All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (13 page)

Cathoair heard the smile in her voice, even while looking at the back of her head. Or maybe he caught a glimpse in the mirror behind the bar.

“I used to be,” she said. “Have you seen this man?”

It was an odd thing: when she pulled her reader out of her pouch and tapped it on, it chirped “Happy birthday!” and she flinched. And then she pressed a button, and a hologram shimmered into existence above it.

An image, if Cathoair was seeing properly, of a clay sculpture. A sculpture that looked right through him, with empty eyes.

His hands tightened on the neck of the broom, as if he could throttle it. He imagined soft hands and flesh too heated to be human, the stroke of a thumb down his throat and fingers spread across his nape to behind his ear.

He gasped, flushed with heat, and turned away.

Too much to hope the woman hadn’t noticed. Too much to hope she wouldn’t turn around and say—

“You know him, then?”

Oh, fuck it.
He swallowed and summoned whatever brass he had left. “Pay for my time,” he said, “and maybe I can tell you something.”

“Pay you?” she said.

He nodded. “Or maybe there’s something else we can do for each other.”

She studied him, and he thought an expression of pain narrowed her eyes. “I’m not in the market for a toy.”

Hard words, said hardly. She’d meant to sting. Aethelred turned aside, stepping away from the bar. Cathoair looked at the woman steadily, drawing himself up, poised and aware that whatever his face looked like, from the neck down he could turn any heterosexual woman’s head.

He had to assume she was an investigator, a vengeance specialist. She must be working for someone, and—

He hardly dared follow the train of thought where it led
him. But her boots and her sword were expensive, and it didn’t look like she had to fight, or whore.

“No,” he said. “Those aren’t the services I’m offering.”

She blinked, but finally nodded. “What do you want?”

Aethelred had vanished into the back. Cathoair was on his own. “I want a job,” he said. He swallowed the harsh taste of skin, and sweat, and blood. “One with a little dignity.”

She looked him up and down, the hologram glowering past her shoulder. And then she nodded slowly, but said, “What makes you think I can help with that?”

“You’re a revenger?”

Something about the question made her smile. “Not exactly.” A pause, and then she nodded, slowly, and—much to his relief—clicked the holo off. “I’ll pay for information.”

For now, it would have to do.

“Come on,” he said, leaning the broom against a chair. “Sit down.”

A
s Muire and the pretty gigolo sat down, the landlord appeared from his strategic retreat and came to them across the empty bar. He set a pitcher of “lemonade” between them and asked, “Do you want something stronger?”

“What do you have?”

“Gin. Brandy or vodka. Rum. Synthetic wine and mead.” The mirrors of his face gleamed all the wrong ways when he smiled.

“What’s the difference?” she said, just managing to hold on to her own grin.

“Other end of the bathtub,” he admitted, so Muire laughed and said, “Just this.”

She dug in her pouch for chits and her bowl, only to have the landlord stay her with a gesture. “It’s on the house,” he said. “Any friend of Cahey’s is a friend of mine.”

There was no threat in the words; it was all implied, and softly. Muire put her money away and laid her bowl on the table. Across, the young man did the same.

“Thank you,” Muire said, trying to hide her interest in watching the interaction between the young man and the older halfman. She’d assumed the landlord was also a whoremaster, the young people working his establishment more or less chattel.
But that wasn’t what she saw when the landlord laid his hand on the other man’s shoulder before walking away.

She frowned, reassessing.

And then the young man she would not allow herself to think of as Strifbjorn touched her hand, drawing back her attention. Muire extracted herself and poured the lemonade.

“So you’re Cathoair,” she said, conversationally, and guessed that she only didn’t manage to make him choke on the lemonade because he wasn’t drinking any.

He recovered faster than she would have expected. “Of course. Aeth called me Cahey.”

“And your name is over the board, in the kickboxing standings,” she agreed.

“And you claim you’re not an investigator.”

“Not by trade.”

The lemonade had never been closer than fifty years to a lemon, but it was wet and chill. She swallowed it reluctantly, sugar coating her teeth, and noticed that Cathoair still had not touched his own.

Thus proving that death and resurrection could teach even Strifbjorn wisdom. Muire pushed her own bowl away with the tips of her fingers. There was still clay under the nails. Typical, to have failed to notice.

“Why do you fight?” she asked. “Or, if you’re going to fight, why do you—”

“Whore?” Coolly, as if to show that nothing she could throw at him would shock. “For the money. Aethelred pays us a cut of the book to fight, and the fighting—” He swallowed, and did reach for his lemonade this time, the motion reminding her uncomfortably that he was still half naked. “—the tricks pay more once they’ve seen us.”

“Seen you fight.” She could imagine him in the ring. Yes, people would pay a premium to touch that.

“I’m good at it.” He shrugged, rolling his head back on his long neck as if it hurt him.

“You could compete citywide.”

She wasn’t prepared for his answering laughter. “No, I can’t. I’m not truman.”

She squinted at him. If he wasn’t, he could pass.

“My mom,” he elaborated, “caught an engineered flu when she was pregnant. I’m a Mute. Reflexes, eyesight. Strength and muscular coordination. I’m not allowed to fight real people.”

He paused, as if expecting her to answer. She couldn’t, at first. But in a gesture of solidarity, she tapped the table left-handed and said, “I’m Muire.”

“No last name.”

“Muire,” she answered. “No last name either.”

She shook her head, and they grinned at each other. Animals, both of them. With animals’ names. Not even really human at all.

“So,” she said, “tell me about the Grey Wolf, won’t you?”

“That’s his
name
?”

“It’s his epithet,” she said. She wondered if she should be telling him this. But trade for trade. If he ran right back to Mingan with it, then the Wolf would know Muire was hunting him.

