“Then—”
“But the danger lies in how they manipulate others to take up their cause. They may tell you of actions they portray as evil—”
“No one needs to tell me about Hel’s actions. They are evil.”
Kuhntul turned to face me, her expression blank. For a moment, she almost seemed angry. “No. No one argues for a different interpretation. But…have you considered her motivations?”
“Her motivations don’t—”
“Do they not? What drove her to make the choices she has? What led her down this path of bitterness, of fury…of hatred?”
“Look, Kuhntul, I don’t know about—”
“Shouldn’t you, though?” she demanded. “Shouldn’t you consider that which drives someone to do what they do? How can you judge her actions without…” With a visible effort, she calmed herself and shook her head. “You’ve tasted Mirkur’s techniques, seen the torments Owraythu is subjecting Hel to—or at least you’ve heard the results of those techniques. You’ve seen how we ‘lesser beings’ are thought of by these Plauinn—objects fit only for manipulation. Not people in their eyes, we are less than insects. We are nothing.”
I looked down at the ground so far below us. “Does that make it okay? Are you even aware of what she’s done?”
“I’m intimately aware of what she’s done,” she said so softly I almost missed it. “Perhaps more so than you.”
“Oh, so she killed thousands and thousands of people on your klith?” I scoffed, trying to make it a chuckle but failing.
“Yes. Many, many more, actually.”
“And I suppose she kidnapped your family? Cursed you, ruined your life?”
“The actions undertaken by the woman known as Hel have affected me in ways you can’t imagine, and to say she ruined my life…well, at times, there aren’t words to express the depths of my anger, my rage at how Hel’s actions have impacted me over the course of my lifetime… But you know what, Tyeldnir? It isn’t a competition between the two of us. She’s done evil things. She’s done monstrous, horrible things, and that can’t be denied—not by anyone, me least of all. But still, she, like everyone, deserves compassion and an attempt at understanding. No one deserves to be tortured without pause for eternity.”
An algid silence descended between us. I didn’t look up at her, but I felt her eyes crawling over my face. “Why are you defending her?” I hissed.
Kuhntul sighed and shook her head. “I’m not… I’m…” She sighed again, and the sound of it was bitter, cold. “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing! But there’s more to it than you understand, Tyeldnir. More to it than you can understand.”
The wind gusted around us, and the sun sank lower in the sky. “What she’s done…” She shook her head. “I’m not saying she’s made good choices, Tyeldnir. But perhaps you can—”
“What does Hel’s behavior have to do with Mirkur?”
“Do you truly not know? Have you not guessed?” Kuhntul sighed. “There is more going on here than you realize.”
“You’ve said that.”
“What about Luka? Do you have easier feelings—”
“Are you kidding?” I glared at her. “He killed my partner—no, he ate my partner.”
“Yes,” she said, hanging her head. “I’d forgotten.” The last came as a whisper floating on the wind.
“I wish I could forget. He…Luka left him there, on the table between us when I caught up to him. Jax was—” Suddenly, it was all too much. The pain had scabbed over in the intervening years, but thinking about it, talking about it again, ripped that scab away, burned out the stops that I’d grown to keep the pain at bay.
“He, too, has made atrocious decisions, but even with that said, there were reasons he became what he is—”
“What?” I nearly shouted. “What reasons? What could possibly mitigate what he’s done? To my family? To his own family?”
Her expression was grim, but she nodded.
I sucked in a long breath and let it out through my nose, going for a bit of Zen, trying to rein in my emotions; not only because the name of unfettered emotions was spelled P-A-I-N in the parlance of my Personal Monster™, but because I’d grown to like Kuhntul in the few weeks I’d known her, to respect her, and I didn’t want to let the wedge that was swelling in the space between us solidify.
I nodded once, curtly. “Based on what Mirkur wants…demands I do to Hel, Luka, and Vowli, in conjunction with what you’ve alluded to tonight, I’m going to go out on a limb here. Did Mirkur recruit Hel as one of his agents? Is that where her depravity started?”
Kuhntul grimaced and shook her head.
“Or Luka, maybe? Vowli?”
“Mirkur…” She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “The story is long and complex. It isn’t as simple as saying Mirkur influenced their thinking, that he brought them all together and they went their own way. No. It was more than that. It was more than recruiting them…”
“Then what?”
She sighed. “Perhaps it is not the time. Maybe it is too soon, too fresh. Or perhaps you haven’t seen enough of the Plauinn and how they operate.”
I nodded and held out my hand, palm up. “Out of respect for you, and for Meuhlnir, I will try to keep my mind open. I will try to be open to…to whatever these mitigating circumstances might be.”
“That’s all I can ask. Watch the Plauinn. Watch the Isir. Watch everything, withhold your judgment if you can.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
She looked at me, and I read the depth of her passion in the set of her jaw, the twitching muscles around her eyes, her flared nostrils. “Tyeldnir, there are things I can’t tell you, things I…I…things you should…”
“Kuhntul, listen. I understand how important this is to you, and for that reason alone, I would give all this my best effort, my best…uh…whatever it is. My best.”
