“You know that about me?”
“I know everything about you. Certainly Genitrix informed you that thoughts are things—waveforms suspended in the vacuum that holds us all. I see your wavebundles very clearly, Egil. I understand why you want to kill me. I have come to offer you that chance.”
Egil’s mouth balked.
“You are right to be surprised,” Gai told him. “Of the great many of your fellow beings that Genitrix has reproduced, you are among the very few whom I have addressed directly in recent times. I need you—or, at least, a man like you. Ah, I see your curiosity is piqued. What need has the Rimstalker of its bait—and how will that need give you a chance to kill me?”
“Genitrix has warned me of your duplicity, Rimstalker.” Egil pointed his knife at Gai. “You create to destroy. I will not be your fool.”
“You are already my fool. You are alive in Chalco. Shall I simply leave you here to continue as I found you?” Gai faded to a blur.
“Wait!”
The Rimstalker’s plasma shape concentrated, though she remained transparent to the sunlight slanting through her.
“Say what you have come to say, Rimstalker.”
The mirrors of Gai’s eyes widened, and Egil saw himself leaning forward, knife held tip up. He sheathed the blade. “Good,” the Rimstalker condoned. “Maybe you are the very one I am seeking. You have learned well from Genitrix. You know, she doesn’t tell everyone she makes all that she has told you. That is only a recent development.”
“Since you aborted her creative functions in Doror,” Egil said.
“She’s been compensating for that lately by telling her creatures—at least those who can listen—what a monster I am. She doesn’t really believe that. It’s zōtl programming. Yet, I won’t deny it. I am a conscientious killer. My world is threatened by the zōtl. I will do whatever I can to save my people, even sacrificing other sentient lifeforms.”
“So I have seen, Rimstalker. What would you have with me?”
“A king. I am looking for a king.”
“Of what hell? Chalco is the zōtl’s kingdom.”
“Chalco cannot be ruled. Genitrix is still active here, and what I have in mind will require more stability than this genetic frenzy would allow. No, not Chalco. Doror is the kingdom I offer you.”
“Doror already has a king. Ieuanc 751—ruler of Doror these last three centuries.”
“Ieuanc 751 is a Crystal Mind. I want a human king to rule Doror.”
“Why?”
“The zōtl have no use for numans. They want intelligent creatures whose brains squirt certain chemicals when they feel pain.”
“You want to give Doror back to the zōtl?”
“Yes. The numans have been far too efficient in sweeping the zōtl aside, and now the numans encroach on Chalco. That has made the zōtl desperate enough to attack my Form—and that I cannot allow. Far better that the zōtl have all the humans they can process. Then their timelines will be more vivid in the Overworld, and my chances of finding the O’ode that much greater.”
“And I am the one you have selected to usurp Ieuanc 751?”
“You are the one. But there is more. I want you to strike a bargain with the zōtl. You will make an arrangement with them whereby they will receive all the humans they want from what Chalco-Doror can produce—in exchange for not attacking the worlds of your kingdom.”
“Of which Know-Where-to-Go is to be one.” A scimitar smile slashed across Egil’s yellow beard. “You will thus retain your freedom to search for the O’ode unmolested. Cunning, Rimstalker. But why would the zōtl agree to such an arrangement?”
“Do you think they prefer being killed by the Crystal Mind? They will agree—and readily.”
“And me? You think I am cold enough in my heart to feed my fellow humans to the zōtl so that I may be king of a doomed empire?”
“All empires are doomed. Yours will endure a thousand years. What earthly king could want more? As for your fellow humans—have you forgotten your life on Earth? You are a Viking. You were bred to conquer weaker races and dominate them. I am offering you a chance to fulfill your breeding. You will select the weakest of the humans for the zōtl to take. The strongest and the most beautiful will thrive under your protectorship. Why do you hesitate? This has been nature’s power from the beginning of life—a blind power. Why should it not be in your hands, where it can be used discriminately, for the outright benefit of those who merit your favor?”
“Genitrix warned me you would do anything to achieve your aims.”
“Anything. Will you then decline the power that I am offering you?”
