All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (27 page)

Instead, she let him hold her, though he squeezed hard enough to creak a mortal woman’s bones. “Has Cathoair come back?”

“They’ve been calling you, trying to find him,” the man answered, taken aback enough by her directness to slip a little.
Hrothgar, that was his name. The one with the blue hair, whom Cathoair had kissed in the ring.

Just Muire’s luck.

Yrenbend’s remembered voice mocked:
There are seen hands and unseen hands, little sister. Angels do not believe in coincidence.

“I’m not the one who ended up a rat,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?”

Oh, shadows, she’d said it out loud. The wolf-sherd laughed in her heart. She shook her head, wondering if the jangle of voices was already driving her mad.

In any case, the hand on her wrist was plain enough for all to see.

“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “I hadn’t been home to check messages. I came as soon as I heard—” She stepped back a pace, so her arm leashed between them.

Hrothgar gave a small tug. Not hard. “Come on. I think we’d better talk to Astrid.”

He led her downstairs without releasing her, and that he left the front door unguarded reinforced Muire’s deductions about how seriously Cathoair’s friends took his disappearance. Hrothgar brought her through the crowd—thinned, now that the fighting was done for the evening—and into a back room she should have suspected the existence of if she had ever taken a moment to wonder.

And there he left her. The latch clicked as he pulled the door shut.

Astrid would doubtless be along in a moment, so Muire took advantage of that moment to straighten her blouse and appraise her situation. Hrothgar hadn’t tried to relieve her of her blade, which was for the best—both for his own safety and
for what it revealed about the circumstances of her custody. Also, the room in which she had been left was a failure as a prison cell. Most mortals would have been able to break the door or the lock, and the hinges were on the inside. Even if they had taken her sword, this place was full of potential weapons: the weights on the exercise bench; the chain from which a kick bag depended; the bottles of alcohol; the table and the chairs.

Muire slipped out of her baldric, hung Nathr over one post of a ladder-back chair, and sat to wait.

No more than five minutes later, the door swung open again and Astrid and Aethelred entered. The chrome-skulled bartender breathed like a bellows in the dim room, which made Muire suspect he must have been hauling his metal armature up and down stairs at speed, and Astrid’s hair was unbraided and had left a long wet semi-transparency down the shoulder and front of her misbuttoned blouse. She had a bowl of water in her hand, and reached out gingerly to set it on the table-edge within Muire’s reach. “Hrothgar said you had been running.”

“Thank you,” Muire said. She cupped it in one hand and let the water touch her lips, as much to hide her face for a moment as to quench her thirst, and waited for Astrid to play her next card while Aethelred leaned against the wall beside the door.

Astrid, no disappointment, cleared her throat. “What exactly is it you’ve gotten Cahey into?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Muire answered. “I haven’t spoken with him in over a day. Tell me what I can do to help.”

She put all her conviction into it, sitting back in the chair, doing her absolute best to appear relaxed. Astrid just eyed her,
fingers tapping on the opposite forearm. “So you don’t have any idea why the Technomancer has arrested him?”

There was
someone
in Astrid too. The intensity in her expression bordered on a flash of light, and Muire, full of the Grey Wolf’s strength, could no more have missed it than she could have missed her fingers on the end of her own arm.
As if her name wasn’t enough of a clue, you idiot?

The folded arms, the arch expression, were such that Muire could almost see the outline of her long-lost sister, as if Astrid wore a waelcyrge’s ghost as a cloak. And Muire wasn’t sure if it was herself or the wolf-sherd that quailed most when she realized who it was that stood before her, wrapped in mortal flesh and innocent of her own existence.

Sigrdrifa.

For a moment, Muire feared she’d said the name aloud.

Was it a doom then, that they would be betrayed from within by the same hands as before? The wolf-sherd bristled in her bosom, all bared teeth and lust after blood. Muire, with effort, gentled it, though it cost her. It was not yet time to make such judgments. If it would ever be her place to do so.

If not yours, then whose?

Muire could not answer him. Nor Astrid, neither. But it was a relief to bare her teeth, and so she did, and said, “I can’t be certain. But I know how to win him back.”

T
he threat of death is not what baffles the wolf. Death cannot dismay him. But the possibility that his death could thwart his purpose—
that
binds him in the shadows, keeps him from stepping through the Technomancer’s wards into her Tower.

It would be easy to enter. A single short step out of shadows,
and he would be among her creatures like a fox among chickens. Like a wolf among sheep.

Once, he would have taken that single, short step. Out of the half-world and into the fire. Strange to think on it now, when he is old and moth-eaten, but he had been impulsive once. Quick to love, quick to lunge.

He has learned a great deal about trickery since. The Technomancer has survived her enemies in this fortress for more than three hundred years. None of those enemies are—were—the Grey Wolf, it is true. But Mingan is not fool enough to think that makes them unformidable.

There was a time when he knew himself unbreakable, unrivalled. Unmatched in hunger and strength. There was a time when he knew a great many things. And he has learned that he had been wrong about most of them.

Now, he has the rage of the sun-eater and the sorrow he drank down with Muire’s breath, and he is certain of nothing. So he lingers between spaces, liminal, indeterminate, watching for a glimpse of his enemy’s face or the face that never was his lover’s, and waiting.

He has also learned to wait.

R
escuing Cathoair did present a series of somewhat intractable technical challenges. The first of these was that of gaining access to the Tower. It was a floating island; the approaches were controlled; it was a sorcerer’s holdfast. The obvious solution would be Kasimir, but Muire preferred to hold him in reserve.

Especially as he was their most reliable means of escape.

