The Lost Tohunga (3 page)

She smiled sadly, then reached over and pulled out his necklace. It was a greenstone pendant on a string cord. Really, it was two pendants, a Maori koru and an Irish knot, designed to fit together. He had carved them himself, from kauri, but in Aotearoa they had been transformed into pounamu, or greenstone. He had intended them as gifts for his parents, but they had seen the two pieces as implying they would be reconciling, so he had ended up with both the pendants after all. Maybe it was meant to be that way. It wasn't a bad thing — together, they seemed to augment his abilities. Another pendant hung beside the koru–knot now: a tear-shaped piece of jade. The tear of a taniwha: Lena's tear. It was cold and strange to touch.

‘I suppose you'll be going off to see that Jones fella as usual, then?' Mum asked, in disapproving tones.

‘Sure. He's expecting me.'

He watched her bite her lip, trying to find a reason for him not to go. Finally, she gave it up. ‘Well, best you go then, so you can be back in time for dinner. But you tell him from me that he's to cut you some slack. It's trying to live up to what he wants that's setting you apart from your friends. A boy has to have some fun, too. You tell him that.'

 

Mat left Mum and walked southeast along a muddy little shoreline path leading away from town. To his left, the holiday homes were coming alive as their families arrived. To his right, the dark shape of the log flowed through the water, closer and
closer. He glanced over his shoulder to check he was alone, stopped and then drew out his koru–knot pendant.

He closed his eyes, and shut out the smells of the lake, the distant traffic, and the chill touch of the wind. Inside himself he could feel a thin coil of verdant fire. He grasped it, visualized Aotearoa, the Ghost World that existed parallel to the real world, the place where legends lived and the dead went. It took seconds, as energy surged then left him shaking and perspiring. He opened his eyes, and looked about. The time-shares had vanished, replaced by verdant forest. The town had been replaced by a Maori pa and a collection of colonial houses. He exhaled with satisfaction, and then the lake boiled about his feet, and with a rush, a massive water-serpent towered over him, its teeth bared.

‘Kia ora, Horomatangi!' he shouted, as a wave washed over his knees and made him stagger.

The taniwha hissed, and its fishy breath hit Mat like a cold blast of steam. Massive filmy eyes took turns at regarding him as the serpent turned its head first one way then the other. Lake weed slid from its oily black flanks, and clung to the twisted folds and ridges of its massive skull. If a mythical dragon had mated with a massive eel, it might have resulted in this creature. But it was far more than a big fish. This was the lake-god, and the world seemed to bend around it. Mat could feel throbbing skeins of power that emanated from it. It was both in and of the water, bound to both worlds at once.

Horomatangi lowered its head back into the water, half-submerged, one huge opalescent eye watching him. Its tongue flickered out. On it was a stone the size of a compact disc, grey slate washed smooth by the waters of the lake, presented
as a gift. Mat reached cautiously into the taniwha's mouth, between fangs the size of his hands, and took the stone. In the great reflecting eye, he saw an image flicker of Jones, and he nodded. Then a pulse of energy made him gasp, and the pale disc of stone seemed to fizz with light. Further images formed. A blonde woman with a scarred face and a tattooed chin: Donna Kyle! His heart beat faster. More images followed. A hollow-eyed tramp limping down a gravel road. A shape like a woman, composed entirely of birds. A giant pounamu stone that pulsed like a heartbeat. Then darkness. His vision cleared, and he stared up at the taniwha.

Horomatangi reared again, towering above him, then swirled away into the depths with a mighty crash of water. Mat barely kept his footing, his clothes were sodden. He stared after the taniwha, hoping for more, but it was gone. He was left wet and shivering. He slopped back to the shoreline and sat on a tree stump, shivering.

The face of the blonde woman still haunted his dreams. Donna Kyle, Puarata's former apprentice. The last time he had seen her was an instant before the waters had swept him away in Waikaremoana. He had hoped she had drowned, but her sneering, cold-eyed face never left his nightmares. Why did she feature in the taniwha's message?

Standing, he began to run down the trail. Under the pallid sky, if seen out of the corner of the eye, the sun seemed to be a huge carved face — only the most obvious sign that he was in another world. He reached an old jetty, then turned up a short path through bush that thrummed with insects and birdsong, to an old wood cabin that lurked among towering kauri trees.

‘Jones! Jones!'

An old man stepped from the front door, a bony figure with lank, grey hair and rough white stubble. He wore faded brown cotton pants of the sort worn by colonial settlers, and his checked shirt was stained and threadbare. A grin adorned a leathery face that had something of a wolf about it.

