings to generate enough lift that it could slam its body weight down onto my right wing.
The expected pain didn’t come: the thunderbird’s bones were less fragile than a smaller creature’s might’ve been. But it unbalanced me badly, and the dive became a tumble, serpent and thunderbird wound about one another as we crashed through the air. I screamed outrage over and over, shattering the storm clouds above us. Rain hit in torrents, sheets of water weighing us further, driving us toward the lake’s surface.
The serpent wrapped itself around my neck, crushing my throat. We hit the water with a splash that felt like it broke every bone in my body.
CHAPTER 34
I felt terribly, terribly small, beneath the surface of the lake. My wings were waterlogged, the serpent’s strength much greater here than in the sky. It slithered around my neck until it held me with the end of its tail, and then began swimming deeper, dragging me farther into the stormy lake. I spread my wings, pathetic painful gesture of protest, and the serpent’s speed slowed a little.
A little. Not enough. I closed my eyes and struggled to backwing, trying to pull myself back toward the surface. The serpent tightened its tail around my throat and swam harder. I wondered how long I could survive underwater, or if a thunderbird didn’t need to do mundane things like breathe.
From the growing tightness in my chest, I suspected I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
Why hadn’t it worked? I’d sure as hell gotten the thing’s attention by bellowing its name. Why hadn’t it bent to my will?
Maybe because I had no ritual. It’d taken ritual to open the world walls with the coven. The water grew colder and darker and I fought to remember any of what they’d done, beyond dancing around a fire and singing in a language I didn’t know. Even in the midst of drowning, I snorted at myself. Water went up my beak and I coughed out most of
the air I had left.
Ritual not only wasn’t my style, but I was a little short on time anyway. The serpent had only hesitated when I called its name, not been stopped entirely. I was missing something.
Virissong’s face flashed through the darkness that was becoming all I could see, and I almost laughed. Didn’t, quite: I’d already used up too much air. But almost. And cast down deep into myself, reaching for power at the same time that I made a promise: if I got out of this alive, I was going to spend a whole lot more time studying and a whole lot less time pretending that my gifts didn’t exist.
Approval bubbled through me, not my own. The thunderbird stretched its wings farther and swept them down powerfully, dragging the serpent and its downward journey to a stop. The serpent snapped around, a silver streak in the dark lake, its fangs bared as it lunged for the thunderbird.
My power responded with a flare of brightness that turned the rain-pelted lake to white. I whispered, “My name is Siobhàn Walkingstick,” into the whiteness, and the thunderbird’s voice roared, water shaking away from me in visible shock waves. “I live within Wakinyan, your ancient Enemy.” Maybe I had a little ritual in me after all. “I know you, Amhuluk. And I know the demon whose soul you share.”
I had no way to draw breath, and the impulse to do so nearly killed me. I drew water all the way to the back of my throat before coughing it out again. Dizziness brought my eyesight down to pinpoints, even the thunderbird’s superb color vision unable to offer me more than tiny spots of focus. I took the last air in my lungs and someone else whispered, “Idlirvirissong,” from my mouth as I lunged forward to slam my talons through the serpent’s skull, shattering bone and closing claw through the monster’s mouth.
I had a moment to be astonished while thunder ruptured all the water away from me, sending it spouting up into the sky in a whirlpool that I was the eye of. The serpent was flung into its swirls, squealing hideously as the water swept it farther and farther into the sky. A split appeared in the sky, shredding the clouds and opening a path all the way up to the clear stars. I dragged in a deep breath, feeling warmth and life returning.
I was good with the idea of nets. Cars and nets and cages. Things that held people in, rather than releasing them. What I needed now was an opening, the same kind the coven had created, one that would let not just the serpent, but all the spirits we’d released into Seattle return to their homes.
The idea of sacrifice flirted around the edges of my mind, so obvious and simple that even now I almost fell for it. It’d been made clear to me that it was my power that’d given the coven the strength to do what they had. I was certain that a little thing like the cost of my life would be enough to pay for sending the spirits home again.
But that would be the easy way out, and frankly, I didn’t think I deserved it. I tilted my head back, feeling wet feathers ruffle and stretch against my throat. I had no spell to sing, but I had the voice of the Wakinyan, and I had my own will to change the things that had been done badly.
I had never heard a sweet sound from a raptor’s throat before. The pure noise of shattering glass played off the whirlpool’s walls, bouncing higher and higher into the atmosphere, until the sound itself crashed into the gash in the sky, and tore it open all the wider.
I threw my own will behind that sound, flinging power up toward the clouds. Just to the clouds: rain thundered down all over Seattle, and I wanted to use that. I envisioned silver drops of power mingling with the rainfall, splashing down over man and beast and calling those who belonged somewhere else home again. Roofs and tree cover meant nothing, I whispered to the power-infused rain. It was the rain that carried the message, and all the creatures that heard it were bound by my will.
Amhuluk, closest to the rip in the sky and weakened by the calling of its name, went first. It threw its own black power behind it, trying to stitch the tear closed, so that the others couldn’t follow. I reached up and slashed the hole open again with a silver lance of magic, the distance between it and myself meaningless.
