FA+
Shop
413
Views
Views
5
Favorites
Favorites
Category
Story / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 50 x 50
File Size 48 kB
Report this content
More from Kythra
Listed in Folders
Chapter 17
The Kraken had recovered from his physical injuries, but his anger at being forced to retreat had not ebbed in the slightest. The seas were barren of whales – but they were full of ships, and he’d learned to avoid the thrashing bronze blades that drove them through the water. His hunger was sated for the moment – but his humiliation was still unavenged. He’d moved into the deeps near the Straits of Gibraltar, pondering his next move while resting in the calm depths, moving only every few days when he rose to the surface to ensnare one of the smaller vessels that plied the waters.
The Soviet Union had built a larger military than it could afford, one of the major factors that had finally driven the communist government aground on the rocks of economic reality. The Russian Navy was operationally far smaller than its predecessor, with hundreds of ships rusting at anchor or sold off to foreign services, but they had managed to scrape together the funding to keep their most advanced and capable ships at sea – even if the sailors were, in many cases, no longer completely human.
The Russian Federation had had a very high proportion of Changelings, and the chaos spawned by this had extended into its military forces. It had taken most of two months for things to settle out, but the inclusion of the Changed was never in question – there were simply too many of them to be done without.
Captain Second Rank Victor Ostrovo peered over the shoulder of his now-ursine sonar officer as the Lyra class vessel (called an Alfa by NATO navies) Tsar Piotr Alexeyevich moved quietly through the waters off the coast of western Europe. “I’d like to tell you what we are looking for, Andrey, but I don’t know myself. There’s a sea monster, they tell me. It’s attacked the Amis. The First Directorate people say they’ve tracked it to this region by its attacks on freighters. I ask them why we want to go near it at all? Let the Amis deal with it. They tell me to stop asking questions and find the thing.”
Captain-Lieutenant Andrey Vanakov shook his head. “And what do they wish us to do if we should find this monster?”
His commanding officer shrugged. “They tell me, try to make contact with it. If it should wish to talk with us, I will be most surprised and pleased. You know how sentimental the Amis are about whales and wolves and all manner of beasts – they would not have attacked this thing first, whatever it is, so I doubt it is friendly. If it attacks us, we will torpedo it.”
“With the Special Torpedo?”
Ostrovo shook his head. “Only as a last resort. Still, now that the Amis have used a nuclear missile, as they claim on a mythical monster, they will be unable to protest too loudly if that should become necessary.”
The display rippled as it detected changes in the conditions outside the titanium hull. “Bozhemoi. Captain, we may have found this thing after all.”
Ostrovo swore, and picked up his microphone. “All hands to battle stations. This is not a drill.” He closed the circuit as the bridge and the rest of his ship burst into quiet activity. “Andrey, activate the hydrophone speech circuit. It’s stupid, but I have my orders.”
<Now this was unexpected. One of the metal ships down here? Clever humans, to bring themselves to my larder. Their tasty little minds are inside, this is not another trick with machines simulating life.> The Kraken drifted up from the sea bed, its tentacles cautiously moving towards the submerged vessel.
Vanakov turned on the hydrophone. It was a relatively simple device, patching a microphone into the sonar transducer, and was normally used for short-range communication with divers and other vessels in emergencies when stealth was not required. He nodded to his captain, who cleared his throat and began speaking. “Greetings from the Russian Federation. We come in peace.”
Ostrovo turned off the microphone and looked at the sonar readings. “Is it doing anything?”
Vanakov shook his head. “It’s still drifting towards us at about eight kilometers per hour. Something that big, it’s not going to react too fast. It’s twice the length of our ship, Captain.” The lines on the display suddenly shifted. “Ah, there we go. It’s starting to accelerate towards –”
The Tsar Piotr suddenly heeled to one side as the first tentacles made contact. Ostrovo shouted, “Full emergency power! Rudder right ten degrees!” The submarine tilted even farther as the engines drove up to their maximum settings, the scimitar-bladed propellor churning the water as the ship tried to escape.
