Stoneskin's Revenge (25 page)

Yeah, all that was possible, Calvin decided, but it still didn't give him any clear notion what to do.

A resumption of the thrumming in the earth made the decision for him. And this time it felt—sounded, whatever it did—really close. In fact, Calvin thought he could determine an actual direction: northeast, toward the darkest part of the woods. He had not taken four strides across the short backyard grass when he literally stumbled on something that gave him pause: a low ridge in the earth, almost exactly like an immense mole tunnel. One end terminated with the expected mound and hole, the other led toward the woods—and the source of the thrumming.

“Uki, go with me,” Calvin whispered, and followed the ridge into the forest.

The thrumming kept up, stronger and stronger, and Calvin increased his vigilance, fearing that, since he knew he faced a shapeshifter,
anything
he passed might be his foe. Trees suddenly became sinister where before they had seemed almost sentiently benign; stumps could no longer be taken for granted as merely rotting wood. He found himself wondering if the Stoneskin was bound by the same rules of skinchanging he was, then recollected with a scowl that he hardly knew all the nuances either.

But at least he had a trail, and that was something, never mind that it was leading him deeper into the woods; it was also—thank God—leading away from his friends.

And then he heard it: a ghost of the song that had haunted his childhood. “Spearfinger will get you,” his grandmother had whispered. “She will sing you the song:
‘Livers I eat, su sa sai!'
And when you hear that four times, she will have you!”

And Calvin was hearing those words now. Already he could feel the melody insinuating its way into his head, making his thoughts grow dim, his body and reflexes leaden. And how many times had he heard it already?

It didn't matter; he dared not hear it again, and with that, he dropped to the ground and scrabbled among the mosses on the forest floor until he scraped up enough to cram into his ears as makeshift plugs. He could still hear the song, but not clearly, not as a whole.

But the fact that he had heard it at all meant that he was getting pretty close.

Almost
too
close, and had Calvin not been alert, he might have stumbled upon his quarry before he was ready.

As it was, he noticed a subtle increase in the amount of light on the way ahead and slowed, slid into shadows, resumed a furtive darting from tree to tree.

And finally peered between the twin trunks of a pine tree and gazed upon Utlunta Spearfinger, the Stoneskin.

She had found herself another clearing in the woods—no more than twenty or so feet around. And once more she had raised up stone monoliths to surround it—the closest, in fact, was scarcely five yards away.

But Calvin's first actual sight of his adversary almost disappointed him. She looked no more than an old Indian squaw, clad in rags and tatters of coarse fabric and leather; like something from one of Curtis's nineteenth-century photos—or Dame Judith Anderson's feisty old squaw from
A Man Called Horse.
Stooped and bent she was—no taller than Calvin's chin, if that—and with long gray braids hanging to the ground. Her face he could not make out, for it was veiled by the shawl she wore wrapped around her head and by her crouching stance. But he could see her hands quite clearly—including the great long awl-finger that had begat her appellation. Worse, though, was what she was doing with those hands.

There was no stone in south Georgia; at least not in great slabs like these. But Spearfinger had either
wrought
stone from sand or had called it from the bowels of the earth and made it rise at her bidding. And now she was embarked on a far more ambitious project, for there in the middle of her circle she was sculpting a life-sized man. It was almost finished, in fact, though every now and then she would reach to the ground and mumble (this disrupted the rhythm of the song a little), and fold her hand around something which she would then affix to the work-in-progress. Calvin was intrigued in spite of himself, and now he examined it more closely, he could see that the manikin was made of lumps of pressed-together stone, augmented here and there with colored pebbles.

The troubling thing was that the statue looked familiar. It was male—that was pretty obvious, since she was making it nude and it was facing toward him. Its build was slender, but there was enough fullness of muscle on arm and chest and leg to hint at a gymnast's poise and strength. She was still working on the face, but Calvin knew he had seen it before: angular chin, level brows, full lips, a nose that was neither stubby nor yet quite straight.

David!

There was no doubt about it, Spearfinger was making a simulacrum of his buddy Dave!

And that gave Calvin whatever proof he needed that his best friend was the Stoneshaper's quarry.

It was time to fulfill his mission.

A deep, slow breath; another; and then Calvin slid his hand back over his shoulder, snagged an arrow, and drew it soundlessly from the deerskin quiver. Another fluid motion and he had nocked it, and with another he took aim.

But he could not see her hand clearly from where he was and finally admitted that he really did need another vantage point. He had good night vision for a human—and the moonlight was plenty bright. But he had to hit dead on the first time or he might not get another chance.

Which meant he needed to get closer. He edged to the left a little, but one of the stones blocked the best angle, so he slipped a half dozen steps to the right.

And brought his foot down on solid rock.

The air suddenly filled with a high-pitched shriek like the sound of fresh-broken stones sliding together.

Calvin sprang back reflexively—but found he had fallen flat on his back instead, and then he saw why.

Without skipping a beat, Spearfinger had changed her song, and the rocks had obeyed, had wrapped themselves around his feet and held him fast. He fumbled with the bow, but before he could get his shot realigned, other stony pseudopods had prisoned his arms, forcing him to sprawl spreadeagled on the ground with all his limbs trapped and the stone beginning to twitch beneath his back. Spearfinger was looking at him too, gazing straight between the monoliths and right into his face. He could see her beady little eyes, the cruelly hooked nose: every archetypal witch in the world rolled into one.

