Changer's Daughter

by Jane Lindskold

  “Kabiesi!” Regis cries, falling flat to the floor, heedless of the burned spot in front of him. “I never knew! Forgive me!”

  “That’s better,” Shango replies, but the air still crackles around him.

  When the sun rises high, Shahrazad is ready enough to agree to the griffin’s demand that they get to cover. Before this, she had hoped that any moment they would see the truck on the road ahead of them. She had envisioned how they would land on the bed of the truck, how she would break the little window in the back of the cab and reach in to stop Wayne from driving any farther.

  She doesn’t fear the mouse, for it is small and she has eaten many mice. It doesn’t particularly bother her that this mouse might well be her half sister. She’d never liked Louhi.

  However, they never catch up to the truck, and the griffin, though quite powerful, has grown tired. She has flown several hundred miles, carrying some twenty-five pounds of not-quite coyote. Moreover, she has not flown where people might see her for what she is in a long, long time. Although brighter than either eagle or lion, the griffin is still animal in her adherence to pattern and habit. The higher the sun rises, the slower she flies, until by midmorning she takes them down into the shelter of a copse of trees.

  Once Shahrazad has stretched kinks out of muscles unaccustomed to the cramped posture she had maintained on the griffin’s back, she shifts back into her familiar coyote form. The griffin can get plenty of water from the snow, but she cannot leave to hunt without risking detection.

  Remembering how once, long, long ago, her father had hunted for her, Shahrazad assumes the responsibility for feeding her companion. It takes a lot of rabbits to satisfy the griffin, but there are plenty here, and, since there are no predators to speak of this near to a highway, Shahrazad finds them easier hunting than the canny creatures she had pursued on the Other Three Quarter’s Ranch.

  Gnawing on a leg bone from her own, much smaller, meal, Shahrazad tries to think where Louhi and Wayne might have gone. Respecting the griffin’s greater age and experience, she whines a query. The griffin answers promptly:

  “To Lovern. He is the only one who might be able to give her back her body.”

  “Lovern?” Shahrazad does not have an inordinate respect for the scrawny wizard. Her father had treated him as if he were some sort of joke, and she herself had encountered Lovern during a rather bad time for the wizard. However, the griffin is adamant.

  “Lovern.”

  “Lovern belongs to Arthur,” Shahrazad says, “but he has his own den, too. I’ve never been there, but it has been spoken of.”

  The griffin nods. “We cannot chase the truck. Let us go to Arthur when darkness falls. The way will be shorter if we do not need to follow these human roads.”

  “Do you know where Arthur lives?”

  The griffin hunches her feathered shoulders in something like a shrug. “South. In a big city. You lived there. You will find it for us.”

  Shahrazad isn’t certain that she can, but as she cannot think of a better plan, she agrees. They sleep side by side then, letting the short November day wheel past.

  When twilight comes Shahrazad shifts herself into her hybrid form and climbs onto the griffin’s back. This time when the eagle-puma rises into the air, she takes them south, toward the distant city of Albuquerque.

  21

  Man kann, was man will, wenn man nur will, was man kann.

  (We can do what we will if we only will to do what we can.)

  —German proverb

  Aduke stares in horror at the man seated in one of the chairs around Oya’s conference table. At first she had thought it was Kehinde, that he had trespassed on the borders of Oya’s territory, perhaps in eagerness to learn something of the folklore to which the elder often alluded. Kehinde’s greed in such matters is enough to overcome common courtesy toward a hostess, and he has hinted once or twice that their strange landlady must know more than she is telling.

  That Kehinde would trespass on their benefactrix shocks her enough, but when Oya gently explains to her that it is Taiwo, not Kehinde, who sits so slumped in the chair before her, Aduke feels her knees grow weak.

  “It cannot be my husband,” she protests. “He is in Lagos. No one has come into Monamona since Oya brought the wind, so this cannot be Taiwo.”

  “It is Taiwo,” the man says, and raises his head for the first time. He looks terrible. Dressed only in once-stylish pajamas now sullied by his night’s travel, he seems a boy dragged out of bed, not a grown man, and certainly not the confident young businessman who had courted her, winning her consent and even her love.

