Urban Shaman (31 page)

More than just sacrifices,
the Rider murmured to me.
Like Suzanne, those he killed to gain his power were blood of his blood. Little is as strong as blood magic.

“Blood—” I shook my head, confused, then understood: how many children
had
Herne fathered over
the years? Half the world could share his bloodline by now. Hell, I could.

Except the Old Man had apparently made me from scratch, and it seemed like if you were going to bother to do that, you’d make sure you weren’t getting anybody else’s magic tangled up in your recipe.

Which was
so
not what I needed to be thinking about right now. I could still feel the Rider’s thoughts and memories, dispassionately shared with me. He’d been caught in my world, separated from the host body and terribly vulnerable. With Herne’s direction, he sought a new host. The child in—where was it? It was the silver misted world whose loss I had felt so keenly outside of Babylon, but what was it named?

Tir na nOg,
the Rider replied, and for the first time there was longing in his thoughts. Herne’s bindings hadn’t yet wiped the need for home out of the Rider’s soul.
Anwyn, Avalon, fairyland, Islands of the West, name it what you will. It is older by far than mankind and will continue when you and your names are ancient dust.
There was no apology or sympathy in the telling, the Rider’s concerns too remote to be even neutral.

The dying body, the boy Rider in Tir na nOg, was Cernunnos’s first child, half-mortal and half-god. He no longer knew, if he ever had, who his mother was. Blood of the god’s blood, he’d taken a piece of the god’s power with his birth, and with it tied the Horned God to the mortal cycle of death and life. He rode with Cernunnos of his own free will, and doing so rendered himself immortal, untouchable by the god who might
otherwise sacrifice his first-born child in favor of riding free. In all his terribly long life, no one had ever compelled him against his will.

Until Herne. Blood of the god’s blood, once more. Brother to the ancient Rider, but a lesser creature. There was no remorse in the Rider’s thoughts: for him there was, and there was not. Neither had any reason to carry emotion.
Our father learned from me. To be cautious of what he gave the women he lay with. No other son of Cernunnos can bind him as I do; no other child has such power.

“But Suzy,” I whispered. I couldn’t tell if it was out loud or not, but it didn’t seem to matter. The Rider responded with the vast indifference of an immortal shrug.

She will change the bond. Blood magic is strong, and my brother has chosen well. He has sacrificed the one he loved.

Adina,
I thought in despair. Had the other shamans been her friends before death? Had Herne gained his blood power through killing everyone closest to the ones closest to him?

The girl’s parents. Her friends.
The Rider’s answer was an agreement.
It changes the balance of power. My loyalty is Herne’s.

“But that’s
wrong!
”

I felt the surprise of the Rider’s soul as it seemed to turn and look at me for the first time, leaving off in its quest to take over Suzy’s body.

Human fallacies,
he said.
Right and wrong do not matter to me.

“What does?”

Suzanne herself turned her head to look for the pale mare. “Riding,” she whispered, the desire in her voice clear and pure. She was a fourteen-year-old girl. She didn’t even need the Rider’s soul to want that horse with everything she had, but the power of the immortal soul within her gave the single word such an ache that I felt tightness in my throat, tears stinging my eyes. It would be Herne whom the Rider would follow, and with this child’s innocent strength behind him, Herne would defeat Cernunnos and take his place. It made no difference at all to the Rider. His power and purpose were enough to rein in any god, and he would do so gladly until the end of time.

I wondered, very briefly, if Herne realized he wasn’t going to be obtaining ultimate power if he won the battle. Then the electricity of the Rider’s power left me and there was no time left at all in which to think.

I heard it like a chime, the clear moment of Suzanne Quinley’s birth, resonating down through fourteen years. I dove to the side, dragging Suzy with me. Cernunnos vaulted the wooden carousel horse, leaving a surprised and furious Herne behind. Gary bellowed a war-cry and flung himself at Cernunnos, crashing into the god with a braced shoulder. The Rider howled in delight and dove deep into Suzanne’s body, while the remaining fragments of the girl’s soul shrieked in desperation and fled.

I’d caught Cernunnos with a net, in Babylon. There was so little of Suzy left that she’d slip right through a net. Instead I reached inside myself for the weary coil
of energy and shaped it into a ball, fragile and pearlescent as a soap bubble. There wasn’t enough time!

