The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1)

by Deborah Davitt

  Matrugena reached up and stroked a finger along the bird’s neck. “As for me . . . not it,” the Pict told the others, forthrightly. “It hit like a shockwave. I couldn’t do anything except try to shield . . . and Lassair and Saraid, my other spirit, did most of that for me.” He paused. "Though Saraid seems less affected."

  Kanmi nodded. “I know I didn’t catch it. I’m a sorcerer. I might have more will than the average person. But I’m still just human.” He looked at Adam. “You noticed any unusual powers?”

  “If I concentrate very hard, in the mornings, I can put my pants on one leg at a time,” ben Maor returned, dryly. “For the rest? Pretty normal. I think my sense of smell might be a little better, but that could be my imagination.” He shrugged. “I’ve been doing my absolute best not to think about that entire incident.”

  Kanmi looked at Caetia, who was apparently dozing now. In his mind, there had only been two places where the power of the god could have gone . . . into Trennus’ spirits . . . or into a god-born. A vessel already supremely prepared to receive godly energies. “Caetia?” he asked, quietly. If she were really asleep, he didn’t want to wake her.

  “I feel no different,” she finally replied, her eyes still closed, and her tone faintly irritable. “I am what I am, Esh. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

  He didn't know if he believed her or not.

  Kanmi's thoughts churned onwards. If Lassair and Caetia both took a quarter of the total energies released . . . that’s somewhere in the vicinity of eleven million thaums each. Well, explains why Lassair’s suddenly able to manifest in physical forms, like that bird. Caetia . . . the gods only know. She seems about the same. Cold, abrupt. Maybe it just . . . washed through her and transmitted to her god. Maybe she’s like a lightning rod like in that way? Possible, I suppose.

  He shook his head. It was a problem to consider at the back of his head. One of the puzzles that he’d revolve in his mind before going to sleep at night. Kanmi glanced up at the room’s clock, debated leaving . . . and decided, again, he didn’t want to fight with Bastet. Not yet, anyway. There were so many things he hadn’t had a chance to puzzle out with his fellow lictors in the past few days. They’d had so little time to talk, between preparing to come here, and all the alarums and events of the past two days. “Speaking of Nahautl . . . .when I was trapped in my room here,” Kanmi said, after several minutes of silence, as Caetia appeared to doze off completely, “until they brought me these dispatches, all I had to do was watch the far-viewer. You catch any of the news stories from there?” he asked, his lips curling back.

  Matrugena looked amused. “Ah, no. I didn’t even get out of bed till noon, actually.”

  “At least for you, that was a choice,” Kanmi muttered. “Anyway, the thing that got me was seeing, in the background of the stories . . . all those priests of Tlaloc. Just carrying on as if nothing even happened?”

  “Yes, but what are they going to do?” Matrugena asked. “Announce to everyone that . . . well . . .” A quick glance at the doorway, in spite of Kanmi's privacy spell.

  “That would probably incite mass panic and hysteria,” ben Maor noted, dryly.

  “Maybe they should trust in people to be intelligent and adult. Maybe they should tell the truth. That’s what priests are supposed to do, aren’t they?” Kanmi stared down at the tile floor.

  “Do you really think people would be intelligent and adult, and not start rioting, looting, and killing?” Matrugena, quick and incisive . . . and surprisingly cynical.

  “Best case scenario is that people would accept it as truth and not riot. But it’s far more likely that they’d rise up and say that the priests were lying.” Ben Maor’s voice was glum.

  “Oh, I think there’d be plenty of that, if it wasn’t handled right. Godslayer.” Kanmi let out an explosive breath.

  Adam actually winced. “All in all, I’d prefer if they didn’t mention any of that until after I’m dead, buried . . . and buried someplace where no one can find the corpse, at that.” He paused. “Usually, you’re our cynic, Esh. You’re the one who usually points out the dark side of human nature. For the moment, I think they’re . . . trying to protect people from each other. Us. Their citizens.”

  “I think that this is one case where the people themselves should be trusted. Allowed to decide.” Kanmi's cynicism usually buried his latent ideals, but they were stubbornly trying to assert themselves today.

