Once the ship was out of sight, it became impossible to guess how high we were. There were no familiar features with which to orient myself. The brightness of the Gloryhammer before us washed out most of the stars.
“I’m going to step out,” I said.
“What?” Infidel yelled back.
“I’m going to step out of my body. I’ll be limp for a moment.”
“Go,” she said.
I once more leapt from the golden cage and out through the wooden staves, sailing freely into the frigid winds. It occurred to me that if Sorrow was listening to my words, it’s possible she now knew I could escape from her cage. She’d been treating me rather fairly since I’d given her the map to the Knight’s Castle, but would she try to cage me again? I’d deal with that if and when I saw her.
I slowed, letting Infidel pass on. As the glow of the Gloryhammer faded into the distance, I saw that the curtains of light had dimmed, leaving behind stars of stunning crispness. Until now, I’d only seen the sky through the humid, gauzy air of my island home. Here, every last trace of moisture had frozen and dropped from the sky, leaving the stars fully exposed. I felt much the awe and wonder I’d experienced when, as a teen, I’d seen my first naked woman. I was glimpsing something ordinarily hidden from the eyes of man. I sensed that if I could understand what I was gazing upon, I would find wisdom.
Of course, the main wisdom I gathered in studying the bodies of women in my youth was that any serious course of education was going to be expensive. But these stars, these stars... The Sacred Writs are full of tales of men who go into wastelands to find communion with the Divine Author. At this moment, I grasped why. The stars were so numerous that patterns emerged wherever I glanced, as if the celestial canvas was some immense manuscript that a man might one day learn to read.
No wonder the ice-ogres thought of these starry reaches as heaven.
Of course, I had resisted the call of heaven so far. I shook off my fascination and returned to the task at hand. Looking back, though it had been beyond the gaze of my wooden eyes, I could see the
Freewind
aglow like a distant star against the inky darkness of the sea. To the north and west, I could see the sea turning white in the distance. Flying higher, I saw that I was gazing at a shoreline, like the world’s smoothest, widest beach, formed of sand white as pure salt. But given the chill that numbed even my ghostly bones, I soon deduced I was looking not at sandy beaches, but at the edge of a vast, unbroken ice sheet.
Infidel was flying along the edge of this ice sheet, looking like a shooting star in the distance. With a thought, I was back at her side, animating the driftwood golem once more. She sensed my return and asked, “See anything?”
“The stars are amazing once you’re free of the glare of the Gloryhammer.”
“Hmm,” she said. “You can’t see the stars right now?”
“Not much.”
“I see them fine,” she said. “In fact, now that I think about it, I never get blinded by the hammer’s glow. It must be one of those passive powers Sorrow talked about.”
“I think I know another power of the hammer,” I said.
“What?”
“When you were at the Jawa Fruit village, Tower flew straight to you, and I remember him saying that he’d told the hammer to find you. So the hammer has some kind of ability to track people.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t he find me years earlier? He’s had the hammer ever since I vanished, and was obsessed with me the whole time. Why didn’t he come looking for me?”
“Maybe the hammer is like a bloodhound,” I speculated. “It has to have some reference point to use for tracking?”
Infidel’s face went blank as I said “bloodhound.”
“You’re thinking of Menagerie, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” she said.
We flew on through the darkness for some time before she asked, “Is this all my fault?”
“I don’t see how you can be blamed for the insane plans of a two-hundred-year-old witch.”
“But what if I’d killed Menagerie when the Black Swan told me to? None of this would have happened.”
“The Black Swan also told you to kill Greatshadow and you didn’t,” I said. “I think you made the right call. I think, against all odds, you converted an enemy of mankind into a grudging ally. I heard you explain your reasons to Zetetic. The Isle of Fire should remain untamed. I can’t agree more.”
“Am I crazy to want to raise our daughter there?”
“No,” I said. “It’s dangerous, but it’s the only place in the world I’ve ever felt that life makes sense. You saw how happy my grandfather was living with the Jawa Fruit tribe. The island can be paradise if you respect it rather than trying to tame it.”