Except inside the little bubble of my shield, there was. The music of the chime held, a long thin sound vibrating the air. Nothing stopped, but what had been chaos almost too fast to see played out in elegant slow motion.

Cernunnos jolted to the side as Gary impacted him. His sword dragged a thin line of red across my shoulder blade as I rolled with Suzanne. I felt skin parting, and waited for it to hurt, but the pain came even more slowly than the attack. Stumbling, his features contorting with rage, Cernunnos drew the broadsword back as he turned to face Gary, the motions so precise it could have been a choreographed ballet.

No ballet I had ever seen, though, had the bad guy stick a real live four-foot long sword through the good guy’s rib cage. Surprise widened Gary’s eyes as he doubled and staggered back, sliding off the sword and crashing hard into the wooden horse. As easily as that, Cernunnos dismissed him, turning in slow motion back to Suzanne and myself.

My roll brought us up against the red dragon’s pole, my back to Cernunnos, protecting the girl as best I could. The chime that sounded her birth hour in my head was still loud and strong, her fragmented soul caught against the bubble of slow time. Knowing it was going to get me killed, I contracted the bubble, bringing the slowness and the shards of Suzanne’s soul closer and smaller until it was within her entirely, and time outside it sped back up.

I followed the bubble in.

The Rider’s soul was a parasite, rust on a car, captured in the last seconds before it destroyed its host entirely, no more able to free itself from the slow time bubble than Suzanne’s soul was able to wrest free from the Rider’s. In here, I had all the time in the world to do repairs. Out there, if I wasn’t careful and quick, I wouldn’t have a body to go home to.

Just like the Rider didn’t.

Your world,
Cernunnos had said, and made one fist.
My world.
Another fist, not quite touching the first.
And we are here.
The blackness between the worlds. I could reach that. Could I take down the walls that held the two worlds apart?

I closed my fist around the bubble of slow time, reached for power, and threw myself into the void, dragging the Rider and Suzanne along. I didn’t know where the strength to do it came from: I was afraid to wonder, just then. It flooded through me, though, once more washing away all the exhaustion and pain of the past three days. I felt, quite literally, as if I were flying.

Flashes of other worlds, closer to mine, came and went in bright colors that moved too fast to imprint. For a painfully long moment there was nothing, not even the starscape, just an agonizing emptiness. I held on to the sound of the chime and dredged up my own memories of the silver mist world. I flung both those things into the emptiness, like sonar, hoping for them to be recognized and draw me to the right place.

Home.
The longing in the Rider’s voice was so in
tent it hurt. Inside of an instant, I was the tagalong, no longer in control. The binding wound around the Rider shattered, my power replacing Herne’s as the Rider and I reached for a common goal.

My power replacing Herne’s. This would be a good time to instigate some control. The last thing I wanted was for the youthful Rider to leave Cernunnos behind on Earth, where he could wreak all the havoc he wanted without the controlling influence of the child.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a single goddamned clue how to do that.
Stop! Or I’ll say stop again!

The Rider laughed at me, a sharp, bitter sound, and darkness exploded into a haven of deep green leaves and silver trees, wreathed by gentle cooling mists.
Home,
the Rider thought, and I echoed it, his need for refuge resonating deep in my own soul. His need overrode my purpose, and for a deadly moment I relaxed. Triumph, as palpable as with Cernunnos, leaped through the link we shared and I knew I was lost, unable to control the son of a god. Tir na nOg would be peace; it would be rest, after a very long journey. It was enough. I followed the Rider’s lead, content to have done with it.

Home,
Suzanne whispered, like a memory. It stung me into remembering her, remembering the world we were leaving behind, and I groaned. “No.” My own voice was a whisper, too little power behind it to make the Rider take pause. I closed my eyes against the green misty world and said something I’d told Gary not to, about a million years earlier: “In Cernunnos’s name I set my geas.”

The Rider stopped so abruptly I flew ahead of him, my own journey not yet finished.

A boy slept in the silver woods, fey and slender and so pale it seemed like death must have already visited him. I knelt beside him, putting my hand on his chest. There was a heartbeat, so faint and irregular I might have imagined it, and his chest rose and fell very slowly, the last breaths of a dying child. I couldn’t remember the words to the spell I’d found on the Internet, but it hardly mattered. I had the idea of them in the back of my mind, and I bent over the child, whispering them.

