Blood of the Isir Omnibus

by Erik Henry Vick

  I gained altitude, not wanting anyone to take a potshot at me with a bow or crossbow. A loud, screeching crrruck sounded from the rear. I glanced behind me, and a snow-white bird swooped down from above to fly by my side. The white bird looked like a raven—except for the color, of course. The bird rolled its eyes and made a noise that sounded distinctly like laughter.

  On the beach at the edge of my vision stood a vast horde arrayed in formation—trolls in the front, then demons, then men, and a horde of Svartalfar in the rear. The white bird at my side screeched and veered off to the south, making a rumbling call as it went. I followed and, when the bird dipped into the trees edging the beach, I landed beside it on the sand.

  With a pop and a flash of smoke, the white bird transformed into Kuhntul, arrayed in white armor, long white hair unbound. “Greetings, Tyeldnir,” she crooned.

  I responded with a crrruck of my own.

  “I don’t suppose you can transform?”

  “No,” I croaked, surprised I could form the word.

  “Why ever not?” she mused. “You Isir are so funny.”

  I shifted from foot to foot, impatient at this interruption of my flight.

  “Relax, Tyeldnir. I won’t take much of your time.” Kuhntul smiled down at me. “You’re even cute as a bird. Jane had better keep a tight grip on you.”

  “What…do…you…want?”

  “To business, as ever,” she sighed. “Such a shame. We could have such fun… You’ve seen the Dark Queen’s forces on the beach ahead. They are making ready to march on your position, hoping to pin you between the mountains, the Great Forest of Suel, and the sea. They mean you harm, Tyeldnir.”

  I bobbed my head, hoping she’d get the reference to a nod.

  “So cute…” she murmured. “This may be the last time I can come to you with a warning. Mother Skult is furious with me over the changes you carved into Iktrasitl. But, I’ll try to slip away when possible, and give you what additional help I can. Now, you must hurry. Rouse your companions and set out at once. If you travel quickly, you may squeeze past them in the darkness. Now, awake!”

  Forty-three

  I sat up straight, shoving the bedroll away, heart trip-hammering away in my chest. The image in my mind was of a huge host—an army—arrayed for battle, and an albino raven. The dream washed through my mind like a flooding river. “Wake up!” I shouted. “We need to get moving.”

  “What is it?” asked Mothi in a voice furry with sleep.

  “There’s an army marching toward us,” I said. “They mean to pin us against the Great Forest of Suel or the mountains. We have to get by them tonight! Everyone up!” Darkness rested around us, cold and content.

  We struggled into our saddles, exhaustion etched on every face. I estimated it was two or three in the morning, and we had only a few hours before dawn.

  Veethar led us again, alternating between a gallop and a canter, changing from one to another by an internal clock only he and the horses understood, angling off toward the foothills. After the trial of the Forest, it was a cruel punishment—sleeping only a short time before having to be up and traveling. No one spoke, no one laughed—the only sound of our passage was the syncopated beat of the horses’ hooves, their heavy breathing, and the jingle and creak of harness and saddle leather.

  From the darkness ahead came the sound of hooves pounding the ground. Veethar drew us to a halt, peering into the darkness. “It is a single animal,” he whispered. “One rider.”

  I loosened Kunknir in its holster but did not draw it, ever aware of my diminished supply of ammunition. Mothi drew a single double-bladed axe and held it across his lap. He rode away from Sig, giving the boy a glance to tell him to stay where he was.

  A pale horse rode toward us out of the early morning gloom. Its rider wore leather armor and an oft-patched black cloak. His hair and beard were long and snarled, and dust and grime caked his face and neck. His eyes had a harried, wild look I didn’t much care for. “No!” he called to us. “Not this way! You are riding into an ambush!” He charged up to us, waving his free hand as if the chance we might not see him existed.

  “An ambush?” Meuhlnir asked in a gruff voice.

  “Yes! There’s a large army of trolls, men, Svartalfar, and other creatures back that way. They are trying to funnel you into a position where they can flank you, trap you against the mountains, and kill you. The Dragon Queen—‍”

  “What do you know of the Dark Queen?” Mothi snapped.

