Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (62 page)

No. Don’t fall into thinking that.

Whether by choice, oath, or stricture, Williams was Cordus’s creature. It’d be foolish to forget it.

I stared up at the massive monolith of ice. It seemed to have erupted from beneath the snow, like a sword. Or rather, to be erupting — in the light of the low sun, I could see movement all over the citadel’s surface, as though the ice were flowing slowly upward, in defiance of gravity.

There was no doorway and no windows. Except for the soft hiss of moving ice, everything was eerily silent.

Beside me, Ghosteater gave a soft growl. I stroked his head and looked up at Williams.

“They’ll come,” he said.

And they did.

A cleft opened in the ice wall, and three ice people stepped out. Two were male. They were much bigger than Bob of Dorf had been — at least ten feet tall. They were also hairy all over, whereas Bob and the one other ice person I’d seen back in the F-Em had been furless from the elbows and knees down. Other than that, they were similar: white fur pattered with pale gray; furry humanoid faces with oversized mouths and large, dark eyes; thick, straight horns protruding from the sides of the head; and impressive, out-in-the-open genitalia.

The third must’ve been female. She was much shorter, and her build was lighter. Her lower legs and forearms were bare. Whatever private parts she had were just that — private.

The males were carrying weapons — long, thick staves made of ice. As they approached, the staff of the one on the left morphed into a massive sword. The other’s became thinner and longer and grew a leaf-shaped blade on the end.

The female stayed between and a few paces behind the males. She was unarmed.

Williams stepped forward, holding out empty palms. “Greetings on behalf of Lord Cordus. I bring his solatium to the ice mothers, as stipulated in your agreement with him.”

A little shock ran through me.

I guess I’d been holding onto the possibility that Cordus hadn’t given me away, in spite of everything. I smiled bitterly and shook my head at my own foolishness.

The ice mother silently considered what Williams had said.

The consideration went on and on.

Finally, she turned my way and told me to identify myself.

I shook my head and motioned that I couldn’t speak.

That prompted another round of silent consideration. I had no idea if she understood what I meant.

At last, she turned her gaze to Ghosteater. “Hale, elder beast. Why are you here?”

The wolf growled, low and menacing.

The ice men stepped in front of the female, lifting their weapons.

“A friend of Miss Ryder’s,” Williams said, “accompanying her by choice to guide and protect.”

I laced my fingers through Ghosteater’s ruff, waiting to see how he’d react to being spoken for.

Rather surprisingly, he didn’t react at all.

The ice mother deliberated some more.

Finally, she turned back to Williams. “We accept Lord Cordus’s solatium, delivered in good condition and a timely fashion, as per our agreement.”

Then she told me to remove my weapons.

I took a deep breath and shed Terry’s M4. Then I slid my holstered knife and sidearms off my belt and laid them on the ground next to the rifle.

My gift lurched within me, then stilled.

That’s the weapon I’ll be keeping.

Ghosteater’s head moved under my hand. I looked down to find him studying me.

“Pup. You smell …” His vocabulary seemed to fail him. “It is a troubled scent. Do you want this?”

I knelt down in the snow and wrapped my arms around him, burying my face in the thick, soft filament-fur of his neck.

Then I pulled back, looked him the eye, and nodded.

He stared at me for a few seconds and then backed away, head and tail low, turned, and melted into nothingness.

The ice men sank into defensive postures, protecting the female. Long seconds ticked by in which a whole lot of nothing happened. Eventually, the ice mother said something in her own language, and the males stood down.

The one with the sword bent and scooped my pack up off the ice. The other stepped forward and wrapped a huge paw around my upper arm. Without ceremony, they turned and marched me into the citadel. Just before it closed behind me, I turned and looked back.

Williams was standing there, watching me go.

I couldn’t see Ghosteater at all.

Ghosteater sat in the snow.

It had grown quite dark.

The wind whispered past him, murmuring of the ancient granite mountains it had touched, foretelling their eventual demise under its relentless wear. It told him, too, of a dead walrus, thirty miles north. And of a lemming conducting its business nearby beneath the new snow. And of the man, Williams, moving slowly away through the polar night. And of a thousand other things.

The wind said nothing of the she-pup beyond the fading trace of her buried footprints.

The world’s coat of scents seemed strange without hers.

The bare patch bothered him.

He whined softly, then checked himself. To grieve a human was foolish. Humans were troublesome creatures, full of confusion, abstractions, silly rules. Beasts were not like that. It was a wrong way to be. Better to listen to the wind. The wind never left him.

As if in confirmation, it ruffled his fur.

Dead walrus
, it said.

It was a clear night. Ghosteater tipped his head up. Lazy green curtains of the aurora rippled overhead.

So beautiful
.

The perception of beauty quivered at the center of his consciousness, strange and frightening. It was not a beast’s thought.

