Morning Star

The priest ushers us through the temple’s mouth, where we wait, kneeling on a black stone antechamber inside the mountain. The stone mouth grinds closed behind us. Flames dance in the center of the room, leaping up in a pillar of fire to the onyx ceiling.

Acolytes wander through the cavernous temple, chanting softly, draped with black sackcloth hoods.

“Children of the Ice,” a divine voice finally whispers from the darkness. A synthesizer, like the ones in our demonHelms, layers the voice so it seems a dozen sewn together. The invisible Gold woman doesn’t even bother to use an accent. Fluent as I in their language, but disdainful of the fact and of the people to which she speaks. “You come with news.”

“I do, Sunborn.”

“Tell us of the ship you saw,” another voice says, this one a man. Less lofty, more playful. “You may look upon my face, little child.” Remaining on our knees, we glance up furtively from the ground to see two armored Golds deactivating their ghostCloaks. They stand close to us in the dark room. The temple flames dance over their metallic god faces. The man wears a cloak. The woman likely didn’t have time to don hers, so eager were they to attend us.

The woman plays Freya while the man is dressed as Loki. His metal visage like that of a wolf. Animals can smell fear. Men can’t. But those who kill enough can feel the vibrations in that particular silence. I feel them now from Sefi. The gods are true, she’s thinking. Ragnar was wrong. We were wrong. But she says nothing.

“It bled fire across the sky,” I murmur, head down. “Making great roars and crashed upon the mountainside.”

“You don’t say,” Loki murmurs. “And is it in one piece, or lots of little itty-bitty pieces, child?”

It is risky saying we saw a ship fall. But I knew no other ruse that would draw the Golds away from their holo screens in the middle of a rebellion, past their security systems and Gray garrison to meet me here. They’re Peerless Scarred, trapped here on the frontier as their world shifts beyond these walls. Once, this post would have been considered glamorous, but now it’s a form of banishment. I wonder about what crimes or failings brought these Peerless Scarred here to babysit the wastes.

“The bones of the ships litter the mountain, Sunborn,” I explain, looking back at the ground so they do not insist I take away the riding mask that covers my face. The more groveling I do, the less curious I am. “Broken like a fishing boat laid upon mid-stern by a Breaker. Splinters of iron, splinters of men upon the snow.”

I think that’s a metaphor the Obsidians would use. It passes muster.

“Splinters of men?” Loki asks.

“Yes. Men. But with soft faces. Like seal skin in firelight.” Too many metaphors. “But eyes like hot coals.” I can’t stop. How else did Ragnar speak? “Hair like the gold of your face.” The Golds’ metal masks remain impassive, communicating to one another over the coms in their helmets.

“Our priest claims you have a weapon of the gods,” Freya says leadingly. Sefi produces the seal cloth once more, body tense, wondering when I will dispel the magic of the gods as I promised. Her hands tremble. Both Golds move closer, the slight ripple of pulseShields evident. I touch them and I fry. They have no fear. Not here on their mountain. Closer. Closer, you dumb bastards.

“Why did you not take this to the leader of your tribe?” Loki asks.

“Or to your shaman?” Freya adds suspiciously. “The Way of Stains is long and hard. To climb all this way just to bring this to us…”

“We are wanderers,” Mustang says as Freya bends to look at the blade. “No tribe. No shaman.”

“Are you, little one?” Loki asks above Sefi, voice hardening. “Then why are there blue tattoos of the Valkyrie on the ankles of that one?” His hand drifts to the razor on his hip.

“She was cast out from her tribe,” I say. “For breaking an oath.”

“Is it marked with a house Sigil?” Loki asks Freya. She reaches for the weapon’s hilt in front of me when Mustang laughs bitterly, drawing her attention.

“On the handle, my goodlady,” Mustang says in Aureate lingo, remaining on her knees as she strips off her mask and tosses it onto the ground. “You will find a Pegasus in flight. Sigil of the House Andromedus.”

“Augustus?” Loki sputters, knowing Mustang’s face.

