All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (39 page)

And then there was Thjierry.

Kasimir backwinged like a peregrine, the snap shattering windows to both sides, and brought himself into an elegant stall. The helicopter overshot spectacularly.

The Technomancer stood in the center of a red brick path bordered by lilies, body canted at a sharp angle forward over her crutches, her hair shocked every which way by the wind. She stood impassive as Muire and the valraven descended, settling light as a dandelion seed to the walk before her.

Or so it seemed until his hooves touched brick and the brick powdered, the ground shuddering under his weight.

Muire drew Nathr but did not brandish the blade. Instead she lay it across her armored thighs. A touch of her heels sent
Kasimir forward, exactly as if he could feel her. “This time, I come to you in my strength, Thjierry.”

The Technomancer pushed heavily at her props, and for a moment, Muire saw the scene as anyone else would. The heroic old woman in her frayed brown sweater, indomitable, uncowed before the armored witch on her iron beast of Hel.

“What do you want?” Thjierry asked. “I offered you allegiance. I
begged
you for help. And you destroyed my ally—your
friend
—Gunther, and assaulted me, and you come now why? To destroy me? Is Eiledon not dying fast enough to please you?”

It was a very pretty speech, and Muire wondered for how long Thjierry had rehearsed it. She was playing to the audience. And that audience was rapt. Thjierry might be the only one on the pathway—small and frail before Kasimir’s might—but students clustered three deep behind every overlooking window (the shattered ones as well)—and Muire was sure that moreaux in force lurked just out of sight, and beyond every door.

“Oh, yes,” Muire said, resigned to playing her role. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Thjierry kept looking at
her
. “Let’s talk about Eiledon and its death,
Technomancer.
Let’s speak of how you have kept it alive all these years, not by your own strength, but by stealing hamarr. Let’s speak of your
engine,
my lady magician, and how it is that the orrery draws hamarr from all the world to keep fresh what should be rotten. Let us speak of the souls you’ve enslaved, the minds you’ve bewitched. If you live by feasting on corpses, what is life?”

“Life,” Thjierry answered, with profound dignity. “That’s all it is. All there is. Life.”

They faced one another across fifteen feet of brick, a scant five meters between the banks of white and bronze and burgundy
lilies, and Muire thought she had never in her life seen someone who looked less afraid. One by one, the campus lights were flickering to life, white washing away iron twilight, and Kasimir and Thjierry each cast two long shadows from the lamps.

“So have you come to slay me, then? I warn you: I stand in my holdfast, on ground consecrated to Tyr, and it will not go easily for you.”

“No,” Muire said, as Kasimir lowered one head to lip weeds insolently from between the bricks. “I’ve come to do what one does with corrupt sorcerers. I’ve come to challenge you to a duel.”

W
here the hoverboards let them off, they separated. Cathoair came with Selene, but Cristokos went his own way, shoulders hunched and hands dry-washing, into the underground. Selene, who had been watching for it, did not even see him vanish.

The remaining two continued into the campus, businesslike but with concealed haste. Selene’s presence precluded casual challenge. Even for the dinner hour, shortly after sundown, the pathways seemed deserted, and from somewhere not too far away Selene heard the brief thunder of steel hooves powdering stone.

“She’s doing it,” Cathoair said, and Selene folded her ears down tight against her skull.

They entered the library without incident. After his last visit, Cathoair knew the way as well as she did, and his long legs hurtled him up the stairs faster than she could manage unless she dropped to all fours and bounded like a cat. She caught him on the turns, however, and they stayed within two strides the whole way up.

She didn’t like the unfamiliar web harness under her armor.
It chafed, and she would have stopped to pull at it, but there was no time now, and they were at the door.

The doorkeeper was Borje, though, and the heavy swing of his stone-black head and armspan horns brought Cathoair up short. The bull snorted, wet nose twitching, and lifted his chin to squint over the human at Selene. “What is this?” he asked.

“Show him,” Selene said.

