by Kevin Hearne
“When was the last time you dealt with any?”
“Well, there was this rain god of the Maya who gave me a bit of trouble.”
“The Maya! Do you know what happened to them?”
“Not for certain, but they might have left this plane. They had a priest who could do it. But this is a completely different belief system,” I said, waving back at the hogan, “and so the rules of the magic are different as well. If I wanted to work up something to ward specifically against a skinwalker, I’d have to confront it first and see the pattern of it in the magical spectrum. General wards against magic from another plane may or may not work. And that’s the problem with wards, Granuaile.” I figured I might as well embrace the teachable moment. “You can’t ward against everything, and sometimes the bad guys will win through or around it despite your best efforts. So you know what happens in that case?”
“The bad guys win?”
“What, automatically? Getting past your wards means you’re instant toast?”
“Well, no, I’d fight first.”
“Exactly. You fight. The problem is you don’t know how.”
Granuaile huffed, her pride wounded. “I’ve taken some kickboxing lessons.”
I grinned at her. “Ah, you have? Bring it.” I set myself in a defensive stance.
My apprentice scowled at the idea. “You’ll use magic.”
“I promise I won’t. Not even a little—”
She didn’t lack for initiative. She pivoted and shot a kick at my gut before I finished the sentence. I pivoted as well and her toes grazed my belly, no more. I knew she was the athletic sort, but I hadn’t seen her exert herself until now. She was fast. Lunging in, I socked her in the stomach before she could recover and she staggered back, wheezing. I didn’t press my advantage, and she didn’t seem eager to continue.
“You know a bit more than kickboxing, don’t you?” she said.
I nodded. “Considerably more. We could do the whole Pai Mei thing if you want, but I’d rather not hurt you and I don’t have the flowing white beard to pull it off respectably.”
It will drag on the ground and get dirty every time you go to smell something or eat. It will be a mess.
Thank you. Hound 4, Druid 3.
“That’s all right, sensei, I’ll take your word for it,” Granuaile said, clutching her stomach. “Do I have to carry water up the mesa or something? Wax my car? Paint the rocks?”
“No,” I said, smiling at the movie tropes. “I don’t think I need to break your will. But we do need to train your muscles and get you accustomed to fighting with weapons.”
“I’m going to need a sword, then?”
“We will train with swords, yes, but I don’t think that will be your best weapon. Your size and reach will put you at a constant disadvantage in a sword fight. I think a staff would be better for you, and we will see what you can do with a throwing knife.”
“How will a staff and some throwing knives help against some brute who bull-rushes me with his shield up? Or a smart guy with a gun?”
“An excellent question. Every weapon has its drawbacks. We’ll prepare you for all kinds of antagonists.”
“What about automatic weapons? Can you pull a Neo and dodge bullets?”
“Nope. I cheat if I have the time. I dissolve the firing mechanism with a spell of unbinding.”
“And what if you don’t have the time?” That was an even better question—a dawning ray of paranoia that should be encouraged. “What about snipers?” she added, and I almost burst with pride. I settled for clenching my fist and drawing it down close to my body.
“Yesss! I ask myself that question every day and everywhere I go. Well done. And the answer is, you look around.” I pointed up at the buttes above us to the north and south. “I can’t stand where they’re placing this hogan, because we’re in the ideal spot to get picked off. You have to see the snipers before they see you, take cover, and then unbind their toys into hunks of useless metal.”
“But if you don’t see them in time, or if they have one of those fancy plastic guns, you can’t do anything.”
“Right. Except duck. Druids aren’t invincible, or else there would be more of us around.”
Granuaile turned to consider the hogan, which was lined in the red glow of the setting sun.
“So how do you create a ward, anyway?”
“You can think of it like a Boolean search on the Internet. You begin by defining your boundary—‘all life is okay in here’—and then you layer on the exclusions. ‘And not frakkin’ Cylons and not douche bags and not Imperial Stormtroopers.’ ”
“That’s it?”