Food
, the wind whispered.
Fat. Newly dead
.

He rose and shook himself, then headed north at a steady lope.

This was the right way — eating or being eaten, running until being run down. Being in the world, not contemplating it.

Confusion was not the province of beasts.

Nor was beauty.

Nor were the ways of men.

In a small, cluttered home in Brooklyn, the largest extant fragment of the Thirsting Ground set down the scarf it was knitting.

Its mind had been wandering, and that was no good.

To bring itself back to the separateness of Helen Sturluson, it produced an exasperated sigh and said “My, my, how vexing!” in its best old lady voice.

That made it feel a bit better.

It was a hard thing to maintain, separateness.

The whole of the Thirsting Ground was always there, on the edge of the fragment’s consciousness. When its attention flagged, its boundaries began to blur, and remembering its separateness from the whole became harder. The whole existed in unrelenting torment, trapped in its isolate. The Brooklyn fragment had no desire to subject itself to that. It had escaped, after all.

“I must concentrate,” the fragment said to itself. “Mustn’t drop a stitch.” It smoothed the scarf in its lap and realized it had already dropped one — an ugly little yarn ladder stretched up at least five rows. Now that it was paying attention, the mistake was as clear as day.

“Damn!” it said. But that wasn’t quite right. Helen Sturluson didn’t
damn
things. “Oh fiddlesticks!” it said. “Shucks!”

It shook its head, disturbed at its own lapses.

The youngling fragment — that was the problem. Its connection to the whole was so strong, and it was so close — just up the river on Cordus’s estate. So easy to get sucked into its simple, unconscious being and, through that, into the whole. So easy. It had been happening for ages, now. It was becoming intolerable. The day before, the Brooklyn fragment had snapped at Mr. Vong, the grocer, when he tried to put its purchases in a plastic bag. This sort of thing could not happen. Helen Sturluson did not snap. Helen Sturluson was sweet and kind. Always.

Steeling itself, the fragment let itself focus on the youngling. A wave of desperate need filled it, and before it could think, it was out the front door, on the sidewalk.

Stop! I am Helen Sturluson!

The fragment bent over, gripping the fence in front of its house, struggling to master itself.

The youngling’s need is not my need. Separate. Separate.

“Are you all right, ma’am? Do you need help?”

The fragment looked up into the eyes of a concerned young woman. Blond hair. Brown eyes. Not the right woman. Not Beth Ryder.

It smoothed its face. “No, my dear. I’m fine. Thank you. Just a dropped stitch. In my side, I mean. I have a stitch in my side. I’ll just head in, now.”

The fragment walked back to its front door, taking care to move as Helen Sturluson moved — slowly, stiffly. On the doorstep, it turned and waved cheerfully at the young woman, who was still waiting uncertainly on the sidewalk. Then it went inside, closed the door, and collapsed into an armchair.

This had to stop. These lapses were putting it at risk.

But how to stop it? The youngling was desperate to get to Ryder, but Cordus had it well trapped. The longer it struggled, the more desperate it became — and the harder to ignore.

This will only get worse.

The Brooklyn fragment began to consider a radical alternative.

Ryder wasn’t anywhere nearby. Nowhere in the first world, perhaps. If the youngling were to escape, it wouldn’t stay in New York, hunting indiscriminately. It would go off in search of the girl. It wouldn’t find her, obviously — such a journey would be too complex for an entity without thought or knowledge. But it would go
somewhere
, and then it would be someone else’s problem.

Helping the youngling was a frightening thought. If anyone found out, the Brooklyn fragment would be in terrible trouble. But the alternative — continuous lapses leading to discovery — was even worse.

Gingerly, the fragment opened its connection to the youngling. Grimly resisting the pull of its need, the fragment focused on the smaller entity’s predicament.

The barrier around it was simply too strong. The power that had gone into making it was overwhelming. Shifting reality into a no-barrier state would take more strength than the youngling had. More than the Brooklyn fragment had.

That was sobering.

But the barrier seemed crudely made.

Its interest piqued, the Brooklyn fragment examined the working and found irregularities — ozone molecules scattered through the barrier’s predominate dioxygen.

Foolish boy
, it thought.

Cordus should’ve had his pet barrier-worker help him with this. Sheer power is no replacement for skill and experience.

The fragment sank deeper into the youngling’s point of view and began searching for two ozone molecules in close proximity.
There!
It guided the youngling to push a carbon atom out of its own substance and then to use its gravity-working to bring carbon and ozone together. The resulting reaction left two tiny holes in the barrier, holes a gravity-worker could enlarge easily. The Brooklyn fragment got the process started and then began separating itself from the youngling.

As it withdrew, it sensed gratitude.

How odd
, it thought.
I wouldn’t expect the youngling to be capable of that
.