It turned out that there would be serious problems. The Aelen Kofer could not reach the Krulik and Sneigon works directly. There would be a lot of walking the middle world needed. Though, Heris discovered belatedly, that would not require the whole dwarf race to go traipsing across the Grail Empire in a loud, gaudy mob. One skilled magic-using dwarf could do the walking and opening of the way. Which, evidently, was an escape skill many Aelen Kofer learned early.
Of course, a gang would be needed to haul the weapons away. But they, and their goats, could make the journey in lazy stages on the other side. The dwarves never mentioned their rune-laden standing stones.
“Double Great! Before you bail out on me. You heard what we’ve been talking about.”
“No. I wasn’t listening.”
“Listen now. I have a cache of weapons over there with nobody guarding them. I didn’t think about that when I asked … for them. You understand me?”
The old man sighed and nodded. “Give me the gruesome details. I’ll take care of it.” Like Pella, she reflected, when he was asked to do a chore. Totally put-upon.
Cloven Februaren was an eternal adolescent. Incredibly powerful, a genius — with all the acquired personal skills of a spoiled fourteen-year-old.
With all that talent and genius he had no need to be mature.
***
Cloven Februaren and Ferris Renfrow went away. The Aelen Kofer followed, leaving only a skeleton crew. In time, Heris had only the ascendant and three sour, elderly dwarf women for company. And, occasionally, a young mer who called herself Philleas Pescadore. The mer thought that was funny but never explained. She shifted shape and left the water, stark naked and achingly beautiful, only when Asgrimmur was around.
Heris knew she was imagining actions and motives because the fact was, Philleas needed Asgrimmur to translate in order to communicate.
Philleas was both intensely curious and deeply naive about the world above the waterline. For her that world was more mythical than was hers to humanity. Only a few mer in any generation, most female and young, could change and pass for human, briefly. Naked young women who dared not venture far from the sea would not see the best of land dwellers.
Philleas was doubly ignorant. Her entire world had been the harbor. The dangers she knew were shark and kraken.
Heris found the girl more irritating than interesting. She never stopped asking questions.
Out of the blue, a few days after the old men left, Asgrimmur announced, “I’m not interested in Philleas the way you think. She isn’t interested in me that way, either.”
“What?” Taken completely off guard.
They were on the quay. The ascendant wore his most manly man form. He stared through the portal at the brilliance of the middle world.
The gateway was open so Heris could go if she must.
“Her people have found the survivors of another pod out in the Andorayan Sea. They mean to merge pods by uniting Philleas and Kurlas, a mer her age in the other pod. That should be interesting. Philleas has picked up a lot of romantic notions from us. Especially from the old man. Meanwhile, the sea pod has spent a century hugging the warm water round a slow power leak. They’ll have turned quite strange.”
Heris grunted, not much interested. She just did not want to see the mer in human form and have to compare herself.
It was not fair. Not even a little. The girl was not even human.
The ascendant said, “I believe Februaren thought he was playing a clever practical joke.”
“He would. Sometimes he’s an idiot. I’m surprised he didn’t exploit her naiveté.”
“Who knows? He may have. It wouldn’t matter. What Philleas does in human form is separate from what she does as a mer. I couldn’t guess the old man’s proclivities — if he has any at his age — but his sense of humor would be intrigued by the fact that Philleas starts out a virgin every time she takes human form.”
“Oh, now that’s just! … All right. I don’t know how he’d think about that. You don’t go sneaking around, trying to find out if your oldest living ancestor is some kind of pervert. Asgrimmur, let’s stop. This stuff makes me uncomfortable.”
“So let’s go climb the mountain instead.”
“Excuse me?”
“Let’s pack some food and go explore the Great Sky Fortress. You are curious about it, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. The same way I’m curious about seeing what happens when a ship founders and everybody drowns.”
“An odd way to think of it.”
Heris shrugged. “I’m an odd woman. I’ve survived an odd life. I see the world through skewed eyes.”
“I thought it might be useful to walk the field before the battle. Save us time once the others get back. Winter will come. When it does it will serve Kharoulke far better than it will us.”
“I can’t say you’re not right about that.”
***
The rainbow bridge remained brilliant and thrummingly potent. Heris had no difficulty crossing. The Construct had no direct potency inside the Realm of the Gods but using it outside had built up her self-confidence.
The ascendant followed, fearless himself. And had no reason to fear. Should he fall he need but change. … A random gust did push him off his footing. In an instant he developed tentacles that snagged hold of the rainbow. He dragged himself back onto the bridge, where he turned into a huge bird that hopped the last few yards on one foot. He had his trousers clutched in the other.
“That was impressive,” Heris said, noting that one wing seemed stunted. “Those stories about people changing into animals always made me wonder what they did about their clothes.”
“You lose them if you get in a hurry. Otherwise, you make arrangements.” He remained generically bipedal till he finished wriggling into the trousers. He became fully human, then, but only momentarily. His exposed feet and upper body changed again. He developed lionlike feet and a heavy pelt above the waist.
It was cold up there.
Heris observed, “You’re going to be an adventure for some demigoddess.”
