Spiritwalk (12 page)

“Who is this Blue?”

“I guess it was a real long time ago that you lived here—everybody tells me that he’s been here forever. He kind of runs the place, though the House itself has got a way of letting you know where you can go and what you can do. It’s like there’s all these people staying here and nobody messes things up.”

She nodded. “I remember that.” Some things never changed. “Are there many guests staying here just now?”

“There’s a few full-timers—like me and Blue and this weird one-handed guy who spends most of his time in the garden. Right now I guess there’s maybe, I don’t know, twenty people?”

“And is this Blue around?”

“No. He’s at the hospital. His girlfriend came down with something weird a couple of weeks ago and he’s been sitting with her, so he hasn’t been around much lately.”

“I see.” She pushed a loose strand of hair away from her shoulder so that it fell down her back once more.

“This is going to sound weird,” he said, “but when you first turned around there was this wind... ?”

She gave him a blank look, then remembered. “It must have been a draft,” she said with a smile. “Old houses like this get them, you know. What’s your name?”

“Tim Gavin. I’m writing a play. A musical. It’s about what happens to kids when their parents split up. I know that sounds depressing, and I’m keeping it serious, but it’s not going to be all downbeat. I’m going to lighten it up some.”

His eyes took on a real glow as he described the project.

“It sounds like it could be a winner,” she said.

“Well, maybe. Nobody’s much interested in it—I’ve got no credibility, you know, ’cause this is just my first one. That’s why I’m staying here. If I had to pay rent somewhere, I’d be too busy working some dead-end job to do any writing.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“Do you write, too?”

“Sometimes. Mostly just the kinds of things that have a very limited audience of one: me.” She smiled. “My name’s Esmeralda Foylan.”

“Are you here to do some writing, too?”

Esmeralda shook her head. “I’m here to see some old friends—and perhaps make some new ones.”

She offered him her hand. Giving her a quick grin, Tim stepped forward and shook.

“Do you want to come have some coffee or tea?” he asked. “Most people are using the Lobo Kitchen on the north side of the building, but I keep my stuff with Blue’s in the Silkwater Kitchen—that’s the one that overlooks the garden.”

“I remember it,” Esmeralda said. She smiled, hearing the old familiar room names of the House dropping so casually from Tim’s lips. “After the long drive from the airport, some tea would be lovely. But first I have to talk to someone.”

Tim followed her gaze as it went into the Postman’s Room. “There’s a phone in the kitchen,” he said.

“The person I want to talk to is in here,” she said.

“But there’s no one in—”

“You go ahead and put the water on—I shouldn’t be long.”

Tim gave her an uncomfortable look. He hesitated in the hallway, flinching slightly as she entered the study. When nothing happened, he moved to the doorway and looked in.

Esmeralda didn’t look up as she sat down in front of the computer. “I won’t be long,” she repeated.

“Okay,” Tim said. “I can take a hint. But Blue’s—”

“Just going to have to live with it,” she said.

She waited until she sensed him walking down the hallway before turning her attention to the words that were still on the screen.

THANK YOU FOR COMING, they said.

“Not even a hello, Jamie?” she asked.

The chimes by the window tinkled again, and then a new series of words spilled out from behind the cursor as it dropped two lines and sped across the screen.

4

Smoor had changed in the months since his mistress had been slain. Unlike his brothers, who had fled into the hills the night of her death, fled not to return, he had crept back into the glade once the humans were gone. He took up the ashes of his mistress and her human puppet in his hands and spat on them, then smeared some of the mixture on his face and torso. More of it he had swallowed, and then the convulsions dropped him to the ground, pain like a fire inside, burning behind his eyes, shrieking as it swept like lava through his nervous system. He wept and tore at the grass, howling and gnashing his teeth, until finally, with the dawn, the pain left him.

And he was changed.

No longer the simple squat gnasher, with a face like a toad’s and a mind so simple it could only follow, never lead. Like a phoenix, knowledge had risen up from the ashes of the dead to wing into his mind. The woodwife knowledge of his slain mistress. The human knowledge of her pet.

