Stoneskin's Revenge (26 page)

Calvin gaped incredulously. “It was you! You've been
blocking the Barriers Between! No wonder I couldn't get in touch with Uki!”

“Silence!” Spearfinger hissed. “I will leave you here for a while, Edahi, to think on things, and to fear. It will make your liver oh-so-toothsome!”

“Is that what you did to that little girl, too?” Calvin spat. “Did you make her cry, make her beg, fill
her
with fear before you killed her?”

“It would have spoiled
her
,”
Spearfinger chuckled. “It is a warrior's flesh that fear seasons best.”

She hunched around until she was at Calvin's right side, then squatted and ran a hand along the arrow he still gripped ineffectually. Then with great delicacy, she slipped the finger into the waistband of his jeans.

He closed his eyes at that, gulped, fearing to be emasculated before he died.

But Spearfinger was a true expert at her craft: she simply hooked the stony nail a fraction and yanked upward, ripping Calvin's wolf-mask T-shirt open to his neckband, and laying his belly bare. A further series of deft flips and yanks, and she had exposed his entire right side.

Calvin gritted his teeth and waited, but the expected pain did not come. Instead, there came a gentle prickling along his ribs, and he realized that Spearfinger was simply drawing the nail of the terrible finger gently along his flesh, so precisely, so carefully, that it sent chills and shivers stampeding across Calvin's body. He could feel goose bumps forming, and tried to twist away, but still Spearfinger continued stroking him. It was torture, that's what it was: she was toying with him, playing his body like an instrument, making it feel tickle and itch and pain and even a pleasure that was almost sexual, all at once.

And then she stopped, rose, and stared back down at him. “The next time I examine your liver, it will be as bare as the flesh I have just caressed above it,” she cackled. “I must go now, and finish my poppet so that I can send it to find your friend.”

“No!” Calvin groaned, and wished instantly that he had remained silent.

“Yes, Edahi,” Spearfinger croaked offhandedly, “you are correct: I do not know where he is. But wherever Yellow-Hair goes, there will be earth and stone close beneath him, and wherever they are, I can follow. My man of stone can follow too, and much more quickly, for while I can swim in stone, he
is
stone.”

“One question,” Calvin cried desperately. “You've said you want me to die in knowledge, not in ignorance: why livers? And why pick on Don and his folks? You say you don't want attention paid to Galunlati, yet by killing an entire family, you're raisin' suspicions that make that even more likely to happen.”

“No, I make them suspect
you
!”
Spearfinger cackled back. “I am more wise about this World than you imagine. And when they find you with your liver gnawed and your knife in your hand where you have carved it out and feasted on it, they will think you have gone mad with remorse. There will be no more questions.” She paused then. “As to why livers? Why is it that some beasts live on fruit and others flesh, and cannot exist either on the other? But I grow hungry once more—perhaps it is time I sampled the boy.”

“Bitch!” Calvin shouted helplessly.

But Spearfinger was through paying him any need. She turned and shuffled back to the clearing, where she resumed to work on her statue. All the while Calvin lay prisoned, bound by stone around both legs and arms.

*

How long he lay in helpless fury, he didn't know, for Spearfinger had started up that damned song again, and with it came a resumption of the thrumming. Calvin knew what it was now; he had no choice
but
to see: it was the Stoneskin keeping rhythm with her feet upon the earth while she worked her craft. Every pat resonated through the ground like an immense, ancient drum.

And then, abruptly, the song and the thrumming stopped. Spearfinger stepped back from her handiwork and admired it critically. She muttered a word that Calvin did not catch, and then to his utter amazement, simply melted into the ground in front of the statue, whereupon the thrumming started up again with renewed vigor, but in a subtly different form—like sound heard under water, not in air. For its part, the manikin turned an exact stone-and-pebble copy of David Sullivan's face toward him, grinned wickedly, then spun about and started walking north. But, Calvin realized, it was also slowly sinking into the earth, which produced a softer thrumming of its own. Unbidden, the lines from the Book of Job came to him: “Going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.” He also remembered who it was that had said them.

Chapter XVIII: Sweating Bullets

Calvin lay flat on his back on the dully thrumming slab of ensorcelled stone—still struggling against his rocky shackles, though there seemed nothing he could do to free himself. He was therefore also trying—with little success, because the damned vibrations made him muddle-headed—to remember his death song.

He had started it long ago in the comfort of his grandfather's cozy cabin up near Qualla, still remembered that gloomy December day he had begun:

“You should always be ready,” the old man had told his twelve-year-old grandson, puffing on one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. “You are a man now. Already you take life from the world in the creatures you hunt, but now you can give life as well, and that is a wondrous thing. But do not become so proud that you forget Life's twin: the Black Man of the West, Lord of Tsusginai, the Ghost Country in Usunhiyi. Him you will meet when you least expect it, and when you do, you should know the words to say: your name, the tale of your life, the things you have accomplished, and the people you have affected. Know them all, commit them to memory, for the Black Man may not give you time to sing them all with your tongue, maybe not even the first word. But by thinking on it, you
have
sung it. Beware, though, for the Black Man will not be fooled.”

More than a little frightened by this, Calvin had commenced immediately, scrawling clumsy iambic pentameter couplets into his junior-high notebooks and committing them to memory over the next several days. It had grown over the years, spread and branched like a tree: separate songs for each unique occasion, and not always with the same rhyme or meter, for as he became more musically sophisticated, there came ballads, laments, lyrics—even rock and country and jazz—and lately he'd been adding to it something he called the “Werepossum Blues,” which detailed the adventures of Dave Sullivan and Calvin's increasingly important role within them.

