Mountain Echoes wp-8

by C. E. Murphy

  Morrison asked, “What’s going on, Walker?” as he finished pulling his T-shirt on.

  I shook my head, preferring to show rather than tell, and beckoned him over before he put his shoes on. “Same routine as before. Stand on my feet.” I swung around so my back was to the valley, and he stood on my feet. I put my hand on his head and said, “See as I See,” which wasn’t poetic or spell-like at all, but at this juncture, I didn’t think I needed my poor rhymes to set the magic in place.

  Morrison’s eyes filtered gold, then darkold, bened.

  I didn’t need to look again. The images were seared in my mind. Arguing with Morrison had been a lightweight relief, compared to what the valley presented. The war was bad enough, groups of men pushing back and forth toward a broad expanse of river. I half envisioned misted blood rising in the air, and wasn’t certain if it was my imagination or not. There were places where the earth ran with blood, rivulets large enough to be seen from the distance amassing and pooling in hollows.

  At the heart of it, as if orchestrating, a lash of black lightning cracked down, down, and down again. Its silence was worse than any sound could be, and each time it shattered the sky, a single individual was illuminated by the power of darkness.

  The lightning was fed by five points around the battlefield, places where the fighting was bloodier and more vicious than anywhere else. Malevolence rose from the Native warriors, a madness driving them beyond what warfare had once been to their people. The wights hung above those battles, drawing on the warriors’ fury and rage, and every time another man died, what was left of his soul was gobbled by a wight and sent back through the black lightning.

  “What is that?” Morrison’s voice said he knew, but that he needed me to confirm it.

  I did, and let him go as I spoke. “It’s Aidan.” I faced the slaughter with numbness rising in me. “This isn’t even Europeans coming in and making a hash of things, not as such. This is just warfare between nations.”

  “You mean we can’t stop it.”

  I shook my head. I felt very calm, very rational, and knew it was a front. I was willing to embrace it, though, because otherwise I would fall into the screaming heebie-jeebies over not just the battle, but Aidan’s presence in it, and the dark power he was drawing in. “We couldn’t stop it anyway. But it’s… It really annoys me, you know? The presentation of Native Americans as being pure, innocent, and one with the land until the Europeans arrived. But it’s still really easy to think that all of the bloodshed and death was implemented by Westerners. It’s harder to remember that some of these groups were nation states of their own, and conducted warfare on their own. I fell right into that trap. I figured all the pain the Executioner was drawing on came from the incomers, but no. A lot of it was self-inflicted. Europeans might have triggered it, but…anyway, I know when we are, now, more or less. Mid-to-late seventeenth century, I’d guess. They’re Iroquois and Huron out there, I think. They’ve been pushed west by the Europeans, don’t get me wrong. From what I’ve read, the war they waged before Westerners arrived was much smaller scale, and now they’re fighting for their land and their lives.”

  As a kid I’d resolutely ignored all the Native American history that had been offered up, but in the past year I’d begun paying attention to the histories of those people whose shamanic heritage I was drawing on. I’d mostly read about the Cherokee, but the Iroquois had put together maybe the fiercest, largest armies against European settlers and, inevitably, against other Native tribes as they were all forced out of their original lands. They’d eventually turned on the members of their own league of nations. It had not been a good time.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’m pretty sure we’re in the Ohio River Valley. Probably in Kentucky.” A wry smile pulled at my mouth as Morrison turned an astonished expression on me. “I spent most of my childhood driving around America, Morrison. I know where things are. We headed north, maybe a little northwest. You pretty t. utimuch have to run into the Ohio River if you go far enough that direction, and there’s a big damned river out there. The details have changed, but it’s not like there’s a volcano waiting to go off nearby and change the whole face of the countryside.”

  Morrison shrugged his eyebrows, faintly impressed. “What are the Iroquois doing down here, then? I thought they were from the Northeast.”

