After a few minutes, Sigrun and Lassair and Saraid joined the search. Fritti was aware of her own parents, in the background, following along and asking what was wrong. But of course, they couldn’t really help. They’d just see . . . whatever Loki wanted them to see. Just like most of the rest of the guests.
Lassair and Saraid were definite: No, we did not feel any such power here. But Loki is skilled at hiding his essence.
Sigrun was . . calm and a little sad. As if she expected this. “Why don’t you read the note?” the valkyrie offered quietly.
Fritti looked down at the folded paper. She’d been so intent on finding him, that she hadn’t even looked at it yet. Inside were words in shaky handwriting. I wished to be here to see Rig wed, and to see you again, too, Frittigil. I could only send a portion of myself to you, and it took more of my strength to leave the Veil and travel so far than I would have liked. The darkness is still coming. I had hoped Rig would not be born to fight in this war, but . . . there is only one thing left that might be averted, before it begins in earnest. Be safe. Be well. And when you most need me, come to the place where I fell, and call on me. Use your gift, that Baldur and the Evening Star both gave to you, Frittigil. I will . . . endeavor to be ready. I may not be able to stand with my brethren. But I can, at least, stand with humanity. And with you.
No signature, but it didn’t need one. Fritti’s eyes burned, and she turned and put her head on Sigrun’s shoulder, and did her best not to weep. Today was her son’s day, and Inghean’s, and Masako and Solinus’. She’d have plenty of time to shed her tears later. “What can be averted?” she asked Sigrun, as the older valkyrie patted her hair, gently. “What remains to prevent Ragnarok?”
“I am not sure. But he still clings to hope. Which is more than can be said for some of the other gods. Ironic, is it not, Fritti, that our gods, born of wyrd, and the sense that everything must fall, that Ragnarok will come, are the ones fighting that future . . . while others have given in to despair?” Her voice was distant.
“I don’t understand,” Fritti admitted, and pulled back to mop at her face, even as Rig handed her a clean cloth with which to do so. Inghean was at his side, and they both stared at her, worriedly.
“It does not matter,” Sigrun told her, with a terrible sort of gentleness, and looked away.
Trennus had just joined them, and shook his head. “I’ve been looking for him, and for Reginleif, in the Veil for years,” he admitted, quietly. “No signs at all until today. This is good news, Fritti. It really is. It means he’s still bound to you, and he can . . . pull a fraction of himself from the Veil, and locate you, along the bond.” He grimaced. “The bad news is, he can’t pull all of himself from the Veil. That might mean he’s still unstable.”
Or that he lacks in power. Lassair’s voice was sad. He gave up much, to try to prevent worse damage.
He asks me to use the gift of the Evening Star on him. He asks to be resurrected. But won’t that cost a life? Fritti decided to hold that question back behind her eyes, for the moment. The wedding had already been far enough disrupted, as was. So she tucked the note into her bodice for safe-keeping, and did her best not to weep or even think for the rest of the day.
Februarius 14, 1986 AC
Adam ben Maor stared out the window of the Tenochtitlan airport. There were Legion troops spread all around the airfield, and, just visible from his window, he could see a tank blocking two lanes of traffic leading to the main terminal, and a checkpoint manned by legionnaires with old-fashioned rifles slung over their shoulders. The soldiers were checking travel papers before anyone was admitted to the airport itself; even with Praetorian Guard identification, it had taken two hours to get through the long line of cars this morning.
From his vantage, he could see smoke rising from various places in the city, and he flicked a glance up at the far-viewer globe suspended from the ceiling. The news coverage was scanty, and heavily edited, but he could clearly see the ancient temple of Tlaloc in downtown Tenochtitlan going up in flames. Part of him thought Good riddance, and the rest of him worried about consequences. There were ten thousand protestors, all part of Potentia ad Populum, apparently, rioting in the center of the city.
An individual person could be deeply intelligent. But put that intelligent person in the middle of a crowd and subject that person to the mob mentality, and all vestiges of intelligence would drain away, being replaced with social dynamics, really. A mob of people had about the intelligence of a herd of cattle. When they heard a loud noise or sensed danger, they tended to panic and flee, or panic and try to attack the threat. That being said, the rioters currently in downtown Tenochtitlan had obviously rehearsed this for months. Preparation and organization could replace thought.
They’d closed off bridges with ships’ anchor chains, and in this beautiful city with its hundreds of bridges, the causeways were the arterial system that allowed everything to flow. They’d ignited the temple of Tlaloc, not with mere bottles of naphtha and burning rags, but with barrels of the damned stuff, sticky and impossible to douse, moved there in a catering van, which was all the local authorities had been willing to tell Adam before hustling him to the airport. Where he stood in line with the rest of the people trying to leave town.
The whole world’s going mad, he thought. Kanmi was right. Tlaloc and the priests not acknowledging his death came back to bite us in the ass. Took a little longer than he predicted, though.
