“This is the right way.” Tuttugu nodded as if to convince himself and pointed ahead.
For my part I turned on a heel and hurried back to Kara’s side. “Crap,” I repeated myself. Part of me still wanted to follow the line Tuttugu indicated. “It’s all true, isn’t it? Tell me there aren’t boggen and flesh-mauls too . . .”
“The path to the Wheel grows strange.” Kara spoke the words as if quoting them. “And then more strange. If a man ever reached the Wheel he would find all things are possible. The Wheel gives anything a man could want.”
“Well . . . that doesn’t sound too bad.” And so help me my feet started taking me south again. South and a little east. Tuttugu set off again too, just ahead of me.
“It’s the monsters that stop them reaching the Wheel.” Kara’s voice, an unwelcome nagging behind me. Even so, the word “monsters” was enough to stop both me and Tuttugu. We’d both seen more monsters than we ever wanted to.
“What monsters? You said anything a man could want!” I turned back, unwilling.
“Monsters from the id.”
“From the what?”
“The dark places in your mind where you make war on yourself.” Kara shrugged. “That’s how the sagas have it. You think you know what you want, but the Wheel reaches past what you think you know into the deep places where nightmares are born. The Wheel grows stronger as you get closer. At first it answers your will. As you get closer it answers your desire. And closer still it dances to your imagination. All your dreams, each shadowed corner of your mind, each possibility you’ve considered . . . it feeds them, makes them flesh, sends them to you.”
Tuttugu joined us. I caught a whiff of him as he drew close. Old cheese and wet hound. It was only when we had a moment apart that you noticed it. We probably all reeked after too long in that little boat and it would take more than a quick sinking to wash it off. “You lead us, völva,” he said.
Only Snorri remained where he was, out on the moor with long grass dancing to the beat of the wind all about him. He stood without motion, still staring south where the sky held a purplish taint, like a fading bruise. At first I’d thought it was clouds. Now I wasn’t sure.
“After you.” I gestured for Kara to lead us. My imagination proved torment enough to me from one day to the next. Absolutely no way was I heading somewhere that could put flesh on any bone I dreamed up. Men are dragged down by their fears all the time, but in Osheim apparently that had to be taken far more literally.
Snorri remained where he’d first stopped, close enough to hear our conversation but making no move to return or go on. I knew what he would be thinking. That the great Wheel of the Builders might turn for him and bring his children back. They wouldn’t be real though, just images born of his imagination. Even so—to Snorri the exquisite pain of such torture might be something he couldn’t step away from. I opened my mouth to make some remonstration . . . but found I had no words for it. What did I know of the bonds that bind father to son or husband to wife?
Raised in a culture of war and death I would have pegged a Viking warrior to be the most able of any man to put such tragedy behind him and walk on. But Snorri had never been the man I’d thought would lie behind the beard and the axe. Somehow he was both less than the fantasy and more at the same time.
I turned and walked back toward him. Anything I had to say seemed shallow beside the depth of his grief. Words are awkward tools at best, too blunt for delicate tasks.
I almost set a hand to his shoulder, then let it fall. In the end I settled for, “Come on then.”
Snorri turned, looked at me—as if from a thousand miles away—then twitched his lips, hinting at a smile. He nodded and we both went back together.
• • •
“Sail!” Tuttugu had returned to the ridge above the dell whilst I went to retrieve Snorri. Now he pointed out toward the ocean as we returned.
“Maybe we won’t have to walk after all,” I said as we reached Kara.
She shook her head at my ignorance. “You can’t just wave down a ship.”
“Why’s he jumping up and down then?”
“I don’t know.” Snorri said the words in a voice that suggested a slow-dawning suspicion. He left us and jogged up the slope toward the ridge. Kara followed on at a more relaxed pace and I dogged her heels.
Both men were crouched by the time we reached them and Snorri waved us down too. “Edris,” he hissed.