  “Taiwo?” she echoes. “But how? If you have been in Monamona since the wind rose, why didn’t you come to see me? Why haven’t you answered my letters? Your mother,” she says, aware even as she speaks that she is bordering on hysteria, “has wished to see her son!”

  He sighs, a great shuddering thing, and meets her gaze.

  “I was in Monamona on business, business that my boss did not wish to be known. There was no hope of secrecy if I came to see you. Even if you didn’t talk, Mother would, or one of the sisters or husbands or children. So I stayed away.”

  Oya, seated at one end of the table, makes a tut-tutting sound. “Haven’t you had enough of lying, Taiwo?”

  He looks sharply at the older woman. Clearly, in his focus on Aduke, he had forgotten that she and his strange captors are present as well. With this realization, he shrivels further, but tries to maintain his bravado.

  “It is the truth,” he maintains.

  “But only the smallest part of that truth,” Oya persists. There is no kindness in the gaze she turns on him. “You have been playing with dangerous people, thinking yourself the great man while your wife misses you.”

  Anson pauses in his meal. Since their return he has been eating steadily, matched in his voraciousness by the strange white man with the long black hair they call “Changer.” Aduke notes that no one explains his presence, any more than they explain the presence of the wild-eyed woman who sleeps now in Oya’s own bed. With what she is learning, Aduke isn’t certain she wants to know.

  “And, Taiwo,” Anson says, “those games are ending. We want help from you, help that will finish your masters’ reign of terror as swiftly as possible.”

  From him, the words do not sound melodramatic, but merely a statement of facts. Aduke sees Taiwo cringe, and with a sinking heart realizes that the accusations are true.

  “What have you been doing?” she says softly.

  He turns to look at her, speaking as if they are alone, not with a half dozen other people.

  “I thought I was building a place for us in this new Nigeria of ours,” Taiwo answers. “I thought I was making connections that might someday see me a national minister and you one of the first ladies in the land. By the time I realized that my employers were dirtier, more dangerous people than I had ever suspected, I was in so deep there was no getting out.”

  Oya pushes a glass of cold lemonade to him. “You’re telling the truth now, Taiwo. Keep telling. There may be salvation for you in helping fix what you have broken.”

  Taiwo doesn’t even look at her. “I killed our baby, Aduke.”

  She gasps, staring at him, gone beyond horror into dull shock. Oya’s hand on her shoulder is no comfort. She feels so desolate she cannot even manage a single word, but Taiwo continues unprompted.

  “Did you ever wonder how Baby caught the smallpox—especially in Lagos, where you kept so much to yourself?” Taiwo says. Despite the lemonade he has sipped, his voice is rusty. “I gave it to him. Remember how you and I had a series of vaccinations—the ones I told you were a fringe benefit of my new position?”

  Aduke nods.

  “Actually, they were to preserve us from the smallpox. I demanded shots for all my family, and my request was granted, but they wouldn’t give me anything for the baby,” Taiwo shrugs, “so I went into Regis’s lab and I stole a vaccination. There were two cabinets in
his lab, one labeled ‘Live’ and the other labeled ‘Killed.’ Of course, I took my vial from the one labeled ‘Live,’ for I wanted the baby to live.

  “As I learned later, I was a fool. What I had taken was no vaccine. It was the live virus itself. By the time I had learned this, I knew why Baby had caught the smallpox. When he died, I could not bear to face you, so even when business brought me to Monamona I stayed away.”

  Aduke wants to hate Taiwo for this, and finds that she feels only pity. She can see him as he must have been, arrogant and confident, stealing the vaccine, administering it to Baby. When Baby had fallen ill, Taiwo must have thought at first that he had incurred the curse of the King of Hot Water. Only later had he realized that the only curse had been his own pride.

  No, she does not hate him, but when she searches for the love she had known for her husband it is gone as if it had never been. She realizes that the man she had thought was Taiwo had been an illusion as insubstantial as one of the bush ghosts in Kehinde’s tales.

