The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1)

by Deborah Davitt

  . . . walking to the front door of her father’s house in Cimbri, built in the oldest part of town, close to the edge of Lake Caestus. Slipping in, late at night, the dining room the first room visible in the old-fashioned home . . . only to see a swirl of long, tawny hair and a child’s nightgown, and to be hit somewhere around waist-level by a projectile comprised mainly of skinny arms reaching around her in a hug. “Sigrun!” Sophia exclaimed, looking up at her. “Oh, I’m so happy you’re home. I had such bad dreams about you.”

  “Little one, what are you doing up? It’s after midnight.”

  “I dreamed you were coming home. Mother and Father said it wouldn’t be for a week, but I woke up and knew you’d be here.” Sophia regarded her with wide green eyes, the color of a dark wine bottle. “I had such bad dreams about you the past month, Sigrun.”

  Sigrun ruffled the dark gold hair lightly. “I was very safe in the northern kingdoms. This wasn’t even as dangerous as when I was on the Mongol border, when you were six. Just guarding a bunch of diplomats and passing around platters of food.” Sigrun knelt down, dropping her spear and her duffle bag on the floor, and not caring if the weapon scratched her step-mother’s precious hardwood floor. “I brought you a gift. A nesting doll, from Raccia. Let me get it out of my bag.” She was aware, peripherally, of Ivarr and Medea entering the dining room, both of them in night robes; she’d really meant to slip in quietly, and not disturb them. To pass, like a ghost in the night, if at all possible.

  “That’s not what I dreamed about, sister.” Sophia’s ten-year-old inflections were still piping, but held more stubborn will than there had been the last time Sigrun had seen her sister. “I saw you. You walked a dark road, heading east, always east, and the sky was like blood behind you, as the fires of a dying god consumed the world. Ashes fell from that sky like snow, settling on your hair, which was matted and soaked with blood, hanging down around your face like a medusa’s snakes.” Sophia’s voice was dreamy, and her eyes had gone unfocused. “You had a raven on one shoulder, one eye clear and amber, the other white as milk, and it held a silver key in its beak. You had a spear in your hand, that glowed like a levinbolt, and carried a child under your heart, but the father is both alive and dead, and you had been both married to him and never truly wed, and he’d been young enough to be your son and old enough to be your grandfather when the child blossomed in your womb.” Sophia’s eyes widened for a moment, and she added, still, in that same, dreamy voice, “This is how the world ends, sister. In fire, and not in flood. And you’ll be there to watch it die.”

  Sigrun released her hold on the girl and just stared at her for a long moment, as their father bellowed, “Sophia! I told you not to repeat that nonsense!”

  Sigrun held up a hand, for the first time in her life, to stay her father’s words. “Father, stop.”

  Ivarr didn’t listen. He took a step forward, and caught Sophia’s shoulder in his big hand. “That is no way in which to talk to your sister, Sophia. You should be ashamed of yourself—”

  “I should cane her hands for this. For telling lies.” Medea’s tone was venomous, and that got Sigrun’s attention, her head coming up with a snap.

  “Stop it.” This time, Sigrun had let the rune-born light appear on her skin as she stood up, but she addressed only her father, putting herself between the girl and her parents. “Father, there are no lies in her eyes. I would see them. She’s not inventing this. This is what she has seen.” She looked past her father’s shocked face towards Medea, once her pedagogue, and now her step-mother, and gave the woman a cool look. “It appears that the blood of the gods flows on both sides in this family. However, Father, I would recommend that you find Sophia a teacher other than your wife. As her previous student, I would not give her my recommendation as an instructor for god-born children.”

  A flare of temper, a narrowing of Medea’s green eyes; the Hellene woman was half a foot shorter than Sigrun, and had dark, wavy hair. Sigrun met that stare with her own. “I’ll not allow you to cane her for speaking the truth,” Sigrun told Medea, grimly, “the way you caned my hands weekly if I couldn’t speak my lessons word-perfect on the first try.”