I edged alongside Tuttugu on my elbows, adding more mud to my costume.
“Shit.” I squinted at the flash of sail miles and more off the coast. “How the hell can you tell?”
I felt Tuttugu shrug beside me. “I just know. It’s the cut of the sails . . . just the way of it . . . Hardassa for sure.”
“How is it even possible?” I asked, becoming aware of Kara moving up beside me, her braid runes tapping as the wind played them out.
“The unborn knew where to dig for Loki’s key,” she said.
“It was under the Bitter Ice! Anyone who listened to the stories knew—oh.” The Bitter Ice stretched for scores of miles of ice cliffs and then reached back an unknown distance into the white hell of the north. How did they know where to dig?
“Something draws them to it,” she said.
“There’s unborn on that ship?” Suddenly I wanted to be home very badly.
Kara shrugged. “Maybe. Or some other servant of the Dead King who can sense the key.”
I shuffled back from the ridge. “We’d better move fast then.” At least running away was something I understood.
THIRTEEN
“We’ve got to move fast, but in which direction?” Snorri asked.
“We need to be away from the coast.” Tuttugu hugged his belly with nervous arms, perhaps imagining a Hardassa driving his spear into it. “Take away their advantage. Otherwise they’ll pace us at sea and come in for us by night. And if they’re forced to beach they’ll have to leave men to guard the longboat.”
“We’ll aim south-west.” Kara pointed to a low hill on the horizon. “We should reach the Maladon border in three or four days. If we’re lucky we’ll be close to Copen.”
“Copen?” Tuttugu asked. I offered him silent thanks for not making me be the one to display my ignorance yet again.
“A small city on the Elsa River. The duke winters there. A good place to rest and gather our resources,” Kara said. By which she no doubt meant “for Jalan to buy us food and horses.” At this rate I’d arrive at Vermillion as poor as I thought I was when I left it.
• • •
We set off at a good pace, knowing the Hardassa men would be better provisioned, better equipped . . . probably just plain better in all regards given that our second best warrior was likely a woman with a knife.
The sun came out to mock us, and Kara led the way, winding a path across slopes thick with heather and dense clumps of viciously spiked gorse.
“We’re getting closer to the Wheel aren’t we?” I asked an hour later, footsore already.
“Yes, we’ll just cut through the outer edge of its . . . domain.”
“You can feel it too?” Snorri fell back to walk beside me, his stride free as if his wound no longer pained him.
I nodded. Even with four hours until sunset I could sense Aslaug prowling, impatient. Each patch of shadow seethed with possibilities despite the brightness all about. Her voice lay beneath all other sounds, urgent but indistinct, rising with the wind, scratching behind Snorri’s question. “It’s like the world is . . . thinner here.” Even with an arm’s length between Snorri and me that old energy crackled across the shoulder facing him, buzzing in my teeth, a brittle sensation, as if I might shatter if I fell. With the old feeling came new suspicions, all of Aslaug’s warnings creeping into my mind. Baraqel’s hold on the northman would be strengthening with each yard closer to the Wheel. How lo
ng could I trust Snorri for? How long before he became the avenger Baraqel intended him to be, smiting down anyone tainted with the dark . . .
“You look . . . better,” I told Snorri.
“I feel better.” He patted his side.
“All magic is stronger here,” Kara called back without turning. “Quicker to answer the will. Snorri is more able to resist Kelem’s call, the light in him is battling the poison.” She picked up the pace, and glanced my way. “It’s a bad place to use enchantment, though. Like lighting a fire in a hay barn.” I wondered if Snorri had mentioned Harrowheim to her.
“What is this ‘wheel’ anyway? Some sort of engine?” I imagined a huge wheel turning, toothed like the gears in a watermill.
“No one alive has seen it, not even the wrong-mages who live as close in as they can stand. The sagas say it’s the corpse of a god, Haphestur, not of Asgard but a stranger from without, a wanderer. A smith who forged weapons for Thor and Odin. They say he lies there rotting and the magic of making leaks from him as his flesh corrupts.” Kara glanced up at me, as if to gauge my reaction.
