off at the roots and fallen. The birds had disintegrated. The stench coming from the remains of the house was worse, if that was possible.
“I’m ready,” I said. “Occam, I need the two piles of soil, here and here.” I pointed in front of my knees to the ground just outside of the death and decay infecting Hugo Ames’ house.
He tipped the bag and shook it to make two small piles of local farm soil. Beside me, T. Laine tore an alcohol pad open and, to make her happy, I cleaned my finger with it. She opened the lancet and held it out to me.
I stabbed my fingertip and inhaled a gasp. “Dagnabbit!” It hurt. It hurt worse than when a plant stabbed me with a thorn. Maybe, like a plant, I was becoming sensitive to steel. And dagnabbit was an exceptionally unsatisfactory word for the pain.
My blood ran down my finger as I steadied my breath. Curling my fingers over my palm, I caught the blood-trail and the drops. I placed my other palm flat on one pile of dirt and said, “Okay. Step two.”
From the King James Bible, T. Laine said, “For, behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.” She had assured me that this was not a sacrilege or a blasphemy, to use scripture to cleanse the earth, though I knew most members of my church would see it that way.
I shook off my uneasiness and sank my consciousness into the earth. I hadn’t read deeply in weeks, hadn’t searched for the sleeping sentience, the soul of the hills. It hadn’t occurred to me to search here at all, so far from the mountains, so far from home. But I dove deep, just beyond the death and decay, reaching through loam and clay and shattered rock, through limestone riddled with holes and full of water, through ancient riverbeds with rounded stones and curved boulders, farther, deeper, into the dark. I touched the sleeping sentience, the presence of the Earth, or one of them.
When I was certain that it was deeply somnolent, I placed my blood-filled palm onto the other small pile of farm dirt.
T. Laine was saying the biblical quote over and over, her words rushing like water across dry ground. My blood soaked through and touched the land beneath. Lights crackled and sparked and the energies of the land below me came alive. It was a three-dimensional palette of spinning bright green, churning dark red, and the almost painful deep purple of bruises.
The death and decay spun like a top, swirling like a fire devil. It rose up, hot as liquid glass, yet glacier cold. Alert, but not attacking. Not sentient, not self-aware. It was blind and seeking, sizzling and fiery, frozen and shattered. But not alive.
It was death. Emptiness.
But so very powerful. A burning frozen black hole where no life was, or could ever be.
The energies of death rolled closer.
It was like watching opposites attract, the positive light and joy of fecund life and the brittle burning/icy opposite, the negative darkness and emptiness of death and decay. My own power, the power of yinehi, of nature and earth, reached out toward the death energies, the wrong energies.
Carefully, I held my magic back. Not letting the energies touch.
When the conflicting energies were stable, only inches separating them, I sank into the earth. Deeper. Getting a feel for the parameters of death and decay, how wide its reach, how deep into the soil.
Slowly I wrapped and wove my magics into threads and then skeins, the soft spring green of leaves, the dark burgundy red of summer flowers, the deep purple of grapes and berries. I pulled in the browns of soil and the sparkling reflections of falling water, the powerful black of local marble and the charcoal of local granite, the greens and grays of limestone.
I twisted and knotted my energies together, weaving a basket of life, vines and roots and thorns and rocks and soil, strong, alive, and healthy. The power of the Earth. Though there was no light so far beneath the surface, colors glimmered and flashed, the cool green, green, green wrapping like roots, circling around the burning emptiness that was death. I slid the weaving through the ground, pulling and shifting it until it surrounded death and decay, fencing it in. But not touching it. Not letting it