Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 25

We ended up down in the garage break room, the place I was most comfortable in the station. A surprising number of people followed us down, evidently all struck with the need to take a break at exactly the same time. Morrison was conspicuous by his absence, for which I was both grateful and resentful. He, after all, had seen the diner’s security tapes and had come around far enough to reinstate me to work on the case. It seemed like he should come keep an eye on me while I did the weird stuff that he’d reinstated me to do.

Maybe I didn’t need to work on that damsel in distress routine after all. The idea of Morrison keeping his eye on me implied I might need him to rescue me, which seemed both unlikely and annoying. Fortunately, my replacement, Thor the Thunder God, came in from the garage with the rest of the mechanics. His arrival knocked me out of sulking over the captain.

“This really isn’t going to be that exciting,” I said to Gary. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder and was carrying it carefully. I assumed my drum was in there, protected against the weather.

“Want me to get ‘em out of here?” He looked more hulking than usual, like a rooster with his feathers fluffed out. I almost laughed.

“No, I think it’s okay. I just, ah.” I stopped arranging an empty space on the floor and looked around at the two dozen men and women crowding the break room. “No. No, in fact, I think I have an idea. All right, look, everybody.” I lifted my voice and straightened, arms akimbo. Nearly everyone came to attention, like I was their worst drill sergeant returned to haunt them. I fought off laughter again.

“This isn’t,” I repeated, “going to be very exciting. I’m going to sit here in a trance while Gary bangs a drum. I take it pretty much everybody’s gotten the lowdown by now.”

Nobody would quite look at me, or at each other. Especially at me. I couldn’t help wondering if they were here to see if my freaky new life was real, or if I’d just lost my mind. Either way, I couldn’t help laughing. Nothing traveled faster than gossip, and getting the lowdown had brought most of them here. “Right,” I said. Bruce, at least, met my eye with an unapologetic little shrug. “Since you’re all here anyway, I’m gonna ask a favor of you.”

Maybe a dozen people were left when I was done explaining what I wanted to try. To my surprise, Thor stayed. He glowered and folded his arms over his chest when I arched an eyebrow at him, but he didn’t move. I wondered what his real name was as I waited another moment before beginning. No one else left, so I sat down Indian-style in the middle of the crowd. Gary sat down across from me and took my drum out from the duffel bag.

“I brought this, too.” He withdrew Cernunnos’s rapier, sheathed in leather, from the bag. My eyes widened.

“Don’t tell me you had a scabbard just lying around.”

Gary shrugged a bit. “Okay, I won’t tell you. Take it.” He offered the sheathed blade to me, and I placed it across my lap. Curious murmurs rose and fell, but no one asked outright. That would come later, I imagined. A lot of questions were going to come later. Either that or a lot of people were going to start finding excuses not to talk to me ever again. I wondered which route I’d have taken, if someone else had been trying to pull this off.

“Not gonna lie down this time?” Gary asked.

“I think I’ll be okay. If I fall over, somebody can prop me up.” I inhaled, a long slow breath through my nostrils, and let my eyes drift closed. The first beat of the drum was deep and certain and sent chills over my arms. I straightened my spine involuntarily.

I knew I could do what I wanted to do. I didn’t know if I could do it on purpose. I remembered the electric awareness of the airport, the charge in the air that was the life force of hundreds of people coming and going about their business. It had been so available, the urge to tap it obvious and nearly irresistible.

There, on the scale I’d reached for power on, it would have been deadly. Here I wanted only a fraction of that power, and I was asking for it to be volunteered. The drum settled into a rhythm that matched my heartbeat. I exhaled, and with the exhalation stood, leaving my body sitting empty on the floor, motor functions operating while my consciousness stepped out for a breather.

The room’s inhabitants glowed with the same peculiar neon life force I’d seen outside my apartment when I’d gone for the inadvertent visit to the dead shamans. It was the same force that had unlocked inside me, although less potent; the same astonishing skinlessness I’d experienced in the coffee shop while talking with Morrison. They were full of life, breathing and pulsing with it. Curiosity caught me for a moment and I looked past them, through the walls of the garage, to study the look of living earth from below instead of above.

I shouldn’t have; it was depressing. Bisected and intersected with concrete, there wasn’t much living at all. The sunken building walls had their own sense of purpose, their own energy, but it wasn’t what I was looking for and I didn’t have the time to examine it more carefully.

