Star Wolves (The Tribes of Yggdrasil Book 1) (25 page)

“You little fucker!” Hal shouted, “You’ve got about twelve minutes to live, Devrim,” Hal said, as he struggled impotently against the guard’s grip.

Devrim ignored Hal and walked up to his sire.

“Over-Chieftain Egemen, sire,” he said, bowing his head, “I offer you this slave as a gift.”

Egemen stood up from his throne. He was a greatly muscled man, carved from stone it seemed.

“Finally,” Egemen said, “after all these years, I dared not hope. You have perhaps begun to act like my offspring.” That was high praise indeed coming from Egemen.

Devrim said, “that is all I have ever desired, sire; to prove myself worthy of your blood.”

Hal glanced down at his belt, and noticed one of the small cylinders missing—his Alfar cledyff-dagger!

Devrim held his arms open to his sire for an embrace. Egemen stood for a moment, then closed the distance to Devrim and embraced him.

“Welcome home, Dev- ickk, grra - ”

Hal saw something protruding from the top of Egemen’s head—his blade.

A tall man beside the throne began to lunge toward Devrim, but stopped when Devrim spoke, “Serkan, hold!”

Serkan stopped, staring down as a pool of Egemen’s blood formed around his Over-Chieftain’s feet, then freeze into a solid oblong disc as the cold depths of Niflheim sapped the heat from the Over-Chieftain’s lifeblood.

Not one Hrymar in the room moved. There was absolute silence. Hal thought he could hear Devrim still speaking to his father. He continued the embrace until the blood stopped flowing, then he dropped the man to the floor, and took the throne; his predecessor dead in a heap at his feet.

Devrim looked over at Serkan with eyes cold and evil. Hal couldn’t believe this was the same sniveling nithing he had interrogated.

“I once asked if you would serve me,” he said to Serkan. Devrim’s eyes seemed ablaze. “I will ask you one time only. Will you now serve me?”

Serkan bowed deeply to Devrim.

Then in near unison, every Hrymar in the room bowed to Devrim, the new Over-Chieftain of the Hrymar.

H
al shivered
near a damp stone-wall at the back of his cell. His new accommodations were only two-meters square; he could barely have lied down had he wanted to, but it was too damned cold. As far as he could tell, he was the only prisoner. He had been taken to some old cell block beneath the great hall where Devrim had ascended to become the Over-Chieftain of the Hrymar.

Devrim had not died from the explosive charge in his head, because there never was one. Hal had wanted a ruse to help keep Devrim in line, and judging by Devrim’s previous cowardly behavior, he thought it should have work well.

Hal had been played. Devrim was no coward or fool, he was a calculating, patricidal little bastard.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been down here, but it was certainly longer than he’d ordered the
Sleipnir
to wait. Hal stood shivering, his eyes and mind just drifting. He was too cold to be hopeless, all he could think about was getting warm. The cell was not cold enough to kill him quickly, but it was cold enough to make his time in pure agony. The guards had taken his jacket and sword, as well as his wristcom. He was left with a short sleeved shirt and a pair of pants which were not designed for arctic conditions.

Then he heard a door open and footsteps clicking on the icy rock floor. It was Devrim … alone.

Devrim wore a triumphant grin as he stood before Hal’s cell, as well as a luxurious brown fur cape, which Hal presumed was a badge of office; it was the same one Egemen had worn.

“I really must thank you, Hal.”

Hal narrowed his eyes contemptuously at Devrim, and was tempted to spit at him, but his mouth was too cold and dry.

“Without you and your people I would have never achieved my birthright. So, as the old tales say, a gift for a gift. In exchange for this gift you have given me, I will offer you a gift in return. In fact, I will offer you the choice of two gifts!” Devrim beamed.

Hal said nothing. He suspected Devrim was just toying with him.

“Are you not the least bit curious as to what I could offer you? Oh very well, if you insist, I will tell you. You may choose either your freedom, or … the knowledge of whether your wife and son live.”

Hal was no longer cold. His mind raged, his spirit yearned to grab this
thing
and strangle the life out of it, watching with joy while it died.

Devrim raised his eyebrows. “No? Still not curious? As you wish.” Devrim turned to leave and began walking down the corridor.

Hal ran to the bars at the front of his cell. “Do they live?” he shouted

Devrim turned back and looked straight at Hal. “No.”

Devrim walked back and stopped in front of Hal’s cell.

