Changer (Athanor)

by Jane Lindskold

  JANE LINDSKOLD

  Obsidian Tiger Books

  Copyright Information

  Changer

  Copyright © 1998 by Jane Lindskold.

  First published by Avon Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portion thereof, in any form.

  Cover design by Pati Nagle.

  Obsidian Tiger Books, Albuquerque, New Mexico

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This one is for Jim Moore, with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the people who contributed in ways great and small to the creation of this book. Jan and Steve (S.M.) Stirling encouraged me by asking pointed, intelligent questions about the work in process. Both Sage Walker and Walter Jon Williams offered tidbits of information that saved me making stupid mistakes. Phyllis White of Flying Coyote Books steered me toward many fine texts on coyotes and shared with me anecdotes about coyotes and coy-dogs. David M. Weber read the manuscript and provided feedback. Jim Moore, my husband, read the manuscript and offered me detailed comments on the developing story. For his thoughtful assistance and for his simply being his wonderful self, I am very grateful.

  Introduction: Magic Circles on the Sidewalk

  Changer had its genesis during the Summer of 1994, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  At this point, I’d been living in Santa Fe with Roger Zelazny for a month or two. We’d decided to take a break and go for a stroll, window-shop, grab some lunch. We’d parked the car on a side street, then walked toward the plaza along a very narrow sidewalk.

  I noticed that someone had inscribed an elaborate pattern into the concrete when it was wet. I stopped, astonished at what I saw.

  “It’s a magic circle, a pentagram, complete with crystals!”

  Roger nodded, kept walking, not in the least surprised.

  That was the moment my novel Changer was born. I don’t mean in its final form—like Athene from the head of Zeus, full-grown and in armor—just that at that moment I resolved to write a novel set in New Mexico soon, before the shine wore off the place, before I, too, took magic circles in the sidewalk for granted.

  Now those of you with methodical minds are checking copyright dates, noting that the book wasn’t published until December of 1998. You’re thinking, “What happened? I’ve heard that publishing can be slow, but four and a half years?”

  To be honest, Changer had a more troubled birth than most of my novels. I started it soon after the events recounted above. I had a strong image of what Changer himself looked like, that he was an immortal, associated with a community of immortals. The revenge theme was also firmly in place.

  Mythology and folklore were my gateways into science fiction and fantasy, so I was already familiar with a considerable amount of material when I decided that my immortals would have links to numerous mythological figures. I wanted to touch myths from over a long period of time and from all over the world.

  I was well into this exploration, when life got in the way of writing. Roger died in June 1995. I was deeply depressed and overwhelmed. Suddenly, not only was my beloved dead, but I also had to find a new place to live, figure out what I was going to do, deal with all sorts of fallout.

  At that point, I was also working on the computer game Chronomaster. That project had to be finished. I don’t program, but I wrote the storyline, based on some ideas of Roger’s. Later, I wrote the dialogue that went into the game itself.

  (Scot Noel, my contact for the Chronomaster project, was astonishingly and amazingly kind and supportive. I met with a lot of kindness in those black days.)

  When Chronomaster was done, I went back to work on Changer. I have a note in the daily writing journal I keep that by early September I had a hundred pages written.

  A little later, I was approached by Prima Publications and asked to write both a novelization of Chronomaster and the player’s guide. I was also beta-testing the game. I worked on all of these projects simultaneously. I find a note in the writing journal: “Thank God for work.”

  While all of this was going on, I was also house-hunting, moving, doing edits for my novel When the Gods Are Silent. I finished the Chronomaster projects. By this time, the contracts had been finalized to let me fulfill one of Roger’s final requests—that I finish his two uncompleted novels: Donnerjack and Lord Demon.

  I also signed a contract for Changer at this time.

  The manuscript for Donnerjack had to be completed before I could write anything else, so I immersed myself in it. By mid-June of 1996, Donnerjack was written and mailed off.

  Now that I had some time to myself, I wrote some short fiction and tried to get back into Changer. I found myself writing more slowly, unable to make any significant progress. Finally, I figured out why. Changer had been begun during one of the most difficult periods of my life. I couldn’t go back there, but neither did I want to abandon a story and characters that meant a lot to me.

  I consulted with Jim (who by that time I was dating), then made a tough decision. I would discard the whole of what I had written—roughly two hundred pages at that point—and start over fresh. On September 16, 1996, I began again with a somewhat different approach, using what I’d learned about employing multiple points of view when writing Chronomaster and Donnerjack. This enabled me both to “open up” the novel and explore a more complex storyline.

  That version of Changer is the novel that came out in December 1998—that won the Zia award in 2000—a book that started many years before with a magic circle inscribed on a sidewalk in Santa Fe.

  Dream tonight of a compass rose

  Points smashed finny flat

  The scent of my blood on the wind

  1

  There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.

  —Sainte-Beuve

  Death comes in many forms, but it has one smell, a smell of blood stagnating, of flesh stiffening, of breath grown stale. Later there is decay, and that can have many smells: sweet and sick and sour. But death has one smell. Returning from hunting, a limp rabbit in his jaws, the dog coyote smells another death carried in the wind from his den.

