Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy (40 page)

us now amidst large, smoking braziers. Huge warriors, with white hair to the waists, arms bare, iron buckles on waists, huge axes on backs. Black eyes and rings studded with precious metals glitter in the low light. But they’re too stunned by the sight of the three-hundred-year-old iron doors suddenly glowing orange and melting away to speak or kneel. I draw up before them, still dragging the corpses of the Golds behind me. Mustang and Sefi hurl their captured Golds forward, kicking out their legs.

They sprawl on the ground and stumble to their feet, attempting beyond all reason to maintain some dignity here surrounded by giant savages in the smoky room.

“Are these gods?” I roar through my helmet.

No one answers. Alia moves slowly through the parting warlords.

“Am I a god?” I snarl, this time removing my helmet. Mustang and Sefi remove theirs. Alia sees

her daughter in the armor of her gods and she flinches back. Fear whispers over her lips. She stops near the five bound and gagged Golds as they finally find their feet. They stand over two meters tall.

But, even bent and old as Alia is, she’s a head taller than I. She stares down at the men and women who were once her gods before looking up at her last daughter. “Child, what have you done?”

Sefi says nothing. But the razor on her arm slithers, drawing the eyes of every Obsidian. One of their greatest daughters carries the weapon of the gods.

“Queen of the Valkyrie,” I say as if we had never met. “My name is Darrow of Lykos. Blood brother of Ragnar Volarus. I am the warlord of the Rising, which rages against the false Golden gods.

You have all seen the fires that rage around the moon. Those are caused by my army. Beyond this land in the abyss, a war rages between slaves and masters. I came here with the greatest son of the Spires to bring the truth to your people.” I wave to the Golds, who stare at me with the hatred of an entire race.

“They struck him down before he could tell you that you are slaves. The prophets he sent told it true.

Your gods are false.”

“Liar!” someone screams. A shaman with crooked knees and a bent spine. He babbles something else but Sefi cuts him off.

“Liar?” Mustang hisses. “I have stood upon Asgard. I have seen where your immortals sleep.

Where your immortals rut and eat and shit.” She twists the pulseFist in her hand. “This is not magic.”

She activates her gravBoots, floating in the air. The Obsidians stare at her in wonder. “This is not magic. This is a tool.”

Alia sees what I have done. What I have shown her daughter and what I have now brought her people whether she wants it or not. We’re the same cruel kind. I told myself I would be better than this.

I failed that promise. But noble vanity can shine another day. This is war. And victory is the only nobility. I think that is what Mustang was looking for here with Obsidians. She was more afraid that I would allow my own idealism to let something loose that I could not control. But now she sees the

compromise I’m willing to make. The strength I’m willing to exert. That’s what she wants in an ally as much as she wants a builder. Someone wise enough to adapt.

And Alia? She sees how her people look at me. How they look at my blade, still stained with the

blood of the gods, as though it were some holy relic. And she also knows I could have made her complicit in the Golds’ crime. Could have accused her before her people. But instead I offer her a chance to pretend she is just learning this for the first time.

Lamentably, my friend’s mother does not take the offer. She steps toward Sefi. “I carried you, birthed you, nursed you, and this is my reward? Treason? Blasphemy? You are no Valkyrie.” She looks at her people. “These are lies. Free our gods from the usurpers. Kill blasphemers. Kill them all!”

But before the first warchief can even draw their blade, Sefi steps forward, lifts the razor I gave her, and decapitates her mother. Alia’s head falls to the floor, eyes still open. The woman’s huge body remains standing. Slowly it tips backward and thuds to the ground. Sefi stands over the fallen queen and spits on the corpse. Turning back to her people, she speaks for the first time in twenty-five years.

“She knew.”

Her voice is deep and dangerous. Hardly rising above the level of a whisper. Yet it owns the room

as surely as if she roared. Then tall Sefi turns away from the Golds, walks back through the gaggle of warchiefs to the griffin throne where her mother ’s fabled warchest has sat unopened for ten years.

There, she bends and takes the lock in her hands and roars gutturally, like a beast, as she pulls at the rusted iron till her fingers bleed and the iron crumbles apart. She throws the old lock to the ground and rips open the chest, pulling free the old black scarabSkin her mother used to conquer the White Coast. Pulling free the red scale cloak of the dragon her mother slew in her youth. And hoisting high her great, black, double-headed axe of war called Throgmir. The rippling gleam of duroSteel catches in the light. She stalks back to the Golds, dragging the axe on the ground behind her.

She motions to Holiday, who removes the gags from the mouths of the Golds.

“Are you a god?” Sefi asks, her tone so different from her brother ’s. Direct and cold as a winter storm.

“You will burn, mortal,” the man says. “If you do not release us, Aesir will come from the sky and rain fire upon your land. This you know. We will wipe your seed from the worlds. We will melt the

ice. We are the mighty. We are the Peerless Scarred. And this millennium belongs to…”

Sefi slays him there with one giant swing, cleaving him nearly in twain. Blood sprays my face. I do not flinch. I knew what would happen if I brought them here. I also know there’s no way I could keep them as prisoners. The Golds built this myth, but now it must die. Mustang moves closer to me, her sign that she accepts this. But her eyes are fixed on the Golds. She will remember this slaughter for the rest of her life. It is her duty and mine to make it mean something.

