Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman (28 page)

“
Sit down,” he ordered, pointing to one of the blankets. I sat. He picked up the bowl of water, walked a few steps away, and held it up as though offering it to the sky. He muttered something I couldn’t catch, then walked around behind me and repeated the gesture. Two more times brought him back to his starting place. He then plucked a flaming stick from the fire and repeated the same process with the stick. By the time he set fire to the tobacco and took that bowl around, I’d figured out he was stopping at the four compass points. A pass with the cup of rock salt apparently completed the procedure. He re-turned to the fire, spread his arms, and declared, “Soul-Are be with us.” Then he looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

“
Oh...” I said “Uh...” I stumbled to my feet, imitating his pose as best I could, and repeated, “Soul-Are be with us.” He nodded and smiled briefly. Indicated I should sit again.

Opening his pack, he produced a small, leather-wrapped package. Unrolled, the leather revealed a carved stone pipe and two cloth pouches. He filled the pipe with some sort of herb from one of the pouches. He lit the pipe, took a lungful of smoke, and held the pipe out to me. I looked at it dubiously.

“
You want to learn about these experiences?” he asked. “This is the door to your first schoolroom. Take it or leave it. It’s all the same to me.”

I managed to keep my hand from shaking as I took the pipe from him. I sucked in the smoke, expecting it to choke me. I wasn’t a smoker, and my previous experiments with smoking had not been pleasant. I didn’t know what this herb was, but in my travels with my Pa I’d seen people smoke a great many different things. This wasn’t tobacco, and it wasn’t pot, hash, corn silk, or any other substance I was familiar with. It tasted a little fruity, with a sort of sour undertone, but it went down easy, and to my amazement it didn’t make me cough. It wasn’t that hard to hold the smoke in my lungs, either.

The Railwalker chuckled. “It ain’t mary-gee-juaner. You don’t have to hold it in.”

I let the smoke out with a gasp. That made me cough. The Railwalker laughed out loud. “Careful, kid. You’ll blow the damn fire out.”

He took another draw from the pipe, and handed it back to me. When we’d each smoked from the pipe three times, he emptied the rest of the herb into the fire, held the pipe up to the sky for a moment, then cleaned it and wrapped it up again. By that time I was starting to feel pretty strange. If it wasn’t pot in that pipe, it was something that would alter your consciousness, of that I had been pretty sure. Now I was absolutely certain. Sitting across the fire from me, the Railwalker began a low chant, rocking his body in time to it. The words were so long and drawn out I couldn’t tell what they were, or even if they were Merican, Mayacan, or some other language.

Things were starting to take on a funny glow. The creosote bushes seemed to crackle with something like electricity. The palo verde had a soft, pulsing light to it. The Railwalker’s pale eyes, staring into the fire, seemed to give off sparks. In my peripheral vision I saw lines of light. They vanished when I looked directly at them. As I watched the Railwalker, I became convinced that he saw them, too. His eyes seemed unfocused, though he appear-ed to be gazing into the fire. I took a cue from that. I didn’t want to look at the fire, and have my night-sight destroyed, so I looked out over the darkened desert instead. I fixed my eyes on the middle distance, trying not to focus on anything in particular. Keeping my eyes still, I shifted my attention to my peripheral vision.

Immediately, I saw it: a web of energy, pulsing lines of light running everywhere, from everything to everything else.

Movement at the edge of the chaparral attracted my attention, and I lost sight of the web of light. The wolf we had seen in the morning—I was certain it was the same one—was standing there watching us, the firelight making his eyes glow red, which reminded me so much of an effect from a bad DV movie that I laughed out loud. My laughter quit abruptly, though, as I realized that whatever the smoke was doing to me, this wolf had been seen by others and could possibly be real and capable of killing me; it would be easy in my drugged state. My whole body went cold; I was rooted to the spot.

Then the Wolf spoke. “Is this a private party, or can anybody sit in?”