Cathoair hit him with the flat of the sword. Hard, maybe harder than he had to, and the bull blinked and then bellowed, “Hey!” and grabbed for the human with mammoth three-fingered hands. Cathoair sidestepped—fast, faster than any human Selene had ever seen—and whacked the bull again when he went by.

Selene cringed, thinking of torture sports and matadors, but again, the human drew no blood. And this time, the bull pulled up, confused, and turned to Selene blinking. “He hurt me,” he said, and then sat down on the floor, doubled his fists in front of his belly, and curled around them as if to keep them safe.

“This is sickening,” Cathoair said, and Selene pressed her thumb against the door.

Selene gave him a steadying look, and saw him swallow. “You should try it from the inside.”

And then they were in the Technomancer’s quarters, under the span of her airy brass engine, and Selene shut the door and with Cathoair’s help dragged the sofa over and wedged it under the handle. “I can’t open the drawers.”

“That’s the other thing the sword is for,” Cathoair said, and strode grimly forward.

He went after the map drawers with the no-nonsense swing of a construction worker wielding a wrecking bar. No finesse,
no technique, just heft and muscle and the sound of the blade cutting metal like the sound of peacocks screaming. And cut metal it did; like slicing paper with a trimming machine. Selene, from farther back, wielded her whip. Its monofilament tip cut much less dramatically: she moved her hand, and a section of drawer facing fell away.

But she was curious about the sword. “What is that made of? Diamond?”

“I don’t know,” Cathoair said, and looked along the blade. It blazed in his hand with a merry blue-white light. He frowned at it, and slung it back over his shoulder. Muire could sheath hers in a single automatic motion. Cathoair’s technique involved some groping for the bottom ring.

Selene moved toward the ruined drawers so he would not notice her amusement. She coiled her whip and began drawing out swords, eminently respectful of the points and cutting edges.

They had three little piles of blades on the floor already when there was a click audible even over the ticking of the great machine, and inside the crystal domes of the orrery, a trap door swung up from the floor. Selene stepped back; Cathoair turned toward the noise. And within, Cristokos drew his narrow body out of the crawlspace and flattened himself against the floor, below the path of the wheeling planets. He began to inch forward, belly-crawling, almost slithering like a snake.

He did not look at them. They might have been invisible. But Selene and Cathoair shared a glance with one another and went silently back to work. Until Selene’s hand brushed something in a drawer, and she stopped, frozen, as if she had touched a live electric wire. Her fingers closed on it; she drew it out without daring to look, and held it in her hand.

Solbiort
.

“I don’t understand.”

Her name is Solbiort
, the stallion repeated.
She is your sword.

O
n the south end of the cricket pitch where she would do battle, Muire stood over the abyss and tuned her fiddle. The field was a little less than thirty yards of close-clipped grass, mown recently enough that the sharp, slightly musty scent of chlorophyll colored every drawn breath. The skies had darkened to indigo now, the light in them only visible where the trees were silhouetted, but the pitch was so brilliantly floodlit that the putrescent light from the Defile could not stain the world sickly green. Twenty yards north, Thjierry waited, leaning between her crutches with ill grace. Muire thought if it were not for those, and the lawn, she would be pacing.

Kasimir was not on the pitch, according to both plan and the rules of combat. He stood back and to the side, before the bleachers, with a clear line of sight and six of Thjierry’s faculty sorcerers and three handpicked unmans to prevent him from interfering. If anyone were laying odds, Muire would have put her money on Kasimir.

I am quite certain she intends to claim me as a spoil.

If she defeats me, you still have a mission.

He snorted.

And that job is
not
killing her.

Fasoltsen murmured
Vengeance
. Muire bowed her head.
Sometimes justice is more complicated than an eye for an eye,
she told him. He wasn’t interested in her excuses, though, so she rosined her bow, checked the fiddle’s four melody and four drone strings one final, compulsive time, and composed herself for war.

Muire had no doubt Thjierry was the better sorcerer. She had never been much more than a dabbler, more interested in the music and the metallurgy and the bend of nib against paper than the magery any of those implied. And blacksmithing was not a battle-art, except in the preparation.

