All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (4 page)

A
nd so, twenty-three-hundred years pass. Days wear into centuries, but the hunger grows no easier for all that. No easier, but at least no worse. And the world . . .

Well, the world winds down only ponderously.

But every pendulum slows.

Since the breaking of the Light the wolf has been listening to the ticking decay. Worlds, like gods, are a long time dying, and the deathblow dealt the children of the Light did not stop a civilization of mortal men from rising in their place, inventing medicine and philosophy, metallurgy and space flight.

Until they in turn fell, two-hundred-odd years ago, in a Desolation that left all Valdyrgard a salted garden. All of it, that is, except the two cities—Freimarc and Eiledon—that lingered. Life is tenacious. Even on the brink of death, it holds the battlements and snarls.

But now Freimarc—where the wolf has whiled away the end of time—has fallen, and even Eiledon is failing. Now the heart of the world skips, erratic, and the pauses between beats grow long. And as the wolf hesitates in the cold between shadows, the place that smells of char and ice and where the sun has never, in his memory, risen to warm the creaking frost beneath
his boots, he hears that rhythm now, the ragged tolling of a stately bell.

He smiles, and keeps walking.

Once he traversed earthly forests, amid the crack of twigs and the rich scent of pine needles. He ran beside his companions of the hunt, wolves and einherjar. He drank in the mead-hall with his shield-brother, Strifbjorn.

Now, he is more often to be found in the icy world—Midgard, or rather its chilled remains, colder now in its final winter even than Niflheim—than Valdyrgard, the living one. Or, to choose his language more precisely, the dying one.

Travel is nearly impossible in Valdyrgard now—the roads nonexistent, the conveyances destroyed, the few remaining mortals huddled into one decaying city. But the wolf has his shadowy paths, and they serve him.

The heart tolls again. The wolf pauses, tilts his head to savor the dying fall. He lifts his face, eyes closed, as if he scented the wind. But the air here is cold and still. His cloak and queue hang unstirring against his shoulders.

The Last Day was nothing, meant nothing. It has become myth only, as Midgard had been myth to the children of the Light. Waelcyrge and einherjar were barely legends now, and human society had flourished very well—had
blossomed
—without them.

Blossomed. And then fallen like the rose to the canker—rotten, slimed, and dead. They did it themselves, the Desolation, created it with their bioweapons and their radiation bombs, with their shoggoth main battle groups and their killer robots and their orbital microwave projectors, their mass projectors and combat sorcerers and laser-guided death curses. Over two centuries past, the fatal bullet.

Worlds are a long time dying, it’s true. But the wolf is old and patient. And soon, there will be peace. The peace he’s sought since first he betrayed Strifbjorn.

For
now,
however, he’s drawn from his still, silent refuge, from just-dead Freimarc and long-dead Midgard and back to dying Valdyrgard. With a task. So he paces through shadows in the cold world, alone in the dark and fearless, until he comes to Eiledon.

He quells his urgency under patience; he is the wolf, the last remaining. He has already waited a long time to see men die. Eiledon is not as it once was. From the shadows, peering from the cracks between that world and this one, he sets out to learn the place again.

Eiledon grows around a curve of the broad, brown, tidal river Naglfar, a dark glittering city that once was bright and fair. It was a great port when there were ships and destinations. Now the river is dead and empty, its chop capped with poisoned foam. Sometimes it burns, and the levees and river-walks that channeled it and made it pleasant once are a soot-stained firebreak now.

Eiledon is an ancient city, a medieval city, a modern city. She wears a dark girdle of ruins. When first he saw this place, it was a city on the south of the river only, hemmed by its walls, well defended. Then she made an uneven enclosure, the river running through chained gates and portcullises into a bailey pierced by eight strong gates. Still later, before the Desolation, she sprawled far beyond her medieval walls, which were kept intact merely for the sake of history.

Now she has contracted again, and her desperate six million live crammed within the gold-green shimmer of the Defile—the Technomancer’s guardian wards—which only extend so far as the ancient bulwarks of hand-quarried stone.

