“Harpies. L-lindworms aren’t . . . t-trained y-yet.” A sidelong glance. “P-pity we have no v-valkyrie.”
“If they go insane like that frequently, we’re probably best off without them.” Her tone was dismissive, to say the least, as she opened her satellite phone, and got the rest of her harpies—the ones affiliated with Vidarr’s Lindworms, anyway—in the air.
Maius 1, 1993 AC
Air-raid sirens whooped, shrilling through the air. Everyone on the campus green slapped their hands over their ears scattered for secure rooms inside of the various buildings. Secure rooms usually involved poured-stone bunkers with protective circles etched in the floor. Minori dragged Zaya into the archive building, and hustled her for the vaults. At the moment, they were possibly the safest place on the entire campus, being triple-warded, with sorcery, summoning, and technological safeguards. “It’s probably another set of rockets,” Zaya said, a little out of breath.
“The last set had efreeti as the payload,” Minori replied, quickly. The city had been hit several times in the past few weeks, but outlying areas were being harassed much more frequently. “Get downstairs, and make sure the new calculi lab is secure.” She had her own wards up around her body, and a cool breeze followed her wherever she went—something that amused Amaterasu-within to no end. At the moment, the goddess was silent, however, watching intently through Minori’s eyes as the sorceress found a window, and peered out. It’ll either be coming from the east or the south . . . there. Found the contrail.
Anti-missile technology had been a very tough nut to crack. Judea, Hellas, and Nippon had pioneered rocket technology for getting into space, and defensive and offensive uses had been immediately obvious as well. It had taken time for the rest of the world to catch up, but currently, the Persians were using the rocket attacks as a way to harass Rome provinces, while not committing their armies back into the field. Catching a rocket with another rocket required pinpoint radar, very advanced mathematics performed extremely quickly, and maneuvering thrusters that could move the defensive rocket in its course quickly enough to react to changes in position detected by the radar. It was a messy proposition, and not even the best minds in Judea had been able to correct for these problems yet. Not even Dr. Larus Sillen, though the gods knew the fenris physicist had been trying.
That left magic. Minori twitched, watching the contrail come closer—it was probably moving faster than the speed of sound, but time seemed to have slowed for her, for the moment. “I’m too far away to do a damned bit of good,” she muttered.
It is not your task to defend, at the moment, Amaterasu counseled. Look!
A shimmering curtain of light spread over the sky, like the aurora borealis, or a soap bubble. It looked diaphanous, and certainly too frail to do much against the incoming weapon. Minori swallowed. “Come on,” she whispered, and would have prayed, except that the goddess that she would have prayed to, was currently nestled inside her heart.
When any researcher came to the Magi archives and asked for documents, those requests were reviewed, and Zaya had flagged one Ninson Tehro’s interest in ancient defensive spells. Erida had intervened, and subsequently worked with Tehro. None of them really liked the magus; Minori found him gauche. But he’d had an idea that was worth pursuing, and they’d reworked some of the oldest spells in existence with the technologies of the present. The ancients had had been aware of ley—the layout of Egyptian, Tawantinsuyan, and Nahautl towns and monuments attested to this—but the Gauls had been the first to put it to work. As such, ley was a source of power that the Magi as a whole did not use much. Thus, Trennus had been brought aboard, and the incantations and equations revised to use Judea’s almost untapped ley-lines to power this defensive spell. Bodi, Masako, and Minori had subsequently been brought in, along with military contractors, to work the technomancy aspect . . . and bubble shield had been born.
Calculi and radar were employed to gauge an incoming projectile’s speed and trajectory, so that the defensive bubble didn’t have to be equally strong in all directions—which created efficiency. The gems that were the capacitors for the spells were quartz, and interlinked throughout the city, piggybacked onto the existing electrical grid. All they’d needed to do was have technicians climb telephone poles, set the capacitor boxes in place, and connect them to the copper wire. And then they’d had their defensive grid.
Almost a year’s worth of effort, and the result was today’s test—the first test of the spell against actual live enemy fire in the major metropolitan area. They’d tested it in the desert, against friendly fire, but . . . those were experiments where they controlled both sets of variables, offense and defense. Not entirely valid. The mayor of Jerusalem and the Temple elders had been somewhat against the magic aspect, but Governor Caesarion had agreed to it, especially after the recent rocket attacks. Even the priests had been persuaded, after one of the last rockets had clipped the Second Temple and the palace of the governor, as well.
Minori swallowed. Come on. Prove to everyone that bringing the Magi, the Chaldeans, and the Medians into the Empire was the right move. And as she watched, the missile hit the bubble, and exploded, two miles above the city.
She yipped under her breath and did a slightly undignified dance in place at the window as fragments of metal fluttered down like confetti, scattering with the flames along the curve of the blue-green dome. The spell was designed to turn any inbound inanimate object that fit certain profiles—missiles and ornithopters—into pieces smaller than an assarius coin. A piece of metal that size could still hurt someone if it hit them at terminal velocity . . . which was why everyone with sense should be indoors.
