A Storm of Lies: Crowmakers, #3

By L. E. Erickson

He made them weapons. It's up to them to become heroes. 

An experiment made them more than human, masters of advanced weapons that would guarantee the dominance of the fledgling United States. A tragedy turned them into killers, breakers of a tentative peace. Now, their enemy holds in his hands an ancient supernatural power that he cannot hope to control, with every reason to unleash it on the militia which murdered his beloved brother and threatens his people.

As an unnatural storm breaks over the Indiana Territory and promises to devour all life in its path, lies peel away to reveal terrible truths—and the Crowmakers must risk everything to battle a monstrous threat, before their Crows transform them into the real monsters.

As powerful as the Crowmakers have become, in the end it may be that only their humanity can set things right.

The conclusion of a dark journey toward redemption through a bleak but beautifully-rendered world where monsters are real—and the worst of them might be us. Buy now to find out how it all ends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMA Publishing
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386780366

Book preview

1

August 1806

Indiana Territory: Tecumseh’s Town

O

nce Tenskwatawa learned of Tecumseh’s death, all else happened quickly, with the inevitability of lightning descending from a storm-filled sky.

Early afternoon sunlight glittered on Wapahani Sipi’s rippled surface, sharp-edged as tomahawks before battle. To Laughing Girl’s eyes, the water seemed made of colored glass, transparent as a rainbow framed by blue sky and deep green forest. People scurried toward it as if they could walk across its surface. Their brown heads bowed, and they spoke in hushed voices as they herded each other toward the water.

Gather my people.

They didn’t know, yet. The people did not know that Tecumseh had died. They whispered rumors among them of what the runner’s arrival barely two hours past had meant, of what Tenskwatawa’s call to gather might mean. But they didn’t know. No one had yet burdened them with the truth.

And the river was not solid, nor was it transparent. Beneath the water’s light-hearted burble, a deeper voice thrummed. With the abundance of rain this season, the Water of White Sands filled its banks, taut as the belly of a woman in the final days before childbirth.

The water’s surface might look solid enough to dance across. But beneath the light lay darkness and hidden depths. If nothing else, the lenipinsia prowled the world beneath the waters, growling to call the storms, restrained yet ready to answer Tenskwatawa’s commands.

Bring them to the river.

Laughing Girl walked among her people, touching backs and shoulders as she urged them along, doing as her father had commanded. By this time, though, the people moved of their own accord. Their bodies formed a wave of their own, rolling out from the village of frame and bark houses and down the banks to stand at the river’s muddy edge. Laughing Girl’s attention was left free to dwell on a different depth, hidden beneath Tenskwatawa’s words.

There is a thing we must do.

Laughing Girl didn’t know what Tenskwatawa meant. But after so much time spent listening to whispers and chanting from his lodge, after the horrible fury written across Tenskwatawa’s face when he learned of Tecumseh’s death, Laughing Girl’s heart feared.

Vengeance is our right, she reminded herself.

To bring war upon the long knives, that would be Tenskwatawa’s action. It was what he and Tecumseh had plotted all along. Tecumseh had demanded caution. Tenskwatawa alone had insisted that the Master of Life did not favor patience or waiting.

Now, with Tecumseh dead, neither Tenskwatawa nor the Master of Life would be denied.

For months, Tecumseh had been insisting the people were not yet ready to face Harrison and his ilk. Tenskwatawa had argued on behalf of faith and confidence, and Laughing Girl had stood firmly on his side—speaking her father’s words even when he didn’t hear hers, convincing her husband that he should listen her father, aiding them both in turning the ears of their people toward the Master’s truth.

Laughing Girl looked at them now, her people. They swirled around her, bare-chested men and women with children on their hips, black braids and those faded to white, sun-darkened skin wrinkled or smooth.

Were they ready for war?

A fang of guilt sank into Laughing Girl’s heart. In her mind’s eye, her father’s frowning face turned on her, his one good eye glinting with disapproval. And even as Laughing Girl silently second guessed him, questions unfurled beneath the question, like a cold current beneath a deceptively calm surface. Calling the people to war—that was surely what Tenskwatawa planned.

So why could she not shake the feeling that something more was happening?

