Glen Cook - Surrender to the will of the night

He said, “The Old Ones are the strongest voices. But all the voices come and go.”

“What do they tell you?”

“Mostly they scream. Including the All-Father and the Banished. At the most intense moment of their existence, they were all in extreme agony.”

Heris shuddered. This was grim stuff.

Asgrimmur said, “We should go. There isn’t anything we can accomplish here.”

He was listening to something else. The screams inside? Or the Old Ones imprisoned nearby?

Heris suspected the latter.

Asgrimmur continued, “Let’s go back down to the tavern and see what the Norgens say.”

“The Norgens?”

“That’s how I think of those crone dwarves Iron Eyes left to babysit us. Norgens figuratively, not literally.”

“What would Norgens be?”

He frowned. How could she not know? “Southerner! Norgens are something like the Fates. Three crones who spin the threads of destiny. More or less.”

“If they were still in business would they be in the bottle with the Old Ones?”

“They’re long gone. A different kind of Instrumentality. They’ve faded into whatever afterlife claims used-up Instrumentalities.”

A subject on which she and the Ninth Unknown had wasted hours speculating, as an intellectual game. She thought the old man had it right. Instrumentalities did not die in the normal course, they faded into obscurity and quiescence, becoming one with the mud in the swamps of the Night. Unless somebody actively tried to kill, consume, contain, or shatter the Instrumentality. Then it could cease to be. Except, possibly, as a constituent fragment in another Instrumentality.

Eyeing Asgrimmur as she thought that.

His Norgens might be out of business but they would be out there, somewhere. Sleeping. A clever someone might find a way to waken them. As clever someones had been wakening grander and more terrible Instrumentalities.

“All right. Let’s go talk to the old women. But tomorrow we come back with paint and chalk and measuring lines. We’ll lay out fields of fire.”

The ascendant looked baffled. And was.

The soul at the heart of him was a man two hundred years out of his native time. He had not lived through the changes of all those years.

Thus his gods had taken even more.

Hours with the reluctant dwarf women equipped Heris with the key details about the Old Ones. She wrote everything down on parchment provided by the dwarves, using quills and inks manufactured by the Aelen Kofer.

Thus, when she rose in the morning what she had written the evening before was still there, despite what might have become of her memories. What she left herself included notes and messages about the rest of the information and thoughts about how it all could be used.

Heris visited the Great Sky Fortress every “morning.” She explored new areas each time but always visited the hall that Asgrimmur insisted was the one where he had imprisoned the Old Ones. She used a lot of chalk and paint, both in there and for marking routes through the confusion.

“Asgrimmur. It’s eight days since everybody left.”

“Which could be only hours in the middle world. A day at most.”

“Not so much my worry.”

“Then?”

“I need you to take a trip with me. I want to show you something. Out there.” She waved a hand at the gateway.

The old dwarf women started complaining before Heris finished explaining what she wanted.

“Enough,” the ascendant said. “Do as you have been told.” He began to change.

Heris was behind him. She did not see what he showed the dwarves. It made an impression. The complaints stopped. None of the three spoke again till they brought their small boat to a stop just outside the gateway to the Realm of the Gods.

“Good fortune attend you,” said the eldest.

“Fair weather attend you,” said another.

And the last, “Take no needless risks, girl.”

All three used a language Heris understood, albeit with brutal accents.

“Thank you, grandmothers.” She meant it. “Come here, Asgrimmur.”

“Did you have visions or strong emotions when we were translating?” Heris asked.

“I visited Hell. A darkness infested with nightmares.” He was shaking, not because of the cold.

“Then it must be me. Something I’m doing.”

“What are you talking about? And what is that foul smell?”

They stood on a cold gray hillside amid lifeless broken rocks, most of which boasted sharp edges. Ice filled any crevice the sun did not reach. A steady wind brought both a bone-biting chill and the reek of corruption. But the sky above was a cheerful expanse of pale blue occasionally marred by the hurried passage of a twisting cotton puff.

The wind also sang with a thousand voices as it played amongst the massive shards of stone. The chorus was a dirge.

Heris said, “Follow me. And stay low. We don’t want to silhouette ourselves against the sky.”

Asgrimmur finally understood that he was far from the old dwarf women. “What did you do?”

“Quiet would be a big help, too.”

Heris crept to the ridgeline, thinking she had changed a lot in very little time. Relatively speaking. Not just since Grade Drocker rescued her but since Grandfather Delari brought Gisors-Piper-back into her life. Not so long ago she had been a slave, a Chaldarean used and abused in what the idiots there were pleased to call the Realm of Peace. Now she was a wild adventuress clambering across an arctic hillside with a demigod, thousands of miles from the cities of her shame.

She reached the vantage she wanted, slowly lifted her head. She beckoned Asgrimmur. “Come up here. Slowly.”

The ascendant did so.

“That’s it, Asgrimmur. The monster god. And his worshippers.” Two starved forms huddled for warmth beside the Instrumentality’s putrescent flank, probably so mad and weak they could do nothing if they did spot the watchers.

The stench was overpowering. Heris breathed through her mouth but that helped only a little.

“That’s the dread Windwalker? That’s why we need to free the Old Ones?”

“That’s him. But others of his kind are loose, now, too.”

Kharoulke the Windwalker, in summer, sprawled across the shingle, just above the agonizing touch of the sea, resembling nothing so much as a decaying jellyfish more massive than a beached pod of blue whales. Unhealed wounds leaked treacle-darkness that dribbled down the god’s side to the shingle, then crept away into the brine.

The ascendant asked, “Why are we worried about that?”

“Because the Instrumentality, diminished, survives inside that offal. Waiting. Because winter always comes. And winter here is long and bitter. The Windwalker will thrive in that. If we don’t conquer it first.”

Heris had to admit it was hard to consider that stinking mass a threat. It was hard to believe that she could not destroy it herself, given logistical and technical support.

She would not get that. However much the Ninth Unknown said he believed in her, he would never support her the way he would her brother.

There was just no way to improve the thinking of men.

The ascendant asked, “Are you going to do more than look?”

“No.”

“It knows we’re here.”

“What?”

“I feel it calling someone to deal with us.”

“The rot. Is it just camouflage…? Asgrimmur?”

“I’m all right. I was… It senses me, not us. It smells the part of me that conquered it two thousand years ago. It wouldn’t have noticed you by yourself. It’s sending someone to deal with me.”

Heris could get her mind around that. The ascendant belonged to the Night. She, on the other hand, could come and go, ephemeral, unnoticed until she attacked that stinking earthly aspect down there.