Eiledon is bejeweled in its towers and arcologies, glass and steel and chrome, elegant masterpieces of architecture and technomancy. There are citizens who never leave these hothouse spires. Along the riverfront, buildings are older, solid stone and brick, bristling with gargoyles and fantastic with murals and relief carvings and stained glass.

But that is not all. Between the riverfront neighborhoods and the central city, in the shadow of the tallest towers, hangs a great rough-bellied hemisphere, a floating promontory twenty stories above the ground. The river runs through it, climbing the sky and then tumbling down again as if its channel lay undisturbed. That floating island is a university campus, ripped from the earth and hurled aloft, a gesture of flagrant power and defiance made by the immortal Technomancer when she seized control of the city from its Thing more than two hundred years before. Its shadow is the shadow of the Desolation, an endless reminder of the genocidal war that Eiledon fought—and survived.

At the time, the citizens were disinclined to complain. Eiledon blessed its savior’s name, and—rare, precious—children are still named after her: Thjierry Thorvaldsdottir, the Technomancer of Eiledon.

Eiledon’s inhabitants call her home the Tower, though it is ten or eleven buildings rather than one. Classes—in a particularly Eiledain madness—still take place there: the floating bastion is a functioning university. But it is also the Technomancer’s holdfast. She dwells there, far above the city she still protects, amid her truman students and her unman servitors.

In the shadow of the Technomancer’s Tower, in the twilight where it never rains, lie the slums.

And that is where the wolf travels. Something he left behind
has been taken up again. Something he once owned has been stolen. He is the wolf, and he is einherjar no longer. He does not want it back. But neither will he suffer another to misuse it.

Especially when that ancient magic might strengthen the world’s limping heartbeat, buy it a few more years, centuries, millennia of life. It is time—
a wolf-age, a wind-age
. Following a voice that sings only for his ears, the wolf steps from the cold emptiness of a dead world into the bustling street of one that is merely dying fast.

He has outlived two Ragnaroks and a far more human apocalypse. It is time to tear down, shed the husk, leave behind a dead world to see a new world reborn.

C
athoair got these feelings sometimes, and he was having one right now. Specifically, the prickle across his shoulders and up under his hair that had nothing to do with the ring sweat drying on his scalp in the cool night air. He reached up left-handed, because his range of motion wasn’t as good on the right, and tugged the thong out of his ponytail as he stepped down out of the kickboxing ring, onto the crowded floor of the Ash & Thorn. Astrid was there, her black hair falling in a wrist-thick braid over her shoulder, smiling under her twice-broken nose.

She never could keep her guard up.

She threw his robe over his shoulders and handed him a towel. “You did good, Cahey,” she said. “Real good.”

Cathoair dropped his skull back on his shoulders and breathed deep. Rolling his head from side to side gave him an excuse to scan the crowd, looking for the source of that uneasy prickle. Right now, most of them were talking, eating, slurping
drinks, placing bets on the next match. Once he’d dropped down to floor level and Hrolfgar had limped out of the back side of the ring, the applause—and whatever attention Cathoair rated—had stopped.

But the prickling sensation hadn’t. And when he turned, he saw why.

It wasn’t the three women and a man who were eyeing him with the sort of sidelong appreciation he was used to, the admiration that told him they were nerving themselves toward the eventual offer of a drink in the hope or expectation of more. No, it was the second man—neither tall nor heavy boned, sitting with his back to the wall in a shadowed corner behind the ring, out of traffic and away from the dance floor.

Cathoair had seen the man before, occasionally, on nights when he was fighting or covering for Aethelred behind the bar. He mopped his face with the cold towel that Astrid handed him and stole another glance. A craggy, almost ragged face was made more stern by silver-shot dark hair pulled back in a warrior’s braid, bound by silver clasps and hanging long over the man’s shoulder. His eyes seemed light under graying brows, his left ear pierced at the lobe by a heavy, twisted ring in the old style. His clothes were invisible under a cloak he wore, clasped with heavy silver brooches at the right shoulder.

And he was looking directly at Cathoair, as boldly as if he did not expect to be seen.

