I followed him into the room. I floated up in the corner of the square room, near the ceiling. Luka stood by the podium, flicking switches, adjusting sliders, and setting dials without hesitation. “Haymtatlr, enable this proo,” he said.
Could it be that easy? I wondered.
“I can’t do that, Luka.”
I appeared above Veethar’s head. “No troops,” I said. “Looks like they disappeared with the Black Bitch.”
Veethar nodded. “Any sign of Sif?”
Luka slapped his palm on the podium. “Don’t play games with me, Haymtatlr! You can enable this proo, and you will.”
“No, Luka, you misunderstand me. I didn’t say ‘I won’t,’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ You instructed me to turn off all access to the preer, and I did so. But you fail to grasp the complexity—”
“Haymtatlr…” growled Luka.
“There are ninety-three thousand two hundred ninety-one preer, Luka. Rather than turning them off one-by-one, I turned off the—”
“Fine! Turn them all back on, only get this one working now!”
A loud clunk sounded, then an almost inaudible hum that I felt in the soles of my feet and deep in my bowels.
“What was that?” asked Jane.
“The preer coming online. We have to be quick!”
“Proo departure station alpha-nine-five-three activated. Destination set,” said Haymtatlr’s voice from a speaker in the podium. The square dais in the center of the room began to glow, and a high-frequency hum started behind the walls. The memory of those strange horn-shapes in the brown room flashed through my mind.
“He’s going through a proo!” I shouted, trying to memorize the position of each control on the podium, but there were too many settings, and I couldn’t concentrate with my mind split into three parts.
“No, I saw no one,” I said, answering Veethar.
“Maybe you could start each sentence with the name of the person to whom you are speaking,” muttered Jane.
Luka stepped on the dais and walked to its center. He glanced up at me, a sneer playing at his lips. “Send me, Haymtatlr, and close the proo behind me,” he said. The dais flashed through a rainbow of colored light, and he disappeared.
“He’s gone!”
“What?” asked Veethar.
“Luka! He opened a proo and crossed over.”
We reached the corridor that led to the white door and sprinted to the room. I skidded through the door and snapped my animus from the corner back into myself.
“Follow him!” said Meuhlnir. “Don’t let him escape! We mustn’t lose him!”
“Will you be okay?”
“This is nothing,” he said, but his face was gray, and his lips were tinged with blue. “We’ll find Sif, and she’ll fix me up.”
“How will we reconnect?”
“Leave the proo open, and, after we’ve found the others, we will come find you, Hank. Never fear,” said Veethar. “Be careful, and good hunting.”
I snapped my animus back and looked at Jane, Yowtgayrr, and Althyof. “They want us to follow Luka through the proo. Veethar says they can find us as long as we leave the thing open.”
“But Meuhlnir was injured—”
“He said he’s fine. They will find the others and join us when they can.”
“Haymtatlr, open this proo and set it to the destination Luka traveled to,” said Jane.
“Luka asked me to—”
“But does Luka talk to you? Does he ask you interesting questions?” The dais shimmered with potential energy and began to hum. “Let’s go get the bastard,” snarled Jane.
“No, Jane. You mustn’t leave,” said Haymtatlr through the podium’s speaker. “I shall cut the power if you try, and no one will leave!”
“He’s right, hon. You should stay, go with the others. Find Sig.”
In answer, Jane walked to the platform and stepped up. “Mothi is there to protect him, and Sif and Yowrnsaxa will mother the heck out of him. Sig will be fine. You, on the other hand…” She tipped me a wink. “Haymtatlr, if you don’t allow me to leave, I’ll never speak to you again.”
Haymtatlr didn’t answer, but the power to the dais remained.
“I think it’s now or never, Hank,” said Yowtgayrr. Looking down at the shimmering platform with a trace of distaste on his face, he stepped up and moved to stand next to Jane.
I glanced at Althyof. “I’m going with them,” he said. “Sounds like fun.” He tipped a wink and stepped up on the platform.
With a shrug, I called Keri and Fretyi to my side and stepped up next to the others. “Hit it, Haymtatlr.” A nanosecond later, he did, and my next breath tasted of home.
Rooms of Ruin
Table of Contents
Cover page
TITLE PAGE
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Fifty-one
Fifty-two
Fifty-three
Fifty-four
Fifty-five
Fifty-six
Fifty-seven
Fifty-eight
Fifty-nine
Sixty
Sixty-one
Wild Hunt
Blood of the Isir
Book three
Erik Henry Vick
Wild Hunt Dedication
For my parents,
Patricia and Jerome Vick,
who always told me I could do anything.
A person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones or trying to convince twenty-first century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.
―Stephen King
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
One
I have said to the gods and the sons of the god,
The things that whetted my thoughts;
But before thee alone do I now go forth,
For thou fightest well, I ween
—The Lokasenna (The Poetic Edda)
The woman awoke at a wormlike pace, coming back to herself bit by bit as if she had slept for ages. Her tongue lay in her mouth like a dead slug and tasted of a bitter metal, or perhaps blood. Her ears rang with the silence that encircled her, entombed her. Her memory was foggy…incomplete.
