All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (10 page)

“You’re a student?” she asked, taking the cup he extended,
pressing it to her cheek for the warmth and the scent of the tea while he sorted sandwiches.

“Not exactly. Here, have this one. I’m a postdoc. I work for Professor Thjierry Thorvaldsdottir.”

“You said. And she is . . . ?”

“Dean of the School of Technomancy.”

Oh.
“You’re a technomancer?”

“Well, not a very good one.” He grinned, and unwrapped another sandwich for himself. The stuffing of this flatbread was the bloody magenta of rare beef.

“Did you know,” she said, shifting a buttock to avoid a pointed stone, “that technomancy grew out of the old rune-magic?”

“We still learn the seventeen runes,” he said. “As apprentices. We’ve advanced some since the old days.”

“Seventeen? There are eighteen.” He was staring at her. She looked down at her hands. “According to the Eddas.”

“The eighteenth one is secret,” he said. “Nobody knows it. Tell me about walking here from Freimarc.”

“Part of it was by ship,” she answered by reflex, while he poured the wine: pale gold, too sweet and not cold enough. “I like walking.”

It beat thinking.

“How long did it take?”

She shook her head. “Four months? I started in winter.”

“Wow.” The eyebrows did something expressive, which Muire wasn’t entirely sure how to read. His facial expressions were as theatrical as the rest of him. “The University is lucky to have you. Were they reluctant to wait?”

“Is this an interview?”

“Maybe.” He rolled a walnut half between his fingers. “You’re interesting. When’s your birthday?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Seriously!”

She waved him off. “No day in particular.”

He laughed—“So it must be every day.”—and ate the nut. “You’re very mysterious, you know. There’s not much about you on the net.”

“Stalker.”

His sandwich held in both hands, he examined it as if determining an angle of attack. Muire felt a sort of kinship with that lump of bread and meat. “Sculptor in residence. Did you haul all your equipment here on your back? What do you sculpt, feathers?”

She unwrapped her sandwich and sniffed it: the aroma of sprouts, mustard, and an earthy mushroom smell rose from an envelope of unleavened bread. The sharp scent of aged cheese triggered a pang of hunger. She shoved a corner of the bread into her mouth and then spoke through the food, covering her lips with her hand. “Normally, in a conversation, the parties take turns asking and answering things.”

“You forget to eat,” he said.

She nodded, swallowed a painfully large lump, and washed it down with wine. Then crammed another mouthful in.

He shook his head. “So does Thjierry. Side effect of genius? No, eat, don’t answer that.”

Gunther touched the translucent skin on the back of Muire’s hand. It was thin over the bones, and she pulled her hand away, uncomfortable with the touch.

He shook his head, seemed to cast about for a safer subject, and failing that took another bite of his own sandwich. He ate
with neat decorum. Of course, Muire thought, compared to her right now, wolves ate with neat decorum.

She knocked crumbs from her chin. “Thank you,” she said, when she realized that she hadn’t already. “Apparently I need a keeper.”

“Or at least a feeder.” He pushed another sandwich at her. “The other cheese one. Go ahead.”

She reached for it, and her braid fell over her shoulder.

“How do you work metal with such long hair?”

“Pin it up,” she said, wax paper crinkling as she flattened it. She abandoned the sandwich for a moment and lifted a plait still damp from the morning’s washing to where she could study it. It was neither gold nor gleaming, but a threaded shade between brown and blonde. “You should have seen my sisters’. Bright blonde, and down to the floor. Never cut. Mine was thought mousy.”

“You have a sister?”

Had. Many. But Muire did not correct him. “I’m orphaned. No family left.”

A dead moment of silence weighed the air between them, and then Gunther picked up his tea and drained the cup.

“Well, I’m the king of Foot in Mouth.” He set his lunch on the cloth and pushed it out of the way. “I’m sorry. I’m not doing very well at finding safe topics, am I?”

“I’m prickly,” Muire answered, after a longer silence. “I’m sorry, I know that.”

