The Goddess Embraced (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 3) Read online

  Or it burned itself out, leaving only ashes.

  The bond between them, so long and enduring, snapped, and with it, came a recoil of energy. He’d soul-bound her when she was a tiny spriteling, amorphous and pale; since then, she’d absorbed some of the dying energies of many gods, though Saraid had taken on Loki’s freely-given gift of transformation. She was returning to him all the energies he had spent on her over forty years or so . . . with interest. He was spirit-touched—god-touched, if he was going to be honest about it. And now all his power was coming home to him. He was what Akhenaten and Sayri Cusi, the Sapa Inca, had wished to become . . . but while they had wrestled and forced and broken to achieve it, Worldwalker had done it by peaceful bargaining, by partnerships and alliances and good will. He had become a god. A little one, perhaps, a demigod . . . but still a god.

  And he’d never once made this his goal.

  Worldwalker closed his eyes. He’d been there when this awareness had been forced on Stormborn. He was grateful that his own awakening, his own ascension, was far gentler.

  Worldwalker stood. Take what you will in payment, he told Nodens, grimly. I will not cavil at the price.

  In order to make sure that the wreaking remains stable, Veil energy will course through the transplanted land. Perhaps for decades. Centuries. Perhaps forever. The amount of energy expended to bring it there, cannot be spared again, to return it to its place of origin. And even if such energy could be expended twice, it would likely damage the people, the plants, the animals, and the land, to pass twice through the Veil. Nodens’ voice was uncompromising. You will need to be a conduit for the energy and the land, until the wreaking completely stabilizes. You will be the Keeper of the Forest. You must enter the Veil physically to maintain that conduit for periods of time. Every winter, if not six months a year. Saraid would not be able to divert enough of her attention and power. You must do this, Worldwalker. No other.

  He closed his eyes. It was better than dying, and he’d already accepted that as the price. If that’s the case, then I will leave open a door. A door between this Wood, and its reflection. So that those whom I love may visit, when I must work to maintain the flow of energy between this place, and the mortal realm.

  Agreed. Let it begin.

  And then they were through, and Trennus cried out with it again, dropping his head as the energies pulled and tore at him. He could smell the scents of Judea on the wind. Almond orchards and pine trees, and warm, barely humid air. The dirt underfoot felt different—more clay, and no peat. And then Saraid was with him, her arms wrapped around him, trying to keep him from flying apart, and he could feel the Wood coming home to him.

  Trees burst into existence, their roots burrowing down into the dense clay . . . and peat soil began to appear everywhere around him, too, burying the smells of Judea under the rich odor of moldering leaves and moss. He looked up, half-blind, and saw twisted branches crisscrossing, everywhere, blotting out the sky, and turning morning into twilight. He could feel the net of power flinging itself out over the land once more, and the further it reached, the more things came through with it. His ley-senses kicked in, and he could feel the topography of the land changing under his feet, tall mountains rising out of nowhere, each somewhere in the two-thousand foot range, atop a promontory of land that was already a mile above sea level, near Jerusalem. The lochs and rivers and fjords carved themselves into the ground, all reaching now for the Mediterranean, instead of the North Sea. The forest and the soil draped themselves over their old geographical homes, and then the animals and the people came through. Some whole. Some . . . changed. Veilic energy crackled through the air, the land, and the water. Still in flux. It would take a lifetime to balance the whole.

  Several lifetimes.

  Saraid’s mind was the only thing keeping his from toppling into darkness. I will not let you go, Worldwalker, I will not release you. Stay with me. Stay with me.

  . . . not . . . going . . . anywhere. Trennus managed to open his eyes again. Tell . . . Lassair . . . didn’t mean to hurt her . . . .

  She knows, Worldwalker. She knows.

  And then he finally did drop into oblivion, but it was the peace of unconsciousness, and not of death.

