Mythworld: Invisible Moon (15 page)

… Then, they stopped, noses high, sniffing the air …

… and turned to look at her.

They were asking for
permission
.

Whatever it was she had become, Meredith suddenly realized that she was no longer strictly human—and whatever parts of her had changed were powerful in strange and unorthodox ways. She could fly. She was strong, although not so strong as Shingo. She was more resilient and less vulnerable to injury. And apparently, she held some sway over these creatures standing before her.

She looked at Shingo, who had been reaching many of the same conclusions in his own head, and had suddenly begun to question the previously indisputable outcome of the Battle of the Pickle Factory. Against Meredith, he could prevail easily; add the trolls, and he still held the upper hand. But against a pack of wolves …

Herald stirred, moaning.

Meredith looked at his prostrate form in concern, then back to Shingo in time to see the loathing reflected in his eyes.

“You wouldn’t
dare
,” said Shingo, eyes narrowing.

Meredith nodded. “Maybe I would.”

For a heartbeat, no one moved, then Shingo tightened his grip on a twisted piece of metal—he was readying a strike—and in response, Meredith tipped her head at the wolves.

In a single effort, they fell onto Shingo, jaws ripping and tearing flesh. He killed several before the numbers overwhelmed him, forcing him down; and when two enterprising wolves hamstrung him, that was the end of it. He was bleeding from a hundred wounds, most of his legs had been chewed away, and his throat and face were badly torn.

Respectfully, the wolves moved to the far end of the hall; whatever had gone before, they realized this was Meredith’s conflict to conclude as she would.

Oly growled, standing protectively over Herald’s broken body. “You guys just stay the blazes on your own side,” said Herald, squinting suspiciously at the wolves.

Meredith stood over the man she’d come to love, to whom she’d given her heart, her soul, and her body, and she knew that she was going to kill him.

Meredith held up her right hand, formed to a claw that she instinctively knew had the force and the strength to push its way into Shingo’s chest, and rip free his heart.

She lifted her hand, and prepared to end his life, when a familiar voice cried out her name.

“Meredith!”

Junichi was standing in the charred entryway to the private quarters, a worried Delna behind him; how much they saw of what had gone on Meredith had no idea, but June had come at the precise moment that his son was going to die. Meredith took a breath and arched her shoulder.

“Meredith.”

Softer this time, it was the pleading note in June’s cry that stopped her hand more than anything else, something that appealed to the deepest part of her; that, and the fact that at the moment he called out to her …

… She felt a presence in her womb.

Meredith looked down at Shingo, who had slain the father of her heart, then back up at the father of his.

Meekly, June bowed. Meredith could tell he was trying not to weep.

“Meredith,” he said again, “Please—if you are going to take the life of my son, I ask only that you let me be with him as he dies. This is all I will ask of you.”

She looked at the strongest man she had ever known, now struggling to meet her eyes, hoping desperately that he will be allowed the privilege of watching a child he’d raised as his own …
die
.

Meredith suddenly realized that killing when it was not necessary to kill was not something that she did, whoever she had been and whatever she may have become.

Meredith lowered her hand, and began to back away.

“Meredith …” June began, an unbelieving look of hope blossoming on his face, when his eyes suddenly widened and behind him, Delna screamed.

Meredith had barely turned when the iron bar pierced her neck and threw her backwards, pinning her to the floor.

“I thought you were smarter than that, Meredith,” Shingo rasped, staggering to his knees, still towering over me, still gripping the other end of the bar, “but I was wrong about a lot of things.”

She screamed as he gave the bar a vicious twist. “I don’t really need you now, you know,” he continued, “not when I can have anyone I want.”

“Earl, please,” said June, “she spared your life. Do not do this.”

“Yeah,” said Shingo. “Like I’m going to listen to you, you old cuckold. You never even defended what was yours.”

“What do you mean?”

Shingo blinked, incredulous. “You mean you don’t know? You don’t even know about Mom and …”

“And Vasily? Of course I knew, Earl.”

Immediately, the strength seemed to drain from Shingo’s arms. Meredith pulled the bar out of her neck and scooted away, trying to stem the flow of blood. It was miraculous that it hadn’t killed her, but she had already realized that she was harder to kill than she used to be.

