Her first call this morning was a native vs. non-native dispute between a Judean landlord and a Hellene bakery owner; the incident could have been handled by the gardia, except that the bakery owner was suspected of ties to a counterfeiting ring, so Sigrun stopped by the main Praetorian building long enough to pick up Mazatl Itztli so she’d have backup, and headed into Little Hellas. “You want me to go invisible?” Mazatl asked her, laconically.
“Please do. They’ll undoubtedly think they have the advantage of me if I appear to be alone.” Sigrun rubbed at her eyes. “Would you mind driving?”
“Tired again? You should try sleeping, Caetia.”
“I would love nothing more.” She yawned.
Little Hellas had become exotic. Sigrun could see a half-dozen dryads, male and female, sitting atop a tile roof, sunning themselves, in spite of the Februarius chill in the air. The more clothing they took, off, the better they’d undoubtedly feel. At least they’re not a huge drain on anyone’s resources, she thought. While they still could eat, and many still preferred to do so, so that their stomachs wouldn’t shrink, and their intestines would continue to function properly, dryads could go for long periods subsisting on sunlight and water. Sigrun liked them, as a whole. They very rarely caused trouble. They had few material needs, though the females still liked pretty clothing as much as the next woman. They still liked all the things normal people did—far-viewers and automobiles, and whatnot . . . but their slightly more plant-like mindset seemed to have erased some of the acquisitive drive from them.
She could see several harpies up on another roof. Most of them were not innate, instinctive flyers; perhaps the next generation would be, but for most of the harpies, flying was a learned skill, like swimming was for most humans. She spotted an instructor up on a roof, demonstrating take-offs and landings, in front of an audience. The woman’s slender body was overshadowed by her massive wings, which reminded Sigrun of a black swan, and the harpy had oddly pale skin, as if she hadn’t seen daylight in a decade, which contrasted with her black hair and feathers. Most harpies had trouble with clothing. Male harpies usually went shirtless, or had to wear tunics that laced at the sides, with large openings for the wings at the rear. Females, well, the traditional Hellene peplos tangled in the wings. Most of them were opting for halter-necked, backless shirts, and a few preferred bodices, as Sigrun did. Though any such bodice would have to be cut very low in the back, indeed. Sigrun squinted up at the instructor, and suppressed a yawn. Perhaps she was a tourist who was in Hellas when the blast wave hit, she thought. It’s not like Hellas didn’t have a thriving tourist trade. There had to have been thousands of people from all over the world there on Martius 21, 1987.
Sigrun brought her eyes back down to street level, where she saw a satyr at a corner vegetable stand, arguing with the human owner about the price of melons. If harpies had problems with clothing, the satyrs were a walking affront to Judean modesty laws. They already had heavy fur on their legs, and therefore saw no reason to put on pants—even pants that had been crafted to fit their oddly-curving haunches. Give it a few years, Sigrun thought. The Hellene satyrs will put together an anti-defamation league and begin to insist that the old plays of Aristophanes can no longer be played as ‘satyr’ plays, and that the huge fake phalluses that the male actors have to wear during performances should be banned. Or perhaps, that they should be enlarged, as they are currently too small, and don’t do them enough credit. She chuckled under her breath, and started to turn towards the driver’s seat to make a comment about it . . . knowing that Adam or Kanmi or Tren would make a joke about the modern satyrs and waving the fasces . . . and all amusement drained from her face as she saw Ehecatl’s son in the seat beside her. Mazatl gave her a quizzical look, arching an iron-gray eyebrow. It was always somewhat shocking to realize that the young man was in his early fifties now. “Something’s funny?”
“A chain of thought broke in the wrong place. Nevermind.” The car came to a halt, and Sigrun got out, squinting against the bright sunlight, and sighed under her breath. This is the fun of being seventy-eight years old, she told herself. No one gets your jokes without ten minutes of explanation first. What’s the point?
