A wonder.
“It is a conveyance,” Cocohuay told them both, sitting on the floor, and putting her back against the soft, curving wall. “I have only traveled in this way once. I . . . believe you should sit down.”
Trennus did so. Kanmi, clearly panicking a little, joined him. Trennus knew the sorcerer was stretching out every arcane sense, trying to understand what he was seeing.
Force. Raw force, shoving them back and down, against the resilient wall of the sphere. The sickening lurch in his belly that Trennus associated with taking off in a plane, and the wobble that meant that air was moving around them, though it was . . . far more distant than it would be in a human vehicle. But he could feel them leaving the ground. He could feel the ley-lines receding behind them—fast. Very damned fast. Trennus closed his eyes and prayed, very hard, to any of his gods that might be listening, and felt Saraid touch his mind, reassuringly. You are safe, she told him, gently. I am with you. I am always with you.
A sway, a curse from Kanmi, and then a shudder through the whole of the sphere. “What was that?” Trennus asked, shaking.
“I think we just broke the sound barrier,” Kanmi said, grimly. “Where’s ben Maor when we need him? He’d be loving this. We’re heading up along a parabolic curve.”
Trennus froze. “We’re going into space?”
Only the very highest portion of the atmosphere. This is faster for me, than a straight line, I assure you.
“Do I want to know how high up we are right now?” Trennus asked Kanmi. He was trying very hard not to pay attention to his ley-attunement, which was screaming at him that the ground was very, very far away at the moment.
“No. You don’t.” Kanmi actually sounded sick as the acceleration pushed them back into the walls. Remarkably, there was almost no trembling. A rocket had to fight friction in the air, which resulted in a lot of shaking. This godly vessel? Had no such problem, it would seem.
They hit the top of the arc, and for a moment, there was freefall. Trennus actually drifted in air for a moment . . . and then gravity recaptured them, his back slammed into another softly yielding wall, and then they were sailing down, and it was every nightmare he’d ever had about flying, all at once. Entombed in a vessel, hurtling through the sky, falling. Falling forever.
Chapter XIX: Lahar
Once upon a time, there were two woodcutters’ children who lived near the Black Forest in southern Germania. Their names were Halvar and Gudrun. Their mother had died when they were young, and when their father married again, it was to the village herbalist. Every day, when their father went into the forest to cut trees for other people’s fires, Halvar and Gudrun followed their step-mother under the shade of the branches that blocked out the sky, and helped her look for mosses, herbs, and mushrooms.
The spirits of the Black Wood were capricious in those days, and a dark mood gripped the forest. The trees whispered of a man with an axe made of steel, who cut too deep, and took too much. The spirits whispered in the dreams of the woodcutter, and showed him blood pouring from the trunks of the trees wherever his axe bit deeply. You have taken our sons and our daughters, root of our root. You will give us yours, in return, or the next time you come to the forest, your axe will turn in your hand, and the earth will drink your blood.
Weeping, the woodcutter knew that he had done wrong, and that he had to make recompense in some way. But he did not wish to give up his son and daughter. He did not speak of the dream to his wife, but rather took Halvar and Gudrun into the forest without their step-mother the next morning, with a piece of bread each. He told them that he loved them, and that the spirits would take care of them. And with that lie, he turned and left them alone in the woods.
But Halvar and Gudrun knew the forest well. Halvar had marked their trail with little cairns of stone, and they skipped out of the forest before nightfall. Their father rejoiced to see them; he thought that the spirits had let them go. But the dream came to him again that night. Give us your children, or your axe will turn in your hands, and the earth will drink your blood.
So the next day, the woodcutter took his children into the forest once more. And this time, he walked so fast that Halvar couldn’t leave cairns of stone behind, or mark the trunks of the trees with his little knife. And again, he said goodbye, and told them that the spirits would look after them. And then he left, weeping.
The children wept, too, because this time they knew it was not a game. As they wandered through the woods, hand in hand, they noticed that birds followed them. Ravens with the eyes of men. But they knew that ravens were the messengers of Odin, and they were not afraid.
