Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  The night sky made no answer.

  Wren sighed and frowned at the steel door again. She reached up and grabbed the rusty bars in the window and shook them.

  The fangs sank into her left hand in perfect silence and the only sound that broke the night was Wren’s shriek as she felt her flesh rent open and the searing, plague-filled venom trickling into her veins. She wrenched her hand back and fell to the ground, and through the bars she heard a deep-throated growl that ululated, like laughter.

  Groaning and gasping, Wren clutched her burning hand to her belly and stared up at the heavens. “Woden, you miserable son of a bitch!”

  Chapter 13

  Wren ran from Katja’s cell clutching her bleeding fingers to her belly, tears streaming from her eyes. She stumbled in the snow and fell hard against the stone wall of the castle, and she lay there a moment, wheezing and sobbing quietly with her chin on her chest and her eyes squeezed shut.

  I’m going to die. I’m going to turn into one of those things, those ugly freaks, those monsters, I’m going to turn into a monster, and then they’re going to come for me, and no one will protect me, and they’ll have to kill me.

  Maybe Freya will kill me.

  After a few moments she ran out of breath and out of tears and she just sat in the snow, exhausted and trembling, staring at a patch of stone in the wall beside her head. With her burning left hand in her lap, she raised her right hand to look at the bump of the rinegold ring on her finger inside her glove.

  Gudrun’s ring.

  She sniffed. “Hello, mistress? Gudrun? Brynhilda? Anyone?”

  Dimly she saw three or four withered old faces hover in the air for a moment, but only a moment. The faces of the dead valas of Denveller frowned at her and faded away into the darkness. She dropped her hand into her lap and sighed.

  “Why?” she whispered. Wren rolled her head against the wall to look up at the black sky and the flurries of white tumbling gently down toward her. “Why, lord? I served you, I kept my faith with you, I kept my oaths to you, and I would have been a good vala. I know I would have. Better than Gudrun, at least. I mean, let’s face it, she was crazy. She spent more time pissing on the floor than honoring you, Allfather.”

  The sky said nothing.

  “All right, well, maybe that was unfair. She did serve you a long time while she was able, and trained more than a few apprentices, I know. So that’s something. Sorry, lord.” Wren sniffed and shivered. “Still, I would have done pretty well, too.”

  The snow began to build up on her arm, and she gently shook it off.

  “You’re really not going to answer me, are you? I mean, you never do, but I was sort of thinking that you might this time, since I’m going to die now. You know, it would be nice. Just a word or two,” Wren whispered. “Good work, Wren. Thanks, Wren. Everything will be made clear in the next world, Wren.”

  A clump of snow fell from the outer wall and landed on the ground by her foot with a soft thump.

  “Fine.” Wren pushed herself up and trudged through the knee-deep snow to the iron door of the castle that led inside to the cloak room and the dining hall beyond, but a sound caught her ear and she paused. The crackle of the burning torch by the door seemed to roar in the silence, so she wandered away from its light and heat and noise back across the courtyard, listening.

  The sound had been either very quiet or very far away, but it had sounded like a word, a single word drawn out in a long, weary breath. She crunched across the yard, head down, eyes narrowed to slits. Her hand throbbed, but with it wrapped up inside her sleeve she found it easier to push the pain to the back of her mind.

  After all, I have hours, days, before anything will actually happen to me, right?

  “Morayo,” said the tiny voice.

  Wren froze in place, frowning at the dark walls and snowy lumps around her.

  Morayo? Where did that come from? And what does it mean?

  Slowly she started walking again, tilting her head back and forth. It had been a quiet voice, not a distant one, and the girl made her way around the far side of the castle, scanning the shuttered windows and even glancing at the top of the outer wall for some sign of life. But the cracks in the shutters were all dark and there was no one on the wall.

  “Morayo.”

