‘The plan appears to be walking to the Wheel and turning off the engines that drive it,’ I said, my voice sour. ‘Do you think it would be more of a one-man job, Taproot?’
‘One, one thousand, it makes little difference.’ His hands returned to the wrestling they’d been caught in during his stasis. ‘Your dreams are what will tear you apart. Every man is the victim of his own imagination: we all carry the seeds of our own destruction.’ He tapped a long finger to his forehead. ‘It feeds on your fears.’
‘So we need another plan… We need to—’
‘There is no other plan.’ Snorri cut me off. ‘Taproot has watched a thousand years go by. His people built Osheim, made this happen. The ancient machines speak their secrets to him. And he hasn’t stopped the slow roll of this world into oblivion.’
‘It’s true.’ Taproot hugged himself. ‘Go to Osheim. Perhaps the key…’ A tremor ran through the chamber. ‘We should go.’
I was already at the door, Loki’s key pressed to the button pad. ‘Open!’
The heavy valve slid back without a whisper.
‘Well that’s encouraging.’ Taproot at my side. ‘That is no simple lock.’
We stepped aside to let Kara and Hennan through. I would claim chivalry but the truth is she held the light. I took a last glance at the room as shadows reclaimed it. The rotting horror of the dead Builder’s head watched us go.
‘I could have sworn…’ That it had been looking the other way when it first fell. I followed hard on Snorri’s heels, cursing him to hurry. Once through I held the key to the button pad on the outside and commanded the door to close.
Kara and Hennan were already climbing, an island of light above us. ‘Go on.’ I slapped Snorri’s shoulder. ‘If the kid falls you can catch him.’
I took the opportunity to plead my case alone with Taproot in the gloom at the bottom of the handholds. ‘Look, I can’t go to Osheim. You said it feeds on fears. Christ, I’m all fear. Fear and bones. That’s all I’ve got. I’m the worst person to send – the absolute worst. You should go with Snorri. Look, I’ll just give you the key and—’
‘I have other things to do. The data-echoes in the deepnet—’
‘What?’
He drew in a sigh. ‘There are Builder ghosts in machines beneath the earth. They too will be destroyed if the Wheel turns too far. They can’t stop the Wheel’s engines safely but the engines only turn the Wheel because we use the power it gives us. They can’t stop the engines but they can stop what’s driving those engines on.’
That sounded depressingly familiar. Grandmother had said something similar. ‘Us?’
‘Yes. There is a faction – a faction growing in strength – that wants to use the remaining nuclear arsenal to wipe out humanity. Without people to exercise the … to use magic, the Wheel should stop turning.’
‘What can you do?’ The Kendeth ghost that Garyus had summoned from the box had spoken of this. I had hoped he was lying.
‘I can talk to them. Gather evidence. Politic. Delay. And that delay is only useful if someone else acts in it.’
I reached up and found a handhold in the dark. ‘All I’m saying is that pretty much anyone would be a better choice for this than me.’ I started to climb.
‘Fear is a necessary metric without which the modelling of risk and consequence would serve no purpose.’
‘What?’ He’d gone back to talking nonsense.
‘No man is without fears, Prince Jalan. The key is designed to unlock things. If it has gathered you four together then perhaps you’re the best chance we have to unlock Osheim.’
That made a kind of sense. I chewed on it as I climbed. By the top I’d lost the thread and was more concerned with the ache in my arms and the business of not falling.
25
We stood with Dr Taproot at the fort’s shattered gates, an island amid a sea of mist, the skies above us bible black and strewn with diamonds.
‘You have to come with us!’ I said. ‘Who could be more help to us in stopping the Wheel than a real live honest-to-God Builder! Your people built the damn thing!’
‘And I have spent a thousand years failing to turn off the machines that drive it,’ Taproot replied. ‘The key has assembled what it needs to do the job.’ He spread his arms toward the four of us. ‘If I were required for your success then the key wouldn’t let me leave – it would find a way to keep me here. That’s how the thing works. Loki’s a tricky bastard. So stick with your plan. Go to Osheim and try the key.’
‘That’s your best advice, Taproot? Try it?’ Snorri seemed unimpressed.
