Blood of the Isir Omnibus

by Erik Henry Vick

  “What’s that, Hank?” asked Jane. “You woolgathering again?”

  “No, I got… One of Luka’s memories swept me away there for a minute, as one of Krowkr’s did back in the other Penfield.”

  “Speaking of which…” said Althyof.

  “Krowkr will explain what he left out of the tale he told us back at Hoos Oolfsins.” My eye burned as it tracked to Krowkr’s gaze. “Isn’t that correct?”

  Krowkr gulped and nodded. “I didn’t mean to…to…”

  “And yet you told us a lie by omission, did you not?” I demanded, using the tone I reserved for getting the truth from Sig.

  “I…” Krowkr drew himself up and pushed his shoulders back. “I did, Lord Hanki—Hank.” He turned and bowed to Jane, then Yowtgayrr, and finally to Althyof. “I am not proud of our reasons for seeking Yarl Oolfreekr out. The idea of becoming oolfur streethsmathur attracted Skatlakrimr and my brother. They wanted to rekindle the Briethralak Oolfur.”

  Althyof’s face scrunched in on itself. “Indeed?”

  Krowkr blushed at the scorn in the Tverkr’s voice but nodded and turned his head away.

  “Yes,” said Yowtgayrr in a soft voice. “Mistakes are easy to make under such circumstances.”

  Althyof grumbled something into his beard.

  “We can talk about each other’s mistakes later,” said Jane.

  Krowkr flashed her a look of gratitude—of worshipful gratitude. “Thank you, my lady,” he said and bowed.

  “Yes, well, I hope you realize the depth of your stupidity,” said Althyof.

  Jane glared at the Tverkr. “Right now, our focus is making sure my son and our friends are safe from Luka.”

  An awkward moment stretched itself out, and I cleared my throat. “This is the slowth of the right Luka. Our Luka.”

  “Good. Can you track him through the preer?” asked Althyof, turning away from Krowkr.

  “I haven’t tried that yet. I got…” I shook my head. “I got caught in one of Luka’s memories.”

  Althyof’s lips twisted in a moue, and he looked at me through narrowed eyes. “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. It was… Have you heard of a man named Vuhluntr? A karl, I think.”

  “Him,” sneered Althyof. “Yes, I’ve run across the bastard. Gives good Tverkar a bad name.”

  “I thought he was a karl? From Osgarthr.”

  “He was, but he learned his craft from the Tverkar, and his actions reflect badly.”

  I waved that away. “And this sword he made for Hel? Kramr, Luka called it? Have you heard of it, too?”

  Althyof made a disgusted noise, and Yowtgayrr’s expression wrinkled.

  “I guess you have. The memory I experienced was of Luka forcing Vuhluntr to work on the sword. The sword the Dark Queen commissioned to kill Meuhlnir.”

  “Yes,” said Yowtgayrr softly. “They never used it for its intended purpose.”

  “Obviously!” snapped Althyof.

  “What happened to it?”

  Yowtgayrr shrugged. “No one knows. Well, I suppose one person knows, but no one knows who that person is. It disappeared in the Battle of Suelhaym after Vuhluntr used it to rend the North Gate.”

  “Wait… Vuhluntr opened the gates?”

  Althyof shook his head. “Vuhluntr merely held the hilt. Kramr sliced through the massive hinge at the top of the right gate. The bastard used the friction of the blade’s passage through the hinge to slow his leap from the top of the wall. The damage caused that gate to slam into the ground, and to buckle the hinges of the other gate. After that, it was only a matter of pouring power into those hinges and ripping the gate out of the way.”

  “I’m confused,” said Jane. “You seem to dislike this Vuhluntr guy—more than a little—but it sounds as though he handed you Suelhaym.”

  Althyof nodded. “Both ideas are accurate.”

  “His reasons for doing what he did are the distasteful part,” said Yowtgayrr.

  “The coward was running from Luka when he destroyed the hinge,” said Althyof. “He didn’t care a whit about the war. He didn’t care which side won out. He only cared about being paid for his services, and everything else be damned.”

  “Yeah, I got that feeling about him from Luka’s memory.”

