The wind still blew, fitful now, edged with memories of winter. The land lay strangely silent, the lone cry of a curlew seeming an impertinence. I could smell rain approaching.
“Not much go left in them,” I told Kara as Tuttugu drew near. Hennan looked half-dead on his feet, though I’d heard no word of complaint from him. The boy wiped at his nose as he came closer, dry mud still in his hair from where I had brought him down when he raced to stand with his grandfather.
Tuttugu drew level and lifted his axe in greeting, the blade dark with dried blood, exhaustion written in the gesture.
Snorri grabbed the back of Hennan’s jerkin as he passed and hoisted him off the ground and onto his shoulders with one arm. “You can ride,” he said. “No charge.”
Tuttugu looked my way. “And Jal carries me?”
I laughed despite myself and slapped a hand to his shoulder. “You should come to Vermillion, Tutt. Fish off the bridge for your living and come out with me of an evening to scandalize the highborn. You’d love it. If the heat doesn’t melt Vikings.”
Tuttugu grinned. “The war chief of the Undoreth endured it.”
“Ah, but even Snorri went crispy at the edges, and he did spend most of his time in nice dark prison cells . . .”
“Wh—” Tuttugu bit his reply off and stopped to stare.
As we crested another fold in the terrain an archway stood revealed in our path. Weathered stone, tall as a tree, narrow, and set with deep graven runes. Kara hurried ahead to examine the carvings.
“Well, that’s nice.” I walked through it, ignoring Kara’s hiss of warning. A considerable part of me had hoped, albeit without conviction, that I’d find myself somewhere new on emerging from the other side of the arch. Somewhere safe. Sadly, I just arrived on the grass opposite and looked back at the Norse, their hair wild across their faces in a sudden gust.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Something to set our backs against,” said Snorri.
“A work of the wrong-mages.” Kara craned her neck to stare at the runes above her. “A doorway to other places. But opening it is beyond any skill of mine. And like as not those places are worse than this one.”
“Sounds like any one of these wrong-mages could take the Empire throne and bend the Hundred to his will if their magic is so strong.” I followed her gaze up the stonework. Runes had been worked on my side too. Some of them reminded me of those the Silent Sister set climbing across the walls of the opera house and suddenly I felt those awful violet flames again, my ears filled with the screams of those I left to burn.
“Hel, they could take the whole world with magics like that.” Tuttugu set his back to the stone and slid down to sit against the base. Snorri shrugged Hennan from his back and lifted his axe to inspect the blade.
“The wrong-mages are bound to the Wheel,” Kara said. “And in time it breaks each of them. Their power diminishes swiftly as they move further from the centre. Not that many of them have the willpower to leave in any case. Kelem was the only wrong-mage to truly escape this place.” Her fingers moved among her braids, freeing most of the runes still hanging there, preparing for the fight.
“You said opening the doorway was beyond you . . .” I frowned at the völva, her face resigned yet still fierce. “But before today the spell you summoned serpents with had only ever rippled the grass . . .”
She looked up at Snorri, standing beside her. “Give me the key—there’s not much to lose at this point . . . I’ll try to open the way.”
“What?” He eyed the open space between us. “It’s an arch. There’s no lock.”
Kara touched her rune-filled left fist to a symbol on the left support, eyes narrowed in concentration, the echo of some internal litany twitching on her lips. She crossed to the opposite side and struck a second carving with her right fist. “Give me the key. I can work this.”
Snorri looked suspicious. I felt a little glow to know it wasn’t just me he didn’t trust with Loki’s gift. “Direct me,” he said.
The völva shot him a narrow look. “We don’t have time to argue, just—”
“Show me how and I’ll do it.” I could hear the growl in his voice. This wasn’t up for debate.
Kara glanced toward the closest ridge where the Hardassa would soon appear. “From the runes it seems this arch was an attempt to open the doors to many places where men were not meant to go. Here,” she pointed to the first character she had touched, “darkness, and there, light. To step across miles in this world you have to take shortcuts through such places.”