“That’s what a ward is. The tricky part is defining your terms. How does the ward know the difference between a douche bag and a boy from Scottsdale?”
“Oh, I see.” Granuaile nodded. “They’re practically synonymous.”
“Right. Much of the time spent constructing wards is devoted to defining your terms magically. And you can’t define the magical signature of something until you’ve run across it once and laid your eyes on it in the magical spectrum. So I have no ward against skinwalkers. Trying to construct one now would be the equivalent of a null program.”
“But you do have a ward against douche bags?”
“Alas! Turns out they’re not malignant magical creatures at all, just naturally occurring phenomena, an evolutionary mutation of modern society.”
Granuaile cocked an eyebrow at me. “Evolutionary? You’re suggesting that douche bags are naturally selected?”
“Sure. Vestigial remnants of hunter behavior manifests itself as douchebaggery in males when confronted with the emasculating role of modern man, where they are no longer expected to provide food, shelter, or even spiritual guidance for their families but rather stay out of the way until it’s time to perform in the bedroom.”
“Really?” Granuaile cocked a single eyebrow at me, her voice drenched in wry skepticism.
“Maybe. I just made that up.” I turned to Oberon. “I should get a point for that.”
“I don’t think so, sensei. Sounded pretty pointless to me.”
Once the equipment was stowed, Darren Yazzie’s whole six-man crew—each of whom I assume was handpicked by Coyote—was going to spend the night on site as part of Chischilly’s Blessing Way ceremony. They unloaded a couple of coolers from their trucks and moved them inside, lit up a few kerosene lanterns for ambient light, and popped open some sodas. They had bedrolls and joked with one another about who was going to snore the loudest. Darren announced he was going to make a quick run into town to grab a couple of party trays full of veggies and some more ice, which was acknowledged only by Sophie; she smiled fondly at him, and I got the sense that he was doing her a favor. Frank didn’t hear him at all, absorbed as he was with arranging his jish for the ceremony.
“Why do they need to stay?” Granuaile asked. “I mean, I get that it’s a necessary part of the ritual, but why?”
I shrugged. “My guess is that they lend their strength and energy to the protections. The more people present, the stronger the blessing. Or the binding. I’ll be watching as it progresses.”
Frank started singing as soon as he was ready, while there was still a touch of dark rich blue in the western sky. As I’d thought, this didn’t produce immediate silence among the crew. They may have quieted down a bit, and a couple of them were paying attention, but it was casual interest. The ceremony was conducted in Navajo—a language I do not speak aside from a few stray words—but Frank was singing and working on a sandpainting on top of a sacred buckskin. It would be one of the Holy People,
though I wasn’t sure which one yet.
I turned on my faerie specs to see what magical energies, if any, were being employed, and discovered that Frank was doing something much more complicated than I expected.
To a Druid’s eyes, all magic, regardless of origin, is an exercise in binding and unbinding. Other systems differ from Druidry in what they’re able to bind and how, and usually they call on different energies from Gaia’s, but all those circles and pentagrams and sacrifices accomplish a binding of some sort. Customarily there is a religion involved and a generous helping of faith. Shamanistic systems, like those of many Native American faiths, often seek to bind people more closely to the spirit world for healing and protection or else unbind them from the influence of a malign spirit. I find them all fascinating and a little bit scary, because, except for my own shape-shifting—which involves my own spirit—I have no influence on the spirit world. A Druid’s bindings are physical. But what Frank was doing was occurring almost entirely on the spiritual level.