I withdrew back into the break room, concentrating instead on the brilliant auras of my co-workers and friends. And Thor. Billy had shown up, a stolid wall of fuchsias and oranges. Unlike almost everyone else, he held his hands in front of him, a coiling ball of color writhing between his palms. Jen, nearby, held the same kind of ball, in boiling yellow and brown. I didn’t even know brown came in neon.

A few of the others stood that way as well. The others simply stood where they were, casting curious, silent glances at the body I’d temporarily abandoned—not that it was apparent I’d done so—and at the people around them. Their energy rolled off them in waves, flickering away like flame. Some were clearly concentrating on extending goodwill toward me, visible in sheets that dissipated without focus. The rest had less ability to focus, offering not much more than their simple essence.

I reached for the sheets of goodwill first, wondering how to temper the power. Was a wish of good thoughts an infinite gift, or did it exhaust the giver? If it did, I had to make this very fast, or find a way to slow down the output. There was too much I didn’t know.

On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot of time to sit around agonizing over that fact, either. I cupped my hands, siphoning the unfocused power into a ball between my own palms, watching the startling colors spin and dance around one another without quite melding. Where they touched, flashes of gray and black and white blurred them together, making them cohesive without taking away any of the individuality. Mesmerizing patterns formed within the ball, all of them unique and yet still sounding a common theme. I watched a moment, then shook myself. If I was lucky, there’d be time later to study the universal similarities in man. If I wasn’t, I’d be dead and it wouldn’t be much of a worry for me anyway.

Calling the already-focused power that Billy and Jen offered was easier. Their energy flowed to me when I called them, dancing around the ball I held like electrons around an atom, almost too fast to see. All of the power I held traced thin lines back to its creators, bright snaps of color that wound around each other in intricate braids without ever tangling together.

I wasn’t taking anything at all from at least a quarter of the people in the room, the ones who weren’t able to offer it up as easily as the others. I could take it outright, borrow some of their life force, just as I’d intended to in the airport, but for now I left them.

Babylon. How did I get back? By candlelight, and back again. I closed my eyes and fell inward on myself, reaching backward and within for the starry void. My hands and feet and head sucked inward, collapsing into my belly button. My entire self shriveled and shrunk until with an audible pop I imploded entirely and exploded back out of my belly button again, exactly as I’d been, only facing the opposite direction and looking into the racing starscape instead of the garage break room.

“Hey,” I said out loud. “That was cool.” The energy I’d borrowed was no longer visible in a ball between my palms. Instead I could feel it settled in my abdomen, a life force there that was, and was not, part of myself. I shuddered and tried to shut myself away from recognizing the feeling. With a jarring shock, spiderweb cracks shot through me, deeper and sharper than anything before.

“Give me a break,” I whispered. “This isn’t the time.” I superimposed clarity over the cracks, and they faded out reluctantly. It occurred to me that all three times I’d found my way to the star scape, the past I’d tried so hard to leave behind had resurfaced. I wondered, very briefly, what exactly this place between the worlds was. Then the candle appeared and I wrapped my hands around it and whispered, “Babylon.”

A noise like the end of the world hit me, sending me staggering back a few steps. A huge knobby root caught me in the back of the knees. I sat down hard at the foot of a Joshua Spire, trying to make sense of the chaos that had become Babylon.

The sky had lost its blue-gray color, tinged now with deep, sickening red. The silver Joshua Spires twisted up into the bloody sky, hanging gardens torn and falling down the sides of the trees. They shifted restlessly, not pushed by the wind, but like dying creatures making a last desperate snatch at life before giving away to the inevitable end.

The restless, cheerful babble that had filled the air was gone, too, leaving lonely wind and cries of fear and pain in its place. For one crystalline moment, I saw a long view of human history, reaching far back to the first days of mankind. I saw a small woman with thick curves and dark eyes, recognizable as human, yet alien all the same. She met my eyes and performed a shrug, small, wry, fully understandable.

We came here once, she said, when we were few.

This was Babel, I said back. This is where we came to all speak together. To share and understand each other. When we bred too many… Babel was lost?

She nodded and smiled, warm and approving.

You’re Eve, I said. She threw her head back and laughed, a very human sound.

