All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens)
Read All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) Online
Authors: Elizabeth Bear
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.
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.
Tor Books by Elizabeth Bear
A Companion to Wolves
(with Sarah Monette)
Elizabeth Bear
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ALL THE WINDWRACKED STARS
Copyright © 2008 by Elizabeth Bear
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-5851-6
First Edition: November 2008
First Mass Market Edition: September 2009
Printed in the United States of America
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This novel is for Kat Allen and Pen Hardy,
without whom it never would have been written.
I
am indebted to my mother, Karen Westerholm, who gave me the passion for language; to Brian Rogers, without whom there would be no Muire; and to Stephen Shipman, without whom there would be no author.
Kudos also go to my loyal first, second, and final readers: especially but not exclusively Larry West, Kathryn Allen, CMS Burrell, Penelope Hardy, Sarah Monette, Jaime Lee Moyer, Leslie Lightfoot, Ruth Nestvold, Stella Evans, Kyri Freeman, and Hannah Wolf Bowen—and to the critters of the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction and Fantasy, without whom this book would certainly not exist in the form it does today.
I am also indebted to my editor, the redoubtable Beth Meacham, and my agent, the miraculous Jennifer Jackson.
All the Windwracked Stars
Isa
(ice)
On the Last Day:
He was born white, before
she
burned him.But that wasn’t what happened first. Not in the beginning.
In the
beginning
was the end of the world.
T
here was snow at the end of the world, and Kasimir was dying in it. Broken wings dragged from his shoulders like defeated banners, disordered feathers hauling crimson streaks through the snow that would not stop falling. The wings were the worst pain, each step grinding bone shards through savaged muscle and lacing his withers with acid ribbons.
The worst pain, but not the only. One foreleg wouldn’t bear his weight. His harness dragged askew, girth snapped, stirrups banging his ribs as he hobbled in circles, right head hanging, antlers scraping ice and frozen earth and fouling his remaining foreleg.
But still he walked, limping in tightening circles, bellying through drifts that rose to his chest, blood freezing bright as hawthorn berries on feathers and hide that faded into the mounting snow.
It was cold, and he was dying alone. But somewhere under the snow was Herfjotur, who had been his before she was torn from the saddle. Kasimir was a valraven, the war-steed of a waelcyrge, and they were dead, all dead, every one of them, the waelcyrge and the einherjar, the Choosers of the slain and their immortal warriors.
They were dead. Herfjotur was dead. It was snowing.
And Kasimir would not lie down until he found her.
T
hey had sworn to die singing, and they had done it, every one of them. Ten thousand taken all together, einherjar and waelcyrge and the tarnished, the children of the Light and those fallen to the shadow, together again under the falling snow.
Every one of them, except for Muire.
Now she slogged through thigh-deep snow, returning to the field of battle. She was not dead, though she should have been. She lived because she had fled, because she had broken and run and left her brothers and sisters to fall without her. To fall like stars, and die singing, here on this high place with their backs to the ocean and the snow drifting over their corpses. She stumbled past the great slumped shapes of valravens, the smaller hillocks of her brothers and sisters lying tangled in their silver chain mail and their ice-colored swords and their cloaks of midnight blue, spangled with embroidered stars.
In death they were anonymous. She could not tell the tarnished from the Bright, and she did not pause to uncover their faces. She tried not to see the gaunt black shapes of the sdadown sprawled among them, red tongues lolling in the snow, poison-green eyes sunken and lightless.
And over all of it the blood, and the ice over that.
Muire did not feel the cold. She was a child of the Light, of the North, of the ice and the winter, and no cold could touch her. It could not make the bones in her hands ache or numb and gall her feet. It could not crack her lips and pull the moisture from her skin.
She was a child of the Light, one of the wardens of Valdyrgard. But now she reached out to that Light and touched nothing. No song, and no singing, and no power of the massed will of her brothers and sisters. They were gone, and she was the last, limping through snow on a leg scored by the teeth of a sdada that had charged past her, to join the pack pulling the war-leader apart.
Strifbjorn had died there, eaten alive, borne down under a black wave of sdadown. And Muire had lived, because she ran.