Hal thought he would be shattered to find out for sure they were dead. In some ways he’d already accepted it. He was almost relieved; in this cell he was sure he would die within a few days, so he would see them soon in the afterlife. His ancestors believed in Valhalla for warriors who died in battle, but he was not sure what he believed; Hal hoped there something more than this, that there was some point to all the trials and struggling.

“Then, I’ll see them soon,” Hal said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

Hal looked back at Devrim, confused.

“Well, not much of a gift, was it?” Devrim said, “I
will
free you, Hal. Unlike my father I want there to be peace amongst our peoples. Both sides have lost enough in this
unfortunate
engagement. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Hal was puzzled how Devrim knew anything about the battles. He had been in cryo for months.

Sensing his confusion, Devrim explained. “My advisors updated me on recent events,” Devrim produced two cylinders and held them up, “I’ll also return these when you leave, and thank you for the use of the dagger. Good luck to you, Hal.”

And with that, Devrim walked away.

T
he Hrymar returned
Hal to his pinnace and ordered him to leave their system immediately. Hal was not happy to be headed back to Earth—there was no joy in being released, but he went through the motions; he would survive, if only to exact revenge on these Hrymar for all they had done to him. Devrim should have killed him, Hal thought.

The trip back to Earth would take three times as long with the pinnace’s emergency-only hyperdrive, but there were cryo chambers on the pinnace, so he would plot the jump, then sleep for the journey back.

Hal got up from the pilot’s chair and walked to the back of the pinnace where the cryo chambers stood vertically against the rear starboard wall. As the pinnace was making it’s way to the edge of the system, Hal figured he better make damn sure these cryo chambers were in perfect working order. He had just begun running a detailed diagnostics of the cryo chambers when he heard a beep on the comm panel and a saw a light flashing up near the cockpit.

Hal stepped away from the cryo chambers and walked forward to the cockpit. It was an SID comm signal—the
Sleipnir
!

O
ne-hundred and
thirty light-years from New Midgard, at the star Earendil, which Humans would later designate Svartalfheim Trading Post-2, a 100 tonne scout ship dropped out of hyperspace. The ship flew to a large orbital station around the planet Turi Naari and proceeded to dock.

A dark haired woman passed through the station’s airlock and down one of the many corridors where she arrived at a vast room with a high ceiling and walls, each wall lined with tanks. Each tank was filled with a yellow translucent liquid and contained a specimen—Alfar specimens.

She passed through the warehouse and walked briskly down another corridor leading to a large wooden double door. She opened one side of the door with a tug. Too damn heavy, she thought.

On the left side of the room was a small desk, behind which Cate Fisel was sitting, and behind a mammoth desk at the far end of the room sat Ben Gridrmann.

“Jasmine, darling! So good to see you!” he said, and stood to greet her.

Jasmine Gridrmann, also known as Nila Johar, strode up to him briskly and slapped him hard across the face; so hard he shook his head and put his hand on a very, red mark welling up on his left cheek.

“What the hell, Jasmine?”

“You filthy bastard! There was no mention of bombing New Midgard! How could you allow that to happen!”

“Jasmine, please, I had no idea it would go that far,” her father pleaded.

She just shook her head at him, filled with disgust and rage in equal measures..

“It seems when Governor Zelinski set off the stellarcom self-destruct, the Hrymar considered that some kind of offensive action, and so they bombed the city in retaliation. I’m sorry, darling, I didn’t want that to happen.”

Jasmine slumped down in the chair in front of Gridrmann’s desk. Her head hanging low.

“Darling, it’s over now. No more cloak and dagger, no more pretending to be this Nila Johar person. You’re home now.”

She looked up at him and scowled. “Home? Home? This is a bloody space station orbiting some alien planet! I can
never
go home, thanks to you.”

“Jasmine, home is where your family is, and since your mother died, I
am
your family, so this can be our home now,” Gridrmann said.

“Father, I can never go back to Earth. I can never see India again, or visit my cousins in America. That is not much of a life. I’m consigned to live on alien stations and planets, and for what? So maybe, just maybe, you can live a few years longer? That is too high a price.” There were tears in her eyes as she looked at her father.

“Come with me,” Gridrmann said.

He tenderly plucked his daughter’s hand off the chair and pulled her up, then led her down the hall, back toward the warehouse.

He stopped her in front of one of the tanks, a blue light glowing from the top, suffusing the yellow liquid with subtle green rays, like sunshine viewed from underwater.

“This is our future Jasmine,” Gridrmann said, looking in to the slumbering face of an Alfar woman, naked except for the wires and cables attached to her body in the tank.

One-hundred and thirty kilometers west of Dublin, on a picturesque peninsula called Yew Point, Hal was burying his family, if not physically, then emotionally at least.