Crystal filled the air, so sharp-edged and full of color I winced away from it. It took long moments to realize it was an aurora, more brilliant in the thunderbird’s acute vision than my own mind was capable of processing. Jade faded to diamond-white at the edges, then ran and blurred into violet and crimson, so hard I thought I would cut myself if I reached up to touch them.
And littered in the colors came the spirits, their own forms faded and gentle inside the aching incandescence of the aurora. Resentment tingled from some, relief from others as they pounded into the sky.
The beat of footsteps into the sky shook the earth, and a surge of panic lent strength to my power. I didn’t want another earthquake, and remembered too vividly that was how the spirits had been given body. I shouted again, thunderbird voice running deep this time, and the whirlpool I hovered in the midst of buckled and mirrored itself, opening a spigot into the depths of the lake beneath me. I was the focal point of that one, too, the center at the small end, its width growing as it spiraled down toward the bottom of the lake.
Poor fish, I thought unexpectedly, and for the first time started to worry about things like airplanes and weather patterns when there was a whirlpool in the sky. I reached out with my power, trying to feel the rest of the city, to see if I’d endangered anyone or anything.
The whirlpool nearly crushed me, water slamming in toward my body so fast it stole my breath again. Fresh panic flared, forcing the waterspout to its original dimensions, my focus entirely on it again. I gnawed my lower lip, at least mentally—bird beaks weren’t really meant for gnawing—and gave the power inside me a sort of sideways glance, trying to peek at it. I’d had it drained from an external source before, but I’d kind of hoped it might be like the Energizer Bunny, left to its own.
That was clearly not the case. I was tapping the absolute limit of my own abilities, so much so that I couldn’t even afford to open myself up and let the city hit me with its strength. It was pretty clear that a lapse in concentration would kill me.
The good news was that all manner of creatures were thundering into the lake below me, physical bodies and spirits seeming to separate as they hit the double whirlpool. They raced up and down the swirls, becoming part of the aurora or part of the lake, returning to the things they’d come from. I just needed to hold on long enough for the rain to drive everything home again.
Long enough becomes a strange amount of time, when it’s just you against yourself. Long enough becomes one more second, each one infinite but graspable in conception. I can hold on one more second. Each one became the sum total of my universe, until there was nothing left of me but a shell pressing outward, holding the water back like Moses at the Red Sea. One more second. Meaningless, endless time lost in an aurora so intense that my eyes slowly learned to deny it. All around me there was nothing but static white light, and then that, too, faded away into a sky full of broken clouds and the scent of rain.
I beat the thin air with weary wings, turning a slow wheel on a tip so I could cock one eye at the rip in the sky. It was all but gone now, last vestiges of what I hoped was victory. The lake, far below me once again, was almost settled, a few choppy waves rippling its surface. I heaved a sigh and folded my wings, plunging toward the white-capped lake. It was over.
Slamming into my own body at two hundred miles an hour drove me beneath the surface, so deep I wondered if I’d be able to make it back up again. There was no somersault sensation this time, just a good old-fashioned kick to the gut as I sank into the water. My lungs hurt. My ribs hurt. Golden fire burned into my breastbone, doing something to replenish the worn-out power I carried within me, but not doing a damned thing for the lack of air in my system. I was too tired to panic. Hell, I was too tired to kick toward the surface. Maybe I could survive long enough to bobble that way with whatever little air was still left in my lungs.
Soft gold power drew me upward, exiting my chest as it had done before, but without taking my sense of
body with it. One last spirit to go home, I thought hazily. The tear in the sky had to still be there, so the thunderbird could return to the Upper World.
Two spirits, someone inside my own head corrected me. Nakaytah’s voice, oddly familiar in my own mind. I exhaled, somewhat foolishly, all the stress leaving my system as I finally recognized who had spoken through my mouth when I’d named Virissong properly.
I hoarded his name for all this time, Nakaytah said. Only a shaman speaking it could drive Amhuluk and Idlirvirissong back into the Lower World.
I wished I had some air to breathe, but I smiled a little anyway. Drowning turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant way to go after all. I was going to have to apologize to—well, somebody—for my sarcastic doubting earlier. You’re the Wakinyan’s host, too, you know? I asked her. Your name is a part of it, too, now. It can’t be banished unless the Enemy knows to call your name, too.
Nor released, she agreed, and because I could take a hint, I drew in a lungful of water and whispered, “Goodbye, Nakaytah Wakinyan.”
I like to think I was the only one who saw the golden ghost of a thunderbird rise upward from my chest and speed into the sky like a star falling in reverse.
Eventually it struck me that being dead was a great deal like floating in a giant swimming pool, my chest rising and falling just like I was still alive and breathing. My eyelids were so heavy I had to lift my eyebrows to get them far enough open to see. A handful of fuzzy bright stars came into sight, and I began to think I probably wasn’t dead after all. I’d lost my contacts in the lake water, but on a scale of one to ten, with ten being dead, losing my contacts was probably somewhere around a negative fourteen in matters of consequence.