Kasimir suggested the possibility that Mingan’s kiss might have left Muire with the ability to pass through shadows, but the technique was not intuitively obvious, and the wolf-sherd at least superficially unforthcoming. Muire thought she might have successfully interrogated it, given time . . . but time was in extremely short supply. And there was the other issue. The one that informed her options and made Muire’s eventual decision a foregone choice before she knew it herself.

Muire had business with Thjierry, had had it since she took Cristokos’s hand and understood who he used to be, and how he had come to return in that form. Whatever her goal, what Thjierry had done—perverting sacred weapons to enslave sentient beings—was more than obscene. It was blasphemous. Anathema.

So there was a single real possibility. Muire would present herself, plainly and in her own person, at the gate to the tower.

I
n the interests of combining alacrity with symbolism, Muire made the approach at sunrise. Alone, over Astrid’s objections.

“I know you don’t trust me,” Muire had said. “And honestly you have no reason to. But if I can’t bargain with—with the Technomancer, then we’d be stupid to give her more leverage than she already has.”

And Astrid had answered, “I can take care of myself.” She lifted her chin, staring Muire down across her height advantage. “He’s my partner. I’ve known him since we were kids.”

Muire opened her mouth to retort,
You’re still children,
and couldn’t, quite. Cathoair wasn’t yet twenty, unless Muire was seriously underestimating his age, and she didn’t think Astrid was more than five years older. They were irresponsible, carefree, living hand to mouth, and if either of them ever was likely to settle down to responsibility, Muire would be very surprised. But it wasn’t glimpsing the ghost of Sigrdrifa in Astrid’s eyes that silenced Muire.

It was the realization that no matter how feckless and young they were, they never had been children. No more than Muire herself had. Less so, even; Muire might have walked out of the starlit sea a woman grown, but she had been centuries old before anyone had expected her to make a hard decision or, once she had made it, defend it. And when she had, it hadn’t gone so well.

While she’d had to fight for her life, and her supper, she’d never had to whore for it. She looked down. “I’m sorry. I can’t take you.”

“I can take myself.”

Muire had spread her arms wide in exasperation. “I can only get two away safely!” she said, sharper than she had intended.

And Astrid had taken a step back. “Oh,” she’d said. “Why didn’t you say so?”

So it was that Muire waited alone—except for the unman operator—and unarmored—because she was maintaining the pretense that she came as a guest—on the intentionally rickety lift platform, staring up at the bright gray morning while the cage descended. Muire did not think there would be sun today, or rain either, but clouds had come in the night. She squinted against their unhealthy luminescence. The glow did not come entirely from either the day-faded Defile nor the occluded sun, and she was glad not to be in the open, unprotected beneath such a sky.

The unman beside her worked the lift controls silently, and Muire made an effort to treat him as etiquette demanded—as no more than a part of the furniture. But every time he caught on her peripheral vision she started, and had to look away quickly so she would not stare. Because under his skin, he was one of her brothers, too.

The wolf is mad, you know. You have no guarantee that this is anything but contagious delusion.

It told her something, though—that he was seeing the unmans as avatars of the Light, and had chosen only to slay Thjierry’s human servants under his vendetta.

Not that a human life should mean less than an angelic one.

He was tarnished. He had taken that first guiltless life, and all those after, and he would never be clean again. But if he were
unwilling to murder his brethren—Oh, she didn’t know what she was hoping for. Hoping for a reason to believe he could be saved, and that was daft.

The cage clanked on the edge of the platform, and she stepped forward. She hadn’t expected it to be empty; unmans, surely? An honor guard, or just a guard? But there was nothing, and she glanced over her shoulder once, just to make sure the operator intended her to proceed.

But he nodded, and she stepped in. Alone.

The grille rolled shut, and she rested one hand on the grab bar, pretending it was for balance only. And then with a creak of cables, the lift started upward, and Muire forced herself to relax. The wind whipped her skirt around her calves, and she reached around her hip with her free hand to catch the pierced-work eagle chape at the bottom of Nathr’s cherry-leather scabbard and steady the blade.

If she died here, now, well—she wouldn’t have to keep fighting, then, would she? And if that happened, Cathoair would be safer in Thjierry’s tower than where Mingan could get to him.

Oh, yes, defeatism, and she didn’t really mean it. But then, she wasn’t really scared of the cable snapping, either.

And then a masculine voice, one she thought she should recognize, spoke in her ear, and said, “Happy birthday, Muire,” and she was glad she’d taken a grip, because it prevented her from spraining an ankle when she spun and her foot caught on the barred floor.

“Who are you?” Microspeakers, probably, but that didn’t make the disembodied voice less unsettling. Nor did the fact that she
nearly
knew it.

“She’s forgotten me already,” he said, and sighed windily. “You don’t look a day over a hundred and fifty, so you know.”

The lift cage rocked hard in the wind; she balanced over the bump without really noticing. “Gunther.”

“In the—voice. I’ve missed you,” he said, his enthusiasm ringing bright and hysterical. “Did you get my messages?”

“The happy birthdays.” There was grit on the grab rail, a little rust showing through the chrome, that bit into her palm when her fingers tightened. The sky was growing brighter as the sun rose. The crawling light that shimmered along the cloud-base did not so much dim as it was washed away. Muire thought of semiprecious moonstone, and the way its blue adularescence dulled in hard light. Any of a dozen things could be lurking up there: rogue nanotech, undispersed battle-magic, some ancient and hovering summoned malevolence. Or it could be nothing at all, just a sickly glow. That quality of light sucked all saturation from colors, made her burgundy skirt dull brown and the ocher-and-blue slate roof of the building she was rising past seem as drab as its granite gutterspout gargoyles.