“All right,” Adam muttered. “We’re going in blind? And if so, where are we actually going?”
“Can we work to retrieve some of the wolves? Perhaps the jotun?” Vidarr offered, without much hope in his voice. “I do not see the other god-born. We have time to . . . try to see what is here, and do something about it.”
“They did say they’d come here after daybreak,” Sigrun agreed, hesitantly. The big, empty building sounded like the obvious place to search, first, but . . . “Allies would be . . . very welcome.” She swallowed. “But returning each wolf, each giant, to sanity, took time on the road. I do not know how much time we will have.”
I will go to the wolves, Saraid said, simply. I can begin with each of them, what we accomplished before. I can take the madness away, and then, later, together we can bring back the self-inside. I will require a little assistance. Perhaps you, male wolf? You, furred sister?
I stay with Vidarr, Ima said, forcefully, but Sikke slunk to Saraid’s side. Leaned down to sniff the spirit’s hair.
Lassair nodded. Stormborn and I can attempt the same for the giants.
“What?” Sigrun hissed, out loud.
“Sikke might well just look like a wolf who’s gotten loose from the kennel,” Adam said, shaking his head. “And Sari can just go in with him. Getting Sig into the barracks, though . . . that’s going to be a problem. You can’t go in there alone, and the guards will probably see you en route. Everything about this, even getting . . . recon so we can all see what we’re doing,” he sounded frustrated at that, “depends on stealth.”
“And I am not good at stealth,” Sigrun returned, immediately.
You said that you wished for allies, did you not? And is it not the right thing to do, to release those jotun who might be returned to sanity? Lassair’s tone was calm.
“Yes, but it took twenty or thirty minutes to help—” Sigrun had to think for a moment, and then came up with the giant’s newly-chosen name, “Japik, on the road. I see dozens of flickers of light where you say the cages and the pits are. I do not think we have that kind of time.”
“Well, what else can we do?” Minori asked, shrugging. “Shall we explore the center building, and have guards that we cannot see suddenly appear and take us into custody for entering a facility that appears, even to Asha, to be little more than a ruin?” The small woman shrugged again, and looked up at Sigrun.
“Or do we wait to see when your god-born friends will appear, and see what sort of a trap gets sprung on them?” Kanmi added, pulling his cloak more tightly around him. “I’m for any plan that lets us move around and stay warm.”
Sigrun grimaced. Put that way, even moments of indecision sounded like a bad idea. She glanced at Adam, and realized, suddenly, that he . . . wasn’t making the decisions. She’d gotten used to following his lead in the past fifteen years. His grasp of tactics was excellent, and he had a genuine gift for “seeing the whole board,” as Livorus often put it. Right at the moment, Adam was silent, and letting her lead, and Sigrun didn’t like it. She’d always co-led the team with him, and had always had input into final decisions. For him to completely abdicate things to her control made her feel oddly twitchy. “All right,” Sigrun said, after a moment. “Let’s gain access to one or more of the buildings that only Asha and Sari can perceive at the moment. We can leave the . . . apparently empty one that everyone can see alone.” It could be one of two things: glamoured to appear empty, when it wasn’t, and carefully enough so that it turned aside a powerful spirit’s gaze . . . or it really could be empty. Either way, it would keep. “Kanmi, do you have enough strength to hold your light-refracting bubble over all of us a little longer?”
Kanmi grinned. “Absolutely. Just don’t let any of the invisible guards bump into invisible us en route. That will get awkward.”
Sigrun winced. “At least in this fashion, we will not be dividing our forces unnecessarily,” she muttered, under her breath.
Nerve-wracking was the only description Sigrun could put to the next fifteen minutes. Most of her training told her that there were codes of honor in combat, but no one in the Odinhall found stealth dishonorable—so long as war had been declared or a challenge had already been made. Smiling and sucker-punching someone while their guard was down was dishonorable, but infiltration was perfectly permissible, particularly when hostilities were already ongoing. That being said, Sigrun, due to the confluence of her godly abilities, and the highly obvious rune-glow to her skin, was absolutely terrible at stealth. Adam, Kanmi, and Trennus had been working with her for fifteen years and more, but the best tactics they’d usually come up with had entailed Sigrun creating a distraction, and the rest of them sneaking in behind whoever the opponent was.
