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  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Stoneskin’s Revenge

  For

  Acknowledgments

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

  Prologue I: Song-Called

  Prologue II: Wheels Within Wheels

  PART I

  Chapter I: Watched Pot

  Chapter II: Inconveniences

  Chapter III: The Hunter and the Hunted

  Chapter IV: Dreams and Visions

  Chapter V: Conjurations

  PART II

  Chapter VI: Sneakin’

  Chapter VII: Off the Beaten Path

  Chapter VIII: The Doll-Maker

  Chapter IX: Runaways

  Chapter X: Frettin’ and Worryin’

  Chapter XI: Moonstruck

  Chapter XII: “Uwelanatsiku. Su sa sai!”

  Chapter XIII: The Lurkers in the Shadows

  PART III

  Chapter XIV: Chance Encounter

  Chapter XV: Plotting

  Chapter XVI: Being Prepared

  Chapter XVII: Confrontation

  Chapter XVIII: Sweating Bullets

  Chapter XIX: Catching Up

  Chapter XX: Spyin’ on the Spied-upon

  Chapter XXI: Put to the Question

  PART IV

  Chapter XXII: Comin’ To

  Chapter XXIII: Frayed Nerves

  Chapter XXIV: Breaking Point

  Chapter XXV: Changing Times

  Chapter XXVI: Back and Forth

  Chapter XXVII: Treed

  Chapter XXVIII: Taking Aim

  Chapter XXIX: Gathering at the River

  Epilogue I: Road Trip

  Epilogue II: Roadkill

  About the Author

  Stoneskin’s Revenge

  By Tom Deitz

  Copyright 2015 by Estate of Thomas Deitz

  Cover Copyright 2015 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Tom Webster

  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’—an’ that gave him one mighty fright.

  Werepossum Blues

  words: Calvin McIntosh

  music: Darrell Buchanan

  Prologue I: Song-Called

  (Jackson County, Georgia—Monday, June 16—between 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 Jefferson—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-Yunwiya—the Principal People—the Cherokee, as they were called in a tongue not their own—had 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, and—more remotely—the 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 wa
s 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 white—and not remotely mortal—but 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 hunter—but 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 abutment—bound, 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 singing…

  Prologue II: Wheels Within Wheels

  (Walhala, Galunlati—high summer—early morning)

  Hyuntikwala Usunhi—Uki, as he was sometimes called in the Lying World—sat 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 salt—as perfectly white as Uki’s own hairless skin (though he was not an albino)—but 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 laurel—plants of vigilance—floated 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 not—or 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.

  And lately it had shown him an illness in Nunda Igehi, and given him a means to effect its cure—if the efforts of certain mortal friends succeeded.

  It was to check on them that he had come here with the ulunsuti.

  He continued to stare at it, feeling the sun hot across his shoulders, his eyes burning with weariness as he sought to conjure the image of Edahi as Uki last had seen him: tall and straight and strong, with hair like raw stone-that-burns, and the twinkling eyes that had so entranced his half-sisters, the Serpent Women.

  But he still saw nothing except glassy haze and the septum of red light that bifurcated the crystal.

  And then, abruptly, images…

  …morning sunlight glints off the pitted chrome and Candyapple Red enamel of a ’66 Mustang hardtop that looks as if it needs new paint far more than the frequent waxing that is obvious surrogate. One fender is blue and has been for nearly a year, and it carries the mud and dust of half-a-dozen north Georgia counties across its dented flanks. Its interior is seat-deep in road-trip detritus: maps, candy wrappers, foam plastic burger boxes from the Winder McDonald’s, a burgundy T-shirt emblazoned with the sigil of the Enotah County ’Possums, bits of legal paper bearing scrawls in four adolescent hands. And the trunk…though closed, that has been lately pillaged of backpacks and coolers and less likely gear. The only noteworthy object there now is a recurve bow of laminated wood, its countless layers shimmering like a rainbow.

  The car sits in an oil-stained driveway just shy of the terminus of a dead-end street in a suburb east of Atlanta. A brick ranch house rises before it, its lawn unmown, the paint on the front door peeling. The nearer side yard is enclosed by a high chainlink fence wire-laced to angle-iron posts anchored ten feet apart. It secures a brace of beagles used for rabbit hunting. Woods rise behind it, shielding any view of civilization in that quarter. It is the last house on the block, the only brick house on its side of the street.

