The general picked up a laser pointer and pointed at the screen behind Lucas. He turned to look.
The red dot was moving in tight little circles next to the trickle of water. “That, gentlemen, is the monstrosity known as the London Eye. That should give you an idea of the scale of this thing.”
There was a murmur around the room, and uneasy movement. That was the most these highly trained people allowed themselves to show, but the revelation was staggering. Lucas stared at the small dot the general had been pointing at. What he had thought was a trickle of water was the wide, graceful curve of the Thames itself, running past the Embankment, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye. The rubble wasn’t rubble at all—well, some of it clearly was—but the little squares and oblongs on the ground that he had thought was building debris were actual buildings. The jump jets had been a lot higher than Lucas had assumed.
He stared at the tower again, beginning to understand the true size of the thing.
“I’m quite sure you are all asking yourselves right now how tall that blighter really is. I had a pair of structural engineers run some scale calculations. The base of each foot, which is roughly triangular, is just over four hundred metres from the apex to the base. The base is also four hundred metres across. They’re perfect equilateral triangles.”
Lucas did the conversion to Imperial almost automatically, his jaw unhinging once more. A quarter of a mile! Just one foot of the tower was a quarter mile long!
“The engineers tell me that the top of the tower is just under four thousand metres high. Everest, gentlemen, is eight and a half thousand metres high. Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the British Isles, is four and a half thousand feet. I looked it up this morning.”
More murmuring. Lucas shook his head. The tower was nearly two and a half miles high!
“The mission was ordered to fly by once only and as quickly as possible to avoid any undue risks, as every vehicle was flying with only one pilot.”
“Where were their navigators?” the Indian officer asked.
“The navigators gave up their seats so the pilots could take an Einherjar along with them. The Einherjar assured us they could breach the aura surrounding the tower for a short time, enough to pass through, and we thought it worth the risk to try.” The general lifted his finger again and the video began to roll once more. “The flyby happens very quickly, but we will be examining every frame for details.”
The tower tilted on the frame as the planes rolled, banking away from the tower to skirt it. Then the tower moved out of the frame as they straightened up and flew on, heading south, judging by the direction of the sun.
The screen went blank again and the dim lights came back on.
Everyone stirred, bringing their attention back to the table.
That scared them, Lucas realized. It wasn’t a difficult guess. He could feel his own heart banging around inside his chest and the sour taste of adrenaline in his mouth. The scale of the tower, once he’d grasped the true size of it, was shocking.
Simmons was the first one to speak. “Do we have any idea what they’re doing with the folk caught inside the shield, general?”
The general grimaced. “No. No one gets in and no one gets out.”
“Your pilots got in,” Simmons replied.
“Through some wizardry the Einherjar understand and that I do not.” The general straightened. “I brought along a technical expert of my own, this morning.” He glanced at his aide, who straightened up smartly and walked over to the doors. He tapped on the glass and the MP on the other side opened one side of it, enough to let through another figure.
Asher Strand.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lucas swore under his breath, as the possible reason for him being hauled out of Turkey at two in the morning made itself clear.
Asher didn’t look anything like the urbane businessman and banker Lucas had known for years. Like everyone else on Earth, this war had changed him. Lucas looked him over, cataloguing the differences.
He wore combat pants that were common in nearly every army Lucas knew of, but they were a plain, dark brown. His shirt was the same tough fabric as the pants, but a lighter brown. It was sleeveless and the edges of the armholes were ragged, telling Lucas he had ripped out the sleeves that had once been there. The shirt was stained and wrinkled, lying in accordion-like folds that said Asher had recently been wearing body armor over the shirt, long enough to iron in the wrinkles.
There were heavy wrist guards on each wrist and he wore his sword openly upon his hip, the naked blade thrust through a loop on the second belt he wore. There was a long knife on the other hip and one tucked into the top of his…Lucas didn’t know what to call them. He had wound belts, or long pieces of leather, around the legs of his pants, from ankle to knee, crossing them over and holding the excess material of the pants tight against his legs and out of the way. The leg armor the SEALs wore did the same thing, but the thongs would be lighter and less cumbersome and suitable for any combat situation.
He had three or four or more days’ worth of growth on his chin and his hair was shorn short in such a ragged fashion, Lucas suspected he’d done it himself, without the benefit of a mirror and probably with the knife on his belt.
There was nothing close to a uniform anywhere in his garments. No insignia, and no suggestion of rank. Everything he wore shouted of purpose, from the leggings to the unsheathed sword, to the wrist guards, to the roughly cut hair. He was dressed for war.
Only Asher’s eyes hadn’t changed. He looked around the room with the same assessing stare that Lucas remembered. Lucas suspected that the hard stare and the calculating attitude were the genuine thing. What Lucas had known before had been a mask. Asher hadn’t changed like the rest of them. He had simply dropped away all the masks and roles and disguises.
This was the true Asher.
