All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (16 page)

Even he was a little nervous coming to this part of the neighborhood, though he wasn’t about to let Muire see it.

“I’m used to it,” he said.

Whether he meant to shock her or not—and he wasn’t sure, honestly—it worked. She whitened, and twitched hard enough that her helm swung on its strap and knocked against her backplate. He pulled hard, and the boot popped free. A hard shake rattled the pebble loose, and he handed her back the boot.

He was standing before she could look at him again.

“We swear by whatever’s most taboo in the cultures we grew up in,” she explained, as if to fill up the silence. “Thus, I blaspheme. You . . .” She grinned up at him, and he could see the effort to not make it look forced. She put her foot down and stomped. “. . . don’t swear much at all, do you? Which leads me to believe—”

“—that not much is ‘taboo to my culture?’ ” She blinked at him, and Cahey grinned. He was a pretty good mimic, and she was easy, with her formal tones and big vocabulary.

He thought she’d change the subject, and she did, checking the hang of her sword before she said, “Do you always go out unarmed?”

As if she’d just thought of it.

“I can handle myself.”

The sword was at last seated to her liking. She shook her head. “You have a death wish, kid. Come on. More walking.”

He fell in beside her, matching two strides to every three of hers. She probably could have walked under his outstretched arm.

“I didn’t know detective work was so glamorous. Are we just waiting for him to kill again?”

“Or to come to us,” she said.

He nodded. “I have a hunch we’ll find something soon.”

“I’d love to know more about your hunches.” She sounded genuinely curious. “We should talk about it. When we’re not—”

“Right,” he agreed. “It’s on the list. Somewhere after serial killers, but before regrouting the bathroom tile.”

She laughed. It sounded rusty, every time she did it, but he managed to make her do it fairly often.

Still, when he looked over at her, she was staring straight ahead. “You don’t sense him?”

“Not yet. Let’s keep moving.”

“It pisses me off that he could be killing almost at will. We wouldn’t even know about it unless somebody happened to notice a weird death, and one of us happened to stumble across that somebody. I keep thinking there has to be something in the history that will help us. If it’s really
him
—”

“It’s really him.”

“And he’s really that old.”

Muire hurried in half-steps to catch up. He’d allowed his stride to lengthen, but he checked it when he realized. “I wish I could see the stars,” she said, craning her head back.

“I’ve seen pictures.” He shrugged. “They say you can’t see them anywhere in Eiledon.”

“You’ve never been out of the Well.” Not a question: just a flat statement.

“Where would I go?” he asked, and tried not to notice that she closed her eyes in pity. “Muire, you said you were going to research him—”

Their footfalls squelched in the muck. There wasn’t much litter—almost everything useful was put to use, especially here—but that didn’t mean the streets were clean.

Muire shrugged. “The sources might have been an enormous help if they didn’t contradict each other every step of the way.” She kicked a cracked half of a brick lying in the road. “How much of it is legend? How much is direct report?”

Cahey hated to bring up religion, but if you spent time with Aethelred, you got soaked in the stuff. “He’s mentioned in the Book of Riddles, isn’t he?”

For some reason, Muire chuckled dryly. “Oh, yes,” she said. And then after a pause: “Secondhand,” and then she quoted from memory.

“At the closure of the slaughter, there remained upon the strand/One who fled, one who lived, one who chose not to attend.

It maybe loses something in translation.”

Apparently, Aethelred wasn’t the only one. “I didn’t think you were a Believer.”

“I’m not. I was a historian once. And a poet. And couplets are easy to remember.”

“Do you know it all?” He had a good memory, and a lot of what he’d heard had stuck, but it wasn’t the same as being able to read it for yourself.

They passed two registered gangsters cleaning anti-Technomancer graffiti off a stained concrete wall. One of them, a darkly glossy gray-eyed girl, turned to check Cathoair out, but after a single glance turned back to the work. He looked after her, shook his head, and caught Muire frowning at him.

His own fault, if she thought he was shallow and conceited.

She said nothing for a moment or two. And then just when he’d given up, she bit the side of her thumb and said, “Hardly, anymore. Some stuck.”

“What else does it say about our friend?”

“He’s not a friend.”