Adam himself had been called here for a security conference, which had rapidly degenerated into “what did you know and when did you know it” hearing on the subject of Tlaloc’s death. The local gardia and Praetorians had had warning that there was unrest brewing. The Quechan provinces in the south, given limited self-rule under Livorus’ diplomatically-brokered agreement, were particularly restive. Quite a few of the peasants in Quecha itself, that vast, eastern section of Caesaria Australis that encompassed everything from the jungles to the pampas, were in favor of replicating, in their own country, the reforms underway in Tawantinsuyu. Those reforms had culminated last year, when Mamaquilla fully stepped down as ruler, and allowed the election of what they were calling a “first councilor” out of the two houses of her new government, in addition to the female god-born of her own line who had been established as the new Sapa Inca. The first ruling empress in the region’s history. A middle-class banker had been elected as the voice of governance in a country that had been through enormous turmoil in the past twenty-five years . . . but now looked to be emerging from it, better and stronger than before.
Of course, the Quechan gods were not as involved in their people’s daily lives as Mamaquilla had been forced to become, and their original system of governance was perfectly intact. The country’s infrastructure hadn’t been damaged by the earthquakes of 1960 AC. Among the humans, the upper classes had no motivation to change what had worked for them for over a thousand years . . . and the Roman governor of the province was, in Adam’s opinion, a half-wit who should never have been appointed. Riots had broken out several times in the past five years, and martial law had been imposed, bloodily, six months ago, across almost half a continent. You can’t hold that much land, that many people, under martial law for that long, Adam thought. There’s going to be a rebellion, and many, many people are going to die.
As a result, there had been mass migration out of Quecha proper, into the Quechan Autonomous Self-Rule region at the southern end of Nahautl. People had marched right up the isthmus, past border guards who hadn’t wanted to open fire with machine guns on thousands of unarmed civilians who just . . . kept walking, like army ants. Crossing ditches and climbing walls and passing through jungles.
The last time Adam had been in Nahautl, Achcauhtli, the tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, and emperor of Nahautl, had been a middle-aged, but incisive ruler. A man that Livorus had described as intimately aware of his people’s romanticization of their warrior past, but also more bellicose than then-Governor Dioscuri had been willing to brook. Ach
cauhtli had been willing to send troops into the Quechan provinces of his empire to maintain order, and had been prevented from doing so on several occasions. Now seventy-five, proud, stubborn in his age, and, most importantly, armed with a Roman governor who agreed with him that the immigrants had to be kept out and returned to their homes . . . Achcauhtli had ordered his troops to open fire with live rounds on anyone trying to make an unauthorized border crossing.
The results hadn’t been widely disseminated in the press. Adam himself had only seen a few pictures because Marcus Livorus was on the Intelligence Oversight committee in the Roman Senate, and had showed them to him before he left for Tenochtitlan. There were mass graves being dug in the jungles. And no casualty estimates were being released. Damn them all.
All of that had been brewing in the background, when the Praetorians and gardia had called him here, to discuss allegations made by Potentia ad Populum in their newsletters, which had been picked up by legitimate news outlets, that Tlaloc was dead, and that a massive government conspiracy had concealed that fact from the populace. Particularly at issue was the fact that the priests of Tlaloc had continued to collect tithes from farmers, newlyweds, and the parents of newborn at their naming ceremonies. While no one objected to the priests charging fees for conducting marriages, the protestors were enraged at the taxes applied to farmers on behalf of a fertility god who couldn’t, clearly, be making it rain, on account of being dead. “If Tlaloc is dead, then he doesn’t need our coin, unless the gods of Rome have decreed that he needs it to cross the Styx!” had become a popular refrain. Half joke, half bitter stab at Rome.
So Adam had been told, by Caesarion IX himself, what he could and couldn’t admit to. The Emperor had told him, explicitly, not to admit to any involvement in the god’s death. “They’re looking for a scapegoat. And not only will they drag you through the streets behind a motorcar and allow their people to tear the flesh from your bones as they do, if they find out, but suddenly, this will become a conspiracy by Rome to unhinge their government, their culture, and their way of life. No. Admit to nothing, Adam ben Maor.”
After that conversation, Adam had taken certain precautions before leaving Judea. He wasn’t one to make gestures of faith just to be seen making them, but he thought that in this case, a certain amount of prudence wouldn’t be a bad notion. He went to a mikvah bath and purified himself. He carried certain of his faith’s writings in phylacteries, tied to his arm, underneath his shirt. It might not do any more good than a rabbit’s foot, but at the moment, all he wanted was to ensure that any spirits they set on him couldn’t read his mind. And if this doesn’t work, I’ll be right with my god in case I find myself meeting him somewhat before I expected to do so.
And so, he’d arrived in the province a week ago. He’d sat in stuffy rooms, with a shifting cast of other men and women, some of whom were even god-born of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca and high priests of a dozen other gods whose names Adam found impossible to remember or pronounce, though he tried. The prepared script was close enough to the truth, that he could stick to it when questioned, and not feel entirely dirtied. Tlilpotonqui Tototl and Gratian Xicohtencatl had been, in the end, responsible for their god’s death. They’d brought back human sacrifice, in contravention of all treaties with Rome. They’d used their god as an energy source to try to free themselves from free, abundant ley-power, which had had the unfortunate side-effect of tying them to the Empire, and the ley-mages who largely came from Gaul, Germania, Nova Germania, and Novo Gaul. The script said, that, just as had actually happened, Tlaloc had escaped from his bindings by taking Xicohtencatl’s body as an avatar. And that after that, the Pyramid of the Sun had collapsed, probably due to the extensive drilling that the technomancers had used to drive their conductive rods through the structure. “We were lucky to escape with our lives,” Adam said, truthfully. “Quite a lot of energy was released at that point in time, as well.”
