3

Hagalaz (hail)

The walls of Her office were cinder block and limpid shatterproof, offering a panoramic view of Eiledon’s rooftops and towers. Not the loft of the Arcology, strangely, but the jeweled teeth of the old city and the thick bend of river southwest of the Tower. The enormous room—almost the entire top floor of the library—was dominated by a giant orrery encased within moving crystal spheres; the furniture, while comfortable, was relegated to the edges.

Selene, waiting upon Her attention, stared through the tall glass plates, tail lashing, ears still laid flat, and willed herself to calm. Fear-and-fight were not her friends. They were the animal, the instinct that made her a superlative warrior. But the threat had been left behind on the ground, and Selene was in the Tower, in Her presence. Safe.

The broad windows were new, since the Desolation, giving Eiledon’s savior, leader, teacher a sweeping view of Her demesne and the Defile, but the marble floor was original to the University. Once it had been smooth, close-fitted, and the cool blocks were still so tight one could not slip a card between them. But the stone had been worn in intervening centuries, and there were little hollows and valleys that showed where feet had trod those hundreds of years away.

She sat in Her habitual chair—no ostentatious throne but the functional work station of mesh and padding she used when she was not afoot on two crutches, or in Her hover chair—and stared over Her city. Selene knew that She was waiting for Selene to regain control, to find her center.

She was gracious.

Finally, She lifted a hand and beckoned. She wore two thick mismatched sweaters over Her red-brown scholar’s robes, the gray and taupe cuffs rolled up around Her bony wrists. She’d let Her hood fall onto Her shoulders, revealing Her cropped gray hair, and the pinched marks of Her spectacles remained on the bridge of Her nose.

Selene stepped forward, tail still twisting, and bowed before Her chair. Her hackles bristled, her fur damp from the drizzle but standing all on end under the farmed leather straps and ceramic plates of her body armor, but she forced herself to calmness as she extended the package in her hand. It was long, bound with wire over a stiff cloth wrapping, and it left a chill, buzzing sensation climbing the bones of Selene’s forearm.

She groped for one of Her crutches, rose from Her chair with an effort, and came before Selene. “Good girl,” She said, softly, slipping the bundle from Selene’s clawed hand and tucking it under Her arm for safekeeping. Selene kept her talons sheathed in the soft flesh of her fingertips throughout, breathing deeply, her whiskers smoothed flat against her muzzle and her toenails pressing slight scratches into the hard marble floor when she couldn’t quite manage to gentle them.

Selene smelled old woman’s flesh, acrid electronics, and constancy, and it helped drive the dangerous musk from her nostrils. She stroked Selene’s ears with a palsied hand and stepped back, but not before Her touch and scent had soothed the moreau.

“Why so upset, Selene?”

“I smelled something,” Selene reported. “Something in the dark under the Well. Musky. Hunting.”

“A rogue?” She asked sharply.

She was not angry with Selene. She never raised Her voice to Her unmans. She never had to: the moreaux were perfectly obedient to Her will, and they would die before they failed. Since She Herself had constructed them, the only blame for their occasional shortcomings fell on the wizard Herself.

She was a just and a forgiving creator-god.

But sometimes—rarely—a moreau would grow strange, go feral, fail to return. Rogues were dangerous to unmans, trumans, halfmans, and nearmans. She did not tolerate them, and Selene would not tolerate them on Her behalf.

Selene was very skilled at her tasks.

“I do not think it was a rogue,” she said, carefully. Her words came sweetly despite needle-sharp teeth, rolling trippingly from a rasp-sharp tongue. “A . . . predator. It smelled not like one of us, though I saw nothing when I met Fasoltsen.”

“And you did not touch the weapon?” She lifted the slender bundle in Her hand. It was long, long as Selene’s leg from hip to ankle, long as her lashing tail.

Selene rocked her head side to side, an awkward counterfeit of a human shake. “The wrappings were intact.”

“Excellent,” She said, and spared Selene a smile full of an old woman’s crooked yellow teeth. “Go, pretty girl. Rest until morning. You have pleased me.”

Selene could not smile. She hadn’t the muscles for it. But, turning to go, she felt the warmth of Her approval run down her spine like the stroke of a velvet glove, and stood straighter under her weapons and armor as she strode away.