He came to a halt at the other end of the table from the general, well back from the officers sitting there. He took a spread-legged stance and crossed his arms. The big biceps flexed. “General,” he acknowledged. Lucas wondered if he had picked the spot because it put him within reaching distance of where Lucas stood.
“This is Askr, Son of Brynjar, Stallari of the New York hall,” the general told them.
Asher nodded.
“You’re a long way from home,” Simmons said.
Asher glanced at him. “We have a hall here, in the hills around Vajenny.”
Silence greeted him, as the humans in the room acquainted themselves once more with the fact that the Kine could step from one side of the planet to the other through their portals. Lucas still didn’t fully understand how they worked. Very few humans got to use them. The Kine had made it abundantly clear that it wasn’t that they didn’t want humans to use them. It was because they couldn’t use them, not if a Kine was not with them, and the Kine were severely limited in numbers.
This matched up with what Charlee and Darwin had told him about the portals and the Kine population.
“Askr is being somewhat coy about his activities. He is based in New York,” the general said, “but I believe he has come directly from China where the Kine and the People’s Republic have just taken back the Ganxiao hall. Is that correct, Stallari?”
That explained the battle-worn look about him. Lucas was willing to bet hard currency that the armor that had left the wrinkles in his shirt was sitting outside the conference room doors, where he had shucked it just before stepping through.
“The Ganxiao hall is ours again, yes,” Asher replied.
“Stallari, there has been a question about the aura that surrounds the eyry in London. Could you explain how your people could penetrate the shield? I lack the knowledge, myself.”
“You’re not the only one, general,” Asher said. “Magic isn’t something that humans are used to thinking of in practical ways.”
“Magic?” The question came from down the table. “These auras are magic?” There was derision in the to
ne. “Will there be fairies, next?”
Asher sighed. Lucas could hear it. “Colonel, ‘magic’ is just a word-symbol for something you do not understand. Humans have been using electricity and electronics for generations now, but the Alfar don’t understand that any better than you understand auras. To the Alfar, electrons are magic. But they use auras and the power they produce in the same way electrical engineers use circuits and computer engineers use circuit boards. Auras are a practical form of power that drives everything they do.”
“Do you use auras for your portals?” Simmons asked.
“Auras are used to generate the portals, but once they are connected, they are self-sustaining. When we first came among humans, we made a decision to minimize the use of auras, so that we could blend in with humans better. Very little of what we do, now, is powered by auras but we have always had the knowledge.”
“Which is how they knew what to do with the shield around the tower,” the general summarized. “Thank you, Stallari. Could you remain here for the rest of the meeting? I’m sure there will be more tricky questions.”
Asher nodded once more.
“Will you share the final report on the analysis of the tower footage, general?” Simmons asked.
“Of course,” the general replied heavily.
“We have experts who could help,” Simmons pointed out.
The general smiled. “By all means, send them over. We have no objections to tapping the United States’ unlimited military budget.” He shifted on his seat, and pushed a folder aside from the stack in front of him, mentally shifting gears. “The recapture of the Ganxiao hall secures portals that have been vulnerable for a year and gives the Kine direct access to more halls. It’s a positive outcome, but it’s not the reason for this meeting. As coordinators for your forces, I wanted you to be the first to know what the Kine learned during the Ganxiao offensive. As the stallari was there and has been gracious enough to remain here for questions, I will let him impart the news.”
Asher’s arms dropped. He straightened up, obviously surprised he was being called upon. Then he dug into a pocket on his thigh and produced a very ordinary and quite human-looking cellphone and lifted it up. “I have photos on this, if someone can put them on the big screen?”
A technician stepped over from the desks against the walls and held out her hand. Asher thumbed through several screens and then pointed to something on the screen. “Those two,” he said quietly and dropped the phone onto her hand.
She walked back to the desks and plugged the phone into a USB jack, then swiped at the touchscreen built into her desk. With a tap of her finger, the two images jumped onto the big screens, repeated around the room.
It was clear the photos had been taken quickly, with no time to properly frame the subjects. They were mid-distance from the camera lens. The one on the right looked vaguely human. It had two legs, encased in boots that made its legs look as thick as tree trunks, or perhaps it simply had thick legs. Two arms and hands, but there wasn’t enough resolution in the photo to determine more than that. There was a head on top of joints that served as shoulders for the arms, recognizable eyes that tilted at a sharp angle, and a mouth. The area between was flat, with holes where a human’s nostrils would be. What it had for flesh looked mottled, like freckles that had grown rampant and huge.
The creature was holding something that was clearly a weapon, for it was using it to fend off a man wielding a sword. An Einherjar, Lucas presumed, as the Einherjar would have used the portals to step through into the inner halls of Ganxiao, while the Red Army would have attacked from outside, and the man in the photo was neither Asian nor outside. But it wasn’t a weapon that Lucas could classify except to say that it had a sharp edge and two handles.
The one on the left was also human-like in that it had two arms, two legs, a head and a torso, but that was where similarities seemed to end. It crouched low to the ground and one of the arms was propping it up. It was about to leap upon an Einherjar, who was just turning to spot it. It carried no weapons.
