Brandr leaned forwards, and gave her a light, gentle kiss, signaling that the ceremony was done. Regin blinked. It hardly felt as if it had begun. Thor was shaking his head, and Loki was laughing, of course, the brittle laughter that had haunted her dreams for years. You told me once, that you wouldn’t extend Joris’ life, because I couldn’t have entanglements, when the final battle came, she told her grandsire, suddenly. Nothing that I would be held back by. Brandr . . . doesn’t count? She bit down on the real fear. The fear that Brandr would die, too.
Your Joris was a competent sorcerer. But he could never have fought at your side. Loki’s tone held tinges of regret. Cloudwalker can. And will. But his fate is shrouded from me. As so many things are, in these days. Go now. Take your wedding meal in this place, as you should, and then return to your tasks.
Minori shared the wedding meal with them all, and asked Sigrun how it compared to her own, years ago. Idle conversation. Reginleif could see the shadows in the former valkyrie’s eyes, however. “Quieter. It’s war-time now, after all. Fewer people popping in out of idle curiosity.” She managed a quick, mirthless smile, and put a hand on Nith’s neck as he coiled beside her chair. “Different guests. Fewer curses. And less spilled wine.”
Reginleif caught Sigrun’s arm as she prepared to leave. “I . . . tried to turn the world into Joris’ pyre,” she managed, quietly, out of earshot of the rest. “Don’t make my mistakes.” She managed a smile. “You could actually do it.”
Sigrun pressed her fingers. “I won’t. Different people. Different circumstances.” She shook her head and changed the subject. “Erikir’s invoking Freyr over there for virility. Brandr’s blushing. I didn’t think he could.” A brief, wintery smile. “You may find out in very short order if you actually lay eggs or not.”
And then Reginleif surprised her former student by confirming that she, too, knew how to blush.
______________________
That was the last happy occurrence for quite some time. A month later, Taranis managed to catch Ares out of the Veil, and killed the Hellene god of war. Mad godlings encroached on Rome itself, and the earth shook as Ceres and Proserpine both died on the slopes of Mount Etna, which promptly erupted. God-deaths had become . . . banal, somehow. When the earth trembled, people no longer wondered where the earthquake was centered, but rather, who had died.
Apollo of Rome fought a mad godling near the Alps, and, having splintered it into a thousand smaller whorls of destruction, caught sight of Cernunnos, the horned god of the Gauls, watching from the edge of the battle, as if to see who would win. Apollo, mindful of Jupiter’s dictates, attacked. Both gods were archers, and they ranged across the world, firing on one another. Each of Apollo’s arrows was a golden shaft of sunfire; each of Cernunnos’ shafts was a meteor. They traveled from the frozen snows of Germania, to the refugee camps of Gaul, and crossed the Sea of Atlas. One would strike from ambush, and then disappear, and then the other would do the same. Finally, Cernunnos laid his enemy low near Divodurum, that sweaty, steamy, bayou city on the Gulf of Nahautl, and Apollo of Rome died.
In Judea, Sophia Caetia snapped awake in her bed in the asylum, screaming for Sigrun . . . and her sister did not come. But Lassair did, slipping in, and holding the prophetess tightly, muffling her cries so that the nurses would not come with their needles. It’s all right, Lassair soothed.
“No, it’s not, it’s not, he’s fallen, and he is terrified. It wasn’t supposed to happen yet—” Sophia put her head down on Lassair’s shoulder as the spirit wrapped warm arms around her. “And now he’s looking for a way to protect himself . . .” She whimpered. “He’s looking at me . . . .”
Shh. I am here. Stormborn asked me to look in on you, when she could not. And I am glad that I did. Lassair rocked the terrified woman gently. Apollo of Delphi may be afraid, but you are watched over, guarded, and loved, Sophia Caetia. You are safe. Let your mind relax . . . .
Sophia’s eyes closed, and she turned into Lassair’s embrace. And just lay there, as peaceful as a child in the womb, while Apollo of Delphi screamed in her mind.