  Trennus cleared his throat. “I don’t like to think what people would do with the information that . . . entities can die.”

  “They already know that, Matrugena. They know about Babylon and Sumer and Egypt.” Kanmi flipped a hand.

  “Yes, but they know about things that happened three thousand years ago, not last year. And they know that about . . . actual real godslayers. Spirits and demons that strode the earth like giants. Like the nephilim mentioned in old Judean legends.” Ben Maor shrugged. “It’s abstract. This . . . this is pretty concrete. And it’s going to scare the living shit out of some people.”

  “And for others, it’ll just become . . . an opportunity.” Kanmi grimaced. “I know. You’re right. But . . . I can’t think that the priests are remaining silent to protect people. You, me, us, or the people of Nahautl. I think it has to do with power, and control. Just like the priests in Egypt who kept right on carrying on after Akhenaten wiped out half their gods. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “About what?” Ben Maor looked puzzled.

  “Well, if I were you, Adam ben Maor, godslayer . . . I’d honestly have to wonder if your god’s still around or not.” Kanmi waved a hand. “I know. It’s nothing people don’t say all the time about Judeans anyway.”

  “Having second thoughts on converting?” Ben Maor’s lips twitched.

  “I have no problem worshipping a dead god if everyone knows and agrees that he’s dead.” Kanmi nodded. “Might be more peaceful that way. I mean, everyone knew Osiris was dead even before Akhenaten came along. Set tore him to shreds and Isis had to bandage him back together, minus one important part, so the rest of the gods had to get together and create the world’s first strap-on for him so she could bear him Horus posthumously . . . .”

  Matrugena had to turn away and choke down on his laughter, and ben Maor actually snorted a bit. “Made of gold, no less,” Kanmi went on, relentlessly. “The Egyptian gods make the Hellene ones look tame.” He paused. “Oh, and it’s yet another instance of the mate of a fertility goddess dying horribly and being brought back from death. Don’t get me started on that.”

  “And you have no problem commenting on them, do you?” Trennus said, managing to get his face straightened out again.

  “I’m theoretically subject to Baal-Hamon. A dead god is going to have to scoop himself up out of his sarcophagus and move pretty fast to smite me with lightning before Baal-Hamon whacks him over the head for poaching.”

  Adam shook his head. “We’re getting into depths of philosophy that are way over my pay-grade.” He paused. “But . . . as to your question . . . whatever it was . . . .”

  “How can you possibly know if your priests are doing exactly what the priests of Tlaloc are doing, or not?” Kanmi arched his eyebrows.

  “I can’t know it, Kanmi.” Adam shrugged. “That’s . . . the whole question of faith, isn’t it?”

  Kanmi exhaled. “At least you’re honest about it. The priests in Nahautl . . . . They’re not. And it makes me furious. How can you even start to make the world a better place if it’s all built on a foundation of lies and half-truths?”

  Adam looked at him soberly. “I don’t know. Like I said . . . way over my pay-grade.” He lifted his free hand; the other one still held Sigrun’s. “We start with the little things, I guess. Little truths. Because people can’t handle the big ones. Not all at once.”

  ___________________

  The door swung open, without a knock, and all three men shot to their feet. Adam saw both Kanmi and Trennus raise their hands as if to start castin
g, and his own hand had moved to the small of his back. Everyone on the hospital staff knocked. It was a rule.

  The woman who entered now smiled at them, her green eyes wide and glassy. She was shorter than Sigrun by half a foot. Her dark blond hair was long, and dressed in ringlets that fell from the back of her neck, and she wore a translucent white silk peplos . . . a traditional Hellene garment that consisted of a single sheet of material, folded to drape across her breasts and fastened at the shoulders with fistula . . . but it left her right ribs, hip, and thigh bare, and the silk itself left . . . remarkably little to the imagination. She also wore thick gold bracelets and an intricate golden necklace, all in the form of serpents. Adam found a safe spot somewhere around her shoulder for his eyes to rest, and wondered just how many people in the hospital had suffered small aneurysms as she’d walked past them. “Ah, I think you may have the wrong room,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Godslayer,” she purred, looking up at him. Way up. Past his head, in fact. Her focus seemed to be somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling. “I’m precisely where I’m supposed to be, at precisely the right moment.” She frowned as she let the door slip shut behind her. “Though I have to say . . . I thought you’d be taller.”

