Blood of the Isir Omnibus

by Erik Henry Vick

  “Guns, dork,” murmured Jane.

  I pulled my pistols but stood with them pointed at the ground. “Nothing to shoot at,” I said. “Noise.” Both varkr were on their feet, growling deep in their chests, staring at the falling water.

  “Puppies don’t approve of it, though,” muttered Jane. “Neither do I.”

  Yowtgayrr whirled to stare at the rock face beneath me. His sword and dagger came out with the whispered hiss of steel on steel. He moved to the side, eyes never leaving the cliff.

  But there was nothing there. Nothing I could see from my animus at any rate. I walked over so I could see past the cabin and Jane followed, the puppies walking with us, but absently, never taking their eyes off the waterfall.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Can’t see anything, but both Althyof and Yowtgayrr are staring at the cliff back there. No idea why.”

  Another rumbling crack assaulted the air. The water jetting down from the top of the cliff parted with a hiss of spray, and a massive chunk of ice fell to the pool below.

  “Something’s in the water,” I said. “Behind the waterfall somehow.”

  Althyof began to sing a trowba, and the air crackled with power. He whirled into the area behind the cabin, spinning and leaping as he cast runes and the energy built until the air seemed charged with it.

  I pointed at Krowkr and the karls from the village. “Stay here!” I commanded and followed the Tverkr, Jane at my left and one pup on either side of us, as if we needed chaperones.

  A throaty, inarticulate shout boomed across the meadow, echoing from the stone face of the mountain, and reverberating off through the trees opposite. Keri and Fretyi added their barks to the auditory assault. A long, pale azure arm penetrated the falling water and hurled an ice boulder the size of a man’s head at Althyof. The Tverkr avoided it easily, spinning away long before the ice struck the ground. He made a throwing motion with one of his daggers and a red bolt of power shot from its tip and sliced through the water, followed by a bellow of rage and pain.

  “Come on,” I said to Jane and started toward the waterfall. At the same time, I sent my animus diving into the foot-thick column of water pouring down the face of the cliff. I skimmed down through the rushing water and emerged in a hollow behind the waterfall. Against the back wall of the grotto stood another silvery proo, and between it and me stood a humongous blue-skinned giant of a man.

  He stood on two legs, but his limbs were over-long, and his joints were bulbous and thick. Despite his muscular neck and shoulders, the creature’s bald head seemed too big to support. White horns jutted from where a man’s collarbones would be, and again from his elbows and knees. His eyes were a brilliant red and stared at my animus with baleful, threatening intensity.

  “A blue-skinned troll or a demon or something,” I said. I tried to make my animus as translucent as possible and moved to the side of the cavern, but those sinister red eyes followed me, nonetheless.

  The thing reached toward the water, and where his hand intersected the stream, another ball of ice formed. With a guttural roar, he threw the ice boulder at my animus. I darted away, and the ice exploded when it hit the stone wall of the cavern.

  Althyof threw another bolt of power through the waterfall. It slammed into the thing’s abdomen with a hiss, and the creature screamed in rage. With one last glare at my animus, he grabbed another handful of quick-freezing water, and I let my animus fade—no sense getting him all riled up.

  He erupted from the waterfall, ice shards as sharp as any dagger exploding into the clearing. The varkr snarled and paced, stiff-legged. Althyof whirled and danced, hurling bolts of power every few steps, but now that the blue-skinned creature could see them coming, he avoided them with the ease the Tverkr had avoided his ice boulder.

  My guns came up as though my hands had minds of their own, but I checked my fire at the last instant—the big blue brute wasn’t attacking—not yet, anyway. He stood staring at us, head moving ponderously from one face to the next: Althyof, Jane, me, back to Althyof again, as if trying to solve a complex math problem but having no idea of where to start.

  “Is it me, or does he seem…limited?” asked Jane.

  “It’s not you.”

  At the sound of our voices, he growled, showing a mouth full of fangs and sharpened teeth. He took a giant step forward but kept his feet in the freezing water, and the puppies barked in earnest, hair standing up on their backs. His gaze bounced between the pups, and his lip curled with hatred. He bent and scooped up two handfuls of flash-frozen water and hurled them at the varkr.