<Curious. Are they shouting defiance at me? It will do them no good.> It had been literally millennia since Creya had bothered to learn new languages, and nearly as long since he had tried to talk to anyone. Not since he had sided with Tethys against Poseidon. He grabbed at the ship, speeding up his attack in case this meant it was about to try to hurt him. <Slippery thing.> Its whirling propellor suddenly began to thrash at the water and it began to slip from his grasp. <I should have let it get closer.>
The hull groaned as the engines fought against the tentacles, and then the ship broke free, jolting everyone aboard as the suckers suddenly lost their grip on the outer hull. Vanakov shouted, “The thing’s got a long reach, Captain! We’re still a quarter kilometer from the main mass!”
Ostrovo swore again as he stumbled back to the center of the bridge. “Keep me informed of its location. And let’s pray it’s slower than we are, because I doubt we can dive deeper.”
Vanakov nodded and turned back to his gear. “Shall I go to active sonar, Captain?”
“Da. It’s not like it doesn’t know where we are.”
The high-frequency pings did a much better job of ‘seeing’ the Kraken than the passive detectors could. The body of the thing was fully two hundred meters long, and the longest four tentacles were close to three hundred, though the main swarm of them was shorter. That quartet was once again reaching for the Tsar Peter. “It’s accelerating, sir. Up to 12 kilometers per hour.”
Ostrovo glanced at the helmsman’s plot. “We’re only up to nine.”
The helmsman nodded, his face grim. “We can probably outrun him, sir. We just have to get up to speed.”
Creya would have frowned, if he still had the ability. The ship had broken away from his grasp and was turning that nasty thrashing blade toward him as it tried to escape. His fins rippled as he moved toward it, trying to reach safely past the propeller with his longest tentacles, but it was speeding up now.
The creature was vanishing off the sonar plot now, disappearing into the ship’s blind spot dead astern, but the tentacles could still be detected as they tried to reach around the screw to attach themselves to the hull. “Fifteen kilometers per hour, Captain, and holding steady. That may be its top speed.”
The helm plot indicated eleven for the submarine. “Give us three minutes and we can outrun it, then. Do you have a fix on the creature, Dmitri?”
Captain Third Rank Dmitri Polnyenko was the ship’s Weapons Officer. He nodded. “Of course, sir. We’ve had a lock on its location ever since it first moved.”
“Fire tube one, then. We’ll have to trust the wire. The thing’s too close for safety, but we’ll have to risk it.”
Polnyenko gave the order. A moment later, a torpedo left the bow of the ship and began to circle around to the stern, following the commands transmitted over the thin strand of wire spooling out behind it.
The Kraken felt the vibration of the torpedo in the water. Abandoning the attempt to catch the submarine, it jetted backwards, leaving the ship and its annoying weapon behind. <The full change cannot come soon enough. These machines are intolerable!>
Silence reigned on the bridge of the Tsar Piotr as Vanakov replayed the final moments of the display. The tentacles whipped away from the submarine as the Kraken jetted backwards at a speed of at least fifty kph. “I guess fifteen wasn’t its top speed after all, sir.”
Ostrovo nodded. “But it’s a giant squid. It can’t chase us at its full speed because the tentacles would be trailing behind it. Maintain full speed for an hour, then reduce to ten kph and surface. We’re making more noise than we should. I want to see what kind of damage it did to the outer hull.”
14 March 2013: New York City
The United Nations Security Council meets in closed session today to hear the American response to the General Assembly’s censure for the use of nuclear weapons against Mexico. The US Ambassador to the UN has warned that he will of course veto any attempt to pass sanctions against the United States, and the British Ambassador backs the US position. Russia remains silent on the matter, while China and France have said they will consider voting for sanctions...
The Ambassador from Brazil banged the gavel to open the session. The first day had been nothing but speeches from most of the Security Council members, viewing with alarm, calling for investigations, and generally going on record as opposing the US action. The Ambassador from the United Kingdom had made a brief statement asking the other members to wait on the evidence before condemning the US, and the Russian delegation, curiously, had simply passed when their turn to speak came up, but the rest of the first day was otherwise rather uniformly uninformative. Today, something was actually supposed to happen. “The Security Council recognizes the Ambassador from the United States of America.”
