Blood of the Isir Omnibus

by Erik Henry Vick

  Maybe John was right. It fit what Meuhlnir had told me about Osgarthr’s ancient past.

  We raced across the gravel and small stones that littered the lifeless plain. From horizon to horizon, not a single tree still stood, of course, but also no scrub, no lizards, no birds, not even insects existed. Wisps of the greenish mist blew across the landscape, and every now and again, a distant shriek preceded the blooming of a fresh death-blossom, and the ground shook. I wondered how long the war had been going on, what type of weapons could so destroy the ecosphere of a planet, and who in the hell would be stupid enough to employ them.

  “Is this…” grated Mothi, his voice hoarse and ragged from breathing the vapor.

  The specter of biological or chemical weapons reared up in my mind, and I shook my head, finger over my lips. “Speak only when necessary. Take shallow breaths.” I pointed at the blobs of mold-colored fog drifting across the plain.

  Mothi nodded and pointed at the crags in the distance. “Dragon spine? Ragnaruechkr?”

  John nodded, eyeing the mountains with a speculative gleam in his eye. “Did you not say the preer could break the boundaries of time?”

  I thought about the stories Meuhlnir had told me of Isi, Jot, and Vani and their great war and shrugged. Whether we were witnessing the destruction wrought by Mim’s three sons or another war-torn klith didn’t matter. What mattered was getting to Sig, Yowtgayrr, and Skowvithr before something killed them. Or us.

  “Speed,” I grated at Althyof, then coughed until I almost lost my lunch. He squinted up at me for a moment and nodded. The runeskowld began a trowba, but his voice rasped and creaked, and he shook his head and brought out a section of cloth. He tied it around his mouth and switched to a rhythmic chant.

  We ran under that bruised sky for what felt like hours, following the wandering slowthar of my son and my Alfar friends, passing burnt-out wrecks of armored vehicles, blackened patches of exposed bedrock, and plains filled with nothing but the skeletal remains of combatants. When we stopped, it was because Sig, Yowtgayrr, and Skowvithr’s slowthar looped and knotted around each other as if they’d performed a ballet. After the knot, the slowthar veered away on an arrow-straight path to the east.

  “Not good,” I said. “I think a troop of, well, something, set upon them, and captured them perhaps, but whatever it was, it left no slowth.”

  “No trail? I thought you said—”

  “What do you mean ‘set upon?’” demanded Jane. “Is our son okay? Are the Alfar hurt?”

  “By their slowthar, everyone is healthy, but I don’t like this.” I squeezed her hand. “They show no injuries, Jane.”

  “Who attacked them?” asked Althyof. “I thought you said everyone leaves a slowth?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know the rules of this stuff. All I can say is that so far, everyone I’ve seen leaves a slowth, but maybe a race exists—some demonic race—that doesn’t.”

  Veethar shook his head. “Not demons. Not if this is Osgarthr in the time of Isi.”

  I arched my eyebrows at him.

  “No preer yet. At the time of Isi’s war with his brothers, the inhabitants of Osgarthr were alone.”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  “Then what?” asked Jane.

  I shrugged. “I can only see which direction they took when they left: East.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  With a shrug, I turned and led them alongside the slowthar of Sig and the Alfar. No matter where we ran or what direction we faced, it all looked the same—a wasted planet under a ruined sky. After what felt like an eternity of dodging the smoky green gas clouds, a forest of strange poles thrust from the ground in the distance. An acorn-shaped mass of dark, non-reflective metal topped each pole.

  “Weapons?” asked Mothi.

  “A fence?” creaked Jane.

  I shrugged and ran on, following the trail straight toward the copse of poles. The slowthar ran on, as straight as a ruler, right through the middle of the weird devices.

  When we crossed the plain dictated by the first row of poles, the squeal of an electronic alarm split the noxious air. With no one saying a word, we spread out into a loose semi-circle and readied our weapons, trying to see in every direction at once.

  Then everything went black.

