by C. E. Murphy
Half the world spread out below us, sunlight bouncing hard off snow and sending blue-white flares through my vision. I turned in a slow circle, delight and awe spreading through me. It turned to laughter as I caught Mandy’s smug expression, and I put it into words sheerly for her benefit: “This is incredible.”
“Yeah, I know.” She grinned back, broadly, and a shapeless blur of nothing came out of the snow to knock her off the top of the mountain.
CHAPTER TEN
The world filled up with sound: Mandy’s scream, my shout, and below those, a bone-rattling roar that came from everywhere and nowhere at once. Its depth made my heartbeat do funny things and upset my stomach, like I’d swallowed a stone. My first reaction was to drop to my hands and knees and breathe carefully so I wouldn’t throw up, but once there I had a vividly clear thought: this was a hell of a defense mechanism on the monster’s part. If its voice could make people sick and rubber-kneed, it would rarely have to fight more than one opponent at a time.
Pity for it that I was uniquely well-equipped to fight off sickness. I buried my mittened fingers in the snow and reached past a wobbly heart and sloshing stomach for the healing power that imbued me.
Nausea burned away as cool, welcome magic rose up in me. The world went dark with winter, snow rendered invisible through the Sight, which looked into the mountain sleeping beneath it. Sleeping, not dead; winter was a time of rest and renewal up here on the mountain, a time of hibernation. Even the pale blue sky had that same sense of waiting: waiting for spring and warmth that would return birds and insects to it. It was comforting in its quiet way, and I thought that someday I would like to come here to sit at the top of the world when there was nothing more pressing to do than admire it. Fleeting observations, filling my mind and replacing the beast’s roar.
Peculiarly serene, I sat back on my heels-more of a trick than usual, since I was wearing snowshoes-and reached down the mountain with my power. The real world came back into focus, underlying what I saw with the Sight. The morning sun made pockets of gold in the snow, overruling blue shadows, rich colors tangling with the winter calm of the earth.
Mandy was fiery against that calm, both in real vision and with the Sight. Half buried in snow, she poured off heat and life and fury and fear, her aura as vivid as the red coat and black snowpants she wore. Everything she had was being poured into fighting, but the way she flailed told me she couldn’t see her opponent.
I could barely see it, even with the Sight. It was a massive blur, hardly even a shape. It had tooth and claw, but even those were translucent, like someone was shining light through packed snow. There were no eyes, no visible edges to its body, although it had a sense of weight to it. It had to: it kept pressing Mandy farther into the snow, and I caught an impression of talons lifting to strike.
When they fell, it was to reverberate off the glittering hard shell of my magic.
I had gotten pretty good at shielding both myself and others over the past year. It was easier, in fact, to protect someone else. My own demons tended to get inside the deepest part of me and work their way out from there, making shields less useful than they might have been. But my friends tended to just face external threats when I was around, and that I could handle.
The picture before me could’ve been an expensive special effect, a give-and-take of power flowing from me to the pair thirty feet down the mountain. Mandy looked like a superhero, wrapped in silver-blue shielding that glowed even in the sunlight. Her scream became a squeak of astonishment, and the creature’s dull roar ricocheted into a pained howl.
For just a second I felt proud of myself.
Mandy won my admiration forever by slamming the mittened heel of her hand upward, straight-arming her invisible assailant. Its head, for lack of a better term-that’s where the teeth seemed to be, anyway-cracked backward, briefly illuminated by the power wrapping Mandy. I had a glimpse, nothing more, of a human face badly distorted, and tried frantically to rewind my memory and remember if its teeth had been manlike or more predatory. The idea they’d been both popped up, then retreated again as the infuriated blur of nothing tumbled ass over teakettle down the mountain.
Trying to see it-or See it-was giving me a headache. It changed shape and size like it was struggling to figure out what it was. It landed on all fours, facing me, and slid yards before coming to a stop. Claw marks marred the snow, five surprisingly delicate lines from barely-visible paws. Ten seconds earlier it’d had enough weight to drive Mandy into the snow. Now it barely broke the crusted surface, and the gut-clenching low rumble of its roar rolled over me again. I let go a shout of my own, feeble in comparison.