 

Muire stood in the ruined square and wiped her hands on her cloak, though nothing stained them. It was dark here, in the shadow of the Tower, dark and chill. This was the truncated end of the Boulevard, the mile-diameter, near-geometric ring road that circumscribed the places where honest folk traveled in Eiledon. Anything beyond its compass was as likely to be lawless as not; it all depended on the character of one’s neighbors. Where the road was broken, its edges had cracked and melted where the Technomancer had pulled her Tower from the earth, interrupting its symmetry.

A dark undercity had grown beneath that Tower in the intervening centuries. Shielded from the weather, from the sun’s unfiltered radiation, the Well cradled Eiledon’s more dangerous neighborhoods and also her better bars in an improvised arcology, neither as protected nor as pretty as the sunlit ones. There in the depths, one could find bloodsport, sex for hire, specs and killers. . . . and also, real live music, for a change.

The scent that hung about the dead man’s body led Muire down the newer stair, the unbroken one. She descended into the Well, where the light trickled from colored floods, tethered floats, and garish signs, and even the green-gold aurora of the Defile was obscured.

She paused at the halfway point of the stair, her gauntlet scraping on the improvised pipe railing, the stone steps gritty under her boots. Below, a moderate stream of people moved along the beneoned street in seasonless darkness. The atmosphere never brightened here, though in the daytime it would gray, sunlight reflected in by systems of mirrors. The lights were never doused, however.

The denizens of the Well were far more colorful than the trumans who lived above, in Riverside and the Ark, or near Muire’s loft and workshop on the long side of downtown, near Dockside and Hangman. The buildings were less makeshift than one might expect: Eiledon had been jammed to bursting with engineers and tradespeople, and the suburbs offered rich scavenging. Buildings of four and five stories were not uncommon. The narrow haphazard streets between them coursed with men and women and the undecided, truman and nearman and halfman and unman, sorcerous and cybernetic and between and neither. The tide of humanity drew Muire like the pulse of the ocean in her blood: the dark, starlit ocean that had brought forth her kind.

The Light had failed and with it its children, but these other children—mortal children, candle-flickers—continued, endlessly fighting and dying and returning their blood to the wash of the sorrowful sea. The mortals had a saying, that blood was thicker than water. But to Muire blood was water: the water of the ocean, and the force of the Light upon it.

She descended the last few stairs and dropped into the current, following the paling scent-trace of cloak and boot caressing stone, whistling a half-heard melody that lit the killer’s footsteps for her eyes alone, so they stood out in the darkness as if brushed with phosphorescent dust.

Her geas—the ghost-hungry memory of Ingraham Fasoltsen—drove her. Vengeance, he murmured half heard in her ear. Justice. And over and over, a father’s seaworn murmur that she could do nothing about at all, I cannot leave my child.

Music sloshed from open doorways like the surf, and neon and liquid crystal dazzled, but Muire passed them by, patting the snub shape of the flechette pistol snugged against her waist.

She was walking to her enemy. And in the shadow of the Tower, no rain fell.

 

The tickling sensation on the back of Cathoair’s neck came back when he reentered the bar. He’d steamed and scraped, and cleaned his hair, and wore a soft white shirt that was open at the collar over tight black pants. Hustling clothes, and not at all what he’d be wearing if it were him and Astrid lying out on the roof finding shapes in the lights on the underneath of the tower, drinking hot tea and resting their aches in the cool Well air. He paused by the bar and caught Aethelred’s eye, and Aethelred—a gnarled boulder of a man with a Twisted Serpent pendant winking in the hair behind his open collar, the half of his face that wasn’t radiation-scarred layered in mirror-bright chrome so you found yourself talking to your own reflection when you tried to look him in the eye—fished Cathoair’s bowl out from under the counter and topped it up with something that smelled of artificial fruit.

Cathoair studied the mirror behind the bar while he drank it. He didn’t take liquor, as a rule, and Aethelred would keep the synthpunch coming all night if that was what it took. But it was a busy night at the Ash & Thorn, and prospects looked good. Aethelred was taking bets on the next bout—a girl fight, Astrid and Feorag, who had an Islander name like Cathoair but was red-haired white-skinned Eiledain, not the dark-skinned descendant of refugees—and the neon and strobes over the dance floor were twitching, the music loud enough to ring his ears.

And, snakerot, he still had that sensation, as if somebody were trailing cold fingers down between his shoulder blades. The gray man again?

He lifted one hand to signal Aethelred. If it was legitimate interest, he wasn’t in a position to mind. And if it wasn’t, he could take good care of himself, thank you.