“Thank you, Hank Jensen.”
I grinned and bumped her with my shoulder. “Aw, shucks, Kuhntul. I didn’t know you even knew my full name, let alone could use it.”
“I know many things about you, Tyeldnir. For one, it is apparent how much you enjoy it when I call you Tyeldnir, or Aylootr, or—”
“Um, I think you might have that one backward.”
She winked at me and flashed a crooked smile. “No, I think not.”
“If you say so.” We sat next to one another for a time, legs dangling off the branch hundreds of feet off the ground, swinging our feet like children. I swept my hand at the horizon. “I thought this place was a dream.”
“You mean it isn’t?”
“We’re here in the flesh this time, right?”
Kuhntul shrugged. “I am Tisir.”
“Back to that?” I grinned at her. “No, I mean last time I was here, it was a…I don’t know, a brink-of-death dream, right?”
“And what is different this time?”
“Mirkur sent me this time.”
“You’ve said.”
“I mean, I’m actually here this time. Not in spirit—”
“Dreamslice reflection,” she said.
“—or whatever.” I cocked my eyebrow at her. “So, last time, I was here the way the Three Maids are here?”
Kuhntul shrugged. “Who do you think I am, Stephen Hawkman?”
I grinned. “Hawking. Stephen Hawking.”
“Him, too.”
“Is that your way of admitting you don’t know?”
“I am Tisir,” she said with a shrug.
“Is this place real? Is it an actual place? A physical place?”
Kuhntul patted the branch we sat on, then rapped her knuckles on the trunk. “Seems so.”
“Could a proo reach this place?”
“If you understood how to direct it here.” She shrugged.
“Bikkir taught me how to put the end of a proo where I want it.”
“Ah, so you’ve been traveling through the same proo?”
“We thought about tryi
ng one of Meuhlnir and Veethar’s preer, but we didn’t have any knowledge of where they ended up and—”
“That’s how Mirkur found you.”
“What?”
“Because you’ve been using the same proo, only switching its terminus.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When you use the same proo every time you travel, or even if you use one more than any other, the Plauinn can sense it. If they are interested in you and sense your passage along a certain proo frequently, they will move into that proo and lie in wait.”
“Why would they…” I shook my head and waved it all away. “Never mind that question for now. How do you know this?”
“I am Tisir.”
“Yeah, but how do you know? Has it happened to you?”
Kuhntul lifted her chin and let it drop as she exhaled. “It is difficult to explain.”
“Try,” I said.
“My existence is…complicated. What has happened to another sometimes feels as if it has happened to me. Sometimes I… Sometimes I am confused by the memories—confused whether the memories are mine, those of the ones I am charged to watch over, or…or belonging to someone else entirely.”
“Ah. You are Tisir.”
“Exactly. Regardless, I have a memory of being accosted inside the preer. I don’t think I knew it was there until you told me of your experiences, but it is a true memory, nonetheless.” She gazed at the horizon for a moment, a thousand-yard stare wiping her features clean of expression. “I remember…”
“What?” I asked softly.
“I remember learning that my use of the same few preer was allowing the Plauinn to trace my movements, to follow what I was doing…” She shook her head. “Eventually, I learned that if I wanted to act with subterfuge, I needed to call a fresh proo—either to create one, or to call one at random and reset its terminus points to my liking.”
“I don’t know how to call a proo, let alone to create one from out of thin air.”
She nodded once. “This thing, I can teach you.”
“Bearing in mind I’m not Tisir, will I be able to do it?”
She turned slowly and locked gazes with me. “I wasn’t always Tisir, Tyeldnir. I learned this trick before I…” She shook her head. “Before I transitioned from what I was into what I am.”
Her manner had grown strange, her speech halting, broken. “How did you—”
She made a chopping gesture with her hand. “No. I will speak no more of it.” She slid off the branch and hung in midair, arching an eyebrow at me. “Come.”
“Plyowta,” I said and slid off the branch. “Lead on, O Sage.” I grinned, but Kuhntul didn’t return it—she flipped her hair and held out her hand, instead. I grasped her hand, and she pulled me out over the forest, heading away from Iktrasitl.
“Too many prying eyes back there,” she called over the wind-noise of our flight. After a few minutes’ flight filled with course corrections that seemed random, Kuhntul swooped through the trees to land on the rich forest loam.
As soon as my feet touched the ground, I released her hand and took a step away. She turned and flashed a long-suffering grin at me.
“Tell me how this Bikkir taught you to manipulate the preer,” she said.
“There’s something he called ‘the hook’ on every preer, and I have to reach out and grab it with my mind. Once I have it, it twists the way a dial or a knob twists, and if I am picturing the destination with enough clarity, the proo snaps to it.”
She made a face. “That’s a strange method. I’ve never heard of anyone using a method such as that.”
I shrugged. “Seems to work for me. How do other people do it? I know the Alfar and Tverkar don’t even try.”
“Ha! They try all right, they just can’t do it very well.”
“Oh. They led me to believe something else.”
“By the Alfar? Or by your Tverkr pet?”
I nodded.
“Consider the source.” Her voice had taken on an imperious tone that made my skin crawl.