And the Wolf had to know that already.

“Mingan,” she said, when the candle-flicker stayed silent.

This time, he reacted. Eyes wide, nostrils flaring. “That’s not his real name.”

“But it is,” Muire said, pitching her voice so it would not carry. “You see what you’ve wandered into?”

“So he calls himself after a devil,” Cathoair scoffed. He
scrubbed at his mouth, though, and Muire pitied him his denial. “How very . . . romantic. And overwrought.”

She couldn’t lie to him, but she didn’t have to correct his misapprehension. “Is the beer any better than the lemonade?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t drink.”

She must have looked shocked into disbelief, because he dropped his eyes in embarrassment. “Soap operas and sex are my only vices,” he said, and she laughed because she believed he meant it. And then he tilted his chin up. “So ask me your questions, Muire. You’re paying for the time.”

“Right,” she said. It was hard, not staring at the scar that pulled his lip up and the corner of his eye down. It looked like a sword or knife wound, and when it happened must have laid him open to the bone. “What do you know about him, then?”

“He’s a client,” Cathoair said coldly, trying to make her look away from his stare. But she held the eye contact and he glanced down first. “Well, not exactly.”

“No?”

He shook his head and hunched. “All right, exactly. But he’s been coming to the Ash & Thorn for . . . not too long. A month? He never touched any of us, though. Not before last night.”

“And last night?”

“He wanted me.”

“Not any of the others?”

“Me.” He swallowed, and poured lemonade, and drank it off the way Strifbjorn would have drunk off mead. “But just sex. Nothing—”

Muire’s cheeks stung. She didn’t want to think of them, or of Mingan’s obscene pleasure in finally having Strifbjorn under orders and biddable. Nor did she wish to think that the Grey
Wolf had gone from hanging his deadly embrace over her, to having his way with this candle-flicker.

Who was
not
Strifbjorn, who did not remember Strifbjorn’s failings, who could not be held accountable for Strifbjorn’s crimes. But who could be punished for them, it seemed—and if the Grey Wolf had his way, would be.

“He didn’t harm you,” Muire said.

Cathoair shook his head. “Actually, it was kind of creepy. He was . . . tender.”

She watched him, the long hands folded on the table before him, the regulated breathing, the long scars on his right arm that matched the one on his face in age.

She did not know why the Grey Wolf had let her live. But she knew why he had come to Eiledon.

If she took Cathoair on, she would be using him, as surely as Mingan had used him. And with less excuse, because she would not be using him out of some terrible old need, or even the memory of love, but in spite of it. She would be using him to entrap someone he had once died for the love of.

Someone he had loved, when he could not love her.

She held the thought in her hand, and wondered how much of it was seeing the only way to avenge Ingraham, and rid the world of the Grey Wolf forever. And how much of it was her own ancient loathing.

“You’re hired,” she said at last, though after long moments she still was not certain of the rightness of her answer.

N
othing is ever as easy as it could be.

Kasimir was uniquely suited to appreciate that particular platitude. He flew over devastated country, and it would have
been simple if he could flit back to his valley with the same ease by which he could reach his rider’s side. Whenever Muire bespoke him, he could be with her instantly, without regard for distance.

Leaving again was less simple.

And so, painstaking wingbeats carried him away from Eiledon. He could have awaited her in the wasteland, just beyond the Defile, but there seemed little value in that. She might not summon him again for weeks, or longer. The Grey Wolf was canny, and Kasimir harbored no illusions about his rider’s stubbornness.

He did however husband a bright spark of joy that she had summoned him at all.

Still. Better to fly the afternoon and through the night, to be by Cristokos if Cristokos should need him.

Not that the rat-mage was incapable.

But Kasimir
was
War, and should anything untoward occur, he was more sufficient to it than Cristokos. He passed over furrowed fields, the glint of shattered plastic and fused sand, the bloody smears of rusting machinery. His wings reflected the crawling blue of radiation through the night. In one blasted metropolis, the heaving glisten of a battle-cratered shoggoth came around to track him, gliding on a trail of slime, and locked weapons. But his shadow was fleeting, and either its power, its ammunition, or both were long exhausted.

If one could call it alive, it was the only living thing he saw between Eiledon and the moment when he banked, climbing sharply, riding gusts that pitched him up a high barren slope. As he rose, the land below twisted with eroded gullies, blown snow or ash obscuring the view, gray as grave netting. As he skimmed the sharp crest of a saddleback ridge between two peaks that leaned away from one another as if expressing the aftermath of
an argument—not the pass Cristokos had braved, but the one at the high end of the valley—the terrain changed.

Pine and cedars, and the flicker of a mountain sheep’s white rear as it plunged away from the silhouette of his wings. There were eagles in Kasimir’s valley, still—the last eagles in the world—and an eagle would not scruple to dine on mutton, if the opportunity presented.

Here there was green to trap the sun’s warmth, and roots to trap the rain’s moisture. High wind-wearied desert gave way to forest and glade, cliffs like stone curtains, water plummeting hundreds of feet to pound deep icy pools at their bases. The slope swept down to a valley floor that, while not level, was partially terraced into fields. Kasimir had labored like a plough-horse to help clear them, and to split and haul the wood for Cristokos’s ramshackle cabin with its sagging porch and shading fruit trees.

The rat was on his knees in the garden when Kasimir descended. The valraven, for all his size and weight, cupped air and settled behind Cristokos silently, except the hiss of steam and the creak and tick of metal.

“That one should not go to the city,” Cristokos said, without raising his tapered snout from the weeding. “She will notice that one. What She notices, She would possess.”

Kasimir snorted, stretching his necks long and low under the weight of his horns and his antlers.
Who can hold such as I? Summoned, I will go to her.