A Gathering Evil

by Michael A. Stackpole

  I tagged his left leg with the Ariel. He spun around and slammed into the side of my car, then flew off and into the median. I heard him scream as he landed in the arms of a big saguaro and hung there like a grim, southwestern Easter spectacle. On the other side of the road the pickup rolled down an embankment and came to a rest with all four spinning wheels in the air.

  As I sped away from that tableau, two questions came to mind: What the hell is Leich? I'd shot him six times, all total. I'd forced his bike into a car at 60+ miles per hour and watched him give himself an asphalt massage. After that he quenched his thirst with the blood of an ally and was still steady enough to shoot very well from the back of a moving truck. Finally, after he's knocked out of pickup truck, he rolls and stands. I hit him with the Ariel, and he still manages to be alive enough to scream when he gets impaled on a cactus.

  I knew things were strange, and I didn't mind that while sharing a hallucination with El Espectro, but unkillable creatures on the streets of Eclipse were not something I'd bargained for. "The logical explanation is that Leich really is, ah, one of a set of identical quadruplets that all share the infirmities of the others through this empathy thing El Espectro talks about."

  It sounded no better spoken aloud than it did echoing around in my head. The alternate explanation was that Leich, like the Draolings, was a native of another dimension. How he got here, how he got hooked up with Lorica and Nerys, and how he knew to go after me this morning were all open to conjecture. Of all of them, the last bothered me the most, but I tabled consideration of it until I successfully completed Nero Loring's recovery.

  The other question, of course, was how I would explain to Marit what had happened to her car. "I'll just have to be very appreciative, I guess."

  Frozen Shade covers the eastern half of what used to be known as the Valley of the Sun right up to the Salt River Indian reservation. I'd seen the break on the map I'd reviewed, but I hardly expected it to be so abrupt. Frozen Shade panels actually covered the eastern edge of Scottsdale to catch the morning sun, with only 20 feet of clearance along the major roads.

  Fortunately McDowell Road

  was a major road, so I shot out into the reservation, passing beneath the soil, without a hitch. Out there, in the gloriously warm sunlight, I took the car up to 70 mph and let the through-current of air sweep glass and seat stuffing out through the back window. I reveled in the heat and, somehow, the bright light nibbled away at the dread Leich had inspired in me.

  I picked up Route 87 heading northeast and took it through some of the driest, most inhospitable land I'd ever seen. In the distance I could see small, ramshackle houses the ruddy color of the dirt. It took me a moment to realize they were actually made of adobe bricks, and that astounded me. In this day and age, in the shadow of one of the largest cities in North America, there were people living in homes made of mud.

  Somewhere beyond where the Beeline Highway

  cut across the Arizona Canal, I turned north onto a dirt track. I followed it as faithfully as possible, leaving a huge cloud of dust in my wake. Twice I flushed jackrabbits and three times drove past the rusting skeletons of cars. Always, though, I kept the Ariel's nose pointed at Sawik Mountain.

  A rounded red hunk of rock, Sawik Mountain sat on the surrounding flat plain as if it had been formed from clay and squashed into a lump there by the potter. I followed the track as it cut east and stopped on the far side of the formation. Re-holstering the blue Krait, I pulled the gun case and sandwich bag from the car. The case showed a dent where it had deflected one bullet and one of the two sandwiches had a rather big hole in it.

  Trekking around through the small gullies was not particularly difficult. As I had seen when El Espectro mindfed me the location, I found the footpath leading in toward a small split between the mountain itself and a large hunk of rock as soon as I entered the mountain's shadow. At the base of it I saw two men, both Indians, one young and one ancient.

  "Howdy, gentlemen." I did my best to approach easily and openly because the younger man had a lever-action Winchester .30-06 rifle hanging from the end of his right arm. "Nice day for a hike."

  The old man started laughing in a wheezy voice. The younger man brought the rifle up and laid it in the crook of his left elbow. "Mister, if you came all this way for a hike, you're bound for disappointment. This is reservation land, and it's not open to the public. You might as well turn around and head back out of here."