  Oh. God. This would be Sophia Caetia. Sigrun’s mad sister. And the day was off to such a good start, too. He blinked for a moment as he realized that the two women, for all their differences in height and general coloration . . . could have been thought, by an outsider, to be the same exact age. Neither looked a day older than twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. Adam cleared his throat. “Ah, Sophia? I’m down here.”

  “That is the first time a man has ever said that to a woman in the history of the world,” Kanmi muttered. “You know this person, ben Maor?”

  “Oh, of course he knows me, Archmage. We just haven’t met before.” Sophia nodded to Kanmi. “I did so want to see all of the Four in the same place, at least once, with my own eyes, and not just the eyes of the future and the past.” Her voice was dreamy. “The Godslayer, the Binder, the Archmage, and the Ascendant. And the four will become six and then seven, as the Heart of Fire and the Wolf Queen and the Truthsayer reveal themselves. And all of you will need to be united, before the second darkness comes.” Sophia looked at her sleeping sister, and without raising her voice, said, “Wake up, Sigrun!”

  The words carried uncanny force. Sigrun’s gray eyes snapped open, and she looked around in a daze. Sophia sank down on the edge of the bed, and told her sister, cheerfully, but still with that dazed air, “Oh, good. There you are. I travelled all this way to see you now that you’re finally sorting things out in your own life, so I could tell you some of the things I’ve seen.”

  Adam looked up at Trennus and Kanmi; Kanmi met his eyes and touched fingers held in a circle to his temple: She has a hole in her head, eh?

  “No, Archmage, I’m not crazy,” Sophia’s voice was patient, and she didn’t even turn to look at Kanmi, who stood completely behind her. “I just see everything. Everything that was. Everything that is. Everything that will be.” She took Sigrun’s hand in her own, but still addressed Kanmi, now finally turning slightly towards him. “I did tell you already that I was sorry about your wife, didn’t I? But don’t worry. The next woman in your life will be your equal, and she’ll hold the sun itself in her flesh before the end of all things. She’ll be worth coming back from the dead for, I swear it.” Sophia’s dreamy smile never faltered.

  Kanmi’s mouth fell open, and he stared at Sophia, before his jaw clicked shut, and he darted half-angry, half-confused glances around the room at the rest of them. As if daring them to say a word.

  Sigrun tried to lever herself up, and then stopped, wincing in pain. Adam, without letting her see him do it, clicked on the button that would distribute a metered dose of morphine into her blood, and then helped her sit up. “Leave them alone, Sophia,” Sigrun managed. “They don’t deserve having their private lives meddled with by you.”

  “They won’t have private lives,” Sophia said, and sighed. “But at least they’ll live.”

  Adam froze in place and just stared at the woman for a moment. I’ve known her for five minutes, and I already feel like I’m going mad from just proximity. What is it like to be related to her?

  Sigrun rolled her head back on the pillows. “You’ve taken the seers’ drugs again, haven’t you?” she asked, her tone resigned. “Perhaps you should come back when you can speak sensibly. When you haven’t taken anything.”

  “Oh, no. No peyote or mushrooms today. But poppy-juice, yes, to slow things down. It soothes my mind. Makes it so I don’t see the end of everything all the time. So that the world of now isn’t so real, and so fragile, and I don’t feel the vividness of death waiting for me after every eyeblink.”

  Adam could see agony in Sigrun’s face for an instant. Worse than the pain of her body. Her voice was very gentle as she tried to reach her sister with logic, “Sophia, if you know precisely how the world will end . . . how can you be afraid of death with every heartbeat?”

  “Because I know that I will end, too. And before the world does. But only by weeks.” Sophia waggled a finger at her sister. “But you’ll meet us all again, Sigrun. Everyone that you love, on that black road. And you’ll need to protect us and love us and teach us. And that’ll be hard for you, because you’ll be so angry. You’re really good at being angry. Why, you’re angry even now!”

