This time, with the whole of northern Europa laid waste, was another story entirely. As Sigrun had said, they’d begun that journey purely out of self-interested motives. Adam thought Sigrun was being a little too hard on herself to call it selfish. They’d had a right to demand an answer about the curse. And the Odinhall and Valhalla had backed them, albeit for different reasons; they’d wanted to know where Loki had disappeared to, and why. They’d been suspicious of his motives. And now . . . millions of people were dead. Millions displaced. Millions more sent mad, or . . . malformed. Sleep had been very difficult for Adam to find, but again, he found solace in the fact that even the gods of Valhalla had said that it would have been far worse, if they hadn’t been there. That kind of assessment was a balm to his mind. But his conscience still itched.
The biggest problem at the moment, was that over the past fifteen years, he’d gotten used to having Sig around all the time. On the job with him, almost always within the range of his voice, maybe as distant as a radio, and never more than that. But she was spending three or four months at a stretch in the north right now, and he strongly suspected that if she weren’t married to him, she wouldn’t be taking any time away from the plight of those in Europa at all. The fact that she wasn’t here was a substantial adjustment, and it meant that he couldn’t pull her close at night. Bury his nose in her hair, smell the apple blossom shampoo, and relax, knowing that his personal world was in its orbit. It made it hard to turn off his mind, and not dwell on what else they could have, should have done. Especially when he knew damned well that there wasn’t even one more option they could have pursued. That was a hard sell to his subconscious at three antemeridian.
I should be in the north, with her. That was a constant refrain at the back of his mind, too. I should be up there, helping those people. I could be working with Vidarr, to train his jotun into an army. I could be working with the nieten, what they’re calling the beast-people, what a name. . . . His thoughts changed tracks. They say the Mongols retreated when they saw the mess they were about to invade in Raccia, and who can blame them? But they also see open lands, ripe for the taking. Why not exploit the chaos, kill some monsters, and take the lands the Khanate considers historically theirs, anyway? They’ll be coming back. It’s just a matter of time. I should be up there.
But instead, he was here. Where, if he was good at his job, he’d be in charge of this branch of the Praetorians inside of five years. It just felt so utterly pointless, to be filling out reports about suspected coin filing and counterfeiting in Little Nippon, suspected to be related to yakuza gangs that had moved there from Edo in the past ten years. This wasn’t who he was. This wasn’t what he was good at. He’d somewhat outgrown his career path, it seemed. But in the end, he was forty-one years old. His body was starting to protest field-work, as the trip into Fennmark had reminded him, pointedly. It was time to change gears.
But that didn’t mean that his desk felt any less cramped. It didn’t mean that the coffee, made from beans grown in Tawantinsuyu, didn’t bring back memories of drinking the stuff, cold, in their hotel in Machu Picchu, looking out the window at the home of the Sapa Inca, and wondering if they’d be able to get on a plane for home before the sun touched the Inti Stone at the summit of that mountain palace, or if they’d be found by a mob and lynched.
Adam realized he’d been wandering the hallways for a solid ten minutes, coffee cup in hand, and shook his head at himself. To gehenna with this. Go see Tren.
As promised, he’d managed to get Trennus a job here, in the counter-summoning department, which Trennus genuinely seemed to enjoy, but . . . counter-summoning was a quirky department. They were housed next to forensics, but where forensics had gleaming, stainless steel workbenches and microscopes, and the best calculi in the building, the counter-summoning department had a dozen tiny offices for foreigners who’d been recruited for their summoning abilities. Most of these were about the size of the average closet, and Adam, looking in at Trennus, always felt bad for complaining about his desk. Trennus looked up, and grinned at him. “Ben Maor!” he exclaimed as he leaned back in his chair. Which ensured that his desk promptly lifted up to balance on his knees, and the stack of books there just as promptly started to slide, inexorably, to the floor. “Son of a bitch!” Trennus rapped out, and lunged forward to rescue the stack of grimoires.