‘You must have more than that.’ I tried to keep the whine out of my voice. ‘Where’s the wisdom of the ages? I ask you! I mean, you’re older than my grandmother. Hell, you’re older than Kara’s.’ I waved toward the völva. Taproot made Skilfar’s three hundred years seem youthful.
Taproot smiled apologetically and gestured up at the night sky. ‘The light of the sun is new-born, hot from the fires of heaven, and speaks cruel truths as the young are wont to – but starlight, starlight is ancient and reaches across an emptiness unimagined. We are all of us young beneath the stars.’
‘Very pretty,’ I said. ‘And not much help.’
‘My boss had it on a sampler behind his desk.’ Taproot shrugged.
‘Loki?’ Snorri rumbled, his face a mask. ‘You worked for Loki?’
‘Trust me, it would do you no good to know.’ Taproot started to pick his way across the debris toward the rippled surface of the mist, lapping the slope just beneath us.
‘Trust you?’ I called after him. ‘Loki is the father of lies!’ I thought of Aslaug. Even she had warned me against Loki.
‘A lie may be built of many truths, and the truth fashioned from innumerable falsehoods stacked heaven-high.’ Taproot waved a long-fingered hand at us over his shoulder. ‘Good luck on your quest. I’ll do what I can to buy you time. Don’t waste it.’
He stood knee-deep in the mist, the slow currents reaching up to wind the whiteness about him. Three more strides and he was gone.
I found his lens in my hip pocket late on the second day. Fingers hunting a coin discovered the cool smoothness of glass and I fished out the silver hoop. The old man must have slipped it in there – perhaps as we stood at the bottom of the shaft. I held it up to the sun, letting the light sparkle through it.
‘What’s that?’ Hennan nudged his horse my way. He was a decent rider by now.
‘Just some toy.’ Watch me. I held it to my eye and peered at the boy. He looked no different. With a shrug I let it slip back into my pocket.
Two more days took us through increasingly war-torn country. We reached the rearguard of the Red Queen’s army and passed into the outskirts of Blujen. We camped in the rain, our tent pegs driven into mud made black by ashes. Fires burned in the woods, they burned on the ridges to the west, and in the ruins before the city walls and out beyond them. Flames guttered in the windows of empty stone shells that were once the homes of rich men.
We crowded four into a tent that would have been snug for just Snorri and me and, in orichalcum light, watched the rain dribble through the wax-cloth. Several companies of Milano skirmishers had their camps set around us. On the foremost tent pole we flew the crossed spears of Red March to dissuade patrols from skewering us through the cloth and asking questions afterward. Come morning we would make the journey over the rubble of the city gates and into Blujen town to find the Red Queen. A trip better made in daylight if you hoped to survive it.
Occasionally a distant cry would break the night. Red March forces were still playing deadly games of hide and seek with the surviving Slov defenders amid the burning ruins. I hoped to be in and out with minimal delay, two Slov armies were rumoured to be only a day away, their outriders already circling through the farmlands just a mile from Blujen’s walls.
Sleep came quickly as it does at the end of most days on which you’ve covered thirty miles. I lay dreamless until Kara woke m
e, crawling over my blanket to the flaps, her hair brushing across my lips. She disappeared into the night and sleep went with her, leaving me stranded in the darkness, alone with my thoughts. Also a snoring Viking and a boy who kicked in his slumbers. Time passes slowly under such circumstances, but even taking that into consideration there comes a point when you realize that you’re not getting back to sleep, the völva has been gone too long for just answering nature’s call, and that no matter how you lie a rock will still be sticking into you.
I emerged to find that the rain had stopped and that Kara was sitting on a broken-down wall, watching the slow turn of the stars above the tattered clouds.
‘Checking up on me?’ she asked as I drew near, stumbling over the unfamiliar ground.
‘I wish people would check on me more often,’ I said. ‘I could usually use the help.’
‘Your grandmother and her sister have the Blue Lady trapped in there.’ Kara nodded toward the glow above the roofs of Blujen.
‘She deserves what’s coming to her.’ I stood close to Kara now and leaned my hip against the wall she sat on. ‘She deserves all of it.’
