The All Father Paradox

by Ian Stuart Sharpe

  “And that’s why you came direct to my chambers to warn me? How loyal you are. I haven’t decided what to do with the Roarer himself yet, but the empire is quite safe in my hands.”

  “Everything dies, but not everything stays dead. Does your Majesty know what a draugr is? They live in the dark, hungering for the life they have lost. The Jötnar were his gift from the grave. Your Roarer is as old as the hills his kind are buried in. Now he carries his own curse. He escaped his burial mound, and he will escape your prison.”

  Perhaps a bit of martial praise might stand him down, she thought. He was probably a Christian; those cultists were always talking about resurrections and the dead returning. Didn’t the military weed out heretics? She’d have to review the screening processes.

  “Oh, there are worse things than dead men, and I sleep easy in my bed knowing men like you are serving me.”

  “Your Majesty, I re-enlisted to put a stop to him. I should have seen to it when I had the chance, the instant we caught him again. I thought it my mistake to fix. But the fylkir’s will is the will of the wind, and who am I to argue? Well, I have delivered my warning. I can’t make you heed it.”

  He was muttering now, the earlier confidence lost. His mind was like the sky blanketed in clouds; one minute he was a drifter, the next instant, he was lucid and foreboding.

  “And I can’t let you leave,” she said. “I have listened to more than my fair share of drivel today. MIM, I am still appreciative of your talents!”

  Trumba spoke to the air in general, expecting the machine to reply with force. This man was very depressing, like a travel guide for the long dead.

  Gest shook his head. “The Midgard Infinity Machine? So, it is real. If there is one thing I have learnt in all my years, it is neither a shoemaker nor a shaftmaker be, for anyone but yourself. The men speak of it as though it is worse than the Jötnar.”

  She wondered who the wolfcoat’s next of kin were. He’d mentioned Danish ancestry; someone should write a suitable bereavement notice.

  “When the victors write history, we edit out the shibboleths.”

  “Oh, believe me,” he said. “I understand. I’ve seen some big fish get away. Tell yourself whatever story you like. People always do.”

  And there it was, the insolence! Trumba might have bothered to reply, but at that moment the door contorted, fell out of its frame and toppled into the room, swiftly followed by a dozen guardsmen. So much for the emergency responder drills, she thought, but better late than never.

  THE WOLFCOAT WAS HOG-TIED AND left in the bathroom while she had MIM summon Bohr and Mannerheim to her room. There was no choice now; she was going to have to come clean about both her special guests.

  It wasn’t the ideal forum to explain herself, surrounded by men. She’d tried for a few minutes to patch Iðunn Lind into the conversation; the old bird might fight in her corner out of guilt. But Bohr prevaricated as soon as he arrived. There were fundamental incompatibilities between the Verðandi bio-computers and MIM’s hardware, he said, it was like a puddle of amino acids trying to have a dialogue with the ultimate expression of evolution. Trumba couldn’t tell whether he was being derogatory or was just envious, so she’d sent people to physically bring Iðunn to her council, but the lector called them back, saying that he had no intention of letting “that greengrocer” into his facility. It was unbelievable really—with all the money she provided, she couldn’t get the Vǫlur to stop squabbling and co-operate. She decided to focus on the issue at hand, and that meant a handful of heaven’s little fungal helpers.

  By that time, there were half a dozen naval types milling around the room, trying very hard not to gawp at their half-naked empress. She liked tantalising the troops with a touch of her own augmented reality. She tried to make eye contact with one of the naval men. It would make them fight harder in the future. Or just harder.

  When Mannerheim had arrived, the officers in her room were summarily dismissed and replaced by new men who’d arrived with the admiral.

  Ah well, thought the empress, no time like the present.

  Admiral Mannerheim seemed… surprised to learn that the Roarer had been brought to Mímisbrunnr in defiance of security protocol. Well, maybe surprised was an overstatement. He was somewhat hard to read at times. Bohr was less of an enigma. He looked like he was ready to burst.

  “Ymir’s corpse! What have you… where is he? Who is guarding him? Tell me he’s not conscious!”