  “They were, but they moved south and west when the settlers came. There was a huge war that got smeared all over the countryside as resources got scarcer. Mostly beaver pelts, I think.” I wished I’d studied it more, but nobody had warned me I’d be in need of real-life application of the knowledge. “Besides, even if I’m wrong about when, the what is pretty obvious. Wholesale slaughter, captivity and death. And it’s all being dumped into Aidan, who’s going to bring all that misery back to our time once everybody here is dead.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to go in and get him before that happens. There’s a little tiny bit of good news out there. You see those flashes?” I pointed down, then glanced at Morrison again, making sure the Sight was still working in him.

  It was. His blue eyes were gold, utterly unearthly with his silver hair. Oblivious to my shiver, he looked where I was pointing and nodded.

  “That’s white magic.” I winced. “Life magic. Positive magic. Not magic performed by white guys. You know what I mean.” Morrison nodded and I fumbled on. “Basically it means there’s someone down there doing what they can to stop this. Iroquois or Huron shamans, maybe. Someone who hasn’t been corrupted or captured yet, anyway. We’re not going for Aidan right away. We’re going to go see if we can team up with whoever’s on our side, and maybe together we’ll have a better chance at stopping this.”

  Morrison took his attention from the massacre below. “Walker, I hate to ask, but how far are we going to go to stop this?”

  “You mean am I going to do down there and shoot Aidan if I have to?”

  Morrison nodded. I set my jaw. “Yeah. If I have to. In the leg or arm or something where it’ll get his damned attention. It’s about the worst idea I’ve ever had, but if I can shock him into breaking free for even an eye blink I can get inside and try to help him fight the wights and the mark the Executioner left.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “It will.”

  “But if it doesn’t?”

  “It will.”

  A smile cracked Morrison’s face. “That may be why I love you. All right. How do we get in there without getting killed?”

  “That,” I said, “I can manage. I invented an invisibility cloak thing ages ago. The only danger is whether the wights or Aidan notice I’m working magic, but I think they’re involved enough in what they’re doing, or they’d have already wiped that guy out.” I nodded again toward the intermittent flashes of power struggling to hold against the tide of blood. Morrison took my hand, and I called up just about the oldest trick I knew, bending light around us in a sphere of “we’re not here.”

  “We’re good. Let’s go.”

  Morrison hesitated. “I can still see us.”

  “Look with the Sight.”

  He blinked a few times, then bobbled witen stilh surprise. The shields around us warped the world beyond just a little, light refracted ever so slightly wrong. “Too bad we can’t use this on police raids.”

  “Just as well. Imagine how many drug runners would get off by declaring their rights violated by magic.”

  “If any of them dared admit it.” We shut up after that, concentrating on barreling our way down the low mountains and into a battlefield. I wished the invisibility shield worked both ways, so I didn’t have to see the myriad ways people could die by edged and blunt weapons. Our feet became caked with mud and gore, and the smell went from bad to worse to vomit-inducing. Morrison kept me going after I did throw up, and for a few minutes I wasn’t certain if he would get through with his innards intact. But we weren’t hampered by fighters attacking us, a
nd I was happy using my shields to keep them farther away than they might naturally have come.

  Grim with determination, we worked our way toward the irregular sparks of healing magic that burst through the gloom, until suddenly we were in the heart of a pitched battle, men dying and killing all around, and the frantic blip of light was immediately in front of us. I risked it all, dropped the invisibility shield and bellowed, “Hello?”

  The blood turned to roses, and my father walked out of the chaos.

  Chapter Eighteen

  My knees cut out. Morrison caught me, which took faster reflexes than most people possessed. I wrapped my fingers around his biceps, trying not to collapse further as emotion hammered through me. Mostly shock, but also relief and a vast surge of anger.

  I swear to God, Dad hadn’t aged a day in the years since I’d last seen him. His black hair was still worn long but not loose: it was braided now, falling over his shoulder in a thick chunk. He was barefoot—my father never wore shoes if he could avoid it—and clad in jeans and an unbuttoned plaid shirt.