  A phrase El Espectro had implanted in my brain floated up to my conscious mind. "I'm just seeking visions, friends. The Witch's father needs my help."

  The young man made ready to wave me off, but the old man said something to him. The rifle slipped down so the forward handgrip rested in his left hand, and he motioned down with it. "Get rid of the bag and case. Take off your windbreaker."

  I did as commanded, leaving me with a sleeveless T-shirt and shoulder holster covering my chest. "Now what?"

  The old man tossed a waterskin out into the crescent of sunlight to my right. "Get the bag my grandfather has thrown there," the young man commanded. "Pour water out onto your arms and wash them off. Wash them good."

  Given the way my morning had gone so far, this request even sounded reasonable. I picked up the skin and poured some water into my hand. I sniffed it and smelled nothing. I washed my arms off, then capped the skin and tossed it back into the shade. "If you ask me to put on surgical greens and perform an operation, I'll just leave now."

  The younger man winced at my joke, but his grandfather wheezed out another laugh. We waited for five minutes, with the old man constantly checking the sun and then me. Finally he spoke to the younger man, and the rifle swung up and away from me. "Come on in". You're clean."

  I frowned as I recovered my gear. "I'm clean?"

  The old man spoke in a voice that was at once quiet and impish, yet commanding. "In the old days, evil creatures could not stand the touch of sunlight. Now they have sunblock." He rested a palsied hand on his grandson's strong shoulder. "You will wait here, Will. You must stand guard while we go to the Cave of Dreams."

  "Yes, Grandfather."

  The old man, whose long gray hair was restrained by a leather thong encircling his head, led me up the narrow path. "You have been sent by Ghost Who Lives. Did he tell you what you would find?"

  "No."

  The old man looked back at me over his shoulder with sharp gray eyes. "Here we are far from the world you know in Phoenix. Nero Loring is as far from us as you are from Phoenix. Loring entrusted himself to me, and I agreed to help him on his quest, but I can help him no more. This will be up to you."

  "I'm Tycho Caine, by the way."

  The ancient one just laughed lightly. "My given name is, in your tongue, He Whose Antics Are the Light in the Eye of the Raven. It is not a compliment. You may call me George."

  "George?"

  He shrugged. "In my youth I learned to write English by copying the words on money. In signing up for service during the Korean War, my name choices were either George or Novus and the first seemed easier for my sergeant to learn."

  While we talked, we worked our way up a steep, twisty trail that hugged the mountain. The years had weathered the volcanic rock, but they had not made it smooth. One misstep and I'd end up looking like the road pizza Leich should have been.

  George stopped me at a wide ledge. To the left a series of hand- and footholds had been carved into the rock generations ago. Up at the top I could see, over the lip of another ledge, the top of what I took to be a hole in the mountain. He pointed toward the opening.

  "This is a sacred mountain, and the Cave of Dreams is a magical place. Nero Loring has been in there for three weeks. Will and I have brought him food and water each day. We also stand guard to prevent those who would come to hurt him from disturbing him. When you go up there, do not say anything to him until he speaks to you. You do not want to break him from communion with the gods until they are done with him."

  The old man sat down
in the mountain's shadow. "I do not know what you will find up there. I have not been in the cave since I first took him up there. Whatever you find, do not disturb it, for it will be a symbol of power for him. It may be all that is keeping him alive. Listen to him, and when he speaks to you as you, then it is that you may take him from this place."

  "In the meantime," he pointed at my luggage, "I will watch your things."

  I sat the case down and tossed him the sandwich bag. "Help yourself, but watch out for lead poisoning."

  He nodded solemnly. "It is a crime to waste food."

  I started to climb up, straining to hear any sounds from above. The climb proved easy and every time I looked back down at George, he saluted me with smaller and smaller pieces of sandwich. At the top of the climb I saw a jug of water and an empty plastic plate resting on a ledge that seemed just smaller than a twin bed.

