The spellbook ofLow Magic

The drums were lost in the river crossing, so old Wirra, the human shaman who has traveled with the pride for thirty years, keeps the beat herself, stamping and chanting in the red dust of the savannah of Gondwana's east coast, behind the lion-men. The raiders come over the rise at a run. Every Andaman within thirty paces of her feels the song settle into his arms, and the spears fly truer than they did at dawn. Wirra does not stop, not when her throat burns, not when a javelin lands a pace from her feet. The luck, she knows, lasts exactly as long as her voice does.

Before the seal hunt, the shaman Nuna kneels at the edge of the bay and taps the ice three times with her walrus-tooth rattle. The little spirits of the water answer as a hum under the frozen crust. She asks them one thing only: will the ice along the eastern point hold six men and a sledge until evening? It will not, they tell her. The current has been eating it from below for days. Last winter a young hunter asked these same spirits about a girl in a village across the strait, and got nothing back but cold silence.

The children of the Borean Forest camp have found a hollow oak with a little door carved in its roots, and they want to go inside. Their shaman, Ilkka, makes them wait. He crouches two strides from the door, murmurs to the spirits, and for one short minute he sees plainly what his eyes usually miss. The door itself is only a carving. But the moss on the threshold shines with a faint, crawling enchantment that has no business being there. Ilkka sends the children back to camp and fetches an axe.

The llama traders want to cross the high passes into Nazca before the snows, and they have paid the Quechua shaman Tupaq in salt to ask the spirits first. He shakes his bundle of feathers over a fire of dried moss and asks after the whole caravan together. The smoke leans west, then curls back on itself. The route holds danger, he tells them, and it is fairly hazardous rather than perilous. The traders argue about that grading for an hour. In the end they go, but they tie their animals together and send a boy ahead to watch for rockfall.

The hippo came out of the reeds of the Zimba river without a sound, and now Kwabena lies on the bank with his thigh laid open. The shaman Adwoa kneels beside him, twisting a doll out of green river grass with quick, practiced fingers. She binds a strip of Kwabena's torn loincloth around the little figure's leg, lays her other hand flat on his chest, and hums. Under her palm the torn muscle knits and the bleeding slows to a seep. The wound is still there, raw and angry, but he will walk home on it.

For four days the young Kutchin shaman Tetsoh has eaten nothing and sat alone on the ridge above the caribou crossing, drumming and waiting. On the fifth morning a raven drops out of the fog, lands on his drum, and looks at him sideways. Then it is gone, and he feels it settle inside his chest like a second heartbeat, amused, patient, and very old. Years later, when a hungry spirit in the burial grounds tries to climb into his body, it finds the raven already there, and flees.

The goblin sentry on the stilt-walk over the Ngani Swamp hears nothing until the shaman Rakai opens his mouth and a swarm of tiny lights pours out of him like sparks from a green fire. There are nine of them, then a tenth, darting across the black water faster than dragonflies. Each one stings the goblin once and vanishes. The sentry drops his spear, slaps at his arms and face, and bolts shrieking into the reeds with blood beaded on his skin. Rakai sighs. He had hoped for more spirits tonight.

The Tartessian envoy steps off his launch onto the black beach of Rapa Nui smiling, with gifts. The island's shaman, Hotu, watches from the tree line and lets her gaze rest on him for the space of a breath. What she sees is a small, grasping, cruel soul with no real power in it. Then she turns her eyes to the envoy's silent bodyguard, a tall man in gray, and her gaze slides off him as if he were oiled. Something is shielding his mind. Hotu tells the chief to accept the gifts and watch the quiet one.

The young musk ox has slid into a crevasse in the ice fields of Gava and is bellowing, and the Aesir villagers who found it cannot get ropes around it while it thrashes. Their shaman Ragna climbs down onto a ledge, shuts her eyes and reaches out to it. No words pass between them, only a flood of cold, pain and terror from the beast, and from her a slow, steady warmth: stillness, help, soon. The bellowing stops. The calf stands trembling while the ropes go around it, and it keeps its shaggy head pressed against Ragna's shoulder until the hauling begins.

Somebody has been eating the hermit's bread. Brother Aldo, a savant who has lived in a grotto in the Forest of Arden for eleven years, has decided the matter needs looking into. He sits cross-legged on his mat, breathes slowly for the space of a minute, and lets his mind slip sideways. The grotto looks the same. The little invisible Sprite sitting on his bread shelf with its cheeks full does not. It freezes, crumbs on its chin, as Aldo slowly raises one eyebrow and holds out his hand for the rest of the loaf.

The river in the Golian Mountains has burst its banks upstream, and the villages below it do not know yet. The shaman Mahalu ties back her hair, rubs dust from the trail on her ankles, and starts to run. She does not stop at the first ridge, or the second. By noon she has covered what a messenger on foot would need all day to cross, and her breathing is no heavier than when she started. At the third village she shouts her warning and keeps going. Behind her the water is already rising in the gullies.

