Spiritwalk

  But she thought of what he’d said and her smile faded.

  Someone’s going to have to take him by the hand and lead him down the Path of Souls.

  In other words, for them to get rid of the man that was draining the House’s energy—what Sara would call its taw—someone was going to have to die with him. To show him the way.

  Great. Were they supposed to pick straws?

  Well, she wouldn’t let anyone else do it. She just wouldn’t tell them.

  You see, Jack, she told the empty place where he’d been standing, I don’t want to die either, but if this is where I have to get off my wheel, I’ll do it. Not for you, not for the House, not even for the people. But for Beauty, because Beauty encompasses it all.

  But I’m scared, Jack.

  In a perfect world, he would have returned to comfort her, but there was no perfect world—except perhaps for what lay at the end of the Path of Souls. She’d been close to that land once; now she was finally going to see what it really was like. And maybe there’d be a coyote-headed man waiting there for her, one who didn’t know how to lie, or if he did, knew how to say he was sorry when he did.

  Somehow, she didn’t think so.

  Gripping the fetish, she closed her eyes and followed the thread of her journey back through the Otherworld to where it had begun.

  5

  The first half hour after Blue and Sara left seemed to drag on forever. When it had passed and there was still no sign of otherworldly invaders roaming about the House, Emma made the decision to dismantle one of the barricades. She sent Sean and Cal out ahead to scout the lower floors, then divided those that remained into three teams: one stayed to hold their position on the second floor, keeping the Postman’s Room as its nerve center. Another was responsible for consolidating as much of the provisions as could be scavenged from the kitchens and ferrying it up to the second floor. The third worked on a cleanup detail, removing the corpses from the House and depositing them outside.

  The latter was brutal, ugly work. None of them—except for Sean and Ohn—had ever had such a close-up experience with death before. The animals were bad enough. Some of them were half-eaten, chest cavities torn open with the organs and intestinal matter spilling out on the floor. Their fur was matted with congealed blood. The air around them buzzed with flies and had already taken on an unpleasant odor.

  But it was the ones that were almost human that were more troubling: the monkeymen with their all too human faces and the strange iguana-like beings with their scaly head crests and reptilian eyes. They were like dead people.

  “Forget they were ever alive,” Sean said as they hauled the bodies outside.

  That was easier said than done, Julianne thought. She’d never considered herself to be a squeamish person before, but her stomach kept doing flips when she was confronted with the stiffening corpses. Blood collected on her clothes and smeared her hands and forearms, while the sightless eyes of some of the creatures seemed all too reproachful. She wasn’t the only one to lose the contents of her stomach when they first started.

  They found the bear to be the worst to deal with—and not only because of its size. In death, its features had taken on a noble, almost bittersweet cast. There wasn’t one of the twelve it took to push the carcass down the stairs and drag it down the hall that wasn’t affected by its death.

  They had posted guards down the lengths of the corridors where they were working, but the crazy onslaught of the Otherworld’s creatures wasn’t repeated. Tim muttered something about the calm before the storm, but fell silent as more than one person shot him a dirty look. When they finally got the bear’s corpse outside, dawn was streaking the eastern skies. Julianne found herself slouching against the wall beside Cal. She was exhausted—mentally as well as physically—but she reached out a hand and touched his arm to get his attention. It left a red smear on his shirtsleeve.

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  Cal gave a short bitter laugh and spread his arms to show the bloody mess of his clothes.

  “Like it’s going to make a difference,” he said.

  “We have to talk, Cal.”

  She expected him to get up and walk away, or just withdraw behind the barrier he seemed to erect behind his eyes whenever she looked his way, but the brutal work on the cleanup detail had left him as drained as it had her. All he did was stare out at the giant trees of the forest that reared up in front of the House like monolithic holdovers from the dawn of time.

  “What’s to talk about?” he said finally.

  Julianne sighed. “The world’s not black and white,” she told him. “It’s not divided up into the good people and the bad people. There’s just people.”

  “What about Hitler—are you saying he had his good points?”

  “You might as well ask, what about Jesus, like he had bad points.”

  Cal turned to her. “That sounds weird, coming from you.”

  “I’ve got no fight with Jesus,” she said, “or anything he tried to teach. The only problem I’ve got with him is what people do in his name, but that’s not what I was talking about. Sure, there are exceptions, people who are impossibly good or evil, but that kind of thing doesn’t have a whole lot of relevance for ordinary people like us. Most of us are just a mix of good and bad; the best of us try to leave the world a little better place than it was when we got here.”

  “But—”

  “What I’m saying is that it’s not as important what you’ve done, as what you do. If you make what you believe to be a mistake, learn from it and try to do better, but don’t brood over it until it takes over your life. None of us are here long enough for that kind of shit.”

  She put an arm companionably around his shoulder and gave him a small hug.

  “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” she added.

  Cal nodded, but before he could speak, the quiet that had descended on the House after that long onslaught of the forest’s creatures was suddenly broken with the sound of drums. They started with a solitary drumbeat that was quickly picked up by more and more instruments from every quarter of the forest until the air itself seemed to thrum with their combined rhythm.

