“The scyldars killed them,” Wulf shot back.
“She called the scyldars down on us.”
“You are nearly blind if you believe that,” Wulf said. “We called the scyldars down on us when we chose to leave the Emirate. We chose hell over our lordly lives in Doror, because the Emir is no true warrior but a craven tyrant, a puppet of the spiders. Have you forgotten the pogroms that killed legions of distorts because they did not meet the Emir’s definition of human? Do we now pretend we did not see the pastures on Ren where people are bred like cattle, made to live in kennels, never to know their parents, or even to hear music, left to wander naked and uninformed until they are ready for consumption by the zōtl?”
“We have forgotten none of this, Wulf. Why do you think we fight with you? Why do you think so many of us have died at your side?”
“Ah, then you know,” Wulf replied with a shrewd squint. “This woman is not our enemy. She is but a weapon of our enemy. A weapon we will make our own. Imagine! A Viking Elite Guard fighting with us! Let word of that reach N’ym. Let the Emir think on that.”
Frya rose from where she squatted, jaw throbbing. “I have betrayed you, just as I said. I am a captain in the Elite Guard. And I will not fight with you. Come at me. All of you. Take my life. And I will surely take as many of yours with me as I can.”
Wulf stepped boldly into the line of fire, his back to the VEG spy. A huge, chill grace possessed him as he held his arms open before his angry people. “You will not deprive us of this weapon. None of you will harm her.” He gazed into each of their clenched faces, demanding their compliance. “This warrior will fight with us. That I swear on the blood of those we lost today.” Then he turned slowly and faced the hard-eyed woman. “You are one of us now, Frya Kori.”
“I am a Viking Elite Guard. I cannot be anything else. You know that.”
“I know you are a Viking. That is why I know you are one of us. You live to fight. But you cannot fight for the Emir anymore. He is no true Viking. If you look into your heart, you will see this is true.”
“There is no truth, Wulf Bane. Only conflict. Look into your heart, and you will see that is true.”
“I have indeed seen that, Frya Kori. That is why you find me as I am. I was born an Aetheling on Valdëmiraën. Ah, I see by your smile you knew that of me.”
“I did not know it—but I sensed it. You have the aloof and solitary bearing of an Aetheling.”
“My clan were lords. Graytooth who died today was regent of Sakai. My cousin there with the beard patched with scars was duke on Ras Mentis. All the Viking men here were among the chiefs in the distort wars. We stalked the Overworld for runaway vassals, going to the far horizons even the Ordo Vala dread. And we ruled our fiefdoms with nobility and grace—until we looked into our hearts. And there we saw the conflict—the true conflict of life and death, of being and nothing, that is the heritage of all mortals. After that, we could no longer serve an Emir who is no more than a slave to the inhuman masters of these worlds. No true Viking can live to serve. We are born to rule.”
“We rule Doror and Valdëmiraën,” Frya protested. “In time, we will rule all of Chalco.”
“We rule nothing! The zōtl rule and we serve. Every Viking, even the Emir himself, is but a vassal to the spiders.”
“We have an alliance with the zōtl. They take our undesirables, we take our liberty with these worlds.”
“Bah! We ransom our liberty with human souls. Is even the most undesirable human worth sacrificing that we may continue to live in servitude to the spiders? Look into your heart, Frya Kori. Having known us—having lived as one of us, free, truly free of any other power but our own wills—can you now return to the Emirate and call yourself a Viking?”
“I am an Elite Guard,” she said quietly, as if to herself. “I serve the Emir.”
“And he serves the zōtl.”
“He deals with the zōtl. They are a reality that must be confronted.”
“Let us confront the spiders with our weapons—not our cowardice.”
“The Emir is no coward. He is a Viking of the first world—of Earth. He suffered and died on the storm-tree, brave as Odin.”
“Would Odin send scyldars—programmed corpses—to fight for him?”
“I did not know scyldars were to be used.”
“What else do you not know? How much do you need to see before you realize we are the true Viking lords—we are the human spirit, bred to fight, as all life has fought from the beginning of time.”
Cold awareness saturated her, and her knees almost buckled before her training asserted itself. The inhuman scarab-faces of the scyldars rose up in her memory, the black, featureless faces of death itself. They were the one enemy, the only enemy of life—and seeing that, she sagged to her knees.