  “He’s being held in a secure cell in one of the unfinished modules on the far side of the Ring,” she said. “I have him guarded by my best—”

  “If it’s an unfinished module it’s not secure enough. Not by a long shot.”

  “Bohr, my guards scouted the location ahead of time and made the call. He’s not going anywhere.”

  Mannerheim’s visor was chirping now like a flock of sparrows. The admiral looked quite pained, but Trumba only realised just how annoyed he was when he went to salute her. He snapped instead and shook Trumba out of her reveries.

  “You captured the greatest war criminal in history, but you didn’t think to inform the General Staff? Do you have any idea what he is capable of, what his genetics make possible?”

  “The Roarer?” she answered, with an insouciant shrug. “That’s exactly why I am keeping him on the Ring. I want his secrets. All of them, and as the Queen of the Storm Hall, you know, I am entitled to them.”

  “Empress, this facility is not a toy. It—”

  “Don’t you dare presume to lecture me, Admiral. This facility belongs to me. MIM and the Skuld will pluck every secret he has like bloody petals.”

  “MIM…” muttered Bohr.

  Mannerheim looked constipated as he watched something scroll across his visor. He clenched his teeth.

  “Yes, well, I hope for all our sakes that is true. I’ve issued a General Alert. At least we have laid hands on his accomplice,” said Mannerheim. “Let’s see what this turncoat can tell us.”

  “Oh, well, this will be fun. That one has all his ancestors in him, talking all at once. Bátrdrit. Make it quick and send him on to Valhöll so he can annoy the dead directly. I’ll find my visor and follow.”

  Mannerheim had the Varangians bring the Úlfhéðnar to a chair, placed by the inside wall, with an officer at either side. He began by asking him who he was, and his relationship to the Roarer. Trumba saw that he was trying to be avuncular, a friend to the ordinary soldier, but he wasn’t very good at the ruse. Besides, the wolfcoat was too far gone to use military formalities; irregulars got like that.

  The prisoner looked and sounded strangely depressed for a man who had been full of dire warning not ten minutes ago. Trumba didn’t understand the sudden dismay. Surely, he had thought this far ahead? How divorced from reality could you be? You couldn’t just invite yourself into the inner sanctum of the empress without repercussion. Come to think of it, if you were invited into her inner sanctum and declined her bed for no good reason, you deserved everything that was coming to you. Rassragrs, the lot of them. The thought left her cold, so she went to her wardrobe and found something a little warmer to wear. Then it clicked: truth serum. The wolfcoat had been drugged! She should have seen that coming. Damn, she thought, she was slowing down. She hurried to rejoin the conversation, eager to avoid missing anything else.

  “…he used to say odd things like, ‘I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.’ All kinds of nonsense.”

  The old warrior tutted at himself, distractedly. Trumba knew that brand of limpness; navy drugs had a real kick. She perched on the end of her bed, watching the interrogation unfurl, sipping from a golden goblet. It was fun to be in the actual room this time.

  Lector Bohr sat directly opposite Gest, alongside the admiral. It was the double act of the century. She grimaced at the thought that she was relying on these two men, when they were so obviously in cahoots. Bohr had the demeanour of a remote and humourless psychiatrist, evaluating a disturbed patient for t
he umpteenth time. No doubt his Skuld had scuttled to make sure he was fully briefed, but even so, the lector didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow when the prisoner recounted the quick version of candle and the curse. She couldn’t tell whether it was pragmatism and Bohr simply didn’t want to waste time, or if it was something more sinister, something he’d already known perhaps. Was it possible that one of his order had unleashed the curse a millennium ago? Was their record-keeping that good?

  On second thought, it was probably much more prosaic. Knowing Bohr, he had already used his Bots to quietly check the warrior’s blood and genotype. She was dying to find out what everyone else knew—except she couldn’t put her hands on her visor. She scanned the room for it, irked at being out of the loop.

  “If you don’t have a service number, perhaps tell us where you enlisted?” Mannerheim asked.

