Mamaquilla went on now, with a grim note of power in her voice. It is left to me to heal and nurture this land. I ask that Inti’s great temple be rebuilt, and that his tomb be venerated, and that you continue to love and worship my beloved, as the Sacrificed God. In the hopes that, through your love, he might one day be reborn. She lowered her head, and Sigrun saw two luminous tears course down that dark face, like comets in the night sky. I command that the name of Quehuar, he who gave his life for Inti, that his god might have comfort in his captivity, be honored, forever. I command that the name of Cocohuay, who gave her life, that I might live, be honored, forever. I command that the name of your Emperor be forgotten, for all time. Let it be effaced from every book, every monument, every relic of his reign. I will permit a god-born of my lineage to rule in Tawantinsuyu after this day. But there will be changes, my children. Many of them.
And for the rest of my commandments? Let the word go forth that Tawantinsuyu holds to its bargain with the gods of Rome. No human sacrifice will be permitted. You will love and honor me, as you will love and honor Inti, the Sacrificed God. And we will work together to heal our sore-troubled land.
The news report cut off then. Going to the window of the room, Sigrun could see, outside, that everyone in the streets had stopped where they were, to look up into the sky. “Social disruption,” Adam muttered, quietly. “There’s no place in this country that’s going to be the same after today.”
“Yes,” Sigrun told him, letting the curtain fall. “That does not, however, mean that it must be worse than it was before.”
Livorus looked at Sigrun. “You find hope in this, my dear?”
She nodded, feeling her throat tighten. “Yes. Mamaquilla is the moon. The moon . . . is mutable. It waxes. It wanes. It changes.” She paused. “She’s also the sea. Tides rise. Tides fall. It’s always in motion. A sun-god . . . rarely changes. The day passes into night, and night becomes day.” Sigrun smiled a little. “The night need not be terrible.”
Trennus looked up. “And out of death, new life.”
She met his eyes, and nodded.
The meeting disbanded after that. Livorus enjoined them to get a good night’s sleep, as their evacuation flight from Rome should be arriving around five antemeridian. “At least, after the entity’s news broadcast,” Livorus said, looking at the ceiling, “no one should, I think, be hunting for our heads. We can be grateful for that. For so long as people pay her words heed, at least.”
“Which means we’ve got about a six weeks’ grace period before someone decides it’s a massive conspiracy by Rome,” Kanmi said, cynically.
Once out of Livorus’ room, Adam beckoned the others into his and Sigrun’s chamber, and explained, quietly, what Inti had done to his gun. None of them, besides Lassair, who had registered the words between Adam and Inti clearly, had known. Sigrun swallowed in disquiet as she studied the weapon. She could see colors around it. Just as she saw them around the humans in the room. It shimmered, faintly, golden as sunlight. Something is wrong with me. But she didn’t volunteer a word about the weapon. Or her condition.
Kanmi and Minori were studying the weapon in fascination. “I don’t sense much beyond a very light enchantment,” Minori said, after a moment. “I’d say it converts the bullets, in the barrel, to . . . another form of matter?”
“If it converts the matter into plasma, it would melt the gun into slag the first time he pulled the trigger. There’s got to be more to it than that.” Kanmi almost reached for the gun, then put his hands behind his back, as they stared at the Velserk, which currently lay on a towel on a small table in Adam and Sigrun’s room. “Maybe a cooling enchantment? I just can’t see it.”
“It’s all spirit-energy,” Trennus commented, distantly. “I can see it. The metal’s practically permeated with it.” He looked at Adam, his eyes shining in the dim light of the room. “You’re carrying around a modern version of Caledfwlch.”
“Caled . . . what?” Adam decided not to bother with the rest of the twisting Gallic syllables.
“Caledfwlch. Romans usually make it Caliburn. Easier for them to say, when they’re retelling Gallic legends. It’s the sword that could cut stone. Given only to the high king, and only in times of great need.” Trennus smiled faintly. “It hasn’t been seen in over a thousand years.”