‘Does she?’ Kara pursed her lips and returned her attention to the stars.
I opened my mouth but it took a while for the words to come out. ‘Of course! She wants to burn the whole world, Kara! Not a barn or a village or…’ I looked around, ‘…a city. The whole damn world. Just so she can be empress of the fire.’
Kara sucked her lip. ‘The Wheel is turning. The wise say it can’t be stopped. All the Lady Blue is doing is pushing it a bit harder. Choosing her own time for the end. A time when some few might survive. If the end’s coming soon is it so terrible to make that end a little sooner?’
‘Yes!’ I spread my hands and gave her an incredulous look. ‘Hennan’s going to die one day … so let’s stab him now if there’s some advantage in it? The Lady Blue deserves everything my grandmother is going to give her.’
‘I suppose she does, but that’s not the same as being wrong. Have you thought about what we’re doing, Jalan?’
‘I haven’t thought about much else. The last thing I wanted to do less than go to Osheim was walk into Hell.’
She looked toward the tent at that. ‘Have you talked to him yet?’
‘About Osheim?’
She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘About Hel. About what happened to him when you abandoned him.’
‘I didn’t…’ Her scowl made me give up my denial. ‘He says he’s at peace. He doesn’t want to talk.’
‘Men. Idiots all of you. Big or small. Young or old.’ She shook her head. ‘He needs to talk. It’s not over until he tells his friends what happened. Any fool knows that. And you’re all he’s got left.’
‘Hmmm.’ I would place ‘having that conversation with Snorri’ quite high on the list of things I didn’t ever want to do. ‘What exactly did you mean before, about the Lady Blue not being wrong? The key can save us … right? This isn’t entirely a fool’s errand? I mean … I don’t mind long odds…’ Actually I did, I minded them very much. ‘But a suicide mission?’
‘Skilfar says even if we manage to turn off the Builders’ machine in Osheim it might only delay things. The machine is pushing us to destruction but when you stop pushing something it often rolls on a way by itself, and if it’s reached a slope it can keep on going until it hits the bottom.’
‘Skilfar says? How would she know? And how would you know what she knows?’
Kara smiled, reminding me of how I had once doted on her. ‘Individuals like my grandmother can reach out to trained minds across any distance, and when she chooses to speak to me I can reply.’
The warm feelings that had been stirring vanished in a moment as I imagined Skilfar watching me out of Kara’s eyes. For a moment imagination painted wrinkles across Kara’s face, tightened her skin there, loosened it here, pointed this, blunted that, and gave me the ice witch herself, weighing me with the coldest stare.
Kara ran a hand into her hair, as if looking for the runes she had once worn. It broke the spell.
‘So we should just give up because it might not work?’ I was less hostile to the idea than my question indicated.
‘The key could be used to ease a passage from what comes before the conjunction to what comes after. Some might say it would be better to use the key to inherit the future rather than run such a risk to try to save the past.’
‘But when the Wheel turns too far everything is going to burn – that’s what everyone keeps telling me!’
‘The Blue Lady says there will be an afterwards. Unlike anything we’ve known. And those who pass through the conjunction will be gods in a new world. The Lady Blue isn’t destroying this world, that’s the Builders and their Wheel. She can’t stop it. Your grandmother can’t stop it. Skilfar can’t stop it. We’re all heading toward the falls and no matter how hard we paddle … we’re all going over. All the Lady Blue is doing is paddling forward, building up speed to make the jump to something new. She doesn’t care about the Dead King, she doesn’t want what he wants. He’s just the tool she’s using to crack the world open sooner rather than later.’
‘You’ve been talking to her!’ I knew it for truth as I spoke the words.
‘I’ve seen her in my mirror.’ Kara shrugged. ‘She’s not the devil, and I’m no sheep to be led by another’s opinion. I listen. I consider. I make up my own mind.’
‘And?’ I spread my hands.
‘I’m undecided.’ She straightened and slid from the wall. Spots of rain began to fall around us.
