The Sky-Blue Wolves

by S. M. Stirling

  And by her side a young woman whose yellow hair flew in a wind that lashed with cold salt spray, a woman with Thora’s eyes and Thora’s sword in her hand, and his harp cased across her back. . . .

  And behind them was Órlaith’s inheritance, the High King and Queen he had known and followed, and Juniper Mackenzie his teacher, and more and more.

  No! The Sword is cycles within cycles, and perilous to one like me, a man whose lust is to know. That is for another day. Everything is linked, but not everything is as important as the other, not to us, not here and now. The work of the day is to be done!

  His eyes opened and met Órlaith’s, and they shared the knowledge.

  Thus I repay Lady Juniper’s teaching, and the High King who stood as my friend when I was a youth from a little place in the wilds of Westria, alone at the glittering court of Montival, he thought. You are my Queen and liege, and for you I fight—with sword, and with craft.

  “Lie down and compose yourself, everyone,” he said. “Time is . . . different, where we’re going, but it won’t be a matter of seconds here. We’re all rested and fed. Keep yourself warm.”

  They lay and covered themselves, absurdly like guests settling in for the night back in the hall of his father, back in Mist Hills.

  I will see my home again. Thora and Ruan and I will tend our land and raise the daughter of our souls.

  He paced around the chamber in the pavilion, pausing at each corner to reach out to the spirits and pour a little rice-wine on the floor.

  “Wights of this land,” he murmured, “hail to you. Bless and ward our work today.”

  He looked at Ruan, where he sat in a chair; beside him were hypodermics and other gear. “Be careful, my heart, as I told you once before. To bring a spirit back untimely . . . that may mean the spirit is forever maimed. Or it may leave an emptiness that invites . . . other things.”

  He tried a few taps on the hand drum he had brought from Montival; it throbbed with a staccato beat that sank into bone and blood as his skilled fingers evoked the rhythms at the heart of life. All life was one, all one, all the beat of the heart every day of life—and before that in the womb, when your mother’s heart was the beating of the heart of Earth itself.

  Egawa grinned. “A priest’s drum, like a shrine at home.”

  “Be close; take each your neighbor’s hand.”

  “Or my stump,” Egawa said.

  He seemed to regard the fact that few of them spoke his language as a license for wit, but it was good to see a man so lighthearted facing peril to spirit as well as body. Reiko took his stump in her hand, after an admonishing tap.

  “You are linked as closely as by blood, now, all of you,” Deor said. “You are battle-comrades. You fight for your lands and peoples, and you do it together. This is a mighty thing! Feel the strength of each that is the strength of many.”

  Deor arranged himself cross-legged in the center of the circle, a posture that his trained body could maintain even without his waking mind to guide it. He began to tap on the drum, locking his muscles into the rhythm.

  “If you need them, spirit weapons will come to you,” he said. “Remember the weight of your sword and it will come to your hand. And those Swords will be ever with those who bear them.”

  “A sword made of thoughts?” Órlaith said, her voice distant.

  “Your Sword is a thought in the mind of the Lady of all things, High Queen of Montival. And where we go, thought takes form and walks for all of us, not just those whose line has the special blessing of the Powers.”

  She nodded soberly, and he continued: “And all of you, call on your allies. Mine is a Meadowlark. You may see him when we’re in the Otherworld. Thora’s protector is the Bear, the Grizzly. Pip’s is the Lion. . . .”

  “Mine’s the Bushrat,” Toa said unexpectedly, chuckling like gravel in a bucket.

  Tha-ba-da . . . tha-ba-da the drum spoke, sinking into bone, into blood, into pulse and gut.

  He relaxed his throat muscles, let his voice go smooth. “Sink down . . . let each limb relax . . . The floor is Earth, our guards protect you, the wights—”

  He reached out. Again he blinked. At first it was faint, and then a savage joy, as if he’d freed something long chained and it rejoiced in it and called him to war. The land-wights, the spirits of place as the Mackenzies called them, the kami of rock and tree and beast, were still here beneath the lifeless emptiness that had troubled him. And they longed for release.