“I know,” said Infidel. “I want our daughter to love exploring the jungle just as much as we did. I want her to be able to appreciate nature by getting dirt and blood under her nails as she stalks her own meal. But I don’t want her growing up as some naked, unwashed savage like your grandfather. I want her to read the books that you loved. I was bored by operas and museums and cathedrals when I was a girl, but now I want her to see these things, so that she can understand the beauty that man is capable of producing. How do I do this? How do I raise a child to be both wild and refined, civilized and feral all at once?”
“You’re describing yourself, you know,” I said. “Half-forest-dragon, half-princess. The ultimate blend of beast and beauty. My god, I never stood a chance. You captured my heart the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
“Oh, that was just lust,” she said, dismissively. “I was pretty hot when I was twenty.”
“You’re pretty hot now,” I said.
“Actually, right now I’m freezing,” she said. “My nipples are hard as walnut shells.”
“It’s lucky you ditched that chrome-plated bra.”
She laughed, but then her voice went serious. “I’m scared, Stagger.”
“Of being a mother?”
“What do I know about raising a child? What do I know about anything? Other women have mothers, sisters, best friends they can talk to. People who can tell them what to expect, what to worry about and what to shrug off. I don’t have any of this. I’m thirty years old and I can rattle off a list of about three hundred people who’ve vowed to kill me, and precisely two people I count as friends, and they’re both dead!”
“Two?” I said, instantly regretting that I sounded surprised she had a second friend.
“There’s also Aurora,” she said. “I mean, it’s dumb. A month ago she was nobody to me. But I really connected with her on the dragon hunt. She told me her secrets, I told her mine, and... I dunno. There was a bond. It was almost like I had a sister. Which is why I feel so strongly about keeping this promise.”
“I understand,” I said. “But she won’t know if you keep the promise or not.”
“How do you know? You’ve managed to keep tabs on me.”
“I saw Aurora move on. She went to her heaven... the Great Sea Above.” I glanced up. “Maybe she’s up there right now, looking down, watching us streak across her sky like a comet.”
“If she’s watching, she knows what a mess I’ve made,” said Infidel. “Old Infidel would have shrugged this off. New Infidel intends to clean things up.”
“Your newfound devotion to cleaning will probably be a big help in motherhood.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“As for advice on childbirth and raising kids, Gale Romer can probably give you some guidance.”
“She’ll charge me for it,” said Infidel. “We’re not really friends. I was just a mercenary she employed. I liked her as a boss, but I can’t say we were close. And after all the grief I’ve caused her on this trip, she probably hates me.”
I didn’t know what to say. Infidel couldn’t return to her own family for assistance. My father was a monk and would be of no use; my mother had been a whore who abandoned me at an orphanage. I wasn’t her only child, but even though I have a dozen half-siblings out in the world, they’re strangers to me. My grandfather would probably be willing to help, but, as noted, he’s gone feral. Also, while Judicious seemed remarkably sound in body and mind, it was no trivial matter that he was a whisker away from his hundredth birthday. It was no certain thing he’d be around in nine months.
“I don’t know what the future holds,” I said at last. “But if my past is any guide, things always work out.”
“Not always,” she said.
“Often enough,” I said. “My gut tells me everything will be okay. My gut tells me you’ll be a great mother.”
“You don’t have a gut anymore,” she said.
“Well, my brains tell me.”
“You don’t have brains either!”
“True. All that’s left is my soul. And if a soul isn’t the ultimate judge of the rightness of things, what is?”
“Hmm,” she said, before the faintest flicker of a grin crossed her face.
We flew on in silence. I felt as if she were happy for the moment, or at least in a state of relative peace, and I worried that it would be too easy to tip her mood back into worry.
Slowly, a curious thing unfolded. The sky at our backs grew noticeably lighter.
“Everything’s turning blue,” said Infidel as she slowed, turning back to watch the sky.
