All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (14 page)

His
her
was not the same as Cristokos’s.

Cristokos laid his whiskers flat against his face. “That one is too loyal.”

His own loyalty did not trouble Kasimir, but their disagreement did. Cristokos had only scorn of service, and for those who served, pity. But service was Kasimir’s purpose, even when
that service was best met through disagreement and argument. His service, however, had always been a chosen one. Cristokos’s has been plundered.

But if Kasimir were to say so, Cristokos would answer that Kasimir deluded himself as to the nature of his and his rider’s bond. The rat-mage would speak of how Kasimir’s rider disregarded him, and that Kasimir martyred himself to his service. And Kasimir, in honesty, could not answer that.

The argument was old. He folded his wings and shook out his mane, letting the wires rasp and rattle. Under his hooves, the grass smoked; he stepped aside, onto the gravel they had laid to prevent unwanted burning. Cristokos still did not turn.

Kasimir suspected the rat-mage was angry with him. So he waited. Patience was cardinal.

And eventually, Cristokos looked up from tucking straw carefully around the roots of his strawberries and turned to him. Black eyes flashed in the variegated face, bright as obsidian. “What does that one desire?” he asked.

Kasimir shook out his manes.
Perhaps your help.

“And perhaps not?” The rat-mage tilted his head and folded spindly arms. It was not Kasimir alone who made a virtue of obdurance.

Your She.

Cristokos glowered as only a rat can. “What of Her?”

My enemy, and my rider’s enemy. He hunts her creatures.

Cristokos stiffened, lips lifted away from chisel teeth. “The moreaux?”

Not that I have seen, though that is no guarantee of truth. The trumans who serve her. The Mongrels and the messengers.

“Then how is that one’s enemy not a friend?”

Kasimir flicked his tail against his flank, striking sparks. Cristokos did not flinch, or even appear to notice.
My rider has sworn vengeance against him.

“And finally called you out of exile, because she can’t do it alone. Bright one—”

He is a killer. He is tarnished.
Kasimir said it as if it ended discussion. For him, it did.

Cristokos might feel differently.

Kasimir lowered one head and stretched to tear grass in neat bites, falsely idle. With the other head, he regarded Cristokos.

They had known one another for a very long time.

Will you help me?

The rat-mage didn’t answer. His black-and-pink-tipped fingers rippled on his upper arm.

Will you tell me about your She, and her creatures?

The stare continued. The dew was burning off the grass, even further from the heat of Kasimir’s inner furnace.

Cristokos sighed and turned away, dropping down beside his zucchini. He spoke as if to the plants. “What does that one care to know?”

How is it that you won free of Her control?

W
hen stalking the tiger, set lures. Traditionally, tiger-traps were baited with goats, either bloodily slaughtered or terrified and still bleating.

Muire suspected that the techniques that worked on a tiger would work on a wolf. Mingan had always been impassioned, impetuous. The years might have made him crafty, but Muire hoped the wolf within would not be able to resist his ancient
bond with Strifbjorn. Whether Cathoair would feel the same enticement was an open question, and one she did not care to dwell on too deeply.

Still, she would not mislead him.

She hadn’t put her reader away; it was still set on the table. Over Cathoair’s warning, she ordered bread and cheese and vat-grown apple from the landlord, and tapped the screen to turn the reader on, ignoring the “Happy Birthday, Muire” and Cathoair’s quizzical expression. She said, “Do you think he’ll come back for you?”

He played with his bowl, rolling it between his fingers. “Depends what he was looking for.”

“What’s your instinct?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitating, and then looked at her, as if seeking approval or critique. The food came. Muire thanked the landlord and paid, and Cathoair held his peace while she did. The blue flecks in his hazel eyes seemed brighter than the green, momentarily, and Muire glanced down at the platter. “The bread is
fried
.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He shook his head. “There is literally nothing I can eat here without breaking training.”

Without returning her gaze to him, she asked, “Does it happen often?”

That rocked him against the back of the chair. “Does what happen often? Breaking training?”

“That,” she said. “Knowing things about people. Whether you can trust them. Which ones you can go down an alley with. Which ones not to let your friends go off with alone.”

He blinked.

“Knowing to trust me when I started spouting about mythical monsters.”

“Okay, you’re creepy.”

“Yes,” she answered, and reached for the pitcher. “I get that a lot. You’re not answering my questions.”

“You haven’t paid me yet,” he said, and held out an open hand, pink palm creased in ocher.

Muire stared at it for a moment, then reached into her pouch and started counting chits into his palm, one at a time. He clearly expected her to stop long before she did, because his expression of surprise when she pulled her hand back was quite comical. “I hope that will suffice to ensure your loyalty for a week or two.”

“Loyalty is one thing,” he said. If she’d meant to shame him, it seemed to roll off like water from slate. He pocketed the money. “Service is another.”

“So about your knack for telling if people are trustworthy?”

“I just know,” he said. He smoothed a straying lock back into his ponytail. “I’ve always known. I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me. How did
you
know I knew? Er—”

“I’ve seen it before,” she said. “And there’s a lot of history, if you know where to look. In five-twenty, I think it was, or maybe five-twenty-two, there was a seith-wife in Ardrath-in-the-Islands, who had the knack of telling truth—”

“What was her name?”

Muire shrugged. “Saibd. According to some versions. Or Berrach. Does it matter?”

He smiled and waved her on.

“She was,” Muire said with resolute archness, “very much in demand. As you might imagine. And made a fair living as a soothsayer until a local warlord took offense.”

“Occupational hazard? He had her executed?”

“Locked in a tower,” Muire answered. “Until she died of old age. A resource like
that,
you don’t just waste.”

“Nice,” Cathoair said. “When you say five-twenty, though . . .”