“I call down the walls of the world to help free you. I call on the god who must listen to me. I call on wind and earth and sea. I call on fire to help free you. In Cernunnos’s name I set this geas. By my will and by these words I bind you to ride eternity.”

The coil of energy unleashed inside me as I spoke, weaving a net of silver mist and green power that wrapped itself around the boy’s sleeping body. I pulled it into my arms as I’d done with Cernunnos and stood, cradling the child. He weighed almost nothing, as if he were spun from air. I could feel the resistance from his soul, which wanted nothing more than to stay in Tir na nOg, in the silence and safety that had been torn from it. He struggled against the binding I’d wrought, but he’d told me himself: blood magic was strong, and I’d invoked the strongest blood link of all, that of the father and son.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I need you to send Cer
nunnos home. Just a few more hours and the ride will be done until next year. You’ll be able to go home. I’m sorry.”

I fled the compelling world of Tir na nOg, bringing the boy’s body back as a physical thing.

W
e surged out of the void into a blackness unlike anything I’d ever seen in a city, split by lightning from a storm that hadn’t been there when I went under. The wind was colder than death, cutting through me and yanking at my hair like it was trying to pull it out. Pellets of snow and water struck my hands and face.

There was an extraordinary line of fire stretched over my back. When I tried to roll over the movement made me scream, a hoarse guttural sound that I was growing all too familiar with. For a moment I just lay there, trying to breathe.

Then, because there wasn’t really time to lie around feeling sorry for myself, I forced my head up. As obvious as it was that I had something desperately wrong with me, it was equally obvious that Suzanne hadn’t been struck by Cernunnos’s blade. Her eyes were closed,
but there was color in her cheeks that even the flashes of lightning couldn’t bleach out, and her breathing was steady.

Which meant either I’d succeeded utterly or failed completely. There was no boy in my arms. Wasn’t that a Scottish fairy tale? I laughed, a high-pitched sound of panic, and rolled over just in time to miss being stabbed in the back a second time by an extremely unhappy god. The sword stuck into the wooden carousel floor. Cernunnos snarled. I smiled up at him and looked through his legs to see what was going on.

In the flashes of light, Gary slid down the carousel horse, dark blood seeping through his coat to stain it black. Behind him, a spark with the same unearthly luminescence as the Hunt appeared, whirling in unexpected directions as the wind snatched it back and forth. The Hunt came forward through the storm, gathering around the rapidly growing spark.

Cernunnos yanked his sword from the floor as the pale mare let out a nicker of pleasure and shadowed through both Gary and the carousel horse. The Hunt parted their circle for her, and I realized I was still seeing through solid objects.

“Stupid shaman,” I mumbled, and closed my eyes. The darkness went away, replaced by the brilliance of pure spirit in everything from the carved carousel animals to the god of the Hunt himself. When I opened my eyes again it was easier to see, physical forms faded to lesser importance.

Gary was dying. Every heartbeat drove thick blood
out, more slowly now than a few moments ago. Suzanne—I didn’t even need to turn my head to see her—was growing stronger, her breathing deeper. Cernunnos swept his sword up and I flinched, too badly hurt to move more, waiting for the next blow.

Instead the god parried a blow he couldn’t have seen, sword braced over his shoulder as Herne drove his own sword down from behind Cernunnos. Metal sang as they smashed together, then scraped as Cernunnos whirled, drawing his blade along the length of Herne’s. It was perfect: Herne’s sword was pushed wide, and Cernunnos opened his son’s ribs from side to side in one long sweep. Herne dropped to his knees, sword falling from numb fingers, the emeralds and browns of his colors suddenly bleaching.

Cernunnos drew back his sword for the final blow, and a child’s voice rang out: “Stop!”

Cernunnos dropped his sword like a marionette released from its strings, turning in shocked rage to face the young Rider. He stood fey and slender and stunningly beautiful, with a look of deep resolve in his brilliant emerald eyes. He sat astride his pale mare, one palm reassuringly against her neck, his other hand easy on the reins. Behind him, the Hunt were gathered, the hounds sitting and lying at the horses’ hooves rather than slinking around.