Commander Sterling looked over the first day’s transcripts in the US delegation’s briefing room. “I see now why you didn’t bother to bring me up here yesterday.”
Secretary Rice smiled at her. “It wouldn’t have done a whole lot of good. These people can talk even a diplomat to death, and that takes quite a lot of talking. You’re happy with those sketches, now?”
Sterling nodded. “They look like what I remember seeing. We’re lucky that the backup cameras weren’t affected by the anti-technology zone, or we’d have no proof at all, though.”
The Secretary frowned. “It won’t matter. They won’t really look at the evidence, half of them. They’ve already made up their minds and mere facts won’t affect them. The Chinese delegation – I’ve met Chang, and he’s a decent enough fellow. But he’ll be following orders from Beijing, whether or not he agrees with them.”
“Why are we even bothering, then?”
“Because the 'closed session' will get leaked to the press, and it will get back to other governments. We’ll leak it ourselves if need be. There are things we want to be disseminated in your testimony that will be more creditable if we don’t say them in public.”
Sterling looked at her. “The tech failure, you mean?”
The Secretary of State nodded. “Exactly. The more people thinking about that problem, the better.” She looked up as an aide opened the door. “And it looks like we’re on. Let’s go.”
Lowe looked at the pictures in the folder in front of her. Taken by an ASW helicopter on routine patrol out of the NATO base in Rota, Spain, they showed a Russian submarine on the surface of the ocean. The accompanying notes told her what she was looking at.
‘Acoustic tile damaged extensively at A, B, E, and G. Note ring-shaped patterns four to five meters in diameter with scoring at the centers. Starboard retractable plane damaged, apparently jammed in the extended position. Sail dented at points marked C, D, and F.’ Lowe frowned as she looked at the submarine’s technical specifications again. “Yep, I thought that’s what it said. Titanium hull. Probably the only reason they got away from the thing. Now if we could just figure out how to make it move away from Gibraltar, maybe we could do something to it...”
She looked up at a cough from the doorway. “Doctor Lowe? Ms. Stardancer is here.”
“Thank you, Evelyn. Send her right in.” She put the folder down, taking a moment to stretch and rub her eyes as the witch entered and sat down in her usual chair. Evelyn brought them both cups of tea and then quietly returned to her own desk. The wolf nodded to the red-haired witch. “Any luck?”
Stardancer shook her head. “Not so far. I’ve tracked down some references to the Eldest – and a name, Cerrunos – but no hints as to where he might be. Coyote’s not even in those books. The best I’ve been able to come up with was a talk with an old Lakota medicine man. Gave me a description of what he thinks Coyote’s true form is...” Her voice trailed off and she stared past Lowe in astonishment.
The wolf frowned and then sniffed the air with her nostrils wide. “Let me guess. Someone matching that description is standing in the corner.” Stardancer nodded, still staring. “Great. This doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence in how well our wards are working.” She turned her chair around to face him. “Coyote, I presume?”
He gave her a canid grin and leaned over to take her hand and brush his lips across the back of it. “I have that honor. I see that Grandmother Pele understated the reality of your beauty.”
Lowe blushed, though it only showed inside her ears. “I’m flattered, I’m sure, but that’s not why we’ve been trying to find you. Please, sit down. Would you like tea, or something to eat?”
He shook his head, though he did pad quietly over to one of the chairs, sprawling on it to make himself comfortable. “Nothing right now, lovely ladies.” He leered at both of them. “Don’t worry too much about your wards. I got through them, but Cerrunos gave me the key.”
Stardancer frowned. “I’m not sure that reassures me. How did Cerrunos have it to give to you? He is the one Pele called the Eldest, correct?”
