C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

I didn’t much want to use the most common human drainage valve for this particular experiment. I settled for sticking my fingers into the mouth of the nearest wight, and imagining an oil tank releasing its black gooey contents onto the ground.

The good news was they had no shields at all. Nothing prevented me from doing as I imagined.

The bad news was its corrupted life force came out exactly as I imagined, as horrible stench-ridden sticky black goo. I shouted in disgust. It would have been more effective with a voice, but it made shock waves anyway, magic reverberating against the air. The wight pulled backward, screaming. Black oil stretched from it to my fingers, thickening instead of thinning. Its life drained away, corruption skimming down my ethereal arms and searching for ways in.

It weighed a tremendous amount. I’d mostly had experience with things trying to kill me. Attempts at corruption had been relatively subtle, but there was nothing subtle about this. It coated me, growing stickier and more alarming as it rushed over my torso and toward my face. The wight I was draining kept screaming even as it faded, but there was a vicious triumph in its cold eyes as it screamed. I started to get the idea that I had once more made a terrible mistake. I wasn’t turboed up like I’d been before, but possibly leaving my body behind and attacking a bunch of soul-sucking monsters while one of my spirit animals was going great guns working magic inside my head had not been all that well thought out.

I wished for the umpteenth time that someone had given me a goddamned handbook, and then I put that thought to bed forever, because I’d gotten this far without one and I wasn’t dead yet. I could hold on through this. I could take on every inch, every ounce, every spot of nastiness these things had, and when they’d poured it all onto me I could wrap it up in a big shining blue-and-silver bow, and obliterate it. All I had to do was hang on while they gnawed and pierced and did their best to get inside me. I shut my eyes, sealed my mouth, did my best to pinch my nostrils together. No access. I was a seal, with crazy ear flaps that kept water out.

Rattler stirred at the base of my skull. I hastily assured him I did not want to actually turn into a seal right then. He settled again, and I stuck with the imagery. Nothing was going to get inside me, and I was going to suck these bastards dry. The first one’s howl began to lose confidence, like it had believed it would break thrould goingh and then have all of my potential for its pickings. My own confidence picked up. I could do it. I was going to do it, one at a time or all of the rest of them at once, I didn’t care, and then Aidan wouldn’t have to fight a battle nobody his age should be seeing. A kind of give-me-your-best-shot triumph crashed through me.

So did a freight train’s worth of white magic.

Every ounce of my attention had been wrapped up in the wights. I had nothing left to keep my metaphorical feet on the ground. Aidan’s power slammed me backward into the forest. Bark and bugs and leaves and twigs smeared through my spirit and my impression of the world, and only gradually slowed me down. Six months ago they’d have stopped me cold, because my consciousness would have accepted them as totally solid, the kind of thing a body would crash into and slither down. Now not only could I register them as ephemeral, but also myself.

Under other circumstances I might have been proud of myself for that change of belief. Under these ones, I wished I hadn’t come quite so far in accepting the new way my world worked, because it left me thirty trees back from Aidan and the wights as they went into a throw-down.

I’d lost the one into whose mouth I’d shoved my fingers. The muck connecting us had been vaporized, sparks of it still lingering in the air. I got myself heading the right direction again and shot back to the fight.

All five wights had risen into the air, bodies arched with exultation. Near-white magic danced between them, sucked out of Aidan at an impossible speed. I was close enough now to shield him, and threw a wall of magic between him and the undead.

Or I tried, anyway. I didn’t know if he felt it coming or if my timing was just excruciatingly bad, but in the half an instant between throwing the magic and it manifesting, his power changed. He wrenched it back from the wights with brute strength that even I admired, rechanneled it and threw it like a massive missile, intent on destroying the wights. I squeaked, but it was too late.

Aidan’s magic backfired. I knew exactly what it felt like, because I’d had it happen myself. He was a healer, and healing magic had strong opinions about being weaponized. I was astonished it hadn’t happened when he bowled me over, but my guess was that had been solely intended to save me, not damage the wights. Magic, the living stuff of the soul, had a sense of the intent behind its use. Violently saving somebody was borderline okay. Taking the fight to the bad guys was something else. That was why my own path had been such a tricky one to get right. I hoped Aidan would never have to walk it. But right now he was dangerously close to trying, and I watched his magic roll up and shut down.

For what I bet was the first time in his life, his spiritual presence became quite ordinary, if spiked with fear. I Saw him struggling to call the magic again, and watched it retreat deeper into him, until there was nothing left but a scared kid.

A scared kid with a black mark on his soul.

Renee finished her work, and my body surged through time and space, slamming my spirit back into place. It rattled my teeth, but not my vision.

With all his magic tamped down, I could See the streak of darkness that had lodged in Aidan’s center. It was a small scar, but it sizzled and stung like cold iron melting magic away. It was growing fast, like his magic had been holding it in place and it now suddenly had room to expand. I took a half dozen runninf dg like g steps, my hands alight with power, though I already knew it wasn’t an infection I could simply wipe away. I would have to go into his garden—be invited into his garden, after the fuss I’d made yesterday—and we would have to tackle that growing corruption together.

Two steps away from him, the wights threw down a thunderous wall of magic that cut me off from Aidan entirely. I bounced off, shocked, and shot a look upward. They were gathered together, cannibalizing the magic that sustained them in order to build a funnel between themselves and Aidan. The black mark inside him expanded exponentially, seizing his retreating magic and bending it to its own will.

I slammed my sword into existence and bashed it against the cascading magic, but its strength called on exactly the same things that had made me vulnerable to my mother’s power: in Ireland, Mom’s magic had known mine well enough to break in. Here, Aidan’s magic knew mine well enough to keep it out. And I was unaccustomed to forcing myself in where I wasn’t wanted, magically. I doubted it had been high on Mom’s list of honed talents, either, but she had, after all, been one of the bad guys when she did it to me.

I was not one of the bad guys, but the power draw was reaching a crescendo. If I didn’t act now, something bad was going to happen, and I didn’t even have enough imagination to wonder what. I whispered, “Sorry, kid,” and let my spirit go a second time.

This time I dove deep, as deep into the mountain as I could go, then turned tail and began scrambling back toward the surface, but on the other side of the magic pouring from the sky. I was a mouse, a badger, a wombat, any digging thing. The images were familiar to me from my first journeys into my garden, but this time I was digging my way toward Aidan’s. He could be righteously furious and I could be properly apologetic later. Right now we had bigger problems, and the only way to defeat them was from the inside out.