Surrender to the will of the night iotn-3, page 58
part #3 of Instrumentalities of the Night Series
“More likely, never.” He turned away, shoulders sagging. He stepped out of the garden, ambled toward the entrance to the keep.
What was his problem?
The ghost of the Walker, disappointed. Beginning to realize that patience was not enough. There would be no restoration. No escape from flesh where he was a passenger without control.
Could he be exorcised? She rather liked today’s Asgrimmur Grimmsson.
Heris followed the brooding ascendant to the hall where the return would happen. It was a jungle of color as jarring as biting into an unsuspected hot pepper. Nowhere else in the Great Sky Fortress was there any color.
The Aelen Kofer had created lamps burning oils charged with sorcery to give the color Heris wanted to paint and chalk her cuing lines and signs so participants would know where to stand and how to move. The colors were on floor, ceiling, and walls. Cords ran hither and yon to keep people from moving in wrong or dangerous directions. Six falcons all directed their snouts at an area of interior wall on which had been painted a square in a harsh red. Large black dots marred the red. Two eighteen-inch-wide trestle tables sat endwise to the wall and lengthwise toward the two heaviest falcons, which had their butts to the light from outside. On the tables were hammers, star chisels, copper tubes with silver linings, blow tubes charged with silver dust, oils and unguents, garlic paste, and anything else Heris, Jarneyn, or the ascendant thought had any chance whatsoever of being useful.
Heris discreetly checked to make sure items suggested by the ascendant lay at the ends of the table farthest from the red paint.
Trust leavened by caution. Always.
The ascendant did not appear to mind. Might not, for that matter, have noticed.
There was more. Much more. The Aelen Kofer had invested a middle-world fortune in silver. There was silver everywhere, in everything, in patterns meant to constrain and direct the Old Ones if they evaded immediate control. Silver would channel them into the mouths of the falcons. Silver would subject them to harsh debilitation before they could escape to their hapless world. Any that did win free would have been drained down to the weight of boogies and sprites. There would be nowhere to go but their dead realm after that.
Before the release started Iron Eyes would seal all the exits from outside. Only those inside the Realm of the Gods would suffer.
A dozen heavy glass bottles in the general shape of flat bottom teardrops sat near the painted wall. Their tops bent at right angles and narrowed to a tube just large enough to fit one of the silver-lined copper tubes. The bottles ranged in size from a gallon to more than a hogshead. They were masterworks of Aelen Kofer glassblowing. The thick glass held hints of sparkle, smoke, and gray and purple. Silver dust had gone into the melt.
Heris hoped to move the Old Ones from one captivity to another, where contracts could be forged before the Old Ones were decanted.
The ascendant asked, “Is there anything more you can ask?” Exasperated because she was such a detail-oriented woman.
His main personalities were all smash and grab and deal with the consequences later sorts.
“I’m sure there must be. I’m counting on the Old Ones to be confused and disoriented long enough for us mortals to get control.” She watched to see how that played.
Too much of this depended on the ascendant.
He had to have control of the Instrumentalities inside him. Then the Bastard had to do whatever a blood descendant had to do.
Heris never did understand that part. But all the old farts agreed: The thing could not be managed without the presence of the divine blood. They were the ones intimate with the Night. They knew the supernatural rules.
She hoped.
Iron Eyes was waiting on the quay. Impatiently. “Good to see you two…” He did not explain what irritated him. “The youngsters are over there already. Including my only son. The Windwalker is working himself up. He knows the appearance of Aelen Kofer means an attack is coming. It always has. He’ll think the Old Ones are free and will turn up after the Aelen Kofer prepare the way. But all he’ll get is you. Hurry. I don’t want him smashing up the future of my tribe.”
Heris scowled. If Jarneyn hadn’t been determined to save the dwarf world from outsider pollution she and the ascendant would be there now. “So let’s hoist all sail and a-reeving go.”
That won no smiles.
They kept saying she had to work on her sense of humor.
