Shaman Rises

by C. E. Murphy

  Instead I spoke. Whispered: speaking aloud was far beyond my capabilities. “You...killed them. You let them die? You...” Raven? Rattler? Their names inside my head were desperate and empty, echoes their only response. I felt naked, naked inside, somehow, as if everything that had shored me up for the past fifteen months had been stripped away. “No. No, no, no, no you can’t, you can’t be gone, you can’t, Rattler, Raven, Raven, Ravenravenravenraven please come back, no, no, no, don’t do this don’t do this—”

  But it was too late. They’d done it already, all three of them, made a decision I hadn’t gotten to take part in. I searched helplessly, hopelessly, for some kind of answer from within my mind, and got nothing. No snarky hissing rattlesnake, no enthusiastically bouncing raven. It was just me.

  Me and Renee, and sensing her, I went cold. So cold I could hardly feel my own body. She’d survived, when my sweet, crazy Raven hadn’t, and I was never going to forgive that.

  I am sorry, Renee said again.

  “Go away.” They weren’t words. They were a growl, a snarl, a threat of such violence I couldn’t comprehend how to carry it out. Renee winked out of my consciousness and I screamed, the sound bloodying my throat. I rolled onto my forearms and shins, head ducking between my arms, and the worst of it was I wasn’t even allowed to scream again, or to mourn at all, because in rolling I ran into Gary’s gray, still body, and a whole new panic rose to sandwich the pain of loss.

  My magic was still there. Horribly, impossibly, it wasn’t even diminished without Raven’s and Rattler’s presence. It was still there, and it leaped into Gary, searching for lingering life within him.

  It was there, barely. His heartbeat stuttered, no longer shored up by the tortoise’s strength. More than that: pulled out of rhythm by the tortoise’s loss, as much as my own gut and heart were torn and abused by Raven and Rattler’s. My hands were nothing but cramps, my body in throes of agony that I couldn’t soothe. I’d been hurt so many times over the past year, but the only thing I’d ever felt as unforgiving as this was Ayita’s death. Ayita, Rattler and Raven. I was still screaming as I healed Gary, a thin high wrenching scream that hurt my throat as badly as the first one had. I couldn’t stop. I could hardly breathe around the sound, but I couldn’t stop, and the magic did nothing to ease it.

  It didn’t do enough to ease Gary, either. It wasn’t the magic: I felt it in me as strongly as ever. It was me, so angry, so hurt, that I didn’t know how to get beyond it. Someday I would be able to stop screaming. Maybe then. Until then, Gary was not dying: his heartbeat was steady, his breathing was regular, and that was as much as I could do. The rest, the spark of life, the healthy color, all the things the Master had drained from him, those weren’t things I could fix. Not right now. Maybe never.

  “Call. My. Brother.” The grated voice was half-familiar. I dragged my gaze from Gary’s barely breathing form to find Morrison standing above us. His eyes were black as death and his skin a terrible pallor, almost as bad as Gary’s. He had no magic in him, nothing to feed the Master except his own life source, and that would burn out in no time at all.

  There was no way. No way the Master would choose Morrison over Coyote, even if he was desperate for a host. I stared at him without comprehension, trying to understand why of all people here, the Master would choose Morrison, until his face contorted and he snarled, “Call my brother,” again.

  When I still didn’t move, Morrison drew the duty weapon he had borrowed from Billy and pressed it against his own temple. This time his voice was soft, even calm. “Call my brother, Walker, or this body dies.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Get out of him.” The scream was gone from my voice, but what was left sounded like the ruin of my heart. It probably was. “Get out of him and I’ll do it.”

  “C’mon, Walker. If I get out of him, what’s to make you keep your end of the bargain?”

  “If you kill him, I will sure as fuck not do what you want. Get out of him. Go...” There was only one place he could possibly go in this scenario, even assuming Coyote or Annie were still around and hadn’t run away like sensible people would. None of my friends were sensible, but I wouldn’t let myself look for them as I got to my feet, raggedly, and spread my arms. “Come to me.”