My suspicion that everyone would play a part in the ritual was confirmed; whether they knew it or not, whether they were actively participating or not, some portion of their energy, their spirit, was contributing to the protection of the hogan. It took no effort on their behalf; Frank was gathering it, channeling it, and redirecting it, and he was doing this through his singing and his sandpainting. Since I had never seen this ceremony performed by any other hataałii, I didn’t know if it was normal—but I suspected Frank might be in a league of his own. In my sight, the energy flowed from the others in multicolored undisciplined globs toward Frank’s sandpainting, and then it flowed outward from there as fine white rays of light. These rays shot toward the base of the walls. The ceremony wouldn’t be complete until the fourth day, according to Frank, but his preliminary songs during construction and his current singing was already energizing a rudimentary protection along the base—and a good thing too. Oberon, who was inside with us, barely had time to warn me before the attack began. I was about to pop open a can of liquid sugar when his ears pricked up and he growled.
A bestial feline scream rent the night and a crunching impact shuddered the north wall of logs, rattling the roof and eliciting more than a few curses of surprise. It was quickly followed by another impact directly behind where I was standing, which enveloped me in a cloud of sawdust and shot splinters into my back.
Chapter 7
As any war veteran will tell you, there is a vast difference between preparing for battle and actually facing battle for the first time. You can be told that reading Victor Hugo will sap your will to live, but you can’t understand what that means until you’ve read a few chapters and your eyes have glazed over and someone has to revive you with a defibrillator. Sophie and the six crewmen might have understood intellectually that skinwalkers possessed superhuman strength and speed, but to see it in action freaked them out a little bit. The creatures had nearly punched through the walls on their first try.
Frank Chischilly cast a pleading eye over at Sophie and kept singing. He couldn’t stop what he was doing without stopping the flow of magic; he had to keep singing, had to keep sandpainting.
“Keep on with the ceremony!” she bellowed. “Join in, help Frank where you can. It is our best defense.” They nodded, and some of them offered up their voices along with Frank when they knew the words; the choruses were repetitive.
Any idea what’s outside? I asked Oberon.
I turned around, thinking I would ask Coyote, only to discover that he wasn’t in the hogan at all. Come to think of it, the last time I remembered seeing him was right after I told him off.
“Where’s Mr. Benally?” I asked one of the workers.
He shrugged. “He left a while back.”
“Gods-damned sheep-loving tricksters,” I muttered. Always figuring out ways to get other people to fight for them. But then I got a chill. What Coyote feared wasn’t death but what the skinwalkers would be able to do if they acquired his skin. His absence indicated he thought there was a very good chance for the skinwalkers to get hold of it tonight—which meant we were all in movie trailer territory, where that guy with the low, twelve-pack-a-day voice informs you that you’re “in a world … of terrible danger.”
I was on the east wall near the door, opposite Frank. I moved around to the north side of the hogan as the attacks resumed on the logs there. They were absurdly percussive; the sound reminded me of small battering rams. I could hear wood cracking, splintering, chunks of it flying away outside, and saw the trauma reflected inside. If they were doing this with nothing but flesh and bone, then they were operating on the strength level of vampires, and the walls wouldn’t last very long. I activated two charms on my necklace, squatting down and peering through a gap that had developed between the logs. The first charm was night vision, so that I could see what was out there. The second was faerie specs, because this was my first chance to get a handle on how the skinwalkers’ magic worked.
It took me a while to find them; they were moving so fast that they blurred in my vision. Once I did spot them, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at; each was a gruesome mash-up of three different creatures, and if Frank hadn’t told me about the old spirits from First World, I wouldn’t have been able to interpret what I saw. The physical form causing all the damage was a bobcat, warped and mutated into ferocity beyond its natural bent—so that was the skin they were currently wearing. But underneath that skin, I saw something dark and scabrous, a mottled horror of crouching, insectile menace with orange eyes; underneath that, crippled almost beyond recognition, subsumed to the other two and its nobler nature quashed beneath a blanket of bile and aggression, was a human.
