“After yesterday? I don’t know, Keeper. I really don’t know.”
Forty-three
As Night Shadow Star stared into the depths of the well pot, she could feel Sister Datura’s first gentle caress as it flitted lightly around her souls.
Beneath the reflective surface, the black water shimmered and stirred. Invisible threads of Power undulated in the depths. Fragments of images formed then turned liquid and faded. Any perception of time dwindled into the eternal now. Subtle currents drew her down, wafting her first this way and then the other.
Sister Datura’s embracing arms tightened as she swayed in time with Night Shadow Star’s souls. Twirling slowly, they began the dance, bobbing and dipping, rising and whirling in the perpetual descent into iridescent midnight. Matching each beat of her heart, the darkness pulsed. With the drawing of a breath, it seemed to expand, to fill the universe, only to contract as she exhaled. The endless depths had become a living presence that surrounded and flowed through her.
The fragments of images, sights, faces, visions of the past, snatches of conversation, broken laughter, shattered weeping, spun themselves from nothingness, only to vanish without coherence.…
She felt herself settle, rocking slightly on some soft surface resembling sandy mud. Though in darkness, she had vague impressions of being at a junction. Whichever direction she looked, it was to see yet another shadowy cave vanishing into obscurity.
Something moved to her right, and an impossibly huge snapping turtle rose from the mud. As it lifted its bulk, streamers of sand flowed from the beast’s shell to ripple and flow in patterns. Moss and silt clung to the arching carapace. The thing’s plated head, with its hard angles, extended to fix her with questioning eyes, the round pupils expanding in black interest.
“He’ll be coming.” As it spoke the turtle’s sharp jaws barely moved. The great head drifted toward her, moss waving on the beast’s blocky shell. She shivered in fear as the two nostrils at the point of its snout took her scent.
“You’re still alive,” Snapping Turtle noted, slightly surprised.
Night Shadow Star tried to swallow, only to choke. Sister Datura’s arms tightened around her, squeezing with each terrified beat of her heart.
“Ah.” Snapping Turtle’s head cocked slightly. “You dance with Power. But it does not calm your fears. Were you summoned here?”
“No.”
Snapping Turtle lifted his head slightly, turning it to stare closely at her with one eye. “Courageous … to come on your own. Walk unprotected into his domain.” A pause. “Tell me, Lady of Cahokia, did the Water Panther choose well? Are you the one we need? You? Barely more than a spoiled child, weeping and heartbroken over a too-soon-dead husband? Courageous, yes, but drowning in self-pity, grief, and undirected rage. Why are you even here? Why not simply walk out of your splendid palace and surrender yourself to the inevitable? An abomination hunts you, and he will get you in the end.”
Snapping Turtle’s jaws gaped like a sick grin. “Capture would be excruciating, but the pain would be over in a day or two. The woman you are now—possessed by Spirits, hearing voices, afraid, and insecure—might live what? Another fifty or sixty summers? And all of it in slow pain and mindless terror, forever convinced that those around you are plotting, seeking to destroy you. As the years pass, you’ll fall deeper and deeper into despair and self-inflicted misery. The voices will grow louder, and you’ll beg for Piasa to end it once and for all.”
He snapped his jaws like shears. “But by then, you’ll be so pathetic he’ll turn away, unwilling to lower himself even to the point of sullying his talons with the stroke it would take to end your pathetic life.”
Night Shadow Star whimpered, curling in on herself as Sister Datura’s arms wound around her like vines of light.
The voice came from behind her. “Snapping Turtle always expects the worst.”
Night Shadow Star turned, heart hammering; a giant coiling serpent filled the cave behind her. How could such an enormous creature have crept up so soundlessly? She’d felt not a tremor, nor so much as a whisper of its presence. The snake—its body thick as a canoe and as long as a chunkey court—had a head the size of a small boulder. Glassy scarlet antlers rose from the beast’s shimmering head; wings, graced with barred-and-spotted feathers, sprouted from the center of its back. The scales gleamed metallically, glowing with every color of the rainbow. Between the diamond-hatched patterns running down its body, the black circles on its sides seemed to be depthless, as if they were portals into eternity. Rattles the size of pumpkins tipped the mighty beast’s tail. But most terrifying of all were the crystalline eyes that fixed on her. She flinched when the forked tongue flicked in and out.