  Julianne withdrew her arm from Cal’s shoulder and they both stood up, joining the others who were already trying to peer between the trees to find the source of the eerie drumming. Cal retrieved his rifle from where he’d leaned it up against the wall and worked its action, pumping a shell into its firing chamber.

  “Jesus,” someone said, Julianne wasn’t sure who. “I don’t think I can go through this all over again.”

  Ginny was alone in the Postman’s Room. She pushed her chair away from the desk, and leaned back with her arms behind her head, trying to ease the tightness in her neck and shoulder muscles. Memoria’s screen had stopped its flickering roll call of Weirdin images, settling on just one again: the symbol for the The Gray Man’s disc.

  She realized that she might as well pack it in. What was happening here had nothing to do with software problems. It was magic, plain and simple; the same kind of hoodoo that had transported the House into the Otherworld, that made a forest take root in its rooms and had whisked Esmeralda away with the spin of a wind that had no logical source of origin.

  Her experience as a systems analyst was meaningless here. In her time she’d designed dozens of programs, customized hundreds of different kinds of software, even built hardware from scratch, but the root of this problem was magic and it needed a magician to fix it.

  She wasn’t a magician. The tricks she knew to get obstinate systems up and running might seem like conjuring to anyone unfamiliar with what she was doing, but they were just that. Tricks. This required real magic.

  She slumped in the chair for a long moment, then rose wearily to her feet. It drove her crazy to have to give up, but it was time she started doing something useful. She got as far as the doorway before the loose paper in the room began to swirl around once more. She froze, eyes widening as Esme
ralda seemed to step out of nowhere into the room.

  You should be used to this by now, she told herself, but she knew she never would be.

  Her pulse was jackhammering and it took her a moment to regulate her breathing. Esmeralda nodded to her, than walked toward the computer. She held a bird in her hand that twitched and struggled against her grip until she reached the desk and pressed the bird against Memoria’s screen. As Ginny watched, the bird’s struggles grew frantic; then it suddenly went limp.

  Esmeralda opened her hand and looked down at the bird lying in her palm. With her fingers removed from around the bird, Ginny could see that its wings had been tied against its body. The leather thongs used to do that were decorated with beads and feathers. The bird looked dead.

  “That should do it,” Esmeralda said.

  She laid the bird on the desk beside the keyboard, then turned to Ginny.

  “Where is everybody?” she asked.

  “Uh...”

  Ginny stared at Memoria’s screen. The symbol of the Weirdin disc was gone. Replacing it was a familiar menu.

  Esmeralda drew a finger along the body of the dead bird.

  “I found Jamie,” she said. “He’s back in the House now, but I wouldn’t try calling him up just yet. He’s going to need a little time to reorient himself.”

  “Uh... right,” Ginny finally managed.

  She remembered what she’d been thinking just moments ago, how what they needed was a magician to fix the computer’s problem. Somehow, for all that had happened in the past day or so, she hadn’t really been serious, but the way that Esmeralda had just solved the problem with the computer—using a dead bird, for God’s sake!—that brought it all home with a rush of fear that made her head ache. She was finding it hard to breathe again.

  “Are you all right?” Esmeralda asked.

  Ginny blinked. She took a deep breath, exhaled, took another, then slowly nodded.

  “Where is everybody?” Esmeralda asked, repeating her earlier question.

  “Outside,” Ginny said.

  And then the drumming began.

  When the figures came walking out of the forest, Ohn stepped forward. He touched Cal’s arm as he passed him, then Judy’s.

  “Stay calm,” he told them. He turned slightly so that what he said next could be directed at everyone who held a shotgun or rifle. “Point your weapons at the ground and don’t make any threatening gestures.”

  “You’re shitting us, right?” Sean said.

  Ohn shook his head.

  “Look at them,” Emma said, supporting the harper’s request. “None of them are armed.”

  The newcomers stood just under the umbra of the outermost trees, half in shadow, men and women both, with only a few yards between each of them. They were dressed in ceremonial garb, beaded tunics and leggings, quill-decorated dresses; their faces were painted with white clay and dyes. Some had feathered headdresses, others wore the curved heads of wolves and other animals as hoods, which gave them the appearance of being an an odd mix of animal and human. They all had drums hanging from their belts. Their fingers continued to dance rhythms from the taut heads of their instruments; their features were unreadable.

  “Who are they?” John Haven asked softly.

  “Better ask what are they,” Sean said.

  “They’re shaman.”

  Emma gave a happy cry when she saw Esmeralda standing in the doorway behind them.

  “You’re back!”

  Esmeralda nodded. “When they did get here?” she asked, nodding to the drummers.

  “Just a few moments ago,” Ohn said.

  “Are these Blue’s rath’wen’a?” Judy asked. “Those Drummers-of-the-Bear he was telling us about earlier?”

  Esmeralda look at the men and women, half-hidden in the shadows of the forest, and shook her head.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “They’re drummers, all right, and they are shaman, but they’ve got the feel of the first forest about them.”

