The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 2

  But if you looked more closely, the layer-forged metal turned into recurring shapes that vanished into each other and drew your eye in and down, down and in. . . .

  The Sword had been forged beyond the light of common day, to embody the land of Montival and the line of her blood. Her parents and their sworn companions had made the Quest of the Sunrise Lands a generation before, sought and fought and followed dreams and portents, to find it in a place even her father couldn’t describe . . . because language itself buckled beneath the burden. He’d believed it wasn’t a thing of matter at all, but a thought in the mind of the Triune Goddess given shape and form and palpable substance, a thing possible only in the modern era, after the Change began to open doors in the walls of the world that had been long closed.

  It didn’t give her that indefinable sense of connection here that it did back home in the lands and on the waters of Montival. These islands in the midst of the Mother Ocean were the domain of Powers wholly other than those she knew, wild and fierce and strange.

  As she raised her gaze she sensed a woman-form with eyes that glowed like lava turning to look at her, like a ghost-wave of heat across her face. That One abode in the white-tipped blue of the mountains inland, or perhaps She was those mountains and the earth-fires at their hearts on all these islands born of upwelling rock meeting the sea in cataclysms of steam and flame. In the blue, blue waters alongside, a grim seaborne maleness snatched at the land with every retreating roar of surf, rode the waves with fin and devouring shark-sharp tooth. And beyond those were others, a kaleidoscope of forms up to a terrible fourfold majesty. But They weren’t unfriendly; not to her, far from it. She felt Their burning wrath that foreign men had dared to land with weapons in hand, to bring fire and killing among the folk who honored Them. Their hand was over Their people . . . and gave leave to anyone fighting alongside them against the same foe.

  Above the enemy . . . a flat louring darkness, a taste of the absolute cold and motionless stasis at the end of all things, when the very atoms of being had decayed, and a stillness that hated and hungered. But strong, strong with a strength that had eaten the cosmos itself in other turns of the Wheel.

  And the Sword did give her an intuitive sense of where her own people were—as if she carried all the maps and files and notes in her head, continually updated, and could recall them perfectly. The information was just there when she needed it, as if remembered; her father Rudi Mackenzie, the first High King, had told her that when you bore the blade forged beyond the world to war it was like having the world’s best general staff living in your head. And like much of what the Sword did it was a little . . . disturbing when it popped up at the back of your mind all of a sudden. It didn’t do things for you so much as made it possible for you to do things that wrung every ounce of the possible out of you, and a little more besides.

  Through it she could feel what her followers felt. As any commander needed to do that and could . . . but through the Sword it came sooner, and more definitely. Fear of course, but also anger—her father had been much loved as a ruler and a man. The foe ahead were the ones who’d come to Montival and killed the High King, a gross offence to their pride and sense of themselves. Hence the grim resolve she sensed, a driving need to avenge his blood and the realm’s honor.

  Better still was an iron determination not to fail comrades whose respect mattered more than life: shields locked with a file-mate whose family had the farm next to theirs, the playmate and workmate of all their years; the bow-line who were village neighbors and blood relations and initiates of the same Mystery; the men-at-arms who had proudly knelt and put hands between those of a lord and pledged loyalty unto death for all to see.

  Each one knowing those who survived would return home to tell their kin of their honor or their shame.

  “The enemy are very determined, but they won’t stand and take that for long,” Naysmith said clinically.

  The elite of her people, the Bearkillers, selected what they called their A-List for merit and trained them to think as well as fight, and the Royal Navy recruited from all Montival on the same basis.

  “They’ll pull back to regroup and reinforce, maybe dig in behind field fortifications once we’re committed to a single landing zone and we can’t keep making them run up and down the beach trying to get ahead of us anymore. But here and now they’re tired and they’ve taken heavy losses. Hitting them immediately will cut our butcher’s bill, even if our landing-troops have to fight with their feet wet, and it gives us most of the day to fight.”

