Snorri moves to stand by Tuttugu’s side, reaching for his own axe.
Tuttugu shakes his head, closing his faceplate. ‘You didn’t come here for this.’ He turns away. ‘Neither of us can count the number of battles you saved me in. Now it’s my turn. Go.’
Snorri looks once more at his friend and nods.
‘We’ll meet again in Valhalla.’ Tuttugu grins. ‘I’m not facing Ragnarok without you beside me.’
‘Thank you.’ Snorri inclines his head, eyes full once more.
Tuttugu squeezes Snorri’s shoulder a last time and leaves the house.
As the long silence wore on I began to glimpse the tunnel, Kara’s orichalcum light throwing our shadows across the curve of the wall, no sound, our footsteps deadened by the dust of a thousand years.
‘Did you speak to them?’ My voice came rough and echoed ahead, following the arc of the Wheel, vanishing into the darkness.
‘I did,’ Snorri said. ‘And it gave me peace.’ The Viking paced a hundred yards before he spoke again, and while he held quiet I started to hear distant hints of pursuit from behind us.
Snorri cleared his throat. ‘When I came out of the house Tuttugu was waiting for me. He said he would guard them as long as he could. I told him I would stop the Wheel’s engines and free Freja and my children from Hel. Or die trying.’
‘Where will they go?’ I hadn’t quite followed that part, or thought Tuttugu capable of delivering such a speech. But then, I’d underestimated the man time and again.
‘To whatever has always waited for us beyond life,’ Snorri said. ‘They will be free of the Wheel. Released from man’s dreams and stories and lies. You’ve seen it yourself, Jal. Is that where you want those you love to spend eternity?’
My mother was assuredly in Heaven, but on the other hand my father, cardinal or not, was definitely in Hell if the rules he occasionally preached held any truth. Most importantly though, it was not where I wished to spend forever.
‘What’s this?’ Hennan pointed to a sign fixed to the wall, so covered in grime that we had nearly passed it by.
‘We don’t have time!’ I stared back into the darkness, ears straining for those sounds again. At any moment Cutter John could race into view.
‘International…’ Kara was already rubbing dirt away from the sign with her sleeve. ‘Kollaboration…’
‘It looks like gibberish to me, come on!’ The lettering was alien, though faintly familiar.
‘It’s an old version of Empire tongue, very corrupted.’ She rubbed away more of the dirt. The sign seemed to be enamelled metal and in many places corrosion had broken up the surface beneath the grime. ‘I can’t read the rest. The first letters are bigger though. I.K.O.L. That last word might be “Laboratory”.’
‘What’s a laboratory?’ Hennan asked, looking up at me for some reason.
‘It’s something that wastes your time while monsters creep out of the dark to kill you,’ I said.
‘There’s a picture here too.’ Kara wiped at it with her filthy sleeve. ‘It can’t be…’
Despite my fears I moved to join her. Beneath the large title running several feet across the top of the sign were three pictures, side by side, head-and-shoulders portraits, painted with exquisite detail. A balding grey-haired man with glass lenses over his eyes; a middle-aged man, black-haired and serious, his face divided by a beak of a nose; and a young man with a wild shock of brown hair, his features narrow, eyes large and dark.
‘Professor Lawrence O’Kee,’ I read, puzzling through the twisted lettering. ‘Dr Dex— no, Fexler Brews, and Dr Elias Taproot!’
‘Taproot was in charge of the Wheel?’ Snorri asked, looming over us as Hennan wriggled between Kara and me for a closer view.
‘Important enough to be on this sign,’ Kara said. ‘I’m guessing this one is in charge, though.’ She set her finger to the oldest of the three, the professor.
The sound of running brought an end to the questions, feet pounding the dusty tunnel, coming up fast behind us. I started off without the others, sprinting into the darkness and got about twenty paces before hitting something very solid. I saw a dim outline with just enough time to get my arms up – even so, the next thing I knew was being helped up off the floor by Snorri.
‘Where is he?’ I threw my head left and right, hunting the gloom for Cutter John.
‘The footsteps vanished when you hit the bars.’ Kara stood behind me with the light.