Mazatl followed her in the door, invisibly, and she spent the next hour questioning the human Hellene bakery owner and all of his employees. “I don’t see how this dispute between me and my landlord merits Praetorians involvement,” the baker muttered under his breath, in Hellene.
“It might not have, except that there was a fire in the building last week, which suggests that the dispute might be getting out of hand,” Sigrun told him, in the same language. Or, it could also mean that you were rendering metals molten in preparation for casting them into coins.
Mazatl touched her shoulder after a moment, and Sigrun did her best not to jump out of her skin. Ehecatl’s son was a true Jaguar warrior, like his father before him: absolutely silent on his feet. “They’ve got large numbers of drachm in the coin counting area,” he whispered in her ear.
Sigrun frowned, and then it clicked. “You wouldn’t have many Persian customers, would you?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” the baker assured her, and she and Mazatl left after a few more questions.
In the car, Sigrun leaned back against the headrest. “Persian drachm aren’t worth much in the Empire. The exchange rate is terrible. I don’t remember how bad, but . . . .”
“They’re debased coinage,” Mazatl reminded her. “The current official rate is three gold drachm for every aureus.”
“And the street exchange rate is closer to two to one, right?”
“Correct. But that’s only in regions up near the Caspian, and Chaldea, where you can actually use the damned things.”
“So, here’s a theory. They get Chaldean and Median customers who . . . order bread for their own stores or restaurants. Large orders, or standing ones, which would explain the gold. Our baker friend knows he can’t use the drachm for pretty much anything. So he decides to make them worth something.” Sigrun yawned again.
“He’s rendering the coins for their metals and casting them into denarii and aurei?”
“I think it’s more likely that he’s just re-stamping and re-milling them. They’ll be underweight, but once they’ve started circulating, they won’t be caught till they come back in to a bank, or some merchant who’s canny enough to weigh every coin at transaction, and who really does that?”
“But where would he get the equipment from?” Mazatl asked, reasonably enough. “I didn’t see any as I was poking around in the other rooms of the shop.”
“Need to dig into his connections,” Sigrun said, a wave of tiredness passing through her. She knew this really was important. Counterfeiters tended to run with smugglers and organized crime syndicates, after all. It was just . . . really hard to care at the moment. There were mad gods in the world. There were refugees everywhere, and rebuilding to be done. Rome still had war on two fronts, massive civil unrest in Nahautl and Quecha, and there was another war rolling between the Khanate, India, and Qin, which was threatening to embroil the smaller kingdoms of Asia—Korea, Siam, and a dozen others. Chasing counterfeiters seemed petty. But it was what the current commander of the Judea Praetorians had her doing, and her gods had given her leave to be here, and not on the front lines. For now. At least this let her stay home with Adam.
If only she didn’t feel completely useless.
She met Adam for lunch at a café that they liked, sitting outdoors in the shade of some cypress trees, as she struggled to swallow another yawn. If she’d been talking to a young woman who had symptoms like hers, her first recommendation would have been a pregnancy test, but . . . she’d been tired for a year, and she knew she was barren. She was god-born, so it wasn’t anemia. “I still feel like I’m somehow on Burgundoi time,” she told Adam, putting her face in her hands at the table, and then looking up again. “How was your morning?” she added, and slid one of her hands across the covered table instead,
letting him wrap her hand in his.
“Developed last night’s pictures of the Andromeda galaxy. I think I got a few good ones.” Adam squeezed her hand, and released it. “I’ll show you tonight.”
Sigrun nodded, and her eyes drifted half-closed. When she was tired like this, it was an effort to keep othersight at bay, and, honestly, she didn’t mind it so much if she happened to be looking at Adam with her other eyes.
“What are you smiling at?” he asked, as the waiter left, having taken their orders.
“Mmm. Just . . . looking at you.” Sigrun smiled a little more. “When I see you in othersight, you’re sometimes too bright to look at directly. Like sunlight reflecting off of polished steel. And I think your spirit’s too big for your body. Like it . . . struggles to be held by a mortal vessel.” But there’s a shadow around you, lately. That’s the guilt, I think.
