Gods of Earth (50 page)

“These are the modbarrows,” Wadjet told him. “In each little hill, a soul is bound. By choice, they say. It was endless life that they sought. But now they are mad and envious of the living.”

The barrows stretched off all the way to Yggdrasil. After their night of travel, Yggdrasil did seem slightly wider to Chance’s eye, a single black trunk rising forever.

Wadjet touched Chance’s arm, and then pointed out at the horizon. Chance followed her aim. A black cloud was forming far before them on the plane.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Like birds,” she said.

And Chance knew then what it was, as they approached.

“They are Makine,” he said. “A black flock of flying Makine.” Like the makina he’d seen the Guardian destroy above the river—it seemed a year ago, though it had been only weeks.

The flock sped toward them quickly, a growing black cloud—and then suddenly the glinting black beings flew all about the ship. In a huge speeding band they circled the cabin twice. If they made a sound, it was inaudible above the engines. But the sharp black wings darkened the sky, and the dense flock seemed to spin them into some other world for a moment, as it whirled with blinding speed, filling Chance’s view.

And then they were gone, flying off toward the west.

“Where are they going?” Chance asked, suddenly concerned. He turned to the back of the cabin, where a row of windows covered the raised door, and looked at the black flock as it hurried away in the direction from which they had come.

Mimir did not answer. She looked down at the rolling hills beneath them, then out at Yggdrasil. Chance followed her gaze: he could see now where the great trunk of it met the ground, and where what appeared to be buildings were clustered. Then Mimir turned toward Chance and Wadjet.

Mimir drew her dice from her pocket and tossed them, still standing. They rolled all the way to Wadjet’s feet. Both Wadjet and the makina looked at them. The symbols on their faces were meaningless to Chance.

“What is this?” Chance demanded. “It’s time you talked, and treated us as your allies—”

Mimir moved in a flash. In a moment she was between Chance and Wadjet, one hand flat on Chance’s chest, the other gripping Wadjet’s arm.

The steward twisted in a way Chance would not have thought possible, running her feet up the side of the cabin, leveraging her
arm out of the gap between Mimir’s thumb and fingers, while also flipping over to land behind the makina.

She kicked the makina in the head, hard.

Mimir bent forward but did not fall. Quickly, Mimir turned and stood erect, facing Wadjet. Wadjet held up her hands like claws. But then Mimir vomited a silver liquid out of her mouth in a narrow stream, straight into Wadjet’s face.

Chance shouted, horrified. The silver substance clung to Wadjet’s face. Chance had seen quicksilver and this was something like that—and yet it seemed granular, like sand, as if made of small moving things. Wadjet growled but choked immediately as the silver stuff rushed into her mouth and nose.

Chance hit Mimir under her arm with his free hand. His punch was weaker with his left, but he could still hit hard. It was like striking a bag of wet sand. He knocked Mimir forward slightly, but she seemed unharmed. She reached out with one hand and seized Chance’s free wrist before he could strike her again.

The silver slime was gone from Wadjet’s face. All of it crept into her mouth and nose. Wadjet fell against the side of the cabin, bent over, retching, trying to cough the stuff up.

Chance twisted and pushed, but could not get his arm free to hit Mimir again. He leaned back and kicked Mimir under her arm, awkwardly but with a solid hit. He kicked her again.

But in a single swift motion Mimir swept her foot under his feet, and Chance, with his balance impaired by his sling, fell back. Mimir released his wrist and he toppled onto the hard floor.

“Why did you wait so long?” Wadjet gasped.

“I am not sure how long the emotive bonding agent will operate effectively,” Mimir answered. “And so I delayed until we were nearly ready to tether this vehicle beside Yggdrasil. I am sorry if the delay was stressful for you.” Her voice had a calm, matter-of-fact tone.

“What have you done?” Chance shouted at Mimir. He got to his feet, and stumbled to Wadjet’s side. He put his hand on her bent back.

“Can I help?” he whispered. “What…?”

Wadjet coughed, retched painfully. She looked up at Mimir. “Why not just kill me?” she managed to croak.

“I have no desire to execute any sentient being.”

“Liar. There’s some other reason.”

Mimir watched Wadjet writhe in pain. “You may be useful.”

