King of Thorns

“And you let him live?” I asked.

The Duke of Maladon glanced at his fireplace as if an enemy might be squatting there among the ashes. “There’s no killing a fire-mage, not a true one. He’s like summer-burning in a dry forest. Stamp out the flames and they spring back up from the hot ground.”

“Why does he do it?” I knocked back the last of my salt beer and grimaced. Almost as bad as the absinthe.

“It’s his nature.” Alaric shrugged. “When men look too long into the fire it looks back into them. It burns out what makes them men. I think he speaks with the j?tnar behind the flames. He wants to bring a second Ragnar?k.”

“And you’re going to let him?” I asked. I cared little enough for j?tnar, or any other kind of spirit. Push far enough past anything, be it fire or sky or even death, and you’ll find the creatures that have always dwelt there. Call them what you will. “I heard tell there was no problem that a Dane couldn’t cut through with an axe.” It’s a dangerous business questioning a man’s courage in his own hall, especially a Viking’s, but if ever a place needed shaking up then this was it.

“Meet him before you judge us, Jorg,” Alaric said. He sipped from his ale horn.

I had expected a more heated response, perhaps a violent one. The Duke looked tired, as if something had burned out of him too.

“In truth I came to meet him,” I said.

“I’ll take you,” Sindri said, without hesitation.

“No.” His father, just as fast.

“How many sons do you have, Duke Maladon?” I asked.

“You see him.” Alaric nodded to Sindri. “I had four born alive. The eldest three burned in the Heimrift. You should go home, Jorg Ancrath. There’s nothing for you in the mountains.”





18





Four years earlier


Sindri caught us up before we’d got five miles from his father’s hall. I’d left Makin with Duke Alaric. Makin had a way with the finding of common ground and the building of friendships. I left Rike too, because he would only moan about climbing mountains and because if anyone could show the Danes true berserker spirit it was Rike. I left Red Kent also, for his Norse blood on his father’s side and because he wanted a good axe made for him.

“Well met,” I said as Sindri rode up between the pines. It had never been in doubt that he would give chase. He found us as we left the lower slopes and thick forest behind.

“You need me,” he said. “I know these mountains.”

“We do need you,” I said.

Sindri grinned. He took off his helm and wiped the sweat from his brow, blowing hard from the ride. “They say you destroyed half of Gelleth,” he said. He looked doubtful.

“Closer to a fifth,” I said. “Legends grow in the telling.”

Sindri frowned. “How old are you?”

I felt the Brothers stiffen. It can be annoying to always have the people around you think you’re going to murder everyone who looks at you wrong. “I’m old enough to play with fire,” I said. I pointed to the largest of the mountains ahead. “That one’s a volcano. The smoke gives it away. What about the rest?”

“That’s Lorgholt. Three others have spoken in my lifetime,” Sindri said. “Loki, Minrhir, and Vallas.” He pointed them out in turn. Vallas had the faintest wisps of smoke or steam rising from its western flanks. “In the oldest eddas the stories tell of Halradra being the father and these four his sons.” Sindri pointed to the low bulk of Halradra. “But he has slept for centuries.”

“Let’s go there then,” I said. “I’d like to watch a sleeping giant before I poke a woken-up one.”

“These aren’t people, Jorg,” Makin had told me before we left. “They’re not enemies. You can’t fight them.”

He didn’t know what I thought I could achieve wandering the landscape. I didn’t either but it always pays to have a look around. If I think back on my successes, such as they are, they come as often as not from the simple exercise of putting two disparate facts together and making a weapon of them. I destroyed Gelleth with two facts that when laid one atop the other, made something dangerous. There’s a thing like that at the heart of the Builders’ weapons, two chunks of magic, harmless enough on their own but forming some critical mass when pushed together.

The Halradra is not so tall as its sons, but it is tall. Its lower slopes are softened by the years, black grit in the main, crunching under hoof, the rocks rotten with bubbles so that you can crumble them in your hands, the fire so long gone that no sniff of it remains. Through the ash and broken rock, fire-weed grew in profusion, Rosebay Willowherb as they had it in Master Lundist’s books. The first to spring up where the fire has been. Even after four hundred years nothing much else wanted to push its way through the black dirt.

“Do you see them?” Gorgoth rumbled at my shoulder. The depth of his voice took me by surprise as always.