Adam shook his head, clearly rattled. ‘All right, well . . . that’s neither here nor there. What do I do with it? I can’t keep this. Do I . . . sink it to the bottom of a lake, or the sea? You said water buffers things like this.” He shifted a little. “Mamaquilla wouldn’t take it back.”
Kanmi snorted. “If you drop it to the bottom of a lake, ben Maor, it’s going to be a bitch getting it back if we need it again.”
Trennus looked at the ceiling, clearly amused by something. “Well, the ancient legends do say that Caliburn is kept by a water spirit, a lady of the lake, when it is not needed. If we drop it in the right one, she should lift it forth for the rightful bearer and give it back, Adam.”
Adam gave them both a dark look. “I’m failing to see what’s so amusing about this.”
Lassair interposed, gently, If Mamaquilla would not take the weapon back, Steelsoul, it is because she knows you have yet more to do with it.
Trennus’ lips quirked. “There’s that. And there’s the fact that you’ve just been told you’re the modern equivalent of a high king, you’ve been handed a weapon out of legend, and the first thing you want to do is sink it in the ocean.” He shook his head. “Only you, Adam.”
Adam grimaced. “All right. I take the point. It’s my responsibility. I’ll lock it away in a safe, or in a box in my nightstand in Judea, or some damn thing.”
Sleep didn’t come easily to Sigrun that night. Usually, she could sleep anywhere, any time. A habit honed by being in combat-type situations throughout most of her adult life. On restless nights, now, all she needed was Adam’s arm, draped loosely around her, in order to relax and doze. But tonight, when she desperately needed the sleep, in the hope that the pre-epileptic colors would fade from her field of vision, sleep would not come.
At midnight, she realized why, as the phone in the room rang. Somehow, she’d been waiting for this. Dreading this.
Adam sat up in bed, reaching for the phone. “Don’t,” Sigrun told him, huddling under the sheets.
“What?” He sounded surprised, and the phone rang again.
“Don’t answer it.”
“Sig, it could be Livorus.”
“It’s not going to be. It’s her.” Sigrun’s tone was dull.
Adam turned to look down at her in the dim moonlight coming in through the window. “Her?” he asked, blankly, as the phone shrilled again. “Who?”
“Sophia. I’ve been expecting this.”
The phone paused, and then another ring. “Sig, I’m not going to listen to this all night.” Adam plucked the phone off the cradle, and said, in Latin, “Ave?”
After a moment, he sighed. “Yes, Sophia. That would be the second time. How many more times do I get to do this?”
There was a pause, and then he handed her the phone. “Please deal with your sister,” Adam told Sigrun, before getting up and heading to the bathroom, where she could now hear water being poured from the clean pitcher Minori had prepared for them.
Sigrun put the phone to her ear. “What do you want, Sophia?” she asked, wearily.
“There you are. You were trying to hide from me. Silly thing.” Sophia half-sang the words. “What does it feel like, Sigrun, having taught death how to die?”
“I cannot help but notice that quite a few people died anyway,” Sigrun said, staring off into space.
“The sun died, too, but there was still a dawn,” Sophia replied. “What is a god but the symbol of something greater? A concept. A belief. Inti was life, and he died. Supay was death, and now there’s new life!”
Sigrun shifted, and looked out the window at the moon. Things can change. Spirits have a symbiotic relationship
with humans, as Tren has said. We change them. We change ourselves. We saw the biggest change in the gods in modern history today. Not since Akhenaten has so much changed in a faith. In a people. In a land. “Your fate is broken,” Sigrun told her sister, sudden conviction in her tone. “For these people, the world as they knew it has ended. A new one has begun. So much for prophecy, eh?”
“Oh, not at all, Sigrun. You were always going to do this. You’re just taking the inevitable steps along the road. Look around you. The ruined land of the Four Quarters? It’s just a microcosm of what’s to come. Pompeii will burn once more. So will most of Caesaria Aquilonis. Only Judea will be safe. It is a promised land, after all.” Sophia giggled. “Let me tell you more.” Her voice took on the hated cadence, once more. The voice of prophecy. “I see twin goddesses. One fire and one ice. One life and one death. One beginnings, and the other endings. They’re beautiful, and they’re terrible, Sigrun. But they’re only two of three. The first is the maiden, who runs through the woods, the second is the mother, who nurtures the fields, and the third is the crone who buries the dead. Oh, how I wish I could see their faces, but all I see are their eyes—”
“Stop.” Sigrun had switched to Cimbric, and she said it with all the force she tried not to use with mortals. “Stop it right now.”
