All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (5 page)

Oh, he was beautiful, there in the shadows beside the descending stair. The new stair, the stair that leads down where the Broken Stair once led upward, the stair that leads into the Well, the dark neighborhoods under the Tower. Beautiful and ragged, broken as an ancient statue, his braid grizzled over his shoulder and his eyes dark as ice.

And we had gone to him, and he had guided us to our knees, and with the folds of his cloak falling all around us
—
heavy soft
strange and faintly greasy-smelling, like real wool, perhaps, if wool could still be had
—
within the folds of his cloak he had kissed us.

Kissed us and breathed us in, within.

Kissed us and drank us down.

Ingraham’s hands slid from Muire’s armored shoulders to fall slack on the riven stone. She tilted her head back reflexively, drinking deep of night air tainted by the unwholesome sweetness of the Well, looking upward as if the stars were there to help her bear the pain.

There were no stars. Through the glassy brilliance of the Defile and the shadows of the rain clouds, she could not even make out the glow of the moon.

It hurt. The death hurt. Even a little death, a mortal death such as this, brought its own measure of pain. It settled into her flesh—mere meat and bone now, no longer the numinous stuff of Light—and sank deep talons in her, demanding
justice,
demanding
vengeance.

She didn’t care about the pain. She welcomed the wrath the dead man brought. She would need his strength as surely as he would need her sword, to see this matter through.

Yrenbend, her favorite brother, had said it to her once: “There are seen hands and unseen hands. I am an angel. We do not believe in coincidences.”

This was a seen and an unseen hand at once; the one that had wreaked the deed, and the one that had directed her in its discovery.

The tarnished had returned.

T
he walls of Her office were cinder block and limpid shatterproof, offering a panoramic view of Eiledon’s rooftops and towers. Not the loft of the Arcology, strangely, but the jeweled teeth of the old city and the thick bend of river southwest of the Tower. The enormous room—almost the entire top floor of the library—was dominated by a giant orrery encased within moving crystal spheres; the furniture, while comfortable, was relegated to the edges.

Selene, waiting upon Her attention, stared through the tall glass plates, tail lashing, ears still laid flat, and willed herself to calm. Fear-and-fight were not her friends. They were the animal, the instinct that made her a superlative warrior. But the threat had been left behind on the ground, and Selene was in the Tower, in Her presence. Safe.

The broad windows were new, since the Desolation, giving Eiledon’s savior, leader, teacher a sweeping view of Her demesne and the Defile, but the marble floor was original to the University. Once it had been smooth, close-fitted, and the cool blocks were still so tight one could not slip a card between them. But the stone had been worn in intervening centuries, and there
were little hollows and valleys that showed where feet had trod those hundreds of years away.

She sat in Her habitual chair—no ostentatious throne but the functional work station of mesh and padding she used when she was not afoot on two crutches, or in Her hover chair—and stared over Her city. Selene knew that She was waiting for Selene to regain control, to find her center.

She was gracious.

Finally, She lifted a hand and beckoned. She wore two thick mismatched sweaters over Her red-brown scholar’s robes, the gray and taupe cuffs rolled up around Her bony wrists. She’d let Her hood fall onto Her shoulders, revealing Her cropped gray hair, and the pinched marks of Her spectacles remained on the bridge of Her nose.

Selene stepped forward, tail still twisting, and bowed before Her chair. Her hackles bristled, her fur damp from the drizzle but standing all on end under the farmed leather straps and ceramic plates of her body armor, but she forced herself to calmness as she extended the package in her hand. It was long, bound with wire over a stiff cloth wrapping, and it left a chill, buzzing sensation climbing the bones of Selene’s forearm.

She groped for one of Her crutches, rose from Her chair with an effort, and came before Selene. “Good girl,” She said, softly, slipping the bundle from Selene’s clawed hand and tucking it under Her arm for safekeeping. Selene kept her talons sheathed in the soft flesh of her fingertips throughout, breathing deeply, her whiskers smoothed flat against her muzzle and her toenails pressing slight scratches into the hard marble floor when she couldn’t quite manage to gentle
them
.

