by L. W. Jacobs
Tai grinned. “You won’t get rid of me that easily.”
He circled back, warier, dropping to the hillside and striking mindsight. It was a skill he’d been practicing, during the long days on the boat, refining his vision to focus on just one mind at a time, to get better at following the current of their thoughts forward to their plans, and backward to the motivations they might not even know drove them. To their fears.
But there was no time for that now—now he sought only which of them was attacking their minds. Sought only the barest outlines of their plan so that he could disrupt it—because these were clearly stronger shamans than they’d faced, and everyone else except Avery was still rolling on the ground screaming.
There—the man on the right, short and stout with a flowing fur cape. Delusions of grandeur. A giant stream of uai. Tai shot for him, summoning boulders of air to smash the man from either side, to disrupt him, to give Ella and the rest a chance to fight back.
Because he had no doubt, if they did fight back, it wouldn’t matter how strong the shamans were. They would be destroyed.
The man stumbled, then spun for him and took to the air. Blurred in air, using his uai to act as a wafter and timeslip at once. Tai shot left, knowing he was unlikely to escape, but that every second was another second for his friends to wake up, then spun backwards, upside down, wafting like the cats of Riverbottom ran when they sensed danger. And as he did, he sought ever deeper with his mind, trying to find the man’s goals, his fear, his weakness.
Something slammed into him, screaming, and his mindsight cut off. Not real, Tai thought, striking at his resonance, shoving at the revenant as he’d shoved at so many in his life. You’re not real.
His resonance came back just as something hard and real connected with his back. He reacted with the momentum, throwing himself further that way, groundward, taking the worst of the blow in speed rather than his bones.
Mindsight came back with a vengeance: Brayleigh. The shaman’s name was Brayleigh, eldest son of a minor Yersh house, desirous of power, studying shamanism to become immortal—
Another slam, a flying length of timber. Tai rolled with this one too, sent air billowing back at it, kept pushing deeper with his mind. Brayleigh’s desire came from fear, a fear around women, an inferiority he’d always felt, Dleana the woman they’d met at the fire—
A third revenant slammed into him just as the timber did, and there was no disbelieving in it, no rolling with it. The roaring wind and green hills blinked out, and Tai fell from the sky.
48
Ella went from dying in flames to lying on her back on a cool stretch of grass, friends screaming all around her. Then back to dying, but the words she’d been hearing struck home: not real. Shamanic attack. Not on fire.
It was Avery’s voice, calm in the midst of the screaming. Touch your body. You are not on fire.
Just as she did, the flames stuttered again, the pain disappearing like it was an illusion.
“Because it is,” she cursed, pushing up, flames roaring back but without their heat somehow, now. Avery had said defense against revenant attacks was based on disbelieving in them. Whatever this was, disbelief must be the answer to it too.
Ella stood, flames still there but translucent, like fire viewed through hazy glass. Ahead of her Avery and the woman faced off, while in the sky above Tai and another man circled and fought, the other man moving almost too fast to see.
Stains—while she’d been rolling around delusional, Tai and Avery had been risking their lives for her. Time to return the favor—even if it meant shortening her own life to do it.
Ella struck resonance. Better short-lived than dead.
The world slowed, Tai going from a zip to a drift, his pursuer slowing down too, a portly man in some kind of cape circling around him, fast but not so fast as she was.
Ella ran. If Avery and the woman were facing off, then they were dueling in the traditional way of shamans, trying to thrall each other’s uai away in a battle of wits. There was a wiry man walking down the hillside unopposed, arms at his side. But her illusions had stuttered, which must mean the man Tai was battling was causing them. Her man looked outclassed, but every hit he scored was a chance for the rest of them to see through it and wake up.
Trust Tai to think first of saving everyone else. As she ran a timber rose from the meadow grass and caught him in the middle of a dizzying loop. He drifted out of it as though without resonance, which didn’t make sense—unless he’d been hit with a revenant too.
Ella unfocused her eyes and saw the trailing threads of something hooking to Tai’s spine. Prophets. These were no ordinary shamans, if there was such a thing. But Tai’s strategy was right: Avery appeared to have met his match, and Ella was unlikely to defeat the other two without help. So she had to kill the fat one first, to get Feynrick and Marea back into the fight.
Which meant stealth more than speed—the fat one was drifting toward the ground now, slowing as he apparently dropped the shaman’s version of timeslip. Still the second she stopped or dropped resonance he would see her, and she didn’t trust herself to battle his illusions.
So instead of running for the place he’d land she ran past that, under him getting to Tai just in time to break his fall. Then she laid him in the grass and laid down behind, using his much-bigger body as a hiding place. With any luck the fat man would not notice her gone from the three others rolling on the ground, and she could get in a surprise strike.
Ella watched over Tai’s mass of black hair as the fat one touched down, moving slower now, likely trying to distract Avery with illusions as he kept Marea and the others down. Had he noticed she was gone?
It didn’t matter. She had one trick and there was no time like now.
Ella got up and started running, fat one facing away from her as the others were. Mid-stride a thought occurred to her: she had more than one trick these days. Surreptitious practice over the last week had her reliably grasping revenants and moving them. How much harder could it be to sic one on somebody, like the fat man had on Tai?