Thus, Sigrun was caught in the grip of pure cognitive dissonance. They were sneaking into an area where there were, apparently, people and creatures hidden all around them. They should have been doubled over and darting from shadow to shadow, but instead, they walked in, straight and upright, as Kanmi held a shell of light absorption over their heads, like an umbrella, and Minori swept their tracks away behind them. The biggest issues? Just as on the ice of the lake, moving together, as a group, not one of them letting so much as a fingertip leave the protective bubble. Not running into walls, as Lassair told them to put their hands out in front of them . . . and then, the perceptible tangible sensation of something being there, but not visible. And, of course, dogs and wolves. Lassair said that there were patrols of guards with dogs moving around the facility, so they had to stay downwind of creatures that, at first, they couldn’t see any more than they could see the buildings. Totally reliant on the spirit’s guidance, though Sigrun squinted, frantically, trying to make out the flickers and glows of human spirits. She trusted Lassair, but the spirit was, on occasion . . . damned flighty.
And then, suddenly, as if they’d stepped through an unseen doorway . . . the area lit up, and all of them froze in place. Fortunately, they were in the shelter of a wall, their hands all resting on it as they all reflexively dropped into crouches. Sigrun blinked rapidly, trying to let her eyes adjust, and glanced around. Guard towers, lit up with ley-powered search-lights, each lamp sending a finger of light down to the ground to sweep the buildings. Probe the shadows. “Gods,” Kanmi whispered. “Someone is using a lot of power to hide this place. From the air, from random passersby.”
“Even from god-born,” Sigrun whispered back. “I would have passed this place by, were I looking for a nest of monsters, or a group of technomancers.” And I know that Erikir and Brandr were sent into Fennmark with other god-born of late, looking for the source of all the rumors of monsters. They found lindworms . . . but no jotun or ettin.. Are there other facilities like this one, hidden and cloaked? Is this the only one? The main one? Too many thoughts, too many questions. Sigrun set them aside, and they crept around the corner of the building. Cracked a side door open, and they slipped through, carefully, one at a time.
Smells. Effluvia. Blood. Sweat. Pain. Excrement and urine, in equal measures. It hit Sigrun like a wall, and she actually heard a faint, choking gag from Adam, whose sense of smell was far better than hers, and low growls from the jotun and fenris behind her. Her eyes watered slightly as she looked around the interior of the large building, which was built like a warehouse; poured-stone floor and metal walls. Along the eastern side of the building, where they were, dozens of huge metal cages, bars sunk into the poured-stone floor, each containing a jotun. Most of them looked like Vidarr, except . . . unkempt. Long, matted hair. Most of them wore rough kilts made of hides, if that. There were . . . runnels in the cells, to allow urine to run off, but that was it. Many of them appeared dejected, their heads hung low. Others stood, gripping the bars of their cells, staring into the center of the room . . . and Sigrun followed their gaze. Three pits had indeed been dug in the center of the building, each twenty feet deep and lined in poured-stone, like a Nahautl ball court. Each was twenty-five feet, or less, in diameter, and in each, a jotu
n was fighting for his life against a pair of ettin, or a pair of grendels, or, in the last pit, one of each, while human guards, with shock-prods and guns stood at the top of each pit, aiming down, ready to put down anyone who tried to escape.
“Gods,” she whispered, after a moment, and raised her eyes, looking beyond the pits to the cells at the far side. There were twice as many cells on the other half of the building. All filled with two-headed ettin, or the hairy, brutish grendels, as Vidarr called them. The ‘failed experiments’ outnumbered the ‘perfect specimens’ by nearly a two-to-one ratio. And each of them represented a human life . . . or, in the case of the ettin, two human lives, that had been destroyed here. Sick to her stomach, Sigrun turned and whispered, “Vidarr?”
“Géa.” Yes, in Gothic, his voice so tight with anger and hatred that it was almost unrecognizable as human.