Fiercely enough that he stepped back.

“Sorry.”

Her glare wavered. She looked away, started walking again, and beckoned him on with a sweeping hand. “On the Last Day, in the battle between the Children of the Light and the tarnished, he did not fight—betraying both sides, for he had in turn been sworn to each. He preferred to live among men and prey upon them rather than perishing with honor, and so he survived. If you can call what he does surviving.”

“For thousands of years,” Cathoair breathed. “Wow.”

For whatever reason, Muire let that pass without an answer.
But there was something in the quality of her silence that dragged at him. So he quoted at her, two lines of the old poetry that he did remember:

“So the Children singing came all to the slaughter/Stars and shining suns, sons and shining daughters—”

And without hesitation, she picked it up, singing rather than chanting, her voice high and pure and unanticipated, the sound filling his own throat with the urge to sing with her. Nobody wanted to hear his singing, though, so he bit it back.

“And all the windwracked stars are lost and torn upon the night/Like candleflames they flicker, and fail to cast a light./To begin with there was darkness, darkness, Light, and Will/And in the end there’s darkness, darkness sure and still.”

She choked off, sniffling, and he was struck by the way the single tear she didn’t catch in time seemed to collect all of the available light. She cuffed at it clumsily, before he could reach to wipe it away.

“You’re good,” he said, and when she dismissed the praise with a shrug, said, “I guess you do remember a lot of it.”

“I guess I do,” she answered.

“Aethelred always talks about the Bearer of Burdens—”

“The Serpent,” Muire said. “He’s supposed to absorb the suffering of the world—”

“He’s not doing a very good job,” Cathoair said, and then glanced at her sidelong, hoping she hadn’t noticed the bitterness saturating his tone.

But Muire just rubbed at her face with her gauntlet as if feeling the itch of the Wasteland dust that coated everything in Eiledon. She examined her fingertips and grimaced; the tear had smudged a clean trail through the dirt. “Yuck. I want a shower already.”

“It’s not toxic, once it comes through the Defile,” Cahey said, maybe a little too sharply. It wasn’t that she was spoiled, he reminded himself. It was—

It was just that she was spoiled.

He found he envied her.

“It’s still not something you want on your face.” She shook herself, as if chilled, and then lightened her tone and said, “Nice to know I annoy you.”

“You pay me,” he said, which wasn’t entirely true. He needed the money, but—

There was something about her. Something that was in her eyes now, as she turned and frowned, and for a bad moment he thought she was going to ask him about the money, and what he needed it for. Not that it was a secret. Not that he was ashamed. But somehow, he realized, he couldn’t bear to have her know his frailties.

So when she said only, “Hey, kid, where did you come from?” he sighed silently in relief.

And then he misdirected, teasing, playing the role he played. “Halla sent. Didn’t you know? I’m einherjar.”

She stared, face sallow in the streetlights, and bit her lip. “You shouldn’t joke like that,” she said. “Something might hear you.”

He opened his mouth to argue, make some flip comment. Her intensity silenced him. “This block is deserted,” he said, instead. “There’s nobody here.”

“You should have seen it during the Desolation,” Muire answered. “Squatters and refugees on every corner. Field hospitals in every courtyard and marketplace.”

“I’ve seen the same films you have,” he said. “It’s emptier every year. But the Technomancer still keeps the housing above-ground for the ones who can afford it. Trumans. Citizens.”

“You can’t see the stars from up there either,” she said, as if that was what mattered. And then her head snapped around and she spun like a compass needle, sticking southwest instead of north. “Someone’s dying—”

“Someone,” said a gravelly voice from not far away at all, “is dead. Thou didst sing to me, sister?”

Cathoair knew that voice. He knew the scent that came with it, too, and as he turned to face the Wolf his hands were shaking. Beside him, Muire lifted her helm on its straps and seated it over her hair. A ringing scrape followed as she drew her sword, and Cahey saw to his surprise that the blade was black crystal. And then it flared in her hand, savagely, with a light as cold and sharp as starlight, and he swore he saw the same blaze from her eyes, from her mouth, chopped between her teeth when she spoke.

“Not to thee,” Muire said. “Who was it this time, shadow?”