Patches of sun-heated earth passed beneath Laughing Girl’s feet, spots of warmth among the shaded cool of grass more deeply in the shelter of the oaks and birch along the river. This was the still part of the day, when the sun reached its hottest. Even with the rain that Tenskwatawa’s pleas to the lenipinsia had brought this season, the air moved only in papery dry whispers against Laughing Girl’s cheek. A hard blue sky hung above motionless treetops and sunbaked corn fields.

A summer afternoon, like every other—except that Tecumseh was dead. Everywhere Laughing Girl looked, she glimpsed darkness where once there was light, sharp edges where once was found softness and comfort.

Ahead of Laughing Girl, along the river, Tenskwatawa had already taken his usual place. He stood facing the water, his back to his people. Wind Man stood nearby, easier on the eyes than Tenskwatawa but in a similar pose. Around the two of them stood a half of the village’s youth, blinking and uncertain but doing as Tenskwatawa had asked as they waited for his next directions.

Tenskwatawa’s clenched fists lay against his sides like river stones, hard and unyielding. The last Laughing Girl had seen of his face, it had been twisted with grief and anger. Spittle had flown from his mouth as he shouted directions.

Directions which she had carried out. And yet now, it was Wind Man who stood at Tenskwatawa’s side. Laughing Girl’s steps slowed to a stop. People swept past her.

His adopted white brother stands by his right hand. Not his own daughter. Not me.

A grief of her own swept over Laughing Girl. Tears prickled behind her eyes, and a fist closed around her heart.

All my life. All my life I waited for him to notice me. To have time for me.

And now her own husband had stolen her place by her father’s side.

A frown knit itself across Laughing Girl’s brow. With a whisper like lapping waves, anger licked at her pain.

No. This is not how it will be.

When Laughing Girl’s steps resumed, her feet moved quickly and with purpose. She shifted her shoulders from side to side, gliding through the slower-moving tide of people as a hunter fish angles toward its unwary prey. Tenskwatawa’s back remained turned to her, a forbidding expanse of buckskin and crimson cloth surrounded by the slender, smaller forms of the half dozen boys who attended him.

Wind Man, though, lifted his head. His gaze scanned the crowd side to side. As Laughing Girl grew closer, she glimpsed the tight lines of his face. His brows drew down into an expression which Laughing Girl recognized as worry.

Worry was not an unfamiliar expression on the face of the man she called husband. More often than not, in all the years Laughing Girl had known him, Wind Man had drifted, lost and uncertain, in the wake of more powerful people, like a man caught up in a flood and clinging to a branch in hopes that someone would rescue him.

She had rescued him. Laughing Girl had drawn him in and caught him neatly, recognizing the value of their marriage arrangement. Now, she would help him once again to see how things ought to be done. Wind Man would remember that she was the smart one, the wise one, the one with all the answers. He would remember, and Tenskwatawa would remember. The latter, of course, mattered more.

Wind Man’s questing gaze passed over Laughing Girl. He blinked and quickly jerked his attention back to her. His shoulders lifted. But rather than smoothing with relief to see her, Wind Man’s brow furrowed even more deeply. He glanced to his side, where Tenskwatawa’s fists clenched without respite.

Tenskwatawa’s shoulders rose and fell. Laughing Girl recognized that he must be speaking aloud. Praying, she imagined. Asking the Master of Life for direction and inspiration.

Behind Tenskwatawa’s back, Wind Man’s gaze returned to Laughing Girl. He lifted his hands to waist level and turned them palm out. He shook his head. His mouth formed into a silent no.

No, come no closer. No, remain where you are. No, Laughing Girl, do not presume that you should be included in the proceedings of your own father, your own husband, your own god.

No, Laughing Girl. No.

Her fists clenched every bit as tightly as her father’s. She leveled a cool glare at her husband and kept marching, sliding with determination through the thickest part of the crowd as she approached the river’s edge.

Wind Man glanced once more toward Tenskwatawa, as if to ask permission. Wind Man always asked permission.

Tenskwatawa did not seem to notice Wind Man’s conundrum.

Wind Man’s jaw clenched. His face turned again toward Laughing Girl.

