And then, as he looked up, the stars went out.
At first, he thought that the cloud cover had thickened again. But no . . . there was a sliver of a moon still there. Enough light for him to see where the clouds were, and weren’t. The stars were gone. “Rig,” Maccis said, his voice uneasy, and punched the older man in the leg until Loki’s son woke up. “Look up and tell me what you see.”
Rig opened his eyes, and stared. And then stood, and called out, silently, Solinus!
What?
Look up.
. . . I’m not seeing this right . . . .
As one, Rig, Solinus, Maccis, Scimar, Heolstor, and Reginleif stared up at the sky, their eyes wide.
But what does this mean? Scimar asked, his voice the crackle of flames in a hearth.
“Perhaps that I will not need to rush to join Brandr on the longest of roads,” Reginleif said, her siren’s voice harsh with dissonances. “Because the end is at hand.”
To the east, Kanmi and Minori had been fighting beside Erida, Illa’zhi, and Mercury, all day. “Not possible,” Kanmi assessed, looking up at the night sky. Not unless every star in our galaxy all . . . died at different times. That Alpha Centauri was snuffed exactly four years ago, and Sirius died almost precisely eight years ago, and all the others died eleven or twenty or a hundred years ago, all timed precisely so that their lights would vanish from the heavens, as seen from Earth, at the same time? No. Impossible. His mind raced. Light from the sun, eight light-minutes away, was still coming in; otherwise the moonlight wouldn’t be present. Something or someone has thrown a shield over the night sky, he thought. Something that’s diffracting light from behind the orbit of the moon. Or this is one gods-be-damned big illusion, and for no real purpose.
Minori added, quietly, Or time outside of Earth’s orbit has, for all intents and purposes, stopped.
Also impossible. Kanmi was exhausted; they all were, really. They’d had a few hours to rest since the last wave of mad godlings. At least they’d all been small. The big ones weren’t heading for them, at the moment.
Incoming, Mercury said, tiredly. From the east.
Kanmi straightened his back, and summoned the tight ball of anger that always burned at his heart. You’re not getting through, he told the godlings as they appeared on the edge of the all-too-dark horizon. I don’t care if you’ve got new tricks now, or not. I won’t be distracted. And you’re not getting through.
Then the next group of mad ones was on them, and they no longer had time to think of anything but what was in front of them.
______________________
On L’banah, Dr. Larus Sillen stared at the screens relaying satellite imagery from the other side of the world. He’d been observing with fascinated horror, as the supervolcano in the northwestern area of Caesaria Aquilonis continued to erupt, belching out huge quantities of carbon dioxide and ash into the atmosphere. On the whole, he was of the opinion that the climate scientists on the lunar base were right, and that it would lock in the ice age that had begun with the death of Skadi, possibly for hundreds of years.
Then someone on Libration Station paged L’banah, nervously, by radio. “Could L’banah and Cydonia both please confirm what we’re seeing here? We’re wondering if we have an equipment malfunction. Don’t look at Earth. Look at the rest of the observable heavens and tell us what you see.”
They all stared at the screens. And then Larus went to the observation dome, to look with his own eyes. The fenris scientist finally confirmed, I do not see any stars.
The reply from Mars took a few moments; radio waves took some time to carry. We don’t see them either. No illusion spell can be this large, can it? It would take a god . . . .
Larus’ stomach tensed, and he found himself growling unhappily under his breath. While he usually enjoyed the unknown, this was terrifying. The universe was not acting by its expected rules. And he had thought that other than issues of supplies, that the problems of Earth couldn’t really follow them up here. I need to revise my estimates.
On Mars, it was night, and tiny Phobos and Deimos, in their all-too-rapid orbits, barely illuminated the surface. No lights of civilization. And in an atmosphere this thin and devoid of oxygen, no fires, either. Just the primal night. A tiny breeze whorled the red fines among the scattered ejecta stones restlessly. For a moment, it almost formed the shape of a woman’s face.
Still, a shadow somehow seemed to flicker through the area, as if the night had grown darker, somehow. And a voice spoke. Hecate?
The breeze stopped moving, and the red sands rose, arranging themselves into what might have been a female human form. You returned. You remembered.
In the end, I did, yes.
Is it time?
It is time for me to return what was taken from you. And you must return to the Veil, lady of doors. You must also help take all those who must be protected into the Veil. Only you and Worldwalker can accomplish this task.
The misty body, formed of fines, solidified, and Hecate stood on the surface of Mars, fully manifested in her dark cloak, golden eyes gleaming beneath her cowl. How is this possible? Her voice had all its old force and resonance, though she was not her three-fold self again.
I am the effect before the cause.
You dare to do what Cronus did. One of the reasons for which Zeus slew him.
Cronus was not of this universe. Neither are the godslayers of old. I am. I have the right, and I have the power. And I will save this realm, no matter the cost to me. Come. You have little time.
And you do not?
I have all the time there is.
The two figures vanished, leaving nothing but a single pair of footprints on the ground of the Martian wasteland. And after a thin Martian breeze drifted by, even the footprints had been erased.