  Forty-four

  Awareness stole over me like an assassin creeping into a darkened room, first the grinding, pounding pain in my head, then light so bright I could see it through my closed lid. Sounds filtered through my awakening mind: people talking, an eerie, mechanical clanking that faded away over the span of a few minutes, the quiet susurration of a radio not tuned to anything in particular. My mouth tasted the way I imagined aluminum mixed with peat would taste.

  I cracked my eye open—just enough to peek at our surroundings. We were in a vast enclosure. I couldn’t see the walls of the place—black shadows shrouded everything outside the area where we lay.

  “That one’s awake,” said a gruff, no-nonsense voice.

  “Ah, so. Welcome to my command center,” said a deep baritone voice. “There’s no sense in pretending. Our sensors can detect your brainwaves, so we know you are conscious and alert.

  “Not so sure about alert,” I muttered.

  The deep baritone laughed. The other voice did not.

  I sat up, making only small, controlled movements, wary of setting off an avalanche of aches and pains. A quick, patting search revealed that they had failed to search us, or if they did, they didn’t care that I was armed. The others lay sprawled around me in thick, silt-like dust. “What was that thing?”

  “That thing?” Two men stood before me. One squat, with a thick torso and dressed in black combat fatigues, and the other tall and broad-shouldered, dressed in an immaculate white suit.

  “The perimeter defenses, Lord,” said the gruff voice—the one in black.

  “Oh, yes. You walked into a sensor patch as bold as you please and, of course, set off the perimeter alarms. The automated defense system rendered you unconscious.”

  “Sensor patch?”

  “Didn’t you see the poles?” asked the man in black.

  I shook my head. “With the acorn-things on top?”

  “Acorns?” asked the man in white.

  “Never mind. We didn’t know the poles signified the ground was off limits. We were following—”

  “Who sent you?” asked the man in black.

  “Come now, Keirr,” said the man in white. “There is no reason for rudeness.” He patted Keirr’s shoulder but never took his gaze away from my own. “You must forgive General Keirr. He’s a military man, born and bred.”

  I shook my head. “Nothing to forgive. I’d be wondering the same thing in his shoes.” I rubbed my temples. “And to answer his question, no one sent us. A malicious asshole sent my son and two guardians to this place, and we’re here to retrieve them.”

  Keirr’s eyes narrowed. “Sent here? By whom?”

  I waved it away. “You wouldn’t know him. If you’ll return our friends, we’ll get out of your hair. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

  “Ah, yes. Your interesting…friends.”

  “Lord Isi, no!” said Keirr.

  The man in white turned to the man in black, an expression on his face as if he’d bitten into something sour.

  Keirr’s face burned with shame.

  Isi sighed. “Well, the secret is out of the box, now.”

  “Sorry, my Lord.”

  “Yes, well.”

  A short man wearing light blue scrubs stepped out of the shadows and approached. “Lord Isi? If I may?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Yessir. The deep readings from this group are strange…much the same as the other three, but even more so for two of these new ones.”

  “The other three?” I asked. “A boy and two Alfar?”

  “Alfar?” asked General Keirr.

  “I asked first,” I said. Behind me, Jane moaned and pushed herself into a seated
position.

  “Lord Isi, this man, and that woman…they are the ones with more significant readings. They are even stranger than the first one—”

  “Silence!” snapped Keirr.

  “Readings?” mumbled Jane.

  “Tell me about the other three, please,” I said, directing my gaze at Isi. “One of them may be my son.”

  “Hmmm.” Isi strode three steps to the side, his gaze boring into mine. He turned without breaking his stare and walked back. “Tell me who you are, and I may share information about the other three we captured at the sensor patch.”

  “My name is Hank Jensen.” I hooked my thumb over my shoulder at Jane. “That’s my wife, Jane.” I pointed at Althyof and spoke his name. Krowkr was next, then the other Isir with me, ending with John Calvin Black.