  “I am a farmer’s son who found he was good with a sword, and I’ve never been paid to think unless it was the way to point the sharp end. I was raised in Groning in Denmark. I first swore on an oath-ring there.”

  “No thumbprint? Well, can you tell us where you fought?”

  “I’ve fought everywhere in my time, but I was on Jötunheim when Utgard fell. I thought he was long dead. Imagine, he called the Jötnar, rose them from the pages of the sagas! We’d share those stories around the fire, the hirdsmenn and I. They all joined Odin in his halls, one by one. I figured we’d all meet again at Ragnarok and that I was just taking the long way around.”

  Trumba interrupted. She found it bizarre that the truth serum was having so little effect.

  “Enough nostalgia. You have enough stories to write your own saga.”

  Mannerheim nodded at one of his commanders, who flicked through the information on his visor. Trumba paced around the room, frantically searching for hers. There was a business in the room that she wanted to be part of. Without her visor, she was truly naked.

  Bohr smiled at the wolfcoat.

  “Perhaps we can find some middle ground? This Roarer, he captured you?”

  “I manned the Gjallarhorn Array during the Breach of Gastropnir. Sonic weapons hurt them, kept them back. Still, the Einherjar withstood assaults you wouldn’t believe, the Jötnar erupting all along the ridge, a cannonade of molten metal. I was one of the first to cross the Vimur River, but fell there with a thousand more. A Jötunn made our slain into a bridge of the dead, as his kind trolled for survivors.”

  “Brave men,” said Mannerheim, “true to their oaths.”

  “Bah. Even the Jomsvikings would have fled. We vowed to fight against men, not shapechangers dressed in flayed skins. The Jötnar pierced our ranks like driving rain, blasting lightning from their fingertips. The skies were so thick with their swarms they blotted out the sun.”

  “But the emperor carried the field? The Raven Banner flew victorious?”

  “The raven appeared all right, beak wide open, flapping its wings and restless on its feet. It left with blood on its beak, human flesh in its talons and the reek of corpses in its mouth. Never trust a skald: victory is never a poem, it is sinew and steel, guns and grit. The field was carried with HEIMDAL strikes after they gutted Emperor Dietbald and paraded about his remains.”

  Gest made a sign of the hammer in the air, touching his shoulders.

  Mannerheim nodded silently throughout all of this. Trumba suspected it was his order that scorched the skies of Jötunheim. HEIMDAL burst with the light of a million suns. The land was bleak to begin with, but the firestorms incinerated the forests. Within days, the black rains came, clouds of ash and soot snuffed out the sun, and the world froze. She’d only seen the broadcasts, she’d been too young and too sequestered to follow the battle in person.

  “You survived though? This far?” asked the admiral.

  Trumba groaned inwardly at his vast and penetrating insight. They’d stretched credibility to breaking point now; any more and she would scream. They knew something—they had to. Where was the fucking visor?!

  “Well, the missiles might have made lighting my candle a little easier, but I was deep below ground. I helped the surviving Verðandi to the rescue ships. I was the guest of Jötnar for the last few days of the siege although it wasn’t as pleasing as imperial hospitality. I played dead after the slaughter at Vimur. Then the draugr found me and brought me in. I swear he knew just where to look. Draugr know all manner of secrets.”

  “Such as? What did he say? Any little detail may be helpful.”

  “When he first saw me, he huddled down close to my chest, as if checking that I was breathing. I was caked in gore, surrounded by broken bodies, crushed into the soil. I remember hoping he’d pass by, trying to hold my breath. I remember the ravens shrieking and hoping against hope they’d leave my eyes in my skull. He admired my belt a while. I could feel him trace its edge with his nails, like he was caressing the fingers of an old flame, rekindling memories. I thought he was going to eat me, but then he was gone, into the trees like a breeze.”

  Mannerheim spent a few moments glancing distractedly at his own visor, silently sending orders and receiving the required answers.

  “Cross reference psych for evals,” he said. “Religious affiliations, you know the drill.”

  When Gest spoke, there was an urgency in his voice.