  Kunknir and Krati bucked in my hands, reports crashing against the cliff and bouncing back undiminished. The karls gasped at the noise the guns made. Jane hurled her golden spear, and the air crackled as it turned to lightning. The bullets hit first, slamming into the blue creature’s chest, flinging pale green blood into the water behind him, and half spinning him around. The golden bolt of lightning hit him broadside, and for a moment, he convulsed where he stood.

  With a shout of pure malice and rage, he scooped up more ice and hurled it at us, but two rounds from Kunknir’s ever-diminishing supply shattered them in midair. Fretyi and Keri raced toward the stream, barking and snarling. Althyof spun between the blue giant and us, singing a trowba at the top of his lungs.

  “We have to get it out of the water,” Yowtgayrr said from somewhere off to my left. “Limit the frost giant’s ammunition.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll try.” I whistled for the puppies, and they scampered back to my side. Jane and I backed away from the stream, putting the cabin at our backs. After a single pass, Althyof looped around behind us, singing and casting runes to magnify our agility. I took up his song, casting the runes along with him. Jane called her spear back and hunched behind her shield at my left.

  The frost giant scowled at us and scooped two more handfuls of ice out of the stream. Jane barged her shield at him, and it pinged like a giant wind chime. A jagged black beam ripped the air between her and the frost giant, and the blue-skinned creature flew from his feet and landed on his back on the far bank. Chunks of ice clung to his feet like shoes.

  The giant bellowed and slammed his fists into the earth on either side of him. He lurched into a sitting position and glared at Jane. Something splashed through the stream—Yowtgayrr, still invisible—and the giant’s head snapped in that direction.

  “He could see my animus, even as translucent as I could make it!” I shouted. The frost giant glanced at me, then back to track Yowtgayrr.

  I snapped off two rounds from Krati, trying to draw the giant’s attention, but he ignored me. Jane hurled her spear again, then held her hand out, as if beckoning the frost giant to take her hand. The giant’s gaze drifted up to the sky and then back down to take in the water rushing past him at his feet. He shook his head like a drunk and glanced at me, bleary-eyed.

  “Can we defeat it?” I asked.

  As if in answer, Yowtgayrr appeared behind the giant, his longsword and long dagger held aloft, pointed downward at the giant. He plunged the blades down, piercing the giant’s flesh near the horns at his shoulders. The giant lurched and shuddered as the blades bit deep into his chest.

  Althyof shouted two discordant words in the space between two short lines of his trowba: “Hyarta umsikyanti!” Two red bolts shot from the tips of his daggers and ripped into the giant’s chest above his heart.

  The giant’s muscles tensed all at once, arching his back, and as a result, ripping Yowtgayrr’s blades from the Alf’s hands. As if in a daze, the blue creature swept an arm in a flat arc to his side, slamming Yowtgayrr through the air. The Alf landed in a boneless heap.

  I strode forward, muscle-memory from a thousand move-and-shoot drills taking over, pulling the triggers of my pistols as fast as I could. Rounds from Krati peppered the blue skin of the giant’s torso while rounds from Kunknir hammered into the creature’s face. Green blood flew, coating the giant’s body. He bellowed, and more
greenish blood erupted from his mouth. Jane barged at him with her shield again, ripping the hand she beckoned him with toward her as she did so.

  The giant lurched forward as the air pinged and the black beam tore at the air. The beam slammed into the giant and drove him over backward, feet splayed in the air. Yowtgayrr’s blades sank to their hilts into the giant’s flesh.

  “Help Yowtgayrr,” I said, and Althyof nodded, whirling and dancing toward the Alf.

  Jane recalled her spear and threw it again, hurling it as if she’d grown up throwing spears. She held out her hand again and beckoned, eyes boring into the frost giant’s prone form. I fired off a few more rounds from Krati, but the giant never moved, except to twitch as the rounds bit into its flesh.