“This one is not yours, Father,” the boy said, almost apologetically. “I would that he were, for the Hell that has been visited on me. But of your blood, none is less meant for you than he but I myself.”

Cernunnos’s mouth curled in a snarl. “Thou
wouldst have mercy on the one who stole your power and would have usurped mine?”

The boy shrugged, as painfully graceful as Cernunnos. “It is not mine to say. There is no mark on his soul that gives him to you. He is your child, Father. You cannot have him. It is the way of things.”

Behind me, Suzanne whimpered and shifted, the warmth of her body moving away. Cernunnos turned, eyes bright with anger, and lifted his sword again. I felt a peculiar kind of relief, knowing that I was his target, rather than the young woman sprawled on the carousel floor.

“Father,” the boy said, apologetic and warning.

“
I
can see the mark on this one,” Cernunnos growled. The boy inclined his head.

“So can we all, Father, but not yet. She has a long journey before she comes to the Shadowlands.”

That didn’t relieve me as much as it should have. “Nor are you done here,
gwyld,
” the boy said. “Get up. Finish your tasks. We have a long Hunt before us tonight, and I will not ride until I see this thing finished.”

“You’re welcome too,” I croaked. Ungrateful little bastard.

“Make right what has been put asunder,” the boy said sharply. The mare pranced, a few nervous steps, and he stroked her neck again.

“Make right,” I mumbled. “Make what right?” I closed my eyes again and sank into myself, reaching out toward everyone who stood or lay around the carousel, looking for something that was obviously
wrong, knowing better than to expect the superficial physical wounds to be the problem.

Big fat sword holes are superficial?
a little part of my brain asked. I told it to shut up and go away. To my surprise, it did.

Nor were my own flaws the problem. I knew that without bothering to look to myself. I touched the others only fleetingly; it was Herne, I knew that, much as I didn’t want to face another encounter with him. A schism ran through his soul, a chasm of pure blackness, holding apart the thing that he was from the thing he was meant to be.

Green Man. Protector. Healer. Godling. Those things lay on the wrong side of the gap, torn and distorted by a terrible jealousy, by anger and bitterness at a mortal lifetime gone wrong, hundreds of years ago. Herne had turned his back on a shaman’s path, and his immortal blood had granted him no peace since then. He’d buried pain in the pursuit of power.

Would this have happened to me?
I could see the potential in myself, the buried anger from a dozen years ago, never acknowledged, never dealt with. Nor was I ready to deal with them now.

But I could acknowledge. I swallowed hard and laid myself open to Herne, soul to soul, matching wound for wound, fissure for fissure. His were deeper, more plentiful than mine, but this wasn’t a popularity contest. Shared pain was pain eased. The elder who’d given me my drum had told me that after Ayita died. I’d turned away.

As Herne tried to turn away now. I caught him in a
web of silver rainbows, wondering where I was getting the power to maintain my own strength, when I’d started out the evening exhausted already.

Soul to soul, we met, and Herne screamed out the unfairness of his death six hundred years before.

You’re right,
I said without thinking.
It sucks.

On some microcosmic level, he stopped shouting and stared at me in astonishment. I shrugged.
It sucks,
I repeated.
It wasn’t fair. But nobody said life is fair, and you’ve been behaving like a three-year-old long enough.

Herne gaped at me.

Look, I’m calling the kettle black here, okay? Except I’ve only been sulking for twelve years, not six centuries. You’re the soul of the forests, you idiot. You’ve been ignoring them for half a millennium. Look what’s happening to them. Look what’s happening to
you.
Green Man.
I poked him in the chest with two fingers. He stumbled back a step, looking down at himself.

It still lay within him, the depths of the great woods, buried beneath centuries of pain. Once noticed, the ancient strength of growing things flared up like a challenge. It lit him from the inside, showing all the cracks and flaws in his character, just as my own spiderweb of broken glass did to me. Herne howled and flung his arms up, an action of denial even as his hands curved as if to pull all the power and strength of the woods into himself. He stood frozen like that for what seemed a brief eternity, and then the lure of power was too great for him to resist. He grasped at it, and something fundamental changed in the world.

A roar surfaced, so loud it threatened my eardrums,
so loud it seemed impossible that everyone could not hear it. It was the sound of welcome, of green things recognizing the touch of their protector, and it went on and on.