‘Mat! About time!' Aethlyn Jones strode down the path and hugged Mat, his warm embrace reeking of pipe smoke. He still spoke with a Welsh burr, despite having left Wales two hundred years before, fleeing a Church-led purge of the remnants of druidism and witchcraft. Eventually, he had settled in Aotearoa. Since New Year, Mat had become ‘wizard's apprentice' to the old man. Which was fine, because he liked Jones hugely, whatever Mum thought.

‘Let's be lookin' at ye, laddie,' Jones said, holding him out at arm's length. ‘You smell like a swamp and you're wet through. What on earth have you been doing?'

Mat held up the stone disc. ‘I saw Horomatangi! He gave me this, for you!'

Jones raised an eyebrow. ‘Well then, best I have a look.'

One year ago …

Parukau

I
n the seconds after Puarata fell at Cape Reinga, a dog on a dirt road near Hawera, far to the south, jerked to its feet and barked furiously. It was a bony, feverish creature with diseased yellow eyes, and belonged, if that was the right word, to Old Mac, a tramp steeped in his own filth. They had been together for seven years, and sometimes the old wanderer puzzled over how the dog still breathed. It smelt like week-dead road kill. Bare patches festered on its hide, it walked like a drunken sailor, and there was nothing healthy about it. Or its appetite — it ate carrion, bugs and whatever it could scavenge.

‘Lil' bugger won't last a week,' Old Mac remembered thinking as he had kicked it away from his pack, all those years ago. But it had hung around, begging scraps, and he had been lonely. He had never even named the vile mutt. But they were well matched. Old Mac was no whitewashed saint. He had gone bush after attacking a nun in Levin back in '83. By the time the case had gone cold, he had forgotten how to live in the normal world.

The barking woke Mac, confused and bleary-eyed from the rot-gut he had been swilling. They were beneath a stand of pine, amidst the sheep shit but out of the rain. ‘Shut up, ya mangy bugger!'

The dog turned and growled. Something flickered in its eye that had never been there before. Before Mac could move, the dog leapt on him, both forepaws on his chest. A weight like a boulder crushed him, emptying his lungs. ‘Get off me! Ya feckin' … ugh … get off.' His voice changed from threat to choking plea as the dog's weight intensified. Its eyes seemed to grow. Mac went rigid with fright as a spiral of unlight poured from the dog's mouth and coiled like a snake, a serpent made of smoke which poured into his mouth, choking his final words. He couldn't speak, not even to beg. He tried, though. He writhed and twisted, but the dreadful thing on his chest neither moved nor relented. His heart hammered like an overstressed engine, until the world fell away.

 

The tramp sat up and stared at the dog lying cold and dead beside him. Although the tramp wasn't Old Mac any more: he was Parukau. Parukau, first among Puarata's servants, before the tohunga had imprisoned him in the body of that filthy mutt.

But I'm free now … Puarata must be dead …

Puarata dead! He could taste it! He was free! ‘FREE!' he shouted aloud, his first words in over a century. He shouted for sheer joy, half his outpourings mere barking and gibberish, but he didn't care.

An hour later he was hobbling down an eastward road.
Puarata's fortress was in the Ureweras, and there was a very special place there, known to only one other being: himself — Parukau! A secret place they had made together, that they called Te Iho, ‘The Heart'. It was where the true power lay.

I'll be damned if I let someone else gain control of it. Quite literally damned.

Kurangaituku

When Puarata fell from the bluff at Cape Reinga, birds rose from the trees and streamed south, shrieking the news. Deep in the bush near Hamilton, hundreds of sparrows, pigeons, starlings, magpies, water birds, gulls, all manner of birds, began to swirl madly together, swarming like insects. They spun in tighter and tighter knots, blending in a blur until an observer would have sworn they were trying to form a shape: a blurred outline amidst the sight-defying movement appeared vaguely human.

The birds flew closer still, their wings beating against each other, fouling each other's flight, sending feathers flying as blood spattered the ground. Still they meshed closer, their calls deafening, until suddenly they turned inwards and with a sickening crunch collided, ramming into each other, breaking spines, rending bodies, shattering each other. The bloody mess collapsed in a heap of feathered, quivering, red-stained flesh.

The mass of dead and dying seemed to dissolve, their last calls growing plaintive and thinner as each succumbed, and then the whole ghastly heap was still. It remained so for some minutes, as red fluids fed the roots of the trees. Then it quivered.

Gently shaking, and then more violently, the ghastly pile bulged from movement deep within. The top corpses slid to the ground with wet little thuds. Something was beneath, struggling to rise through the deathly debris. Then a skeletal arm broke through, brittle-looking, tendons glistening, downy feathers sticking to bone. A head emerged, somewhere between human and bird, with a long beak sticky with gore. The pile of debris deflated as this new thing stood, and raised its arms. Brown skin formed slowly to cover the sinew and flesh. Bluish veins pulsed. Grey hair sprouted from the skull, and fatty globules formed buttocks and breasts. It was female, muscular and athletic, with the strength to power through the air, although the bird-like face, whose nose and chin almost touched, was aged and gaunt. She stretched and sighed, dreaming new dreams of freedom.

