“This morning. The Odinhall, ah . . . doesn’t particularly need to place telephone calls or send telegrams, dominus.” Sigrun rubbed at her forehead. “I was summoned. I must go. And I would be . . . greatly indebted, sir, if you could explain matters to the Praetorians, and tell them that I will gladly stand on their carpet to be caned at their leisure, assuming I can do so. I may not be permitted to return to the service of Rome after I have . . . finished accounting for my actions.” Adam could see the line of muscles in her throat move as she swallowed.
“Of course,” Livorus replied, immediately. “I’ll speak to the commander of the Guard myself.”
“Would it do any good,” Adam asked, surprising himself, “if we were to come with you? If we offered testimony?”
Sigrun actually chuckled, a single, rueful snort, and shook her head. “I rather doubt it. I, ah . . . don’t think you would be allowed to speak before the, ah, tribunal.” She was clearly edging around something. “They would not consider it to be your business.”
Adam shook his head. “All right, back up a moment here. You could be barred from further service with Rome, the Praetorians, or with this team.” He leaned back in his chair, frowning and scrubbing at his freshly-shaved chin with his knuckles. “I’d say that any of those three make it our business, Sigrun. You’re an integral part of this team. If they’re going to take you away from us, I think we’ve got a right to say something about that.” He looked at Kanmi, Trennus, and Ehecatl. “You?”
Kanmi snorted. “I say that if the rest of us have to go hang by our balls from meat hooks in the Praetorian main office, she should not get out of that particular joy.” He bared his teeth at Sigrun. “Though I think the command staff will find it challenging finding a place to sink a meat hook on you, Caetia.”
Trennus closed his eyes and chuckled, visibly fighting off the image. “If pushed to translate that out of the original Eshmunazar,” the Britannian said, dryly, “I think that means ‘if we’re all going to hang, we may as well hang together, as separately. Which I agree with. If . . . somewhat less colorfully.”
“I’m in,” Ehecatl said, simply. “I’m probably already in as much trouble with my own gods as a human can be, and live. Going to the Odinhall can’t get me any further into hot water, can it?”
Adam gave him a look, not wanting to think about the kind of trouble the gods of Nahautl could make for Ehecatl. They might not kill him, outright, but they could take a long and subtle vengeance on him. Look at the book of Job, for the kinds of misery that can be inflicted on a human by a god, he thought. Every child dying, the death of your wife, boils and plagues and poverty . . . and that is my god, who was testing Job’s faith. Of course, the book of Job tells us that God gave Job as many children again, as he lost, but that doesn’t erase the sorrow endured for the death of each beloved child, does it?
Sigrun shook her head, but Adam could see from the growing softness in her gray eyes that she was genuinely touched. “I appreciate it . . . but I do not think your words would be heard. You should all report directly to Praetorian headquarters. You are . . . you’re all already in enough trouble. Don’t . . .” She paused, and Adam could hear the shift in her speech into a less formal mode. “Don’t make it worse for yourselves, on my account.”
“Yes, well, stuff that,” Kanmi informed her. “I want you at the damned hearings for the Praetorians. If you’re there, we all stand a much better chance of getting out of this with our hides intact. And me? I like my job. It pays the rent and ensures my children get a good education. It also covers their medical bills.” He looked up at the ceiling, and grimaced. “No. I’m going there, and if I have to yell from outside the door at whoever your commanders are that we didn’t do anything wrong deliberately . . . I will.”
Sigrun’s lips twitched, and she slowly put her head down on the table and just laughed, uncontrollably, for almost a minute. After the first fifteen seconds, the various men were looking at each other uneasily. “Ah . . . did we miss something?” Adam asked.
“Yes, but . . . you won’t understand.” Sigrun’s shoulders were shaking. “You won’t understand till we get there. Come along, you daft fools.” She glanced at Livorus. “With your leave, of course. And once we’ve arranged for other Praetorians to take our spots.”
Livorus waved. “You’re all on administrative leave,” he said, shrugging. “Rome is sending new lictors to relieve the local Praetorians who joined the team. Go. Go, so that you can return to us, my dear.”
“Thank you, sir.” Sigrun glanced at the rest of them. “All right, gentlemen. Let’s go get our plane tickets.”