After picking up the books, they headed out to lunch together. Anything that involved being away from the tiny, cramped offices. “At least you get a break at night,” Adam said, over hummus and pita bread and kabobs at a café around the corner, looking down dubiously at his plate. It even felt strange, walking into a café, and knowing he could order anything he wanted off the menu. “Sig says your little corner of the Veil is the most restful place she’s ever been. She says it’s better than the Odinhall.”
“I don’t know about that. The Odinhall, everyone gets to make their own reality.” They were speaking in Latin, as they tended to default to; Trennus’ Hebrew was only used for official purposes and on the clock, and was thickly accented with a lilting roll. “The forest is pretty one-dimensional at the moment. I explained it to Kanmi, and he calls it the Garden of Continuity.” Trennus chuckled, and took a piece of meat off his skewer with his fingers, before putting it in his mouth. “I kind of like that.” He gave Adam a look. “As soon as I figure out how to bring a perfectly normal human there, you’re invited. Honestly, I think the only reason Sig made it there was because she was, well, drawn in the wake of other, larger things. Like a coracle caught in the wash of a freighter.” He paused. “Hmm. Maybe Asha can help pull you there.”
Adam grimaced. Technically, he should say no. He absolutely should say no. But his sense of being confined and constrained was intense, and instead, he found himself nodding. “I’d like that. So long as Sig can come along with us.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.” Trennus hesitated. “When I first went there, all I was . . . was what Asha first was, when she was . . . damaged. A ball of light and some tendrils. I had to work to create a self-identity, and some of that comes out of self-perception. I’d be fascinated to see what you look like to yourself.” He pulled a tomato off the skewer, gave the cooked, wrinkled thing a skeptical glance, and then shrugged and ate it. There was almost nothing that Trennus wouldn’t eat, Adam had realized, long ago. “Sig, though? She’s got a really bad self-image.”
“Her step-mother’s responsible for some of that,” Adam muttered. Medea was still alive, somewhere in Hellas. Sigrun didn’t even have an address for her step-mother, and it was better, all around, that it stayed that way. “I tried an experiment about, oh, ten years ago. I brought a mirror home, and hung it up in the bathroom in our Rome apartment. My explanation was that I was tired of using a hand-mirror to shave.”
“And?”
“Sig bought me a standing mirror, small enough to put in a drawer, and started using a different bathroom to get dressed in the morning.” Adam found himself starting to twirl a knife from the table in one hand, and had to make himself put it down. “I told her the avoidance was really silly, and dragged her in front of it. You ever try to make a cat look directly at you?”
“She wouldn’t look at herself, I take it?”
That long-ago day had been mind-numbingly frustrating. “She looked. Found a spot on her jeans where she’d snagged them on something, and said she needed to fix them. I told her no, wait, look. How can looking at yourself in the mirror be that bad?” Adam shook his head. This had been just after the events in Tawantinsuyu, in between her trips to be debriefed and re-educated by Reginleif. Oh, that’s right, Reginleif was a traitor. I wonder how many of their gods are currently wondering what kind of re-education she actually gave Sig. And Sigrun had looked at the mirror, but he’d seen her defocus her eyes. God damn it, Sig, look at yourself.
Adam, why are you making such a fuss over nothing? I see nothing of importance.
Did you see nothing of importance the day we got married, t
oo? Didn’t you think you looked good?
Confusion, briefly, in her face. Sophia helped me get dressed, but that was armor and a cloak, and my hair was down. She assured me that nothing was out of place, and I took a quick glance in the glass to ensure that she had not missed anything. I tried to look good, yes. But I was raised not to be vain, Adam. If you’re vain, you’re . . . .
. . . Punished for it?
Usually, yes. She’d held up a hand. The universe takes care of that. What’s that Indian concept you’ve told me about? Karma?
He’d rubbed at his eyes for a moment. All right, pictures, then. You’re fine with people taking your picture. You even keep them on the walls. It was true, too; she had dozens of pictures of them, with their fellow Praetorians, and their children, on the walls of their Judean house, even today.
