The Bone Tiki (17 page)

Kelly was writhing on the floor, trying to reach Mat. He stepped away from her, so as not to lose concentration.

His small pulse of power threaded unseen through the air, toward the chanting witch. He could feel the pressure of Donna’s chanting, and the swelling of the aura of the tiki as it prepared to release Wiri, but it was constrained by the fact that he, Mat, was the tiki’s wielder, not the witch. He could allow or refuse it to happen. But for now he let her pour more energy into the working, let her drain herself. Finally, when he saw her skin go slick and her hands tremble, he released the power in the tiki.

Donna cried out, a sighing, releasing exclamation almost sensual in its intensity, and she sagged against the desk. Wiri poured slowly from the tiki, a glow, a darkness, a solidifying shadow that painted itself on the air. He was in his feather cloak again, his eyes round and appalled. He flexed immediately to strike, but Donna was faster. She straightened, shrieking a torrent of guttural words. Cords of darkness leapt from the tiki, and wrapped about Wiri, catching his whistling taiaha, snagging his arms and legs. He toppled against the desk, crashing into it. Donna stood above him, her eyes triumphant, her face splitting into a leering, skull-like grin.

‘I’ve done it! I’ve done it!’

Mat struck. Not a blow—it wasn’t violent. It was an
infiltration.
The nail clippings—these discarded pieces of Donna Kyle—gave him a path into her mind, and just for a second, he was
inside
her. Even as he felt the nail clippings flare and consume themselves in his hand, he slid past the exultation and the malice, past fleeting memories of a murdered father and a poisonous mother, past a dark,
bestial creature that pinned her down in the darkness, to the spark of cold will. He slapped it, stunned it, and felt her howl in dread. Then the link was gone, and he staggered, drained and nauseous. His eyes flickered open.

Donna’s face had gone momentarily slack, her eyes glazed and her hands limp. Her head turned slowly toward Mat, a look of disbelief on her face, and then she was struggling to regain control. It took her only a second to become aware, but she was already too late.

The bonds of shadow fell from Wiri like a frayed spiderweb, and he swung the taiaha in a furious arc, bellowing a war cry. Donna’s arms came up to protect her face. The blade of the taiaha passed straight through the tiki to smash into her forearm, and break it with a hideous crack. She screamed and fell, sagging against the desk, fighting for balance. The tiki fell from limp fingers to clatter to the floor. She tried to rally even then, pain-glazed eyes searching the floor for the talisman, but a second blow smashed into the back of her head, slamming her forehead into the desk, and she slid limply to the floor.

As Mat ran around the desk, he heard the door crash open behind him. He looked up as Big-Nose burst in, a gun in his hand. Others were coming behind him, led by the red-bearded officer who had overseen their capture.

Wiri leapt the desk and soared to meet them, as Kelly rolled to one side.

Mat reached under the desk and grabbed the tiki. Donna’s face was bloodied, and blood was seeping through the hair at the back of her head. He had no idea whether she was
alive, and cared less. The tiki was warm in his hand, but cooling fast. He straightened to grab his koru knot, one eye on the fight at the door.

Wiri slammed the point of the taiaha into Big-Nose’s belly, then caught him with a fist under the chin as he doubled over, a blow that made the big man fly backward, arms spreading and legs buckling. Another man came through, levelling a musket. Wiri’s taiaha blurred and knocked the barrel upward even as it fired, and then he kicked the soldier in the stomach. Even as the soldier doubled over, the taiaha cracked down on the back of his head and the soldier flopped limply to the floor. Wiri ducked low, as Red-beard, who had been calling orders from the hall, finally stepped through, his sabre slashing at Wiri’s throat.

The fight was brief and lightning fast, the blows instinctive. Red-beard slashed twice, fierce slices that would have cut Wiri in two. He ducked the first, and parried the second on the taiaha. The sabre caught in the wooden shaft momentarily, just long enough for Wiri to wrench the taiaha’s pointed hilt around and spear the officer through the stomach. His eyes went round and flat like saucers, and he sagged backward against the door frame, a piteous moaning escaping his mouth. Mat gagged.