After hours of wandering, they found a tiny house, where there never had been one before, in all their wanderings through the woods. A wonderful smell came from the windows of that house, a smell of pies and cakes and all such good things to eat.
Halvar said, “I’m so hungry. Should we knock at the door? Maybe whoever’s inside can tell us how to get home.”
Gudrun shook her head. “No one lives in the forest. Whoever this is, must be an exile.”
“Or a spirit.”
“Or a witch.”
Before they could walk away, the door opened, and an old woman emerged. “Who whispers outside my house?” she demanded. Her eyes were like old gold coins, yellow and a little blind.
The two children remained silent, hiding in the trees. They could feel the forest whispering around them. They watched as the old woman built a pyre of wood in the center of the clearing, near her house. They watched as she wove a little cage made of stout, tough branches. Just the right size for a child. “Come out,” she called towards the woods. “Come out, children. I know that you are there.”
“You’ve made a cage,” Gudrun called back. “What is it for?”
“Why, to hold a little piglet in, when I go to market.”
“You have built a pyre,” Halvar called out. “Who has died?”
“Why, no one, child. I built it to welcome summer next week. Come out, little ones, I have food and drink for you.”
Halvar and Gudrun were tired and hungry, and the food smelled good from inside her house. They came out of the woods, and the woman gave them honey-cakes and cider, and then, quick as could be, she shut Halvar up in her little cage. “See what a fine piglet I have,” she told them, smiling. “When you’re fat enough, I will put you in the cage, on the pyre. I will have my blood, as I did in all the days that went before.” And she put on her tattered cloak, which Gudrun could see now was made of bark and leaves, and the girl knew that this was the Black Forest, the spirit that dwelled at its heart.
For a week, she made Gudrun her slave, and Halvar, she fattened with wheaten cakes. Then she bade Gudrun light the pyre. Weeping, Gudrun did . . . and as the old woman moved the cage to the pyre, their step-mother emerged from the forest at the edge of the clearing. There were good spirits with her—spirits of the deer and the trees—and on her shoulder, a raven perched. The old woman screamed when she saw them, and their step-mother called to Gudrun, “Push her! Push her into the fire!”
Gudrun, who was right behind the old woman, did. The old, withered body fell into the flames, and burned with a smell of wood-sap. Working together, Gudrun and her step-mother released Halvar from the cage, and the brother and sister fell on each other’s necks and wept.
They returned home to their father’s cottage, where he begged them for forgiveness; the raven on their step-mother’s shoulder flew towards him, and plucked out one of his eyes. Their father wept, but he had learned wisdom, and he had his children back in his arms. And once one has suffered punishment, and justice has been done, then forgiveness can be offered.
—Willahelm and Jacobus Grahn. Stories for Children: One Hundred Traditional Tales, Ambrones Press, 1888 AC.
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Maius 21, 1960 AC
A wave of energy pulsed through the earth from far to the north, rippling through segments of the continental plate, followin
g the ley-line connecting Nazca to the complex at Maucallacta. Almost no one along the route that the energy took could feel it for what it was; they only knew that the ground shook, and moved outside. Everyone in this tectonically-active area of the world knew the dangers of earthquakes.
The seismic pressures had attenuated by the time they reached the slumbering giant that was Coropuna, but the spirit-born energy needed somewhere to go, and the ley-line was the closest thing it had to an attuned conduit. The Mountain began to tremble and shake, sending rocks tumbling down cliff-faces, and causing the glacier atop the volcano to crack, a slab of ice a hundred feet thick calving off and sliding down the northern face, effacing the land of the few scrubby trees and bushes that clung there.
In the complex around the Oracle of Maucallacta, people felt the ground quiver, and scrambled away from dinner tables, running for doorways, looking up apprehensively, at the snow-covered peaks above them. Coropuna had slept for centuries, as the glaciers attested . . . but there were dark outflow marks all along the mountain’s sides. Testimony of a different sort. A few, looking up at the right moment, pointed and cried out, “A shooting star!” Coupled with the earthquake, it didn’t look like a good omen.