  Dropping the rabbit, the dog coyote crouches and sniffs the breeze. Death is there, death in quantity, and with it other smells. The smell of human sweat, of gunpowder, of horses, and of blood—coyote blood. He does not need to see more to know who has died, but he creeps forward nonetheless, a very uncanine dread blending with his coyote terror.

  From the shelter of a low-hanging bush he sees two humans, both dressed for riding. Their horses are picketed to a tree a few paces away, shifting nervously, either at the smell of fresh blood or at the scent of carnivores, the dog coyote cannot tell. Nor does he care: His attention is all for the humans.

  One is skinning a dead coyote. The overwhelming smell of blood should mask identification, but the dog coyote knows the scent, knows the reddish pelt of his older daughter; her black-tipped tail is blown by a faint breeze in a parody of life. He does not need to see the thin scar running from shoulder to flank to know that the pelt already hanging from the saddle of one of the horse’s is that of his mate.

  He bites back a wail of grief and rage. Still crouched in concealment, he looks to where the second human kneels by the mouth of the den, twisting something with his gloved right hand, his head tilted as if listening.

  The dog coyote’s hearing is much more acute than the human’s, and he hears the frightened
whimpers of the pups beneath the earth. Perhaps those infant cries would have softened the human’s heart, but he does not hear the cries, only the sharp, short scream as the wire gig rips into the puppy’s belly.

  “Got it!” the man grunts, satisfied. Pulling on the wire, he hauls out the pup. One thump from his hand breaks the puppy’s neck, and the crying stops.

  The dog coyote, who is more than a coyote, can do nothing but watch as his baby’s body is tossed into a sack already lumpy and bloodstained by the corpses of its littermates. Bitter lessons from centuries past have taught him to hold still at such times, to preserve himself even when he cannot preserve those he loves.

  Waiting, he weeps within, chides himself for not relocating the den, for not keeping a tighter watch on where the young female roamed. With little reason, ranchers hate and fear coyotes; there are few places coyotes can live that do not infringe on human territories. Once again, the coyotes have lost and with them so has the Changer.

  Then he hears a faint sound, a whimper and a scrabbling. In two bounds he is at the entry to the den. The smell of blood and urine almost covers another scent.

  Aware of his danger should the two humans return, he forces head and shoulders into the den. The entryway is tight, dug for his mate’s slimmer build, but he can make his way. In the dim light from the second entry, he sees a chubby form blindly trying to dig its way into the dirt at the back of the burrow.

  It is his daughter, the runt, the smallest and weakest of the litter. Small to begin with, unable to compete fairly with the others, she had not grown as quickly; now her littleness has been the saving of her life.

  With his teeth he drags her from the hollow in which she had taken refuge from the searching gig. Mother and siblings dead, she would have died of starvation or fallen prey to owl, fox, or hawk if he had not found her.

  Quickly now, the dog coyote hauls his daughter into the sunlight. Her whimpering increases when she sees the skinned bodies of the others. First he must get away and wait for darkness. Then he will consider what to do next.

  As he is ascending the hill into safer ground, he freezes at a flicker of motion down where the pasture meets the highway. Thinking it might be more humans, perhaps the same two returning, he sets down his daughter and watches.

  The two ranchers have ridden to meet someone in a car, someone who hands them money in exchange for the raw pelts and the bloody, dripping sack. Their bodies keep him from seeing who is in the car, but here the smell of death does not so dominate.

  Through the clear air, the dog coyote catches a new scent, one that registers with the dormant portion of his mind, a smell that recalls flowers and musk, seductive and artificial.

  A growl rumbles in his throat, a growl so furious that his daughter rolls on her back, pissing in submission and fear. He ignores her, his entire attention focused in a very uncoyote-like fashion on gathering information. When the car pulls away, he memorizes the license number. Then he watches until the two horsemen stop at a ranch where they clearly reside.

  Now is not the time, but soon he will have some calls to make, some questions to ask, and, quite possibly, some deaths of his own to arrange.

  Elsewhere, in a clean but cheap motel room, a whippet-thin, sharp-featured, red-haired man punches an unlisted number into a telephone. That the number is not only unlisted but the connection impossible delights him. He has a fondness for amulets and charms, for tools of all sorts that permit him to expand his own eclectic but not terribly powerful talents.

  After a series of chimes, soft and high, like a crystal goblet tapped with a silver filament, a voice speaks, deep and resonant, in cadences pedantic: “Greetings to you, fire-born, fire’s self, flickering fastness, impossible imp.”

  The red-haired man sighs. “Can’t you just say ‘Hi, Sven’?”

  “Without body, with naught but mind, I make shape, shapeless one, from words, from fancy.”

  “We’re working on fixing that, buddy,” Sven says. “I’ve pinpointed where the Changer is hiding. He’s definitely in New Mexico, out in the Salinas District. All the portents indicate that he’s living as a coyote.”

  “Salinas? So salt calls sea-born master of shapes, such said I when searching started.”

