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)
Shanghai, some part of me thought at once, though I had never been there.
Or maybe not Shanghai literally? But the place in the language of this vision that meant their center.
Mary shuddered beside me. I felt her fear, but also her need to know, just like mine. She had the same scholar’s greed, perhaps in a different key, that I felt in myself. The branch beneath us trembled and hummed as if carrying a massive current.
Elsewhere, in Sicily, I heard voices through the roaring in my body.
Not words at first. Only the fact of speech around me while I remained bent and spread and used.
Fragments sharpened.
“Rouen…”
“Ask him…”
“Aksel says…”
Giovanna’s voice, cool even now. Mateo’s lower murmur. They seemed very far away, yet somehow threaded into the same structure as Mary’s awareness of another chamber, another observer, another man trying to make this impossible thing submit to analysis.
The name Aksel flashed through my mind with no image attached at first except precision. Then, faintly, from somewhere that was not exactly my own perception, I got an impression of a tall blond man in a stone room beside Sven, his gaze fixed and technical, as if he meant to dissect a miracle into usable mechanisms.
The thought itself might have made me laugh, if I had had any breath to spare.
Henrik drove deeper and the almost-laughter became a cry.
“What do you see?” he demanded.
I tried to answer at once. The answer fractured under another climax.
“Lights,” I gasped. “A tower… no… a trunk made of power lines… energy—”
“Be precise,” Giovanna said somewhere behind or beyond me, sounding infuriatingly professional while I was impaled by my master’s manhood, atop a Viking relic and coming out of my mind.
I tried. The effort itself seemed to pull me and Mary farther along the branch, as if articulation could function as a kind of steering. We moved toward the industrial tree, as if direction meant nothing in this utterly non-Euclidean space. That tree was and wasn’t the same one where we were.
The imagery thickened. Young women knelt beneath it, naked. Men crouched behind them… over them. The girls knelt as conduits, faces down and bottoms up. Their heads were bowed to the ground as their masters fucked their bottoms, their hair spreading over the soil around them.
From their thoroughly used bodies rose filaments of light that fed the larger structure. Behind them the men, in dark modern clothes, their rigid manhoods jutting from their flies, drove them onward. Their faces would not hold still. Executive. Priest. Engineer. Party official. The vision slid among categories, refusing to settle.
A sisterhood, I thought suddenly. A sisterhood to serve the fellowship. The way the Order of Ostia served the Pretorian Guard… the way bed thralls, vǫlur, like Mary and me served the Sons of Odin.
CHAPTER 33
Ilsa
A creeping dread began to work its way into my mind, as I tried to understand what I could see in the Chinese tree. The feeling arrived with such clarity that it seemed less like an inference than a warning. The linked lights below the Chinese tree had begun to seem aware in a way I didn’t understand at first. Not sentient exactly, not in any simple anthropomorphic sense, but… responsive. If Mary and I pressed further downward into that gleaming network of towers and kneeling women and transmitted force, then something in it might feel the pressure of our looking.
I turned to Mary on the branch. Her pale face, framed in loose red hair, had taken on the same tautness I felt in my own. Her eyes widened. She gave the smallest shake of her head.
Yes, I thought at her without words. You feel it too, don’t you?
Below us, or through us, or in whatever impossible relation the vision bore to our bodies, I felt again the soreness between my legs, the burning in my bottom cheeks, the profound, used heaviness of a girl who had been ridden to the edge of her mind.
The sense of danger should have sharpened my awareness, maybe. Instead it reminded me how tired I was.
The branches under us seemed suddenly less solid than they had before. The air around the Chinese structure hummed with a kind of electric appetite. I had the awful intuition that if we lingered, some woman there—or some man behind those women, some master of that other order—might look up and find us.
Mary’s face changed again, softening into an exhausted resignation that I felt certain matched my own. We had gone as far as we safely could. Whatever link had let us look into that other tree, whatever leak between systems or symbols or networks I had only begun to understand, didn’t feel like a passage we should force.
I let go.
I had the impression of falling back into my own body. The duality that I had found as I had climbed into the canopy of the tree vanished immediately under a wave of pain… and then aftershock… and at last relief so complete it seemed to erase thought. The branch, the lights, the industrial trunk of power and finally our own tree, Yggdrasil itself, all seemed to fold inward like a map being closed.