Trennus thumped his fist against the arm of the couch. “I don’t know. They might think she’s god-born, or possessed. There aren’t too many spirits who wander around manifested in human form, and pregnant.”
“Steady. She’s a month along. They’re not going to know from just looking at her.” Kanmi’s voice was bracing. “Objectively, how much danger do you really think she’s in?”
Trennus rubbed at his face again. He’d been working on raw nerves for hours now. Lassair had gone from being, in the old days, a creature who’d been acutely vulnerable, to being almost untouchable, other than by another spirit. Vulnerability from her was an uncomfortable return to the old days, and he hadn’t thought she’d be a target on this mission. Not really. Not till today. So he was grateful when Kanmi stepped in; his brain was clearly functioning just fine.
Trennus knew that Lassair had caught a portion of Tlaloc’s energies. She’d been to the Odinhall and hadn’t been chased off like an errant pest. Then again, Saraid had been permitted to stay, too. Perhaps the gods of Valhalla are just very polite to their god-borns' guests.
Lassair could manifest fully, stay manifested for weeks on end, and could change forms as freely as Trennus could change clothes. Saraid, by way of comparison, had never given any indications of these abilities. These were all signs that Lassair's power had grown, and enormously. “She could make a fine target for whatever they’re doing,” Trennus admitted, opening his eyes again, “if they knew her Name. Without that, they can trap her, certainly, but they can’t force her to do much of anything.” He glanced at Lassair. “Right?”
They can make the attempt, but everything requires leverage, as well you know. Names, or something that I value. Even in her sleep, Lassair’s lips turned downwards.
“Well, let’s definitely keep your Name under wraps.” Kanmi’s glance to the side encompassed Minori. “Lassair, you know, generally speaking, the. . . disposition of someone approaching you, yes? If they’re hostile or deceptive or not?”
Yes. But not if they are using masks. Carrying imbued vials of other people’s blood, for example. Or if they have a bound spirit encompassing their bodies, as when Saraid or I spread ourselves through Flamesower. Lassair didn’t sound happy about that. I could de-manifest. But I don’t know what that would do to the child. I have never done this before.
“In that case, any time we’re in the rooms, we set up wards, and if you hear someone at the door, you change form. Turn yourself into a mouse and hide under the nightstand.” Kanmi’s voice was forthright. “I don’t care if they say they’re housekeeping, you get out of sight.”
Won’t that harm the child?
“At the moment, it’s a ball of cells, and a mouse is a mammal, and one close enough to human to be used for most drug testing. If you were further along, the child would be too big for the mouse, and you’d split yourself in half trying, but fortunately, you just barely qualify as pregnant in most people’s books.” Kanmi’s abrasive tone, once more, was bracing.
Trennus snorted under his breath, as the sense in the words got his brain working again. Took some of the fear away. “What in the gods’ names would we do without you, Esh?”
“Run around in circles looking for your heads, probably. Someone around here has got to have the common sense to tell you that they’re tucked up your asses.” Kanmi’s words were uncharitable, but he grinned at Trennus now. All edges. “All right. We’ve got three hours till anyone in Rome will be awake. We need to . . . shit. We need to find out how long they’ve been adding to the Lines. That’ll give us a timeline, I think, as to when this started. The Lines themselves have been here for about a thousand years.”
“They probably were originally places to venerate the gods, and large spirit-traps for troublesome, malevolent spirits,” Trennus supplied. “The locals call ‘demons’ the supay, which is also the name of their god of death. The ruler of Uku Pacha. The supay are the spirits of the ‘world within,’ or the ‘land of the dead.’ We got the full lecture two days ago when we were looking at the local mines and manufacturing buildings. The locals believe that they live in caves, hence why they didn’t do much mining till Rome made contact with them.”
“Demons?” Kanmi asked, picking one word out of the flow and raising his eyebrows.