  Órlaith glanced at the two monarchs who flanked her on the flagship’s quarterdeck, King Kalākaua of Hawaiʻi and Tennō Heika Reiko of Dai-Nippon. Each gave her a very small crisp nod, which was possibly a historic record for brevity and efficiency as far as coalition warfare was concerned. Montival had the bulk of the strength, but she had to tread carefully around the pride of her allies; not just the monarchs, but those behind them who they had to heed. And both of them had things to contribute that she and the realm needed badly.

  Kalākaua was a big handsome brown-skinned young man of a few years more than her mid-twenties, glistening with coconut oil and lightly garbed in stout strapped sandals, a scarlet-and-yellow malo loincloth twisted around his waist and ending in a panel before and behind, and a short semicircular cape of the same color. He wore a light armor jacket of coconut-fiber woven with stainless-steel strands, similar guards on his muscled forearms, and a crest of yellow feathers across his round helm from brow to neck. There was a heavy nine-foot battle-spear in his hand, a short chopping sword and knife at his waist, and he was raging-eager to punish this attack on his people.

  And she knew from things he’d said how bitterly he regretted all the sweat and toil lost as well as the lives—resettling an Oahu devastated and depopulated when the Change stopped the world-machine had been a work he and his father had pushed at all their lives. Much would have to be done over again, after the waste of war.

  She thought Reiko had the slightest ghost of a smile on her lips as well, or perhaps only in her narrow dark eyes. Her left hand rested on the hilt of Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi tucked through the sash that girt her set of Tosei-gusoku composite armor, a new design that drew heavily on the legacy of the Sengoku, the Age of Battles. Two of her samurai stood by ready to hand her the flared seven-plate kabuto helmet with the chrysanthemum mon on its brow, or the long higoyumi bow and naginata; altogether she looked like some kami of war from her people’s long, long past, down to the fact that her five-foot-six made her as towering for a Nihonjin woman as Órlaith was among her own people.

  She’d recovered the lost Imperial sword, one of the three great treasures of her dynasty, with Órlaith’s help . . . very personal help, since it had been only the two of them at the last, there in the haunted castle in its little bubble of otherness in the Valley of Death. Órlaith had held the doorway and Reiko fought within against perils not altogether of this world to reclaim a plundered inheritance brought there in the great wars of the last century. Absorbing the shattered fragments of the Grasscutter from within the bodies of her enemies and into her Masamune heirloom sword as it cut her foes down, to make the sacred Imperial blade anew in a different form.

  Which is rather grisly, when you think about it. And if I find custom and ceremony irksome . . . for Reiko going back to it after a taste of freedom must be like being buried in living cement, though she’ll never complain. My dynasty began with my mother and my father; hers is thousands of years old and claims to have been started by the son of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu-ōmikami . . . and that claim may be literally true. Certainly the Immortal One Shining In Heaven reached down and claimed her, that day on the beach at Topanga.

  They were close friends, as far as their respective obligations allowed. They were of an age, and they had shared things no others did, starting with the fact that their fathers had been slain by the same enemy within an hour of each other. And g
oing on to what they both bore at their waists, in shapes that only seemed to be steel. The Grasscutter had its own powers, and they’d both seen them. . . .

  “Admiral, I think the assault wave should go in now?” Órlaith asked, a little rhetorically.

  Admiral Naysmith snapped her telescope shut and meditatively raised a fist to her lips, touching them for a moment to a ring that bore three interlinked triangles in a knot.

  “My thoughts exactly, Your Highness,” she said, nodding slowly.

  Sometimes I feel a bit irked when she’s surprised I’m doing the right thing. Yes, I am a lot younger, but I was raised and educated by the people who won the Prophet’s War, Admiral Grim-All-Business, with the Valknut on your ring. Why is it that people who follow a God who’s a notorious trickster are usually so . . . so serious? The Thurstons out in Boise are that way too. But it’s a party every night in Valhöll. To be fair, those among the Bearkillers and Boiseans who are Christians are like that too.

