Blood of the Isir Omnibus

by Erik Henry Vick

  The hawk whistled in a high-pitched, plaintive tone.

  I shrugged and uttered the triblinkr that summoned an animus, shaping it in the form of a raven. I sent it winging away over the trees, hoping the hawk would follow suit, but it only made the laughter sound again. “Suit yourself.”

  I slid to the trunk of the enormous tree. Iktrasitl’s bark seemed to have been grown specifically for me to climb. The bark grew in large crenulated diamonds—each just large enough to make a good hand- or foot-hold.

  I leaned toward the center of the trunk, putting one hand and one foot into a likely hold and shifting my weight. Behind me, the hawk dropped down to the branch I’d vacated and laughed at me yet again. “If you’re not going to be helpful…”

  The hawk squawked—almost as if insulted.

  Far below, the dragon roared its earth-shaking cry, and the sound of Ratatoskr scaling the tree trunk rasped through the air. I climbed toward the foot of the tree, hoping the squirrel would watch where he was going.

  I had no intention of doing anything for Mirkur, but there was no reason to hang out on a tree branch. Plus, I’d found Kuhntul at the base of Iktrasitl many times, and I hoped she’d be around.

  Above me, the hawk screamed and sprang off the branch, whirled around the tree in a tight circle a few times, then swooped back to land on the branch again. Strange behavior for a hunting kite—well, for a bird in general.

  I paused in my climb and glanced back up at the hawk. The sun glinted off the hawk’s brilliant white feathers as the bird hopped from foot to foot, doing the bobble-head dance again, this time adding a peculiar open-beak, close-beak move to the rest.

  It almost seemed like someone in a costume taunting me to guess who it was.

  Kuhntul. Of course.

  The hawk made the sound of children laughing again and morphed, stretching her wings out to the side and shaking her shoulders like a jazz dancer.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I get it now.”

  She laughed again. “Hello, bird-brain,” she gurgled.

  At that moment, the sound of a thousand chainsaws ripped up the trunk beneath my feet, and the hot wind of Ratatoskr’s approach wafted up the trunk. “Clear off, there! Clear! Make way!” the squirrel rasped.

  There was no place for me to go—I’d already climbed too low to return to the branch without a major effort, and there were no other suitable branches within reach. I did the next best thing: leaned into the trunk, hugging it with my arms, and squeezed my remaining eye shut.

  “Watch out there!” yelled Ratatoskr. There was a flurry of claws on bark and a suspiciously dog-like yelp. “What are you doing? Don’t you know this trunk is reserved for official business? Do you have a permit to be here? Where are your climbing spikes? Do you realize how far from the ground you are, Isir? Aren’t you familiar with the rules of the trunk?” A pregnant pause followed, then the squirrel said, “Oh, it’s you again.”

  “Hello, Ratatoskr,” I said, daring to crack my one eye open.

  “Yes, hello.” He scampered up to eye level and peered around my shoulders. “No spear today?”

  I chuckled. “It wasn’t me who said he’d stab you with a spear. We’ve been through this.”

  “Oh! It’s you.”

  “Yep. In the flesh.”

  “Well, okay. But this climbing about on the trunk is dangerous! Don’t you realize how fast I can climb on this bark? How hard it is for me to stop at full-scamper?”

  “I was trapped on the branch up there. Tindur carried me—”

  “Tindur? Tindur? What was he doing out of the tree top?”

  “Saving me. I was falling from a great height—don’t ask me how I—”

  “Yes, yes. No time for long stories. Important business with Tindur, you see.”

  “Yes, I know. More insults from the dragon?”

  “Must keep the lines of communication open.” He cocked his head and twitched his tail. “Uh, if it’s not too rude to ask, why are you climbing down the trunk? Shouldn’t you be hanging from a branch or something?”

  “No, that was last time.”

  “Oh.” He twitched his head to the side. “Well, if you say so.”

  “I do.”

  “Oh.” This time, his head twitched the other way. “Okay. But climbing?”

  “What would you have me do, Ratatoskr? Fly?”