Selene smelled old woman’s flesh, acrid electronics, and
constancy, and it helped drive the dangerous musk from her nostrils. She stroked Selene’s ears with a palsied hand and stepped back, but not before Her touch and scent had soothed the moreau.

“Why so upset, Selene?”

“I smelled something,” Selene reported. “Something in the dark under the Well. Musky. Hunting.”

“A rogue?” She asked sharply.

She was not angry with Selene. She never raised Her voice to Her unmans. She never had to: the moreaux were perfectly obedient to Her will, and they would die before they failed. Since She Herself had constructed them, the only blame for their occasional shortcomings fell on the wizard Herself.

She was a just and a forgiving creator-god.

But sometimes—rarely—a moreau would grow strange, go feral, fail to return. Rogues were dangerous to unmans, trumans, halfmans, and nearmans. She did not tolerate them, and Selene would not tolerate them on Her behalf.

Selene was very skilled at her tasks.

“I do not think it was a rogue,” she said, carefully. Her words came sweetly despite needle-sharp teeth, rolling trippingly from a rasp-sharp tongue. “A . . . predator. It smelled not like one of us, though I saw nothing when I met Fasoltsen.”

“And you did not touch the weapon?” She lifted the slender bundle in Her hand. It was long, long as Selene’s leg from hip to ankle, long as her lashing tail.

Selene rocked her head side to side, an awkward counterfeit of a human shake. “The wrappings were intact.”

“Excellent,” She said, and spared Selene a smile full of an old woman’s crooked yellow teeth. “Go, pretty girl. Rest until morning. You have pleased me.”

Selene could not smile. She hadn’t the muscles for it. But, turning to go, she felt the warmth of Her approval run down her spine like the stroke of a velvet glove, and stood straighter under her weapons and armor as she strode away.

M
uire stood in the ruined square and wiped her hands on her cloak, though nothing stained them. It was dark here, in the shadow of the Tower, dark and chill. This was the truncated end of the Boulevard, the mile-diameter, near-geometric ring road that circumscribed the places where
honest
folk traveled in Eiledon. Anything beyond its compass was as likely to be lawless as not; it all depended on the character of one’s neighbors. Where the road was broken, its edges had cracked and melted where the Technomancer had pulled her Tower from the earth, interrupting its symmetry.

A dark undercity had grown beneath that Tower in the intervening centuries. Shielded from the weather, from the sun’s unfiltered radiation, the Well cradled Eiledon’s more dangerous neighborhoods and also her better bars in an improvised arcology, neither as protected nor as pretty as the sunlit ones. There in the depths, one could find bloodsport, sex for hire, specs and killers. . . . and also, real live music, for a change.

The scent that hung about the dead man’s body led Muire down the newer stair, the unbroken one. She descended into the Well, where the light trickled from colored floods, tethered floats, and garish signs, and even the green-gold aurora of the Defile was obscured.

She paused at the halfway point of the stair, her gauntlet scraping on the improvised pipe railing, the stone steps gritty under her boots. Below, a moderate stream of people moved
along the beneoned street in seasonless darkness. The atmosphere never brightened here, though in the daytime it would gray, sunlight reflected in by systems of mirrors. The lights were never doused, however.

The denizens of the Well were far more colorful than the trumans who lived above, in Riverside and the Ark, or near Muire’s loft and workshop on the long side of downtown, near Dockside and Hangman. The buildings were less makeshift than one might expect: Eiledon had been jammed to bursting with engineers and tradespeople, and the suburbs offered rich scavenging. Buildings of four and five stories were not uncommon. The narrow haphazard streets between them coursed with men and women and the undecided, truman and nearman and halfman and unman, sorcerous and cybernetic and between and neither. The tide of humanity drew Muire like the pulse of the ocean in her blood: the dark, starlit ocean that had brought forth her kind.