He stepped away from Tenskwatawa’s side and dove into the gathered people, swimming through them like breaking waves. His sudden action startled Laughing Girl effectively enough that her own steps slowed even as Wind Man’s increased.

Wind Man fetched up in front of Laughing Girl. His hands closed around her wrists.

You cannot be here. Despite his actions, Wind Man’s voice lacked the command that Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s always held.

He is not like them, Laughing Girl was reminded. He had never truly been of their blood, in more ways than the color of his skin.

Recovering from her surprise, Laughing Girl pulled herself up to her full height. She was a tall woman, and Wind Man was not a tall man. She looked him straight in his pale eyes.

Tell me why. Her voice did not lack command.

Wind Man’s mouth opened and closed, like a fish pulled from the water. Laughing Girl calmly removed her wrists from his grasping fingers and started around him.

With surprising quickness, Wind Man again stepped into her path. His hands this time fell upon Laughing Girl’s shoulders. His fingers dug into her flesh, not painfully but also not weakly.

With Tecumseh’s death, my brother is distraught, Wind Man said.

My brother. Not son of my father, as it should have been said.

Tenskwatawa is not your brother. The words hissed from Laughing Girl’s mouth as if she had sprouted snake fangs. Her gut twisted with outrage. She looked into Wind Man’s face and could not remember how she had taken him as her husband.

Wind Man leaned back from Laughing Girl’s venomous words. But when Laughing Girl attempted to shake off his hands, he closed them even more tightly onto her shoulders. This time, it did hurt a little.

Please. His one word was little more than a whisper, a puff of breeze beneath the cyclone of hushed voices from the people around them.

A point of chill realization pricked inside Laughing Girl’s head and pooled outward from there, cooling her anger as it spread.

Wind Man was afraid. With Tenskwatawa’s trust, he had everything that Laughing Girl had ever wanted. But he was afraid.

The uneasiness Laughing Girl had been feeling earlier again swooped in. She stopped resisting Wind Man’s hold on her and shook her head.

This is not about Tecumseh. Laughing Girl spoke the realization as she finally fully understood it.

It is, though. It is all about Tecumseh. Wind Man’s voice strained.

Afraid. He is afraid.

Laughing Girl peered past Wind Man toward the water’s edge, where Tenskwatawa now lifted his hands and tilted back his head in supplication to the skies.

Tenskwatawa arched his back and threw his posture forward, as if to fling himself willfully into the sky. The boys around him leaned away. A couple even stepped back, before remembering their place and stepping again into it.

At Tenskwatawa’s feet, water lapped against the river’s edge. Full and dark, the current flowed, in shadowed places breaking free from the illusion of stillness cast by the sparkling of sunlight on its surface.

As the river flowed, it murmured. For a moment, Laughing Girl heard more than the movement of water. She heard voices. Whispering. Chanting.

Impossible.

With new eyes, Laughing Girl looked once more around her. The occupants of Tecumseh’s Town huddled along the river’s bank, filling this side as completely as birches and oaks filled the opposite side. Even hushed in trepidation, the voices of the gathered people out-sang the birds. The entire village had emptied out, including all the visitors who came to hear Tenskwatawa’s words and then stayed. The only people not present were Tecumseh and his party, dead somewhere to the southwest, along a different river.

Everyone stood beside the river. All of the people.

Tenskwatawa prayed. And the river chanted.

Laughing Girl’s mind sped back through her memories, starting with the moment the useless drunkard of a man named Loud Noise had wakened from near death, and The Open Door had announced he could hear the Master of Life’s voice. In his rise to new life and new power, Tenskwatawa had chosen Laughing Girl to aid him. She had cared for nothing else. But now…

She had heard the voice that now spoke from the river before this moment. Laughing Girl had felt the hum of power beneath it. The same chills had wracked her spine, and the same sick feeling had trembled in the pit of her stomach.

Clinging to her joy at having a good father, a strong father, and more than anything, a father who wanted her, Laughing Girl had willfully ignored those things.

Please. Wind Man’s plea this time included a gentle shake of Laughing Girl’s shoulders. Please, go back. Go away from here.