  _____________________

  Libration Station had been added to, modularly, over the decades. The station was by no means as large as the base in the Sea of Tranquility, or even the small Mars colony in the Cydonia region of the red planet. It didn’t really need to be. The station existed as a ship-redirection point, and a construction-and-assembly plant, taking ship parts sent up from Earth, assembling them, and letting crews proceed from Libration Station to other points in the solar system. This system allowed for greater mission flexibility, and avoided the need to launch entire voyage ships, intact and assembled, out of Earth’s powerful gravity well. The station was located at the L1 point between Earth and the Moon, and periodically needed to adjust its orbit, a process that was currently conducted by tow ships, rather than by the chemical jets on the station itself, which hadn’t been fired since the station was much smaller.

  It was shaped like a wheel in space, and rotated around its long central hub, which contained the docking ports, the machinery and gyros that rotated the station, a large cargo and construction bay, used for assembling ships and major ship components in atmospheric conditions, and the main command center. Tubes led from the central module to the midway modules, which, like the outer modules, because of the station’s rotation, had a sort of pseudo-gravity, maintained by centripetal force. The central modules included many laboratories and the workshops, and the outermost modules contained crew living quarters, hydroponics, and the power generation equipment, most of which connected to the immense solar panels that were strung all over the entire station. The living modules were usually maintained at almost three-quarters of Earth’s gravity, but the entire station could be stopped in its spin to allow large components to be moved in and out of ship-building modules. Every module had pressure bulkheads that allowed the crew to cut off a damaged module from the rest of the station. There had been talk of expanding the station into a cylinder, years ago, but it simply wasn’t necessary, with L’banah and the Cydonia outpost being set up.

  Fewer than two hundred people manned this vital piece of architecture, and they frequently spent time poring over satellite imagery—the more so, of late, as volcanoes continued to erupt in anomalous fashion, all over the globe. One Hellene engineer, who’d been on the station for ten years, and no longer had a home in Athens to return to, sipped coffee from a rubber bladder as he stared down at his screen. He’d long since gotten used to the taste.

  A droplet of hot brown fluid seeped out of the straw as his fingers squeezed the bladder, convulsively. The droplet became a stream, which formed into a hot and mildly hazardous globule suspended in the air in front of him. “Commander,” he called over his shoulder. “I think you should see this.”

  The station commander was Judean, and had replaced the previous, Nipponese commander six months ago; the previous commander also had no home to return to, and had gone, instead, to a billet on L’banah. Ben Hevel scowled when he saw the liquid hovering in the command module, and grabbed a towel from a supply container. “Water and electronics components don’t mix, Photios,” he growled . . . and then stared at the screen, himself. “. . . what am I looking at?”

  “That’s the northern half of Britannia. There’s smoke coming up from it as if a . . . massive volcanic eruption has just started, but the area’s geologically stable.” Photios was tapping out commands now, and had released the coffee bladder to let it hang in midair as he re-tasked an observation satellite to get a better view. “Lots of cloud cover and maybe smoke, I guess—”

  “Can you get any kind of thermal?”

  “Might need one of the military satellites for that, and they’re touchy about letting us just borrow those—”

  “Understood. That . . . looks like a god-damned big storm. What are all
the dots?”

  “Meteorological recordings of lightning activity in the last four hours.”

  “There are over four thousand recorded strikes in the last hour, and before that, nothing?”

  And then the clouds parted, just a little, and both men squinted down at the screen. “That’s . . . one very big lava flow,” ben Hevel said, quietly. “That’s . . . what’s the scale on this?”

  “I’m reading this as over five miles long. That . . . can’t possibly be right. But it explains the smoke and ash being lofted up above the clouds . . . .”

  “Yes, but where in god’s name is it coming from? I don’t see a point of origin down there. Lava doesn’t just happen.”

  Four hours later, the storm had rolled south, over Londonium, and work on the station ground to a standstill. From orbit, they could see that the familiar green northern end of Britannia was now bedrock brown. Orbital satellites could not find cities. Could not find forests. For all intents and purposes, the entire northern half of the island had been wiped bare, and there were patches in the north, including two chains of islands, that looked like smoking volcanic slag, smoke and ash still rising from long lines in the earth’s crust. But no volcanic cone. Nothing to explain the phenomenon. Ben Hevel swallowed and contacted main control in Jerusalem. “We have a problem up here. We’re seeing evidence of some sort of an attack on Britannia.”

