“Your gods owe a duty to people?” Meriwether asked, not sure if he was appalled or charmed by the notion. He wondered if Father Avenir would say the same of the Holy Covenant.
“How else?” She patted Meriwether on the arm in a motherly and reassuring gesture. “We have a great battle ahead of us, and Coyote has some powers. Not as great as Raven, because Raven feeds off the new magic in the land as well as the European magic in the body possessed. Your spirit dragon is powerful, as is my eagle, but Coyote is stronger than us. He might be our best chance to wrestle some of the land’s magic away from Raven.” She looked up at the shaman in his Coyote mask and pelt. “I’m glad he is with us.”
Though the creature disturbed him, Meriwether tried to see the advantages. But now and then, behind his Coyote mask, Dosabite would glance toward him with a deeply malevolent expression.
As the war party packed the last of the camp and mounted up, Father Avenir came up to Meriwether, bowing. He smiled and said, in his oddly accented English, “I cannot go with you, my son. I have other things to do in this ravaged land, but I will give you my blessing, from our God, a blessing such as was given to the knights of old when they went into battle against impossible odds.”
They were accepting help from a powerful native spirit, so why not the blessing of a papist? “We can use all the help available.”
Head bowed, the priest walked up and down the line of expedition members and Snake People, dipping his aspergillum in a bowl of water he carried, flicking droplets of holy water at them. Most of the men weren’t sure how to react. LaBiche crossed himself when the water fell on him, and Meriwether was surprised to see Sacagawea also make the gesture, though he supposed Toussaint must have taught her. Had she actually converted to Catholicism? How did she reconcile her beliefs? For that matter, how did the Church reconcile the traditions of the man taking at least one other wife?
Then he sighed. Considering the dragon sorcerer, an insane Raven spirit, the rising power overrunning the land, and his own desperate journey to the land of the dead, such worries did not seem important. The people and even the priests in these largely unpopulated lands were cut off, and adapted their beliefs and experiences as needed to survive in a place filled with supernatural magic.
Father Avenir continued his prayers and blessings, sprinkling holy water. There was a tense and awkward moment when he reached the end of the line to face the shaman in his Coyote guise. As if remembering his human body, Coyote stood straight, grinning at the priest from beneath the coyote head balanced on the shaman’s tangled hair. Dosabite’s lips spread, displaying sharp, shiny teeth that had not been there before. Startled, the priest paused, holding his aspergillum, then let it rest back in its bowl. He gave a respectful bow, not in the way a man bowed to a god, but more as one bowed to an acquaintance.
The shaman’s body bowed at exactly the same moment.
The discomfited priest stepped back and turned toward the mounted party. He said in a very loud voice, “Bless you my children. May you win a victory against the evil one and free the land of his stranglehold.”
Coyote grinned wider, and his golden eyes shone.
The priest then walked off to the southeast, while the war party headed out, led by Coyote. The shaman had chosen not to ride, but instead he ran ahead of the group, faster than any horse could move.
Meriwether rode his horse alongside Sacagawea. “I thought you would guide us to the lair of the dragon sorcerer, taking us to where you remember.”
“I will help, but when it comes to Raven and Coyote, we aren’t always in the real world. After I escaped, it is possible I didn’t walk in the real world for the first few days. Or weeks. I know we have to head north, but just following a physical direction might not get us where we need to go.” She nodded toward the shaman loping ahead with unnatural swiftness. “But Coyote moves the same way Raven does. He can take us directly to the place where Raven is hiding.”
They rode hard for the day, stopping several times to let the horses drink whenever they found dwindling trickles of water in arroyos. The terrain looked arid, increasingly rugged, but Meriwether noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Suddenly, though, the dirt and sparse grass changed to just plain rock. The sound of the thin creek they’d been following on their left ceased. The party halted, uneasy.
Meriwether looked around, realizing that the light had dimmed and that natural sounds had ceased. All sounds.
Ahead of them, Coyote stopped and sniffed the air. Watching the shaman, Meriwether was certain the head on the pelt actually twitched and snuffled.
The path stretched out before them, and the rocks rose up on either side, swiftly becoming cliffs twenty feet tall, funneling the war party in a particular direction. There could be no retreat on either side. Meriwether found the canyon ominous, a likely spot for an ambush.
Coyote made a gesture for quiet, and whispered instructions that were passed down the line from rider to rider. Moving as quietly as possible, they backed their horses, and Coyote led them to the left side of the path and up the rocks. He scampered to the top of the cliff, with the horses struggling to follow. Meriwether didn’t believe they could go very far in this manner, but Coyote was more interested in looking down into the canyon, where the path led.
Only moments after they had gotten into position, a rumbling sound like an avalanche of thunder echoed through the canyon. A herd of buffalo exploded down the dry path, hundreds of them, shoulder to shoulder and confined by the rock walls. They bellowed in a panic, their eyes rolling.
Behind them, driving them forward, a large creature lashed out with a hissing roar. Meriwether knew exactly what it was.
From above, he unslung his rifle, pumped it.
Behind the herd of buffalo, their horrible mouths open to reveal rows of sharp teeth, strode two of the giant reptiles he and Clark had met on the plain near the Canoti mound. The enormous lizards snatched buffalo in their jaws, crunching down with a will, sending blood and bones everywhere, but they didn’t stop to feed. The huge reptiles simply slaughtered their prey and charged on, thundering along on powerful back legs.
Meriwether shuddered. If they hadn’t moved to the top of the canyon, the stampeding herd would have crushed them. But even from their height and presumed safety, he saw that the largest of the antediluvian beasts might be able to reach them and kill them.
He took his rifle to his shoulder and fired twice, aiming for the tiny eyes, which he hoped was the most vulnerable spot, although these magical reptilian revenants might be destroyed simply by being pierced with bullets of civilized metal. He certainly didn’t want to fight them with his knife.
Following Meriwether’s lead, the rest of the party brought their rifles out and all together they let loose a sharp, booming volley of shots. The gunfire was loud enough to echo even above the roar of the stampede and the bellow of the giant lizards, and it quickly became obvious that the metal of their bullets did not possess extraordinary properties. The sharp gunshots drew the attention of the scaled beasts, however.
They charged the canyon walls, seeing new prey above. The monster lizards stomped on buffalo they had already killed, lunging upward to the humans just out of their reach. One of the largest beasts reached out, extending its short, clawed forelimbs. Meriwether fired again.
With a primal scream, the creature slipped in its scrambling climb up the rocks, taking its companion with it. The maddened buffalo ran ahead, surging out of the confining canyon to the open space beyond.