The demon-eyed thing was the glue binding the other two; it’s what allowed the human to shape-shift using an animal skin. I wondered how it would appear in Frank’s magical sight. Something snicked into place in my head—perhaps it was the way the dark tendrils of the insect thing had wrapped itself around both the bobcat and the human—and I realized that this was a magical symbiosis. Alone in the Fourth World, that dark spirit of the air could exert its will about as well as a substitute teacher on a room full of jaded seniors. But with the willing cooperation of a corrupted human, it could overpower most anything. My strategy, magically, should be to figure out a way to sever the spirit from either the human or the bobcat. It was unlikely that any one of them could harm us acting singly; bound together, however, the skinwalkers were practically juggernauts until sunrise.
Frank’s magic wasn’t severing anything, however; his Blessing Way was laying down a ward around the hogan.
I dropped to all fours to see precisely what those threads of light were doing once they slipped under the lowest log. I had to unbind the cellulose in front of my eyes to give myself a peephole of sorts, but once I did and put my eye to it, I could see Frank’s work clearly on the ground outside. His ward was building from the ground up; already there was no way the skinwalkers could get in by digging underneath the hogan. But the protection hadn’t found its way above ground level yet. Crisscrossed on the earth, I saw a webwork of glittering threads, obscenely bright in the darkness, like someone had taken those glow sticks kids use at raves and fueled them with plutonium. I tried to filter the light out to see what was at the core of it, but there didn’t seem to be anything else. One of the skinwalkers slammed into the logs directly opposite me, and I admit I jumped, but then it yowled as it touched the ward on the ground and skittered away.
The light, I realized, might be all there was to it. In First World, or Black World, light was in short supply—anathema, in fact, to all the dark spirits of air that lived there. Make some light in the magical spectrum, and the mojo of First World was neutralized. It sounded simple, but it wasn’t. I don’t do shiny mage balls or handheld fire globes or soft, friendly light whispers in any spectrum. Those aren’t
in a Druid’s bag of tricks. Clearly, though, some kind of effective light was being produced by Frank Chischilly and the others participating in the Blessing Way. I couldn’t duplicate it, nor could I think of any other way to ward against the skinwalkers in the short time we had before they burst through—I gave it less than five minutes, at the rate they were tearing through the logs. I wouldn’t be able to come up with a magical bullet to sunder the humans from their First World symbionts either, in so short a time. What I could do, though, was bind the logs back together and perhaps make them tougher to shred in the first place. It would be a time-consuming and draining effort, but all I had to do was keep it up all night.
“Ha-ha, that’s easy!”
I said that out loud?
Never mind. It was merely positive thinking.
I’m not sure if there’s any onomatopoeia that properly describes the sound of an unholy bobcat punching its paw through a log. Punt-thrack-rawr? But that sound exploded near my head, and I got a few wood chips in the face by way of punctuation. The next one or two hits would clear a hole, and then all they needed was to widen it enough to get through. No time to waste; Granuaile and Oberon said something to me, but I had to shut them out and give my undivided attention to keeping the skinwalkers outdoors.
I focused on the log, down to the level of its substance that I normally dismiss as visual noise. There I began to bind it back together, like to like, the simplest binding there is, and though the next impact actually got most of the paw through the wood, I was able to fill it in after that faster than they could punch through it. Once the skinwalkers realized what was happening, their pissy kitty howls went up an octave and switched to the key of apeshit. They backed off for a time, considering, and then I lost track of them. The next impacts came on two completely different walls. The ones after that were in yet another location. They were betting I couldn’t divide my attention and strengthen two or more spots at once. But I noticed a pattern to their attacks that I hadn’t seen before: They were always hitting the same log in terms of vertical distance from the ground. It was the fifth one, every time. It made sense when I thought about it: They had to hit the log hard, leaping off the ground outside the influence of the Blessing Way ward, and then leap back or ricochet out past the ward each time. If they went too low, they wouldn’t have the arc to miss it safely on the rebound. If they went too high, they’d have no problem falling safely, but the force of their hits would be greatly reduced due to simple physics. So if I could strengthen that fifth log on every wall, they’d be at a supreme disadvantage.
