“Sure. Vestigial remnants of hunter behavior manifests itself as douchebaggery in males when confronted with the emasculating role of modern man, where they are no longer expected to provide food, shelter, or even spiritual guidance for their families but rather stay out of the way until it’s time to perform in the bedroom.”
“Really?” Granuaile cocked a single eyebrow at me, her voice drenched in wry skepticism.
“Maybe. I just made that up.” I turned to Oberon. “I should get a point for that.”
“I don’t think so, sensei. Sounded pretty pointless to me.”
Once the equipment was stowed, Darren Yazzie’s whole six-man crew-each of whom I assume was handpicked by Coyote-was going to spend the night on site as part of Chischilly’s Blessing Way ceremony. They unloaded a couple of coolers from their trucks and moved them inside, lit up a few kerosene lanterns for ambient light, and popped open some sodas. They had bedrolls and joked with one another about who was going to snore the loudest. Darren announced he was going to make a quick run into town to grab a couple of party trays full of veggies and some more ice, which was acknowledged only by Sophie; she smiled fondly at him, and I got the sense that he was doing her a favor. Frank didn’t hear him at all, absorbed as he was with arranging his jish for the ceremony.
“Why do they need to stay?” Granuaile asked. “I mean, I get that it’s a necessary part of the ritual, but why?”
I shrugged. “My guess is that they lend their strength and energy to the protections. The more people present, the stronger the blessing. Or the binding. I’ll be watching as it progresses.”
Frank started singing as soon as he was ready, while there was still a touch of dark rich blue in the western sky. As I’d thought, this didn’t produce immediate silence among the crew. They may have quieted down a bit, and a couple of them were paying attention, but it was casual interest. The ceremony was conducted in Navajo-a language I do not speak aside from a few stray words-but Frank was singing and working on a sandpainting on top of a sacred buckskin. It would be one of the Holy People, though I wasn’t sure which one yet.
I turned on my faerie specs to see what magical energies, if any, were being employed, and discovered that Frank was doing something much more complicated than I expected.
To a Druid’s eyes, all magic, regardless of origin, is an exercise in binding and unbinding. Other systems differ from Druidry in what they’re able to bind and how, and usually they call on different energies from Gaia’s, but all those circles and pentagrams and sacrifices accomplish a binding of some sort. Customarily there is a religion involved and a generous helping of faith. Shamanistic systems, like those of many Native American faiths, often seek to bind people more closely to the spirit world for healing and protection or else unbind them from the influence of a malign spirit. I find them all fascinating and a little bit scary, because, except for my own shape- shifting-which involves my own spirit-I have no influence on the spirit world. A Druid’s bindings are physical. But what Frank was doing was occurring almost entirely on the spiritual level.
My suspicion that everyone would play a part in the ritual was confirmed; whether they knew it or not, whether they were actively participating or not, some portion of their energy, their spirit, was contributing to the protection of the hogan. It took no effort on their behalf; Frank was gathering it, channeling it, and redirecting it, and he was doing this through his singing and his sandpainting. Since I had never seen this ceremony performed by any other hataalii, I didn’t know if it was normal-but I suspected Frank might be in a league of his own. In my sight, the energy flowed from the others in multicolored undisciplined globs toward Frank’s sandpainting, and then it flowed outward from there as fine white rays of light. These rays shot toward the base of the walls. The ceremony wouldn’t be complete until the fourth day, according to Frank, but his preliminary songs during construction and his current singing was already energizing a rudimentary protection along the base-and a good thing too. Oberon, who was inside with us, barely had time to warn me before the attack began. I was about to pop open a can of liquid sugar when his ears pricked up and he growled.
A bestial feline scream rent the night and a crunching impact shuddered the north wall of logs, rattling the roof and eliciting more than a few curses of surprise. It was quickly followed by another impact directly behind where I was standing, which enveloped me in a cloud of sawdust and shot splinters into my back.
Chapter 7
As any war veteran will tell you, there is a vast difference between preparing for battle and actually facing battle for the first time. You can be told that reading Victor Hugo will sap your will to live, but you can’t understand what that means until you’ve read a few chapters and your eyes have glazed over and someone has to revive you with a defibrillator. Sophie and the six crewmen might have understood intellectually that skinwalkers possessed superhuman strength and speed, but to see it in action freaked them out a little bit. The creatures had nearly punched through the walls on their first try.
Frank Chischilly cast a pleading eye over at Sophie and kept singing. He couldn’t stop what he was doing without stopping the flow of magic; he had to keep singing, had to keep sandpainting.
“Keep on with the ceremony!” she bellowed. “Join in, help Frank where you can. It is our best defense.” They nodded, and some of them offered up their voices along with Frank when they knew the words; the choruses were repetitive.
Any idea what’s outside? I asked Oberon.
I turned around, thinking I would ask Coyote, only to discover that he wasn’t in the hogan at all. Come to think of it, the last time I remembered seeing him was right after I told him off.
“Where’s Mr. Benally?” I asked one of the workers.
He shrugged. “He left a while back.”
“Gods-damned sheep-loving tricksters,” I muttered. Always figuring out ways to get other people to fight for them. But then I got a chill. What Coyote feared wasn’t death but what the skinwalkers would be able to do if they acquired his skin. His absence indicated he thought there was a very good chance for the skinwalkers to get hold of it tonight-which meant we were all in movie trailer territory, where that guy with the low, twelve-pack-a-day voice informs you that you’re “in a world… of terrible danger.”
I was on the east wall near the door, opposite Frank. I moved around to the north side of the hogan as the attacks resumed on the logs there. They were absurdly percussive; the sound reminded me of small battering rams. I could hear wood cracking, splintering, chunks of it flying away outside, and saw the trauma reflected inside. If they were doing this with nothing but flesh and bone, then they were operating on the strength level of vampires, and the walls wouldn’t last very long. I activated two charms on my necklace, squatting down and peering through a gap that had developed between the logs. The first charm was night vision, so that I could see what was out there. The second was faerie specs, because this was my first chance to get a handle on how the skinwalkers’ magic worked.
It took me a while to find them; they were moving so fast that they blurred in my vision. Once I did spot them, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at; each was a gruesome mash-up of three different creatures, and if Frank hadn’t told me about the old spirits from First World, I wouldn’t have been able to interpret what I saw. The physical form causing all the damage was a bobcat, warped and mutated into ferocity beyond its natural bent-so that was the skin they were currently wearing. But underneath that skin, I saw something dark and scabrous, a mottled horror of crouching, insectile menace with orange eyes; underneath that, crippled almost beyond recognition, subsumed to the other two and its nobler nature quashed beneath a blanket of bile and aggression, was a human.
The demon-eyed thing was the glue binding the other two; it’s what allowed the human to shape-shift using an animal skin. I wondered how it would appear in Frank’s magical sight. Something snicked into place in my head- perhaps it was the way the dark tendrils of the insect thing had wrapped itself around both the bobcat and the human-and I realized that this was a magical symbiosis. Alone in the Fourth World, that dark spirit of the air could exert its will about as well as a substitute teacher on a room full of jaded seniors. But with the willing cooperation of a corrupted human, it could overpower most anything. My strategy, magically, should be to figure out a way to sever the spirit from either the human or the bobcat. It was unlikely that any one of them could harm us acting singly; bound together, however, the skinwalkers were practically juggernauts until sunrise.
Frank’s magic wasn’t severing anything, however; his Blessing Way was laying down a ward around the hogan.
