Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

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. I

t 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.

With no way to move them without someone noticing, Mustang, a Gold aristocrat, has conceived the most audacious plan in the history of the Sons of Ares. One massive troop movement, utilizing thousands of shuttles and freighters from Quicksilver’s mercantile fleet and the Sons of Ares navy to move the population of the pole in twelve hours. A thousand ships skimming over the Southern Sea, burning helium to set down on the ice before Obsidian cities and lower their ramps to the hundreds and thousands of giants swaddled in fur and iron who will fill their hulls with the old, the sick, the warriors, the children, and the fetid stink of animals. Then, under the cover of the Sons of Ares ships, the population will be dispersed underground and many of the warriors to our military ships in orbit. I do not think I know another person in the worlds who can organize it as fast as she does.

—

On the eighth day after the fall of Asgard, I depart with Sefi, Mustang, Holiday, and Cassius to join Sevro in overseeing the final preparations for the migration. The Valkyrie bring Ragnar with us on the flight, wrapping his frozen body in rough cloth and clutching him close in terror as our ship cruises just beneath the speed of sound five meters from the surface of the ocean. They watch in awe as we enter the tunnels of Mars through one of the many Sons’ subterranean access points. This one an old mining colony in a southern mountain range. Sons lookouts in heavy winter jackets and balaclavas salute with their fists in the air as we pass into the tunnel.

Half a day of subterranean flying later, we arrive at Tinos. It is a hub of ship activity. Hundreds cluttering the stalactite docks, taxiing through the air. And it seems the whole city watches our shuttle as it passes through the traffic to land in its stalactite hangar, knowing it bears not just me and our new Obsidian allies, but the broken Shield of Tinos. Their weeping faces blur past. Already rumors swirl through the refugees. The Obsidians are coming. Not just to fight, but to live in Tinos. To eat their food. To share their already-crowded streets. Dancer says the place is a powder keg about to erupt. I can’t say I disagree.

The disposition of the Sons of Ares is dour. They gather in silence as my ship’s landing ramp unfurls. I go first down the ramp. Sevro waits beside Dancer and Mickey. He slams me into a hug. The beginnings of a goatee mark his stoic face. He holds his shoulders as square as he can, as if those bony things alone could hold up the hopes of the thousands of Sons of Ares who fill the docking bay to see the Shield of Tinos brought back to his adopted home.

“Where is he?” Sevro asks thickly.

I look back to my shuttle as Sefi and her Valkyrie carry Ragnar down the ramp. The Howlers are the first to greet them. Clown saying a respectful word to Sefi as Sevro steps past me to stand before the Valkyrie.