  “Born from the mythic timber of its darkest wood,” Ohn agreed, “but flesh and bone now.”

  “What do they want?” Sean asked.

  “That’s simple,” Esmeralda said. “They’re exorcising us—or at least they’re trying to.” She looked around the small crowd. “Where’s Blue?”

  “He and Sara are trying to get back to Ottawa,” Emma said. “Sara thought her friend Pukwudji might be able to take them back.”

  “How long have they been gone?”

  “For a few hours now.”

  Esmeralda frowned.

  “What’s the matter?” Emma asked.

  “I have to reach them before they try to confront the man who’s responsible for all of this.” At the unspoken question in Emma’s eyes, Esmeralda added, “Because I know how to stop him.”

  “That’s great! What do we do?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Esmeralda said. “It’s a special kind of magic that can’t be talked about.”

  Following their conversation as everyone was, Ohn frowned.

  She was lying, he thought. But why? What had she learned on her journey?

  “Did you find Jamie?” he asked.

  Esmeralda nodded. “But I think it’s going to be a few hours before he’s got himself together enough to shift the House back to Ottawa.” She looked past Ohn’s shoulder to where the drummers were still tapping their rhythms from the heads of their instruments. “We’ll just have to brave it out with these folks until then.”

  “And hope they don’t call up something worse while we’re waiting,” Sean said.

  “I’ll try to talk to them.”

  She stepped past Ohn, moving closer to the forest. The gazes of the shaman tracked her motion, then settled on the quick deft movement of her hands as she used sign language to explain that they meant no harm to the forest; their coming here had been an accident and they would be leaving soon.

  The drums stopped with an abruptness that left their ears ringing.

  One shaman—an old woman with more gray in her hair than black, her features horsy and wrinkled—spoke. Her voice was gruff, her words clipped and guttural; her hands echoed what she said in sign language similar to what Esmeralda had used.

  “What does she say?” Ohn asked.

  “Too much death,” Esmeralda translated. “You have slain our—” She frowned. “I don’t know that word she just used. It could have been heart, or spirit....”

  “It’s the bear,” Emma said. “She’s talking about the bear we had to kill.”

  “You killed a bear?” Esmeralda asked, but then her gaze traveled to where the corpses were piled. “My God, you killed all those creatures?”

  “They were attacking us,” Judy said. “What were we supposed to do—let them kill us?”

  “No. Of course not. But—this is serious. Some of those animals were clan totems.”

  The shaman spoke sharply. As she did, they could all hear something large moving in the forest behind her. A collective gasp whispered through them as the source of the noise stepped forth from between the trees.

  The creature was almost seven feet tall and had the physique of a bodybuilder. Not until it drew closer could they see the fine downy hair that covered its body. The large bull bison head that sat on its shoulders was real, not part of a cured pelt. The two short, curved horns glinted in the growing light; a long dark mane fell to its shoulders. It wore no clothing. Between its legs hung an enormous flaccid penis and testicle sac.

  The shaman’s hands were busy echoing the harsh words that issued from her mouth.

  “’Our plains brother comes to our aid,’ “ Esmeralda translated as she finally drew her gaze away from the bison’s features and looked at the woman again.

  Ohn watched Esmeralda’s hands as she replied.

  The shaman shook her head, responding with a short cutting motion of her hand.

  He touched Esmeralda’s shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

  “I asked her if they wo
uld wait.”

  “And she said no?”

  Esmeralda shook her head. “Not exactly. She just told me to send out our champion to meet theirs.”

  “Our... ?”

  Esmeralda just pointed at the bison-headed man.

  “That’s theirs,” she said. “We’ve got about a minute to pick one of us to fight him.”

  “Why don’t we just shoot it?” Sean said, lifting his rifle.

  Esmeralda pushed the barrel of the gun away. “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because first, they’ll just send something else after us—”

  “I thought all we needed to do was buy some time?” Sean interrupted.

  “—and secondly,” Esmeralda went on as though he hadn’t spoken, “the karma would be devastating.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a physical battle, does it?” Julianne said.

  Ohn nodded in agreement. That was well considered, he thought.

  Esmeralda agreed. “You’re right. The actual word she used was ’challenge’—I just naturally took it to mean physical combat.”

  “I don’t know,” Judy said dubiously. “He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who would settle for a verbal debate.”

  “I think it’s like a riddle,” Julianne said. “You know, where the most obvious answer isn’t necessarily the correct one? They’re mad at us because of how many of the forest’s creatures we killed—I know,” she added as Sean started to protest. “We didn’t have any choice. That’s given. It’s over and done with. But now’s our chance to show that we don’t just automatically shoot whatever’s threatening us.”

  “You mean well,” Sean said, “but you’re full of shit. I’m not standing around to let that thing gore me.”

  “You won’t have to,” Esmeralda told him. She turned to Emma. “Can you get everybody into the House?”

  Emma shook her head. “I’m staying out here with you.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not. Two years ago you risked everything to help me. I’m not walking out on you now.”

  The others began to agree—even Sean—but Esmeralda wouldn’t have it.