All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, War, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780765358516
Google: D2xZ7sI46CgC
Amazon: B003KN3WS6
Goodreads: 6601517
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2008-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Another time, Muire might have waited until they were out of the snow to interrogate Ingraham on his silence. But not today—if days could be said to have any meaning here. Nor was she in a mood to argue with this mortal scrap, not here, calf-deep in the drifts of a dead world. She was healed now, fatted on poisoned strength, and she had Mingan. Though the memories he had left her were fragmentary and confusing, she was determined that they would be enough. One hand on Kasimir for support, Nathr an anchor in her hand, Muire turned herself within.

It was unlike meditation, and also unlike searching one’s own memories. More like searching the fragments of a dozen mirrors heaped in a pile. She had fragments, unreconstructed glimpses and imaginings. Too much of it was random, unreadable. Sheer chaos. But there were things both ghosts had found important, which were recent to each memory.

It had gone beyond simply avenging the dead, and—no matter how she sought to deny it—into some deeper mystery.

Ingraham remembered how he had died. And Mingan remembered how he had done murder. And—though neither of them was happy to share with her—that was a place to start, while she sorted through shatterling histories.

She knew at once when she found the right moment in Ingraham’s memory. The scent and texture of the air, the echo of his footsteps, the cold patter of rain on his hair—all conspired to remind her of the night he died. She walked with him, felt the raw chill of the night and the long, soaked cloth package in his hand. That was the delivery. The important thing. The thing Ingraham Fasoltsen had died for touching.

An unman met him at the foot of the stair he had died upon, and Muire saw her with a shock. A shock that Kasimir echoed, because under the fur and armor, the inhuman proportions and the lanky outline, both he and Muire knew her as soon as Ingraham looked into her eyes.

In Ingraham’s memory, the Black Silk extended her hand to take the bundle, and Muire reached out with her own left hand as if to lay Nathr across her palm. Then she jerked back, staggering in the snow, slipping against Kasimir’s obdurate shoulder. She bruised herself falling, but she was beyond burning now, and it didn’t interrupt the memory. Inside her head, Ingraham extended his arm, and slid the bundle into the unman’s grasp.

As if it were a real dream, a nightmare, Muire hauled herself free only with effort. She leaned on her steed’s shoulder, thickheaded and disoriented, and tried to shake the rag-tatters of phantasm from her psyche but only made her own head spin. If she had stayed with the memory a few minutes longer, she would have lived Ingraham’s death with him again. And she could have lived it through the Grey Wolf also, but she did not care to experience that particular luxury again.

Instead, she considered the unman. Muire had seen her the first time and thought nothing of her.

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