Coyote nodded. “He is. And who do you think sent you your first grimoire, Stardancer?” He grinned insolently as her eyes widened, but then straightened up and put on a more serious expression. “I’ve come to invite you to a gathering, Diviner. You may bring the witch with you, and your consort if you want. No one else, please. The Eldest feels that it is time for you to meet him.” He stood up and placed an ornate gold-lettered envelope on the corner of her desk. “I know the way out.” And then he was gone.
Stardancer shook her head. “I’m not sure I want to go, after that. He’s rather intense, isn’t he?”
Lowe nodded. “Just a bit. We’ll have to go, of course. Tell me what you learned from the old shaman...”
“...so they were expecting this, anticipating the Event as long as a century ago?”
Stardancer nodded to the wolf. “That’s how I interpret it now. Apparently the cycle is fairly irregular – but the Immortals learn to watch for the signs that it’s imminent.” She pointed to the invitation, still sitting on the corner of the desk. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
Lowe chuckled. “I suppose I should.” The envelope was addressed simply to ‘The Diviner’, with no return address. A claw made short work of the creased flap, and she pulled out the parchment-style message within. The message was neatly handwritten in silver ink, glowing slightly against the paper.
‘You are cordially invited to attend a gathering on the Twenty-fourth of March, Year 1 of the Eighteenth Convergence, 2013 CE in the old style, to meet with Cerrunos, the Eldest, and discuss matters of mutual interest. You may bring any guest who can read this invitation. Meet at the Connecticut Avenue entrance to the National Zoo at 9 a.m. Transportation from that point will be arranged.’ The signature line was the imprint of a cloven hoof, also in glowing silver. A short postscript read, ‘Shadow and Storm will be traveling with you if they accept their invitations. Casual dress.’ The second signature was an ornate rune. Lowe handed it to Stardancer and waited for the witch to read it.
“Shadow and Storm?”
Lowe shrugged. “We’ll find out. The Immortals seem to enjoy making up their own names for people.”
Stardancer nodded. “A point. They sound more like titles, though. Can you clear your schedule nine days ahead?”
The wolf nodded. “I’m going to, whether I can or not. This should be very interesting.”
The Kraken had recovered from his physical injuries, but his anger at being forced to retreat had not ebbed in the slightest. The seas were barren of whales – but they were full of ships, and he’d learned to avoid the thrashing bronze blades that drove them through the water. His hunger was sated for the moment – but his humiliation was still unavenged. He’d moved into the deeps near the Straits of Gibraltar, pondering his next move while resting in the calm depths, moving only every few days when he rose to the surface to ensnare one of the smaller vessels that plied the waters.
The Soviet Union had built a larger military than it could afford, one of the major factors that had finally driven the communist government aground on the rocks of economic reality. The Russian Navy was operationally far smaller than its predecessor, with hundreds of ships rusting at anchor or sold off to foreign services, but they had managed to scrape together the funding to keep their most advanced and capable ships at sea – even if the sailors were, in many cases, no longer completely human.
The Russian Federation had had a very high proportion of Changelings, and the chaos spawned by this had extended into its military forces. It had taken most of two months for things to settle out, but the inclusion of the Changed was never in question – there were simply too many of them to be done without.
Captain Second Rank Victor Ostrovo peered over the shoulder of his now-ursine sonar officer as the Lyra class vessel (called an Alfa by NATO navies) Tsar Piotr Alexeyevich moved quietly through the waters off the coast of western Europe. “I’d like to tell you what we are looking for, Andrey, but I don’t know myself. There’s a sea monster, they tell me. It’s attacked the Amis. The First Directorate people say they’ve tracked it to this region by its attacks on freighters. I ask them why we want to go near it at all? Let the Amis deal with it. They tell me to stop asking questions and find the thing.”
Captain-Lieutenant Andrey Vanakov shook his head. “And what do they wish us to do if we should find this monster?”
His commanding officer shrugged. “They tell me, try to make contact with it. If it should wish to talk with us, I will be most surprised and pleased. You know how sentimental the Amis are about whales and wolves and all manner of beasts – they would not have attacked this thing first, whatever it is, so I doubt it is friendly. If it attacks us, we will torpedo it.”