Wiri stepped away, jerking the taiaha from Red-beard’s wound, his face grim. He snatched up Kelly in one movement, slung her over his shoulder fireman-style. Mat looped the koru knot and tiki over his neck and grabbed Donna’s knife and sheath. Then he pulled open the desk drawers, and had just found a bunch of keys, when he heard
cars braking hard on the gravel outside, and flung open the curtain. Sleek black shapes slid to a stop on the driveway outside.

‘Puarata’s here!’ he yelled.

Two black BMWs disgorged muscular, dark-suited men. One looked up and saw him, pointing and yelling even as he drew a gun. Mat leapt away, and ran to the other window. His heart sank. The garden was filling with constabulary, the fiery torches they were waving giving their faces a ruddy, demonic glow. He jerked back and ran to join the others at the door, as a bullet shattered the first window and lodged in the wall.

‘Out the back!’ he yelled.

Wiri went first, carrying Kelly, who was struggling furiously. They ran down a corridor leading away from the front, to where it finished in a white door. Mat went last, and locked the heavy wooden door behind him. He shouted ‘Hello!’ along the corridor to his left as Wiri kicked open the white door and leapt through. Mat was about to follow when he heard a weak muffled call in reply. He tore along the corridor, even as windows smashed in the office. There was a door on the right, reinforced with metal, with a heavily barred peep-hole. He pulled it open—Manu and Spriggs were there, tied and gagged—Spriggs was unconscious but Manu was trying to yell around the gag. ‘Mnnhhh—gggrrn…’ His jaw worked frantically, his eyes bulging at the effort.

Mat looked at the bunch of keys, trying to see which would fit, when the door at the end of the corridor opened,
and a soldier stumbled through. Mat threw the keys into the cell then ran, yelping for Wiri.

He tore around the corner, the soldier right on his back. Wiri was in the corridor holding his patu—the space was too narrow for the taiaha—and Mat ducked and rolled through his friend’s legs. The soldier roared around the corner behind him and met the full force of Wiri’s fist—as his legs splayed forward his head flew back and he slammed into the floor, already out cold. Wiri wrung his fist in pain as he backed up. There was hammering at the office door.

The white door they had fled through wasn’t the back door, it led to a modern garage, with a gleaming red Toyota RAV4 four-wheel-drive. There was no other exit but the closed metal garage door. Mat whirled to snib the white door locked, then threw open the driver’s door, while Wiri tore at Kelly’s bonds.

‘There are no keys in the ignition,’ groaned Mat. Kelly pulled her hands free and tugged at her gag, while Wiri worked her feet free. She pulled it down to her chin, and yelled, ‘Don’t worry, I can start anything. Get my legs free, dammit!’ she screeched at Wiri. He tore the rope away and she leapt past Mat into the driver’s seat.

‘Nice wheels,’ snarled Kelly as she peered under the steering column. ‘Being a bitch obviously pays well.’

Mat suddenly remembered how the two BMWs had spun across the driveway, blocking all exit that way. Maybe there would be enough of a gap to get past? But what if they were still trapped?

‘Come on, Mat, get in!’ yelled Kelly, as Wiri ran around
to the passenger side. Kelly was bent under the steering wheel, pulling and fiddling with the wires to the ignition. Mat pushed a box against the door, when suddenly a musket ball blasted through the thin door and pinged off the four-wheel-drive. He yelped and backed toward the vehicle, his mind racing. Kelly swore at something, then sat back and pumped her right foot, twisting at the ignition with her right hand. The engine coughed, then roared to life, making the vehicle shudder powerfully.

‘Come on, get in!’ yelled Kelly, as she gunned the engine.

Mat stared at the four-wheel-drive, consumed with a new thought.

I could—

‘Come on!’ Kelly screamed. Wiri was already around at the passenger door, looking across at Mat, his anxiety plain.