In the tower on the western side of the complex, Minori’s gag had just been pulled back, briefly, for her to respond to one of her tormentor’s questions. She could feel the vibrations transmitted up from the floor, into the table to which she was strapped. She couldn’t feel ley-power, most days; that’s why she carried a multimeter with her to job sites. Whatever this was, however, she could feel it as it surged along every copper line in the tower, like a buzzing sensation in her blood. The ley-powered lights over her head flared brilliantly, and exploded, and she barely closed her eyes in time as broken glass showered over her and darkness fell. The ground trembled, and Minori cautiously squinted, feeling glass shards shift against her lids as she did so. There was a little ambient illumination in the room, coming from the emergency lights near the door, which had just flicked on. Just enough to see that her captor had staggered at the roll and pitch of the ground, and had turned away from her to see what was going on.
It was a second, maybe two, of distraction on his part. His body was barely a shadow among the brilliant afterimages dancing in her eyes, but now Minori had a location for him. She’d been prepping the framework of the spell in her mind every time he’d let her have even a tiny break from the pain. The framework was simple, almost delicate. It required very little power. All it needed was accuracy, and that was a function of concentration. Difficult, but not impossible. Minori’s whole world had become that spell. She wove herself into it—dangerous, that, with a killing-spell; you risked killing a part of yourself, or at least taking backlash this way, but she had no other tools besides her mind, her body, and her will. The electricity of her own body generated the initial energy spike, and, unable to move her numb hands, Minori quickly croaked out a single phrase to focus her spell and bring it to life. “Kuuki wa kekkan wo haire!” she rasped.
Sorcerers native to Europa who learned spells by rote, ancient ones passed down from times gone by, learned them in Attic Hellene or ancient Chaldean. Sorcerers like Kanmi, who devised their own spells, generally defaulted to their native language for precision and nuance. Minori had trained in Nippon, and thus, she used the elegant, formal form of Nipponese used at the Imperial Court. This wasn’t a traditional spell, however. Traditional air spells treated air as wind. They whipped it into a gust to carry an enemy over a cliff, raised a storm to wreck a ship, or lifted the caster off the ground in a self-contained vortex. They might go so far as to create a dagger of ice from the water ambient in the air. That was the basis of Minori’s combat training. But she’d been arguing with Kanmi for a solid month on the perils of relying on the traditional. And traditional would have been too cumbersome and visible and required too much power to be useful in this room. This was unconventional casting.
No sooner had she spoken, than her captor spun towards her, slapping one hand to the side of his neck. Minori sank back against her bonds, letting her eyes close. Felt the sting of particles of glass that had seeped past her cracked lids. It didn’t matter. At the moment, it didn’t even matter if he managed to kill her in the next thirty seconds. It didn’t make her victory any less complete.
Prompted by her will, a tiny splinter had formed in the air, the size of a hypodermic needle. Wider bore than a bee’s stinger, it had embedded itself in the man’s carotid artery. Just long enough for the second half of the spell to take effect, as air was pushed, forcibly, through that tiny tube, and into his blood vessel.
She couldn’t see him, but she could hear him stumble. Felt him fall against the table to which she was strapped, trying to steady himself. “You bitch. What did you do? I am going to end you—”
Minori let her eyes crack open. She was hazy now, drifting just above the pain that completely filled her body. “Sayonara,” she whispered.
The air bubble, injected into his artery, hit his brain less than thirty seconds after being introduced to his circulatory system. The result was an embolism and a stroke; his entire body stiffened. His hands rose to his head. And then he fell to the ground. She couldn’t see him from her angle, but she could feel him jerking and spasming briefly as blood vessels inside the brain exploded, tearing the brain itself apart with the force.
