He nodded, unable to argue with her. “That might have been luck.”
“Luck?” Water Petal asked.
Anhinga raised a questioning eyebrow.
“What if Mother hadn’t been chosen to follow Grandmother? What if Moccasin Leaf had been chosen Clan Elder instead? Would life still be good?”
Water Petal’s eyes hardened.
“This talk is helpful, but it doesn’t dig down under the guts where the real question lies.” He dropped a square of fish meat into the next trap and with Anhinga’s help, lowered it over the side. The marker float bobbed in the current as Water Petal steered them down the channel.
“And just what do you think lies under the guts?” Anhinga asked.
“Doing what is right,” he answered. “Not just for us, not just for Sun Town, but for everyone.”
“Right? By the Panther’s blood, what is right?” Anhinga’s frown deepened. “What is right for Sun Town will not be right for my people. Even your own clans have different ideas about what is right.”
“That, Anhinga, is my problem,” he told her. “How I can choose what is best for everyone?”
Water Petal cocked her head. “Salamander, why should you have to?”
“What?”
“Why should you have to do this? Why not someone else? Why did Power choose you?”
He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know, Cousin. All I can tell you is that if I don’t choose correctly, I just know something bad is going to happen.”
A shaft of ocher light bored through the Dream, as though barely penetrating a midnight gloom. Anhinga stood passively—partially hidden. She could barely discern the grim surroundings. Darkness swirled at the edges, as if smoke choked the air and devoured the reddish light that illuminated the place. Dark shadows, beings of some sort, flickered and twisted at the sides of her vision. She could barely make them out—only that they were whip-thin, quick, and dangerous. In the center, the bloody light bathed five somber young men.
Mist Finger stood at the head of the group. His arms were raised high, like a bird preparing to leap into flight. Behind him Cooter, Spider Fire, Right Talon, and Slit Nose followed his lead, lifting their arms at angles. About them, the eerie figures detached from the darkness, lunged, struck, and withdrew. The attackers were menacing, vaguely human, thin as whips, and so incredibly fast. They struck with blurred movement, and each touch of their sharp arms sliced skin on one of the youths. Each feint, each stroke, came with the rapidity of a snake’s lightning tongue.
Anhinga watched in horror as her friends’ bodies writhed in pain. Their faces twisted in terror. Why didn’t they run? Why didn’t they act to protect themselves? She found her voice, calling out, “Mist Finger?”
He turned terror-bright eyes on hers, his face contorted, the black hole of his mouth open in agony. “Dead,” she heard him say.
“Get away!” she cried. “All of you, flee! Run! Escape!”
Yet they stood, arms lifted, heads rolling as they flinched from each blow given them by the darting wraiths. Their bodies shone red as blood slicked their quivering skin in sheets. Each gaping cut hung open, and beneath the cleanly sliced skin she could see exposed muscles straining and jumping like knotted ropes.
The darting manlike shadows continued their dance, flitting, slashing with pointed hands. Anhinga stifled a cry as patches of skin began to hang, draping like soggy cloth. Her friends opened their mouths and shrieked—but she heard only silence.
“Run!” she pleaded, clasping her hands in front of her as she sank to her knees. “In Panther’s name, run!”
Cold stone ate into her knees as tears streaked down her cheeks.
The shadowy apparitions ducked, whirled, and lanced out with greater frenzy.
Anhinga saw sections of muscle sliced away, bloody bone exposed here, entrails dropping out of gut cavities there. And still the screams her ears could not hear shattered her souls.
Bit by bit their guts came tumbling out, falling past their savaged crotches to puddle in a slippery mess at their feet. It didn’t end as bits of their bodies were flayed away. It didn’t even end when only crimson skeletons stood teetering in the gaudy light, bits of sinew hanging like web from the brutalized bone.
The darting wraiths continued to collect in the smoky shadows only to strike repeatedly. Now each flashing stab of arm or leg neatly severed a bone from the wavering remains.
One last strike snapped Mist Finger’s blood-matted skull from his neck, sending it tumbling down. Like a gourd, it spattered into the steaming viscera, and rolled down to rock on its side no more than an arm’s length before Anhinga’s face.