“The Gap holds so many marvels that glisten and sparkle with unfathomable intelligence. Surtalogi speaks to us—if only we could listen. Even the smallest of things has a voice. There are worlds at our fingertips, each interacting in incredible ways, and each is willing to share knowledge, to grant us their boon.
“Your Majesty’s realms are, in one sense, just great lumps of rock, hurtling through the void, but in another very real sense, they are also branches stretching across one heaven, and across countless heavens, simultaneously. When we study Yggdrasil, the mathematics of entanglement help explain what each tree knows and how they communicate that information, especially when separated by voids that take light itself thousands of years to travel. Mathematics is the only language in which we can speak to the trees and the stars. But beyond the Skuld, there are very few versed in its tongue.”
“It is all Greek to me,” she said, archly. “I didn’t come here for a lecture on cosmology. For the third time of asking, why are we here?”
The lector ignored her blatant insult, but his voice grew sterner, more authoritative. He was no longer trying to excite the fylkir about his work. He was admonishing her.
“Trust me, after a trip to the surface here, you’ll see there are two very different places. Mímisbrunnr is here—we are here—because this place is where the ring is joined, physically and metaphysically. Surtalogi is an old man, older still than Sol. The sagas suggest it is older still than the Well of Fate, and the skalds are not often wrong with their portents. Yggdrasil was born here, in this clash of primordial forces, between fire and ice. And in that sense, human life began here.
“But still, that is not the only reason we are here. We, Madam, are the Skuld, the last of the three Norns who fix the length of the thread of life. We alone can unravel the disasters our sisters have wrought. We wear these cowls as a symbol—the future is unknowable to all but us. We take our vows because events which cannot be prevented must be directed. All humanity is in our debt because Mímisbrunnr is its salvation. Our mathematics,” he almost spat the word in his rising fury, “calculated the Thought Drive that brought your ship here and the Memory Drive that will return you home. Our mathematics delivered to us the superlative mind of MIM and tamed the Mímameiðr.”
He strode to another hollow and threw out his arms with a defiant flourish.
“And there, there, Madam, is the contribution to your war. Our mathematics have unlocked the secrets of that primeval wood whose twisted boughs course over this land, unharmed by fire, impervious to radiation, untouched by steel. And with it, we have forged you a fleet to last a thousand years, finally able to defeat the Jötnar once and for all. Perhaps now you understand why I invited you here?”
Bohr spun on his well-heeled boots and flounced out of the room. Trumba was stuck somewhere between mirth at having annoyed the old man, concern that she might not get to play with her new toys, and the shock of having been yelled at. Two of her Varangians looked in briefly, but she waved them back through the doorway.
She was left alone with the star charts. Well, the room still crawled with Skuld-ants, although they all looked stunned by the outburst. The chemical fear they exuded was palpable. No one raised their voice to the fylkir. It was unheard of.
“The rassragr doth protest too much, methinks,” she muttered.
Bohr was hiding something between all the bombast and hyperbole. She’d developed a nose for that kind of thing; perhaps it was in the blood. Still, she had ring-fenced several days from her schedule for the visit. She was quite looking forward to the excitement ahead. She had a few tricks of her own up her sleeves.
For now, she turned her attention to the matter at hand.
“You there, Skuld. Explain these to me. Why create a map to a place you can never visit? The stars are still out of reach, I presume, or have you grown longer arms?”
And why create a room full of purposeless maps? Bohr must have planned to ambush her here for a reason. It wasn’t just for the view.
These star charts were five or six centuries old, probably the result of Keppler and Brahe drinking themselves into the grave at the Imperial Observatory at Himinsborg. Trumba was a keen student of history; she knew very well that facts and personages of great importance in world history occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. From a young age, she’d studied the realms she would inherit. She had even toyed with balls and pieces of fruit to help her visualize her Kingdom of the Heavens.
Ironically, five hundred years ago, the empire had been fighting immortals too. Although, if she remembered correctly, the Persians hadn’t put up much of a fight. In fact, she was fairly sure they turned out not to be very long-lived at all. Black Death and Red Thor at the same time… wow, that was an era to miss.