I am the daughter of a samurai. I do not bow. I do not break. I do not give in. Minori began to shiver, convulsively. Shock was setting in; the doctor had been carefully treating her for that in between sessions. He apparently knew, very well, how to prolong the lives of his subjects. I have to get out of here, Minori thought, but the words were distant inside of her own head. She couldn’t open her eyes, for the glass, and she was shackled at hands and feet. Just . . . need to form the air inside the locks. Press each tumbler, just so. And then turn it. Just like so long ago, in the Palace. But it was so hard to concentrate now. She didn’t have her hatred of the torturer to help her focus. Shock was making everything seem less real. And she was so tired. It would be good just . . . to slip down into the darkness. Where the pain would go away. Every organ in her body had been twisted. Turned. Bruised. Shocked. The connective tissue holding each piece had been pulled like candy floss.
No! Lassair’s voice echoed in her mind. Do not go! I won’t let you go! Stay!
In the central room of the tower, Lassair had been pinned in the circle, trying, futilely, to protect herself. Binding circles were permeable to a spirit from the outside, in; protective circles reversed this, keeping a spirit out. Part of it was the energy and focus of the summoner who’d created it, and some were powerful enough to persist past the death of the summoner. The Nazca Lines, surely, had been created by generations of summoners and priests. This circle was powerful enough to keep her contained, at first as if her back were against an invisible wall of glass, as Micos continued to slam her with raw kinetic force. It wasn’t fire. It wasn’t earth. It was simply energy, clenched around a tiny speck of dust, and slammed into her like a fist, over and over. Lassair slipped to the ground and curled into a ball, knees to her chest, trying to keep her head and vulnerable abdomen safe as another kinetic punch hit her in the ribs. And another. And another. She didn’t think Micos was rational anymore. Her spirit-mind could absorb that, understand that, while body-mind spasmed with pain and panic. Spirit-mind knew that for the sorcerer, she’d become a symbol of everything that had told him no in his quest to save his wife’s life. The gods. His emperor. Nature. Natural philosophy. And she, herself.
She tried to reach out, desperately, along the cord of soul that connected her to Trennus, through whatever shell covered this place and muffled her ability to hear others. Another buffet, and Lassair curled in more tightly on herself, feeling a rib snap. Tried to pour body-mind into spirit-mind, where the pain couldn’t reach. Spirit-mind could feel Stormborn and Steelsoul fighting. Freeing themselves, and a tiny part of her rejoiced, though she could feel
their fear, their panic, their need to hide. Come to us, come to us, come to us, she called, almost incoherently, and then the wave of energy hit the building. The tower shook to its foundations. Breakers all over the room popped and flung themselves to their offline positions. Half the Tholberg coils in the room overloaded and began to overheat, throwing out sparks, beginning to melt.
Lassair couldn’t reach any of that fire, any of that heat. She was separated from it, like an insect in a bell jar. The floor rocked and swayed, and her captor, distracted for a moment, stared around him as guards ran for the doors, and technicians abandoned an office off to the left, a couple grabbing for fire extinguishers, but the majority of them fleeing the building.
For spirit-mind, time was infinite. For body-mind, time was both too slow and too fast, relatively speaking. Spirit-mind felt the roof overhead begin to crack, weaken, slide. Spirit-mind reacted before body-mind could, rolling the body out of the way as a chunk of mortar and tile plummeted towards her and her captor. Micos had had less warning, just an ugly crack from above. He glanced up, and reacted, on instinct, trying to jump out of the way of the falling masonry . . . and hopped ahead, directly into the circle.
Spirit-mind saw him coming. Saw the arc that his trajectory would make. Saw that he might hop out of the circle entirely again. And body-mind saw the causer-of-pain, the one who had threatened the child within and the body’s own life, and simply reacted, faster than spirit-mind for once. Lassair lashed out a leg, tripping Micos, bringing the man down heavily atop her, just as the mortar and tile landed between them and his helplessly watching wife, confined as she was, in her wheelchair. Her body shrieked at more injuries, but spirit-mind had caught up now, and Lassair realized in a blinding instant that she had her captor, her tormentor, in reach. Someone who would have forced her to give up who and what she was, for his own ends. No matter that he’d wanted her to heal someone he loved. He would have forced what should have been a gift, when she was powerless to protect herself.
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