  Sudden cries shatter the suburban calm: teenagers—nervous and harried and alarmed. A girl stumbles from the forest. Her hair is red and she drags a knapsack with one hand while clutching a small animal to her breast with the other. (Uki starts at this.) She dashes to the fence and pauses there, terrified, gazing back at the sky above the treetops. Two boys follow: one blond, one dark-haired, also with knapsacks. Between them they assist a third, who is staggering. He too is blond, but here is a strangeness to his features that is not entirely human, for he is one of the Nunnihe who live on the other side of the Lying World from Galunlati. Uki knows all three boys but does not bother to name them. It is sufficient that they are friends.

  He wonders what has happened to them, though, for their faces are all haggard with fatigue and dread, and like the girl, they aim apprehensive glances at the sky. The Nunnihe boy screams as they approach the fence.

  Birds slide into view above the treetops: vast raptors gliding quick and low. They are black and larger than any eagles, though that is what they most resemble.

  The shorter boy, the blond, yells frantic orders, abandons his charge, and scrambles over the back fence, then pounds through the dog lot and vaults the street-side fence. His cut-off jeans rip as he crosses. The beagles are too taken aback to react.

  He reaches the car, fumbles in his pocket but finds no keys, then snags his spare pair from under the hood. A moment later he is in the seat, gunning the engine. He backs up, then finds first—and floors the accelerator. Tires squeal, and he aims the Mustang toward the fence. Metal shrieks, the fence collapses, and beagles disperse in terror.

  The car hurtles on, smashes the back fence as well, and grinds to a noisy halt atop it. The boy leaps out, the girl takes his place behind the wheel, and the boy helps his dark-haired friend with his screaming Nunnihe companion. A door slams, and the birds descend.

  There are six of them, and they attack the car, but seem to be repulsed by the metal. As the Mustang roars into the street, one falls to the pavement and flops about gracelessly. Though already large as a man, it shimmers and blurs, and suddenly takes on the form of a tall, slim warrior in black.

  From the shadows by the woods brown eyes can abide such sights no longer. Their owner vents a panicked, yodeling cry and bolts for deeper cover.

  But the bird-man does n
ot hear. He regains his equilibrium, shifts shape once more, and wings skyward.

  The car speeds away, but in the backseat the Nunnihe boy screams louder still and starts to writhe. His friends watch, concerned, and then the boy in front sets fire to paper and thrusts something into its heart. The blond boy finds himself handed the small animal. Uki’s name is shrieked aloud, but is cut off. Flame fills the Mustang for an instant, and then the backseat is empty, though the car continues on…

  For a moment longer Uki watched, a scowl of concern furrowing his snowy brow, but then he muttered certain words and cast his vision south. What he saw there troubled him even more: the Nunnihe boy and the blond boy had succeeded, were here in Galunlati, but far away, which he had not expected. And Edahi was with them, though not in his own form. Uki could spare no time to seek them, but he could certainly send word.

  He stood, scanned the sky, and uttered a long, high-pitched screech.

  An instant later an eagle appeared, floating down from the hot, cloudless heavens to land lightly on the northern spoke. “Siyu,” it rasped gravely. “Greetings, Hyuntikwala Usunhi.”

  “Siyu, adawehiyu,” Uki responded formally. “Greetings unto Awahili, Lord of Eagles.”

  “You have need of me?”

  “I do.”

  And with that Uki delivered unto Awahili certain messages, and took from a pouch at his waist what looked like two milk-white arrowheads—or maybe they were sharks’ teeth. These he placed in another pouch, which he looped around his feathered colleague’s neck.

  “Your message will be delivered,” Awahili assured him, and rose once more into the sky. The sand showed no mark of his passing; not a single grain had been shifted by his feathers.

  Uki sat down again, though it was not to spy on the present this time, but to cast his eye to the future a day—and a World—away.

  At first the ulunsuti remained clear, the septum pulsing dully as Uki sought anew to pierce the World Walls—and then, abruptly, it darkened. It was as if the Barriers Between had grown solid and opaque when he tried to gaze upon the results of Awahili’s messages, as if someone had thrown up endless clouds of sand to veil his sight.