I rounded a corner and heard a terrific shriek from behind me. It sounded like a pissed-off bird-of-prey. One by one, the howls and snarls and growls fell silent, until only the tea-pot screams of the flying thing remained. I ran up the street, away from the shrieks.
The houses grew fat around me. Built from dry-stacked stone, they bore accent colors on the doors and shutters. Each house had at least one flower box beneath a window, but all the flowers were black and dead.
On my right, there was a house with live flowers in the flower box. It looked well cared for, safe and warm. The door was painted a bright red color, as were the shutters. The flower box was a garish shade of orange that clashed with the doors and shutters such that it hurt to look at it—a clear case of what I called ‘winter-psychosis,’ where after a long, white winter, people went out and bought the brightest color paints they could and painted their houses with them.
Fear froze me in front of a door...THE door.
Behind me, the shrieking tea-pot finally, finally stopped. I wanted to turn, to see the thing chasing me, but I was frozen, staring at the door.
“Turn and see me,” boomed a voice from behind me.
“No,” I mumbled. “I don’t want to see.”
“Then you must open the door and go in.”
Icy terror wrapped its claws around my heart and squeezed, breaking my cardiac rhythm to pieces. Instead of my normal rhythm—ka-thump, ka-thump—my heart was making weak, squelching noises—ka-skish, ker-swossle.
“I-I-I—”
“I-I-I,” mocked the thing behind me. “C’mon, Hank, you don’t talk about things, you do. You just do.”
I stood frozen, longing for the time I spent running with a flying thing chasing me.
“Open it,” cajoled the thing behind me.
I reached out with a shaking hand and touched the blood-red door. As soon as my fingertips brushed the wooden door, there was a loud pop from behind me, and I knew the flying thing was gone.
But it could come back.
I pushed the door with my fingers, and it creaked open, sounding like old leather rubbing against bone. The interior of the house was dark—nothing but shadows—but I could see a female form and a smaller form tied to chairs facing the door. My heart crawled up into my throat without leaving a forwarding address and beat there so loudly I thought it would wake the dead men-at-arms littered around the city.
“I’m scared, Mommy,” said a small voice.
“I know, Sigster. Think about Daddy. Okay? Think about how brave your daddy is.”
I knew those voices as well as I knew my own. They belonged to my family. To Jane and to Siggy.
I moved forward on weak knees, unable to feel my feet. My heart had moved higher into my throat; I didn’t imagine I’d ever be able to speak actual words again.
Something glinted behind and above the shadowed forms of my wife and son. Metal shrieked against leather, and the glint became a flash.
There was someone—no, something—standing behind Jane. There was a sound like a hammer splitting a rotten board, and then it came again.
“Jane? Sig?”
A rough, dry chuckle came at me from the darkness. “Too late,” said the voice of a woman. A woman I knew.
“No!” I screamed.
I rushed forward, unseeing, to fall to my knees before my wife and child. I dreaded to touch them, fretting that they would be cold, dead.
And they were, they were.
Cold.
Dead.
Thirty-four
I woke with a start, hearing the jingling of a horse harness. It was daylight already, but I felt like I hadn’t slept at all. The nightmare swirled around in my head like a cancerous, two-headed snake. Everything it touched curled up, black and dead.
It was one of those mornings I’d come to dread, where it seemed like there was no way I could move that didn’t hurt, and no way to get comfortable. A black depression washed over me like seawater over the prow of a sinking ship.
I closed my eyes and lay there, thinking of Jane and how she’d take a day off from work on days like today—just to be with me and to try to keep my spirits up. She had called it “state of mind treatment.” I thought about how she used to pour me into her German SUV and drive somewhere pretty—one of the Finger lakes like Keuka or maybe to Letchworth State Park.