The snow under my feet compacted alarmingly, like it was suddenly bored with its current location. I had a vivid realization that I was standing on top of a mountain, and that deep noises could start avalanches. There was a tree line that might help mitigate disaster, but if a good snow slide started, the trees would break like twigs. And so would I.
Mandy flinched upward, escaping the worst of the snow’s grasp in a sudden poof of color. Snow crunched and cracked beneath her, but she rolled carefully, edging her way toward the ridge at an oblique angle, away from the divots she and the monster had made as they’d rolled down the mountainside. She still shone with the protective glitter of my shielding, but I had no way to reduce gravity within that shield.
Maybe I didn’t have to. The idea hit me with the same dazzling clarity as sun on snow. I’d made all kinds of shapes with my shields in the past, and it didn’t seem impossible that a flattened oval could help spread her body weight over a greater distance. Trusting that the formless monster couldn’t move fast enough to eviscerate me in the time it took to rearrange my concept of the shield and Mandy’s weight within it, I turned my attention to her alone.
I’d never thought about the mass I was protecting when I’d created a shield before. Now I could feel her weight like the shielding was a hammock, drawing down toward the buried earth where her body touched it. But that drop-point could be eliminated by increasing the hammock’s tension, pulling its corners farther apart until it was a smooth, stretched-out expanse still capable of bearing the same weight. All the change was in the hammock, rendering its burden unchanged, yet perfectly safe on a taut surface.
Mandy’s shield popped out wide and thin, just like my image of the hammock. The wind carried her gasp of relieved bewilderment to me as she got free of breaking snow and lay atop it. She went preternaturally still, lying with her arms and legs spread out like she was on thin ice and, intentionally or not, reducing my need to pay attention to her shielding’s form.
I had exactly enough time to look back toward the featureless monster before it bashed into me.
Up close it smelled like carrion. I gagged, choking for breath, and aspirated snow. I coughed it out, vision blurring, though I couldn’t tell if it was tears or just that the world itself had gone white and cold, with no sense of up or down. I wasn’t hurt-the shielding I’d wrapped around Mandy surrounded me, too-but the thing rolled me in the snow, disorienting me further. I grabbed at it, fingers clawed uselessly inside my mittens, and it pulled away without effort.
I got a glimpse of it, an outline against the pale blue sky. Its eyes were white, or transparency’s closest brother to white, and its mouth was a tear across its head. The teeth, more visible than anything but the claws, were a skull’s grin, but the head stretched wider than a human head should have. There was no way this thing had eaten the people we’d found so far.
Or, if it had, it was becoming more and more wild, losing any vestiges of humanity that it had once had. I caught a downward strike with my mittened hand, and felt myself sink deeper into the snow. I didn’t want to think too hard about how far it might be to the mountain rock below; the idea made me feel like I was drowning in snow, just as I had in my vision the day before.
Snow collapsed on my head, which didn’t help at all. I gasped for air and got a lungful of rotted meat stench. For somethi
ng that had landed on the snow crust light as a feather, it certainly was strong and stinky. I tried Mandy’s trick, straight-arming it, and caught it solidly in the chest to no dramatic effect except fueling another roar.
That time I felt it in the ground, the way it shivered and dislodged a bit of the packed snow it held in place. One more howl like that and the whole mountainside was going to go, which might be okay from my monster buddy’s point of view, but which would be a world of hurts for me and Mandy. I reached for a psychic net, an idea that had worked for me in the past. A blue-white mesh burst out of my fingertips and stuck against the monster’s mutating form.
It reared back, clawing at the net, then simply dissipated like it had never existed. My net collapsed, partly because it had nothing to hold and partly because I was too surprised to keep its idea in mind.