I don’t mind having our life together chronicled, Adam. That’s important. That’s worth doing.
And then it had sunk in for him. She only lets her picture be taken when we’re together. They’re . . . reminders. Like her prints from the various cities we’ve been.
So he hadn’t been at all surprised when she’d eventually glued a piece of corkboard over her half of the mirror, and started hanging notes there from pushpins. Reminders of appointments and schedules and everything else. The best he’d been able to do was to brush her hair out for her, every night. Let her relax into his hands. Primate social grooming had an effect even on god-born, apparently, and she’d let the hair grow out. Mostly, he suspected, because he made such a point of liking it. There really only seemed to be three accepted valkyrie styles, anyway. Long, and down, as when they’d been married. Long and braided, with the option of being pinned in a bun at the back of the neck, as Sigrun typically wore it. And short, cropped to the nape of the neck, like Reginleif. No deviation whatsoever.
Then again, that was a part of how people could tell who they were, just from seeing them walk down a street. He couldn’t imagine Brandr or Erikir affecting a Nahautl shaven scalp with a raised ridge of hair down the middle, spiked with egg-white, as he’d seen a variety of young men from Novo Gaul doing on the far-viewer of late. The mere idea was ludicrous, and he’d actually chuckled when he’d seen the young Gauls doing their best to look like Jaguar warriors. Ehecatl would laugh. Young people these days. Do they have any idea how idiotic they look?
That thought alone had made him feel about ninety.
In the here and now, Trennus continued working his way through his meal. “Look, when Sig gets back, we’ll all have dinner together, or something. Send the children over to your parents, with Fritti, for the evening. Maybe Asha can talk some sense into her.” He paused, obviously considering his own words. “Maybe Sari would have a better chance,” Trennus amended.
That would be a first. Sigrun doesn’t hear what she doesn’t want to hear. He loved his wife, but this was one of the roadblocks of their married life. She’d hear him on the topic of work. Of family. Of children. Of gods, religion, natural philosophy, everything, except on the subject of her, herself. How many times had he made a note in his journal of weather events that had seemed oddly related to her mood? The light rain-showers that always followed sex. The more passionate, the better the chances of an actual thunderstorm, like their first night, in Rome. The fact that Judean weather forecasters were now talking about the development of a changing microclimate here, because summers were milder, rainier, and cooler, and because there had been bumper crops every fall—though that could be related, Adam thought, to Lassair’s presence here, as well. Snow had fallen three times in the past three years, which was enough to get climatologists excited. Not about global cooling, but about a shift in sea currents and prevailing winds. Something, anything, that was responsible for cool, gentle, nightly rains that happened to coincide with every vacation that Adam and Sigrun had spent here.
And yet, he knew precisely what her answer would be, if he handed her the journal. That weather was weather, that she was a valkyrie, and that she had no control over such things. She was what she was, nothing more, nothing less. And how could he fight that fight with her, when every time she got ready to leave for the north, he could hear her throwing up in the bathroom just before departure? Because even her god-born body was rebelling at whatever the stress was, that was putting shadows under her eyes. And every time she vomited like that, the weather outside would shift. Cold fogs rolled in, the kind that might well convince air traffic controllers to ground the planes, at least for a while. She doesn’t want to go. She’s angry about something, punishing herself for something. Probably for having ‘failed’ in the northlands, or for selfishness, or some other damned thing. And she’s forcing herself to go, each time, in spite of it . . . but on some level, she’s doing what she doesn’t want to do, and her subconscious is beating her senseless for it. And there’s nothing I can do or say that will change any of that. But at least if I were there in the north, fighting side by side with her . . . . Adam threw down the remains of his food, his appetite gone. But I’m not. Damn it all.
He finally looked up, and caught the look Trennus was giving him. “We can try. And bring Sari over, too. She’s been working just as hard as Sigrun, up to the north. She needs a break. Tireless spirit or not.”
He was rewarded with a startled blink. “You . . . wouldn’t mind?” Trennus said, cautiously.