“Open the door to light,” Snorri said.
“Damn that!” I saw his plan now, to unleash Baraqel and his kind on the Broken Empire. “Take the dark path—Aslaug can guide us.”
“No!” It was perhaps the first time since he faced Sven Broke-Oar that I’d heard true rage in his voice. A nimbus of light lit around him, tinged with the red of the western sky. “We’ll not take that road.”
A fury of my own rose at the snarl on the northman’s treacherous face. A black anger running through my veins, dark and thrilling. The idea that I had ever feared Snorri seemed as ridiculous as the idea I had ever trusted him. Right now I knew the strength of mere muscle would count for nothing when I reached out to crush him. I held his gaze. The bastard wanted Baraqel out in the world. Everything Aslaug had said was true. Snorri was the light’s servant now. “Kara, open the night-door.”
“No.” Snorri stepped forward and I matched him, until we stood face to face beneath the empty arch. Darkness smoked off my skin and I could feel Aslaug’s hands upon my shoulders, cool and steadying. The light that burned around Snorri bled from his eyes now. There’s light that is the warmth and comfort of the first days of summer, then there’s the glare of a desert sun where that light moves from comfort to cruelty—the light Baraqel sent through Snorri went beyond that into something not meant for men, so harsh that it held no place for any living thing.
“Kara!” I barked at her. “Open it.”
Snorri raised his fist, perhaps unconscious of the axe clutched in it. “I won’t have that night-whore—”
I hit him. Without thought. And the impact of it near deafened me. A burst of dark-light threw both of us yards back, but we found our feet in moments, throwing ourselves at each other, howling.
Only Tuttugu stepping into the archway and interposing himself prevented a second, more violent clash. Snorri found himself holding his father’s axe above the head of the only other living Undoreth. I found myself, hands outstretched into claws, reaching for Tuttugu’s face.
Snorri withdrew his hand and let the axe drop. “What . . . what are we doing?” The moment of madness passed.
I’d been going to leap on an axe-wielding Snorri, barehanded. “Christ—it’s this place!” Neither of us owned our actions any more. A little longer and we’d both be puppets for the avatar we carried inside us. “We need to get out of here before it kills us.”
“The Red Vikings will probably beat Osheim to it.” Kara insinuated herself past Tuttugu to stand between us. She pushed both of us back. “I’ll try to open the door that I think I have most chance of success with.” She looked up at Snorri. “And if you won’t let go of your precious key then, yes, I will direct you.” She wiped the frustration from her face and pushed Snorri back another couple of feet before turning to face the archway, eyes doing that defocused “witchy” thing of hers. “There!” She moved beside him, pointing to an arbitrary point in the air, her head cocked to one side, staring past her finger into some infinity.
With a frown, Snorri fished out the key on its chain and, stepping closer, raised it to the point indicated. The blackness of the thing looked wrong against the thickening gloom. It had nothing of darkness about it, that black, but was something else again, perhaps the colour of lies, or sin.
“Nothing.” Snorri put the key away. “All
that fuss and . . . nothing.” He bent to pick up his axe. “I’m sorry, Jal. I’m a poor friend.”
I held up a hand to forgive him, ignoring the fact I’d hit him first.
Snorri stepped away from us swinging his axe. The enemy would be upon us soon enough. He needed to make ready. The axe cut glimmering arcs as he wove a figure of eight, then turning with the swing, reversed into an upward slice. Snorri made it seem almost an art, even with so crude a weapon. To my left Tuttugu readied himself, tightening his belt and wiping clean his blade with his sailcloth sack. Courage didn’t come naturally to him, at least not the kind that warriors laud, but he’d taken his death blow once already this day and now prepared to die again.
“We could just give them the key.” I felt someone should state the obvious. “Leave it here and head west for Maladon.”
They all ignored me. Even the boy—and he hadn’t a clue what I was talking about, so that seemed harsh. Ten or eleven years were surely too few to see past Prince Jalan’s glossy exterior?