But that came late in the opera, and looked like it might be the concluding aria.

Just now, he was having trouble remembering how the damned thing
started.

That frigging, persistent
thrumming
kept getting in the way—coupled with Spearfinger's song, which he could no longer hear with his ears, but which still seeped up through the ground to dull his brain. It was really hypnotic, too, and for an instant before he realized he was doing it, Calvin had begun affixing words to match the beat:

…
deep shit…deep shit…deep shit…

He tried to resist, tried to think clearly, but could not…
Uwe…lana…tsiku…su sa…sai……deep shit…deep shit…deep shit…deep shit…deep shit…

And then the rhythm shifted slightly. Calvin puzzled over that a moment, even as the stone's grip finally ceased growing tighter. The beat had become more halting, which meant—if Calvin was correct in his half-formed theory that the drumming was either Spearfinger drawing on the Power of the earth or sending her Power through it in the rhythm of her steps—that the ogress had resumed an even more halting pace. More interestingly, though, the beat had become distinctly bluesy, so that before he was quite aware of it, Calvin found he was softly humming the “Werepossum Blues.”

“Oh Lord, my name is Calvin, an' Indian blood run through my veins.

Yeah, my name is Calvin Fargo, an' Cherokee blood be pulsin' in my veins.

I've had some wild adventures; seen an awful lot o' wond'rous things…”

He had just commenced the second verse when something clicked inside his head.

Werepossum!

Lord, he'd been a fool. The solution was no farther away than the uktena scale. With that he could shift to a smaller form and escape—presuming the stone shackles didn't change with him to accommodate. They seemed to have pretty well solidified now, appeared to be holding him rather passively, not with the active grip they had maintained when the song began.

The thrumming had ended, too; had just sort of tapered off without his noticing it. Maybe that meant—troubling thought—that Spearfinger had reached her destination. Or perhaps she'd simply passed out of range. Certainly his head was clearer now.

So he could escape after all—if he could somehow activate the blessed scale. Where was it, anyway? It should have been on its rawhide thong around his throat, but then Spearfinger would have noticed it when she'd laid his torso bare—but no, when he strained his head up to check (yanking at his hair, for the rock had ensnared a good part of it), he felt the scale poke him in the left armpit.

Trouble was, there was no way to
activate
it. He tried twisting his arm and body and shoulder around within the narrow bounds of his confinement, but that only rubbed his skin raw. He could not reach his knife, nor twitch the arrow he still held enough to bring blood from its point, at least not where it could reach the scale.

That left the technique he had used before: biting himself until he bled. It had worked, after a fashion, though
he hated the thought of doing it again because, like everything else involved in shapeshifting, it seemed to require a lot of pain. One thing, though, it would not be his tongue this time. No way!

Steeling himself, he closed his eyes and curled his lower lip over between his incisors, then concentrated, striving to fix on his teeth, not the damp flesh between them, as he bit down. His lip resisted like an alien, living thing; writhing and twisting as the pain increased, and once it hurt so much that he gasped and it slipped him entirely.

He started over.

Harder and harder, and he had to force himself to continue. He felt like a fox he had once found. It had come limping into his grandfather's yard on three legs, dirty and emaciated and still bleeding from the stump of its right forepaw. Grandfather had cared for it, but it had died soon after. It was more than a week later that Calvin, on one of his rambles, had found a trap containing the gnawed-off foot of that same fox.

And now he was gnawing his lip for much the same reason. Succeeding too, finally, for he could taste blood. He strained his head forward as much as he could, tilted it, half-blew, half-spat between his teeth. Could feel something warm trickling down his chin and onto his throat—and stopping there.

Seeking to augment the flow, he bit harder—and was rewarded with a slight increase, but still not enough.

He wiggled his torso and jerked his head, trying to urge the recalcitrant blood to flow into the hollow of his arm. If he could just get the transformation started, he thought he could manage.

But it wasn't working! He wasn't situated in a way that allowed him to feed the talisman enough blood.

Calvin ground down even harder, and pain beyond belief shot through his lip. He felt it trying to free itself, but that only added to the agony that engulfed it from inside and outside alike.

Another, stronger gush of blood, and Calvin spat again, then choked and gagged as too much ran down the wrong way.

Another bite, sliding his teeth back and forth now, gnawing away—

And cutting through! He could feel a section of his lip flop down against his chin, almost bereft of feeling. The very concept made him retch, forcing him up against his bindings as blood fountained across his chest, slid down his throat—and, thank God, ran in a steady stream down his chin, across his neck, and into the hollow of his left arm where the scale lay. He waited until a sticky warmth accumulated there, and began to concentrate:

'Possum, 'possum, 'possum…

'Possum was what he would become, because it was small enough and he had been a 'possum, and thought he could handle a smaller form if it were one he had worn before. He had to fight, though, had to resist the nausea that threatened to overcome him, the agony of his wounded lip, the distancing from his
self
that signaled the
change
about to begin. What was 'possum? Small, furry, furtive; pointy nose, beady eyes, long naked tail, and paws like tiny hands.

The
change
hit him all at once, not gradually like before, and he had to make a conscious effort to maintain control as alien instincts once more invaded his mind and took up lodging there. But the rock was loosening as his body shrank away from it. In seconds he could slide his left hand free, and when he did, he clasped it around the scale and let the points sink in.

That speeded things and smoothed them out. He took a deep breath and let the
change
proceed, keeping his mind firmly locked on self-awareness as he felt his joints shift, the twitch at the base of his spine that was his tail making its presence known, the strange pulls and tensions, the sudden loosening of clothes as his body altered and they did not.