“Candle-flickers,” the Grey Wolf answered, and stepped into the light. His cloak swung heavily around his feet, and his hair was slicked back, shining like oil, into its braid. “A girl and a boy, hard upon their labor, garbed all in green.”

Sickened, Cahey thought of the Mongrels they’d walked past, scrubbing walls. The Wolf said
singing
. Had Cahey and Muire led him down on them?

“Just try to lay hands on him,” Muire said. “Lay hands, and hold on.”

“Yes,” the Wolf said. “Do try.”

Cathoair lunged. He didn’t think he’d make contact, not with this first feint, but the Grey Wolf only stood his ground, looking—at best—curious, and at worst amused.

At the last possible moment, Cathoair planted himself, converting his momentum into a spinning side kick. The Wolf leaned aside, though, and Cahey missed cleanly with the first blow. He’d expected to, however, so rather than coming down off-balance and staggering, he managed to continue the arc and clothesline the Wolf, getting a double-fistful of shirt and pulling him to the ground.

They rolled, and it was like wrestling an animate statue. The heat of Mingan’s body almost scorched the palms of Cathoair’s hands, and his height and weight advantage meant nothing against the other’s inhuman strength. He clutched the Wolf’s wrists, pushed him back, tried to roll to pin him. But the Wolf held him up easily, laughing in his face with hot rank breath, and he knew how terribly he was in trouble.

Not since Astrid had begun teaching him to fight had he been so outclassed. Incapable of defending himself, like a battered child. Like the battered child he had been—

He panicked. He struck out wildly, fighting to get away now, to kill, maim, anything to avoid the strength of the predator that held him. But Mingan kept the grip, struck him across the mouth with an open hand, and pushed him back. The Grey Wolf was rising, both of them smeared in filth from the street, Cathoair beating at his face with gross futility, wondering where the hell Muire was—

Her voice rang out. Whatever she said was in a language he did not know, something that sounded archaic and mystical.

And then there was the reek of hot metal, competing with
the sharp musk of the Grey Wolf all over him, and the sting in his nose of his own blood. And a roar of machinery, loud as a helicopter, and—

He felt the hard shove, staggered back, fell against the stones. Pushed himself up, hands cut, arms shaking.

Turned to hurl himself at the enemy one more time, but . . .

The Grey Wolf was gone.

And where he had stood, an enormous metal statue loomed, a black stallion with two horned heads and mantling wings, the wet stones steaming around it. It pawed the ground and hissed like a giant teakettle, then turned its attention on Cathoair.

He ducked his head between his shoulders, and somehow made himself stand.

You could not have done more. It was a near thing
, it said, as Cathoair put out a hand to steady himself against the wall. And then it turned, stared past him, and said,
Muire. Would you go after?

D
amp brick crumbled under Muire’s gauntlet as she clutched at the wall. The smell of the Wolf was enough to trigger the harsh, atavistic memory of how brutally he’d bested her when last they met. But she dragged herself forward, sword trembling at guard, hands shaking cold and boots scraping the cobblestones. She had no idea what she
said,
exactly—but inside her head, she spoke a secret name.

Kasimir materialized like a shadow in the clear air above and plunged earthward, a thunderbolt, a mountainside falling. As he did, Mingan shrugged Cathoair off like an unwanted coat and slung him aside.

Cathoair knew how to fall. But by the time he rose again, Kasimir stood pawing at the stones where Mingan had vanished, and Muire managed to slip her sword into the sheath and go to Cathoair. She had not quite reached him when Kasimir looked at her and told her he could send her after the wolf.

Inside her gauntlet, her right hand ached. She tucked it under her arm, aware that she must look like a dog with a wounded paw.
Coward,
she cursed herself, and another voice whispered
Vengeance.

Always vengeance.

If she could not get it for him, she would be hearing that whisper until the end of the world. “I would go after,” she said. “Can you tell me how?”

Cathoair was close enough to turn and catch her shoulder. “If you go alone he’ll kill you—”

Muire nodded, wondering if he could see the motion through her helm. “I fear he shall.” She stepped back, so his hand dropped between them. And then she closed her eyes and shook her head. “I fear also that the risk of my death is no extenuation.”