Trennus rocked a hand back and forth. “You know how I feel about that term. In this case, they’re death-and-fertility types. Like the lilitu of the Mesopotamian area, only not wind and desert spirits. I think the local shamans and summoners would only have bound the worst of them, ones that had gone fully malevolent. The type that might possess an unwilling human as a vessel and use them.” Trennus exhaled. “The type that can’t be bargained with, because they won’t honor any contract. When you deal with something like that. . .” he shook his head again. “There has to be a balance between the death and the fertility. Something for something. If all they are is death, and nothing springs from the bargain. . . well. Those you bind or banish. And the locals didn’t have metal jars back in the day, and their oldest pottery vessels all seem to have been open-mouthed, so you couldn’t seal them except with maybe wax. They also didn’t have writing back in the day, so binding with a Name was probably difficult. The Lines were probably their original solution for sealing away the bad ones.” He paused again. “Still the newer symbols. . . seem to be very recent. The earth still feels raw where they’ve been cut.”
“Can you tell how recently?” Kanmi’s voice was intent.
Trennus considered that. He was very in touch with earth and soil. He had to be, in his profession. “Considering the strata and weathering. . . the oldest might be eight to ten years. The newest, no more than two.”
“So. . . the oldest was built right around when Gratian and Tototl got started up in Nahautl.”
“Possibly. Don’t get set on the idea of a global conspiracy, Esh.”
“I’m not married to the idea that the two are linked,” Kanmi replied, dryly. “I just see potential connections.” He paused. “We can confirm that through the locals in the morning. For now, let’s look through the rest of the data we collected. There’s got to be some way in which this is hooked into the ley-grid. They were using Tholberg coils up in Nahautl. This. . . doesn’t seem to be the same method. But there has to be something.”
It took almost all of those three hours. And it was Minori who found it. “Look,” she said, with muted excitement, at close to one in the morning. “Here, this picture of the maps from the third facility we visited. You said that there was a tower in the Nazca valley, Master Matrugena?”
“Trennus,” he corrected, absently. “Yes, right at the center.”
“This map shows similar structures in a ring, dotted through the mountains around here.” Minori’s tone was clinical.
“We’re over five hundred miles from Nazca. Half our day was spent flying back and forth,” Trennus pointed out, tiredly.
“Yes. . . but look at the map of the whole of Tawantinsuyu,” Minori said, and grabbed one. Started marking each tower location on it. “Here, outside of Cuzco, the first location Kanmi and I visited. Next. . . northwest of here. Machu Picchu. Northwest of that. . . Ayacucho.” She pointed at the translation of the Latin letters that formed the Quecha word. “Spirit-corners. It’s a kami place, I think?”
Lassair didn’t open her eyes. The men who spoke to us the day before yesterday spoke of that city, yes. Many ancient temples. Some habitations outside of the buildings of the town, said to be very, very old.
“Twelve thousand years or so,” Tren supplied. “Caves, in the main. And most people in the region think of caves as being the home of the Uku Pacha. So. . . yes. Possibly.”
Minori nodded, and traced a curve between each of the points, lightly, with a compass. . . and swept around to another mark on the map. “Ica,” she said. “Land of the Sun, it says. Home of the Paracas, and apparently an area especially sacred to their sun-god. Inti.”
She paused and drew neat lines from
Nazca to each of the points so far. “Each of these,” she noted, quietly, “was the epicenter of a major earthquake in the last ten years. Here, Coropuna? Major earthquake centered here, four years ago. It’s a volcano to the southeast of Nazca.”
“You’re missing a point,” Kanmi noted, looking over her shoulder. “If you’re showing us a circle, there’s not much to the southeast.”
“Sicuani,” she said, shrugging. “No tower built there yet, according to the map from the file, but one is planned. No earthquakes. . . . yet. But no tower built yet, either. It’s not an important religious center, but . . . agricultural. I think. I need books.” Her tone was impatient.
Silence in the room for a moment, as they all considered the implications. Minori picked up the threads of her thoughts. “So. . . towers. Like spokes on a wheel,” she said. “Some of them aren’t completed, and some haven’t been built yet. But they have Nazca in between, as the hub. Most of them are near the ley-stations, but not on the same land. There was one near each of the stations we visited, in fact. And there are metal spikes driven down into the bedrock, anchoring the foundations, in each. Copper, in fact. Precisely what you’d use for a ley-platform. . . but they aren’t ley-facilities.”