Egil Grimson turned away, to think without the eerie shape of the Rimstalker filling his sight. He stared into red sunlight glistering on the stream. A Viking, proud of his ferocity, prouder for knowing how he had died without a twinge of cowardice to satisfy his enemies, he knew he was strong enough to do what the Rimstalker asked. He had no doubt of that. But he feared the zōtl. Though he had only seen them from afar as silver streaks of needlecraft, he had heard all the abhorrent stories of what they did to people, and he had viewed their spidery bodies when still inside Genitrix and had felt the horror of staring into the clasped hemispheres of their abstract faces.
“Is that not the very visage of death?” Gai asked, reading his thoughts. “Must we not all face that visage someday, in some form? I am offering you the power to choose who will die now and who will live to die later.”
“That is not a power for any man to hold,” Egil declared, almost in a shout.
“No, not for any man—but for a king. The zōtl will feed anyway, Egil—and without you, they will feed on whomever they capture. With you, there is hope for a human kingdom, free of domination by zōtl or numans. Or would you rather I simply leave you here on Q’re and search for my king elsewhere? I will find the one I seek, sooner or later.”
Egil turned about, the caverns of his eyes lit with fiery hatred. “You said I would have a chance to kill you, Rimstalker. What do you mean?”
“Just that. As king, you will be an ally of the zōtl. Even now, they are picking furiously at the lynklock to the grotto on Know-Where-to-Go, where my physical body is housed. By allowing them to feed without fighting, you will give them a greater opportunity to break through the Tryl code and kill me. You may very well be the death of me.”
“I cannot believe that.”
“Believe, Egil Grimson. This is war. My world has been devastated by the zōtl. My people—my very family-killed by them. I am willing to risk my life to have a chance to destroy them. And that chance will be equally yours to destroy me.”
“Then I accept, Rimstalker. I will be your king—though I do not see how you will draw the zōtl into this.”
“That will be far easier than wooing you, Viking. Saor is my ambassador to the zōtl. He will arrange everything. You need only remember your ancestry.”
“That I will, Rimstalker. If I am to be a king of hell, I will be a strong Viking king. Our fates are decided by powers greater than either of us, for even you do not know how the fates will decide the future.”
“That is why I can promise nothing but my strategy. Both your will and the fates are needed to make it real. So gather those of your tribe that you want with you. In the coming days, I will have Lod terminate the magravity generators in Doror. In the confusion, you will begin your war against the Crystal Mind.”
The Fugitive Lords of Hell
His bravery is so lonely, his suffering so wise, Frya thought, even as she sent the signal that would call in the troops to destroy him. He would have made a fine Aetheling for the Emirate.
Frya Kori placed a needle-thin transmitter in a crevice of a treetrunk on the perimeter of a rebel camp, and walked back through the forest to where others hunched about a leaf-fire. The man who inspired her compassion acted as the rebel leader, Wulf Bane, a lanky, beardless, and broad-faced man with a mane of black hair. With his Viking and distort followers, he had sabotaged many of the
Emir’s efforts to establish colonies in Chalco; the rebel gang had blown up zōtl lynks and freed the vassals destined for Galgul. Wulf sat on a fallen log listening with the others to the storysong of the gang’s runesmith, whose mellifluous voice lilted sadly about the tales of lost comrades.
When he saw her enter the glade, Wulf waved Frya to him, and she wended her way among prone warriors and sat on the log beside him. Though she had only joined the gang several days earlier, Wulf had taken a liking to her and kept her close. She was a handsome woman, long-boned, strong-nosed, with a generous mouth, large blue eyes, and swan’s-down hair that she had shaggily cropped for this assignment. Most of the women in the gang came from ferine tribesfolk and distorts who had joined the rebels during their long wanderings. Frya, the only Viking woman among them, understood the envy in the other women’s dark eyes whenever Wulf showed her preference.