Mat threw open the door to the back seat, and leapt in, but his mind was racing ahead. He pulled his door shut, even as he gripped Donna’s knife and pulled it out.

Kelly revved the engine, while she sought the remote control to the garage door. Something slammed against the house door and it rattled, but the box held it shut. Mat opened the palm of his left hand, and slashed it with the knife, yelling as he did so. Wiri looked back at him anxiously. The garage door began to tilt upward. The engine roared. Voices shouted from the house. One sounded familiar, but he blocked that thought out, concentrating on what he was trying to do.

Mat grabbed at the pendants about his neck with his right hand while smearing blood onto the car seat with his left.

He felt the power he wanted surge from the talisman in his right hand, rush through his chest and out the other arm, to gush from the wound in his left hand. Blood stained the seat but he didn’t see it—what he saw was light. Power. Energy. It poured out of him, and flowed through the vehicle even as it began to roll forward, even as the gears worked, as Kelly cursed, and Wiri called to him. He threw his mind back, to the sensations he’d felt at Taupo, at the river when the coming of the taniwha had ripped a hole in reality and he’d fallen through, into Aotearoa. He reached for the essence of Aotearoa, his memories of the look of the sky, and the smell of the ferns and the earth, and the taste of the kumara, and the singing of the people of Maungatautari pa. He called wordlessly, inside his mind. And it heard him—he reached for it, and it pulled him, and he pulled at it, and suddenly he felt a burning incandescent connection, and he knew they were
there…now.

The RAV4 roared from the garage, and Kelly spun the wheel to follow the driveway right, realising too late she was accelerating straight into the two BMWs strung across the driveway. She opened her mouth to scream, even as Mat opened his eyes and sagged backward, completely drained, and incredibly peaceful.

Men with guns leapt aside, and trained their weapons, when suddenly they froze, and stared…and then they were gone, and Kelly cried in shock as the two BMWs vanished, replaced by a small row of constabulary with muskets and sabres, who dived aside as the RAV4 roared through them, and out onto the dirt road.

Wiri whooped joyously, as Kelly fought the wheel, and they roared down a darkened road toward the colonial city of mythic Auckland, and their enemies fell behind them, scattered across two worlds.

Mat smiled in satisfaction, and looked cautiously down at his hands. The left fell open, to reveal a scar that looked clean and already old, as though seared close by the heat of the energy that had flowed through it. He opened his right hand, and felt a momentary twinge of surprise.

He had expected it would have been the tiki he gripped, but it wasn’t. It was his koru knot. It looked dark and felt very cold, as if the blood has somehow seeped into it. He held it up and switched on the cab light to examine it and whistled softly. It was his koru knot, but it had changed.

It was no longer wood. It had become greenstone.

W
hat happened back there?’ asked Kelly, as she drove a winding dirt road through the hills west of Auckland. The city was well behind them, as was the panic they’d caused by blazing through the streets in a loud, monstrous gleaming metal vehicle. Mat vividly recalled glimpses of wide-mouthed faces, and panicked horses dragging carriages into collisions with market stalls and hitching rails and wagons. He hoped no one had been seriously hurt. At one point mounted men with pistols had galloped after them, but they’d been left far behind.

The downside of being on this side of the two worlds was that there was no harbour bridge. They had been forced to drive out west, and circle north, to travel around the inner edge of the Waitemata Harbour. The roads weren’t too bad, but they kept coming upon surprised travellers on carriages
and horses who pulled aside in alarm and disbelief as they roared past. ‘Fortunately,’ commented Kelly at one point, ‘we’re in ‘mythville’, and they can’t radio ahead to set up road-blocks.’

Mat wondered whether Puarata could do something very like that. One thing was certain: Puarata could travel faster on the sealed roads of the real world than they could here, on the dirt roads of Aotearoa.

‘Mat,’ said Wiri next morning. ‘You still haven’t told us about last night. How did you move the whole vehicle from one world to the next?’