  Ratatoskr tittered his squirrelly laugh. “Fly! Oh, that’s funny.” He sobered and peered into my face. “But, yes. Why aren’t you flying?”

  “Human. No wings.”

  Ratatoskr cocked his head to the other side yet again and blinked at me rapidly. “You are sometimes quite strange. Do you know that?”

  I fought a grin. “I have heard that before.”

  “Oh. Okay, then,” said the squirrel. “Why aren’t you flying again?”

  “Human. No wings.”

  “Riiiight.” His bushy tail twitched twice in rapid succession, and his lower jaw moved from one side to the other. “You know you can fly down, right?”

  I sighed and shook one of my arms without letting go of the tree. “No wings, remember? Human.”

  Ratatoskr shook his head decisively. “Sure, sure. No wings. Human. Got it, got it. But climbing is dangerous. Why not fly?”

  “Because I can’t?”

  “Right, right. You’re human, blah-blah, no wings. But she can fly you down, certainly?” Ratatoskr jerked his head toward the branch above me.

  I looked up, and Kuhntul reclined on the branch as if it were a chaise lounge, one leg on the bough, the other off and kicking in the wind. She grinned at me and tossed her white hair. “Hello again, bird-brain.”

  “Hello, Kuhntul.” I glanced at Ratatoskr, who gave me an exaggerated wink. “Ratatoskr says I don’t need to climb down the trunk, that you could fly me to the bottom.”

  Kuhntul smiled, then laughed her glass-bell laugh. “Have you forgotten already, bird-brain?”

  “Forgotten?” I shook my head as best I could while clinging to the side of a huge tree with a squirrel crouched next to my face. “What… Oh. Duh. Plyowta.” My feet left the stirrups in the giant ash tree’s bark, and I laughed, letting go of the trunk altogether.

  Ratatoskr winked his exaggerated wink at me again. “Don’t climb,” he mouthed without making a sound. “Fly.”

  “Yeah, fly.”

  “Try to stay out of the travel lane in the future,” he chided. “Dangerous for non-squirrels.”

  “You got it, Ratatoskr.”

  “And…well, if it’s not too much to ask…or rude…could you perhaps wear a name tag, so I can tell the two of you apart?”

  I glanced at Kuhntul and shook my head. “We don’t look very much alike.”

  “Well, of course you and Kuhntul don’t look alike! Do you think I’m stupid? I mean the two of you who do look alike.”

  “You’ve lost me, Ratatoskr.”

  “Oh, never mind. I’ll continue to ask you about the spear-thing. That’s worked well so far.”

  I nodded, doing my best not to smile. “Thanks for not knocking me off the tree before I remembered I could float down.”

  “Pleasure, pleasure. Now, I really must be off. Important discussions afoot today. I really sense we’re making progress!” Without another word, Ratatoskr turned his nose toward the top of the tree and sped off, accompanied by the sound of chainsaws ripping through soft wood.

  “He’s a funny little guy,” I said.

  “Indeed,” said Kuhntul, still lying across the branch.

  “Well? Are you coming?”

  “Coming where, Tyeldnir? Didn’t you come here looking for me?”

  “Yeah, I guess I did. Still, wouldn’t we be more comfortable—”

  “The Nornir are down there. You don’t want them to overhear your questions, do you?”

  I nodded. “Oh. No, I guess not.” I glanced at the branch. “Slide over.”

  She rubbed her hand down her side and smiled. “Are you sure you wouldn’t ra
ther cuddle here with me?”

  “You know better, Kuhntul. Shove over.”

  With a sigh, she sat up and slid close to the trunk. “There. Happy now?”

  “It’s a start.” I settled onto the branch next to her, looking out over the vast forest. “Sure is beautiful for a conflux.”

  Kuhntul sat up, eyes intent on my own. “What did you say?”

  I shrugged and waved my hand at the view. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yes, yes. What else did you say?”

  “I said, ‘it sure is beautiful for a conflux.’”

  “Why do you call it that?” Her eyes blazed, and blood colored the peaks of her cheeks.

  “I ran into someone… Actually, I got hijacked by someone. He called this place ‘The Conflux.’”

