Valkyrie, Chapter II: Parhelion (Patreon)

The airship that would take Anok away from his people and south to the war arrived on the last day of summer as the sun dogs flashed in the sky over the frozen vastness of the pack. The young troll watched its anvil-shaped bulk sail out of the glimmering light from a ridge outside the capital where he sat with Inelu, who was braiding his hair. Anok could hardly sit still. “It’s the ship,” he hissed excitedly, beating his knuckles against the ice. “It’s the ship, Inu. I’m to be made Trollguard tomorrow.”

“My grandmother said that She Who Goes Beneath drove all the stars but one ten thousand, thousand leagues into the dark, and that the last star is our sun,” Inelu said, pretending in their serene way that they’d not heard Anok speak. “She hides herself for half the year and bears her children in the black and silence of the land beyond the moon, but sometimes they slip from her frozen house and race across the sky while she gives chase, and those are the sun dogs.”

Anok shot the other troll a look of hurt over his shoulder, but Inelu only tugged on his uncompleted braid until he turned again and submitted to have it finished. Inelu’s fingers were deft. Whaling had made them clever with knots and braids and all manner of intricate things. Now they wove  and Anok, in spite of his irritation, was calmed by it. It felt good to sink into the quoman’s attentions, good to watch the great Rastish dreadnought grow larger as the sun sank toward the far horizon and the sun dogs faded, their reflections flickering on the ice and throwing wedges of dim shadow out over the blues and whites and pearly grays of the pack.

“The dwarf philosopher Agrios called them parhelion,” said Inelu as they tied the last of Anok’s braids and bound the mass of them together with a leather thong. “It means “beside the sun.” He said that they predict sudden drops in temperature. Ice in the air catches the light.”

Anok sighed. He leaned back against Inelu’s broad chest. He could hear the older troll’s heartbeats through the thick sealskins they wore. “Which story do you think is true?”

“Both. Neither.” Inelu wrapped their arms around him. “What does it matter?”

“I don’t know.” He watched the airship’s shadow slide across the ice in the far distance. It was growing fast. A wake of loose snow swirled in eddying clouds over the pack. “Why did you tell me, then?”

Inelu cupped Anok’s chin and tilted his head back until their eyes met. “So you don’t forget where you come from,” they said, and kissed Anok on the mouth. Their lips were warm and soft. Their tusks clicked against Anok’s as they pushed their tongue past his lips and licked the roof of his mouth and the hard ridges of his teeth. He stiffened in his elkskin breeches, the cold kissing his cock’s head where it pressed against the hide.  

“Don’t forget me, Ano,” Inelu breathed against him.

“I won’t,” Anok promised, his chest heaving. He twisted in the other troll’s arms and pushed them down onto the ice, one hand sliding under their hides to trace the hard curve of a hip, the soft crescent of their belly. They looked up at him and he felt at once that he was caught in something shameful, that in some way he couldn’t fully understand he’d hurt the quoman he loved, perhaps past all hope of healing. The thought frightened him. He pushed it away and straddled Inelu’s hips, wet heat under his buttocks. He gripped their wrists and forced them hard against the snow. His erection ached.

“I won’t,” he said again, feeling that he had to. He kissed Inelu. The bone-shaking drone of the dreadnought’s great engine washed over them, carrying with it a wave of powder blown off of the pack. Inelu freed their wrists and took his face in their long, clever hands.

A string of spit glittered between their lips in the freezing air as Anok pulled away. “I won’t.” He kissed them again. “I won’t.”

Inelu closed their eyes and kissed his brow. They reached down between his legs to hold him there. Their fingers dug into his flesh and he trembled against the rough pad of their palm.

“Good,” they said.

