Olivia (59 page)

“Silence, demon!” Olivia shouted, really getting into the part.  “Release your hold on that human!”

A low current of angry agreement ran through the crowd at her back.  Vorgullum, trying very hard to sound reasonable, just beneath it:  “Would someone tell me what is going on?”

Mojo Woman unleashed a maelstrom of shrieking and Olivia almost jumped back in alarm.  For a moment, just a moment, it sounded as if the cry came from more than one throat—a chorus of hatred like a wind, not the play-acting of a slightly power-crazed human.

Conscious of her audience, beginning to feel uneasy, Olivia squared her shoulders and stepped forward.  “You will not trick me, demon!  I am Olivia and you have no power over me!” 

And then there was a mighty crack like thunder inside her mind and Olivia felt blistering heat and pain pound through her body, roaring out through her throat in a voice that was not entirely her own: “
Mine is the blood of darkness and mine are the bones of the mountain and mine is the fire of all creation and
I call you out, demon
!”

Gone, with the same suddenness of its arrival.  She woofed forward, nearly falling with the force of its leave-taking.  Olivia could hear a profound silence behind her, as though every breath were being held. 

There was the sound of a struggle and then Grunn dropped out of the chute.  He clambered wildly past Olivia and fell against the wall, shaking and silent.  Slate-thin, his fur mottled and torn along his back and sides, he stared at nothing with eyes that showed more white than black.  No one reached out to him, and in the next moment, Vorgullum was bowling his way through the crowd with eyes of fire.

“What is this?” he was shouting.  “What has been happening in my mountain?  You, answer!”

“It’s all right, Grunn,” Olivia said gently.  Grunn’s eyes darted to her, focused, darted away.  “It’s almost over.  Your mate is possessed of an evil spirit, and I intend to chase it out.”

“What shit are you smoking?” someone called from Grunn’s lair, but it was not Mojo Woman; it couldn’t be.  There
was
more than one voice, and they no longer spoke in perfect tandem.  “I am not possessed, you
puta
!” Maria screamed, as the other voice, terrible and inhuman, blew in and out of the words, trying to keep pace.

Olivia felt herself start forward.  It was the very last thing in the world she wanted to do, but she couldn’t stop herself, and at her first step, the thing in Grunn’s lair erupted into a screaming, retching, laughing fury that cut across her ears like knives. “
Come and have me, then!”
it finished, no longer even pretending to be human. 
“I’ll drink the blood from your beating heart!
”

Vorgullum grabbed her arm. “I forbid it. 
Spear
!” he bellowed.

“She means it,” Grunn shuddered.  “She will kill you.”

“
I am not for that one to kill
,” Olivia heard that other voice inside her say, and if thunder could be gentle, that was how it was.  She unhooked Vorgullum’s hand from her arm and pushed him back into the wall as if he weighed nothing at all.  She drew her spikes from her belt and started up. 

Olivia had no idea, really, what happened next.  She remembered coming out of the chute, and then her arm went straight into the air at the same time Mojo Woman swung the heavy iron fire poker, and somehow she deflected the blow that should have caved her skull in.  Her claws twisted, hooking the poker from Mojo Woman’s grip and throwing it aside with a clatter.  Olivia sprang from the chute and faced the thing that Maria had become.

The woman who had once laughed about trapping Grunn’s soul in a candle was still there, struggling within a swollen mass of flesh that leaked water in thousands of tiny rivulets.  Her wiry black hair clung wetly to her bloated head; the ends writhed like headless snakes.  The eyes that should have been brown were frosted over now with white, but they could still see her and they narrowed with hate. 

Mojo Woman opened a mouth that unlocked like the hinge of a door and dropped halfway across her chest.  A torrent of clear, cold water gushed from the gaping hole in Mojo Woman’s face and poured out over the floor.

Olivia stepped back from the spreading pool, feeling herself seized with a supernatural calm.  “
No
,” said the other voice inside her. 

Mojo Woman thrashed and vomited again—gallons of water, masses of it, enough to fill a bathtub, enough to fill two or three.

Olivia’s hand went up, pressed down on the slick, freezing curve of flesh that was Mojo Woman’s brow.  “
No
,” she said again.  “
This was not the agreement.  Release her
.”