The trader from Tartessos short-weighted the ivory and laughed about it, and the shaman of the Avakuli does not forget such things. That night, in a hut that smells of smoke and blood, he binds a lock of the trader's hair to a figure carved from soft wood and whispers to it about the gray fever of the river flats. Two days later, far downriver, the trader wakes shaking and sweating on the deck of his boat. He will reach Tartessos alive, perhaps, but he will be a long time recovering.

Two shamans of Nazca have been feuding over the same hunting valley for six years, and today it comes to spirits. Old Yupanqui barely has time to walk his circle, a single slow turn with his staff dragging through the grass, before his rival across the clearing opens his mouth and a swarm of spirit darts pours out. They reach the edge of the invisible ring and simply stop existing, like sparks landing in a pond. Yupanqui settles into the grass inside his circle and waits, knowing it will not last forever and neither will the other man's patience.

The captive has been taken into the stone slave pens of Tartessos, and nobody on the raft knows which cell. Kaimana, the raft's shaman, lies down on the bamboo deck and tells her brothers to guard her body with their lives. Then she is gone from it, rising like mist, racing across the harbor and through the fortress wall as if it were fog. She sees the guards dicing, hears their jokes, passes through three doors and finds her cousin chained in the fourth cell. She cannot touch the chains. She can only look, remember the way, and hurry back.

The boy wandered off from the berry pickers somewhere in the foothills of the Tara Mountain Range, and night is coming. The shaman Birrani sits down on a flat rock, closes her eyes and says nothing at all for a long while, as the women wring their hands. When she finally opens them she lifts one finger and points east, into a gully nobody thought to search. They find him there after dark, asleep in a dry creek bed with a lizard on his chest, entirely unaware that anyone was worried.

The fisherman from the shore of the Lake of Dragons has not spoken since the witchdoctor's curse fell on him at the new moon; his mouth moves but nothing comes out. His wife brings him to the shaman Nyokabi, who spends a whole afternoon carving a new likeness of him from driftwood. At dusk she holds the little figure to his lips, speaks the curse backwards, and breathes into the carving's open mouth. The fisherman coughs, clears his throat, and says, hoarse and astonished, that he is very hungry. His wife starts to cry, and then to laugh.

The shaman Arun has been leading the column through the Black Jungle since dawn, and an hour ago he quietly called on the spirits to watch over him. Now, with no sound and no sign of anything wrong, a cold prickle runs up the back of his neck. He cannot say from where. He throws up his hand and the porters freeze. Nothing happens. Then a python the thickness of a man's thigh slides off the branch just ahead, lands heavily across the trail where the lead porter would have been, and hisses at them all.

Every evening since her son paddled south with the walrus hunters, the Kulugmiut shaman Aaja has held a lump of clear river quartz to the lamp and gazed into it. Tonight the stone clouds over and then clears, and there he is: sitting by a fire on a gravel beach, gutting a seal, arguing cheerfully with another hunter about the weather. She watches for as long as the spell holds, which is not long, and then the stone is only stone again. Aaja puts it back in its pouch and goes to sleep smiling.

The Cimmerian war band has camped somewhere in the Borean Forest, close to the reindeer herds, and the herders need to know where. Their shaman Kaija draws on a cloak sewn from the feathers of an eagle-owl, spreads her arms, and the forest suddenly becomes enormous and full of detail. She rises on silent wings above the spruce tops, turns her great round eyes to the east and sees the smoke of their fires within minutes. She circles once, counting tents, and glides home well before the change runs out.

The thing crashing out of the jungles of Paragua toward the village is taller than the longhouse and its roar makes the villagers' spears rattle in their hands. Men who have hunted jaguar all their lives start backing away. Then the shaman Chaska begins to sing, standing in the middle of the village with her arms raised, and the terror simply drains out of everyone who hears it. The hunters plant their feet. They are still hopelessly outmatched by a tyrannosaur, and they know it, but they hold the line while the children run for the caves.

The Cymbri raiders beach their boats on the Pictish shore at dawn, expecting a sleeping village. Instead they find a gray-haired shaman standing alone on the dunes, singing. It is a low, grinding song with no tune, and it crawls under the skin. One after another the raiders drop their shields and flee back into the surf. Their chieftain alone stands his ground, jaw clenched, sword up. He takes a step forward, looks around at his empty beach, and then very slowly backs away to his boat by himself.

Losa has been told that she is too clumsy and too loud ever to marry, and she has come to the old shaman of Manua to ask whether that is true. The shaman gives her nothing but a cup of bitter tea and sends her home. That night Losa dreams of a beach she does not know, and a gray-haired man laughing at something she has said, and three small children fighting over a canoe. She wakes knowing it will happen, though not when. She is still smiling at breakfast.