  “Acknowledged, Libration Station. We have some confusion down here, as well. Could you switch satellite feeds and take a look at Jerusalem, Megiddo, Tyre, and Palmyra . . . and tell us what you see?”

  Photios’ fingers rolled across a keyboard, and everyone on the station found a screen to look at; at the moment, Earth had turned too much for them to get a good look out a window at the area in question.

  There was a distinct pause, as ben Hevel looked at what should have been the perfectly well-known northern edge of Judea, the Carthaginian provinces of Tyre and Damascus, and the disputed territory of Western Assyria. “You’ve got the wrong satellite feed up, Photios.”

  “No, this is definitely the right meteorological one, sir. In orbit directly over the Sinai.”

  “Jerusalem Control? I’m seeing . . . geography that isn’t possible. I see . . .” ben Hevel paused, feeling like an idiot. “Mountains that shouldn’t be there. Rivers and lakes that cut out to the Med. And I see . . . a good hundred and twenty miles of forest between Jerusalem and Palmyra, and it stretches about two to three hundred miles across the entire upper peninsula . . . right up against the Wall, in fact. I also see . . . towns. Where there weren’t towns before.” He stared at the screen. “Is someone playing games with the satellite feed? Are our calculi compromised?”

  “Negative. We’ve been trying to determine if this is some kind of massive-scale illusion by Persian magi. Thanks for confirming that you can see it from up there. Keep sending us hourly reports. Especially if anything changes.”

  Everyone on the station remained completely silent for several minutes. Finally, Photios turned to ben Hevel. “You know, my father was on this station, back in 1960,” he said, conversationally. “Was only half the size it is now, of course.”

  “He was here for the fireball?”

  “Yes. He was actually out on a spacewalk when it appeared. Said he was glad he’d been wearing adult diapers at the time, because he shit himself when he saw it light up the sky. He thought he’d have radiation poisoning, for sure. He didn’t.” Photios shook his head. “That was a god’s work, commander. I’m guessing we’re looking at more of the same here.”

  “I’m going to stick with ‘hallucination, hoax, or calculi espionage’ as my working theories for now, if it’s all the same to you.” The Judean man set his jaw.

  “You want to put denarii on it, commander?”

  “. . . not really, no, but leave me some of my illusions, all right?”

  Below, in Britannia, the three-way battle had been raging for hours, with Taranis allowing Nodens to work with the spirits and with Trennus, while keeping the mad godling and Jormangand occupied. The earth under them rippled and went from the verdant green of a forest, to the flaccid brown of a moonscape. More bereft of life than any desert in the world, the land had been scraped down to the bedrock in many places. The winds off the North Sea now had no barriers, as they howled southwards over empty, barren plains. No population for a hundred miles in any direction.

  Nodens returned his attention properly to the battle now, and pulled at the storms brewing out over the sea, redirecting their energy, beginning to tear at the mad god. At the same time, Taranis, the sky-god of the Gauls, unleashed his full power on the creature, trying to shear it apart. War-gods like Camulus and the Morrigan appeared in the sky, trying to tear it in as many directions at once as they could. For an instant, they held it between them all, transfixed, pinned from four directions at once . . . and Jormangand, finally able to reach his dodging, retreating, cunning opponent, reared up and bit into the mad godling with his massive jaws.