Adam shrugged. “She’s part of your family. You two are . . . official . . . in a sense, right?”
Trennus winced. “We’re soul-bound, yes. I think Lassair and she negotiated out how much each of them gets, but I think it’s a fifty-fifty split. They didn’t really tell me the details.”
Adam shook his head. “Your life is far more complicated than mine, old friend. But . . .we’ve sort of been treating Sari as a . . . non-citizen alien for years. That’s wrong.”
Trennus just beamed for a moment, and slid his glasses back up his nose. “She’ll be happy, Adam. Thanks.”
And then they went back to work, and Adam braced himself, and walked into his small office. Sat at his small desk. And realized that his stomach had already started to churn. Guess Sig’s not the only one doing what she doesn’t want to do, because it’s what in front of her to do. Guess I am, too. Shut up and do the work, ben Maor. Just think. Twenty-four more years until retirement. Assuming Sophia isn’t totally off the mark, the world shouldn’t end by then.
______________________
Ianuarius 1, 1971 AC
Hadar ben Ilor, call-sign “Atzmay,” and his copilot, Jaron ben Maron, call-sign “Auzh,” took to the sky over Gotaland in their Tsadi-5 Dmiony, pushing north, with a wingman, into the Jotunheim mountains. “Anyone ever tell the locals that their choice in naming their mountain ranges is somewhat ironic?” Atzmay spoke through his mask radio to Auzh.
“I wouldn’t want to tell them that to their faces. Most of them still have that thousand-yard-stare going.” Auzh was eminently practical. “Probably not a good time to joke, Atzmay.”
They were part of the air wing of the Judean Defense Forces, and they and forty-seven other fighters had been dispatched to this frigid northern peninsula as a good-will gesture on behalf of Rome to the northern countries . . . and also as a bid to get more of the refugees to turn around and go home. The refugees had been in place for only eight months, but that was more than enough for them to wear out their welcome in many places. They provided competition for jobs that were in short enough supply as is; they placed a strain on charitable institutions and housing facilities; and, in many places, they were just . . . culturally and linguistically dissimilar. Jerusalem had taken in five hundred thousand Goths, Ostragoths, Jutes, and Cimbrics; Chaldea and Media had taken in two hundred thousand Raccians. Lydia and the rest of Asia Minor had dealt with an influx of Fenns, Estonians, Sami and just as many Goths as everyone else was dealing with.
The Goths tended to want to be able to worship their own gods, thank you, and to observe their own holy days. This made for a certain amount o
f friction, in Judea, anyway, where the highest sticklers objected, loudly, to the unbelievers carrying on with their foreign rituals. They had to put up with the Roman temples; Rome didn’t insist that they worship Roman gods, and so long as they didn’t vandalize Roman temples, everyone had gotten along fairly well for two thousand years. The area of Little Nippon was a small neighborhood, all things considered, and most of the people who lived there were engineers, and involved in the aerospace industry. They kept their kami-worship mostly inside their own houses. The Goths didn’t really have an area of their own yet—everyone wanted to see this as a temporary arrangement—and tended to conduct their religious observances outside, under an open sky, and usually around bonfires.
This had certain conservative segments of Judean society up in arms, Atzmay knew. He didn’t particularly care about that. About all he really cared about was flying. The pure rush of speed, of pushing his Dmiony through the air, the feeling of wind under the wings. Pushing himself and his machine to their limits.
Their current mission objective was to scout out through the mountains, where the locals had reported a potential rookery of lindworms. The damnable creatures were nowhere near as fast as his beloved Dmiony, which could move at twice the speed of sound. They didn’t have rockets, as his plane did. But the creatures flew at altitudes above where most helicopters could reach, hit speeds in excess of three hundred miles an hour in steep dives, and reached, at full adulthood, the size of elephants. Their overall wingspan should have made them clunky in the air, but they were, instead, frighteningly agile, and they readily attacked people and livestock. Farming communities had people with guns positioned at every cattle enclosure now, and still, there were daily losses.
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