  The man shrugged. “What everyone knows, I guess. She’s evil—evil to her very core. I’ve heard it said she was once a great leader, a great queen, but all I know of her is evil.”

  “Your name?” asked Meuhlnir.

  The man shook his head. “You won’t have heard of me. I’m not a native to Osgarthr. Queen Hel and her cohorts ripped me out of a pleasant life on Mithgarthr. I was their prisoner for years and years, but I escaped them. I’ve been wandering this world since, looking for a way back to my home.”

  “Luka closed the preer. There is no way for you to return home at the moment,” said Mothi with a glance my way. He quirked his eyebrow at me, and I shook my head—I had no idea who this newcomer was.

  The man sighed and shook his head. “For all these years, I’ve tried to get back to my family. To my home.”

  “I asked your name,” said Meuhlnir again, with a hint of iron in his voice.

  “It’s been so long…” The man shook his head, looking down at his lap. “Long ago, friends called me John, but that name no longer fits me. Call me Farmathr.”

  “And where in Mithgarthr are you from?” asked Mothi.

  “You won’t have heard of it. It is a new land, not known in the time of the Vikings.”

  “America?” asked Sig.

  Farmathr turned his head slowly, scanning the faces in our party until he reached my son’s. He nodded. “Yes, the New World. I lived in the colony of New York.”

  “What a happy coincidence,” said Jane in a campy tone. “Next you’ll tell us you are from Western New York.”

  Farmathr shrugged. “Yes. I lived in a community named Geneva, on the shores of Lake Seneca.”

  There was a protracted moment of silence, only broken by Slaypnir pawing at the ground. “What a happy coincidence,” repeated Jane in the same tone.

  The newcomer quirked his eyebrow and looked from face to face once again. “If you’ll pardon me, my lady, I find nothing about this happy. They ripped me from my home, imprisoned me, tortured me. My escape was arduous; the time I’ve spent wandering this world has not been pleasant, separated as I am from my family. It’s been years, and I’ve been alone.” He jerked in his saddle and glanced over his shoulder. “But, there’s no time for this now! We must flee, or they will be upon us!”

  “Who sent you?” demanded Pratyi, sounding skeptical.

  “A…a woman.” Farmathr scratched his head, his fingers snarling in the tangles of his long, unkempt hair. “A woman…at least I think she was a woman…she appeared from out of the mist.”

  “Was her name Kuhntul?” I asked.

  “Kuhntul…uh, yes, that was it.”

  “Tell me, Farmathr…why should we trust you?” asked Pratyi.

  “For one thing, if the Dragon Queen or her cohorts catch us, I will die along with you. For another, I’m risking my life to give you a warning.” He turned his horse so it faced the mountains. “I know a path into the mountains, a path to a place the army cannot follow. An old place, an ancient place. A stronghold where we can rest in safety and comfort.” He spurred his pale horse and rode away.

  I glanced around, more than a little surprised to find all eyes on me. When did I become the leader of this band? I wondered. “What he says is in line with what Kuhntul told me. We know the army planned to ambush us.” With a shrug, I nudged Slaypnir’s flanks and rode after Farmathr.

  When I caught up to him, he nodded, as if grateful I’d followed him. “You said ‘the colony of New York?’”
<
br />   “Yes. It was named a state after the war with England, but where I lived, we still thought of it as a colony.”

  “In what year were you taken?”

  He glanced at me, his face contorted. “It was a long time ago. Perhaps longer than I fear. It was 1798.”

  I averted my face, hoping he wouldn’t see my expression. “You are Isir?”

  He scoffed and blew a raspberry. “The queen’s cohorts went on and on about my blood. The Blood of the Isir, they called it. Who cares?”

  “It’s why you’ve lived so long,” I murmured.

  “And how long have I lived?” he asked, reining his horse to a stop.

  “I… Maybe we should talk about it later.”

  “No, now. Or I won’t show you the way into the stronghold. Vowli would never tell me how many years I spent in captivity.”

  “Vowli, not Luka?”

  “Yes,” he snapped. “Now, tell me how long!”

