A sigh, from the other end of the line. “Inti died in Tawantinsuyu. God knows, ninety percent of their entities were wiped out. The result has been more faith in Mamaquilla than ever before. Hel died. Loki was . . . trying to create a volunteer army of giants and wolves. His near-death and self-banishment wound up mutating millions of people. There are millions of people who hate him, but there are also millions of people who now love him, as the same kind of Sacrificed God as Inti. Even hate is a kind of belief. Disasters actually seem to create belief.” Adam’s tone darkened. “Of course, those who decide not to blame the gods, seem to be directing all their hate at sorcerers at the moment . . . .”
Minori nodded, knowing he couldn’t see her. “Yes. I’ve seen the literature from some of the groups.” Kanmi’s hobby meant that she still received dozens of pamphlets and newsletters from extremist groups every month, all sent to various innocuous pseudonyms at the office mail drop. She glanced through them every once in a while, but while Kanmi had gotten a kind of black humor out of most of them . . . when he wasn’t enraged by them . . . all they did to her was make her sick to her stomach “That being said, Adam, the seismic activity is what we need to follow, since it can’t be concealed or denied. And there’s just too much of it right now. CO2 levels are rising in the atmosphere thanks to all the volcanic activity.”
“Tell the dryads to get started on sopping more of that up.”
“It’s nothing to joke about,” Minori said, her tone sharper than she intended. “This could be either a Krakatowa-type event, with the ash in the atmosphere putting us into a cooling pattern that could last for years. Or, conversely, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Between that and the heat they’re putting into the atmosphere, we could be looking at the Deccan Plateau all over again.”
“The what?”
“It’s a sixty-thousand square-mile region of India that, between sixty and sixty-eight million years ago, was under a solid stream of lava. The volcanoes spewing all that magma released sulfur dioxide . . . a fairly poisonous gas, that . . . and the debris and the gasses in the atmosphere may have contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs.”
“I thought that was the result of an asteroid.”
“The planet was sick before the asteroid hit. Lots of evidence of species evolving rapidly in response to stress. The asteroid just finished the task.” Minori sighed. “And it did a very thorough job of it.”
Adam paused. “All right. What can we do about it?”
Nothing, Minori thought, and that was the really maddening part about it. They weren’t in a position to tell other governments how to handle problems that they were . . . clearly not publicizing. They were barely in a position to raise flags within Rome. “Pass the word up through Judean Intelligence, please. We could experience extremely harsh winters. Shortened growing seasons. Famine. If you remember your history, there were winters in the past when the Tamesis river in Britannia froze over? Mid-sixteenth century, and again, in the mid-nineteenth? They were able to hold fairs on the ice in celebration of the event, but there was famine as a result of the harsh winters, too, world-wide.”
“Stockpile food.”
“Yes. Depending on the location of the next volcano complexes . . .” Minori grimaced. “There are theories that there could be a supervolcano complex under the Greenland ice sheet, for example. Just theories. Very hard to prove. That would be a massive amount of water to release back into the oceans, if it all suddenly broke apart at once, due to an eruption. There’s a supervolcano complex in Caesaria Aquilonis that . . . well, it would bury half the continent under ash—”
“I’m not worrying about that area just yet. Sig’s gods are pretty powerful.”
“They are not the only gods there,” Minori pointed out, sharply. “And the gods of Valhalla may not go into areas held by the petty kingdoms. If the mad godlings attack the petty kingdoms—”
There was a long, distinct pause, and then Adam ben Maor cursed. “Fuck,” he said, in clear, hard Latin, and then several more words in his native Hebrew. “The Morning Star. The Morning Star foresaw this all in 1954. He wanted to re-establish his bond with his people and become powerful enough to hold off destruction—”
“Do you really think that a god worshipped by fewer than a hundred thousand people is going to be strong enough to hold one of these godlings at bay?” Minori wrapped the cord of the phone around her finger, strangling the digit.
“Zhi managed—”
“Zhi is destruction incarnate. He is fire, smoke, and wind, and it is a very good thing he has always been . . . punctilious about his agreements and arrangements, and that he and Erida have influenced each other. Also, the creature was weakened.” Minori shook her head, feeling the cord of the phone whip back and forth as she did so. “Pass it along, Adam, please. My contacts in the Praetorians have all retired, or are too embarrassed at having made cutting remarks about Kanmi over the years to do anything but dodge my phone calls. You have a few more strings to pull than the rest of us do.”
“I will. What’s your plan?”
“Go to Hokkaido. Get my parents out, if I can. Look around and see what’s really going on there . . . and report back.” Minori sighed. “A different form of the same game I used to play for Livorus. Let people talk around me and see what slips . . . and keep my eyes open.”
“You don’t have to. You’re creeping up on retirement age, you know.”
“People like us never retire, Adam. Look at Sigrun.”
“She says she doesn’t have a choice in that. Which is, of course, why she’s back on the Persian front. Again.” Adam’s voice was grim.
“She doesn’t have a choice, no. None of us do, really. We are what we are.” Minori tried to be comforting, but she knew she’d failed.
