Powers (23 page)

No illusions—I’m a smith, not a wizard. I never even knew this shit existed before last week.

He shouldered the pack with another grunt. Still heavy. Using up all her bombs and eating almost all her food hadn’t lightened it that much. He wasn’t carrying it out of misplaced chivalry.
She
was the deadly warrior goddess, swift as her mountain winds. He didn’t want anything to slow her down if the shit hit the fan.

So
that’s
what made those tracks.
Albert concentrated on looking
both
non-threatening and non-tasty at the same time. Maybe “dangerous enough to not be worth the trouble” was a better choice.

He studied the thing in the low, late afternoon light. Best name he could come up with on short notice was an armadillo bear. And short notice was what he had. They faced off across a small clearing in the forest. By the time they’d seen each other, they were maybe thirty feet apart. Bear-sized, large for a black bear or maybe smallish for a grizzly, bear-shaped with big teeth and long claws, but covered in dark brown scale or plate armor like an armadillo or pangolin. Armor on those was laminated bone or horn, wasn’t it? Tough and resilient.

Okay, so that’s evolution’s answer to fireflies.

How she could free up her attention to scrawl a note and wave it under his nose, escaped him. Maybe
she
could move as fast as her winds. He couldn’t. That made him the obvious meal if the bear wanted one. Old joke—“I don’t have to run faster than that bear, I just have to run faster than
you.
”

Albert had a conscientious objection to being a meal, even for a bear.

The “bear” gave them a glance, curious but not much, the attitude of something that was used to being the roughest, toughest bastard on the block and not needing to prove it to anyone. Then it went back to tearing a rotten log apart, probably looking for delicious squirmy beetle grubs and termites.

Yeah, a firefly would have a hard time finding anything to bite on that, if it curled up to protect nose and asshole and anything else soft. He thought they would have some problems getting either buckshot or pistol bullets through the armor, if they had to. Looked like a job for either an elephant gun or maybe a shaped-charge anti-tank rocket. Or, at a minimum, one of those automatic rifles they’d left lying on the forest floor. He could have figured out how the safety and magazine latch worked by now.

Never bring a knife to a gunfight.

They’d been looking for a place to camp for the night, some place more or less level and more or less clear of rocks and roots and without any big dead limbs overhead and not in any drainage path in case of the rain they hadn’t had yet. Did
not
look like this was that place.

He felt the cool touch of a breeze on the back of his neck, wind changing around sunset, and the bear must have whuffed or chuffed or something because dust and splinters of dark rotten wood blew away from its nose. The bear jerked, all attention on the strangers now, as it rose up on its hind legs. Albert changed his mind. Big as a grizzly, seven feet, eight feet tall.

Okay, so we haven’t either of us had a bath all week. No need to get so huffy about it.

Albert had been wondering how long Mel was going to be willing to share her small backpacking tent with his stinky carcass. Or for that matter, he with hers. Neither of them wanted to get downwind of themselves. But they probably smelled strange to an educated nose, as well as filthy. He doubted if minor gods wandered through here on any regular basis.

The bear was still staring myopically across the clearing. You could read its thoughts on that armor-plated ursine face: “What the hell are these strange human-shaped objects that don’t smell like humans?”

The wind shifted again, bringing the reek of Big Mean Carnivore back across the clearing and with it an undertone of rotting wood and dirt. In the course of all that, Albert had unsheathed his sword-cane and added the knife in his left hand.

Showing
his
claws. He was pretty sure Brother Bear recognized them.

Yes, he still had her pistol hanging on his waist. No, his instincts didn’t go for it. Rational thought followed reflexes, pointing to the armor and the fact that he’d already decided a 9mm pistol didn’t measure up to the target. Always use enough gun . . .

Not that he thought he needed one. The average bear was a pacifist.

This
bear dropped back to all fours, must have whuffed again judging by the spray of leaves under its nose, and bounced toward them a couple of feet before stopping. Albert had just labeled that as a bluff charge, now they could back away from each other and everyone could go off with honor satisfied, when he felt the distant boom of her shotgun by his side, sound still deadened by his hearing loss, and the bear’s face exploded in blood.