  Wren looked sharply to her left, then hurried toward the castle wall. The starlight fell on a rough wall of black stone that ran straight down into the freshly fallen snow without a door or window or crack to tell what might be inside. Wren set to digging and kicking the snow away from the base of the wall, but under it all she only found the cold edge of where the wall and the earth met. There was nothing there.

  “Hello?” she called softly, and then a little louder, “Hello there?”

  The ground was silent, and the night was silent, and Wren’s feet were cold, so she stomped back around to the front of the castle and went inside. The dining hall was empty except for two of the old guards sitting by the fire at the far end, and she went to sit beside them for a little while to dry out her hair and boots, while taking great care to keep her left hand folded up inside her blanket, which she kept draped across her thin shoulders.

  The two guards said nothing to her. They didn’t even look at her. They just stared into the smoldering coals in the brazier and chewed on their beards and gently passed gas from time to time.

  With her hair dry and billowing out of control down her back and her left hand barely throbbing at all, and only a trickle of sweat on her brow, Wren stood up and quietly left the dining hall. She walked back down the corridor to the room she had slept in the night before. She stood in the corridor for a moment and stared through the open doorway at the cold, lonely bed in her room, and then she walked on by it.

  As she passed a room on her left, the curtain was pulled back and a young woman with long dark hair stared out at her. “Oh, it’s you.”

  Wren paused. “Thora, isn’t it? How are you?”

  “Fine. Tired. Cold.”

  Wren nodded.

  “So Gudrun is dead,” Thora said. “You must be pleased. Skadi says she was a horror. Did she do things to you?”

  “What things?”

  Thora shrugged. “Things she shouldn’t.”

  Wren cringed. “No! She didn’t do much at all. She could barely move.”

  “Oh. Well, good for you then. Are you planning on staying here for long?”

  “I’m not planning anything. I’m just waiting for Freya to come back.”

  “Then I’m sorry,” Thora said. “You’ll be waiting a long time. No one ever comes back from the north.”

  “Not even Leif?”

  The apprentice’s face hardened into an expression somewhere between rage and sorrow. “Leif will come back, somehow. He always survives.”

  “Oh.” Wren nodded. “I’ll bet he does. You know, back home we have a word for people that always survive, and it isn’t lucky. It’s craven. It’s a pity you don’t have any real men around here to remind you of that.”

  Thora’s hand whipped out from the shadows and smacked Wren across the face. “We had the finest men, the bravest warriors, and the finest prince, a prince worthy of standing beside the Allfather at Ragnarok, a prince who—” She broke off, her lip trembling. “But now they’re all dead. The plague took them, one by one, leaving us with the old, and with Leif.”

  Wren jerked back from the doorway, clutching her stinging cheek with a sudden tear gathering in the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry. You must have lost people you loved, too. Sorry. I didn’t mean it. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too.” The apprentice stared out from her haunted, sunken eyes and then withdrew into her room, leaving Wren alone in the dark corridor.

  She stared at the closed curtain for a moment, trembling and confused and tempted to press inside and talk to the tall girl again, but instead Wren turned and hurried down the hall with her eyes burning and lips squeezed tightly together. At the
end of the passage she turned left and found a stone stair, and she ran down it, down and down the narrow crooked steps into the blackness until she found the earthen floor and she sat down in the cold and the dark, and she cried.

  After a while she was too tired to cry anymore and she leaned back on the bottom step and stared into the utter darkness of the cellar. She was about to stand up and go back to her room to try to sleep when she heard footsteps above her descending the stairs. At first she didn’t move, content to let whatever servant find her and sneer at her and tell her to go back to her room. But then she heard the whisper.

  “Morayo.”

  The voice! It’s coming from down here!

  Wren stood up, groping in the endless shadows for something, anything. She had no idea what she was looking for, but she had to look, and then she remembered the feet thumping down the long stone stair behind her, and she fumbled her way around what seemed to be a tall, frozen sack of potatoes, and she huddled down to wait.

