Gift of the Unmage (20 page)

“What are you?” Thea said, her voice rather small.

“Every living thing,” Big Elk said gently, “has a beginning, a source, the thing that it is like, the thing that it sprang from. I am the father of every elk that ever was, ever will be. I am the spirit of the elk tribe.”

“There are others like you? For other living things?”

“Many,” he said. “Big Bear. Big Wolf. Big Eagle. Big Owl. Big Catfish. There are even shadowy worlds shared by such growing dreaming things like Big Oak, Big Cedar, Big Pine—ah, but I have walked in that forest, and it is beautiful. We are that of which all else of our ilk springs.”

“So you’re an Elk God,” Thea said.

“Not a God. I am Elk Spirit, rather. My kin do not pray to me.”

“Is there a Big Human—someone like you, for someone like me?”

“Humans,” said Big Elk, “are different from other kindred. My folk does not dream of futures
or remember distant pasts. They know what they are and they live their lives that way. It is a simpler way of life. With your kindred, it is…difficult. You might say that every one of you has a Big Human. Or that you sprang from a line different from ours. Or you come from the Old Ones themselves. It is hard to tell if the Old One you came with wears your shape because
you
wear it, or whether you wear that shape because she does. With humans, it is hard to tell. When they call upon that Big Spirit that should be the image of them all, every mind has a different picture…. Perhaps that is the trouble, you put in too much detail and what you get is specific, not general.”

Thea thought back to the drawing on the rock wall, almost childlike, rendered in only the barest minimum of strokes necessary to create an impression of an elk. “I think I understand,” she murmured.

“We are,” said Big Elk, “of the spirit realm. And communication with the spirit realm requires an all-inclusive figure. They could have drawn an image of a perfect elk back there on the stone wall—but that would have been only
one
elk, the specific one whose image was cap
tured there on the wall. What is there now calls to me, the spirit of all the elk, something that connects all of us, like a shining strand of time. When they need me, they will come, my kind. When I can help them, I will. If there is a place with clear water or better pasture or safer shelter with fewer hunters to take them—I will lead them there. I can, because I am all the elk. They can see me, there in the dawn light, enough to follow me when I call them.”

“But they can’t see any of the others,” Thea said. “The other ancestral spirits. For other creatures.”

“The others are not of their world,” Big Elk said.

“But elk share the earth with bears and eagles and foxes,” Thea said. “At least in
my
world they do.”

“Yes,” said Big Elk. “And all of these things they will notice living around them. But if Big Fox comes to his brethren, the elk will not see that guardian spirit—and if I come to my folk, the foxes will never see me. All that the elk and the fox tribes will see on the earth is what they themselves do upon it. And they answer to none but the spirit of their own kind. They do what
they must. That is the rule of all life.”

“Curious,” Thea said softly.

One of the great stag’s ears turned marginally in her direction. It was an unspoken invitation to continue.

“The stars,” Thea said. “They send their spirits to walk the worlds—they make, I don’t know, small incarnations of themselves—they make themselves small to talk to their folk. You—your kind, the spirit ancestors of what lives on those worlds—you make yourself big, large enough to hold every soul of your kindred within your own.”

“Yes,” Big Elk said. “That is the way of it. The living worlds both need us and call us, and in order to meet that call, that need, we do what is necessary and we teach those who need to know how to invoke us.”

“And us?” Thea asked. “My people?”

“There are so many more of you than there were when the world was young,” Big Elk said. “And although you have gone a long way from what you once were, few of you are now able to see the things that your ancestors knew and understood. It seems to me that your numbers grew, but your faith remained finite—and now
it’s spread so thin that sometimes it’s hard to believe in the things your rational mind tells you are impossible.”

“But I believe in you,” Thea said softly, running a hand down the corded muscle of the great stag’s neck.

Big Elk tossed his head, lifting the side of his face into the caress. “That is why I am here,” he said. “Even the Old One could not have called me to you if you did not have the ability to believe in my existence, to see me when I set foot in that sacred wood. And that is why
you
are here—because you are capable of that faith—and why so many of your kindred never can be.”

