Ghostlands

ELEVEN

Familiar as these ancient hills were to Mama Diamond, even they had changed some since the world lost its way in recent days.

Physically they were the same: the expelled marrow of volcanoes a million years extinct, the compressed effluvia of what must once have been the floor of a primordial sea…and couldn’t you just feel it here, the weight of those centuries stacked one atop another like the laminar striations in a canyon wall?

I’m just one more fossil now, Mama Diamond thought. The difference is, I happen to be breathing.

A half-moon lit the chilly sky. She understood that she would have to find a place to make camp before moonset. Cope and Marsh, her horses, stepped lightly and a little nervously along a trail Mama Diamond had first explored thirty years ago. The train tracks were periodically visible, looping up a gentle incline from the east and crossing a canyon on a steel trestle. Mama Diamond had followed the tracks most of the way from Burnt Stick. But the horses disliked that high trestle and she had accommodated them with this back route.

In the distance she heard the howling of wolves-a great many of them, it seemed to her. That tribe had prospered since the collapse of technology drove human beings out of these hard lands. They feasted, she thought, on our leavings. Now they were getting hungry again.

It was late, but Mama Diamond felt remarkably fresh. She wondered how that could be. The encounter with that dragon, with Stern, had left her sore and dispirited…but life had crept back into her over the course of the day, maybe too much life, a strange euphoria.

Why did she feel stronger rather than weaker? Was it possible the Change had not left her untouched after all? But Mama Diamond disliked that thought and dismissed it from her mind.

She was able to avoid the trestle because she knew these hills, knew them perhaps even more intimately than the surveyors who had laid down the rail routes way back when. And she doubted the extra time would put her far behind Federal Agent Larry Shango, who was depending on pedal power and force of will to carry him up the incline. But some difficulties she could not avoid…such as the upcoming tunnel that was blasted through the most difficult rock face these eroded hills had to offer. A half mile of darkness by day or night.

Mama Diamond considered making camp this side of the tunnel, but she didn’t want to lose the time or make a habit of postponing unpleasant obstacles, particularly when she felt so well. This was why she had packed a quality oil lamp. She had anticipated this passage.

Still, the sight of the tunnel mouth with its stained concrete lintels, like the entrance to a demonic temple, was disheartening. “Not everything is easy,” she whispered to the horses. Marsh sidled uneasily. Cope blew a gust of breath through flaring nostrils.

Mama Diamond lit the lantern, closed its mantle, and tried to draw some confidence from the flickering light. After all, Shango must have come this way already. And come out the other side…unless, of course, Shango was lying dead in the darkness next to his ridiculous rail bike, an image on which Mama Diamond preferred not to dwell.

The moon hovered just beyond the near peaks of the Laramie Range, watchful.

“Hey-up, Marsh,” Mama Diamond said, and the animal stepped into the shadows with an almost palpable reluctance, Cope hanging behind at the end of his rope like a counterweight.

Ambient light faded instantly. Mama Diamond’s lantern was too feeble to cast more than a narrow circle of illumination around her. Darkness enfolded her like a blanket. But she could see the tracks well enough to follow.

She disliked the smell of the tunnel. The tunnel stank of damp stone and rusting iron and cold cinders and limestone. And animals had been here-were still here, perhaps.

Were definitely still here, she decided a few moments later.

More wolves, most likely. They kept out of her circle of light, but she smelled them and heard them moving parallel to the tracks, keeping pace; heard their wet tongues slopping out of their mouths.

Marsh and Cope sensed them, too, probably more acutely than Mama Diamond did, and she had to speak to the horses to soothe them, faking a confidence she didn’t feel. Had it been a mistake to attempt this crossing tonight? But when would have been better? Daylight? There was never daylight in here.

Canine eyes peered out of the darkness, almost comically like a cut-rate special effect or a carnival-ride illusion, a Saturday matinee recalled in a nightmare.

But there was light ahead now, the faint but welcoming moon-bright oval of the tunnel’s far end. She trotted Marsh toward it.

However-

However, parked in that slat of moonlight was a single old gray wolf, a big gap-eared beast missing patches of fur, smiling its perpetual canine smile, black lips pulled back over yellow spearpoint teeth. It sat in Mama Diamond’s path coolly watching as she approached.

