Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 32

The serpent snatched the power I was bringing to bear, draining it from me so fast that black thunder pounded through my skull. Spikes of light shattered behind my eyelids like unhealthy warnings that my life was in the balance. I dug my hands into the edges of the serpent’s scales, struggling to keep my feet as I began to feel stretched thin as taffy. I had one frivolous moment of sympathizing deeply with Bilbo Baggins, and then knowledge began slamming into my mind with each of those bright bursts of lightning, and I had no more time for superficial thoughts.

It wasn’t some great epiphany on my part. It was that in opening itself to take my power, the serpent also revealed itself to me. Memory assailed me, flat and eager and hungry.

I waited restlessly in a place where fragile human conceits like time had no meaning. There were constants in my world: there was power, and with power, temptation. Time meant nothing when I had these things, because the creatures who had birthed me with their fears and petty dreams were endlessly weak. There would always be those willing to sacrifice anything for power, and I waited for those ones, secure in the knowledge that they would come.

Sometimes others came, traversing the dark places that belonged to me and my kind. Those ones could be tempted but rarely caught, their purpose at opposite ends to mine. They led the weak out of darkness, slipped them from my grasp and turned them back to light. I always knew them when they came into my place, because they were touched by the Enemy.

I shifted, scales sliding over one another in comforting hisses. Darkness cradled me, and I waited, for time meant nothing when I had power and temptation and most blessedly of all, the Enemy to rise against and fight again someday. So it was and so it would be until the small things that had given life to me and the Enemy no longer had life of their own. I did not think I would fade away then. I had been brought forth from nothing and believed I would continue in darkness so long as there was light. It was the way of things. If meaningless time ended, then perhaps so might I, but I belonged to something larger than mere life and death.

A shard of blackness, bright against the dark. A path, leading out. A man, youthful and arrogant and strong, untouched by the Enemy. Better still, I could see the mark on him, blazing black in endless night: rejected by the Enemy, his power tainted with the need to make himself a hero, to be beloved of his people and to stand above them all as their god-king.

I wondered, at times, why the Enemy did not fold ones such as this under its wing, choosing to reject rather than to guide and protect them. Should one of the Enemy’s fall so far as to walk my path, I would welcome him with sweet words and gentle teachings, until his power was so corrupt and so great that I could break free of my waiting place and into the Middle World forever. Surely the Enemy could use one of mine so well as that, to burnish and embrace such aspirations until its dream was the one dreamed by all the creatures of the world.

But perhaps the Enemy can only squint at heat illusions and bright horizons, blinded by too much sunlight. Those who dwell in dark must learn to look farther than we can see, depending on the imagination of ambition to free us from our cages.

He is so easy, this newcomer. His people freeze and starve and he believes without hesitation that it is the spirits who are to blame. That there is a great and terrible battle waging in this other world he walks in now, and that the creatures who fight here are so powerful that their war spills into his world. And his people are hunters, so it is very easy to convince him that the dark things must be brought into his world in body, so that men might slay their physical forms and thus weaken them in this, the spirit world. Then his people will be safe and warm once again, with food in their fat bellies and no more thoughts of darkness in their small minds.

He agrees, with all the naiveté and arrogance of his kind, and never understands what he will be giving up to me. For this one has power, an unusual power, and my bargain this time will cost him everything, at a price he will think a gift: time. Meaningless, endless time.

The serpent shifted, its scales cutting into the palms of my hands and yanking me out of memory and into my own mind again with a flare of pain. Panic sickened my stomach, a foreboding feeling of awareness that I should have understood more from the brief moment of sharing the monster’s memory than I did.

I had seen those memories once before, from someone else’s point of view. From Virissong’s point of view. I clenched my eyes shut, trying to remember. He and Nakaytah had built a power circle, he’d said. Said, not shared; the memories were too painful and I’d been willing to listen instead of see. And the monsters tried to become them. Virissong’s spirit animals had been strong enough to protect him. Nakaytah’s had not.

