All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (15 page)

Muire drew her feet up a rung so she could rest her elbows on her knees.
Vengeance,
Ingraham muttered, and not for the first time, Muire wished she could silence him.

And then felt guilt. For he had already been silenced, by her own enemy. Another failure: lay them all at her door.

Hers, and Mingan’s, and Strifbjorn’s.

As if thinking the name had summoned him, then, Cathoair passed through the press, tall and lithe. Persons of every and indeterminate gender turned to watch him move, so the crowd folded like a radiant flower around him, and Muire pressed her knuckles to her lips.

So different.

And not different at all.

She would have closed her eyes rather than watch him
climb the elevated platform and step over the ropes into the ring, but even she could not be so craven. Whatever brought the Grey Wolf here, Muire had come to bear witness.

Perhaps she should have been surprised when Cathoair paused in his corner, turned over his shoulder, and smiled directly at her, but she wasn’t.

Nothing alike, and everything. She would have known him anywhere.

His opponent was another young man, not as tall, heavier, blue-haired and pale, and with longer arms, Muire thought. She watched them square off and pulled her legs onto the seat, kneeling high to see better. Her armor bit into the flesh below her knees.

She placed a hand on the wall for balance and watched the dance.

Cathoair’s style was pantherine, well suited to his long frame. He used the space in the ring and made his opponent pursue him. They were unshod, sure-footed, and they moved fast: Cathoair languid, the opponent—Hrothgar, by the board—blocky and choppy and prone to lightning sallies, rains of jabs and feints that fell away again quickly if they didn’t find a mark.

It was savage. Cathoair gave ground, and Hrothgar took it, trying to use his reach to an advantage. He landed more blows, but this wasn’t a fight for points: that didn’t matter, except in the toll it exacted from his opponent.

But when Cathoair hit, he hit solid, flesh leaping away from the impact of fist or foot or elbow, Hrothgar staggering back finally from a left jab under the solar plexus that lifted him onto his toes.

It was the step back that finished him. Muire expected Cathoair to close the distance and go for the pin. But with perfect
timing, instead, as Hrothgar came off the ropes, Cathoair bounced on the ball of his foot and kicked out hard, weight and momentum behind it, sweat flying as he committed, the neon running rivers of color down wet skin.

He struck Hrothgar across the mouth.

Hrothgar went to his knees.

Muire expected him to come up spitting teeth, but he stayed down long moments, both hands pressed to his lips, face clenched, hunched forward.

When he pulled his fingers from his mouth, Muire could see that they were smeared with red.

First blood.

Cathoair reached out, and Hrothgar reached out also. Their hands clasped, and Hrothgar came to his feet, and into Cathoair’s arms, and kissed him gingerly.

A warrior might kiss another warrior, a friend kiss a friend. That would not look like this, with tilted heads and possessive hands.

And by their titillated roar, the crowd knew it. And approved.

Muire looked away, mouth dry, face on fire.

Of course.

Oh, she should have known.

I
n just two days, Selene had had time to experience any number of uncomfortable revelations. The one that nagged at her most was the queasy, exotic sensation of not being the hunter.

It was not bred in her to be quarry. But with tail-lashing certainty, she was being forced to admit that her seeming prey was toying with her. She traced him through dark streets and
cold abandoned buildings. Neither a patrol of other unmans nor a pack of Mongrels could have made her safer, and so she went alone, losing the trail, regaining it—cold—by mere chance, blocks farther on.

Chance . . . or because he had laid it for her to recover.

And though she knew she moved silently as smoke (and not always—or even often—at ground level) through the confined city, the predator who had killed Ingraham Fasoltsen was always gone a moment before she arrived. As if he were not
like
smoke, but smoke exactly, scattered on the wind of her arrival.

Selene suspected magic to go with the mockery. She reported in, apprising Her of her suspicions, and was ordered to continue surveillance at a distance. “Engage him if you have the opportunity,” She said. “I trust your judgment. Do you require technical support?”

A mage, she meant. “Not yet,” Selene said into her headset. “A rat would slow me down, for now. If I know what the prey is doing, I believe I can take countermeasures. However, I would recommend detailing another Black Silk, independently, and having support teams on standby.”