“May God damn every person who finds me useful,” Wadjet said. And Chance understood, somehow, that this quoting of his own curse was Wadjet’s way of saying goodbye.

She moved in a flash. She pushed Chance into Mimir, and the makina and Chance stumbled back as Wadjet leapt forward. She yanked at a red cord in the wall, and two loud snaps—small explosions—sounded out. It was the emergency release for the door. The door fell open, laying itself down like a ramp. Wind roared in, swirling bits of stray cloth and detritus about the cabin before these were sucked out into the sky behind the ship. Wadjet grabbed a rope that hung coiled on the wall, and leapt out into the air.

“Wadjet!” Chance called. He hurried to the edge of the door and looked down. The line paid out as Wadjet fell. She wrapped the cord around her arm. He saw then how clever the daughter of Stewards had been. The rope had hung there, seemingly untouched, for days. But when they had been moving boxes of stores, Wadjet had tied one end of the line down, and run the other end under a bench so that the rope would drag through a bend of two pipes, paying out slowly.

Mimir reached for the rope. To cut it, Chance thought in a flash. He bent back and twisted, getting all the bound force he could muster, and then struck her again, in the head, as hard as his twisting, leaping body would allow. Mimir fell. Wadjet’s line ran out to the end. Chance put one foot out on the door so he could look over
its edge. He saw Wadjet twisting on the end of the line as it reached its full length. She dangled perhaps four paces from the ground. And then she let go.

She hit the ground with cruel force and bounced into the air, her limbs flailing.

“Wadjet!” he cried out. There is no way she survived that, he thought. Or she is surely hurt, many bones broken, and will be crippled there.

He would have to go back for her. He was not leaving anyone else.

Mimir seized the back of his shirt, pulled him away from the door, and threw him on the ground. Chance landed hard. He put his hand down and found something pointed under it. The dice. He clutched them and held his fist up, showing their square faces to Mimir.

“You cannot escape your decisions, Mimir. This is your fault, your wrong that happens here.”

He threw the dice through the open door.

Mimir watched them fall. Chance had for a moment the thought that she would jump out after the dice, to see how they landed in the grasses below. But then, after standing frozen a moment, Mimir pulled the door up and tied it with a rope.

Then she turned toward him. She opened her mouth.

“This is not going to be easy, Mimir,” he said. He got to his feet, snatched a grappling pole from the wall of the cabin, and held it back, a long club. “I’m going to make this hard. Very hard. You might puke that filth on me, but there is no way you can knock me down so as I won’t get right back up and fight you again.”

“Chance Kyrien, it is not my intention to knock you down or harm you in any other way. I only want to ensure that you perceive certain opportunities in a favorable way, as I believe that you should.”

Chance backed toward the front of the cabin.

“You cannot do significant harm to me with that rod, Chance Kyrien. It therefore does not have a deterrent effect.”

“Oh, we’ll see,” he said. And, with all the speed he could manage, he turned and smashed the controls of the airship. Mimir leaped on him, but he struck the small control box twice more with the rod before she pulled his head back, and spat her choking quicksilver machines into his mouth.

The whine of the engines had changed. The ship listed, dropping.

Chance tasted metal. Lead. Tin. He coughed. The quicksilver stuff crawled over his eyes. A horrible sensation of choking, as though he were drowning, overcame him. But he struck out again, and again, both times hitting something hard, solidly. And then his air was choked off, and he fell onto the deck, unconscious.

CHAPTER

46

“I
t’s beyond anything I imagined,” Sarah said. She stood, with her mouth open, looking out the front windows of the airship at the sky-cutting height of Yggdrasil. From this distance it was little more than a thin black slit in the horizon, rising from Earth to beyond her vision, but she could see both that it must be huge in circumference, and that it stretched beyond the clouds.

“Yes,” Thetis agreed. “It was once the most important thing that human beings had ever built. It was going to give them the stars.”

“It stretches to the stars?” Sarah asked.

“No,” Sar answered. “But it stretches beyond the air, and beyond the reach of the heaviness of Earth. That’s the hardest part of getting to the stars: getting up that little way.”

Sarah shook her head in wonder.

They had traveled for three days; most of that time Sarah had stood impatiently with her hands on the back of the seat where Sar sat and steered the airship. A hundred times, Sarah asked, “Are you sure this is the right way?”