“With the Special Torpedo?”
Ostrovo shook his head. “Only as a last resort. Still, now that the Amis have used a nuclear missile, as they claim on a mythical monster, they will be unable to protest too loudly if that should become necessary.”
The display rippled as it detected changes in the conditions outside the titanium hull. “Bozhemoi. Captain, we may have found this thing after all.”
Ostrovo swore, and picked up his microphone. “All hands to battle stations. This is not a drill.” He closed the circuit as the bridge and the rest of his ship burst into quiet activity. “Andrey, activate the hydrophone speech circuit. It’s stupid, but I have my orders.”
<Now this was unexpected. One of the metal ships down here? Clever humans, to bring themselves to my larder. Their tasty little minds are inside, this is not another trick with machines simulating life.> The Kraken drifted up from the sea bed, its tentacles cautiously moving towards the submerged vessel.
Vanakov turned on the hydrophone. It was a relatively simple device, patching a microphone into the sonar transducer, and was normally used for short-range communication with divers and other vessels in emergencies when stealth was not required. He nodded to his captain, who cleared his throat and began speaking. “Greetings from the Russian Federation. We come in peace.”
Ostrovo turned off the microphone and looked at the sonar readings. “Is it doing anything?”
Vanakov shook his head. “It’s still drifting towards us at about eight kilometers per hour. Something that big, it’s not going to react too fast. It’s twice the length of our ship, Captain.” The lines on the display suddenly shifted. “Ah, there we go. It’s starting to accelerate towards –”
The Tsar Piotr suddenly heeled to one side as the first tentacles made contact. Ostrovo shouted, “Full emergency power! Rudder right ten degrees!” The submarine tilted even farther as the engines drove up to their maximum settings, the scimitar-bladed propellor churning the water as the ship tried to escape.
<Curious. Are they shouting defiance at me? It will do them no good.> It had been literally millennia since Creya had bothered to learn new languages, and nearly as long since he had tried to talk to anyone. Not since he had sided with Tethys against Poseidon. He grabbed at the ship, speeding up his attack in case this meant it was about to try to hurt him. <Slippery thing.> Its whirling propellor suddenly began to thrash at the water and it began to slip from his grasp. <I should have let it get closer.>
The hull groaned as the engines fought against the tentacles, and then the ship broke free, jolting everyone aboard as the suckers suddenly lost their grip on the outer hull. Vanakov shouted, “The thing’s got a long reach, Captain! We’re still a quarter kilometer from the main mass!”
Ostrovo swore again as he stumbled back to the center of the bridge. “Keep me informed of its location. And let’s pray it’s slower than we are, because I doubt we can dive deeper.”
Vanakov nodded and turned back to his gear. “Shall I go to active sonar, Captain?”
“Da. It’s not like it doesn’t know where we are.”
The high-frequency pings did a much better job of ‘seeing’ the Kraken than the passive detectors could. The body of the thing was fully two hundred meters long, and the longest four tentacles were close to three hundred, though the main swarm of them was shorter. That quartet was once again reaching for the Tsar Peter. “It’s accelerating, sir. Up to 12 kilometers per hour.”
Ostrovo glanced at the helmsman’s plot. “We’re only up to nine.”
The helmsman nodded, his face grim. “We can probably outrun him, sir. We just have to get up to speed.”
Creya would have frowned, if he still had the ability. The ship had broken away from his grasp and was turning that nasty thrashing blade toward him as it tried to escape. His fins rippled as he moved toward it, trying to reach safely past the propeller with his longest tentacles, but it was speeding up now.
The creature was vanishing off the sonar plot now, disappearing into the ship’s blind spot dead astern, but the tentacles could still be detected as they tried to reach around the screw to attach themselves to the hull. “Fifteen kilometers per hour, Captain, and holding steady. That may be its top speed.”
The helm plot indicated eleven for the submarine. “Give us three minutes and we can outrun it, then. Do you have a fix on the creature, Dmitri?”
