All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (17 page)

“We can hunt him together—”

“We have his trail now. If we let it go cold, who’s to say we will ever catch him again?”

He stared at her, fists at his sides. And then snapped, as if he were spitting: “It’s stupid!”

Then he stepped back as if he had shocked himself in his passion. “If you die, then what do we do about him? Is he just going to keep hunting the Technomancer’s people?”

“Unless he can get to Thjierry herself? Yes,” Muire said.

His eyebrows did something interesting at her casual use of the Technomancer’s name. Muire bit her lip, too late, but he asked a better question. “And if he does, what happens then?”

“The end of the world,” Muire answered, calmly and without hesitation. She’d had a great deal of time to think about it, lately. She stepped wide around Cathoair and walked toward Kasimir. “Th—the Technomancer is the thing that keeps Eiledon alive in the face of the Desolation. Her will. Her tremendously potent magic.”

“That’s true? It’s not just stories?” By his tone, he would rather it were a tissue of lies.

“It’s true,” Muire said. “Every word of it. You know there was another city—”

“It fell,” Cathoair said. It had been on the news channels.

“It didn’t have someone like Thjierry.”

“So when the wolf kills you? What then?”

She turned back. She looked over her shoulder. She smiled. “Keep fighting him,” she said. “Find a way.”

Kasimir? Where are we going?

Midgard
.

Midgard is dead.

Aye. And so is Valdyrgard. Yet here we remain.

Point taken,
Muire answered, and stepped up beside him. Kasimir poised like a giant wound spring.
How do we go there?

Lay your hand on my mane.

She did, though it was hot enough to sweat her fingers inside the gauntlet. Before long the flesh would blister.

“Now,” she said. And went forward with him, when he spread his wings and walked into the cold.

I
n the cold and the dark, Muire thought of dying.

It hadn’t been the first time. The first time, that promise of death—of surcease—sustained her through the long, brutal labor of excavating the frozen bodies of her brethren. Of chipping them free of the ice and each other, of dragging them to the location she had chosen for their cairn. The snow even proved a blessing; Muire’s strength alone, no matter how much greater than mortal, would not have sufficed to the task without its slickness.

And it proved a blessing as well, because it was soft and cold and it reminded her of death. The death she anticipated, once this final task was complete. The silence and the peace. The end to bitter toil.

But first, she labored.

When the bodies were stacked, valraven among the children of the Light, tarnished among the unfallen, she found stones. With the blade of her lightless sword, she levered them up and piled them, course upon course over the dead. She built the barrow in a ring, packing snow into ramps—here, again, the snow was kind—and climbing each tier to set the next, knowing that when the blowflies arrived with summer—if there
was a summer—they would find their way through sticky crevices to the bodies beneath. Then, as the maggots fatted themselves on angels (and in their own turn transformed and flew), the stones would fall and lie over whatever bones might linger.

Even the grave was but a temporary thing.

It would have to serve: she had no means of constructing a dome that might support its own weight.

She labored and carried, lifted and stacked. She grew thin with it, her hands cracked, her eyes near blinded by the weary sun. She chewed the kind snow from the battlefield for water, for thirst began to haunt her, and sometimes that snow was salt with the blood of the dead. She, who had never understood what it was to be cold, suffered with it—bleeding lips and dripping nose and chill to the bone. Still, it could not kill her, though she hoped it would. When her more-than-human strength failed her, and she—who had also never known sleep, except when wounded—collapsed into the snow and curled there, it would not freeze her.

She prayed for mortality. She received exhaustion.

Her punishment.

She had failed, and the Light had failed, and the Dweller Within had never risen from the sea at their backs to fight with them. As she covered Strifbjorn’s gnawed face with stones and with the bodies of his brethren, she wondered if he had known that their flight north to the ocean was futile. She wondered if he had carried that terrible secret, so that they would not have to. If he had let them die in hope.

And she wondered if that had been better than letting them die in despair.

There was still Light, she learned. A fragment, a flicker. What she carried within her, only, and it gave her physical
strength even while it wearied her heart. She could not reach outside herself and touch that larger thing, that certainty that had always buoyed her. She was, for always, alone.

The night the cairn was complete, it snowed, and Muire was again thankful. She did not wish to look up and see the sun, or the stars. She set the last stone across the top of her barrow, there on the cliff at the edge of the sea where her family had turned at bay and slaughtered one another. And she stood atop the grave and turned East, where the sky grew brighter.

Whatever she had promised herself at the end of her labors, she had earned. She picked her way down slick stones, her caution ironic in light of her purpose, and made her way to where the sea and the rocks awaited. The snow stopped during her descent, and the clouds wore thin and tore. By the time she reached the cliff-edge, sunrise painted the gray granite boulders with blood and time.

She reached over her shoulder and drew her black crystal blade. She had thought of leaving her there, to mark the barrow, but that now seemed indecent. The sun flamed, breathtaking, crimson and incarnadine and vermilion and hellebore and scarlet, and Muire drew breath as if that light could fill the hollow. The cold air only made her cough.

She had made herself a bargain. She thought of stepping into that sunrise. She pictured her fall, tumbling, and the wreck of her body on the sea-ripped boulders below. She imagined the brief sensation of flight and closed her eyes.

She spread her arms wide. A bitter sea breeze had tugged at her, almost lifting her up, and she took a deep and singing breath. This time, she did not choke on it.