  Torchlight bobbed down the last few steps and one of the elderly guards entered the cellar with a lit candle in one hand and a small plate in the other. He walked across the cellar, taking his small ball of dancing light with him, illuminating the rough rock walls of the cave that served as the castle cellar, and Wren tried to see all the sacks of vegetables and grain, and all the salted carcasses, piled along the walls as he passed.

  At the end of the cave the guard turned left and moved out of sight for a moment, but the candlelight continued to dance on the walls right there, just around the corner. And then the man returned, walking just as calmly and dully as before with his candle and plate, and he went up the steps, taking the light with him.

  When he was gone, Wren stood up and carefully felt her way across the dark cave, rediscovering with her outstretched hands the sacks and butchered animals that she had seen a moment ago. She came to a place that she guessed to be the corner around which the man had disappeared, and she stopped, knelt down, and whispered, “Hello?”

  “Morayo.”

  Wren fell over backwards. The voice had been so close, just in front of her face. There had even been a faint gasp of breath, a movement of the cold air. She got back up and reached out with her hand. “My name is Wren. Who are you? Is that your name, Morayo?”

  She groped left and right, and farther forward, but encountered nothing. Unwilling to move any farther from the stairs, Wren stopped trying to reach out. Instead, she pulled off her right glove with her teeth and held her bare hand in front of her face and rubbed the rinegold ring with her thumb, and whispered the words, “Wake up, you old hags.”

  The ring glowed faintly, so faintly that at first all Wren could see was the ring itself floating in the dark. But the light grew a bit more until she could see her hand, and when she held the ring close to the ground she could see the face of the stone floor. She reached out again, extending her hand just above the floor. She found a plate, a dark circle of tin lying crooked on a bump, and a few small bones wearing a few small shreds of flesh and fat on them. There was a broth in the bottom of the plate as well, but it had run across the tilted surface and down to the ground.

  Wren reached a little farther, and found a bare foot. Five dirty toes twitched in the light, and someone inhaled sharply.

  A woman?

  Wren moved her body a bit farther forward and raised her ring up past the foot, and leg, and body to find the face. She found it exactly where she expected it to be, and yet the sudden discovery of two wide white eyes in the darkness startled her and Wren yanked her hand back, blanketing the face in darkness again, which was worse. So she held out her ring and looked on the face of the woman.

  She was middle-aged with gaunt cheeks and dark-rimmed eyes that never seemed to blink. At first Wren thought that the light from her ring was so feeble that it left the woman’s skin in shadows, but after a moment she realized that the stranger’s skin was naturally dark, a deep sort of brown Wren had seen in the eyes of only a handful of people from the south of Ysland, and her hair rose about her head like young heather on the moors.

  The woman blinked and whispered, “Morayo.”

  “Morayo?” Wren sat down beside her and tried to hold her hand up in a comfortable and non-threatening gesture so the light would fall on both their faces. “Your name is Morayo? I’m Wren. Can you say Wren?”

  “Kill… Morayo.” She wasn’t just speaking slowly from exhaustion or starvation, she was struggling to speak Yslander at all. She had an accent like nothing the young vala had ever heard before. “I want… to kill… Morayo.”

  “Oh, I see.” Wren nodded slowly. “All right. Good, good. That’s something. You want to kill someone. It’s good to have goals in life. It keeps you going when times are tough. I know how that is. Now, what is your name?”

  The stranger looked at her with shaking eyes that stared right through her, seeing nothing. Wren watched her eyes dance in confusion and fear. It was a look she recognized all too well, the same look she had seen in Gudrun’s cloudy eyes every day for the last six years.

  She’s insane.

  Wren patted the woman’s hand and tried to move the plate closer to her, but the stranger grabbed the plate from her hand and pushed it back down to the floor in the exact same place, tilted up on the uneven stone floor.

  “Okay then. We’ll just leave that there for now.”

  The glow from her ring began to flicker and fade.

  “I’m going to go back upstairs now, but I’ll come back tomorrow. I promise.”

  The woman shuddered. “Morayo.”