A djinn erupted from the wreckage in a spiraling cloud of darkness . . . and skated along the surface of the dome, almost curiously. The ‘soap bubble’ dispersed, the colored lights that had tinged the sky vanishing, and the djinn began to descend into the city. Minori exhaled. Counter-summoning teams would already be on their way, but they wouldn’t have to deal with fire, debris, collapsing buildings, and bleeding, dying people all around them while they struggled to bind or banish the djinn. “We did it,” she whispered, and half-closed her eyes to try to spot the red-glowing, translucent form that she knew was Kanmi’s spirit. “Now all we have to do is . . . do it again. And keep working on the hydrogen incantation.” She opened her eyes as the breeze grew stronger. “You’re the one who gave me the idea.”
. . . look at how well . . . my great idea . . . turned out. . . .
“Shh. If they’re really feeding the mad godlings by repurposing the godlings’ ghul, we need to wipe out as many of those ghul as possible. Both to starve the godlings and to remove a weapon from the Persian arsenal. That, and start looking like such a bad target that they’d be better off trying to fight the godlings.” Minori sighed. “As we all really would be.”
. . . unity . . . not much . . . of a strong point . . . .
“I know, Kanmi-kun. I know.”
Communications were spotty at best, but she suspected Persia was hardly alone in the world in trying to find a way to propitiate the mad godlings, but there was really no evidence that any of them were . . . sapient. Anything other than raw hunger. And yet, they were all men once. Men who hated Rome, yes, men who were willing to sacrifice their first-born sons to ‘free’ their people. I find it hard to believe that all their selves vanished in an instant. Trennus has theorized that they were unNamed in the moment that you destroyed their mortal forms, Kanmi, and the god’s energies overwhelmed them. Minori shuddered, and felt Amaterasu quiver within, too. It would explain why, though their energies originated in the Veil, they cannot go there. Not only are they the essence of destruction, and cannot go to a place that is the essence of creation . . . but if they are Nameless, they cannot go there. They have no identity. They are inimical to all life.
. . . religions . . . that say we should . . . overcome . . . the self . . . would be pissed to hear that . . . .
“If the self is bad,
then these godlings should be perfection. They have no person left. Just the animal, I think.” Minori smiled faintly at the empty air. “These creatures have no higher-order human functions left. No love. No feeling of community. No passion. No charity. No kindness. No guilt. No shame. None of the ligatures inside of each of us that keep society functioning. All that’s left is anger, hate, and hunger. A desire to hurt back, whatever’s hurt them. The negatives, people should control, but the positives are what make life worth living.” Her mind kept churning along, however, as she walked, and she realized that some of the researchers along the crowded hallways were giving her odd looks. Not that she hadn’t gotten enough stares in the past few years anyway. A few Judean and former Mithraist engineering professors had asked her if she’d sold her soul to a demon for eternal youth. Why is it always a demon? Lassair had asked her at the time, in mild annoyance. If a spirit isn’t powerful enough to be a god, why must it be a demon in people’s minds . . . ?
Kanmi’s whisper broke into her thoughts. Talk to me about banishing the godlings . . . .
Trennus says he thinks they could be banished to the Aether, but no one knows how to do that. Minori rubbed at her eyes as the air raid sirens stopped blaring, and clattered down a set of steps, deeper into the archives. We have to try everything, Kanmi. If we don’t pursue every option, we are going to lose. Not just the war. We’ll lose the world.
. . . I know. Gentle brush of air against her face. Stronger here.
“On campus?” Minori stepped into a darkened area of the stacks, where there were no ears to hear or eyes to stare. “Go to the old lecture hall. Throw chalk at Masako’s students. The myth of Esh the Bastard is alive and well on campus. Go cultivate some belief, dear one.”
. . . I think . . . I might.
Minori looked up as the wind drifted away, and sighed. She had work to get back to, and the show, for the moment, appeared to be over.
Maius 4, 1993 AC
“It is still our land!” The senior temple delegate to the conference was red-faced with fury, and thumped the table for emphasis.
“It might be your land underneath, but our land happens to be on top of it.” Trennus’ voice was remarkably calm. “The spirits and the gods apparently didn’t want to turn Tyre into a land-locked city by taking the northern half of our island, rotating it, and slapping it into the Mediterranean like a new peninsula. Would you like to take this up with them?”
Over half the people in the room were still having trouble adapting to the new reality, and the evidence that the universe didn’t always work in the way in which they thought it did. Adam flexed his knees under the conference table. Caesarion had decided that he needed Adam as a “senior advisor.” Adam’s job was to ensure that he and Marcus Livorus understood the political ramifications of what they wanted to say and do here in Judea. At the moment, he had to give them credit; their faces could have been carved from stone. “Perhaps,” Caesarion said, lifting a hand, “we could come to some sort of an accommodation. Perhaps the mineral rights can still belong to Judea and the Carthaginians, and the surface rights would be retained by the Picts?”
“There are coal deposits near Perth,” Trennus said, leaning back in his chair. “Perth is currently located southeast of Jerusalem. I think that the miners would object to having their livelihood stripped in such a fashion.”
Marcus Livorus’ lips compressed. “Very well. All mineral rights previously held by the Picts remain theirs; the mineral rights for the . . . strata of land below . . . what are we even calling the region now? Pictiana? Pictland? Albion?”