“Those are sound recommendations,” She said, and Selene basked in the glow of praise. “Helios is available. He’ll be on the street within the hour. You may coordinate with him directly as necessary: it remains your lead.”

Selene, crouched among gargoyles in a building outside the western edge of the Well, could not stop herself from purring. She liked Helios the lion, but she liked being in charge more. “Thank you,” she said, and She dropped the connection.

Not entirely, of course. She would continue to monitor telemetry,
and would be there if Selene or Helios required Her. But She had many responsibilities, and could not pay personal attention to them all.

Which was why she had Selene and Helios and the trusted unmans, both the beasts—and the others.

“Gunther,” Selene said, and felt the system’s attention fall on her. “Can you generate a map for me, coded to time and space, showing where the prey has left traces and what his routes and rates of movement between them must have been?”

“Of course,” said the computer. “Anything for my favorite kitty—oh, I see what you’re driving at. I don’t think this is physically possible.”

“He’s apparating.”

“Technically not supposed to be possible,” Gunther replied. His voice wasn’t mechanical at all, but human and warm. More flexible than Selene’s, which, despite its lightness of tone, could be painful to use at length. “I’ve never known a sorcerer, wizard, or anything else that could do it. But it’s a working theory. Watch your back, kittycat.”

“Watch Her back, Gunther,” Selene answered. “If he’s hunting us, and he can come and go as he pleases—without using the standard approaches to the Tower. . . .”

“I take your point. Are you sure he’s hunting us?”

She grimaced, a curl of her lip exposing thick-rooted yellow fangs to the night air’s chill. His scent was still there, lingering, scratching the inside of her face until she turned her head and rubbed her wrinkled nose against her armor.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”

________

T
hrough keen observation and ruthless opportunism, Muire had managed to secure a table by the time—clean and shaved and dressed, rubbing his knuckles and limping a little—Cathoair threaded through the crowd to join her. He turned away at least two propositions along the way, and Muire bit her bottom lip and watched him do it.
Open your eyes,
she told herself.
This is not Strifbjorn.

She’d had to defend the other place vigorously, and she was sure she saw more than one disappointed glance when Cathoair dropped into it. He seemed oblivious, however—perhaps intentionally—and more casually dressed than when she’d seen him hustling. He leaned forward on his elbows and said, “Have you been waiting long?”

Maybe a conversational gambit, because she was fairly certain he knew exactly how long she’d been waiting. That uncanny awareness . . . he might not be an einherjar. But he wasn’t a mere, dull human, either. A Mute, he called himself. Mutant.

Just another animal, like Muire, like most of the Well.

“Long enough to see you fight,” she said. Someone else was coming up behind him, a sturdy dark-haired girl maybe four or six years older. And he knew it: though he didn’t turn his head, she saw his eyes flick toward the side.

“Hello, Star,” he said, as she set a handled cloth bag on the table. “Star, this is Muire, my new boss. Muire, this is Astrid, my partner.”

She levered his head back with a proprietary grip on his ponytail and kissed him, hard. Muire studied the writing on the bag, a line drawing of a rooster. “There’s no chair, I’m sorry,” Muire said, when Astrid decided she’d sufficiently claimed her prize, and broke off the kiss.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll stand. Cahey, eat.”

Obediently, he pulled the bag over, while Astrid held her right hand out to Muire. An X of white tape crossed her nose, and both her eyes were ringed in violet, so it wasn’t surprising that she winced when she smiled. But she moved with springy strength, like a small muscular dog. Another one of the fighters, then, a heavily built girl who wore her black hair in a braid the way Muire’s sisters used to wear their blonde.

She extended a hand and a smile. Muire accepted both gingerly. She clasped the hand, released it as quickly as possible without exposing her discomfort, and sank back into her chair, wondering if Cathoair was sleeping with
everybody
that he beat up on a regular basis.

“And of the Holmish warriors,” Muire said, “it was the doughty women Harald feared most.”

Astrid grimaced—it wasn’t quite a smile, but it wasn’t a frown either—and cocked her head. “Sounds like you’re quoting?”