“We retain them for measurements and observation, your Majesty. They are old because the study of the Heavens was abandoned long ago. But these Stjörnubók contain the secrets of the Sufis.”
Which was probably syphilis, she thought. The Persian War itself wasn’t interesting, just one in a long line of conquests and annexations. But it had uncorked the cult of the Khurramites and let them carouse freely across the wider empire. No historian would deny the Norse always had a propensity for hard drinking and hedonism, so it was easy to see why the Eastern practices had spread like a concubine’s legs. The court astronomers who once quested for knowledge slaked their fascinations with exotic wine and foreign women instead. Himinsborg became infamous for its harlots and homosexuals. In a seminal act, Fyklir Sigurd IV had wisely sent in the Varangians to burn them all. The star maps must have been saved by a rassragr in the ranks.
With the aptly named advent of staggering, a hundred years of debauchery snapped back into sobriety, and astronomy had become a footnote. Only the Skuld cared about the stars. They shared a kinship as big balls of gas.
“So why was the lector looking at them when I arrived? Has he located the Jötnar or not?”
None of the vǫlur could, or would, answer her. But there was something incongruous about the whole setup, something lurking at the edge of her sight. She determined to ask Bohr directly in the morning.
“I’d like to kill something now. Tell Bohr I will be in the state chambers. Tell him I want to see this new fleet as soon as possible.”
TRUMBA ROLLED OUT OF BED, irritated that she couldn’t sleep. She padded over to make some tea and then reached around in the dark for her visor. There was another barrage of messages from her old lover Berg. The Varangian was always whining about the cold and damp on Helheim, pleading for a return to the warmth of her bed. She deleted the files without opening them. He had his orders; anything else was just noise.
She needed something to relax her mind. In all the chaos of the past few days, she hadn’t had the chance to follow any of her Úlfhéðnar, her wolfcoats, a pastime that had leeched into an addiction.
Watching the wolfcoats track down undesirables was one of the perks of being empress. Trumba could jump into any of their viewpoints and feel the thrill of their most recent hunt. The adrenal rush a soldier experienced on the verge of a kill had to felt to be believed. True, there was always the stench of shit, and the taste of blood was abrasive after a while, but you could always mute those senses and focus on the audio-visual feeds. Trumba delighted in pivoting the viewpoint, wheeling away to take a raven’s eye view of the field, which also had the benefit of putting a modicum of distance between her and any screaming.
It was a vicarious pleasure, but only the adept wolfcoats even suspected she was following them, and the records were easy to delete. The Urdur brought her up to cover her tracks.
Perusing the file headings, it looked like the trespassers of the past few nights had been religious lunatics. That wasn’t surprising. The Serer kingdoms in the Burning Lands had been the worst offenders. They had been making unscheduled migrations for years, although her father had overlooked their transgressions. He even went so far as to pay homage to the imme
nse Serer god on state visits, a sky god called fat Roog or Koox or something nonsensical, that was supposed to be an aspect of Thor. As far as Trumba was concerned, he was a pretty shitty aspect because he’d lost the past three wars his people fought in and was dead set against fornication to boot.
Predictably, Dietbald’s peaceful embassies had only encouraged the Serer lamanes, the headmen, who saw it as a tacit blessing. Now they were always staggering across the greenways, searching for new land to exploit. It got to the point where Trumba had been forced to make an example of her vassal during the coronation. There was the usual outcry, but the Serer had been warned plenty of times. In the end the Maad Saloum Fode N’Gouye Joof died before she could work out how to pronounce his name. It turned out he hadn’t been granted immortality by fat Roog after all.
