The lichkin came on slowly as if daring us to run. I knew how fast the thing could be and made no move that would spark it into action. Instead I hung onto those last few moments of life remaining to me. Bonarti, lacking my understanding, ran for it. He got two steps before the lichkin hit him in the back. It flowed into him like a string of sinew sucked up by a hungry mouth. I caught a nerve-white flicker as the last of its thin body vanished beneath the skin to wrap his spine. The lichkin’s shroud of ghosts peeled away as it found flesh, winding themselves smoke-like about the paralysed man.
Bonarti’s scream was thankfully short, but his pain didn’t end with it. A moment later a hundred razor cuts opened all across him, no more than skin deep. With the lichkin anchored in Bonarti’s flesh I would have run, but he blocked my path away from the throne room and at the doorway corpses crowded, hungry-eyed, held back only by the lichkin’s desire to toy with its food. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
Bonarti faced me, eyes wide, mouth twisted into a grin he didn’t own. His skin began to peel away, a dozen broad strips flayed out slowly between parallel cuts. There comes a point where you get so scared that it really doesn’t matter where you’re running to as long as you are running. I knew that the half-doors and broken chances that lay behind the fractures all around me each led straight to Hell, but frankly Hell had already come visiting and terrible as every part of it was I would rather be running toward some part that didn’t contain a lichkin. The creature reached for me with Bonarti’s raw red hand, flayed skin dangling. With the same scream a man uses when steeling himself to some awful task, like cutting off a limb to escape a fire, I drove Loki’s key into the nearest fracture. The closest faultline shimmered through the wall beside me and had nearly faded to nothing before my hand reached it. The key found its socket and held there, anchoring the fracture. Bonarti’s wet fingers found my neck and, still screaming, I turned the key.
It seemed in that moment that the world broke. Rather than falling through the hole I’d made I flew back as something big burst out of it, barging me aside. Something big, hard, and fast.
Snorri swung overhead, his axe shearing through Bonarti Poe’s collarbone and deep into his chest. A heavy boot, shattering ribs, gave the leverage to wrench Hel’s blade clear. The Norseman’s next blow swept in from the side before Bonarti’s corpse hit the floor, taking off his arm at the elbow and carving toward his spine.
Snorri followed the corpse, roaring, reddish dust smoking from his hair and clothing. Behind him the fractured window into Hell started to close, reality still able to heal itself. Just.
The lichkin forced Bonarti’s body to crawl beneath the rain of axe blows. The ghosts rose to blind and tear at Snorri but he scarcely noticed, hewing deep into the meat of the man beneath him. White tendrils reached out, questing for other bodies, for dead flesh to inhabit, but the Northman struck them off with swift efficiency. Properly bound to a host as the lichkin are in the form of unborn, the thing could have drawn more effectively on the dead and the living to repair itself, but this unbound lichkin had become reckless, thinking to toy with its food, and in winding itself so tightly about Bonarti had become vulnerable.
The butchery continued unabated. Snorri knew his foe was buried deep inside the flesh before him. I glimpsed the whiteness of the lichkin where Snorri’s axe shattered Bonarti’s spine. A second later the creature began untangling itself from the ruin of the corpse. But, like me, Snorri seemed able to see it, his time in the deadlands lending something to his sight. His axe became a blur, hacking at the lichkin, somehow finding it solid in these moments where it tried to rid itself of flesh. Perhaps so long a time in Hell had given Snorri’s axe an edge that could find even the lichkin, or being wetted in the blood of devils had enchanted the blade— either way . . . it bit.
In Trond they hold contests to ward off the boredom of winter. One such requires the Norse to take an axe to the trunk of a fir tree about as thick as a man, and the first of them to chop entirely through it is the victor. Snorri’s assault on the lichkin held much of that contest in it, and before the thing escaped Bonarti’s ruin it came dangerously close to being cut through. In the instant that the last nerve-white tendril of it withdrew from the bloody remains before us the lichkin folded the world around itself and fell away into the deadlands. With an animal howl Snorri threw himself after it. If not for my strategically placed leg he would have vanished back into Hell in pursuit of his prey. As it was he sprawled, face-first, on Hertet’s sumptuous, though soiled, hall rug. The air rippled where the lichkin had punched its hole through the world, and lay still, the portal gone.
I glanced back at the dead men watching from the entrance to the throne room. Perhaps if I hadn’t they might have continued to stand there watching vacantly for another five minutes. My gaze seemed to animate them, and as one they surged forward.
“Get up!” I leapt to Snorri’s side and tried to raise him. Just touching him gave my hands back that death-dry feeling, making paper of my skin, sucking the vitality from my flesh. “Get up!” I’d have more luck lifting a horse.
Snorri got his arms beneath him and launched himself to his feet as the dead men reached us. They had lost their speed now that the lichkin had fled, but they still had numbers.
Numbers didn’t seem to matter. Snorri went through them like a scythe. It reminded me of my glorious victory over the bucket-boys back at the opera house. Snorri waded through the dead like a prince of Red March wades through terrified street urchins. The axe is truly the weapon for such work. A sword is a tongue: it speaks and gives eloquent voice to violence, seeking out a foe’s vitals and ending him. An axe only roars. The wounds it gives are ruinous and in Snorri’s hands nearly every blow seemed to take a head or limb.
Two minutes later the Norseman stood amid the carnage of his work, perhaps a score of corpses now divided to the point at which necromancy could make nothing dangerous of them. I followed him into the throne room, casting nervous glances over my shoulder against the possibility of new foes advancing along the corridor. Many of the dead had swords, still scabbarded at their hips. I took one that looked to have been forged for service rather than show.
“Are . . . are you all right?” I looked about the hall. Snorri stood, head down, coated with other men’s blood, breathing heavily. He held his axe across his hips, one hand just below the head, the other at the far end of the shaft. He didn’t look all right. Neither did the hall, every surface soiled, the throne cast down, tapestries trampled, the whole place stinking of death and decay. “Snorri?” He seemed almost a stranger.
He raised his head, staring at me beneath the black veil of his hair, unreadable, capable of anything. “I . . .” His first word to me since we parted in Hell. It had been months for me—how many lifetimes would it have felt like in that place?
From the darkest corner of the hall a dead man rose from beneath a tapestry—some victory picked out in silver thread, now smeared with blood and foulness—he charged toward Snorri’s back, trailing the embroidered cloth like a banner. Snorri lashed out to the side, almost without looking, his axe an extension of his arm. The man’s head flew clear; his body stumbled, and collapsed.
“I am at peace,” Snorri said, and walked over to clap me in a warrior’s embrace.
TWENTY
“Lisa!” I broke away from Snorri, nearly tripping over one of the butchered corpses littering Hertet’s great hall. “Lisa!”
“The girl you wanted to marry?” Snorri stepped back, taking in his surroundings for the first time.
“We have to go!” I started toward the main doors. “I have family in trouble.”
Snorri shouldered his axe and followed, stepping over scattered pieces of armour and the occasional twitching corpse.
The great doors to Hertet’s throne room crossed each other at drunken angles, each clinging to the frame by a single hinge. I kicked the left one and sent it swinging back. The antechamber was a well-dressed charnel house.