Morning Star

  Sefi carefully plucks a blossom from the tree. The flames scorch the edges of her leather gloves, but she comes away with a small white flower the shape of a teardrop. When touched it expands and darkens to the color of blood before wilting and turning to ash. I’ve never seen anything like it. Nor do I particularly give a piss about the showmanship. It’s too cold for that. A bloody red footprint blossoms in the snow in front of us. Sefi and her Valkyrie stay deathly still, arms outstretched with fingers crooked in a gesture of defense against evil spirits.

  “It’s just blood hidden in the stone,” Mustang says. “It’s not real.”

  Still, the Valkyrie are overawed when more footprints begin to appear on the ground, leading us toward the god’s mouth. They look to each other in fear. Even Sefi goes to her knees when we reach the stairs at the base of the temple’s mouth. We mimic her, pressing our noses to the stone as the throat opens and out waddles a withered old man. Beard white. Eyes violet and milky with age.

  “You are mad!” He howls. “Mad as crows to travel the stairs on the eve of winter!” His staff thumps each individual step in his descent. Voice squeezing the lines for all they’re worth. “Bone and frozen blood is all that should remain. Have you come to request a trial of the Stains?”

  “No,” I rumble in my best Nagal. To take the trial of the Stains now would do nothing for us. We would only see the gods when we received the facial tattoos. And surviving a test of the Stained is something even Ragnar thought I was not prepared for. There’s only one other way to bring the gods to me. Bait.

  “No?” the Violet says, confused.

  “We come to seek an audience with the gods.”

  At any moment, one of the Valkyrie could give us up. All it would take is a word. The tension works its way through my shoulders. Only thing that keeps me sane is knowing Mustang’s on board enough with the plan to be bent on a knee beside me at the top of this damn mountain. That has to mean I’m not totally insane. At least I hope.

  “So you are mad!” the Violet says, growing bored of us. “The gods come and go. To the abyss, to the sea down below. But they give no audience to mortal men. For what is time to creatures such as them. Only the Stained are worth their love. Only the Stained can bear the fever of their sight. Only the children of ice and darkest night.”

  Well this is bloodydamn annoying.

  “A ship of iron and star has fallen from the Abyss,” I say. “It came with a tail of fire. And struck among the peaks near the Valkyrie Spires. Burning across the sky like blood.”

  “A ship?” the Violet asks, now utterly interested, as we supposed he would be.

  “One of iron and star,” I say.

  “How do you know it was no vision?” the Violet asks cleverly.

  “We touched the iron with our own hands.”

  The Violet is silent, mind sprinting to and fro behind those manic eyes. I’m wagering he knows that their communications systems are down. That his masters will be eager to hear of a fallen ship. The last sight he might have seen was my speech before Quicksilver shut everything down. Now this lowly Violet, this eager actor banished to the wastes to perform a mummer’s farce for barbaric simpletons has news his masters don’t. He has a prize, and his eyes, when he realizes this, narrow greedily. Now is his time to seize initiative and gain favor in the eyes of the masters.

  How sad, the dependability of greed to make men fools.

  “Have you evidence?” he asks eagerly. “Any man may say he has seen a ship of the gods fall.” Hesitating, fearful of the deception I work but disdainful of priests, Sefi produces my razor from her bag. It is wrapped in seal skin. She lays it on the ground in whip form. The Violet smiles, so very pleased. He tries to snatch it from the ground with a rag from his pocket, but Sefi pulls it back with the seal cloth.

  “This is for the gods,” I growl. “Not their whelps.”

  The priest ushers us through the temple’s mouth, where we wait, kneeling on a black stone antechamber inside the mountain. The stone mouth grinds closed behind us. Flames dance in the center of the room, leaping up in a pillar of fire to the onyx ceiling.

  Acolytes wander through the cavernous temple, chanting softly, draped with black sackcloth hoods.

  “Children of the Ice,” a divine voice finally whispers from the darkness. A synthesizer, like the ones in our demonHelms, layers the voice so it seems a dozen sewn together. The invisible Gold woman doesn’t even bother to use an accent. Fluent as I in their language, but disdainful of the fact and of the people to which she speaks. “You come with news.”

  “I do, Sunborn.”