Blinking, Laughing Girl peered into her husband’s too-pale eyes and glimpsed the heart beating behind his urgent words.

I want many things. Wind Man lowered his head as he whispered. But more than anything, I want you away from what is coming. Take yourself away from this river. Away from this village. Go now.

As much as Wind Man’s words, his uncharacteristic insistence took Laughing Girl aback. She peered into his eyes, wide and haunted in the tanned-over pink of his face. She looked around her, at Wapahani Sipi glittering in the summer sun, at myriad foliage greens fluttering against a high blue sky, at the bronzed skin of her people in the center of the scene. They were a painting, a moment of stillness plucked from life’s never-ceasing motion.

They stood upright, all of them. The sky was up, the water was down, and the people planted their feet in the mud, firmly grounded.

Except they weren’t grounded, not at all. They were falling, all of them. Laughing Girl felt the sickening thrill of it in the pit of her stomach, even though she could see no physical movement.

Her gaze landed on her father. On his back, of course, since he still reached toward the sky. Again Laughing Girl was struck by the sense that things were not as they appeared. Tenskwatawa appeared to reach toward the sky but it seemed to Laughing Girl that he didn’t really, not at all. He reached down, toward the water.

Without mistake, the one place he did not reach, did not even look, was toward her.

Father. The plea fell weakly from Laughing Girl’s mouth. It wouldn’t matter. Tenskwatawa wasn’t listening for her words, anyhow. He never truly had.

As with a physical fall, Laughing Girl’s body tensed with a comprehension of inevitable impact. The fall had already happened. Laughing Girl and the people around her—they just hadn’t hit the ground and felt the shattering of their bones yet.

The sky changed first. As if in response to the voices whispering beneath the river’s current, clouds formed against the blue. They came from nowhere, puffs of wispy white that thickened and darkened quickly. Far too quickly.

Within moments, storm clouds towered overhead. An early dusk fell across the forest and the water. Birds dived for the cover of treetops. Caught with no shelter and stunned into a fearful murmuring, the people nearest to where Laughing Girl stood with Wind Man reached for each other, clinging much as Wind Man clung to Laughing Girl. The boys standing with Tenskwatawa cowered and huddled together.

As hands held fast to hands, thunder boomed directly above their heads. Fearful shouts drowned in the deafening roll.

With the shattered fragments of sunlight erased from Wapahani Sipi’s surface, it no longer held the illusion of a solid path upon which Laughing Girl might set her feet. Depths turned the water the same green-black as the impossibly sudden storm above.

With the vanishing of sunlight, all illusion of stillness vanished, as well. Beneath the surface, the river roiled. The surface began to stir, as well, choppy waves rippling as the water rebelled from whatever force had once held it in place.

Breaking free. Something was breaking free.

Lightning flickered. It brilliance reflected from scaled silver coils undulating beneath the river’s surface.

Around Laughing Girl, panicked motion erupted. Hands grasped and voices shouted. Pointing fingers motioned toward the river.

Lenipinsia. The name of the creatures crept into the people’s voices, a whisper that grew into a shout.

Storm panthers. Stormworms. Horned beasts, part cat, part serpent, entirely dangerous. Long sleeping.

Never to be wakened. Tenskwatawa had developed an affinity with the lenipinsia, one that allowed him to call on their powers yet keep them firmly caged in permanent hibernation.

Another flash of silver, shining in the flash of lightning.

The stormworms were not sleeping now.

Wind Man’s hands were still on Laughing Girl’s shoulders. She grasped wildly at them and dug her fingers into his wrists.

What has he done? Laughing Girl dragged her gaze away from the river and peered into the face of her husband, a man she had thought she’d known. "What did you do?"

Wind Man’s eyes were closed. Anguish painted itself across his features.

What had to be done, Wind Man replied, without opening his eyes. Instinctively, Laughing Girl knew that he merely repeated what Tenskwatawa had told him.

In the river, a head broke the surface. The fanged maw and pointed ears of a cat perched on a snake’s neck. Horns jutted from its forehead. Mud and water sluiced from the scaled torso. Out of the water, its body looked more gray than silver, like the peeling bark of a diseased birch. It reared back and opened its mouth.