“But Sigrun, this is important! This is about why you’re not going to have children until the world ends in fire and frost . . . .”
“Stop!” Sigrun sat up in bed and shouted the word. “I will hear no more of this! I am done with gods and demons and prophecies and futures. There is only one future I want. I want a mortal life. With Adam. Nothing more. I will hear not one more word of prophecy, Sophia. Not one more word, or I will never hear any other pass your lips again.”
There was a long, shocked silence on the other end of the phone, and Sigrun’s stomach churned. This was her sister. This was her baby sister, nineteen years her junior. Whom she loved almost as much as if Sophia had been her own daughter, but for whom she could do nothing. “Sigrun,” Sophia said, and suddenly, it was the voice of the frightened ten-year-old again. “Sigrun, please. I knew you would be angry. And you have no idea how sorry I am. But you’re never going to get what you want.”
Sigrun hung up the phone, very carefully. Turned her face into the pillow, and wept.
After a short time, Adam came back to bed. Wrapped his arms around her, until the tears passed, and they listened to the sound of sleet slamming into the windows, as clouds covered the moon. And eventually, as the tears faded, and they began to kiss, Sigrun suddenly remembered something. “Adam?”
“Hmm?”
“I left my pills in the hotel in Cuzco. They’re under forty tons of rubble by now.”
Adam considered that. “Good.”
Sigrun pulled back. “What?”
“We wanted children, right? We’re probably going to be on administrative leave for a year, thanks to all of this mess. If we’re going to do this . . . it’s probably the best time we’ll ever have to do it. Let’s have children, Sigrun.”
She looked up at him in the dark. “My sister says I won’t have children until the world ends. A pretty way of saying never.”
Adam leaned down, and kissed her, fervently. “Neshama . . . Sigrun . . . Let me just say this.” He paused. “To gehenna with prophecy.”
Interlude II: Settling Dust
1960-1964 AC
1960-1961 AC
Thirty thousand people died in Tawantinsuyu in the aftermath of the earthquakes, eruptions, and the cholera and dysentery outbreaks that followed the disasters. This was in spite of aid sent from every subject nation in the Empire; the infrastructure was inadequately developed to move supplies to the hundreds of mountain villages affected by the scope of the devastation. The lictors had a hard time considering their mission a success . . . but they had the word of Inti and Mamaquilla that it would have been worse if they had not been there. If they had not intervened.
That didn’t make it any easier to sleep at night, after watching the news.
Adam’s prediction of a full year of administrative leave wasn’t entirely accurate. They were, however, given a full six months of it, which consisted of literally hundreds of interviews with various people, from Praetorian Guard Internal Affairs to the diplomatic corps to the high priests of Jupiter, Juno, and Mars, and the Imperator himself. And that was just dealing with Rome. They also had to meet with representatives from Tawantinsuyu repeatedly, in the safety of Rome, and answer questions, at length, about the death of the Sapa Inca. Most of the time, they were able to default to the answer, “As Mamaquilla indicated, the late emperor attempted to destroy the gods of your nation, with the assistance of Supay. Mamaquilla has forbidden his very name to be spoken. Why does it matter how, precisely, he met his end?”
The answer was, of course, that various factions among the Tawantinsuyan nobility wanted someone to blame. They wanted a godslayer. They wanted the black-clad figure on Nefertiti’s tomb wall, all hooks and barbs. The lictors, as one, stonewalled. They refused to specify who had killed whom, to anyone except for Livorus and the Imperator of Rome. Adam admitted, reluctantly, to Livorus and Caesarion, that he’d pulled the trigger on Inti. Sigrun and Lassair both admitted to their roles, and Caesarion IX, after three days of consideration, informed them that he was choosing not to commit any of this to paper. “In this much, I can protect you and your descendants,” he told them, quietly. “The information can and must die with all of us.”