‘Bars?’ I saw them now, gleaming pillars of silver steel, each as thick as my arm.
The sound of charging feet started up again behind us, maybe fifty yards back. I pushed Snorri away and fumbled for the key. It slipped from my fingers, treacherous as ice, but the thong held it and I caught it again. ‘Open!’ I tapped it against the closest bar and all of them slid back into their recesses, the top half into the ceiling, the bottom into the floor.
I stepped over before they sunk from sight and turned, sharpish, the others following. The shadows spat Cutter John out at a dead sprint. ‘Close!’ I slapped the key against the gleaming circle of a bar, now flush with the floor. I stood, frozen by the sight of that goggle-eyed monster racing toward me. Snorri jerked me back, but not before I saw Cutter John leap for the narrowing gap … and miss. He hit with awful force and I swear those bars rang with it.
‘Come on.’ Snorri dragged me forward.
‘The bars will hold him,’ I said. I almost believed it.
Fifty yards on the tunnel entered a chamber as big as the new cathedral at Remes. The black tube that had run along the tunnel core continued through the centre of the open space and vanished into a tunnel mouth on the opposite side. Its path took it into the jaws of a vast machine that sat upon the chamber floor fifty feet below us and extended another fifty feet above the point where the black tube passed through it.
Lights set into the ceiling, too bright to look at, lit the chamber from top to bottom as if it were a summer’s day. The air smelled of lightning, and throbbed with the heartbeat of huge engines.
We stood at the edge where the tunnel gave out onto a sheer fall to the floor far below. If there had ever been any supporting rail or stairs they hadn’t been made of such durable material as the bars back along our path or the titanic machine before us, and perhaps now accounted for the brownish stains down the walls and across the floor.
‘There’s someone down there.’ Hennan pointed.
At the base of the towering block of metal an alcove had been set into the bulk of the machine, an alcove lined with plates of glass all aglow with symbols and squiggles. In the middle of it, from our angle only visible from the shoulders down, stood a man in a white robe or coat of some kind, his back to us.
‘He’s not moving,’ Kara said.
We watched for a whole minute, or at least they did: I kept looking back in case Cutter John caught us up and pushed us over the edge.
‘A statue?’ Hennan guessed, stepping to the edge of the drop.
‘Or frozen in time, like Taproot in that Builder vault.’ Snorri pulled Hennan back.
Far behind us a dull clanging started to sound. ‘We should get down there and find out,’ I said.
‘How?’ Kara approached the edge less boldly than Hennan, on hands and knees.
‘Fly?’ I flapped my arms. ‘We’re wrong-mages now after all!’ I willed myself off the ground, lifting my shoulders, standing on tiptoes. Nothing happened save that I was forced to take a stumbling step forward to keep from falling, and was very glad I hadn’t tried closer to the drop. ‘Why won’t it work?’
‘The Builders’ machines must place counter-spells to protect themselves. How else would they still be working after so many years?’ Kara leaned head and chest out over the edge. Snorri beat me to the job of holding her legs. ‘There are rungs set into the stone of the wall, just like in the shaft we came down.’
She inched back, shook her legs free, then spun around to back over the edge, feet questing for the holds. With the stron
g suspicion that the clanging noise was the bars back along the tunnel surrendering to Cutter John, I slipped over the edge directly behind her.
A minute or so later all four of us stood on the chamber floor, feeling like ants, both in scale and significance. Snorri led the way to the alcove in the base of the machine. The towering silver-steel engine, through which the black core of the Wheel passed, occupied most of the chamber but a good twenty yards stood between the wall of the chamber and the outer skin of the machinery. The thing looked like no engine I’d ever seen. There were no wheels or cogs, no moving parts, but the structure seemed to be built of many sections and various pipes snaked across its surface, meeting and separating in complex patterns. The whole edifice hummed with power – not a comforting hum but an ungentle sound that carried within it unsettling atonal harmonies that could not have come from any human mind.
‘It’s that man from the sign.’ Hennan walked at Snorri’s side, a large knife that the Viking must have given him ready in his hand.
‘Professor O’Kee,’ Kara said.