‘But she’s evil! I saw her kill—’
‘You say she’s evil because one of the people her cause needed to die was your mother. But the Red Queen’s cause has led to the deaths of thousands, plenty of them mothers. Look around you.’ She swung an arm at the ruins.
‘I … I expect…’ I tried to find the words to explain why she was wrong. ‘Most of them probably ran for it.’
‘Your people are the invaders. Snorri told me that he saw the one-armed man who tortured you – in a Red March tabard, here in Blujen, walking with soldiers.’
‘Cutter John?’ I found I was hugging myself and the night seemed colder, more full of terrors. ‘I thought that bastard would be dead by now.’
‘Men who can get information from captives quickly are a valuable resource in war, Jal.’
‘It’s a mistake. Red March doesn’t have an inquisition. We’re the good ones … I’ll tell the queen. I’ll—’
‘Look behind the wall.’ Spoken softly to the night.
The rain fell harder now and I didn’t want to look behind the wall.
‘Make your own decision, Jalan. But do it with your eyes open.’ She brushed past me, bound for the tent.
The rain started to fall in earnest and clouds had stolen the light of moon and stars, but a tongue of flame still licked from a pile of blackened beams ten yards past the wall on which Kara had been sitting. With a curse I hunched my shoulders against the coldness of the raindrops and leaned over the wall where it stood at its lowest.
A girl’s corpse lay curled at the foot of the wall. She lay there as she had lain for our whole conversation, as she had lain when we pitched the tent and while we slept, eyes to the sky filled with cold water. Half her face had been burned black, the skin peeling away in dark squares, but I could tell she had been young, pretty even, her hair long and dark like my mother’s. I almost pulled away without realizing the bundle against her chest was a baby. I wish I had.
We came into Blujen on a grey morning beneath a cold rain. Tears for the dead.
A squad of ten Red March infantry escorted us along the town’s high street. Fire had erased many of the signs of fighting but I didn’t have to look hard to see them. In one place bodies lay in a heap, civilians uniformed in mud, a silent mound. The Dead King would have them hunting me if I stayed long enough for him to register the key. I saw soldiers bringing timbers ready to build a pyre, taking their leisure and
complaining beneath their loads. If they had been at Vermillion’s walls a week earlier they would be running to build it!
We spotted the tower before we saw any sign of the Red Queen or her forces. I say we saw the tower but in truth it was only the gleaming reflection of the sky, and as we drew closer, our own reflections warped, along with the surrounding ruins, across the surface of a mirror-wall. The men told me that the tower had been as any other, tall, rock-built, a ring of slit windows beneath a tiled conical roof. As the first soldiers had reached it the mirror-wall sprang up and had held ever since, immune to assault, reflecting back all violence.
The troops occupying the ruins, smeared with ash and mud, some bearing wounds, watched us with hard eyes. They must have known me as the marshal that let Vermillion burn. Some offered up a grim nod as we passed. Perhaps they knew how the Red Queen would deal with such failure and pitied me.
They took us to the royal pavilion, an edifice in scarlet dwarfing the campaign tents of the generals and the pavilions of her lords beyond them. Sir Robero, one of grandmother’s seasoned campaigners from the Scorron conflicts, took the Norse into his custody while a pair of royal guards led me on. I surrendered my sword and dagger at the entrance.
Grandmother’s pavilion had fared better than my tent: a silk outer skin, taut above a more durable waxed felt, seemed to have kept out the worst of the Slovian autumn, though I was gratified to see a collecting bowl to one side being fed by a steady drip-drip-drip from a seam high above.
Guards and officers drew back to clear a path to her wooden throne. The place smelled of wet bodies and old sweat. A dozen lanterns couldn’t quite break the gloom and the rich rugs beneath my feet were thick with muddy tracks. Grandmother sat stiff-backed but older, as if ten years had passed since we last met, iron grey threading the dark red of her hair.
‘Tell me of my city.’
How much did she know already? I couldn’t see the Silent Sister amongst the crowd. I straightened myself before the Red Queen, now hunched in her chair, and there in the half-light I told Vermillion’s tale. And among all that talk of burning half the city to save what lay within the walls, of her son’s treachery, and of my brothers’ deaths … I quite forgot to lie.