They called me Mother, when I was there. I was not the first in the way you think of Eve as being. It was not so easy as that. But—yes. Eve might do as a name. But go, she said, or all my children will lose the place we once had, forever.

Goodbye, Mother, I whispered. The roar of angry wind filled my ears. I had never left Babel, but I could see it again. The street cobbles were torn, chunks of stone flung at wild angles that suggested an earthquake of devastating magnitude. Where they’d been the warm color of rust before, they were splattered with red, the dangerous crimsons and dark shades that meant vital blood had been spilled. I rubbed my breastbone, feeling sick. There was too much to think about, too much to assimilate and far too little time.

People hid behind every cockeyed piece of street, some dead, some dying, others mourning and still others screaming out their defiance against the Hunt that rode through them. As I watched, a line of soldiers, arm in arm, stood up together and walked forward. Before them, the street shivered and reformed, cobbles lying back down under the force of their will. Behind them, it lay smooth, a gauntlet thrown in the face of the chaos that was the Wild Hunt.

And down the newly relaid road they came, a dozen too-solid riders and the lonely pale mare. Cernunnos rode at their lead, his elegant antlers sweeping back to tangle with his ashy hair. He carried the new double-edged sword. Beneath the blood, it gleamed as bright a silver as the rapier I’d taken from him. As I watched, his stallion leaped a still-broken section of road, and Cernunnos smiled brilliantly at a young woman scrambling to get out of the way. Her lips parted and she went still, fear replaced by the compulsion of the god’s green eyes. He laughed, like the music of breaking glass. His deadly bright blade swept down in a gleaming arch, and the girl stiffened, waiting for the blow.

I whispered, “No.”

The god’s sword smashed into my spoken word like it was a shield, and rebounded. Cernunnos jolted back, and for a moment the entire Hunt hesitated. The girl, freed from Cernunnos’s eyes, turned and ran. With precise slowness, Cernunnos transferred his sword from his left hand to his right. He curved the fingers of his left hand down, rubbing them against his palm, and stretched them wide again. Then he lifted his hand, palm up, and looked slowly around with the intent of a deadly, confident predator.

It was suddenly important that I face him before he called me out. I pushed away from my tree root and walked forward, coming into the street ahead of the line of soldiers, who stood still now, remaining arm in arm, waiting and watching. Their healing power still rolled off them, spreading out through the ruined city of Babylon. A wave of fierce protection wrapped around my heart. I would die before I let anyone else here die. Let him see nothing but me, I willed. Let him forget them.

Cernunnos watched me silently, fascination visible even in features only half-human. Behind him, the archer and the thick-shouldered rider exchanged glances. The thick-shouldered man smiled before returning his attention to me; the archer nocked an arrow, but didn’t draw. I thought it was rather unsporting of him anyway. I’d seen how fast he could nock an arrow, earlier. It wasn’t like he needed the extra time afforded by doing it now.

“Little shaman,” Cernunnos said. The beautiful voice was harsher now, distorted by the thickened neck and changed vocal cords.

“My lord master of the Hunt,” I replied. The thick-shouldered man did smile at that. Cernunnos did too, a twist of a mouth that had the fullness of the man’s lips pulled into a stunted muzzle, neither human nor animal. He bowed from the waist, a small gesture as impossibly elegant as anything I’d ever seen him do. It wasn’t enough, though, to wipe the blood from the blade he carried. The power I’d borrowed boiled in my belly, asking to be used.

“I hardly expected to see you again, little shaman.”

“I hardly intended to leave you here. This isn’t your place, Cernunnos.”

“Oh, but it is,” he murmured, and lifted his hands, bloody sword in one, to encompass the bleak red sky and the death in the streets. “Look what I have wrought.”

“You marked it. That doesn’t make it yours. Come on, my lord master of the Hunt.” The words sounded like they would if I’d said them to Morrison, full of sarcasm. “Mano a mano, eh? You and me. If you win, I take the child’s place in the Hunt and you ride unbound. If I win, you leave this place now and forever and return to Earth with me.”

“Now and forever?” the god asked, a gleam in his brilliant eyes.

“That remains to be seen,” I said steadily. He lowered his head, ivory horns catching the bloody light, and considered me.

“How did you say it? Mano a mano. So it shall be. I swear it by my name and by my power and once more by my immortal life. Should I lose here to you, nevermore shall the Hunt return to Babylon, and with you we will go, to the place you call Earth.”