We’d play a game—a guessing game—as we drove through rural areas. The game was to guess which farms we were passing were owned by an Amish family and which were not. We had all sorts of “rules” set up: if the barn was freshly painted and well-maintained, then it was Amish, if there was a bunch of trash in the yard, numerous old cars, engine blocks, and tires, then it was not; if there was a long clothes-line rigged from a window of the house to the top of a silo or barn, with a pulley system, then it was Amish; if the clothes on the line contained a lot of dresses (Jane had arbitrarily set a limit for non-Amish women of wearing no more than one dress per week), then it was Amish; if there was a buggy or two, well, duh, it was Amish. I remember being amazed at how often the barn rule proved correct.
The destination hadn’t mattered, just spending time with her had reminded me that my life wasn’t just a series of painful flares. It had reminded me that my life wasn’t over and that there were plenty of things I could do and enjoy, even if I was doped to the gills with opiates.
I longed for her touch, for some of her smart-assed comments, for her laugh, for her silly jokes about political bumper-stickers, or the way she seemed to think she had to take corners like Mario Andretti with his pants on fire—all without breaking forty miles an hour.
Tears glistened behind my eyelids and a painful lump formed in my throat. The deep black depression tightened its grip. I rolled to my side, sighed, and opened my eyes, trying to wipe the tears away without looking like that was what I was doing. There was no use pining for the way things were. The only thing that would help was to find her and my son and take them back.
“Good morning,” said Mothi, his eyes on the ground in front of him.
“Not a whole lot good about it,” I muttered. I felt a cool hand on my shoulder and knew it was Sif, coming to check on her patient.
She squatted behind me and put her hand on my forehead. “You have a fever,” she said with concern in her voice.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “All part of the joy of my disease. It’ll go away.”
She stood and dug into her bag. “Even so,” she said. “I think willow bark tea will be a part of your breakfast.”
“If you say so,” I said. “I have to do a shot before breakfast.”
“A shot?”
“An injection. Methotrexate.”
“I don’t know it,” she said. “Shall we apply the cream?”
I sighed, keeping my eyes down. “I think it would be a wasted effort today, to be honest.”
“Come now, no megrims,” she groused.
“No, really,” I said, sitting up with a groan. “Today is what I call a ‘heavy’ day. Nothing really helps, not even high-powered pain medicine, though it does take the edge of the brutality off of it.”
She stood beside me, looking down at me. “Do you have this methotrexate with you? And this pain medicine?”
I nodded, wanting nothing more than to hear Jane’s voice. “Both are in my pack.”
“Let me see these medicines,” she said.
“I don’t know how that will help, but if you slide that behemoth of a pack closer, you are welcome to see them both.”
She pushed my pack closer to me with her foot, and I fished the bottle of oxycodone out. I opened the bottle and poured one of the little white pills into her outstretched palm. She lifted her palm to her nose and sniffed the pill several times. Then she stuck out her tongue and tasted it with the tip of her tongue. “Losa layntarmowl,” she said. She grunted and handed the pill back to me. “It is a form of Dragon’s Kiss—a plant with red and black flowers that grows in the foothills of Kvia to the west—but
yours tastes far more bitter.”
“It’s called an opium poppy on my side. It’s been the root of many a war.”
“We don’t find much use for Dragon’s Kiss,” said Sif with a shrug. “I can do better, but I need ingredients I don’t have here.” She dusted off her hands. “And this methotricksah?”
“Methotrexate,” I said without thinking. I rooted around and pulled out the little vial of chartreuse liquid. I fished out a syringe and filled it to my dosage and then added a little more.
Sif held out her hand, palm up.
I squirted a little of the yellow liquid in her hand. “Oh shit,” I said. “You shouldn’t be touching that. It’s got black box warnings a mile long—”
“No matter,” she said and licked her palm. Her face crumped, her nose wrinkled and she spit it to the ground. “Poison, Hank! It is nothing but poison.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s something called chemotherapy on my klith. Small doses of poison that are used to kill wayward cells. In my case, they kill back cells in my immune system. The theory—”
“Barbarism,” she snapped. “Why do you knowingly poison yourself? Who told you to do this?”
I shrugged, a sour grin on my face. “It works. It’s one of the only things that helps at all. If you’ve got something better, I’m all ears.”