I use their surprise and slip forward. By the time they turn back to me I’ve snatched the razor out from under Freya’s hand and activated the toggle so it is the curved question-mark shape that has burned on hillsides, been cut into foreheads, and killed so many of their kind. The same they would have seen on the holoDisplays as I made my speech.

“Reaper…” Freya manages, pulling up her pulseFist. I hack her arm off at the shoulder, then her head at the jaw before hurling my razor straight into Loki’s chest. The blade slows as it hits his pulseShield, frozen in midair for half a second as the shield resists. Finally the blade slips through. But it’s slowed and the armor beneath holds. It embeds itself in the pulseArmor plate. Harmless. Until Mustang steps forward and swivel-kicks the hilt of the razor. The blade punches through the armor and impales Loki.

Both gods fall. Freya to her back. Loki to his knees.

“Mask off,” Mustang barks as Loki’s hands wrap around the blade sticking from his chest. She slaps his hands away from his datapad. “No coms.” Holiday strips the razor from the man’s hip as his pulseShield shorts. I take Freya’s razor from her corpse. “Do it.”

Sefi and her Valkyrie stare wide-eyed from their knees at the blood pooling beneath Freya. I remove Freya’s helmet from her head to reveal the mangled face of a middle-aged Peerless Scarred woman with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes.

“Does this look like a god to you, Sefi?” I ask.

Mustang snorts a dark little laugh when Loki removes his mask. “Darrow. Look who it is. Proctor Mercury!” The pudgy, cherub-faced Peerless Scarred who endeavored to recruit me into his own house at the Institute before Fitchner stole me away. When last we saw each other five years ago, he tried to duel me in the halls as my Howlers stormed Olympus. I shot him in the chest with a pulseFist. He smiled all the while. He’s not smiling now as he stares at the metal in his chest. I feel a pang of pity.

“Proctor Mercury,” I say. “You have to be the least lucky Gold I’ve ever met. Two mountains lost to a Red.”

“Reaper. You have to be shitting me.” He shudders in pain and laughs at his own surprise. “But you’re on Phobos.”

“Negative, my goodman. That’d be my diminutive psychotic accomplice.”

“Gorydammit. Gorydammit.” He looks at the blade in his chest, grunting as he sits on his haunches and wheezes out breaths. “How…did we not see you…”

“Quicksilver hacked your system,” I say.

“You’re…here for…” His voice trails away as he looks at the Valkyrie rising to gather around the dead god. Sefi bends over Freya. The pale warrior traces her fingers over the woman’s face as Holiday strips off her armor.

“For them,” I say. “Bloodydamn right I am.”

“Oh, goryhell. Augustus,” our old proctor says turning to Mustang with a bitter laugh. “You can’t do this…it’s madness. They’re monsters! You can’t let them out! Do you know what will happen? Don’t open Pandora’s box.”

“If they are monsters, we should ask ourselves who made them that way,” Mustang says in the Obsidian tongue so Sefi can understand. “Now, what are the codes to Asgard’s armory?”

He spits. “You’ll have to ask nicer than that, traitor.”

Mustang is deadly cold. “Treason is a matter of the date, Proctor. Must I ask again? Or must I begin trimming your ears?”

Beside Freya’s body, Sefi dips her finger into the blood and tastes it.

“Just blood,” I say, crouching beside her. “Not ichor. Not divine. Human.”

I hold out Freya’s razor for her to take. She flinches at the idea, but forces herself to wrap her fingers around the hilt, hand trembling, expecting to be struck by lightning or electrocuted like men are who touch pulseShields with bare hands. “This button here retracts the whip. This one controls the shape.”

She cradles the weapon reverently and looks up at me, furious eyes asking which shape she should conjure. I nod to mine, trying to build kinship with her. And I do. If only in this martial way. Slowly her razor takes the shape of the slingBlade. The skin on my arm prickles as the Valkyrie laugh to one another. Vibrating with excitement, they pull their own axes and long knives and look at me and Mustang.

“There’s five gods left,” Mustang says. “How’d you ladies like to meet them?”