The hunter has tracked the witchdoctor for three days across the scrubland of Kush, and at last he sees him, a small figure on the next ridge. He raises his bow. On the ridge the witchdoctor calmly pulls a little carved figure from his pouch and pushes a long black thorn into its right knee. The hunter's leg folds under him as if the bone had been removed. There is no wound and no blood, only a white blaze of pain. He lies in the dust and watches the witchdoctor walk unhurriedly away.

The sacred drum hangs in the Naga chieftain's longhouse in the Sarakan Jungle, and the shaman Tambi means to take it home. He speaks the words at the edge of the clearing and fades out of sight like breath on a cold morning. He walks straight past the guards, lifts the drum from its peg, and passes within arm's reach of the sleeping chieftain, the man who burned his village. His knife hand twitches. He knows exactly what would happen if he struck. So he keeps walking, the drum under his arm, and is gone before anyone wakes.

When the landslide came down on Tamarack Sound, it pinned the headman's daughter under a cedar trunk the width of a doorway. Four men have tried to lift it and failed. The shaman Kwaskwi pushes them aside, calls quietly on the spirits he carries within him, and feels them pour into his shoulders and back until his body is as strong as any man's body can ever be. He crouches, grips the bark, and heaves. The trunk rises a foot, then two, and the others drag the girl clear before his arms give out.

Everyone in Thule knew the drowned sorcerer was a wicked man, but only he knew where the stolen ring was hidden, so the shaman Hrafna calls his spirit anyway. The lamps flicker. She asks her first question and waits. No answer comes. Instead the air grows cold, and her apprentice by the door goes suddenly rigid, eyes rolling. Then he gasps, shudders, and shoves the cold thing out of himself by sheer stubbornness. Somewhere in the dark the spirit hisses and slips away through the smoke hole, looking for a softer body.

Before the duel on the shore of Anostos, while the Fomorian champion roars and beats his club against a boulder, the shaman Morna sits motionless on the shingle and meditates for the time it takes the tide to turn a pebble. When she rises her eyes are distant and calm. The first blow of the club should break her ribs. It knocks her down instead, and she gets up bruised. The second tears her sleeve and leaves only a welt. The champion stares at his club as if it had betrayed him.

The canoes cannot get past the rapids below Ulloa, and the shaman Yaku is tired of carrying them overland. He wades into the shallows and calls into the white water. For a few minutes nothing happens. Then the river bulges, and a water spirit rises beside him, a shape of glassy current with a face like a drowned smile. For the rest of the hour it hauls the canoes upstream through the rapids as if they were leaves. When the hour ends it sinks back into the river without a word, and Yaku knows better than to try to keep it.

The lions come to the waterhole at Marhashi at dusk, just as the children are filling the gourds. The shaman Obuya steps between them and raises both palms. The spirits he carries surge outward, and the great black-maned male is lifted off its paws and shoved back through the dust until it stands ten feet away, snarling at nothing. Obuya holds it there, sweat pouring down his face, every thought in his head bent on the push. Behind him the children scramble up the thorn tree. Only then does he let go.

The pteranodon comes out of the sun over the Isles of Tirakamba with a fisher boy kicking in its claws, and the whole beach screams. The shaman Wayra has spent the whole winter preparing arrows, and she has seven in her quiver. She draws one, nocks it, and looses without seeming to aim. The shaft climbs twice as far as any arrow should and takes the creature through the chest. It drops the boy into the lagoon and goes wheeling away over the reef, crippled. Wayra lowers her bow. Six left.

The slave-hunters have tracked the escapees into the Sarakan Jungle, and they are close. The shaman Dayang pulls a cloak of striped tiger hide around her shoulders and ducks into the undergrowth. What comes out is neither woman nor tiger, but something tall, muscled and striped, with a woman's cunning in its golden eyes. It moves through the trees without a sound. By the time the change wears off, near dawn, the slave-hunters have scattered back to their boats, and none of them will ever agree about what they saw.

The overseer on the Tartessian galley likes his whip, and the chained shaman at the third oar has been giving him insolent looks all morning. He brings the lash down across her back. She does not flinch. Instead the overseer howls and staggers, and a red welt blooms across his own shoulders, matching hers stroke for stroke. He stares at her. She smiles and nods at the whip, inviting him to try again. He does, once, out of pure rage, and then he lies on the deck for a while.

The spirit of the chief's son was stolen by something from below, and the shaman of Nan Matal has agreed to go after it. She takes two warriors by the hand. The third, an older man who does not trust her, pulls his arm back at the last moment and refuses to come, and she lets him go. Then she sings the words, and the three of them rise out of their bodies and sink downward through the floor of the world. They will come back only when she sings it all again in reverse.