Individual days were interminable, and filled with a grinding, dull sort of exhaustion, but the weeks and months passed so quickly, that no one really seemed to know what day the calendar actually read. Persian troops had a stranglehold on the southern half of the Arabian peninsula, and were trying to push north, but had run into a wall of jotun and fenris flesh.
On Martius 24, 1998, Bacchus killed Nott, and Heimdall retaliated, slaying Bacchus. A week later, the last of the Qin gods died, unrolling shockwaves across the entirety of Asia, and igniting volcanic activity in the Hindu-Kush mountains. With that pantheon dead, the mad godlings there were free to move on, and swung west, entering Persia directly, and rolling over the wastelands of eastern Europa to set up on Rome’s doorstep. And they swept over the Pacifica to put pressure on Nova Germania, Novo Gaul, Nahautl, and Tawantinsuyu. “One by one, the lands of man fall,” Kanmi muttered to Trennus. “And it’s my fault. If I’d been able to find Baal-Hamon’s idol location before the technomancers were ready, there wouldn’t be any mad godlings.” He gave his old friend a haunted look.
“You’re not responsible for this,” Trennus told him, as the ceiling overhead shook. They were in a heavily-reinforced annex of the Pictish king’s current headquarters, and a dozen military commanders were on radios around them, receiving information, and moving pins on a map, showing troop movements. “That was closer,” Tren added, clinically. “Get some harpies in the air!” he called to one of the commanders. “I want to know where the shelling is coming from.”
One of the commanders dropped his handset, strode to the map, and put a series of black pins in place, near Domitanus’ Wall. Black meant mad godlings sighted. “Maybe we’ve been wrong all along,” Kanmi told Trennus, quietly. “Perhaps there’s just enough humanity left in them, that they still have anger, hatred, and jealousy. And that’s why they attack, instead of mere hunger.”
“I think you’re ascribing motivations to something that’s almost a force of nature, in order to make it more understandable to yourself,” Trennus told him, but the thought didn’t leave Kanmi.
Maius 4, 1998 was chilly at best in the city of Divodurum in southern Novo Gaul. The temperature in this city on the Gulf of Nahautl should have been in the mid-eighties, and the humidity should have made it feel closer to the high nineties. Instead, frost traced the roofs. Houses here were not built to withstand cold, but heat; there were decorative fireplaces in homes here that had never been used before the past three years. Currently, smoke slanted up from thousands of chimneypots, contributing a brownish haze to the scene.
Drust Corraidhin awoke with the sun, and immediately went to his window to check the street outside. He’d moved here, twenty years ago, with a young wife and an infant son, to work for a ley-based calculi manufacturing firm not far from this neighborhood. The work had been steady until the past few years. The plant had struggled to keep everyone employed; while there was still demand for their devices, they couldn’t get components, which had been manufactured in Qin, Nippon, and Hellas. Thousands of people had been laid off.
Drust had scrounged for work, and managed to get employment at a motorcar shop, at well below his previous salary. Of course, they were running out of parts for automobiles, too; half of each day was spent at the scrap-yards, searching for parts that might work in a given vehicle. His wife had left an accounting job when her firm folded, and had started teaching at a local school. Their son was off with the Gallic legions, as most of the young people were, these days. Those who weren’t in the army, were unemployed. But their son sent his ration cards home, to help out . . . and Drust had long since uprooted his gardenias in favor of a kitchen garden. Most of the grocery markets were closed; bread was available for almost a solidus at the local baker, thanks to inflation. Or you could buy flour, yeast, and eggs with a ration card, and make it yourself.
The city didn’t have the funds to provide
much of a gardia, anymore. The people of Drust’s home owner’s association had banded together to establish a Citizens’ Watch instead. It would be his turn to patrol tonight. All of them carried guns, and anyone caught out after curfew was subject to questioning. All of the Watch members were on edge. The armies of Nahautl had conducted sacrifice raids north of the border for years, while still embroiled in a large-scale war with Quecha. With Quecha fallen, and most of its people hiding from Nahautl forces in the jungles, Novo Gaul was a more attractive option for raids these days. When presented with two options, jungle combat, or war on empty plains, only a madman would choose the jungle.
