All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (26 page)

But he was not. And so all Selene could do in her own right to reward him for approximating worthiness was to let him stay for a while in the sun.

The rose garden lay behind the old Botany building, appropriately. It was over an acre square, bordered by high briar
thickets, and one of Selene’s brethren sat crosslegged on the grass before the gate, weeding out the bed.

Even after the end of the world, there was weeding.

“Hello, Orpheus.”

“Hello, Selene.” He was a mockingbird, gray-feathered and white-barred. For a joke, he mimicked her voice so perfectly that Cathoair turned to look at her when Orpheus spoke.

Selene squeezed her eyes to show she appreciated the humor. “This is Cathoair. One of Her guests. I am here to show him the garden.”

“Let me move,” he said, and scooted aside so they would not have to walk over him. And so they entered the garden.

It was very fine in the sun, full of warmth and scent and the rustle of leaves, the hum of insects.

“What are those?”

Selene had to push Cathoair’s pointing hand aside with the back of her own to keep him from poking a honeybee. The insect buzzed away, frosted with pollen like flakes of gold leaf, and Cathoair glowered at her.

“It’s a bee,” Selene said. “Don’t touch. If you scare it, it stings you, and it dies.” She took a deep breath as he sheepishly withdrew his hand. “And some people have a fatal anaphylactic reaction to the venom. Even if you don’t, it smarts.”

He nodded, accepting her correction, unhumiliated. “Thank you.” He leaned forward, though for a better look. “Where do they come from?”

“They’re the last bees in the world. She salvaged the hives.”

“Oh.” She noticed he kept his hands laced one inside the other, behind his rear. She approved. Right up until the moment when he turned, arms still locked behind his back, and kissed her human-style, full on the mouth.

Warm, musty, richly man-scented breath flowed across her face. His lips were weird, muscular, flexible, and they moved in complicated fashions. His cheek brushed her whiskers; they slicked back automatically, as if she had been rubbing her face against him to claim him with her scent glands. It was bizarre, a bizarre behavior, and for a moment she thought about apes and mating behaviors and their monkey germs and how
strange
everything humans did was.

But what shocked her most was that she did not pull away.

She let him do it, rather, and then when he pulled slightly away she rubbed her cheek quickly on his chin and then licked the tip of his nose.

“Ow!” He jerked back, one hand touching where her tongue, like a rasp, had left a raw place. The salt and blood of him filled her mouth, and now her flews were tingling, itching too. She leaned in, purring, and he backed away a step. “You bit me.”

“Licked,” she said, working her tongue against her palate to explore the flavor of his skin. “If I had bitten, you would not be talking.” And then she yawned, so he could inspect her mouth, the finger-thick canines, premolars like shearing chisels, and the reverse-barbed surface of her tongue, adapted for smoothing fur and shredding meat off bones.

“Oh,” he said, as he had said about the bees. “So that wasn’t such a good idea?”

She blinked, and considered, and slicked her whiskers against her face in contemplation. “It’s what humans do to friends.”

“Yes.”

“And grooming is what cats do to friends. So you may assume that if I found it strange, I did not—too much—object to it.” And then, because she felt wicked and whimsical, which
were not emotions she was accustomed to, she added, “So what
have
you got, besides pretty?”

“Try me and find out,” he said. He smiled widely, cheek twisting around his scar.

Selene, in sudden cowardice, shook her head and backed away. “I’ll show you your room,” she said, wondering if this was why the cryptic immortal had taken him into her company.

Seemingly cowed, he let her lead him to the dormitory and show him the small suite he would inhabit. But when she left him there and locked the door between them, she was perfectly aware that his gaze remained on her until the narrowing crack was sealed. And once it was, Selene leaned against the wall beside it and licked her chops and tried to get the taste—and the itch—out of her mouth.

“Gunther?”

“See what?” he answered, without hesitation.

She laughed, a cat’s soundless amusement, and nodded thanks.

She liked Gunther a lot.

I
t developed that Cristokos did not live on the train, or even particularly near it. He inhabited a house—a log home, too spacious for Muire to be quite comfortable calling it a cabin, even if it was one in every technical detail. But in Muire’s head, at least, cabins were still what they had been five or six hundred years before, on a more eastern continent. One room, rough-hewn, and if one were lucky enough to have a plank floor instead of rammed earth, one spent a fair fraction of one’s time sweeping out the sawdust from the borer beetles that inevitably inhabited one’s walls under the bark.

This
was a structure with two rooms and a loft, a mortared fieldstone fireplace, a laid stone floor. It was a cabin the way Cristokos was a rodent. Yes, surely, that was a description. But it was not even remotely the whole story.

And now Muire stood on its porch and watched the sun go down, something she had not seen undimmed by the Defile in centuries. The sun slid behind mountains while it was still high in the sky, leaving indirect light to reflect down into the valley. Twilight lingered long, but this did not lessen the drama of the colors.

This sunset flamed vermilion and incarnadine, fluorescent oranges, unreal colors that Muire could barely believe existed outside of the forge. So she barely noticed when Kasimir materialized in a gravel patch provided for his use to the left of the porch, rustled folded wings, and stared at her.

She waited until the sky had grayed before she spoke.

“I could stay here forever.”

You could.

“No one could ask more of me than I have done.” It was hard to get that out without glancing at him for a reaction, but she managed.

No one with a modicum of compassion.

Muire snorted and dusted her hands by slapping them against her hips. “Well, that lets
me
out, then. You’re taking this very well.”

