She had known before that male magic was weak. The rituals that the wolf shaman Kveld Ulf practised, for instance, could influence the physical realm but were scarcely recognisable as magic at all to the sisters of the Troll Wall. They were performed without the aid or understanding of the runes and to the witch queen were as strong as a house built without foundations. The blue-eyed sorcerer’s presence was almost fragile to her.
She saw images pulsing from his drum, running wolves, reindeer, bears, all moving from the skin as little stick figures, dancing their way into the mire. What was he trying to do? She allowed herself to sink into the rhythm of the drum, turning it over in her head. After a time she understood it, owned it. The rhythm was hers to command now. The sorcerer was concentrating too much on the man in the mire and didn’t realise she was there, that the beat coming from his drum had been altered and was spilling his secrets into the web of the witch queen’s mind. His thoughts fell open to her. He had been seeking the twin who had become a prince, had insight into his importance but had no real idea how to proceed, she could tell.
The witch queen was pleased. She had her enemy at her mercy, distracted, not aware of her, his limited magic ensnared in an attempt to influence the young man in the mire. She felt the runes rising in her as a sharp thorn to prick him with, fire to burn him, ice to freeze him, water or earth to stop up his breath.
In the darkness of her cave she felt a hand take hers. She turned in the weak glow of a whale-fat candle to see a woman with a ruined face sitting beside her, smiling. Then a realisation came to the witch’s mind and she forgot her odd companion.
The witch knew that the sorcerer, no matter how weak he appeared, was the god Odin. Therefore any vulnerability he expressed was a strength in disguise. She might attack him but he would survive, and, in surviving, he might realise who he was, awake to his powers and crush her.
The candle guttered and the shadows seemed to stretch across her sight as she sensed her murder-minded ancestors looking at her from the rocks around her. In their sudden presence was a message, she knew.
Magical thinking can appear close to insanity but, like some forms of insanity, it has aspects of genius. The first witches had known Odin had taken up female magic. He alone among men was a master of the women’s art - Seid, as it was called. Loki had told Gullveig that the god was lore-jealous, that he was striking at her because she had become too wise in magic. So the god hated powerful sorcerers in the earthly realm and would come to kill them. Very good, she thought. Then, if the god himself came to the earthly realm and was made to recognise himself as the most powerful sorcerer, he would strike at himself. The god could be tricked into killing his own incarnation. Odin was known as the all-hater. Would he exempt himself from that hate? No.
She would help the sorcerer, strengthen him and weaken herself, and in so doing she would shrink from the notice of the dead god and make him focus his attention on his own earthly self. He had seen enough to embark on that path anyway, she could tell. His visions had shown him the wolf and the boys and now he was trying to summon the creature to be his protector. He was using the girl. The Wolfsangel showed the witch that the healer’s girl was bound to the brothers and to their eventual transformation. So Gullveig’s enemy had nearly everything in place to summon the wolf. And yet, without her help, he would never do it.
The death of the girls in the Witch Caves had not been an attack. It had been a sort of prophecy, guidance, even perhaps a manifestation of her own magic, telling her what to do. The keys to magic, the witches had always known, were pain and shock. Now she saw the key to survival was weakness. She would diminish the power of her sisterhood, bolster that of her enemy and help him perform the magic that would destroy him. She had thought that she would call the wolf to destroy the god. Now she knew better. The god could call the wolf himself.
The sorcerer had achieved a great deal without the runes. With them, she thought, he would rush to his fate. Gullveig decided, she would send her enemy a gift.
One of the older sisters, the one who held the rune that shone like a lamp in the dark and brought insight and clarity to the witches’ visions, was dying, lying in the upper caves. Her inheritor was at her feet, deep in the trance that would enable her to receive the rune. That, thought Gullveig, could not happen.
Disa had been right about magic. A spell is not a recipe as such, though many have their ingredients, their methods of mixing and baking in the dark oven of the mind. It is more like a puzzle, where constituent parts must first be identified and then assembled into a whole, or even like embroidery, but formed from pain and denial rather than needle and thread.
At its higher reaches magic is a matter of feel. The witch queen, who had trained her instincts in years in the dark, knew that cold thought yielded nothing in sorcery. The way to achieve what she wanted was simply to begin, to take those invisible threads in her hands - the one called agony, the one called despair - and weave them into something more than the sum of their parts.
As she allowed herself to fall into a trance, Gullveig thought of the dying witch and her breathing became shallow, her limbs feeling weak in sympathy. Rot was in the witch queen’s mind - disease, the burst corpses of fever victims, the stink on the breath of old women dying. The smell seemed to cling to the witch queen and she knew that the old witch’s was a rightful death, a fine and beautiful thing.
The witch queen walked with the woman through her deathbed memories. She saw how the old witch had been brought to the caves as a girl, felt her fear of the darkness, her anguish as she was trained and her elation as the rune finally lit up in her and bonded her fast to her sisters. She sensed the other witches too, spectral presences in the old woman’s mind, and she went to them, telling them it was time to leave and to bid their sister goodbye. The witches melted away and the queen felt the dying woman’s thoughts shrivelling in on themselves. When the sisters were gone, Gullveig sat with her in the dimness of her mind. Her rune was shining in the murk like a lantern.
