Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Erik nodded.

  Freya grimaced and tightened her grip on her spear. She was tempted to call a halt and demand a few answers from their guide, but with the river screaming in their ears it would be a waste of time. So she kept her eyes on the path ahead, the path behind, and the gorge walls high overhead.

  Half a league farther up, Erik pointed to the stone wall about as high up as Freya’s head at a long straight black mark etched into the rock. “What sort of fire did that?”

  “Maybe a torch was dragged across it,” Freya signed. “I don’t know, but it means there is someone living up here after all.”

  They pressed on, and the farther they went the louder the river became. A thin, cool mist hovered on the water and a thin green moss clung to the rock walls around them. And then a gray shape appeared in the mist ahead. It was a gently curving line that stretched across the entire river from one side of the gorge to the other, and when they were close enough Freya saw that it was a heavy chain bolted into the walls and strung across the river at a height just above her head. Leif pointed to the chain, and then to the far side of the river, and mimed the act of walking using his two fingers on his palm.

  Freya exchanged frowns with her husband.

  Dangling exposed above a rushing river? No, he won’t try to kill us here. It’s too obvious, and too uncertain. A fall into the river might be dangerous, but not fatal. No, I need to figure out why he wants us dead.

  Is he afraid we’ll succeed where he failed? Is he just afraid to be out here at all? Or did Skadi tell him to kill us? Maybe she doesn’t want to find a cure. Maybe she wants to keep Rekavik afraid, isolated, and obedient to her. She’s only a dead king’s wife, not a real queen, so maybe she could lose power if the crisis ended.

  Leif reached up for the chain, but Freya pulled him back and indicated to him that she would cross first. The sullen youth shrugged and stepped back. With a hand up from Erik, Freya leapt up to the chain and wrapped her legs over it so that she hung with her back to the river, and then she began pulling herself across. Hand over hand she moved along the chain, feeling the clumps of rust on the links and the cold smooth patches of steel where the links rubbed together.

  The mist was thick and she felt her clothes growing heavy as beads of water formed on her face and shimmered on her eyelashes. It was a long, cold crossing, but she reached the far side without incident. Then Leif crossed in the same fashion, and finally Erik joined them. The huge hunter had barely dropped to the gravel strand before Leif set off again along the north shore, still following the river east.

  Now the river screamed at them, and the walls screamed at them, and the mist grew so thick they could only see a few paces ahead. And finally Leif stopped and pointed up the path.

  Glymur Falls towered over the river, a sheer white cascade that stampeded over the edge of the gorge and crashed down over the rock walls from one mossy ledge to another. Most of the water fell together in a single torrent, but some of the water came down the rock face closer to them, running down in silvery streams before rejoining the river. And in between the white falls and the silver falls, there was a house.

  It was a stone lodge built upon a ledge high above the level of the river, and it stood against the gorge wall surrounded by huge broken stones. The roof was also stone, and there were no windows, so the only clear sign that the house was indeed a house at all was the heavy leather curtain protecting the doorway.

  Freya gazed up at the falls, at the impossibly high and endless rush of white water plummeting down from the surface of the earth high above them, and she signed, “It’s beautiful. It must be the biggest waterfall in all of Ysland.”

  Erik shrugged and signed back, “I’ve seen bigger.”

  She punched him on the arm, and they resumed walking.

  Leif led the way up to the ledge and he pushed inside the house without pausing at the door, and they followed him inside. Freya stepped into the deep shadows of the windowless home and blinked through her dripping hair. It was nearly silent inside the house. She wiggled her ears and jaw, and reveled in the gentle sensation of being able to hear herself think again. She glanced around, but there was nothing to see. The floor had been swept bare and the house was empty.

  Leif flopped down in the corner on the floor and sighed. “Well, here it is. Glymur House. If anyone was still going to be alive out here, I thought it might be Kjartan. He lived here with his mother. Tough old bastard.”

  Freya wrung out her hair on the floor and then let the heavy blonde lock hang down her chest to her belt. “Why would anyone live here? How would they even build this house?”