“Sturla Half-wise,” she said. “He was a historian of the Arnian conquests who wrote about eleven hundred years ago. Harald was Harald Clawhand, the one who sired only daughters, about twenty of them. His sons-in-law wound up slaughtering each other in civil wars until they had succeeded in carving up the empire between themselves.”

“Oh.” But Astrid actually sounded interested, even as she found a nearby pillar to lean against. “I hope you know what you’re getting into,” she said, conversationally, as Cathoair started laying out waxed-paper packages in a row.

Muire wasn’t sure which of them she was talking to. “Pardon?”

Astrid nodded sideways at Cathoair. Cathoair threw a
wadded sandwich wrapper at her without even looking, and just as reflexively, she knocked it away. He was staring at Muire as he chewed, a challenging expression, and she found her eyes sliding off of his. She trained her gaze on his scar instead. “That doesn’t look like a kickboxing injury.”

He touched it as if puzzled. He’d been lucky, or as lucky as anyone might be, to find himself disfigured—the nerves and muscles still worked, and whoever has sewn it for him had matched the edges well. His face twisted around the scar, but it seemed like everything worked. Whether from that, or something else, he lacked the vagueness of feature that young people almost always seemed to have: the thing that made any given holo of a teenager look like a dozen other pictures of completely different children, taken years apart.

His face looked lived in. So did Astrid’s.

“It’s a sword wound,” he said. “Dueling. From when I was young and stupid.” Then, as if to stop up any further words, he took a bite of sandwich.

With the air of someone intentionally changing the subject, Astrid reached out and tugged Cathoair’s ponytail again. “How’s your mum?”

He swallowed a too-large bit and said, “Keeping,” with a sideways twist of his head. “You know.”

She nodded, frowning, and patted him on the arm. Muire hooked her fingers together under the edge of table, telling herself that the pain under her breastbone was only the bittersweet tenderness of the very, very old for the very, very young. They seemed so incredibly far away. He called her
partner
. Were they lovers? Did the word even apply to such relationships anymore?

Astrid produced a flask and a bowl and poured, sliding the result in front of Cathoair. It smelled fruity, not alcoholic.
“Drink it fast,” she said, “or the bubbles will go out of it. Muire, Cahey says you’re an investigator? A specialist?”

Vengeance specialist,
she meant. A mercenary vigilante.

“After a fashion.”

Cathoair apparently attracted caretakers. Muire wondered if he needed them.

Astrid grinned. “You’ll keep him out of trouble, I hope.”

He started to protest, reaching out to swat her, and she sidestepped nimbly. A cold liquid sensation filled Muire’s belly, and in a moment she recognized envy.

Ridiculous. He wasn’t a tenth her age.

A child. An innocent. A candle-flicker.

The bait in her trap.
Vengeance
.

Muire all but felt the hot breath of the Wolf at her throat.

C
ahey and his new employer had been out for half an hour when she called a pause. Behind the waterfall, where the streetlights lit cobbles and peeling stone buildings slick with spray, Muire balanced on one foot beside the anchor of a lamp float and tugged at the other boot.

“Stone?” Cathoair asked.

She grunted. Her gauntlets seemed to interfere with the removal; she twisted the boot and her hands slipped, and she swore—“Shadows!”

Cahey laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “You swear like my grandmother.”

“Is your grandmother a stevedore?”

“What’s a stevedore? She was a salvage tailor. She’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry,” Muire said, after a long pause. Awkward as the
way she was standing, balanced on one foot. Awkward as if she hadn’t expected to hear of a death. As if death weren’t everywhere.

Cahey squatted in front of her and pushed her hands aside. “Here. Let me.”

She seemed about to hop away, but gathered herself and stood steady, one hand on the lamp cable. He pulled, and she leaned on the cable, and overhead the streetlight swayed. When he was little, Cahey had done that on purpose, to make the shadows dance.

“The street’s filthy,” she said, as he dropped a knee for balance.

He looked up at her, her face peering at him from across her armor. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the thunder of falling water. The noise was probably why this had become such a rough neighborhood; nobody wanted to live in thunder, and so the buildings were unmaintained squats.