  “Tell us of the ship you saw,” another voice says, this one a man. Less lofty, more playful. “You may look upon my face, little child.” Remaining on our knees, we glance up furtively from the ground to see two armored Golds deactivating their ghostCloaks. They stand close to us in the dark room. The temple flames dance over their metallic god faces. The man wears a cloak. The woman likely didn’t have time to don hers, so eager were they to attend us.

  The woman plays Freya while the man is dressed as Loki. His metal visage like that of a wolf. Animals can smell fear. Men can’t. But those who kill enough can feel the vibrations in that particular silence. I feel them now from Sefi. The gods are true, she’s thinking. Ragnar was wrong. We were wrong. But she says nothing.

  “It bled fire across the sky,” I murmur, head down. “Making great roars and crashed upon the mountainside.”

  “You don’t say,” Loki murmurs. “And is it in one piece, or lots of little itty-bitty pieces, child?”

  It is risky saying we saw a ship fall. But I knew no other ruse that would draw the Golds away from their holo screens in the middle of a rebellion, past their security systems and Gray garrison to meet me here. They’re Peerless Scarred, trapped here on the frontier as their world shifts beyond these walls. Once, this post would have been considered glamorous, but now it’s a form of banishment. I wonder about what crimes or failings brought these Peerless Scarred here to babysit the wastes.

  “The bones of the ships litter the mountain, Sunborn,” I explain, looking back at the ground so they do not insist I take away the riding mask that covers my face. The more groveling I do, the less curious I am. “Broken like a fishing boat laid upon mid-stern by a Breaker. Splinters of iron, splinters of men upon the snow.”

  I think that’s a metaphor the Obsidians would use. It passes muster.

  “Splinters of men?” Loki asks.

  “Yes. Men. But with soft faces. Like seal skin in firelight.” Too many metaphors. “But eyes like hot coals.” I can’t stop. How else did Ragnar speak? “Hair like the gold of your face.” The Golds’ metal masks remain impassive, communicating to one another over the coms in their helmets.

  “Our priest claims you have a weapon of the gods,” Freya says leadingly. Sefi produces the seal cloth once more, body tense, wondering when I will dispel the magic of the gods as I promised. Her hands tremble. Both Golds move closer, the slight ripple of pulseShields evident. I touch them and I fry. They have no fear. Not here on their mountain. Closer. Closer, you dumb bastards.

  “Why did you not take this to the leader of your tribe?” Loki asks.

  “Or to your shaman?” Freya adds suspiciously. “The Way of Stains is long and hard. To climb all this way just to bring this to us…”

  “We are wanderers,” Mustang says as Freya bends to look at the blade. “No tribe. No shaman.”

  “Are you, little one?” Loki asks above Sefi, voice hardening. “Then why are there blue tattoos of the Valkyrie on the ankles of that one?” His hand drifts to the razor on his hip.

  “She was cast out from her tribe,” I say. “For breaking an oath.”

  “Is it marked with a house Sigil?” Loki asks Freya. She reaches for the weapon’s hilt in front of me when Mustang laughs bitterly, drawing her attention.

  “On the handle, my goodlady,” Mustang says in Aureate lingo, remaining on her knees as she strips off her ma
sk and tosses it onto the ground. “You will find a Pegasus in flight. Sigil of the House Andromedus.”

  “Augustus?” Loki sputters, knowing Mustang’s face.

  I use their surprise and slip forward. By the time they turn back to me I’ve snatched the razor out from under Freya’s hand and activated the toggle so it is the curved question-mark shape that has burned on hillsides, been cut into foreheads, and killed so many of their kind. The same they would have seen on the holoDisplays as I made my speech.

  “Reaper…” Freya manages, pulling up her pulseFist. I hack her arm off at the shoulder, then her head at the jaw before hurling my razor straight into Loki’s chest. The blade slows as it hits his pulseShield, frozen in midair for half a second as the shield resists. Finally the blade slips through. But it’s slowed and the armor beneath holds. It embeds itself in the pulseArmor plate. Harmless. Until Mustang steps forward and swivel-kicks the hilt of the razor. The blade punches through the armor and impales Loki.

  Both gods fall. Freya to her back. Loki to his knees.