Trennus winced as he stood. “Couldn’t we just take a train?” he asked, plaintively.
“I don’t like it any more than you do, Trennus,” Sigrun told him, equitably, and with a degree more familiarity than she’d previously spoken to any of them. There was even a smile there, if an uneasy one, as she looked up at the tall Britannian. We who are about to die, Adam thought, his lips quirking faintly, may say thou to one another, apparently.
The planes out of Tenochtitlan were ley-powered and quite modern, as befit a jewel in the crown of the modern Empire. Adam was thus amused to watch both Trennus and Sigrun jitter the entire long flight from the Nahautl city to Burgundoi. The city was close to four hundred miles north of the palm trees and sunny skies of Nimes-on-the-Pacifica, the Gallic city to which Adam had been assigned for a while after his stint in India . . . and over two thousand miles northwest of Tenochtitlan. “At least we don’t have to transfer planes,” Adam told them both cheerfully.
Trennus opened his eyes just long enough to give him a dirty look. “You’re a ley-mage,” Kanmi told Trennus, with a faintly malicious grin. “How can you possibly be nervous about this?”
“Because ley-lines are scarcer in the air than on the ground, and no one’s yet worked out a passive system for recharging ley-batteries while an engine is drawing from them. In other words, if the batteries fail, the whole plane crashes, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” Trennus shot back, in the sharpest tones Adam had ever heard him use. “I like staying on the ground. It’s . . . much safer there.”
Ehecatl quietly rolled his eyes, and leafed through an in-flight magazine’s foolscap pages. Kanmi leaned back, grinning to himself, and obviously taking mental notes for later use.
Since Nimes and Burgundoi were along the same western stretch of coast on the western shores of Caesaria Aquilonis, Adam had expected . . . something of the same environment. Palm trees. Warm breezes. Getting off the plane on the tarmac, he was surprised to see how gray the sky was here, and how chill the wind, especially after the damp heat of Tenochtitlan. He shivered a little, and pulled his cloak a little tighter; suddenly, it was hard to believe it was Iunius.
The city itself, spread out around and encircling a shallow bay, had skyscrapers that were akin to those he’d seen in Novo Trier; there was something just fundamentally different about Gothic architecture than Roman buildings. The buildings, tall and narrow, raced up to the sky, but instead of the clean austerity of Roman pillars and arches, which might have had a naked god or a cluster of grapes for decoration . . . most of these buildings had gargoyles. Some of the buildings were surmounted by hundreds of the beasts, and just looking at them, less than a week after having fought the monkey-dog ahuizotl, made Adam feel distinctly uneasy. He half-expected to see the creatures take off like a cloud of bats and careen through the twilight sky.
He was driving, as usual, and was actually rather startled to realize that their rental vehicle was a solid Judean import—electric engine and all. “The power grid here—it’s electric?” he asked Sigrun, startled.
“It’s a mix. Both ley and electrical power plants are here, and it depends on which neighborhood you’re in, what type of outlets you’re going to have.” Sigrun leaned back in the passenger seat, her eyes blank as she stared out the window. “Some of the older buildings suffered damage in the Great Earthquake four years ago
, in 1950. The regional ley-mages didn’t even feel it coming . . . but they were able to stabilize most of the large buildings, including the bridges. And the Odinhall survived it. The gods would not permit it to fall.” She looked around at the city, and Adam spotted scaffolding on a number of buildings that were under construction . . . or reconstruction, as the case might well be.
For all of Adam’s unease with the damned gargoyles, he thought Burgundoi might possibly be one of the most beautiful cities he’d ever seen. They had to cross the bay on an enormous suspension bridge, which Sigrun told them was called the Ceasterhild Brycgian, or the Citygate Bridge, from the airport, which was on the mainland, to get to the center of the city, which stood on a peninsula on the other side of that dark blue bay. He could have lived without the crazy street grid, however; the city was old, having been built sometime in the 1200s AC, and all of the buildings were perched atop rolling hills.
Sigrun had been giving him low-voice directions of left, right, left at the next stoplight for a while, and finally, told him, “It’s ahead, on the right.”
