All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (28 page)

“Yeah,” the voice that said it was Gunther replied. “Thjierry said I couldn’t call anyone. But she didn’t say I couldn’t send a card.”

Muire squeezed her eyes shut and said, “I buried you.”

“You buried worm-meat,” he answered. “I wasn’t there anymore. I died in Thjierry’s arms, Muire. What does she do for a living again?”

Muire’s other hand still clutched her bronze eagle scabbard chape. She thought about swords, about the kiss of angels, about drawing Ingraham Fasoltsen’s last breath into her own lungs to seek vengeance for his murdered soul. She thought about the tarnished, and how they stole every breath, except that final one, and so avoided the geas.

She thought about using the weapons of dead angels to
draw the souls of dead angels back from their rest, and incorporate them in salvaged flesh.
Created to serve,
she thought. And
there was no one else. She did what she thought she had to do.

She turned Gunther into a fylgja.

Muire knew she would have done differently. But she did not know if she would have been right to do so.

And so she forced her fingers to uncurl. From the sting, she’d probably imprinted the pattern of the filigree into her flesh. “I am so sorry,” she said, wondering as she did if any words that passed her lips had ever been more inadequate. She could have done something.

She could have
noticed
when Thjierry walked into her own home, and stole her friend’s
soul
.

Inanely, she said, “Has it been very bad?”

He laughed, a touch frantic, and said, “You have got
no idea
. Ones and zeroes, ones and zeroes, and never a damned cup of tea. Whups. We’re almost to the top. Hang on. There’s a bump.”

T
hjierry was not waiting at the landing, but two unmans were—a lion and Selene. They led Muire through a grape arbor and into a relict gazebo, hung with firm green unripe fruit and broad-leaved vines that softened the uncomfortable light.

And there, in a cane chair, was Thjierry.

Muire had come in with ideas of what both best-and worst-case scenarios might look like. Neither was quite adequate to the truth. The Technomancer was neither a hulk, immobile and decrepit, nor remade entirely a gleaming machine. But neither was she spry and limber. She was just an old woman alone in a chair, her hair wispy and tousled, the corners of her
mouth drawn down to delineate her jowls. Her hands folded over the knob on a steel-headed cane, liver spots thick on slack gray skin marked with channels like the solder-tracks in a solid-state device. She raised one of those hands and beckoned Muire with a crook of tidy-nailed fingers, but Muire found herself frozen with indecision just at the edge of the shady space.

“Are you shocked?” Thjierry asked, when Muire had been silent some seconds. “It is shocking, isn’t it? But it’s what all flesh is heir to.”

Muire thinned her lips, and had sense enough not to respond. Not when the words on her lips were:
I am not flesh
.

Thjierry looked around, furtively, as if to see if anyone except Muire and the unmans were in earshot, and whispered the next sentence conspiratorially: “Except yours, apparently. Tell me the secret isn’t your moisturizer.”

Most terrible, that it
was
funny. Thjierry’s timing was perfect—it had always been good, and practice had not harmed her delivery—but there was something so desperate about the defusing joke, a match struck in terror of the dark, that Muire flinched even as she began to laugh. And then she came to Thjierry, leaving the unmans behind as she crossed the wooden floor, and dropped to a crouch before her.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too,” Thjierry answered.

Muire wondered how much she was dissembling. They had been allies, never close, mostly linked through Gunther. And then Muire thought,
Uncharitable, angel. Perhaps she’s missed you exactly as much as you have missed her. Which is to say . . . somewhat.

“Did you avoid me because you are immortal?” Thjierry asked.

Muire shrugged. “Did you avoid me because of what happened to Gunther?”

“Oh, that.” Thjierry reached out with a papery hand and touched Muire’s throat above the baldric, above the collarbone. “I wasn’t sure you would understand.”

“Then,” Muire said, “I wouldn’t have.”

“We couldn’t afford to fight, you know. You and me.”

“No,” Muire said. “We couldn’t have.” She folded Thjierry’s hand in her own, and Thjierry closed her eyes as Muire squeezed.

