“And? So?”
“The hand is also missing when I’m human. But when I’m a man I don’t need to invest much effort holding the form. I can create the illusion of a hand.”
“Illusion? I’ve seen you use it.”
“Have you? For sure?”
“Uh… No, actually. What happened?”
“I attacked somebody when I was the mad monster of the high Jagos. He didn’t panic like the others. He chopped it off. That was not pleasant. But it was useful. The pain eventually wakened what little sanity I had left. That and a savage ambush later that almost killed me.”
Asgrimmur extended his right hand. It began to shrivel. “Kind of creepy, isn’t it?”
“You might say.” Heris stepped through a gap in the dry stone fence surrounding the orchard.
For an instant the gray went away. The garden offered a vision of itself in olden times. A gorgeous blond goddess plucked a golden apple. She placed it under a small flagstone, made a sign Heris assumed was a blessing. She looked in Heris’s direction as though thinking she had heard something coming. She saw nothing, evidently. Distress warped her beauty. Then the vision ended.
“What just happened?” the ascendant asked. “I felt something when you stepped through the fence.”
“I’m not sure. A flash from the past? I might have seen what the orchard looked like, back when.” The tree from which the goddess had picked the apple lay at Heris’s feet, rotted. Without a termite.
Like the power, insects were not returning to the Realm of the Gods, if only because the gateway was in the middle of a freezing sea. Though all the recent comings and goings probably meant that fleas and lice had become reestablished.
Heris said, “It’s sad, all this having to go. It was magnificent.”
“Have you forgotten what lived here?”
“No. But I bet they weren’t worse than any other Instrumentalities from their era. Were they big on human sacrifices?”
“They demanded it. But not often. The victims were usually condemned men, cripples, or people about to die from disease anyway. Or, after the Chaldarean cult reached the northern world, missionaries. But when times were extreme the gods sometimes demanded a real sacrifice.”
“Did you enjoy your time with Cloven Februaren?” Heris stepped back out of the orchard, strolled toward the entrance to the “keep” of the Great Sky Fortress. Keep was appropriate based on design but a deep understatement by the standards of middle-world fortifications. The structure sprawled to left and right and rose up and up and up.
“I did. The man has a unique mind. Most of what you’re looking at is an illusion. The real fortress goes more back into the flesh of the mountain than it goes up.”
“Not the answer I was looking for.”
The ascendant frowned. He took a moment, as though trying to craft a response that would be approved. “I’m sorry you were disappointed. I’m never sure how things are done. Nor why I do what I do. The Walker and the Banished were powerful personalities. Even as ghosts they sometimes work some wicked magic.”
Heris started to say that that was not what she was looking for, either, but stopped herself.
Asgrimmur continued, “I do enjoy time spent with the old man. My stay at Fea was a pleasant interlude. I enjoyed him even more, here, while you were away. He has an insatiable curiosity. But he likes to start arguments. He squabbled with the Bastard constantly.”
“I’d say he has an infinite capacity for making mischief. What did he get up to when I wasn’t watching?”
Asgrimmur gave her a blank look. Again, she had trouble connecting him with the brute raiders who had come out of Andoray centuries ago. Then she recalled the Ninth Unknown suggesting that he might have absorbed knowledge from the people he had killed during his mad seasons.
She asked, “So what do we do now?” Trying to distract herself.
That old man with the insatiable curiosity would have been up here countless times while she was away. Maybe she could get Asgrimmur to let her in on what they had learned. Maybe she could get him to explain how he had become such a changed man.
“Come.”
She followed.
He showed her a place she refused to visit again.
“This is where my brother and I and our boyhood friends were kept while the Instrumentalities waited to turn us loose. This is where the heroes of the north, scavenged from battlefields by the Choosers of the Slain, awaited their destiny. This is where those who served the Old Ones well in life hoped to spend eternity. The Hall of Heroes. A paradise that has a lot in common with your Chaldarean Hell.”
Despite countless years gone on the smell of death remained.
There was little light back there, inside the mountain. For which Heris was thankful. In the area she could see there were scattered limbs and bodies so terribly mutilated that they had not been able to answer the call to battle when the Walker summoned them to save the Night.
Before the Old Gods went, there had been no corruption in the Hall of Heroes. Just a stink of fresh death. But, now, corruption had found its way into the Great Sky Fortress. Slow, slow corruption, constrained by cold and alien physical law.
“How did you trap them?” Heris asked.
“Clever. Trying to catch me by surprise. But no help. I must have been inspired. But I was too mad to remember. I ripped the necessary knowledge out of the All-Father and the Banished like tearing out their lungs, I expect.”
Heris suppressed a gag reflex. “The smell is too much. How did you stand that for a couple hundred years?”
“It wasn’t that short. Time differences, remember? But we were lucky. We were unconscious. Though that was bad enough. There were dreams. My brother… No point tormenting myself with that.”
“I understand.” Recalling what the ascendant and his brother had done once the Old Ones turned them loose.
“I make no excuse more powerful than that I was trying to take care of my brother. As you would if you had one.”
“All right. Yeah. Whatever. Show me something else.”
There was little to see. Certainly nothing dramatic. Just more and more rooms, large and small, where nothing remained but dust. And that mostly dust created by the slow decay of stone, one mote at a time.
“There aren’t any furnishings,” Heris noted. “No matter where we go. Not one shred of old cloth or one bit of corroded metal. It can’t have been that long, even if time does run different here.”
“The glory that was existed because the Old Ones were here to see it. The Aelen Kofer of antiquity were ingenious artificers. Even the form and dimensions of some parts of the Great Sky Fortress would change in accord with the whim of the beholder.”
“Those would be the same Aelen Kofer we’re working with today?”
“No doubt a point worth keeping in mind.”
“You speaking from memory?”
“Memories not my own. But, yes. There’s still a thrill of pride in the ghost of the All-Father, though he did no more than compel the dwarves to build what he wanted. The genius was that of the Aelen Kofer.”
“If they were geniuses, how did they end up the next thing to slaves?”
The ascendant stopped, faced her, stared for several seconds, then said, “Though the dimmest Aelen Kofer are a dozen times more clever than us that doesn’t make them a dozen times stronger. Nor more willful. They aren’t… They’re… They’re artificers, Heris. Merchants and tradesmen. Folk who take orders and execute them.”
Heris noted the first time use of her name but gave it no weight. She knew what he meant about the dwarves. She had been there. She shifted the subject. “You don’t sound anything like an Andorayan pirate should.”
The ascendant frowned, worked out what she meant. “You have some practical experience? You think you know how a pirate sounds?”
“An Andorayan pirate, no. But I do have direct experience. Though I’ll stipulate that I’m female and I was young at the time.” Younger than he should be thinking now.
The ascendant just looked puzzled.