It was a cold, grey October day in county Connacht. The weather mirrord the mood of the people gathered. Hal wanted the service to Siobhan to be back in her homeland. Had their farm on New Midgard been extant, she would have preferred that.

Hal commissioned a memorial stone with the inscription written in an ancient Celtic script called Ogham—it was composed of linear lines branching straight, or angled along both sides of a central guideline. Ogham was used by the Druids in ancient times, predominantly for monuments; Hal felt it fitting that his wife and son should be so honored, as Druidry had been her spiritual path.

A local Druid, Cathbad, was in attendance to guide the funeral rite, a memorial really, as a funeral implied you were physically burying someone.

Hal listened as Cathbad spoke words to help Siobhan and Ailan take their place among the honored ancestors. He said something about acknowledging they were taking their journey to the hall of the ancestors, which stung Hal. Cathbad continued, saying to remember we will all take this journey someday. Hal was only half listening now. Formally recognizing they were gone, that his family were dead, was overwhelming. It was like being back on New Midgard after the bombing all over again, healing wounds wrenched open anew.

Saeran, Eva, and Gina, were in attendance. Even Cadfael had made the trip; he and Hal had grown surprisingly close. It was good to have friends, and Hal had few enough of them.

Cathbad continued and Hal looked out over the graveyard. Their memorial stone had a clear view across Lough Ree to the lovely Hare Island. Hal tried to hold it together, but a nascent tear formed in one eye, seemingly blazing a trail for braver droplets. Hal hadn’t cried at his parents funeral, he supposed he’d been in shock. At fifteen, losing your parents just didn’t seem like a reality, it had been confusing to him, in fact his brain couldn’t quite process the event back then. Nearly twenty years of reflection had allowed him time to internalize the event, and now he understood the impact of death, and of losing his loved ones. This time was all the more bitter for the realization he’d lost his family twice in his short lifetime.

Siobhan’s parents held each other, not crying, but exuding a sorrow more palpable than paltry tears could convey. They had no other children. At least they still had each other, Hal thought. He was happy for that.

The final step in the journey Cathbad advised, was the interpretation of the event, which was unique for everyone. Hal wasn’t quite sure how to interpret this event. Then he reconsidered. He knew how to interpret this: Human life was short, cruel and miserable, for the most part. As if in response to that thought, Venn, who had been sitting beside him quietly, rubbed her muzzle on his leg and looked up at him. He looked down at her and attempted a smile.

At least while fighting the Hrymar his sorrow was kept in check by anger, fury and a lust for revenge. Those emotions were all more immediate than sorrow, they needed urgent action, while sorrow could wait. Now that revenge and fury had been interrupted, sorrow crept back in like a cold wet blanket being thrown over a naked body, chilling him to the bone, displacing the heat of anger.

Hal’s mind conjured up a poem he’d heard years before by an American housewife and florist, Mary Elizabeth Frye:

A
tear rolled
down Hal’s cheek. The funeral rite was complete. His family had been properly honored. But the pain remained.

J
ust south of Dublin
, Hal waited in his room in the St. Helen's Hotel. He sat on the edge of his bed, looking out the window toward the silvery sea, painted by strokes of white sunlight which pierced the grey clouds. He nursed a glass of Connemmara single-malt Irish whiskey—his fourth that morning.

It was over, he thought. Now what? Previous suicidal thoughts had been replaced with a deep and unbelievably heavy emptiness; he was bereft of all emotion. Hal finished his whiskey, but felt such a heaviness bearing down on him, he couldn’t move; he just sat there, feeling as cold as the Irish Sea rippling out before him.

A knock on the door pull him up slightly from the deep well of darkness, allowing him to process the sound. Someone was here, he thought. I should get up and answer the door. But he continued to sit.

A second knock sounded. “Haldor? Are you in there?”

It was Eva.

Suddenly Hal’s body and soul ached, he wanted to share some of this misery. Maybe by talking about it he could conquer part of it?

Slowly be rose from the bed and shuffled to the door, empty glass in hand. He turned the old brass knob and opened the door. Eva stood there in a black dress, demure, yet inviting. She proffered a small smile.

Hal just stepped aside and walked back to the bed, leaving the door open. Eva stepped softly across the threshold and closed the door behind her, saying nothing.

She stood in front of Hal, who was sitting on the edge of the bed again. She looked into his eyes longingly, as if willing him to share some of the pain. She put her small warm hands on his cheeks, as she used to do, then ran them through his dark wavy hair. Hal leaned in toward her and she held his head to her chest and he held her back, tightly.