  Leif shrugged. “It was a vala’s house. Kjartan’s mother was the vala. The last vala of Glymur, it would appear. Kjartan fished the river, I think. There’s trout in there. He’s the one who put up the chain, too, but that was a long time ago.”

  “So you’ve been here before?”

  “Sure, when I was younger, back before the plague. I used to live a few leagues west of here, farther down the Botsna near the sea. I remember Kjartan didn’t have much, but there was furniture in here, and skins and furs. They were all gifts for the vala from over the years. But it looks like they took everything with them. They must have left before the reavers found them.” Leif stretched and groaned.

  A dead end.

  Freya sighed and leaned against the cool rock wall.

  So now the real hunt begins, with no trail to follow, and no idea where Fenrir might be.

  Erik wandered around the room, scraping his shoes on the floor and examining the walls. He paused to peer into a crack where two of the rocks didn’t quite touch, admitting a sliver of light and a whisper of the noise of the falls. He jerked back from the wall with a grimace and he looked at Freya, signing, “I don’t think they left in time.”

  She followed him outside, back into the roar and the mist, and they circled the house. On the far side of the ledge, just in front of the huge column of churning white water of the larger waterfall, there was a narrow crack running up the face of the rock wall, and jammed into that crack just a little above Erik’s head was a metal spike, perhaps the broken shaft of an old steel spear. And hanging from that spike was a body.

  It was only half a body, the legs and pelvis, possibly a woman’s from the look of the hips, and it was dangling upside-down from the ankles, which were bound together with a hemp rope that had rotted down to its last threads. The bones themselves were bleached white from the sun, and every one of them was covered in huge, glistening brown slugs.

  The rest of the body, the ribs and arms and skull, were missing. But Freya spotted a bit of white in the cracks in the rock around the hanging legs, and she reached down into a gap full of small stones and pulled out a single broken rib.

  “It can’t be Kjartan,” Leif said.

  Freya could barely understand him over the noise of the falls, but she read his expression and the man’s name on his lips, and drew his meaning. She recognized all too well that the bones were not a man’s, and were small for a grown woman as well, so if it was not a child, it was certainly an elderly woman’s body.

  Kjartan’s mother, the vala. Another dead vala.

  Freya inhaled a long sigh of the cold wet mist and wiped her hair back from her face. She patted Erik on the arm and signed, “There’s nothing here. We should go back—”

  She broke off when she saw the look on her husband’s face change and his eyes snapped to the left. Freya spun to look just in time to see a tall man with brown skin and midnight hair step out of the shadows from behind the waterfall.

  The stranger’s face wore many fine lines around his eyes and mouth, as though from years of worry and sorrow, but his brow and cheeks were quite smooth and strong. His hair was thick and wild and wavy, even weighed down with the damp of the mist, and there were faint streaks of gray at his temples and the edges of his stubbled jaw.

  Freya couldn’t begin to guess how old he might be, thirty or sixty or anywhere between
, but his dark eyes sparkled with amusement and a faint grin curled his lip. She smiled and raised a hand in greeting. “Hello there!”

  “Son of a bitch!” Leif whipped his sword free of its sheathe and gripped it in both hands.

  Freya looked at the youth. “Hey, language!” But Erik grabbed her shoulder before she could stalk toward him. “What are you—oh.”

  The stranger wore a long dark blue coat with bright silver buttons down the right side, but the coat was open to reveal the man’s finely tailored shirt and trousers and shining black boots, and his sword. It was no Yslander sword. The hilt was slender with a woven grip, and the guard was a square plate instead a bar, and instead of a pommel there was a simple black cap below the grip.

  That’s a pretty little sword.

  Freya raised an eyebrow.

  It looks like a snake.

  The stranger smiled a cold and humorless smile, and he called out, “Leif of the Blackmane! The shining sword of Rekavik! It’s been ages, young man, just ages. How have you been?” He rested his hand on the butt of his sword.