  “Admiral, you’ve checked the records, so can we talk as men? The Witch Queen. I knew her, drank at her wedding to Botulfr the Black. She would always say ‘what is written can be rewritten,’ and that stuck with me. Now, I’ll try and explain, but I am not sure I have the words or that you have the context. I am very tired…”

  He was slurring now, barely able to string a sentence together. Trumba was incredulous.

  “What the fuck is this lunatic talking about?! Who is this Witch Queen?”

  The old warhorse sounded drowsy, speaking as if in a dream.

  “I came to warn you. Queen Ellisif had the sight. She saw then three men. The first was Harald, dead in the blood-red roots of the empire. The second was Askr, the greatest skald of the age, climbed high up into the leafy green boughs. I am the third; I have vaulted higher still. Are we not beyond the rime and frost, touching the stars? There was a fourth, and he has come to shake the tree to its very roots. Your prisoner is a Howling One, crept out of his grave.”

  Well, so much for her Úlfhéðnar. Post-traumatic stress, it broke the strongest of men.

  “Draugrrs, indeed,” she said. “I interrogated the man myself. The only thing shocking about him is his hair.”

  Mannerheim inhaled slowly, the air whistling through his dangling jaw. She always knew military intelligence was an oxymoron, but couldn’t understand why Nanna had seen anything in this man. Trumba would reappoint him soon—the Fleshpots of Sind always needed a firm hand. There were other people to command the fleet.

  The admiral turned slowly toward Trumba and took a step toward her. She noticed, only then, the cracked remains of her visor under his great jackboot. His eyes were withering.

  “Dómhild,” he spat, “we invite our friends to dinner. Our enemies, we have nothing to do with. You appear to be confused over which is which.”

  “How dare you speak to me that way!” she said. “What is going on here? And why the fuck is my visor under your boot?”

  Trumba wasn’t going to suffer being scolded in public. The best way to deal with men like Mannerheim was to appear as imperious and unbending as possible. Her father had done the exact opposite and look what it had achieved.

  “Because we have all been under your drug-addled heel for far too long. Your negligence is astounding. Your father would be ashamed. He died for this empire so that you would have something left to rule. That you run secret death-squads is one thing, but it is quite another to use them to bring the enemy, the creature that murdered Dietbald, to your very door. I haven’t the words…”

  Aloof, dismissive. That was the key. She shifted into the right stance. She waved her hand, nonchalantly.

  “I fail to see the pr
oblem,” she said. “There are no sub-optimal outcomes here. MIM was quite certain. The Roarer holds the key to the secrets of the Jötnar, and despite the ravings of this madman here, the Father of Monsters is quite secure.”

  “You stupid whore!” the admiral screamed. “You gave the Jötunn access to MIM when you brought him aboard. The whole Ring has been compromised for days! And then he parades this brainwashed fanatic to rub it in our faces! I think that constitutes a sub-optimal outcome, don’t you?”

  The whole room winced and fell into a stunned silence. Bohr sighed his assent.

  “The Roarer is a master manipulator, your Majesty. With what he secretes from his glands, it wouldn’t have taken him long to bond with the systems here and have them at his beck and call.”

  Mannerheim was apoplectic, storming across the room, waving his arms. “Slave-maker genes. While you have been parading about, naked as the day you were born, we’ve been investigating the damage. This poor, unwitting guardsman has been enthralled and sent to sow confusion. We saw it a thousand times in the war; decoys, sometimes laced with thermobarics. Our own people turned against us. There are always enough chemical traces to find the fingerprints and maybe to track the puppet-master. But his mind is quite gone. The delusion is total.”

  Trumba reeled across a gamut of emotions, from anxious to despairing, by way of terrified. Externally, she kept a veneer of calm, visage of normality, although her facial muscles twitched with the effort. She could handle this upstart.

  “I doubt it. Much as I despised my father, that Jötunn spilled my blood, imperial blood. I have repaid his kindness, an eye for an eye. He is bound with the intestines of his own two sons. Gutted like fish for rope. Let him retch on the stink of his own flesh for as long as Iðunn’s chemicals last.”