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

by Deborah Davitt

  “Yes, sorcerers who can cast without spoken incantations, and default solely to gestures are so often quiet and unnoticeable,” he said, his eyes glittering in the low light of the hall. “That’s military-grade training, at the very least. I can do it myself. I can feel the structure you’re already readying in your mind. And I can counter it before you trip it.”

  “Stop this!” Camulorix said, from where he sat on the couch, his tone frail. “I called on you to help us, not for you to attack my colleague—”

  “I cannot possibly help your colleague if she won’t tell us the truth,” the Praetorian said, coolly. “Stop lying. Tell me who you are, and how you’re involved in all of this.”

  Minori’s hands shook. “I swear to you,” she told him, breathlessly, “that the only falsehood I have spoken is my name. And that was changed for me, to protect my family when I left Nippon.”

  An arrested look in his eyes. “To protect your family from what?” he asked, his tone harsh, but his expression more open.

  She looked down. “From shame,” Minori said, tiredly. “From the shame of having a daughter so . . . inappropriate.” There was more to it than that, but it seemed unlikely that they’d understand it, and it wasn’t their business. Her past had nothing to do with current events. “My father was . . . generous . . . to permit me to study sorcery at all, but when it seemed possible that I could tear the house down by accident, there was, perhaps, little choice in the matter.” She studied the floor, the seams between the tiles. “And when my skills proved to be much more suitable for war and engineering than making flowers and crops grow, he was, again, generous in permitting me to leave Nippon and come here, instead of marrying me off, binding me as someone’s concubine, or requiring me to become a shrine-maiden. He is . . . progressive, in that respect. He loves me, in his way.” She swallowed. It was intolerable to have to speak of this, but if she didn’t tell the truth, the whole of it, then this questioning would just go on and on. Minori raised her eyes. “He did the best he could for me. And now I do the same for him, by not bringing shame to his name.”

  “And that’s all?” Eshmunazar’s voice was skeptical. “Is there anyone out there who knows your real name? Anyone who might be trying to go after you on those grounds?”

  “I tell you, no. All of the threats have revolved around the research that Professor Camulorix and I have been conducting, and I will not be frightened off of it!” Minori shook with the fury she was trying to repress.

  “Esh,” the Britannian said, gently.

  “What?”

  “She wasn’t in the Initiative in 1955. It’s probably a coincidence.”

  She speaks only the truth as she knows it, Emberstone. Again, silent words in Minori’s mind, as the phoenix perched on the Britannian’s shoulder chirruped. Her eyes darted back and forth as the two men exchanged glances.

  “All right,” Eshmunazar said, at last. “Gather up every last bit of your research. You keep anything at your apartment?”

  Minori blinked. “What? You’re going to make me burn it or something?” Inwardly, her heart constricted. Rome was an empire, just as her homeland was. Things like this happened when those in power found scientific research threatening for some reason or another.

  “No.” The single bald word startled her. “I want to see every single idea you’ve had in the last year. Every piece of data you’ve collected. I can correlate it against mine.”

  What? she thought, stunned, as he looked around. “Your office is at the Eleutherian Industries complex outside of town, right? I’ll drop by there and grab everything else you have, once we’ve gotten you to a safe place. Both of you.”

  “My research is at my house,” Camulorix said, shakily. “My wife passed away two years ago, but I have children. Grandchildren.”

  Another exchange of glances. “Might be a good time for them to take an extended holiday,” the Britannian said, mildly. “We’ll grab your address book, and you can call them, sir.”

  This was all going much too fast for Minori’s liking. “It’s very kind of you . . . ” she managed, though it was definitely pushing truthfulness to call Eshmunazar’s demeanor kind, “but the most this is, is industry sabotage. People whose work we’re calling into question. Maybe someone whose patent is being used in the new facilities—and I’d love to get my hands on the schematics for those—whose work is damaging the environment.”