  He hadn’t aged, but he had changed. His eyes, at least, had changed. They blazed yellow, as gold as mine ever got. Or they did for half a second, anyway. Then they snapped back to ordinary brown, though his pupils were so large they just about ate all the brown. The misting rose petals became blood again.

  Morrison, who was the only one who could find his voice, and apparently his sense of humor, as well, said, “Joseph Walkingstick, I presume,” and stepped forward, me in tow, to offer a hand. “Michael Morrison. It’s a relief to find you, sir.”

  Dad shook Morrison’s hand absently, like it was more or less reasonable to be meeting modern-dressed white men in the middle of seventeenth century Indian wars, and finally managed to say, “Joanne?”

  Somebody chucked a spear at us. I snapped my hand up, strengthening shields that didn’t need it, and the weapon bounced away. A brief, startled silence rushed through the warriors around us, and a few more slings and arrows came our way. They all bounced off, too, and that was that. They went back to slaughtering each other, evidently satisfied that we were insufficiently easy targets.

  Dad’s eyes glimmered gold again, then widened. I supposed he was checking out my shields, my aura, my whole general shamanic showcase. A mix of regret and pride slid across his face, sharpening the line of his cheekbones. I’d gotten his cheekbones and Mom’s nose, making for some fairly prominent features. My eyes were between theirs, too, hazel to Mom’s green and t. uts. IDad’s brown. They tended to pick up more of the green, but the power-indicating gold reminded me more of Dad. And I had Dad’s shamanic magic and my mother’s magery running in my veins, setting me on the rare warrior’s path.

  Oh, yeah. I was my parents’ child, through and through.

  “Aidan is here.” Even I was surprised at the coldness of my voice. “Is Lucas?”

  Dad’s expression went flat. So did something inside of me. He said, “I’m sorry,” and a wall of white noise rose up, drowning out the sounds of battle in a static rush. Morrison didn’t, or couldn’t, catch me this time: after a while I became aware I was on my knees, fingers dug into the red mucky earth, and that my breathing was harsh and shuddering. Scalding tears dripped from my eyes, still hot as they hit the backs of my hands while I stared wide-eyed and barely seeing at the ground beneath me.

  I hadn’t seen Lucas Isaac in more than thirteen years. I hadn’t been much looking forward to it, either, because the best way I could imagine a reunion turning out was awkwardly. I’d wanted the chance, though. I’d wanted to see how he’d grown up.

  That wasn’t exactly true. I did want to know how he’d grown up, but what I meant by that, in my heart of hearts, was that I’d wanted to see if he’d apologize for having been a chickenshit and running back to Vancouver. I’d long since accepted we’d never been fated for a happily ever after, and while I understood why he’d done it, I still thought if he’d grown up well he might have apologized.

  Dad started talking again, or maybe he was repeating something he’d already said. “…called me Sunday afternoon, after he hadn’t come back from an overnight camping trip in the mountains. He had his compass, and plenty of food and water, but…”

  “Why hadn’t she gone with him?” That was Morrison, the consummate professional.

  A smile flickered through Dad’s voice. “Sara is the five-star-hotel camping type. She never liked getting out into the woods and getting dirty. She likes things tidy.” The sound of the smile faded. “So I went up to where she’d dropped him off and followed his trail. It wasn’t hard. He’d gone to—” He hitched, and I felt the weight of his gaze on me. I didn’t look up. My breathing was still ragged. “He’d set up camp in a hollow Joanne used to visit, a couple miles back in the hills.”

  My stomach dropped again and I bent closer to the ground, making fists to put my forehead against. I knew where Dad was talking about. It had been my sanctuary, far enough from town I couldn’t hear anything but the loudest engines or the occasional airplane. I’d pretended I was a remote survivor of the olden days, or a modern one thrown back in time. That was where the time-travel game had come from, the one Morrison had evidently never played. I’d brought Lucas there because it was special to me, and I was trying so hard to make him like me. I hadn’t been back since I’d realized I was pregnant. I wondered how often Lucas had gone back.