Beneath them the world turned, bright and dark, starlight reflecting on water, swallowed by dark forests, a primeval world wrought to be home to a primeval spirit. For no particular reason, Thea found herself close to tears.

“Thank you,” she said, although she had no real idea what she was thanking Big Elk for.

“You are welcome,” he said, sparks from his hooves still arcing upward to extinguish themselves in the night air. “And while this is nothing to do with me or with my kindred, and therefore I can do nothing to help you, I can give you a
warning, freely and without price.”

The hair rose on the nape of Thea’s neck, as though the air was suddenly electrified. “Warning? Of what?”

“Be wary,” Big Elk said, “because you are marked. And there are those who will come for you if they can, if you give them the least nod, if they believe in any way that they have offered a price and it has been accepted.”

“Are you talking about the Alphiri?” Thea said, suddenly afraid.

Big Elk lifted his head fractionally, and Thea followed the direction of his gaze. She had been too enthralled by this ride, too enchanted by what was happening to her, and far too overwhelmed by her surroundings to notice that anything might be amiss—she didn’t know what any of the rules were, never mind when they were being broken. But now, with her attention focused on one particular thing, she realized that something
was
in fact wrong. The sky was just as brilliant and beautiful here as she knew it ought to have been—all but one patch of it, a growing emptiness, spreading like a stain and extinguishing stars as it grew. Thea felt it tug at her senses; she could not decide whether she felt a banked
malevolence or a supreme indifference to anything that stood in its way, or whether those two things could exist in the same terrifying entity, soulless and dangerous and utterly pitiless.

“The Alphiri brought
that
,” Big Elk said.

“What is it?” Thea whispered, staring, her mouth dry.

“Nothing,” Big Elk said. “An emptiness, a hunger that cannot be sated, a wanting that will not be denied.”

“In
this
world?”

“In all worlds. It comes where they go.” He tossed his head. “But have no fear. Here, tonight, with me, it cannot harm you.”

Thea found herself torn between a wish to hug the great animal and the distinct urge to bow down before it. She compromised by scratching it behind the ears, something the elk accepted without a word and even gave some indication that it enjoyed.

“We’d better get back,” she said reluctantly after a while.

“Yes,” Big Elk said, and came to a stop, right beside the great rock painting on the cliff face in the wood. As if they had never left the place at all.

He knelt again for her to dismount, as he had
done before, and this time Thea gave free rein to instinct and kissed the great head right between the eyes before she swung herself off his back and came to stand beside him. “Thank you,” she said again. “For everything.”

He rose, towering above her, and reared for a moment onto his hind legs, outlined heraldically against the diffuse light in the night sky.

“Go well,” he said, “and remember what I told you.”

And then he was gone, vanished, disintegrating into the bright air as if he had been no more than mist and shadows.

There was a rustle, and another shadow stepped out from under the scattered pines.

“He carried you,” Grandmother Spider said.

He warned me….

Thea woke suddenly, sitting bolt upright in her bed. For a moment she was completely disoriented, and then she became aware that what had woken her was not the impossible presence of Big Elk in her bedroom but a quiet rustling noise by Magpie’s closet. It took her a moment to calm her panicked heartbeat and realize that what had startled her awake was no more than one of Magpie’s usual nighttime excursions.

“It’s just me,” Magpie whispered, cradling something in her arms half-wrapped in a trailing bit of what had once been a decent blanket, before it was chewed, clawed, pecked, and shredded into near oblivion by a succession of clawed and beaked convalescents.

“I wish you would call a halt to that for a while,” Thea hissed back, knuckling her eyes with one hand. “You just don’t know
what
is out there, and I hate the idea of your being out alone at night. What have you got there…?”

The new patient appeared a little larger than Magpie’s most recent acquisitions, the size of a small adult raccoon or a comfortably tubby full-grown cat.

Except that it was neither.

Through the shreds of blanket, Thea suddenly saw a familiar pattern of black-and-white fur. The last pieces of her dream vanished as she swung her legs out of bed, both bare feet on the floor, suddenly and vividly awake and ready to run.

