All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (40 page)

Necromancy indeed. Necromancy worked upon the living.

Muire could have let it happen. She was immortal, ageless; she held all the hamarr she needed. Enough for cities of mortal men. But then that strength would be Thjierry’s as well, and Muire could not permit that. She held herself tight, tuned her energies in a spiral. She became a vortex and let Thjierry’s attack grope fruitlessly at the slick whirling edges of her power.

It wasn’t entirely successful. Thjierry got hold of a thread, unraveled it like drawing cotton candy off the spool, like a dark companion winding off a giant star’s photosphere. Muire could see the light, the spiral gyre, the flare of blue-silver fading to incandescent green. Green and gold, solstice colors, and Muire was a creature of brief chill summers when the sun never set, of the endless nights of winter.

Maybe it was, after all, she who was the monster. Perhaps it was Thjierry who was right—

The insinuating thoughts, another attack. Thjierry touched her hamarr, and sent poison back along it.

Muire gritted her teeth and counterattacked. She knew songs of combat, songs to lay warfetter and snap warriors’ limbs. She used them now, the music wailing from her fiddle. The music was the sound; the sound was the word; the word was the rune; the rune was the power.

And a rune could freeze flesh, let blood, tear sinew. They were not the fort of her strength, but Muire knew the seventeen. And she did not think even Thjierry knew the eighteenth.

She leaned into the music and fought back, hard. The fiddle wailed, and Thjierry fell back a step, dragging her crutches. And
then she rallied, raising her voice, thready and age-worn and shot with power, and the rise and fall of what Muire played seemed to echo, empty, across a vast and uncaring plain. She could barely hear the sound of her own music, just Thjierry’s voice mounting higher, louder, drowning out everything that was not her words and her song.

The fiddle was no magical instrument, just a gift from a dying mortal man, but Muire treasured it. She played louder, faster, filling up the darkness, a manic reel that rose and rose and rose until—

The eight strings smoked and snapped.

T
he human started and spun at the clamor. Selene laid the back of her hand against his arm. “We’re not going out that way,” she said. “It’s all right.”

He didn’t relax, exactly, but his hands dropped from the guard position. “We won’t have long.” His scent peaked; he slapped his palms together like a man about to get down to work.

A thump from inside the crystal dome drew Selene’s attention. She turned to look in time to see Cristokos backing out of the access hatch, rubbing his head. He turned, saw them, and gave her a spidery thumbs-up.

Selene looked at Cathoair. Cathoair nodded.

Stallion? We’re ready.

A
s Muire went to her knees, Kasimir spread his wings, scattering unmans and sorcerers like infantry before a charge. The ones before him fell back, turning, and he felt the immaterial bonds they meant to hang on him clutch at all his limbs. He
knew nothing but contempt for their shackles. He was already rising.

Muire was sealed within the bounds of the holmgang, and he could not reach her. And reaching her was not the task she had set. So he beat higher, higher, and let his wings carry him away from another rider in mortal peril, while someone on the ground found the sense to reach for a machine pistol and bullets splashed against Kasimir’s hide.

He would have remembered the window from last time even if Muire had not reminded him of it. He could have come in through the wall—he was Kasimir, and bricks and mortar could no more withstand him than could a paper bird-cage. But it was safer for those within if he could see and avoid them.

Bullets shattered on his haunches and wings, the impacts growing less with distance. It should still be possible to evacuate the others, frail as they were, until the enemy had time to close distance and the organization to mass their fire.

He must hurry.

Kasimir came up even with the top floor of the library and plunged through the plate glass window as if he meant to come out the other side of the building. Selene and Cathoair had warning. They should be under cover, away from the flying glass.

Yes. And here they came running, until he hissed at Selene to stop her skittering barefoot among the shards. It was a good hiss, somewhere between a steam locomotive and an angry adder, and it drew her up. A sword hung at her hip, lashed on a length of rope, and her hand fell to it in a gesture that could have broken even an iron-banded heart under the weight of memory.
Stand aside
.

They stood, and Kasimir advanced upon the crystal domes. He expected a stout blow of a wing should shatter them, but instead they rang like a bell, and he snorted and kicked out. The vibration was terrible; within the dome, Cristokos flinched and covered his ears.

I’ll go out the way I came in,
the rat said.
I’ll meet you on the ground.
He slithered through the trap door and was gone.

Kasimir turned back to the window. Cathoair and Selene draped the bundled swords over his withers and around his necks until they hung against his chest and shoulders like bunches of grapes, distributed so his caparison would protect the ropes from the heat. They rattled when they moved.

They were not heavy.

Come. Be ready.

Cathoair and Selene picked across glass to stand in the frame of the broken window, Cathoair kicking glass splinters out of the frame until the lower edge, at least, was clear of daggers. Selene drew a strap of her harness free of the collar, and threaded a rope through the loop, making it secure with a series of careful knots. Cathoair mirrored her, checking each of his knots against hers. She glanced at his rope and nodded, and then they turned to Kasimir. “Ready,” Selene said, and gave him the ropes.

He took one in each mouth.
Trust the harness. Don’t hold the ropes. You will burn your hands if you try.

When he flew out of the window, it was slow and controlled, his wings moving on long gentle sweeps. He did not spiral down to the city, but rose, traveling away and afar.

M
uire heard Kasimir break free as she fell, as the neck of her fiddle snapped in her hand, and breathed a prayer of thanks she
knew would go unheard. The grass was wet under her knuckles. Her armor bit into her knees. She whimpered.