Sigrun had found that to be a partial relief, but she was traveling from one meeting to another so often now, she usually didn’t know what time zone she was in. She and Adam spent much of that six months of leave in Judea, rebuilding the inside of their house. Adam joked that the concept of having children had lit a fire under him, because he really didn’t want to see her holding up drywall for him to hammer in place when she was eight months pregnant. “I know you, Sig, you’ll be out wrestling pythons and Nile crocodiles when you’re out to here.” He gestured with the hammer in front of his own stomach, and then dropped it on a work table.
“Ah . . . Adam?” Sigrun hesitated. “It probably won’t be nine months.”
He’d turned away to measure the new window they were cutting into the inner wall of the house, facing out into the Roman-style atrium. Now, he turned back, and squinted at her. “What do you mean?”
“Valkyrie, like my great-grandmother, who are chosen? God-touched, not god-born? They come to term in human time.” Sigrun took the tape measure out of his other hand, and fiddled with it, extending it out to nine inches, and then halving its length. “I am god-born. And we are meant to fight. We can still fight when we are gravid, but not as we should. Thus, the gods were kind enough to halve our term.”
Adam blinked. “I . . . see.” He looked around. “So what you’re saying is, once we’re sure you are, it’s going to happen fast . . . so I should really start with the nursery?”
“It might be wise.” Sigrun had decided to ignore every word Sophia had ever said on the subject. Human beings could not function without hope. She might not be entirely human, but she needed the last denizen of Pandora’s box as much as any of them ever could.
“All right. Let’s get this window finished, and we’ll move on from there.” Adam had sounded a little rattled, but had smiled anyway, and she’d brushed a strand of long hair back from his sweating face, and tucked it behind his ear.
___________________
Working on the house had actually been the best part of those six months. When they weren’t doing that, or flying to Rome for more hearings, Sigrun would often awaken with a dream still burning in her mind. You will report to the Odinhall at once. Transportation will be provided.
There were only a handful of entities—the word inevitably made her twitch now, even in her own thoughts—who could instantaneously transport humans and materials from place to place. She suspected that the gods of Rome, who had over a billion worshippers, who at
least paid them lip-service, could manage it. The gods of her people, with two hundred and twenty-five million worshippers, between Germania, the northern kingdoms of Europa, Novo Germania, and parts of Raccia, could transport someone like her to either the outside of Valhalla, or to the Odinhall, in a heartbeat. They just had never done so before this incident. She hadn’t even known it was possible.
She was always aware of being someplace else when the Odinhall called her. Of flying in a vast and timeless place, where there were clouds that went on forever . . . but at the same time, the journey always seemed to transpire instantaneously. And her ears inevitably popped when she appeared in the lobby of the Odinhall, halfway around the planet from Jerusalem. She was almost positive that this transit was the effect of an ‘interface matrix’ similar to the great room near the top of the Odinhall. What little Trennus had said about his own sojourn in the Veil had convinced Sigrun, however, that most mortals would be deeply troubled by going there. They would probably return from it stark raving mad, in fact. Perhaps that explains Sophia, she thought, miserably. She and her sister had not spoken in months.
In the Odinhall, the routine was the same, every time. She endured scrutiny from Odin, Thor, Tyr, Freya, Heimdall, and even masked Hel herself. They never explained what they were doing, but it mostly seemed to involve her standing at the center of a perfectly white, empty room, while they paced around her. Their auras were blinding, and Sigrun had squinted a bit the first few times she’d arrived. Freya, a mistress of seiðr, or magic, noticed this immediately, and asked what troubled her. Sigrun had described the colored auras, and had seen intrigue rise in the goddess’ golden eyes, and the significant look Freya shot Odin. I will help you learn to control this, Freya had told her, toying with a necklace around her throat, which reached her waist. Brísingamen, it was called, and it supposedly held half her powers. Odin gave up an eye to see the mortal world as humans do. You have somehow developed the ability to see as spirits do. Interesting. But, with practice, it will be something that you can control, child.
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 125