Captain Third Rank Dmitri Polnyenko was the ship’s Weapons Officer. He nodded. “Of course, sir. We’ve had a lock on its location ever since it first moved.”
“Fire tube one, then. We’ll have to trust the wire. The thing’s too close for safety, but we’ll have to risk it.”
Polnyenko gave the order. A moment later, a torpedo left the bow of the ship and began to circle around to the stern, following the commands transmitted over the thin strand of wire spooling out behind it.
The Kraken felt the vibration of the torpedo in the water. Abandoning the attempt to catch the submarine, it jetted backwards, leaving the ship and its annoying weapon behind. <The full change cannot come soon enough. These machines are intolerable!>
Silence reigned on the bridge of the Tsar Piotr as Vanakov replayed the final moments of the display. The tentacles whipped away from the submarine as the Kraken jetted backwards at a speed of at least fifty kph. “I guess fifteen wasn’t its top speed after all, sir.”
Ostrovo nodded. “But it’s a giant squid. It can’t chase us at its full speed because the tentacles would be trailing behind it. Maintain full speed for an hour, then reduce to ten kph and surface. We’re making more noise than we should. I want to see what kind of damage it did to the outer hull.”
14 March 2013: New York City
The United Nations Security Council meets in closed session today to hear the American response to the General Assembly’s censure for the use of nuclear weapons against Mexico. The US Ambassador to the UN has warned that he will of course veto any attempt to pass sanctions against the United States, and the British Ambassador backs the US position. Russia remains silent on the matter, while China and France have said they will consider voting for sanctions...
The Ambassador from Brazil banged the gavel to open the session. The first day had been nothing but speeches from most of the Security Council members, viewing with alarm, calling for investigations, and generally going on record as opposing the US action. The Ambassador from the United Kingdom had made a brief statement asking the other members to wait on the evidence before condemning the US, and the Russian delegation, curiously, had simply passed when their turn to speak came up, but the rest of the first day was otherwise rather uniformly uninformative. Today, something was actually supposed to happen. “The Security Council recognizes the Ambassador from the United States of America.”
Commander Sterling looked over the first day’s transcripts in the US delegation’s briefing room. “I see now why you didn’t bother to bring me up here yesterday.”
Secretary Rice smiled at her. “It wouldn’t have done a whole lot of good. These people can talk even a diplomat to death, and that takes quite a lot of talking. You’re happy with those sketches, now?”
Sterling nodded. “They look like what I remember seeing. We’re lucky that the backup cameras weren’t affected by the anti-technology zone, or we’d have no proof at all, though.”
The Secretary frowned. “It won’t matter. They won’t really look at the evidence, half of them. They’ve already made up their minds and mere facts won’t affect them. The Chinese delegation – I’ve met Chang, and he’s a decent enough fellow. But he’ll be following orders from Beijing, whether or not he agrees with them.”
“Why are we even bothering, then?”
“Because the 'closed session' will get leaked to the press, and it will get back to other governments. We’ll leak it ourselves if need be. There are things we want to be disseminated in your testimony that will be more creditable if we don’t say them in public.”
Sterling looked at her. “The tech failure, you mean?”
The Secretary of State nodded. “Exactly. The more people thinking about that problem, the better.” She looked up as an aide opened the door. “And it looks like we’re on. Let’s go.”
Lowe looked at the pictures in the folder in front of her. Taken by an ASW helicopter on routine patrol out of the NATO base in Rota, Spain, they showed a Russian submarine on the surface of the ocean. The accompanying notes told her what she was looking at.
‘Acoustic tile damaged extensively at A, B, E, and G. Note ring-shaped patterns four to five meters in diameter with scoring at the centers. Starboard retractable plane damaged, apparently jammed in the extended position. Sail dented at points marked C, D, and F.’ Lowe frowned as she looked at the submarine’s technical specifications again. “Yep, I thought that’s what it said. Titanium hull. Probably the only reason they got away from the thing. Now if we could just figure out how to make it move away from Gibraltar, maybe we could do something to it...”