It was a cold morning on Niflheim, which was to say, it was a morning like every other. Devrim made his way to the main slave market, accompanied by his household guard; men he had hand picked for loyalty.

There were pens with all manner of creature here. Specimens from a quarter of the galaxy lived and died here, waiting to be sold. But Devrim ignored them all. He passed hundreds of pens, and thousands of slaves. The market reeked of urine and feces, and other excrement—the scent nigh unimaginable.

“If we fed them less, perhaps there would be less shit to clean,” Devrim noted as he walked.

In the pens, were humanoids, quadrupeds, pentapeds, octopeds, and even unipeds. Some creatures were vaguely humanoid, and others were the size of elephants, and some yet larger still. Slavery was the Hrymar’s only industry.

Devrim made his way to a building at the far end of the market. Its door was flanked by two burly guards; neither were Hrymar, but were some other species, twice as tall and thrice as mean. But even
they
bowed their heads low and stepped aside as Devrim approached.

As Devrim entered the building, he saw a fat Hrymar standing behind a counter.

“My Lord!” Birgul squealed, “ I didn’t know you were coming,” he said, with shaking hands, “how may I be of service?”

“I want to see my special guests,” Devrim said.

“Of course, my Lord, right away.” Birgul snapped his fingers and a small unipedal creature with two tiny hands, darted out from another room. It was only a meter tall and had brown, matted fur, and held a ring of keys.

“Fuj will take you, my Lord,” Birgul said.

Fuj made some unintelligible squawk and hopped on its single leg toward the back of the building. They came to a heavy door, into which Fuj placed a key and turned the lock, then opened the door.

An alien aroma came wafting out and caused Devrim to cover his nose, and squint.

“What in Surt’s name is that smell?” Devrim demanded.

Fuj made some noise and pointed to the back of the room. There Devrim saw perhaps a dozen cages, all with humanoid slaves.

Devrim made his way over to one cage in particular, which held a pale female and a small boy, both with orange hair. They were both naked and filthy. The woman’s longer hair was matted and tangled and she cowered in the corner shielding the boy.

“Hello,” Devrim said in Yggdrasi. The woman glanced at him, then broke eye contact.

“Please, do not be afraid, Haldor Olsen sent me.”

The woman turned her head to look at him, her eyes wide.

“Haldor? You know my husband?” she said.

“Yes, indeed I do. We are friends. He rescued me, and I told him I would come and take you back to him.”

The woman began to sob almost uncontrollably.

“Please, do not weep. Come to me and I will take you to Haldor,” Devrim offered a hand to her.

Siobhan looked at the hand but hesitated, afraid to yield to the offer.

“You will be fine. We will get you cleaned, clothed and on a ship back to see Haldor,” Devrim said gently.

Siobhan looked at her son, Ailan, who she was shielding from them. “Do you want to see Daddy?”

Ailan nodded vigorously.

She smiled at Ailan and took his hand, standing. She tried to cover her nakedness with the other hand, but there was little point. She walked hesitantly to the entrance of the cell, and toward Devrim.

“There,” Devrim said, “I apologize for the harsh treatment, but it is over now.” Devrim nodded to one of his guards who seized Siobhan roughly. The other guard held Ailan firmly.

“Take her. Get her cleaned up and ready to work.”

Siobhan screamed and kicked, trying to claw at the guard’s eyes, but to no avail. The guard was at least twice her size and just carried her off over his shoulder.

“Ailan! Ailan! Noooo!” she screamed, over and over, the volume diminishing as she was taken farther away.

Ailan stood before Devrim, sobbing. The other guard held onto Ailan’s shoulder.

“Ailan, there is no need to cry. Your mother will be fine. We all have to work to earn contribute to our society here. She has to go to work.”

“Do I have to work?” Ailan said between sniffles and sobs.

“No, not you. You are very special, Ailan. Your father and I were very good friends, and he asked me to take good care of you if anything happened to him.”

“Did something happen to my Daddy?”

Devrim lowered his gaze, and nodded slightly. “Yes, Ailan, I am afraid so. Your father was killed in a battle.”

Ailan began sobbing again.

“I know it is painful, I lost my father recently too, so I know what you must be feeling. But I can fix things for you.”

Ailan stopped sobbing, and between sniffs asked, “How- can you fix things?”

“I will be your father. Here on Niflheim, you call your father, sire. Do you think you can do that?”

Ailan nodded, still choking back tears and wiping his nose.

“Then I want you to say, yes, sire. Try that.”