Of course, there seemed to be a fair number of madmen in Nahautl these days. It seemed unfair. Drust had taken his wife and son on vacation there fifteen years ago, to Kùutsmil, the Island of the Swallows. It was a Quechan region, but under the regional autonomy agreement, there hadn’t been any unrest . . . and it had been beautiful. His son had come home having learned fifty or so words of Quecha, and determined to study the language in school.
But these days? Drust had seen the flayed men on the far-viewer, and shuddered. The skull-faced women, with the bulging, eternally-pregnant bellies, which looked as if the child inside might well tear its way out with clawed fingers? Equally horrifying. A group of those creatures had made it as far north as Karankawa, the barrier island south of Divodurum, two months ago. A scouting party, the military had announced, and told Watch groups to be prepared for more.
The Watch prepared for attack the way they handled hurricane season. They boarded up all their windows and left them that way, to protect the expensive glass. There were days when Drust thought about just bricking over the damned things. But for the moment, there were knotholes here and there, to allow for a decent view of the street, and areas where a rifle’s barrel could be shoved through. But if that happened . . . it would mean that the Gallic legions had been overrun. It would mean that Drust’s son was probably dead.
A fellow member of the Watch, Faelan, said that none of this would be happening if the gods were doing their jobs. Faelan had broken the statues in the shrine in his backyard. He refused to leave milk and bread out for the house-spirits, saying that the ritual was nothing more than cockroach bait in this area. And he refused to go to the bonfires now, too. If I don’t do my job, I don’t get paid. Why should I pay homage to the gods, if they’re not doing theirs?
That sort of talk unsettled Drust. Sure, things weren’t the way they were supposed to be. But in spite of the chill, the earthquakes, the sunrises and sunsets that looked like spilled blood, you couldn’t blame the gods for everything. You had to take responsibility for your own actions . . . didn’t you?
Peering out of his boarded-up window, Drust saw a thread of cirrus cloud stir. Before his eyes, it sucked in on itself, looking like milk stirred into coffee. “Sadb,” he said, and his wife rolled over in bed. “Sadb, get your robe on, and go downstairs to the bathroom, would you now?”
She sat up, quickly, in a swirl of sheets. “It’s not a tornado you’re seeing, is it?”
“Not sure, but it’s best to be careful.” The downstairs bathroom had no windows, no external walls, and a cast-iron tub. As Drust watched out the window, the swirl in the clouds deepened, but it never quite achieved the funnel-like look he knew so well.
Under his feet, the entire house shook, as if a steamroller had just slammed into a corner of the foundation. Drust closed his eyes, listening to the clatter as everything on the shelves around him rattled. Morrigan of the Three Faces. Taranis of the storm. Damara, lady of the good green earth. Toutatis of the skilled hands. Cernunnos the hunter. Nodens, lord of the seas. When Cernunnos laid Apollo low, there were earthquakes, but you kept my people safe. Do it again, aye? He opened his eyes. You do your job, and I’ll do mine?
Against the southeastern horizon a line of black rose, like a plume of smoke. It hadn’t been there before, and he blinked, trying to understand what he was seeing. It looked like a black thread, being dangled before a kitten. Drust dug out his rifle and his blunderbuss, and ammunition for both. There might be ghul, he thought, walking down the stairs, and handed his wife the blunderbuss. He took the butcher knives from the block in the kitchen, and got them near to hand, while his wife began pouring water from the tap into every pot and pan in the house. “Good thought, dear heart. Might be a while before we see clean water again, aye?”
She nodded, but there were things that they could do, and occupation with the tasks kept the fear at bay, as the ground shifted and trembled again under their feet. “It’s worse than a hurricane coming in,” Sadb said, after a while. She’d changed into trousers and boots, and had the blunderbuss across her knees, as they now huddled in the bathroom, with their battery-powered radio beside them. “I almost wish it was one.”
