Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven (19 page)

There is an oddness to being served by a yeti—I mean, beyond the bare fact that I am being served by a yeti. It’s the juxtaposition of a warm domestic act of friendliness on the one hand with a whirling blade designed to inhale the spirit of a stabbing victim on the other.

Erlendr puts a plate in front of me and another down on the floor for Orlaith.

is my hound’s only comment as she attacks her breakfast.

“What do you wish to accomplish today?” Erlendr asks, sitting down at the table and ignoring his sister.

My eyes flick to Hildr and the blur of a weapon hovering in front of her.

“I’d like to save my father,” I say.

“The blade will not be finished in time to do that today. But does that mean you have reconsidered?”

“Yes. I think there is no escaping my responsibility for its creation. I might as well save my father too. But perhaps I can kill something very small with it to return your elemental energy. Like a mosquito.”

“I doubt that will work. But a small rodent should suffice.”

After he finishes eating, Erlendr excuses himself to get some rest, since he worked on the whirling blade all through the night. Ísólfr and Skúfr come out and join us, while Hildr stays in her zone. The day only gets stranger from there. The yeti teach me how to play fidchell, and I teach them how to play charades. And then, struck by inspiration, I say, “Tell me about snow,” and their faces light up with joy. They take me outside, eager to share the beauty they have discovered, like children explaining butterflies to adults.

They say things like, “Snow is the form to which all water aspires, for only as snow is it unique and at rest,” and “Vapor is distant and water cuts away at the earth, but snow is the blanket that protects us.”

They create puffs and eddies of snow that take brief shape as animals or plants and then scatter. Ísólfr leads me to a sheer cliff face where he has composed ice poems. Skúfr doesn’t seem to think them important or even worthwhile, but he reevaluates once I express approval. Ísólfr has written five short poems on the wall in blue ice, where the snow cannot rest. They’re written in Old Irish, and each letter sparkles in the weak sunlight. The type is even kerned well, if I’m not mistaken, and that takes it to another level of artistry. I memorize one, to be translated later and preserved for posterity, so:

Ísólfr puffs up with pride when I tell him the poems are beautiful, and Skúfr inexplicably becomes jealous.

“I was the one who sculpted the figure of Brighid,” he announces. I hasten to assure him that it is a brilliant piece of art. “Shall I make you a snowman?”

Before I can answer, a figure of snow begins to rise out of the drift. Not a marshmallow-looking thing but a real human figure—legs and hips and everything.

“Oh, cool!” I say. “Can you make him hold a huge two-handed sword and wear a cloak with feathers all around the shoulders?”

“Of course,” Skúfr replies, pleased that he gets to show off a bit. I demonstrate the pose I want and the yeti obliges me, giving the snowman a nice mane of hair at my instruction, including a lock that droops fetchingly in front of one eye. He even creates eyebrows and a thin blue frosty beard that hugs the jawline.

“Can you write something for me on the ground in frost letters, but using English?” I ask him.

“If you trace it out, I will do so.”

I scrawl a phrase in front of the snowman’s feet, then back away as Skúfr changes it to blue ice and fills in my foot and handprints, smoothing out the surface of the snow.

“Oh, that’s perfect! I love it!” My cell phone’s battery is long dead, so I haven’t a prayer of capturing an image. “I wish I had a camera. I want a picture of me talking to him.”

“Does he represent someone you know?” Ísólfr asks.

“No, he represents a character from one of my favorite stories. A handsome fictional man. On several occasions, a beautiful redhead tells him what I have written there.”

“What do the words say?”

“They say, ‘You know nothing, Jon Snow.’ ”

By the time the day is finished and it is Ísólfr’s turn to work on the whirling blade, Skúfr asks me to give the weapon a name.

“Each whirling blade is unique and has its own identity. I must have a name when I begin the final phase.”

The temptation to be flippant and thereby blunt the sinister nature of the whirling blade is strong. If I named it Usul, I could
ask it to tell me of its homeworld and promise that its water would forever belong to my sietch. Or I could name it Yoda, firmly aligning it to the light, except that Yoda would never have anything to do with a blade that glows red. I blurt out, “Fuilteach,” without knowing precisely why it came to mind when I thought I was traveling a safe but silly thought path. In modern Irish, it means
bloodthirsty
.