  “We should speak on this newfound ability to sift through another’s memories,” muttered Althyof.

  “Yeah, but later. After we’ve solved the problems we have to solve.”

  “Fair enough, but we have many such tabled topics. At some point, the tabled topics will outweigh everything, and that will force our discussion, circumstances notwithstanding.”

  I nodded. “From his slowth, Luka set this proo to take us back to Roanoke, and he’s been back since…after laying the trap there.” I shook my head. “He’s a strange one.”

  “Who? Luka?”

  “Let’s review… Cannibal, check. Shapeshifter, check. Hangs out with the foulest bitch in the history of the universe, check. Yeah, that qualifies as strange.” Jane’s eyes danced as she ribbed me, and it made her even more beautiful.

  “Well, if you put it that way…”

  “What do you mean, Hank?” asked Yowtgayrr.

  “He’s not… I had this idea that he was nothing but an ice-cold killer. Especially after I heard the tale of Paltr and Huthr’s cold-hearted murders—his own brothers. But… He’s not… It’s more complicated than that. He’s not cold at all, not on the inside.”

  “He’s still an asshole, cold or hot or lukewarm,” said Jane.

  “Yeah, I’m not saying he’s a good person. He’s just… He loves Hel. And I do mean loves. All he thinks about is making her happy, about getting her back to how she was before everything fell apart. At least at the time of that memory, but his dedication to her seems unchanged.”

  “Interesting,” said Althyof.

  “And it appears he truly regrets having taken part in the murders of his brothers. As if he thinks of it as something he had no choice in, but if he had had a choice, they wouldn’t be dead.”

  “It may be,” said Yowtgayrr with a shrug.

  “And he might wear a pink tutu under his clothes,” said Jane. “But he still did all those things.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and he still has to pay for doing those things. It’s only that…well…”

  “You imagine a way in which he might redeem himself,” spat Althyof. “You Isir! You never seem to realize when someone has earned their death.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not saying Luka might redeem himself, Althyof. All I’m saying is that his character isn’t as cut and dried as it appears.”

  Silence fell amongst us, brittle and cold.

  “We don’t have to make any decisions,” said Jane in a placating tone.

  “No, and I’m not even advocating we change our minds,” I said. “He caught me by surprise is all.”

  Althyof shrugged. “None of it matters if you can’t track him.”

  “True. Let’s figure out if I can, but before we go after him, I still want to go home and get ammunition.”

  “Or we can go to Nitavetlir and check if Prokkr has learned the art of making these bullets you set such store by.”

  “Or that. But first…” I stared down at the slowthar twisting over the floor of the chamber. I could pick out Luka’s as quickly as any of my friends. Maybe it has to do with how well I know them?

  I did not understand how to track Luka or anyone else, but I knew I could, so it was a matter of persistence and trying everything I could imagine. I focused on Luka’s slowth and imagined myself standing next to him.

  Nothing happened.

  I imagined following his slowth in my mind’s eye.

  Again, nothing happened. “This may take a while.”

  “We have all the time in the universe, evidently,” said Althyof.

  I grinned at him and tipped him a wink. I ran through all the ideas I could think of: looking at the slowth’s surface for clues as I would a proo, peering into it
without allowing myself to get sucked along into memory, trying to pick through Luka’s mind in the present rather than in memory, and reaching out with my mind to grasp its hook as Bikkir had taught me to do with the preer. None of it worked. None of it seemed to make any difference at all.

  “I have no idea how to do this,” I murmured.

  “Well, don’t look at us mortals,” said Jane with a twist to her lips.

  “Perhaps you can summon Bikkir?” said Yowtgayrr.

  “I’m not sure Bikkir knows I can do this, and I’d rather keep it from him if he doesn’t.”

  “Sensible.”

  “Can you choose what you… Which memories you…view?” asked Krowkr.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think I get it,” said Althyof. “Can you pick-and-choose between Luka’s memories? Can you selectively view the memory of his travel out of here?”

  I shrugged. “Both instances so far have been random memories. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.”

  “Try it,” said Jane with a shrug. “It’s that or cook us dinner.”

