All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (18 page)

She blushed and fed him soup so she wouldn’t have to answer. They both knew he was dying. While he swallowed—painfully—she reached out to silence the news feed. Power—electricity—was one of the few resources Eiledon had in excess. The fusion plants and the orbiting solar arrays were entirely automated, entirely self-sufficient. And there was no competition for the energy now.

“No,” he said, and made a paddling gesture with his hand, not quite willing to force his touch upon her. On the screen, the camera lingered on a woman, staring blindly over her cheekbones, with a child in a sling against her hip. Muire was not sure the child was breathing. “Something should be done, Muire.”

She wondered if he thought he loved her. She wondered if he was right.

“There’s too many of them.”

“They’re the last,” he answered. “You know I’m right.”

She tried to feed him more soup, but he turned his face away. His lips were numb and swollen, his voice slurred by the paralysis in his cheeks. The soup tended to drip over his seeping flesh. Muire had had to set small charms, tiny cousins of the massive wards of the Defile, to keep the flies away.

From below, she heard a sound. And then her name, called out in a familiar voice.

Gunther’s eyes teared under puffy lids. “Thjierry.”

Muire went to the top of the stair. “Thjierry,” she answered. “And an army.”

She set the soup aside and descended. The Technomancer stood among the injured and sick who lay on pallets in ranks on Muire’s cold slate floor. Behind her were two figures in black armor, one a woman with the head of a cat and one a woman with the head of a hawk. There were others, but they walked among the casualties, offering such succor as they could.

It was a measure of the times that when a man with the head of a dog or a bull or a rat bent over another, few of the sick could rouse themselves to fear or wonder.

Thjierry—thinner, now, slack flesh drooping at the corners of her face—came to Muire with her hands extended. Muire descended the spiral stair and embraced her as a sister. They squeezed each other briefly. Muire stepped back first, trying to remember when last she had held someone in her arms.

She thought it must have been somebody who was dying.

“Gunther?” Thjierry asked, and Muire stepped aside without a word and gestured her up the stairs. Thjierry nodded and passed her, clinging to the banister as she climbed.

Muire went to put her armor on.

By the time the Technomancer returned, Muire was sliding Nathr into her sheath. She knew from Thjierry’s face that it was over.

She raised her eyes as Thjierry came to her. “Did you see him?”

The Technomancer nodded. “I said good-bye. Thank you—”

Muire turned away. “He was my friend, too. What are these?” Her gesture went to the animal-headed creatures moving silently among the dying, crouching, examining, tending. One woman screamed, thrashing away, but the black-and-white-spotted rat beside her laid a hand on her forehead, and somehow stilled her panic.

“Unmans,” Thjierry said. “I call them moreaux. My creation. Where are you going?”

“To do something Gunther wanted me to do,” Muire said. She patted the hilt of her sword.

“I’m going to stage a coup,” Thjierry said.

“Good. I’m going to bring those refugees through the Defile.”

“Good.” Thjierry had nodded, lips thinned. “We understand each other.

If you have to die, Muire had thought, her gauntlets bruising the soft joints of her fingers, better to go down fighting. Better to die in company.

Better not to be the last, and alone, weighed down with all that
knowing
.

K
asimir’s hide rasped against her fingertips as he stepped forward: the creak of frozen metal on frozen metal. She paced three steps to his one, but he went slow. She could stay with him.

The ice flaked from his neck, his withers, his feathers. And that made no sense. She had thought the mist condensed and froze on him as if he was colder than the surroundings, but he was still hot to the touch—though now she could hold her armored hand against his shoulder without pain. In the savage cold, he ticked. Muire thought of a kiln, of a forge, of a smelter. Cooling.

Of course. The mist was attacking him.

And her. It rimed her armor as well, crusted the joints, cracked away when she moved and refroze so she walked with an arthritic shuffle. Its weight on her shoulders was enough to sense. She shrugged, and ice fell in showers and grew again.

“This is Niflheim. This is the land of Hel. Starvation her plate, and famine her knife.”

The world is the land of Hel
, said Kasimir.
All starve in the end.
Walk on
:

She made herself do it, the stallion white beside her, his
wing against her back now pushing her on. She stumbled and he caught her, creaking, bracing her with his branching antlers until she steadied herself. The mist blinded and deluded, but Kasimir was confident, and so she followed.

Before them, the way darkened, that eerie ambient radiance growing less. Muire walked with her steed, pushing against the weight of the ice, Nathr dragging down her hand. Nothing was too heavy for her to bear. She was waelcyrge. She had borne up and carried and buried everyone she had ever cared for.

She might have run. But she had not lain down.

Kasimir’s heads drooped. He moved like a windup automaton. But he moved, and buoyed by his example, Muire stepped forward, dragging her foot under a weight like the world. She planted it, shifted her weight, and stepped again. Again. Again. Again.

And found herself on a plain, knee-deep in discolored snow, the only light whatever trickled from the cold stars far above through the silhouetted branches of a great bare tree so vast she could not fathom it.

Still,
she thought.
The stars.
And tilted her head back to see better, wondering if their light still sparked an answering glow in her eyes.

Kasimir
—

She heard no answer.

She turned to him, and found him still as a statue, one hoof raised, wings half spread, the ice now vaporizing from his black steel skin on sizzling threads of steam.

“Shadows,” she swore, and pushed against his shoulder.

No answer, though his heat again soaked through her glove. She passed her hand through one of the banners of steam rising from his hide, and it stayed disturbed, as if she had pushed
through gelatin. “Frozen in time,” she said, and thought of runes and mysteries and wizardry.

“Not he,” said the wolf at her shoulder. “Thee.”

