Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 34

I felt terribly, terribly small, beneath the surface of the lake. My wings were waterlogged, the serpent’s strength much greater here than in the sky. It slithered around my neck until it held me with the end of its tail, and then began swimming deeper, dragging me farther into the stormy lake. I spread my wings, pathetic painful gesture of protest, and the serpent’s speed slowed a little.

A little. Not enough. I closed my eyes and struggled to backwing, trying to pull myself back toward the surface. The serpent tightened its tail around my throat and swam harder. I wondered how long I could survive underwater, or if a thunderbird didn’t need to do mundane things like breathe.

From the growing tightness in my chest, I suspected I wasn’t going to be that lucky.

Why hadn’t it worked? I’d sure as hell gotten the thing’s attention by bellowing its name. Why hadn’t it bent to my will?

Maybe because I had no ritual. It’d taken ritual to open the world walls with the coven. The water grew colder and darker and I fought to remember any of what they’d done, beyond dancing around a fire and singing in a language I didn’t know. Even in the midst of drowning, I snorted at myself. Water went up my beak and I coughed out most of the air I had left.

Ritual not only wasn’t my style, but I was a little short on time anyway. The serpent had only hesitated when I called its name, not been stopped entirely. I was missing something.

Virissong’s face flashed through the darkness that was becoming all I could see, and I almost laughed. Didn’t, quite: I’d already used up too much air. But almost. And cast down deep into myself, reaching for power at the same time that I made a promise: if I got out of this alive, I was going to spend a whole lot more time studying and a whole lot less time pretending that my gifts didn’t exist.

Approval bubbled through me, not my own. The thunderbird stretched its wings farther and swept them down powerfully, dragging the serpent and its downward journey to a stop. The serpent snapped around, a silver streak in the dark lake, its fangs bared as it lunged for the thunderbird.

My power responded with a flare of brightness that turned the rain-pelted lake to white. I whispered, “My name is Siobhàn Walkingstick,” into the whiteness, and the thunderbird’s voice roared, water shaking away from me in visible shock waves. “I live within Wakinyan, your ancient Enemy.” Maybe I had a little ritual in me after all. “I know you, Amhuluk. And I know the demon whose soul you share.”

I had no way to draw breath, and the impulse to do so nearly killed me. I drew water all the way to the back of my throat before coughing it out again. Dizziness brought my eyesight down to pinpoints, even the thunderbird’s superb color vision unable to offer me more than tiny spots of focus. I took the last air in my lungs and someone else whispered, “Idlirvirissong,” from my mouth as I lunged forward to slam my talons through the serpent’s skull, shattering bone and closing claw through the monster’s mouth.

I had a moment to be astonished while thunder ruptured all the water away from me, sending it spouting up into the sky in a whirlpool that I was the eye of. The serpent was flung into its swirls, squealing hideously as the water swept it farther and farther into the sky. A split appeared in the sky, shredding the clouds and opening a path all the way up to the clear stars. I dragged in a deep breath, feeling warmth and life returning.

I was good with the idea of nets. Cars and nets and cages. Things that held people in, rather than releasing them. What I needed now was an opening, the same kind the coven had created, one that would let not just the serpent, but all the spirits we’d released into Seattle return to their homes.

The idea of sacrifice flirted around the edges of my mind, so obvious and simple that even now I almost fell for it. It’d been made clear to me that it was my power that’d given the coven the strength to do what they had. I was certain that a little thing like the cost of my life would be enough to pay for sending the spirits home again.

But that would be the easy way out, and frankly, I didn’t think I deserved it. I tilted my head back, feeling wet feathers ruffle and stretch against my throat. I had no spell to sing, but I had the voice of the Wakinyan, and I had my own will to change the things that had been done badly.

I had never heard a sweet sound from a raptor’s throat before. The pure noise of shattering glass played off the whirlpool’s walls, bouncing higher and higher into the atmosphere, until the sound itself crashed into the gash in the sky, and tore it open all the wider.

I threw my own will behind that sound, flinging power up toward the clouds. Just to the clouds: rain thundered down all over Seattle, and I wanted to use that. I envisioned silver drops of power mingling with the rainfall, splashing down over man and beast and calling those who belonged somewhere else home again. Roofs and tree cover meant nothing, I whispered to the power-infused rain. It was the rain that carried the message, and all the creatures that heard it were bound by my will.

Amhuluk, closest to the rip in the sky and weakened by the calling of its name, went first. It threw its own black power behind it, trying to stitch the tear closed, so that the others couldn’t follow. I reached up and slashed the hole open again with a silver lance of magic, the distance between it and myself meaningless.

Crystal filled the air, so sharp-edged and full of color I winced away from it. It took long moments to realize it was an aurora, more brilliant in the thunderbird’s acute vision than my own mind was capable of processing. Jade faded to diamond-white at the edges, then ran and blurred into violet and crimson, so hard I thought I would cut myself if I reached up to touch them.

And littered in the colors came the spirits, their own forms faded and gentle inside the aching incandescence of the aurora. Resentment tingled from some, relief from others as they pounded into the sky.

