About eight centidays after beginning, Gril’Die finished talking. The Ginnung Council sat in silence, reflecting on all the information they’d just been provided. For several millidays, the Councilors just sat at the table, fingers interlaced or drumming on the wooden table. While they thought about everything he’d just told them, Gril’Die took the time to wonder at the architecture of the room.
The Council Room was a circular room carved out of the inside of one of the Skogr Forest’s many trees. It had two windows, each about a quarter turn of the wall long. The windows were heavily latticed, so that sight was easily achieved outward from the inside, but sight was incredibly difficult to achieve inward from the outside. The wall of the room was clearly maintained with regular burning treatments to prevent the tree from growing inward again, and Gril’Die wondered just how often they had to recarve the lattices in the windows. The ceiling of the room was heavily arched, the central point at least four times higher than the wall.Gril’Die also noticed that the only door was the one leading into the lift that led back down into the city, which jutted out of the wall into the room exactly where one might expect a door leading outside to sit. Gril’Die wondered for a moment what they would do if there were a fire but was interrupted in this thought by the High Councilor, Feriadd Khuda’Salongriell, with whom he had initially spoken.
“Mi’Olnr, what do you expect us to do with all of this information?” Gril’Die snapped out of his thoughts and turned to Feriadd. Feriadd was leaning against the back of his chair with one arm, the other extended outward onto the table. Gril’Die briefly had to remember that these men were not actually politicians but rebel military leaders who were elected to their positions without campaigning. None of the men in this room cared for the pomp and circumstance that would frown on such a stance. He smiled at the thought, encouraged to be surrounded by military men instead of the politicians to which he had become accustomed on Thor. One of the men even had his feet propped upon the table.
“Well, to be quite honest, I would rather you not distribute it to common knowledge just yet, first of all.” At this, a few of the Councilors frowned, but most of them nodded in agreement. It would hardly be surprising if people reacted in a way that no one would much appreciate if they knew half of the information the Council had just been told. “Secondly, I think it would be a very good idea to destroy the Monarch’s… device.” Poison seemed to drip from Gril’Die’s voice as he spoke of the machine. He wasn’t sure how many people knew about it, but he was fairly certain that there weren’t many, though he had a feeling the Valkyries knew about it. Those women were never surprised by anything.
“And how would you propose we go about destroying said device? We don’t even know when next it will be used. Fargerre Sheii’Cronell just became the Monarch a few cycles ago. Sheii’Cronells don’t exactly age quickly.” This time, it was not Feriadd but a Junior Councilor named Qziderien who spoke. He was no older than twenty-three cycles, but he seemed to be one of the more hardened members of the Council. Based on the musculature of his neck and shoulders, he was probably an armored karlsohk pilot, which would mean he’d probably been at the front lines of several more battles than most of the men at this table had even commanded. This meant he also had a much more skeptical mindset than most of these men, making him a good counterweight on the Council. Gril’Die silently applauded the Ginnung for electing such a well-rounded government.
“That’s true, but the Monarch always wants a stronger body. If an even more powerful Sheii’Cronell were to be born, we might be able to use him to destroy the device, assuming we could get him on board with us. All we need is someone willing to reject the Monarch’s transfer without letting the Monarch catch on before the transfer was attempted. The device would be deadlocked and totally useless. All that would be left would be the Monarch himself.” Gril’Die tried his best to make this seem like a passing detail, but he knew better after the previous comment.
“I thought the device would kill the Monarch if the transfer was rejected. His mind would already be in the device when it deadlocked, right?” Qziderien was as quick to this as Gril’Die had expected.
“It was rigged that way initially, but the Monarch’s too careful, and he’s had a lot of time to learn more about that machine. The deadlock reaction couldn’t be removed, but he’s had a lot of time to figure out a way for it not to kill him. To be honest, I’m surprised he didn’t kill me after I found out about the device.” That was certainly the truth. Gril’Die avoided further detail on the matter of that occasion.
“Well, we’re certainly glad he didn’t. I suspect it might have had something to do with the aliens,” Feriadd said. He was now leaning toward Gril’Die over the table, as were most of the other Council members, just as they had when he had been telling them everything he knew about the Monarch, the truth of the Fehmadadi, and the Sheii’Cronells. They had certainly reacted strongly when he got into the idea of genetic alteration. It was something very specifically forbidden in Jalihu’dai’s later sacred texts.
“Nonetheless,” Qziderien said, “how do we find a stronger Sheii’Cronell than Fargerre? He’s the most powerful one history has ever seen. And if we do, how do we get him to join the Ginnung?”
The last Councilor with his feet propped dropped them with a thud, and ever
yone looked in his direction. He had been so motionless during the entire discussion that most of them had thought he was sleeping, his bulky robes covering even his face with their large hood. He hadn’t even introduced himself when Gril’Die had begun, opting instead to sit in silence. “You just let me take care of that.” The Councilors all stood quickly but none so quick as Gril’Die. The voice had not been one of a man but a woman. Looking about the room again, Gril’Die wondered how none of them had noticed that there were only twelve Councilors, yet there were fourteen people in the room, until this moment.
The mystery woman stood slowly, her hood pulling up and away from her face a bit more. Before she even reached up to remove her hood, however, Gril’Die was fairly certain he knew who it was, though they had never met. He could see the green glow of her eyes against the dark interior of her hood as her hands came up to the edge of the hood. She pulled it off to reveal gray and blue hair that had been tightly braided and bunned to disguise her identity.
“Matriarch Khuda’Cronell, it’s a pleasure to meet you at last,” Gril’Die said, cutting through the apprehension in the room full of men who feared only one thing and suddenly found that thing in their midst as if it was just as at home as they were, if not more so. How she had gotten in, no one could be certain, but if Gril’Die didn’t do something fast, she may be the only one leaving it, and he was fairly sure that wasn’t her intention. “Would you care to elaborate on that last comment, please?”
Continuing to remove the heavy Councilor’s robes she had been wearing over her highly decorated Valkyrie uniform, the Matriarch spoke, “Well, you may remember setting a protocol that sent Valkyries out to that mystery beacon you found consistently over the past few dozen cycles.” Grie nodded, and she continued, ignoring the nervous Councilors as she neatly folded the robes and placed them on the table. “Good! Then I presume you’ve been receiving my reports to you on our findings there? You did mention some of those findings in this meeting, after all.”
“What’s your point, Matriarch?” Qziderien seemed to have found his voice again, and the Matriarch turned to him. He stepped back a bit as her gaze set upon him, but he stood a bit taller when he stopped.
The Matriarch smiled. “My point is that the Valkyries have been visiting a planet full of these ancient Murhan for the past several dozen cycles, which has been quite a different extent of time on the other side of the Bifrost. Valkyries aren’t exactly known for romantic indecisiveness, either. Eventually, one of them is going to find a mate, and you may recall what the Mi’Olnr just told you about what would happen if a Valkyrie reproduced with the exact same type of people who are on that planet.”
The men in the room all looked at her with a bit more surprise, if that were even possible, as they realized the extent of her words. Feriadd, nodded, his eyes narrowing as a faint smile grew across his face. “I see.”
But even the Matriarch had no idea just how soon her prediction was about to come true as Jake Kendrick began digging into a pizza in a restaraunt that was a Bifrost and several galaxies away with a Thorlinthian communicator in his pocket.