Stoneskin's Revenge

by Tom Deitz

  Which left him where he’d started.

  Now, where to begin?

  Well, the procedure he’d followed before called for him to close his eyes, squeeze the scale until it brought blood, while imagining how it would feel to be the animal desired. The change had then come upon him quite abruptly.

  But, he wondered suddenly, how would it be if he tried to shift a little at a time, or maybe only one part?

  Yeah, he’d try that.

  Left hand still clutching the scale, he tightened his grip slightly, and felt a jolt of pain as the substance pierced his flesh. A trickle of warmth slid over his palm, cooling rapidly, but he did not look that way. Rather, he was gazing at his other hand, thinking how the bones lay and imagining them stretching, merging, bringing the outer fingers with them as his nails grew thick and long and hard and became a cloven hoof. He could feel something now, a dull throbbing, a sort of grinding in his hand—a warmth flooding up from his other palm, through his arms and chest, and back down to the experimental appendage. There was a tingling as well—but he tried to banish it, though he had begun to feel dizzy. He was sweating all over, too, and more than his hand was now twisting and stretching. There was a truly appalling itch at the base of his spine, and he felt decidedly uncomfortable lying flat on his back. A glance down showed far more body hair than he’d had before (which was almost none), and his penis seemed to have shifted a little higher. And his vision kept blurring and dimming, so that he had trouble focusing on one thing. He also had a headache.

  No, it wasn’t working—or rather, was working too well. He had to stop, had to, for already he could sense strange instincts filtering through his thoughts: a desire to flee, to run; an almost insatiable urge to eat his fill of green grass and tender leaves.

  His hand was on fire, but the rest of him was too. And it all had to end right now! He thought of the things that made him a man, forced himself to run his free hand along his side, over his chest and belly and hips, ignoring the coarse hair, his single desire to once more find a man’s shape there.

  Abruptly the heat faded, his vision cleared.

  He sank back against the tree, mortally exhausted. And slept.

  A dream found him: sky, clouds swirling around him like pieces of some alien landscape, as he had seen them from a plane once—or better, as he had seen them far more recently in the shape of a falcon. No longer remote, they were things to be touched, felt, toyed with, dived through.

  But he was not alone. There were others there, darting down from either side to flirt with him: a pair of peregrines. And that told him something:

  Falcons were his totem, because they—like him—could see things others could not. And he knew enough of the mystical to know that many events had a mystical interpretation.

  This was therefore a Dream of Power.

  He was also flying, though he had no body, and part of him was afraid because he had been a falcon once before and had perhaps enjoyed it too much (in spite of his fear)—so much that he had nearly lost himself that time, too—though he had not told even Dave about that.

  Do not be concerned, a voice in his mind interrupted. It is only your soul that travels, and a soul can take whatever form it pleases and never lose itself

  Follow, another thought insisted. Follow, see.

  And Calvin did follow, vaguely aware by the slant of the sun that they were flying north and west. For a long time they flew, until a hump of gray granite rose from the horizon, one he recognized as Stone Mountain. The birds began first to circle it, then to fly in patterns which they repeated over and over, leaving contrails of feathers in the air. At first those designs were indistinct, but as the falcons continued to repeat them, Calvin was able to recognize some of them: the cross-in-circle that was a symbol of Power both for his own folk and for the Sidhe, and then—and part of him laughed at this—the circle bisected by a diagonal that was the international No sign, and then the circle surrounded by three triangles that meant RADIATION HAZARD. Others there were too, but less obvious. And abruptly he realized the falcons were gone, had worn away their very selves to become feathery sigils in the sky. He stared at them stupidly, trying to find some elements of unity. And then it came to him: they were all round symbols, all symbols of Power. But they also all carried a warning.

  A warning of what?

  A chill shook Calvin, and he shuddered. And when he did, a branch poked his bare side. He awoke at that, stared at the sky across the creek. There was a trace of duskiness there, and the breeze sliding up from the river held a hint of evening cool.

  There were also two things moving in the sky: a pair of peregrine falcons.

  And he had dreamed of falcons, and earlier that afternoon he had seen a falcon fly off with a snake…Darkness fell upon him, of a sudden, as if a cloud had slipped over the sun, but still his gaze chased the birds. They were gliding west now, but very, very slowly. Calvin followed, slipped into the forest that bordered the creek, felt that world engulf him, knew it found resistance in such simple things as the smell of the soap he had cleaned up with.

  “Sorry,” he whispered. “Can’t help it, I’ll be more careful in the future.”

  And the trees seemed to whisper back, seemed to urge him on.

  Calvin simply drifted then, and was not surprised when a moment later he found himself approaching the stump of a lightning-blasted cypress, which was very strong medicine indeed. He scrambled up a buttresslike root that was taller than he was—and found himself atop a sort of natural altar within a ring of forest: decaying wood a carpet beneath his feet, the darkening sky a vault above his head. He could feel the air playing about his naked body.