  I continued moving toward the stream, both guns covering the giant, but I checked my fire. There was no sense wasting rounds shooting a dying (or dead) thing. Jane shuffled forward at my side, holding her shield ready. The varkr pups escorted us, walking stiff-legged, holding their tails out behind them as though they were hunting.

  I stopped when we stood across the stream from the ever-increasing pool of pale green blood and the giant it came from. Muscles slack, eyes rolled up in his head, the creature didn’t move. I stepped into the stream, wincing as the temperature of the water lanced through the joints in my feet and ankles. The puppies sniffed the water but didn’t follow us.

  “Not too close,” murmured Jane.

  “I think he’s dead,” I said.

  “Still.”

  I nodded and changed directions, so we came out of the stream ten feet from the giant blue corpse. His blood steamed, boiling in the frigid mountain air, and his eyes turned black while they smoked and hissed. As we watched, the giant’s flesh collapsed and decayed, releasing a sickly white smoke and the stench of putrefaction.

  Althyof offered his hand to Yowtgayrr and pulled the Alf to his feet. “Are you all right?” Jane asked.

  Yowtgayrr nodded and retrieved his weapons, grimacing at the gunk that stuck to the blades. He grabbed handfuls of the sparse grass and cleaned his sword and dagger as best he could.

  A clamor came from behind us, and I turned to see the karls from the village below standing in the cabin’s side yard. Mouths hung agape, and eyes were round and open wide.

  “I don’t suppose we can ask them not to tell stories about this.”

  “Doubt it,” said Jane. “Why did that thing attack us?”

  “Frost giant,” grunted Althyof. “Nasty creatures. Rude.”

  “What was it doing here?”

  “There’s another proo inside a grotto behind the waterfall,” I said. “Maybe it wandered too close to the other end and got pulled through.”

  “Are they intelligent?” asked Jane.

  “You could say that if you were feeling generous,” said Althyof. “More than a troll, less than a Svartalf.”

  “Wouldn’t it have known what a proo was?”

  Althyof shrugged. “Perhaps Luka left this one as a guardian of that proo. Or perhaps it was another of his jokes.”

  I watched the outer layer of the frost giant’s skin liquify, melting as if it were ice, giving off more noxious white smoke, as all but a few of the Viking karls crossed the stream to see the thing for themselves. “Why is it melting?

  “They come from a strange stathur, one that is very, very cold by our standards. This klith is too hot for them, and they can’t stay long. Even up here in the heights, the temperatures limit their stay to mercifully short periods,” said Yowtgayrr.

  “Did you notice how it stayed in the water?” asked Althyof. “Cooling.”

  “How long could it have been in the grotto?” Fretyi whined and yawned as widely as his jaws could move. “Well, come here, puppy,” I said to him and held out my hand. Krowkr shooed the puppies toward me and stepped into the stream behind them.

  Althyof pursed his lips. “Not long.” His eyes strayed to the rear door of the cabin. “When I opened the door… What’s that idiot doing?”

  I turned in time to see one of the karls push the back door of the cabin open. “Hey! Get away—”

  A searing thunderclap of color and light blinded me. The ground beneath my feet leapt out from under me, and a blast of hot wind knocked me ass-over-teakettle. A whump I associated with heavy explosives deafened me. I hit the ground in a reverse belly-flop, and the air burst from my lungs. A moment later, a cold wind blew from the other direction, filling the void created by the release of energy.

  My ears rang to the exclusion of all other sound, and I had monstrous purple and green spots in the shape of the cabin floating in my gaze. We should be dead, I thought. Explosions didn’t work like in the movies. The initial blast wave should have pulverized our organs, and if we somehow survived that, the high velocity shock wave—the hot wind—should have poured even more energy into our innards. The following cold wind should have hit with equal force next, what the bomb squad called a “blast wind,” flipping us back toward the cabin until we hit something.

  Jane was on the ground next to me, holding her head. She nodded when I put my hand on her shoulder. Althyof and Yowtgayrr had become entwined in a heap of limbs, but both were aware and moving around. Krowkr lay in the stream, face toward the sky, an oversized puppy in each arm. The karls on our side of the stream lay scattered about but seemed no worse off than we were. The other side of the stream, however, was as different from ours as night is to day.

