Back in Latin, now, Trennus said, “You’ll be three hours away by car. You’ll be out of range of the handheld radios.”
“Can’t be helped.” Sigrun didn’t look happy about it. Neither did ben Maor, for that matter.
Trennus looked to the side then, as if someone whispered in his ear, and his eyebrows rose. “Ah . . . can you, ah, see spirits, Sigrun?”
“I can see the one hovering beside you at the moment. It’s just barely there, isn’t it?”
“She’s . . . weaker than she should be, yes. What the summoner who last bound her did with her . . . damaged her.” Trennus’ hands opened and closed back into fists. “She’s more than a little scared of going back there, but she says she can go with you, and if you need help, she can travel back to me faster than you can, and let us know that you need help. I’d send the stronger one with you, but my forest friend is keeping watch on Livorus, while watching the other Praetorians for us.”
“Any help you send, will still take three hours to get there,” Sigrun replied, pragmatically.
“Better than no help at all,” ben Maor said, sharply, and with more than his usual force. “I’m not much of one for employing spirits, but this sounds like a better option than no communications at all.”
Sigrun raised her hands in surrender. “All right. You convinced me.”
Trennus nodded and pulled out his notebook, writing something down on a scrap of foolscap with a fountain pen in Gothic runes, pushing it across the table to Sigrun, and removing one of the amulets he wore around his neck, holding it out to her. She mouthed the word there, and hesitated before accepting the amulet. “I thought this was how your spirits could locate you.”
“This one can locate me with or without the amulet. The amulet’s a conduit for her, though.”
Sigrun pulled the leather cord over her neck, and Kanmi offered, brightly, “See? Now he’s even giving you gifts.”
The god-born woman awarded Kanmi a glacial stare and tossed two silver coins on the table to cover her meal. “Thank you, Trennus. I appreciate the help. Let us hope that I will not need it.” She stood, which forced ben Maor to stand to let her out of the booth, and headed for the door.
Kanmi released the sound dampening field to call after her, “You’re only proving my point, you know!”
At that point, Matrugena excused himself, too, and Kanmi was left with ben Maor, who leaned his elbows on the table, steepled his fingers, and said, dryly, “You know, I asked you to be more of a team player.”
“And expressing a sense of humor isn’t going to make me more a part of the team? Lighten up, ben Maor.”
“Sense of humor is one thing. Embarrassing people is something else.”
“That was light compared to the kind of jokes they’d see in the Legion, foreign levies or otherwise, and you know it.” Kanmi snickered. “If Trennus had a locker, I’d be pinning pictures of naked women to it by now. That boy needs to relax in the worst way.”
“I’ll agree with that, but don’t make Sig a part of the joke.”
Kanmi’s eyebrows went up. “I think she can take care of herself.”
“Exactly the problem. You push her too hard, and you’re going to find out what your own teeth taste like.” Ben Maor gave him an amused look.
“What is life without risk? But, out of pure respect to you, noble leader, I’ll take it under advisement.” Kanmi finished his water, bared his teeth in Adam’s direction, and headed for bed, himself.
____________________
Iunius 7-9, 1954 AC
When she flew, Sigrun instinctively kept a bubble of controlled wind around her, to shield her eyes and face from the tremendous airflow that gusted around her when she hit her top speed. She’d always been able to control wind—localized gusts that let her slap away arrows, for example. She had no real way to measure her top speed, however, besides counting mile markers on an Imperial highway and trying to judge it against a pocket watch, but she suspected that she could do better than three hundred miles an hour if she really needed to push.
A spirit flew alongside her this time, however. Its name was, according to the piece of paper Trennus had handed Sigrun, Lassair. And the creature made Sigrun slightly uneasy. It was a wisp of air and fire, the dull red glow of a banked coal at the bottom, stretching up into gossamer-fine white tendrils at the top . . . but sometimes, it distorted and assumed a faintly humanoid shape, like a ghostly woman. All white, with what looked to be blood-red eyes . . . and then it vanished again, back into that barely-perceptible shimmer. It floated along beside her as she flew, keeping pace easily. “Can you understand me when I speak?” Sigrun asked it, in Cimbric, more or less to test it.