  And there came to him, distantly but distinctly, a familiar, disturbing cry.

  A glance above showed him four falcons—the single most magical number—all flying in a circle just at the edge of the ring of trees. Round and round they swooped and swirled; faster and faster. One had something in its talons, but he couldn’t tell what it was.

  And then, all at once, all four arrowed inward, seemed to collide, but then winged apart again.

  But at that instant when Calvin was certain they were going to impact each other, one let something fall.

  It landed at his feet, but he did not flinch, did not look down. Rather, he continued to stare after the falcons as they flew in single file northwest.

  Only when they had vanished beyond the froth of treetops did Calvin dare venture a glance at what his totems had abandoned there.

  His hair prickled as he knelt before it, stretched a hand out at the baseball-sized blob of white and red, and rolled it over so that he could identify it.

  A face grinned back at him: tiny sharp teeth drawn back in death’s rictus, beady red eyes still glittering with a hint of life.

  It was the head of a ’possum. An albino ’possum. And with that realization chills shook him all over again. For the name Uki had given Dave Sullivan in Galunlati was Sikwa Unega: White ’Possum.

  This, Calvin reckoned, was an omen he could not ignore. Four falcons, a white ’possum’s head, and the birds had flown northwest with great urgency.

  So what did it mean?

  But he already knew, for those birds had tried to tell him before. This was a warning. Something was happening in the northwest, or was going to happen, something that involved snakes—or some similar threat from the Underworld; involved Stone Mountain, involved danger; and now, evidently, involved his buddy Dave.

  “Never leave business unfinished,” Calvin’s grandfather had told him, “especially not when it involves magic.”

  As if in confirmation, four falcon feathers drifted down from the sky. Calvin did not hesitate to claim them. Maybe Sandy had been right. Maybe this was a Vision Quest—in which case he’d better start observing the prohibitions.

  Suddenly Calvin Fargo McIntosh was very uneasy.

  Chapter V: Conjurations

  (east of Whidden, Georgia—sunset)

  So much for getting his he
ad straight, Calvin mused an hour later as he busied himself cutting palmetto fronds for a certain part of the ritual he was planning. Evidently the Powers-That-Be had no intention of leaving him alone—or at least that’s what the visions of the past few hours seemed to indicate. And here he had, perhaps foolishly, assumed he was through having adventures for a while. Books were like that: the hero triumphed, the villain was vanquished, and then you looked for someone else’s trials to entertain you.

  But, as he was beginning to discover, the crises of real life were not so easily assuaged: rather, they snuck up on you and attacked unaware, often from forgotten or unexpected quarters, and did not then line themselves up in order of priority and present themselves for optimum convenience. And lately they’d been mixing and mingling and jostling with each other in such a mad quest for ascendency that even Calvin, who was normally pretty laid back, sometimes found himself at a loss as to how to proceed. It was too bad, he reckoned, that he could not check ahead now. At times like these it would be really nice to read the last page first and find out how everything turned out. But he was beginning to wonder if there even was a last page to his particular story. Perhaps not, at the rate weird things were accumulating.

  Or perhaps he really had been simply dreaming, in which case he was behaving like an utter fool. But his heart did not believe that for an instant.

  Not a day had passed, after all, since he had been involved in a desperate quest to help Dave rescue their Faery friend Fionchadd from a heretofore unknown realm of the Sidhe where he was being held hostage—a captivity that had precipitated war among the tribes of that World, which had slopped over into this World as such massive storms that Dave had found himself with no choice but to try to stop it once he had learned of the effect it was having both in his World and in Galunlati, where it was actually moving the sun. Calvin had been involved from the time he had helped Dave’s buddy Alec use the prophetic ulunsuti crystal he had acquired on their first visit to Galunlati to ascertain the source of the aberrant weather. It had shown them the war in Faerie—but worse, it had revealed a possible future in which their friend Gary Hudson’s fiancée was struck dead at the hour of her wedding by a bolt from those same sorcerous storms. That had led Dave and his comrades to orchestrate an end to the war—which eventually had succeeded, but not without cost to all of them.

  Calvin’s problem had been simply one of having to use powers he was not fully in control of yet, spells and rituals Uki had taught him, or which he had picked up from him, but which he had been advised again and again were only to be used with caution. He had used them, too, and successfully as far as he knew—but now he was beginning to wonder if perhaps he had not been a little too full of himself, a little too vain about his own fledgling shamanhood. But it was also damned scary when the fate of reality as you knew it depended on how you used a few talismans and a smattering of obscure information. And now, Calvin very much feared, he was going to have to use them again—although he hadn’t a clue what for.

  But such speculations were not doing an iota of good.