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Heike made her way along the sidewalk with her hands in the pockets of her coat. It was just after seven bells and Visling Street was swamped with workers, most from the slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants in Hellholt, pouring out of Herkimer Station, which bulked between Frieder Street and the noisy chaos of Steef’s Square two blocks south. The air was coppery with the smell of blood. The crowd was mostly human, sunburned Rastish men and women headed home in the fading daylight. Their long legs were like a great moving thicket through which Heike had to weave. No one paid much attention to gnomes in Lundheim. The clanships hadn’t come to the city since the riots at the Royal Exhibition twenty years ago. Heike’s own parents, whoever they’d been, had lost her or left her behind in that terrible welter of bloodshed. That was old business, though. Today was about the future.

At the corner of Visling and Frieder was a deli, Habermann’s, the name stenciled in chipped and fading gold and black across the shopfront where sausages hung in garlands from the ceiling above glistening hams and strings of salted cod. Heike set her shoulder against the door and pushed, forcing it open little by little. The bell over the entrance chimed as she stepped into the meat-and-mustard smell of the place, which had been cleaned perhaps as recently as before the fall of the monarchy. 

A tall, thin man sat in a haze of cigarette smoke at a corner table. She knew him only as Katz and had, in over her thirteen years reporting to him as her direct supervisor within the sprawling cephalopod coils of the Imperial Ministry of Intelligence, heard him referred to by a dozen other names, each as innocuous as the last. He lit a cigarette as she approached his table. The ashtray was already overflowing. 

“Weismann,” said Katz as she scaled her seat and stood there on it facing him, all three feet six inches of her. Outside of Warren on the city’s outskirts few of Lundheim’s boroughs bothered to pretend they wanted gnomish custom. Dwarves fit the seating better, if only by a little, but they kept for the most part to Little Aleph across the river in Elkside where the Seido and Muniro families had bought up a long stretch of property not long before the fall of the great cities-under-earth. All that had been long before Heike’s time. 

“You wanted to see me.”

He tapped a finger on the table’s scarred top and for the briefest moment a silver rune no larger than a pinhead flickered above his forefinger’s first knuckle. Sorcery prickled Heike’s skin and raised the hair on the back of her neck. A hex against eavesdropping, one every hood in the service learned at the teat. It would draw their words in, bind the sound of their conversation to the table so that only those in contact with the stained and timeworn wood could listen in. She shrugged out of her coat and hung it neatly on the chair back before leaning in to rest her elbows on the pale initials carved into the tabletop. 

Katz blew smoke out of his nostrils. “I have something for you.”

Behind the counter Habermann himself, who was short and wide with massive arms and disconcerting tufts of hair which grew from his scarred ears, was taking rounds of rich black bread out of an oven on a long-handled peel. The deli’s few other customers sat at tables nearer to the door, drinking coffee and playing chess, while an aging woman with a worried expression watched one of Habermann’s assistants weigh lamb chops on a flat-topped scale. 

“You still have a Verangian identity running.” 

It wasn’t a question. Heike took her hands off the table and flagged down one of Habermann’s kitchen boys for coffee, which was brought to her in a child’s brightly colored cup. She drank. The brew was weak and greasy on her lips.

“You’re to travel to Hinterberg to take charge of a defector there. An engineer.” Katz flicked ash into the porcelain ashtray in a neat little flurry. “It’s all arranged.”

“I’m close to making something happen with the Barkultish attache,” said Heike, wondering if her imagination had supplied the faintest tremor of unease in Katz’s voice, the minute bead of sweat at the corner of his mouth where a blemish, perhaps from shaving, discolored the senior agent’s smooth, pale skin. 

“This takes precedence.” He sniffed. “You leave tomorrow.”

No, she thought, sipping her weak coffee. She hadn’t imagined it. His long, elegant hands trembled ever so slightly as he stubbed his butt out in the ashtray and lit another cigarette. This man who’d lived through the revolution and its bloody aftermath when the military and the IMI had fought like rabid dogs over the empire’s corpse, who had survived Vulgar War and the siege of Ramsgard where the defenders were reduced to hunting rats, boiling boot leather — and other, more terrible things buried in haste and swiftly forgotten after the fighting was over — and whom she was more than half certain had helped to purge the IMI under Kreuger and his successor, Marten Roem, had been shaken.