Yes. Words are thought. I understand the thought, not the words. The words were cool flame inside her mind, and Sigrun frowned, understanding that this had been, once, an elemental spirit of fire. There was a warmth to Lassair’s presence that was more than merely destructive, however; it was life-giving. But weak. Very, very weak.
“May I know the nature of the bargain between you and Trennus?” Sigrun asked, cautiously.
One of the stipulations of the contract is that we cannot speak of it, except if it would cause either of us damage to remain silent, or unless someone has already ascertained the nature of it.
Sigrun grimaced. That doesn’t sound precisely promising.
I assure you, Stormborn, that I will not allow any harm to come to him. I am bound to him, and he to me. He saved me. I will, someday, return the favor.
“Do you hear everything that everyone thinks?” Sigrun’s discomfort was only increasing.
No. You are bound to a god. You wear the amulet, and thus, I can hear you quite clearly at the moment. Trennus, I can hear, always. Steelsoul and Emberstone, sometimes, if I focus. Emberstone is not bound to anyone. Serpentshadow is not bound. Steelsoul is bound, but not . . . tightly. Those with quiet voices, gray souls . . . are much harder. I can make their words evident to Trennus if I work to do so. The spirit’s use of Trennus’ human name was evidently deliberate.
Sigrun breathed a little easier after that. The spirit was, for the moment, fairly limited in what it . . . no, she; it was definitely a she . . . could do.
After that, she spent the bulk of the night perched high and uncomfortably in a jungle tree, overlooking the ley-platform’s compound, with a good view of the western wall. Half that night, she spent slapping away mosquitoes, moths, spiders, ants, confused tree-frogs, and the occasional startled bat, while Lassair hovered in air beside her. The area made her skin crawl, and Lassair shared her unease. This is a bad place, Lassair whispered to her, as the stars crept in their course overhead.
“Yes. It is. There is power here, power without direction, without . . . intention . . . but there’s also a sense of . . . will?” Sigrun shuddered. She’d seen the results of an experimental psychotherapy process once, called lobotomization. Somehow, this energy felt like the blank, soulless stare of one of the patients who’d been given this treatment. But with an undercurrent of darkness. Is this the trap my sister spoke of? Am I about to be tricked or captured? No. There is no fate. There is only wyrd and the choices along the road. The choices of others shape that road, but we have the ability to decide our own fates. If only, sometimes, in choosing how and when and where and with whom we will die. I cannot let her affect my thinking or my decisions.
As dawn broke, Sigrun’s eyes burned with exhaustion, but she still spotted a group of men tromping over to the western wall, with shovels. “Lassair? It’s time for you to go get Trennus and the others. I think I can divert these good people for three hours or so.”
I do not need to leave you. Trennus can hear my voice from here. I will assist you, however I may. Lassair flickered uncertainly. I do not know how, though.
“Just . . . watch my back.” Sigrun slid off her tree branch. “And have Trennus go to my room and get my regalia, would you? It’s dawn on a Tiwesdæg, and I feel underdressed.” She hovered in the air, sti
ll concealed among the branches of the trees, some eighty feet above the ground. From her angle, she could see through the branches as the workers began to dig.
Her spear hadn’t left her hands all night, and its weight was a comfort now. All right. You have all very considerately built the region’s biggest lightning rod for me, and it’s even grounded. Let’s see if it can handle electricity as well as whatever it was designed to conduct. If nothing else, I might be able to melt down the transformers, if they’re not rated for the load.
Sigrun looked up at the sky, which had already begun to cloud over, throughout the night, and felt the first cool spatters of rain against her face, smiling as if she’d just received a lover’s kiss. The winds began to howl, tearing at the branches around her, and flocks of birds rose, panicked, into the air, as Sigrun reached up for the clouds with her will . . . .and brought the lightning down.
The thunder was ear-shattering, and followed so close on the heels of the flash of brilliant white light, that they were almost indistinguishable. The men on the ground shouted in consternation, looking up at the sky in clear panic, as blue-white arcs of electricity ran down the frame of the conductive mast. But they didn’t stop; they kept digging. Need a little more convincing?