  Energy exploded outwards, sending even the gods reeling. With so many of them present, there were only a half-dozen small godlings spawned, all of which raced away over the scoured earth, looking for energy sources to eat, no doubt. Of the gods in the air, Camulus was closest to where Jormangand was, and the world-serpent turned on him, snarling and breathed out a blast of liquid fire. Camulus was caught off-guard, and still trying to swallow the remnants of the mad god; as such, he screamed in pain and vanished into the Veil, badly injured. The remaining three gods hovered there, warily staring at the behemoth, which finally turned and began the long trek back out to sea. Call to Odin, Taranis said, grimly. We agreed that we would defend one another’s territory in alliance. If his gods do not control Jormangand . . . the creature is almost as much of a danger to us all, as the mad gods are.

  Agreed, the Morrigan said, raven feathers fluttering in the tripartite goddess’ hair, as her face shifted from aspect to aspect. All of her selves were warlike, and she was one of the most powerful of the Gallic gods. I will go to Valhalla personally to express our displeasure.

  Lassair could barely perceive Flamesower now. And then, for a moment, even the tiny dot of love and affection that was his spirit now wavered, and almost went out. She covered her face with hands of flame, but could faintly sense Saraid holding his mind up, supporting him. And then the blankness of unconsciousness.

  Lassair demanifested, fleeing into the Veil, racing to get back to Judea. She burst through and re-manifested, in a rush of flame, in the middle of a forest. Energy pulsing everywhere, crackling up inside of every tree, in every bush. Panic in the minds of all the people who’d been . . . unexpectedly displaced. In the minds of the people who’d already lived here, and found that the roads on which they drove, no longer went where they should. That there were rivers where there should have been desert, and hills where there should have been plains.

  Where she’d appeared, there was a perfect reflection of the lake Trennus had created in the Vale, right down to the island at its heart, which was a submerged fortress. And hovering in the air at the heart of the island, Lassair could see a stable opening. A door in space and time, leading between the Veil and here. She stared at it for a long moment. She’d never seen anything quite like it before, and would not have thought it possible.

  Then her attention was caught by Saraid’s soft voice, a gentle stream of words. Lassair turned and found the forest spirit holding Trennus’ head pillowed on her lap. Lassair, still wreathed in flame, moved closer, and could still perceive the bond between these two, and her heart ached. Should we not . . . take him home? she asked Saraid, quietly.

  He is home, Saraid told her, simply. He left his heart in these woods, years ago. And now, they have come home to him. There are rooms in the fortress. There may even be beds to lay him down upon. But for the moment, we can take him to the house. She put her hands on his unresponsive shoulders, and in a flicker, was gone. Lassair followed, and they all appeared once more in the bed
room of the house on Shar’abi street, Trennus’ body resting atop the quilt of the bed they’d all periodically shared. Somehow, though Lassair knew the room’s dimensions perfectly well, it looked smaller than it usually did. Less real, somehow.

  His breathing and heart-rate seem to be normal, Lassair offered, after a moment, examining his body with her senses. We should call Stormborn.

  Do you think that there is any healing she can offer, that we cannot? Gentle reproof, as Saraid sat down beside the bed, and took Trennus’ hand in her own. But tears formed in her leaf-dappled eyes, and her shoulders quaked in silent pain.

  Lassair shook her head. She has grown most skilled at healing hurts of the mind. She goes . . . where I cannot.

  Saraid looked up, and there was a sense of distance to her for a moment. She comes.

  Sigrun and Niðhoggr had been northwest of Frankonovurd am Main, in the Taunus mountains, specifically Greater Feldberg and Smaller Feldberg. The smaller of the two mountains had been the site of a Roman legion outpost, or lime, on and off for two thousand years; however, the Legion had stripped it of most armaments and supplies and fallen back from it six months ago. It had subsequently been overwhelmed by grendels—a band of about four thousand of the giants had taken the place over, and they were now entrenched. The good news was, the grendels had no manufacturing capabilities at all. The bad news was, they were fairly adept at capturing and stealing weaponry, including surface-to-air rocket launchers, from Roman and Gothic supply dumps. Thor had gestured to the site on a map, and ordered Sigrun to go do something about it, as the grendels were moving out of that fortified base to attack Frankonovurd, when they weren’t pillaging what remained of the local farms and smaller towns that ringed the once-great city.