C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

Dad knelt in the center of the circle, taking up a number of branches that had been cut free from trees when the chopper went down. He pulled a knife from the back of his jeans, which surprised me in that I was surprised to be surprised. Of course Dad had a knife. He probably had an entire survival kit tucked into pockets and sleeves, because that was my father. He sharpened four sticks to deadly points in record time, then pulled a leather pouch out from under his shirt. I rolled my eyes at the sky because he was proving my point, but in rolling, saw Aidan again, and lost all humor.

By the time I looked back at Dad two seconds later, he’d taken a pinch of tobacco from the pouch, and Morrison was throwing him the thing he’d been carving: a small, rudimentary pipe. Dad packed the tobacco in and lit it with a match that came from the pouch, then sprang to his feet and strode from one side of the circle to the other, driving his stakes deep into the earth. By the time he was done, the pipe was smoking pretty well, leaving the rich scent of tobacco to follow him. He stopped in the middle of the circle, took a piece of black cloth from a pocket, and wrapped the pipe in it, giving it an air of permanence despite having just been carved.

The smoke created a drifting barrier inside the power circle, a secondary circle that reinforced the first one. Dad tipped his head back, blowing a deep lungful of smoke toward Aidan, the wights, and the shrieking portal. The first breaths barely touched the wights before they ripped themselves away from the circle and came, en masse, at my father.

It was all the excuse the military guy needed. The wights had taken themselves out of the shielding provided by Aidan’s presence, and the guy’s first shots took three of them out. For an instant they clashed together, chaotic indecision at its finest. Dad puffed another huge lungful of smoke at them and one shriveled in the air, collapsing into a dusty pile. Aidan’s chanting grew increasingly determined, and I struggled not to hop in place. I wanted to help . I wanted to do something. Never mind that I had no idea what to do and that everything I’d tried thus far had backfired. I wasn’t accustomed to being left holding left ho the ball, or in this case, holding the power circle. Close enough.

As if feeling my impatience, Aidan’s shouting strengthened and the vortex sped up, testing the bounds of the power circle. I curled a lip and dug in. I might’ve been left holding the ball, but that didn’t mean I would let myself get sacked. Or something like that. Football metaphors were not my strong point.

Three of the wights had the good sense to abandon the attack on Dad and retreat to the safety Aidan offered. Less than they hoped, though: the moment they were close enough, he stretched his hands out and sucked them dry, gobbling up every last bit of magic that kept them functioning. Black light shot through the vortex, expanding it downward, since that was the only direction it could go. Aidan didn’t drop, though, only became more central to the expanding darkness. My heart started hammering in overtime as I wondered what happened when he became enveloped by the vortex.

Dad, in a voice much stronger than Aidan’s, began a counter-chant. He called on spirits I knew nothing about: men from the Lower World, a Red Man and a Purple Man. The Purple Man had a familiar feel to him, a Trickster feel that reminded me of Coyote. He came from the sky, dancing backward and covering his eyes with one hand as he shouted and teased at Aidan. The Red Man came from below, strong and generous of spirit, and drew arrows from his bones to fire at the vortex above.

One struck Aidan, and he fell.

It was a chance. I took it.

Aidan’s garden was shockingly vulnerable. Not surprising, I guessed, since it had been invaded by the Executioner and very possibly by Raven Mocker himself. The Executioner would have very little need to guard its own personal space, though I thought Raven Mocker had a lot more self-awareness. Especially if Raven Mocker was the Master, but that thought wasn’t worth pursuing. I could deal with the Executioner. Raven Mocker was a bigger fish to fry. I took a breath, trying to understand my surroundings, and put my money on Aidan’s possession being mostly Executioner: I had no sense of a personal vendetta, no active will beyond drinking down the available power. The Executioner’s hunger was only a funnel, passing what it took on to the Master, and what was left of Aidan’s garden had that transitory feel to it.

The walls had fallen. More than fallen. They had become ragged edges of a flat earth, with once-rich soil collapsing into nothingness while rivers of water poured over the sides. Every drop that passed wore away more of the garden’s area, and it ran relentlessly.

So did rain, pounding from vast black clouds against earth so water-laden it sucked at my feet, trying to hold me back. Dark shadows were illuminated by rapid explosions of lightning that struck time and again at shattered trees. Somewhere in there, I told myself: somewhere in there, a kid was huddling, holding a candle against the dark. All I had to do was find him. If the Executioner had no particular sense of self, it shouldn’t be that hard. It seemed logical that something without a sense of self wouldn’t think to disguise something that had a sense of self.

An eleven-foot-tall metal monstrosity of spikes and plate mail, bearing a sword larger than I was, erupted out of the darkness and put paid to that thought.

I nearly fell off the edge of the world, trying to escape it. Dirt crumbled under my fingers as I scrambled back to solid land. One of my knees dropped alarmingly before I lurched myself forward and crawled, then ran, for the garden’s center at s centetop speed. The Executioner lumbered after me, sending whole yards of earth falling away into the void as it ran. This was going to have to be a fast fight, or there would be nothing left of Aidan’s garden to recover. I got to what appeared, in the darkness, to be about as central a location as was to be had, and turned to face the Executioner with two fists full of healing power.

If nothing else, the magic provided light, but that proved less heartening than I might have hoped, since I could now see clearly how badly damaged the land was. I didn’t know how lush Aidan’s garden had been to start with, though I was betting it was in much better condition than my own. Even if it was as uninspired as mine to begin with, though, the fraying landscape had taken an appalling amount of damage. I breathed, “C’mon, kid,” and lobbed a ball of power into the Executioner’s gut, hoping to wake in Aidan a vestigial remembrance of what it was like to be one of the good guys.

The Executioner’s sword lit on fire.

“Oh, that’s just not fair.” The whole image was straight out of a twelve-year-old fantasy reader’s nightmare, a Frank Frazetta death rider of the apocalypse. And it was happy to murder me until I was dead, whereas I couldn’t afford to return the favor for fear of taking Aidan out along with it. Someday I was going to get to fight something and there would be no collateral damage, but this was not that day. Worried about Aidan or not, though, I drew my sword. I wanted to at least be able to parry if that thing came my way.

Which it did, a slow heavy swing that a sloth could have avoided. Good thing, too, because not only did it light the trees it hit on fire, but it also cut them all in half. Four of them. With one blow. I watched them slide to the earth, fwip fwip fwip fwip, and listened to the fire go out in a series of hisses and pops as the severed trunks slid into the sopping ground.

The Executioner was so ponderous it had to spin all the way around with the weight of the blow, which gave me time to watch the trees fall down and still get out of the way when it came back around. I ducked the next blow and ran inside its reach. It roared, dropped the sword while still wheeling from its second slash, and tried scraping me off its plate armor.