Chapter 20: The Night without Stars, Part III
If I lose you, I were better dead,
for should you meet your fate,
there will be no more joy for me
only sorrow.
—Homer, Andromache to Hector, Book VI, The Iliad.
______________________
Caesarius 32, 1999 AC
Back on Earth, outside Judea, Persian technomancers and commanders had worked together to devise a last-ditch strategy. A way to gain access to the various libraries, archives, and technomantic facilities, and all the secrets they contained, in the hopes of finding and obtaining the secret by which Judea had been protected all this time. It was manifestly obvious that something had been protecting the province. Godlings ignored the region. It couldn’t just be a coincidence that the traitorous Magi had fled here, decades ago. Something had to exist here, that they could use to defend their people. Invading, taking the region, and moving their population here wasn’t entirely an option; they’d move their command centers there, but Judea was tiny, compared to the Persian Empire. Or what was left of it, anyway. No, the objective had always been to take whatever was protecting the province, and move it to Persia.
And because they were desperate, commando units were paired with the most powerful summoners the Persian forces had left. Strike teams would be carried through the Veil by daevas, and moved into areas that were well behind enemy lines. The Magi Library. The Temple Archives. The defense dome’s main power station. If there was information, they were to obtain it, even if it meant torturing the people there to get the data. Someone had to know something.
______________________
At the defense shield’s main power station, Bodi and Jykke Eshmunazar heard the crack of gunfire outside the central generator room of the defense shield facility, and exchanged glances. “That’s not a good sound,” Jykke muttered, and pulled up her personal shields.
Bodi shook his head. He was forty-eight years old, and at the height of his power as a technomancer. His father and step-mother had trained him rigorously since he was a child, and he no longer needed to incant his spells, or gesture for them . . . but he had, in h
is hand, a technomantic device of his own design. A graphic calculator, with an LCD screen, to which he’d added additional battery packs and a variety of additional crystals and chips, for use as spell-storage matrices. It was an edge that most technomancers lacked. “All right, everyone, this is not a drill. Inform all the substations that they’re going to have to handle the load for a bit. Cut power to the shield emitters on the roof. All personnel, to your defense positions. Nothing gets through.” They’d been expecting a strike on the main station for years, either by Persians or by Judean fundamentalists who objected to the use of foreign, heathen magic on their soil . . . and nevermind that the magic of the shield had been holding off missile attacks for years now. They’d practiced. Now it was time to defend this place, for real.
The doors of the generator room sprang open, and Bodi put a hand on the outer case of the enormous dynamo in front of him. It was mainly powered by a ley-tap, but also ran on electrical current, generated, ultimately, from a coal furnace in a boiler room several stories below his feet. The generator produced hundreds of thousands of wex of power an hour, and all of it was currently at Bodi’s disposal. He took it, and, using his device to calculate his spell parameters, formed a hemisphere around the intruders. Wrapped it around them, and compressed the air around them, increasing the atmospheric pressure by up to eight times normal, inside of two seconds. All of the men collapsed, raising their hands to their bleeding ears and eyes.
“More behind them!” Jykke called, and locked into the generator’s power now, herself, before superheating the anteroom outside, raising the ambient temperature to two thousand degrees, and causing the air itself to sear the lungs of the sorcerers and soldiers there. Paint and wallboard hit their flashpoints, and burst into flames, instantly, which just gave the technomancers another source of energy with which to work.
Bodi’s radio crackled with reports from throughout the complex, suggesting that multiple strike forces were in the building. Let them come, he thought, grimly. We’re ready for them.
In the Magi Archives, Zaya had fallen asleep at her desk again. With Maccis missing in action, she’d found herself waking up at her desk three or four times a week. When she was home, the dull acid of worry ate through her chest, and she couldn’t sleep, in spite of Saraid’s reassurances that Maccis was fine. At work, she tended to nod off over the Prometheus tablet, and woke to find herself adhered to the marble by her own drool. It was embarrassing.
And she hadn’t been able to explain it, other than stress, until she’d been to see a Magi-approved Judean doctor this past week, to ask for sleeping pills so she could rest at home, in her own bed. “I’m afraid I can’t prescribe those to a young lady in your condition,” the woman had told her, sympathetically. “It wouldn’t be good for the child. And you say your husband is missing in action?” She’d paused, and put a hand on Zaya’s shoulder, not registering the look of shock. “There are many good reasons for your sleeplessness. I recommend mint or chamomile tea. Rosehip is fine, too. Drink it before bed, and try not to worry, though I know that’s a platitude.”
Zaya had stared at the doctor, flummoxed. “But we . . . I only left off the anti-conception charm once . . . .”
“It only takes the once, I’m afraid. You were just lucky.”
Luck had nothing to do with it. Maccis wasn’t joking, all these years, about his ability to make me bloom . . . . Zaya had endured the cheerful congratulations in a kind of numb haze, but hadn’t told her mother yet, or her father, though Illa’zhi would have known the instant he saw her, had he not been off fighting. She wanted Maccis to be the first to know.
