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People of the Masks(99)

By:W. Michael Gear


He had planted the staff with Lamedeer’s head in a snowdrift, thirty hands away. Firelight flickered over the sunken yellow eyes and sagging flesh. Almost all of the hair had fallen out. Not even the man’s closest relatives would recognize him now.

Soon, yours won’t recognize you, either. The hideous voice seeped from the head. You hear them out there, don’t you? Soon. They will fall upon you like fanged lightning beasts.

Jumping Badger tugged his blankets up to his chin. The darkness beyond the halo of light whispered and chittered, the ghosts watching from the shadows. They had been coming in for days, one at a time, joining Briar, waiting for Silver Sparrow’s command to attack.

Yes, you see them.

“Shut up, you fool,” Jumping Badger hissed at Lamedeer. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

He wished he knew of a fresh burial somewhere close. He would stop the ghosts. An old witch named Prancing Tree had taught him. Jumping Badger had followed him for the first time in his eighth winter. The skinny gray-haired old man had left Walksalong and sneaked off into the night. Jumping Badger had tracked him by moonlight. First, the old man had traveled as a cat, the tracks soft, clawless. Then he’d trotted as a dog; the claw marks had deeply cut the soft earth. He’d found the old man in a burial ground three hands of time later, sitting alone before a boiling pot. A hideous grin had twisted his toothless face. As Jumping Badger crept closer, he’d seen the bones lying around the pot, and the holes in the ground. The pot cooked the flesh of children who’d been dug from their graves.

Lamedeer laughed, and Jumping Badger shouted, “I wish we were at Paint Rock Village! There are plenty of little corpses there. I would eat their hearts before your eyes, and make stilettos from their bones to kill you!”

Several of the nearby blanket-wrapped warriors flopped to their other sides, or covered their heads. Jumping Badger’s eyes sought out Elk Ivory, and he found her, just as he did every night, watching him from across the fire. Her dark eyes gleamed.

“Don’t you sleep, either, old woman? Stop staring at me!” His voice had progressively risen until the last word came out a shout.

Acorn got to his feet, and sleepily stumbled out into the forest, getting as far away as he could without actually leaving the safety of the camp. Apparently he found someone else out there, for Acorn’s whispers carried on the cold night wind: “I don’t know … crazy …” he said.

The other warrior responded, but Jumping Badger couldn’t make out the words.

He rolled to his back and gazed up at the feathered lodges of the Night Walkers. With the fire so close, he could see only the brightest of the lodges. They glowed like eiderdown in the sunlight.

Strange, but on nights like this, he often thought about his former wife, Hollow Hill. He touched the ridge of scar tissue that puckered on his throat. She had been the first to learn that he could speak with ghosts. All he had to do was acquire a clump of hair or a tooth, and he could control the living person. The hair acted like a doorway to the person’s souls. Jumping Badger could open it and go inside where the souls lay naked and vulnerable, then do anything he wished. He had risen to the position of war leader only because he’d wounded the souls of the other men who had challenged him. After he’d been inside them, their blood had gone as weak as an old woman’s. One of them had run in the face of battle. That had ruined his chances. Another had accidentally shot a member of his own war party. No one trusted him any longer.

Hollow Hill had discovered the truth. She’d always been nosy, which is why he’d been forced to beat her so often. She’d asked too many questions, and pouted when he gave her no answers. One evening, right after old Prancing Tree had been burned alive for witchcraft, Jumping Badger had gone down to bathe in the river. He’d left his Power bag necklace by the side of their bedding. Against all the sacred rules of her clan, she had searched it, seeing the fingernail clippings, different-colored strands of hair, teeth, and bits of dried flesh. When he’d returned, she’d demanded to know what he did with such gruesome things.

She called you a witch.

“I shouldn’t have gone to sleep that night, I—”

Especially after you’d split her mouth with your fists, and blacked both her eyes.

“Nothing more than she deserved. Can you imagine a woman daring to touch a man’s Power bag? I should have killed her.”

You are a witch.

“I take Power where I find it. That’s all.”

A dragging noise came from the forest to his right. Twigs cracked. He turned. The noise heaved itself to the edge of the firelight, and stopped, but a bitter cold seeped from its body, and spread across the camp. Jumping Badger threw another branch onto the flames, and pulled his blankets around his throat, shivering.