The beat of footsteps into the sky shook the earth, and a surge of panic lent strength to my power. I didn’t want another earthquake, and remembered too vividly that was how the spirits had been given body. I shouted again, thunderbird voice running deep this time, and the whirlpool I hovered in the midst of buckled and mirrored itself, opening a spigot into the depths of the lake beneath me. I was the focal point of that one, too, the center at the small end, its width growing as it spiraled down toward the bottom of the lake.

Poor fish, I thought unexpectedly, and for the first time started to worry about things like airplanes and weather patterns when there was a whirlpool in the sky. I reached out with my power, trying to feel the rest of the city, to see if I’d endangered anyone or anything.

The whirlpool nearly crushed me, water slamming in toward my body so fast it stole my breath again. Fresh panic flared, forcing the waterspout to its original dimensions, my focus entirely on it again. I gnawed my lower lip, at least mentally—bird beaks weren’t really meant for gnawing—and gave the power inside me a sort of sideways glance, trying to peek at it. I’d had it drained from an external source before, but I’d kind of hoped it might be like the Energizer Bunny, left to its own.

That was clearly not the case. I was tapping the absolute limit of my own abilities, so much so that I couldn’t even afford to open myself up and let the city hit me with its strength. It was pretty clear that a lapse in concentration would kill me.

The good news was that all manner of creatures were thundering into the lake below me, physical bodies and spirits seeming to separate as they hit the double whirlpool. They raced up and down the swirls, becoming part of the aurora or part of the lake, returning to the things they’d come from. I just needed to hold on long enough for the rain to drive everything home again.

Long enough becomes a strange amount of time, when it’s just you against yourself. Long enough becomes one more second, each one infinite but graspable in conception. I can hold on one more second. Each one became the sum total of my universe, until there was nothing left of me but a shell pressing outward, holding the water back like Moses at the Red Sea. One more second. Meaningless, endless time lost in an aurora so intense that my eyes slowly learned to deny it. All around me there was nothing but static white light, and then that, too, faded away into a sky full of broken clouds and the scent of rain.

I beat the thin air with weary wings, turning a slow wheel on a tip so I could cock one eye at the rip in the sky. It was all but gone now, last vestiges of what I hoped was victory. The lake, far below me once again, was almost settled, a few choppy waves rippling its surface. I heaved a sigh and folded my wings, plunging toward the white-capped lake. It was over.

Slamming into my own body at two hundred miles an hour drove me beneath the surface, so deep I wondered if I’d be able to make it back up again. There was no somersault sensation this time, just a good old-fashioned kick to the gut as I sank into the water. My lungs hurt. My ribs hurt. Golden fire burned into my breastbone, doing something to replenish the worn-out power I carried within me, but not doing a damned thing for the lack of air in my system. I was too tired to panic. Hell, I was too tired to kick toward the surface. Maybe I could survive long enough to bobble that way with whatever little air was still left in my lungs.

Soft gold power drew me upward, exiting my chest as it had done before, but without taking my sense of body with it. One last spirit to go home, I thought hazily. The tear in the sky had to still be there, so the thunderbird could return to the Upper World.

Two spirits, someone inside my own head corrected me. Nakaytah’s voice, oddly familiar in my own mind. I exhaled, somewhat foolishly, all the stress leaving my system as I finally recognized who had spoken through my mouth when I’d named Virissong properly.

I hoarded his name for all this time, Nakaytah said. Only a shaman speaking it could drive Amhuluk and Idlirvirissong back into the Lower World.

I wished I had some air to breathe, but I smiled a little anyway. Drowning turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant way to go after all. I was going to have to apologize to—well, somebody—for my sarcastic doubting earlier. You’re the Wakinyan’s host, too, you know? I asked her. Your name is a part of it, too, now. It can’t be banished unless the Enemy knows to call your name, too.

Nor released, she agreed, and because I could take a hint, I drew in a lungful of water and whispered, “Goodbye, Nakaytah Wakinyan.”

I like to think I was the only one who saw the golden ghost of a thunderbird rise upward from my chest and speed into the sky like a star falling in reverse.

Eventually it struck me that being dead was a great deal like floating in a giant swimming pool, my chest rising and falling just like I was still alive and breathing. My eyelids were so heavy I had to lift my eyebrows to get them far enough open to see. A handful of fuzzy bright stars came into sight, and I began to think I probably wasn’t dead after all. I’d lost my contacts in the lake water, but on a scale of one to ten, with ten being dead, losing my contacts was probably somewhere around a negative fourteen in matters of consequence.

The lake water was still incredibly warm from the heat wave, though the air itself seemed to have cooled. I drifted for probably half the night before it occurred to me that I could swim to shore. Getting there took a long time, and once I crawled onto the beach I didn’t want to do anything else. I sat there until the sun rose, like I was waiting for something.

And I was. A gray shape in the water became recognizable as morning sunlight began to pick its way across the lake’s surface. I got up and walked into the water again, striking out in a swim when the bottom fell away, and brought Colin’s body back to shore.