  When Aduke still does not speak, Taiwo labors on, “In my grief and shame, I behaved like a man who didn’t care what his ancestors thought of him. I connived at murder and kidnapping. I indulged in rape and petty bullying. I became as great a monster as those who have been called my ‘masters’—but they did not make me evil. When I was drawn to them, I was merely ambitious. It was the shame of killing my own firstborn son that made me evil.”

  Aduke scrubs tears she had not realized she was weeping from her cheeks and straightens beneath Oya’s hand. Grief will only drown her. There is redemption in action, and Oya has shown her that she is not without resources of her own.

  “Taiwo,” Aduke says to her husband, “Oya and I are going to finish your masters, whatever it takes. Will you tell us what you know of them and their plans? Consider it an offering to our dead son’s ghost, then maybe his spirit will trust enough in the living to be born again.”

  Taiwo’s answer is a quiet “Yes,” but the pain in his dark eyes shows her that only now has he realized that they are finished. Aduke is appalled to realize that he had believed that somehow he would still hold her to him. She shakes her head in dismay, and says one word:

  “Idowu.”

  As if her reminder that she was born with power greater than even that of twins is a command, slowly Taiwo begins to speak. Soon Oya and her allies are gathered round the council table, taking notes, asking questions, planning a kidnapping—and perhaps a murder or two—of their own.

  Louhi has never been to the Academy, indeed she barely knows of its existence, but she has been to Pendragon Estates. Even if Lovern is not there already, there he will come, for in crisis the wizard will be at his king’s side. And wasn’t she a crisis? If a mouse could smile, she would have smiled then, but the twitching of her whiskers that substitutes vanishes almost as quickly as it occurs. She and Wayne have not traveled as quickly as she could have wished. Indeed, the five hundred-or-so-mile drive could have been accomplished in a night, bringing them to Arthur’s doorstep before Frank would have awakened from the binding ice of sleep.

  However, her tool is weak, muddled both by Frank’s drugs and by wounds inflicted by her bitch half sister. She does not believe that her control of him is sufficient to guide him through driving at night. Therefore, once they are well away from the Other Three Quarter’s Ranch and the roads show some traffic, she has him park at a rest stop.

  While Wayne snores, dreaming of her, Louhi meditates, trying to restore her power. She would have liked to have her wheel, but that would have meant bringing her cage as well, and she is finished with cages.

  They arrive in Albuquerque after nightfall the next evening. To Louhi’s ire, the journey has taken almost a full turning of the clock. Once upon a time, she would have thought this good journeying for such a distance over such terrain—after all the Rocky Mountains had been in her way. Now, though, she has been spoiled by modern conveniences and feels only impatient.

  “So we change as the world changes around us,” she thinks, and is amused by the thought, for she has always considered herself the Changer’s daughter though he has done little enough for her.

  At her prompting, Wayne presses the intercom button alongside the gate to Pendragon Estates. A male voice, but not one Louhi knows, emanates through the speaker:

  “Yes?”

  “Wayne Watkins. Let me come in.”

  There is a pause. Doubtless the man answering the door has gone to report to King and wizard. Reply comes in the form of the gate swinging open—like magic, though what moves it is nothing more than electronics.

  Wayne follows a driveway whose twistings, like the landscaping that fringes them, are meant to conceal the hacienda from the road. In late autumn, following the first hard frost, this is less effective than it had been in September, when Louhi made her last visit. Still, all even the most nosy could see are the solid two-story walls of the inward-looking house.

  Louhi suspects that Arthur will be waiting for her in his office. Inside the house is more secure than outside, both from prying eyes and from other forces. So confident is she that the confrontation will take place inside that she is completely unprepared when something very large and very solid rocks the back of the pickup truck.

  Had she been so equipped, she might even have screamed, but mice squeak, they do not scream. Wayne is reacting to the new stimulus by driving erratically, weaving so that the front end of the truck scrapes against chamisa and sagebrush planted along the driveway.