  I sighed and glanced at Jane as the others caught up with us. “I lived in Western New York. We traveled to Osgarthr in the year 2017.”

  “But that’s…” He shook his head and spurred his horse on.

  With a shrug, I followed him. “Don’t worry, Farmathr. Meuhlnir has told me that the preer can traverse time as well as space. If we can get the preer working again, they can return you to your time.”

  Farmathr shook his head. “No. There’s nothing left for me now.”

  That struck me as odd, and I glanced over at him. Tears tracked through the grime on his cheeks. He saw me looking and shrugged.

  “They are all dead, then,” he whispered. “My family. My friend Donehogawa. All of them.”

  “You’re thinking about this in too linear a fashion. They were dead when I lived in New York, but you can go back to the time when they were alive. You can—‍”

  “No. You misunderstand. To save them…to save my nephew, I had to…” He dashed tears from his face with an angry gesture. “It doesn’t matter.” He pointed at the mountain ahead. “That’s where we must go. That mountain there. The stronghold lies within it.”

  “Within?”

  Farmathr nodded. “There is a series of tunnels and rooms under the mountain. Not like a mine, but a place where people lived and worked for a time. The tunnels run to the north and south through the mountains.” He shrugged. “I explored a few of them, but not all. There are…barges I guess you would call them, but I feared riding on one by myself, so I came on horseback from the South.”

  “And the army won’t be able to follow us?”

  Farmathr shook his head. “No, if we can make it there in advance of the horde, they won’t even know the stronghold is there. The entrance is hidden and secured against accidental invasion. I learned the code from Vowli before I escaped.”

  “How did Vowli capture you?”

  “That’s a long story—and a sad one. Suffice it to say that I ran afoul of the Queen, Vowli, and another companion in woods to the west of Lake Seneca. They have abilities out of nightmare. Vowli can become a demon—half wolf and half man—and the Dark Queen is a witch! I hadn’t believed such things were possible until I witnessed them for myself.”

  “Let me guess…they ate people.”

  Farmathr looked at me with a strange expression on his face. “Yes, how did you know?”

  “The Dark Queen and Luka were still at it in 2017, though I bet they had to be much more careful in my time than in yours.”

  “2017…” Farmathr shook his head. “That’s almost two hundred and twenty years from the last time I saw my home.”

  “Remember, that it might have been a much shorter time for you. Those preer can—‍”

  “Bend time. Yes, I know. But it feels like two centuries.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. I knew all too well what it felt like to have everything you cared about ripped away by the Dark Queen and her minions. “We are going to Pilrust, in Kleymtlant. That’s where we can regain control of the preer, in a place called the Herperty af Roostum—the Rooms of Ruin.”

  “Cheerful name,” he grunted.

  “I assume it was a technology center, and that, over time, it’s fallen to disuse.”

  “Technology?”

  “Yeah, computers and…never mind. Machines that do complex math for us. The Isir have a complex mythos built up around all of this, but it amounts to creation mythology. All of this, vefnathur strenki, the preer, all of it, it has to be an advanced technology we don’t understand yet.”

  “Why?” asked Farmathr.

  “Because…there has to be a scientific explanation for all this.”

  “Why?” asked Farmathr again. “Is there a scientific explanation for God? For miracles? For the Devil? For evil?”

  “Well…”

  As the sun broke over the mountains in front of us, the sound of our pursuit rumbled behind us, echoing against the mountains like thunder or waves pounding against a cliff, but it was constant, without pause. I looked behind us, and a gigantic dust cloud obscured our pursuers.

  “Hmph. Closer than I thought,” murmured Farmathr. “We need to hurry.” He kicked his horse in the flanks, and the animal galloped away from us. With a shrug, I did the same.

  The sun rose as we galloped toward the mountains in the east, and for the rest of that day, we ran from the dust cloud, seeming unable to lose it with speed or with constant motion. As the sun set, sunlight filtered through the dust of the army pursuing us, and an icy fear settled in my guts. There would be no stopping, no relaxing campfire, no stories told, no hot dinner.

  Forty-four

  Exhausted and mind-weary from too many sleepless nights, too much interrupted sleep, and constant worry or outright fear, when Farmathr reined up and pointed at an unbroken solid wall of rock, I stared at it, thoughts ponderous and jejune.