“I dropped the sack. There’s water up here but nothing to eat.”
“It’ll be a short adventure, then. I have a question.”
“I may have an answer.”
For reasons uncertain Heris turned toward the dead apple orchard once they passed through the gateway. “Your missing … whatever. That comes and goes. You always have the right number of hands and feet when you’re human. When you’re something else you always have a crippled limb. Which is why you lost your shirt and the food.”
“And other valuables as well.”
“And? So?”
“The hand is also missing when I’m human. But when I’m a man I don’t need to invest much effort holding the form. I can create the illusion of a hand.”
“Illusion? I’ve seen you use it.”
“Have you? For sure?”
“Uh … No, actually. What happened?”
“I attacked somebody when I was the mad monster of the high Jagos. He didn’t panic like the others. He chopped it off. That was not pleasant. But it was useful. The pain eventually wakened what little sanity I had left. That and a savage ambush later that almost killed me.”
Asgrimmur extended his right hand. It began to shrivel. “Kind of creepy, isn’t it?”
“You might say.” Heris stepped through a gap in the dry stone fence surrounding the orchard.
For an instant the gray went away. The garden offered a vision of itself in olden times. A gorgeous blond goddess plucked a golden apple. She placed it under a small flagstone, made a sign Heris assumed was a blessing. She looked in Heris’s direction as though thinking she had heard something coming. She saw nothing, evidently. Distress warped her beauty. Then the vision ended.
“What just happened?” the ascendant asked. “I felt something when you stepped through the fence.”
“I’m not sure. A flash from the past? I might have seen what the
orchard looked like, back when.” The tree from which the goddess had picked the apple lay at Heris’s feet, rotted. Without a termite.
Like the power, insects were not returning to the Realm of the Gods, if only because the gateway was in the middle of a freezing sea. Though all the recent comings and goings probably meant that fleas and lice had become reestablished.
Heris said, “It’s sad, all this having to go. It was magnificent.”
“Have you forgotten what lived here?”
“No. But I bet they weren’t worse than any other Instrumentalities from their era. Were they big on human sacrifices?”
“They demanded it. But not often. The victims were usually condemned men, cripples, or people about to die from disease anyway. Or, after the Chaldarean cult reached the northern world, missionaries. But when times were extreme the gods sometimes demanded a real sacrifice.”
“Did you enjoy your time with Cloven Februaren?” Heris stepped back out of the orchard, strolled toward the entrance to the “keep” of the Great Sky Fortress. Keep was appropriate based on design but a deep understatement by the standards of middle-world fortifications. The structure sprawled to left and right and rose up and up and up.
“I did. The man has a unique mind. Most of what you’re looking at is an illusion. The real fortress goes more back into the flesh of the mountain than it goes up.”
“Not the answer I was looking for.”
The ascendant frowned. He took a moment, as though trying to craft a response that would be approved. “I’m sorry you were disappointed. I’m never sure how things are done. Nor why I do what I do. The Walker and the Banished were powerful personalities. Even as ghosts they sometimes work some wicked magic.”
Heris started to say that that was not what she was looking for, either, but stopped herself.
Asgrimmur continued, “I do enjoy time spent with the old man. My stay at Fea was a pleasant interlude. I enjoyed him even more, here, while you were away. He has an insatiable curiosity. But he likes to start arguments. He squabbled with the Bastard constantly.”
“I’d say he has an infinite capacity for making mischief. What did he get up to when I wasn’t watching?”
Asgrimmur gave her a blank look. Again, she had trouble connecting him with the brute raiders who had come out of Andoray centuries ago. Then she recalled the Ninth Unknown suggesting that he might have absorbed knowledge from the people he had killed during his mad seasons.
She asked, “So what do we do now?” Trying to distract herself.
That old man with the insatiable curiosity would have been up here countless times while she was away. Maybe she could get Asgrimmur to let her in on what they had learned. Maybe she could get him to explain how he had become such a changed man.
“Come.”
She followed.
He showed her a place she refused to visit again.
“This is where my brother and I and our boyhood friends were kept while the Instrumentalities waited to turn us loose. This is where the heroes of the north, scavenged from battlefields by the Choosers of the Slain, awaited their destiny. This is where those who served the Old Ones well in life hoped to spend eternity. The Hall of Heroes. A paradise that has a lot in common with your Chaldarean Hell.”
Despite countless years gone on the smell of death remained.
There was little light back there, inside the mountain. For which Heris was thankful. In the area she could see there were scattered limbs and bodies so terribly mutilated that they had not been able to answer the call to battle when the Walker summoned them to save the Night.
Before the Old Gods went, there had been no corruption in the Hall of Heroes. Just a stink of fresh death. But, now, corruption had found its way into the Great Sky Fortress. Slow, slow corruption, constrained by cold and alien physical law.
“How did you trap them?” Heris asked.
“Clever. Trying to catch me by surprise. But no help. I must have been inspired. But I was too mad to remember. I ripped the necessary knowledge out of the All-Father and the Banished like tearing out their lungs, I expect.”