She hung in an empty space surrounded by a kaleidoscopic horror of colors and abstract geometric shapes exploding around her. Time and space held no meaning for her, there was no up nor down, only the mysterious sensation of tides pulling at her from every direction. No solid ground existed beneath her feet, no liquid…nothing.
Named Hel, Que
en of Osgarthr, rightful ruler of the Isir, her own people had betrayed her centuries ago, and, more recently, her allies—the Plowir Medn—had betrayed her, too. She remembered the foul blue creatures teleporting her away from the battle with that damn cop and his cohorts—she’d almost forgotten fighting with Hank Jensen, but she felt a vague tickle about battling a colossal bear, and then thousands of robots had come at her from out of nowhere. Haymtatlr’s guardians! Her rage was a palpable thing, a beast, alive and clawing for dominance.
Luka was not with her—the Plowir Medn had left him behind as if he counted for nothing—but her mind ran in circles, first imagining Luka was with her, wondering where he was, cursing the Plowir Medn, wondering if Haymtatlr's guardians had killed the Isir. Haymtatlr betrayed me, just like all the others—the Isir, my allies, even my so-called “guides” who abandoned me toward the end of the rebellion!
She drifted in utter silence, lost, bereft—even the voices had abandoned her…those two voices—both unfamiliar, and yet, as intimate as lovers—had she imagined them? The Plowir Medn had named them Mirkur and Owraythu. Hel had never heard those names before, not in all her travels, not from any of the peoples she had visited in her many years of life, and yet…and yet she seemed to know them, to recognize the sound of their voices.
Their names were jokes…Mirkur meant “darkness” in the Gamla Toonkumowl while Owraythu meant “chaos.” The silly blue men claimed they were brother and sister, and worse yet, ancient gods of great power. It made sense that the Plowir Medn would worship deities who claimed to embody darkness and chaos. As a race, they embraced disorder…they seemed to feed off it.
How long Owraythu had kept her imprisoned, she couldn't say. An hour? A day? A year? She had no idea—time was meaningless in this eternally variegated changing pattern of colors and images.
The last thing she remembered was Owraythu saying, “You refused to play by the rules. For that, you will pay the price.” And…
The pain had engulfed her, then. Wave after wave of nauseating agony seared her nerves and racked her body. Her muscles had refused to obey her, even her mouth and throat. She hadn't even been able to scream.
It had gone on and on, just her and the pain. Her senses had shut down one by one, her vision, her sense of smell, her hearing, her sense of touch, and even the taste of her tongue in her own mouth as it dried. Only the pain had been constant.
When the darkness had overtaken her mind, she had welcomed its release, but now she regretted the loss…of memory, of her sense of place in the universe. What did they do to me while my mind rebelled and ran away from the pain? Where am I, and more importantly, how can I escape? How can I get back to my war?
“Lyows!” she said into the dead space in which she hung. Nothing happened, and a tingle of fear rattled around her belly like dice in a gaming cup. Her memory of what had happened after Owraythu had told her she would pay the price was fuzzy. She thought something else had happened, but she couldn't pin it down. “Luka! Where are you, my Champion?” she yelled.
Nothing and no one answered her, not even the echo of her own voice. She was alone. A mere mote of sentience in a polychromatic nightmare.
She no longer felt any pain—she no longer felt anything. Her skin was neither hot nor cold—it was as though whatever surrounded her maintained the same temperature as her body. Even the air enwrapped her in stillness…no breeze…nothing.
Owraythu had mentioned something about Hel’s refusal to play by the rules…but what did she mean by that? Was it a reference to breaking the Ayn Loug? Or did it have a more sinister meaning? Hel didn’t know and was not sure she cared.
She drifted through the orgy of hues, the mad finger painting of Owraythu and Mirkur on the satin black canvas of the place in which they incarcerated her. Well, maybe Owraythu alone had created the superfluity of color, since the shades of soot accounted for every tincture on Mirkur’s palette. Her eyelids drooped to half-cover her eyes, and her eyes unfocused. Her mind ran down, thoughts coming slower and slower until she drifted in a fugue of non-thought, of nothingness in stark contrast to the chaos of exploding colors she drowned in.
Time lost all meaning. One moment was indistinguishable from the next. Nothing happened, nothing marked the passage of time—no sun arcing through the sky, no pitter-patter of animal life, no people, no weather, no sounds of sea or wind or war. Nothing.
Just nothingness.
“This one senses you’ve awakened,” said a voice like fingernails scratched across textured glass.
Owraythu, Hel thought.
“As good a cognomen as any other.” The voice seemed to growl from the very air, from all around her, the rumbling staccato of a machine gun nest.
