The ground changes character slowly, step by step, becoming more stony, the dust cloud thinning. Snorri catches glimpses of the warrior who has joined him. A giant of a man, a Viking, long white hair streaming out beneath his helm. He looks to have stepped from the sagas, his armour finer than that of any jarl, scroll-worked, runed, the iron faceguard of his helm fearsome to behold, the many iron scales of his mailed shirt each chased with silver.
Snorri cuts down a pair of identical demons, both as gaunt as old trees, with gnarled hands and skin like bark. He spits blood and heaves in a breath. He can see the remaining demons now, a shadowy horde, perhaps a dozen in total.
“Come, Hel-spawn!” He meant to shout it but it escapes in a gasp. “Let’s have you!” A glance at his shoulder reveals a ragged wound deep into the meat, pouring blood. He raises his father’s axe, preparing to charge. “I said, let’s—” But somehow his legs fail him and Snorri finds himself on his knees.
The demons send up a cacophony of roars, hoots, screams and barks, surging forward for the kill. And the armoured Viking runs to intercept them. He spins into their midst, body-checking one, beheading the next, destroying a face with an armoured elbow, drawing the next into a devastating head-butt. Then somehow he is clear, in space, swinging his blade again. It takes a minute, and for that minute Snorri remains on his knees, slack-jawed, held by the sight. It’s a dance, a violent, beautiful dance of steel, life taken at each beat, the warrior’s victory as inevitable as it is perfect. Sixty killing seconds.
At the last the warrior stands, gore-splattered, stained with the blood of his enemies, their corpses strewn about him, his sword sheathed, and behind him the dust settles. It’s like a fur drawn back from the bed, revealing three hundred yards, every step of the way littered with the dead, dozens, scores, many and more.
“What a tale we’ve woven here, brother.” Snorri stands to meet the warrior as he returns. It takes all his strength but he’s damned if he’ll meet such a man on his knees. “Who are you? Did the gods send you?”
“The gods forbade me from coming.” A deep voice, speaking Old Norse. Something in it familiar. Perhaps the accent or the tone.
Snorri looks down at his axe. His father’s father’s father had named it Hel. Perhaps some v?lva had seen its fate and suggested the title. Perhaps it was Skilfar, old even then. He looks up at the warrior, a man his own height, an inch taller, possibly. Snorri’s father stood as tall, had the same hair. “You . . . can’t be . . .” The hairs on the back of Snorri’s arms stand up and a cold chill commands his spine, his mouth too dry to say the words. “Father?” Tears fill his eyes.
The man reaches up with both hands and removes his helmet, shaking the hair from his face. It is not his father, though he has the same look.
“They’re waiting for you.” The warrior nods back up the gorge. Demon bones litter the rocky ground as far as the eye can see, drifts of them in places, skulls rolled to the walls, shattered, broken. “I’ve been keeping them safe as best I can. I knew you would come.”
Snorri blinks, seeing but not understanding. The warrior takes off his gauntlets and puts them in his belt. The hands beneath are scarred, the fingers crooked from old breaks. “They want the key,” he says.
“What?” Snorri’s face tingles, his mouth works but no words come.
“They want the key—the last words I spoke to you. I wanted to say more. To tell you I loved you. To thank you for finding me. To say goodbye.”
“Karl!”
“Father.”
The two men meet in a fierce hug.
Murder stumbled again and jolted once more from the story I glanced around—but I could see none of the Osheim’s horrors: my eyes were too blurry.
“I could come with you, Father.”
“No.” Snorri sets a hand to his son’s shoulder. “Your place is in Val halla. They will understand . . . this.” He lifts his axe toward the carnage stretching back along the gorge. “But more would be too much. We both know it.”
Karl inclines his head.
“I’m proud of you, son.” It doesn’t seem real—to have Karl there before him and to be saying goodbye again. Snorri wants to take his boy home, but a man stands before him. A man with a seat waiting for him in Asgard, a seat at a table in Odin’s own hall.
“We’ll sit together one day, Father.” Karl smiles, almost shy. “That we will.”
Snorri takes his boy in his arms one last time. A warriors’ embrace.
He lets him go. If he were to stay any longer he would be unable to leave.
The child he raised has become a man. Even before he died. The Karl who had played on the shores of the Uulisk fjord, who had chased rabbits, tended goats, played with wooden swords, loved his father, laughed and danced, fought and raced . . . that boy had had his time and that time was good. Even before Sven Broke-Oar tore their world open, that boy was safe in memory and now a young man wears his clothes. Snorri walks away, not trusting himself to speak further, not looking back, wounds forgotten, his arms remembering the feel of his son.
TWENTY-NINE
“Jal!” A tug at my arm. “Jal!”
“What?” I shook off the vision of Snorri and Karl. A desolate heath surrounded us, the horses plodding on, the wind blustery and promising rain. Just ahead of me Snorri rode with head lowered, wrapped in memory, still telling his story. I wanted to follow him back into it. “Jal!” Hennan’s voice at my ear.
Above us the sky had become a purple wound, a gyre that drew the eye. The dreary landscape about us hung thick with maybes, all of them bad. I turned in the saddle. Hennan, immediately behind me, pulled my sleeve again. “What?”
“We’ve passed over the Wheel!” He pointed back to a low ridge in the heath, like an ancient earthwork, stretching off in both directions in a straight line . . . though as I followed it with my eyes a slight curve revealed itself.
“You’ve been watching?” My gaze flitted to the monstrous shapes already starting to gather in the middle distance. They looked uncomfortably close to the demons Snorri had described. “How come you’re not . . .”
“Dead?” Hennan shrugged. “This place doesn’t trouble my family the way it does other people.”
“Well it scares the shit out of me.” I closed my eyes, trying to get back into Snorri’s tale. “We’re heading to the heart of the Wheel. Let me know when we get there.”
“The centre of the Wheel is nothing but chaos.” Urgency coloured Hennan’s voice and that note of worry kept me with him despite the pull of Snorri’s words. “The heart of the Wheel is in the ring, the place where the machine is controlled from.”
I scowled. “How do you know all this?”
“Stories my grandfather told m—”
“Goat-herders’ tales?” I spat, angry that the boy had risked my life for this. Already my imagination was conjuring fiends in the darkness behind my eyelids and very soon the Wheel would make them real. “You never asked me who Lotar Vale was!” A shout now. “Who?”
Hennan punched me in the kidney. Me! A prince of Red March, punched by some heathen peasant! “My grandfather’s grandfather. Lotar Vale. He was the most famous wrong-mage of his time. He managed to return to the margins and raise a family there. He knew this place!”
“Shit! Snorri!” I turned Murder. “Snorri!”
Glancing back I saw Snorri lifting his head as if from a dream, Kara shaking herself free.
In the distance, about a quarter mile along the curve of the Wheel, a blocky shape broke the monotony of the landscape: a small building of some sort. “We need to get there!” I pointed. “Hold tight.” I kicked Murder into a canter. Cold terror washed me, and rising with the fear came grey shapes, lifting from the heath like mist and congealing into more substantial forms as I looked. “Ride!”
Demonic shapes, dead men, clockwork devils with knives for fingers, witches, black and dripping tentacles reaching from tar pits, pine-men, vast devil-dogs, burning wolves, djinn . . . the products of my over-fertile imagination populated the heath so thickly there was scarcely room for them all.
“Jal!” Snorri from behind. “Jal! It’s all you!”
He was right. There wasn’t room enough in the Wheel for all my fears—no one else’s nightmares stood a chance of gaining elbow room. “Clear your mind!” Kara shouted. Advice as useless as any I’d heard.