Steam hissed out from beneath her palm and nightmarish shrieking filled the room.  Mojo Woman’s body began first to pucker, then to convulse.  She twisted, spewing violent jets of freezing water in every direction.

A hand, bluish-white and ghostly, thrust itself sluggishly from Mojo Woman’s mouth.

Olivia heard herself scream, but that other voice spoke on with fearless resolve.  “
Out, creature.  You have no claim on this one.  Release her
.”

The hand grew an arm, then the slick curve of a woman’s head crowned, filling the gulf of Mojo Woman’s gaping maw, reluctantly birthed in a freezing gush of water.  The head twisted, opening eyes like mirrors, baleful and beaten.  She clutched turgidly at Olivia’s arm, but the ghastly hand burst apart when it struck her skin and then the whole emerging body collapsed and splashed out over the floor.

Mojo Woman slowly folded over, her jaw sliding back into place, the great flood of water slowing to a stream, then to a trickle, and then gone.

Olivia blinked and realized she was standing in a massive puddle of water that appeared to be dissolving into the solid rock.  Maria lay at her feet, her wasted body sprawled and skeletal, water leaking out its last drops from her open mouth.

“Olivia?”  That was Vorgullum, sounding subdued and fearful.

“I’m here,” she answered faintly.  “I’m fine.  Just a moment.”   She looked around, as if to orient herself, then walked towards the source of light and into the pit room.  There were perhaps a dozen jars lined up along the wall beside the sleeping pit, each one filled with honey and holding a single strip of bark upon which had been written a different name.  Olivia picked one up and opened it, sniffed cautiously at the interior.  Just honey.  Just bark.  Just the cruel theatrics of a delusional mind.

Olivia pulled the strips of bark out one by one, and put the sticky things in her belt pouch to be burnt later.  She returned to the entry and knelt down beside the prone human.

Cold.  Still.

Dead, and dead for weeks.

Olivia shuddered and stepped away.  She stood shaking over the corpse and did not think.

7

“No, seriously,” Amy said for the fifth time.  “What happened?”

Olivia sighed and covered her face with both hands.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know and believe it or not, I don’t care anymore.  All I know is I went up there thinking I would screw around with Maria’s head and maybe get the tribe to see what a total fraud she was and the next thing I know, something…horrible happened and she was dead.”

They were sitting in the commons of the women’s tunnels, where Olivia had been ever since leaving Grunn’s lair.  It was the only way she could have any peace.  By this time, the story of Mojo Woman had been told and retold so often that if everyone who claimed to have been there at the time really had been, there wouldn’t have been any room for Olivia herself.

Amy watched as Olivia rubbed her face free of worry and went back to work scraping the coarse hair from an elk’s hide.  Slowly, reluctantly, she said, “Listen, not to sound like a total psychopath here, but is there any chance that little Somurg really might be the son of the Great Spirit?”

Olivia slammed her own scraper down on the ground hard enough to knock chips off it.  “Am I mistaken,” she said tightly, “or did you just call me the Virgin Mary?”

“Hey, if it walks, talks, and quacks like a duck, chances are it’s a damn duck!” Amy shot back. 

“Well, it’s bullshit!  Kodjunn got the idea from me and I made it up!”  Olivia grabbed her scraping tool and attacked the hide again.

“Got what idea?  What are you talking about?”

Olivia shot a series of swift, angry glances around the cavern to make sure they could not be overheard and lowered her voice.  “When I got…hurt a while ago.  Do you remember?”

Amy nodded impatiently.

“Cheyenne did it.  Cut up my feet and covered me with some of Murgull’s love-musk and left me in the tunnels for Kodjunn to find so he wouldn’t come back and find her gone.”

“Okay, we all knew she was a bitch and you were covering for her, keep talking.”

“Well, it’s a good potion; it did what it was made for.  Kodjunn was ready to throw himself on his sword and tell Vorgullum, and I knew how
that
would end, so I told him I had a dream and Urga told me the Great Spirit possessed him so it really wasn’t his fault…and anyway it was total bullshit!”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?” 

“Did you have a dream?”

The scraper jigged in her hand and sliced into the delicate webbing between her thumb and finger.  Olivia cursed and sucked at the blood, glaring at Amy.  “No, of course not,” she said around her hand.  “It told you, it was spur-of-the-moment crap.  I just didn’t want to get him castrated or Cheyenne killed!”