  “And coin isn’t enough reason for someone to kill?” Eshmunazar pointed out, catching her arm and propelling her along. “Even if we were all living in a dream world where money won’t buy you a shallow grave, there are bigger things at stake.” He looked around. “We’ve got a vehicle out back. Tren, get the professor’s stuff packed up, I’ll get them to the car.”

  Minori resisted in irritation, yanking her arm out of his grip. “I would very much like to know why you think there’s ‘more at stake,’ she told him. “Why should I share my research with you? You saw most of it at the conference, anyway—”

  “Because we can guarantee that it wasn’t ley-energy that caused the earthquakes,” Matrugena said, behind them, already digging through the books and papers in the office. “The energy might have leaped along existing ley-lines, and I won’t argue that. But the source itself wasn’t ley.”

  Absolute certainty in that voice, and Minori raged against it. Certainty was a thing of belief, not natural philosophy. “And you can prove that?” she challenged them both.

  “Yes. Because we were there when the Pyramid of the Sun collapsed,” Eshmunazar replied, his tone stark. “Matrugena here is a ley-mage. And that wasn’t ley. Come on. Car. Now.”

  ___________________

  Two hours later, Kanmi cleared their hotel suite of any unwanted intruders largely by sending a gravitic pulse through the outside wall, and keeping one hand on the cinderblocks as he ‘listened’ for echoes. “One of these days,” he muttered, “I am going to design a spell that lets me feel body heat a quarter mile away, so I don’t have to stand right outside the damned door to do this.” Of course, then the opposition would just send golems in after me. Still, in a world where there are automatic weapons and arrows that can pierce through walls? A couple of panels of plaster-covered wood are damned little comfort, sometimes. That was, of course, one of the reasons why they’d picked this hotel. It had sturdier construction than most, being an older building. And a ground-floor suite was available, so Trennus felt less separated from the earth.

  Inside, Kanmi gestured for their guests to take the couch; both were soaked to the skin from the heavy downpour outside. “Get the windows,” Trennus told him, lugging in the first two heavy boxes of books and papers from the car.

  “Already on it.” Kanmi started setting up wards over the glass. Reinforcing its structure with energy weaves. He’d been working on this with Adam for the past two years. Bulletproof glass was on the market—a lovely Judean innovation, that—but it deteriorated in sunlight. Bombproof glass was something else entirely, and Kanmi’s lips and hands both had to move for this spell, thanks to the intricacy as he latticed layer after layer of energy and matter together into a laminate. The latticework would disperse energy from an incoming blast or bullet into the cinderblock walls, and the laminate would hold the actual materials in place, as if they were embedded in an additional physical matrix. He’d taken to doing this on the windows of Livorus’ motorcar every time the man left his manor. It might not be totally effective against spells, but . . . every little bit helped. The walls, however, were Tren’s department.

  Kanmi ducked outside for an armful of books and a box of papers, while Trennus, in the room, pulled ley-energy up through the floor, pouring it through the walls. Shifting them from cinderblock structure and melting them into each other. Reinforcing them with each other’s substance. There were no more dividing lines of weak mortar, but one contiguous whole. “Home improvements,” Trennus muttered now, wringing out his wet hair. “Never my favorite hobby.”

  “You
wind up buying that house that ben Maor and Caetia are suggesting, and that’s going to become your job, not a hobby,” Kanmi warned. “Last boxes are still outside. Don’t see anyone out there watching us, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yes. I’ll grab us some extra eyes when I get back in, and you can ward the door with an alarm.”

  Ten minutes later, they were doing precisely that, Kanmi enchanting a ringing squeal that should go off when anyone other than the four of them tried to open the door. “What about room service?” Minori asked, her expression still faintly on edge.

  Kanmi held up a Do not disturb sign and slipped it over the knob before he closed the door, locked it, and slid the chain home. “Matru?”

  “Calling us a few extra eyes.”

  At which point, Lassair appeared next to him, shifting out of phoenix form to coalesce into her full human body. Kanmi caught the way Minori’s eyes widened, her lips parted, and the sigh she gave, and his lips quirked. Lassair had that effect on men and women alike. She was simply so stunning at this point, that the mind had a tendency to wander, no matter what your personal sexual preference happened to be. He had a personal theory that the spirit could probably give a three-day-dead corpse an erection by dancing atop its grave.