Its roar echoed among the people, crashing like a wave through their gathered numbers. The force of its cry reverberated in Laughing Girl’s chest.

Upriver, a second lenipinsia rose from the increasingly-agitated water. It, too, roared.

The flickering electricity overhead coalesced into a ball of blue-white. Full force, it crashed from the heavens and into the forest. A crack like the sound of the world breaking vibrated through the air.

When the sheer white and the deafening shock faded, flames licked the treetops. Around Laughing Girl, people screamed. They had not yet begun to run, but they eddied in place.

Overhead, the clouds thickened, heavy as stone and the green-black of a river bottom.

They will drown the world, Laughing Girl began.

And stopped, because something new had caught her attention.

Out on the river, the water boiled even harder. Among the silver coils of the worms yet beneath the choppy surface, shadows grew. The waters blackened from beneath.

The whispering voices Laughing Girl had barely heard now sang more loudly. Chanted, in word-like syllables she could not comprehend.

The clouds broke open. Rain poured down, massive drops that struck Laughing Girl’s skin with the force of thrown pebbles. The world vanished behind a curtain of falling water. Even Wind Man’s face became little more than the idea of a face, mere inches from hers.

I never truly knew him. Not her husband, not her father. She had never really understood either one of them.

In her ears—inside her head—the chanting became a shout.

Between the raindrops, Laughing Girl glimpsed the black beneath the stormworms as it overflowed the river’s banks and shattered into a hundred—many hundreds—of pieces of night. In those pieces of darkness, the only brightness was that of claws and teeth.

Run. Wind Man’s voice, as if from impossibly far away. His fingers dug into Laughing Girl’s shoulders. Then he pushed her, and she stumbled back from him.

With a quickness Laughing Girl had not realized her father possessed, Tenskwatawa reached for the boy standing nearest to him. In his hand, a blade flashed, unsullied white. Tenskwatawa jabbed the blade and then lifted it, slitting the boy from navel to sternum. Blood spilled onto the mud and into the water.

The first boy did not have time to scream. Tenskwatawa tossed his body forward into the river.

The second boy screamed, as the water roiled and bubbled where the first had gone in.

Claws and teeth. Blood in the water.

Wind Man put his hands again on Laughing Girl’s shoulders. She should have felt pain, with how roughly he spun her about.

Behind her, the screaming continued. Not just the boys now, but more people. All the people.

In her gut, she knew the screaming would not end soon.

Laughing Girl ran.

2

August 1806

Indiana Territory: Easton

T

he link to Ger Owen’s Crow itched in the back of his mind, a constant reminder that he was no longer alone inside his own head. Physically, the Crow still perched on the back of his saddle, with his horse somewhere outside the shaded but close interior of Easton’s general store. But that endless sense of a waiting presence not his own was never gone from Ger’s mind.

Ger stood there inside the store, perspiration soaking the armpits of his uniform shirt and jacket, and tried to act like that fact didn’t bother him.

I don’t think you understand. Captain Tucker Ellis, as well-dressed and imposing a figure as ever, spoke like he was cracking a whip. He stood perfectly upright before the store’s counter, leaning neither backward nor forward. I am not making you an offer. The United States military requires—

"I don’t think you understand. The store’s proprietor was a short, well-rounded young woman with rust-colored hair and a faint French accent. She crossed her arms under an ample bosom and stared Ellis down. Easton is not a military outpost. And you, sir, are not a military unit like any I’ve ever seen."

They’d been in town near an hour. Ellis had set Vincent to organizing Crowmakers to restock water and whatever else needed done before they set out again on the trail that led east from town. Away from Easton and toward the White River before turning north again, toward Tecumseh’s Town.

Will they call it something different, now that Tecumseh is dead?

The more important question was how many Indians would be organizing to come south as the Crowmakers moved north. How many would ride out to avenge their chief’s death?

How many will we have to kill?

And, of greatest concern in Ger’s mind—how many more people would die because more Crowmakers lost their minds and then control of their Crows?

Too many. Already too many. He had more blood on his hands now than when he’d thought bringing justice to Ripley would redeem him. So many deaths he’d failed to prevent.