The Light had failed and with it its children, but these
other
children—mortal children, candle-flickers—continued, endlessly fighting and dying and returning their blood to the wash of the sorrowful sea. The mortals had a saying, that blood was thicker than water. But to Muire blood
was
water: the water of the ocean, and the force of the Light upon it.

She descended the last few stairs and dropped into the current, following the paling scent-trace of cloak and boot caressing stone, whistling a half-heard melody that lit the killer’s footsteps for her eyes alone, so they stood out in the darkness as if brushed with phosphorescent dust.

Her geas—the ghost-hungry memory of Ingraham Fasoltsen—drove her.
Vengeance,
he murmured half heard in her ear.
Justice.
And over and over, a father’s seaworn murmur that she could do nothing about at all,
I cannot leave my child
.

Music sloshed from open doorways like the surf, and neon and liquid crystal dazzled, but Muire passed them by, patting the snub shape of the flechette pistol snugged against her waist.

She was walking to her enemy. And in the shadow of the Tower, no rain fell.

T
he tickling sensation on the back of Cathoair’s neck came back when he reentered the bar. He’d steamed and scraped, and cleaned his hair, and wore a soft white shirt that was open at the collar over tight black pants. Hustling clothes, and not at all what he’d be wearing if it were him and Astrid lying out on the roof finding shapes in the lights on the underneath of the tower, drinking hot tea and resting their aches in the cool Well air. He paused by the bar and caught Aethelred’s eye, and Aethelred—a gnarled boulder of a man with a Twisted Serpent pendant winking in the hair behind his open collar, the half of his face that wasn’t radiation-scarred layered in mirror-bright chrome so you found yourself talking to your own reflection when you tried to look him in the eye—fished Cathoair’s bowl out from under the counter and topped it up with something that smelled of artificial fruit.

Cathoair studied the mirror behind the bar while he drank it. He didn’t take liquor, as a rule, and Aethelred would keep the synthpunch coming all night if that was what it took. But it was a busy night at the Ash & Thorn, and prospects looked good. Aethelred was taking bets on the next bout—a girl fight, Astrid and Feorag, who had an Islander name like Cathoair but was red-haired white-skinned Eiledain, not the dark-skinned descendant of refugees—and the neon and strobes over the dance floor were twitching, the music loud enough to ring his ears.

And, snakerot, he still had that sensation, as if somebody were trailing cold fingers down between his shoulder blades. The gray man again?

He lifted one hand to signal Aethelred. If it was legitimate interest, he wasn’t in a position to mind. And if it wasn’t, he could take good care of himself, thank you.

Aethelred filled two more bowls with brandy, accepted and tallied another bet on the chalkboard over the top shelf, and then leaned across the bar so Cathoair could shout into his ear.

“Seen a guy, Aeth? ’Bout so tall, gray cloak, salt and pepper plait?”

Aethelred nodded and shouted back. “Yeah. Couldn’t tell you if he was safe, sorry. But I didn’t like his eyes—”

Something to take on evidence, when a bartender said it. That, and the way he gave Cathoair that creeping feeling, like he sometimes got, the one that always presaged adventure. “What was he drinking?”

Aethelred’s smile rearranged the furrowed scars on the mobile half of his face into deep eloquent valleys. “Mead,” he answered, with a shrug. “You’d be a damned sight safer with that one,” he suggested, with a jerk of his shoulder toward the stairwell and the door.

Cathoair squeezed Aethelred’s wrist once quickly and turned, and caught his first quick glimpse of the girl.

She was little, not much better than child-sized, cheekbones plain under the pale skin of her face, her ash-gold hair bobbed even with her earlobes and her eyes very serious behind the escaped strands that fell across her face. She wore rust-brown ceramor and a navy cloak shot through with threads of gold, and the worn, peace-bound hilt of a sword stood over her shoulder. She was poised statue-still, and from the expression on her face
when she turned, she must have been staring at the back of his head like a rabbit staring at a hawk.