“Hey, I’m an enlightened American atheist,” Amy said defensively.  “I majored in mathematics, for crying out loud!  But the rules have changed, honey-bunny, and it seems to me that it’s at least plausible that some great cosmic force is working through you, because something sure as shit was working in Mojo Woman!  So let’s play along for a second.  Maybe nobody had to possess Kodjunn, and maybe you did spin that whopper out of whole cloth, but what if, by telling him what you told him, you actually caught the Big Guy’s ear?  So maybe he didn’t know you from Big Bird before, but now you’ve piqued his interest.  Since he’s already been called the Divine Daddy by Kodjunn in front of the whole tribe, now he’s for damn sure got to be certain little Somurg is born.  And for that, he’s going to need to keep an eye on Mommy.” 

“That,” Olivia said darkly, “is a whole lot of maybes.”

Amy tapped her finger thoughtfully against her bicep.  “Here’s one more for you.  Maybe you should be asking the Great Spirit for game.”

“Hey, let’s not play with this, okay?” Olivia said, more sharply than she’d intended.

“I’m not playing,” Amy countered.  “That’s a legitimate request.  Or hadn’t you noticed that we’re all slowly starving to death?”

“We’ve got Mojo’s storerooms now,” Olivia countered.

“It won’t last, Olivia.  Being a mathematics major means you never stop seeing the numbers, and I’m telling you, we’re going to run out.” 

“I—”

“You don’t want to play with it, I get that.  But if what you just told me was the truth, the only way you stopped Mojo, or whatever she turned into, was with this extremely real Great Spirit’s help.  And if what you told me was true, no one else could have stopped her.  So if you had it to do all over again, would you do it the same way?”

Olivia opened and closed her mouth a few times, torn.

Amy threw up her hands in surrender.  “Do what you’re going to do, Olivia.  I’m not Cheyenne; I’m not going to cut you up if I don’t like your answers.  All I’m saying is, if I had some power over the Great Spirit, I’d be using it to get us fed.  Even the Virgin Mary had God pick her a cherry once.” 

8

Much later, alone in her lair, Olivia sat in her alcove with her photo album on her lap and stared into the fire.  It was late, but Vorgullum wasn’t back yet.  She didn’t really expect him to be.  He would be out all night, no doubt, trying to figure out exactly what had happened, who was involved, and how long people had known about it.  She didn’t anticipate a happy gulla coming home to her at the end of it.

So when she first heard the soft sounds of claw-studded footsteps, she braced herself for unpleasantness, only to see Sudjummar, the tribe’s metal-maker, limp into the room.  He raised a hand to her, then took a seat on the bench, facing her with the sleeping pit between them.  “So,” he said. 

“Is Vorgullum coming?” she asked uneasily.

“Eventually.  He’s with Grunn now, and Grunn may need a lot of comforting before he’s safe to be left alone.  He blames himself.”  He tipped his head politely to one side.  “Are you all right?”

She managed a laugh she did not in the least feel.  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Spirits can be powerful allies,” Sudjummar agreed with a solemn nod.  “They can also be easily distracted.  You have been touched once, Olivia.  I suggest you do not live believing you are forever in the Great Spirit’s eye.”

“How comforting.  Amy wanted me to ask for game.”

Sudjummar shrugged, gullan-style.  “You wouldn’t be the only one.”

“Yes, but I might be the only one suddenly borne out of the caverns on fiery clouds, hurling lightning bolts into the backs of giant, glowing elk.”  She looked at him plaintively.  “What I saw today was awful, but what happened afterwards was worse.  The way they all looked at me…I don’t want to be worshipped, Sudjummar!  It was wrong when Mojo Woman did it, and it would be just as wrong if it was me!”

He regarded her sympathetically.  “I think I begin to understand the situation,” he said. “But if I may ask, why did you go up to confront Mojo Woman rather than send another of your humans?”

“They are not my humans!”

“Don’t change the subject, answer the question.”

Olivia sighed and threw up her hands.  “How should I answer?  Because it was my idea!  Because if it was going to work, I couldn’t take the time to confer with someone else first!  Because—and I want to make this absolutely clear—because I
never
thought Mojo Woman was really possessed!”