All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (9 page)

Selene plucked up the hair and had no need to ask for an envelope. The rat was there with one already. Selene collected the evidence, and while she was writing out a tag, Achilles took the unsealed pouch and sniffed lightly. “The woman.”

Selene did not nod, not unless talking to trumans. For Achilles, her ears pricked and her whiskers came forward. “Somebody saw something.”

“It’s a hope. We could canvass.”

If anyone in such a neighborhood as this would be willing to come forward. Selene glanced under her arm: the Mongrels were standing around in clumps, keeping the gawkers away from the moreaux while they worked. Nearmans, she guessed, in the ghetto. One or two cybered halfs. Some of them might be trus, like the Mongrels—pure-blood humans, unmutated—but you couldn’t tell them from the nears to look at them.

It would be hopeless for moreaux to canvass here. Selene blew through her whiskers. “I’ll ask Her to put the Mongrels on it.”

Trumans, even those who worked for Her, wouldn’t take orders from an un.

Achilles held up the sealed envelope. “Make sure She knows we’re looking for a blonde.”

“I’ll do better than that,” Selene said, uncoiling, stretching her spine out as her heels dropped to the cobblestones. “I’ll see if there’s enough material for Her to run a trace on it.”

Achilles wagged, and handed her the envelope back. And
Selene did not finish her thought:
. . . if Her strength will support the effort.

W
hen Muire awoke, the sun was low through the windows, skipping eye-watering brilliance across the faceted river. She covered her eyes with the cast and groaned, but sat up easily. Sleep was an excrescence.

And she needed to eat—already—again.

It would wait.

Over a life as long as Muire’s, objects accumulated. She owned a bed and a reading chair, lamps and end tables, a forge and an anvil. Clutter and memories. A viscreen and a hook to hang her fiddle from.

The fiddle was upstairs, and she fetched it when she went up to change. It was old, pre-Desolation, resonant and red-varnished. It had been given her by a dying man in a railroad town, when there were railroads, when they needed towns. She was tired, she thought, of dying. Dying people, and things, and ways of life.

Dead tired.

The fiddle case was dusty. “Muire, really,” she said, and found a cloth to wipe it clean.

Sleep had brought some healing. Her fingers would flex, and so she bent them around the bow. It scraped; painstakingly, she tuned the melody strings and the drones. Her wince was for the instrument, not for the pain in her hand.

Once—that word again, and she wished it would fade back into dusty memory, where she’d meant to abandon it—once, the children of the Light forested a world with their song, voices
raised in concert for mighty wreakings. Once they had been the makers of miracles.

Now, she might be able to speed the healing of a shattered bone.

If she were lucky.

The music cascaded through her, pulling energy with it, drawing light. In rivulets and streams, it crept out the tips of her fingers and whispered back into her ears. Her fingers softened, moved more surely, and the tone grew pure, and she closed her eyes and tilted her head back and leaned on the music hard—because, for a moment, she could. She put what she could into it, the wildness and frustration, the fury that scoured her when she remembered the Grey Wolf’s touch, his mockery, his grief. The ends of her cropped hair shook about her face as she bent forward.

Oh, how dare he presume to be sorry?

And then the song was done. She stood panting, head bowed, her broken and pinned hand aching. Itching, too, and that was a positive sign. She set the fiddle in its case and closed the latch. She wiped her forehead on the back of her uninjured wrist.

“Vengeance,” she said.

The cast had to come off before she could attempt a sculpture of her prey.

Clay, first. And wire. The flea-colored mud—dense and slick under Muire’s fingers—marked her nails in purple-brown crescents. She knew his face, the narrow-bridged nose, the furrow to the corners of a thin mouth. She knew the earring and the fold at the corner of his eye.

She made him as perfect as her hands could shape. And
when she had done it, she pressed her nails into her palms—her eyes tearing when she tried to fist the right one—and managed not to smash it flat.

How many can say they got to see the world end twice?

I
, said Kasimir’s old-iron voice, in the back of her mind.

She could have laughed, but it hurt her throat to think on it. Instead, she opened her viscreen. It chirruped—
Happy birthday!
—in a dead man’s voice, as it did each day of the year.

The net always knew her.

She wondered if the man who had written that clever little technomatic virus still would have done so, if he had known he would be breaking her heart for centuries to come.

She imaged the sculpture and burned it to a chip, which she libraried to her reader—
Happy birthday!,
when she fired it up—and then pocketed. When she turned back, the bust stared forward, opaque eyes unreadable.

A cloth lay around its neck, where Muire had draped it. She reached down and pulled it over the sculpture’s head.

Vengeance,
Ingraham Fasoltsen nagged.

It was more welcome than Kasimir’s gentle reminder:
There is still the matter of the widow.

G
unther Watsen had been the first person Muire met when she returned to Eiledon. It had been a summery morning near the spring solstice, two hundred and seven years previous to meeting the Grey Wolf in a dark alley under the curve of the Tower. She had walked—she walked a great deal in those days—from Freimarc, and she paused on the shoulder of the green mountain overlooking the valley of the Naglfar, at a place where the trees broke.

Below, an agate-colored river wound seaward, restrained by the topography even as it reinvented it. On its banks the city rose, a sprawl of multicolored glass and faceted metal set in the landscape like a rococo jewel in a verdigrised setting.

The last time she stood on the shoulder of that peak, Eiledon had been a walled cluster of three- and four-story buildings. But it had far outgrown those medieval walls, though she could still detect their presence in the pattern of the streets. A steady procession of aircraft slid down the sky, the foaming wakes of freighters and pleasure craft scarring the placid river. The port was ten miles downriver, in the delta, and the city and its suburbs lined the banks the entire way.

