Glancing back is seldom advisable, especially when in full flight from danger. What are you going to do, run faster? It didn’t work out well for Lot’s wife and although I’ve learned few lessons from the bible, that one I should have hung on to. At least I hung onto my horse, though just barely. Perhaps the darkness saved me, concealing enough of the detail to preserve my sanity. As the Unborn Prince tore past the guardsmen, cardinal’s robes flapping, each man ripped open in a red butchery of tattered flesh and white bones. The contents of their bodies vomited out toward the prince and where they struck they stuck, flowing, reorganizing, so that stride by stride he grew and changed.
‘Dear God!’ I kicked Murder to greater efforts but he was already giving all he had. He might be as vicious a stallion as ever ran the fields of empire, but in this instance the same mad terror made cowards of us both.
Whatever the Unborn Prince was becoming one thing was certain – it wasn’t slow. The furious wet crunching thrash of the beast didn’t seem to be fading away into the distance as Murder stretched his legs. In truth it was growing louder, closer, and more furious.
The thud of heavy feet began to drown out the thunder of Murder’s hooves. Cold blood spattered across my back with each wordless roar of the monster. In moments a swing of its jaws would take me from the saddle. On the road ahead shapes loomed out of the murk, refusing detail to my rain-filled eyes.
‘Save me!’ A shout that emptied my lungs top to bottom.
With no alternatives left I veered right, hauling on Murder’s reins and kicking him into a huge jump that carried us clear of both the ditch and the six-foot hedge standing behind it. At the height of the jump I glimpsed my pursuer, just starting to overhaul me, but still on the road, trying to follow, too heavy to match our turning circle. The thing that the unborn had built itself into looked for all the world like a dragon from myth. A huge, raw, skinless dragon whose wet and flapping mouth housed rib-bone teeth.
The last I saw of the unborn before the hedge took it from view was of bloody feet with thigh-bone claws scrabbling for purchase on the cobbled road as it sought to turn, starting to present a broadside to the three riders in its path, all of whom were now trying to throw themselves from their mounts to get clear of the collision.
We landed with a jolting impact and I narrowly avoided smashing my front teeth out on the back of Murder’s head. Instinct told me to keep going, racing out in a straight line cross-country. Common-sense could only muster a faint cry from the corner at the back of my mind where it had been relegated, but since that cry concerned the inevitability of laming Murder while crossing rough ground in the dark at speed, and being stranded alone, waiting for the corpse-dragon to find me … I listened. I tugged hard to the left and brought him toward a dip in the hedge.
The unborn monster must have lost its footing and smashed into the horses side on. Two lay on their backs on the verge, legs flailing. The Norse appeared to have got clear without being crushed. Snorri had hold of Hennan, dragging him out of range of the hooves as the nearest mare tried to right herself.
The third horse went down with the corpse-dragon and now lay entangled with it, dwarfed by the beast, screaming in a register that would have loosened my bladder if I hadn’t passed that point several hundred yards back. As the unborn found its feet the horse, Hennan’s chestnut mare, Squire, ‘peeled’ and became part of the monster, its flesh and bones being drawn up and redistributed across the manufactured body. The lantern one of the riders had been carrying lay smashed in a pool of dancing flame, casting the unborn into hideous relief.
Snorri, pressing Hennan into Kara’s care, returned on foot to the middle of the road.
‘I have swum the River of Swords. I have whet my axe on jötnar bone in the cold places of the underworld. I am Snorri ver Snagason and I have slain your kind before.’ He lifted his axe and somehow the edge of it cut a glimmer from the night. ‘This night you return to Hel.’
The corpse dragon shook itself, tattered flesh trailing beneath the muscular barrel of its body, supported on four thick legs. The head, its mouth wide enough to swallow a man, tilted first one way, then the other, bundled spines crackling deep within stolen flesh as it flexed. The porcelain mask now sat bedded in the beast’s forehead, a single white scale amid all that rawness. Two eye-pits regarded the Viking. The eyes I had met long ago in Vermillion’s opera house watched from their recesses – I couldn’t see them but I felt their hate.
