“We’re gonna need to get these caltrops outta the way, though, before we can start.”
Granuaile said, “There’s a couple of brooms in the hogan. I’ll go grab them.” As her footsteps crunched behind me, I felt foolish standing there with a naked sword, so I gingerly crept back into the circle, keeping my distance from the skinwalker’s body, and recovered the scabbard. I sheathed Moralltach and slung it over my back. Coyote tossed his manila envelope onto the ground behind him; whatever was in there wasn’t important to him right now.
Inside Joe’s jish were some feathers, rattles, pouches of herbs, and two sacred buckskins. He divided the contents with Coyote.
When Granuaile returned with two brooms, we carefully brushed all the caltrops to the south side against the wall. She saw Frank there and quietly said, “He was such a sweet man. How did he die?”
“Heart attack. They didn’t get him, though. Other way around.”
She didn’t reply, only nodded, and then leaned her broom up against the wall of the butte. The two Coyotes were murmuring to each other in their own language. When they finished, Joe set off toward the other skinwalker, who had fallen to his death some thirty yards away to the west. Coyote stepped closer to the blackened one that Frank had killed and motioned us over.
“Wanna tell ya somethin’ in case somethin’-well, just in case, all right? See, in the beginnin’, me an’ Joe weren’t much differ’nt than that thing you see there.” He pointed at the boiling blackness of the First World spirit. “Except we were a whole lot sexier, o’ course. First Man and First Woman, they were spirits of the air too. We were people of mist, if you wanna think about it that way. An’ as we rose up through the worlds, we changed, an’ these bodies were given to us by the Holy People.” He tossed his head toward the spirits before continuing, “These fuckers, however, came up with us from First World, but they never got their bodies. They’re unevolved, see? Unless you wanna count the fact that they’ve turned from plain ornery to pigshit evil. Thing is, like Joe said, we can’t do anything to ’em when they’re spirits. So we’re gonna give ’em bodies. Their own bodies, not somebody else’s body they can possess and turn to the Witchery Way. Then we step on ’em.”
“Beg your pardon?” Granuaile said.
“They’re insects,” Coyote said. “Not sure what kind. Could be ants, could be those hard-shelled bigass beetles, could be dragonflies or locusts, but insects no matter what. When we get through with this ceremony, they’ll be bugs, and we can kill ’em easy and send ’em back to First World. They won’t be coming back, though. So you two can help by kinda standin’ over there.” He pointed to a space between the two skinwalker corpses. “Once they’re bugs, they’re gonna try to get away-they’ll skitter around or fly or somethin’-and we could use your help to chase ’em down.”
“What if they do get away?” Granuaile asked.
Coyote shrugged. “Ain’t that big a deal. What’s the average life span of a bug? They’ll die eventually. A bird will eat ’em if we’re lucky. They’ll be on the slow train to First World instead of the express, that’s all. The important thing is they’ll be mortal and won’t be able to harm anyone after this. We’re gonna get started now before the ch’iidii start to disperse, all right?”
He bent down and grabbed a pouch of corn pollen and an eagle feather.
“Um-” I said, but Coyote started to sing before I could form a coherent question, and I knew he wouldn’t stop for my benefit now that he’d begun. Joe’s voice joined in from over by the other skinwalker, and that left Granuaile and me with nothing to do but worry.
My apprentice asked the philosophical question first. “Is he trying to create something out of nothing, sensei? Can he do that?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go stand over there where he asked us to.”
Granuaile kept talking as we moved. “Don’t you know how the stories went? How did First Man and First Woman get their bodies? You can’t tell me you don’t remember.”
“Well, I’m fairly certain the process didn’t involve gasoline,” I said, watching the two Coyotes sprinkle gas on the skinwalkers’ bodies as they sang and danced around them clockwise.
She snorted. “That’s a safe bet.”
“I understand why they’re doing it: They have to unbind the spirit from the ch’iidii before they can shove it into a body. It just seems to be a very modern way to do it. You’d think they’d use some pine or juniper or something.”
Granuaile frowned. “Yeah, that is weird. He seemed like he was in a hurry, though.”
“True. And it’s not an important part of giving the spirit a body. The buckskin has a lot to do with that.” Both Coyotes had set the bodies on fire now and the spirits were billowing, straining to get away. They definitely did not like the light. Nor did they want to be bound to those ch’iidiis anymore.
“What do they do with the buckskin?”
“In the Dine Bahane’, there are a few different stories where the Holy People gave spirits a corporeal form. Usually they covered up corn or special stones with sacred buckskins and then invited the Wind to blow underneath the skin. Nilch’i was the name of the Wind, and it always had to blow four times-four was an important number. But the idea was that you had a Breath of Life thing going on there, like you see in many creation stories.”
“Oh, cool.” Granuaile flashed a quick smile at me. “I like how certain ideas seem to be almost universal.”
“I dig that too. It’s cool how almost every culture has some sort of trickster figure like Coyote, who’s always cocking something up-oh, shit.” I paled.
“What?”
“This could be very bad.” The Coyotes had unfurled their sacred buckskins over the burning bodies and briefly let them rest on top, smothering the flames before lifting the buckskins and letting the Wind blow underneath them for the first time. The resulting plume of smoke and ash was made worse by the enraged ch’iidiis and spirits.
“Coyote is one of the First People, not one of the Holy People,” I pointed out. He didn’t have the same powers of creation. Granuaile understood right away.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed, as the Coyotes dropped the buckskins a second time and lifted them again, inviting the Wind to blow. In my magical sight, I saw the ch’iidiis weakening and the spirits straining mightily to break free.
“Yeah. And there’s a whole series of tales where Coyote tries to imitate Badger and Wolf and so on, and every time he does, he fails spectacularly.”
“Fails as in nothing happens, or fails as in something explodes?”
The Coyotes dropped their buckskins a third time, and when they rose again to invite the Wind to blow, the ch’iidiis were almost gone. The spirits would be free the next time they raised those skins. Or they’d be trapped inside the form of a bug.
“Depends on the story. A bit of both.” Without realizing it, I had drawn Moralltach and set myself in a defensive stance.
“Gah! Can’t we do something?”
“Hope nothing happens,” I said, watching the buckskins fall for the fourth time. But when the Coyotes lifted them from the fire, something happened: Instead of smoke and ch’iidiis and spirits, giant locusts the size of half-ton pickups erupted from underneath them, and the source of that torn-metal skinwalker scream became woefully clear. It was also clear we would not be stepping on these bugs.
“Run for the hogan!” I shouted over the noise, giving her a tiny shove in that direction. She would have to run around, because Coyote’s locust was between us. I began a charge at it but then halted as it fluttered enormous wings-the sound and wind was like a helicopter taking off-and leapt out of the fire. It pivoted and seized Coyote with its front legs and bit off his head, hat and all. A fevered glance backward showed that Joe was also abruptly on the menu. Occupied as they were with their Coyote Crunch ’n’ Munch, the horrors didn’t forget about us. They shifted their giant back legs a bit and fixed their nasty compound eyes on our progress. Granuaile and I were next.
Chapter 31