“I count at least eighteen jotun like you here.” Sigrun debated for a terrible moment, and then looked at the others. “The giants in the pits may try to attack the guards, each other, even us. Everyone, defend yourselves, but the order of priority is human guards, then ettin and grendel, and then the jotun.” She closed her eyes. It was a terrible thing, to judge in this way. But the ettin . . . with two minds fighting eternally for control of one body . . . they could never be sane. The grendel? She had to trust Vidarr’s judgment of them . . . and also, what she could see of them, in her othersight. There was almost no person there. The fenris, even the male whom she had helped, had more self, than the grendels did. “Tren? Close off the pits for the moment, but just use bars. Keep them from getting out, at least at first.” She didn’t give Lassair orders; the spirit wasn’t hers to command, after all. In some vague way, Trennus commanded Lassair, and Lassair commanded Trennus, and that was . . . more than Sigrun wanted to get into, in combat. “Vidarr, if the jotun break free to attack us, try to hold them down until we can attend to them. There are only three of them in the pits. If they look in danger of being overcome by their attackers below, let us know. In the meantime, Adam’s on the southern guards, Esh and Min, you’re on the northern ones. Vidarr, your people are with me, in the central pit area, so we don’t foul anyone’s line of fire.” Her stomach roiled, but . . . it had to be this way. Even though she felt as if she were helping to finish the job, a murderer, this was probably a mercy. And it would save other lives. Their own, possibly, if the ettin and grendels were turned loose against them.
She pulled her spear from her shoulder. The wood of the haft was new; no spear lasted through the strain of combat forever. But the head, well-worn as it was, had seen combat against the pazuzu, alu-demons, Supay, and the gods only remembered what else. Don’t fail me today, she thought, distantly, and readied herself.
Tren led off, sealing all three pits with a latticework of bars, to the ringing shouts of dismay and fear from the guards. Then Adam opened fire on the humans around the southern pit with his automatic rifle. Kanmi dropped their invisibility, and he and Min encircled the northern guards with air turned briefly to plasma. Sigrun loosed herself, racing through the air and dropping down atop the first guard at the central pit, slamming knees-first into his shoulders with all of her body-weight and considerable inertia. He fell face-first into the poured-stone floor, his head hitting that surface with a thud not unlike hearing a melon dropped from a second-floor window. Sigrun rode his body to the ground and leaped back up again, before the other guards could even react. Behind her, Vidarr took a first shot with his huge musket, which turned another guard’s chest into a red ruin, and then he and the other jotun charged, roaring, their strides shaking the ground.
Machine-gun chatter to the south. Faces became blurs, and she saw, dimly, that the giants in the now-covered pit beneath her feet had looked up . . . but no time to do more than register that.
Ducking, a diving roll across the floor as the nearest guard managed to raise his blunderbuss and fire at her. Feeling pellets from the wide-dispersing buckshot round sail through the air over her head, and then launching herself back to her feet as she finished her roll, bringing her spear’s butt up to knock the blunderbuss off-line, then reversing, a quick, fast circle to bring the point back around to cut the man’s stomach open with an upwards slash. Kicking him backwards as he dropped his weapon to clutch at his entrails, which now bulged out of the wound. Dropping to a knee to keep the flow of movement, which would make it much harder for them to target her . . . rising thrust with the spear into the upper abdomen of the next guard, angling the point just under the sternum. Feeling the heart spasm on the blade, and letting the man sag forwards onto it. Releasing the spear to strip the blunderbuss out of his dying hands, wheeling and firing it across the pit at a third guard, turning his surprised face into a red ruin with a full spread of shot. Dropping the muzzle-loaded weapon, retrieving her spear, and launching back into the air . . . .
. . . and then Vidarr and Ima were there, the giant taking a shot to the chest from one of the guards across the pit from him, and not even slowing down. Ima sprinted ahead of him, and leaped at the first guard on the other side, taking the human to the ground with a crunch of bone, and clamping her massive jaws around his throat, ignoring his strangled scream. Then Vidarr was on the next, shoulder-checking the man before he could fire his musket on Ima. The jotun snarled, lifting the human up with one hand . . . and then turned and threw him down into the pit, to the jotun and other creatures below. The twenty-foot drop did the human no favors, and Sigrun could hear snarls of glee below her feet, as those in the pit closed on their erstwhile captor.
There was a third group of guards, mustering out of a small barracks through a door in the wall behind the central pit, streaming now through the cages towards the central pits. The giants in the cages were all on their feet and roaring. Cacophony. The guards didn’t seem to know where to fire their guns first—at the ‘loose’ jotun, like Vidarr and his cohorts, or at Sigrun and her friends.