“Get a satellite phone before you go. I don’t want you out of contact, Min.” Adam’s voice held genuine affection. “You’re the best we have.”
Gods, Kanmi. Why aren’t you with me to do this?
Getting a flight was fairly difficult. A number of planes had been grounded, because of the ash in the atmosphere; the tiny particles of volcanic glass could destroy a jet engine. Only ornithopters with fully-shielded engines were currently running, so Minori had to go in through Qin on a regular Hatasahl Air flight, and then switched to an ornithopter run by Qin Air to get to Nippon. Edo itself was in an uproar; she’d never seen the port city so frantic . . . or so gray. There was a solid three inches of ash on the ground, being swept from the streets by men wearing facemasks. It coated everything, from roofs to trees, and got into everything, as well. Car engines, which still had moving parts, even if they were electric- or ley-powered, broke down in the ash. She managed to get a train for the Soya bay region, where her father’s estate lay, near the beautiful lake of Onuma. Minori was doing her best not to be agitated, but the twenty hours of plane and ornithopter rides, followed by another twenty hours on a train which needed longer maintenance stops at each station than usual, again, due to all the ash, gave her plenty of opportunities to review the seismic regions of her home country. The fact that they were passing through fields and forests and cities that all showed traces of ash was not promising, nor the fact that the sun appeared to be more orange in the hazy sky than it should have been.
Waiting for the ferry that would take her from Honshu to Hokkaido, where she shivered a little in spite of the summer heat, she noticed a much older woman walking around, looking for a place to sit. No one around her moved, a clear violation of manners and respect for the elderly. Minori frowned. Apparently, young people in her homeland weren’t being raised properly these days. She stood, and gestured for the old woman to take her seat. She might have aches and pains, but at least she wasn’t walking with a cane quite yet. Minori helped the elderly woman sit down, and asked her, “Is there anything I can get you while we wait? A cup of water, perhaps?” She eyed the woman, seeing the remains of an ancient beauty, fine bones under the creased and lined skin.
“I cou
ldn’t possibly put you to the trouble—”
“It would be my honor to do this small task for you—”
“Please, I am far thirstier for talk than for water.”
Minori perched on her own suitcase, her eyebrows rising faintly. “Of what would you speak?”
“I would like to know what brings you here today. You speak like a native of the northern islands, but I think one who has been away from home for a long time.”
A faint smile quirked up her lips. “Hokkaido has not been home to me for close to forty years. It is the home of my childhood, the home of memory. And I will always love it. But it is not the home of my heart.” Minori shrugged. “I am here to see if I can convince my parents to come with me. I think they and my brothers and sisters are in grave danger.”
“Ah, but this is their home. Not just in memory and the mind, but in the flesh and in the heart. No one ever wishes to leave their home. Did you?”
“I needed to, to come here.”
“I meant, when you first left.”
Minori blinked, unbalanced. This was an odd conversation, but she humored the old woman. “The child in me grieved to leave everything I knew, and feared change. The rest of me knew that I could never stay.”
The elderly woman brushed white hair out of her face, and regarded her steadily. “Why do you fear for your parents?”
“They live not far at all from Rishiri Island. The island is formed from an extinct stratovolcano.”
“If it is extinct, why are you concerned?”
Minori hesitated. Fear was a disease, communicable and almost untreatable. “It is what is known as a quaternary volcano. It last erupted when humanity had not yet come down from the trees,” she temporized. “However, there has been a truly exceptional amount of volcanism, and seismology is a hobby of mine. I am . . . concerned for them.”
The elderly woman’s eyes were surprisingly sharp as she studied Minori for a moment. Minori had the uncomfortable feeling that the old woman was looking right through her. “What are all these volcanoes likely to do? Cool the earth, and prompt an ice age?”
Minori grimaced. She’d been trying to explain this very subject to Adam, who was at least scientifically conversant, and she felt like she’d reduced the subject down to . . . newspaper quotes, at best. “It’s difficult to say,” she said, quietly. “It’s a complex subject.”
“We appear to have time. The ferry is nowhere near.”
Minori glanced up, and realized that somehow, everyone who’d been in the crowd around them, had dispersed. There was now no lack of chairs, and her eyes narrowed. She was usually far more observant than that. Something was amiss. She reached out with her other senses, the ones attuned to magic and found . . . nothing. It was unnerving, and the old woman only smiled. Minori cleared her throat. “Very well. The problem with all predictions is that climatology is poorly understood and usually poorly modeled. There are variables of which people still don’t know, or cannot render mathematically with any accuracy. It is also the fusion of at least four disciplines, each so complex that no one alive can possibly understand one of them completely, let alone master all of them. First, there’s weather. Atmospherics. Second, there’s seismology. Understanding what hot spots in the crust do to the water and air and land above it, what volcanoes do . . . is, to a certain extent, geography. Understanding how mountains shape air currents and block storms. Third, there’s oceanology. Understanding currents, where they’re warm and where they’re cool, and how they affect weather and the coastal regions of land. You have a cool current running by a coast that’s in a warm latitude, and the temperatures on land will be surprisingly balmy, for example. The winds blowing in off that cool ocean will be temperate. You have a shallow basin of an ocean, easily warmed by the sun or by volcanic activity under the water, and the land around it will be warm, too. And that brings me to number four, and that’s the role of the sun. It goes through periods of intense activity. We know that solar output has actually increased and decreased in previous geological eras. All of these factors combine and interrelate, and not one of them is perfectly understood.”