Autumn sped by and the long months of winter. By the time spring touched the Gatineau Hills, he was ready to leave the solitary holt where he’d hidden away for half a year. In that time he had assimilated what the ashes had given to him.

And he was changed.

He could bide the touch of iron now and understood the ways of men—that a gift from his mistress’s human puppet. From the ashes of his mistress herself, he had acquired a woodwife’s Faerie lore. He could farsee. He could change his shape to walk among men or Faerie as one of their own. His own strengths were undiminished.

There was only one price set by the shades of his mistress and her puppet: in payment for what they had given him, the Autumn Heart and her friends must die. It was an easy debt for him to discharge for he had his own score to settle with them.

So now he walked in human form down a corridor of Ottawa’s General Hospital. He paused at the doorway of a private room and looked inside. The woman on the bed lay very still, an IV tube in one pale arm, the lights of monitoring units blinking behind her. The man sitting by the bed looked up, eyes bloodshot and haunted.

What the man saw was an orderly in hospital greens, pausing at the door. What Smoor saw were two victims, one already half-dead. He gave the man a solemn nod, then moved on down the hall, a thin smile touching his lips once he was out of sight.

Soon, he thought. Within hours, the Autumn Heart would belong to him.

5

It was a bizarre tale that Jamie related, the words appearing on his screen almost faster than Esmeralda could read them. Some of it she had known already. She had been there at the beginning—three thousand miles away, but aware enough to send her warning across the Atlantic. And she had been there at the end. Briefly. Like a murmur of wind, fanning the spark of Emma’s Autumn Gift into a glow. But she hadn’t known the details that fell between her warning and the tale’s resolution. She hadn’t watched the glowing ember subsequently fade, the spark die, the darkness return.

The first she knew that all was not as it should be came to her in a waking dream that showed Emma’s familiar face, the features now pale and drawn, the promise of the gift that lay within no longer hidden, but fled. Then the letter arrived at her Chelsea flat, a letter from a dead man, and she knew that it was too late for warnings and that words could not be enough.

And so she had come. Returned to the city of her youth. To the strange rambling house that now served as the body of one of her dearest friends.

She read the last of what was on the screen, then leaned back in the chair, absorbing what she’d been told. Her gaze strayed, not quite focused, until it fell upon a small leather bag that lay on the desk’s blotter. Here were the Weirdin that Blue had brought back from the glade.

Blue, she thought. Who was this man? Jamie’s friend, Emma’s lover. She felt as though she should know him, but knew they’d never met. Not on this turn of the world’s wheel.

The bone discs clicked against each other with a muffled sound when she picked up the bag. She’d found references to them in druidic texts, studied the meanings of the symbols inscribed on either side, understanding them with a familiarity that had long since ceased to surprise her. It was often that way for her with old things—ancient languages, the placement of stone circles, the bardic calendars of the trees, oracular devices. She’d always had an instinctive grasp of their meanings, their relationships with the past, and with the world as it was now and might come to be.

The bones were worn and smooth to the touch. She could feel the ridges of their inscriptions, smoothed as well. By time. And much use. Their age tingled against her fingers, the years rising up from them through the pores of her skin to spark and flicker in her mind.

A quick glimpse, she thought. Not a full reading, just a glimpse into where we are. Where we’re going.

She drew three of the bones out of the bag and laid them out in a row on the blotter.

Secondary, First Rank: The Acorn, or Hazelnut. For hidden wisdom and friendship.

That was Emma. Or herself. Perhaps both.

Secondary, Second Rank: The Forest. A place of testing and unknown peril.

The peril was Emma’s... unless... It depended on who was being tested, she realized.

Tertiary, Mobile: The Eagle. Release from bondage.

Who was imprisoned? Emma in her coma? Or were the bones riddling deeper than that? Release could mean many things. A release from a way of life. Release from life itself.

The computer beeped and she looked at the screen. It went blank for a moment; then Jamie’s words appeared.

THE TROUBLE WITH ORACULAR DEVICES IS THAT WITHOUT A CLEAR QUESTION THEY TEND TO MUDDY THE ISSUE.

Esmeralda nodded. “And sometimes the best thinking is done when you’re not thinking at all.”

EXACTLY.

“What do you think this means?” she asked, pointing to the bones.