  “Mask off,” Mustang barks as Loki’s hands wrap around the blade sticking from his chest. She slaps his hands away from his datapad. “No coms.” Holiday strips the razor from the man’s hip as his pulseShield shorts. I take Freya’s razor from her corpse. “Do it.”

  Sefi and her Valkyrie stare wide-eyed from their knees at the blood pooling beneath Freya. I remove Freya’s helmet from her head to reveal the mangled face of a middle-aged Peerless Scarred woman with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes.

  “Does this look like a god to you, Sefi?” I ask.

  Mustang snorts a dark little laugh when Loki removes his mask. “Darrow. Look who it is. Proctor Mercury!” The pudgy, cherub-faced Peerless Scarred who endeavored to recruit me into his own house at the Institute before Fitchner stole me away. When last we saw each other five years ago, he tried to duel me in the halls as my Howlers stormed Olympus. I shot him in the chest with a pulseFist. He smiled all the while. He’s not smiling now as he stares at the metal in his chest. I feel a pang of pity.

  “Proctor Mercury,” I say. “You have to be the least lucky Gold I’ve ever met. Two mountains lost to a Red.”

  “Reaper. You have to be shitting me.” He shudders in pain and laughs at his own surprise. “But you’re on Phobos.”

  “Negative, my goodman. That’d be my diminutive psychotic accomplice.”

  “Gorydammit. Gorydammit.” He looks at the blade in his chest, grunting as he sits on his haunches and wheezes out breaths. “How…did we not see you…”

  “Quicksilver hacked your system,” I say.

  “You’re…here for…” His voice trails away as he looks at the Valkyrie rising to gather around the dead god. Sefi bends over Freya. The pale warrior traces her fingers over the woman’s face as Holiday strips off her armor.

  “For them,” I say. “Bloodydamn right I am.”

  “Oh, goryhell. Augustus,” our old proctor says turning to Mustang with a bitter laugh. “You can’t do this…it’s madness. They’re monsters! You can’t let them out! Do you know what will happen? Don’t open Pandora’s box.”

  “If they are monsters, we should ask ourselves who made them that way,” Mustang says in the Obsidian tongue so Sefi can understand. “Now, what are the codes to Asgard’s armory?”

  He spits. “You’ll have to ask nicer than that, traitor.”

  Mustang is deadly cold. “Treason is a matter of the date, Proctor. Must I ask again? Or must I begin trimming your ears?”

  Beside Freya’s body, Sefi dips her finger into the blood and tastes it.

  “Just blood,” I say, crouching beside her. “Not ichor. Not divine. Human.”

  I hold out Freya’s razor for her to take. She flinches at the idea, but forces herself to wrap her fingers around the hilt, hand trembling, expecting to be struck by lightning or electrocuted like men are who touch pulseShields with bare hands. “This button here retracts the whip. This one controls the shape.”

  She cradles the weapon reverently and looks up at me, furious eyes asking which shape she should conjure. I nod to mine, trying to build kinship with her. And I do. If only in this martial way. Slowly her razor takes the shape of the slingBlade. The skin on my arm prickles as the Valkyrie laugh to one another. Vibrating with excitement, they pull their own axes and long knives and look at me and Mustang.

  “There’s five gods left,” Mustang says. “How’d you ladies like to meet them?”

  We drag the bodies of seven gods, two dead and five captured, behind us. I wear the armor of Odin. Sefi the armor of Tyr. Mustang the armor of Freya. All of which we pillaged from the armory on Asgard. Blood smears the stone of the hall. Feet slide and stumble as Sefi jerks one of the living Golds behind us by his hair. Her Valkyrie drag the rest.

  We returned to the Spires on a shuttle stolen from Asgard, which we slipped through silently, using Loki’s codes to access the armory and drape ourselves in the panoply of war before seeking the remaining gods out. Two we found in Asgard’s mainframe leading a team of Greens attempting to purge Quicksilver’s hackers from their system. Sefi with her new razor claimed the arm of one and beat the other unconscious, terrifying the Greens, two of which held up fists to me as silent acknowledgment of their sympathy for the Rising. With their help, we locked the others in a storage room as the two Green sympathizers connected me directly with Quicksilver’s operations room.