Mama Diamond rode until Marsh would go no farther. The horse simply stopped and stared, trembling, as if the motionless wolf were a writhing nest of snakes.

Mama Diamond spoke, meaning to reassure the horses, but she found herself addressing the wolf instead:

“Ho there, Old Dog. One old dog to another.”

The wolf seemed surprised, but it didn’t budge.

“What do you want from me, then, Old Dog? Do you plan to eat me? Well, that’s not in the cards-not tonight, anyhow. I’m feeling brisk and I’m feeling mean. Fair warning.”

And how powerful and assured her words sounded, even to herself! What made her speak so masterfully to a low animal like this one?

The wolf seemed abruptly uncertain of its intentions. It looked from side to side, licking its dark cracked lips.

“Oh, I know you have your tribe here with you. But they can’t protect you, Old Dog, nor you them. Not from me.” She raised her hand and her garnet rings glittered in the moonlight. More words spilled from Mama Diamond’s mouth: “But you’re not the boss, are you, Old Dog? You’re in charge for the moment, but the Big Boss isn’t here.”

The wolf whined and snapped its jaws.

“Well, Old Dog? What will it be? Fight or get out of my path?”

The wolf emitted a series of breathy barks, smacked its lips and drooled a string of spittle. But what Mama Diamond heard was:

You have no place here.

“Don’t tell me where I belong, Old Dog! Now stand back, or my horses will trample you.”

The animal rose uncertainly.

“Move, I tell you! Out of my path, Low Thing! Carrion-Eater! Haul your stinking carcass aside and tell your boss I said so!”

The wolf yipped and scuttled into the cavernous dark.

Mama Diamond led her horses from the mouth of the tunnel into moonlight and cold, clean air.

Now that was strange, she thought.

She caught up with Larry Shango a day later.

As she rode up, the government man squatted by the side of the tracks where the railroad divided a weedy meadow. Shango was striking matches into a loose assortment of cottonwood kindling-more hoping for a fire than making one, Mama Diamond thought.

So intent was Shango on this task that he was visibly startled to see Mama Diamond and Marsh and Cope practically on top of him.

“Not very vigilant,” Mama Diamond observed, “for a government agent.”

“I made a career out of vigilance. Jesus! Those horses must have rubber-soled shoes.”

It did seem to Mama Diamond that she and her mounts had been moving with a certain stealth ever since their encounter with the gatekeeping wolf. Maybe that wasn’t just wishful thinking.

“I can help you with that fire,” Mama Diamond said. “You’re wasting matches. And unless you clear a break, you’re liable to start a brushfire while you’re at it.”

Shango stood up to his considerable full height. “Thank you, but may I ask what you’re doing here?”

The sun was low but the merest whisper of afternoon warmth lingered like an uncertain ghost. It would be a cold night. And a starry one, the air as clear as it was.

“There’s not much left for me back in Burnt Stick, you know. Not with my treasure stolen. Thought I might come along and keep you out of trouble.”

Shango’s expression remained stony. “You’re welcome to stay the night, ma’am. But I’m afraid I can’t let you travel with me. No offense, but I don’t need that kind of liability.”

“Of course not. All you need is some help with the fire. Oh, and I brought a rabbit we can cook, unless you have some game of your own. No? Well, then.”

The government agent sighed, looking at the rabbit with real longing.

They talked amicably enough over dinner, but not about anything substantial-jewel-thieving dragons, for instance, or the so-called Source Project. Mostly they talked about the journey through the Shirleys and the difficult road yet to follow, though Shango was cagey on that topic, too.

It didn’t matter. They retired peacefully to their respective sleeping bags. The night was as starry as Mama Diamond had hoped, stars and planets so bright and crisp they showed their colors, Mars like a little pale ruby on the smoky throat of the sky. The air was cold, though. She tucked her knees up beside her and fell asleep listening to the small restless noises of Cope and Marsh and the rustling of wind in the weeds.

She was unsurprised, when she woke in the morning, to find Shango and all of Shango’s baggage already gone. She imagined she could hear the faint squeal of Shango’s lunatic rail bike somewhere down beyond the thin line of the horizon.

She could have caught up easily if she had saddled the horses then and there. But she didn’t. She tidied up the campsite, made sure the fire was thoroughly doused, packed her saddlebags equitably and at last rode north at an easy trot. There was no talking Shango into this deal, Mama Diamond realized. Larry Shango would have to come to certain conclusions in his own way and on his own time.