  “You’re dead!” Leif hissed, his sword shaking in his hands.

  The stranger held out his empty hands as though inviting the youth to embrace him. “Not at all, young man. Why? Aren’t you happy to see me again?” He spoke with a strange accent, and his smile widened to flash his brilliant white teeth at the young warrior.

  Freya wrapped her fingers around her favorite knife, and found the bone handle cold to the touch. She called out over the roar of the falls, “Leif! Who is this?”

  The youth didn’t answer. He shuffled forward a few paces on the wet rock, keeping his sword pointed at the stranger.

  The dark man leapt lightly across the wet ledges to stand between the hunters and the young warrior.

  “Stay away from me!” Leif shuffled back.

  “I intend to, young man, just as soon as I repay you for our last encounter.” The stranger stepped forward and drew his sword, and Leif screamed.

  Freya stared at the young man. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  The Yslander’s sword clattered on the rock and tumbled into the river. The youth stumbled back, his face ashen, his mouth stretched wide in a silent scream, his neck straining with throbbing veins.

  Still Freya stared in confusion. “What happened?”

  And then Leif’s left arm fell off at the shoulder, leaving a blackened stump waggling in his severed sleeve. Leif stared down at his arm on the ground, and then he collapsed, struck his head on the rock ledge, and rolled back into the river.

  Freya started forward. Erik tried to hold her back, but she shrugged him off and ran to the edge of the rock to look down into the frothing waters, but there was no sign of Leif. The dark man sighed and she jumped back, a knife in her hand. “Who are you?”

  The man raised his sword, not to threaten her but to inspect it. The blade shone with a brilliant white light that cast his face in sharp lines and deep shadows, and the mist from the falls exploded into waves of scintillating rainbows. He smiled sadly, and slipped the sword away, and suddenly the ledge and the mist were quite dull and dim once more. “You’re not a friend of his, are you?”

  “Who are you?” Freya shouted. Erik moved closer, his spear leveled at the man’s back.

  He killed Leif, and Leif was a prick, but he wasn’t a murderer. At least, not yet, I don’t think. So what does that make this man?

  The stranger inclined his head. “Perhaps it would be better if we spoke inside.”

  “What?” she shouted over the falls and squinting through the mist. “Maybe we should go somewhere else to talk.”

  “Indeed, fair lady.” The man turned and leapt lightly back across the ledges and slipped into the shadows behind the falls.

  Freya frowned and put her knife away. Erik nodded at the falls, and she nodded at him, and they followed the stranger into the darkness. The rock ledges were slick and the rushing cascade was absolutely deafening, but Freya kept her spear close and minded her feet and soon she was standing inside the cave. Erik slipped once, but she caught him, and they stood side by side. The falls shimmered behind her like a curtain of crystal sparkling in the sunlight. But ahead of her she could see nothing at all.

  “Hello?” she called.

  The soft sigh of a sword being drawn echoed in the distance, and the stranger’s white blade appeared in the darkness, illuminating the rough stone floor, the vicious stalactites hanging overhead, and the man holding the shining weapon.

  “Come along, fair lady,” he said. He headed back into the cave, taking the light with him.

  Freya followed with Erik at her side, and they hiked up the gentle incline of the cavern until the falls were only a pale dot behind and below them, and their roaring was reduced to the gentle shushing of a stream or the wind in the grass. At first they saw nothing but stone walls, but soon they came upon a slope strewn with bones, pale white ribs and femurs and skulls, many smashed into fragments that crunched underfoot.

  Above the bones, the stranger led them into a chamber where the floor was quite smooth and the hanging rock spears had all been broken off, leaving smooth little stumps above their heads. There were quite a few furs and skins piled up against one wall, which Freya took to be the man’s bed, but it was the only sign of human habitation. There were no other pieces of furniture, no tools, no clothes, nothing to cook with, and nothing to eat. At least, not that she could see.

  “You live here?” she asked.