Hurricanes, you can run from, or wait out. Hurricanes don’t turn you into a monster. Hurricanes don’t tear you apart. Drust pulled her up against his side, and they listened to the chatter of voices on the radio. “. . . looks like a giant serpent, made of volcanic rock and magma, coming up out of the sea . . . .”
“Mad godlings have been sighted in Karankawa Bay—”
“Extremely high waves, probably caused by the lava-serpent’s presence—”
“—has been identified tentatively as Jormangand—”
The lights overhead flickered.
“—mad ones have engaged with Jormangand!”
The earth shuddered, and a fine spill of dust seeped down from the ceiling.
“Gods are in the sky!” The voice on the radio was filled with exaltation and terror at once. “Cernunnos, I think—I can’t tell for certain . . . I think Damara and Nodens—look at the surf! They’re fighting the mad ones . . . I’m not sure I dare to watch—”
The lights flickered again, and went out entirely.
The seas near the island of Coabana had been warm, and Jormangand had enjoyed the novelty of the shallow water and the sunlight playing through it—a far cry from the frozen hell under the ice of the Arctic, to which he’d been banished for centuries. He’d slain several mad godlings in the Caribbean over the past years, and had a companionable relationship with the Feathered Serpent and his people, who now occupied the Taino islands. Today, however, over a dozen of the damnable godlings had raced through the skies overhead, aiming for the continental shelf. He’d considered that, ponderously. The form he had adopted, with neurons and nerves that were miles in length, took time to process information, though the tiny spark of the spirit-mind within still could move outside of time. Still, he preferred to make decisions with the same speed and force of tectonic plates grinding on one another.
Spirit-mind and body-mind came to a conclusion at the same moment: They go in search of weaker prey. A corollary thought followed. They go to attack those to whom I am allied. He pondered that. He bore the gods of Valhalla no affection. But he had made an agreement with Loki, father-self, to serve in this great war. Slowly, Jormangand uncoiled, and followed the mad ones, heading for a city whose weight he could feel on the soft, swampy clays of the coast.
“Residents in low-lying areas near the coast are urged to evacuate immediately. If you are in a storm-surge area, please leave now,” the radio blared. Drust and Sadb huddled together, listening. “If you are not in a flood zone, stay off the roads.” The last time there had been an evacuation, the roads had been blocked by motorcars for eighteen hours. People would have been better served to walk, than sit in their automobiles and wait for death.
Jormangand plowed into the coast, up and into a harbor, ignoring the ships that rammed into their quays as his bulk displaced the water. He ignored the skyscrapers and the grid-locked highways. All of his attention was on the mad ones. Nine were small, their tendrils reaching across no more than a third of the sky. Two were the same size as the one that had attacked the land of the Picts, years ago. And one . . . one was a giant. Jormangand had never seen a godling like this one. It no longer had tendrils
. It was simply a howling rift, an absence, a negation, that pulled in everything around it. Light bent towards it, reddening faintly. And the other mad ones cringed away from it. They fear its hunger. It will consume them, when all other prey is gone.
The world-serpent rose to his full length, water sheeting from his sides, and snapped at the void in the sky. He was a creature of raw destruction. So was the mad god. He would pit his strength against its, and one of them would fall.
Cernunnos, Damara, and Nodens all appeared. The horned god, his face covered by a mask, stared for a moment at his surroundings, and took his bow off his shoulder. Call for the others, he told Nodens. Damara, clear the way for our people. Get them off the bridges. The roadways will collapse after another few earthquakes.
Even if I must level buildings, I will provide them with a way out of the city. I go! The goddess flickered away in a shimmer of green, even as Cernunnos set arrow to string, sighted, and let fly. The arrow was a manifestation of his will and power, tucked into symbolic analogue that allowed that power to interface with space-time. As it rose, it became a meteor-like pulse of raw energy, and slammed into one of the godlings. The creature had no distinguishing features. Nevertheless, Cernunnos felt its attention shift, as it focused on him. Good. Come and play, godling. The more of you that focus on me, the fewer of you to attack Jormangand, while he is on the big one.
The Goddess Embraced Page 121