I had the horrible feeling I was Nakaytah in this scenario, and I already knew the spirit animals I’d met were manifestations of Virissong’s power. Black eyes, bright eyes, all like the serpent towering above me. All like Virissong himself. All meant to draw me in—successfully—to the web he built for me.

I desperately wanted to burst into tears or throw up or run crying for help, but I was pretty sure the person I needed to get help from was me, which left me shit out of luck.

I leaned back without releasing the serpent, literally digging my heels into the ground, as if doing so would help me cut off the rush of power that it siphoned from me. The bubble in my belly stretched a little, not far enough to snap, but enough to encourage me. I was almost certain it was psychological, but what the hell: if vehicle analogies and physical action did the trick, I could work with that. All I needed was a moment to think, time to unjumble the memories and thoughts I’d shared with the monster I held on to.

Exhaustion swept over me, leaving me trembling and unable to haul backward on the serpent anymore. Screw understanding. I needed to cut off the flow of power, or better yet, do with it what we’d intended: translocate the damned monster somewhere safe. I gritted my teeth together, leaned forward, and shoved as hard as I could.

The monster smashed forward, dragging me with it.

Not in to some other place, outside the Hollidays’ front yard. No. That would have been good. That would have been what I wanted. No, it splintered through the pentagram walls like they’d never been there, and dove into Colin’s chest.

I went with it, all the way through the pentagram lines, and let go the instant before I, too, was absorbed into Colin’s body. I had too much momentum and stumbled forward, planting my hands on the tree behind his shoulders, so I was right there, half an inch from his nose, when his eyes went black and hard as obsidian, bright and dark like Virissong’s. Like Judy’s.

Like the snake I’d brought back to give him strength.

For one brilliant, aching moment I understood.

I understood something even Virissong hadn’t. There was no separation of one creature and another. The serpent was Virissong, and Virissong the serpent. They hadn’t always been one and the same. That much I could tell from the serpent’s memories that still lingered in my mind, their meaning becoming ever-more clear. Virissong’s spirits hadn’t protected him at all. He’d become a vessel for the serpent, allowing it into the Middle World. My world. He still thought he was in control, that the serpent did his whim. That the hunt he’d begun for the monster that had destroyed Nakaytah, so many thousands of years ago, was his own hunt.

But the serpent’s memory whispered to me that like the serpent itself, Virissong had only been trapped in the Lower World, unable to free himself and regain the Middle World that was the serpent’s own goal. With Virissong’s human face, they could together influence receptive mortals from time to time. Faye had been one, but her mistakes paled next to mine.

Because the black snake whose weight Colin’s slender shoulders had borne carried a thread of Virissong’s essence within it. A thread that I had carried back from the Middle World to make this all possible.

There’d never been any chance the pentagram would hold the serpent, not with a real and true shard of its self outside the star’s safe walls. Not with a willing host waiting to carry it into the world, and not with a helpful conduit shuttling pieces of its core back and forth from the Lower to the Middle World. Faye had done badly by beginning the process that would release Virissong, but I was the one who’d actually brought a piece of him into my world.

Virissong’s grin split Colin’s face in a nasty gash, his laughter a rich deep delight edged with diamond razors. He said, “Thank you,” the whisper rattling the small bones of my ears and sending chilly waves of nausea down my spine and into my fingertips. He swayed his head, watching me with cold flat eyes, snakelike, and split another vicious smile. “Perhapsss the Enemy cannot bind those who walk my path, asss I could not fully bind you. Perhapsss the Enemy is wissser in not trying,” he whispered, “but perhapss that iss not sso. In sso little time of following me, look what you have wrought, Walkingstick.” The hiss in his voice faded with each sentence, as if he was relearning the way a human tongue made speech. “You have brought me forth fully, as no one has been able to do in thousands of years. And there is no Enemy to bind me again, shaman. You are my greatest achievement.”

