Trio of Sorcery (23 page)

“No, we are not powerless,” Mooncrow declared, steel in his voice. “This is one of
our
people. He was punished, and he does not accept that punishment. He is harming others, he harmed
you
. He raised his hand to you, an honored Medicine Person. We do not need this woman's permission to stop him any longer. Now, we are duty bound to stop him.”

She looked up sharply, and pain stabbed through her
skull, pain she ignored at the sight of the expression on her grandfather's face. This was not the Little Old Man. This was not the Medicine Person. This was the Warrior.

“What can we do?” she asked humbly. “How can we stop him?”

“I told you, I do not know—yet,” Mooncrow said, pushing himself up out of his chair. He stood tall and straight, towering over her, and she was suddenly aware that while he might be lean, he was all muscle, and he exercised more in one day than most teenagers did in a week. “But I know who does. The most patient of all, the one to whom all things come.”

She blinked at him. This was not a spirit one approached lightly, and generally it was the other way around—you were led to her. “Grandmother Spider…”

He nodded. “Yes. Her web has caught all of the stories of our people—not the ones that we tell, but the ones as they happened. She is without pity and tells the dry husk of the truth, not the storyteller's tales. Now we—more precisely, you—will go to her.”

It wasn't that easy or that direct, of course. First, they used the little cedar-lined room that they occasionally used for a sweat lodge as an ordinary sauna and baked Jennie's aches and bruises until they wouldn't interfere with her ability to move into the spirit world. And although Mooncrow
normally was not one to let her have
anything
that might interfere with her visions, he himself gave her a couple of acetaminophen to further dull those aches.

Then there was the ritual bath, to cleanse her, mind and spirit as well as body, of everything except what they needed to know. Most of the time when she went into the spirit world, her questions were met with riddles, but she sensed that this time things would be different. The
mi ah-lushka
had knocked everything out of balance. He had done what was not supposed to be done. The spirit world would be troubled, and there was no time to frame this in the sense of a “teaching experience.” This was a rare time for action in both worlds.

Jennie and Mooncrow sat in the middle of the living room wearing simple, comfortable clothing, David sat between them, holding a small drum. They had all spun additional protections and deceptions around the house, layering new protections atop the very formidable ones Mooncrow already had in place. If the ghost could make his way through them, he was no longer just a ghost but something approaching a god.

And if that happened, well…Caro's fate would be the least of their worries.

Mooncrow looked up at Jennie. She nodded. David started the drumbeat as Mooncrow began to sing.

Jennie let the song guide her, as it had so many times, and without any effort at all, slipped free of her body to walk in the proper spirit world.

To her, the spirit world was as real and solid as the world she lived and worked in every day. For one of her ancestors, in fact, there would have been no sense of transition; the landscape of the spirit world would have been identical to the physical world he knew well. Now, the world Jennie lived in was very different from this one. Here, despite the passage of centuries, things were unchanged; not even the light hand of the tribes had made a mark on these lands.

As she got her bearings, Jennie realized she was not among the trees that spread on either side of the Arkansas River; she was somewhere farther north, in the kind of forest generally found around the Kansas border. The Osage had been the dominant force up and down the entire length of the Arkansas River, so she could have found herself anywhere along its banks or miles to either side.

The one thing that always indicated that you actually were in the spirit world was the weather; it was always summer. It was never very hot and seldom rained. Some tribes called it the Summer Country. She took a deep breath of air that was clean in a way it never was in the waking world, scented only with dust and old leaves.

Despite the apparent calm, Jennie could tell there was something wrong here. It was very quiet—an uneasy quiet. The spirit world sensed something out of balance, but it did not yet know what.

The ghost must be strong enough to hide his actions
and intentions even from the guardians of this place. To say this was a bad sign…

It meant it was possible that she would be the first one to tell them what was going on. She could only hope they were not inclined to shoot the messenger.

Well, there was no hope for it. She lifted her arms, and they became wings; she shrank, and with a thought, became the Kestrel of her spirit name, and sprang into the sky. With rapid wingbeats, she threw herself up through the branches, her falcon eyes spotting gaps that falcon reflexes aimed for. In a moment, she was out of the tree shadow and into the sun.

As soon as she cleared the tops of the trees, she saw Red-tailed Hawk, the spirit more important to her people even than Eagle. Her sharp falcon eyes picked out every detail though she was still far below him; how each feather in his tail and wings moved, catching the updraft and holding it, how the hackles of his neck blew a little as he shifted position. He was circling, circling, purpose in every motion of his feathers. He was watching for something. She darted upwards, and saw the moment when she came into his sharp gaze. His head swiveled and tilted, and she felt his attention focus on her. He knew who and what she was, of course.

“Little Sister!” he called, his voice piercing. “The world is uneasy; dreams are disturbing and portents are vague. Something is amiss. Have you brought us word from the
waking world?” Now Jennie knew that he was not just
a
hawk, he was
the
Hawk.

“I have, Honored One,” she said, feeling a little more hopeful, since this was speech more direct than she had ever gotten from a spirit creature before. “One of the Little People is acting as no
mi-ah-lushka
has ever acted before.”

She explained as succinctly as she could, soaring with Hawk over the treetops. When she had finished, he voiced a note of dismay, a thin, plaintive scream that slicked her feathers down. “This is not good,” he said. “This is not good at all. We must find Grandmother Spider. All things come to her web and break their necks therein. If anyone has the wisdom to see this ended, it is she.”

“As you say, Honored One,” she replied eagerly. “Lead, and I follow.”

