“Right. So, this dreamslice reflection and this matterstream manifestation walk into a bar…”
She gave me a strange look. “I don’t follow.”
“That’s how a bunch of bad jokes start back on Mithgarthr. Never mind.”
“I don’t remember jokes like that,” she muttered.
“You’ve been to Mithgarthr?”
She started and looked away. “What? Oh, who hasn’t been there?”
“As a Tisir or before?”
She shook her head. “You were saying something about dreamslice reflections?”
“Yeah.” I couldn’t see how talking about her pre-Tisir past would make her uncomfortable, but she gave off the vibe in waves. “The dreamslice reflection and the matterstream manifestation, together they define the person?”
“Or thing. Or place.”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. What do you call the coin? The whole?”
She lifted her shoulders and abruptly let them drop. “The concinnity.”
I swept my hand around us. “Is this the dreamslice reflection, the matterstream manifestation, or the concinnity of the Conflux?”
She raised her eyes and looked at the surrounding forest. “I’m… I don’t know. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter.”
“So what is this place? The Conflux, I mean?”
Again, her shoulders hitched up and dropped. “It’s the remains of the home realm of the Plauinn, and, as such, it’s the point of unification for the timeflows.”
“Oh, boy. I’m not going to ask.”
“Think of it as the opposite of Owraythu’s realm, where the timeflows have been forced into divergence.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t help. Thanks anyway.”
“The distinction being that here there are an uncountably infinite number of potential preer to choose from in this place, while in Owraythu’s realm, there are almost none.”
“That seems like it would be particularly dangerous to open a proo to her realm, in that case.”
Kuhntul nodded, her shoulders slumped and her eyes glistening. “Yes,” she whispered. “And for that reason alone, a direct rescue of Hel would be very difficult.”
“Let’s get back to the preer,” I said, not willing to open the subject of saving Hel from her torment again.
“Yes,” she said dully. “Here, it is easy. Reach out your hand, and there is a proo beneath it. But other places are different and finding a proo can be too difficult. The strenkir af krafti is the matterstream manifestation while the concurrent proo is the dreamslice reflection. A concinnity is what we must create to bring a new proo into existence.”
“I don’t even understand what a concinnity is in this case.”
Kuhntul’s smile was a faint one. “But you do, you just don’t know you know. What is a proo, in your own words?”
“A wormhole,” I said with a shrug.
“And where does a wormhole exist?”
“In spacetime.”
“No, that’s too general. Where, exactly, does a wormhole exist?”
“What do you want me to say. A wormhole connects two points in spacetime with one another.”
“Yes! A wormhole exists between two points.”
“Ah,” I breathed. “And the strenkir af krafti? The physical part? What is that? Where does it exist?”
“Very astute questions, Tyeldnir. The strenkir are expressions of the matterstream in widths that approach zero, depending on the size of the internal compact dimensions of the universe-slice it exists in.”
“Oh, boy.”
“They are thin, with a width smaller than the smallest bit of matter, but they can have infinite length.”
“Okay. Extremely skinny, yet super-long streams of matter. What’s a stream of matter look like?”
“I said, ‘can have infinite length,’ not ‘do have.’ They can be as short as they are wide, which is an important part of calling a proo into existence.”
“I think I’m getting it. To create a proo, I need to connect two points that aren’t already connected, and once that has happened, move one end of the proo to where I want it.”
Kuhntul smiled and nodded. “That’s it. That’s right.”
“How do I do it?”
“It’s an act of creation, the same as when you vefa strenki or when you stayba runana. I bet none of your teachers taught you that aspect of the arts, did they?”
“No,” I said, scratching my beard. “But it makes sense. I’d never thought of it that way. Meuhlnir creates a path for the lightning to follow. Mothi creates a path for the cells of his muscles to transform—to grow or shrink. Sif’s healing creates a path for a wave of healing energy, creates the building blocks of life.”
“Just so.”
“Tell me how to do this!” I said, excitement bubbling in my voice.
“The first step is to create two small bits of something—almost unimaginably small. And you must create them within a field of power you maintain control of—at least at first. Attend me.”
I enchanted my vision, so I could follow what she was doing. She held her hands in certain ways that reminded me of something I’d seen before, but which I couldn’t place.
“Akneer ayka syer stath,” she said, and with a tiny flash of light and an almost inaudible pop, twin points of brightness appeared between her out-thrust hands. “There, do you see?”
I nodded.
“And now the linkage.” She took a deep breath and an expression of deep concentration settled on her features. “Akneer hlechkur.”
A vibration I almost heard occurred, and the two points of light hovering between her palms linked with a slash of light that was so thin it appeared to be a glint of sunlight on the edge of a finely sharpened blade.
“Now, the proo.” The lines of concentration etched in her features deepened. “Hlyowthu strenkidn,” she hissed. With a high frequency twang that I felt more than heard, another glinting line appeared between the flashing points of lights hovering between her palms. “Ah, that’s fine,” she said. “Can you see this hook Bikkir taught you to manipulate?”
“No,” I said. “It’s different from…” I peered at the symphony of light hovering between her palms. “Wait. I can see the hook even though the proo is as different from any proo I’ve seen as air is to water.”