She brought it down again, and again, and the third time, the copper sphere atop the mast actually fractured in half. Random electrical arcs sparked out, starting spot fires in the jungle and around the entire compound, and the men finally dropped their shovels and ran for cover, shouting to each other. “I don’t suppose,” Sigrun called above the banshee wail of the storm that was starting to roll in, “that you can understand what they’re saying?” She couldn’t summon rain, or anything other than very localized winds. That it was raining, in addition to the lightning she was generating overhead was strictly a coincidence.
I . . . think they are afraid that their god punishes them?
“Oh, this should be interesting.”
It was a long three hours. Sigrun knew that the storm would slow the others down in reaching her, but her only other alternative was landing in the compound and standing atop the supposed grave site and fighting all comers, on her own. She could do that . . . but the problem was, she’d probably wind up killing all of them. Not to mention, wind up taking a few musket or pistol balls along the way, and bullets hurt. Not an optimal solution, as Livorus would likely say. It leaves us with no one alive to answer questions.
So she used lightning and belief to her own advantage, and every time the men looked apt to come back out and start digging again, she brought the lightning back down again.
But it was with a surge of relief that she spotted the line of motorcars approaching the gates, all covered with special tarps against the rain. “Are those our people?”
Yes. Trennus is with them. Joy in the spirit’s voice, and relief, which surprised Sigrun mightily. She watched as the various guards tried to deny the vehicles access . . . and smiled a little, tightly, as the Roman gardia exited their motorcars and showed their identification badges. She swooped down for a landing, just off the side of the road, in the dense trees, and pushed her way through the vines onto the muddy track, one more figure lost in the confusion, and made her way to the propraetor’s car. A hand opened the door from the inside, and, soaked to the skin but not shivering, Sigrun slipped inside. “Baal’s teeth,” Kanmi swore at her, and handed her a towel, “did you try to drown yourself?”
“Yes. Slowly. One drop at a time.” Sigrun began to dry off. “Did you bring my regalia?”
Trennus, in the front seat, hoisted a bag over the center console back to her. Sigrun grabbed it eagerly, and pulled out at least the feathered cloak. The armor and everything else, Tyr could forgive her for, but the cloak was important. “I’ve always meant to ask,” Adam asked, quietly, “why it’s swan feathers?”
Sigrun fastened it at her throat. “Valkyrie means chooser of the dead. But our oldest name was swan-maiden.” She shrugged. “It is said that in order to take the skies, we once changed shapes into swans or ravens.” She took the amulet from around her neck, and handed it back to Trennus, with a word of quick thanks.
“Like the raven-maidens who attend on the Morrigan,” Trennus said, his eyes unfocused for a moment.
“Yes. Once, long ago, your people and mine were probably one.”
Kanmi, in the meantime, had fallen against the side of the car with silent laughter. “A swan,” he finally gasped out. “The bird that waddles around on land and honks and hisses.”
Sigrun gave Kanmi a resigned look. “Yes,” she replied. “Precisely so.”
“You’re a goose-maiden.” Kanmi gasped out again, still laughing.
“On the whole, I think I preferred the chicken-suit joke,” she murmured, looking up at the tarp that served as a ceiling, and the vehicle bumped forward through the gates.
The next several hours were very busy. The civilian guards, hired to protect the site, had been busy putting out spot fires throughout the whole complex, and half the Tholberg coils inside had been melted to slag. Enough remained, however, for Kanmi to get good, solid, black and white pictures of the apparatuses. Sigrun was able to confirm for the gardia that no one in the uniforms of the security force had been among those doing the digging; this limited the amount of questioning and processing required.
The guards were therefore told to put up their weapons and go to their barracks while the gardia were on site, and all of the engineers, and the site manager, were shackled to pieces of equipment inside the main building for safekeeping and questioning. Even so, the Praetorians and Roman gardia were very busy indeed, as they tried to ascertain if people had known was down there, what they’d been told they were digging for (a leaking water pipe had been the tale, apparently), and who had given the order to start digging.