Trennus shrugged. “We’ve always been Caledonia. But I suspect that outsiders will call it ‘that damned forest’ for some time to come.”
“I expect the terminology used will be rather more colorful than that,” Caesarion returned, dryly. Adam covered his mouth and coughed to cover his chuckle; so did Trennus. “Does anyone object to Senator Livorus’ recommendation? Can we now leave the question of mineral rights and move on to the thorny issues of water rights, reclamation, and agricultural uses? I would like to get this out of the way before we move on to the even more tangled issues of ‘who governs Caledonia . . .’”
“I’m amenable to the Senator’s suggestion, pursuant to surveyors being able to ascertain where our ‘strata’ of land end, and where the native environment begins again.” Trennus’ voice remained perfectly level. “And I would very much like to move on to the issues of governance My people wouldn’t let me throw the title of king around the neck of any of my other relatives. They’re of the opinion that I got us into this mess; I am apparently welcome to lead us out of it.”
“It’s our land,” the Carthaginian representative objected, again, at the same moment the Temple representative opened his mouth to say the same thing.
“If I may?” Adam interposed, and received a nod from Caesarion. “If you want the land back why not enter the Forest, driving a bulldozer? I think that the subject would find itself tabled until your replacement arrives. Or your replacement’s replacement, if the first one happened to be particularly slow-witted.” It wasn’t diplomatic, and he wasn’t really guiding Caesarion around the pitfalls of dealing with the locals . . . but he was a local, and one of the benefits of age was getting to say what he really thought.
There was a moment of silence in the conference room. Caesarion cleared his throat. “Commander ben Maor is correct. You cannot go back. The Forest is here, and the Picts are here. All that currently remains is deciding how you will live together. If we should consider them an autonomous nation within the Empire . . . as they were before . . . self-governing and paying taxes to Rome . . . or a sub-unit of Judea or Carthage, and without self-rule.” Caesarion raised a hand to forestall Trennus. “I know what your response will be, Matrugena, and I am inclined to agree. The past is the past, and while the rights of others with claims to the underlying land must be respected . . . circumstances have changed.” He steepled his hands before his lips.
“You believe that whatever you propose, Rome will agree with?’ The Carthaginian representative sounded glum. The Roman governor of Tyre sat beside him, and had had little to say thus far in the meeting; Caesarion was the son of the ruling Imperator, and the other governor was obviously content to observe him for the moment.
“I will send the details of whatever deal is brokered here to the Emperor, who will very likely pass it to the Senate with his recommendation that they make it law by acclamation. The Senate and the Emperor have much more important business before them at the moment, gentlemen. That includes the defiance of Gaul and Germania, millions of Gothic refugees, civil warfare in Nahautl and Quecha, and the millions more refugees from Qin and Korea and Nippon who have all but invaded Australia.” Caesarion let the list of concerns sit there fore a moment, and then went on, “With Persia conducting little more than harassment drills for the moment, we are the least of Rome’s concerns, and I would prefer to remain so.” His words were blunt. “While allowing Caledonia to remain a nation of its own may prove somewhat problematic if the Gauls and the Goths follow through on their threat to break away from the Empire, I think it best, in the end, that they be allowed to retain their autonomy. They are culturally distinct from both Carthage and Judea; their language is vastly different, as are their customs and religion. There is no pressing reason to subordinate them into either province. They are, and I think, should remain, a nation unto themselves.”
Adam saw relief cross Trennus’ face. He hadn’t thought that his friend had disliked living in Judea all this time . . . but then again, Trennus had taken his family north to Britannia every year for the summer, three months out of the year, every year, until travel became dangerous. It was probably one thing to live in a foreign country, himself. Quite another to subject his entire people to the laws of a foreign nation. “Thank you. That would be more than acceptable,” Trennus said, quietly. “We’re good neighbors, you’ll find. The indigenous people whose cities are now surrounded by
the Forest . . . that’s another question. My nobles have recommended three possible actions, in the event that Caledonia retained its status as a kingdom. First, that the people of those cities could give up their Judean or Carthaginian citizenships, and become Picts. We wouldn’t infringe on their religious beliefs. Second, and less optimally, they would become separate city-states, surrounded by our lands, like some of the nations of Caesaria Aquilonis are surrounded by larger provinces. Third, we could attempt to buy their land from them, and they could re-settle elsewhere. Trade has been . . . somewhat disrupted . . . so our treasury is a little bare.” Trennus grimaced.
“A token payment will hardly be restitution for entire lives disrupted—”
“We’ll work on that after lunch,” Caesarion interposed, flipping through a booklet of notes he’d taken so far. “In fact? A capital idea. Food will sweeten everyone’s disposition.”
Adam stood, tiredly, and headed for the door. He had his cane with him, but he didn’t need it today. The weather had been beautiful. A solid ten degrees cooler than average every month since the geographical changes had occurred. That had made the winter months more uncomfortable for him, given his arthritis, but the mountains and forests were, indeed, serving as rainmakers. There were showers almost every morning and evening, never lasting long, but giving the ground a good soaking.
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