  “You said you thought he was near an ocean,” Sven retorts sarcastically. “New Mexico is about as different from an ocean as you can get: hot and dry, cold and dry, mountainous and dry. I don’t think anyone could mistake it for an ocean.”

  Sven’s auditor maintains a dignified—or perhaps offended— silence and, after a moment, Sven continues: “When I get him— and that’s not going to be easy, let me remind you—I’ll try to get you your pound of flesh.”

  An indignant hrumph precedes the inevitable alliteration: “Embodied blood, not flaccid flesh is what sorcery seeks to build bodies. Ocular oracles so ordain.”

  “I know,” Sven says. “I’ll try not to harm the Changer. I have plans to use him against another of my targets. When they’ve worn each other out, then I’ll catch him for you.”

  “Seize swiftly, this one, oldest of us all.”

  “I’ve promised, haven’t I?” Sven retorts. “In any case, I have a lot going on right now. Revolution isn’t easy to manage.”

  “Easier,” his cohort reminds him, “when alongside I stand.”

  Sven nods as if the creature on the other end of the phone could see him—as perhaps he can.

  “I haven’t forgotten. I’ll check back in a few days.”

  “Farewell, fire’s friend.”

  “Bye.”

  Hanging up, Sven considers what to do next. He needs to make a bunch more calls tonight, uplink to his website, then continue scouting for the Changer. Quickly he punches the extension for the motel restaurant and orders a snack. No rest for the wicked, his mother might have said—if he’d ever had a mother. To be perfectly honest, he doesn’t remember.

  The gap in his memory doesn’t bother him a great deal.

  The night following the deaths of his mate and pups, the dog coyote sits on a rough, rocky hilltop about five miles from where his former den had been. Superficially, the area is exposed, but given his current situation, it is far preferable to where he had denned before.

  Humans and their creatures do not care for these places. The bristly foliage of piñon, juniper, and four-wing saltbush do not offer grazing, only shade. The mica-flecked sand slips under boots or all but the cleverest hooves. Nor do the creatures who often reside in such copses invite visitors: biting ants, rattlesnakes, millipedes, scorpions. Not that a coyote is particularly fond of such crawlers and biters, but he knows how to scent them, to avoid them.

  Here he takes his motherless daughter for protection. An old ground-squirrel burrow can be enlarged enough to hide a scrawny whelp such as she, and, regardless of what other ways in which she may be a poor excuse of a coyote, she is a survivor. She is the last of his family, the last except for the scattered litters of other years, most of whom are most probably dead already. There are reasons that coyotes litter six pups a year.

  Scratching behind his right ear with a rear leg, the dog coyote contemplates the moon, considers what he must do. That teasing scent on the wind has given to him to believe that the deaths of his family were not merely vermin extermination, but were murder. The humans who did the kills might or might not have known what they did. This is something he must resolve.

  But before he can do this, he must do other things, things that are tangled in with yet other things. His mind is not a coyote’s mind, for all that it resides in a coyote’s brain, but even his other-than-coyote mind rebels from the complexities he must resolve before he can do the simple thing of asking the two ranchers why they slew his family.

  First there is his daughter. At least she is no longer so dependent on nursing. He can take many shapes, but they are all male. Mother’s milk is the one thing he cannot give her. Although she is just reaching the age where she would be learning to hunt, she cannot be expected to do s
o for herself.

  Scrawny as she is, she is still vulnerable to numerous predators. Accident could also claim her: a fall, a chance encounter with a rattler, poison, or bad water. No, whatever he does, he must make provisions for her.

  Abandoning her does not even occur to him. She may have been the runt of this litter, but she is his daughter and has claim on his protection for at least her first year. And, in all honesty, he no longer thinks of her as the poorest example of this year’s pups. Her attempt to avoid the wire gig rather than giving in to terror has won his admiration.

  So he must provide for her. For several days, she should be safe enough on this scrubby hilltop. He will regurgitate food for her and warn her to stay near the ground squirrel’s burrow. Having learned the practical uses of caution, she should obey.

  Next, he must consider how to confront the humans. Unlike other of the Earth’s inhabitants, humans only know how to converse as equals with other humans. He tries to remember how long it has been since he lived as a human for any extended period of time and decides that it has been about fifty years. During that time there have been many changes, changes he has observed but not taken part in. Still, if he does not claim too much, he should be able to pass himself off as a human.

  Now things become difficult. He can take human form, but human society demands things that he cannot shape from his own body: clothing, money, transportation, personal history. His exasperated growl sends his daughter, who had been battling a twig, scuttling into the ground squirrel’s burrow.

  A moment later, her little black nose peeks up over the edge, sniffing vigorously for sign of whatever had annoyed her father. Turning his mind back to his problems, he lets her decide for herself when it is safe to come forth. It is a lesson she will need to learn.

  Bright and laughing, the moon stares down at him, offering him a partial solution. Her face shines over more than this hilltop; her gaze encompasses the ranch house and the pastures. Although the Changer has no form that can fly as high as the moon, he can take other forms, something he has been resisting until he knows better what he needs.