C.E. Murphy - Thunderbird Falls

“They’re the elders, beloved,” I replied. “You must trust them.”

“No! It isn’t right that we starve and freeze and do nothing. I’ve found a way,” he said, suddenly eager, and turned to me. He wasn’t, I realized, all that handsome after all. His features were lighted by a fierce zealotry, and that gave the wide bones of his face and the darkness of his eyes a compulsion that was easily mistaken for good looks. “I can make the spirits come to me.”

Horror drained down my throat in an icy sluice, colder than the wind, and pooled in my belly. “But you’re not a shaman. Not called, not trained—”

“But I am called,” he protested. “How else could I make the spirits come? I am called, Nakaytah. It is only that my family is not a favorite, not born to the shaman line—”

Reluctant agreement thawed the horror inside me. Virissong’s father and grandfather had both pleaded to study with the shamans, convinced that they, too, carried within them the power to visit the spirit world. Their pleas had been denied; no true shaman, the elders said, would have to struggle so hard to prove his position. A spirit journey would show their true paths, and the journeys hadn’t led Virissong’s family to the powerful shaman spirits. Now they were shunned and a little ridiculed, for their delusions of grandeur. My hand crept out and wrapped itself around Virissong’s. “What do the spirits tell you?”

Virissong sat back, relief sagging his shoulders. He tightened his fingers around mine, then withdrew them. I tucked mine back inside my leathers; it was too cold to hold hands in the frozen wind. “They say there is a great and terrible battle raging in the spirit world. They say that the monsters the spirits fight are so strong the battle spills into the Middle World, and this is why it’s so cold, and why game is so scarce. Only we are stubborn—” Virissong broke off with a crooked little grin, adding, “—or foolish enough to stay.”

Disbelief bubbled up in my stomach. “You can’t mean the spirits want us to leave here!”

Comic dismay popped Virissong’s eyes wide. He shook his head, reaching to catch my hand again. “No, no. The spirits admire our stubbornness a little, I think. No. They say that to end the cold and bring the game back, we must end the battle that’s being fought in the spirit world.”

My chin dropped to my chest, cold leather tucking against the warmth of my neck as I stared at Virissong. “We have to bring the monsters to this world,” he said enthusiastically. “Here, men can hunt and slay their bodies, weakening them so that in the spirit world they can be defeated.”

Slow admiration began to course through my veins, warming me despite the freezing air. “Like in the stories of the First People,” I said wonderingly. Virissong did his best to look modest, but excitement burned in his eyes. “You’ll be remembered forever as a great hero!”

Virissong ducked his head, smiling. “That isn’t why I do this,” he said. Not even my host entirely believed him, so when he lifted his head, expression bright and hopeful, to say, “Perhaps a little of why,” it made us both laugh. “I want to prove myself,” he went on in a low voice, when the laughter had faded. “I want to show them that even if the family is not a long line of shamans, our power should not be denied. But I also want to help our people, Nakaytah. We freeze and starve and die, and I do not want this to be the end of us.”

“Then we will.” I put my hand in his again, still warmed from laughter and admiration. “Even the elders will see that they were wrong, and warmth and food will come back to us. I’ll help you, if I can.”

In the Lower World, Virissong took his hand from mine. I startled awake, blood sticky in my palm, to find him looking away, tightness around his mouth. “If you must see the rest I will show you,” he said in a low voice. He’d lost the familiar colloquial speech patterns and was more cautious now, formality masking distress. “It is…painful. Nakaytah died, helping me.”

“Oh my God. What happened?”

“Something I didn’t anticipate. The monsters were more cunning than I thought. We built a power circle,” he said, idly drawing one in the earth in front of him. “We called the spirits to protect us, and we drummed to catch the monsters’ attention. We wanted to draw them into the circle, where we could slay them and free our people.”

I nodded, clutching my hand closed over the wound in it. “What went wrong?”

“The monsters tried to become us,” Virissong said. “They tried to take the places of our own souls. My spirit protectors were strong, and rejected the monster that tried to take me. But Nakaytah…”

“She wasn’t strong enough.” I felt dizzy, as if I’d lost far more blood from the cut than I thought I had. “What happened?”

“She leaped at me with tooth and nail,” Virissong said. “She took my knife from my belt as we struggled, cutting me here, and here.” He pushed up a sleeve, showing a strong white scar across his forearm, and then another across his belly as he pulled his shirt out of the way. “I carry these scars forever, to remember her by.”

My fingers found their way to my cheek, brushing over a thin scar that ran from my eye socket to the corner of my mouth. “I understand,” I said. Virissong nodded, letting his clothes fall back into place.

“I took the knife from her,” he went on after a few seconds. “I was stronger and larger and trained in hunting, if not war. She… ran forward. Onto the knife. I pulled it away, but it was already inside her. Blood went everywhere. It brought down the power circle, as you did a little while ago.” He nodded at me, an acknowledgment of repeating patterns. “I saw the monster that had infected her fly free, beyond the power circle and into the world. I vowed that day I would never rest until I had brought it to its death.”

“And three thousand years later you’re still trying.” My voice was tight and choked. Virissong inclined his head.

“I chose to spend many lifetimes in the Lower World, waiting for a time when I had a chance against the monster again. I think the tide of the Middle World is changing, now. I think there are many who look to embrace a better way of life. I think now is the time I must make my final challenge. But I’ve grown weak, being away from the Middle World for so long. It’s why I need your help, and the coven’s help. With the power you lend me, I can become whole again, joining spirit and body together as they are meant to be.”

“And the monster?”

“Together we’ll track it down and destroy it,” Virissong said, voice flat with ancient emotion. “And from that, I hope a new world will be born. A better one.”

I nodded slowly. “What happened to your people, Virissong? Did the cold end?”

“It did. The spirits were right. With the battle no longer shaking the Lower and Upper Worlds, the Middle World became safe and normal again.”

“That’s good. But—” Something nagged at me, a prickle at the base of my neck. I frowned vaguely at Virissong, then at Judy, who sat quietly beside me.

Virissong’s eyebrows rose. “But?”

“But what—” Another tickle ran down my spine, like an elementary school fire alarm buzzing in the distance. I frowned less vaguely and rubbed the back of my neck. “What happ—”

The tickle turned into a shrill that broke through my trance, finally recognizable as the phone ringing. I stumbled to my feet and picked up the receiver, my voice groggy with disuse. “Hello?”

“Joanne Walker?” The voice was unfamiliar, even if I wasn’t half-asleep.

“Yeah?”

“Do you know a Gary Muldoon?”