Iron Eyes wasted no time moving Heris and Asgrimmur outside the Realm of the Gods.
The ascendant was shaking when Heris took hold for the translation. So. He could be afraid despite all his strength and power.
Out the other side, arriving at the same point as before, with Asgrimmur totally shaken. He needed three minutes to regain control.
“Are the transitions really that rough?” Heris asked. They were like blinking her eyes for her, anymore.
“Yes. And worse each time. That was terrible. I felt trapped. The more time went on the more sure I was that I’d never get out again.”
“We need to explore that, then. Come on. Tell me while we’re getting set to shoot.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to tell me what you experienced, carefully and clearly. I want to know why it’s different from what I experience. And will you look at that?”
There had been a dramatic change in the Windwalker. The great jellyfish blob was gone. The god had traded the protection of two-thirds of its mass for a shape that concentrated strength and required less energy to maintain.
The Windwalker now resembled a gigantic lard toad tadpole about to shed its last remnant of a tail.
Asgrimmur said, “It isn’t that hard to explain. When you translate you’re a human cutting a chord across the Night. When you carry me you take a part of me back home. The Banished and the Walker were born of the Night. Svavar was imprisoned there for centuries. Svavar is repelled. The Walker and Banished are, too, but they’re also drawn. And we can see the entities that dwell there. The hideous souls.”
“Souls? It’s like Hell? Or Purgatory? Or Limbo?”
“Limbo, maybe. For the souls of gods. Instrumentalities have two souls. They bring one into our world with them. They leave the other one in the Night. It anchors them. I see those when we pass through.”
“Well, that sounds good.” Distracted. “It’s got eyes this time. It’s looking at us… Down!” She pulled the ascendant off his feet.
The toad-thing’s tongue struck where they had been an instant earlier. Heris wasted several seconds wondering how she had anticipated Kharoulke. Maybe repeated exposures during her transitions had left her sensitive. “Why am I wasting time brooding when that thing is about to…? You Aelen Kofer! Why aren’t you shooting?”
Asgrimmur tried to say something.
“Yeah. Never mind for now. Come on.” She grabbed his hand and yanked, proud that she had remembered which one was real. She headed for the nearest dwarfish ballista.
That, being of Aelen Kofer manufacture, was an amazing engine. Which had been assembled where it could not be brought to bear on the Windwalker. None of the crew admitted sharing a language with Heris.
Asgrimmur interrupted her rant, “They couldn’t put it together in a clear line of sight because the Instrumentality would get them with its tongue.”
Heris’s high excitement wilted. “All this for nothing? Did I outsmart myself again?”
“Again?”
“For the first time. What do I do now?”
“You go to the other machine, which is out of the toad’s range, and get it started. Once the Instrumentality is fixed on it these dwarves will move their engine up.”
“You follow dwarf gabble good enough to get all that?”
“I filled in based on context. But parts of me did speak the language when they were independent.”
“Got you. Hanging around with them probably helped, too. So. Here we go. Off to the other one. Carry on, boys. You’re doing a wonderful job.”
Jarneyn’s son, called Copper, had picked up some middle-world Firaldian from Heris, Asgrimmur, and the Ninth Unknown. Copper was in charge of the second and even bigger Aelen Kofer machine. Heris demanded, “Why haven’t you shot the damned thing yet?”
“We were directed not to engage until you were here to see the effect of each shot.”
Heris muttered something about beginning to understand the frustrations her brother often felt. “All right. Talk to me. What are you going to do, Copper? And how did you come by that name?”
His companions snickered. Heris did not miss the fact that they understood her question fine. Then recalled that when they cared to the Aelen Kofer commanded the mythic power to understand all languages. When they failed to understand they did so deliberately.
Copper said, “It’s a bad joke. I did something stupid a few hundred years ago.”
“All right. When I need to know I’ll ask Iron Eyes. What are you doing?”
In part, that was obvious. The dwarves were cranking the ballista so tight it shrieked in protest.
