All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (30 page)

I cannot.

For a moment, Muire thought about walls and buildings and tree-grown mountainsides.
I see your point. That’s why you took us so high before you brought us back, the first time.

I thought it safe to dog his steps, and pass through Niflheim where he had. Also, Midgard is empty. So it is safer going than coming. But distances there do not compare to distances here. So consider it an option to be undertaken only in desperation.

But you could use it to pass through the Defile without ever crossing the field.

Yes,
Kasimir said.
That is what we shall do.

What about the mist?

The mist is a gift. It can only serve to conceal us.

And if it eats us? Melts our faces off?

She could imagine his tail swishing.
Then we need not fight tomorrow.

And when she was finished biting back laughter, she changed the subject and asked:
Kasimir,
Muire said,
I don’t need an answer now. But do you suppose it’s significant that the site of Eiledon in Valdyrgard corresponds roughly to the site of the world-tree in Midgard?

Yes,
he said.

Good. Because I do, too. And do you know what that rune carved in the world-tree’s root might be?

The eighteenth rune. The secret one.

But what does it mean?

No one knows. Except the All-Father.

And he’s dead.
Muire turned back to the room. Selene stood stolid in the corner, arms folded, eyes downcast, and Muire pretended for a moment that she was the statue she pretended. She
would like to sculpt her, those perfect sinews and the sleek elastic muscle. But it was to Cathoair that Muire spoke.

“I’m not sure I’m going to do what Thjierry wants me to do,” she said. “If I don’t, that puts you in a very awkward position. Put your shirt on, would you?”

Muscles in his throat rippled as he swallowed. But he picked up the shirt and started threading his arms into the sleeves, and then—without being told—put on the jacket, too. Though he left them both open down the front, Muire let it rest. “She’s going to keep us prisoner,” Cathoair said, looking at her directly.

Muire nodded.

Gunther said, “Muire, I can tell by the expression on your face that you’re thinking of some audacious plan. And I feel constrained to inform you that it’s not in my program, currently, to allow you off university grounds. Or to commit any acts of sabotage to university property.”

Muire sighed. “That’s that, then. Gunther, before I give the Technomancer my decision . . .”

“Yes?”

“May I view where the swords are kept?”

A pause. “Thjierry says yes. And says she hopes it will help you understand the desperation of the circumstances. Her laboratory is on the top floor of this building; she will meet you there in ten minutes.” And then a deeper pause, as if to indicate that he was speaking on his own behalf, now. “You should know that my core consciousness is also housed in that laboratory. And I will not permit you to leave this facility while I am at the helm of its defense.”

________

H
e just asked me to kill him,
Muire said later, climbing the stair.

Yes.

I
t complicated her plan enormously, but Muire still envied the orrery. It dominated the penthouse level of the library, glistening and turning and whirring softly, no louder than a pocket-watch. The arms were steel, the fixtures brass and copper and soft-hued gold, rubies and garnets glinting in the works. From the heart of it, barely visible, came the shine of light through vacuum tubes and solid-state crystals. The stars were tremulous lights in the nested crystal domes surrounding the works, the planets filigree, shining from within. Muire wished desperately she could see it at night, in all its glory, revealed by its own lights. It must have weighed tens of tons, but the whole of it appeared as light and perfectly balanced as a spinning gyroscope.

It made her uneasy to look at. It was lovely, exact, fantastically precise. But it left her dizzy and weak if she stared for more than a moment.

Still she paused in the doorway for a moment and watched the grand machine spin. Comets swept around the edges; the great worlds of the middle system swung in stately progression; at the center, by the light of the yellow sun, the little messenger worlds spun vertiginously, carving bright runes in the air.

The rest of the penthouse, incongruously, looked exactly like a wealthy sorcerer’s living quarters should look. A half-partitioned laboratory, with slate floors and slate-topped steel tables, occupied the side of the room with the northern light. Opposite, a pleasant living space, grass-floored, with ferns
both as borders and in pots, on stands before broad windows. It was furnished in airy, simple slat-sided wood, the sort of benches and tables one would expect in a gentleman farmer’s home.

Despite the wonder of the orrery, Muire found herself staring at the curtains, their black-white-and-rose pattern of stylized calla lilies somehow deeply unsettling.

“Very few have seen what you are looking at,” Thjierry said, shuffling around the base of the thing on two canes, barefoot on the verdant grass. “Take your shoes off, if you don’t mind?”

Muire complied, standing on each foot in turn. Selene was already barefoot, of course. And Cathoair seemed frankly glad to be rid of his, and left them tumbled by the door.
If we live, I’ll buy him boots,
Muire promised herself, and thought after the fact that it was the nearest thing she’d uttered to a prayer in twenty-five hundred years.

Barefoot, she came down the stairs, and felt the grass under her feet. Thjierry offered her a hand; Muire accepted the clasp. “The orrery is beautiful.”

“And functional,” Thjierry answered. “It draws up the hamarr, and processes it so it can be used to sustain our tank agriculture, the medical and conception programs, the Defile itself—everything.”

Muire bit her lip and turned to look at it again. She was not a technomancer, but even she could sense the pulse of power in the giant anachronistic machine.
We must not destroy this.

Must we not?

Muire took a breath that smelled of grease and metal, and stared at the spinning worlds and moons that made up the thing. Was this what Gunther had meant? Was he in here, too, linked to this clockwork heaven? Would he show her what to attack?

“The swords?” she asked, when she could bear to hold the eyeless machine gaze of the orrery no more.

This time, Thjierry gestured. “Gunther, please.”