Adam gave her a look that was comprised of about seventy-five percent pure embarrassment, and twenty-five percent concern. “When you talk like that, you sound surprisingly like Sophia.”
Sigrun blinked and sat up straight, clamping down on othersight, and told him, “I apologize. I did not mean to make you uncomfortable.”
At a café across the way, she caught sight of a woman, wearing a lace-front jeans and a surprisingly long blue cloak being escorted to a table outside. It caught her attention. The cloak was northern in style, and winter-cut, lapping down to the woman’s heels. That, and the fact that she was choosing to sit outside in Februarius, stood out. Sigrun and Adam had been the only people sitting outside along the entire street of restaurants. The cold didn’t bother Sigrun, but Adam was bundled up against the light chill so as to enjoy the fresh air with her. Now, the woman stepped delicately around the table, moving her cloak with her hands, and then perched lightly at the edge of her seat, leaving a foot of space between her and the chair’s back.
Sigrun was distracted as Adam leaned across the table and caught her hand again. “I didn’t mean that you sounded insane or anything, Sig. It’s just unusual, for you to speak . . . mystically . . . and when you do, you sound a little like she does. That’s all.”
Across the way, the woman watched the pair as the waiter brought her a glass of chilled water. She touched the condensation on the side, carefully. She couldn’t explain to anyone that solidity was . . . amazing. That the fact that when she traced a line on the side of the glass, the line stayed clear, and moisture remained on her fingertip was . . . a miracle, really. She picked up the glass, and took a sip, half-closing her eyes at the taste and the sensation. She’d been like this for almost six months, since her return, and frankly, she couldn’t stand herself like this. But it was true. The feeling of wind on her face, stirring her hair, a miracle. The drift of white clouds above, reacting to that same wind in clear, defined ways, being shaped by it . . . another miracle. Cause and effect. Physicality. Wonderful things. She shouldn’t enjoy them so much. Shouldn’t find so much joy in the sensation of sunlight on her skin, the sensation of cold water sliding down her throat and coursing down her esophageal tract. She didn’t deserve it. But the body and the mind rejoiced, in spite of her conscience.
Judea, and Jerusalem in particular, had become much more cosmopolitan since the last time she had ventured here. The menu at this particular café, which billed itself as Nipponese-Judean-Gothic fusion, whatever that meant, was more varied than she’d have expected, decades ago. Her order was certainly not kosher, and was indicated to the waiter solely by touching the menu in the correct places. The waiter blinked. “A nori salad with dulse, watercress, and mint, and . . . crab cakes?” Nori was, of course, kelp, and dulse was another variety of seaweed. The crab cakes were done Gallic-style, which was to say lightly breaded and fried.
The woman nodded and the waiter scurried off, which left her plenty of time to study the pair across the street from her, while making sure that her head constantly appeared to be looking down at a book, brought with her for precisely the purpose of looking as if she weren’t looking at anything at all. A simple matter, to keep her illusionary face pointed down at the table, while her eyes remained locked on them.
Nothing could have illustrated better how much time had passed, than the fact that Adam ben Maor now had a head of almost entirely white hair. He shouldn’t have looked as old as he did; fifty-nine was really just late middle-age, thanks to modern medicine. Even from across the street, hawk-like vision captured the creases around eyes, mouth, and nose, the slightly sagging jaw-line. He was eating a salad with chicken and chickpeas, apparently, and speaking with enthusiasm about something, gesturing with his hand and a fork as he did so. But there were shadows around him; she could see that with her other eyes, the ones that would always belong to the Veil. The shadows weren’t mortality pressing on him. They were guilt and weariness.