Outside the walls, where the city was less crowded, Muire
walked beside a broad avenue bordered by flowering trees. It was not especially well designed for pedestrians; electric cars and at least one ground-effect vehicle blurred past, blowing dust into her eyes. But she walked on, and Eiledon rose up around her.

The population of the metropolitan area crested at twelve million souls: a teeming center of commerce, romance, and artistic endeavor.

Eiledon had eight gates and two river locks. Muire entered through the easternmost, the Wolf Gate, for easy access to the Green and the University. Here, the walking was easier—only electric and human-powered vehicles were permitted within the walls, and bicycles, scooters, and hoverboards outnumbered autos in the knotty cobblestoned alleys.

One long block—ignoring the winding, tunnelish side streets of the Wolfgate neighborhood, with its aura of decayed wealth—brought her to Boulevard, which she crossed. This was the new Old City. The Ark rose on her left until its heights were lost in the haze, a contrast to the government center on her right, with its elaborate lacework stone.

It was noon by the time she reached the Riverside Market, and glossy heads shimmered in the mounting sun. The earthy scents of vegetables and the sweetness of berries saturated the air, but a flower-seller’s booth reeked of humid jungle.

Muire breathed deeply, rubbing her hands in the warmth.

She bought a newschip and slid it into her reader. Several people eyed the device: judging by their appearances, she guessed they were wired.

Country cousin,
she thought, and tried not to burst out laughing. It was far from the first time.

She could have bought a mapchip, too. But it was just as
easy to turn to a gangling young man buying coffee ice cream from a stand in the tree-shade by the Green and ask.

He looked down on her from a towering height, and smiled in a way that rearranged his features engagingly over the bones. Brown hair, uncut in recent memory, blew across his eyes and into his mouth when he spoke.

Muire thought he might be a little too aware of his own quirky androgynous beauty. But he was nevertheless polite, and at least his teeth were crooked. “Of course. Down Park to University, turn right. The campus is up the hill: there’s a stair at University and Boulevard.”

“I just crossed Boulevard,” she said, as his ice cream dripped over his knuckles.

“It’s a circle. It makes a big loop around the Green. You . . . must be new in town?”

“I’ve been away a long while,” Muire answered. The best she could do: waelcyrge did not lie, unless—until—they grew tarnished. “Thank you for your help—”

But he fell into step beside her, twisting his long wrist awkwardly and craning his neck in the opposite direction until he could suck the ice cream off his fingers. “I’m going that way. I’ll walk with you,” he said, seemingly unperturbed by the dust on her clothes, her greasy plaits, or the rucksack dragging her shoulders down. “Are you a student? Or have you taken a job at the University?”

She should have shut him down, and she knew it. But he was as awkward and eager as a puppy dog, self-conscious to the point of stammering and somehow still seeming entirely genuine.

“No,” she said. “Neither. I’m an artist. I have a fellowship.”

“Oh,” he said. Still waging left-handed war with the melting ice cream, he reached out and pressed an only slightly sticky
fingertip to the pad of her reader. It chirped when it had scanned his print, and he said, “Look me up. I’m Gunther Watsen. I’m an assistant to Professor Thorvaldsdottir.”

And for some reason, Muire looked at him wiping hair out of his eyes, and said, “I will.”

M
uire really needed to stop taking in candle-flicker strays. She tried, Light knew: she held herself aloof, didn’t place calls, avoided social engagements. She didn’t take lovers. She didn’t need friends. She especially didn’t need friends who would inevitably break her heart with their fragility, their evanescence, the shadow-quick passing of their mortal lives.

Gunther Watsen appeared at the door of her brand-new, just-rented warehouse studio as if by magic, two days later, carrying a picnic basket and a bottle of wine.

“
An
artist,” he said.

Muire had been on her hands and knees, face daubed and hair smeared with tile cement, replacing the broken slates of her floor. She stood holding the glass door open on Gunther, who swung his basket meaningfully and grinned—smirked, really—like a hopeful schoolboy. “I beg your pardon?”

“You said you were an artist.”

“I am . . . ?”

“You didn’t say you were the sculptor-laureate.”

“I said I had a fellowship,” she replied, but somehow he’d gotten past her. She turned and watched him wander in slow circles, his head angled back as he took in her distinctly industrial space in all its tumult of renovation.

Without looking at her, he continued, “They said you walked from Freimarc.”

“Who said?”

“Gossips,” he answered, with a disarming grin. And now he looked at her directly. “I brought lunch. Can we eat it?”

Muire opened her mouth to say something along the lines of
don’t you think you’re presuming a little?
and instead, heard her stomach growl. She glanced down at her hands, scraping her thumbnail against a black bit of cement. “I haven’t a table yet.”

“You have a courtyard,” he said, and led her out into it. Or, more precisely, he exited, and she pursued.

It was a weedy, erratically shaped patch of earth, partly paved in cracked stones, partly carpeted in dandelions, saw grass, and violets. A dead cedar tree stood in one corner, a failing magnolia in the other, its bloom already past.

Gunther plunked himself down on the sun-warmed earth, avoiding piles of broken brick and mortar, and pulled a square of fabric from his basket. “Do you mind eating here?”

Muire opened her mouth. Shut it. Gathered herself, and said, “Mister Watsen—”

“—Gunther. I get enough of that from professors—”

“—I’m afraid I’m a vegetarian.”

He paused in the act of laying out napkins, plastic cups, disposable knives. “Well, that’s only a small problem,” he said. “I hope.” He tapped a little heap of wrapped sandwiches. “Two of these are cheese. Is cheese okay?”

“Cheese is fine,” she said, surrendering to the inevitable, and plumped herself crosslegged at the edge of the cloth.

He had not only wine but a thermos bottle of tea, redolent of cinnamon and already cloudy with milk.