That, a few scant hours before her trip to Hinterberg tore a hole in the world she knew and dragged something wild and slick and squalid back through it into daylight, was enough to frighten her all on its own.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Head pounding and mouth dry, Anok rolled out of his bunk to the sound of first bell. The mechanical klaxon shrieked through South Barracks. It dug into his ears and pushed a hot wire into the throbbing headache already taking shape behind his eyes. The sun was already up as it would be until long past midnight, pale light pouring through the slit windows high in the barracks walls. South, like all the embassy buildings, was made of brick rather than snow and sunk not on the pack but on the slate shelf of Univi, the Tooth, where ice and earth met at the border of the Empty Kingdom.

Sergeant Heidgar stalked the aisle between the bunks. His boots clicked against the hard concrete. The Rastish officer was short and whipcord slim with a clean-shaven pate and a thick gray mustache he kept waxed to curled points. The crown of his head came no higher than Anok’s breastbone, but he walked as though he were taller than any troll in the barracks hall. 

“Today I done with you,” he snapped in his terribly accented Qipik. “You go South, fight wars, maybe die, maybe glory. Shame me, your bones rot where you fallen. No bring back to sleep under ice with heathen god. Understand?”

Their instinct to snigger at Heidgar’s atrocious diction had long ago been knocked out of them by the cattle prod he wore at his hip and the high-pressure hose he used on laggards during morning calisthenics. Now they stood at attention, backs ramrod straight in spite of the crippling hangovers most of them were nursing after their night of fermented yak’s milk and the mildly hallucinogenic pickled eel livers pretty Umuliqi served at the brothel hidden under the ice outside the city walls. Anok would have brought Inelu but they had demurred and he, already drunk, had let Susqut and Big Mulli drag him away from their family’s icehouse, their voices raised in a brutally coarse song about a whaler’s wife and his favorite harpoon. 

I should have stayed with them, he thought as he filed with the other recruits — a Rastish word, flat and thudding — into the cold showers. The stinging brine, pumped up from beneath the pack, washed the night’s sweat and grime out of his braided hair. He swilled some to clear the taste of yak’s milk from his mouth, then spat into the drain and shuffled on into the sauna where Susqut was already ladling water over the hot coals. The slender troll’s hair was shorn short in the Rastish style and the long zigzag scar that ran from his chin up to just beneath his left eye, splitting his lips on the way, was livid after the cold shock of the showers.

Six years, thought Anok as he slumped onto the worn wooden bench beside Little Mulli, who looped a massive arm around him to ruffle his dripping hair. I’ve lived in this place for six years. I’ve never seen the south. I’ve never been to war. Not real war.

“I know that look,” Little Mulli said consolingly. “Either you’re heartsick over that long-finger quoman or you had too much eel last night.”

The others chuckled. Narwhal Sword, a barbarous troll from one of the recently absorbed far northern tribes, his face and shoulders covered in pinprick ritual scars, elbowed 

“Trollguard no laugh,” Susqut growled in a pitch-perfect imitation of sergeant Heidgar, scratching with one hand at his genital sheath and with his other making a little circle over one eye in mockery of the monocle the human sometimes wore while reading. “Trollguard no fuck! No fart! No shit! Trollguard only joy is war! Honor! Victory!”

“He hears you doing that and he’ll sand your tusks to nubs,” Big Mulli said in his tired, somber voice. He was a full head shorter than the next shortest troll in Ivory Company but the best of them with a rifle by just as broad a margin. “He did it to Enul, that big fucker in Eagle Company.”

“Enul had the tusk rot,” said Little Mulli, waving a dismissive hand.

This is our last day in this place until our tours are up, thought Anok as the others laughed and jeered and wrung out their wet braids over the steaming boards. Some of us will never see the pack again. Some of us will come back crippled, or driven mad by the strega. Some of us really will be buried in the earth, and not Beneath.