  The hole in the mountain had obviously been carved by human hands. Three feet in diameter, it led into a tunnel of similar dimensions that slanted up at a 70-degree angle for 10 feet. I kept my head down as I crawled through it, devoutly wishing to avoid having my scalp scraped off by the rocks, then stood slowly as I entered the Cave of Dreams.

  The only light in the whole place came through a hole in the domed roof, and it came down in a brilliant shaft that washed over Nero Loring's seated body. Lacking an accurate frame of reference, it took me a moment or two to realize that Loring was physically a rather small man. Seated there in a lotus position, and with the sunlight making his bald head, bare shoulders, arms and legs bright patches of white, and with his eyes rolled up into his head, he looked like a creature wrapped in a light-cocoon in preparation for a spiritual chrysalis.

  Keeping one hand on the cavern wall, I carefully picked my way around the outer edge of the spherical room to a small alcove. I did not have much room in which to work because Loring had filled the cavern floor with an intricate sandpainting. It looked familiar because of the medium. I had seen many sandpaintings on sale in Phoenix—Eclipse and City Center both. What struck me as odd was that while the technique used was traditional, the images were not.

  Loring seated himself at the hub of the circular painting. Seven lines came out from the middle, splitting the drawing into seven even parts. Each slice contained a bizarre creature of some symbolic import, I had no doubt, but I could not puzzle them out. One, for example, had a cracked egg from which was emerging an insectoid monster. Another appeared to be a big-mouthed, rapacious creature shoveling earth into its mouth with arms that ended in steam-shovel buckets. They made no overt sense to me, but I felt I had the key to their meaning inside me somewhere. I just needed one more piece of the puzzle.

  That piece was the outer circle itself. It had been done almost entirely in black sand except where golden sand had been layered in. The gold bits were all angular, beginning and ending in dots. I knew I had seen that design before, but it took me a second or two to remember where.

  The dimensional gate! Loring has built himself one out of sand. I swallowed hard. Whew, must be some serious Pharmaceuticals at work here.

  At seven spots around the room, in small pots placed at points beyond where the spokes ended at the outer circle, incense burned. Thick ropes of it filled the air and drifted like clouds of cosmic dust through the universe. I caught some of the spicy scent but couldn't place it. It burned my nose and eyes enough to start the one running and the others watering. As tears filled my eyes and blurred the scene, things shifted.

  Suddenly I found myself out where I had been with El Espectro. I floated above the red planet. Surrounding me I saw all sorts of humanized creatures in traditional Amerindian garb. They regarded me closely, then shifted in shape to become stained-glass saints, and then again into the myriad gods of the world's pantheons. None of them said anything to me, yet I sensed from them an insistence that I act. And about the same time as I began to wonder if they truly existed, they began to vanish, and I wondered if what I had seen was nothing more than an externalization of things lurking within my own mind.

  Below me, seated in the dust of the red world, I saw Nero Loring. Pointing my toes, I forced myself to drift down to him. As I did, behind him, on a sheer mountain face, I saw images begin to take form as if a movie were being projected on the mountainside. On the mountain I saw Nero Loring's head and shoulders as they were now, but the crosshairs of a rifle scope slid down over them. I saw the purple dot the Allard Technologies Espion CIV laser sight used to mark its victims. It clung to Loring's forehead like the biblical mark of Cain, then I felt my right index finger spasm.

  In agonizingly precise slow motion I saw a hollow-nosed, 180-grain bullet that had been drilled and patched core through the sighting dot. Upon impact, the droplet of mercury inside the bullet shot forward, bursting free of the front of the bullet. Its microfine beads ripped through the tissue like shotgun pellets. The rest of the bullet fragmented, expanding to create an exit hole five times the size of the entry wound as it went out just above his neck.

  As the head snapped forward, it dropped from the camera frame, and the movie ended. I knew without question that what I had just seen was a memory conjured up from before I woke up in the body bag. Whatever it was that was in the incense had freed that vision when I saw Loring. I had shot and killed him, I knew it. I felt it right down to my soul. I had killed Nero Loring, yet here he sat before me.