I wondered, briefly, what that name he swore by was. It was not, I was sure, Cernunnos. There was something deeper, more private, that he answered to in the most secret part of his soul, and no one else would ever know that name. Except maybe the camel, I thought in a fit of pure irreverence. I hoped he hadn’t heard that, and spoke out loud to cover the thought. “I have no immortal life to swear by. Should I swear by yours?”

Scathing disdain filled Cernunnos’s vivid eyes. My mouth twisted in a smirk. “Don’t have much sense of humor, do you?” I straightened my shoulders. Being a smart-ass might help keep my courage up, but this was important. My heartbeat, steady as the drum, sounded loud in my ears as I spoke. “As you swear it, so shall I, by my name and my power and my all-too mortal life. If I lose to you here, I’ll ride in your missing child’s place, and try no more to bind you.” A constriction came over me as I spoke, a very real compulsion, and it occurred to me once more that I’d gotten in way over my head. There was a proverb about that. Looking and leaping. Maybe someday I’d remember it before I leaped.

God knows what I was expecting. It wasn’t the force of Cernunnos’s will smashing down on me like a hammer, though. My words were still lingering in the air when he hit me, green strength like a mountain coming down. I dropped to my knees, the air crushed from my body, and held onto the contents of my stomach through clenched teeth.

Cernunnos dismounted with predatory grace, stalking toward me across the new cobblestones. I swayed, watching him and distantly remembering the helpless fear in the woman’s face a few minutes ago. I had been here before, weighed down under his power. Unfortunately, Gary wasn’t here this time to haul my ass out of the fire. I was going to have to do it myself. I reached for the internalized strength I’d borrowed from my friends, and hesitated.

Not yet. Cernunnos stopped a few feet away from me, easily within the reach of his sword. “Thou art bold, little shaman,” he murmured. “Foolish, but bold.” He drew the blade back, preparing for a deeply disabling strike. I didn’t think he was going to kill me. Not unless he knew a way to capture a newly released soul, which, now that I thought about it, I wouldn’t put past him. That didn’t make me feel any better.

He lunged forward, and I fell over.

It certainly didn’t have any of the grace the god persisted in showing, but it did get me out of his path without me having to fight off the weight of his power to get up. He stumbled, taken off guard, and I rolled forward, into his legs. Gratifyingly, he lost his balance for a moment. I twisted on my back and drove a booted foot up into his groin.

For one horrible moment Cernunnos stared down at me and I was afraid I might as well have kicked one of the Joshua Spires.

Then he screamed, so deep and angry it twisted my bones. The gray veil that I had willed Babylon behind shivered and faded. Cernunnos flung both hands up, his sword knotted in his fists, and drove it down toward me.

The weight of his power was gone, though, shattered by pain as thoroughly as crystal was by sound. I came to my feet as the sword slammed down into cobblestone. As he began to draw it back out I kicked him in the jaw. He spun around, torso moving faster than his legs, one full turn and an aborted half, just like Charlie Chaplin.

Against all the rules of good sportsmanship, I kicked him while he was down. I caught him one solid blow in the ribs, moving his whole body a few inches, but the second time he caught my foot and twisted it hard to the side. Something that shouldn’t have popped in my knee and I screamed, collapsing almost on top of the god. For a few seconds we lay there, panting at each other. I saw a flash of anger in his eyes.

It was just enough warning to throw up a shield as his power slammed down on me again. This time I could see it, the deep snarling green of his strength pushing at the silver-gray barrier I’d flung up, testing it for weaknesses.

And finding them. Uncertainty, lack of knowledge, simple fear, they were holes I didn’t know how to plug up. Like the Lilliputians with Gulliver, Cernunnos pinned me down through those holes, threading green power into the stone around me. He grinned, feral and strange on the half-animal face, and rolled to his feet, dragging his sword out of the stone.

An incongruous thought made me look away from him, to the thick-shouldered rider in the host. He lifted his bearded chin, a trace of amusement in his face, and then he nodded, a single drop of his chin. Something familiar glittered in his eyes as Cernunnos’s sword came free of the stone with a scrape. Then there was no more time to contemplate the riders while I looked for a way to get free of Cernunnos’s bonds.

The god rose up and drove his sword into my belly, and I stopped thinking at all.