She scanned the meadow as she ran, heart beating faster if that was possible. She wasn’t good enough to see what resonance a revenant was, which meant she didn’t know if they were safe to thrall, but that shouldn’t matter right? She didn’t expect the thing to actually seat in the shaman. Just distract him long enough for her to cut his throat.
She seized a nearby revenant even as she pulled her blade, the wiry third man in the shaman’s party beginning to look her way.
Too bad he was moving at a glacial pace. She closed the gap, dragging the revenant close. At the last minute the fat man turned and the world went black. Illusion, she thought to herself, but more importantly she could still see, just not in the world of colors. In the world of revenants.
She slammed the revenant at the shaman, not sure what she was doing but sure harder was better. The blackness dropped and in the clarity of sight she chopped her knife into his neck.
His eyes opened wide in shock but she was already turning to the wiry man. Every second in slip was hours of her dwindling life. No time for gloating.
The wiry man was facing her, raising his arms in regular time. He could slip too. Stains.
“Impressive,” the man said, voice clear among the rumbling screams of her friends. “I did not have you marked for a shaman. But Brayleigh was a friend of mine, even if he was an arrogant bastard. And for that you must pay dearly.”
Ella ignored him, already halfway across the hillside to where he stood. Then a sudden weight pulled at her left arm, and she looked with horror to see the hand holding the knife encased in stone. Growing stone.
“What—”
A weight pulled at her right arm then too, and she stumbled under the weight.
“A pity we cannot kill you outright,” the wiry man said over her curses. “But we need all the uai we can get, and you have a remarkable stream.” He smiled. “So be quiet while I deal with your friends, hm?”
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Cold stone wrenched her mouth wide, and she tripped over a foot turned suddenly leaden.
The wiry man smiled and turned back to the battle. “Good girl.”
49
Marea knew rationally, somewhere in the quieter recesses of her brain, that flames did not spring from thin air. Just as she knew they wouldn’t go on for hours or days without fuel, impervious to her best attempts to roll and beat them out. She had even heard Avery’s calm words as soon as they’d started, telling her it was an illusion.
But that knowledge was just one cool, rational voice. A voice drowned out by the panicked, screaming mob that was her mind.
Then suddenly the flames were gone, and the pain with them. The panic took a moment longer, but without the mob screaming the cool, rational voice was able to make some headway. Marea pushed out of the grass, heart still thudding, to see Avery locked in some kind of staring contest with the woman who’d led them there, a wiry man striding toward them and Ella laying in what looked like an odd collection of boulders, two bodies nearby.
Feynrick whistled beside her. “Burn ye to death and they’re still not done, are they, lass?”
“We have to do something,” Marea said. “Avery’s in danger!”
Feynrick unlooped an axe from his belt. “I have to do something, ye mean,” he said. “Battle like this is no place for a pretty little girl.”
Irritation threatened to replace panic for a moment in her. “I am no little girl,” she said, standing and striking resonance. “You know what I can do. Go, and I’ll give you all the luck I can.”
“Luck?” Feynrick grinned. “Always needed more ‘o that.”
“Avery first!” Marea called, but he was already running. Cursing, she focused her mind. Envisioned Feynrick slamming his axe into the shaman woman’s throat, hearing the thud, seeing the shock on her face, tasting the iron—
Then boulders started rising from the earth in Feynrick’s path. Marea added them to her vision, Feynrick dodging and weaving between them. The boulders grew thicker in front of him, walling him in. Feynrick leapt to the top of one with a brawler’s grace, and she added that to her vision, the stout Yatiman leaping between boulders with shouts and yells, always finding one for his feet, leading him ever closer to the woman threatening Avery.
And then the boulders started throwing themselves at him.
Cursing and pulling hard at her resonance, Marea imagined his leaps dodging the oncoming boulders, imagined them slamming into each other, opening pathways for him, more islands to hop on, until—
With a shout she could hear two hundred paces away Feynrick slammed his axe into the woman’s neck, exactly as she’d imagined it, and the blood sprayed and the shock showed and the revenants swirling around Avery suddenly sucked back into him.
Marea dropped resonance. “Oh, thank the Prophets.” Then a boulder hurtled toward her, and she would have been crushed beneath it if Eyadin hadn’t tackled her from the side.
Cursing, Marea struck resonance again. “Come on!” she yelled, imagining a lucky path for them through the sudden rain of boulders, willing them to collide and bounce off each other, hearing the thuds and crashes and feeling the debris in as much detail as she could imagine. Prophets send Avery or Feynrick could deal with the last man, the one raining the boulders, because he’d apparently figured out she was a fatewalker, and it was all she could do not to get crushed.
Through a gap in the stones she saw Avery now facing the man, hands raised like they had been against the woman. Hurry, my love, she thought inside, skipping between two boulders meant to sandwich her, then ducking under another hurtling sideways in air. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.
She saw Feynrick too, good old trusty Feynrick, running for the wiry man like he’d run for the woman, bloody axe in hand. Eyadin pulled her back just before a boulder landed in front of them, and she split just the tiniest part of her mind off from imagining herself surviving this to imagining the Yatiman’s axe finding a second bloody home in the wiry man’s chest.