  Isi frowned at Althyof. “Is this one of your Afar?”

  “Alfar,” I said, “and no. Althyof is a Tverkr.”

  “From whence came he?” asked the scientist in blue.

  As I remembered the story of Isi’s war, our captors wouldn’t know about the preer. “A place far from here.”

  Isi shook his head. “He’s not of this planet.”

  “No,” I said with a nod.

  Isi nodded. “Our other three captives are a boy and two strangers who have the same look to them as this Tverkr.”

  “Sig is the boy—Sigurd—and he’s my son. The other two are Alfar by the name of Yowtgayrr and Skowvithr. They are our friends—the three we came here to find. If you allow us to join them, we will leave you in peace.”

  Isi cocked his head to the side, then snapped his fingers at the scientist. “What differs about these two?”

  “As with the others, their quantum signatures are…very strange. This one,” he said, pointing at me, “appears to have lived for a very long time. Eons. The female appears to be in a state of quantum entanglement such that her signature approaches the male’s.”

  Isi shook his head and flashed me a small smile. “And that means?”

  “My Lord, I…” The scientist shook his head. “I can’t begin to guess, but I can say that such a thing should be impossible.”

  “Your enchanters are amateurs,” grumbled Althyof without opening his eyes.

  “Ah, he speaks,” said Isi with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “And he speaks our language.”

  “That’s a result of—”

  “Yes,” I said, interrupting the Tverkr. “Althyof speaks our language fluently. And unless you consider fifty years a long time, your pet scientist here is wrong.”

  The scientist cleared his throat. “Lord Isi, this man’s state is similar in ways to the other…uh…guest in the lab. There is…an ageless quality to the readings.”

  Isi turned to the man with a sigh. “And does this information clarify whether either of them is a threat to us?”

  The scientist gulped at Isi’s hard tone and shook his head.

  “In that case, I’ll thank you to shut up unless I ask a question of you.”

  “I don’t know who this other one is, but neither we nor our three companions threaten anyone here,” I said. “All we want is to be reunited, and we will leave this…area, never to return.”

  “What were you going to say?” Isi asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He treated me to a shrewd glance, then shook his head. “You understand I can’t just take your word for it?”

  “But you can. You are fighting a war, right? Against Vani and Jot?” At Isi’s grudging nod, I continued, “We want nothing to do with it. We are not agents of either of your brother’s factions. As I said, we are only here for our friends.”

  Isi squinted at my face for a moment. “I believe you believe that, but everyone on this planet is in one of the three camps. My brothers feel the same way: You are either with me or against me. There’s no way to remain neutral.”

  “And yet we are.”

  General Keirr shook his head. “Lord, if you’ll allow me, our advanced interrogation techniques will yield—”

  “I think not,” said Isi, but whether to my comment or the general’s, it wasn’t clear. He pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a tug. “No, I think not.” He snapped his finger at the darkness again. “Bring them!” he commanded.

  The eerie clanking started up again, and I thought I could see movement in the darkness beyond the bright lights shining on us. My hands came to rest on the butts of my pistols.

  Isi caught the motion and laughed. “Your primitive weapons will not help you here. Did you think we’d overlooked them?”

  With a conscious effort, I moved my hands away from my hips empty. Typical examples of our weapons might not frighten them, but they had no way of knowing how our arms and armor had been manipulated and enhanced by the strenkir af krafti. A thought struck me, and I grinned. They may not even know the possibility of manipulating the strings of power in that way exists yet.

  Isi saw the grin and took a step back. Keirr stepped in front of his sovereign as I stood and stretched.

  “You don’t want us as enemies,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Let’s keep this friendly. I am asking you to return my son and my friends.”

  Isi stiffened. “And you don’t want us as enemies.” As he spoke, the shadows moving in the darkness clanked and clattered into the light.