I slipped out of my shell to verify that this was so. An eerie twilight had broken through the gloom, distinctly azure in hue. Then, with no fanfare, the bright white upper edge of the sun peeked above the southern horizon. I’d never appreciated seeing the old dragon Glorious quite so much.
I wasn’t the only one happy to see the sun. The internal glow of the Gloryhammer had intensified. The weapon gave off a slight crackling sound. Infidel held the weapon toward the distant orb.
“Feel this,” she said. “Put your hand on the hammer.”
I placed my gloved root on the shaft, but felt nothing. “What should I be feeling?”
“The hammer is sort of humming. It’s almost like the purr of a kitten when it’s being held by someone it knows.”
“The Glorystones fell from the sky when Glorious first merged with the sun. Maybe the hammer remembers him. They’ve been separated for over a day now, since the sun never appeared on the Sea of Wine.”
“Maybe,” Infidel said.
But if the hammer truly had a memory, it was not allowed to dwell for long on these recollections. After a leisurely stroll across the horizon where it never quite got airborne, the distant sun once more began to recede.
We turned north and flew on, the landscape beneath us aglow in the relatively bright twilight. Against this backdrop, anything dark stood out, and far ahead I spotted specks upon the ice, small as fleas. I pointed toward the dark forms with my gloved hand. Infidel nodded and altered our course to investigate. We soon came to see that our targets were moving. As we closed upon them, the specks became two large humanoid figures crouched over a gray mass on the ice. They had their backs to us; the gray smear they were hunched over proved to be a large seal they were butchering. As one of the butchers moved to the side, I spotted tusks jutting from his lower jaw. Ice-ogres!
Infidel came in low. The Gloryhammer caused long shadows to stretch before the ogres. They turned back to look at the source of the light, raising their hands to shield their eyes.
“Sorrow,” I said. “Right now would be a fantastic time for you to teach me the ice-ogre word for ‘hello.’”
“Awk,” she responded almost instantly.
“I can manage that,” I said. “Awk! Awk!”
We were several hundred yards away. Between the faintness of my squeaky voice and the rush of wind, I can’t believe they heard me. Nevertheless, something triggered them to choose this exact second to abandon their kill. They ran toward a ragged-looking patch of ice. This proved to be a deep pool of slush leading to the ocean beneath, or so I deduced as they disappeared into it.
“Damn,” said Infidel, landing on the ice where they’d just stood.
“Do ogres swim?” I asked.
“They’re excellent swimmers,” said Sorrow. “If they had time to fill their lungs they can last almost twenty minutes underwater. Their high body fat helps retain heat. They can travel miles beneath the ice; they use their tusks to bash their way up through thin spots.”
“Weird,” said Infidel, with her ear almost pressed to mine. “I can hear you, Sorrow. Just barely.”
“It’s the sympathetic vibration of the other half of the seed pod.”
“Have you... have you been listening to everything we said?” Infidel asked.
“I told you before you left that I would hear what Stagger heard. But, don’t worry, I haven’t been paying attention to your confessions of maternal inadequacy. We’ve been preoccupied here by the arrival of Levi. The whales messages found their mark.”
“Levi? Gale’s oldest son? He showed up fast.”
“It turns out he has his mother’s talent for shortcuts,” said Sorrow. “Though that’s not really the thing that stands out about him.” I waited for a elaboration, but she had said all she had to say on the subject.
Infidel said, “I feel bad that we scared them off. They’d done a lot of work.” She was looking at the seal. It was in a relatively advanced state of butchering, the skin flayed from the muscle and stretched out to create a tidy workspace. Neat slabs of meat were spread over the surrounding ice, faintly steaming as the winter air sucked out their moisture. The nutrient-rich organs, like the heart and liver, were laid out as neatly as if they were in a butcher’s window. The skull had been worked free from the spine and set aside, the lidless eyes forced to watch the dismemberment of the body. Either the ogres were fast workers or we’d frightened them away from the fruits of several hours’ work.