Gullveig took it and the witch died. She saw the girl who was to receive it waiting in the dark. In her trance, the witch queen held up her hand and the girl fell dead. Then she returned to Vali in the mire and sent it spinning towards the sorcerer.
She heard a cry, heard the rhythm of the drums falter as the rune entered him. The witch smiled to herself. Now he would have insight and clarity like he had never had before. He would understand what to do when she sent him the next rune. She took out her small piece of leather, ran her thumb around the outline of the Wolfsangel rune. The sorcerer could sense her now, she could tell. She thought of the Wolfsangel and opened her consciousness like a deadly flower, exposing the dark nectar of the rune within. Something reached hungrily into her head, tearing and ripping. The witch fought to stop herself retaliating, to keep her defences down. Her eyes felt as though they would burst as the sorcerer’s drumbeat seemed to chisel the rune from inside her. She fell forward, bleeding at the nose and at the mouth, biting at her fingers to try to distract herself from the pain in her head. She felt her enemy’s exultation and agony as the rune wound its tendrils into his mind. The witch was satisfied. The god’s manifestation was on the way to where he needed to be to destroy himself. Now he really could call the wolf, which meant he would die. She withdrew from her trance and shivered.
The experience of having killed one of her own buzzed through her mind like an angry wasp through a summer’s day. She had stepped deeper into insanity but even that felt right. She got up to go to her dead sister. She would sit with her a while, she thought. It would be useful to confront what she had done, feel its impact, stroke the old witch’s hair, stay with her in the darkness while she rotted. Murder, regret and grief were tools she could work with to dig new tunnels through the labyrinth of her magical mind.
She stood, not noticing the hand that helped her to her feet.
23 Running Wolf
To Vali, the panic seemed dimmer this time, smudged by tiredness. His e
ndurance was gone and he breathed in, then felt the clamping of his throat, the involuntary spasm of the muscles as he tried to propel himself to the surface. He tried to relax, to let what had to happen, happen. Then the fear fell away from him, disappearing like a ballast stone dropped from a ship.
‘He’s still,’ said Hogni.
Orri just shook his head and looked down. The rain had set in properly, unrelenting sheets sweeping off the ocean. The whole world seemed made of water, the mire and the hillside that held it just smears of grey against a storm-black sky.
Vali felt the certainty of death, calm and comforting, bringing with it the promise of an end to cares. Death felt like a warm bed he could climb into, like meat to the hungry.
There were entities in his mind - hostile presences, he thought. He felt displaced in his own consciousness, a tenant in his own head.There was a man, his presence felt fragile and he was fighting a woman whose mind seemed as deep and dangerous as the ocean. But the man was winning. He had taken something from the woman. Vali’s normal senses and thoughts could not understand what that thing was. It came to him as a shape, a cut in things, a cut in everything, a jagged slash in the fabric of creation.
Vali was in that tunnel again, the glow of the rocks like light through water, the air cold and heavy. The floor was flooded up to his knees. He looked to his side and saw a strange figure. It was a man in a stiff wolf mask, something constructed of wood and fur. In his hand was a shallow drum.
‘Why am I here?’ Vali’s voice sounded curiously muted.
The man in the mask began to beat the drum. Vali instinctively understood it was intended to summon something, something within him. The light seemed to ripple and he became aware of the shape again. It seemed to tremble from the skin of the drum, to hover, shake and pulse in front of his eyes. Destinies, he knew, were set at birth. The future was a path between mountains and you could not deviate from it. The legend of the Norns, the three women who sit beneath the world tree spinning out the fate of each human, had been impressed upon him since his earliest years. But now something was being offered to him. That shape, that awful, awful shape, something between a knife and a needle, to cut the thread of his life and restitch it, something hooked and sharp yet incorporeal - an idea more than a thing. The strange shape was a disturbance in the world that caused other disturbances. It was a rune. He could not see it now, but the thought of it seemed to float at the edge of his consciousness, like an idea remembered from a dream.
The rhythm of the drum seemed to command Vali and he had the strong urge to lie down in the water of the tunnel. He gave into it, leaning back and stretching out his arms, bending back his legs and sticking his head forward. Vali’s body contorted into the shape that seemed to capture his whole being, his whole destiny. The Wolfsangel. He now seemed just an expression of its meaning.
He understood that he was being offered a choice: this shape or no shape, the rune or death. And then, in his mind, he wasn’t the rune at all. He stood. The rune was the wolfman he had captured in the hills, floating there in the water of the tunnel. And then it was someone else. Adisla. She lay flat, her dress spread out around her, her arms wide and her legs bent in the same posture he had been. He seemed to be floating above her, or she beneath him, as if they were turning.
‘Darling, where are you?’