W
hen Muire spins on him, she leads with her blade: a whirl and thrust, a chance of making it good. Until the wolf slaps it aside, the light that flares in its crystal dulling against his palm as coals dull around splashed water. He braces his boot upon the blade, closes his fingers on her gauntlet, and—however she struggles—holds her there.

She hisses with rage. He hears it through her faceplate, and though she locks her left hand on his wrist, he lifts the helm from her hair and casts it away, revealing her features stark by swordlight.

She screws up her face and spits in his.

“Hush, sister,” he says, wiping his cheek against his shoulder. “Peace. I shall not harm thee. Or this my brother,” with a nod to Kasimir, who is not immobile, exactly, but might as well be.

Whatever the waelcyrge was about to say, that diverts her. “How can you be
his
brother?”

“My sire is his dam. He is my half-brother.” Mingan had removed his gloves before he came to her. Now he lays his palm against her cheek, and though she shies away she cannot stop him. “The heraldry is complex. And art thou her creature?”

“Her?”

She conceals nothing. He has not the strength nor skill to seek deep, to look beyond the surface of her mind. He never has had, though it has cost him dearly: home, pack, family. But there it all is, roiled by the mists of Niflheim, the ghosts of all
her memories. She is not allied with the Technomancer, and in fact knows nothing of that wizard’s abominations.

Shadow, I have hunted thee.

“Foolish,” he replies, bending close. He is not large, but she is tiny. He looms over her as Strifbjorn once loomed over him. “Futile. But a beautiful grim gesture nonetheless.”

She was always fierce beyond her size. Indomitable in her will, and her honor. He thinks she never knew how she appeared to him, to the others: strange, fey, thoughtful, and wild.

He sees himself through her, the eyes in their caverns in his face, the cloak, the silver earring that swings against his cheek. Her fear is sweet. It is little effort at all to overmaster her. She cranes her head over her shoulder, leaning away from him, yearning toward her steed.

“Fear not,” Mingan whispers. “I carry thee within me now, little one. I have taken thee out of time. That is all.”

“Why?”

“For conversation,” he says, and—because she is shaking, and not only with fury—he takes her out of the snow and ash of dead Midgard, and into a place he prepared among the roots of the Tree. When they appear, while she starts, he disarms her, and throws her sword far out over the snow. She’ll find it again. But not before he’s through with her.

She crowds away, back against the trunk—a trunk so vast its curve is largely imperceptible—her hands raised defensively. Her fingers brush the rune carved there, and she looks at it, startled. He does not think she recognizes it.

“So strip me of my armor and my weapons,” she says. “I will not fear you.”

But she does; he smells it on her. Over the scent of the flowers she crushes underfoot, the roses—red roses and white, hundreds
of them—that he heaped around this bower. They have frozen. They crunch when she walks over them, and she stares down in horror.

“Flowers,” she says.

“Roses,” he offers. He holds out his hand, a supplicant. He does not remember how to speak to people. If ever he knew it. “A gesture of peace.”

“Peace.” Her fingers clench in their gauntlets. “The only peace between us is the peace of the grave.”

“I thought thee in it,” he whispers.

“You should be.” She shakes her head, her laugh strained and murderous. “Are you courting me? As you courted
her
?”

In her voice is two thousand years of betrayal, the ghost of Mingan standing like a blood-soaked shadow at the right hand of a tyrant queen. He cannot deny the truth of that accusation. “Thou hast my parole that no harm will come to thee tonight.”

“You have not mine,” she answers. “Release my steed.”

“Thy steed is not restrained,” Mingan says.

She stoops, and hurls his own frozen roses at him, a fistful of them. They spin through the air. The stems and petals brush him. A few snag on his cloak. “Don’t chop logic with me, you bastard. Either you brought me here to kill me, or—”

She shakes her head. Either her imagination or her voice has failed her.

Mingan shows her his teeth in a smile, to let her know that his has not. “I am my father’s son, but that—I will not,” he answers. He steps forward like a ripple in the starlight, and she would step back, but the Tree is behind her.

She is still within him, and he knows as he speaks that she will find him insolent. Still, he says: “Thou wilt sit, and thou wilt listen.”

“Sit in the snow?”

“Art cold?” he mocked. “Or merely proper?”

“I am not fat on the souls of mortal men,” she says. And folds her arms, and sits in the snow.

“No.” He drops beside her and reaches to take her hand. The ridges of her gauntlet cut his palm. He raises a single finger in admonition. “Thou art weak, sister. Force not my hand, or it will go ill with thee.”

“Do you think you are charming?” The scorn in her voice is her only weapon, and she wields it like a cutting torch. “Will you invite me to dine?”

“I have dined,” he answers, softly, so she pales, to his eyes, even under starlight. But this is not that of which he wishes to speak. “Thou art the child of the Light who wrote the Book of Riddles.”

She stares at his mouth; he has licked his lips. She lifts her chin and says, “I am.”

“I wondered.”

“But never enough to look for me.”

“I thought,” he says, so softly, “that it would not matter. That thou wouldst die with the world. No profit to murder or suicide, my dear, when we are all ruined.”

“Two thousand years ago. You knew the world was dying then.”

“Yes,” he says. He does not elaborate, though he feels the howl of the Suneater under his skin. He contains multitudes, Mingan does, and if the Suneater had any physical form that mad wolf would be up and pacing.
Devour her,
it says, not words but a flare of hungry heat in his breast.

He’s so inured to the pain, it cannot even make his eyes tear. He as good as feels fingers in his collar, twisting off his
breath. He had been Heythe’s lover, though she made the word filthy in his mouth. He had been her pawn, the object of her lust and sadism.

He knows more than Muire about what happened on the Last Day, and what it cost.