I would have set off by myself but the Silent Sister’s trap had grown stronger with each stride we took toward the Wheel. I doubted I could get a hundred yards before the crack tore wide and Baraqel ripped from Snorri while Aslaug poured out of me.
“The sun’s coming down,” Kara said unnecessarily.
“I know.” The arch’s shadow stretched toward the Wheel, dark with possibility. I felt Aslaug’s breath on the back of my neck again—heard the dry scratching at the door that held her back.
The Red Vikings came on over the ridge, close enough now for me to see the detail on their shields: sea serpent, pentagon of spears, the face of a giant with the shield boss its roaring mouth . . . The fatal wounds Snorri had dealt out now glistened in the red and dying light—a man split from collarbone to opposite hip, another headless and led on a tether, more behind. Somewhere in that crowd Edris Dean watched us from behind a Viking face guard. Was the necromancer there too, in furs, a shield on her arm? Or did she spy from some remove, set apart, as so often before? Suddenly my bladder declared itself beyond full.
“Do you think there’s time—” I began, but those bastard Red Vikings cut me off with their battle cries and started to charge.
It turned out there was time. I drew my knife and with wet legs prepared to face the onslaught of nearly two dozen Norsemen.
Something changed.
Although it made no sound the archway drew my gaze from the charging axemen. The whole of it lay black and darkness spilled from it, streaming cold about my ankles, thickening the shade before us.
“Jalan.” Aslaug rose from the shadowed ground as a woman might rise beneath her bed sheets, shrouded at first, her form uncertain, then drawing them about her, tighter and more tight, until at last she stands framed before you. She faced me, her back to the enemy, and I stood filled with her power, seeing the world with perfect clarity, darkness smoking from my skin. “This is no place for you, my prince.” She smiled, eyes gleaming, black with madness.
The first of the Hardassa, a fleet-footed young reaver, sprinted toward Aslaug, ready to bury his axe between her shoulder blades. Instead he came to a jerking halt, impaled on a sharp-ended black leg, thin as an insect’s and seemingly emerging from Aslaug’s back, though I couldn’t see from where or how. This was new—she was actually here in the flesh. “Shall we go?” she asked as the man died, choking on his blood. She gestured toward the arch with her eyes.
Snorri met the next wave of men, carving through the first one’s face with exquisite timing, long arms at full stretch. He leapt clear of the man a half pace behind, rotating to hack into the small of his back as momentum carried the fellow past. Tuttugu—already backed against the other side of the arch—slipped sideways with commendable skill and let the first of his foes hew stone so that his weapon was shaken from his grip. Tuttugu answered by burying the wedge of his blade in the man’s sternum.
More men came from Tuttugu’s left, keeping away from the yawning oblivion within the archway. Kara threw her runes at them, hurling a meagre handful. Each became a spear of ice, thrown with more force than even Snorri could manage. The shafts pierced shields, mail, flesh and bone, leaving the enemy staring in confusion at the holes punched through them.
“Jalan?” Aslaug asked me, drawing my attention back from the melee. Small hands gripped my leg. The boy. God knows why he chose me for protection . . . Another two Hardassa reached us, trying to swerve around Aslaug. Both fell, sprawling forward, snared in web-like strands of darkness. “You need to leave,” she said. Behind her, the man transfixed on her insect leg lifted his head and eyed me with the consuming hunger of those returned from death. From his wide-open mouth came that wordless roar that dead men keep in place of language. Aslaug flicked him off in a crimson shower as he started to struggle. “Mine is not the only magic here.”
Snorri caught an axe just below the blade as it blurred toward him. He twisted into the attacker, a powerfully built redbeard, until his back pressed the other man’s chest, with the back of his head pressed against the other man’s nose guard. Arms outstretched, still trapping the axe, his own blade free on the other side, Snorri rotated into more attackers. Their blows thudded into the back of the redbeard Viking that he now wore as a cloak. Snorri let the man fall, dragging his Hardassa axes with him. Unencumbered once more, he hacked across his two closest foes.