“Very interesting.” The old woman’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “And yet, here you are, trying to move your parents away, based on only one of those factors.”
Minori looked down and away. The rampant volcanic activity almost had to have been started by the mad gods. “Based on more than that, but yes.” She had no idea who this woman was, but something told her that this was . . . important.
“So, what do you see happening, young one? Tell me the nightmare that has brought you running home after so many years away.”
Minori flicked her a glance. “There is a volcanic ridge, a slow-spreading one, under the Arctic ice,” she said. “That was already causing quakes—a swarm of them, a few years ago. The Arctic sea, itself, under that ice, is quite a shallow basin. As the volcanoes there begin to erupt, the water will heat, and the ice will begin to melt. Greenland was shaped by volcanoes, though none are currently known to be active . . . but if one re-awakens, it would melt the ice sheet, as well. I see flooding, as a result. I see Novo Trier, Burgundoi, Divodurum, Londonium and Edo underwater. I see islands like Rishiri with their mountain peaks still poking out of the sea, but nothing more. I see most of the Hellene islands without beaches, just peaks, again. And yet, the world itself might not be any warmer or colder. It depends. Ash in the atmosphere blocks sunlight. The world cools. The same volcanoes that belch out ash, also pour out carbon dioxide. That’s a greenhouse gas, and would cause the world to warm, incrementally. So I see a world trapped between fire and ice, and struggling to find natural equilibrium, as it has hundreds or thousands of times in the past. We know that in past eras, entire continents were deserts. Or swamps. Or forests. The planet has changed over time, shaped by the sun’s light, by its own internal chemistry, by . . . the methane production of the imperfect digestive systems of the dinosaurs, for all I know.” Minori exhaled. “I do not know what will happen, madam. But I have a very bad feeling about this area of the world, and would like to offer my parents and my father’s other children safe harbor.”
“And what is causing all of this? The sun? The internal chemistry of the earth?”
Minori shook her head. “I cannot say. Forgive me.” The truth as a last defense.
“Or perhaps fragments of an ancient mad god tinted red by human hate?”
Minori’s head jerked up, and she stared at the old woman. “Excuse me, but how do you know that? Do I . . . have we met before?”
The old woman shook her head faintly. “You do not recognize me? And yet, I have known you, your entire life.” She picked up the bag that sat beside her on the bench. “I do not suppose that I could ask you to take this with you, back to Judea, unopened, could I?”
Minori’s mouth opened, and then shut. She stared at the woman, looking for traces of a deception. “Please do not tell me that you are my future self, come back to warn me, or to try to avert catastrophe,” she finally said.
The old woman laughed, uproariously, and had to clutch at her stick to remain upright. “Oh, no, no, no. Nothing like that, I swear.”
“Then how do you know—”
“I know everything there is to know about you, Ijiun Minori, daughter of Tadaoki and Aika. I know how you struggle to make yourself get up, every morning. I know how you look out your window at sundown every day, and curse the sun-god Baal for taking the life of your beloved husband. I know that you feel old, alone, and useless. And I am here to tell you that you are none of those things. And that you can help our people, more than you can imagine.” The old woman held up the satchel. “Would you take this with you, unopened?”
Minori bit back her first response, which was an awed yes. She took a breath. “Forgive me, but I cannot do that,” she told the woman, with bleak practicality. “For all that I know, there could be a bomb in there. A spirit contained in a gem, like a djinn trapped by a magus in a diamond ring, or an efr
eet in a bottle. There could be biological agents. And I would need to pass through Customs, regardless. I will not risk Rome, Judea, or my family either there or here, by carrying something unknown to me.”
The old woman shook her head and sighed. “The world has become a suspicious and untrusting place, with no appreciation of the mythic,” she said, glumly, and opened the satchel so that Minori could look inside.
She stared for a moment, and then stopped breathing entirely. The first object was an old, ornately-wrought mirror. Not glass, but rather, bronze polished to a perfect reflective sheen, and the outer frame cast in simple, austere lines . . . but there was the image of a dragon on the back, worn with time. The second object shouldn’t have fit in the satchel. It was a sword, and far longer than a katana typically was; she would have considered it an ōdachi, except that its length seemed to . . . vary . . . as she stared at it. The old woman drew it out of the satchel so that she could see it better. Sometimes it was three feet in length; sometimes, in the old woman’s shaky grip, it was closer to five. Such swords had been used against cavalry, in ancient times, but now were only offered as votive gifts at Shinto shrines. But she could see from the scratch marks along the blade that this one had seen use.
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