  Her father’s head had spun towards her. Sigrun had never mentioned it. There had been no way to prove it, at the time. The cane marks healed within a half hour of being administered, and, in those years, even public schools had permitted caning as a disciplinary method for stubborn, willful students. But when Sigrun had been old enough to leave home, she’d done so with a joyful heart . . . until she’d learned that her father had freed Medea, whose family had sold her into slavery to pay their debts . . . and had subsequently asked her to marry him. When she’d learned that Medea was pregnant, all Sigrun had been able to hope was that the woman would treat her own flesh and blood better than she’d treated Sigrun herself.

  It had been a long night after that point, but Sigrun had never forgotten the words of prophecy Sophia had spoken. For the first few years, they’d haunted her thoughts on the nights in which she couldn’t sleep. As they continued to show absolutely no sign of coming true, she was able to distance herself, mentally, from the vividness of the words.

  Unfortunately, there was only really one place in the world for a god-born of Apollo with the gift of prophecy, and that was Delphi. Where Sophia had gone at the age of eighteen. And Sigrun felt, somehow, as if she’d lost her beloved little sister eleven years ago, because of it.

  “Sigrun? Are you there?” Quick, light words, in their native Cimbric. Faint slur in the speech, dreamy, detached tone. Light sound of muffled, female laughter in the background. Rustling and shifting, too, unmasked by the static in the connection. Sigrun did a little mental math; Delphi was eight hours ahead of Tikal. It was nine antemeridian here, and thus . . . five postmeridian there. I suppose I should be grateful she can still talk, she thought, grimly.

  “Yes, Sophia,” Sigrun replied, tiredly, sitting down on the edge of the desk, feeling as if the entire world suddenly had come to rest on her shoulders. “I’m here.”

  “I had a dream about you,” the drowsy, muzzy voice on the line breathed into her ear, and the hairs on the back of Sigrun’s neck prickled. “You’re walking into a trap, sister. I can see it . . . .”

  “Sophia,” Sigrun managed, her throat tight, feeling as if she were holding onto a thin piece of cord a thousand miles long . . . and that she was trying to reel that fish in with her bare hands. “Sophia, sister . . . there is no fate. Only wyrd.” She’d tried to tell her sister this, so very often, but between the training at Delphi, and the visions . . . Sophia didn’t listen. Or at least, didn’t hear. The two were much the same.

  “Beware the black bird, Sigrun . . . .”

  Sigrun leaned her head back against the wall, still cradling the phone. “That’s a little vague, Sophia. You don’t mean the one on my shoulder at the end of the world, do you?” Sophia’s visions had been appallingly clear and precise when she was a child, but on going to Delphi, and being subjected to the training and the drugs . . . it was as if her inner eye had clouded.

  Then again, maybe she takes the drugs just to dull the inner eye. Maybe she can’t stand to see so clearly, and wants nothing more than mortal sight. I could understand that . . . if only she made sense when she talks now . . . .

  “Don’t be silly . . .” Sophia giggled on the other end of the line, echoed by more female laughter in the distance. Then she sucked in her breath in a gasp, and told Sigrun alertly, and more rapidly, “The black bird at the end of time is a raven. This one is the size of a man, and he’ll tear the heart out of you, if he has a chance, and feed it to his god. He wants his god to be powerful, so that he can share in that power, but there’s another creature there . . . a bumblebee. And he wants to bleed the god out on the ground so that everyone can lap up the blood, like dogs.” Sophia laughed, a dazed sound, and then gasped again. “Ah . . . have to go, Sigrun. Talk later, all right?”

  Sigrun hung up the phone without saying
good-bye. It wouldn’t have done any good even if she had. And then she sat there for a long moment, rubbing the tears out of her eyes.

  Those wouldn’t do any good, either.

  When she’d calmed down enough, she considered her sister’s prophecy, such as it was, as dispassionately as she could. On the face of it, it made no sense at all. Then again prophecy never did. It was all mind-games, really. Something someone would either cause to come into being, like poor damned Oedipus . . . or wouldn’t understand until it was too late, anyway. What does this tell me that I didn’t know ten minutes ago? Sigrun wondered, and then sighed. Not a damned thing. Should I tell Adam? Livorus? Any of them?

  No. They’ll just start second-guessing everything, too. Let them be free of the gods-be-damned gift of fikken prophecy.