“We still can’t. Can’t afford to fight. You know, Muire, it was your sword that gave me the idea.” The hilt protruded over Muire’s shoulder, and—after disengaging from Muire’s grip—Thjierry brushed it, then drew her hand back languidly, rubbing the fingertips as if they stung. “Is that your secret?”

“
My
sword?”

“When I came to visit you. It was hanging on the wall, and the same magic was in you both. That’s what’s kept you young. I can make it work for the unmans, but—” She knotted her old hands together in frustration. “Only a little for me.”

“Two hundred years—”

“Only a little. Look in a mirror, woman.”

Muire smiled. “I try not to. You know, those swords are the reason the wolf is hunting you.”

She nodded. “They’re also the only thing keeping the Desolation outside. Do you have a better answer?”

“Not yet.” Muire dropped a knee on the floor for better balance. “Thjierry, you’re holding a friend of mine—”

Thjierry smiled. Her breath, when she spoke, was not precisely evil, but it smelled musty, like a long-closed-up room. Yes. Cathoair. I hoped he’d bring you to me, and he has. Would you
like to see him? I could have his scars erased, you know. Ask him to talk to me about it. For a friend of a friend—”

“I would like to see him.”

“Well then you shall,” Thjierry said. And as Muire stood, waiting to be dismissed, added, “—and after you have seen that he is well? Come back and talk to me some more?”

“About the swords?”

“About what we are going to do, to protect Eiledon. I’m dying, you realize.”

“Yes,” Muire said, her hands cold and clenching. “I had guessed.”

M
uire had expected both unmans to escort her from the Technomancer’s wind-stirred bower, but the lion stayed behind, leaving Muire in the charge of Selene, the leopard. It might be uncourteous to speak with an unman uninvited, but Muire found she was wearied with rules.

She turned to Selene as they walked and said, “How did you come to know Ingraham Fasoltsen?”

Vengeance,
he murmured, as though his name were a trigger. Muire pinched her temples with one hand, trying to massage the headache away.

For Selene’s part, she seemed neither confused nor discomfited by Muire speaking to her. Certainly, she was less uncomfortable overall than Muire, who saw Herfjotur every time she looked at the unman.

Her ears slicked back, and she seemed to consider. “Not long,” she said. “Perhaps fifteen years? He was not old by human standards. How long have you known your . . . friend?”

For the love of all that was holy, he was already making
passes at the catgirls. Muire would have happily covered her eyes with the raised hand, but the bricks of the path were cracked and heaved up unlevel, and she needed to see where she was putting her feet. “We just met, after a fashion. But sometimes it feels as if I’ve known him forever.”

An odd rumbling noise emerged from Selene, as she squinted in feline laughter. Muire tried to remember how long it had been since she’d heard a cat purr. She’d never seen an unman laugh, hadn’t known they were capable. Thought on that, shaking her head and wondering what else she didn’t know about unmans, as she followed Selene into a black brick dormitory that might have been red once, or yellow. It looked old enough to have acquired its patina during Eiledon’s industrial era, when the streets had been thick with the smoke of factories and motorcars, and must be absolutely sweltering in high summer. Muire remembered it from her tenure at the university, but she had never been inside.

“He’s on the fourth floor,” Selene said. “Would you like to take the lift?”

“The lift is out of order.” Gunther interjected himself into the conversation as smoothly as if he had been there all along. Which he had been, in his own fashion, Muire supposed. If he inhabited a nanotech fog, she was breathing bits of him in and out with every draught of air. “It will have to be the stairs. Shall I take her up, Selene?”

Muire wasn’t sure what relief looked like on a snow leopard, but she was willing to make a guess. Cathoair was, indeed, already making friends. “Thank you,” Selene said.

So they ascended the stair together, Muire and Gunther—if Gunther could really be said to ascend—and as Muire had suspected he might, Gunther took advantage of the moment alone.
His voice half hesitant, half wistful as she’d heard it once before, he asked, “Will you help her?”

Muire paused to rest on the second landing, for extended privacy rather than from weariness. There was a window, and she went to it, pressing her face to tepid glass to expand her field of view. “Will you tell her everything I say?”

“If she makes me.”