THAT THEY ARE TELLING US SOMETHING VERY PRECISE WHICH WE AREN’T CLEARHEADED ENOUGH, OR WISE ENOUGH, TO UNDERSTAND AT THE PRESENT.

“In other words, ’What was the question?’”

WHEN YOU DON’T DO A FULL READING, IT HELPS TO BE VERY SPECIFIC.

Esmeralda looked at the bones for long moments, clearing her head of all thoughts to let an intuitive leap come if it would, but she had too many questions tangled up inside her to be able to attain the required inner quiet. Sighing, she replaced the bones in their bag.

“I need to think,” she said, “without thinking. A cup of tea with a playwright sounds about right at the moment.”

YOUR OLD ROOM’S WAITING FOR YOU.

She smiled. “The Blue Dancer’s Room,” she said softly. “High in the southwest tower. I used to dream about princes in there, Jamie, and they all looked like you. Did you know I had a crush on you? I think half the women staying here at the time did.”

UM...

“An embarrassed computer. A blushing house.” Her smile widened as she rose from the chair. “I’ll talk to you later, Jamie.”

Her good humor lasted all the way down to the Silkwater Kitchen and through her visit with Tim, but when she finally took her carpetbag up to her old room in the southwest tower, not even the room’s familiarity could stop its fading. Instead, it added to her growing sense of disquiet.

The Blue Dancer’s Room, like the rest of what she’d seen of the House so far, hadn’t changed at all. By now she shouldn’t have been surprised, but the room was almost too familiar. The books she’d left behind when she went away were still on the bookshelf. One of Emma’s watercolors hung above the mantel. Below it was a clay South American whistle in the shape of a bird that she’d borrowed from Jamie one night before she left. The patchwork quilt that her grandmother had given her was still on the bed. The room was neat, and dust-free. And it looked as though she’d just left it this morning. As though all the intervening years were just a dream. Pages in someone else’s journal that she’d read instead of lived.

She felt dislocated from herself. Talking to Jamie had woken old feelings that she’d thought she’d forgotten. And the House, this room... She had traveled three thousand miles to help a friend. Now she felt as though she’d traveled through time as well. Into the past.

She stayed long enough to put away the contents of her carpetbag, then went back downstairs, troubled by more than what had initially brought her here.

6

A deep quiet lay inside Migizi. He dreamed awake, his gaze traveling far beyond the confines of his conjuring lodge. He tapped his water drum and chanted. He spoke to his totem through the fingering of the dream objects of his
skibdagan
. West his gaze ranged, and farther west, beyond the sight of his soul. He lit the spirit pipe again, but Nanibush remained hidden, refusing the invitation of smoke that Migizi offered.

The deerskins of his lodge finally shook in response to his seeking, but it wasn’t the ruler of the west approaching. He heard a puckish laughter. His eyes flickered open in time to see the head and upper torso of a small, thin, brown figure poke into the lodge. Its wizened face, bewhiskered like a cat’s, flashed a grin in his direction as it drew the sacred smoke into its lungs; then the little being was gone, and the deerskins lay still.

Memegwesi
, Migizi thought. The sound of their laughter diminished as the little band of mischievous manitou left the area of his
jessakan
. He lifted a deerskin flap in time to see the last of them slip away into the woods.

“Choose another old man to play your tricks on!” he called after them. “This one has serious business to conduct.”

There was no response, but he hadn’t expected any. He retied his medicine bag to the beaded belt at his waist and replaced his pipe and tobacco pouch in his bandolier. As he left the lodge and stood erect, muscles still supple despite his sixty-three winters, he caught another glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye.

Like the
memegwesi
, the strange manitou was leaving as well.

“I will try again,” Migizi told it. By the honeysuckles, his soul stirred and drifted down toward the lodge. “Dreams walk quicker by moonlight, following Nokomis’s light west. I will ask her to bear our message to her grandson.”

The strange manitou paused as though listening to him, then faded in among the trees and was gone. But it would be back. Whether he spoke to the west or not, it would return. Troubled and alone. The discord within it setting up an echoing disturbance that distressed the balance of bird and animal, plant and stone, in ever-widening ripples.