Adam looked around the crowded downtown street; there were people packing all the sidewalks, and there were skyscrapers on all sides, interspersed with a few parking garages. “Where?” he asked, baffled. He was looking for a low, wooden building. Or a taller one, with a palisade. A castle, perhaps, like the ones developed in the new world during the early wars between the Gothic and Gallic tribes, against the Comanche Alliance and the Lakota Nation. Something that shouted Goth to his senses.
Sigrun pointed, and Adam set a foot on the brakes as he looked up.
The Odinhall was not built in wood, but in steel and poured-stone. It was, by far, the tallest building in Burgundoi, surmounted by a roughly triangular spire, and with two ‘wings’ of poured stone jutting out from its sides . . . and those wings housed literally thousands of animal statues and gargoyles. It was a sleek and fundamentally modern building that took Adam thoroughly by surprise. “We can leave the car over there,” Sigrun said, pointing at a five-story parking garage. “They’ll take the Praetorian identification and comp us.”
On walking in the front lobby, Adam began to feel more and more out of his element. The walls were all wood-paneled, and the floors seemed to be oak, and highly polished . . . but the reception area held images of the caduceus and of a winged woman holding a chalice . . . Eir, the goddess or valkyrie associated with healing, his memory tossed up after a moment’s frantic thought. “Ah, Sig? This is a hospital?” Adam asked, feeling lost as the five of them cut their way through the crowds of thoroughly Gothic people. He hadn’t seen this much blond hair in one place since the Novo Trier airport, on their way back to Rome after the whole Ponca disaster.
“Yes. The bottom ten floors are.” Sigrun tabbed one of the elevator buttons, and waited patiently . . . even as some of the people around them started to notice, and react to them. Adam, Ehecatl, and Kanmi got overt stares; olive skin, dark hair, and dark eyes were, as any number of women in Nimes had pointed out to Adam, intriguingly exotic in Gallic and Gothic regions. A couple of people addressed Trennus in Gallic, with friendly smiles and wrist-clasps. And Sigrun . . . well, it was the Novo Trier airport all over again. She wasn’t wearing her regalia, holding her spear, or channeling any godly power; the white runes were nowhere in evidence on her face. But this wasn’t Ponca, with its mix of Gallic, Gothic, and indigenous citizens. This was the Odinhall, and everyone there knew a valkyrie when they saw one. Smiling women came over and asked her soft questions in Gothic or Cimbric or whatever, and held out their babies for Sigrun to lean down and kiss. Brought their toddlers and adolescents over, so that Sigrun could crouch down, and give them lightly admonitory words or blessings or . . . something . . . in their native tongue. What looked to be lawyers and magistrates, in gray tweed slacks and cloaks, came over as well, holding their briefcases, to shake her hand, meet her eyes, and ask for what looked to be the same thing.
Adam was highly uncomfortable. They were treating her like a celebrity, in a sense, but someone who was far more accessible than a king or a queen or a philosopher. It wasn’t adulation, and Sigrun didn’t treat it as if it were her due. This was just . . . part of her job. And for the first time, Adam understood why she tended to say that a god-born of Tyr’s first and last task was duty.
“We’re going to need to change elevators on the thirtieth floor,” Sigrun told them all as they got in, and an attendant nodded to her, and pushed the button for the highest floor that this elevator could access. “This one only serves the public floors—the hospital, the temples, the administrative offices for each. That includes investment offices for tithes and how those funds get distributed to the truly indigent.” She shrugged. “After that, there are apartments for the physicians, the living quarters for the highest-ranking priests and priestesses, and after that, floors dedicated for the training of priests, priestesses, magistrates, and god-born. A university, I suppose you might call it. There are dormitories. Entire floors dedicated to practicing the art of combat. And above all of those is my destination.”
“This is a small city,” Ehecatl said, his voice quiet. The Nahautl man looked a little uneasy, and had his back to one of the elevator’s walls.
“On a busy day, there are seventy thousand people in the building,” Sigrun agreed.
“That’s the size of a city,” Trennus agreed, looking just as uneasy as Ehecatl, but probably for different reasons. They were now three hundred feet above the ground, after all.