It was an honest answer. And one that told Muire a great deal about what Thjierry had become, as Gunther had no doubt intended. “What’s going on here, Gunther? What’s she concealing from me?”

It might have been a breeze in some open window that riffled Muire’s hair, though this window was not open. Or it might have been the caress of an invisible machine. She did not ask. She said, “I know about the swords—”

“
What
do you know about the swords?” he interrupted. Intent and forceful, as when they had argued literature and history until all hours of the morning. And he had tried to kiss her. Just the once.

She wondered if he remembered. She wondered why she said no.

Self-mortification.

Adding insult to injury, the wolf-sherd yawned complacent assent.

“I know she’s using them to control the moreaux,” Muire said. Down below, on some inaudible signal, the students had begun to trickle across the campus. There were so few of them: clumps of two and four, where she remembered rivers. “To keep herself alive. To keep you alive.”

“And?”

“Of course there’s an
and
.” Muire muttered. “I don’t know the and. Will you tell me?”

“To keep Eiledon alive.”

“Well, by implication—”

“No. Directly. All the hamarr, the vitality, that supports the city’s survival is drawn through the swords and focused through Thjierry. She’s turned herself into a prism, with the blades as the source of the light. Metaphorically speaking . . .”

Not metaphorical at all
. Except—

She didn’t turn away from the window to say, “The blades aren’t source of
anything
. They’re just a conduit.”

“So where,” he asked with rhetorical weight, “is the hamarr coming from?”

Muire frowned across the hazy skyline to the Defile, at the city walls and the crumbling suburbs beyond—all visible from this height. She made her hands release the windowsill, but they promptly knotted themselves in her skirt. “Oh, Light,” she said. “I know what you’re not saying.”

“She’s cannibalizing the rest of the planet,” Gunther said, merciless. “Draining its hamarr to support Eiledon. And has been for two hundred years. Freimarc—she’s responsible for all those deaths, Muire. And now that that’s gone, she has to find something else, or—” He imitated a brief sharp exhalation.

“And you and I helped her do it.”

“Well,” he said, “it seemed mean to bring that up.”

C
athoair wasn’t sure what he expected when he heard footsteps approaching the locked door of the suite where the Technomancer had warehoused him, but a crisp polite knock was
not it. “I’d say come in,” he called, without rising from the stiff-seated chair beside the window. “But the door is locked.”

The voice that followed did not precisely come in answer, because what it said was, “Gunther?” But it jerked him to his feet anyway, hands twitching at hip-level.

“Muire?”

“Just a moment,” she said. “Are you decent?”

“I can get you references and affidavits, if you like—oh, am I glad to see you.”

She stood framed in the doorway staring at him for a moment, cleanly dressed in a skirt and tunic, her hair insipid from humidity. “Glad to see you too, kid. And what did you do to get yourself locked up?”

“Why are you blaming me?” He was already crossing the room, grabbing his discarded jacket off the foot of the unused bed. Softer, when they were face to face, he asked, “Did you get him?”

“No,” she said, standing aside. “And I blame you because it’s always your fault. Come on—”

“Are we getting out of here?” There were so many other questions he wanted to ask her:
Who are you really; how old; what are you doing here, now; why me?
Those were questions for when they were safe somewhere that wasn’t atop a floating earth-berg.

“Does this look like a rescue?” She smiled. And winked at him, ever so slightly, just a droop of lashes across her cheek. “I have to have another talk with Thjierry before we go. But I thought I would take you to breakfast in the dining hall first. If it’s anything like it used to be, you’ll hate it.”

________

W
hen Muire said
I have to have another talk with Thjierry before we leave
, she didn’t expect Cathoair to pick up on the subtext. But he frowned at her and blinked and said, “I think I understand,” in a voice that suggested, just possibly, he did.

She fed him—and, as if to prove her wrong, he didn’t complain—and then took him on a comprehensive tour of the university grounds. She was fortunate to have Gunther’s assistance where progress or entropy had overtaken her knowledge.

They all knew they were killing time until Thjierry sent for Muire again, but it was almost fun, for a little, although Muire could not forget herself under the glow of that toxic sky. The overcast wasn’t unusual. But she did not choose to grow accustomed.