For two more days she followed the government agent as the land rose and fell and the temperatures just fell. Both nights she showed up at Shango’s campfire with game she had trapped or shot with her Indian bow. Shango accepted the food and seemed not to object to the company-Mama Diamond learned a little about Shango’s childhood in the New Orleans projects, and shared some stories of her own-but he was adamantly silent about his long-term goals. Shango traveled alone. That was nonnegotiable.

He was a stubborn man. Well, Mama Diamond thought, that figured. Shango was a man on a quest, stubborn almost by definition.

Her fourth day out, Mama Diamond spent too much time stalking an elusive antelope. In the end the animal outmaneuvered her and she wasted an arrow on the prairie grass. By the time she had ranged back to the railway tracks, night had fallen. A fingernail moon shimmered through faint, high clouds. The old moon in the arms of the new, she had heard it called.

Missed dinner, she thought, riding alongside the moon-silvered rails, and the night was darker than she would have preferred for this kind of traveling. She didn’t want Marsh or Cope to step in a gopher hole and break a leg. She would have preferred to have them watered and resting by now. Stupid old woman, she had miscalculated the time….

But at the next turn of the breeze, she smelled dinner ahead. Pork and beans, wafted on a southerly wind. She was surprisingly hungry. She had not had an appetite so voracious since she was a much younger woman-Mama Diamond had been a picky eater for at least a decade. Her appetite had come back to her on this trip like a welcome if demanding guest.

Then she saw Shango’s campfire flickering ahead of her, and she smelled something new, something she didn’t like, something akin to the reek of burning hair.

Distantly, she heard Larry Shango shouting. Mama Diamond urged Marsh to a trot, pulled her bow from her shoulder and nocked an arrow. A gust of howling and barking came to her on the wind.

The wolf, Mama Diamond thought. That damned Old Dog!

The rank smell was the stink of singed fur.

Closer now, she saw that Shango, under siege, had thrown one animal into the fire. The government man circled the campfire warily, as if waiting for the next attack. He carried a weapon: a huge hammer, presumably liberated from his travel gear.

The burned wolf had escaped the flames and rolled in a patch of dust outside the circle of firelight. It howled its pain. The boss wolf-and it was indeed the Old Dog she had met in the train tunnel-stood bristling but silent at the front of a pack of some ten or fifteen other animals.

That wasn’t the whole story, however. The Old Dog wasn’t in charge tonight. Something else prowled the shadows, half seen, silkily invisible except for its motion. Something large, sleek and self-confident. Something that made the horses tremble and dance. Mama Diamond climbed down from the saddle feeling frightened but oddly elated, energy coursing through her from her fingertips to the sockets of her eyes. She planted her feet firmly and said, “Stand back, you Beast!”

Her voiced boomed out of her, so loud and so resonant that it sounded alien even to her own ears. All that air, she thought; how had she drawn all that air into the leathery old marble-sacks that passed for her lungs?

The pack turned toward her, dozens of glowing yellow eyes. Shango, gap-jawed, also stared.

But in the shadows the Boss Beast prowled on, unimpressed.

Mama Diamond strode forward, fearless and ecstatic. Wolves fell back from her heels. She said:

“Carrion eaters, you! Kitten stealers! Leave this man alone! He’s a good man! Back away, mouse biters! Stand down, you louse-furred scavengers!”

The wolves whimpered and backed away.

“Good God,” Shango whispered, “is that you?”

His speech was nearly unintelligible to Mama Diamond’s ears.

Even the alpha wolf, Old Dog, ducked and drooled and moved muttering from her path. That prowling, pacing shadow, however-

“Behind you,” Shango said.

Mama Diamond turned.

This was no wolf.

This one was-a cat. A big one.

A black one.

“You’re not native to these parts,” Mama Diamond said, her confidence flagging at the sight of bared, bright teeth. The big cat stepped into the firelight, its eyes giving back the fire, its coat as black as a starless night.

A panther.

Escaped from some zoo? Liberated by the Change? Liberated and, worse, somehow altered? Those eyes were not merely bright. They were intelligent, uncanny.

“So you’re the one behind this,” Mama Diamond said.

Give us your friend, the panther said. Give us your friend, or be our dinner with him.