  Sigrun lifted her eyes. Met Adam’s, then Tren’s, then Kanmi’s. And then looked at the door. Adam took that unspoken message, and leaned down. Kissed the backs of her cold fingers. “I’ll leave you two to talk.” God. And I thought everyone seeing my family was embarrassing.

  “Yes, yes, this,” Sophia said, cheerfully. “We never talk, Sigrun. And I don’t want to wait to die for us to get around to it.”

  “You’re sick, Sophia,” Sigrun told her sister, bluntly, as the men all filtered out of the room. Adam could hear the tears in her voice. “It’s mortal, and the disease is made of despair.”

  “I know that.”

  “You’ll die of it.”

  “I know that, too. Oh, I do think your Godslayer is wonderful to look at. But I really thought his eyes would be golden. So confusing.”

  ___________________

  Out in the hall, Kanmi shook his head. “I don’t think I’d ever have thought that the god-born had drug addiction and madness in their families . . . but I suppose it makes sense. There are enough mad gods, so why not mad god-born?” He swung his dispatch case back and forth. “Poor gods-be-damned Caetia,” he added, quietly. “I’d hate to come to work with that hanging over my head every day.” He nodded to Adam and Trennus, and took off. He had a wife who was waiting for him, undoubtedly ready for a fight, and two sons to hug. Bastet hadn’t brought Himi and Bodi to the hospital, on the grounds that they didn’t need to see him hooked up to tubes. Kanmi thought that was pure shit, and hadn’t minded telling her so. He’d had no visible injuries, not like the others. No, the truth is, she’s angry at me about something, and maybe it’s still the fact that I haven’t told her every detail of my job.

  So he got back to the governor’s mansion, and hugged his sons. Had dinner with his family. And while he wanted nothing more than to settle in with the contents of his dispatch case, he asked Bastet if she were ready to talk. Talking led to arguing, and arguing led to fighting. “This is not like me having married a soldier or a gardia officer,” Bastet said at one point, almost in tears. “Women who do that, know what they’re getting into. When I married you, we were still at the university. You were going to get a job in . . . ley-engineering or at a university, teaching sorcery. The military was going to be a temporary thing, so you could work it into . . . I don’t know. Consulting. Something.” She brushed the tears out of her eyes. “I don’t see why you couldn’t quit this horrible, dangerous job and . . . do something safe. You could teach. You always said you wanted to teach.”

  Kanmi had found a seat o
n a backless bench across the room, and had been watching her pace back and forth. Bastet couldn’t hold still when she was angry or agitated. Never had been able to, really. “That was until I figured out that I hate teaching,” he replied, quietly. “Took that mentoring job my last year at school, remember? All those thankless, entitled brats going to school on their parents’ money, who think that they should be able to drink and party their way through each semester, and won’t put a bit of work in? Who came to me expecting me to turn their grade around for them? Some people are too stupid for education, Bastet. It’s wasted on them. I know perfectly well that education is a wonderful thing. That it can uplift people from the gutter. But they have to want to be uplifted, and they have to want to work at it. You get out of an education precisely what you put into it. And I have no time in my life for people who won’t do the damned work.” He held up a hand before she could say anything. “That’s only part of it, Bastet. Let me finish.”

  He looked out the window, and exhaled, trying to make sure he was as calm as possible. “There isn’t an engineering firm in the world who would take me, Bastet. Not with what I can do. Maybe as a security consultant. I have entirely the wrong skill-set. My resume, at present, says ‘tactical application of forces and physics to achieve maximum bodily harm to opposition forces and to prevent same to friendlies.’” He looked at his wife, grimly. “Which is to say, I kill, Bastet. I’m very good at it. I don’t do it unnecessarily. I do it to save lives. And periodically, I get to amputate limbs or, like today, fall on my damned face till someone else picks me up again. That’s the job. I’m good at it. Probably in the top two percent in the world. Livorus doesn’t pick slouches for his lictors.” A muscle worked in his jaw for a moment. “We have a good life, Bastet. We can afford a good apartment in Rome. We can afford a pedagogue for the boys. We have insurance. We have all these things because of my job.”