Heris suppressed a gag reflex. “The smell is too much. How did you stand that for a couple hundred years?”
“It wasn’t that short. Time differences, remember? But we were lucky. We were unconscious. Though that was bad enough. There were dreams. My brother … No point tormenting myself with that.”
“I understand.” Recalling what the ascendant and his brother had done once the Old Ones turned them loose.
“I make no excuse more powerful than that I was trying to take care of my brother. As you would if you had one.”
“All right. Yeah. Whatever. Show me something else.”
There was little to see. Certainly nothing dramatic. Just more and more rooms, large and small, where nothing remained but dust. And that mostly dust created by the slow decay of stone, one mote at a time.
“There aren’t any furnishings,” Heris noted. “No matter where we go. Not one shred of old cloth or one bit of corroded metal. It can’t have been that long, even if time does run different here.”
“The glory that was existed because the Old Ones were here to see it. The Aelen Kofer of antiquity were ingenious artificers. Even the form and dimensions of some parts of the Great Sky Fortress would change in accord with the whim of the beholder.”
“Those would be the same Aelen Kofer we’re working with today?”
“No doubt a point worth keeping in mind.”
“You speaking from memory?”
“Memories not my own. But, yes. There’s still a thrill of pride in the ghost of the All-Father, though he did no more than compel the dwarves to build what he wanted. The genius was that of the Aelen Kofer.”
“If they were geniuses, how did they end up the next thing to slaves?”
The ascendant stopped, faced her, stared for several seconds, then said, “Though the dimmest Aelen Kofer are a dozen times more clever than us that doesn’t make them a dozen times stronger. Nor more willful. They aren’t … They’re … They’re artificers, Heris. Merchants and tradesmen. Folk who take orders and execute them.”
Heris noted the first time use of her name but gave it no weight. She knew what he meant about the dwarves. She had been there. She shifted the subject. “You don’t sound anything like an Andorayan pirate should.”
The ascendant frowned, worked out what she meant. “You have some practical experience? You think you know how a pirate sounds?”
“An Andorayan pirate, no. But I do have direct experience. Though I’ll stipulate that I’m female and I was young at the time.” Younger than he should be thinking now.
The ascendant just looked puzzled.
Heris said, “Show me where the Old Ones are locked up.”
“There isn’t anything to see.”
“Then show me all the nothing.”
There was a hall. An empty hall, empty like every other hall, of any size, that Heris had seen anywhere in the Great Sky Fortress. This one was thirty feet by forty-two, with no distinguishing features. She prowled its bounds. Unglazed windows in an exterior wall admitted ample light, though this was the time of day when passing clouds were thickest. Nothing marked the room as unique.
“Where are they? Is there a direction? A point? Something?”
Asgrimmur spread his hands. “This is where I ended it. That’s all I remember. Any more questions would be a waste of time. I don’t know. I went through it with the old man twenty times. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know. Though I am sure I can undo it with help from the Bastard, Iron Eyes, and the old man.”
“It would be so handy to know what direction I ought to be looking when you guys open the way.”
Asgrimmur shrugged. And managed to look apologetic.
“All right, big dummy. I’m standing here. The way opens. I watch that, wherever it develops. What am I going to see? What will be behind the opening?”
“I can be a little more
useful, there. There’ll be …” His words slowed, stopped. He looked baffled. Like his mind had become a blank.
“Don’t tell me. You just fogged.” Heris thought she might know why Asgrimmur had memory problems.
“I did. I’m blank.”
“One of the soul chips in you is more powerful, more rational, and more independent than you thought. It’s sabotaging you.”
Asgrimmur stared at her dolefully. Then started violently. “I believe you’re right.”
“So. Which one? Arlensul, wanting to keep her family locked up? Or the One Who Harkens, working on a jailbreak?”
“Heris, I don’t know. I’m no good at this Instrumentality business. I don’t have much contact. Not like us standing here talking. Most of the time they’re just ghost voices, way far away. I only catch a few words. Sometimes their voices get lost in all the others.”
Did he mean the voices of those he had killed and eaten when he was the mad monster of the Jagos?
He said, “The Old Ones are the strongest voices. But all the voices come and go.”
“What do they tell you?”
“Mostly they scream. Including the All-Father and the Banished. At the most intense moment of their existence, they were all in extreme agony.”
Heris shuddered. This was grim stuff.
Asgrimmur said, “We should go. There isn’t anything we can accomplish here.”
He was listening to something else. The screams inside? Or the Old Ones imprisoned nearby?
Heris suspected the latter.
Asgrimmur continued, “Let’s go back down to the tavern and see what the Norgens say.”
“The Norgens?”
“That’s how I think of those crone dwarves Iron Eyes left to babysit us. Norgens figuratively, not literally.”
“What would Norgens be?”
He frowned. How could she not know? “Southerner! Norgens are something like the Fates. Three crones who spin the threads of destiny. More or less.”
“If they were still in business would they be in the bottle with the Old Ones?”
“They’re long gone. A different kind of Instrumentality. They’ve faded into whatever afterlife claims used-up Instrumentalities.”