He stood, frozen as Taproot had been, studying one of the glass panels and the pattern of lights glowing from it. Also in the alcove, somewhat surprisingly, was a messy pile of dirty bedding, a scattering of books, half-eaten food on a plate, and a stained armchair. Just before him, perhaps knocked by the hand resting on the semi-circular desk that ran along the length of the alcove, a small object, a slim cylinder, narrower and slightly longer than my finger, had been captured just after falling from the flat surface. It hung in mid-tumble about three feet off the ground.
I drew my sword and moved forward to prod it in the old man’s direction. I ran into the invisible wall well before I’d expected it, almost smashing my face into it as I’d only just begun to raise my blade.
‘It’s big!’ I said, to cover my embarrassment.
‘Taproot called it stasis,’ Kara said. ‘A stasis field.’
Snorri set his hand to the smoothness of the boundary between time and no time. ‘Use the key.’
‘He’s not frozen,’ Hennan said.
‘Yes he is.’ I patted myself for the ever-elusive key.
‘That … thing … falling from the table is lower down now.’
I looked. The stylus did look a little closer to the ground, but it could easily be a trick of the eye. ‘Nonsense.’
‘He’s right.’
It took me a moment to realize that I didn’t recognize the voice backing Hennan’s opinion. I turned to find that Snorri already had his axe uncomfortably close to the newcomer’s neck. ‘Who are you?’ A Viking growl.
‘You don’t recognize me?’ The man wore the same long and close-fitting white coat as O’Kee, with black trousers and shiny black shoes beneath. He was in his twenties, perhaps a few years older than me, dark hair in disarray, standing up in tufts as if he was in the habit of tugging on it, and thinning at the crown. His wide eyes sparkled with amusement, certainly more than I would show with a barbarian’s axe just inches from my face. Something about him did seem familiar.
‘No,’ Snorri answered. ‘Why should I recognize you?’
Kara stared at the man, brow furrowed. ‘You’re a Builder magician.’
‘Oh come on! I’m staring you in the face.’ He waggled his fingers under his chin and gestured with the other hand toward the alcove. ‘See?’
O’Kee had his back to us so it was far from obvious, but that was where the familiarity came from. He looked a bit like the older man, or at least how I remembered him from the picture. ‘You’re his son? Brother?’
‘Son. In a manner of speaking.’ A broad smile. ‘Call me Larry. In any case, your lad is right. Look, the pen has reached the floor.’
We all turned, expect for Snorri, too much the warrior to fall for simple misdirection. The cylinder had indeed hit the floor and was perhaps in the process of bouncing.
‘It’s slo-time,’ Larry said. ‘A year spent in there sees a century pass out here.’
‘We need to speak to the professor,’ I said.
‘You could ask me?’ He smiled.
‘It’s a pretty big question,’ I said. ‘We really need to talk to the man in charge. We’re going to turn it off.’
‘What are you going to turn off?’ Larry asked.
‘This.’ I waved my hand at the machine, which was nearly as big as a castle keep. ‘All of it.’ I gestured toward the tunnel mouths at either side of the chamber. ‘The Wheel.’
‘The professor can do it for us.’ Snorri’s voice left no room for choice. ‘It’s his creation.’
Larry shrugged. ‘It’s the creation of hundreds, if not thousands, of the brightest minds of his age, but yes, he oversaw the project. He’s been working at turning it all off for the past thousand years – ten years in his time – but without success. There are a great many processes that must be exquisitely balanced for a successful termination of the operation. The smallest mistake in calculations could see the effect accelerate … or worse.’
‘Even so, we will talk to him.’ Snorri set a palm to the surface where the professor’s time met ours.
‘Be my guest.’ Larry opened his hands toward the professor. ‘But you’ll need the key. And if you don’t have that I’m afraid I’ll have to see you out.’
I glanced at Snorri, his face set in a grim frown, then back at Larry. Most people find an enormous Viking intimidating. Larry somehow conveyed the impression that he considered us all to be naughty schoolchildren.
‘I have the key.’ I pulled it out and was rewarded with the smallest hesitation from Larry before his grin broadened.
‘Marvellous! Really marvellous. You’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting to see that again.’
‘Again?’ I shook my head at his nonsense and turned to the professor. ‘Open!’ I jabbed the key at the barrier … and found no resistance.