Wulf Bane knelt beside her and put a firm arm about her shoulders. “Now, you see. We are all fugitives. We have always been fugitives from the void. Whatever comfort, whatever power we gain from outside ourselves diminishes us—because comfort and power, unless they are won from the void inside, are illusions that make us forget the emptiness that carries us. When we forget that, we believe we deserve comfort and power and so we are capable of any evil. We deserve nothing but what we make of ourselves. We deserve nothing else. And when we understand that, then nothing is enough.”
Frya looked up, eyes webbed in tears. “I did not know they would be scyldars. I thought—I really thought we were the heroes.”
Wulf smiled with sullen grief. “We are heroes. All of us. And we can be together. But only if we stand alone.”
*
Chan-ti heard this story from a cowled distort with a glassy face, whom she had worked with in the mushroom fields on the Dragon’s Shank, before Fra Bathra arrived and confined her. Fech, the glass-skinned man, brought her meals and often lingered to chat, mostly about Fra Bathra’s enormous appetite for glazed slugs and mushroom wine. The hamlet’s population was too small to support the Cenobite’s perpetual midstim trance and work the fields at the same time. And since many of the Saor-priests in Perdur enjoyed the Brood’s comestibles and would dangerously resent the Cenobite for denying them, Fra Bathra sought his pleasure in the ancient ways of wine, food, and frequent stimulation of his reproductive glands, for which he preferred the silver-scaled women.
When Chan-ti had tired of hearing about Fra Bathra’s appetites, Fech told her about the fugitive lords of hell. His glassy visage clouding red, he concluded, “I know their tale well, for I was of them. You have not heard of them, then?”
“There are many Foke tales of wanderers among the worlds, some about Aesirai. I don’t remember hearing of Wulf Bane.”
The distort’s coloring dimmed, though his gaze remained vivid. “If you’ve not heard of Wulf Bane, then you’ll not have heard of me—Fech the Betrayer. Yes, it was I who betrayed the fugitive lords to the Aesirai—I who had run with them from before Frya. I believed all the glory words Wulf spoke, all the staunch speeches about freedom as a devotion of will, about the void that carries us all. Oh, I was a grand believer. I risked my life time and again for those precious thoughts. But in the end, I could not stand alone. On Xappur, I began to change. I got the changing sickness. My jaw began to shine—”
“Bonelight,” Chan-ti recognized, with a dry voice.
“That was it. Bonelight. I was becoming a seraph. Wulf and the others, they wanted to stay on Xappur and tend me—but they couldn’t stop it. A Saor-priest we had captured told me I could be healed in Perdur. You figure the rest. You can see how I am healed. The fugitive lords were destroyed in the fog on Xappur. And I am come here, healed—but never again whole.”
Remorse, time's malignity, Chan-ti recalled from The Book of Horizons but did not say it, knew not what to say. Before she could muster a reply, Fech jerked upright—and they both heard the telepathic head calling for her: You are wanted, young sister. Be wary.
Fech fled, and Chan-ti stood at the threshold. The shrill voice of Fra
Bathra fluted from below, “Chan-ti Beppu—you may come down now. I would speak with you.”
Chan-ti stepped out into the wan glow of gourd lanterns, went to the head of the stairs and spotted the Cenobite below in the large kitchen, bald, bulging forehead sparkling with sweat. He summoned her with two crooked fingers.
When she stood before him, the sweat ran down the seams of his jowls into the folds of his black robe, and she could smell the mushroom wine on his quick breaths. His wee eyes looked at her in a new way, soft and surly at the same time. He put thick fingers on her frayed shirt, and his lumpy face mooned closer.
Chan-ti stepped back, aghast.
The Cenobite exposed tiny teeth in a cold smile. “I was wrong to have locked you away, young one. You should enjoy your freedom among the Brood. And you will, yes, you will—if you are free with me.”
He put his hands on her breasts, and she stifled a cry, knowing it was useless. Then revulsion cut through her, and she brought her knee up swiftly into the soft flesh pressing her.
Fra Bathra curled around a sharp cry, and lifted his head in an enraged sneer. “Don’t force me to hurt you. I have had enough of distorts. You will please me, Chan-ti Beppu.”