  “It is there,” he said, weariness playing its dirge in his voice. “The way in is tricky.”

  “Can we take the horses?” asked Veethar.

  “Yes, but you must do as I say without pause, without deviation. There is a spirit that guards the place, and it has the power to drain the life out of you if it believes you intrude.”

  “That sounds…” began Jane.

  “Ominous,” I finished.

  “Indeed,” said Farmathr. “Now, attend me. I will tell you when we have reached safety, but until I do, touch nothing and do not step out of my path.” He glanced at Sig. “Do you hear, boy?”

  Sig nodded and took a step closer to Mothi.

  “Good. Now, give me a moment…” He turned to face the rocks and did something with his hands as if tracing runes in the air. He might have hummed a musical phrase, but it was difficult to tell over the sound of the wind, the horde at our backs, and the horses.

  With a grinding roar, part of the ostensibly solid stone wall in front of us slid inward and up, leaving a space just wide enough for a horse. Farmathr smiled and winked at me before he turned and rode his pale horse into the darkness.

  The trolls grunted and hooted—a prelude to an all-out charge—off in the night behind us, and somewhere back there, drums began to pound. Being at Farmathr’s mercy inside this place, this “stronghold” as he called it, gave birth to a flurry of butterflies in my gut. But there was no other choice than to follow Farmathr into the unknown.

  We rode in through the opening in the sheer rock face, with Mothi last, and as soon as he crossed the threshold, mechanisms in the darkness that surrounded us whined, and the sliver of light from the outside shrank as the massive door began to close.

  The air in the antechamber reeked of hot electronics, dust, and the unmistakable, spicy odor of long decomposed bodies. There was a faint ticking somewhere off in the darkness, but similar to a cooling car engine rather than a clock or a kitchen timer.

  “Now, if you’ll follow me into the next chamber…”

  “If we could see you, it might be easier to follow you,” snapped Althyof.

  In the darkness, Farmathr
chuckled. Something crackled as if a green twig had snapped, and an eerie green light flared into existence. It was a glow stick resembling the ones we gave Sig on Halloween. “Follow the green light. Step only where I step.” Farmathr led us on a zig-zagging path across a wide area, which I assumed to be a large room. Giant black shapes loomed at me out of the darkness—machines, or cabinets, or giant stone blocks, I couldn’t tell which. The door to the outside finished the traversal of its track, cutting off the ambient light from outside with a resounding boom that sounded permanent. The only light now came from the glow stick that hung down Farmathr’s back.

  “What happens if we stray from your path?” asked Freya.

  The glow stick jumped as Farmathr shrugged. “You die.”

  “That’s it? No warnings, no questions, merely instant death?”

  “I didn’t make the rules,” sighed Farmathr. “I learned them, and I’ve likewise passed them on to you.”

  “You’ve led others through this room? You’ve seen others die here?” asked Frikka with a tone of disbelief.

  “Well, no. But the rules…”

  “Who taught you these rules?” I asked.

  “You’ll see in a moment.” The creak of saddle leather preceded a loud click, and a strange hiss filled the air. “No cause for concern,” said Farmathr. Flickering bluish-white light flooded into the room as a door ascended toward the ceiling.

  Once there was sufficient room, Farmathr ducked his head and rode through the door into a well-lit room. “In here,” he called. “It’s safe in here.”

  We followed him through the tall, narrow doorway. Bright white subway tiles sheathed the walls of the room, but polished natural stone lay under our feet. A long counter—comparable to a reservation desk in an airport back home—lined one side of the room, warped by water at some point, cracked by time and disuse. Behind it, massive black panels stretched toward the ceiling high above, and several doors stood—one pale blue, one orange, and one red. A massive crack zigged and zagged across the face of one panel, and all of them were dark, powerless. The opposite wall contained more red doors, one green door, one orange, and one yellow. Low-slung couches, chairs, and what had once been potted plants filled the space between the two walls without appearing crowded. Far above us, bright white lights burned. Everywhere I looked, surfaces shone and twinkled as though recently polished.