“How do the Tisir do it?”
She turned away from me, presenting her profile, and gazed into the woods. “Tisir methods are for Tisir.”
“Fine. How did you do it before you became a Tisir?”
“You know of the strenkir af krafti already, and know vefari have the ability to weave these strings of power, but has anyone explained to you that the strings vibrate at specific frequencies?”
“When Meuhlnir told me about Haymtatlr and the Kyatlarhodn, he mentioned something about the skein of fate vibrating once Haymtatlr blew the horn, but, between you and me, that all sounded like myth.”
She bobbed her head from side to side. “As did the tales of the Isir, no? Did you believe Osgarthr existed before you came to be there? Did you believe Luka when he claimed to be a god the Norse named Loki?”
“Well, no, but he never actually—”
“Exactly. What that old fool calls the ‘skein of fate’ is nothing more than a representation of the strenkir af krafti combined with all the slowthar of all beings in the universe, living and dead.”
“What about uhrluhk?”
She shrugged. “Uhrluhk isn’t what most people think it is, as you’ve already learned. It isn’t a fixed fate or a fixed destiny at all, but rather can be expressed as the sum of probabilities of what will happen. What might be, in other words. There is no single future, no absolute path that the universe must take.”
“Yeah.”
“All that’s neither here nor there,” she said, flapping a hand. “What we are interested in are the strenkir themselves.”
I spread my hands. “Okay.”
A half grin played on her lips. “What do you think the proo actually are?”
“I don’t have any idea, really, but I’ve always thought they might be wormholes through space.”
“Wormholes?”
“Tunnels. Short-cuts that skip the intervening physical distance between two points.”
She chuckled. “And you are sure all such points have a distance between them?”
I held up my hands in surrender. “Cop, remember? Not Stephen Hawking. Or Stephen Hawkman, either.”
“I’ve come to understand the strenkir af krafti in the time since my…since my transition. The strings connect everything in the universe. Either directly or as chains of strings. One connects you and me, for example. Another connects you and Jane. Yet another connects a point in spacetime on Mithgarthr to a point on Osgarthr. Do you see?”
“I guess, but that seems like an uncountably infinite number of strings to keep track of. It sounds a bit clunky.”
She shrugged. “Who needs to keep track of them all? Surely not you or me.”
“What about Mirkur?”
She made a face and flapped her hand. “He’s not as all-knowing as he thinks. Nor as powerful. At most, one would need to keep track of the strenkir linked to oneself, and even that would be overkill.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Do you see how to create a proo?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Tyeldnir, the strenkir af krafti and the preer…they are different sides of the same coin.”
I thought about that for a moment. If the preer and the strenkir were related to one another, then… No. She said they were two sides of the same coin. The strenkir af krafti and the preer are not merely related to one another, they are aspects of the same thing.
Her eyes were on mine, intense, burning with focus. “You begin to see it.”
“I think so. This skein of fate, this tapestry…”
“Yes?”
“Do the strenkir af krafti form a mesh? A mesh that links everything to everything else?”
She nodded. “And more than that, but for now, it’s enough. Can you see how to create a proo based on that idea?”
“No, but grabbing a proo at random would be as simple as co-opting a string from between two points in the
general vicinity.”
“Ye-e-e-s,” she said. “But that would cause discontinuities in the density matrix.”
“The what?”
She shrugged. “The phase-space probability measure.” I shook my head, and she frowned. “Think of these discontinuities as decoherences in spacetime.”
“A ‘bad thing’ in other words?”
“Well, in terms of the two points connected by the strenkir that had enjoyed a certain phase relation between each other, yes. But such decoherences occur naturally at every given moment. It’s part of the probabilistic nature of the universal underlayment as we know it.”
I waved my hands. “I’ll just take your word for it.”
“I should note that these discontinuities can be mended with closed timelike curves in other strenkir.”
“Do I really need to understand all this?”
Her eyes popped open a bit wider, and she twitched as if waking from a dream. “What?”
“You were explaining what I assume to be the quantum physics of the preer.”
“I…” She looked around. “I was? That’s strange.”
“Sister, you don’t know the half of it.”
She shook her head.
“I’d suggested that I could grab one of the strenkir from the surrounding area and co-opt it as a proo.”
She shook her head. “No, you mustn’t do that. The strenkir af krafti and the preer are two sides of the same coin—they are not the same side of the coin.”
I shook my head and shrugged. “That doesn’t do much to clarify the situation, I’m afraid.”
She pursed her lips. “The Three Maids exist in this place as dreamslice reflections of their true selves, located somewhere in the underverse. Same as you were when you visited Iktrasitl while you lay dying in that cave on Osgarthr. Your body was there, yet your dreamslice reflection was here. You see? Two sides of the same coin.”
I shrugged and blew out a breath. “Which was the real me?”
She flashed a crooked smile. “Neither. Two sides of the same coin, remember? Can one side of a coin exist without the other?”
“Oh…” I inclined my head. “I think I get it. The dreamslice reflections and the…what do you call the physical counterpart?”
“Matterstream manifestation.”
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 122