Now, Zaya’s eyes opened in the dim yellow light of her desk lamp. She blinked for a moment, and then realized that one of her rings was hot to the touch—the one keyed to the Archive’s defense systems. She sat up, sharply, and touched a far-viewer sphere, a tiny one, embedded at the left side of her desk. There were cameras all through the Archives, though they didn’t advertise that fact. And she could see, instantly, that there were soldiers and sorcerers working their way through the stacks and halls, clearing them, one set of shelves at a time. Those aren’t JDF or Legion uniforms. Those aren’t landsknechten, either. Gods. It’s . . . after midnight. I might be the only archivist here, but there should be security . . . Zaya touched an intercom button, and asked, quietly, “Main guardpost, report?”
Silence. She keyed the far-viewer again, and found the camera feed from the main desk, four stories over her head. The two guards there were dead, their bodies limp on the ground, and surrounded by pools of blood. Zaya stared at that for an instant, and then her hands flew over her desk. The standard wards were already keyed—one of them being tripped, was what had triggered the alert to her ring. The rest, she now armed. The stone statues, golems, really, awoke on the third floor, and attacked the soldiers. Half were dog-shaped, and the other half were Sumerian lamassu—the bodies of bulls, the wings of eagles, and the heads of humans. They lifted themselves up from the ends of shelves, from beside elevators and stairs, where anyone passing them might have thought them solely decorative . . . and attacked. She couldn’t hear the screams of the men, but she could see the flash of their guns going off, and winced. Some of those bullets could injure the books on the shelves around them.
She keyed the other wards, rapidly. Every floor had fire suppression systems that were highly unusual. They couldn’t afford what water or chemical sprays would do to the ancient manuscripts. Thus, every level of the library had been built with the same technology that had been used for Libration Station and L’banah. Zaya cut off all of the levels’ ventilation systems from each other, and began pumping in the carbon dioxide gas held in tanks near the surface, while the ambient air was siphoned out from the opposite side of each level. The carbon dioxide was odorless and nontoxic; the soldiers and technomancers wouldn’t even realize that they were suffocating until they were fairly far into the effects of hypoxia. Reduced oxygenation of the brain usually resulted in very bad judgment calls. And any attendant spirits they had with them might not even notice the effects. It wasn’t an immediate threat, and the entire process was governed by machines.
Zaya scooped up the far-viewer sphere in one hand, and lifted the Prometheus tablet off her desk with the other, tucking both into a carrying satchel. She needed to safe-guard the vault. It wasn’t likely that anyone could come through three stories of the upper library without suffocating at this point, but procedures were procedures. And she could control all of the systems down here using the wristwatch she wore—a device constructed by her mother. It let her tie into the controls at her desk, from a distance.
She headed into the deepest zone of the vaults, feeling the chill around her. The air conditioning kept these areas at sixty-five degrees, a good temperature for the preservation of paper and vellum. She opened the fire-resistant door, and passed through into the area reserved for godslayer artifacts, the information on the hydrogen spell, grimoires with information on unNaming, and other such data, and locked the door behind her, tabbing on the lights with a sweep of her hand. Zaya hastened down the aisles, pressing the hidden buttons that caused all of the vaults, which were constructed similarly to safe-deposit boxes in banks . . . metal lockers, though these were sealed against outside air, and filled with argon . . . to sink into the floor. One more layer of protection against fire, that bane of archives everywhere. And as they sank into the ground, the incised marks of a powerful protection circle were revealed. No spirit could willingly cross these lines. It would take a minor god. They knew, because they’d tested the bindings on Illa’zhi and Lassair. Both spirits had been able to cross the lines, but it had taken effort.
She hesitated by the last bank of vaults, and started opening one of the drawers, so she could put the Prometheus stone away in it. But on opening her satchel, Zaya stared down at the stone in shock. The letters there, chiseled into the marble in the careful hieroglyphs of Linear A, glowed now. Fire filled the incised lines, and she could
read the first of the words there: There was a shepherd of Iolcus, who had been too young and simple-minded to go to war when Eurypylus had raised the men to fill the forty ships he would take to Troy. The young shepherd had grown tall and strong in the hills in the absence of his king, but his mind never matured past that of a child. One day the shepherd fell into a ravine, and nearly died there. Bleeding, the simpleton crawled with broken limbs until he found a cave, in which he discovered a piece of black stone that blazed with fire, and a potshard of clay, inscribed with these symbols . . . Azar, the burning one, he who is Fire. And as the previously illiterate simpleton read the words, Azar poured himself into this mortal vessel from the lump of coal that held him.
Foreknowledge filled him, and his limbs, damaged in his fall, straightened and healed. He knew that Eurypylus, the king he had only seen once, as a boy, would go mad after the war that never seemed as if it would end. The king would be cursed by the gods, until he stopped the sacrifice of a youth and a maiden to Artemis, and prevented the custom from continuing. Sacrifices demanded by one god, but denied by another, who might well demand sacrifices himself. Always arbitrary. Always chaotic. Those who came from the place-of-chaos had no right to touch this middle realm so. This mortal realm had a Fate. The bringers-of-chaos might change that Fate. It could not be allowed. Their intrusion was an error.
The Goddess Embraced (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 3) Page 170