After the sauna they dressed and donned their armor in the ready room, a grim and dingy chamber with concrete floors and ranks of steel arms lockers bolted into them. A civilized household separate the activities of its occupants, the instructors at the Lufthauser Academy had repeated to Anok a hundred times, it seemed. Ablutions, sleep, copulation, mealtime; each has its proper place. To intermingle them is to invite disorder and 

Susqut tightened the straps of Anok’s heavy black breastplate. A Trollguard’s armor is his life. No bullet can breach it nor sword pierce its mighty bulwark. Keep your armor in condition and it will preserve your body. Your armor is your body. You are your armor.

He put on his helm, the sound of his own breathing rasping in his ears as he secured the gorget. The world collapsed to his visor’s tiny eyeholes. The weight of his kit made his shoulders ache. No lesser race could wear a Trollguard’s steel. His shield, an eight-foot rectangle of scarred black iron, he secured by a pair of bolts against his left vambrace. He had drilled with it since it had overtopped him, since his mothers had died in the weeping sickness and he and his clan had trekked across the Empty Kingdom to do homage to Iqaniqani, chief of chiefs, King of the pale lands, sustainer of the Last Fire, and to add their strength to his.

Anok had been one of the first sent to the Rastish school, as the fearful elders had called it. He remembered little of them, save for his great uncle Uya’s gentle words and broken, wheezing breath, and the holes in the ice where they had worshiped the dark water and the things that dwelt in it. The things that moved Beneath. Religious worship is a tolerable behavior. It encourages community. In excess it may impede reason. He still remembered the stinging salt reek of those pits. He still dreamed of his uncle sometimes. 

Sergeant Heidgar met them at the muster gate which let out into the school’s parade ground. The gate was open and despite the bitter morning cold and the wind howling in through the gate the sergeant wore only his dress blacks. Without a word they made their ranks for him. Fifty trolls in their thick black plate. Fifty mauls held at parade port on their armored shoulders. Fifty shields that could, if let go, crush a human as if he were one of the little blue mites that crawled in fresh snow out on the pack in high summer. Heidgar inspected them as though he towered over each and every one of them, disdain etched into the hard lines of his windburned face. Anok had given up long years ago on hating him. He did what he had to do to make them Trollguard. To make them the greatest warriors the world had ever seen.

I’ll thank him for it on the battlefield, thought Anok. When the strega call their lightning from the sky and twist my thoughts against me, I’ll be grateful.

“Good,” Heidgar said at last. He gave a single nod, turned on his heel, and strode out into the sunlight. Cheers rose at once. Thousands of trolls and Rastish men were gathered, Anok knew, out in the stands and on the rooftops. The company hefted their shields and marched after their instructor. It felt natural to move as one after so many years of practice. The wind howled through them. Snow skirled over the hard-packed ice and Anok saw the crowd, which encircled the entire square, great smudged expanses of onlookers waving Rastish wolf-and-briar pennons. A great Rastish banner flew over the speaker’s dais where scarred and grizzled General Tokisu and a group of Rastish officers Anok had never seen stood waiting. Eagle Company was marching behind fleshy, blond-haired sergeant Schmidt from the far side of the plaza, and above it all the warship hung in the sky over the square. 

It must be a mile long, thought Anok. If it fell it would plunge the whole city Beneath. It would kill every troll in the world. 

One of the Rastish men stepped up onto a podium at the forefront of the dais. His black stormcoat billowed in the wind. His thinning hair blew wildly as the microphone caught the faint husk of his breath. There were points of color in his cheeks. The footsteps of the marching trolls sent tremors through the ice. The crowd’s applause redoubled. The officer began to speak in a bored, droning voice. His Qipik was a little better than the sergeant’s.

“You are Trollguard today,” he began. “You are the claw — no, the fist. Fist of the alliance that keeps strong our two different people, who are allied.”

Anok thought of Inelu and their clever fingers and the way they laughed at him. He thought of the heat between their legs. 

“The peace and prosperity our wise ally Iqaniqani, may he live forever…”

Beyond the great ship’s anvil silhouette, a lonely skua circled far outside the city, out over the open ice. The Rastish man was speaking still. The crowd roared on. The stiff leather and coarse quilting between Anok and his armor chafed his hide.

I am never going to see this place again.