Sigrun felt a heavy impact against her side, and her head snapped as she glared back at the source; one of the guards across the pit from her was backing away now, his still-smoking blunderbuss in his hands as her rune-born light expanded outwards, blindingly. Low muzzle velocity, she thought, distantly. Adam had insisted, as usual, that she wear a flak jacket over her leather bodice, and she’d concealed it with a long winter tunic of soft wool. Too many layers, too much bulk, but it had stopped the shotgun pellets from breaking through to her skin. And then she was on her attacker, flying forwards, joining the scrum alongside Vidarr, Ima, Torvald, and the others. Jabbing her spear home in his throat, a quick, vicious stab that she immediately pulled back to let her deal with other opponents . . . but even as she turned, looking for her next target, Adam was there, firing on another guard with quick, controlled bursts of fire, and Trennus entombed a third in the poured stone. The guard screamed as he was sucked down into the earth.
Left with no other targets for the moment, Vidarr looked down at where the guard had been, as the poured-stone closed over the human’s head, and nodded to himself. “Turnabout,” the jotun rumbled, his voice thundering through the noise around him, “is very fair play indeed.”
Sigrun met Adam’s gaze, briefly, making sure he wasn’t wounded, and then turned. Behind her, the giants in the pits had gone back to brawling. In the closest pit, two ettin were attacking a single jotun, now that the human Vidarr had tossed below was quite dead. The jotun was bleeding. Waves of sound, from the cages, snarling roars. Making it hard to think. Sigrun shook her head. We’re going to have more guards in here, very shortly, if they don’t settle down . . . . “Esh!” Sigrun shouted. “Min! Noise levels!” A hand gesture, indicating . . . everything in the immediate environment.
Minori made a face. Her lips moved, her voice lost in the roaring and snarling, but she obviously began to incant to set up a field, one that would keep the noise inside the walls, rather than letting it penetrate outwards. Adam, in the meantime, pointed urgently down into the pits, and Sigrun nodded, frantically
waving for Vidarr and the others to move up. She got Trennus to unweave his lattices of stone, while Vidarr and Torvald reached in and hauled the first bleeding jotun to safety . . . and Adam, grimacing fiercely, fired down into the pit, putting an end to the two ettin snarling below. His tight words, in Hebrew, were barely audible through the howls of rage from the cages as he put down the enraged creatures below: “God forgive me for what I must do here today.”
Lassair moved in, even as Vidarr and Torvald held that first bloody, battered, enraged jotun down . . . and slid her hands into his chest, her entire body suddenly ephemeral, and radiating a soft, amber-gold glow.
Sigrun turned, unsure of where she needed to be. Adam would keep, for a moment. More giants in the pits, fighting for their lives. Lassair, shooting her an urgent glance. Stormborn, aid me. Let the others rescue the other jotun. Only you and I can rescue this spirit. Help me!
The spear dropped from Sigrun’s fingers, and she half-closed her eyes. Tried to shut out the screaming and roaring, that reverberated up through the poured-stone floor. She felt, vaguely, as if she were a condemned criminal, standing in the sands of the Colosseum in Rome, as the crowds shouted down for her death. Desperately difficult to concentrate. Hard to see the colored strands that Lassair was already manipulating. “I can’t . . .” Sigrun swore at herself. She sounded like a whining child, giving up without trying. She pictured, just for a moment, flying in the clouds of the construct room of the Odinhall, the physical space that integrated and interacted with the Veil, on some level. Nothing but blue skies and patches of clouds. Thermals. Níðhoggr, chasing after her, doing barrel rolls. Sigrun’s eyes snapped open; she had no idea how the dragon had entered her mental space, but . . . she’d had fun with the creature. Flying as a game, instead of work, a mode of transportation. Joy in the skies, as she’d . . . rarely let herself experience before. Peace, Sigrun reminded herself, aware, out of the corners of her eyes, of Kanmi and Minori using raw sorcery to lift another jotun up from the pit. Japik and Helga holding this one down. Peace, or all of this is a waste. Waste of time. Waste of life. Peace. Calm.
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