C.E. Murphy – Shaman Rises (страница 8)

And that was what was going on inside of Annie Muldoon. The sickness that had been put inside her was eating away at her life and strength for its own benefit, and to the eventual detriment of the world. That wasn’t just about Annie. That was simply how the Master worked. Every spark of love and life he was able to extinguish gave him an incrementally larger hold on humanity. Annie was the poster girl for demonstrative purposes today, but it wasn’t like the entire battle lived or died with her. There would always be other hills to take. Right now, though, taking this particular hill would be enough. I exhaled quietly and let myself slip out of my body, searching for a way through the darkness to heal Annie Muldoon’s body and soul.

An unexpectedly familiar vista came into focus around me as I left my body behind. The first several times I’d spirit-walked, I’d been unable to control it, and had dug my way through to the different metaphysical planes I needed to reach. Literally dug: I’d usually end up in loamy, life-filled earth, my sense of myself turning badger or vole or wormlike as I churned my way through the soil in search of my destination. I was back there again, working through dirt chunked with vast rocks and water-filled drainage points. Back in the day, the impediments probably would have stopped me cold. These days, not so much.

For one thing, back in the day I’d have assumed there was only one path to get to where I was going, and that it lay straight ahead. I smiled faintly at my slightly younger self, then extended my hands upward. I supposed I shouldn’t really have been able to: I was packed into dirt and stone, but I’d always been able to move through it while in an astral realm, and at the moment it made me think of swimming. I wasn’t the world’s strongest swimmer, but I wouldn’t drown in a pool, which was enough. For an instant the dirt surrounding me was pool water, and I was on the bottom of the pool. I bent my knees, pushed off all the way through my toes, and burst upward into the heart of Annie Muldoon’s inner sanctum, into the garden that represented the state of her soul.

Dirt splashed away from me like water, rolling off my skin and streaming from my clothes. I ran my hand over my hair to get rid of the worst of the “wet,” then turned my palm up to watch dirt absorb into the lifeline there, just as water might do. The part of me that would always be six years old wanted to squeak, “So cool!” and do a little dance. Shamanism’s basic tenet was change: to heal someone, it was necessary to change their outlook for just an instant, just long enough to get their attention. It worked that way on every level, so if I could make myself believe, even briefly, that dirt was water, well, then, I could move through dirt like I could move through water.

Magic, when I let myself acknowledge it, was really pretty damned nifty. I shook the last of the dirt away and lifted my eyes, trying to prepare myself for the worst possible visage of Annie’s garden.

Unfortunately, I got it. I had just come off a visit to Aidan’s war-ravaged garden, a place that had been so damaged it crumbled beneath our feet. Annie’s was maybe even worse than that.

What had no doubt once been greenery was infested with black oil. Not just slicked with it, but grayed-out leaves pulsed black ichor through their thin veins like it was sap, and the roots of bleached grass sucked death out of the dry soil. Meadows and scant trees rolled on forever, the size of the place reminding me a little of the jungle that represented Gary’s garden. It appeared a life well-led created a tremendous depth of soul that was represented by vast distances. I thought of my own small, tidy garden, and how the walls that penned it in were only just now crumbling. I had a long way to go to catch up to Gary and Annie. Or even Morrison, for that matter. I was getting there, though, and every step I took through my own garden or someone else’s helped me become a little more of what I wanted to be.

Feeling a bit braver and more confident, I walked into Annie’s meadows, trying not to shiver at the bleak sky above. It twisted in unhealthy purples and blacks, and I had the distinct sense it was pulling at me and at the garden around me. Wonderful. A miniature black hole in the midst of Annie’s garden. Just what we all needed. Even more distressingly, it reminded me of the vortex Raven Mocker had come through, back in Carolina. I did not want to follow that thought to its obvious conclusion.