Mat lay back sleepily. They had driven for two hours before tiredness and poor roads had forced them to pull over and sleep. It wasn’t because the four-wheel-drive couldn’t handle the roads, but the signposting was so bad they kept getting lost, until Wiri suggested they try again in better light. Before they slept, Mat had told them he’d seen Timothy Spriggs and Manu, captive but alive, and tossed them the keys. This news had cheered them all up, though it was by no means certain their friends could have escaped. It was dawn now—he looked at his watch and saw that it had stopped some time earlier. He had no idea what day it was, and only a vague impression of time. The night’s sleep had been good, though. Even cramped into the backseat of the RAV4, Mat had slept like a log, he was so drained. He was hungry now, seriously hungry, as his dad would say. ‘If you feed me I’ll tell you,’ he said groggily.

Wiri laughed. ‘Fair enough—Kel, can you pull into the next farmhouse we see?’

Kelly looked at him, frowning. ‘Is that wise?’

‘Wiser than starving,’ replied Wiri.

Kelly nodded reluctantly. ‘OK. If you say so.’ A few minutes later, she pulled off, and took the car up a long driveway to a large wooden farmhouse.

Farm dogs came rushing out, barking furiously, as they purred into the yard. The horse hitched there rolled its eyes and shied away, and chickens scattered. The rough shed to the side of the house had so much machinery it spilled out into the yard—all of it looking like exhibits Mat had seen in museums, but none of it rusty and old like the museum pieces. Another reminder that the world they were travelling in wasn’t static, but fluid, and alive. He recognised a butter churn and a horse-drawn plough, both gleaming and new. Some sort of pre-electric washing machine was on the porch with pieces scattered about, as though they had interrupted its repair.

As they stepped from the vehicle, a voice rang out over the barking dogs. ‘Don’t move! Don’t move or I’ll shoot!’ The voice came from a man in rough cotton overalls, standing at the door. He cradled a musket in his hands. An array of young faces lined the windows, staring curiously.

Wiri raised a hand, and smiled. ‘Kia-ora. May we stop here and buy some food?’

‘Not until you tell me what on earth that thing you’re riding in is,’ called the farmer.

‘It’s a four-wheel-drive,’ replied Wiri. ‘From Auckland.’

The farmer considered that a moment. ‘From Auckland, you say?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Ahhh…no telling what they’ll come up with next, is there?’

He lowered his gun, and studied them. ‘You look as if you’ve all been dragged backward through the blackberry. If someone had asked me, I’d have said you were up to no good.’

Wiri shrugged apologetically. ‘We’ve had a run in with some unpleasant people, and are now planning to leave them far behind. But we find ourselves without food or water. We would not expect to come inside, and we would pay well.’

‘Would you just? Well, this is a good place this, and we’re hospitable folk, but I’d need to know a bit about you before I let you into my house. Who are you, and where are you from?’

Wiri nodded. ‘That’s fair enough. My name is Wiri, of the Ngati Tautari of the Waikato.’

The farmer nodded. ‘Winston Bailey. From round here. I own pretty much all the flat land you can see.’

Mat glanced around. They were on a slight rise, and he could see a lot of countryside.

Wiri indicated Kelly and Mat. ‘This is Kelly, and Mat. They’re from the Hawke’s Bay, around Napier.’

Bailey’s eyes narrowed a little. ‘You’re a long way from home, all of you. What brings you up this way?’

‘We’re travelling north,’ replied Wiri.

‘North, is it? Tell me about these people who’re after you.’

Wiri told him briefly that they’d been attacked by thieves. The farmer might talk slowly, but he was no fool and asked a lot of questions, always seeking names, and nodding when he got one. Finally he leaned his gun against the door, and stepped down, offering a hand to Wiri.

‘So, you know Tim Spriggs, do you? Good man, that, for a Londoner. He was posted up here last year—made a pretty good impression. If you know Tim, that’s good enough for me. You can call me Win.’

A troop of children and young adults burst from the house to examine the newcomers and their strange vehicle. ‘Some new-fangled thing from Auckland,’ Win explained, and the elder ones nodded. It seemed that Auckland held some mythic place in their mind as a source of all things weird and wonderful.