On Mugna, where Frya had joined the rebels, she had told them that she, too, wandered as a fugitive from the Emirate, appalled by Emir Egil Grimson’s cruelty. The burned-out husk of a strohlkraft—one of the Emirate’s sleek ramstat flyers—and the charred corpses of several vassals, whom she had claimed as her family, gave credence to her story. In fact, a dozen such scenarios had been prepared among the wild worlds of Chalco. She had been the one the fates had chosen for these rebels. The transmitter she had activated at that time became useless when the gang took her with them through a lynk. In the intervening four days, they had journeyed among four different worlds, and she had lost all but this last transmitter in futile efforts to alert the Emirate’s troops to the whereabouts of the fugitives. At any moment, night or day, following his instincts alone, Wulf could command his gang to flee through the nearest lynk. With the lynk-compasses they carried, they could easily locate the nearest escape portal.
In mid-melisma, the runesmith stopped, silenced by a hand-signal from Wulf Bane. “To the lynk,” the leader called out, and the rebels leapt to their feet, weapons and rucksacks in hand, lean-tos collapsing, and leaf-fire instantly smothered.
An icicle sharpened in Frya’s heart. If the rebels fled now, she would have no means of contacting her troops, having just activated the last of her transmitters. “Wait,” she said to Wulf. “Why must we flee? We’ve just arrived but an hour ago. I’m exhausted—and Elphame is the most beautiful of the worlds I’ve seen with you so far.”
“Exhaustion serves our enemies,” one of the dark-haired, sloe-eyed women conveyed in passing.
“Only freedom is beautiful,” another chimed as she flew by, lugging the camp’s lux coils.
“Where are we going?” Frya asked.
Wulf smiled in his solemn way. “You’ve been with us too short a time to understand our ways, Frya. Trust me and in time you will see that it is better to run wild and free than to sit comfortably among slaves like your old masters.”
The icicle in her heart pricked her with the frightful suspicion that he knew her perfidy. Before she could speak to test that, one of the rebel men rushed up to them. “Wulf, the lynk-compass is warbling. That can only mean—”
“A ramstat field, closing in,” Wulf completed. “No time to dash. They’ll know where the lynk is as well as we and cut us off. Weapons up! Find cover! Today we fight for our freedom!”
The rebels scattered, laserbolt pistols and rifles clattering, plasteel blades hissing out of their sheaths. In that instant, the clearing erupted. Laser cannon sheared off the tops of trees, and paths of flame crisscrossed the glade, igniting the brush. Three strohlkraft roared overhead, dropping cannisters of liquid fire that the rebels blasted in midair. Napalm splattered into the forest canopy, and the sky boiled into black smoke.
At the start of the attack, Wulf seized Frya by her arm and dragged her into the woods. Gouts of flame fell all about them, and the air went styptic and acrid. Without breaking stride, Wulf slapped an airmask onto his face and helped Frya with hers. On all sides, the shadows of the rebels flitted among tattered veils of fire, faces masked, guns lancing the sky with laserbolts.
A massive explosion heaved everyone to the ground as the rebels’ laserfire struck a chink in strohlkraft armor and two of the flyers collided. The fireball of fused strohlkraft plunged into the canopy, slewed through the forest, splintering trees, and tumbled into the clearing that the rebels had abandoned. Wulf lifted Frya to her feet by her belt, and they sprinted deeper into the woods as the holocaust expanded behind them, chunks of burning metal skipping along the forest floor and spinning into the hazy sky.
The third strohlkraft circled around and came down ahead of Wulf and Frya. Its laser cannon blasted a clearing in the forest and alighted among blazing trees, repulsion from its ramstat field kicking flames into sparks and coils of smoke. Hatches flashed open, and hooded, scarab-faced figures leaped out, laserifles firing.
Wulf had only a moment to think: Scyldars! The Beast has sent the dead after us!
Then, the black-masked figures surrounded him, and he swung in an arc, rifle rapid-firing. Frya crouched behind him, expecting the scyldars to cut him down at any instant. But he did not panic, and each of his shots found its mark. He grabbed her arm, and they bolted from the strohlkraft, where the other rebels converged. They leapt over the bodies Wulf had dropped and barged through a thornbush, clothes shredding, airmasks protecting their faces. They heard the thud of grenade launchers behind them, and the next moment, the forest shook again as the strohlkraft blasted apart.
From under the thornbush, Wulf sniped at the scyldars that remained, and in minutes the last of the enemy collapsed in the rebels’ crossfire. An air-blast signaled all clear. Wulf helped trembling Frya to her feet, and they reconnoitered with the others in a glade on the far side of the destroyed strohlkraft.