“It will be called Fuilteach, then,” Skúfr says, and bids me a restful sleep. I use Ísólfr’s room this time, since he will be spending the night working on the blade.

I managed to occupy the day with other thoughts besides what was transpiring in India, but the worries come back to me once I’m snuggled up with Orlaith. It takes me hours to drift off, and I don’t remain asleep for a full night. When I wake, Ísólfr is still working and looks very tired. No other yeti are in the main hall, so I feed the fire and wander outside with Orlaith for a while.

When I return, Skúfr is awake and Ísólfr is finished. He staggers up from the seat, stiff and weary, and Skúfr extends a steadying hand.

“Sleep, brother.”

Ísólfr is so wiped out he can manage only a halfhearted grunt in reply, and a twitch of his fingers serves as a wave goodbye.

As Ísólfr leaves and Skúfr sits down at the table, I take a look at Fuilteach in progress. The transparent tube of ice at the top of the blade is now nearly full with pale-blue energy.

“Do you have a name for that thingie there?” I ask, pointing to the tube. I hope he’ll say something nice, like
energy gauge
.

“That’s the soul chamber,” Skúfr says, and I wince.

“Of course. Look, I’m going to leave for a while and return tonight. Happy whirling.”

Orlaith and I exit before any of the other yeti can awaken and delay our departure. The journey down to the tree line, where we can shift away, is only an hour’s slog through the snow. I want to take a hot shower and renew my acquaintance with vegetables, so we shift back to the cabin in Colorado, where nightfall
is beginning to get serious about its darkness and Steller’s jays are talking about how they would have eaten all the worms today if they hadn’t become so tired, but they would totally eat them all tomorrow, you just wait.

Atticus hasn’t been back—not that I expected him to be. I plug in my cell phone and turn it on to discover the date. It’s now October 25. Owen is probably not finished with Atticus’s tattoos yet, though they should be wrapping up in a couple of days. I scribble a note to Atticus with the date and time and let him know that, as far as giants who used to eat people go, the yeti are quite agreeable. And then, to mess with him, I add that the invention of hockey might be more crucial than anyone previously believed.

Orlaith and I finish our interrupted trip into town, returning to the leather shop. I buy some rawhide strips and some unfinished pieces to fashion a makeshift scabbard for Fuilteach. I’m going to put a piece of shaped stone at the bottom to make sure that the tip doesn’t accidentally punch through and steal a shred of my spirit.

Once we return to the cabin, I shift to my jaguar form and run and play with Orlaith in the forest for a while, keeping my claws in and nipping her gently when she wants to tumble. After a shower, a salad, and a brief nap, I bundle up for the return to the Himalayas, making sure to include a set of throwing knives, since I’ll probably be getting into some trouble after I leave the yeti.

On the way up the mountain, I briefly consider asking one of the Tuatha Dé Danann for help in locating my father, but I’m afraid of what their help will cost. The price of getting a whirling blade is already too high. Making deals with deities has gotten Atticus in more than a little trouble, and I wish to avoid that if I can. I hope Laksha has thought of something.

Skúfr is nearly finished and the other yeti are all seated at the table, engrossed in a game of fidchell.

Oddrún welcomes me first and asks what they all must be
thinking: “What’s the name of the blade? Skúfr can’t stop to tell us.” Once I share it, they make noises of approval.

“I want to make clear,” Ísólfr says, “that you are welcome here anytime. Please visit whenever you wish. And we have made you a gift.”

“It was my idea!” Hildr says. She flashes her teeth, reaches down by her feet, and then produces an ice box, which she places in front of me. It’s a beautiful, shimmering thing, and inside is a leather scabbard proportioned to Fuilteach’s dimensions.

“Oh, you saved me some work! Thank you!” The leather strips I brought with me serve to tie it to my left thigh, and once I have it on, Skúfr groans, sighs, and then allows the whirling blade to stop whirling.

“It is finished.” He lowers his hand and the blade descends to rest on the table. “Fuilteach is yours.”

