Mountain Echoes (The Walker Papers) by Ce Murphy

world. That was how it worked.
    Except Carrie’s soul hadn’t passed through the Dead Zone. I’d almost managed to bring somebody back once, when her life essence had been ripped away but her soul had passed into the Dead Zone. That time, the woman had been so startled by her death that she hadn’t even registered it as violent, and had simply moved along. This time I didn’t have even that much chance. Carrie’s soul had been flayed right out of her body along with her life essence.
    If I was really lucky, there were enough pieces of her soul sticking to the insides of my shields that I could put it back together. I stepped back out of the Dead Zone as fast as I’d gone in. Carrie’s body was arching under my hand, exactly like my healing power was a burst of electricity trying to restart her heart. That was how little time had passed. I looked up, the Sight raging full-on, and my stomach fell.
    My shields hadn’t held the stolen life forces in. My brain scrabbled around that, trying to understand why, and landed on a six-year-old’s answer, the kind of thing that fixes itself in a kid’s mind and the adult never quite lets go: of course the shields hadn’t held. Their essence had been gobbled up by Nothing, and everybody knows you can’t hold nothing.
    This was not the kind of deeply held childhood belief that would get anybody on the entire planet except me in trouble. I vowed that I would later stab an ice pick through the part of my brain that was still six, and got up, shaking with anger, to face down the Nothing.
    It had taken everything it was built on, all the wounds and pain born of genocidal history, all the raw power of life it had just obliterated, and it sharpened itself on the whetstone of the fresh terror spiking from everyone else in the holler. It whipped around, no longer a Nothing, but instead becoming something honed, a personification of not just death, but murder. An executioner, an executioner’s ax. It wasn’t that anthropomorphized, but that was the sense of it, its weight ready to fall.
    And there were so many people in the holler for it to fall onto. Dozens of them, everyone who had come up from town an c frh="1em"d from across the county to try to help heal the crying mountain. There was so much power here, and so much good will, and it was ripe for the plucking. My shields, strong as they were, would be spread too thin across this much space. I could not protect them. Not by fighting. So I did the only thing I could think of.
    I dropped my shields.

Chapter Eight
     
    The Executioner went still, like a giant gray smear of evil suddenly catching its breath. I wasn’t sure how sentient it was, though I had considerable faith in the sentience behind it. It was its Master’s dog, just like the Morrígan had been, just like all the others had been. And the Master really ought to be smart enough not to fall for me making myself vulnerable this way, but the fact of the matter was, if he’d done it to me, I’d have gone for his throat, too, never mind what the smart thing was. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when the Executioner swung toward me, slow and ponderous like a thing trying to fool me with its slow ponderousness.
    It was not a Nothing anymore. My brain wasn’t going to pull that trick again. I could catch an Executioner. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it once I caught it, but that was a problem for later. Hopefully not much later, but later. I flexed my hand, waiting for just the right moment, and when it moved, I drew a rapier out of thin air.
    An elf king had made it for a god, and I’d taken it away from the god. Like any decent magic sword, it had useful qualities, like being summonable from the ether, rather than having to carry it around a modern world. But like any decent magic sword, it also had flaws—or I did. For the past year I’d been alternating between learning how to use it and paying the price for not having my healing magic and my