Because you’re not sincere.

“You question my resolution?” But now she was teasing, and she knew it had gotten into her voice.

Not at all. Thus it is that I know you will return to Eiledon.
The slap of steel wires against steel hide as he swished his tail.
What calls you home, Muire?

You’re making fun of me.

With you so brave? Nay, never.
Both his heads stretched long on their necks, and his ears wobbled. She rolled her eyes and looked away.

She expected some word from the splinters that threaded her soul: Fasoltsen, or the wolf. But they were voiceless. “Why now? Why have so many of us returned? Were we assembled to fight the Desolation and failed?”

And why do you know them now, when you did not before?

“I knew Cathoair.”

Gravel rattled under Kasimir’s hooves. He bit off mouthfuls of grass with a ripping sound, and chewed slowly. He said nothing, and he didn’t need to. She had known Cathoair because she was pathetic; because she looked for Strifbjorn in every passing face. But Kasimir’s questions had been rhetorical, and she already had the answer: Mingan would have known them, and so now so did she. She was restored to strength, brought back from the edge of the shadows.

That was all.

It shocked her to realize how frail—how human—she’d grown.

“It’s simple, isn’t it? Once you have all the evidence. Thjierry somehow collected a number of my brethren’s swords, and she’s using them to summon back the dead. She’s using their souls to animate her constructs, and their swords to control and enslave them. And the wolf does not approve, and intervened too late, and so managed to kill the messenger but not retrieve the blade.”

Your understanding matches mine. And moreover.

“Moreover,” she said, “the wolf sees no reason to salvage this world, when it is already so ruined. He’d rather tear it
down. It would not, after all, be the first time. And the Technomancer and her constructs are the only thing between Eiledon and the wolf, and Eiledon and the Waste.” She reached out and rested one palm flat on the porch-pillar, rubbing the smooth peeled wood. “So what are we going to do about it?”

Simple
, Kasimir informed her,
does not mean easy. Are you ready?

She rubbed futilely at her nape. “Let’s say good-bye to your friend the rat before we go.”

A
fter another long flight, Kasimir returned Muire to Eiledon in the middle of the night. The trickiest part of the journey was passing through the Defile unnoticed. Muire was certain, given what she now understood, that she did not wish to come to Thjierry’s notice any more than she already had. But Muire, along with the Technomancer and a handful of other magicians, had raised the thing; if she could not pass through it undetected, no one could. And so they came in under cover of darkness, Muire whistling a spell of concealment until they were down.

She went home first, leading Kasimir in to her foundry through the glass courtyard doors, wondering if they had managed to sneak past Sig or if she would have some explaining to do. The stallion settled down in the corner by the forge like a giant dog, wings furled tightly and one chin resting beside his hooves. The far neck craned over the crest of the near one, head propped on his own mane, as he observed her sleepily. She wondered for a moment how his brain worked; was his consciousness divided, or a gestalt? Was one head dominant, or did they serve different functions? It was obvious at least that one could keep watch while the other slept . . . but how did it
work
?

Magic
, he said.

Which was, she supposed, a good enough answer. She stumped upstairs to shower, change, and charge her vii so she could check messages. The poor thing had gone dead seeking signal in the otherworld, and she owed Cathoair an explanation. In his place, she would be frantic.

She placed it in the induction field and powered it on. As she had expected, once the
happy birthday
was over with, the message chime dinged fast and frequently enough that she lost count. She scrolled through the list once while she was stripping for the shower and did not find Cathoair’s code tag. Astrid’s and Aethelred’s, however, each appeared more than a dozen times.

“Shadows,” she said, and checked the first and last couple of messages in the queue.

And then she was flying down the stairs, pulling a clean shirt over her head so fast she tore it along a seam, hopping on one flour-white leg after the other to pull her trousers on. Kasimir did not need to ask what the problem was; she showed him, and he started to heave himself to his feet.

“No,” she said. “Stay here. You’re conspicuous—” an understatement “—and I can call you if I need you.”

What shall I do if someone enters?

No one was likely to, except Sig.

Muire found socks and boots and slung Nathr’s baldric over her shoulder. “Pretend you’re a work in progress,” she answered, and ran still-barefoot for the door.

P
erhaps it would have been wise to have called ahead, but Muire had left her vii sitting in the charger, and even if its battery were not flat, by the time she remembered it was too late by
far to go home and fetch it. She actually considered calling a cab, but thought she could run the distance in less time than it would take for transportation to arrive.

And so she ran.

Flat out, dodging the street traffic, her feet slapping a rhythm for her breathing. Running now, as if it made a difference. Running as if the time for haste were not already irretrievably lost.

Nathr banged her spine, her shirt flapping in the wind of her passage, one sock twisted inside a hurried boot. And people cleared a path for her, as if her haste obliged passage. They stepped aside, or she sidestepped, and once someone who saw her coming across the bridge shouted
Make a hole
and miraculously, the hole appeared.

She cleared the descent into the Well in a controlled avalanche, down the steps in two bounds, and plunged into the crowds of streetlit merrymakers, cutpurses, and whores. A Mongrel might have detained her, curious where she was bound with such dispatch, but he never so much as brushed her sleeve.

She hit the doorway of the Ash & Thorn still trotting, and almost got clotheslined by the bouncer. But she managed to stop before tumbling into his embrace, which she had to assume was good luck, given his expression.

“You have some nerve,” he said, and latched onto her wrist with a grip she could have broken without effort.