There was another round-robin of murmurs and exclamations.
“They are not Alfar, unless there are more than three races of Alfar?” Simmons asked.
“The one on the right,” Asher said, “is a Sinnar. The little one on the left is an Asmegar. It doesn’t look like it, but the Asmegar are pacifists. They prefer to live and let live. But they will fight when called upon to do so. Only the Sinnar can make them fight.”
“And the Sinnar are what, exactly?” the general asked.
“They are many things,” Asher replied. “But their primary role, the one that will interest you the most, is as Hel’s warriors.”
Simmons threw down his pen. “Wonderful,” he said dryly. “Not only are we getting our butts kicked by the Alfar, but now there’s a second world that wants to pick on the little kid?”
“Hell?” Lucas questioned softly.
“Not the Christian idea of hell,” Asher said. “Hel is one of the nine worlds, just as the Alfar’s world of Alfheim is one and Asgard, which was our home, once. Hel is the melting pot where unwanted species found themselves. The Sinnar and the Asmegar are two of them.” He pointed at the photo. “They were fighting for the Alfar. We have to presume the Alfar recruited them. The Sinnar would sell their own children if it meant they could get into a fight somewhere.”
The general tugged at his khaki tie. “That means the bridge to a second world is open.”
Asher shook his head. “All the bridges are open, general. We think the others are waiting to see how this plays out. That’s why we haven’t seen Jotnar. The Nare—all except the Sinnars—usually prefer to stay out of off-world fights. They have enough troubles of their own, with so many species trying to survive there.”
“Nare?” someone queried.
“All the species on Hel are called, collectively, Nare,” Asher explained.
“Does the name have a meaning?” Simmons asked. It was a good question, Lucas thought. Most of the names did mean something.
Asher grimaced. “It means the damned.”
Pens were scribbling furiously around the table.
“What other species might we expect?” the general asked. “What other Nare are there?”
Asher held up his hand and checked off the names as he spoke. “Sinnar and Asmegar. Mayjar and Ravnar. Mayjar are the messengers of the underworld, and they would have been the ones to deal directly with Renmar and the other Alfar leaders. They are all female. The Ravnar are creatures of the Mayar and are under their control. They are bird-like creatures and they prey on liars, thieves, and the immoral. Then there are the Furies—what you call demons. They are the mates of the Mayjar. There are Dolgar, who are invisible, but when they rise during the night, they sow confusion and fear, they screw up communications and put people at cross-purposes. They feed on violence and high emotions, which is why they like to cause trouble.”
“They sound like ghosts, or psychic vampires,” someone muttered.
“Humans probably got the inspiration for that stuff from them,” Asher agreed. He checked off another finger. “Despair Dragons—early humans didn’t have to exaggerate much when they made up stories about them. They’re as deadly as they sound, but there’s not many of them left, thank Odin.”
The officers at the table were stirring now, uneasy in the face of the shopping list of potential enemies that Asher was reeling off. He had moved onto his other hand two digits before. Now he held up the eighth finger. “The Uppregin. Hel’s gods. They disappeared just like ours did. There are no gods left that we know of.” He frowned. “I’m missing one…” he muttered, and counted off on his fingers again, his lips moving as he worked through the roster once more. Then he rolled his eyes. “I forgot.” He held up all but one finger. “The Kraken. You all know that name.”
Simmons stood up. “Kraken?” he said sharply. “The big, deep-sea monsters that Jules Verne wrote about, and that silly movie about pirates?”
&n
bsp; Asher dropped his hands. “That would be them,” he confirmed.
Simmons spread his fingers across the tabletop, looking down at them. Then he seemed to come to some decision, for he raised his chin and spoke directly to the general. “We’re the only navy represented at this table, sir, but I talk to enough of them to know we’re not the only navy afflicted. In the last four days, we have lost three nuclear submarines and a battle cruiser. The cruiser was running parallel with the USS Vermont, and the Vermont watched it go down. The junior officer on watch was put on report because he said that tentacles wrapped around it, broke its back and pulled it into the water. All hands were lost.”
The room fell silent.
“There have been commercial shipping losses, too,” Simmons added. “We don’t know how many because they don’t have a chain of command to report to that would notice their absence—not for a while, anyway. Some of the supertankers are at sea for six weeks, with no contact with land at all. The only way we’ll know they’ve gone is when they fail to show up.”
Hell’s bells, Lucas thought to himself. If shipping came to a halt, it could put a giant crimp in the distribution of all sorts of essential products, including oil. Food was at the top of the list, too.
The general put down his pen, for he had been scribbling notes just like everyone else. “This is information that will need to go higher up the chain. I suggest you all report to your superiors and any other coordination pods you belong to. This meeting is at an end.”
Asher glanced at Lucas and jerked his head toward the door.
Fucking-A, we’re going to talk, Lucas agreed silently. He stepped up to Simmons’ side. The Rear Admiral was still standing. “Sir?”
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 51