The fiddle was ruined. She left it where it had fallen. Got one foot under her and then the other. Rose painfully, as shuffling steps dragged close.

She stood and looked Thjierry in the eye.

The Technomancer stopped three meters away and waited. Her crutches dangled from her elbows; she stood wobbling wide-legged as a foal, unsteadily. One palm was held upraised and a bindrune blazed on it, carved with the short knife she still held in her left hand.

Muire almost imagined she could see the wires behind the blood. “Oh, Thjierry. Don’t you see it’s over? They have a
chance
.”

“If I could not do it, it could not be done.” Her fingers tightened on the knife. “I wish you could have helped me try, instead of ruining everything.”

“I wish your answer had been something I could have borne.” Muire drew Nathr and let it sway in the air like the snake it was named for. It wasn’t much defense against the warfetter—blindness, deafness, and incapacity—that burned on Thjierry’s hand, waiting to be sent to her—but it was better than nothing at all.

“I’m sorry,” Thjierry said, and turned her hand to blow across it as if she were blowing a kiss.

Her gesture might have been to slit the flap of an envelope holding him, for with it the Grey Wolf stepped out of the shadows at her side. “Mingan—” Muire shouted, raising her blade.

“Vengeance for your passenger, sister,” he said, and swept Thjierry into his arms, knocking her crutches aside. She struggled against him, kicking, and he pressed his mouth down over
her shout. Muire plunged forward, hand locked on her blade, but before she had covered half the meager distance, Thjierry’s knife-hand came up and sank the blade hilt-deep in Mingan’s throat. She tore, a savage gesture, and blood spilled over her hand, but the knife did not move far. It stopped on something, and by then, though her hand groped at the hilt, she had no strength to wield it.

The blow seemed not to discomfort the wolf at all. And Muire had stopped, arrested as if by magic herself, and pressed the knuckles of her sword-hand to her mouth. She willed herself forward, but her feet would not step. Powerless.

There was strength in the old woman yet. She took a long time dying, while the blood dripped across Mingan’s collar. Too long, too long. Something was wrong, more wrong than Mingan committing his murder. Because Thjierry hung limp in his arms, and the holmgang island flickered and went out, and the Grey Wolf seemed to swell and crest and crash and shimmer full of light and energy—

It was not only her he was drinking, but the Serpent, and the city, and all the hamarr she had drawn into herself to keep Eiledon vital.

He was drinking down the world.

“Mingan! Enough! Enough! Mingan,
hear me!
” Whatever emotion had held her, horror released her now, and Muire darted forward, tugging his arm, hauling Thjierry’s corpse out of his arms.

“Wolf, I charge thee
stop
.” She dashed him across the face with Nathr’s hilt.

He jerked back, hand to the wound, and stared at her, his eyes bottomless and full of gleams of light. Then he dropped his
hand and the split cheek and the bruise were as if they had never been. He tugged the knife from his throat, looked at it incuriously, tipped his head like a wolf, and slid it into his sleeve.

“As you bid,” he said, and went away.

W
hen Muire left the holmgang, none of the sorcerers stood against her. She walked among them, stripping off her armor, letting it fall. She was too tired to carry it. The sword she kept, though she returned her to her scabbard. She kicked away her boots before she climbed the library’s portico stair.

She found Cristokos in the atrium, beneath the glass towers of books. He had been shot and had fallen crumpled, a tiny fragile thing underneath his voluminous robes. Still warm, when she composed his limbs and drew the hood down over his eyes, when she stroked the hand-woven cloth, sticky with his clotting blood, and she wished—strangely, sadly—that she had had a chance to return his sword. That they had had a chance to play music together just once.

Or just once more.

But wasn’t that unfair? He was not Yrenbend, no matter how she recollected him. Once more, to her, was once only to him. That she saw in him someone who had been a friend should not be his burden to bear, but hers. Like the Dweller Within, it was her pain alone, and perhaps unkind to burden another with it.

It isn’t fair.
No. It was not; not fair at all.

It was only history, in the weight of all its injustice.

Too late for that revelation to spare Cathoair. He had asked her what gave her the right to choose for him; she might have said, the All-Father. But the All-Father had long abandoned them.

Left
her
. And so only she remained, to assign herself that right, and the responsibilities that went with it.

Like cleaning and composing poor Cristokos as best she could, and kissing him on the cheek, so her nose ruffled his fur. He smelled of clean animal and blood.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she whispered in his ear. “But I hope you don’t have to come back again.”

She took his flute. She did not think he would miss it.

There was another moreau at the top of the stair, and she thought at first that he was dead also. But as she drew close, she saw him trembling, and crouched beside him, one hand resting on his broad neck, below and behind his mighty horns. They were bull’s horns.

She didn’t flinch when he lifted his head.

“Who are you?”

“Borje,” he answered, and she bent down and kissed him on his great slimy nose.

“Go rest, Borje,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. All is well.”

Her second lie, she thought, as she watched him descend.

Ah well, it didn’t matter now.

She had to cut the door open with her sword, but that also didn’t matter. Because when she let herself into the Technomancer’s tower, it was empty except for the wreckage of the drawers, and a shattered window.

The orrery had wound down.

When Kasimir returned, well into the following morning, he found her still waiting there.

T
his time, they flew toward the ocean again. He’d left Selene and Cathoair in his valley, along with all the swords.

The trees die. It is a kindness that Cristokos will not see.

Muire touched the flute and didn’t say a word.

The moon was up; the beach glowed bright below them. Kasimir landed almost in his footsteps from the night previous. And Muire slid down his shoulder and ran to the water’s edge, to call forth the Dweller Within.