The ‘pen’ bounced once more and rolled under the armchair.
Professor O’Kee tutted. He tapped the glass plate he had been looking at – across which lights and lines and numbers were moving in bright and colourful confusion – and turned, bending to retrieve the fallen pen, only to be arrested halfway through the action by the sight of three heathens from the savage north and a prince of Red March.
‘Oh thank God!’ he said. ‘Larry, put the kettle on.’
‘We’re here to turn the Wheel off,’ Snorri said. ‘Will the kettle help with that?’
‘Of course you are.’ The professor offered us a genial smile and nodded toward my still-outstretched hand. ‘You’ve brought back my key.’
‘Your key? This is Loki’s key. It was made in Asgard.’ Snorri bristled.
‘I’m sure it was.’ The professor nodded and hobbled to his armchair. He didn’t look well. ‘I’d offer you all a seat, but I’ve only the one I’m afraid. Age before beauty and all that.’
Larry, who had been standing at the desk back in the alcove now returned with a cup of steaming brown liquid. He offered it to the professor who took it in a hand that quaked with old-man’s palsy, threatening to slop the contents over first one side, then the other. He got it to his lips without incident and took a noisy slurp.
‘That’s tea!’ I said. The others looked at me.
‘Well done, lad.’ The professor took another slurp and made a satisfied ‘ah’.
I nodded my head curtly, accepting the praise. My mother brought the leaves of the tea plant with her from the Indus, dried and pressed, and used to drink an infusion of them in hot water.
The old man looked up at Snorri. ‘There’s no kettle, just a hot water dispenser and very old teabags. It’s an expression – language clings on to things long after we’ve forgotten what they were.’
‘You say it’s your key,’ Kara challenged.
‘In a manner of speaking. In several manners of speaking in fact.’
‘You’re Loki?’ I asked, allowing just a hint of mockery into the question.
The professor shot me a look that ha
d some steel in it, and, blowing on his tea, drank deeply. ‘I guess we should get to it. I can’t spend too long outside slo-time or the rats will get me.’
‘Rats?’ I glanced around.
‘Yes. Can’t stand the things.’ He put down his cup. ‘It’s what the part of my mind that wants to kill me summons up to do the job.’
‘But we’re shielded down here? We can’t work magic like we could on the surface…’ I looked back up at the tunnel mouth high in the wall, expecting to see Cutter John standing there with his pincers at the ready.
‘There’s a dampening field, yes, but the, ah, the unfortunate side-effects of the experiment can still manifest, they just take a little longer. Inside the slo-time bubble I’m completely safe, but too long out in the chamber and the rats start creeping in.’
‘Larry was out here,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes.’ The professor looked at Larry. The family resemblance was quite remarkable now the young man stood beside the professor’s chair. ‘Well, Larry … Larry is—’
‘A marvellous mechanical man,’ Larry said, and executed a sharp bow.
The professor shrugged. ‘I built Larry to carry my data-echo – he is, as he says, an automaton, housing … well, me, or at least the copy of me that the machines hold. We have our little joke: I’m the father—’
‘I’m the son,’ said Larry.
‘And Loki is the Holy Ghost,’ the professor finished.
‘I don’t understand,’ Kara said. None of us did of course, but the völva valued knowledge above pride.
‘You’ve met Aslaug of course?’ The professor struggled out of his chair, falling back once and waving off Larry’s help on his second attempt. The automaton – some sort of clockwork soldier, I assumed – gave us an embarrassed look. ‘A number of my contemporaries escaped their bodies when the nuclear strikes went in, both starting and ending the war over the course of a few hours. They were able, with the help of the changes that our work here had wrought on the fabric of things, to project their intellects into various different forms. Aslaug was Asha Lauglin, a brilliant physicist. She projected onto negative energy states in the dark-matter field. The projections all think they survived. They didn’t of course, Asha Lauglin was carbonized in a nuclear explosion. She died eleven hundred years ago. Aslaug is a copy, just like Larry here, only one that became corrupted over the years, caught up in the folklore of the people who repopulated. Reshaped by their beliefs and the joint will of the believers—’