She raised that awful finger, then, and stared at it as if she were seeing it for the first time. Her eyes glittered balefully, and there was a look of triumph on her face. With a brief, admonishing pat, she left her sculpting and began slowly hitching her way across the intervening few yards between herself and Calvin. She did not bother to walk around the rocks that stood between; rather, she simply altered her droning song, and they slid aside of their own accord, so that in an instant her dirty bare feet were inches from the stone that held Calvin's, and she was glaring down at him gleefully.

He got a good look at her then, and this close he could see that her skin had a rough texture to it, like coarse beach sand that had dried hard. Her face was full of moles and warts and excrescences—or were those simply pebbles?—and her eyes looked like nothing so much as lumps of polished coal. She smelled, too: but not the sour stench of a dirty old woman, though there
was
a hint of musty cloth, and of long-mildewed leather. More it was the odor of fresh mud and sun-baked stone—almost a pleasant smell, if not for what it portended.

For a seeming eternity they stayed that way, with Calvin feeling his legs and arms gripped tight, and her peering down at him with a crooked, almost bemused grin. A puzzled tilt of her head, a frown, and she bent over—and stabbed the awl-finger straight into his face.

Calvin winced, but at the last minute she flicked that dreadful digit expertly aside and with appalling finesse scooped the moss out of his ears, so that the night was suddenly awash with sounds. When she straightened again, Calvin could actually hear her joints cracking and popping.

“You are Yellow-Hair's friend,” she spat. Her voice was harsh and flat, like rocks tumbling, and seemed to come more from her belly than her lungs. “You are the one who showed him the way to Galunlati; do not think I do not know that! I have seen you there—more than once I have seen you lurking—spying—speaking to that soft-one Uki as if he were a god; listening to the foolish knowledge he would impart to you—as if it were true wisdom! But I tell you, Edahi, Uki knows nothing of wisdom. I was in Galunlati before he came, I will be there after he passes, for Galunlati and I are one bone and blood, and I will not allow anything to endanger it!”

“You're crazy!” Calvin gasped. “I know what you are! You have no right part in the way of things!”

“You lie—though that is nothing new to one who comes from the Lying World. But there is a thing you would know, Edahi, and that I will tell you, and that is the reason I have come here.”

“So tell me then and kill me, and get it over with—since you mean to deny me a
proper
death.”

“Your
death
will be as is,” she snarled back. “But unlike your friend, whose liver I will only in part pluck from his living body and slowly devour before I return him to his folks all unknowing, so that he will die oh so very slowly—unlike him,
you
will die knowing the full tally of what you have done, and with full knowledge of the guilt that is yours.”

“Why bother?” Calvin gritted bitterly.

“Because you are of the blood of the Ani-Yunwiya and have always tried to live true to that. I respect that, and therefore I will not let you die in ignorance.”

“I'll still be dead.”

The finger flashed down again, and Calvin was certain he was going to find an eyeball skewered, but it did not happen. “You will be alive without a tongue if you do not be silent! Do you think livers are
all I
eat?”

Calvin bit back a retort, though his glare spoke eloquently. “
Revenge
is what I seek, Edahi! Listen, while I tell a tale.”

And Calvin had no choice
but
to listen.

“In
hilahiya,
in the Ancient Times,” Spearfinger began with the traditional formula, “Galunlati lay close to the Lying World—so close that most men could not tell where one began and the other ended. We of Galunlati were free to come and go, as were the men of the Lying World. Sometimes they hunted our folk, but we did not begrudge them that so long as they thanked their kills for their lives and covered their blood. Sometimes we hunted their folk, too—by we, I mean myself, the Raven Mockers, the Underground Panthers, the Water Cannibals. They feared us, as men do, but we too had our place beneath the sky. And then came the white men, like your yellow-haired friend. They brought lies, they brought deceit, they brought disease. ‘Give us this piece of land,' they would say, ‘and we will ask no more.' And so the Ani-Yunwiya would give them the land—since it was everyone's, how could they begrudge it? ‘But that land is not
enough
,'
the white men would say again; ‘give us more.' And then, ‘Give us more yet,' and finally, ‘Give us
all
!'
And all the time the Ani-Yunwiya kept their word, and all the while the white men lied. Worse still, the Ani-Yunwiya tried to be like the white man: they wore his clothes, they spoke his language, they lived in houses like his and tilled the land as he tilled it. They even took his names in preference to their own,
Calvin Fargo McIntosh!

“And they turned away from Galunlati. Magic could not be, the white priests told them, and so the Ani-Yunwiya ceased to believe. ‘Sorcery is wrong, witches all must die!' This they came to believe.

“Finally it became too much. This World had been tainted beyond healing by the white men, but Galunlati most of them could not see. Yet still their lies reached there, and so it was decided by the Chiefs of Galunlati that the Land Above must be removed from the Lying World. And so it was made to be.”

“But what does this have to do with me?” Calvin protested. “What's it got to do with Dave? He may be white, but he respects the land. He thinks more like one of us than many of our own tribe.”

“
Your
own tribe! You and I are
not
of one blood, do not forget that!”

Calvin simply glared.

Spearfinger nodded with a touch of amusement. “Your friend knows of Galunlati, he has taken others there, his words seduce even Uki, even Yanu the Bear and Tsistu, the Rabbit-Chief. How long will it be before he returns, and with him others? How long before the lies begin again?”

“He'd never do that!”

“How do you
know
?
Knowledge is Power, Edahi, and David Sullivan knows a great many things.”

“But he'd never use it, I promise you.”

“No, he will not,” Spearfinger agreed gleefully. “For within a hand of days I shall feast upon his liver.”

“No you won't! If I can't stop you, someone else will. Dave's got more powerful friends than you know!”

“Who are forbidden to enter this World! Do you think Uki is the only one with an ulunsuti? Do you think he is the only one who can watch between the Worlds?”