The face that flashed through Ger’s mind belonged to Em Jacobs. But Em wasn’t the only or even the first person Ger had failed to save.

Mrs. Orton. Ellis’s smile aimed for genteel, but his voice crackled with obvious irritation. And the smile most definitely did not reach his eyes.

Mrs. Orton smiled, too, every bit as disingenuously as Ellis. With a gentle but solid thump, she placed her palms flat on the counter between her and Ellis and leaned forward. I am in business to make a profit, Mr. Ellis.

Ellis’s mouth twitched. Ger judged that he longed to correct the woman’s failure to address him as captain.

Under other circumstances, Ger might have been amused. He’d definitely have been rooting for Mrs. Orton, who looked too young to have been married for very long or to be running a general store. She was pretty, in a plump-cheeked and freckle-faced sort of way, and her curves very nicely filled out the long dark skirt and buttoned-up white blouse she wore.

At the moment, though, all Ger really wanted was for Mrs. Orton to sell Ellis the damned dry goods Mrs. Lockton had declared they needed, so that Ger and Bosch and Goodson could haul them to the wagon and be done with it. Be on their way.

The other two Crowmakers Ellis had brought along stood on either side of Ger, waiting in a similar sweat-soaked fashion. Since Grouseland, Jan Bosch, mountain of a man though he was, had become more akin to a slow child. He moved like he was constantly struggling against some unseen current, and if he managed to string together more than two words at a time, it was a miracle.

Goodson remained as pragmatic and reliable as the sturdy brown tree trunk he resembled. Grief creased his round face now and then, most notably when Ackermann’s or Rawle’s names came up. Or when they should’ve come up but didn’t, because no one could stand to say them out loud.

Over at the store counter, Ellis’s hands didn’t close into fists. But he pressed his open palms hard against his thighs. Ellis was as rattled as the rest of them, Ger was coming to realize. The cracks were showing.

Heavy footfalls sounded, booted feet climbing the wooden steps leading up to the store and then crossing the planks that formed the stoop outside the door. Ger stood at an angle that allowed him to turn his head and see clearly through the open door.

A family of three stood outside, on the stoop but out in the shade where there might be a little actual air moving, Ger noted with some envy. Inside the general store, the air hung heavy, the sweet clean scents of sawdust and burlap now laced by the stink of too many sweating men.

The first of the three outside was a broad-shouldered man wearing simple homespun, with years of living off the land pressed like earth into the creases of his sun-weathered face. At his side stood a honey-blonde woman who might have been his wife or might have been his daughter. With her wide blue eyes, she watched the proceedings inside the store.

So did the gangly teenage boy beside her. As ruddy and dark-eyed as the man who had to be his father, the boy watched less with concern and more with open curiosity.

But those three had been there all along. They’d been inside the store when Ellis led the three Crowmakers inside. They’d vacated the premises but not gone far. Like everyone else in this frontier town, they’d reacted with wary curiosity.

Visitors to Easton were uncommon enough, Ger figured, let alone uniformed soldiers with tattooed faces and metal birds. Of the fifty-some or so people who lived in or around Easton, Ger estimated roughly half had found some excuse to be in or near the town square after the Crowmakers rode in.

Through the open door, Ger glimpsed the mud-rutted square and the folks milling around the single Crowmaker wagon parked there. Ellis had ordered the wagon carrying Samuel James and Ackermann’s gutted Crow to remain outside town—out of sight and out of distraction, so that James could continue his work. Petras Juszkiewicz and Robert Langston had stayed with James and his wagon and his dismantled Crow.

Annie had, under protest, been ordered into town with the rest of them. She stood near the supply wagon with her arms hugged tight around herself. Mr. Lockton had climbed into the back of the wagon, along with William Jennett. The two of them lifted provisions and maneuvered them into place under the supervision of Mrs. Lockton and Mrs. Epler.

Brian Byrne stood on the ground at the wagon’s back end, near Mrs. Epler, with Jennett on the wagon leaning down toward him. Byrne was waving his arms emphatically, and Jennett was shaking his head with every bit as much passion. A handful of gawkers, women in simple skirts and men in shirt sleeves, stood