Aethelred filled two more bowls with brandy, accepted and tallied another bet on the chalkboard over the top shelf, and then leaned across the bar so Cathoair could shout into his ear.

“Seen a guy, Aeth? ’Bout so tall, gray cloak, salt and pepper plait?”

Aethelred nodded and shouted back. “Yeah. Couldn’t tell you if he was safe, sorry. But I didn’t like his eyes—”

Something to take on evidence, when a bartender said it. That, and the way he gave Cathoair that creeping feeling, like he sometimes got, the one that always presaged adventure. “What was he drinking?”

Aethelred’s smile rearranged the furrowed scars on the mobile half of his face into deep eloquent valleys. “Mead,” he answered, with a shrug. “You’d be a damned sight safer with that one,” he suggested, with a jerk of his shoulder toward the stairwell and the door.

Cathoair squeezed Aethelred’s wrist once quickly and turned, and caught his first quick glimpse of the girl.

She was little, not much better than child-sized, cheekbones plain under the pale skin of her face, her ash-gold hair bobbed even with her earlobes and her eyes very serious behind the escaped strands that fell across her face. She wore rust-brown ceramor and a navy cloak shot through with threads of gold, and the worn, peace-bound hilt of a sword stood over her shoulder. She was poised statue-still, and from the expression on her face when she turned, she must have been staring at the back of his head like a rabbit staring at a hawk.

He didn’t know her. And she looked like a girl playing dress-up in her brother’s battle suit. But she licked her lips and startled when he looked her in the eye, and Aethelred was right; she looked a hell of a lot safer than the Man in Gray.

“Put five kroner on Astrid for me, would you, Aeth?” he asked the bartender, and—cupping his refilled bowl in his hand—started through the crowd toward the gray-eyed girl.

 

She knew him. A shock of recognition like the taste of ice water, and then the tall, elegantly boned young man at the bar turned around and fixed Muire with a contemplative gaze. She’d come down the stairs into this teeming underground as much for the wry neon sign by the stair naming it the “Ash & Thorn” in two runic symbols as for the trace of Grey Wolf. And now, here was this man, who shocked her to recollection like the smell of summer flowers.

He sidestepped through the crowd to reach her (trumans and nearmans here, only—no moreaux, and the cybered landlord behind the bar was the only halfman. Muire could hear his chassis creaking under his skin even through the thump of the music and the excited shouts of the crowd), and her breath felt as if it would rasp a hole in her throat.

Because she didn’t. Didn’t know him, had never seen him before, with his musculature like a classical statue and his oiled brown-black ringlets bound back in a ponytail not so much darker than the polished warm tone of his skin. The broad handsome features, the sensual lips, the smooth-bridged Islander nose and the pink, proud-fleshed dueling scar disfiguring his right cheek and pulling that corner of his mouth up in a mocking involuntary smirk were foreign to her, as foreign as the black slate tiles of this club and the thumping music swinging bodies across the pillared dance floor.

But the recognition didn’t care. It was strong enough that it almost shook free her tenuous grasp on her spell, and for a moment she forgot to track her quarry’s presence as she watched the young man come toward her.

The last time I saw him, she thought, his face was ruined, too. And she wondered for a moment if it was his wyrd now, a punishment for the infamous beauty that had brought them all low, or if it was her punishment for cowardice, to meet him again and again, remembered in a mortal hide, and be powerless to save him.

He moved with an athlete’s grace, maybe limping a little, but the smile was all hustler, as was the way he ducked his head to speak into her ear. “Are you lonely tonight, pretty lady?”

Light, Muire thought, and closed her eyes. He looked nothing like Strifbjorn. Nothing at all. His eyes weren’t even gray; they were a blue-flecked hazel, though still far too pale for the darkness of his skin.

But the voice resonated in the fallible vaults of memory, and she would have sworn it was the same.

But before she could answer, the presence she’d been following evaporated. She jerked her head around and stepped sharply away. “Damn me,” she murmured, and didn’t even bother to shake her head at the pretty, scar-faced gigolo as she turned and ran back up the stair without thinking too hard of what she was leaving behind, except in that it explained why the Wolf might have come here.

 

________

 

At the top of the stairs from the dark, crowded underground bar, Muire hesitated. She knew she wasn’t alone. He had seen her, maybe even known her, when the young man had crossed to her with such haste, drawing eyes. And he was waiting for her here, now, in the darkness of an unlit alley halfway down the block from the intersection of Oak Street and Pleasant.