Cathoair had never been one to back down from a challenge. He dropped the damp towel back in Astrid’s hand and lifted his chin, staring the old man directly in the eyes. He wasn’t expecting the watcher to meet him with a close-lipped smile and a shrug that disarrayed his cloak only slightly, or the
toast of a drinking bowl carved from what looked like horn, but couldn’t be: nobody would bring a precious antique to a public bar where it could be broken or stolen.

“Star, do you know that guy?” Cathoair asked, ducking his head to whisper in Astrid’s ear. She was a big girl, rangy, heavy-boned and heavy-muscled, but he topped her by half a head.

She turned and kissed him a quick peck, so as not to spoil his chances with the clientele later, and said, “Guy?”

“At table twenty.”

She glanced over her shoulder as if checking the ring, and shrugged. “Nobody there now.”

Cathoair lifted his head and blinked. The table was empty, the horn bowl gone along with the silver-brindled occupant. All that remained was the candlefaux and a crumpled note trapped under it, ten kroner in the Technomancer’s scrip by the color. “Huh,” Cathoair said. “I wonder where he went.”

“He’ll be back if he’s interested,” Astrid said. She dabbed at a bruise on Cathoair’s sweaty shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get you into the sauna and cleaned up so you can mingle.”

B
lood would have been easier.

If the cobbles had been sticky under Muire’s boots, if the blood had runneled between stones and flooded the rain-damp dead-end square between Ark and the Well, it would have been simple. She would have dropped a knee beside the man slumped along the blind, truncated stair that had once led to the university, and she would have tried to breathe for him as long as his heart fought to help her, and when his heart stammered and failed, she would have stood in her blood-daubed armor and made her own way home.

But there was no blood upon the stones. And the man was still breathing. Faintly, shallowly, not a mark on him, surrounded by the lingering traces of bitter, predatory musk.

Muire knelt. Her ancient sword hung heavy between her shoulders and her ceramic armor clicked against the stone steps. Cowled in a cloak of midnight-blue, she bent over the dying man. And there could be no question that he was dying: his last few breaths came shallow, and his lids fluttered over closed and sunken eyes.

There was not a mark on him.

Muire touched his cheek with a gauntleted hand, and closed her eyes, knowing the chill that radiated from his skin before she ever properly felt it. She bent over and breathed for him, knowing it was useless, making the gesture all the same.

He was expensively dressed, too much so for the Well and neither like a student nor a lecturer, which meant that he must have come from the Ark—the Arcologies, the hermetically sealed habitations immediately east of the Broken Stair. He was unarmed and he had rings on his fingers, and he didn’t look like much of a warrior with his neatly trimmed hair and his clerk’s embroidered robes, his comm clipped, silenced, to his belt along with the other paraphernalia of a white-collar job—a palmtop parser, an audiovid privacy headset folded into compact form and beaded with droplets that had to be rain. He lay close enough to the falls to hear them, but not within the drift of their poisoned mist. His skin was unspotted by radiation or disease, and he showed not so much as a bruise. But a scent hung on him like cold moss on stone, and his skin felt chill. And he was dying, without any good reason for it, despite anything Muire could have done to save him.

It spoke of something she had thought left behind on a cold battlefield, more than two thousand years before.

Muire took his hand in her gauntleted one, and murmured, “Don’t be afraid.”

When his last breath rattled from his throat, rather than pulling away—as prudence suggested—she permitted it to expire into her mouth and breathed it deep.

So he died there, on the Broken Stair, and the last waelcyrge Chose him. And in the choosing she accepted his death and accepted as well the burden of vengeance that death brought.

Our name was Ingraham Fasoltsen. We were walking
—
we had been walking
—
and we had made a delivery for our employer, and the moreau
—
a cat, an unman female, her fur smoky gray in rosettes
—
had been there as arranged. We had been walking
—
home, home to our daughter (precious child, little girl, eight years old), home to our wife (we are fortunate)
—
and we had heard our name.

Softly spoken, and we had turned to it, and He was there, burning beautiful in all his darkness, eyes alight with the starfire that cannot shine through the Defile, that we know only from old songs old memories old dreams old long-lost dreams. . . .