His interlocutors hammered on the story, over and over again, but Adam couldn’t be shifted from it. Tlilpotonqui Tototl and Gratian Xicohtencatl were responsible. The lictors had only been there to investigate what had seemed to be a human sacrifice ring. They hadn’t, truthfully, expected to find a god there, and had been lucky to escape with their lives. I should be glad Sig isn’t here for this. All this tiptoeing around the truth would be making her twitch.
And then the riots had begun, and Adam had been able to watch the first clashes with the gardia from his hotel room window. Part of him had itched to be doing . . . something. Anything, really. Now I know how Livorus must have felt all the damned time. There comes a point in your life when your job isn’t to do things. And I hate it.
Now, in the airport, he shifted around, and dug in his leather satchel for reports. Briefs. Anything that would take his mind off the situation outside. A coded message from Kanmi slipped out from between two other pages, and Adam shoved it back into the satchel, closing his eyes. The words were already burned into his brain, anyway. All the old godslayer research had come in handy for this—Kanmi wrote his messages in Aramaic, but using the modern Hellene alphabet. Adam could do ciphers like this in his head, and had picked out the words with ease the first time through. I know that the disease is fatal/terminal. It’s all right. Once you accept the inevitable, it’s much easier to do the things that you need to do.
Sophia Caetia could have said the same damned words. I need a distraction from the distraction. He pulled out his satellite phone, and tapped out a number from his contact book, also in the satchel. A male voice, gravelly with age, answered after only a few rings. “Niltze?”
“Ave. Is this Ehecatl Itztli?”
There was a three-second pause as the retired Praetorian clearly tried to put a name and a face to a voice he hadn’t heard in twenty years or so. “Adam ben Maor. Am I being summonsed to testify in front of the Senate or the Tlatoani?” Clear wariness in his voice. “Again?”
“Not that I’m aware of, no. Have you been pulled in lately?” Harah. I didn’t think of this. They could put him in prison, torture him, incarcerate his whole family . . . other than Mazatl, and his wife and children. They’re in Judea, at least. Away from this insanity.
“About a month ago. I reported the Tlatoani’s invitation to come and speak with him and his advisors to the Praetorians. They were kind enough to send a Roman magistrate with me. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been the one who needed a bodyguard.” Ehecatl’s chuckle held no real conviction.
“I assume they wanted to talk about old times?” Adam’s words were cautious. Ehecatl’s home telephone line could be tapped.
“More or less. I told them that I’d narrowly avoided having my heart removed, killed the man responsible for that with my own knife, and then started clearing the way out of a certain location for the rest of the team, while trying not to go into cardiac arrest.” Ehecatl’s voice was carefully noncommittal, and his wording extremely vague.
You were conscious and facing forward when Tlaloc died. If that’s the testimony you offered, I hope they didn’t have you hooked up to a polygraph or have a spirit looking in your head at the time. There’s a hole there. Adam exhaled. “And when they asked what else happened, how’d you respond?”
“That after I got out of the hospital for the cardiac issues that resulted from the failed sacrifice, I dropped by a temple of the four Tezcatlipocas and said a number of prayers to Black Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl to take the memories from my mind.”
“And they bought that?”
“Not really, but short of putting me to more strenuous questioning . . . which gets them into dicey areas, since I’m minor nobility, as a result of being elevated to the Jaguar warriors, and I trained half the current officer corps of the Jaguars . . . they can’t do much. Though they might, in time. If they’re pushed too much.” Ehecatl paused. “Where are you?”
“Tenochtitlan airport, trying to get home. Sorry I didn’t call earlier. I was in hearings most of past week.” Adam pa
used. Ehecatl had a home at the edge of the city, as best he recalled. “Before all the damned riots, I was going to call and ask if you and your wife wanted to have dinner, and maybe play a few rounds of dice.”
There was a pause. “Coszcatl was taken to the gods about six months ago,” Ehecatl finally admitted. “Wasting disease. I’m sorry. I didn’t send you or Sigrun a note about it.”
Adam swore, viciously, in the silence of his mind. “I didn’t even know that she was sick, Ehe. I’m very sorry for your loss.” The words seemed heavily inadequate.
“So am I.” Ehecatl paused. “But, the next time you happen to be in the province, give me a call. I find my schedule is . . . fairly empty these days.” He paused. “Don’t retire, ben Maor, that’s my advice to you. I’m consulting with the local gardia just to have something to do these days.”
Adam managed to hang up without stepping on his own tongue again, but the satellite phone rang in his hand before he could put it away. “Ave?” he answered, unfolding the clunky device.
“Adam. You’ve had your telephone turned off.” Sigrun’s voice was mildly annoyed.
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