A tearing sound behind me, and the archway pulsed with sudden light, like a bright wound in the darkness. From the resulting maelstrom of swirling blackness shot with motes of brilliance, Baraqel emerged, golden-winged, a silver sword in his hand—too bright to look upon, advancing on Aslaug. At the same time the ground about us began to boil, bones rising to the surface like bits of meat in a soup set above the flame. Bones and more bones, skulls here and there. The peaty soil vomited forth arm bones, leg bones, one piece finding another, and joining, linking with old gristle and stained sinew that had withstood the rot.
“This is a place of death!” Kara, yelling from the opposite spar of the arch. “The necromancer—” She broke off to apply her knife to a skeletal hand gripping her leg, more Hardassa closed upon her swiftly.
The dead men strewn in Snorri’s wake also started to rise. Bony hands began to claw at Baraqel’s feet, even reaching for Aslaug. The avatars of dark and light, rather than rushing at each other as Snorri and I had done, had to pause in order to deal with the necromancy reaching up to bring them down.
“Run!” Kara shouted, and free of the bones’ grip, she dived headfirst into the archway.
I hesitated for a moment. It looked a lot like a wider version of the crack that had pursued me in Vermillion. The archway seethed with darkness and light making war, a mixture I’d seen reduce people to bloody and widely scattered chunks. For all I knew small pieces of Kara now decorated the grass on the far side of the arch.
“Don’t!” hissed Aslaug, more limbs springing from her torso to pin Norsemen to the ground before they could reach me. Long, thin, hairy limbs. “Stay!” While the arch had been dark she’d been urging me through, but now she wanted me to stay?
That convinced me. I ran toward the swirling dark-light.
“Wait!” Aslaug’s shriek a mix of rage and anguish. “The völva lied to you, she’s a—”
I leapt through. The weight on my leg told me that the boy had come too. All the sounds behind me cut off in an instant and I started to fall.
• • •
The best thing I can say about what followed is that it probably hurt less than being butchered with an axe.
FOURTEEN
I’m falling. I stepped through an archway and now I’m falling, punching a me-shaped hole through endless night until it finally does end, falling through a white blindness, no kinder than the dark, through sharpness and thorns, through pain so fierce it steals time, and at last into dream. Cool, enfolding dream-stuff, grey as clouds . . .
• • •
I fall screaming through the cloud base, forgetting in my terror that this is dreaming, and plummet at last into the midst of the seven-towered castle of Ameroth wherein my grandmother stands besieged by an army of fifty thousand. An army wielded like a blade by the warlord Kerwcjz. The Harrow of Slov they call him—the iron fist of Czar Keljon who dwells upon the eastern steppes but would rather sit in Vyene, emperor by right of war.
• • •
We stand once more upon the outer walls atop the broad expanse of one of the seven towers. High as we are, smoke wreathes us, blotting out the sky, so thick that had I not fallen from heaven’s vault and down through the burning I would be unsure whether morning had yet taken flight.
• • •
Grandmother is there again, Alica Kendeth—princess of the Red March, not yet twenty, broadsword in hand, her armour battered, the gilding worn, enamel splintering away where blows have dented her breastplate. The same iron look in her eyes as when she loosed an arrow into her sister’s heart. She stands taller than me, and yet Ullamere Contaph towers above her in his demon-black Turkman plate, a livid wound scored from the bridge of his nose past the corner of his mouth.
Shattered rock and pieces of the battlements strew the tower top. Soldiers man the walls, less thickly than before. Dead are heaped beside the stairway down into the tower. Dead in two mounds, one pile flecked with the crimson of the March, the other more varied. Men of Slov lie there, entwined with warriors of the Mayar. There a knight of Sudriech, sprawled across him two Zagre axemen, faces tattooed in the blue wards those peoples favour. There has been an assault, recently turned. I wonder how many more of the foe lie heaped and broken at the tower base among the wreckage of their ladders, coiled amid their ropes . . .
“We have to fall back to the second wall.” Contaph’s wound gapes as he speaks. I see teeth through the gory mess of his cheek.
The Liar's Key Page 18