  She stood and made sure her face was dry and set in composed lines before stepping out of the manager’s office. She caught ben Maor’s concerned look at her from past the reception desk. “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Just family.” She shrugged.

  “Everyone okay at home?”

  No. Sigrun swallowed, and replied, briskly, “Everyone’s exactly the same as they always are. Nothing to worry about.”

  Nothing to worry about at all.

  “Let’s get going then,” Adam told her, his eyes narrowing slightly. Clearly, he didn’t believe her, but wasn’t going to push. “You have priests to interview with Ehecatl, and I have contacts to make with the propraetor.”

  ____________________

  Kanmi had followed Livorus’ orders the night before, and had called Gratian Xicohtencatl. The Nahautl technomancer had been startled to hear from Kanmi—it had showed in his voice. “Can I convince you to come to my house this evening for a little get-together?” Xicohtencatl had asked. “Just a few friends from work and some of the technomage societies here in the province . . . .”

  “Unfortunately, I’m about halfway to Tikal,” Kanmi had said, putting joviality in his voice that he hadn’t felt.

  “Tikal?”

  “That’s life in the retinue of the great and powerful. Close your eyes in one city, open them again in a completely different one.” The irony in his tone hadn’t been hard to fake at all. “I thought you’d said you were opening new ley-platforms down here. Isn’t that sort of risky, given the political atmosphere down here? Don’t your engineers and workers get attacked by the locals?”

  “Kanmi, this is exactly what I’ve been talking about,” Xicohtencatl’s voice had become unctuous at that point. “I’m making sure to provide jobs for the locals, as well as for the highly-skilled engineers being sent down there. There’s job training, so that the people of the region can maintain the platforms, once they’re finished being built. Not only are we bringing power to the people, but we’re empowering them.”

  Kanmi had filed the surely well-worn catchphrases to the back of his head “You sound like you’ve been practicing that speech for the next time you get in front of your emperor’s council of advisors.”

  “If I thought they’d listen, I’d tell them that, certainly. That speech is meant more for investors.”

  “I thought your power company was state-run.” Kanmi pulled the loose thread, not pouncing, but trying to sound tired and a little bored. Both of which were true, so again, it wasn’t hard to fake.

  “Oh, it is. But there are other kinds of investment. We’re talking people capital, Eshmunazar, my friend. If you can get people to buy into an idea, there is almost nothing that you can’t do.”

  It could have been perfectly innocuous. It was a boardroom sort of platitude. Except there was something almost coy in the way Xicohtencatl said it. Kanmi let it pass, however. In many realms of life, it didn’t pay to appear to be too eager. Not in love, not when buying a motorcar, and certainly not in espionage. “So, as I said, I’m heading to Tikal, and carrying the propraetor’s baggage,” he said, downplaying his own position as carefully.

  “Oh, come now, surely a lictor does more than that?”

  Ah. You did check into what I do for a living. All I said before was that I was on Livorus’ staff. That could mean anything from getting him coffee, taking dictation, looking good in a dress, or being a lictor . . . depending on the propraetor in question, of course. “You’d be surprised how dull the job can really be,” Kanmi said, putting ennui in his tone. “The travel really starts to get to you after a while.” He yawned, deliberately. “So. If I’m going to Tikal, is there anything actually interesting in the area, for whatever few off-hours I get?”

  “Are you looking for entertainment, or for something that might intrigue the fine mind I remember from university?”

  “I wouldn’t say no to entertainment, but you were telling me that your new stations down there are unconventional? I don’t know that much about ley-power, but I appreciate good technomancy.”

  “I could probably get you a guided tour of one of our facilities, if you’d like . . . .” The words sidled out. As if they weren’t bait at all. “And perhaps an introduction to some of our better on-site engineers?”

  “I don’t know if I’m going to have the time,” Kanmi demurred, then offered, “but if I happen to have a free hour or two, I might take you up on that.”