A talking wolf, or a spirit wolf, or whatever. I would have expected him to sound like an Indio or a Mayacan. This thing sounded like a guy from the eastern cities, or from one of those old pre-Crash gangster series. I would have laughed again, had I not been too appalled. Besides, I was a stone. A statue next to the Railwalker’s campfire. The Railwalker glanced over at the animal.

“
Always a place at my fire for Brother Wolf,” he said. “Got no meat, but there’s water and tobacco to share.”

“
Thanks, I’m good,” the Wolf said, as it padded to a spot next to the fire and settled down. It looked at me. “You’re a hard soul to connect with, little crow.” My name wasn’t Wolf yet, but it wasn’t “Little Crow,” either.

A huge, gray-blue moth fluttered past my face, its wings flashing blue and gold as they beat in the firelight. It fluttered away again, and the Railwalker stirred himself.

“
If you gentlemen will excuse me, I have an appointment.” He stood up. My pulse began to race. The Railwalker hadn’t actually told me much, but he was my guide to this strange world, and he was about to abandon me, leave me alone with the wolf. Panic must have shown in my face.

“
Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

I watched him walk off to disappear into the brush around the dry waterhole, trailed by the fluttering light smudge of the moth. The Wolf’s eyes followed mine. “That’s his appointment,” he said. “This is yours.” Firelight sparkled around the edges of his fur, giving him a golden nimbus.

“
Listen, kid. You got the Sight, okay? You figured that part out. Now you get two choices. You can walk away from it, pretend it doesn’t exist, and keep yourself out of the deep end. You’ll probably get regular weird coincidences, the occasional prophetic dream, maybe a vision or two. But if you ignore it hard enough, it won’t be so bad.

“
On the other hand, you could embrace it, learn to deal with it, just like you learned to deal with card games or pouring plascrete. You’ll eventually end up in the deep end, but by then you’ll know how to swim. You might even be good at it.”

I found my mouth was no longer made of stone. “Huw..uh.... How cnn...” Okay, I wasn’t ready to audition for newsfeed anchor, but it got the point across.

“
Well, I can teach you some stuff. But, diggit, kid. This is the deal. I come to you this time. Next time, you have to come find me. And I ain’t talking about bumming loco weed off Railwalker Slate, either. Got it?”

And just like that, he was gone. I was looking down a vast wall that seemed to extend as far as I could see in all directions. It was studded with rocks and odd frothy growths, and an eerie orange light came from somewhere far below. I heard footsteps, and then saw the Railwalker, striding across the wall, walking on it at a right angle as though it was a floor, his boots miraculously adhering to the vertical surface. I wanted to ask him how he was doing that, but couldn’t get the words out. He drew near me and leaned over, and the entire world shifted.

I was sitting at the fire, the Wolf gone, the Railwalker crouched beside me. He shifted himself over to sit on the other blanket, reached into his pack and withdrew a bottle. When he uncorked it, I could smell it was water. I’d never noticed clean water had a smell before, but it was clear and distinctive, no doubt in my mind what it was. The Railwalker offered the bottle, and I took it greedily.

“
Three small sips,” he said. “There’ll be more later.”

I was glad I had followed his instructions when my stomach informed me that it wasn’t altogether certain it shouldn’t have been only two small sips.

“
It’ll pass,” the Railwalker said, taking back the bottle. He took three sips himself and set it down. Drew out his cigar and lit it. I expected it to smell nasty, but it was actually a quite pleasant aroma. There were still flashes of the web in my peripheral vision. “Good talk with Brother Wolf?”

“
I guess,” I managed. “Did you...?” I gestured toward the waterhole.

“
Yeah, you can pour your new plascrete tomorrow. In the morning, I’ll give Slim instructions on the offerings.”

“
Give me the instructions. I’ll do it. Hey, I’m gonna have to deal with this stuff. I may as well get started.”

He shook his head and smiled. “Good you’re willing, but no. If it’s not gonna be the owners, it’s gotta be Slim. He’s their surrogate here, not you.” He held out the bottle. “Three more sips. Then sleep.”