  “—grant permission for our work this day. Let your eyes close. . . .”

  As he shut his own he felt awareness begin to alter, at once expanding and shifting focus.

  “Láwerce guide me . . . Woden guard me . . . all kindly Powers, we are Your children.”

  He began to build up the visualization of the path, the cold and dread he’d felt as they scouted the fortress of shadow, the way it crippled the very earth with its weight.

  “So—”

  He began to tap a little more quickly.

  “Let us fare forward. We steal into the enemy’s fortress. Into the very heart of darkness, and there we bring light.”

  The Sword of the Lady shone in the eyes of his mind, the light of the Moon made blinding-bright.

  “There we bring the cleansing fire.”

  The sun Herself answered, arcs of flame vaster than worlds spinning from Her fingers as she danced through space that was not an emptiness but a singing presence, and gave it life.

  His expanded awareness could feel each of them behind him now. Toa added a bass note to it, something deep and massive, scarred by wounds within but stronger for it. A fluttering rose around him, as of a bird with a white body and a red beak. And something peaked out from behind a crevice, something with beady eyes full of cunning. A lioness snarled, an Eagle shrieked, a fox with many tails and deep russet eyes wound among rocks . . . wings and eyes and swords, a vast blue form on the ramparts of Heaven . . .

  “See in your mind’s eye the coldness of the mountains. Feel the land rebel against the bane wrought upon it, against the crushing power of the troll-grip, against the malice of the ettin-kind. Be there.”

  Deor could smell the scents of rock and earth, the dustier tang of cut stone and poured concrete. And as they went farther a cold reek that was like the acidic residue of despair. There was flagstone beneath his feet, but no light struck his eyes. He could feel that he was in Mist Hills dress, a linen tunic and cross-gartered hose, leather shoes and seax and sword at his belt and his harp in her case of tooled boiled leather slung over his back.

  Light came from nowhere, though he was not sure that he was seeing with his eyes at all. An endless tunnel of moist rock stretched ahead of him, groin-arched above, with pillars of rusting steel set into the walls.

  And somewhere . . . somewhere that started very distant and ran towards him, or oozed towards him . . . an attention was turned. He could feel its fimbul-cold rage at being diverted from an endless contemplation of nothing but it itself, an existence so complete that it had no present, had never had a present, nothing but an infinite past that was equally nothing where nothing had ever been.

  I . . . see . . . you.

  “Come to me, comrades,” he said, feeling the strings of their fates in the fingers of his mind. “Come to me in my need!”

  A meadowlark circled about his head.

  “Come!”

  “Well, here I am, oath-brother,” Thora said.

  She was in a simple brown Bearkiller jacket and trousers and boots, unsheathing her sword and looking around, but the strength of a she-grizzly was in it.

  “Come!”

  A lioness snarled, a gaping pink-and-white yawn. Pip—not in Associate garb, but as he’d first seen her, in round-topped black hat, white shirt and shorts, suspenders and boots and knee- and elbow-guards, the kukri-knives and slingshot at her belt and an eb
ony cane with two silver-gold heads. A circle of black makeup marked one eye.

  “Crawling through a bloody chilly dungeon this time,” she murmured, looking around. “Suddenly, changing nappies and arguing with the cook back home seems like a fair chav.”

  “Come! Come!” Deor called.

  The drum thundered, but not in his ears. It was a heart beating at the center of all things.

  The Maori was there, leaning on his spear and panting. John, in knight’s armor. A glimpse of someone with a coyote’s head, grinning in deadly humor, and Susan Mika leaned panting against the wall, in her fringed leathers, face painted for war. A pair of amber-eyed cougars, and Faramir and Morfind were there in their Ranger garb, the white Tree and seven Stars and the Crown above it glowing for a moment in white on their jerkins before it faded.

  “We’re in the dungeons of Barad-dûr,” Faramir murmured.

  Morfind put a gentle hand on Susan’s shoulder for a moment, and then they all drew their swords, standing with their backs to one another and looking about.

  “Or Angband,” Morfind said.