Dammit, why the
hell
did she do that?

Two more booms, again as much felt as heard, and he saw chest armor dent and bounce back, shot deflected into the dead leaves and dirt splashing up. The bear charged their smell and sound even if it couldn’t see through its ruined eyes and Albert jumped to meet it, more afraid of her and her shotgun at his back. His sword-cane stabbed like a bayonet through butter into the bear’s chest. He sidestepped the front claws and let go of his cane’s grip and the bear stopped in its tracks, head swinging around, bewildered.

Knife in his right hand now, Albert slashed the bear’s neck and the scales parted as if nothing more than paper. Blood spurted. He stepped back, panting, shaking, with time now to be scared. The bear collapsed in slow motion, knee joints weakening and then giving out completely. Unbalanced bulk toppled the beast over on its side. It jerked, once, twice, and then more blood flooded from its mouth. Not pulsing now, just flowing.

Dead. After she’d blinded it, that was mercy.

Dammit.

Albert wiped his blade with dead leaves, hands shaking, jerked his sword-cane out of the corpse and wiped
it,
sheathed both blades.

Still shaking, still panting, he pulled out the pad of paper and pencil.

Why???

He underlined it three times, squiggly lines because of the shakes. Then, on a separate page because it seemed to demand it:
Goddammit!!!

She stared at him. She started talking, jumped up the volume and shouted to the point where he could actually pick out syllables and words—they weren’t English. Biting down on her words and rage, she pulled out her own pad.

Attacking you!!!
With her own three heavy underlines that damn near tore the paper.

Then, also separate page,
You asshole!!!

This from the woman who had gotten pissed off because the trackers had forced her to kill some dogs . . .

He scrawled.
Bluff charge.
Then:
Ahimsa.

No underlines, this time. But her face blazed with anger and she balled up her fist, before appearing to think better of it. Maybe she remembered the last time.

Or maybe Buddha-nature conquered Kali-nature. Either way, a win. He slumped down to sitting on the dead leaves and forest duff, running his fingers through his hair. Combing some other dead leaves out of it. Sweat chilled on his back and under his arms and he shivered with it. Aftermath of combat. Unnecessary combat. The worst kind, as far as he was concerned, as if any kind was good.

Maybe she’d never lived in a land with bears in it. Never learned their language, their bluffs and real threats. Never learned that they were gods, too.

More likely, she’d been afraid the bear would steal her blood vengeance. Not nearly as sweet, if your enemy dies by some other hand. Some other paw.

He looked up. She was still glaring at him, stance saying that she really,
really
wanted to kick his ass into next week. The way he felt, he’d almost welcome the chance to thump
her.

She spun on the balls of her feet rather than her heel, always a warrior, always keeping balance, and stalked across the sunset-dappled clearing and halted, still stiff with anger, and reloaded the shotgun from whatever inner stash of ammo she carried. Then she scanned the forest around them, shotgun at rest against her hip, looking anywhere except at him. She did
not
ask for the pack and more shells. He wasn’t going to dig them out, unasked.

Albert levered himself off the ground, leaning on the cane, and then limped across to the dead bear. Close up, he could verify the scales, dark brown verging on black, dull rather than glossy, with raised rib lines as if they’d grown reinforcing along the way. Where he’d slashed, it looked like they were a quarter-inch thick or more. And that was the throat, where a bear wanted flexibility. He laid his hand on fading warmth and blood between the ruined ears and muttered a few words that came to him, asking forgiveness in a language that he hadn’t used in centuries. Didn’t matter that
he
couldn’t hear himself. The stars could.

Then, “Go well, Brother Bear.”

Never give insult without intending it.

But he couldn’t stay long enough for a proper wake and chanting the spirit along its journey. Gloom gathered in the clearing, full dark would come fast, and they didn’t want to be out in it. They hadn’t seen any fireflies since the gateway-cave, but assumed the beasts were nocturnal. They made camp each evening before sunset. Her miniature tent might not be much, but it seemed to be enough. So far.