“I’m no dinner for the likes of you, Shiny Flanks. Nor is my friend.”

We don’t care. He was given to us.

“Given? By whom?” The panther blinked but did not answer. Its muscles, Mama Diamond saw, were tight as steel springs. “What makes a big cat like you travel with a pack of stinking dogs? Who is it that gives you men to eat? It wouldn’t be some dragon, would it? Some big smelly red-eyed batwing dragon?”

Stern, she thought. But she detected something fleeting in the big cat’s eye-lack of recognition? — then it was gone, replaced by naked, brute ferocity.

Stand out of our way.

“I will not! You heed me, you Barnum and Bailey castoff!”

The panther pounced.

Mama Diamond ducked aside, faster than she had imagined possible. Nonetheless she felt hot air as the cat flashed past her face, smelled the burnt-wood smell of its fur a fraction of a second before it landed foursquare, beyond the campfire, and swiveled to face her once more, eyes glittering like furious opals.

Reflexively, Mama Diamond snatched up a cottonwood branch from the perimeter of Shango’s crude fire. The stick was not alight, merely smoldering at the far end. She brandished it at the monstrous cat, feeling the ludicrous inadequacy of it.

But then a word formed on her lips, and Mama Diamond couldn’t say that she intended it before it was said.

“Fire.”

Nothing changed, really, not that she or Shango could observe. Looking down at her arm, she saw that the blackened branch remained the same.

But in the huge eyes of the cat, her reflection told a different story. There, the branch burst instantly alight. Blue flame, like the subtle fire of an alcohol lamp, scuttled up the branch to the mirrored image of Mama Diamond’s hand, then her arm, then all of her.

It occurred to Mama Diamond that this must be something akin to the trick Stern had first played on her when he had emerged from the death-black train, when he had appeared human for a moment.

I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice.

A trick of the eye. Or, more appropriately in this case, the voice.

Mama Diamond suddenly remembered that moment in her shop, when Stern reached out to her and that spark of blue devil flame leapt from his hand to her shoulder and filled her with renegade lightning. Just what in the name of creation had happened there?

Creation, indeed. It seemed to shock them both, most particularly because it suggested a kinship, an intimacy that neither courted. Could it be, Mama wondered, that the calling she had recognized long ago within her, the humming resonance in her core that had drawn her across the world in search of those ancient, thundering bones…

Was her dragon soul.

It was as if Mama Diamond had opened a door in a familiar house only to discover a whole new room beyond it. Known, yet not known.

The cat’s eyes narrowed against the incandescent holy glare of her. It backed up a pace, and then another.

Mama Diamond began to feel her powers draining from the exertion, the way the last water drains from an emptying cup, exhaustion rising from the marrow of her bones.

Just a bit longer, Mama Diamond willed.

The wolves turned tail and scattered. They must see the same heat mirage, Mama Diamond thought, these dark hunters, these predators.

“That’s right,” she said, “back off, Black Cat. You’re in over your head, you Night Animal. Look at me and go blind.”

The panther stood a moment-displaying a courage Mama Diamond was forced to admire-then howled and bounded into the darkness.

The wolves took their cue and ran like the dogs they were, tails tucked behind them.

Mama Diamond exhaled (had she been holding her breath?) and felt the power of illusion fade from her. The sensation was like stepping out of a warm shower into a chilly bathroom. She was suddenly cold and vulnerable. She shivered.

She looked down at her body with sudden fear, abruptly unsure that what she had seen in the cat’s looking-glass eyes was only an illusion and not the reality. But she wasn’t burned. She wasn’t hurt. She was only, suddenly, quite tired.

“I think I have to sit down,” she told Shango.

Shango struggled with words but finally managed, “Be my guest.”

“I’m sorry to disturb your meal,” Mama Diamond said, knowing even as she said it the absurdity of it, knowing it showed how rattled she was.

“Think, uh, nothing of it.” Still staring, the federal agent added, “You want something to eat? I kind of lost my appetite, myself.”

“Thank you, but I think what I really need is to sleep. Will you still be here in the morning?”

“Yes-I believe I will.”

“You’re willing to let me travel with you?”

“I have a feeling I’d be stupid to say no.”

“You were stupid the first time you said no. Will you fetch me my sleeping bag, Mr. Shango? My legs don’t want to carry me right now.”