  “What is it with these evil Dark Lord types and the huge buildings and the buried pits?” Susan said, her voice slightly plaintive; she didn’t like being confined. “Why not villains on nice open plains?”

  A glimpse of a rampant boar, tusks lowered to gore amid foam and gnashing, and then Egawa Noboru, looking exactly as he had, even to the lost hand . . .

  Of course, some distant part of Deor’s mind thought. That loss, each scar upon his face, are badges of honor—what he has sacrificed for his liege, what he is in his heart’s heart.

  “Come! Come!”

  They all stumbled back. A sinuous dragon coiled before them, for an instant luminous as pearls, and stark fire of yellow and red billowed. Then Reiko stood there in her armor of lacquered scarlet, her hand upon the hilt of Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi and the chrysanthemum mon of the Yamato house on her brow.

  “Come! Come!”

  The wings of a great Golden Eagle beat the corridor’s air, and around it circled a Snowy Owl, the keen-eyed and beautiful white-and-black hunter of the northern woods.

  Órlaith stood, and extended an arm for Heuradys to steady herself with.

  “Come!”

  For a moment the tunnel was bright with dawn, soft with sunset, lit with light the deep endless blue of a summer’s sky or the sharp cutting color above an endless waste of snow. Everyone exclaimed and set their backs against the walls. A panting and a thud of paws came with the sound, and a rank scent, and then the sky-blue wolves poured past them. A flood of the beasts, so real he could feel the brush of their coarse fur, but blue save for the yellow eyes and the white fangs over which tongues lolled. A breeze from the high steppe came with them, the crackle of dry grass and hard earth and the ozone of thunderstorms. . . .

  And Dzhambul and Börte were with them, in their blue deel coats and point-toed boots, hands on their hilts.

  “Ancestor . . .” Dzhambul said, wonder in his voice. “I felt him, the Ancestor. For an instant we were one!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHOSŎN MINJUJUŬI INMIN KONGHWAGUK

  (KOREA)

  MAJIMAG BAM-UI GEULIMJA

  (FORTRESS OF ETERNAL NIGHT)

  DECEMBER 18TH

  CHANGE YEAR 47/2045 AD

  (PLACES OUT OF SPACE, AND TIME)

  Reiko pulled Kusanagi from its sheath in a snapping iado movement. A shape writhed down the blade for three-quarters of its length, as if the steel had been chiseled in a horimono and inlaid with the thinnest film of burnished gold. The inlay on the blade was an abstract pattern, seeming at one moment to be curling leaves of fire, another an elongated form dancing, then nothing that human eyes could interpret at all. When you looked more closely you could tell . . . somehow . . . that it was not gold in the form of flame.

  It was flame, in some entirely nonphysical way.

  She looked up; there were globes for a biogas lighting system at the peak-points of the groin-arched ceiling. She whipped the sword back and then forward in a long cut. The globes lit, and a low yellow light flooded the passageway. Though with it came a faint tang of old death that made you wonder what fed the gas-pits.

  Órlaith drew the Sword, and the world flexed.

  She was in Mackenzie kilt and plaid; evidently that was how her mind conceived of herself. Experimentally, she lifted her weight on the balls of her feet and down again. It felt . . .

  Like rising on the balls of my feet, she thought. Muscle, sinew, balance . . . but those things are lying on a pallet in my tent!

  Deor grinned at her.

  “When you feel your feet upon the ground in the waking world, your body sends the feelings to your mind,” he said. “Do you think your mind forgets now? You’re not a ghost yet, High Queen.”

  She nodded, and then simply opened and emptied her mind. “This way,” she said, and pointed.

  “The feeling of . . . wrongness is greater there,” he said, nodding in the opposite direction.

  “Yes, but the Divine Leader is this way,” Órlaith said.

  Toa grinned. “And we’re just going to chop the boss cocky?” he said. “’Strewth, I like the sound of it.”