  They stood seven- or eight-feet tall and glided forward on caterpillar tracks of linked metal plates—the clanking. Each silver-bodied thing held its left arm out straight, with its left hand folded back along its forearm, exposing the matte-black tube of an energy weapon. Except for the tank treads, the robots reminded me of Haymtatlr’s metal guardians, and I wondered if those matte-black tubes were the same weapons Haymtatlr’s robots used.

  They poured out of the darkness, encircling us and stacking up behind, matte-black tubes pointed at my party and me. They came until there were three rings of robots around us, and still more poured out of the darkness and stood ready to fill in the ranks should any of the others fall.

  Isi smiled coldly. “As you see, my warriors are always alert, always ready to defend me.”

  “But can they sing?” asked Althyof, sitting up at last. “Can they keep a rhythm? Carry a tune?”

  Isi’s expression darkened. “I do not enjoy being mocked, sir.”

  Althyof climbed to his feet, a cocky grin stretching his lips. “And your warriors? Do they enjoy being mocked?”

  Keirr took a step toward Althyof, a look of rage settling on his face.

  “Oh, it’s all right, Keirr,” said Isi. “Let them have their fun.” He offered me a smile. “Come, let me take you to your people. I’ve decided to let you see they are unharmed before we return to the subject of why you have come.”

  Keirr grimaced, but with a gesture, he commanded the robots to fall back.

  Isi waved me forward, and we walked together in a more-or-less companionable silence for a time, though the clank and clatter of the robots following along behind broke the silence with regularity. “Tell me, Hank,” he said, “by what manner of transportation did you arrive here?”

  “It doesn’t matter, but it’s no threat to you.”

  He nodded. “Honestly, I see a threat in everything these days. For instance, one of my captives claims to have traveled here from someplace called the ‘underverse’ of all things.” He shook his head and laughed. “My father was a great scientist. Mim was his name, have you heard of him?” He looked at me askance.

  Trying to keep my expression blank, I nodded. “I’ve heard stories about him.”

  “Stories, eh?” Isi asked with a strange grin. “No doubt they fall short. Suffice it to say that Mim did vast amounts of research into the nature of the universe, and I have endeavored to expand on his work. That said, I’ve never heard of this thing called an underverse, but unless I am mistaken, you have.”

  I shrugged. “Yes.”

  “Is that where you are from? This underverse?”


  “No.”

  “Can you describe it? The underverse?”

  “It’s…” I shook my head. “It would be difficult to do it justice, but it’s as big as the universe, perhaps. Maybe I should have said ‘infinite’ instead of ‘big.’” I shrugged. “It’s a void, a darkness. Creatures live in the place, creatures with the appearance of big, blind worms.” I shrugged. “I can’t explain it further.”

  Isi nodded. “Big, blind worms,” he muttered. “Our visitor is human-shaped, not worm-shaped.”

  I wondered if a human-shaped visitor from the underverse would be the same as the Nornir—the dreamslice reflection of one of the Plauinn. I turned my gaze to the ground in front of us, not wanting him to see recognition in my expression.

  He cleared his throat. “Where, then, do you come from?”

  What do I tell him? I wondered. “That is also difficult to explain. There are things I cannot tell you.”

  “Hmmm.” He squinted at me with open suspicion. “I have heard that phrase often of late.”

  I nodded. “By my son and friends.”

  “By the two Alfar. And the other. The Alfar instructed your son not to answer my questions. I find that most rude.”

  “Did you capture this other as you captured us?”

  Isi shook his head, a subtle smile on his face. “No. We found ourselves in possession of him after a failed experiment.” Isi waved his hand airily. “But that is nothing we need discuss. Look, we are here.”

  The square, rock-walled chamber he’d led us to was smaller and better lit. The walls were one hundred yards long, and strange machines and equipment packed the back half of the room, shrouded in clear plastic. Men in blue scrubs stood at various workstations scattered about, or near the two impromptu cells that stood along one wall, making notes.

  Sig, Yowtgayrr, and Skowvithr occupied one, and with a shout, Jane ran toward them.

  “Mom!” yelled Sig.