  Dad answered the question without meaning to. “You’ll want to go, Jo…anne.”

  Jo. The nickname my father had used for me all my life, no matter how much I protested. He was Joe, I was Jo, like I was some not-quite-good-enough not-a-boy knockoff. I’d come around to rather liking it since Gary started using it, but it still left a mark when Dad said it. He could keep right on calling me Joanne forever, as far as I was concerned. I got hung up on that instead of thinking about why Dad thought I should go back to the holler I’d once er koff. I’shared with Lucas. It was better that way.

  Dad went back to talking to Morrison, since I was clearly not going to participate in this conversation. “He camped overnight, and I think he must have decided to find another route home. It took him through the Nothing Holler.” There was no doubt in his voice that we knew what he was talking about. We were here, after all, on the wrong end of time, and we’d gotten here somehow. “His trail led right into it. I followed, but I was too late. It came out here, and I think he must have died before he even knew what had happened. I’m sorry, Joanne. I know you liked him.”

  “I barely knew him. Sara is going to be destroyed.” It was pure displacement and I knew it, but I had to do something that would let me get on my feet again. If shoving Lucas’s death into a box was what it took, that’s what I would do. Later I would let myself wonder if Aidan had known him at all, and what the news would do to him. I shut that thought down. Later.

  It took everything I had to get up. Morrison put a hand under my elbow, supporting me, and it took everything I had not to shake him off, too, which wasn’t at all fair to him. My jeans were filthy with blood and mud, and my hands were only clean in the spots where tears had fallen. The coat, the ridiculous gleaming white coat, still gleamed white, unaffected by the mess I’d pressed it against. That was what good guys did, wore white. Made themselves targets, so no one else would get shot at.

  Lucas Isaac had not deserved to get shot down, and I was going to wreak some unholy vengeance in his name.

  “How did you get here, Jo?”

  I snarled, “Joanne,” and saw Morrison’s surprise as much as Dad’s recoil as I continued, still snarling. “The Nothing killed Carrie Little Turtle and six, no, thirteen others. At least half of them rose again as wights. They kidnapped Aidan—” which was playing fast and loose with accuracy but was close enough for government work “—and when Morrison and I went after him they used Aidan’s power to open a window to this place. Morrison and I got sucked in, but we weren’t tied into the death magic here, so we ended up in a different location. It took us three days
to get here. And all that time Aidan has been sucking down death magic. When everybody here is dead, they’re going back to the future—” and I had been trying so hard to avoid that phrase “—and they’re going to release it. They’re trying to finish the job Columbus and Ponce de León started. They want to wipe out the Native Americans, and anybody else they can take along with them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they thrive on chaos and pain, and the Native genocides are the biggest thing on this continent for them to feed off. If they restart them in our time, and draw more people into ethnic wars or psycho survivalist modes, they’ll keep gaining power. This is Mom’s enemy, Dad. This is the Master. This is his attempt at a checkmate. He’s trying for an endgame, and there is no way he gets to have that on this territory. I’m going to clean this mess up and then I’m taking it home and I’m going to finish this shit.”

  Morrison made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a cheer, cut off deep in his throat. My father, less inspired, stared at me in consternation. “You know about your…about your mother?”

  I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten that I hadn’t spoken to Dad in years, much less in the past year when the magical world had come up and bitten me on the ass. I’d forgotten he had no way of knowing what had happened. That I hadn’t eveI hin yearsn told Morrison about the postmortem reconciliation with my mother, never mind having told Dad, whose entire knowledge of my relationship with her was based on my childhood resentment of her having left me with him. That he couldn’t possibly know that I’d finally, finally learned that he himself was an adept, a shaman of some considerable power, and that magic was, if not exactly old hat, certainly part of my everyday life now.

  And I did not want to explain it to him while standing in the middle of a battlefield with death and hatred raging around me and feeding monsters that were in turn filling a little boy with all that darkness and evil. So I said, “Yes,” and left it at that.