As Snorri raced across the last few yards, roaring his battle-cry, the unborn swiped at him, a bone-clawed foot of raw meat, half as wide across as Snorri was tall. The Northman threw himself under the swing, feet first, sliding across the wet stones and somehow rising to bring Hel down in a violent arc that terminated at the centre of the unborn’s forehead, shattering the porcelain mask and burying the blade haft-deep.
The unborn, clothed in its body of many corpses, swung its dragonlike head, ripping Hel from Snorri’s hands and catching him across the side from hip to armpit. The angle was wrong for biting but the force of the impact lifted the Northman from his feet, flinging him bodily through the air and hurling him on a trajectory that carried him off the road, through the top of the hedgerow, and into the field where he hit the mud about a yard in front of me with a dull thud.
In my limited experience, any blow that lifts a man off his feet tends to be the blow that kills him. One time I saw a stallion kick one of the stable-lads at the palace. His feet left the ground and he flew perhaps a fifth of the distance Snorri covered. I don’t know if he was dead before he landed but if he wasn’t it couldn’t have been long after. They rolled him over and I saw the sharp fractures of his ribs all around where the hoof caught him. The rest of the bones had been driven into his lungs.
Compared to the unborn the hazards of galloping cross-country in the dark were nothing. I should have been out of both sight and earshot before Snorri hit the ground but instead I found myself kneeling in the mud, rolling him over. His whole left side was a mess of gore.
“C-could . . . have gone better.” He croaked the words as air leaked back into his lungs.
“You’re . . . hurt.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. On the other side of the hedges the unborn roared and thrashed. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Perhaps it was eating Kara. I’d imagined a lot of sorry ends for myself, but none had featured being slaughtered in the mud by a monster on a lonely stretch of road.
Snorri groaned and rolled onto his good side, grasping at his ribs. His hand came away messy and my stomach lurched.
“I’m in one piece.” He managed a scarlet-toothed grin and I realized the gore had come from the unborn. “Odin’s blood!” Snorri got into a sitting position, hunched like a man broken on the inside.
“How are you even alive?” I stood up, backing away a step. It seemed that the relatively slow velocity and large area of the impact had conspired to get Snorri airborne without turning his body to pulp.
I reached down to help him up but before he could gain his feet the hedgerow burst open, the unborn forcing a path.
“Shit!” I drew my sword: a toothpick would have been as much use. “What are you doing?” Snorri was still on the ground wrestling something glowing from the pack at his hip. “Put it away!” Light would just help it find us faster.
Too late, the huge nightmare head swung our way and the cold malice of those hidden eyes pierced me. I stood, paralysed, on the point of dropping my sword and running for it, abandoning all honour for the privilege of dying fifty yards further from the road. The thing lurched forward with a hideous gargle, but seemed unable to break free from the hedge. Black root-like loops had encircled its feet.
“Kara!” The v?lva must have been working on the entanglement spell that had had such marvellous effects against the Red Vikings near the Wheel of Osheim. The strength returned to my hand, fingers tightening on my sword hilt. I glanced down at Snorri. “What the hell?” He had the ghost-box, its glow making black silhouettes of his hands as he opened it, pointed toward his face.
“We need Baraqel!” He shouted it into the mouth of the box where a chaotic speckling of light and dark boiled.
At the hedge the unborn roared and threw itself forward, centuriesold roots groaned and creaked under the strain. Several burst apart with loud retorts. Elsewhere, dead flesh tore to let the bonds slip and reformed afterwards.
Snorri got to his knees. “The key, Jal, it’s the way to let him out. He lives in here.”
“It doesn’t work like that, you stupid great . . . Viking.” But even as I said it I pulled out Loki’s key and pointed my trembling blade in the direction of the unborn, which was now uprooting the last hawthorn that had been anchoring it down.
“Yes it does!” Snorri stood, one arm clutching his side, the other holding the box out toward me. “Yes. It. Does.” The look he gave me held such conviction I started to believe it too.
Bone claws dug into the mud and the unborn surged into motion. I dropped my sword.
“Baraqel!” I roared, taking the ghost-box and aiming its mouth toward the unborn. I thrust the key into the box’s base and turned it.
The light that lanced out I had seen once before, though that time I had been inside a tent that had almost burst into flames. Now as then the Builders’ Sun’s light turned the darkness into the blind whiteness of dunes beneath the hottest sun. The unborn screamed, its flesh bubbling. In the next moment the impossible brightness of that unnatural illumination cut off and in its place Baraqel stood, as we had seen him once before at the wrong-mages’ gate, a glowing angel with a sword cut from the sun, nine foot long and burning. In the instant he appeared I knew him. No one else quite managed that look of disapproval when their eyes found me.
A heartbeat later the unborn crashed into Baraqel, his sword descending upon it. Even a twelve-foot angel couldn’t stop the creature dead. The dragon body it wore had been fashioned from the corpses of fifty men or more and Baraqel was thrown aside. But wings of bronze and gold spread to absorb the momentum and his furnace-bright sword struck the unborn’s head from its shoulders in a single blow.
Dark crimson blood vomited from the unborn’s neck in a lumpy torrent while the whole serpentine length of its body convulsed, whipping back and forth. A moment later it warped and tore like dough, corpse heads and disembodied eyes appearing along its back, new limbs forming, ending in rib-bone claws or half a dozen spinal columns thrashing like tentacles. Another convulsion and the mutated mass of it wrapped Baraqel in a coil, bearing him to the ground.
“Come!” Snorri snatched up my sword and, limping, ran into the fray.
“Come? You just took my bloody sword. What am I supposed to use? Bad language?”
I drew my dagger and stood watching. The fight confused my eye: rapid, furious coils of dead flesh black against the angel’s brilliant limbs, bright wings fluttering, black claws tearing, and occasionally a glimpse of that burning sword sending shadows sprinting back across the field. I spotted Snorri here and there, like a mouse harrying an Indus python, Edris Dean’s blade cutting through the necromancy that sustained the unborn, but surely with cuts too small to matter.
I looked at the four inches of iron in my fist, then looked back for Murder, only to find him gone, even his viciousness turned to terror at the sight and sounds of such a battle. The half-expected red tide of the berserker failed to rise in me, just a bitterness, an anger that this creature woven of the worst of men’s hatreds that settle into the deepest rifts of Hell, had haunted me for so long. The unborn had been the start of my journey, breaking my life apart, and now it looked like being the end of it too. I held the dagger out before me. Die fighting alongside Snorri in the light—or alone a few minutes later in the dark? Sometimes the coward’s choice aligns with that of the hero.
Kara told me I was screaming “Undoreth” when I charged. I don’t have any memory of it, but I’m sure it would have been “Red March.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Go away, damn you, and tell Ballessa I want kippers for breakfast.” I screwed my eyes tight against the daylight. “And draw those damned curtains!”
“Time to get up, your majesty.” The maid sounded sarcastic rather than respectful.
I tried to snuggle down into the bedclothes and found them wet and cold. “What the hell?” I opened my eyes, blinking against a bright light close to my face. All of me hurt. At least it had stopped raining.