Hawk tilted his wings, and sideslipped west; she followed, beating her wings hard to keep up with him. Perhaps this would go better than she had hoped; she was being led to Grandmother by someone important. Grandmother would surely take her seriously.

A clearing line appeared in the trees ahead—it was the river, cutting through the forest, winding and curving like a fat, lazy snake. This Arkansas never flooded and never changed its course, so the trees of the spirit world grew right down to the banks, changing from the oak, beech, and chestnut that no longer grew in the waking world to
thirsty cottonwood and willow. Again Hawk sideslipped, and they flew over the gray-green water, his eyes searching the shadows under the trees. Finally, he spotted what he was looking for and headed for the bank and a patch of mingled sun and shadow where a tree had toppled over long ago, leaving a gap.

She saw it too; the great orb of the web stretching from the lowest branches of the standing trees to the ground, strands shining silver where the sun touched them. And in the middle, the squat shape, weaving industriously.

Hawk landed ponderously beside the web. Jennie hovered for a moment before setting down beside him. They both bowed. “Grandmother,” Hawk said politely. “Honored Woman. I bring news concerning the troubling of the world in the mouth of a seeker of wisdom.”

Grandmother looked at both birds with her eight eyes, which glittered like jewels. “Tell me the news,” she demanded, and Jennie complied. As Jennie spoke, Grandmother wrapped a bit of silk around and around, as if she were wrapping up Jennie's words to store them away. Maybe she was; it was hard to tell what she could and could not do.

“This explains much,” Grandmother said, when Jennie was done. “It is one thing to adapt and change. It is quite another to take and hold and gobble up. I sense this spirit is one that would not be satisfied with a single mouthful; he would devour what he has taken and look for more. So, speak. What is it you want to know?”

“I know some of what he was, this
mi-ah-lushka.
I think the secret to besting him lies in what I do not know.” Jennie bobbed her head nervously. If being in the eyes of Hawk was hard, being beneath the eyes of Grandmother Spider was positively unnerving. “You know more than the tales, Grandmother. You know the history, where the tales end, and what the tales do not say. I would know that about him—what lies in the places between the words I have heard.” She waited while the huge spider hung above her, all eight legs splayed out along the strands of the web.

The web trembled, and for a moment Jennie was afraid that Grandmother was angry with her. But then a dry chuckle came from the great spider, and Jennie knew that Grandmother was not angry, only amused. “So, so, so. And that is wisdom indeed. Now you will hear, and may you find your answer in it.”

Grandmother went to the edge of her web, one careful leg at a time, as delicately as a dancer on pointe, moving out of sight among the leaves. When she returned, she came back with a little bundle of silk held carefully in her two forelegs. “Now watch,” she said. “And learn.”

She began to unwind the silk, and as she did, a bright spot appeared in the shadows under the web. It grew swiftly, opening like a window into another time and place.

Jennie found herself looking into an Osage camp of the very oldest sort, at such a distance that she saw the camp laid out before her. A rough ring of rectangular longhouses—pole frameworks covered with dark brown
bark sheets—stood in a clearing. Next to the longhouses were a large meeting house and several small, circular sweat houses covered with hides. Crop fields surrounded the village, planted with beans, corn, and squash. Beyond lay the forest, full of game, and the prairies where the buffalo were, buffalo that would be hunted by enormous parties sent out a few times a year for that specific purpose.

Between some of the longhouses were bowers made of branches driven into the dirt and topped with platforms of brush to give shade to the women and children of the camp as they worked or played. It was summer; the trees around the clearing were in full leaf and the camp was full of women working: scraping hides, smoking meat, cooking, sewing, grinding grain, or mending garments. There were a few older men among them, mostly making weapons and instructing the children. If the style of the lodges had not told her that all this was taking place long before the Heavy Eyebrows arrived, the Osages' clothing and the utensils they were making would have told her that. Decorations were quill embroidery, beads were bone, shell, antler, and stone. Tools were bone, antler, stone. There were mostly naked children everywhere. By modern standards they were very well-behaved children—but then, each had tasks to do. The village was almost certainly pre-Columbian.

By the position of the sun, halfway down to the horizon, it must have been late afternoon; shadows stretched
out over the crop fields and the beaten-down grass around the camp. The men would still be out hunting for the most part; women farmed and gathered in the woods, though it was not unheard of for a woman to be a hunter or a man to tend the crops. Jennie's point of view shifted, until she saw a young warrior emerging from under the trees, a string of rabbits and squirrels in one hand. The moment she saw his face, she knew him. This was the one who had become the
mi-ah-lushka
.

He seemed very popular among the younger women. If she was reading the body language right, he flirted with almost all of them, and in most cases, got at least a saucy answer back. The older women, especially the grandmothers, seemed far less impressed. Certainly they were not nearly as impressed with him as he was with himself.

He was very handsome—well, she knew that, since he was very handsome even as a spirit—and he was dressed quite casually: breechcloth, leggings, and moccasins; the eagle feather that showed his
gente
was on the correct side of his roach. So, he was Hunkah, was he? Interesting. He seemed to be very proud of his muscles too; Jennie was familiar enough with the posing techniques of muscle-builders to tell that he was deliberately flexing them. It occurred to her that the stereo typical jock-jerk seemed to be eternal.

Her focus was drawn to one young woman in particular. The look in her eyes was impossible to mistake; she
was like an infatuated groupie with a rock star parading in front of her. The others might have been attracted to the young man, but this one was obsessed.