  I shook my head, trying to clear the purple and green outlines of the cabin out of my vision. The actual cabin was gone, and I don’t mean blown to smithereens. It was gone, as in disappeared, vanished. There was no debris, no shrapnel, as there should have been in any explosion big enough to generate a blast equal to the one we’d experienced.

  The karls who had stayed back near the cabin littered the ground, like so much thrown confetti after a parade. Blood and clear fluids streamed from their eyes and ears. None of them moved or groaned or, by the look of it, breathed.

  Not even a smear of blood remained of the karl who had opened the door and entered the cabin. He was just gone.

  On my hands and knees, I crawled to Krowkr and pulled him out of the icy stream. While dazed, he didn’t appear to be seriously injured. The pups crawled up his torso to avoid the water, moving as if they were half-asleep.

  “What was that?” asked Jane.

  “Cabin’s gone,” I said.

  She stared across the stream and rubbed her eyes. “Where did it go?”

  “It’s gone. No shrapnel, no debris, nothing left of it. Same with the idiot who went inside.”

  “The proo’s still there, though,” said Althyof, disentangling himself from Yowtgayrr and walking over to us. “I think those men are done for.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Still, we should check on them.”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  “Thanks, Althyof.”

  “Is Krowkr okay?” asked Jane.

  “Yes, my lady,” he said, but he didn’t move. “The Trickster left a trick for us to stumble upon.”

  Yowtgayrr walked over to the other karls on our side of the stream and helped them sit up, speaking softly, resting a hand on a shoulder here and there.

  I got to my feet after a short struggle, the puppies watching me warily as though scared I’d fall on them. The proo shimmered where the cabin once stood. “Two preer,” I murmured.

  “Double the pleasure, double the fun,” muttered Jane in a sour tone. “How do we choose?”

  I sighed and lifted my shoulders for a moment before letting them drop. The movement made my upper back ache. “That was no explosion, though.”

  “No?”

  “No. We’d all be dead if explosives had caused that blast wave.”

  Jane sighed. “Magic?”

  “You’ve got me.”

  “Full of answers today, aren’t you?”

  I walked through the stream, intent on examining the proo and the space the cabin had occupied. Behind me, K
eri and Fretyi whined. “Stay with your mommy,” I said over my shoulder. As I walked, I changed the magazine in each pistol for a fresh, fully loaded one, and let my fingers reload the spent rounds on autopilot. I pawed through the pouches in Prokkr’s fabulous gun belt, counting shells, and grimaced at the results. I only had twenty-four .45 caliber rounds left for Kunknir and thirty-one rounds for Krati. Three full magazines for each gun with a few spares for shits and giggles.

  As if to remind me of its presence, the scroll case that held my grimoire bumped against the small of my back as I walked. Wonder what Althyof will say if I start reading this thing again? So far, his dire predictions of kaltrar that were too powerful for me to handle hadn’t played out.

  And the simple fact was that three magazines per pistol would not be enough to capture Luka. Not unless he surrendered without a fight.

  Where the cabin had stood, there was only a spot of bare earth filled with holes at regular intervals where the foundation posts had been sunk. No other hint that a cabin had once stood there existed—no furniture, no household goods, no debris. The proo hung a few inches off the ground, shining in the morning light.

  The proo that the cabin had hidden from sight looked no different from any other proo I’d seen. A million colors swirled and merged at such a speed that, when viewed as a whole, made the proo appear as a silver mirror missing its stand.

  Jane had the right of it. How could we pick between the two preer without taking a wild-assed guess? And once we picked one, how would we know we were on the right track on the other side? I shook my head and sighed.

  Althyof came to my side, his expression grim. “All dead,” he said.

  I groaned and shook my head. “What was this?” I asked, waving my hand at the empty space and the holes in the earth.

  The Tverkr stroked his beard. “A kaltrar, obviously,” he murmured. “But what kind?” He shook his head. “If I had to guess, I’d say Luka has devised a way to blur the lines between stathur.”

  I glanced at the proo.