“That’s a
skunk
!” she hissed.

“He won’t hurt you,” Magpie said, giving up the attempt at concealment and setting the animal on the floor between the two beds.

“I’m not worried about it
hurting
me,” Thea
said. “That’s it, Mag, I don’t mind the blue jays or the squirrels, but I don’t want to think about living in this room if that creature decides it doesn’t like you.”

“But he’s hurt,” Magpie said. “He won’t do anything I don’t want him to do.”

“I know you have the healing touch with the critters, but not that one, Magpie. I’m serious. None of them should be in here in the first place, else you wouldn’t have to smuggle them in like this in the middle of the night. And I haven’t said anything, and I don’t plan to. But one accident with
that
animal and I won’t have to say a word. They’ll smell a rat.”

“A skunk,” said Magpie with a grin.

“I’m not joking! Get that thing out of here!”

“But what am I supposed to do with him? I have to keep an eye on him, or else he might…”

“
No
, Magpie. Not that one. Don’t you have anywhere else you can stash that thing? Somewhere…outside, preferably…?”

“There’s the garden shed,” Magpie said unwillingly, as though an important secret had been wrung out of her.

“But that’s locked,” Thea said.

“So?” Magpie asked, grinning mischievously,
her teeth a sudden flash of white in the shadows. “But in any event, it doesn’t matter. The big front doors of the shed are locked. The back door isn’t, and the window is always open.”

“Magpie.”

“What?”

“You mean you could have used that place all this time instead of bringing Animal Hospital up here?” Thea said. She tried to be cross, but the laughter was already bubbling up to the surface.

“It’s halfway across the campus,” Magpie complained. “How was I supposed to keep an eye on them over there?”

The skunk stirred, lifting its head. Thea stifled a small scream.

Magpie flung up her hands in defeat.

“All right! All right! I’ll take him to the garden shed!” She gathered up the creature again, rewrapping it as best she could in the blanket, and then stood uncertainly in the middle of the room, her arms full of skunk, staring at the door handle in a calculating way. Sneaking the skunk
in
had been easy enough—the door opened inward into the room, and a jiggle of the handle and a light push with her foot had done the trick. But now she needed to open the door with her
hands full of what might be a problem….

Thea growled deep in her throat. She got up from the bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from the top of a pile of dirty clothes beside her bed.

“Wait a minute, I’ll come and help you. You’ll have the entire residence up in arms in a moment if you aren’t careful.”

“Thanks!” Magpie said chirpily, hugging the skunk closer to her. It seemed, improbably, to be snuggling.

“Why do I do this?” Thea said, rolling her eyes, as she hopped toward the door on one sneakered foot while easing on the sneaker’s mate, a flashlight tucked under her arm. “
What
was Mrs. Chen thinking? Come on, skunk mama. Let’s get this over with. We both need to stay awake for classes tomorrow.”

She opened the door and peered out into the corridor. It was deserted, not surprisingly—Thea’s bedside clock said it was nearly half past midnight.

“All clear,” she whispered, and motioned Magpie forward.

Their room was on the second floor, and Thea stole a moment to wonder just how Magpie had
managed to sneak so many animals up and down the open stairwell without being observed. She climbed down the center of the stairs with her creature in her arms, without hugging walls or seeking concealment in shadows, as though it was a perfectly natural thing for her to be on the stairs at midnight carrying a skunk wrapped in a tattered blanket.

“Are you sure that you have no trailing magic somewhere?” Thea asked when they reached the main hall.

“No, why?” Magpie said, apparently genuinely astonished by the question.

“Just because you don’t seem to be…Wait a minute, the front door is locked….”

“It’s always locked at ten thirty,” Magpie said.

Thea blinked. “Then how do you…?”

“The back door…,” Magpie began, and Thea rolled her eyes.

“Back doors are never locked in this place, it seems. Okay, which door?”

Magpie pointed with her foot, and Thea led the way. They found themselves in a laundry area, with a small bank of washers and dryers…and a narrow, glass-paned back door that let out into a paved yard.