I kept my face stiff. I’ve found heathens to be a touchy lot if you laugh at their stories. “That’s what the priests say. What do the völvas believe?”
“In King Hagar’s library on Icefjar there are remnants of books copied directly from the works of the Builders themselves. I understood them to say that the Wheel is a complex of buildings laid above a vast underground ring, a stone tunnel, many miles long and going nowhere. A place where the Builders saw new truths.”
I mulled on this one, walking another hour in silence. I pictured the Builders’ ring of secrets, seeing it all aglow in my mind’s eye while I tried to ignore each new blister. Less painful than the blisters, but somehow more distressing, was the sensation that each step took us closer to the Wheel, the world becoming fragile, a skin stretched too tight across bone, ready to give suddenly and without warning, and leave us falling into something new and much, much worse.
“Look!” Tuttugu, behind us but pointing ahead.
I squinted at the dark spot down in the shallow valley before us. “I didn’t think anyone lived in Osheim.”
“Lots of people live in Osheim, idiot.” Snorri made to deliver one of those playful punches to the shoulder that leave my arm dead for the next six hours. He paused though, feeling the old crackle of magic, as fierce across his knuckles as it was across my side. “Most of them live far south, around Os City, but there are farmers everywhere.”
I glanced around. “Farming what exactly? Rocks? Grass?”
“Goats.” Kara pointed to some brown dots closer at hand. “Goats and sheep.”
We hastened across the valley toward the lone hut. Somewhere in the back of my mind Aslaug whispered that Snorri had raised his hand against me, yet again, insulted me to my face. A low-born barbarian insulting a prince of the March . . .
Coming closer we saw that the dwelling was a stone-built roundhouse, the roof thatched with dried heather and river-reeds. Apart from a shed a single winter from no longer being a shed, and a drystone wall for stock to shelter behind come the snows, there were no outbuildings, and no other dwellings lay in sight.
A handful of mangy goats bleated at our arrival, one from the roof. An axe stood bedded in a log before the doorless opening. The place seemed deserted.
“See if they left any furs.” I nodded at the door as Tuttugu drew up alongside us. “I’m freezing.” My clothes still felt damp and were doing a poor job of keeping out the wind.
Tuttugu looked up at Snorri who shrugged and walked on over to the doorway.
“Halloo, the house?” Snorri paused as though he heard something, though I couldn’t make out anything but the goat on the roof, bleating as if it were wondering how to get down again.
Snorri stepped up to the entrance. And then stepped back again. The long and gleaming prongs of some kind of farm implement following him out. “I’m alone here and have nothing you might want.” A voice gone rusty with the years. “Also no intention of letting you take it.” By inches a yard of wooden haft emerged, and finally on the other end an old man, tall but stooped, his hair, eyebrows, and short beard all white like snow, but thick, as if a thaw might give us back the younger man.
“More of you, eh?” He narrowed rheumy eyes at Kara. “Völva?” He lowered his pitchfork.
Kara inclined her head and spoke a few words in the old tongue. It sounded like a threat but the ancient took it well and gestured to his hut. “Come in. I’m Arran Vale, born of Hodd, my grandfather—” He glanced back at us. “But perhaps you’ve travelled too far to have heard of Lotar Vale?”
“You need to leave here, Arran.” Snorri stepped in closer, making his words clear. “Gather only what you need. Hardassa are coming.”
“Hardassa?” Arran repeated as if uncertain of the word, or of his hearing. He tilted his head, peering up at the Norseman.
“Red Vikings,” Snorri said. Old Arran knew those! He turned quickly, vanishing into his home.
“It’s us they’re after! We should take what we need and go!” I glanced back at the distant lip of the valley, half expecting to see Edris’s friends pouring down the slopes.