  “And spoil the fun of watching you watch your friends die?”

  “You lack imagination,” I said bitterly. “Wouldn’t it be so much more fun to feel my horror when you force my own hand to kill them? I bet that alone could feed you for years.”

  The black eyes in Morrison’s so-familiar face couldn’t brighten, but they glittered with interest. “You might be right. Come here, Walker.”

  “Is this really necessary?” It was, of course. It was all showmanship. I had never hated showmanship so much in my life. I’d never hated anything so much in my life. Hate ran so deep it left me cold, but not numb. I stepped over Gary’s exhausted form, and finally realized that Coyote and Annie were in fact still there, standing behind Morrison at the heart of the double power circle.

  The circle wasn’t going to do anybody any good. It was mine, after all, and in a few seconds I’d be taking the Master on and would no doubt reduce it to rubble. I took it down myself, feeling a distant surge of power as its magic poured back into me. I automatically made it into personal shields, strengthening them like it would do any good, and spoke to Coyote as I reached Morrison. “No matter what happens next, get them out of here, ’yote. Get them all the hell away from here. Promise me.”

  “I promise.” His voice sounded as awful as mine, as if his tears were made of glass, and he’d drunk them all away. I nodded, then met Morrison’s black eyes.

  The gun was still at his temple. I folded my hand around the barrel and moved it away. The Master didn’t resist, but he did direct where it went: to my own temple. No chance for a double-cross.

  “Works for me,” I said in a low voice, and pressed my mouth to his.

  The weight of the Master’s presence was incredible. Inside a breath I had a raging headache, and before I opened my eyes I could tell that the world was darker than it should be, like the darkness of his eyes bled into the way he saw the world. I did open my eyes to see Morrison’s horrified blue gaze before mine. He yanked the gun away from my temple, and I struggled for a smile.

  It worked. It took almost everything I had, but it worked. I was still in control, my shields holding the Master apart from my own mind. Just barely, but that was all I needed.

  “Morrison.” It hurt to say the word. Everything hurt, but talking when the Master was battering at the inside of my skull was almost impossible. He was already winning: just within my range of vision I saw my coat bleed to pitch-black, marking me as one of the bad guys. My shields were turning to blasted crystal, scored by his relentless power, bursting at seams that hadn’t been there a moment ago. They would be beautiful when they fell, I thought: a crystalline spray, like ocean surf turned to razors. The razors were already cutting up my mind in waves of pain I could barely see through. “Morrison,” I said. “I love you. Go with Coyote. I’ve got something to do.”

  “Walker, you can’t—you can’t!”

  “Watch me.”

  I turned away from him and, stiffly, walked out of one of the shattered windows at the top of the Space Needle.

  I didn’t know what I thought might happen. I supposed if I was really lucky I might kill myself and take the Master with me, but I didn’t have much faith in that succeeding.

  It didn’t. Black magic clouded around me, thickening the air and slowing our descent. After tangling with the Morrígan, I’d suspected he could do things like that, but it had been worth a shot. And he didn’t push through my shields, even though I was pretty certain he could. But I was also pretty certain he was afraid Cernunnos would know somehow that it wasn’t me calling him, if he broke down my shields and took me over completely.
I’d be a great host for a long time, but Cernunnos was his real goal, his forever home, and he didn’t want to blow that. So I risked doing stupid shit like walking out a fifty-story window, and it didn’t kill either of us.

  In fact, we landed with flawless grace that didn’t even dent the already-broken concrete at the foot of the Needle. I stood up, feeling the Master’s anticipation, his urgency, and his great difficulty in restraining himself from shattering my mind as I pulled together the magic I wanted. And he was restraining himself, too, despite the constant barrage of tiny explosions I felt within my skull. They made bright colors, silver-blue and white against the black background of his own power, and I could hardly think through each eruption inside my head.