Copper said, “Velocity will be critical, first shot. That will be a missile we cobbled together while we were waiting.” By gesture he invited her closer to the engine, a bow type with long arms crafted of laminated horn from a beast that did not exist in the middle world.
Done cranking, the dwarves moved to their ammunition, carefully arranged on the flattest ground available. Heris counted eight shafts, each fourteen feet long. They ranged from three to six inches in diameter. The one selected was six inches thick and appeared to be made of ice in imitation of a fluted marble column. The head flared out to a foot wide, beginning three feet from the end. That head was hollowed back in a cone shape a foot and a half deep inside.
“That looks like ice,” Heris said.
“It is ice. Carefully frozen, then bound with strings of the sort used on the rainbow bridge. If there wasn’t an overcast you’d see the light do marvelous things.”
“How can ice hurt the Windwalker? He’s a winter god.”
“It won’t stay ice. Impact will turn the ice to water. Hot water. As one shaft splits into twenty thinner ones. The Instrumentality will have twenty jets of water shooting through him. The pain should break his concentration.”
The shaft was in place. The Aelen Kofer moved to where they could begin cranking as soon as the ballista discharged.
Copper said, “This was your idea. All we did was tinker. Which is what Aelen Kofer do. Get up on the king seat and give the old toad a poke in the eye.”
Heris allowed herself to be guided to a seat atop the engine, above and to the left of the butt of the ice shaft. Copper said, “You see two oak levers by your right hand. The nearest one is the safety capture. Push forward on that one first. When you want to loose you do the same with the farther lever. Do them in that order, left lever, right lever, or you’ll find yourself in big trouble.”
“Got it. Forward on the nearest lever, then shoot with the other one.” She rested her hand on the safety release. That lever was as long as an ax handle. She focused on the Instrumentality, whose own focus was entirely on her.
The god knew what was coming. It was poised to do something about it. Kharoulke was one hundred percent connected to the moment. Was one hundred percent outside the Realm of Night. This was a fight for existence. No other instant in the entire history of the Nine Worlds or Night mattered. This was the moment. Perhaps for Heris and the Instrumentality, both. And she felt the full weight of what will the Instrumentality retained. She should not do this wicked thing. She was Chosen…
Unexpected, sharp pain in her left buttock. She jumped, looked down. Copper winked. “You’re going to shoot, shoot, Son of Man. Left side, then right.”
Heris shoved levers. That hairy-ass runt would be sorry he had done that. She did not look at the Windwalker till the trigger lever slammed home.
The engine lurched violently as the tension in the great bow released. It slammed down again, jarring the air out of Heris’s lungs.
The god’s tongue leapt to meet the shaft of ice. For an instant psychic space filled with dark mockery. The god would brush the projectile aside. Then it would accumulate new Chosen.
The Aelen Kofer shaft had to conform to the physical laws of the middle world, in a part of that world where there was little magic left and the deity had squandered its share already.
The monster toad tongue did deflect the shaft. But that was moving too fast, carrying too much momentum, to be redirected much.
It hit just slightly off bull’s-eye. Otherwise, it performed as designed. It was, after all, an Aelen Kofer artifact.
Dwarves swarmed around the engine, getting it properly aimed again, spanned again, and loaded again. “This one is mostly salt,” Copper told her. “Khor-ben’s idea. I know not what muse moved him. Salt shouldn’t do much. On the other hand, there are iron knives inside the salt. They’ll start spinning when they release.”
Heris watched the shaft go into the tray.
Copper told her, “Left lever first, right lever second.”
“I remember.”
The engine did not buck as violently. The dwarves had seen no need for maximum velocity this time.
As the engine slammed back down Heris saw the other ballista ease into position. It got its first missile off an instant before she launched her third, a long wooden pole filled with thousands of little lead darts, each tipped with a barbed iron or silver head. The lead was expected to separate. The barbed heads were ever so slightly curved. They would not travel in a straight line as they kept creeping through divine flesh.