“Spokes on a wheel,” Trennus said, quietly, and swore. “Damnú air. They might be building a binding circle outside the Lines, as well. No way to tell for certain, though. It’d be huge, though.”
Kanmi looked over Minori’s shoulder, reached out, and traced a finger out into the sea. “It’s more of an oval, Trennus,” he said. “Even if we include Sicuani, it’s not really a very regular shape. . . and obviously, no towers out in the sea.”
“There could be off-shore platforms,” Minori pointed out, immediately. “There are ley-lines in the water itself, and in the land deep under the sea.”
“Yes,” Trennus said, his voice distant, “but I don’t think they’d actually need to do that.” That got everyone to look at him again. “Part of this is using what’s in the Lines to. . . make the ley-lines resonate. And part of this is using the ley-energies already in existence to . . . contain, constrain, what’s caught in the Lines. It’s a self-feeding system, but they have to have enough energy on the outside to maintain the . . . the cage.” Trennus grimaced. “The Lines aren’t that far from the ocean. For a damned good reason. Salt water. Natural barrier. Many spirits get. . . massively confused in salt water.” Chemically, it’s so akin to human blood, and there’s so much out there that’s alive. . . . “So they actually save energy by not having to make a complete circle. Part of the circle, the boundary, is already drawn for them, by nature and geography.”
“There’s more, I think,” Minori said, quietly. “Each of these towers is located. . . hmm. Not far from what looks like old holy sites. Some are still in use, like this one, here. The Oracle of Maucallacta. It’s perched fairly high up on Coropuna.”
“The volcano?” Kanmi said, in a grim tone, and Minori nodded. “There’s a ley-station there?”
“About two miles from the shrine, which is . . . I can’t read this. It’s too small.”
Trennus looked at the tiny letters on the map. “An ushnu. It’s a three-stepped platform on which they offer libations to the gods. Liquid sacrifices, like maize liquor.” Like I offer wine and sugar, if that’s the spirit’s favored bargain.
“Blood?” Kanmi asked, quickly.
Trennus grimaced. “Not at an ushnu, according to what I heard on my tour. But they did comment that human sacrifices used to be offered at the tops of particularly holy mountains. The priests would take the chosen victims, often children, feed them rich foods, and lead them up to the top of the mountain, doped up on liquor or coca so that they wouldn’t feel the cold, and either bash in their skulls with a stone club, or leave them there till hypothermia and the high altitude killed them. A volcano. . .” he shrugged. “Historically, people tend to want to propitiate them.”
Kanmi rubbed at his face. “Spirits don’t really control plate tectonics. I would think that people would know that today.”
Trennus sighed. “Doesn’t mean that there isn’t a spirit associated with the mountain. Could even be a malevolent one, who saw a chance to take energy from the sacrifices without having to meet its end of the bargain. But. . . kind of getting far afield.” He looked at Minori with renewed respect. “So, each tower’s being built close to the ley-stations, and to these holy sites?”
She nodded, slowly, and looked at Kanmi. “Would you like to bet that the reason why you didn’t sense any disturbed earth, or bodies under the ground. . . .”
“Is that we were looking in the wrong place?” Kanmi’s entire body looked like a taut-pulled string. “No bet, Minori. I don’t bet on sure things. Gods, I am so stupid.” He sounded furious, and Tren winced, internally. Kanmi’s anger could turn anywhere, and at the moment, it was all directed inwards. Kanmi hated missing things. Hated missing the links in a pattern. “We were right there. If we’d spread out the search a little further, we could have found this—”
“You want us to have wandered through unfamiliar and extremely uneven terrain, in bad weather, in the hopes of finding something that we didn’t know was there?” Minori countered. Trennus blinked. The woman’s voice was gentle, but the mind behind it was sharp. “Kanmi, we didn’t have enough data to put the pattern together until just now.”