Part of me mourns the death of these Golds. Even as they die, they make these other taller mortals still seem so much lesser. They stand straight, proud. They do not quake in their last moment in this smoky room so far from their estates where they rode horses as children and learned the poetry of

Keats and the wonder of Beethoven and Volmer. A middle-aged Gold woman looks back at Mustang.

“You let them do this to us? I fought for your father. I met you when you were a girl. And I fell in his Rain,” she glares at me and begins to recite with a loud clear voice the Aeschylus poem the Peerless Scarred use at times as a battle cry:

Up and lead the dance of Fate!

Lift the song that mortals hate…

Tell what rights are ours on earth,

Over all of human birth

Swift of foot to avenge are we!

He whose hands are clean and pure.

Naught our wrath to dread hath he.

One by one they fall to Sefi’s axe. Until only the woman is left, her head held high, her words ringing clear. She looks me in the eye, as sure of her right as I am of mine. “Sacrifice. Obedience.

Prosperity.” Sefi’s axe sweeps through the air and the last god of Asgard flops to the stone floor.

Over her body towers the blood-spattered Princess of the Valkyrie, terrible and ancient with her justice. She bends and removes the tongue of the female Gold with a crooked knife. Mustang shifts beside me in discomfort.

Sefi smiles, noticing Mustang’s unease, and walks away from us to her dead mother. She takes the

woman’s crown and ascends the steps to the throne, bloody axe in one hand, glass crown in the other, and sits inside the rib cage of the griffin where she crowns herself.

“Children of the Spires, the Reaper has called us to join him in his war against false gods. Do the Valkyrie answer?”

In reply, her Valkyrie raise their blue-feathered axes high above their heads to drone out the Obsidian chant of death. Even the warchiefs of fallen Alia join. It seems the ocean itself crashes through the stone hallways of the Spires, and I feel the drums of war beating inside, chilling my blood.

“Then ride, Hjelda, Tharul, Veni, and Hroga. Ride Faldir and Wrona and Bolga to the tribes of the

Blood Coast, to the Bleaking Moor, the Shattered Spine and the Witch Pass. Ride to kin and enemy alike and tell them Sefi speaks. Tell them Ragnar ’s prophets told true. Asgard has fallen. The gods are dead. The old oaths have been broken. And tell all who will hear: the Valkyrie ride to war.”

As the world swirls around us and the ecstasy of war fills the air, Mustang and I look at one another with darkened eyes and wonder just what we have unleashed.

For seven days after the death of Ragnar, I travel across the ice with Sefi, speaking to the male tribes of the Broken Spine, to the Blooded Braves of the North Coast, to women who wear the horns of rams and stand watch over the Witch Pass. Flying in gravBoots beside the Valkyrie, we come bringing the news of the fall of Asgard.

It is…dramatic.

Sefi and a score of her Valkyrie have begun training with Holiday and me to learn to use the gravBoots and pulse weapons. They’re clumsy at first. One flew into the side of a mountain at mach 2.

But when thirty land with their headdresses kicking in the wind, the left of their faces painted with the blue handprint of Sefi the Quiet and the right with the slingBlade of the Reaper, folks tend to listen.

We take the lion’s share of Obsidian leaders to the conquered mountain and let them walk the halls where their gods ate and slept, and show them the cold, preserved corpses of the slain Golds. In seeing their gods slain, most, even those who knew tacitly of their true condition as slaves, accepted our olive branch. Those who did not, who denounced us, were overcome by their own people. Two

warchiefs hurled themselves from the mountain in shame. Another opened her veins with a dagger and bleeds out on the floor of the green houses.

And one, a particularly psychotic little woman, watched with great malevolence as we took her to

the mountain’s datahub where three Greens informed her of a planned coup against her rule, showing her video of the conspiracy. We loaned her a razor, a flight back home, and two days later she added twenty thousand warriors to my cause.

Sometimes I encounter Ragnar ’s legend. It has spread among the tribes. They call him the Speaker.

The one who came with truth, who brought the prophets and sacrificed his life for his people. But with my friend’s legend grows my own. My slingBlade’s symbol burns across mountainsides to greet

me and the Valkyrie when we fly to meet with new tribes. They call me the Morning Star. That star by which griffin-riders and travelers navigate the wastes in the dark months of winter. The last star that disappears when daylight returns in the spring.

It is my legend that begins to bind them. Not their sense of kinship with one another. These clans have warred for generations. But I have no sordid history here. Unlike Sefi or the other great Obsidian warlords, I am their untouched field of snow. Their blank slate on which they can project whatever disparate dreams they have. As Mustang says, I am something new, and in this old world steeped in legends, ancestors, and what came before, something new is something very special.

Yet despite our progress with gathering the clans, the difficulty we face is massive. Not only must we keep the fractious Obsidians from killing one another in honor duels, but many of the clans have

accepted my invitation for relocation. Hundreds of thousands of them must be brought from their homes in the Antarctic to the tunnels of the Reds so they are beyond the reach of Gold bombardment, which will come when the Golds discover what has transpired here. All this while keeping the Jackal dumb and blind to our maneuvers. From Asgard, Mustang has led the counterintelligence efforts, with the help of Quicksilver ’s hackers to mask our presence and project reports consistent with those filed in previous weeks to the Board of Quality Control HQ in Agea.