Barely a heartbeat later the creature reappeared and clobbered me with a mallet-sized fist. Stars burst in my vision, and right about then I started wondering why I’d been trying to capture instead of kill it. I slammed a hand out to the side, grabbing a fistful of snow and willing it to become my weapon of choice, the silver rapier I’d taken from a god.
Power surged, and I held the blade like it had always been there. In a way it had been: it made up part of psychic armor and weaponry grown from gifts I’d been given and tokens I’d won. The first time I’d drawn it had been in a dreamscape plane, but since then I’d learned I could pull it across the real world from its usual hiding place under my bed into my hand when I needed it. It was more convenient than carrying a rapier around in day-to-day life, though its lack of physical presence tended to make me forget about it until I really, really needed it.
Like now.
Technically it was a stabbing weapon, not a slashing one, but it had an edge and that that was enough for me. I swung wildly, pouring power into the blade. I’d overloaded monsters before, essentially exploding them with magic, but the invisible snowman only squealed and scampered backward. I lurched forward, trying to follow the path it broke in the snow, but a sword in one hand and snowshoes on the feet did not make for easy movement.
I burst out of the snow like a bit of a fool, powder spraying everywhere. The critter was out of reach and in arrest, making it almost impossible to see. It shimmered slightly, a miragelike distortion of light, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it for fear I’d never locate it again. It was on top of the snow now, no longer breaking it, but the path it had made while escaping me gave me an angle to run up, in so far as I could run while wearing snowshoes. Nothing about the carnivorous beast had suggested it had a sense of humor, or I might’ve slain it with laughter at my blundering.
It crouched, visible only because the distortion in the air lowered: its only two easy markers, tooth and claw, were hidden in mouth and snow respectively. I did a c’mere gesture with my free hand, hoping it’d jump me again, since I already knew which of us was faster. Being on the defensive was just fine with me, when my opponent could cover twenty yards while I blinked.
I still wasn’t ready when it sprang at me. It came from up high, which I expected, but it was smarter than I hoped: instead of skewering itself on my raised sword, it twisted at the last second, coiling toward my undefended left side. Well, my semi-defended left side; I snapped the blade around, scoring a point-tip slash across what I thought of as the thing’s ribs.
It didn’t so much as flinch, though its howl turned aggravated, like it was smart enough to change its line of attack but not smart enough to imagine I might change mine. This time when it hit the snow beyond me it turned with a snarl, but backed away. I swore and tromped after it, earning another one of its low-bellied rumbles.
A crack opened up between me and the thing, and a heavy block of snow slid several yards down the mountain, then edged to a stop. I froze, arms spread wide and eyes even wider, and although I couldn’t see the damned critter’s face, I got an overwhelming sense of smugness from it. It emitted another low roar, then another, and when the snow began to slide that time, I knew it wasn’t going to stop.
I’d been in earthquakes, but they had nothing on the sensation of watching the snow before me collapse and surge as it started an irreversible downward trend. Time dropped into a zone that only happened in emergencies, and I watched chunks of snow break loose and surge forward in slow motion as the packed material in front of it gave way. It was utterly beautiful in a purely chaotic way.
The half-embodied monster was clearly able to stay on top of the havoc it was wreaking, the impressions its claws made gobbled up by rolling snow. I doubted I could manage the same trick, but even if I could, the nasty beast had put me between a metaphorical rock and a hard place. I could try to go after it.
Or I could keep Mandy Tiller from getting killed.
I sucked my gut in, made an apology to my sword, and threw it away so that when the snow fell out from under my feet, I could fling myself forward with it. All I had to do was get to Mandy before her part of the shelf turned to icy dust. The slow-time of heightened awareness helped: even though I knew everything was happening impossibly fast, I could see giant snowballs breaking free, big enough for me to throw my weight onto them as I dashed across a shattering snowfield. The avalanche’s momentum helped, driving me forward faster than humanly possible. I belly flopped on Mandy, my arms spread wide, just as the snow beneath her collapsed.