“That’s exactly what they will do when they spot this place,” Tuttugu said. “Take what they want. Re-provision. Their longship can hold a lot of goats.” Something in his eyes told me his own thoughts were circling the idea of goat stew even now.
“Hurry!” Snorri slapped a hand to the lintel-stone, leaning in.
I looked back again and a lone figure stood on the ridge, little more than a mile away. “Shit.” I’d been expecting it all this time, but that didn’t stop the truth of it from being a cold shock.
Arran re-emerged carrying nothing but his pitchfork and in the other hand a butcher’s knife. Across his back he’d secured a bow that looked as old as him and as likely to snap if bent.
“I’ll stay.” The old man looked to the horizon. “This is my place.”
“What part of Viking horde did you not understand?” I took a pace forward. Bravery of any kind generally makes me uncomfortable. Bravery this stupid just made me angry.
Arran didn’t look my way. “I’d be obliged if you’d take the boy though. He’s young enough to leave.”
“Boy?” Snorri rumbled. “You said you were alone.”
“I misled you.” The faintest smile on the bitter line of the old man’s lips. “My grandson is with the goats in the south vale. The völva will know what’s best for him—but don’t bring him back here . . . not after.”
“You’re not even going to slow them down with that . . . fork.”
“Come with us,” Tuttugu said, his face clouded. “Look after your grandson.” He said it like he meant it, even though it was clear the man had no intention of leaving. And if he did it would just slow us down.
“You can’t win.” Snorri, frowning, his voice very deep.
The old man gave a slow nod and a double tap on Snorri’s shoulder with the fist that held the knife. A gesture that reminded me he had not always been old, nor was age what defined him.
“It doesn’t matter if you win—it only matters that you make a stand,” he said. “I am Arran, son of Hodd, son of Lotar Vale, and this is my land.”
“Right . . . You do know that if you just ran away they’d probably ignore you?” I said. Somewhere just behind the conversation Aslaug’s screams scratched to get through. Run! The message bled out into each pause. I didn’t need instruction—running filled my mind, top to bottom. “Well . . .” I glanced once more at the doorway to the roundhouse, imagining it thick with fur cloaks inside. “We should . . . go.” A look at the ridge revealed half a dozen figures now, close enough that I could make out their round shields. I started walking to galvanize the others into action.
“May the gods watch you, Arran Vale.” Kara bowed
her head. “I will do my best for your grandson.” She spoke the words as if she were playing a role but in the unguarded moment as she turned away I saw her doubts—her runes and wisdom perhaps as much a facade as my title and reputation. She started to follow me. Dig deep enough into anyone and you’ll find a scared little boy or scared little girl trying to get out. It’s just a question of how deep you have to scratch to find them—that and the question of what it really is that scares the child.
“Shit.” I saw the boy, running toward us down the long and gentle slope of the valley’s southern edge, a ragged child, red hair streaming behind. Snorri followed my gaze. I picked up my pace, angling to intercept the boy’s path, though several hundred yards still separated us. Kara veered left to cover that approach should he try to evade me.
Only the Undoreth stayed where they were. “Snorri!” I called back.
“Get him to safety, Jal.” A raw tone that stopped me in my tracks.
“Come on!” I turned back, beckoning them on. Tuttugu stood beside Snorri, axe in hands.
“It matters that we make a stand.” Snorri’s words reached me though he didn’t raise his voice.
“Christ.” They’d bought into the old man’s nonsense. I could understand it from Arran, addled by age and a step from the grave in any case . . . but Snorri? Had Baraqel stolen his mind? And what the hell was Tuttugu staying for?
“Kara!” I shouted. “They won’t come!”
A score and more of the Hardassa advanced down the northern slope now in a rough skirmish line, their cloaks of tartan, of wolfskin, and of bear blowing about their shoulders, shields low, axes held above the heather, their iron helms robbing any expression.
“Take the boy!” She started back toward Snorri.