Shingo looked at June, once more a child looking to his father for answers. “Then why?” he asked, pleading himself now. “Why did you let it happen, if you knew?”

“Because,” said June, “I saw a man who had given up his own family for their own sake, and who nearly gave his life to save me and mine. When I discovered that he and Fuji were close, and that you were not mine but his, I made the same choice he had made with Meredith and Elena—only I was not strong enough to leave.”

Shingo listened, then looked up at June, a cold madness in his eyes. “It’s your fault. It’s all your fault.” He lifted a chunk of concrete over his head. “You should’ve let her kill me, Dad.” He turned, suddenly, and Meredith knew she was about to be crushed. She closed her eyes.

Before he could strike, an explosion rocked the hall, and Meredith opened her eyes to suddenly find herself looking at Herald through Shingo’s chest …

… Or more precisely, through the gaping hole Herald had just shot in him.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Oly, weakly.

Everyone looked at Herald, sitting bloody in the corner.

“Black powder and ball-bearings,” said Herald, holding what looked like a smoking potato gun that he’d pulled from his ever-present bag. “An electromagnetic pulse does diddly-squat to black powder and ball-bearings.”

Shingo stood a moment more, then shuddered and dropped the chunk of concrete loudly to the floor before collapsing in a crumpled heap.

Stricken, June could only stare at the giant, misshapen body of his son. Catatonic, Delna took him by the hand and led him away to his private rooms, which were unscathed by the fire.

The wolves suddenly arched their backs, growling at a movement within the debris. Metal bars and charcoal shifted, and the red and blistered head of Glen Beecroft popped out.

“Well, paint me blue and call me Shirley,” said Glen. “What a cool party.” He managed to extricate himself, and after Meredith pointed him in Delna’s direction, stumbled off to coat himself in unguent.

Almost expectantly, the wolves turned to Meredith.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I think you can go, now.”

They dipped their heads, accepting, or perhaps in some sort of fealty, then one by one, the wolves meekly approached, whining softly, and each in turn licked her hand. Then, silently filing out in a processional of grays, whites, and mottled browns, they left, less disruptively then they had come.

As if to reestablish his turf, Oly limped outside after them and took up a post on the broad porch.

In moments, the building was empty, save for Meredith, Herald, and the dying ogre that had been her lover and her friend.

O O O

Meredith wasn’t sure how long she and Herald sat, looking numbly at each other when the voice broke their trance.

“I guess this is what I get for sleeping with an older woman.”

It was Shingo. Somehow, he was not dead.

“Man,” said Herald, “who the devil are you, anyway—Spock?”

Shingo twisted his head around to look at Meredith. “This is not how this was supposed to go, Meredith. I thought that after what we found, you and I could go away together, be happy no matter what happened to everyone else in the world. If I was with you, I could forget what I knew.”

“Dammit, Shingo, what do you know? What else was in that stupid box?”

He chuckled through his torn throat. “Letters, to begin with. Written to your mother, before you were born, they’d all been returned because she was married … Then some personal notes about how he’d stayed away after your birth, for propriety’s sake. I just read between the lines, and concluded that Michael, not Vasily, was your true father. That wasn’t the good stuff, though.”

“What was?”

“Other papers—proof that we’re all nothing but pawns, in a game bigger than any of us can imagine. A game which began when Hagen slew Siegfried.”

“You mean Michael? This started when he killed Michael?”

Shingo shook his head weakly. “Siegfried … When he slew
Siegfried
.”

“But that was only an opera—an opera at a festival! They weren’t even supposed to
be
there!”

“Yes … yes, they were. There were reasons for the things they did, and the words they spoke.”

Meredith shook her head. “Michael did what he did because he was trying to go along with a psychotic colleague—Michael was only playing a part!”

“No … no, he wasn’t.”

At that, Herald, lying crumpled in the debris at the far side of The Pickle Factory began to laugh: a mad, pain-driven, high-pitched giggling. He was not as strong as they were, and the shock seemed to be wearing off. “There are pieces to the puzzle that are beyond us, Reedy. Pieces that may be the most important, but are still worth bupkis if you don’t know what the picture is.”