Win’s wife appeared, took one look at Kelly, and practically dragged her inside.

‘Totally indecent,’ she declared. ‘Your petticoat is showing, dearie, and oh, look at that tear! And what on earth have they done to your hair?’

Mat began to laugh, until she looked at him. ‘And you, dear! What a mess. You can come too!’

They were washed, fed and darned back into a semblance of order, though Win’s wife, whose name was Clara, despaired of Kelly’s short-cropped ginger spikes.

‘That’s awful, dearie,’ she said. ‘Fancy them cutting your hair off. Probably to make some fancy wig for an Auckland
belle,’ she sniffed, while Mat smirked at Kelly.

Kelly’s dress proved beyond repair, so she was offered a new one, but instead demanded men’s clothing, to Clara’s horror. Eventually she threw up her hands. ‘What young women want these days is beyond me!’ she declared, and flapped out, muttering.

The children—there were seven—climbed all over the RAV4, and the dogs leapt all over it too, as though claiming it for themselves. Kelly looked sadly out the window, and Mat knew she was wondering where Fitzy was. It was still hard to think of the turehu as being other than the faithful dog who had befriended them. Either way, the little goblin was their friend, and part of their group.

A breakfast of eggs and bacon and fried onions, served with buttered griddle cakes and mugs of milk, filled their bellies. Win Bailey wouldn’t hear of being paid.

‘We’ve more than enough. You keep your money, and just remember to give my regards to Tim Spriggs when you see him.’

They drove away several hours later, waving cheery goodbyes, as the seven children stared after them. The dogs followed them to the gate, yelping happily. They saw Win Bailey wave from his porch, and then turn away, rubbing the back of his neck, his mind no doubt already switching to his tasks for the day. They drove north through some of the earliest European-settled land in Aotearoa. As such, it was initially more tamed than the Waikato, with large established wooden manors,
stone fences and old churches. The roads were busy, and everyone stared as the RAV4 rolled past. Kelly took care to go slowly past the horses, so as not to panic them. Twice they were caught in the midst of herds of cattle being moved on the roads, herded by horsemen and yapping farm dogs. The cows watched their vehicle as placidly as they watched anything else.

At one point Kelly fiddled with the stereo, and to their utter amazement, picked up a radio broadcast. It was Aunt Daisy, a famous radio personality Mat could remember his father talking about, who’d been big in the fifties. So they listened to good-natured discussions of household tips, bargains and recipes for an hour or so, before the hills closed in and they lost reception.

‘This place is weird,’ commented Mat. ‘One moment we’re in a village from pre-European times, then we’re in 1860s Auckland, then somewhere in the early 1900s, and now we’ve got radio. Freaky as.’

Wiri shrugged. ‘This is a land of myth—recent legends as well as ancient—you have to be ready for anything!’

Their only concern was petrol. The tank had been just over half-full leaving Auckland, and by midday it was nearly empty. Kelly wondered out loud where they could get more. Wiri turned back to Mat.

‘Which brings us back to the question of how we got here in the first place. You ready to tell us yet, brother?’

Mat scratched his cheek. ‘OK. I’m just not sure, that’s all. It’s hard to describe. I tried to use my imagination to kind
of
tune in
to this jeep thing in the same way I get you in and out of the tiki, and when I did that controlling stuff on you at the marae. That’s what I did to Donna, using some of her fingernail clippings I found in the bathroom.’

‘I remember reading about witchcraft during my brief goth phase,’ said Kelly. ‘They reckon witches use hair and nail clippings to do magic.’

‘Guess it must be true, then,’ Mat said. ‘Anyway, when we got to the RAV, I realised we were going to be trapped, unless we got back to Aotearoa, so I thought if I tried to…ummm…tune into the jeep, then push it into Aotearoa, we’d go with it, and end up with an advantage.’ He spread his hands. ‘And we did.’

Wiri and Kelly looked at each other and shook their heads. ‘You’re way out there, Mat,’ said Kelly. ‘You scare me.’

