Stoneskin's Revenge (39 page)

“Usinuliyu Selagwutsi Gigagei getsunneliga tsudanda-gihi aye ‘liyu, usinuliyu…

“Instantly the red
selagwutsi
strike you in the very center of your soul
—instantly…”

And there was the hand, rising higher as Spearfinger used it to push aside a branch, even as the stone beneath her lifted her another few inches.

Closer…

Closer…

Calvin released his breath he'd been holding in a shouted “Yu!” and loosed the string.

The arrow flew slowly, or so it seemed: too slowly; and in that long instant Calvin felt his heart stop cold.

For the Stoneskin's song had ended abruptly.

And as he gaped incredulously, the arrow buried itself exactly where he had aimed: into the center of Spearfinger's left hand.

The air suddenly rang with a horrible shriek like stones being ripped asunder, and even at this distance, Calvin could see blood gushing out, for the arrow had continued straight through until stopped by the fletchings. Another scream, a sort of incredulous gape as stony black eyes probed straight at him and then the ogress was falling—but she did not tumble off the mound. Rather, it was as if she simply lost her substance and her whole body trickled down the precipitous slope.

A startled exclamation followed quickly by a burst of agitation from the foliage was Don's reaction.

“Stay there!” Calvin shouted. He pitched the bow and remaining arrows to the ground, grabbed the .38 and the scale, and started down the tree. Not as easy as it looked, either: his limb was too high to leap from, and he saw no point in
changing
for that one act. The bark of this particular tree was uncommonly rough, too, yet free of useful projections, so that Calvin's bare chest and thighs bore more than their share of scratches and gouges when he finally let go and leapt the last few feet to the ground.

A quick trot out from under the low-hanging branches showed him poor Brock in the embrace of a low mound of stone that had risen up behind him and prisoned him in much the same way the stones had earlier captured Calvin. The runaway was yelling like a fool, but once he saw Calvin, his tone changed to one of joy: “Hey, good job, Calvin, m' man! Hey, you done it, you done it!”

Loping across the meadow, Calvin hoped he had.

As he neared the fingerlike projections he unlocked the safety on the revolver, still on guard, though those excrescences too were shrinking, evidently freed by their mistress's demise.

Closer and closer, and then he was standing maybe a yard from the ogress, on the side opposite the wounded hand.

Above him, Don had made his way to the lowest branch, but an upraised finger and a warning shake of Calvin's head kept him from coming any closer.

Calvin stared down at his adversary. She lay flat on the ground amid the knee-high grass, arms outstretched, mouth agape, eyes staring and dull. The arrow still protruded from her palm. She looked dead.
Very
dead, and Calvin suddenly felt his gorge rise because murderer or not, she was also a sentient being and the idea of killing a sentient being repulsed him. For the merest instant this was not a shapechanging monster, but merely a withered old woman, not unlike his own grandmother. Except that he did not dare allow himself to think along those lines. No, this
was
Utlunta Spearfinger, the Stoneskin, and he had laid her low. Above him the falcons circled lazily, their shadows tracing spirals across the ground.

Finger still on the trigger, Calvin nudged the body with his toe. It gave no resistance, though it seemed unusually heavy. But Spearfinger's withered breast neither rose not fell, and the long gray hairs on her chin did not quiver with even the shallowest of breaths.

Finally he lowered the weapon and sidled around her; at a loss as to how to proceed, since none of his schemes had extended beyond this point. It would be another body, he supposed. More grist for the mill that could hang him—which he imagined meant that he'd now have no choice but to make some kind of lightning shapechanged raid on Sandy's house, explain things, and move on, adopt another identity, or maybe simply do what he'd considered a time or two before: become animal and never return.

“Is she dead?” Don whispered nervously from his limb. “Is she, Calvin?”

Another prod of his toe, and Calvin nodded. “I reckon so.”

“So what d' we do now?”