In silence the gleaming brass base of the dome split open and trays like map drawers slid out in staggered ranks, as if they had been stacked into a pyramid. Each one was sealed with crystal, and under the crystal of each lay the swords, neatly side-by-side on velvet, hilt by point by hilt by point. Too many to count conveniently, but there were at least thirty drawers, and twenty blades in each, though not all drawers seemed full.

You are standing in a wizard’s Tower,
Muire reminded herself, as she took the seven or ten steps necessary to see clearly into the topmost of the nearest bank of drawers. “You’re not using the blades as a computational matrix? Or merely as a power source?”

“They’re crystal,” Thjierry answered. “They can be written to with a laser.”

I should have thrown them each into the sea.

She named each blade as she passed it.
Dragvandill. Solbiort. Aettartangi. Droplaugar. Skathi.

But Svanvitr was not there. Muire would have known its wire-wound hilt anywhere.

“Which is the most recent? The one Ingraham Fasoltsen died to bring?” Mercifully, that worthy remained silent, and the wolf-sherd too.

“Here,” Thjierry said, stumping toward the laboratory. “I haven’t written it yet. I can show you the process tonight; I know you’ll find it interesting, and I wonder what input you might have—”

Muire followed, half wrapped-up in Thjierry’s scientific enthusiasm until she thought,
she is so far out of touch with reality

that it’s a foregone conclusion to her that I will help.
Even then, it was hard not to take the contagion.

The sword rested on silk draped over a black iron rack upon the farthest table. Muire glanced over her shoulder to make sure Cathoair was still shadowing her—bare feet made him stealthier still—and beckoned him to follow before she advanced.

Here. Here was where she would summon Kasimir. Beside this vast window, safely far from the orrery that had become Eiledon’s clockwork vampire heart, ticking, ticking. Here, where a rack of computational crystals hung on the wall behind the sword, shielded by yet another pane of polycarbonate.

When Muire looked at it, the status lights flickered in an unmistakable wink.

Snakerot.
She had hoped—

She had hoped, that was all.

She glanced at Thjierry for permission to pick up the sword. Thjierry nodded, and Muire noticed that Selene had interposed herself between Cathoair and Muire, hand on the butt of her whip. Absolutely expecting trouble.

Svanvitr slips into her left hand as if waiting. A longer and heavier blade than her own, but for now the hilt suits her palm. She hefts the sword, as if to peer down the blade for straightness.

—ecstatically, the crystal flares to light.

Selene moves, lunges for her, the hand on her whip pulling it from her belt. Another flick and she’ll have it in play. The air thickens around Muire’s arm. Gunther, following his program, against all desire.

But Muire is waelcyrge. Least of her sisters. Least of them all. But herself again, after twenty-five centuries in abeyance. She moves through the thickened air; Svanvitr is Light, and
slices free as if through water. The blade drags. The blade cuts. The wound seals up behind.

Not so when she plunges it into the crystal racks of the computer.
That
is a wound that won’t heal. Muire slashes, and the stiff air loosens. And where is the whip?
Where is the whip?
She moves freely again, and the light that blazes from her might be blinding. Must be blinding: Thjierry’s face is screwed up around her eyes; she’s let one crutch fall to shield her vision with a lifted arm. Selene’s pupils are contracted to pinpricks in velvet, dark instead of showing light, and she struggles—Cathoair has her arms, from behind, his big hands on her biceps.

In a moment, she will twist free and shred him. No human flesh can withstand those claws.

Muire steps into Selene’s reach and—thinking of Cristokos and his accidental freedom—kisses her on the mouth, breathes hard down her throat.

Shock, recoil. Her lips part, her eyes fly wide, both hands tense and splay, displaying diamond-sharp claws as the whip thumps to the floor. Her fine-pointed teeth slash Muire’s mouth. Her whiskers prickle-scratch Muire’s face.

The unman spasms, convulsing as if it were electric current Muire applied to her skin, and not lips. The Light flows into her. Muire flows into her—

She knows not what she does. Neither to what this will give rise, nor how to control it; but the wolf-sherd does. Selene trembles in her hands, claws raking and missing skin and then connecting, slicing down through muscle on Muire’s neck and shoulders as she stops struggling and lunges into Muire’s arms. Her tongue darts, barbed like a cat’s, rasping flesh from lip and gum. Her eyes close; she strains against Muire, fur and muscle beneath the armor, cable strength. A rough purr . . .

Muire thrust her away, tasting blood, broke the kiss, sucked in air and pushed Selene, away,
hard
. The unman sprawled against the nearest table and slid into a crouch.
“Pony.” Now would be good
.

And Kasimir was there, beside her, Cathoair’s wrist in her hand as she threw herself across the saddle and hauled him after, the sharp scent of burning cloth and hair and skin as he banged the stallion’s hide, and then the downbeat of mighty wings—

And then cold. And Niflheim. And the smell of the crushed pansy warming between her breasts.

And all her ghosts come round again.

W
hen Muire came to tell Cahey they were ready to go back to the city, she was carrying a map drawn by Cristokos, one of the odder creatures Cahey had ever met. The unman was a parti-colored rat who seemed a friend of Muire and her giant teleporting metal beast, though Cahey had been somewhat distracted and disoriented when they met, after being detained, rescued, burned, vanished, flown across unknown hundreds of miles, and brought down in a landscape he hadn’t even known the word for until Muire told it to him.

Forest
.

A week ago, he’d never seen a tree with his own eyes. Now, he was sitting under one while a rat-mage smeared salve on his stinging leg and said, “Rats have ways in and out. This one will make those ones a map.” And who seemed pleased, in a rodent-like manner, when Muire told him of kissing Selene.