“Yes, girl,” Sar had answered.

“But then, where is the black airship?”

“It must be faster. We’ll catch them. I’m more worried about what’s behind us.”

But no ship came into view either behind or before them. They finally broke through clouds over a shore where great waves crashed white on black rocks and black sand. Beyond this narrow and broken shoreline, a green forest stretched to low but steep black mountains, its canopy so thick it seemed they could land and walk on it. They rode on, the engine howling, vibrating the whole cabin with monotonous, maddening dullness, until they passed over the mountains and the forest beyond.

A long grassland of small, regular low hills or mounds lay before them, rolling all the way to Yggdrasil.

Thetis pointed now at the hills.

“Those are the modbarrows, as the Guardian called them,” she explained to Sarah. “In each of them dwells the mind of a modghast.”

“What are they?”

Thetis hesitated. “Sar can tell you more. But they were once human beings,” she shouted over the roar of the engines, so that both Sarah and Sar could hear her. “And to escape death they had their… their souls saved—preserved there, in those mounds. They feed off of power that Yggdrasil provides for them.”

“What…?” Sarah hesitated. “What do they do?”

“During the age of the guilds, they created worlds in which they lived. But that all ended during the Theomachia. Now, it is said, they are trapped in their barrows, and are completely mad, and all are desperate to escape somehow. For this reason, crossing the modbarrows is dangerous. Some of the souls trapped there have managed to make crude bodies for themselves, and to possess those bodies. Those might see you, and try to seize you, to make use of you. They will try anything, it is said, to escape the darkness of their bodiless immortality.”

“That’s horrible,” Sarah said.

“Bad engineering,” Sar agreed. “But this had nothing to do with my guild,” she added, defensively, holding up one hand. “Nothing. Other guilds made the barrows.” She pointed at the base of Yggdrasil. “Nor was Ma’at ours. The Orderlies Guild did not want to trust the Dark Engineers, so they demanded that they alone build and control the gate keeper to Bifrost. I don’t trust their engineering. I don’t know what we’ll find there.”

As Sarah looked out over the endless mounds, horrified now to see that there were so many—stretching off, it seemed, forever—she noticed on the distant green horizon a cloud of black.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Sar and Thetis both followed her gaze, searching for a long while before they saw it.

“Keen eyes, girl,” Sar said.

“It looks like a flock of birds,” Thetis said.

Sarah nodded. “But it’s so… straight. And fast. Too fast. Coming this way.”

The cloud did not change shape, but grew as it approached directly, too orderly and round, it would seem, for birds.

“We’ve not far to go!” Thetis shouted. “Whatever it is, if we can just cross the barrows!”

Sarah could not judge the distance to Yggdrasil, not knowing the thickness of the monstrous structure. It looked like it was still a day’s walk away, over the up and down slopes of the small knolls.

She realized that they ought to be able to see the black airship, if it were still aloft. Chance must already be down. If the makina could be trusted, Chance might already be entering that other space where he could kill the god. If she could not be trusted, then.… Sarah could not imagine what use the makina might have for Chance. She did not know what the makina might be doing to him right now. She gripped her sword handles tightly.

“This does not look likely to work well for us,” Sar shouted. For the black cloud was now close, filling a good quarter of their view, and it suddenly opened and spread. It was more like a flock of birds now than it had seemed before.

And then the flock was on them. Black things shot by, flapping their wings. They were birds—crows, Sarah thought, from their big black bodies and wings. But there was something wrong also about the erratic, sharp paths they flew, and something too harsh about the cold glints of reflected sunlight that cut across them.

“Makine!” Sar shouted.

And then they heard the first tear, a rough ripping above. The airship lurched.

Another tearing sounded out, barely audible over the engines. They were starting to drop.

“Take us down! Down!” Thetis cried.

But they were already falling. Sar put the engines on straight downward thrust, to slow their fall, and drove them to full power, so that they roared in protest. But still the airship dropped. The Makine and the wind both now tore at the hull. The black cacophony of wings and glinting metal bodies spun around them, so that Sarah could not see clearly out of the windows, could not tell how high they were, how far they’d fallen, how far Yggdrasil remained. And it seemed that they were starting to spin, as the dizzying flock swallowed their view.