The soul chamber is full blue now. Using more of the leather, I wrap the bare handle and then carefully slip it into the scabbard, thanking the yeti all the while for their hospitality and help. They assert that meeting me was pure powder and wish me success in freeing my father. I give them all hugs, because I’m going to make a T-shirt that says I H
UGGED A
Y
ETI
and I want it to be true. But after the farewells, Orlaith and I scamper downhill to the trees as fast as we can manage.

Thanjavur is very different when I return. There are police, or perhaps army troops, in plain sight, wearing masks to ward off contamination. Anyone on the streets is likewise masked and presumably subject to search and curfew and all the other measures governments take to exert control and institute a quarantine. If the blight had been a traditional virus, then it quite probably would have spread far beyond the city by now, but since the rakshasas were the source, it had contained itself to the local area. Of course, rakshasas wouldn’t respond at all to modern medicine. I shudder to think how many more must have died while I was gone.

I shed layers of clothing that were necessary in the Himalayas
but stifling down here, then cast camouflage on Orlaith and use the bindings carved into Scáthmhaide to turn myself invisible. Keeping a hand on my hound to guide her, I thread my way through the quarantine to Laksha’s house, only to find that it has been burned down. The smell is awful, even to my human nose, and smoke still rises from some of the beams. Had my father attacked her or sent a rakshasa to do this? Or had some portion of the townsfolk decided that she was a witch and needed to burn?

“Oh, gods,” I breathe, and whip out my cell phone, unable to believe that she’s trapped inside. My call goes directly to voice mail. “Laksha, I’m back in town and looking for you. I hope you’re okay. Please call or find me.”

If her body is in the ruins, I won’t find her without drawing attention to myself.

Orlaith asks.

I don’t know what to do now, but I flail and grasp at something just to get us out of the neighborhood.
Let’s go south, where we last saw her. She seemed to know people in that area and might be around there somewhere
.

We exit the city. The agricultural areas do not look much different but somehow feel neglected already, as if the fields sense that they are fallow in the minds of those who used to tend them. The air trembles and ripples around me, disturbed by what floats in the atmosphere. The sun sets as I run next to Orlaith, and I cast night vision.

Laksha is nowhere to be found near the last two houses we visited, and Orlaith says her scent is either missing or “very old.” But at the first house, where we stabbed the rakshasa in the eye and buried him in an alley, a group of people cluster together and speak in hushed, urgent voices. As I draw closer, I see that the mother of the boy we saved is crying, wiping tears from her cheeks as she speaks. She stiffens suddenly and her eyes flick in my direction, but then she relaxes and resumes talking, her tone suggesting that she is tired and would like to go inside. She begins to hug people and wave farewell, and I guide Orlaith toward
the door of her home, around the edge of the group. We flatten ourselves along the front wall, unseen, and wait for her to open the door. The neighbors leave one by one, and as the woman turns to open her door, she says in clear but accented English, “Follow me inside, Granuaile.”

“Laksha?”

“Come inside.” She turns the knob and pushes open the door but leaves it ajar so that we can dart in behind her. Orlaith follows close on my heels, and Laksha closes the door once she hears Orlaith’s paws on the floor. I drop the invisibility and camouflage and tilt my head at the woman.

“Is that you in there?”

“Yes,” Laksha says, and pulls out her ruby necklace from her sari. “I’m possessing this woman for the time being. I need a new body. Selai Chamkanni has been proclaimed a witch, and they burned her house down while she was still inside.”

“Who are
they
?”

“This very woman was responsible,” she replies, pointing to herself, and then gestures angrily at the door. “Along with those friendly people out there and others who helped burn my house down.”

“Why?”

“The boy we saved was taken over by a new rakshasa the night after you left, but this time it did not linger. It came in under the door in a foul fog, showed itself to the woman, then deliberately attacked and killed her son in front of her. I can see her memory of it. She blamed me, thinking that I sent the rakshasa.”

“But that—”

“—Makes no sense, I know. Grief can make us do terrible things. Still, she and her friends caught me by surprise. They surrounded the house and set it on fire, and there was no way to escape without marking the body of Selai forever as a witch. So I tossed my necklace at this woman, left behind the body of Selai, and took over this woman’s mind. It is not the friendly arrangement that you and I enjoyed. I would like to find a more willing vessel. But I don’t think there will be time for that.”