  “I do indeed,” the stranger answered. He sat down on the edge of his bedding and plunged his sword into a crack in the floor beside him. The shining blade filled the chamber with its pale, dead light, but within moments Freya saw the stone floor begin to glow a dull red and the air grew warmer and drier. Tiny arcs of lightning writhed and snapped along the sword’s edge, hissing and buzzing like a living thing. Their host gestured to the floor near the sword and said, “Please, have a seat.”

  They sat. The man on the bed rested his hands on his knees and gazed into the bright blade of his sword. “There were times, so many times, when I imagined what I would do if I ever saw Leif again. Flights of fantasy, day dreams, you know the sort. A bloody bit of torture, a grandiose duel, and many brave and poetic words from me, of course.” He smiled briefly. “I suppose I was just too surprised to see him today, too angry to think. Ah well.” He sighed and shifted his gaze to Freya and then Erik, and back again. “Is he your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “He doesn’t speak, does he?”

  “No.”

  The man nodded. “Well, that simplifies things in some ways, doesn’t it?”

  “Who are you?” Freya asked.

  “What a deeply philosophical question, probably more so for me than perhaps any other person in the world, in history, even. I have so very many names—”

  “Just one will do,” Freya said.

  Please don’t say Woden.

  He raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Omar. Omar Bakhoum, at your service, fair lady.”

  “And why did you kill Leif?”

  The man called Omar smiled again and winked at her. “You don’t seem very upset about it. He wasn’t a close friend of yours, was he?”

  “We’d only just met, and no, we won’t be mourning his death any time soon.”

  Omar nodded and resumed gazing at his sword. “There’s no guarantee that he’s actually dead yet, you know. He survived the cut quite well, without a drop of blood lost. It wasn’t until two years ago that I could pull that trick off.”

  “I saw that. The cut was burned over black before the arm hit the ground.” Freya pointed to the sword. “It burns as it cuts, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “But you never cut him,” she said. “You just drew the sword and he screamed, just like that. Is it a magic sword?”

  Omar laughed so hard and loud that the echo kept cackling and guffawing long after the man fell silent. He shook his head, then nodded. “
Yes, and no, and maybe. But I did cut him. You just didn’t see it. It’s called iaido, the art of drawing the sword. My dear friend Daisuke has been teaching it to me.”

  “Friend?” Freya glanced about the stone chamber.

  “Oh don’t worry, he’s quite dead,” Omar said. “I killed him myself, but that was years ago and we’ve become rather good friends since then.”

  Erik signed, “He’s mad.”

  Freya signed back, “Maybe. Definitely dangerous though.”

  Omar raised an eyebrow at their exchange, but only said, “You must think me crazy. Certainly, certainly. Any sane person would. But then again, the last person to trust me became the queen of Ysland in less than two years, so clearly there are advantages to listening to what I have to say.”

  “Wait, the queen?” Freya leaned forward. “You know Skadi?”

  “Indeed I do, fair lady. Or I did, for a time. As much as one can know a person without torturing them, anyway.”

  Freya nodded slowly. “Maybe you should start at the beginning. Who are you, exactly? And how do you know the queen?”

  Chapter 15

  “I come from the city of Alexandria,” Omar said, “in the province of Aegyptus, in the Empire of Eran, in the land of Ifrica, which is very far away. But none of that matters right now. And you didn’t come all the way out here with Leif to learn about the queen, did you? You want to know about the reavers, yes? But to understand the reavers, you need to understand where they came from, which takes us back to why I am here in your charming little country. So then, I will start with this sword of mine.”

  He pointed at the shining blade standing in the crack in the floor. “We call the metal sun-steel. And if there is any genuine holy mystery in this world, it is in this metal. If it weren’t so bright right now, you’d see it has the color of copper or gold. But here’s the secret. The sun-steel draws in aether like a magnet draws iron shavings. It drinks up aether and it swallows the souls of men and women right along with it, living or dead makes no difference. And if you—”

  “Rinegold!” Freya pointed at the sword. “You’re talking about rinegold!”