Even with the onslaught of power and welcome from the earth, it took a terribly long time to delve into Herne’s dearly held grievances and draw them out. But I had made him listen, for one brief moment. Long enough to begin a change somewhere deep within him, and once begun, I neither could nor would stop until the healing was complete. The power within me exulted, shooting sparks through my body that kept me on my feet much longer than I thought I could manage. There was joy in the healing, empty places inside me filling with relief and purpose that I’d never known I was missing.

I went at Herne mindlessly, stripping away lies: Richard had not betrayed him; Cernunnos had not abandoned him. Herne shrieked with rage and pain, fighting to cling to the lies and the life he’d built around them.

Adina. The essence of the woman rolled over me, through us, and for a moment it seemed like she stood with us at the carousel, expression sad. She had known, of course, that her husband had power, and more, that he had been in great pain. But she was no more able to see through the veil Herne constructed than I had been. I was grateful, very briefly, that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t recognize Herne and his power instantly, even if I’d been convinced I could. Adina seemed to share a sad, wry smile with me, and then she was gone.

With her departure went the tangled remains of
Herne’s pain. I realized with a shock that we were tearing down even the links that held soul to body, and drew back, alarmed.

“Let it go.” As with Cernunnos, I wasn’t sure if the words were spoken aloud or inside my head, but they were said with tired confidence. I hesitated, and Herne repeated himself more insistently: “Let it go.”

He stood in front of me, hands spread a little. The pale-skinned half god was gone. In his place was a woodling god, skin dark and gnarled as an oak tree, fingers knotty and a little too long. Looking at his face was difficult, like finding faces in tree trunks. The pale brown hair had thickened, darkened, flowing back from his face in knots and tangles. Even his colors, the otherworldly light from within, had deepened, into rich browns and dark greens, the color of good soil and summer leaves. In the half-light, only his eyes were the same, brilliant emerald-green. The betrayal in those eyes had been replaced by loss and an ancient sadness.

“Did you have the right to do this?” he asked, and his voice scraped, like rough bark being torn.

“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “I couldn’t have if you hadn’t agreed. Hadn’t helped me. All I did was make you see.”

“I feel no peace,” the Green Man said. I tilted my head.

“I don’t think it comes that easily. Still, you’ve got all the time in the world.”

Herne laughed, wind through leaves. “Sever the last bonds,
gwyld.
Let me go.”

I looked down at the shallowly breathing body. Only a few threads still held the tree spirit to the phys
ical form. I put my hand on Herne’s chest and looked up at the godling one more time to be certain. He nodded.

I drew the rapier and swung it in a low phantom loop just above Kevin Sadler’s body. The threads leaped free, coiling up into Herne as fast as released springs.

A ball of pure light erupted, expanded beyond the carousel in a flare of shocking brilliance, as white as a nuclear bomb. It collapsed back in on itself in the same instant, and the Green Man was gone.

I woke up a little while later with Gary crouching over me. The Center was dark, the lights on the Space Needle blacked out. I wasn’t seeing in two worlds anymore, but the Wild Hunt still milled around, bearing with them their own unearthly light. “You’re dying,” I accused. Gary grinned.

“Not anymore.”

“Oh, good,” I said faintly. “How’d that happen?” I shifted a shoulder tentatively. The line of fire in my back had disappeared. “I missed something, didn’t I? What happened to the lights?”

“They went out when you grabbed Suzanne,” Gary answered, taking the questions in the opposite order. “All over the place.”

Oh. That maybe explained how I’d kept on my feet, metaphysically speaking. I’d borrowed the whole city’s power. I hoped I hadn’t hurt anybody. “And you’re not dead because…?”

“Big ball of light,” Gary reported. “Weirdest damned thing I ever saw. I could see you lying down on the job
over here and standing nose to nose with Herne at the same time. You swung the sword and he lit up and you faded away. Thought you were dead. Then the light faded and everybody was patched up. Was that you or him?”

“I dunno.” I sat up carefully. Suzanne Quinley was kneeling by the extraordinarily ordinary body of Kevin Sadler, sightlessly rocking forward and back. I glanced at Gary, then climbed to my feet and walked to the girl in an almost straight line. “Suzanne?”