“Good question. I guess we—”

But he could not finish, for without warning the dreadful awl-finger stabbed up at him. He had just time to fling himself backward before Spearfinger leapt to her feet and was slashing at him over and over again. He dodged twice, but the third time he felt the edge of her nail scour a line across his belly.

“So you thought to
slay
me, did you, Edahi?” she cackled, as Calvin scooted backward crabstyle, unable to rise because of the way she was looming over him, and unable to shoot because Don was so close above. “So you thought to slay Spearfinger? Well, you trusted too much in white man's wisdom in that,
Calvin,
for if you had thought, you would have known the truth. Spearfinger
was
slain, so how could she live again? She is not like the beasts of Galunlati, gifted with endless lives. She was a woman of this World once, and was slain and rose no more.”

“But how…?” Calvin blurted, so full of despair and dread he could barely function.

“
That
Spearfinger was my mother,” the ogress shrieked. And then she lunged.

The horrified shouts of two boys and one young man broke the quiet of the meadow, but rising above them all was a maniacal female cackle.

Chapter XXIX: Gathering at the River

A quick roll sideways was all that saved Calvin, and even then he felt hot agony bounce along his ribs as the terrible fingernail grazed his side. A second, duller pain was the arrow fletching raking his hip raw as the hand continued its arc—and then he was clear: on his back and kicking out at Spearfinger's thin brown ankles. He connected, too, but it was like impacting stone, and more pain shot through his shins. The ogress, however, did not seem to be affected at all. He glimpsed her from the corner of his eye as he rolled once more—and saw just enough to know she was yanking on the arrow that impaled her hand, jerking the shaft inch by agonizing inch through her stony flesh.

And freeing it—to fling it straight at him with uncanny accuracy. He managed to dodge, but his frantic scrambles brought him full into the shadow of the oak, where hard lumps of acorns poked at him from the ground, adding their own tiny bruises to his already bleeding flesh. A ridge of knobby root ended his progress abruptly, and he grunted in dismay, still unable to regain his feet, use the scale, or get off a shot at his adversary—who was now hurling herself at him, oblivious to her obvious wound.

She might have struck him dead on, too, had Don not chosen that moment to drop from his branch onto her shoulders and wrap his arms around her neck in a sprawling clench that was born part in anger, part in panic, and part in abject surprise. The boy was also hollering at the top of his lungs, perhaps to keep himself sane; and Calvin could see the monster flinch as strong boy fingers found her trachea and curled inward. But then fury burned into her coal-lump eyes, and she gave her whole humped body a violent shake that sent Don's legs flying straight out behind her. He held on through two such assaults, but by then Utlunta had snaked her hand to the side, so that the boy's next gyration would impale him upon the finger.

“Jump!”
Calvin shouted desperately. “Jump, Don,
jump
!”

Don did, coming to rest with an unceremonious thump maybe six feet to the Stoneskin's right. The sudden shift in balance made Spearfinger stagger in the opposite direction—which gave both Don and Calvin time to regain their feet.

“Run!” Calvin motioned Don toward the open field. “Go help Brock, and then get the hell out of here!”

And then Calvin was himself on the move, trying to at least get clear of the tree, so he would have more options. The arrow hadn't worked, which probably meant that Spearfinger's heart was not where legend said it should be. But that still left the rest of her body. And he still had the gun—and, finally, a clear target.

Spearfinger was charging him, pounding toward him at a surprising pace, her awl-finger outstretched before her like a lance. It would have been a ludicrous enough image to make him laugh—a bag lady on angel dust—except for the leer of hatred that contorted her gray-brown face.

He aimed by reflex, pulled the trigger, spat six bullets into her chest. Dust erupted in a long line across the rags, and blood was everywhere, but she did not falter.

Calvin clicked the trigger twice more before he realized the .38 was empty.

And Spearfinger was still rushing toward him.

He tensed and turned sideways, gun in his right hand, scale in the other, hoping to club the back of her skull with the butt of the revolver when they came together.
Next year,
he told himself—hell, next
week—
he'd enroll in one of those martial arts classes he'd been promising himself forever. If there
was
a next week for him.