‘You.’ At first it was the sound of blood gargling in a diseased throat, then somehow it was speech. ‘You dare to stand your ground against me?’
‘Stand my ground?’ Snorri looked very alone, there in the middle of the empty road, the rain dripping from every part of him. ‘Vikings don’t stand their ground!’ With axe raised above his shoulder the poor madman began to charge.
The unborn seemed as surprised as me and stood watching as Snorri covered the distance between them. The closer he got the more huge the unborn seemed, the more unequal the contest.
As Snorri raced across the last few yards, roaring his battle-cry, the unborn swiped at him, a bone-clawed foot of raw meat, half as wide across as Snorri was tall. The Northman threw himself under the swing, feet first, sliding across the wet stones and somehow rising to bring Hel down in a violent arc that terminated at the centre of the unborn’s forehead, shattering the porcelain mask and burying the blade haft-deep.
The unborn, clothed in its body of many corpses, swung its dragon-like head, ripping Hel from Snorri’s hands and catching him across the side from hip to armpit. The angle was wrong for biting but the force of the impact lifted the Northman from his feet, flinging him bodily through the air and hurling him on a trajectory that carried him off the road, through the top of the hedgerow, and into the field where he hit the mud about a yard in front of me with a dull thud.
In my limited experience, any blow that lifts a man off his feet tends to be the blow that kills him. One time I saw a stallion kick one of the stable-lads at the palace. His feet left the ground and he flew perhaps a fifth of the distance Snorri covered. I don’t know if he was dead before he landed but if he wasn’t it couldn’t have been long after. They rolled him over and I saw the sharp fractures of his ribs all around where the hoof caught him. The rest of the bones had been driven into his lungs.
Compared to the unborn the hazards of galloping cross-country in the dark were nothing. I should have been out of both sight and earshot before Snorri hit the ground but instead I found myself kneeling in the mud, rolling him over. His whole left side was a mess of gore.
‘C-could … have gone better.’ He croaked the words as air leaked back into his lungs.
‘You’re … hurt.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. On the other side of the hedges the unborn roared and thrashed. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Perhaps it was eating Kara. I’d imagined a lot of sorry ends for myself, but none had featured being slaughtered in the mud by a monster on a lonely stretch of road.
Snorri groaned and rolled onto his good side, grasping at his ribs. His hand came away messy and my stomach lurched.
‘I’m in one piece.’ He managed a scarlet-toothed grin and I realized the gore had come from the unborn. ‘Odin’s blood!’ Snorri got into a sitting position, hunched like a man broken on the inside.
‘How are you even alive?’ I stood up, backing away a step. It seemed that the relatively slow velocity and large area of the impact had conspired to get Snorri airborne without turning his body to pulp.
I reached down to help him up but before he could gain his feet the hedgerow burst open, the unborn forcing a path.
‘Shit!’ I drew my sword: a toothpick would have been as much use. ‘What are you doing?’ Snorri was still on the ground wrestling something glowing from the pack at his hip. ‘Put it away!’ Light would just help it find us faster.
Too late, the huge nightmare head swung our way and the cold malice of those hidden eyes pierced me. I stood, paralyse
d, on the point of dropping my sword and running for it, abandoning all honour for the privilege of dying fifty yards further from the road. The thing lurched forward with a hideous gargle, but seemed unable to break free from the hedge. Black root-like loops had encircled its feet.
‘Kara!’ The völva must have been working on the entanglement spell that had had such marvellous effects against the Red Vikings near the Wheel of Osheim. The strength returned to my hand, fingers tightening on my sword hilt. I glanced down at Snorri. ‘What the hell?’ He had the ghost-box, its glow making black silhouettes of his hands as he opened it, pointed toward his face.
‘We need Baraqel!’ He shouted it into the mouth of the box where a chaotic speckling of light and dark boiled.
At the hedge the unborn roared and threw itself forward, centuries-old roots groaned and creaked under the strain. Several burst apart with loud retorts. Elsewhere, dead flesh tore to let the bonds slip and reformed afterwards.
Snorri got to his knees. ‘The key, Jal, it’s the way to let him out. He lives in here.’