“Why… What do…”
“Cease!” snapped Owraythu. “The time for this one to talk has arrived, and with it, the time for you to listen.”
“Wait a minute! I’m the rightful—”
“Desist in this irrelevant clangor!” Owraythu’s voice thundered, adding artillery barrages to the persistent drumming of machine guns, painful to the ear and brain.
Hel’s jaw and tongue worked, but no sound came out. She could breathe, but she could not speak. She couldn’t even form coherent speech in her own mind.
“Sibling?”
Half the space around Hel dimmed as if someone had turned down the rheostat governing the saturation of the colors swirling around her. The colors leached out of the nothingness encircling her, and Hel understood the true meaning of nothingness. She tried to turn so that all she saw was the psychotic symphony of shades, but the umbral midnight murk moved with her. Either that, or the sensation of moving was hallucinatory, and she hung motionless instead of twisting like a fish on a line.
“This one does not savor the presence of this…this…this woman. If she can still be cleped thus.”
“This one comprehends your distaste but abandon your disquiet. She will either assimilate, or she will suffer in this crucible of torment this one has created.”
Hel wanted to say she would listen, she tried to nod, to kneel, to do anything, but Owraythu denied her all forms of communication. She hung, speechless, motionless, expressionless.
“She is…” said Mirkur, and his voice abraded Hel’s nerves.
“Yes,” said Owraythu. “She entreats us to reform her errancy.”
“Affirmation. The small one demands correction.”
The darkness seemed to pulse with the arrant lack of light, or perhaps it breathed. Hel couldn’t stand to look at it.
“Her capacity to perceive our realm for what it is reeks of the lacking,” said Owraythu. “Baseness and avarice are the sui generis roots of her psyche, in part—”
“Inconsequence,” said Mirkur.
“Yes, yet her pattern of cognition resides at the root of her error. This small one conjectures her disgraceful creed protects her from—”
“She shall learn.”
Owraythu said nothing, but the paroxysmal bursts of color shouted her pique at being interrupted. At least that’s how it seemed to Hel.
“She will take correction.”
“Agreement.”
“This one requires that she dwell here in suffering until she grows submissive and—”
“This one assimilates, Mirkur. Leave the chore with this one. The task will consummate in success, or the task shall continue without end, without pause.”
The categorical, tenebrous lack of everything related to light and life faded, replaced by a detonation of color that threatened to sear Hel’s brain. In it, Hel thought she detected a sense of maleficent triumph in Owraythu’s interruption of Mirkur’s thoughts. Like called to like, after all.
“Alone at last,” crooned Owraythu. “Allow this one to begin.” The myriad hues and shades surrounding Hel pulsed faster and faster—like the heartbeat of a sprinting woman. “This one has such sublimities to share with you.”
Two
“I think it’s now or never, Hank,” said Yow
tgayrr. Glancing down at the shimmering platform with a trace of distaste on his face, he stepped up and moved to stand next to Jane.
I glanced at Althyof. “I’m going with them,” he said. “Sounds like fun.” He tipped a wink and stepped up on the platform.
With a shrug, I called Keri and Fretyi to my side and stepped up next to the others. “Hit it, Haymtatlr.” A nanosecond later, he did, and my next breath tasted of home.
The breath right after that tasted of dust, damnation, and death. Keri and Fretyi growled and took a few stiff-legged steps, fur standing on end along the ridge of their backs. “Weapons,” I snapped, letting my arms do what they knew so well. Yowtgayrr sketched his silvery runes in the air and disappeared.
Kunknir and Krati in hand, I stepped clear of the others and peered into the stygian satin shadows. “Lyows,” I said, and a warm golden light washed away the darkness.
We stood in an unknown yarl’s old great hall. Three bodies lay in a small group in the center of the hall, and blood pooled around them, wafting the scent of coppery blood and the charnel smells of the slaughterhouse. At the far corner, a battered yew door flapped in the wind.
“What’s that…Oh my God, Hank! That one in the middle…was he butchered?”
“Yeah,” I breathed. “Leg’s cut away. Chopped away, more like it.”
While the pups sniffed around the edge of the blood, Althyof crept to the bodies, daggers out, cadmium red cartoon shapes jigging and jagging. “This one’s dead by violence,” he said, touching the foot of one body. “This one…the one missing the leg…he’s an oolfur, Hank.”
I raised my eyebrows. “A dead oolfur?”
“Yes, killed by an Isir using saytr, unless I miss my guess.”
“Luka,” I rasped.
The Tverkr shrugged. “Who else? This guy here, he died fighting this oolfur, I’d guess.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Jane, gaze drilling into the dark corners of the room.
“Well, the oolfur has his bowels in his hand.”
The puppies stood still, staring at the yew door and the shrieking storm beyond it. Keri had one foot up as though he were about to take a step. As I watched, Fretyi sank into a slinking crouch and edged toward the shadows at the edge of the room.
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 96