The Well was full of them—little blind alleys and side streets, crooked ways that went nowhere, fire escapes and roads that skipped over crowded rooftops, almost close enough to the light-laced underbelly of the Tower to scrape dirt from it with your fingernails. Muire unbonded Nathr, drew the earth-dull sword into her hand, and turned south, where the Wolf awaited.

She wondered if the rain was still falling. It couldn’t fall here, of course, but rivulets gathered to streams, and pools collected in the low places of the city, where pumps labored ceaselessly to lift the water to the river. It had been a pleasant riverfront once, with walks and bridges and pubs built feet-wet in the very canal. Now, the scent of it hung ropy on the moist breeze riffling her hair, and she tugged the hood of her cloak up, picking her way between nighttime strollers and the neon-steeped puddles on the clumsily cobbled road.

A group of Mongrels hung about the entrance to a strip club, interchangeable in their green and black livery, keeping the peace merely by the dangerous weight of their presence. They wore their titanium ID bands on their right wrists, and the oldest couldn’t have been twenty. She nodded to Muire as Muire passed, her brows drawn together in a way that suggested she was hoping, maybe, for a little trouble.

“The Technomancer provides,” Muire murmured, and the gang relaxed. Bored or not, they were there to keep the peace, and it wasn’t as if she needed a license to go armed. She turned down the alley, made two blind corners, and paused in the darkness to let her eyes adjust.

She did not pause long.

Something thumped wetly on the pavement ahead and rolled a half-turn, mewling weakly. Muire lifted her sword, calling Light. A single dim spark ascended the blade like a raindrop rolling in reverse. It cast little brightness, but enough: the figure was that of a young man in his teens, and Muire felt him dying. With the last of his strength, he turned his head to the guttering light, and Muire stepped back from the reflections in his eyes.

A child, a child, Ingraham whispered in Muire’s heart.

Night was all around her, but a denser patch flowed forward, stepping over the dying boy to pause beyond the reach of her blade. His eyes were a gray so pale as to be silver, ringed about the iris with a darker band. They glimmered in shadow, cloaked in frantic starlight as an ember is cloaked in rippling heat.

“Name thyself,” he demanded.

Muire’s fingers tightened on the gridded hilt of her sword. “Muire, child of the Light.”

She had forfeited her right to the title, and here, with that sad spark trembling along Nathr’s edge, the ridiculousness of it ached all along her bones and in the space between her eyes. So frail to raise the Light up as a shield against this, before which it had already quailed.

He inclined his head as if to study the stones beneath her feet, the crass meat of her form. “The Light is dead, little sister.”

His name flew from her lips as if on the wings of a swan. “Mingan.” A legendary darkness: the hungry void, given flesh and form in tarnished silver. She’d found his sword, but not his body, and so she had the honesty not to pretend surprise at encountering him again. Still, Nathr’s Light stuttered when Muire met his gaze.

Vengeance, whispered the voice of a mortal man. Bitter on her tongue, Muire tasted her fear. The Grey Wolf’s nostrils flared; he could smell it.

“I am that.” He stepped one step closer on the unbloodied stones. He cast open his grey cloak, revealing a belt naked of weapons, black leather boots and trousers and a charcoal shirt. His hands were gloved. He had not replaced his crystal blade.

A twisted silver ring held his grizzled hair back, and he still wore a ring in his ear of clean white metal. Though she was not close enough to see the detail, she remembered the wolf’s heads that clasped the metal tongue locked through his ear, remembered the girl who had crafted them with such care and hope, and she hated him a little more.

It was almost a clean hate, for a moment, untainted by her own failures. She went to meet him. His eyes shone as hungry and dead as a shark’s. Tarnished silver—scratch it and it still gleams. Nathr felt light and useless in her hand.

“Little Immortal.” He smiled a cruel and beckoning smile. “Hast a long life before thee. Wouldst cast it away?”

Thee her, indeed. The world had moved on without them. She would not play his game of memory. Brilliance flared, radiance spilling from her eyes, her open mouth, drawn as if dragged on wires.

“Candle-flicker. Come into the darkness, and be no more alone.” His smile grew tender. “Thou art an avenger, sister. Thy Light has abandoned thee. Avenge thyself.”

Her foot lifted and stepped waveringly forward. That craving for vengeance let her understand, for a moment too well, why this her brother might have fallen. The desire was in her. The heat of her sword scorched her hand. She came to him. . . .

She lunged.

And failed again.