“Look, Muire . . . I am not . . . I don’t have an agenda. I like interesting people. I’m boring myself, but I’m drawn to greatness.” He chuckled, with irony, and refilled both drinking bowls. “Can we be friends?”

She ate two more bites of sandwich before she answered,
and this time managed to swallow before she spoke. “I don’t know. I can’t yet say.”

“All right then,” he said. “Can we be acquaintances for now?”

“Yes,” she said. “That I think I can manage.”

She did not quite look down in time to avoid the warmth of his smile.

I
n the years that followed, Muire was happy in Eiledon, though she feared admitting it—even to herself—even more than she feared the happiness. It was all the evidence of bitter experience, that if you have something to lose, you will lose it.

The first sign of wrong came as a whisper, a murmur of war on a distant wind. A famine. An accidental release of a bioterror weapon. A border skirmish, a too-hot summer. A spill of technomantic effluvia. There was news, images, text and flash-holos and chatter on the nets. A scandal when a main battle shoggoth crushed a student demonstration. But it was four thousand miles away, in another hemisphere.

It might as well have been another world. What could anybody do?

And then Muire started finding the songbirds.

One or two, sparrows and robins, orioles and thrushes. And then more, scattered on the sidewalks, their wings twisted and stiff, while the skies grew silent. Cagebirds and parrots followed. The ubiquitous city pigeons.

Crows, ravens. Owls and falcons and hawks.

Insects, too. There had been a white-faced wasp nest in the corner of Muire’s courtyard. A thriving colony, until the day when she found them scattered, dying, on the broken paving
blocks. She knelt down on the stones beside the wasps and lifted one up on her fingertip.

Its wings buzzed faintly, their strong cellophane crumbling. Fuzzy yellow filaments of some invasive fungus protruded from its white-and-black abdomen. It stung her, reflexively, the poison in her finger a searing heat, and she held it while it stung her again.

The tears that choked her breathing weren’t from the wasp’s futile venom. They came because she could no longer deny that she knew. Cascading catastrophe, the system in failure. It was not Muire’s first apocalypse. But then, her kind had always been better at retribution than prevention.

And she knew as if it had been blazoned on a banner, with desperation would come war.

Black sorcery, radiation weapons, nanites, railguns, orbital assault, biotoxins and all the ills the flesh is heir to: Valdyrgard had died its first death in ice. The second was in flames. Mountains were heaved up and pounded flat. Oceans steamed and cities died in silence, suffocated under the falling dust.

Eiledon . . . was spared.

No, spared is the wrong word. Eiledon went to war with all the rest.

But Eiledon had a hero.

I
n a steep green valley, beside a narrow brook that hopped from stone to stone like a child skipping down steps, Kasimir dwelt alone.

His wings fanned like black blades when he spread them, and he had learned caution early and quickly: have a care where you step, for your hooves can scorch the earth, and a fire grow
up about you; have a care where you light, for your weight can crack stone; have a care whom you love, for your touch can burn them flesh from bone.

He did not weather, except to char flat black with soot. He did not rust or stain. He did not weary.

He could not feel the stroke of a hand.

But he could feel his rider. Though she denied him, though she repudiated herself. Though she was his rider in name only, having never sat his back.

Though it was she who had made of him this new thing, flame-hearted and forged in iron.

She never called, but she was there always, just at the edge of his awareness. He knew her despair and her grief. She punished herself. He thought she must not understand how she punished him, as well.

At first, he had approached her. He had tried to speak to her, to cajole her. To make her accept that they two might still have a purpose in the Light, together. “The Light is dead,” she answered. “There are no more angels. The world must fend for itself now.”

And he persisted. But at first she argued with him, and then she denied him, and then she cursed him, and then—in the fullness of centuries—she would not speak to him at all.

And though she was his, and he hers, a valraven has his pride. He would not trail her like a kicked cur, seeking approval.

And so he found his own tasks, and waited. Someday, she might need him enough to call.

A forlorn hope, in the end. Even the end of the world—another end of the world: in a long life, Kasimir had begun to
suspect they happened with distressing regularity—could not move her to seek him.

Muire would not seek him.

But another—did. An accident, except not really.