“What are you talking about? The books? The letters in the box? Or the music? The sheets of music you and Herald found?”

“The music, and the notes—you saw them, Meredith?”

“Yes. Mr. Janes found them, and showed them to me, but I don’t know why they were important.”

“They aren’t,” spat Shingo, “Not now.” He convulsed suddenly, coughing blood.

“It’s funny though,” said Herald, “Hagen thought he’d found the key to the world’s mysteries in a symphony, and Siegfried thought he’d found it in an opera. And they were both right—only Hagen took the initiative to act first.”

“What do you mean, Herald?” Meredith pressed. “What is happening, here?”

Herald lifted himself up on one elbow, taking care not to put any weight on his ruined arm. “The box we found contained a lot of your father’s personal papers, although I didn’t find this out until later—Shingo wanted to go through them, then discuss them with you privately. Given your relationship, I thought that was appropriate.

“There were things other than his personal papers: Michael’s entire set of acquisition records from the University, every rare document he purchased during his time there, complete with receipts—the absence of which might have had some bearing on his dismissal, if it was found they were missing; there were also several simple books relating to the
Edda
 …”

“Mr. Janes was reading through one,” said Meredith, “but I didn’t understand the significance of it, or of what he was saying.”

Herald nodded. “Understandable. There was a lot that didn’t make sense, until we got more deeply into the paperwork. The Mathematics department may have been where the box was attributed, but almost all of the notations made on everything in the box were written by the head of Music Theory at the University.”

“So?”

Shingo snorted, a mixture of disgust and resignation. “The head of Music Theory was Mikaal Gunnar-Galen—our Hagen.”

Herald coughed in agreement and continued. “Shingo saw that connection first,” he acknowledged. “But the question still remained as to what the music—all of it Schubert—had to do with Michael, Wagner, the
Edda
, or anything at all.

“I began to see the parallels when we found the
Edda
page, Reedy. Wagner was seeing …
something
unusual in it, and was attempting to interpret it through his opera. Similarly, Schubert was seeing the same kind of extraordinary things in the writings of Goethe.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Look at it this way, Reedy: Goethe is to German Literature what Shakespeare is to English—or more appropriately here, what Sturluson is to the Norse. Where Wagner was trying to find some deeper meanings in the Sturluson which he could incorporate into the
Ring
, Schubert was trying to find similar insights into the workings of the world in the poems of Johann Goethe. He set fifty-nine of Goethe’s poems to music, but only one was being developed as a full-fledged symphony—and it was this unfinished work which Hagen was dissecting at the University, and which somehow got sent here.”

Meredith shook her head, trying to make sense of the information. “Are you trying to tell me that the papers which were burned were Schubert’s original compositions?”

“No—but they included a first generation copy of the new symphony which Schubert was writing. This is what Hagen—or Galen—was working on, although I still don’t know what it had to do with Michael, or the
Edda
.
”

“What was it called?”

“The Erl-Kings.”

“The Erl-King?”
Meredith asked, confused. That was the name of a well-known poem and musical composition—it seemed unlikely that it was the subject of any serious academic study.

“Erl-Kings
,
”
Herald corrected, “plural. Schubert had apparently gone beyond Goethe’s poem to a deeper, older source, as Wagner did with the
Ring
—he skipped the
Volsungasaga
and went straight to Sturluson. Wagner wanted to achieve a purer interpretation of material which he felt to be primal in more ways than one, and Schubert was trying to do the same, although I’ve no idea what for.”

At this a harsh, bitter laugh filled the burned room. “You idiots,” rasped Shingo. “You don’t understand anything, do you? They were searching for the oldest stories, the Ur-stories. When the world was made, stories weren’t
entertainment
—they were accountings of how the universe worked, and just because people stopped telling the stories doesn’t mean that the machineries of the Gods stopped too. They’re just waiting for someone to come along and take hold of the reins again, and that’s what Wagner and Schubert were trying, and Hagen did—he’s finishing one of the old stories which ran the world.”