  Órlaith nodded; she did too. As her father had said, fighting evil usually involved killing a good many whose only crime was to be born in the wrong place. Some of the songs her brother loved had armies meet and then the leaders settle things on their own. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen now and then; her father had killed the Prophet Sethaz on the steps of his Temple in Corwin, though only after beating his armies.

  I’ll be very content if I can do better than that this time.

  Órlaith looked to Deor. “Can they see us here? Can they feel us, strike at us? Or we at them?”

  Deor nodded; it was an excellent question. “They can and will just so far as they have become part of the thing, the Power, that rules this place. You will see men; if you see them as other than men, or as men who are partly something else, they are of the enemy.”

  “As when Frodo saw the Nazgûl and Lord Glorfindel at the ford, when he was nearly on the other side of the curtain to the wraith-world,” Faramir said softly, and his cousin nodded.

  Deor looked at them, and Órlaith could tell he was surprised.

  “Very much, Ranger of Eryn Muir. Very much indeed. Your Historian spoke more truly than many think.”

  Including you, Órlaith thought, as the two Dúnedain nodded. Then she noticed something else.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Faramir just spoke in Sindarin. Do you know the Noble Tongue, Deor?”

  He shook his head, his thin face growing keen. “Only a little. The rest of you? What did you hear?”

  “Mongol,” Dzhambul said, and his sister nodded. “Rather flowery and formal and with some names I didn’t recognize, but Mongol.”

  “Nihongo,” Reiko said without turning.

  “Bugger!” Toa said. “Te reo Māori!”

  “Lakȟótiyapi!” Susan blurted.

  “We are not speaking with our mouths, then,” Deor said. “Or hearing with our ears.”

  “But we’d better keep a good eye out,” Órlaith said. “Rangers first.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Time hardly seemed to pass as they made their endless way through the tunnels. Susan Mika fought hard not to let the sameness lull her into incaution, and the effort paid off as a faint far-off noise suddenly made sense in her mind. She put her hand up in Ranger battle-sign for halt and hide; she’d learned that quickly. Toa was well back of her and her partners, and Pip behind him; they’d relay the message.

  This section of the tunnel had open doorways every thirty feet or so, including one not far from the junction ahead. They ducked inside into an empty storeroom that measured ten yards by thirty
, plastering themselves against the wall on either side of the door, on hewn stone still rough with the pick-marks of the laborers who’d built it. The iron sound of boots striking the flags in unison came louder and louder. Susan dropped flat, and Morfind reached down to hand her a mirror on a collapsible rod, all the metalwork done in a soft dark matte gray.

  Rangers do have the best gear, she thought, and extended it.

  She got a good view of feet. A column of thirty men was marching down the way; by tilting the mirror she could see the spears and bows over their shoulders. They were in the standard steel-studded leather gear of the enemy, and looked ordinary enough . . .

  Except for the guy in charge, she thought with a shudder, pulling the mirror back.

  He was perfectly ordinary too. Except that there were tendrils of black growing out of his back and seeming to vanish somewhere, and at the same time loom like wings. And that his face was normal, but when you looked at it carefully the lower part was drawn out into a near-muzzle. And the edges of his mouth and the underslung lower jaw were formed in wedges like a saw-edged beak.

  And his eyes were empty holes. It looked like the ordinary man was drawn over what she was seeing or sensing beneath, like a mask over a dancer’s face. Except that the normal face was the false one, and she suspected that if she weren’t here . . . irregularly . . . all she would see would be the human being.

  Like there was a man there once, and he was eaten out from inside like one of those wasp grubs.

  The thudding stamp of the boots died away. Susan handed the mirror back to her partner. . . .

  And the enemy leader leapt through the doorway in a blur of deadly motion. His sword was drawn, ordinary steel that dripped dissolution. Susan rolled frantically as it slammed down towards her. Sparks showered off the stone . . . and though they were light, when they struck her they were freezing cold.

  Susan shrieked, pulled the tomahawk out of its loop at the rear of her belt and threw it, with the same horrified reflex she would have had waking up and finding a worm coiling on her lip. The sword knocked the hatchet aside . . . and it was gone. Faramir and Morfind had their bush-swords out and shouted as they hacked: