Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Cold air breathed out from darkness beyond.
I stopped dead.
The hidden door in an underground garage would have been enough to reverse the feeling of mundanity. The quality of the space beyond, though, lit up my imagination the same way the cavern in Sicily had; stone, old and uneven and lit with a restrained amber glow that at once erased the garage as thoroughly as a dream. I had the immediate, irrational feeling of a world behind the world, one not metaphorical at all now but built—more, built a very long time ago.
Henrik glanced at me.
“Come, lille en.”
I went.
As we crossed the threshold the stale practical air of the garage vanished behind us. The passage beyond descended only a little, but it was enough to make me feel the city lifting away. Stone closed around us. I saw carvings in places, obviously older than the ones in the sanctuary under Capo Zafferano, worn smooth by time and passing hands. Lamps recessed into niches cast gold over rough walls. I heard no traffic. No ventilation hum. Only our footsteps and, somewhere deeper in, the suggestion of a chamber large enough to gather echoes.
Then the passage opened.
I saw Sven first, tall and pale and composed in the amber light, and beside him…
Mary.
Her red hair. Her pale, exhausted face. Her nakedness, mirroring mine. The unmistakable fragility in the way she held herself, as if every part of her below the waist still remembered, just as those parts of my body did. For one heartbeat I saw her in two forms at once: here in a worldly body, and there on the branch, bright with impossible recognition.
Then she saw me, and her expression became radiant and somehow sad at the same time.
We moved at the same time, toward each other, without any permission from our masters but willing, I felt, to endure any whipping we might get as long as we could get it side by side. One moment we stood on opposite sides of the threshold between passage and chamber, and the next we were in each other’s arms with a force that made me gasp because of my sore body. She clung to me. I clung to her. We both trembled.
“It was you,” she whispered against my shoulder.
“Yes,” I said, already crying. “Yes, you, too.”
Her laugh turned into a sob. Mine did too. The relief was so intense it felt almost animal. She was real, and the tree was real.
“So,” said Sven, “you girls have given our scientific approach to the visions of the vǫlur quite a difficult challenge. And that’s before we even consider the Chinese problem.”
CHAPTER 34
Ilsa
As Sven led the way through the passages of the sanctuary, the sheer extent of the facility quickly impressed itself on me. I had foolishly thought the Pretorian Guard’s Palermo mithraeum, and even the Viking cavern with the longship, strikingly extensive. This place, though, seemed to have no end.
Amber light from torches that I noticed, like those in the mithraeum, gave off no smoke caught on carved stone and old timber. We passed openings that seemed to promise entire worlds beyond them: one vast chamber where I glimpsed the high curved ribs of what could only be a longship like the one in Sicily… another where trestle tables gleamed under suspended lamps… another from which came the faint rhythmic sounds of exertion, leather, command. The place felt like a buried kingdom that had accepted electricity and plumbing without conceding any metaphysical ground to the modern world.
Sven glanced back at me once, perhaps seeing the way I kept turning my head despite the care with which I still had to walk.
“I know how curious you are, Ilsa,” he said, and there was a hint of apology in his deep, measured voice. “I should show you the sanctuary properly. The longship cavern here, the carvings, the Mead Hall, the training rooms. And Bellatrix Hestiaea should see them as well.” His pale eyes flicked briefly to Giovanna. “But the debriefing cannot wait. The girls must speak while the branches still cling to them.”
Giovanna gave a small nod. “Of course.”
Beside me Mary leaned close enough that her red hair brushed my cheek.
“I’m so glad,” she whispered, with the intimate urgency of a schoolgirl sharing a secret in chapel, except that we were two exhausted sexual servants in an underground Viking citadel. “I’m so glad you’re my new vǫlva partner.”
I turned my head a fraction toward her. “New?”
“My old partner was Camille,” she murmured. “She’s in North America on assignment with Erik. Sven’s second.” Mary’s lips curved. “She and I are also Pretorian Guard columbae, like you.”
I nodded, remembering the discussion in Palermo. I turned further to her with a questioning look, in hope of more information. Mary smiled.
“I’ll tell you the story later, but we didn’t find a secret sanctuary or anything. And more important… Camille and I never found each other on the tree, the way you and I did.”