‘I am—’
‘This is the place.’ It was another voice. He had heard it before, he was sure. Yes, it was how that man in the shield wall had spoken, the strange pale fellow in the hawk-feather cloak. Had he been called by the drumbeat too?
‘What place?’
‘The place where you are lost.’
The drum seemed to shake him, to call forth something inside him. It had set something in motion, like the footstep that starts a landslide. A roar. It was a voice like he had never heard before - a choking, rasping expression of a wild hate.
Suddenly he was on the ground, and where Adisla had been was a huge, slavering wolf, much bigger than he was. The creature was tethered to a rock, lashed by thin cords that cut into its flesh tight as twine on a joint of meat. It struggled and thrashed to stand but couldn’t, like an animal trapped in the moment of its birth, the legs inadequate to its weight. Worse was its mouth, a gaping bloody wound kept open by a dull metal spar that dug into the flesh above and below.
A voice went skittering through his head, dry and quick as pebbles across rock: ‘When the gods knew that Fenrisulfr was fully bound, they took a cord called Thin and tied it to a rock called Scream. When the beast tried to bite the gods they took a certain sword and thrust it into its mouth so its jaws could not close. There the Fenris Wolf will lie between waking agony and tormented sleep until the last days. Then the fetters will break and the gods will be torn.’
The creature strained against its bonds, half rose, collapsed, staggered up and pushed forward again, the huge head gasping towards him. The sound of its torment was like iron on a smith’s stone but magnified a thousand-fold, a scraping, discordant note of anguish.
Vali felt a strong impulse of fear, not the fear of the shield wall or of battle - that can be bargained with, told that it will be listened to if only, just for a heartbeat, it will stand back. This was like the fear of drowning, of being buried alive, when the terror of extinction, of the hand of death blotting out the senses and stopping the breath, clamps down on you. All reason smothered by those constricting coils of panic, you will claw and tear towards anything, anything at all, your mind’s only ambition, your only coherent thought, ‘Not this, not this.’
Vali turned to run but the walls were now close about him. He was trapped in a little pocket of dim light within a smothering dark. The wolf’s agonies were like his own. He felt its yearning for freedom like stifling air sweeping over his face; felt its hatred of the tourniquet-tight bonds, the stabbing pain in his jaws. It was as if he was drowning, not in water but in the anguish of the wolf; as if the creature was consuming him, not with its teeth but with its mind.
He had to get out - to breathe, to live. His blood beat in his ears, or was it the drum? He looked up. The drummer was standing over him, the bone with which he beat the skin now in the shape of the jagged rune.
‘Help me,’ said Vali.
The drummer stopped drumming. Then he threw the rune towards Vali.
‘Become,’ he said. And Vali went wild.
Standing in the mire, Hogni was taken off his feet by a sudden kick of Vali’s legs.
‘He’s broken his bonds!’ shouted Orri to Jodis.
‘Then take up the rope and kill him!’
Hogni pulled tight on the noose, but it was too late. Vali had it in his hands and stood to pull hard on it. Hogni had coiled the rope about his body and was dragged towards the prince through the water, fighting to untangle himself. He was too slow. Vali was on top of him, howling and spitting, biting and punching. Bragi was on the bank and he leaped into the mire towards the fight.
Orri drew his knife and went for Vali’s back but hesitated for a fatal breath. This was the heir of his lord, after all. The prince seemed to sense the threat and turned to break Orri’s neck with a blow.
Jodis screamed as Vali went for Hogni again but now Bragi was on his back. Hogni got Vali’s legs and together the warriors bundled his thrashing body from the mire. Then there were others there, jumping on Vali, pinning him, holding him and choking him. They were Forkbeard’s men, and there, behind them, glowering in his full war gear of byrnie, helm, shield and sword, was Forkbeard.
Vali was hallucinating. He still saw the Rygir in arms but to him they were not understandable as men, just ciphers for pain and murder. It was as if he could taste their suspicion of him, their jealousies and their fears, as if all their emotions hung around them. Their feelings were like a scent he could breathe in; their many and several emotions, from larger hatreds to tiny animosities, were his to sense and name, as real and as many as the cooking smells on a feast day.
He struggled again and
felt the noose go tight at his neck. He began to come back to himself, to realise who he was. Then everything vanished, and there was a different kind of blackness, a different cold at his back. He blinked, vomited water and opened his eyes. There was Hogni looking down at him.
He blacked out again for an instant.
‘Get him to his feet. Get this dirty murderer and kinslayer to his feet.’
He was pulled upright. Vali’s bones felt terribly heavy, like things excavated rather than lifted. Then he was staring into a familiar and furious face.
‘You’ll pay for this,’ said Forkbeard. ‘I should have known never to trust the Horda. No wonder they sent you, their most useless son. Well, we’ll have your blood anyway. The prince wants death. Well, we’ll oblige him, won’t we, boys? Take the weapons from the other spies.’
Five spears were pointed at Bragi as Vali’s arms were pinned behind his back.
‘Get him down to the hall. I want the assembly there in short order. He can’t die without their say-so. This is not just an execution - make sure everyone knows that - it’s an act of war.’