A glow curved across the edge of his vision, zeroing in on the dead bear, and he jerked back. Firefly. That was damned fast, coming upwind on the scent of death.

Albert backed away. Another glow arrowed in, this time from
upwind,
that didn’t make sense. And another. He spun around. One came straight at him, he was between it and the corpse, and it flew . . .
around
him.

Scavengers. Given the choice, they went for dead meat rather than live. Trapped in the cave and starved, they hadn’t had a choice. Probably selective breeding for aggression, too.

I could hate the people who run this place. Easy. Really, really hate them.

The fireflies could communicate. A colony, spreading out to forage, call the others when you found something juicy? Like bees and the honey dance?

They came from every direction. Settling to feed in the darkening twilight, they made the corpse glow. More colors than yellow, here—red, orange, yellow-green, blue. They swarmed above it as well, dancing in the air. He picked out those groups of three again, the threes of three and the threes of threes of three, moving in unison. The mass of them made flames in the night air.

A king’s funeral pyre, a burning dragon-ship.

He stared, frozen. Then moved one step, two steps, closer. Closer. They chewed the scales, edge in, as well as the wounds he’d made. They seemed to ignore him. He could pick out individuals and follow them. Each trio contained three different colors. They fed. They danced their patterns in the air. They settled to the ground. They came together. They separated and the glows faded.

They were mating.

New life out of death.

No clue how that worked, with three. Two males and a female? The other way around? Three different sexes, with the three different colors? Three different ages with different roles?

He backed away again and found a tree in the darkness. He sat, back against its strength to hold him up. He watched the fireflies and wept. More came, and more, and more, the later ones from further away, most likely. A bear corpse, a bear wake, would have to be a rare gift.

“Wheeled the battle-crane

“Over bodies of slain

“Of blood drank its fill

“Sated fight-gull’s bill . . . ”

Egil Skallagrímsson came to his tongue, unbidden. More followed from the sagas, the Eddas—praise for the fallen, the valor of warriors, the might of their kings and the wealth of their lands. He chanted the Old Norse of the skalds, since his own strength lay elsewhere. Albert sang his bear-kin off on the next voyage.

Whatever that was.

He watched all night, until the multi-colored “fire” faded into dawn and Brother Bear lay as a pile of bones. Nothing ate
him.

Not even a mosquito. He shook himself and groaned to his feet using the tree behind him as brace and leaned on his cane, a cane again instead of a god-killer, and he needed it. Damned near everything ached, from his hair down to his toenails. He stared at three narrow rips across his right sleeve and on to the belly of his jacket. Claw marks. He hadn’t seen them in the gathering darkness, hadn’t felt the blow that caused them. Brother Bear had come that close to gutting him, even blind and dying.

The clearing waited around him in the dawn calm. Crows called in the distance, he had no idea how far, but his hearing seemed to still be getting better. He wondered how crows found any carrion to scavenge, in a land with fireflies. But crows ate damn near anything.

Across the clearing,
she
sat in lotus in front of another tree-trunk. She’d been crying too, he saw it in the streaks in the dirt on her face.

He limped over to her. She did not look up.

Instead, she held her notepad up to him.

Please forgive me. I didn’t know. I thought the bear was going to kill you.

He stared down at her. This was going to get awkward. When you ask God to forgive you, He’s supposed to do it. That’s part of the bargain.

Depending on the exact theology involved, of course. Some gods aren’t big on the forgiveness bit. They prefer wrath and eternal torture. Even for problems
they
caused in the first place.

He took the pad and wrote.
You’ll have to forgive yourself. You can’t push that job off on someone else.

He knew that one too well.

She read his note. She nodded. Head still down, she tucked the pad away and reached a hand up to him. He took it and pulled her up as she unfolded from her lotus and then steadied her as she staggered and worked her legs into a semblance of function. She’d been sitting like that all night? Penance?