“Casualties?” Wulf asked, pulling free from his mask.
His lieutenant, one of his Viking clan cousins, a stout man in a full beard patchy with scars, answered. “Four dead—three from the clan—cousins Wind, Longtime, and Graytooth—and one from the tribes, the woman Queza. Two more will be gone by nightfall, tribeswomen both.”
“Spare those two any more suffering,” Wulf ordered. “Have the runesmith sing the parting for the dead. And be certain to get all the lynk-maps from Longtime. He kept a holoset in his boot-heel.”
Wulf turned to Frya. Even through the sweat and tears that misted his eyes, his stare stayed tight and weighing. “They would have killed you, too, you know,” he said.
She understood then that he knew who she was. Her hand strayed toward her laserbolt pistol and stopped when his stare did not flinch. He was not going to kill her. “Why do you let me live?” she asked.
“You are one of us,” he answered. “Only you doubt that.”
After the runesmith finished his parting, the fugitives went to the nearest lynk and crossed to another island on the dayside of Elphame. Even at noon, Elphame was twilit, the sky mottled with pale silhouettes of planetesimals and worlds. Beyond those clustered crescents, the galaxy tilted, spiral arms silver fire in the gloaming. The runesmith sang to that ethereal beauty of their lost comrades, plaintive voice lifting into the wind that soared above the dusky archipelago.
The rebels ate their foraged food in silence from a bluff that overlooked an ocean where behemoths breached in spray-snorting lunges. With the meal and cleanup done, Wulf looked to where Frya hunkered and said aloud to the camp, “Frya Kori has something to tell us.”
Frya’s eyebrows lifted in a query to Wulf. By his knowing, relentless stare, she knew he would tell if she did not. Since the scyldar attack, the icicle in her heart had pierced her lungs and she had not been able to draw a full breath. Fear had impaled her. Not fear of death, for she was a Viking and had been bred to die for her clan. She feared the self-loathing that had begun to grow in her. Four days of shared hardship in the hell worlds of Chalco had earned her respect for the rebels. They lived as true Vikings all, even the distorts and tribesfolk who had joined Wulf Bane’s fugitive clan during its wanderings. If the strohlk
raft that she had called in had carried real troopers, she would have felt no remorse at betraying these brave rebels, and her part in the struggle to break these renegades would have continued. The scyldars proved the cowardice of her commanders. Scyldars, vassal corpses fitted with mindflex masks, usually showed up in situations with no hope of survival.
“I called in the troopers,” Frya confessed to the camp. “I did not know they would be scyldars.”
Angry exclamations erupted from the band of rebels, interspersed with the sigh of knives being drawn.
Wulf stood up and strode to the front of the bluff, facing the camp. “If blood is to be drawn for this, it will be mine. I knew she was a VEG agent.” He reached into his mane of hair and held up a receiver attached to an earloop. “I heard her transmitter signals. I was able to get us out each time before the signal could be answered—until this last time.”
The Viking Elite Guard, the Emirate’s warrior-zealots, selected for their cunning, ferocity, and willingness to sacrifice their lives to achieve their objectives, were trained from infancy to endure pain and to ignore fear. In the 280 years since Emir Egil Grimson had overthrown the tyranny of Ieuanc 751, the Viking Elite Guard had crushed every rebellion that arose in Doror and had, without the aid of conscripts or scyldars, claimed Valdëmiraën from distort tribes, built the glass-spired city of N’ym overpeering the abyss of Saor, and made that City of the Sky the Viking capital of Chalco.
“If you knew she was VEG,” the scar-faced lieutenant said, “why did you keep that knowledge secret from your clan?”
“That was my privilege as your leader,” Wulf answered. “For seven years, we have wandered Chalco, meeting every challenge the wild worlds and the Emirate have set before us. I see her as only one more challenge for us to conquer—but not with our blades—with our spirit.”
“And Longtime, Graytooth, Wind, and the tribeswomen—what of them?”
“What of them?” Wulf retorted. “They are dead.”
“That VEG beast killed them!”
The Last Legends of Earth Page 31