“I will come up with something better than that foul poison, I can promise you that. I need ingredients, that’s all.” She gazed down at me for a long moment before turning away. She went about packing up her bedroll as if she hadn’t just promised to do better than modern medicine has been able to achieve with two thousand years of effort and fifteen million doctors practicing at any given time.
Mothi looked at me and squatted beside me, forearms on his knees, hands hanging limp at the wrist. “What can I do?”
I grimaced. It was the same thing in every culture. Everyone wants to help in some material way, even though there isn’t a thing anyone can really do during the bad moments of the disease. “Help me up off this cold ground?”
He smiled and nodded, springing to his feet and holding out his hand.
I rolled onto my back and kicked the blankets aside. I grabbed his hand, and he pulled me to my feet as if I weighed nothing. While I stood there swaying, waiting for the stiffness and pain to let up the tiniest bit, Mothi gathered my bedroll under one arm and tied it.
I pulled up my shirt and jabbed the syringe into my skin near my belly button. I depressed the plunger. I’d done it so often it didn’t even sting anymore. I’d skipped the alcohol wipes, but I doubted it would matter much.
“Need anything out of this?” he asked, holding up my pack.
I nodded and shuffled over to him. I shoved the bottle of oxycodone and the vial of methotrexate into the water proof pocket.
“You don’t need to swallow one of the pills?” Mothi asked.
“If I take enough to help, I’ll sleep most of the day. Riding would be out of the question, and there’s no way I could shoot.” I shook my head. “No, I can’t take any today. Maybe when we get to Drinkga…”
“Trankastrantir,” said Mothi. He tied my gear behind Slaypnir’s saddle and then stooped and interlaced his fingers, making a stirrup of his hands.
I laid a hand on his shoulder and put one foot in his hands. He lifted me with no more effort than I would have used to lift Sig when he was six, and I swung into the saddle with a hiss and a grimace. I wasn’t looking forward to another long day of riding, or fighting, or both.
We rode unmolested for half the day before we saw the smoke on the horizon to the north. I could tell, just by looking at my companions faces, that the smoke was coming from where Trankastrantir should be.
“Nithukkr’s metal heart!” snapped Meuhlnir. “Does that Black Bitch have no propriety?”
Sif glared at him for a moment, but only sighed and shook her head. “Come on, then. Let’s see how bad it is.”
We rode in silence for another couple of hours before we started seeing the burnt-out farms. It was another fifteen minutes before we saw the first corpse, hanging from a tree branch that stuck out over the road. The young girl’s body bore the marks of savage bites and was missing long strips of flesh and numerous bones.
I’d seen what Luka did to bodies, but in comparison, he was quite merciful.
“Svartalfar!” snapped Mothi. He leaned to the side and spit on the ground.
“It is similar to what Luka did to bodies on my klith.”
Meuhlnir glanced at me but didn’t meet my gaze. “Itla sem yetur,” he mumbled and then walked Sinir forward.
We rode into the city—or what remained of the city. Broad swatches of street were still covered in frost, some of the buildings were sheathed in ice and yet other buildings still smoldered and smoked, burnt out husks. Karls of the city stood looking around in a vague, distracted sort of way, while thralls picked through rubble or moved among the karls, offering drinks or bread. Bodies were being laid out in the main square, many of them showing evidence that they had served as meals for the Svartalfar. Looking down one of the side streets, I saw several bodies hanging from ropes looped through second story windows.
Men looked at us with distrust, with no discernable expression, or in some cases, with expressions vacant of intelligence. The shock of the attack was still fresh for many of them.
“Did they pass us in the night?” I muttered.
“Seems so,” said Mothi in clipped tones.
“Why?” I asked.
Meuhlnir looked at me with anger twisting his face. “Because they are cowards. They attacked us, and we stood them off, leaving them bloodied and hurt. They couldn’t face us again, so they came here.” His voice rose as he spoke and by the end of the sentence, he was almost shouting.
The karls of the village had fallen silent and still, and now just stared at us. The thralls kept their heads down and kept moving.