Then kept running and burning uai and dodging stones and holding to her visions like a drowning woman holds a ship’s line.
Four boulders slammed down all around her and Eyadin, cutting off their escape but miraculously missing hurting them.
“We’re trapped,” Eyadin said, face pale, but she had no space to respond, concentrating as hard as she was on a fifth boulder not dropping directly down on top of them, trapping them even if it didn’t kill them.
“He’ll drop another one down on us,” Eyadin whined. “Trap us in here till they can kill us.”
“I know, you idiot,” Marea snapped, though it already should have happened. She looked up despite knowing she should stick to her vision, to not worry about reality, sure she would see the fifth boulder descending, a whopper made to crush out her life.
There was nothing above but clear blue sky. No screams or shouts sounded in the distance.
Eyadin met her eyes. “Did they—”
Marea took a deep breath, letting herself believe it only because that would work as well as whatever else she was trying to will into existence. “Climb up and check, will you? I need to concentrate.”
And that’s what she did, till Eyadin looked back down, a shocked grin on his lips. “They did it,” he said. “Bless the Ascending and Descending Gods, they did it.”
Marea dropped resonance, suddenly exhausted, but she couldn’t help but respond, “No, they didn’t. We did.”
50
The worst thing about having a mouth stuffed with solid stone was you couldn’t call for help. Ella watched, bent painfully over all four limbs encased in rock, while Feynrick first made a mad dash for the female shaman, then against all odds sank his axe into the chest of the wiry shaman while the man hurled boulders at both him and Marea. Tai hadn’t stirred the entire time, but she couldn’t think about that. They had won. He would be fine.
But then after Marea had come running from the boulder field and she and Avery had had a very public reunion and Feynrick had made suggestions and Eyadin had looked abashed, her thoughts started to gain a little urgency. She really could use some help getting out of these stone manacles, and Tai really did probably need some attention after taking a few logs to the back. The only problem was she had a mouthful of granite.
The party eventually remembered her and Tai. She was gratified to see Avery run, at least, and he had the sense to lay his hands on her cheeks first, uai buzzing.
The rock turned to grit in her mouth and she spit great mouthfuls of it, grateful despite the grating sensation on her teeth. “Thank the mecking prophets,” she coughed. “Tai. Is he okay?”
“Fine!” Feynrick called from where Tai lay up the hill. “Breathing, anyway, and I don’t see any bleeding. Takes more’n something like this to hurt our little milkweed!”
“Then if you don’t mind?” Ella asked, nodding to her trapped limbs.
Avery got to work on them. “What happened, anyway?” Marea asked.
Ella told her as much as she knew, leading up to getting trapped in rock. “Shouldn’t this have disappeared when he died?” she asked Avery, shaking a freed hand gratefully. “The other illusions stopped when I killed the first shaman.”
Avery shook his head, still concentrated on her left foot. “These are not illusions. The first shaman was what we call an avisceror, using his uai stream to create illusions that distract or confuse opponents. The second one was a visceror, using his uai to alter physical reality.”
Marea shook her head, staring at Ella’s foot as the orb of rock grew a series of cracks then shattered into sand. “Why would anyone make illusions when you can change actual reality?”
“They’re easier,” Avery said briefly, concentrated on Ella’s other foot. When it shattered he went on, “A visceror has to find the right materials for what he wants—in this case, soil in the earth he could use to make stone. An avisceror already has the thoughts and perceptions to work with, th
ough they do have to be very precise.”
“And they use revenants for that?” Ella asked, trying to imagine how it worked.
“They use uai streams for that,” Avery said, standing from the last of her limbs. “And belief. Uai is… a basic force of the universe. Like sound or heat. But it needs shaping, like sound needs the shape of a lute or horn to make music. Winter plants shape the star’s light into uai. Regular people shape uai with their resonances. But shamans—we’re not limited by the shape of our revenants. Our uai doesn’t come through their channel, it comes direct, and so we can use it for whatever we want. So long as we believe strongly enough that it’s possible.”
Ella motioned them toward Tai, concern warring with curiosity. “So that’s why we need disbelief to fight a revenant attack, or to see through an avisceror’s illusions?”
Avery nodded. “But you would not have been able to crack these stones without uai as well. Illusions are easily made and broken. Physical attacks,” he nodded at the low valley, now littered with boulders, “they need more strength.”
“What you’re saying,” Marea said, “is that the man was a powerful shaman.”
“They all were,” Avery said. “My guess is they’ve been here a while, luring shamans off the road into an ambush. Then they would control them with physical or mental attacks while the woman in the lead thralled their revenants. Then they shared the power between them.”
“Making them harder and harder to defeat,” Ella said. “The visceror, he mentioned something to me about getting strong enough to take the stone.”
“If these three weren’t strong enough to take the stone,” Feynrick said as they approached, “how in piss are we supposed to do it?”
Someone answered, but Ella missed it in a wave of concern, running to Tai’s side and kneeling, pressing fingers to his head and chest and back. She knew little of healing, but his breathing didn’t sound good.