  The man's eyes rolled down and skewered me with a feverish stare. In a voice I heard as being as mechanical as Coyote's phone voice, he spoke to me. "He told me you would come. Once the destroyer, once my salvation." He lifted his hands to me as if transferring an invisible burden. "You must find her and bring her to me. He cannot have her."

  I concentrated, frowning, to pierce the mystery of his words. "Who is he and who is she?"

  "He is Fiddleback." Loring's eyes blazed with madness. "She is Nerys. Into your hands I commend the spirit of my daughter. If you cannot save her, we all will die!"

  The real world came crashing back as Loring collapsed in the middle of his sandpainting. I shivered all the way down my spine, then called out to George. He arrived a minute later and gingerly stepped over the lines Loring had drawn. Following his lead, I made my way to the center of the picture and lifted Loring's emaciated body. A man his size should have weighed at least 130 pounds, but he was easily below 100.

  George and I wormed the comatose man through the tunnel and with Will's help managed to get him into the car. I belted him into the shot-up passenger seat and put my rifle case in the seat behind him. Straightening up, I slammed the door shut. Turning to George I started to thank him, but he stalked his away around the car with his arms held wide like a bird facing off against a snake.

  Will and I backed away, watching him carefully. He made a circuit from the radiator all the way back to the rear bumper, then dropped to the ground. As we came around that end of the car, we saw him wiggling his way back from under the vehicle. In his left hand he held a sticky cocoon covered with grayish silk. Without hesitation he set the cocoon down on a flat rock and smashed it with another stone.

  "When you came out here, you were followed."

  I glanced between the black liquid dripping down the stone and the nearly destroyed car. "Yes."

  George nodded proudly. "That was why. It was evil. I suggest you do not return the way you came because they will have forces arrayed to stop you."

  I decided not to point out that his thesis was, in fact, unprovable unless I did return by the route that had brought me to the mountain. As that had never been my intention in the first place, I had no trouble agreeing to his plan. "Thank you, for everything."

  Will frowned. "I deeply love and respect my grandfather, but you, a white man, you cannot believe all this mumbo-jumbo that he has been teaching me. The old ways and the old monsters have no power in the real world."

  In Will's words I sensed he had reached a decision point in his life. One half of him, the modern half, dreamed of living in City
Center just like everyone else. That world had no room for superstitions and bogeymen. That was a world of superficiality where being seen in the right place far outweighed actually doing anything real. In many ways, though difficult to attain and maintain, it was an easy way of life because it required only a willful dedication to work mixed with an equal dedication to hedonism and social climbing.

  The other part of him, the part that had listened to stories of the old ways from the day of his birth, had seen just enough to question things. He'd doubtlessly been involved with his grandfather in ancient rituals. If Will had what El Espectro described as latent empathic abilities, his grandfather could be using ancient rituals to teach him to harness those abilities. Will knew enough to make him wonder if his grandfather might not be right and, if he was, Will knew his whole world view became one leaf on a tree instead of the whole tree itself.

  "I don't know how to answer that, Will. I've seen things that make me question what is real and what isn't." I nodded at George as I opened the driver's door. "If I had the opportunity to learn what he could teach, I would. If he is wrong, at the very least you are rescuing from extinction traditions that predate recorded history. If he is right, you will be infinitely more able to deal with the world than you would be if you remained willfully ignorant."

  I climbed into the car and started it. As I drove away I saw the two Indians walking back toward the Cave of Dreams. George offered Will half of one of my sandwiches, and the younger man draped his arm over his grandfather's shoulder.

  On another two-tire track I drove from the mountain into Fountain Hills and picked up Shea Boulevard

  . I took that back into Scottsdale, passing into the darkness of Frozen Shade at 120th Street

  . I picked up the 101L and headed south to Thomas. There I exited, having skirted the heart of Drac City, and dropped Loring with El Espectro's friends at a little house set back from the road between Hayden and Pima. At no time during the journey did he wake up, and when I left him his eyes were still fairly dilated from whatever drugs he had used.