It turned out that the site manager, Momoztli, had given the order, and thus, he received the most intensive questioning, under the direction of Livorus himself. All he would say was that he’d received a phone call from Gratian Xicohtencatl overnight, telling him not to worry the workers, but that there was a possibility that there might have been a ground shift that would have opened a fissure filled with ethylene gas under the facility, from a cavern deep below the earth. That if the gas wasn’t vented, they’d run the risk of the facility eventually exploding.
Sigrun looked over at Trennus and Kanmi for that one. She already could see the lie in Momoztli’s eyes, and Trennus, actually, was the one who snorted. “There’s no cavern below this site on any of the geological survey maps,” he said, with surprising sharpness. “It’s all limestone around here, so there’s a chance of bubbles in the terrain, I’ll grant you . . . .” Trennus half-closed his eyes, and, after a minute, added, “I just don’t feel any.”
Livorus looked at the site manager, who was now sweating, and flicked a glance at the two gardia members in the room with them. “I’m going to leave you with these two upstanding gentlemen,” the propraetor said, austerely. “And when I return, I hope that you will have reconsidered your intransigence.”
In the next two hours, the gardia did, in fact, recover a body from the west side foundations; it showed about six months of decomposition, which suggested it had been placed here at exactly the same time that construction had begun. That was enough to haul in everyone who’d worked at the site at least six months ago for a stint in the local cells.
Momoztli looked pale when he saw the corpse for the first time, and began to babble, incessantly, that he hadn’t known what was down there. Livorus gave Sigrun a glance, and took her out of the room, into a small controls area, with the others. Most of the panels had suffered scorching damage, which Kanmi was muttering about in annoyance, as it made his job of ascertaining what the devices had been meant to do, that much harder.
“Truth?” Livorus asked her, as the other’s heads came up.
She rocked a hand back and forth. “I suspect he didn’t know what was down there until he received the phone call
this morning,” Sigrun murmured. “There’s fear in his eyes, sir. Fear and lies.” She shrugged. “He knows what the penalty for murder is. He doesn’t wish to face either the gallows or a gladiator. He should be well-motivated to speak the truth now, but still, he fears.”
“Then we’ll need to pull in Gratian Xicohtencatl for questioning as well, as soon as possible. Kanmi, belay that phone call to him.”
“Haven’t even had a chance to think about getting to a telephone, sir. There’s too much equipment here that I really need a trained ley-engineer to understand. Matrugena’s good, but he’s a ley-mage. This is all . . . wiring and conductivity and machinery.” Kanmi sounded harried.
Livorus sighed. “Too much to do, and not enough bodies to do it. We’ll need to establish that this was actually murder first, and not just a work accident and cover-up, however.”
“Which will give Xicohtencatl all the more time to flee, if he’s going to.” Sigrun rubbed at her eyes, irritably.
Livorus patted her upper arm, lightly, with a thin, dry hand. “I’ll have the gardia in Tenochtitlan begin surveillance.” He snorted. “Of course, it seems that our communications with the gardia in Copan were also compromised, as these people here began digging about two hours after I ordered the Copan gardia to come here. Something about which I intend to have a conversation with the regional governors.”
By the end of the day, they hauled fifty men and one corpse back to Tikal, something that had the locals all hanging out of their balcony windows to stare, and which clearly agitated the Nahautl gardia. Not only were Imperial gardia being employed inside a local jurisdiction, but the local governor was being overridden by a propraetor. Toes were, in fact, being stepped on, with great abandon.
Two days later, however, the medical examiner had her report. She was a lovely Nahautl woman in her mid-fifties, with iron-gray hair tied back from her face, jade earplugs, and a white doctor’s robe over her colorful blouse and skirt. “I’m glad you could all be here for the autopsy results,” she told them as they entered the chill morgue room; it was located in the hospital, and, as such, had some of the only stable ley-power in the region, though Sigrun could see the incandescent bulbs wavering up and down as they burned. “If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t have believed it, and I want as many witnesses as possible to corroborate my report.” She sounded uneasy.
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 34