A tui called from the trees. She answered in a lilting voice, wordless, everything conveyed in the pitch and tone. She let the tui alight on her hand. She was Kurangaituku, the Birdwitch. The tui paid her homage and brought her news.

Puarata was dead
, it sung. She had suspected this, sensing the release of bonds that bound her, compelling her service. She closed her eyes, opening her mind to her children, whose eyes were everywhere. She focused on the north, witnessing the aftermath of Puarata's fall. She recognized Wiremu, the tohunga's warrior-slave, now also free, it seemed. She noted the face of the half-caste boy who had stolen the tiki. Puarata had commanded her to find the boy for him, but she had failed him. She didn't regret that, now.

She turned and looked southeast. To the Ureweras, where his lair lay unclaimed.

I must get there first. I must be the next power in the land, the one who inherits his mantle.

I refuse to serve another Puarata.

Donna Kyle

Donna Kyle was dreaming of a time before it all began. It was a dream she often had, of a porcelain doll in a yellowed christening gown. Sunlight was shafting through curtains, and men were singing as they staggered home drunk down Ponsonby Road. The six o'clock swill. Footsteps crunched down the gravel path and she wondered who it could be …

Daughter!

The dry voice in her head made her flinch, and her eyes sprang open.
That voice! Surely not …

‘What's happening?' she murmured aloud to the empty room.

Get up, Donna! Puarata is dead! They're coming for you now!

Father's voice? Impossible — he's dead!

They're both dead …

She remembered. She had been watching Puarata's end, in a scrying glass. She saw him die, and didn't know whether to laugh or scream. She should have run then, but she was still so weak. The drugs dragged her down, back into that same dream she always had. Of that last hour of childhood …

She tentatively raised a hand and touched her swollen face, wincing. She had been beautiful, until Wiremu's blow had broken her nose and split her face. Her head was swathed in bandages, so that she felt partially embalmed. She had been wondering if Puarata would discard her, like others he tired of.
That's irrelevant now. You're on your own, girl …

And now that voice …
Father? No. Impossible …

Then it really hit her …
Puarata's dead! My God, he's dead!
She had never thought Puarata could fail. Not against a mere boy, or anyone else. The images in the scrying glass had seemed like some foolish television show. But he really was dead, truly finally gone.
And I'm next …
Jeff Rothwell was outside, ostensibly to help her home, but Rothwell belonged to Sebastian Venn, like so many in the organization these days.
Rothwell is here to kill me …

When Wiremu struck her down it had felt like death, but she had woken to nurses and bandages and drugs. Puarata had been there, speaking comforting words as drips fed her veins with a pale fluid he said would heal her. She had been afraid that he knew what she had said to Matiu Douglas; those words about escaping his control. But the tohunga had said nothing of it. Did he know? Sometimes it was all too much, being Puarata's lover. It was like being in a cage with a panther. She was over sixty, despite her youthful appearance. Puarata had been tiring of her, she suspected.

Donna
, that voice whispered again.
I have had a nurse place a gun under your pillow.

She spun, but there was no-one there. ‘Father?' she breathed, her heart hammering. A cellphone rang outside, the conversation was terse, and then footsteps approached her door.

She tried to reach for her power, that flame inside her that Puarata had found and taught her to use. But it was weak, barely flickering after the beating and the drugs.
I can't do it … I'm losing it
… She fumbled frantically under the pillow and found the gun where Father's voice had said it was. It felt
heavy and reassuring in her hand. Outside Rothwell spoke in his flat voice. ‘Miss Kyle?'

She lurched to her feet. The room swam and her head felt like it would burst. Rothwell opened the door. She didn't wait for him to speak, just raised the gun and opened fire. She was so dizzy her first shot missed, but the second knocked him off his feet. She staggered over his twitching body and out. A nurse appeared and she couldn't risk that she wasn't one of
them
, so she fired and watched the woman clutch her belly and fold up, her face stricken. She tottered down the hall, firing at every movement, as panic erupted about her. Red-stained walls and floors marked her trail.

Finally she made the shift to Aotearoa, although the effort dazed her. She crumpled to her knees in wet grass, outside a smaller, older building made of wood and whitewashed plaster. A man and woman turned towards her, clad in colonial garb, and their faces swelled with concern as they reached out …

She couldn't be sure. So she raised her gun again.

Click!

The transition had destroyed the powder. The man took the gun from her shaking hands. ‘My lady!' He looked up at the building behind her, then pulled her to her feet. ‘Come, we must leave. Venn is coming. I will see you safe.'

Well done, daughter,
her father's voice whispered.
But do not forget to whom you owe your life.