  “One of…them…hijacked you?”

  I nodded. “We needed to get back to the Herperty af Roostum to get back on Luka’s trail. I set up a proo to take us there, but when I took it, I ended up in limbo, and not for the first time. But this time—”

  “Again? You must tell me of this, Hank.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her, a smile dancing on my lips. “Hank? I don’t think you’ve—”

  “Enough!” she snapped. “Tell me of these trips to limbo.”

  I looked at her askance. “It’s happened twice, now. Three times if you count the trip through the proo I took as my animus, but no one spoke to me at that time. This—”

  “Who spoke to you?”

  “This will be easier if you stop interrupting me.”

  She nodded, a false smile on her face.

  “The first time, the time I traveled as my animus, I could sense these Great Old Ones in the fabric of what lies between the preer. They were huge, shapeless chunks of…of essence, I guess, but they didn’t seem to notice me on that trip. The next time, we were in Niflhaymr, and—”

  “The space between the preer? What exactly do you mean by that?”

  “When you travel the preer, does it feel as if it happens in an instant?”

  “Yes, to most people who use them.”

  I shook my head, noting the careful phrasing. She hadn’t answered my question, not really. “It doesn’t. I think the trip happens outside of time, and that we don’t—or maybe can’t—interpret the lack of linear time so the—”

  “None of that makes any sense, Tyeldnir.”

  “Yeah, well, I never claimed to be Stephen Hawking.”

  “Who?”

  I waved the question away. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just a cop, remember?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps, but I doubt it.”

  “Anyway,” I said with an exaggerated sigh. “I experienced the…the translation that time I went as an animus. It was like…like sliding through a giant tube that had a current like a river.”

  “And these essences were in the current with you? These Great Old Ones?”

  I shook my head, looking up at the sky. “No… At least I don’t think so. It was as though they existed outside the current, as if they did as they pleased.” I shrugged. “Like I said, that first time they ignored me.”

  “Okay. Then tell me of the second time.”

  I nodded. “Luka trapped us on Niflhaymr—or is it in Niflhaymr? Anyway, Luka set another trap using preer, but this time there were three of them. This was after you visited me—”

  “I visited you in Niflhaymr?” she asked, sounding incredulous.

  “Well, in a dream that occurred in Niflhaymr while I slept in this frost giant’s hall. His name was—‍”

  “No matter. Tell me of this dream.”

  “You don’t remember it?”

  She shook her head, avoiding my gaze.

  “You did something to me. You used the chisel you gave me and did something inside my head.”

  She shrugged, shaking her head slowly.

  “Yeah, and about that… I’d appreciate you asking my permission before you do any more spiritual brain-surgery.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said with a wry grin.

  “After that dream, when I looked at the preer, I could sense something more than what I could see. After I enchanted my vision, I could see things under the surface of the proo.”

  “More essences?”

  “Yeah. I call them Great Old Ones—or at least I did before I met Mirkur inside the last proo—what he called the veins of the underverse.”

  Her lips ground into a thin, razor-sharp line.

  “Yeah. But I’m getting this out of order. The Great Old Ones made the shape of runes in the surfaces of the three preer Luka left for us, helping us to avoid another deadly trap. They led us to choose a certain proo, and we traveled across it. That was the second time I experienced the interior of a proo, and that time, I met a cat who called himself Bikkir. He—”

  “Why was there a cat inside the proo?”

  “It’s an expression. Bikkir did more brain-surgery after yelling at me for wasting time.” I pursed my lips. “They are very strange.”

  She nodded.

  “When he let me go, I arrived on Mithgarthr, but a few hundred years ago. We were near this place historians call the Lost Colony. It’s on—”

  “Roanoke Island,” she breathed, eyes misty with intense thought or memories.

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “I… I’ve heard of it in my travels.” She looked away, and the wind ruffled her white hair.

  “Oh.” It was such an obvious lie…but getting into an argument with a Tisir several hundred feet in the air seemed like a bad idea. “Yeah, so anyway… It was a place where Hel and Luka had spent time, and…and I think this is a side-effect of whatever you did to me, but I can see slowthar now. I could pick out Luka and Hel’s slowthar from the rest, and when I concentrated on them, I could see what had happened there.”