  It made traveling with her and Matrugena highly annoying. Five years into their . . . exceedingly unconventional relationship . . . they were clearly still going at it like newlyweds who thought they’d just invented sex. This resulted in Kanmi periodically throwing a shoe at the connecting wall between their suite rooms, inevitably followed by hasty apologies and giggling from the other side. What made it even worse was that Lassair tended to kiss anyone she liked. With gusto usually, right on the lips. Which meant that Adam, Kanmi, and even Sigrun had been recipients, at some point or another. Kanmi still rather wished he’d had a camera on hand for the first occasion on which Caetia had been on the receiving end. For both the during and the after shot.

  With Lassair present and manifested, the room instantly warmed, and the cold dampness in everyone’s clothing began to steam up into the air. Trennus grabbed a grease pencil from his luggage and sketched a summoning circle on the floor, and began calling spirits to serve as eyes and ears in exchange for a little wine and sugar.

  Kanmi, aware of their guests’ eyes on him, cleared the table in front of him largely by shoving a forearm along its length, dropping the telephone and local directory off the edge, and barely catching the lamp in time to keep its bulb from shattering. He set it beside the sphere of the ley-powered far-viewer, and began digging through the boxes himself now, looking for Minori’s papers. “You’re going to get them all out of order,” she said, after a moment, stood, and came over to sort through them with him.

  “There’s an order to this?” Kanmi said, raising his eyebrows.

  “You grabbed everything in my office and shoved it into boxes at random. How did you know how to pick the locks, anyway? I would have thought you’d just . . . .” She waved, vaguely.

  “What, melt the lock mechanisms into slag? Messy. Noticeable. Also means it’s harder to lock them behind us if we need to.”

  “There are more subtle methods than that. But subtlety is not what you are about, are you?” Her tone held asperity.

  Kanmi raised his eyes, and pushed back, just as hard. “And how would you know about lock-picking, Doctor? Does this have to do with your shameful past?”

  He knew he’d hit a nerve by the way she pulled in a breath to calm herself, and looked down, her fists closing. We can play this game all day, my dear doctor. Instead of pursuing the matter, however, Kanmi unrolled a map and stared down at it. “Your earthquake data. Good. I wanted a closer look at this than I got in the lecture hall, anyway.” He swore, mostly at himself. “I didn’t even think of the earthquakes. That sets the timeline back to 1950. Baal’s teeth, that man worked fast.” Gratian had only been back in Nahautl for seven years in 1955. Which meant that, if Minori’s data did tally . . . their first experiments on first empowering and then stripping power from a god had started only two years after Gratian had returned home. “Problem is, you don’t start experiments like this on the best test subject you have,” Kanmi muttered to himself. “You use something smaller. A rat. Who was your rat?” Maybe this wasn’t the first time someone did this. Maybe there were smaller-scale efforts. Maybe with spirits? Or maybe, Astarte protect us from fools, Tlaloc was the laboratory rat. He rubbed at his eyes.

  “You realize that you make absolutely no sense whatsoever?” Minori told him, frankly. “How can I correlate my data with yours if you don’t make sense?”

  “You can’t. You don’t need to know my data. We’re going to put you both someplace safe, and take care of this.” Kanmi stared at the charts.

  Minori grabbed his sleeve at that point. “I’ve spent three years of my life on this. If you’re using my data, then you owe me something in return. If the power wasn’t coming from the ley-grid, then what’s causing it?”

  Kanmi stared down at her hand on his arm, and felt every muscle in his body tighten. He looked back up and met her eyes from only inches away. “I can’t actually tell you,” he said, quietly. “It’s been classified so highly, I was there, and I’m not even supposed to know.” He suddenly saw her, not as a potential suspect, but as a researcher who’d spent her life in a search almost as fervent as his own for the truth, and seeing her that way was dangerous. She could still be in on the Source Initiative’s plans, whatever they were. If it even was an organized conspiracy.