She looked up at a cough from the doorway. “Doctor Lowe? Ms. Stardancer is here.”
“Thank you, Evelyn. Send her right in.” She put the folder down, taking a moment to stretch and rub her eyes as the witch entered and sat down in her usual chair. Evelyn brought them both cups of tea and then quietly returned to her own desk. The wolf nodded to the red-haired witch. “Any luck?”
Stardancer shook her head. “Not so far. I’ve tracked down some references to the Eldest – and a name, Cerrunos – but no hints as to where he might be. Coyote’s not even in those books. The best I’ve been able to come up with was a talk with an old Lakota medicine man. Gave me a description of what he thinks Coyote’s true form is...” Her voice trailed off and she stared past Lowe in astonishment.
The wolf frowned and then sniffed the air with her nostrils wide. “Let me guess. Someone matching that description is standing in the corner.” Stardancer nodded, still staring. “Great. This doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence in how well our wards are working.” She turned her chair around to face him. “Coyote, I presume?”
He gave her a canid grin and leaned over to take her hand and brush his lips across the back of it. “I have that honor. I see that Grandmother Pele understated the reality of your beauty.”
Lowe blushed, though it only showed inside her ears. “I’m flattered, I’m sure, but that’s not why we’ve been trying to find you. Please, sit down. Would you like tea, or something to eat?”
He shook his head, though he did pad quietly over to one of the chairs, sprawling on it to make himself comfortable. “Nothing right now, lovely ladies.” He leered at both of them. “Don’t worry too much about your wards. I got through them, but Cerrunos gave me the key.”
Stardancer frowned. “I’m not sure that reassures me. How did Cerrunos have it to give to you? He is the one Pele called the Eldest, correct?”
Coyote nodded. “He is. And who do you think sent you your first grimoire, Stardancer?” He grinned insolently as her eyes widened, but then straightened up and put on a more serious expression. “I’ve come to invite you to a gathering, Diviner. You may bring the witch with you, and your consort if you want. No one else, please. The Eldest feels that it is time for you to meet him.” He stood up and placed an ornate gold-lettered envelope on the corner of her desk. “I know the way out.” And then he was gone.
Stardancer shook her head. “I’m not sure I want to go, after that. He’s rather intense, isn’t he?”
Lowe nodded. “Just a bit. We’ll have to go, of course. Tell me what you learned from the old shaman...”
“...so they were expecting this, anticipating the Event as long as a century ago?”
Stardancer nodded to the wolf. “That’s how I interpret it now. Apparently the cycle is fairly irregular – but the Immortals learn to watch for the signs that it’s imminent.” She pointed to the invitation, still sitting on the corner of the desk. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
Lowe chuckled. “I suppose I should.” The envelope was addressed simply to ‘The Diviner’, with no return address. A claw made short work of the creased flap, and she pulled out the parchment-style message within. The message was neatly handwritten in silver ink, glowing slightly against the paper.
‘You are cordially invited to attend a gathering on the Twenty-fourth of March, Year 1 of the Eighteenth Convergence, 2013 CE in the old style, to meet with Cerrunos, the Eldest, and discuss matters of mutual interest. You may bring any guest who can read this invitation. Meet at the Connecticut Avenue entrance to the National Zoo at 9 a.m. Transportation from that point will be arranged.’ The signature line was the imprint of a cloven hoof, also in glowing silver. A short postscript read, ‘Shadow and Storm will be traveling with you if they accept their invitations. Casual dress.’ The second signature was an ornate rune. Lowe handed it to Stardancer and waited for the witch to read it.
“Shadow and Storm?”
Lowe shrugged. “We’ll find out. The Immortals seem to enjoy making up their own names for people.”
Stardancer nodded. “A point. They sound more like titles, though. Can you clear your schedule nine days ahead?”
The wolf nodded. “I’m going to, whether I can or not. This should be very interesting.”
Category Story / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 50 x 50px
File Size 48 kB
Comments