  We didn’t reach Quicksilver himself, but Victra relayed news that Sevro’s gamble worked. A little more than a third of the Martian defense fleet is under control of the Sons of Ares and Quicksilver’s Blues. Thousands of the Society’s best troops are trapped on Phobos, but the Jackal is hitting back hard, taking personal command of the remaining ships and recalling forces from the Kuiper Belt to reinforce his depleted fleet.

  The rest of the Golds we located through the station’s biometric sensor map in the lower levels. One practicing with her razor in the training rooms. She saw my face and dropped her blade in surrender. Reputation is a fine thing sometimes. The remaining two Golds we found in the monitoring bays, shifting back and forth between the cameras. They’d only just discovered that the footage was archival from three years before.

  Now, all our Gold captives wear magnetic handcuffs and are tied together by long pieces of rope from Sefi’s griffin, all gagged, all glancing around at the Spires like we’ve dragged them into the mouth of hell itself.

  Obsidians of the Spires flock to us in the halls. Rushing from the deeper levels to see the strange sight. Most would only have seen their gods from a distance, as flashes of gold streaking over the spring snow at mach three. Now we come among them, our pulseShields distorting the air, our shuttle’s pulse cannons melting open the huge iron doors which closed off the griffin hangar from the cold. The doors melt inward like the door on the Pax melted when Ragnar offered me Stains.

  This is not how I intended to bring the Obsidians into my fold. I wanted to use words, to come humbly, in seal skin, not armor, putting myself at the mercy of the Obsidians to show Alia that I valued her people’s worth. Valued their judgment, and was willing to put myself in peril for them. I wanted to do as I preached. But even Ragnar knew that was a fool’s errand. And now I don’t have time for intransigence or superstition. If Alia will not follow me to war, I’ll drag her to it, kicking, screaming, like Lorn before her. For Obsidian to hear, I must speak in the only language they understand.

  Might.

  Sefi fires her pulseFist past my head at the doors leading to her mother’s sanctuary. The ancient iron buckles. Bent and twisted hinges screaming. We flow past an army of prostrate giants who clutter the cavernous halls to either side. So much strength made frail by superstition. Once, when they were stronger, they tried to cross the seas. Built mighty knarrs to carry explorers across the oceans to seek out new lands. The Carved monsters the Golds sowed in the oceans destroyed each boat, or the Golds themselves melted them from the sea. The last boat sailed more than t
wo hundred years ago.

  We come upon Alia as she sits in council with her famed seven and seventy warchiefs. They turn to us now amidst large, smoking braziers. Huge warriors, with white hair to the waists, arms bare, iron buckles on waists, huge axes on backs. Black eyes and rings studded with precious metals glitter in the low light. But they’re too stunned by the sight of the three-hundred-year-old iron doors suddenly glowing orange and melting away to speak or kneel. I draw up before them, still dragging the corpses of the Golds behind me. Mustang and Sefi hurl their captured Golds forward, kicking out their legs. They sprawl on the ground and stumble to their feet, attempting beyond all reason to maintain some dignity here surrounded by giant savages in the smoky room.

  “Are these gods?” I roar through my helmet.

  No one answers. Alia moves slowly through the parting warlords.

  “Am I a god?” I snarl, this time removing my helmet. Mustang and Sefi remove theirs. Alia sees her daughter in the armor of her gods and she flinches back. Fear whispers over her lips. She stops near the five bound and gagged Golds as they finally find their feet. They stand over two meters tall. But, even bent and old as Alia is, she’s a head taller than I. She stares down at the men and women who were once her gods before looking up at her last daughter. “Child, what have you done?”

  Sefi says nothing. But the razor on her arm slithers, drawing the eyes of every Obsidian. One of their greatest daughters carries the weapon of the gods.

  “Queen of the Valkyrie,” I say as if we had never met. “My name is Darrow of Lykos. Blood brother of Ragnar Volarus. I am the warlord of the Rising, which rages against the false Golden gods. You have all seen the fires that rage around the moon. Those are caused by my army. Beyond this land in the abyss, a war rages between slaves and masters. I came here with the greatest son of the Spires to bring the truth to your people.” I wave to the Golds, who stare at me with the hatred of an entire race. “They struck him down before he could tell you that you are slaves. The prophets he sent told it true. Your gods are false.”