She pressed backward against a chair, groped for it to defend herself. But before she could bring it around, Fra Baba stiffened, and his eyes squinted tightly. The Face of Night grew loud in his head: You dolt! Don’t you feel what is happening? Lod comes for Chan-ti Beppu! He has inscribed the thought in your head to have this woman so that you would bring her outside. He would already have snatched her by now if I were not blocking him.
With great difficulty, Saor indeed blocked Lod. Most of Saor’s power had been tapped to run zōtl lynks, and the little left him by the spiders could barely monitor his own priests. This peccable fool had reigned as Cenobite for so long for that reason. Saor would have struck him dead on the spot, but he needed every erg of strength to stop Lod from materializing.
Sparks whirred, brightening the kitchen, flashing off copper pots and the water bucket. Hanging plants ignited, and tendrils of flame crawled into the rafters. Fra Baba turned to the door, but his master’s voice stopped him.
Stay here. Lod wants to draw you outside, where he can snatch the woman. Stay here. I will protect you.
The ceiling and wainscotting sheeted into flames. The air drooled fire. Chan-ti had instinctively huddled, but none of the combustion touched her or the numb-faced Fra Bathra. Flames, smoke, and even heat kept at bay by a bell-jar force visible against the churning holocaust.
The stairs collapsed, and Fech’s body whirled by, fireblown, spinning with the stairway and banister up into the conflagration.
Saor resolved to stave off Lod no matter the cost. This was Saor’s domain, directly under his Form, and if he could not deny Lod here he could deny him nowhere. The Rimstalker would know that the Face of Night truly had grown weak. Saor strained to the friable edge of his strength, repelling the seething hot pressure of Lod. For the sake of the worlds, he ignored the pain of his effort.
The zōtl had been careful to program Saor with purpose. Life’s defender against the World Eater Gai, he believed that if he failed, in a few thousand years, all would be void. And if he won, his victory would blaze billions of years into the future, out into the white orchards of galaxies, where he would eventually take his place among watchful minds at the red limit of the cosmic horizon.
A whirlwind of whitehot energy whipped ashes of the cottage into a thermal spout. With a brattle of thunder, darkness descended in great clots among the falling embers.
Chan-ti and Fra Bathra stood unscathed at the center of a scorched circle. The houses on either side were not even singed. The Brood had gathered on their stoops, alerted first by the telepathic head and then by the fiery geyser. Among them fretted Nappy Groff and Bram Gorlik. They had woken from their exhausted sleep to find that the acid mists had risen, disclosing that the cliff-face they had been hugging in the dark rose directly behind a hamlet of crouched cottages.
The moment they awoke, Gorlik had wanted to tell Nappy about the Face of Night’s visitation and the phanes he had given them—but the miraculous appearance of the village, where before there had been only darkness and scalding mist, troubled him with the memory of Saor’s threat. Before he could resolve himself against his fear, a column of fire bloomed like dawn over the hamlet. He and Nappy had crashed through a garden and down an alley to reach the first real illumination they had experienced since leaving the Overworld. The sight of Chan-ti Beppu, smudged and wild-haired among the dwindling flares, drew them closer. Nappy, mesmerized by exhaustion and the sight of a woman he had never really thought he would see again, and Gorlik, stung by the immediacy of his pact with the Face of Night, gawked.
Fra Baba Bathra wiped dewed fear from his thick brow and muttered a prayerful thanks to the Face of Night.
“Your thanks are misplaced,” a vibrant voice announced from the sky.
A spark flared to a star above the hamlet. The Brood cowered, and murmurs hushed to silent awe as the star descended, lifting colors out of the landscape—gray, insipid hues, bleached by an aeon of darkness. The wincing radiance hardened to a human form, twice the size of a man, blindingly featureless. At his feet, a shadow pooled.