  It had been a binding spell, in the beginning. I held on to that thought, struggling to follow it through. Gary and I had found it and he’d made me uncomfortable by reading it aloud. Later on I’d reversed it and used it to free Cernunnos’s son, the Boy Rider, from the sleep his half brother, Herne, had laid on him. I had evidence that what I wanted to do worked. The only trick was making it work as well as I needed it to without the Master cluing in, but since I’d just walked out a window without him stopping me, I thought I could probably hang on a few more seconds. The truth was my head and heart hurt so badly right now that after those few seconds, I almost didn’t care what happened next.

  I wanted to do more than just call Cernunnos here. I wanted to unleash him on the earth, just as we had unleashed the Master. It was an alarming prospect, really. He was a god, a collector of souls, a master hunter, and while I was drawn to him, even liked him, I hadn’t forgotten that he was all but impossible to contain, or the dangers an unconstrained god represented.

  On the other hand, a constrained god had no chance at all against the Master, and a god was about the only chance I figured we had.

  “I call on the stars to guide thee to me. I call on the green things to welcome thee.” Starlight in his ashy hair. Fiery green in his gaze, burning as hot as the stars themselves. “I call on this earth to know thee again.” It had known him once, all the year around, until the world and the gods had changed so much as to diminish him. No more. Despite my rage toward her, I reached for Renee, asking for her delicate touch through time. Asking her to carry the love of wild things and the awe of the hunt from time immemorial into today, awakening something I hoped was only sleeping, and not forever dead, in the heart of humanity. “I call on things to be known now, that were only known then.

  “I call on the god who has so often heeded me.” An ache began to build in my chest, hope and love and regret, though it was nothing to the pain hammering my skull. I lifted my hands to the sky, welcoming, and wondered if he would see or notice or care about the tears burning hot lines down my cheeks. Maybe not. He was there, just on the other side of the sky, waiting, straining, anticipating. I knew it. I felt it, and no matter what else happened, knew that after this, nothing in my world would ever be the same. He was magic. He was the Hunt. He was a god, and gods did not walk this earth lightly. He would change us, as we had once changed him.

  “By my will and by these words,” I whispered, “Cernunnos, I free thee to eternity.”

  I emptied of all power.

  The unmaking of a god was not a small thing. It took centuries, millennia, to unmake one, to whittle away its believers and thus its power. Even now in our own world, the old gods lingered: Zeus and Odin, Sekhmet and Kali. We might not worship them, but we knew their names, and so long as those names remained some spark of their power would, too. They were bound now, much lesser than they had once been, but still they remained.

  It was much faster to make a god. First, maybe there was the struggle, like what I’d seen between Cernunnos and the Master. Maybe that didn’t always happen, though. Maybe most gods weren’t archetypes given physical form. Maybe most of them were passion and zealotry that spread quickly, miracles buoying hopes, promises of a new world under benevolent rule to earn a young god strength commensurate with its predecessor’s withering. To begin anew was a great gift. I should know.

  But for all the energy of a new beginning, there was something to be said for old ties, too. And my god, my lord of the Wild Hunt, my Cernunnos, had not been wholly diminished.

  The earth heaved. The sky heaved; the stars themselves heaved, ringing with exultation as a thing changed within the universe. As a fettered god was given freedom, and as a choice was made for a world. My choice, my world: Cernunnos was the devil I knew, and if unleashing him would save my friends, then it was a choice I could live with. If it meant humanity had to face the magic they had so long denied, so be it. I did not for an instant imagine it would be an easy choice or that the path that lay ahead would be smooth.

  All that mattered was that there would be a path, a path of light and life, a cycle of death and rebirth, rather than an endless drain into bitter darkness. Left unchallenged, the Master would take each of us by the soul and have us destroy that which we most loved, as he was trying to do with me. I was rich pickings, but he would burn me out eventually, and move on to the next, and the next and the next, until nothing was left to this world but a blackened cinder. His stolen lives would extinguish, and he would start his unliving existence anew, hungrier than ever for a taste of the life he had known.