  Life would make so much more sense if everything really was a matter of conspiracies. You could then just go after the networks and unravel them. Real life was messier. People got ideas from each other. But they might operate totally separately from each other, other than that first transmitted idea, like a virus or a germ, taking seed in their consciousness. Sometimes there were conspiracies. Sometimes, it was just an idea on the wind. “If I could, I’d tell you,” he finally told her. “Information should be freely shared between mages and scientists.”

  “Yes,” she told him, her eyes dark and luminous. “It should. What could be so bad that you can’t disseminate it?”

  Kanmi didn’t answer. Just unfurled the map again, and began working his way through it. Firing questions at her about the fault lines in Caesaria Australis that were lighting up currently. “I’ve spent five years trying to track these assholes down by tracing their memberships. Their connections. Their communications,” he finally said, and stared down at the mountains around Cuzco and Machu Picchu. “And now I might finally catch the fuckers . . . by tracking their latest gods-be-damned experiment and its . . . waste products.”

  Minori actually glared at him. “I’m so happy for you,” she informed him. “No, really, I’m delighted that my data has enabled you to complete your research. And here I thought that you were thorough.”

  Kanmi’s head jerked up. “You have a mouth on you,” he said, after a moment. “Good. I like seeing the real person instead of a yet another fucking lie.”

  She looked as if he’d slapped her, and Kanmi regretted the words, but there was no way to take them back. And he supposed it didn’t matter if he did or not. Tomorrow, they’d get her on a plane for . . . gods. Nippon, maybe. “Where’s a good safe place to send you?” he asked, briskly. “Can we send you back to Hokkaido?”

  “No!” It was a yelp. “I can’t go back. I have to stay in Europa or the new world.” She didn’t huddle in on herself, but her eyes were haunted.

  Kanmi gave Trennus a look, and got a shrug in return. “All right, we’ll talk it over with the propraetor. We can work something out.”

  A look of confusion. “And a propraetor is involved in this . . . ?”

  “Look, you’ve just stumbled into one of my long-term projects. And I’m one of his lictors.”

  “And he’s sufficiently interested in the hobbies of one of his lictors—who’s researching something so classified that even the gods themselves don’t
have clearance—that he’s going to be willing to throw his weight behind an effort to hide us.” Minori stood up straight. “I won’t be disappeared, you understand me? I will fight. Is this some kind of a cover-up? What kind of energy was it? Is it . . .” she paused, as if she were about to utter something horrific, “nuclear? Are we talking about something with the potential to end the world?”

  Kanmi just stared at her for a long moment. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to pound his head against the desk. She’d jumped completely the wrong way. “No,” he told her, after a moment. “I have it on good authority that the world isn’t going to end till a valkyrie of my acquaintance gets pregnant, and considering the rate at which she and her husband are going, I think we’ve got time on that.”

  Oh, that was unkind, Emberstone. Lassair’s tone held reproof.

  Yes, but it’s true, though. Kanmi’s lips twitched. Sigrun’s sister had been chatty at the ben Maor/Caetia wedding. Kanmi had told her, emphatically, that he didn’t want to know about his own future in regards to the end of the world, and her airy reply had chilled him. Oh, don’t worry. You’ll be dead for fourteen years before it happens. But your next wife will be worth coming back from the dead for, I promise! He’d grimaced and closed his mind to the topic. He’d been up to his ears in Bastet’s anger and inexplicable disappointment in him at that point.

  Now he shook the thoughts away. “What I’m trying to say, Dr. Sasaki . . . is no, it’s not nuclear, and I don’t think it’s the end of the world.” At least, apparently, not yet.

  In the meantime, Trennus had been using the room’s phone to allow Camulorix to call his various children and grandchildren and get them to agree to leave their homes on a few unplanned vacations. All of this was difficult to explain to people, without using the words Look, your grandfather’s stumbled onto one group’s efforts to turn a god into a battery. Other people want that kept quiet. People who might be trying to replicate those efforts. We think it’s possible that they’d kill to keep themselves hidden.