Light blazed Nathr’s length, filling the alley with a stellar incandescence, so bright it washed everything to stark blue and to shadows, making knife-edged the crags of his face. The Grey Wolf sidestepped, weaponless, sweeping aside the swirl of her weighted cloak and catching her right hand with arrogant ease. He twisted, and her bright blade doused upon the stones as the bones in her wrist and hand cracked and slipped.

Muire choked on a cry. Her knees folded. She fumbled left-handed for the flechette pistol, but the Grey Wolf caught her arm and hauled her up again, drawing her into the shadow of the wall. A fragile halo of numbness wrapped her hand, which she knew would shred into agony the instant she tried to move. Ironically, the pressure of the Grey Wolf’s hand was a comfort, stabilizing broken bone.

“Not bad.” His voice all seduction, he bent over her. His breath ran hot along her throat, against her ear as he whispered. She had expected his flesh to be cold, cold as a shark’s, cold as the grave. But it was wolves’ breath: hungry, murderous. A bitter scent clung about him. His body within the clothing was hard as sculpture; his heart beat passionlessly while hers hammered in her chest. His fingers left her shattered wrist and tangled her hair, pinioning her head to bend it back. “Fear not. Thou wilt find pleasure in it.”

Desperation flared, overwhelming panic. She knew what he intended. She remembered the tarnished, their perverted kiss, and how their victims, even spared, would return to be taken again. She shook her head against the iron of his grip and found her voice somewhere. “No.”

He paused. She stared up into his eyes, unwilling to close her own, as if she could force him to see her. As if she could somehow push back through the years and the savagery and the betrayals and make him see—

“Strifbjorn,” she said, though the name came up as if on fishhooks. “That’s why you came, isn’t it? You see it. You see it. As you loved him, Mingan, listen to me now. . . .”

“And what wouldst thou know of love, candle-flicker?” His hesitation bent to mockery. “This is as close to an act of love as thou wilt ever taste.”

He settled his open mouth on hers.

I do not wish it! She braced herself against the pleasure that must follow, the aching gorgeousness of the tarnished kiss.

But—As thou wish’t, he whispered in her head, and he let her keep the pain. Past the rush and the roaring of the Light, past the terrible intimacy of that murderous kiss as he swallowed her breath and drank deep . . . there was the pain. He honored her request and did not hold away the pain, and she clung to it, and remained herself to the end.

Surely the soul of an immortal must fill his hunger. Surely it must. Take my life and make it the last life that you take.

With that in her heart, she gave herself up to him willingly. A fierce joy grew in her breast; this was why she had been spared so long ago, spared for this sacrifice, this expiation. This redemption.

His hunger made a grave for ten thousand souls. In her arrogance, she fancied hers could fill it. And maybe she could come back, too, and be reborn, as innocent as Strifbjorn.

And then the darkness drew her down, into silence, into warmth, into forgiveness. . . .

No.

 

She came awake on the stones, aching and numb with immobility and chill. Knees, booted feet, a cloaked figure crouched beside her. Starlight shone from his eyes, the light of hungry, distant suns.

“Live, then,” he said, and brushed her cheek with the back of a glove, “and be in the future less innocent.”

“You have no problem preying on innocents,” she answered, jerking her chin at the corpse of the Mongrel boy. In her ear, Fasoltsen whimpered.

Mingan sighed, stood, turned away, straight-backed under the heavy gray cloak. He still wore his hair in the einherjar style, a shot-silver queue hanging long between his shoulders.

He turned back and smiled. “When has the Light ever been gentle to innocence?”

She realized, for she had forgotten, that he was beautiful. Not lovely to look at; he was not that, with his craggy features and his ridged nose. But full of awful grace and wilderness.

She could not answer. She pushed herself up left-handed, moving with exaggerated caution around the waking agony of her right wrist and hand. The numbness had faded, replaced with a pain that made her want to vomit, or curl around her arm and hide in deepest shadow until the hurting softened.

He came back to her, crouched again and lifted her to her feet with ease, and brushed her hair back although she flinched away. “Mine ancient enemy,” he said, as if it were a benediction.

She winced and looked down, and though her geas hammered at her like the wings of a caged bird at the bars, she did not move to strike at him. Coward, caitiff, craven.

I am sorry, Ingraham.

“I will hunt you,” she said softly. She made herself lift her chin and meet his gaze though she wobbled with weakness and pain. “I will hunt you. For Herfjotur. For Strifbjorn.”

“I will await thee,” he answered, and slipped into the dark as if he had never been.