“We did fight them,” snapped Meuhlnir, sweeping his arm about in a semi-circle. “We beat them.” He glared at the karls, but none of them would meet his furious gaze.
One of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in my life rode up on a magnificent dapple gray mare. She had long jet-black hair of the kind that would make supermodels on my klith drool with envy. Her skin was milky-white like porcelain, a perfect complement to her finely-chiseled features. She reminded me of Jane so much that my heart lurched, and a lump formed in my throat.
The woman wore armor of a shimmery, silver-blue metal, that was now splattered with blood, mud, and soot. “As did we, you big ox,” she said. Her voice had a musical quality to it, but even so, it was ragged with exhaustion and pain.
“Greetings, Frikka. I wish we were visiting in better circumstances,” said Yowrnsaxa.
Frikka sighed. “As do I, Yowrnsaxa,” she said in a voice rimed with sadness. “Even after all these years, the Dark Queen still spits at us.” Frikka’s eyes were a sharp shade of blue that made me think of the color of the New England sky on the first day of spring. She sighed and turned her eyes back to the devastation of her city. “Welcome to Trankastrantir. Or what’s left of it.”
I looked at the destruction of the town, the dead lying on the ground, the frost and frozen spots, with despair. “I’m sorry this happened to your town,” I said. The dark depression of the morning grew teeth.
“It is no matter,” said Frikka. “We will rebuild. The Dark Queen will not defeat us.” She was scanning the buildings surrounding the square. “It could have been much worse if that dreadful beast had been airborne.”
“The dragon?”
She nodded. “For some reason, it was plodding around on foot. It seemed out of sorts. It kept stretching a wing out and shaking black blood all over the place.”
Mothi nodded toward me. “That was Aylootr’s handiwork.”
Frikka arched a brow at me. “Aylootr, eh?”
I shook my head. “I’m Hank Jensen. Call me Hank.”
“Oh, you’ll call him Aylootr, t
oo, after you’ve seen him fight,” said Mothi.
Frikka sighed and rotated her shoulders to stretch her muscles. “There’s nothing we can do here,” she said. “We should leave so the karls feel more comfortable commanding the thralls.”
“Perhaps I can help?” asked Sif.
Frikka shook her head. “I appreciate the offer, but the karls have a few healers they prefer. And you are still a yarl, even if you did marry so far beneath you.” Her mouth turned up in a grin, and she winked at me.
“Well, someone had to keep Yowrnsaxa company,” said Sif with a mischievous glint in her eye. We followed Frikka as she turned her horse and walked it away from the town square.
Meuhlnir looked at them with a hint of a grin and shook his head. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was being insulted.”
“Might as well ask a bear to vefa strenki, as ask a man to understand what two women are saying about him.”
Meuhlnir scoffed. “Such a weak effort, Frikka. Didn’t I teach you better than that?”
Frikka’s laugh was charming.
We’d left the townsfolk behind us, except for a few solitary figures sifting through rumble or wandering around, aimless and in shock. I leaned across the space between Mothi and I and asked, “What’s the difference between a thrall, a karl and a yarl?”
“We have a caste system here,” he said. “Father told you of Ragnaruechkr, right?”
I nodded.
“The thralls are the lowest caste—the laborers. They descend from the lowest ranks of Isi’s army. Karls are the next caste. Their ancestors stood between the upper echelons and the thralls in Isi’s army. Karls are now merchants, farmers, crafters, tradesmen, and the like. Yarls are the highest caste—the nobility and landowners. It is the caste all of us belong to. We descend from the leaders and scientists of Isi’s army. The thinkers, the planners, and the strategists.”
“Can no one rise up through achievement?”
Mothi shook his head. “No. You are born, live, and die as a member of the same caste.”
“Huh,” I said.
“You don’t approve, Aylootr?” he asked.
“It’s not that—I have no right to judge your culture. I know there are cultures on my klith that have used or still use a caste system, but I barely know anything about them. Still, what happens if a yarl is a miscreant with no talent and one of his thralls is a genius?”
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 34