She had stepped—

An echo arrested her.

Live.

She had opened her eyes. The sunrise was over: splinters of gold danced on the dark water far out to sea, and that was all. It looked like a path.

Live
, the echo repeated.

A path. Not her path.

And so the moment passed.

And in the darkness of a murdered world, Kasimir creaking with the cold beside her, Muire stepped forward, as she had not, that other time.

T
hat had been the first time. Not the last one.

There was a light, indistinct, like the light before dawn when the fog glides down hill slopes and smothers the valleys. “Hel,” Muire said. “Is this not Hel’s domain, Kasimir?”

On her left, he would not regard her. In this cold that conquered even the furnace within his iron body Kasimir was rimed white with ice, crystals frozen on the long wires of his lashes.

And after a moment, she too turned away. She could not bear to look at him, in the ghost of his lost whiteness. He looked as he had. Before.

She wondered if the Grey Wolf came here, to the mist and the memories, every time he vanished. If so, she could not wonder at his madness: only his survival.

Walk on
, said Kasimir. Wings folded, eyes front, he stepped forward.

Sword dark, eyes front, through the mist she followed.

________

T
he Desolation spared nothing. Not pride, not love, not dignity. Not family, not friendships, and not hope.

Not Muire’s fragile peace.

After the Thing refused Thjierry’s counsel, the Technomancer disappeared for a time. Muire wondered, naturally, but she had found that the fewer questions she asked, the fewer others expected answered. In any case, Gunther was so busy being mysterious about it—“Fetching help,” was all he would say—that Muire suspected he knew no more than she. And wherever the Technomancer had gone, there was enough work.

Dying is not hard. But it tends to consume all one’s resources.

The Thing closed Eiledon’s walls to the refugees driven out of the south. Still the displaced came, a multi-streamed river, people of all colors and nationalities and languages, a braid of folk of exotic origins and exotic modes of dress. But as time passed that river dried to a trickle, each refugee more ragged and hungrier than the last.

The only word out of the South now was the word that came with them. Cities, nations, entire continents were dead.

Muire, observing them on the remote cameras, understood that there was no aid to be sent. Truth, like a stone on her chest: this was not the first time she had watched a world die.

The world was wider now than it had been; its death throes were more protracted and terrible. And if she despaired, and longed for her own death, where was the blame?

There was no comfort in the knowledge that Eiledon was dying too. The wanderers they turned away might meet their end more quickly and more peacefully than the city that drew up its skirts against them, but taking them in would have done no good. There was already famine and plague within. Not just
ordinary illness, but the engineered killers, the terror-weapons, the genetically delimited bioflus that had been designed to sweep through one’s own troops—or civilians—and render them fitter, stronger, and more vicious. The citizens in the Arks were safe from those, more or less, with their enclosed biospheres and their filtered intercourse with the outside world. Those who lived in the city’s apartments and streets, who died in its makeshift infirmaries and whose bodies were sterilized and committed to the tanks, they suffered it all.

The survivors were never considered exactly human again.

Eiledon was as doomed as the rest of Valdyrgard, and offering help would only exhaust them. More mouths would kill the city sooner.

She would be the last again. She was hardier than mortals, even now, even the engineered and augmented mortals of the new world. She would outlast, and she would watch each of them die, and she would in the end lie down beside the last of them and crumble, too.

Or so she prayed, though she also knew that there was no one to hear her. In her weaker moments, she thought of taking matters into her own hands, but wouldn’t that be flight again? The same cowardice that had doomed her to be here, to bear witness? If she had had the courage to stand beside Strifbjorn, she could have died beside him too, and been spared this.

In weaker moments still, she feared she would endure forever, alone in a poisoned world, a haggard monster and a rag-glad ghost. Still, Muire was among those who helped to raise the Defile. It exhausted every sorcerer and wizard in the city, and several died. But after that, there were fewer deaths from radiation and illness, and far more from starvation.

And then there were no more stragglers. No more refugees, and no more transmissions except the ones from Freimarc, a city to the far east that lay under ruthless martial law, but was somehow also holding on. The news was no better than the news in Eiledon. From everywhere else rose silence, or static.

Who climbs a mountain climbs alone, no matter who their comrades. Should disaster strike, no other has the resources to help; each needs all his strength for himself.

The world is such a mountain. From galling practice, Muire knew it was so.

Is dying easier or harder, when you do not have to do it alone?

W
alk on
, said Kasimir.

So Muire answered with her weary stride.

M
uire had been many things in a long life, and one of those was a physician. When her skill with magic was no longer of use, at least she could tend the sick and wait beside the dying.

The last group of refugees was the worst. Five thousand strong or more, and they came not from the south, but from the north, returning along a path they had perhaps walked once already. When they reached the broad river valley below the mountain, they moved among the abandoned houses and shops of Eiledon’s suburbs. They encircled the city, settled down along the broad once-green Boulevard that marked its processional entrance, and folded their arms.

“They’re waiting to die,” Gunther said, as Muire perched at his side. Muire, her workshop full of the ill and moribund, had given him her own bed when he fell sick. His hands and face were swollen with sores that leaked pus and lymph; his skin had the texture of boiled meat. He made as if to rise and she stayed him with a hand. “You’re not getting out of that bed.”

He
could
walk, but his feet left smears on the floor when he did. He settled back against the pillow and said, “If I’d known this was all I had to do to get into it, I would have tried this years ago.”