She chuckled. “That’s because you are seeing it from the side rather than gazing into it from either end. Snooa,” she crooned, and the lights rotated around their center point, when it was end-on, I saw the familiar silvery oval, but unlike the others I’d seen, there was another oval right behind the first.
“Ah, I see.”
“And you can manipulate it as the Plauinn taught you?”
I grasped the hook and gave it a spin, focusing on the base of a tree twenty steps away. Immediately the far end of the proo disappeared and reappeared next to the tree’s trunk.
“Interesting,” she breathed. “If our roles were reversed, I doubt I could manipulate your proo while you held it in a field of control.”
“Oh?”
“No,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “Observe.” She changed the configuration of her left hand and whispered, “Fira.” The word meant ‘move’ in the Gamla Toonkumowl, and as she uttered it, the end of the proo slid toward us as though she pulled it on a string. “You see?”
“Yes,” I said. “You move the particle, and the proo follows. I move the proo, and the particle follows.”
“Yes.” With a sigh of fatigue, she dropped her hands.
I thought the particles, the strenki, and the proo, would fade from existence, but they didn’t. They began a frenetic dance—orbiting each other like the midair hijinks of two hummingbirds, the strenki and the proo stretching and snapping between them. “Beautiful,” I breathed.
“Can you do this?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said without pausing for thought. “I thought the particles would disappear when you released them, but they don’t.”
/> She shook her head. “No. Creation is the process of converting energy back to matter, just as destruction converts matter into energy. Once converted, in either direction, an object must live out its natural course in the timeflows.”
I nodded as if I understood that perfectly. “What does striking off a series of events from the bark of Iktrasitl do?”
She tilted her head to the side and squinted. “That depends on the extent of the changes, I suppose.”
“What if I did to Mirkur what he wants me to do to Hel?”
“I have never seen one of the Plauinn mentioned in the skein of fate.”
“But they must be there!”
She shrugged. “Perhaps, but I’ve never seen them.”
“Are there parts of the skein that the Nornir forbid you to look at?”
She shook her head. “Even if they did, there would be no real way to stop me from reading whatever I liked. All I’d have to do is wait for their absence. No, if the Plauinn are subject to uhrluhk, they must have their own tapestry somewhere else.”
“Hmm. That seems…convenient. Wouldn’t there need to be another conflux of timeflows as well?”
Her shoulders made their inevitable rise and fall. “Perhaps the Plauinn are not subject to temporal constraint since they live outside the timeflows. Or maybe there is another version of this conflux in the place of limbo you see between the ends of the preer.”
I rubbed a hand across my eye sockets and forehead. “That’s cheating.”
“Maybe so.”
“Is there no way to beat them?”
She turned away and looked at me from the corner of her eyes. “Hel avoided their machinations for a long time.”
“How did she do that?”
“In addition to abstaining from travel by preer, she absconded to Mithgarthr.”
I nodded slowly. “So that’s why they came…why they stayed for so long.”
Kuhntul sighed. “Yes.”
“But why did she want to avoid them?”
Another sigh gusted out of Kuhntul. “The Plauinn manipulated her. They wanted a change to the flows, and Suel was an instrument of theirs. Maybe she proved unsuitable to perform the changes, or she may have refused, fought against them, but whatever the reason, they abandoned her during her war against the rebels. The Plauinn manipulated Suel, Luka, and Vowli into breaking the Ayn Loug, and in the original timeflow that led to—”
“The original timeflow?”
Kuhntul’s mouth snapped shut with a click of her teeth. She shook her head and turned back toward Iktrasitl, so I couldn’t see her face. “Never mind.”
“No, it sounds pretty important.”
“Those events never happened from your perspective.”
“Even so, I’d like to hear what happened.”
She shook her head. “No, it would only cloud the issues. Suffice it to say that the outcome of the Plauinn manipulation of the timeflow was…undesirable, to say the least. The resulting flows were dark and filled with misery.”
“For who?”
Kuhntul sliced the air with her hand. “It doesn’t matter. An intervention was planned and executed, and this timeflow has a much better potential outcome.”
“I don’t like this, Kuhntul.”
She sighed and took a step away from me. “It is how it has to be.”
“How was the original timeflow altered? Tell me that much.”
Her shoulders slumped, and she hung her head. “Hel was told of the treachery of the Plauinn. Hel…she…” She shook her head. “Suel was lied to by the Plauinn. They poured bitterness and unrest into her ears at every opportunity. They turned her reign from its proper course. Perverting what would have been eons of peace and prosperity into a time of darkness, of despicable deeds done in the dark.”
“I’ve heard about Suel’s fall from grace.”
“From Meuhlnir’s perspective, no doubt.”
“Yes.”
“Then you only have heard half the story. He wasn’t privy to—she’d been told he couldn’t be trusted, that, in time, he would foster and lead a rebellion to depose her. It was part of how the Plauinn manipulated her into accepting the course they planned for her and for her empire.” Her voice warbled with emotion. “She should have known better,” she whispered.