“Doesn’t matter. Still should have seen it.” Kanmi’s agitation was clear. “We’d have put this together a day or so ago—”
“And what? We’d have seen towers, yes. We wouldn’t know why they were in a rough circle spread out through the mountains—”
“We’d have seen the one in the center and known Nazca was the key—”
“Please stop. We’re all tired. We need to find out what else we need to . . . find out.” Minori raised her hands, expressing her own confusion as to what that included. “Make a list. And report in to Rome, correct?”
Trennus was surprised when Kanmi actually stopped, mid-rant. Kanmi usually was not good about that. He tended to need to go on, whether under his breath, to himself, or out loud, to someone else, until the fuel that stoked the fire was consumed. A deep breath, and Kanmi nodded. “All right. Top of the list, when new Lines started being built—for certain. What the official story behind that is. Next item, which of these towers was built first. After that, getting access. . . somehow. . . to verify if there are any bodies there, any technology. . . .”
Chapter XVII: Tephra
November 23, 144 AC lives in the popular imagination as the date on which Pompeii died. This is, and is not, true. Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed, but still exist; other cities were built a few miles from the ancient site, and it took their name in testament to the original cities.
Pompeii was founded in the sixth or seventh century before the ascension of Caesar. The history of the region is as turbulent as its geology. The city was captured by the Hellenes, Etruscans, and the Samnites before being adopted into the Roman Republic and remaining loyal during the Second Punic War. The people of Pompeii took up arms, like most of the Campania region, during the Social Wars, that brutal period in which Rome’s Italian allies fought for the right to be called Roman citizens. Pompeii was one of the cities defeated by Sulla . . . who would, eventually, march twice on Rome himself, carrying arms within the sacred boundaries of the city, and who would become Rome’s dictator, enacting numerous reforms, before retiring to a private life outside of Rome.
Earthquakes were common throughout Campania, and it must be noted that the ancients, while fascinated by natural philosophy, did not understand what caused the tremors. Seneca, for example, theorized that the great earthquake of 106 AC was caused by air currents under the earth. Seneca’s suggestion that one set of earthquakes might be interrelated with other quakes was perceived as radical at the time, but he never considered volcanism as a possible cause. He reproved landowners from moving away from the city during the quakes, suggesting that the only proper a
ttitude was stoicism: Death is all around us, and we are more likely to die of disease, than in an earthquake.
That the first major earthquake occurred on a day on which two sacrifices were to be held was considered a portent, and auguries and divinations were consulted. Oracles tend to be much sharper and clearer regarding the near future, than the distant one. Most modern philosophers attribute this to the nature of the quantum universe, and assert that the fewer decisions possible in between two points in time, the easier it is for an oracle to make a true prophecy.
All of the auguries were in agreement: Pompeii would die in fire. None of them, however, could agree as to when, or as the result of what. Some foresaw battle—not an uncommon occurrence during the days of the Republic, but during the early Empire . . . hardly an issue. Others suggested that another earthquake might cause the oil lamps to cause another disastrous fire, as had occurred in 106 AC. Only one, the Pythia of Delphi, suggested that the mountain would erupt. Her words were mysterious: “And the bodies will remain buried, and they will weep ashes, and be a monument to doubt.”
Many people left as a result of the bad auguries. But many landowners did, indeed, doubt the Pythia’s words. They felt that disaster could be averted by making the right decisions, by placating the gods. A new temple of Isis, an Egyptian goddess quite popular in the region, was built and consecrated. Games and sacrifices were offered. A new bathing complex was built. The people of Pompeii were clearly there to stay. And so they did, until November 23, 144 AC, when Vesuvius erupted. The cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum had some time in which to evacuate; Pliny the Elder, the admiral in charge of the region, died, attempting to effect the evacuation of hundreds of survivors. Still, fully half the population of the city died. Estimates run as high as ten thousand lives lost—an estimate comparable to the death tolls in battle from that era.
When the Pythia, as the only augury to have successfully foretold exactly how the region would be destroyed, was approached again, about rebuilding Pompeii and Herculaneum, she calmly told the Roman emissary, “The mountain will now sleep until the world ends.”
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 97