At least he stuck with the salads. So much easier to digest for mortals his age, than red meat. She looked up, or at least, her illusion did, as her waiter arrived with her meal. She began to eat, and was almost overcome with the tastes, her salivary glands kicking in, forcing her to press a napkin to her face hastily. Red meat was no longer an option for her, either; the changes that the Veil had wrought had ensured that . . . but oh gods, just the pure pleasure of eating again. Tastes. Textures. Flavors. Smells. Every bite an explosion of sensation . . . and yet every moment of pleasure, brought with it an equal twinge of guilt.
To keep herself from whimpering in pleasure, she forced herself to put her fork down. Directed her eyes back across the street, and studied, instead, Sigrun Caetia. No visible physical changes, of course. Her god-born constitution prevented that. But the eyes were weary. You’re starting to feel the weight of all the years, aren’t you? And you look at him and see time running out. It had been . . . so easy to hate the young valkyrie, back in the day. Love her and hate her at the same time. Love her, as a bright and cherished student, as her great-grandmother Solveig had been, before her. And hate her, too, for having it all in front of her. For having found the person who completed her life.
The woman’s Veil eyes, however, told her a different tale Oh, gods. What has happened to you, child? Night, death, cold, magic, darkness . . . and . . . a little taste of hope, but one as bitter as brine. The first, and most noticeable difference, was that in Veil sight, all of the rune-marks were visible, all of the time. They were a tangible evidence of Sigrun’s connection to her god. There wasn’t a single portion of the valkyrie’s body that wasn’t covered in marks now; it was a fretwork of lace, and there were thousands of them, all interlinking. Invisible armor, really, all made of blood and pain and sorrow. They glimmered ice-white, of course. The valkyrie’s inner spirit, was, unsurprisingly, levinbolt blue, and there was a taste of rain and a smell of ozone on the cold wind that seemed to surround her. There was also a sense of . . . inevitability. Not mortality, not . . . quite. Not something that triggered the woman’s deathsense. But there was darkness in her that whispered of endings. Of strings being cut. Across the way, the woman shuddered. I might have become that. Gods forbid.
But what truly drew her eye was a prism, gleaming with golden fire, which seemed to be thrust directly through Sigrun’s heart. It looked as if the body carrying it should have died, or certainly should now be writhing in agony. The crystal was, however, raw seiðr. Magic, in its purest form, and it felt and smelled familiar to the woman across the way. It was as much a part of her, as it was of Sigrun . . . no. More. The woman had been trained to use that power since birth. She’d trained Sigrun, decades ago, to be aware of it, and to avoid it, and counter it, but never to use it. It was not a gift of the god-born of Tyr; it was alien to them, if not outright inimical.
But . . . the woman narrowed her eyes slightly. Interesting. She’s resisting it. She’s encysted it. It wouldn’t cause her so much pain, if she accepted it into her. Let it suffuse her. But she sees it as an intrusion, a wound, a foreign object violating her body and mind, and so she resists. I never knew she had that much streng
th. And all around the younger valkyrie, in spite of her levinbolt brightness, the air around her seemed to be dark. Concentration, now, trying to see what the darkness meant, and the world around Sigrun faded. The chairs, tables, food . . . replaced with night. The dark of the void, and stars, here and there, twinkling faintly. And she resists that, too.
The woman settled in for a long watch, pushing her Veil sight away so that she could read their lips. Latin was as easy to understand the shapes of, as her native tongue. She’d had enough practice over the years, after all.
“Have you called Nith lately?”
“Enough to check and see that he’s healed in the Veil. When he came through last time, he still had wounds. Dagon hurt him pretty badly, and the sorcerers were cutting into him pretty badly before . . . Kanmi.” Sigrun looked down at her plate, and her words faltered. “But Malice-Striker is strong. He just needs a little more time to heal in the Veil.”
“I thought there was no time there.”
“There isn’t, but he’s been in Trennus’ . . . garden of continuity. Sari’s been trying to heal him. It’s slower there, but less risky than being wounded in the rest of the wild Veil.”
The Goddess Denied (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 2) Page 98