The Úlfhéðnar had the scent of one of the lamanes now, a pitch-black fellow, with a big bruised lip and a sunken scowl. He had perhaps a dozen tribesmen with him, splashing through the salt flats in the northern hemisphere of Vanaheim. It was a bizarre tactic, but then these backward peoples couldn’t comprehend that the wolfcoats weren’t actual wolves and that they weren’t tracking so much by scent as by satellite. There was only an inch of ground water anyway. Interlopers were always hampered by the stronger gravity as well. They squelched along as if they were in treacle, sweating rivulets into the mineral field. Trumba noticed a sergeant readying his thermal lance, and she blinked twice to follow him, just in time to see him spew a ball of copper fire towards the horizon. The bodies were retrieved later by a Catai cleanup squad. Carbonized for the most part, dismembered heads, brains and intestines, black stains on the otherwise pristine pan.
Reservations clearly couldn’t contain this kind of vagrant. She made a note: perhaps it was time to use Agent Naranga to wipe out the trees in their homeland. That would cut off their path to temptation.
She sipped her tea. It was tepid now, the price of her distractions. She swallowed it in one gulp, then decided to follow a second group. It was better than reading the council dispatches, which Miklagard still insisted on delivering in twee scarlet oak boxes as well as straight to her visor. Several of the jarls were growing insistent that she formally name a newly-built veterans’ home in honour of her father, but she wasn’t going to sully her family name for some drunken brawlers. The Einherjar’s only great skill was to die en masse and on cue. Even so, it was insulting that they thought it was all she was good for and that they didn’t send her anything more substantive. Since she was named heir presumptive, the lords had tried to turn her into just another rubber stamp.
The wolfcoats were much more deserving of her time. The next batch of guardsmen had been called to Thrudheim to retrieve some wandering Skræling. She retrieved the briefing and scanned the notes. A cult had sprung up around an old incendiary who called himself Alédzé, a Dreamer who claimed ancestral rights to use the greenways. She remembered the file now: MIM had alerted her to his visionquests before she left Uppsala. The old man claimed to have died, only to be resurrected with the ability to travel to Heaven in his dreams. Much like the power that gunpowder gives to a bullet, he’d said. He was getting dreams from the All Father and telling everyone what was going to happen. Trumba was willing to tolerate a few native idiosyncrasies, but clearly an asylum was too good for this kind of crazy. Shooting was too good for him. The wolfcoats were in position for an ambush and launched their assault under the cover of white phosphorus. Trumba tutted and switched off the visor. At best the smoke would obscure the hunt, but it was far more likely to scramble her signal. She took a second note to investigate field use of those grenades.
It would be simplistic to regard these assaults as atrocities, her response as disproportionate. She knew the Commonwealth fringes would be appalled if they gleaned anything of her hobbies. She might even offend the jarls themselves, but such were the sacrifices of kings. The body politic was like a dominant athlete, a supreme warrior, white-skinned and bright-eyed, greeting each day with courage and fury. Like any warrior, it could be felled by a mighty axe—but the tiny microbe was just as deadly an adversary. Armaments could be seized, gun shipments impounded, but disease was another matter entirely. All it took was one mutated protein or one errant sneeze. The world could dissolve, stricken overnight with tumour-ridden pustules.
She’d seen it all clearly, even as a child. Trumba knew with certainty that, if you let one solitary germ breach your resistance—well, you invited catastrophe. The Urdur told her she’d been lucky to survive polio and lauded her determination. She saw the episode not only as formative, but necessary.
The great unwashed might consider it innocuous to look the other way, to indulge the filthy spectacle of a Chitai family bribing a seer. They might all like to get their grubby hands around a better life in unspoilt lands. But that was the single nucleotide change in the code, that was the fatal collapse of the immune system. Trumba had to inoculate society against that kind of selfishness. The outbreak of Rabboon Fever in Kashgar was a type of vaccine, just like the Razing of Himinsborg had been a cauterizing. She was learning from the past to make certain of the future. Most importantly, the wolfcoats were helping her clear up her father’s mess. They were much more reliable than the one-trick Einherjar.
Yes, she knew she would have to answer to some committee or other eventually. There was one rule for her and one rule for the poor (in their small smelly rooms, crammed into crime-infested blocks of corrugated iron). It was their shit that had spread the polio virus in the first place.