Instead, I reached out and touched a branch on one of the sickly, sparse trees as I went by. It crumbled, leaving a tacky substance on my fingertips. My own magic glimmered softly beneath the sticky stuff, shields ensuring that it wouldn’t sink into my skin and contaminate me, too.

Which it certainly wanted to do. It smeared across my fingers without help from me, seeking a way in so it could infect this new, healthy territory it had found. I lifted my hand, hoping for a way to get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior, then hesitated. There was always a heart to the darkness, and it was just possible I could let the muck guide me there.

Not all that long ago, the very thought would have gotten me in trouble. I was grateful that the stuff didn’t instantly slide through my shields and gobble up my soul. Even so, I concluded it probably wouldn’t be all that smart to grab another branch and get more of the glop on me. Naturally, that’s what I did: coated both hands in the unpleasant crumbly sticky goo, then closed my eyes and did my best to feel whether it wanted to tug me in any particular direction. It reminded me of driving on a worn road, where the wheels of the vehicle slid into ruts and rumbled along there whether the driver liked it or not. It meant turning aside was difficult, but I wasn’t looking to turn aside just now. I wanted that easy pull, and it seemed like it should work.

Nothing happened.

After standing there long enough to start feeling foolish, I opened my eyes again and swallowed a squeak. Apparently my definition of nothing and the garden’s definition of nothing were not the same. I was no longer in a meadow. I was no longer in a garden, for that matter. I stood on the very edge of a black precipice, wind rushing up to rip tears from my eyes. I couldn’t see a damned thing below me, but above me was the center of the vortex, screaming silently against the small bones of my ears. Hints of shimmering green quartz ran through the black stone beneath my feet like a source of light, the only real light visible in this place. It gave me an unearthly glow and struck me as just the faintest, tiniest strike against the dark, against evil and misery and dreadfulness as a whole. I said, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” out loud, and edged one quarter of an inch farther over the cliff, looking down.

The vortex above me was pulling even harder now, straining to haul me upward into it. Straining to pull the very bottom of the world up into it, as far as I could tell, and that made me think there was something at the bottom that it wanted.

Before I let myself think about it, I dived off the cliff.

I had fallen off the side of forever once before, in the Upper World. Then, a thunderbird had caught me. This time I was pretty certain nothing was going to catch me, but I was less afraid than I should have been. I had no idea where the bottom was, though once in a while I got a brighter glimpse of the falling world around me, as the green quartz flared and darkened again in the cliff face. I whispered, Raven? inside my head, and though my oldest and best-loved spirit animal didn’t actually appear, he offered something he had never shared before: a gift of wings.

I didn’t fly. My fall didn’t even slow. Not until the bottom of the pit finally came into view, a thin green light that strengthened and brightened as I fell closer. At the critical moment that sense of wings flared, slowing me, breaking my fall. I hit the ground in a three-point crouch, feeling like a goddamned superhero, and bounced to my feet crowing, “I’m Batman!”

Bouncing up was nearly my undoing. The vortex’s upward pull dragged me up several feet before it lost its grip. I fell again, far less gracefully this time, and stayed down when I hit.

The green light was coming from a crack in the pit’s floor, which I could now see clearly because my face was mashed into it. The rock broke away under my weight, which was probably a bad sign, but it didn’t collapse entirely while I stared into the light and tried to wrap my mind around what I saw.

Apparently I’d stumbled on the shamanic version of Snow White. An emerald-green stone casket—not really a casket, more a cocoon—was buried beneath the pit, and Annie Muldoon lay within the cocoon. Quiet, soothing power pulsed from it, bringing a soft and unexpected scent of mist and leaves with it. I pushed my right arm into the crack, seeing if I could touch the cocoon.

I couldn’t, quite. It had been well buried. I twisted to look toward the vortex, wondering if the cocoon had in fact been really well buried and that the vortex was only just now managing to tear its way through the earth to reach it. Assuming the shards of quartz in the cliff were related to the casket, it seemed fairly likely. Which meant—