Kasimir believed in fate, in wyrds and dooms and ordained consequences. It was a problem of having been born and reborn a destroying angel. And so when he found another, a creature such as he had never seen, a made-thing, he did not believe it mere coincidence.

His valley was steep and narrow, removed from human habitations, so when the jays flew up crying
man! man! man!
he lifted his antlered head from the water curiously. The horned head continued drinking, slow swallows to fill his belly and maintain the pressure in his hydraulics. If he were as he had been, before Muire changed him, water might have dribbled from his lips and splashed back into the brook. But now he was a thing of fire and iron, and it wreathed his face in steam, hissing off into the cold morning air.

He would go and see this man, he decided. And because Kasimir lived in hope, he would hope that it was merely a wanderer, and not someone against whom he would have to take measures.

Stealth was not his métier. He did not come silently, did Kasimir, but with the rattle of steel on steel, the hiss of steam, the thump of hooves shaking the ground. Still, he came down along the stream bank cautiously, staying to the shadows, blinking into the light. His lids closed like iron shutters over his moist brown eyes. His lashes made the soft sound of stroked wire-brush when they meshed.

Kasimir had not been for subtlety reborn.

It turned out not to matter.

When he heard the noise of scrambling, he paused behind an outcrop that knocked the stream into a wide curve, craning one neck to peer beyond. Whatever staggered up the rocky bank, scrambling over roots, half erect and half scuttling, was no man. It wore rough tattered brown robes, and its fingers were long and narrow and knotted, the right hand solid black on the palm, furred black on the back, and the left hand blotched with white hair and pink skin. A long whiskered nose twitched on a wedge-shaped head, and the fur here too was spotted, the muzzle divided black and white.

The front of the robe was soaked; it had obviously drunk from the stream, as Kasimir himself had been doing. And the entire animal smelled of injury and filth and machine grease, of malnutrition and illness. It dragged itself along the bank, the scent of blood and pus preceding.

And among all that, Kasimir could also smell the sorcery upon it. Technomancy, which had been in old days the magic of letters and forged things, and was now the magic of words and machines and microscopic knives and wires.

In other words, the new animal was a made-thing. A made-thing, like the sdadown.

Kasimir felt no sting as his tail struck his flank. But he heard the slap of wires on metal, and the rustle of a falling branch where his careless gesture had savaged an alder. And so did the dying new animal.

It cringed, curling in on itself, mismatched hands raised to protect its mismatched head. Kasimir saw the gashes on its bony palms, the blisters, the infection. It didn’t speak, but it chittered—a high, distressed sound, frantic and terrible.

A sdada knew no fear. And this creature was terrified.

Kasimir came around the outcrop. He had to step into the stream to do it, and the water boiled around his ankles, hissing. After a moment, it cooled the metal a little, though his hooves still steamed when he lifted them. And down the bank, the little creature—no bigger than a small human, just about the size of Kasimir’s rider—huddled into itself and bared chisel teeth under beady mismatched eyes.

It was a rat. A black-and-white rat, made giant and dexterous.

Fear me not
, Kasimir said.
For I feel pity.

It did not know whether to trust him, and he believed—in its fear, too exhausted to flee—that it would hurl itself at him in an instant, and die in futile combat. He had known rats; rats were creatures of the field and stable.

They were not quitters.

Fear me not
, Kasimir said, again.
I will not harm you. I will save your life. What is your name, made-creature?

It chittered once more. And then drew back, head lowered, and made a noise that could have been a word.

Your pardon?
the warhorse asked.

And it choked, and repeated, “Cristokos. This one is Cristokos. What is that one?”

My name is my own
, Kasimir answered.
Come, follow.
He began to turn away, to lead it at a right angle to the stream. He knew where there was a cave, a dry sandy floor, piles of leaves and pine needles for warmth. If he scraped the earth clean, it would be a safe place to build a ring for fire.

The new animal made a small weary sound of distress, and Kasimir glanced back over his shoulder.
You must follow.

He thought it would protest, but it pushed itself up on wavering arms and crawled forward, moving by inches. A foot, ten feet.