“I’ve only known Meuhlnir for a short time in the cosmic scale of things, but I can’t imagine him betraying anyone.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “But they were convincing. They manipulated events to underscore their dire prophecies. These ‘advisors’ created situations in which Meuhlnir acted in ways they predicted. They’d instructed her to watch for certain behaviors—from Meuhlnir, from Sif and Yowrnsaxa, from all the Isir close to her except for Luka and Vowli. Unwittingly, the Isir reinforced the poison the Plauinn dribbled in Suel’s ear.” She turned back to face me, high color on her cheeks and a glisten of wetness in her eyes. “She should have trusted her friends, but it was all so… The lies she was told, the behaviors she was told to watch for, the unrest in the karl caste, the complaints about taxation, all of it had been ‘predicted’ by the Plauinn. They played her like a lute, and Luka and Vowli danced to the tune.”
“Still. I don’t see how she could lose her faith in Meuhlnir—in her lifelong friends.”
Kuhntul grunted sourly. “You don’t understand what it takes to rule, the personal cost of it. The court intrigues, the constant gossip.”
“No, I don’t know what that’s like, but I know what it is to put my life in another’s hands and to trust that person. Meuhlnir almost died to save her life from assassins, and—”
“Even that was used to turn her from her path.”
“What? How could that possibly be used against Meuhlnir?”
Kuhntul shook her head. “It had started by that time, of course. The manipulation, the fracture of her psyche, teaching her a dark, twisted form of saytr that focused on life and death. A horrible, despicable thing.”
I shook my head. “When we first met, you seemed to hate Hel, but now—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You mistook hating the path she’d chosen for hating the woman herself. I do not hate her. What she became—both as a result of the manipulations, and as a result of rejecting them—I hate that, but the person she was is still there. Buried. Smothered.” She shrugged. “But still there.”
“Who are you, Kuhntul?” I whispered.
She glanced at my face, eyes seeking mine. “I am Kuhntul of the Tisir. No more, no less.”
“That doesn’t seem like a whole answer.”
“Nevertheless, it is all the answer I can give you.”
“There are times…times when you remind me of someone, but I can’t place who.”
She shrugged, a smile on her lips. “I am Kuhntul.”
“Yes,” I said and sighed.
The silence stretched the moment between us as we stood regarding one another. She tilted her head to the side. “You’ve heard Meuhlnir’s tales. Hear a short one of mine.”
“Sure.”
“It was a time of great stress in Suel’s life. She’d taken to walking late into the night, sometimes with Meuhlnir, but less and less so as the Plauinn poisoned her thoughts against him. After that, she walked with Luka or Vowli, whose motives the Plauinn vouched for. One night, she walked alone in her gardens. She came to the spot where Meuhlnir had fought against the two assassins and almost died to save her. She was in a melancholy mood, and her mind turned back to those events, replaying the night in her mind’s eye…”
Twenty-eight
Suel strolled through the garden, following the path she and Meuhlnir had taken on the night of the assassination attempt. Her hand drifted up to massage her throat, which had not yet healed in fullness.
Things had taken a turn that night. If nothing else, the brazen attempt on her life had made it impossible to ignore the depths of unrest in her empire, and it had underscored how futile her actions had been to relieve the politic
al pressure. Damn those fools, she thought, scalding anger pouring into her mind. What more do they want from me?
How could it be possible that Meuhlnir is against me? He fought for me; he saved me from the assassin’s arrows! She shook her head and took a sweeping slice at the air with her hand. It couldn’t be possible. She stopped walking and gazed up into the dark night sky. She released a heavy sigh.
Shadows thickened around her, and she let her eyes slide shut. The shadows felt like velvet as they caressed her skin. It reminded her of one her father’s encompassing bearhugs.
Your mind is a tempest, small one, whispered a voice in her mind. Her voice, the woman who warned her about the plots within plots that grew unbounded across the empire.
“Yes,” said Suel. “I can’t believe my friend Meuhlnir would betray me.”
Ah, that. He is but a male.
“Yes,” breathed Suel.
Males are…complicated. You know this.
Suel nodded, but there was a still, small voice deep inside her that rejected the very idea that Meuhlnir would betray her.
The sound of laughter filled her mind. Ah, small one, did I not explain his jealousy of your throne? Your power? Even as he lay dying before you, you reached into the void and drew such energy to your use that it filled him with jealousy, with rage against your natural talents. He could not save you, the way you saved him, and in his twisted way of viewing the universe, that is a betrayal.
“But he’s never—”
And why would he? Why do you expect him to be honest with you about his feelings? Men think emotions are a weakness! Surely, you know this. He is but a man, and that, above all else, dictates who he is.
Suel shook her head.
Yes, small one. The time you spend with the brother compounds his jealousy. This, too, counts as a betrayal in his eyes, and perhaps the more important of the two.
“No, you do him a disservice. Meuhlnir is not the same as other men. He’s—”
Do not presume to tell me what he is, small one. I have the ability to reach inside him, to see his thoughts. It is you who do me the disservice. What do I gain by turning you against this man?
“I…I don’t know,” she finished lamely.
Nothing. My existence is far beyond your wildest imaginings, and as you are now, you can’t understand my motivations. But I will tell you, if you will listen.
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 123