  “In that case, I’ll get back to work.” I smiled at her and turned back to Luka’s slowth. All the slowthar seemed the same on the surface. A sheath or a wrapper of some kind segregated all the streams of memory—similar to the insulation covering a copper wire. Both times memories had swept me away, it had been as if there was a tear in the insulation exposing the copper beneath.

  I’m missing something about this whole thing. Something crucial. But what is it? If these slowthar mimic wires, then the memories are…what? Something akin to electricity? Signals moving from one place to the next? Bits of data? But connected to what? If my slowth terminates at my present-self on one end, what’s on the other end?

  I turned to my slowth and peered down at it. I already have all these memories, so it should be easier to resist the temptation to watch one. I began to trace it backward, shivering at the strange sensation that it produced inside my head—as if someone with very cold fingers was rummaging around in my mind. I could zip back along the memories, skipping whatever I wanted, by focusing on any scene from my past.

  Skipping backward faster and faster, taking larger and larger leaps between orientation points, I zipped through my life with Jane, backward through my college days, high school, my childhood. I expected to stop at my birth, but with a start, I realized I was past that and still moving. For a time, there was nothing but darkness. The darkness of the womb? I wondered.

  Then the path bifurcated, and I floated at the nexus of two separate routes. One track was my father’s, and the other was my mother’s. I looked at each path in turn, feeling like an intruder, like a voyeur peeking in their bedroom windows.

  “Hank! Hank, stop it!”

  I let the vision slide away and looked into Jane’s worried face. “What? What is it?”

  “You disappeared for a moment,” said Althyof as if it happened every day.

  “More than that,” said Yowtgayrr. “You were drifting out of phase.”

  “I’ll pretend I have the slightest idea what that even means,” I said with a smile. “I was trying something—following my own slowth backward, trying to find where the path started, but it’s as if… It doesn’t start at my birth, instead it's—”

  “Woven from the paths of your parents.”

  I nodded. “But their paths didn’t end at my birth. My path is still here, despite having a son, so it’s not a trunk-branch kind of thing.”

  “Yes,” said Yowtgayrr. “Think of it in terms of weaving cloth. Or, more appropriately perhaps, weaving the tapestry of life. Your parents were yarns already present in the tapestry, and your conception added a new weft thread to the tapestry. Both of your parents’ threads continue until the moment their lives leave the tapestry.”

  “And when parents and children are separated?” I asked, thinking of Henry.

  Yowtgayrr shrugged. “If both lives continue in the tapestry, then other threads separate them. Or by their distance in the tapestry, if that makes more sense.”

  “But all this weaving talk feels…wrong somehow. These slowthar are not threads in some tapestry. They resemble wires conducting something from point A to point B.”

  Yowtgayrr shrugged again with a small smile. “I have no more claim on the answers to life’s mysteries than any other, Hank.”

  “No, I suppose not, but this is really cramping your ‘Wise Alf’ quotient.”

  “Why does this twaddle matter?” asked Althyof.

  “I can’t figure out how to find out where Luka is,” I said. “If I knew how the slowthar worked, I could figure out how to start figuring out a way to find where he is now.”

  “Isn’t wherever he is now at the end of his slowth?” asked Althyof with a lopsided grin. “I certainly hope that’s where I am.”

  I glanced at Yowtgayrr. “See what you’ve done? Now we’ve got to add a place on the board for ‘Wise Tverkr.’”

  “Oh, the horror,” said the Alf with a broad grin.

  “So, all he has to do is follow this slowth to wherever Luka is now? Why does that sound dangerous?”

  “He doesn’t have to go all the way to where Luka is at this moment, only close enough to determine where we must go.”

  “All this is assuming I have any choice in the matter. Yeah, I could move down my path backward, but that’s because I have all the memories in the path already. I could use them as targets, so to speak.”

  “Is that how it works?” asked Althyof with a twitch of his eyebrows.

  “Yeah, that’s enough from the ‘Wise Tverkr’ to last a lifetime.”

  “Is it?”

  I shook my head in mock-severity but spoiled it by grinning. “Okay, I can try it.”