Wiri looked at him thoughtfully.

‘Hey, I’m still me,’ said Mat. ‘It was just an idea that worked.’

Wiri looked at him for a long time, so long that Mat felt uncomfortable, then winked. ‘Well done. You surprise us, all the time. Do you think you can do it again?’

‘Yeah. I mean, I think so. It just kind of knocks me out, that’s all. I feel really zonked afterwards.’

‘Well, if we want more petrol, we’re going to have to get back to the real world soon,’ commented Kelly.

They drove in silence a while.

‘I hope Fitzy is OK,’ Mat said finally. ‘And Manu, and the Captain.’

Wiri let out a slow breath. ‘So do I. Manu has a knack
for getting out of scrapes. And I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything serious to the Captain. Too hard to cover up.’ He put a hand on Kelly’s shoulder. ‘And I’m sure Fitzy is OK. That little fella is harder to kill than a cockroach.’

She leant her cheek on his hand momentarily, but didn’t reply.

The second transition, back to the ‘real world’ (though one seemed as real as the other now), was no easier for Mat. In fact, it took longer, and was more difficult, as he struggled to visualise his own world. Finally, it was the koru knot itself that triggered the change—he pictured it slowly changing from greenstone to wood—and when he opened his eyes, dizzy from the loss of vitality that performing this ‘magic’ demanded, he was dazed but unsurprised to be looking at a tarseal road. The road was empty, and the paddocks alongside, though in farther fields he could see flocks of dirty white sheep. He looked down at the koru knot. It was still greenstone, despite the change in worlds. He remembered that pounamu was considered powerful by Maori, and felt a tremor inside.

A nearby signpost proclaimed they were 12 kilometres south of Wellsford. They found a service station on the south side of the town. Wiri, in his eye-catching feather cloak, was left in the RAV4 as Mat poured the petrol, while Kelly bought a pile of biscuits, chips, Coke and chocolate. Mat managed the
shift
back to Aotearoa, but two such shifts proved too much and he fell asleep almost immediately.

When he woke, it was night time. The sun was down, and the only light was the dashboard. He had woken to the sound of sobbing, and opened his eyes, blinking. Wiri and Kelly were holding each other, the girl’s head and shoulders shaking. Wiri was murmuring something. Mat contemplated going back to sleep, but his stomach was rumbling. So he yawned loudly, and stretched instead. The two young people pulled slowly apart. Kelly didn’t look back, but rummaged for tissues in the glovebox.

‘Hey, brother. You OK?’

‘Sure. Just hungry. Where are we?’

‘Good question. I’ll show you on the map, after we’ve had something to eat.’ He handed backward some Coke, and a packet of chips.

They all ate, then turned on the cab light, and Wiri pulled a road map from the glovebox.

‘We’re just south of Kaitaia,’ he said, pointing at the map. ‘Look, just here. From Kaitaia north, the land becomes very narrow, only a few kilometres wide, and only one road north. It’s narrow and winding, even on the real world side. Here, in Aotearoa, it is very difficult. We can do it better than most, in this vehicle, but a simple road-block could stop us. One way would be to just drive up openly, in the real world, and trust that Puarata can’t touch us in front of witnesses.’

Mat shifted nervously.

‘But,’ continued Wiri, ‘if he really wants to stop us, witnesses won’t put him off. He can escape into Aotearoa as easily as we can. And he might even have asked for police assistance, claiming that the so-called missing boy from
Napier has been spotted. By the time the police have slowed us down, he could arrive and take over the situation.’

Kelly rubbed her eyes. ‘So, what do we do?’

Wiri smiled at them. ‘Well, there is a highway that’s used every day, that bypasses the main road, for most of the journey. Here!’ He jabbed his finger at the map. ‘Ninety Mile Beach. It goes all the way along the west side of the narrows, all the way to here, opposite to Te Kao. If we go that way, we can cut inward, and hit the road again—hopefully behind Puarata’s watchers.’