In its evolved form, neither was technomancy. But the skill it had developed from, the runamal—the craft and carving of letters and sigils of power—
that
had some virtue in combat. And because of Cristokos and Gunther, Muire knew that Thjierry was well acquainted with the antecedents of her art.

Rune-making and galdr, spell-singing, were not so different. Both were the sorceries of words, and instrumental music was just a different language. Muire might be older and of broader experience, but Thjierry was a professional.

Muire’s advantage was that she did not have to win. She only needed to hold Thjierry’s attention. And if she was careful not to consider too carefully the cost of losing, all was well.

There were no judges or referees in a wizard’s holmgang. There was only one rule: the field of combat was sealed with the warriors within, and only the death of one of the duelists could unwork the spell of binding.

Muire let her bow and fiddle hang by her thighs, one in each hand, and nodded to Thjierry. And Thjierry nodded back, shifting restlessly on feet that seemed to pain her. A brown-haired wizard, tawny-skinned by contrast to his cream-white academic robes and mortarboard, stepped to the edge of the pitch. He spoke in a carrying tone. “Do you both agree that all other methods of settling your quarrel have been voided?”

“I do,” said Muire. She could not make out Thjierry’s answer, but the Technomancer’s lips moved, and what she said seemed to satisfy the presider.

“Do you both agree to abide by the law of the holmgang? You will fight on an island, upon which one of you must die.”

“I do,” said Muire, and perhaps the wind had shifted, for this time Thjierry’s answer carried.

“Have you any reason I should not seal the island now?”

“I do not,” said Muire. She had left her helm and gauntlets strapped to Kasimir’s saddle. Now she braced her fiddle beneath her chin and set the bow against it.

Some preparation had been made in advance. The presider only crouched and scratched a bindrune in the dirt with the tip of a yew twig.

Muire felt it take, a stillness and parity of air, and drew her bow sharply down.

W
hatever work Cristokos was at inside the orrery, it was
hard
work, and Cathoair struggled not to fidget. He figured that he and Selene had bundled half a ton of swords—“More than four hundred at about three pounds a piece? At
least
half a ton,” she said—and piled them before the long window, roped together with an intricate series of knots, and the rat-mage was still at it. He had a series of delicate tools, which he withdrew from inside his robe and replaced there until Cathoair wondered if he were wearing some sort of vest lined with elastic loops and tiny narrow pockets, and he had an access hatch open in the base of the machine and the upper half of his body inside.

Cathoair paced, trying not to listen to the sounds that filtered in from outside. They intruded anyway: the high wail of a fiddle, the roar of a crowd. And the flashing lights—green, gold, blue-silver.

He knew what the silver was. But it seemed buried under the green and gold.

Even Selene seemed to be getting nervous. “Cristokos, how much longer?” It was the first thing either of them had said to him since he began work. She had to pitch her voice loud to give it a chance of carrying through the crystal spheres, and Cristokos’s protruding tail didn’t even twitch in answer. Cathoair wondered how loud the clockwork was when you were inside it.

He bounced on his toes, swinging his arms, trying to find something to do with the restless energy. Spoiling for a fight, to be honest; it had all been far too easy so far.

And just as he was thinking that, someone started pounding on the door.

T
he first passage of magic was easy. Muire defended; Thjierry attacked. Muire’s bow slipped and skidded along the strings, her fingers flying, the drone strings buzzing as the music rose. Songs of defense, songs of warding. No need to fight yet, when she could let Thjierry exhaust herself pummeling Muire’s defenses.

The Technomancer was stronger, an adept and crafty with it. Muire had all the time and stamina in the world.
Let the other do your work for you
, Yrenbend would have said, and Muire, fingers flying, was grateful to his ghost. The first attack splashed against her defenses and rolled back like turbid water.

But frontal assault, death-magic, was not Thjierry’s only weapon. The next one came subtler, a fingering at the edge of the music like the touch of elegant, intrusive hands. Thjierry chanted, not discord but harmony, and though her voice was dry and cracked over the rising wail of Muire’s fiddle, somehow
it changed the music, tangled through it. A spell to bleed; a spell to draw off power and hamarr and make it the spell-singer’s.