I snapped a quicksilver shield up around us as the snowslide threw us down the mountain. Mandy rolled over beneath me and wrapped her arms and legs around me, face buried in my shoulder. I knotted my arms around her shoulders and drew my legs up as far as I could with her in my lap, so we made a ball that bounced smoothly-for some value of smoothly-down the thundering wash of snow. I felt like a giant bruise inside about six seconds, and caught myself muttering, “Shock absorbers, shock absorbers,” into Mandy’s ear as the world spun by in a roar of white and rock and trees.
I’d always worked best with car metaphors, and after another couple of bounces the shielding seemed to soften, taking some of our impact against hard snow and harder debris. Mandy made the first sound I’d heard since her earlier screams: a tiny whimper that sounded like relief. I squeezed her a little harder, then closed my eyes against the cyclone of white around us and waited for it to be over.
We thumped and rolled and bumped to a stop about a million years later, still utterly buried in white. There was room around us, enough to breath, but not enough to untangle from each other. I lifted my head a few inches and Mandy loosened her grip to say, “We’re never going to be able to tell which way is up. People die digging the wrong direction.”
I whispered, “Actually, not a problem,” and, perhaps genuinely grateful for it for the first time, turned the Sight onto the world around me.
The torn-up mountain lay at an oblique angle to us, off to my left. It was no longer sleeping, but half awakened through shock and wounds. I could feel fresh gashes in its face all the way down the path the avalanche had taken, and sent out a pulse of sympathetic healing magic, the same way I’d done with Gary after his heart attack, toward the earth’s surface. My, “Sorry,” was murmured aloud, the confines of my mind seeming too small for an apology to an entire mountain I’d disrupted.
Mandy let out a moan, clearly interpreting the apology as meaning I couldn’t find our way out of there, but the mountain itself gave a shuddering groan, like I’d soothed an injury. I said, “No, it’s okay,” to Mandy, and turned my head the other way, nearly bumping noses with her as I did. I hadn’t been this intimate with someone in weeks.
The calm sky was up there, waiting for us to emerge. I gave a tentative push with the shield, wondering if it would move packed snow, then shoved harder and was rewarded with a sudden increase in breathing room. Heartened, I leaned into it, and seconds later snow burst upward and sunlight rained down on us. Mandy shouted in disbelief and scrambled up the ridged snow with me a few crawling steps behind her.
When I got to the top she was lying on her b
ack, arms spread as she gasped at the sky. Not from a lack of air, I thought, but just sheer gladness at being alive. Somehow our snowshoes had survived the tumble, so their narrow backs were poked into the snow, making her legs arc peculiarly as they rose to her bound feet. I smiled and looked up the mountain, at the hideous score of broken trees and boulder-sized snowballs littering the path we’d taken.
My sword was somewhere in there. It was an incongruous thought in face of wonder at being alive, but surviving certain death was familiar, and the rapier was important. I put out my hand and whispered a welcome to the blade, inviting it back to me without the strength of panic behind the offer.
I was a little surprised when it materialized, bright and undamaged. Mandy, behind me, said, “What the hell?” I turned to face her, twisting the sword behind my back guiltily, like I could pretend it wasn’t there. She demanded, “Where did that come from?” anyway.
“Um. You ever see those movies with the sword-fighting immortals?” At Mandy’s slow nod, I perked up a little. “My sword comes from the same places theirs do.”
“In other words,” she said after a moment, “don’t ask.” She was still lying on her back with her snowshod feet in the air. “Just like I probably shouldn’t ask how we survived that?”
“Pretty much.” I waited a long moment, wondering if she would accept that. Eventually she gave one tight nod and put a hand into the air. I caught it and pulled her to her feet. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get out of here.”
Because there was no one to tell us nay, I told the park officials that we’d been on our way back down when the avalanche struck, and that it had passed behind us offering no more than a thrill. Mandy nodded silent agreement to my version of events, and we both agreed we’d been very lucky when the rangers said, repeatedly, how fortunate we’d been. One of their paramedics even looked us over before they were willing to send us back to Seattle while daylight lasted.