  Althyof spread his hands. “If you think it might work…”

  I glanced at Yowtgayrr again. “Do you get what you’ve done? He will be insufferable from now on.”

  “And that will be different…how?” asked the Alf with a grin and a wink.

  “Good point.” I closed my eyelids for a moment. “Okay, here goes.” I imagined wrapping my arms around a giant wire—Luka’s slowth—and dragging myself forward along its length.

  Unlike traveling backward along my slowth, I moved against a kind of resistance—as though walking against the outgoing tide at the beach. Once I got comfortable with the method, I tried to move faster as though fast-forwarding a video.

  I couldn’t quite make out the events as I zipped by but felt that if I stopped and focused my will, I’d be sucked into the moment as I had been with both Krowkr’s and Luka’s memories previously.

  Moving along the slowthar wasn’t akin to traversing a physical space, nor was it like sliding along the inside of a proo. I could discern an infinite horizon stretching away in any direction I cared to look, and it felt less like I moved through the space than the space moved around me. To the front, everything faded into total darkness, but the view to the rear was like a million frames of video all overlapped—millions on millions of shapes and colors of every imaginable kind mixing in a hodge-podge of nonsense images. It made me a little sick to my stomach.

  In a sense, I’d left my own slowth behind, but having Luka’s slowth firmly in my grasp gave me a feeling of being tethered to something real, of being able to find my way back to myself. Even so, the disconnected sensation disconcerted me, much as I imagined clinging to a piece of flotsam adrift far out to sea might perturb me.

  Something flickered in the stark darkness ahead. Similar to sunlight twinkling off the windshield of an oncoming car in my lane, the flashing, blinding light filled me with unreasonable fear. I imagined clamping down on the slowth I held in my arms, and I slowed—almost to the point of having no forward motion.

  Peering ahead, I tried to discern movement or form associated with the blinding, blinking light. An imposing…something…stood there, still as a statue, watching—no, guarding—the way forward. I brought myself to a stop, unsure what to do
next, wary of being discovered. I glanced down at the slowth, looking past the insulating layer at the stream of cognizance contained within.

  I could make out pale walls and had the sense Luka had walked down a long, non-descript hallway. As I watched, he came to a blue door that was familiar.

  I reversed direction and sped back along Luka’s slowth until I found myself again. I let go and snapped my eye open wide. “He’s doubled back! The bastard’s back on Osgarthr! He’s in the Herperty af Roostum! In the Rooms of Ruin!”

  “Sig!” said Jane, alarm spreading red wings across her cheeks. “We have to get back there!”

  “It’s okay, both of you,” said Althyof. “We have time.”

  “Time? That madman could be with our friends and son!” she snapped.

  “You forget that Hank can wrap a proo to whatever time frame he desires.”

  He was right…I’d forgotten that, too.

  Twenty-four

  I stepped out of the proo and into Veethar’s Vault of Preer and breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t been sure I had a firm enough fix on the place to dial the proo to the right place, but even the air smelled right.

  If I’d gotten it right, we’d traveled backward in time to the hour after we’d left the Herperty af Roostum in pursuit of Luka. It was a small jump in time—a few days. Easy.

  I’d wanted to go back further—to the hour after the party had embarked on our journey to the Rooms of Ruin, but the preer had been disabled during that time, and I didn’t know if I could override Haymtatlr’s control. The memories of the trip flooded my mind: Jane killing the sea dragon, learning to cast the runes, meeting Kuhntul for the first time, hanging from Iktrasitl with the enigmatic Owsakrimmr, meeting Kuthbyuhrn and Kyellroona, the Great Forest of Suel, the raven dreams, meeting John Calvin Black, Isi’s Fast Track Transfer Network, the lava tubes, the battles in the Rooms of Ruin, Haymtatlr…all of it, and even though the trip had been difficult, the memories suffused me with a warmth I didn’t expect.

  The others popped in behind me, and I smiled when I met Althyof’s gaze. I’d grown closer to the Tverkr on that trip—I’d grown closer to all my companions, but especially to him. I’d learned so much. It had been hard, but I wouldn’t trade the experiences for anything.