Lod flurried with triumph. He had come with great reluctance to the kingdom of the Dark One, afraid of his counterpart’s power and, worse, his allies: Lod dreaded the possibility that the zōtl virus was contagious. When he had first arrived through the lynk, after a frightful crossing through the mirrorland of the Overworld, he had wandered charily. Fortunately, Chan-ti’s waveform had been instantly apparent, flavored by her time-displacement. There were others with a similar feel, but they were not female. He had approached, intending to commune with her and lead her out, but some of the humans in this hive had mindreach and would hear him. So he had used the most accessible one, the one who would most readily accept Lod’s voice as the urgings of his own body—Fra Baba Bathra. But before he could get Chan-ti to where he could safely envelop her in his plasma shape and carry her off, Saor had confronted him and forced him to act.
Lod’s easy conquest left him elated, eager to return to Gai with news of Saor’s weakness. Repelled by the radiance of his counterpart’s victory, the shadow at Lod’s feet crawled away from his brilliance. Lod pointed at it, and the black puddle rose into the outline of a man the size and shape of Lod but lightless. “Saor, you will say it.”
Saor turned to where Fra Baba and Chan-ti tilted, rooted with shock, and proclaimed in his ponderous voice: “Woman, you are free. Go with Lod.”
Chan-ti walked toward the light, eyes averted from the glare. Lod opened an arm to her. “Do not be afraid,” he beckoned, kindly. “I am here to take you to Ned O’Tennis.”
“Beppu!” a voice called, and its familiarity jerked her around. Nappy Groff shouldered through robed distorts and stood at the edge of the light. Gorlik appeared behind him.
Chan-ti lifted to her toes as if to fly to Nappy. She looked up at the fire giant. “He’s my father,” she said and meant it. “I can’t leave him here.”
Lod sensed her emotional recognition, registered her joy and concern. He beckoned the Foke to him.
Nappy bounded forward, elated to find his daughter and be free of the Witch Maze he had thought his grave. Gorlik followed, eyes big with fear. He did not want to betray Lod. The being of fire looked powerful and noble. The dwarf unstrung his sojourn pack and raised it to throw it into the darkness. But his arm would not work. Saor nudged into his brain and staggered him forward. Too late, Gorlik howled his dismay. The bag burst apart in his hands. The phanes, activated by Lod’s field of force, uncoiled and slashed through the air so fast none spied them but Lod and Saor.
Lod cut his power immediately, but the cables were already on him, biting into him with ice-edged pain. The powerdrop shrunk him and helped the phanes snare his plasma shape. In a fraction of a second, fate had reversed. Darkness swooped in on a
man-sized manikin of tired yellow light bound across arms and thighs by two black pythons.
Saor’s jubilant cry churned a great wind that lifted agate tiles from roofs and blew humans along the street like leaves.
Chan-ti clutched at Nappy. They crashed against a stoop and lay on the steps in a tight hug, watching Lod’s slack body, flimmery with reddening light, drift upward into the blind depths.
Loryn
At Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho, Lorraine Poole had been an instructor in English and had taught several semesters of freshman composition and Introduction to Literature before a car crash on an ice-glassed freeway killed her. She remembered little about the accident —she had had an argument with her boyfriend and had been mulling that over while she drove home late at night. Visibility was good. The snow had cleared off, leaving the sky thistly with stars. But she had not really noticed the stars until she thought back on it, seven billion years after her steering wheel spun uselessly in her hands as her Ford Pinto glided over the ice and into the flaring dragon eyes of an oncoming diesel combine. She did not know if anyone else had died. She had not even realized she had died—until Genitrix woke her and told her where she had found herself: Xappur, the fog world of Chalco.
Unlike many of Genitrix’s salvaged lives, Lorraine did not emerge as an adult. By some whim that even Genitrix herself could only explain as a program variance, the supercoiling of her DNA had been properly adjusted to eliminate aging beyond physical maturity and to correct her myopia and hypoglycemia, and she had been reborn as an infant. Genitrix apologized for this during the long introductory gestation, when Lorraine seemed to be alive inside a vast opal filled with a salutary iridescence and the dulcet voice of her re-creator. Almost all of Genitrix’s infant creations aborted in their birthsacks, usually devoured by beasts and sometimes, in the more desolate places, simply left to wither and die where no one, human or beast, noticed them.
Lorraine forgave Genitrix in advance. Inside the clement embrace of the opal light, she floated, too euphoric to care. As she did for all her infants, Genitrix arranged for the memory net in Lorraine’s brain to withhold her recall of Earth and all she had learned during her gestation until puberty—if she survived until then.
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