  Bearkillers tended to think that Mackenzies were incurably light-minded, and that Associates were playactors too concerned with dressing up in fancy garb and ancient titles to be taken entirely seriously. They were like Boiseans that way, only more so. Órlaith qualified in both categories, in a way, even if she was a niece to their Bear Lord—he was her father’s half-brother, on the other side of the blanket.

  And I do carry the Sword of the Lady.

  “Signals, my compliments to General Thurston, and pass the order to the first wave to commence the assault as per the operational plan,” Naysmith said. “All warships, prepare to elevate to maximum range to avoid friendly fire when we have boots on the beach, but not before, and then to cease fire on order.”

  The flags moved again, and far above them the kite-rider released a grenade that trailed bright-red smoke all the way down, visible for miles . . . and to all the ships where eyes were kept constantly on that dot in the sky, connected to the repeater frigate by a long curve of cable. Nothing would happen immediately. There was a lot of waiting in war, another irritating instance of what her elders had told her turning out to be true.

  You want the waiting to be over. Then it is, and you don’t.

  “Oh, I think I recognize that expression you’re wearing,” a voice murmured behind her.

  It ran beneath the background noise of the crowded ship, everything from the creak of flexing timber and the thrum of wind in the rigging to the hundredfolds slapping of the crews’ bare feet and the constant ratcheting clatter of the catapult pumps and the shanties the crews chanted in unison, like a surf that never ended. That meant you could have a fairly private conversation, if you were careful. Anyone who’d grown up in a tight-packed village learned to speak that way, or gave up any hope of privacy, and it was worse around Court and castles and manors where your rank made everyone want to eavesdrop on you all the time.

  Nobles learn the jailhouse whisper as sure as convicts do.

  The voice went on in the slightly staccato accent of the north-country; you could close your eyes and know the speaker had been born after the Change, in Association territory and not far from Portland.

  “It’s the expression my liege’s family gets on their faces when they’re about to do something very brave and very noble and very very stupid.”

  That was Lady Heuradys d’Ath, her sworn knight, Chief of Household and girlhood friend. Órlaith looked over her shoulder, which involved rotating herself a bit at the hips when wearing a suit of plate with the bevoir that shielded jaw and chin in place and laced tightly to her breastplate. Especially when the four-foot elongated teardrop shape of a knight’s shield was slung over her back point-down.

  Heuradys d’Ath already had hers on her arm, ready to sweep between Órlaith and harm, blazoned with the arms of Ath—sable, a delta or on a V argent—quartered below Órlaith’s crowned mountain and sword crossed with the baton of cadency. She was two years older than Órlaith’s quarter-century, and stood an inch shorter than the Crown Princess’ five-foot-eleven, with amber eyes and dark-auburn hair, her regular features a little blunter than Órlaith’s chiseled looks.

  As she spoke she held out Órlaith’s helmet, with the arming-cap and gauntlets in it; strictly speaking that was squire’s work, but they’d never stood on formality. Órlaith sighed and pulled the knit wool and chamois leather of the cap over her braids, drew on the gauntlets and gave a slap of fists into opposite palm to settle them. Then she took the helm and settled it firmly and fastened the chin-cup and straps; the constriction of the felt-and-sponge pads around and on top of her head infinitely familiar, and she began the slight automatic motion of the head every so often that compensated for the way the sides of the broad sallet cut into her peripheral vision.

  It was much worse with the visor down, of course, but then you were covered from the crown of your head to your toes. It didn’t make you invulnerable, but it did limit the feasible targets on your body very sharply. At close range there was nothing in the world more dangerous than a knight who knew their business, and nothing harder to stop.

  “Da never hung back from a fight,” Órlaith said to her. “Are we going to have this conversation again?”