But it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t her rule. The Chieftain of the Gods, Odin himself, had been very clear on the caste system. Any quibblers could just read the Lay of Kings: the swarthy-skinned and the ugly were born to be slaves; the red-haired and ruddy were progenitors of herdsmen, craftsmen and farmers; the beautiful, bright-eyed blond babies were destined to rule. It was written, and you couldn’t just decide to ignore the entire fathering of mankind because it offended the coffee-drinking sophists of Miklagard. Trumba was on the side of the godsmen on this one, and the courts had always supported the divine.
RULING THE EMPIRE WASN’T EASY, but MIM gave a whole new meaning to imperial infallibility. Trumba barely had to get out of bed most days. MIM, the Myriad Improbability Machine—or maybe Mathematically Impossible Miracle (she couldn’t remember)—had been turned on in ’55, when she was still a teenager and too self-absorbed to understand how powerful the machine was. Until she was crowned, she always assumed the name was a truncation of Mímameiðr.
She had been surprised to find that it meant something.
Behind all the secrecy and security was a soft grey metal chip, frozen to near-absolute zero, entwined within a single black sprig of the tree. The machine connected the empire’s industrial-military complex, from the Well of Urdur to the Sökkvabekkr Data Archives, from the Folkvang Barracks to the Nóatún Launchsites. It worked on the same principles as Yggdrasil, apparently, and was as different to the older Difference Engines as the World Tree was to a solitary sapling. Where the greenways linked the biomass of nine worlds, MIM linked innumerable dimensions. The Skuld said it actually existed across all of them, but Trumba wasn’t interested in the theory. She wanted to know what MIM could do.
Trumba was permanently in contact with the machine through her visor although she occasionally went headset-free to watch the hundreds of monitors the Urdur maintained, and if she was really bored, she might thumb through the printed dispatches. It was only a matter of time before MIM would replace the whole spindly sisterhood and the Miklagard bureaucrats as well, swapping their mummery for something infinitely more modern—if that was the right phrase for something that existed outside reality as she understood it.
MIM’s first success was to bring about the last throes of the Jötnar War with relative ease, optimising the logistics of the final siege, pinpointing weaknesses in the defences, and changing weather patterns. But it didn’t just crunch numbers; it anticipated and optimised solut
ions for all eventualities. MIM didn’t need to be fed data. There was no need to input trends or suggest indicators, to spool through surveillance footage, or even type up a troop report. MIM watched it all with unblinking eyes—matching divorce rates in Uppsala to the price of peaches in Mangi, correlating with the average number of bed-slaves, the temperature on every third Tysdag, and the scorecards of amateur Tabul games. If Trumba had any enemies left, they’d be horrified at how everything and everyone was woven together, spun so very tightly around her fingers.
Its inventor was a Thuringian rassragr who used to joke the machine was more intelligent than an infinitude of Odin’s ravens but, thankfully, considerably kinder. Trumba, however, had no use for a humane machine. The inventor killed himself, the High Urdur reported, apparently by eating an apple laced with cyanide when his correctional hormone treatments didn’t take. His continued fondness for jokes somehow lived on in his machine. When MIM spoke, it used his arch voice and clipped vowels. Trumba kept it on mute and just read the reports.
The very hour she was crowned, she asked the machine to optimise her rule for eternity. Her ministers chuckled at that, assuming it was either childish fancy or deadpan wit. But they didn’t see the world as she did. She wasn’t interested in her legacy; she had no intention of ever relinquishing the crown. She wasn’t interested in heirs, or morality, or other constraints. Those things weren’t optimal; by definition, they reeked of compromise. She wanted continuation, acceleration, power, and perfection.
Iðunn Lind had helped there, of course, once she was “rescued.” Trumba had pardoned the Verðandi and set the Order back on the right track. Lind claimed that she’d been fooled into creating the Jötnar. It didn’t matter one way or the other to Trumba, so long as Lind produced enough of her magic Telomerase enzyme.
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