‘It doesn’t work like that, you stupid great … Viking.’ But even as I said it I pulled out Loki’s key and pointed my trembling blade in the direction of the unborn, which was now uprooting the last hawthorn that had been anchoring it down.
‘Yes it does!’ Snorri stood, one arm clutching his side, the other holding the box out toward me. ‘Yes. It. Does.’ The look he gave me held such conviction I started to believe it too.
Bone claws dug into the mud and the unborn surged into motion. I dropped my sword.
‘Baraqel!’ I roared, taking the ghost-box and aiming its mouth toward the unborn. I thrust the key into the box’s base and turned it.
The light that lanced out I had seen once before, though that time I had been inside a tent that had almost burst into flames. Now as then the Builders’ Sun’s light turned the darkness into the blind whiteness of dunes beneath the hottest sun. The unborn screamed, its flesh bubbling. In the next moment the impossible brightness of that unnatural illumination cut off and in its place Baraqel stood, as we had seen him once before at the wrong-mages’ gate, a glowing angel with a sword cut from the sun, nine foot long and burning. In the instant he appeared I knew him. No one else quite managed that look of disapproval when their eyes found me.
A heartbeat later the unborn crashed into Baraqel, his sword descending upon it. Even a twelve-foot angel couldn’t stop the creature dead. The dragon body it wore had been fashioned from the corpses of fifty men or more and Baraqel was thrown aside. But wings of bronze and gold spread to absorb the momentum and his furnace-bright sword struck the unborn’s head from its shoulders in a single blow.
Dark crimson blood vomited from the unborn’s neck in a lumpy torrent while the whole serpentine length of its body convulsed, whipping back and forth. A moment later it warped and tore like dough, corpse heads and disembodied eyes appearing along its back, new limbs forming, ending in rib-bone claws or half a dozen spinal columns thrashing like tentacles. Another convulsion and the mutated mass of it wrapped Baraqel in a coil, bearing him to the ground.
‘Come!’ Snorri snatched up my sword and, limping, ran into the fray.
‘Come? You just took my bloody sword. What am I supposed to use? Bad language?’
I drew my dagger and stood watching. The fight confused my eye: rapid, furious coils of dead flesh black against the angel’s brilliant limbs, bright wings fluttering, black claws tearing, and occasionally a glimpse of that burning sword sending shadows sprinting back across the field. I spotted Snorri here and there, like a mouse harrying an Indus python, Edris Dean’s blade cutting through the necromancy that sustained the unborn, but surely with cuts too small to matter.
I looked at the four inches of iron in my fist, then looked back for Murder, only to find him gone, even his viciousness turned to terror at the sight and sounds of such a battle. The half-expected red tide of the berserker failed to rise in me, just a bitterness, an anger that this creature woven of the worst of men’s hatreds that settle into the deepest rifts of Hell, had haunted me for so long. The unborn had been the start of my journey, breaking my life apart, and now it looked like being the end of it too. I held the dagger out before me. Die fighting alongside Snorri in the light – or alone a few minutes later in the dark? Sometimes the coward’s choice aligns with that of the hero.
Kara told me I was screaming ‘Undoreth’ when I charged. I don’t have any memory of it, but I’m sure it would have been ‘Red March’.
27
‘Go away, damn you, and tell Ballessa I want kippers for breakfast.’ I screwed my eyes tight against the daylight. ‘And draw those damned curtains!’
‘Time to get up, your majesty.’ The maid sounded sarcastic rather than respectful.
I tried to snuggle down into the bedclothes and found them wet and cold. ‘What the hell?’ I opened my eyes, blinking against a bright light close to my face. All of me hurt. At least it had stopped raining.
‘How are you feeling?’ Kara, squatting at my side wet-haired and smeared with mud. She held the orichalcum up between us.
‘I’m dying.’ With one hand I wobbled my jaw. ‘I think I broke my everything.’
‘He’s fine,’ she called over her shoulder.
Snorri loomed out of the night and offered a hand to haul me to my feet. Hennan appeared from nowhere, more mud than boy, and got under my other arm to help me up as Snorri pulled.
I drew a deep breath and regretted it. ‘Smells like a funeral in a latrine.’