Closer and closer…then impact. The force jarred Calvin so much that he dropped the gun and retained the scale only by gripping it so tightly in his fist it almost brought blood. They grappled together for a moment, locked in an awkward embrace made more so by the pervasive gore and the fact that Calvin did not have full use of both hands. Spearfinger's face was inches from his; he could smell her breath—sweet and sickly like rotting blood and day-old meat; nearly choked on the hot-stone-and-dust odor that, billowed out from her rags. Somehow he managed to confine her elbows at the waist, thereby restricting the deadly finger—whereupon he twisted sideways, hoping his superior leverage would hurl her to the ground. Once he got her down, maybe he could hold her until he could regain sufficient presence of mind to
change,
or one of the boys could retrieve the bow—which were the only options he could think of.

Miraculously, his effort succeeded—in part—for he felt Spearfinger's legs leave the ground. Abruptly she seemed much lighter, which shocked Calvin so much that he lost his balance and toppled to earth again, fortunately atop her. He locked his legs around her, prisoning the finger between her thigh and his, and glanced up frantically. “Don! Brock! Get the bow, it's under the tree I was in.”

He saw a small, dark-haired shape sprinting that way from the direction of the live oak; while another crouched to one side holding something dark before its face, all but hidden by the tall grass. That last was odd, too: he thought Brock was more reliable than to waste time playing games. But then Calvin had no time for puzzles, because Spearfinger was writhing beneath him, twisting back and forth so vigorously it took every ounce of strength and all his concentration to keep her pinned.

“You cannot defeat me, Edahi,” she spat. “When this day ends I will have eaten your liver!”

“The hell you will!” And Calvin renewed his desperate hold.

An evil grin crossed the Stoneskin's face, and her features wavered: blurring, running, smoothing, and realigning—until Calvin suddenly found himself staring into the china-blue eyes of Allison Scott. “You wouldn't hurt a little girl, would you?” Spearfinger cackled. “Not pretty little Allison Scott! But you already
have,
Edahi. She is dead and you are the one who brought death to her!”

Calvin gasped, sick at what he knew was the truth, but he maintained his grip, not daring to relax in spite of what he saw, for the shape beneath him, though a tiny girl's, was strong as ever.

The features slid and shifted again, became those of a tired-looking woman in her late twenties. “This one's liver I sampled
first
,”
Spearfinger crowed. “But it was poisoned, as your kind poison all things including themselves. That is why I would keep you forever from Galunlati!

“But this,” she added with a triumphant cackle, “was sheer pleasure to devour: the liver rich with life and joy and strength.” And she took on the startled, perky features of Don Scott's dead friend, Michael.

“And
this—
ah,
this
liver was tastiest of all!” With that Calvin looked upon the face of his father. “You killed me, my son,” he growled, though it was Spearfinger's mocking tones. “As sure as you live you brought my death, and that will forever be on your soul!”

“No!” Calvin shouted, jerking back reflexively, and in that moment Spearfinger made her move, threw her whole unwieldy weight up and over, and Calvin was suddenly trapped beneath her. She was in her right shape now, but fortunately he still held the deadly hand immobile—though that did not seem to concern her.

And
where
were Don and Brock? He couldn't see Brock at all, and Don was fumbling around the base of the tree Calvin had shot from. Which meant he couldn't count on help from that quarter any time soon.

Spearfinger grinned even more gleefully and opened her mouth to sing. It was the alternate tune, the one that called upon the earth, and Calvin felt the ground trembling beneath him as limestone from the depths responded to her summons. Though the monster was astride him now, he could hear her feet keeping time against the ground, sending thrummings all along the meadow. He knew what she was about, too: she'd keep him here until the stone could rise up and engulf him. And then she'd eat his liver. Probably both boys', too: she didn't seem to fear them at all, though Don had something long in his hand now. Brock, for his part, was still missing.