Old Tsunda, shaman of an Okalo herding village, is dying in her hut, and her apprentice is on the other side of the ocean, studying at the University of the Arts in Atlantis. She has not seen him in two years. She closes her eyes and reaches for him anyway. In a crowded lecture hall a thousand miles away, the young man suddenly stops writing. He does not know what is wrong, only that someone he knows is calling for him, and that he must go. He is at the harbor before sundown, looking for a ship.

The Nubian archer was blinded by a spitting cobra three months ago, and every healer in the city has failed him. The shaman Nia lays her hands over his eyes and does not move again for a long time. The room grows hot. Her face grays. When she finally lifts her hands the archer blinks, and blinks again, and then he begins to weep because he can see his daughter's face. Nia sits down heavily on the floor and cannot stand. She will not be good for anything until tomorrow.

Half a day's climb into the Kaila Mountains, the shaman Dawa has filled two baskets with herbs when the yeti appear, three of them, blocking the only way down. He shoulders both baskets, grips his staff, and calls up a picture of the fire he left burning at dawn, far below. The snow vanishes. The fire is there, still smoldering, and his tea is still warm in the pot. Up on the mountain, the yeti sniff the empty air in confusion.

The barrow wight on the moors of Alba steps out of its mound and turns toward the two travelers. The shaman who is guiding them does not run. He clenches his fist, and the spirits he has carried for twenty years tear out of him in a single bolt of pale blue light that strikes the wight in the chest. It screams like a kettle and staggers back, pieces of it smoking away into the dusk. The shaman stays on his feet, but his knees are shaking. He hopes it will not get up again.

The party has anchored off the Isle of Dread, and the shaman among them sits alone on the foredeck, staring at the black cliffs. The vision, when it comes, is blurred like a picture seen through rain: black sand, a broken spear, and one of their own lying very still at the water's edge. She cannot see whose face it is. It will happen before tomorrow's sunset, and nothing she does will change that. She sits with the knowledge for a long time before she goes below to tell the others.

The Jotun raiders have broken into the Aesir hall, and the shaman Hallvard is the last one standing between them and the children. He calls on the spirit of his grandfather, a famous warrior of the Seidhr Mountains, and for one terrible moment nothing happens. Then the old man answers. Hallvard feels his grandfather's rage settle into his arms, and his axe begins to move twice as fast as it ever has, faster than any giant can follow. The raiders fall back from the hall doors, bleeding and bewildered.

The court magician of Tang has a gift for charming guests, and the shaman from the Northlands knows it. So before the banquet she divides herself in two. One self eats rice cakes and smiles politely at the Emperor's jokes. The other watches from somewhere behind her eyes, calm and wary. When the magician's charm comes, soft and sweet, the smiling self begins to nod along, but the watching self does not, and so she does not agree to anything at all. She knows she is fragile tonight, but it is worth it.

The old signal tower on the Straits of Ayr has been empty for years because of what lives inside it: a spirit that shrieks, throws stones and has twice shoved a keeper down the stairs. The shaman who climbs it now carries only a rattle and a burning bundle of juniper. On the top floor the spirit comes at her in a howling gust of cold air, and she stands her ground and orders it out. It fights her, and for a moment it holds. Then the gust breaks, and the tower is quiet at last.

The Kawanna warriors gather close around their shaman on the morning of the battle, fourteen of them sitting shoulder to shoulder within a few paces of her fire. For the space of a long breath held and released a hundred times, no one moves or speaks. Then they rise together, eyes glazed and faces calm, and walk down to the Awa River to meet the raiders. The enemy blades strike and strike again, and to their horror the Zephyr keep coming, bleeding far less than they should.

The Vanir reaver is laughing as he turns around to face the old Cimmerian shaman on the path. He has killed three of her people and he means to kill her too. She does not speak. She simply lifts her arm and points at his chest with one knotted finger. The laugh stops. He falls to his knees and then onto his face, and does not move again. The two reavers behind him look at each other, and then they turn their backs to her and run, because they have heard what happens to anyone who looks.

The pearl diver from Manawak went down yesterday afternoon and came up much too late. Her family has kept her wrapped in cool leaves ever since, hoping. The shaman kneels beside the body, calls her name into the four winds and pulls, hand over hand, as if hauling in a net. The girl's chest jerks. She coughs up seawater and a little blood, and lies gasping, too weak even to lift her head. It will be weeks before she can dive again, but her mother does not care about that.

For two weeks the witchdoctor of Okwilu has been carving: first a likeness of his rival, the chief's counselor, then a smooth black stone to receive what he intends to take. When the counselor comes to his hut to threaten him, the witchdoctor looks him in the eyes and speaks one word. The counselor stops mid-sentence. His eyes go flat and empty. In the witchdoctor's hand, the black stone grows warm. The counselor will walk and carry and obey now, without a thought of his own, until someone finds a way to put him back.