  The main purpose of the phone call done, Kanmi allowed Xicohtencatl to guide the rest of their conversation. His job now was to listen, and try to find keywords and phrases that prompted reactions. Hiding his motivations—and how closely he actually listened to people, and how fast he found their patterns—was nothing new. This was just slightly more important than ascertaining that ben Maor worried that the rest of the squad took him seriously as a senior lictor, poking Trennus solidly in his insecurity with women, or delicately seeing just how close to the line of insubordination Livorus would allow him to get. Those were all for his own amusement. This? This was real.

  That had been two nights ago. Today, in an open-topped vehicle with a high undercarriage and roller bars, Kanmi and Trennus bumped and jostled over the ill-kept jungle roads with a couple of locals as guides. Kanmi mopped at his face, and muttered to Trennus, “To think I’ve traveled around the world only to find a climate even worse than Tyre or Carthage.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Gods, what I wouldn’t do for a cold breeze from home right now.” Trennus was flushed from the heat, and Kanmi thought the Britannian, fair-skinned as he was, would probably burn right through his cotton shirt. While it might be amusing to watch the high-born, naïve young man turn beet red in the sun, and eventually peel, on the balance, Kanmi thought that heatstroke would probably be a bad idea. Certainly, it would mean that he’d have to do twice the work at the ley-platform, and Trennus would be lying about, being fanned and handed cool drinks. Kanmi looked up at the sun, and considered things for a moment. A ten degree gradual decline in ambient temperature, and . . . if I can manage it . . . reflection of ultraviolet spectrum light . . . no, absorption. I can use the energy later. Or even now.

  He exhaled, and began the mental work of setting up a thin barrier in the air directly around them; soap-bubble fine, it was invisible to the naked eye, but stopped the wind from rushing into their faces . . . while still allowing air to circulate, out the bottom of the vehicle. Trennus gave him a dubious look. “Not a notable improvement,” the man said, mopping at his face again. “I’d prefer a warm breeze to no breeze at all.”

  “Wait for it,” Kanmi told him, and completed the overhead dome. Now, if I do this right . . . I can use one incantation to power the other. He concentrated, hard, and the dome darkened, faintly, becoming like smoked glass. Their driver swerved, nearly ramming into a boulder in their path, and stopped, staring wild-eyed around them. “It’s not an attack,” Kanmi told him, irritably. “Just keep driving.”

  The shield itself was made of air and hovered right with them; the darkness was from dirt and dust from the road that he worked into it, and also a component of pure will. It both created a barrier for the UV, and absorbed it.
The solar energy, Kanmi wove into his second incantation, his lips moving silently. The words weren’t really necessary. It was all a framework in his mind, and the words were just a conduit, a way of creating and understanding that fretwork of energy. The new incantation, powered, began to draw energy out of the air around them . . . cooling it.

  And because he actually now had an energy surplus in the form of heat, and all the batteries in his pockets and equipment bag were fully charged, Kanmi let the heat bleed out behind them, in a wavering mirage that made the jungle ripple like an image in a pond.

  End result: A pocket of space ten degrees cooler than ambient, UV protection, one unnerved driver, two uneasy guides, and two much more comfortable lictors. All things considered, Kanmi was pleased.

  “All right,” Trennus admitted, bracing himself as they hit yet another kidney-rattling hole in the road, “that’s a handy talent there.”

  “Just a derivation of a few other things I can do.” Kanmi shrugged. “This is the less combat-oriented, and thus, more interesting application. A little more subtle.”

  It took three hours of slowly grinding through the jungle, but eventually, they reached the ley station. Kanmi lowered his smoked-glass lenses from in front of his eyes, and stared as they finally breached the barrier of trees that had separated them from it.

  Ley-facilities were generally called towers because they were usually about six stories tall, and had spires that often reached up at least twice that height into the sky, and also because the oldest ones were usually built of stone. In Novo Gaul, where the technology had been pioneered, centuries ago, they had usually built alongside, or as a part of the local castle or defensive structures. Ley-power had helped turn mills to crush grain without having to rely on wind or water, and had provided novelty lights to the rich and powerful, at first. The base of every tower still housed large, loosely-wrapped transformer coils that worked on resonant principles. Metal rods were driven down into the bedrock to anchor the foundation, and to tap the local ley-line itself, whenever possible. Typically, such facilities were connected to the rest of the grid they serviced by long strings of insulated copper wire strung out on tall poles.