  “Stop!” Louhi snaps, and the man hears a word, not a mouse sound. “Drive slowly. Keep to the middle of the road.”

  Barely has she finished giving her orders when there is a thump against the small window at the back of the pickup truck’s cab. Scurrying around, her tail raised for balance, Louhi sees something rather like a fist hit the window. It bounces off, but when it returns it holds a rock, and the window shatters.

  Louhi curses the limitations of her mouse sight. Everything is so large that she has trouble gaining perspective, and she is so panicked by this attack that she cannot sort out the smells suddenly flooding through the broken window. Unlike the Changer, she prefers to change others rather than change herself. Even her enforced tenure in mouse form has not taught her much about the language of scent.

  A long hairy arm shoves through the broken window, groping after her. Louhi leaps from Wayne’s shoulder to the seat, bouncing uncomfortably when she hits the vinyl cover. Finding it difficult to get a grasp on the smooth surface, Louhi slides, then manages to recover. She is climbing up Wayne’s coat to the safety of his pocket when there is another crash of breaking glass, this time followed by a frustrated bark.

  Instantly, Louhi realizes who is after her. But how had the little bitch gotten here so quickly? A dozen possibilities flood the witch’s mind, and she dismisses them all. How does not matter. Why Shahrazad had pursued her is obvious. What the coyote will do when she has caught Louhi is also terrifyingly plain.

  Mechanically, Wayne has continued driving. Louhi senses his confusion when he comes to the top of the driveway. She frantically orders him to park the truck, then to get them both out of it. He is following her orders when Shahrazad finishes breaking the window. A triumphant howl precedes her as she dives through the opening, all white fangs and terrible, grasping claws.

  Louhi discovers, mice can scream.

  “Shahrazad, no!”

  Arthur feels like an absolute idiot, yelling at the thing in the back of the truck as if she is still a puppy chewing on his carpet, but he doesn’t have time to think of anything clever. The Changer’s daughter has thrust herself through the back window of Frank’s pickup truck and is scrabbling with long-fingered, hairy hands after something small and white that darts back and forth on the seat.

  The man standing by the open driver’s side door of the truck looks dazed. Arthur has too often seen people suffering from sorcerous control to give him more than a passing glance. He barrels past the man, still s
houting, the scene before him lit like a stage by the truck’s dome light.

  He hears a shrill shriek as Shahrazad’s hand closes on the white mouse without undue gentleness.

  “Shahrazad, no!” the King shouts again, reaching for the mouse.

  The coyote head snaps at him and snarls, lips peeling back from young, white teeth, every hair on her hackles bristling out, stiff and angry.

  Gods, she’s grown! Arthur thinks inanely even as he is grasping for the wrist above the hand holding the terrified mouse. She’s as big as a wolf now! Where the hell is my back-up?

  Shahrazad growls in defiant fury, her jaws snapping just inches from the King’s face, close enough that he feels her saliva splash his skin. Lucky for him, she seems to have forgotten her free hand, for she could rake him with her claws.

  “Down, Shahrazad!” he yells. “Down!”

  Shahrazad doesn’t seem inclined to give way, and Arthur is resigning himself to getting bitten when several things happen almost simultaneously.

  A shrill eagle’s scream cuts through the night and Shahrazad yelps in pain, dropping the mouse. At almost the same moment, a globe of pale green light encircles the mouse. Recognizing it as a warding spell, Arthur doesn’t hesitate to grab the fleeing rodent, getting a firm grip on her long, pink tail.

  When he backs out of the pickup truck, the King glowers at his wizard. “What took you so long?”

  Lovern, who looks distinctly the worse for wear, glowers back. “Your big backside was in my way. I had to run around the truck to take aim from the other side. I also paused long enough to convince the griffin that stopping Shahrazad was a good idea—and you could thank me for that. You almost ended up on the punishing end of the griffin’s talons, not the damn coyote!”

  Arthur nods, covering his slight embarrassment by getting a better grip on the mouse. Anticipating his need, Chris Kristofer trots up, a coffee tin with holes punched in the plastic lid in his hand.