Ghostcountry's Wrath (31 page)

Again the old woman nodded. “He ran fast. But then, he was pursued. It seemed a merry chase. I did not stop it, though I should have.”

“Why?” From Brock.

“Because those who pursued him were not dead. And only the dead are allowed here. Only because they sought to bring death with them did I permit them to pass.”

Sandy puffed her cheeks. “So only the dead can go through this gate?”

Another nod. “Beyond lies the Narrow Road. At the end of the Narrow Road lies Tsusginai, the Ghost Country. Those who would go there must pass by me.”

Brock looked startled, but Sandy could tell his brain was working ninety miles an hour.
“Everybody?
Everybody who ever died?”

The crone cackled. “There is not room here for everyone who ever died! They come here whose soul-blood compels them here. Here they may remain or return—eventually—as pleases them. Or as pleases those who rule the Worlds and the souls of men alike.”

“There's more than one…place like this, then?” Sandy ventured, unable to resist.

“As many as there are nations. Perhaps as many as there are souls of men, if you dig to the center.”

“What was that about blood compelling?”

“All men come from the earth,” the crone replied. “The earth calls them all, though most choose not to hear. Yet the call is there: the oft-unheeded desire for a center that speaks to the soul, for the earth from which the ancestors came.”

“But we're all out of Africa,” Brock pointed out.

“Not in your souls,” the woman countered. “A soul, once incarnate, links to that land in which it first experienced life. And there are more souls all the time, born in all manner of places. Or maybe there is only one, and I am a fool.”

Brock looked confused. Then: “Oh, I see. Everybody who comes here is somebody who first incarnated in, like, Indian places. Like Calvin's dad: he was part Cherokee. And Don's friend, Michael—didn't he have Indian blood, too?”

“Cherokee,” Sandy affirmed, surveying the darkness beyond the gate speculatively. “What must one do to pass?” she added.

“Be dead.”

Brock was still scowling. “But…what about Don? He wasn't dead—but he came here anyway—I think.”

The old woman frowned. “He was dead in his soul. And he came with one of the dead.”

“And…what about us?” Brock blurted out, and Sandy could have—not killed him, but maybe flayed him alive.

“What about you?”

“We… have business in Tsusginai,” Sandy admitted. “May we pass for a little while?”

“Are you dead?”

“No.”

“Do you bear the blood of those whose place this is?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Do you come in the company of one of the dead?” Sandy shook her head.

“Then you may not pass.”

Brock's eyes narrowed. “What if we just ran by you?”

“I would unmake the Road.”

“The
whole
road?” Brock burst out incredulously.

“Enough that you could not follow it.”

Brock shrugged at Sandy. “Looks like we're stuck.”

Sandy grimaced and began backing away. “So it seems.” She inclined her head toward the old woman. “Thank you, grandmother, for your wise and honest counsel.”

“Peace go with you until the end of all days,” the woman replied.

“So what do we do?” Brock muttered as they headed back to the edge of the sky vault.

“I'm not sure.” Sandy sighed. “But if you're up for a risk, I may have an idea.”

“I'm all ears,” Brock told her.

“Good,” she whispered back. “'cause you may have to be.”

*

…the buck was still ahead, but she was closing. She saw the white flicker of its tail as it fled; observed by instinct the tense and flex of muscles in its narrow legs as it ran; smelled as much as saw the sand kicked into clouds in its wake. She could hear, too, the heavy panting as it strove to outdistance her, the muffled click of hooves on whatever solidity underlay the drifting sand. And she could smell its fear, mingling with the oddly smoky odor of earth, and, more distantly, the scent of humans. But the bitter smell of panic was most pervasive, was what sent her loping onward: a lean cat-shape, muscular, poised, and capable.

She was bloodlust, hunger, and drive—and hot desire to fall upon her quarry, to feel her fangs in its throat, its steaming blood in her belly.

She was also Sandy Fairfax, and this was a mask she wore, for a specified time, for a particular reason. And while she wore it, she had to balance, to grant the beast its freedom, yet retain control. It took finesse—perhaps more than she could muster—to both summon and suppress the urge to kill.

She was closer now: maybe
too
close. Close enough for the final lunge, but not yet near enough for the other.

But she saw it—clearly, where had been haze and the tunnel vision of pursuit. It reared before her, suddenly huge: a dark arch of stone above purple-gray-black sand, down which a body-wide ribbon of gold lay gauzed by drifting black dust.

…reared before her, and the deer passed under…

…reared above her and she too dived beneath.

Movement stung the corner of her eye, then: the crone, abruptly all alertness. Her head snapped up fast as a striking rattler. Her fingers drew lightning in the air. The buck coursed faster, misstepped, staggered, as if the Track had turned to mud where a foot touched down, then gathered itself and leapt across something she could not see. Its flight arched long and high.

She followed, felt the sand go soft as she too flung all her strength into forward motion. The heavy muscles in her hips and legs bunched and strained as she released them, pushing out with feet and claws to maintain what purchase she could on what was becoming
gone.

The sand dissolved beneath her belly. But the deer was straight before her and she forgot
human
and let base instinct carry her on.

…on…

For an instant, fear beyond anything she had ever dreamed filled both sets of reflexes as the ground evaporated, so that for far too long she hung suspended above a colorless, shapeless void. Only the Track remained, no more than a glimmer of dust.

But ahead was the buck and clear ground.

And after an eternal instant, her front paws struck…

…sand. She had found solidity.

But kept running, as did the deer, though its pace had slowed, even as she strove vainly to restrain that which she had freed too fully there at the last. It had saved her, then; she dared not let it damn her now.