  “Yes.” Kuhntul kept her face averted and dropped her head so that her long white hair fell like a curtain over the side of her face.

  “When we returned to the proo, intent on going back to Niflhaymr, I saw that someone had manipulated it. Its terminus had been shifted and had we traveled across it, we would have all died. Bikkir appeared in the surface of the proo and yammered at me again, but this time, he actually taught me something useful.”

  “How to control the preer,” she said in a dull, lifeless voice.

  “Guessed it in one.”

  “And the last time? When you met Mirkur?”

  “That happened right before I dropped in. These Great Old Ones, these essences that live in the preer…”

  “Yes?”

  “Mirkur claims they are the Plauinn.”

  “Yes.” Her bland tone of voice rang about as far from the tone of surprise as I could imagine.

  “He said…he said the Plauinn need agents in these ‘lesser’ realms, that the Plauinn can’t exist here anymore.”

  “Only as reflections,” she murmured.

  “Yeah, but he called them ‘dreamslice reflections,’ whatever that means.”

  “Yes.” Her voice was flat, dead.

  “He said I am to be his agent in correcting uhrluhk.”

  “Tyeldnir,” she said in a voice that quavered and shook, as suddenly full of emotion as it had lacked it a moment before, “This you must not do.”

  “Oh, I know. I went along with him, but I’ll be damned if I will be ordered around like a peon by some giant slugs, rulers of the underverse or not.”

  She nodded, but the gesture seemed depressed, enervated.

  “He also sent me to punish Hel, Luka, and Vowli. He said death was insufficient, that I am to erase them from the skein of fate.”

  She turned to me, and her eyes brimmed with enraged tears. “This…” She rocked her head, dashing away her tears. “We cannot allow these manipulators to succeed, Tyeldnir.”

  “Well, I’m not sure what I can do to—”

  “You must… Tyeldnir, attend me now. Have I not served your interests? Have I not guided you as wo
uld a true friend?”

  I nodded, moved by the passion in her gaze.

  “And have I…have I lied to you or led you astray as you once believed I might?”

  “No. No, you’ve been a true friend, I’d say.”

  “Then listen to me now. You must resist the Plauinn. You must not allow anyone to manipulate you, to coerce you into adopting their beliefs, their plans.”

  “I thought the Plauinn would be…I don’t know, a force for good in the universe. Sounds stupid.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Many people—many races of Man—believe the same, Tyeldnir. It isn’t stupid and were the Plauinn worthy of our respect, they would be forces for good.” Her eyes blazed, seeming to leap out at me. “And yet, they are not! They are power-mad fools, toying with the underlayment of the universe, and despite the harsh lessons such actions have already taught them, they continue.”

  “Are you…” I shook my head. “Mirkur said the Nornir are lesser Plauinn—slaves to the others essentially—but he denied that the Tisir are—”

  “No, we are not Plauinn.” She lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “Have I never explained what we are?”

  “Not really. You told me your people are matrons, protectors, but most of the time you shrug and say, ‘I am Tisir,’ if I ask you.”

  She threw back her head and laughed. “Is that not answer enough?”

  I chuckled and shook my head. “It’s not very elucidating.”

  She laughed again, and it pleased me to hear it. “Perhaps I’ll explain it to you in a future dream.” Her face grew sober, still. “Tyeldnir, Mirkur is dangerous. A being of great power. There are no…constraints…on what he does, what he can do. His very name—”

  “Means ‘darkness.’ I know.”

  “Yes. And do you remember Owraythu and her realm of chaos?”

  I nodded, thinking first of Hel’s anguished screams.

  “She is his sister. Between the two, it’s unknown who is the most avaricious, the most tyrannous. They are named the Tveeburar af Tikifiri—the Twins of Chance—by those that worship them, but they are never content to leave things to chance. Together, they rule the Plauinn—at least the biggest faction. The Nornir…they cower like weaklings in the face of the Tveeburar demands, but they don’t always… Uhrluhk has its own ways of resisting their manipulations.”