‘That’s just you.’ Snorri clapped an arm around my shoulders and steered me toward the stinking ruins of the unborn. Long feathers littered the rutted ground, the light dying from them as I watched.
‘Baraqel?’ I asked.
Snorri shook his head. ‘They destroyed each other.’
The box of ghosts lay bedded in the mud nearby, its glow drawing my eye. I gestured toward it. ‘Get that, Hennan.’ As he ran for it I added, ‘Don’t let it touch your skin.’
He returned, holding it gingerly, his sleeves over his hands. I shrugged Snorri’s arm off and stepped forward to take the box. Before it could summon some ancient relative I called into it, ‘Baraqel!’
At once that same fuzzy light lit in the box’s depths and as I held it away from me a Builder ghost sprang into being above the opening. I could see something of Baraqel in the man before me, the same blade of a nose, the eyes somewhat hollow above prominent cheekbones, the broad expanse of forehead, but it was the way this ghost burned with many times the light of any seen before convinced me this was Baraqel.
‘Entanglement detected.’ The voice of the box. ‘Bareth Kell.’
The ghost met my eyes and spoke with its own voice. ‘Call me, Barry.’
‘I—’ The things always unnerved me. ‘Are you dead?’
‘I’m just a library entry, Jalan. Bareth Kell died many centuries ago in the third war.’
‘But I know you. You’re Baraqel.’
The ghost shone brighter still. I shielded my eyes. ‘When the world burned I was one of the few who could leave their flesh and pattern myself onto the energy flux. I became a wraith, a spirit if you like. The Barry who lived in the meat where my mind was born … he burned. It was a sad time.’
‘Baraqel? This is you, isn’t it?’ I tilted the box and the ghost tilted with it. There was more to this ghost than some ‘library entry’ – he felt alive, charged with energy and personality. I saw it as he leaned with the box, a peevish frown, something judgmental in the way he pursed his lips. ‘It is you!’
Baraqel gave a nod and a grudging smile. ‘It’s me. Or at least an echo of me resonating in this device. I won’t last long. Where’s the heathen? Bring him forward.’
Snorri stepped into the light. ‘Baraqel. You fought well.’
‘You saved us.’ I frowned at the angel, now just the ghost of a man who died a millennium ago, a man in his fifties, slightly balding. You wouldn’t remark him
on the street – yet somehow he had through force of will set his stamp on the universe so deeply that it had carried his spirit all these years since his flesh had burned to cinders. ‘How … how did you get from this—’ I tilted him back. Put a tunic on him and he could be a servant at the palace. ‘To that?’ I nodded toward the unborn’s remains and the great smoking wounds that Baraqel’s sword had left in its flesh.
Baraqel grinned, waving a hand past his head in self-deprecation. ‘At the start it was as if we were gods, those of us who escaped into the … the elements you might call them… We ranged so far. This world is like one leaf and we had access to the tree. Years slipped by unnoticed. It was subtle at first. Men returned, just a few survivors emerging from bunkers after generations or spreading from the depths of places so remote they had suffered no direct damage. They drew us back. We thought it was our idea – that we’d come to watch humanity rise again, to guide it. But the truth was that their expectations reeled us in; and then their stories shaped us, degree by degree, so slowly we didn’t notice it happening or understand the process, and we became the stories they told about us.’
As Baraqel spoke the light from his data-ghost faded. ‘I’ve lived too long. So many years, so many regrets.’ He grew dim. ‘I used to love to watch the sunrise. Before the change. Before the world stopped being so simple. I used to wake up just to watch it rise over the Pyrenees.’ His voice grew soft, blurred around the words. ‘I didn’t watch the sun rise that last day. I had wanted to … I regret that. Perhaps … more than the rest of it.’ He paused, more pale now than the ghosts the box normally produced. The box faded with him, its glow dying beneath my fingers. ‘I think sometimes that when the bomb vaporized me the real Barry Kell died that day, and all I am is an echo, a variation in the light.’ He looked up at me, wraith-like, faint lines suggesting the man. ‘And what … you see here is just an echo of that echo, rattling about in a box of tricks, old Baraqel … the angel superimposed on a simple AI to speak his last words.’