____________________
The elevator came to a halt, and they disembarked, following Sigrun as they wended through narrow halls to a different elevator—this one, with a guard post, with a glass window overlooking the lobby. The guard booth was occupied by two huge men. One had light brown hair, which fell in a braid to between his shoulder blades, and the other was as blond as Sigrun, and wore his hair loose to his shoulders. Both wore their beards short-cropped. However, when they stood and emerged from the guard room, Adam blinked and stared up at them. Both were over seven feet tall, towering over even Trennus . . . and broad in proportion. “Sigrun. Waes hael. You are expected.” The darker-haired one leaned down and engulfed the woman in a hug, lifting her clear off the ground, and rattled something indecipherable at her in Gothic.
“Brandr, put me down, please.” That, in Latin, so clearly for the benefit of her fellow lictors. “Yes, these are my teammates. Adam ben Maor, Kanmi Eshmunazar, Trennus Matrugena, Ehecatl Itztli . . . this is Brandr Ilfetu. He is a bear-warrior. Of Thor’s line. And one of those who trained me here.”
Adam blinked, and reassessed. The man didn’t look a day older than Sigrun, but his face was scarred—no rune-marks to conceal the scars. His blue eyes were steady, however, and he was bluff and hearty as he engulfed each of their hands in what could only be described as a paw, clapping each of them on the shoulder with brother-and-equal vigor. Trennus and Adam both swayed a little at the enthusiasm, Ehecatl endured it expressionlessly, and Kanmi was bowled over entirely. “Nice to meet you,” Kanmi said, picking himself up from the floor, his eyes narrow. “Excuse me while I get a stepstool so I can give you the kiss of friendship in exchange.”
Brandr chuckled. “These men are all right, Sigrun. All have good hands, hearts, and eyes.”
“I knew that already,” Sigrun murmured. “They want to go up with me.”
“They do?” Brandr’s eyes widened. “Well . . . I don’t expect that they’ll be allowed into the highest floors, but I don’t see any reason why they can’t see the training areas, at least.” His teeth flashed white behind his beard. “We have a large class this year, Sigrun. Right around when your sister was born, back in . . . what was it, twenty-nine, thirty? . . . we went from four to seven god-born children a year, to more than thirty a year. It’s much more fun training that many of them at once, than it was training one valkyrie and three bear-warriors for four years.” Brandr looked over. “Don’t you agree, Erikir?”
“
More fun for the students, than when we went through,” the blonder man agreed, smiling at Sigrun. “I don’t think they go to bed aching nearly as badly as we did.”
“Eh, you all healed, didn’t you?” Brandr laughed. “All right. Up you go.”
Adam did a little mental math as they got into the new elevator. “So, your sister’s my age?” he said, mildly. That was both a relief, and slightly disconcerting. Sigrun looked to be more or less his own age. He’d known she was older than he was, but not by how much. If she had a living younger sister, that put her more or less . . . well, it made her younger than he’d thought. How old is she? She can’t be in her eighties if her sister is my age. I mean, yes, technically, a man can father a child in his eighties, but I’m not thinking that it’s going to happen if her father’s a hundred years old . . . unless her father is also god-born . . . . Adam rubbed at his face. There were questions he was not about to ask, out of respect for Sigrun’s privacy, but the question of how old she actually was, was starting to drive him slightly mad.
“Wait. Caetia, you have a sister?” Kanmi said, looking over, sharply. “New information. Is she young? Is she presentable? Can we marry her off to Matrugena here so that the poor lad can get over his clear infatuation with you?”
Trennus made a rude gesture at Kanmi, lifting a hand to tuck his thumb between his index and middle fingers. “I thank you for your interest in my love life, or lack thereof, but I don’t need a matchmaker.”
Sigrun gave Kanmi a dark look. “I don’t talk about her.”
“No. You certainly have not.” Kanmi grinned. “Details, details.”
And of course, Kanmi asks the things the rest of us won’t, because for him, words are weapons. Information is a weapon. “This, from the man who didn’t tell us that his oldest son had fallen and broken an arm a week ago,” Adam said, looking up at the ceiling. “I had to hear it from Livorus. Stow it, Kanmi. Everyone’s got things they don’t want to talk about. I don’t mention my family much, either.”
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 47
