The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 1991.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Also by Tom Dietz and Untreed Reads Publishing

Windmaster's Bane

Fireshaper's Doom

Darkthunder's Way

Sunshaker's War

www.untreedreads.com

Stoneskin's Revenge

Tom Deitz

For

David Dannenberg and Gordon Levine

Larry Pugh and Nathan Ridgway

Michael-Anne Rubenstein and David Scott

Jean Starr and Chad Weihrauch

and

Better Heiser-Zedonek

who made me feel good when I needed to

Acknowledgments

thanks to:

Boo Alexander

Gilbert Head

Adele Leone

Betty Marchinton

Larry Marchinton

Paul Matthews

Mike McLeod

Chris Miller

Chris Myllo

Klon Newell

Vickie Sharp

Jean Starr

Brad Strickland

Sharon Webb

and to

Buck Marchinton,

natural history consultant par excellence
:

a special note of appreciation

for finding time in Hell Quarter to answer all

those stupid questions,

for being my eyes and ears in far-off places,

and

for being a friend when it was an awful lot of trouble to be one

Oh Lord, my name is Calvin, an' Indian blood run through my veins.

Yeah, my name is Calvin Fargo, an' Cherokee blood be pulsin' in my veins.

I've had some wild adventures; seen an awful lot o' wond'rous things.

Well, I got a friend in Georgia; David Kevin Sullivan be that boy's name.

Got me a good, good friend in Georgia; David Sullivan be his Christian name.

Dave saw some lights one evenin'; an' ever since he ain't been quite the same.

Well, you know my buddy David? One day he went an' got the Second Sight.

Yeah, you know my buddy David? He fooled around an' got the Second Sight.

He saw the Faeries ridin'âan' that gave him one mighty fright.

Werepossum Blues

words: Calvin McIntosh

music: Darrell Buchanan

Prologue I: Song-Called

(Jackson County, GeorgiaâMonday, June 16âbetween midnight and sunrise)

That there was fog in Jackson County in the close, still hours before dawn was not, of itself, remarkable. Granted, it
was
almost summer, but that did not mean nights could not bring with them a hint of chill, especially in shady places like the wooded hollows off Lebanon Road ten miles south of Jeffersonâ
especially
when middle Georgia was always humid anyway, present clear sky and moonlight notwithstanding.

But something about
this
fog was different. It had appeared too abruptly, for one thing: easing up from the Middle Oconee in thick white tendrils like the wraiths of the legendary uktena-serpents of the
Ani-Yunwiya,
who had wrested this land from the
Ani-Kusa
and held it and farmed it and hunted it until the white men came with their endless lies and their empty promises and their worthless treaties. The Ani-Yunwiyaâthe Principal Peopleâthe
Cherokee,
as they were called in a tongue not their ownâhad long since departed, though: marched west in the van of Winfield Scott's muskets. Yet their legacy still lingered, not merely in the pot shards and arrowheads that seeded the nearby riverbottoms, but in the very names of the waters that drained field and forest alike: Oconee, andâmore remotelyâthe smaller stream that fed it: Bloody Creek, where the Ani-Yunwiya and the Ani-Kusa had fought one of their most sanguineous battles.

Both
were at peace tonight, however, drowsing beneath a skim of white that grew denser and deeper and crept up the oak-snarled ridges with unseemly haste, as if it hurried to meet some urgent summons.

Perhaps it did.

It brushed granite boulders and enwrapped them, fingered red maples and clung to their trunks and dragged more of its heavy white mass up behind, then hooked other trees, other stones, and flowed deeper into the woods and across the first of the fossilized logging roads. A little farther on it snared a meadow: clover between stands of oak and hickory and loblolly pines. Two apple trees and three chestnuts grew there as late-season enticement for the whitetails that would be hunted in the fall from the tree stand looming above the mist like the crows' nest of some becalmed vessel. Three teenage campers slept in it and whimpered when their dreams went suddenly grim and chill, while a fourth was abroad and furtive.
His
song floated through the nighted woods, low and
a cappella,
in
a tongue of the Ani-Yunwiya that was too
strong
to be deadened by fog. Perhaps it was his singing which drew it.

Or maybe it came at the prompting of another who had sensed the boy's need from a World away and responded by the only means it could, for where the white was thickest a deer appeared. It too was whiteâand not remotely mortalâbut it smelled its humbler kindred about and summoned a yearling buck with the barks and grunts that were its language here in the Lying World. They traveled together for a while, and then came whistling death from the singer's arrow and thanks for a life from a lucky hunterâbut that was all according to the Law, and
Awi-Usdi,
the Little Deer, approved it.

The ground felt the blood, too; knew it seeping warm into the loam and clay as it drank it down. And the fog shrank back from that sudden heat, back through the trees, back over the campers and the red Mustang that had brought them, back down the hollows to the Middle Oconee River.

And back to Bloody Creek.

But it did not slide silent into the waters there. It lingered, cold and waiting, coiled around the mortarless piled stones of a long-abandoned bridge abutmentâbound, perhaps, by something that was not quite done with the secrecy it afforded. And then that something moaned as if in pain, there where the fog had curdled longest, and then the mist abated.

But in its wake, a thing moved in the land for the first time in countless ages. And that thing too was singingâ¦

Prologue II: Wheels Within Wheels

(Walhala, Galunlatiâhigh summerâearly morning)

Hyuntikwala UsunhiâUki,
as he was sometimes called in the Lying Worldâsat cross-legged on the southern spoke of his Power Wheel and stared at the amorphous, fist-sized crystal he had fixed precisely at the juncture of the four radiating strips of dark gravel that marked the cardinal directions and stretched ten arm spans back to the rim, where they terminated in lightning-blasted trees of diverse colors, not all of them natural. The circle of sand beneath those spokes was most times white as saltâas perfectly white as Uki's own hairless skin (though he was not an albino)âbut Nunda Igehi's first hot, pulsing light now tinged both with a wash of the red that was Power Color of the East. There was no wind, and it would not have disturbed a grain had there been any; but the odors of cedar and laurelâplants of vigilanceâfloated delicately across the clearing from where they both guarded and framed this Place of Power.

And still Uki sat unmoving.

He was naked except for a white doeskin loincloth that bore beaded patterns of lightning bolts, and for the twin golden uktena-bracelets that coiled around his muscular biceps. His black hair hung unbound down wide shoulders to brush the ground. His right index finger still oozed blood from where he had pricked it to awaken the crystal.

And longer yet he lingered.

It was probably not wise to use the
ulunsuti
so, he told himself, not prudent to empower it as often as he lately had to spy between the Worlds, great need or no. Those who minded the World Walls might become capricious and show him things that were notâor reveal pasts or futures in the guise of the present and so confound him. Time was not a constant thing between the Worlds: this much Edahi, his mortal apprentice, had taught him; as Uki had instructed the lad in turn about many other things he hoped would do him good in the Lying World. But
that
bit of knowledge confused far more than it clarified.

Adawehiyu,
they called to him:
very great magician.
But what did anyone know? All magic gave you was awareness of the immensity of your ignorance.

Well, not
all.

Magic had gained Uki sovereignty over the weather here in Walhala.

Magic had given him allies in the Lying World for the first time in almost two hundred cycles of the sun and in so doing had shaken him from his ancient insularity and reawakened his curiosity, which was itself magic of a kind.

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