  Wren nodded and exhaled slowly. Then she turned and fumbled back across the dark cellar to the bottom of the narrow winding steps and climbed back up to the main floor. Only a glimmer of starlight fell through the small barred windows, but it was enough to make the upper world seem like a brightly lit paradise compared to the black pit of the cellar.

  She hurried back to her room and crawled into bed, where she lay shivering, alone. Her injured hand started to throb again, and when she closed her eyes she dreamed of fangs and blood.

  Chapter 14

  The next morning Freya awoke to Erik’s strong hand gently massaging her shoulder. In the darkness they had moved another mile to the northeast of the crevasse where the two dead reavers lay, and now the first cool rays of the sun fell on the eastern hills and fields to the faint rustling sounds of crickets, rabbits, and sparrows. She kissed her husband, tasting the trace of salt on his tongue, and then they gathered their spears and blankets, and looked at Leif. The youth sat cross-legged on a rock, his chin on his fist. He glanced at them, frowned, and hopped down to the ground. Without a word, he set out for the east, and they followed.

  The eastward trek was easier than skirting Mount Esja, though the constant interruptions to cross a stream or hike over a steep hill slick with frost slowed their progress. The brush was sparse here, offering few handholds and no food, and vistas of nothing but grass and earth and stone dusted with ice and snow. But at the crest of each hill, Freya looked out at the landscape and saw their destination growing closer.

  They passed the little peak of Sandfell at the base of the volcano, and there they found an empty shepherd’s hut of broken and tumbled stones, but no trace of reavers. Then they began the long hike up the northern side of Jolur’s Hill, a huge bulge in the earth clothed in brown grass and frozen mud. A lone rabbit ran across their path more than once, and several crows stood on the high ridge above them, watching the three people slowly crossing their domain.

  When they finally started down the far side of Jolur’s Hill, Freya sighted Myrka’s Lake to the south and the peak of Burfell beyond it. Burfell was the farthest north she had ever ventured before, years ago, and she wondered if that night she spent on the high hill she’d been watched by reavers, or if they hadn’t existed yet. She couldn’t remember how long ago it had been.

  They continued east across the icy stream called Brynja’s Ribbon near a handful of empty cottages and tramp
led gardens full of old tracks that led nowhere, and then they continued up and over Mulafell Ridge. On the far side of the ridge the earth dove deep into a gorge and Leif said the river at the bottom was the Lower Botsna, and on the far side of the gorge Freya saw that the face of the earth was wrinkled and cracked with the channels of hundreds of ancient streams that no longer flowed west to the sea.

  They followed a deer trail down into the gorge and crossed the river at a rocky fording where a dozen broken houses stood collapsing into the hillside. Erik knelt by the corner of one house, pawing at the ground. He signed, “There was a fire here recently. Less than a week ago.”

  Freya looked at the black marks on the ground. “A very small fire. But you’re right. Someone is still alive out here. Or was.”

  On the far bank they turned north to follow the river, and soon the water grew deeper and wider and faster, churning white and wild over the stones as it raced north and west to the coast. At midmorning they came to a point where a second river, the Upper Botsna, came racing down from the east to join its Lower sister. The rushing and roaring of the water made any attempt at talking useless, and Leif pointed along the eastward river, and they hiked on.

  They kept close to the water’s edge, sometimes on the cold turf a few steps above the river and sometimes in the freezing spray on the stones in the river itself. Shortly after leaving the Lower Botsna, the land began to rise, angling up steeper and steeper in the shadow of the wrinkled peak to the south, and the walls of the shore rose up around them like a canyon, rising up in sheer walls of gray stone as they trudged along the river’s edge with cold wet feet in the deepening shadows. Soon the roar of the churning river became unbearable as it echoed down the stone corridor of the gorge.

  “No one could live in here,” Erik signed.

  “Because of the noise?” Freya signed back.

  “That, and because the river would only have to rise a little bit to wash a house away.”

  “So what? You think he’s leading us into a trap?”