“Buddy,” I whispered, “I don’t know who your Enemy is, but whoever it is, I’m pretty goddamned sure he’s my friend.” I lifted my voice, hearing it crack as I called out, “Marcia? Take care of Mel.”

Then I wrapped my arms around Colin’s no longer frail body and let go with all the power I’d been collecting, focusing the coven’s spell on myself instead of on Virissong.

Air imploded around me with a soft bamf. I hadn’t previously known that imploding air was a sound in my repertoire of easily recognized noises, but it was. For a couple of seconds, I felt like a special effect in a movie, which was just so cool there wasn’t much else in the world to worry about. Besides, it didn’t hurt, and that made it even better. I’d sort of expected that moving myself from one point to another without going through the intervening distance would rupture my eardrums, or something equally unpleasant. I had some pretty recent experience with ruptured eardrums, and I was extremely pleased to not be revisiting that particular moment in my life. All in all it was a highly enjoyable two seconds.

At the end of that time I noticed I was falling very very fast toward a flat glimmering surface a long, long way below me. I was reasonably sure the part where it didn’t hurt was going to come to an abrupt end in the near future.

Colin twisted in my arms, screaming outrage as he writhed. An elbow caught me in the nose and I nearly let go, then held on tighter. For some reason dropping him seemed careless, even as he flailed and shrieked. “It’s gonna be okay,” I yelled. The air tasted thick and sour, too muggy and too hot, even though we were making our own wind by falling through it.

He gave me a black-eyed look of unmitigated hatred, pulling his lips back from his teeth to hiss, more like a cat than a snake. “It’ll be fine,” I yelled again. I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince, but I suspected of the two of us, I was the one concerned about our future well-being.

Which led me to wonder what the hell I thought I was going to do next. The glittering surface below was slowly getting larger—I was pretty sure it was Lake Washington, although I hadn’t ever seen it from quite this vantage before—and I wondered how high up we were and how long it would take us to hit the water, and whether terminal velocity gave any kind of softening on the odds of survival if you hit liquid instead of solid earth. It was amazing the kinds of things that just flowed right through my mind when the other option to think about was impending death.

Colin screamed again, a long thin sound that had no business coming from a human throat. His whole body bucked in my arms, wrenching itself rigid before it softened, as if the bones were melting out from under his skin. I shuddered and took my eyes away from the looming lake to try to calm him, and instead let out a hoarse yell and let him go despite my best intentions.

Hewas melting, skin molting and blending into black scales, the rage in his eyes flattened by the deadly dullness of the serpent’s gaze. His body threaded longer, arms melding to his sides, legs growing together, and his hair became wild with tiny Medusa-tentacles. Spires ripped from his spine, glistening and deadly with poison, until the boy was gone entirely and I fell beside the serpent.

It flared wings, short and stubby, not nearly enough to lift its bulk through the air. Still, somehow, its fall slowed as its body thickened and lengthened, until it was the colossal monster I’d first met in the Dead Zone. I was still falling at a gravity-dictated rate of speed, but the serpent was above me now, black scales picking up sunlight and glancing the brightness through my eyes.

If I hadn’t promised once upon a time that it could eat me, I might’ve thought it was beautiful. As if the thought reminded the thing, it lunged forward, snapping massive jaws shut mere inches from my head.

Given the choice between being eaten alive and smashing at a billion miles an hour into Lake Washington, I decided smashing sounded good. I tucked myself into a pike, then straightened out so my head was pointed down and my body was streamlined. Maybe I could out-fall the thing. Anything was worth trying.

An unexpectedly powerful buffet of wind crashed into me, ignoring wholesale my attempts to streamline myself It knocked me back up into the air, far enough and fast enough that the serpent’s second lunge missed by yards instead of inches. For one startling instant, the whole thing felt very familiar, like every falling dream I’d ever dreamed had just come real.

Only it wasn’t a dream I was reminded of.

I arched back, closing my eyes against the warm wind, and let the thunderbird’s golden liquid fire burst free from my chest.