  I would never be able to stop him, not by myself, and a bound god wasn’t enough to help me.

  Cernunnos rode free.

  The sky itself couldn’t hold him: it filled with storm clouds that raced like baying dogs, the howling wind their cry. Where shadows lay within the clouds, black birds burst forth, flapping wings and raw cries heralding the return of their master. Pain and loss twisted through me, turning my vision hot as I thought of how pleased Raven would have been to see the rooks that were his smaller, gray-beaked cousins. As the shadows parted from the clouds, the clouds themselves became the white-bodied, red-eared hounds of the Hunt. Behind them, thunder rolled in the rhythm of horses’ hooves, beating broken earth into place again.

  They led him for once: a dozen riders I knew by sight, and then more, more, more, riders on bays and blacks, on grays and on browns. Some seemed to nod to me as they rode the horizon: the bearded king, the slim-faced archer. The child, the Boy Rider, upon whom I had laid a spell not unlike the one I had just called Cernunnos with, but also not the same. He, of all of them, was the one I was certain greeted me: he pulled his golden mare around and galloped past me twice, emerald eyes locking with mine. I saluted, but even he couldn’t hold my attention, because even he wasn’t him, the lord of the Hunt. The boy turned from me and rode hard again, leading the others. They swept across the sky, laying claim to it, and the moonlight cast off its natural milky tones and instead burned green.

  Finally came the god. From the stars, from the night, from the quiet gray-greenery of Tir na nOg, he came to this world where he had once been known, and would now be known again in his full and deadly glory. He rode down sunset paths, and he rode straight for me, his gaze hot on mine, as if I was the only thing that mattered in this or any world.

  I had never seen such joy before: wild, raw, untamed joy, so huge it seemed even a god must burst with it. Cernunnos reined in his silver steed before me, and the image seared into my vision just as his first appearance was forever burned there.

  He had been everything then, and he was so much more now. The stallion was no longer liquid silver: he was molten, heat pouring off him, though his color remained unchanged. The god upon his back was one and the same with the beast, an animal creature himself, with eyes that trailed green fire and a whipcord body that bespoke such strength that I both feared and desired a touch of his hand.

  His crown, thick and heavy antlers, wound around his head and contained his starlight hair. He was perfect, complete, free, and his smile was all the emancipator of a god could hope for.

  I blurted, “I’m sorry,” and then my mind
was no longer my own.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It had been so easy. So easy to manipulate the host into giving up her body and calling my brother to her like he was a lost dog.

  The shape of the thought gave me momentary pause, its form so different from how the old man had spoken. Such was the price of a mortal shell, that their small minds wore thoughts and words into familiar patterns, like a river cutting through soft soil. I could reshape them if I wished.

  But some of the sweetness of agony came from letting whatever spark of the host’s mind remained hear and see and think in the way she was accustomed to, forcing her to feel my actions as if they were her own. In desperation, she wanted to think of me as the Master, a thing separate from herself, but it was my delight to make us one, and leave her unable to protest. So: it had been easy, and I reveled in the way she thought it, because it hurt her all the more for me to think that way, too.

  My brother came as if this host were the star around which he spun. He burned more brightly than he had in our last encounter, strengthened, perhaps, by her affection, and that pleased me.

  He knew in the moment of change that he had been tricked. Some outward seeming of this body’s demeanor: the blackness of my eyes, or an uncanny sight that showed him my domination of the small shamanic spirit. His pleasure turned to pain, then to fury, almost as furious as the captured soul inside me. She screamed within my mind, puny fists pummeling me, louder by far than either the old man or her lover, but even so, too small to be so much as an irritation. Strange that she could also be large enough to feed my hunger for rage and despair. She had capitulated so easily, her companions such easy marks, and now before me stood an angry green god.

  Hungering, I reached for him.