  Heuradys helmed herself likewise and flicked the visor up with one gauntleted finger so that it shaded her face like the bill of a baseball cap. Her suit was of the same rare alloy and matchless craft from the Crown workshops, a gift given for her knighting and a signal mark of favor. Even the Crown Princess hadn’t gotten one until she reached her full growth.

  “By the Dog of Egypt, we most certainly are! Yes, he never hung back . . . and he died only a couple of decades older than you are now, leading the charge in a skirmish,” Heuradys added with a bluntness few others would have dared.

  They both had tall sprays of feathers mounted on either side of their helms, Golden Eagle for Órlaith since that was the sept-totem that had appeared to her on her vigil, by the Mackenzie custom she followed; her visor was drawn out a little and had the point curved to suggest a beak when it was down. Heuradys had northern Snowy Owl plumes of black-flecked white in the same place, and their like etched thinly into the surface of her helm, to mark the Goddess to Whom she gave her first worship.

  Associate nobles were mostly Catholic Christians, like Órlaith’s own mother and half her siblings, but mostly wasn’t the same as all. Half the d’Ath family were pagans, and considered eccentric in other respects as well.

  “It was by treachery after the skirmish he died, coming between me and the knife,” Órlaith said. “And there was a prophecy he wouldn’t live to see his beard go gray.”

  The smaller details of her father’s death didn’t alter the general point. Heuradys had been there too . . . and she had loved him, too, both as a long-time honorary uncle, as her family’s patron and her personal benefactor, and as her King. Órlaith forced a warrior’s lightness in the face of death into her tone. That too was part of grieving.

  “And that prophecy was given him by Gangleri the Wanderer.”

  In a dream when he slept in a cave on the Quest, out in the Sunrise Lands, she thought

  “Oh, a prophecy from a god that he’d fall in battle before he was old,” Heuradys said. “That was like needing divine intervention to tell you that the sun would probably rise in the east next Friday. And you’re the same way. He was the best master of the blade I’ve ever seen—even better than my Mom Two—”

  Who was known as Lady Death, in a pun on her title of Baroness d’Ath. She’d been one of Rudi Mackenzie’s tutors in his youth; in fact, Tiphaine d’Ath had been ennobled and endowed by the first Lord Protector of the Portland Protective Association when she captured Rudi and held him hostage for a while as a child, during the Association Wars, before the High Kingdom was formed. Órlaith had heard Lady D’Ath say that Heuradys was as good with a blade as she’d been in her prime . . . though she’d never said it to Heuradys, because, as she put
it, vanity was a leading cause of death.

  The scolding went on: “—But as the wise man said, even Hercules can’t fight two, and a random crossbow bolt through your visor-slit is no respecter of persons and doesn’t care how good you are with a sword . . . even that sword. Here’s a prophecy from a mere humble worshipper of Athana: you won’t make old bones either if you don’t remember that a monarch is supposed to command. You’ve got plenty of people . . . people like me . . . to do the hack-and-slash.”

  “I’m not reckless!”

  “Remember how you had us steal a sack of ramen and run away at night so we could set out on a Quest to find the Superman in his Solitary Fortress of Ice at the north pole . . . when you were eight? Gray-Eyed One witness I knew in my heart it was dumb even then, but you always could talk the birds from the trees or a honeycomb from a bear. And you’re just as good at convincing yourself that it’s a splendid idea to do what you want.”

  “No harm done that time, sure.”

  “So you don’t remember the trouble we got in after Bow-Captain Edain dragged us back by the ears?”

  In point of fact Órlaith did vividly remember how sick she’d gotten of ramen, which had been served up for her dinner every single day until the sack they’d filched from the Guard armory was finished, and by then she retched at the sight and smell of it. The stuff still repulsed her.

  “It’ll be the First of Never and two days more before you let me forget that little bit of mischief, am I right?”

  “I’m going to have it put on my gravestone, along with, Here lies Lady Heuradys d’Ath, peerless knight, who died shouting bitterly: It’s all your fault you mad bitch! at her BFF.”