Muire actually stared at him for a moment in confusion before she realized her error. “Oh, uh. Five-twenty old style. Eighteen hundred ante-Desolation, more or less.”

She held her breath for a moment, but he snickered and shook his head and said only, “You read too many old books, don’t you?”

“Yes.” She waved broadly. “Probably. So, as I see it, we have two angles of investigation.”

“You mean to use me as bait.”

Muire almost bit her cheek. Whatever this child had from Strifbjorn . . . he was smarter than Strifbjorn had ever shown himself. “That’s one way, yes. Although I’m bait too, for what it’s worth.”

“And the second?”

“We go out looking,” Muire said. “I know what he’s hunting. It’s the Technomancer’s people. Trumans, not the unmans. So far. I only wish I understood why.”

He sipped his drink, made a thinking noise, and rubbed a spatulate fingertip across his annoyingly well-formed nose. “Well, there are a bunch of possibilities.”

She waited.

“First,” he said, ticking off on his fingertips, “it’s a personal grudge. Second, he works with—or is!—a political enemy. Third . . .” He thought about it for a second. “I had a third a minute ago.”

Muire washed down a mouthful of grease. “Third, they’re convenient, and he doesn’t think she’ll care.”

“Convenient for?”

“Food. He’s tarnished,” Muire said. “He eats
souls,
Cathoair. It’s where he gets his strength. Fourth, he’s her enforcer, and he’s getting rid of the ones that annoy her.”

“That’s the only one I see causing us problems.” He reached for a slice of her apple and some of the bread, his gaze a challenge, as if daring her to slap his hand away.

Muire was unlikely to eat it all anyway. She waved him in. “Help yourself. If you really want to contaminate your finely honed system with that stuff.”

He snorted and stuffed the impromptu sandwich into his mouth. “Why can’t we just pick up his trail?”

Muire bit her lip. “Because he doesn’t leave one,” she said. “I can trace him—feel him—if I come close enough.”

“You’ve got some knacks of your own.”

She chose not to answer, exactly. “The problem being, if I get close enough to scent him—”

“He scents you.”

“Exactly.” She patted his hand, but wound up jerking her own back sharply, as if the contact sparked. “Get some rest,” she said. “We hunt tonight.”

“I fight tonight,” Cathoair answered.

“Do you fight every night?”

He shrugged that loose-necked shrug of his. “Three or four times a week.”

A lot. Muire wondered, not idly, what he needed the money for. She wondered if he’d keep whoring while she was paying him. If he had a drug habit, there were no marks on his arms.

“I’ll meet you after,” he volunteered.

“I’ll pick you up,” Muire said. “What time?”

M
uire returned to the Ash & Thorn a few minutes before midnight to find it as crowded as the night before. No trace of Mingan fouled the air. Though shamed by her cowardice, Muire was relieved that the confrontation might be postponed.

Eventually, she was certain, he would come for her, if he did not come for Cathoair.

Cathoair wasn’t in the ring, and according to the standing chalked above the bar had yet to fight, so Muire sidled through the crowd to the bar. She’d replaced her ruined gauntlet—for all the good the armor had done her last time—and the new glove, not yet lacquered, shone unsullied white.

The first white she’d worn in two thousand years.

It would have been nice if a stool miraculously opened up just as she arrived, but she wasn’t so lucky. She pushed between dedicated drinkers to the scarred granite surface and slid her bowl across to the landlord, Aethelred. She ordered slivovitz, which could under no circumstances ever have been in contact with a real plum, and wondered if it were brewed in the same bathtub as the gin.

The bowl came back to her with a side order of advice. “Be
careful around Cahey,” he said, leaning over the bar so its wood creaked under the weight of his chassis.

“Is he dangerous?” Muire didn’t mean it to sound mocking. But her tone did something to Aethelred’s expression, something almost impossible to read through the scar tissue and the chrome.

“He’s been hurt enough, is all I’m saying,” Aethelred answered. He took her money and handed her change. “Don’t hurt him more.”

She picked up her bowl and nodded, turning away so he wouldn’t see the confusion of emotions that tugged her face in incompatible directions. Her initial assumptions about Aethelred’s relationship with the young people who flocked around his bar seemed to have been less than precise, or—at the very least—lacking in nuanced understanding.

Muire stepped away, letting the barflies seal the gap behind her. She threaded between bodies toward the corner where the fights were, certain she vanished into the crowd in an instant. There were advantages to being the shortest person in the room.

But it also meant she couldn’t see the action in the ring, and didn’t know what, exactly, had happened as a roar went up around her. She sidled past a tall man, who was distracted by his betting chits, and aimed for a high, vacant stool against a side wall. It was behind a pillar, which was why it was empty, but it was tall enough to offer an obstructed view if she climbed up, and fighting her way to the front was a project that might take half a night.

She availed herself of opportunity, and clambered up the rungs, careful not to spill her slivovitz.

The next fight was two young women, not anyone Muire recognized. Muire cupped her bowl in both hands and watched
them carefully, thinking of the holmgang, and when that roped ring would have been a hide staked to bare earth, the weapons axes and swords rather than fists and feet.

In this combat, there were no three shields to be broken. And so the bout lasted three falls, or to first blood.

About seven minutes, in practical terms, and by the end of it both women were sweat-slicked, heaving for air in the hot, close basement. The winner was muscular, straight-shouldered, young enough that it hurt Muire’s heart to look at her. Her close-cropped hair had been spiked and stained pewter-bright, almost glistening, before the sweat had dampened it, and her whole body between her trunks and halter, across her shoulders and down to her wrists, was covered in vibrant ink—reds and violets and violent orange, a writhing pattern so complex Muire would have had to walk up to her and stare to pick out any representations.