  There was nothing he could find out for sure until mid-night—which was the next of the four optimum times of day for working magic. His only recourse, then, was to funnel his nervous energy into preparations.

  A Vision Quest, Sandy had called this time in the wilderness, yet she had not truly known of what she spoke, except that it referred to a ritualistic seeking after truth which was often so intense it amounted to a rite of passage. It was not even a phrase his tribe used, but had its source much farther west; yet the Ani-Yunwiya had a form of that ceremony as well, used to sanctify all important activities.

  Calvin knew the form of that rite, though he had experienced the full ritual only twice, and each time had been subtly different. The first was when he had reached puberty and his grandfather had made him fast and sweat and breathe fumes and listen to chants until he had had a vision of his spirit guide—the falcons that had subsequently come to warn him. That had not been a strictly Cherokee ritual either, but his grandfather had undergone one like it on a sojourn to Oklahoma, and incorporated it into his own body of lore—mostly herbal medicine, though he also utilized some of the old spells and chants and charms.

  The second time had included Dave and Alec—and Fionchadd—and had been contrived by the human wizard/seer Oisin. They had opened a gate between the Worlds then, and the four of them had journeyed to Galunlati. It had been an opening of another kind of gate for Calvin, too; for the World had never been quite the same after.

  What would tomorrow hold? he wondered. What did the visions mean? If he could only make it to midnight without going bonkers, that much, at least, might be revealed.

  Thwack! And with that last swipe with his knife he decided he had procured enough palmetto. He paused where he was, staring at the pile. It occurred to him (not for the first time, such had been his indecision over the past few hours) that he probably ought to zip into town and give Dave a call and let him know something might be up. His buddy had surely had time enough to get home by now, and while he was at it, he could try again to get hold of Sandy.

  But common sense got the best of him instead. There were a certain number of things he had to do, and all were more easily accomplished by daylight. Beyond that, it would be preferable to tell his friends something than nothing, and if he waited until tomorrow to report, all of them would be rested and thus more receptive, and Calvin would be better informed.

  And since the sun was flirting hard with the horizon, he’d best get moving.

  Sighing, Calvin gathered up his fronds and lugged them the twenty or so yards back to his camp. He had already set up a framework of sweet gum sapling there: a low dome around his fire pit, lashed together at the top with bits of grape vine. In the remaining light, he covered it as best he could with the palmetto, leaving a smoke hole at the top, and a door opening facing the creek. He was trying to construct an asi, a Cherokee sweat lodge, but wasn’t at all certain how well he had succeeded.

  Roughly an hour was spent completing this project, and by the time he had finished, it was full dark and the forest had begun to resound with the cries of crickets and night birds. Indeed, Calvin had never heard the former so loud. They were like white noise, almost drowned out all other sounds, and he found himself more than once unconsciously looking for some kind of volume control.

  Or could they themselves be a sign? Ritual properly demanded drumming, but perhaps the insect cries were some sort of surrogate, conjured by whatever power (he dared hope it was Uki) had sent the earlier visions.

  He stood, feeling an unexpected stiffness in his back and legs that surprised him. He maintained a fairly physical lifestyle and certainly was not averse to a little bit of hard labor, but this perplexed him. Maybe he was pushing himself too hard, maybe he really did need to just take it easy.

  And maybe if he took the easy way out, he would queer whatever quest he was about to embark on before it was begun. After all, overcoming one’s natural instincts and aversions was part of the process. Once on a Vision Quest, you had to do exactly what you thought was right in your center-soul. You could not act frivolously, and you absolutely could not lie. Any one of those would insult the Powers he would be invoking. And such Powers, Calvin now knew, were not to be trifled with.

  Sighing, he began a series of stretching exercises, let his body slide at its own speed back to form. His stomach growled, and he grimaced, wishing he dared eat something, but fasting was another part of the ritual. Ideally, he should have begun that long ago (not that he’d had a really filling meal lately, excepting the one back at Whidden’s Steak-and-Seafood). Seven days’ abstinence was sometimes prescribed, though he’d always made do with less. But for now he’d do as best he could—with one exception. No one could last long without water—or some liquid refreshment—and certainly not in the sticky heat of a south Georgia summer. He was therefore allowed a beverage. Something called black drink was specified—a bitter brew made from
a species of holly. But, though various hollies grew wild in these very woods, he had no time to chase down the appropriate variety—and no knowledge of how the concoction should be prepared. Uki did not use it much, and had never shown Calvin the art of its making, but since the active ingredient, according to what Calvin had read, was caffeine, strong coffee had been deemed a suitable alternative in the past—and of that, fortunately, he had God’s plenty.

  Another sigh, and he busied himself rekindling the fire, using bits of Spanish moss as tinder. As soon as it was blazing along, he filled the peanut can and set it to boiling atop it, then took a flaming twig and used it to ignite a second, smaller fire within the asi.