But at least the earth was solid. Not until she had run a hundred paces more, however, did she finally pause to glance back. The Track was still there, glimmering beneath its film of black sand, while around her sand curved up into layered striations of many-colored stone like the sides of a canyon. Above, a gray-purple haze passed for sky but clearly wasn't.

Fortunately, those images distracted her enough to banish the worst of the beast. She slowed automatically, the better to examine it, then noticed something else and bent to shake a forgotten encumbrance from her neck. It plopped to the sand, where it glittered. Behind her she heard the muffled click of uncertain hooves approaching.

Her nose told her
buck,
and the beast awoke again.

She closed her eyes, looked down, saw salvation sparkling on the sand. She slapped it between her paws, pushed, felt pain and the gush of blood that stirred the beast once more.

Closed her eyes…felt far more pain…and opened them again as human.

The deer was looking at her hopefully, but clearly afraid; as if instincts likewise warred behind those huge dark eyes. She stepped toward it, then hesitated, abruptly sick at heart.
It had no hands!
Therefore, it could not regain its shape as she had done.

But before she could determine an alternative, it reached out and licked her, wrapping its tongue around the hand that held the scale. She stared at it incomprehensibly. Then: “Oh,
I
see!” Whereupon she relinquished her hold.

The deer took the scale in its mouth. She looked away discreetly, busying herself with once again digging her clothes from the pack. “You can stay that way a little longer,” Brock called shakily a moment later. “Gotta get my britches on.”

She nodded, busy restoring her own modesty. “That was a close one,” she called back—and almost jumped, so startled was she at the sound of her own voice. “Je-sus—that thing almost had me. Which means
I
almost had you.”

“Nah,” Brock snorted. “I'd have outrun you. Deer are made for distance, panthers are sprinters.”

“Yeah,” Sandy grunted, finishing up and resecuring the pack, but retaining the war club. “But what about
underwater
panthers?” The sound of a zipper told her it was okay to turn around. She did.

Brock shrugged in the midst of putting on his shirt. “Who knows? All I know is that was a brilliant idea.”

“Crazy guess, more likely,” Sandy gave back. “I didn't know if I got enough of 'Kacha's blood in my mouth back when we transferred to matter; nor that having to look for her a couple of times since then was enough of an adrenaline jolt to bind her pattern—nor that I'd turn into a panther instead of…her. For that matter, suppose I'd pulled a Calvin and gone off chasing Tsistu? Where would you be then?”

Brock started, looking for a moment genuinely afraid, but then all his youthful bravado came flooding back. “It was a risk. So's life.”

“Too big a risk, though,” Sandy replied. “Definitely too big, and one we don't dare run again.”

Brock only shrugged again.

Sandy glared at him. “Don't give me that!” she snapped, feeling two days' worth of tension suddenly rise to a boil—or was it (as recent evidence indicated) a much more predictable, if no less annoying “complaint” arriving atypically early?—probably as a result of too much shapeshifting, she suspected. “That…
thing
there's only got a finite number of charges, don't forget.”

“I'm not
likely
to,” Brock shot back as he retrieved the scale and its thong from where he'd laid them on the ground. “Seeing as how you remind me about every two minutes!”

“Better than getting stuck in animal shape and not being able to get back—which could happen at any time, kid! And it's
Cal's
scale. I'm not sure we have the right to use his resources the way we have, given that we just did what we did for a pretty selfish reason.”

“To save our skins was selfish?”

“To keep from waiting,” Sandy countered. “We could've stayed where we were.”

“'Cept that we don't know for sure Cal'd even come back that way—or 'Kacha. Or how long we'd have had to wait there—with no food.”

Sandy merely glared at him. “The old woman has to eat something.”

“Don't count on it,” Brock snorted, finishing his last shoelace. “But I tell you what: seeing as how we can't go back now—or that it'd be stupid to, anyway—what say we call a truce? I mean, we don't really have any choice but to go ahead, do we?”

Sandy grimaced sourly. “Not really. But one thing: no more shapeshifting unless it's a matter of life or death. And you give me the scale until we reconnect with Cal.”

“That's two things,” Brock grumbled, even as he complied. “And that presupposes we
do
reconnect.”

***

“Well, hell,” Brock sighed an indeterminate time later as he slumped to a halt. Sandy trudged up beside him and tried to mask a gasp as a particularly virulent cramp caught her. They'd been traveling single file—not because it was necessary; the Track was wide enough for two to walk abreast, though not with a lot of room to either side—but because of the psychology of the place: the subconscious desire to stay as close to the center of the only marker they had, yet likewise as far away from the walls, which, though they looked like striated stone might not be—and beyond which, she suspected, based on a couple of things Cal had told her, lurked nothing.

“Hell,” Brock spat again, under his breath.

“An apt choice of words, unfortunately,” Sandy agreed, surveying the landscape before them. It wasn't the rough-walled but arrow-straight tube canyon they'd had no choice but to follow, lo, those many…miles, if that word had relevance here. But that was as much good as she could think about their current situation.

Nope, it sure wasn't the canyon anymore—only because they had suddenly found themselves on the edge of a widening of the Track into a roughly circular depression maybe a hundred yards across. But at least it had the feel of
somewhere
to it, as opposed to the nowhere of the Tracks, and Sandy was pretty sure they'd reached the edge of another island World. Granted, it was hard to tell in the perpetual twilight, but there seemed to be a difference in the sky—though a check back showed nothing more certain than the pervasive gray-purple haze.