The wood peeled away while the shaft was in the air. The flechettes hit the Windwalker in a broad spray.
The shaft from the other engine was of the same type.
Thousands of boils and pustules appeared on the skin of the great toad. The god heaved violently, most of its mass clearing the stained and slimy shingle. A scream both physical and psychic froze the assailants. For a half minute Heris was capable of no rational thought at all.
Shaking, she pulled herself together. Downslope, the Windwalker desperately tried to do the same. Its violent heave had caused it to slide. Its leg and tail part were in the water. A sort of gray, foul mist puffed off the god where the darts had gone in.
The scream seemed to have no end.
Working like they were doing so in the face of a high wind and doubled gravity, the Aelen Kofer readied the engine again.
Heris shouted down, “One of you guys want to take a turn?”
Copper bellowed, “We can’t do that. We’re Aelen Kofer. We aren’t allowed. We only make things and explain their use.”
Heris thought that claim emanated from the stern quarters of a male bovine. Aelen Kofer could and did act when they thought they could get away with it. Whatever it might be.
Copper was hedging bets. Lawyering. Making sure he could disclaim responsibility somewhat. Despite having brought a full ration of Aelen Kofer ingenuity to the murder at hand.
Thenceforth the fight was an execution. The Windwalker was too weak. It could do nothing but take the punishment and hope to survive. And hope its enemies could not bring anything more to bear before winter came.
Winter would come. Winter would bring salvation. This coming winter would be the most ferocious in an epoch. This world would not emerge from its next winter.
“Let’s slow down,” Heris said. “Let’s let each shaft finish working before we launch another.”
The mist puffs coming off the Windwalker had become streamers. They built a cloud around the monster. Heris wanted that to clear.
She got down to stretch her legs. “Isn’t that something?” she asked the ascendant. She glanced at the sun. The day was getting on. The light might not last long enough to finish this.
“I don’t feel well,” Asgrimmur said.
“What?”
“I’m sick. I haven’t been sick like this since I suffered through that minor version of what the Windwalker is going through now.”
“But it isn’t happening to you.”
“No. In theory, it’s not. Except to those parts of me connected to the Night. The entire Night is feeling this. It’s confused, frightened, angry, and disoriented. And fully aware that something unprecedented is happening.”
“Your Old Ones, too?”
“Especially them.”
“The other Old Ones?”
“I don’t think so. They’re in a place outside the Nine Worlds and only the Nine Worlds are connected to the Night.”
“Your Old Ones. The rest of the Night. They can’t possibly feel sorry for this thing.”
“The Banished, not so much. The Walker… It isn’t sympathy. It’s fear and all the things the rest of the Night feels. And… No. That doesn’t make sense. Does it? A kind of guilt, despair, then another kind of guilt?”
“Who said the man is confused? That’s clear as a smack in the teeth. Time for me to take a couple more shots.” The steam had cleared off the Windwalker. The mottled, festering remnants of the toad did not retain a third of the mass that had been there before the attack began.
Her first shot set the surface of the Windwalker to bubbling like hot tar. Heris heard the bubbles bursting. Each vented a fat puff of steam. The toad soon disappeared inside another cloud.
Heris leaned back.
The ascendant climbed up and hung on to the side of her seat. “I’ve made sense of what the Walker is feeling. He sees all this as his fault. He now thinks you’ll actually kill the Windwalker. Being selfish, as gods are, he doesn’t care what that means for the Night. He does think that it means you won’t find it necessary to release the other Old Ones.”
“That wouldn’t hurt my feelings. Not having to try. Be pretty damned anticlimactic after all the work we’ve done to make it happen, though.”
“Yes. Just so.”
“What does that mean?”
“That the Walker is sure you won’t let the work go to waste. That, since you don’t need them now, you’ll bring them out to destroy them.”
Heris thought about that. And found it a not unappealing plan. But entirely unnecessary. The Old Ones could be kept forever harmless right where they were.
