“We’ve got to move fast, but in which direction?” Snorri asked.
“We need to be away from the coast.” Tuttugu hugged his belly with nervous arms, perhaps imagining a Hardassa driving his spear into it. “Take away their advantage. Otherwise they’ll pace us at sea and come in for us by night. And if they’re forced to beach they’ll have to leave men to guard the longboat.”
“We’ll aim south-west.” Kara pointed to a low hill on the horizon. “We should reach the Maladon border in three or four days. If we’re lucky we’ll be close to Copen.”
“Copen?” Tuttugu asked. I offered him silent thanks for not making me be the one to display my ignorance yet again.
“A small city on the Elsa River. The duke winters there. A good place to rest and gather our resources,” Kara said. By which she no doubt meant “for Jalan to buy us food and horses.” At this rate I’d arrive at Vermillion as poor as I thought I was when I left it.
? ? ?
We set off at a good pace, knowing the Hardassa men would be better provisioned, better equipped . . . probably just plain better in all regards given that our second best warrior was likely a woman with a knife.
The sun came out to mock us, and Kara led the way, winding a path across slopes thick with heather and dense clumps of viciously spiked gorse.
“We’re getting closer to the Wheel aren’t we?” I asked an hour later, footsore already.
“Yes, we’ll just cut through the outer edge of its . . . domain.”
“You can feel it too?” Snorri fell back to walk beside me, his stride free as if his wound no longer pained him.
I nodded. Even with four hours until sunset I could sense Aslaug prowling, impatient. Each patch of shadow seethed with possibilities despite the brightness all about. Her voice lay beneath all other sounds, urgent but indistinct, rising with the wind, scratching behind Snorri’s question. “It’s like the world is . . . thinner here.” Even with an arm’s length between Snorri and me that old energy crackled across the shoulder facing him, buzzing in my teeth, a brittle sensation, as if I might shatter if I fell. With the old feeling came new suspicions, all of Aslaug’s warnings creeping into my mind. Baraqel’s hold on the northman would be strengthening with each yard closer to the Wheel. How long could I trust Snorri for? How long before he became the avenger Baraqel intended him to be, smiting down anyone tainted with the dark . . .
“You look . . . better,” I told Snorri.
“I feel better.” He patted his side.
“All magic is stronger here,” Kara called back without turning. “Quicker to answer the will. Snorri is more able to resist Kelem’s call, the light in him is battling the poison.” She picked up the pace, and glanced my way. “It’s a bad place to use enchantment, though. Like lighting a fire in a hay barn.” I wondered if Snorri had mentioned Harrowheim to her.
“What is this ‘wheel’ anyway? Some sort of engine?” I imagined a huge wheel turning, toothed like the gears in a watermill.
“No one alive has seen it, not even the wrong-mages who live as close in as they can stand. The sagas say it’s the corpse of a god, Haphestur, not of Asgard but a stranger from without, a wanderer. A smith who forged weapons for Thor and Odin. They say he lies there rotting and the magic of making leaks from him as his flesh corrupts.” Kara glanced up at me, as if to gauge my reaction.
I kept my face stiff. I’ve found heathens to be a touchy lot if you laugh at their stories. “That’s what the priests say. What do the v?lvas believe?”
“In King Hagar’s library on Icefjar there are remnants of books copied directly from the works of the Builders themselves. I understood them to say that the Wheel is a complex of buildings laid above a vast underground ring, a stone tunnel, many miles long and going nowhere. A place where the Builders saw new truths.”
I mulled on this one, walking another hour in silence. I pictured the Builders’ ring of secrets, seeing it all aglow in my mind’s eye while I tried to ignore each new blister. Less painful than the blisters, but somehow more distressing, was the sensation that each step took us closer to the Wheel, the world becoming fragile, a skin stretched too tight across bone, ready to give suddenly and without warning, and leave us falling into something new and much, much worse.
“Look!” Tuttugu, behind us but pointing ahead.
I squinted at the dark spot down in the shallow valley before us. “I didn’t think anyone lived in Osheim.”
“Lots of people live in Osheim, idiot.” Snorri made to deliver one of those playful punches to the shoulder that leave my arm dead for the next six hours. He paused though, feeling the old crackle of magic, as fierce across his knuckles as it was across my side. “Most of them live far south, around Os City, but there are farmers everywhere.”
I glanced around. “Farming what exactly? Rocks? Grass?”