It was something of a start to wake lying on a blanket outside the construction site. The Railwalker had boiled water, and was making zoner coffee in the tin cup and the water bowl. I took the extended cup, for once not minding at all that it was probably pure chicory.

“
Where did you learn about this stuff?” I asked.

“
An old hoodoo man lived near us when I was a kid. Spent some time with an old Indian guy, too. But most of my training came from the Railwalker Academy.”

“
There’s a whole school?”

“
Where did you think Railwalkers come from? The sky?”

I’d never thought about it before, but it made sense. Just like lawyers and doctors and engineers, Railwalkers had to learn their trade somewhere. Why not a school?

“
How do I get in? What does it cost?”

“
Don’t cost anything, except a lifetime commitment if you want to graduate. Apply to join, and if the crows vouch for you, you’re in.”

“
The crows?”

“
They’re the gatekeepers. And some of the best teachers.”

I thought about my previous strange encounters with crows. They had always seemed to be on my side. “Approved by the crow,” I mused. “Might not be a big problem.”

Later in the morning, once the guys started rolling in, Slim arrived with a motorcycle strapped into the back of his transport vehicle. The bike was a frankensteinien creation, HF cell-powered, cobbled together from a variety of makes and models of various ages. Much of it was rusty and dented.

“
Project of my kid’s,” Slim explained, as he set about removing the straps. “From way back when he lived at home. He don’t want it anymore. Told me to sell it or trash it.” He turned to Slate. “It still runs, figured maybe you could use it, give your dogs a break.”

“
Thank you,” said Slate. “Thank you kindly.” Together we wrestled the bike down from the vehicle bed. The Railwalker strapped his pack to the back of the bike, mounted, and fired it up.

“
Come freely and go safely, Railwalker,” said Slim.

“
Twenty-three Blessings on you and yours, Slim Harnett.”

Railwalker Slate gunned the bike and rode out of Dodge. Er, Two Suns, that is.

INTERLUDE: SOUL FRAGMENTS

During the first century, a Railwalker named Cristoff Rydel proposed what would become known as the “Projected Fragment Theory,” or sometimes simply “Rydel Fragmentation.” Rydel suggested that under a number of specific conditions, particularly those of extreme trauma, either physical or emotional, pieces of the soul could actually split off to form an independent entity. Generally, Rydel fragmentations were supposed to consist of the shadow selves, rejected and dissociated aspects of the soul. Fragmentation Theory was generally regarded as a crackpot fringe, except during the second century post Crash, when it enjoyed some brief popularity.

Yet, in fairness, it cannot be said that Fragmentation Theory has ever been disproved, or even entirely rejected by orthodox Railwalker theorists, and it is worth noting that Rydel’s own conclusions were relatively conservative, with the wildest speculations attributable to later theorists following Rydel’s lead. In his famous work
Fundamentals of the Rails
, Prof. Porte allows for the possibility of such fragmentation, under the conditions Rydel describes, but adds, “As such a combination of conditions is likely to be extremely rare, so is the occurrence of fragmentation likely to be rare, and such fragmentations would undoubtedly tend to have less cohesion and coherence even than the typical shade; though, admittedly, they might have more longevity.”

During the third century there arose a religion based on Rydel fragmentation, the Church of Ecstatic Union. The Ecstatic Unionists believed that true integration of the soul required fragmentation into separate entities, followed by reuniting of the fragmented parts. They developed rites intended to facilitate both fragmentation and reunification. Critics suggest that the rituals of the Ecstatic Unionists are no more than elaborate psychodrama, but adherents insist on their legitimacy. The CEU had its heyday in the latter half of the third century. It began to collapse in 279 PC, when Frederick Tahns, the reigning Prime One, absconded with the CEU’s not inconsiderable treasury. From that time on CEU membership began to dwindle, and as of 387 there were barely a handful of CEU Unification Centers left, most of them concentrated in the city-states of the northeast.