“You have an alliance!” Joy called to Wormeye.
“A treasure like you supersedes all alliances!” Wormeye replied. “Besides, you picked fights with my tumult. You must be brought before Skrymir!”
Her battle-joy had turned to ashes. Half her friends in the world might be injured or dead. The light from the Runemark faded. She was only herself. But she had to help them.
She scrambled over the jagged slopes, trolls bellowing behind her. She reached Inga. The changeling was bruised all over, with a dozen bleeding scrapes dirty with grit. But her wounds weren’t all that had grit. She was already on her knees, and she smiled feebly at Joy. “Well, you gave it a good try,” she said.
“Come on,” Joy answered, helping her up, grateful that Inga forgave her this failure.
They reached the wreck of Al-Saqr. Its rent canvas was sprawled against a hillside, impossible to miss. In a rocky streambed the ger lay tipped on one side. The crash itself had been gentle enough that all seemed unhurt. There stood Haytham, gripping a huge brazier from which the smoky form of the efrit Haboob fluttered out like a kite, staring over the hilltops at the approaching trolls. Mad Katta was there as well, the monk standing ready, head cocked as he listened for the creatures’ arrival. Northwing the shaman leaned against him, evidently exhausted from commanding the winds. And Malin rushed up to make sure Inga and Joy were all right.
Another figure was there was well, a striking Kantening woman of some forty years. She wore a narrow-brimmed black cap and a fine gray cloak, and she gripped a longsword as though she’d trained with one since birth.
“So,” said the woman, “this is the Runethane whom we’ve come so far to rescue. I confess you are not the Runethane I was expecting, but I am pleased to meet you nonetheless. I regret we will be needing rescue ourselves. And you must be Inga, the redoubtable changeling.” The woman bowed. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Joy didn’t know what to say.
“Who the hell are you?” Inga asked.
“Inga,” Malin said in a strangled-sounding voice. “Princess . . . Corinna . . . Soderland.”
Inga’s eyes widened, and suddenly she was on her knees.
“Rise, rise, rise,” the woman said impatiently. “We aren’t exactly in the Fortress in Svanstad. But it’s true. I am Princess Corinna.” She sighed. “And won’t grandfather and Ragnar be pleased to learn about this.”
Wormeye the troll, with some twenty of his compatriots, cleared his rocky throat behind them.
“Well, well, well,” was all he said.
The trolls led their captives into the deep mountains, down tunnels and into gorges, up passes and through fissures. The journey took two days, during which gray spires ate more and more of the sky. In the nights, fires blazed from caves, and what had seemed an uninhabited realm revealed itself as the center of a trollish civilization.
“If I survive,” Haytham the inventor said, staring at the fires, “I intend to make great contributions to Mirabad’s travel literature.”
“I can never tell,” Joy said, “if you’re happy or bitter.”
“There’s too much misery in the world for me to ever be entirely happy. And too much wonder to ever be entirely bitter. I sometimes envy those who can take their emotions raw, but I must have the meat roasted and spiced.”
“I am afraid that may be what the trolls will do to us.”
“You may be right! I haven’t seen them eat—unless you count what Wormeye has done, in swallowing my brazier for easier transport. But I have heard them joke about roast human often enough that I’m convinced they enjoy the taste.”
Late the second day, they found out.
They came to the great mountain of the Trollberg, rising just southwest of its subservient human community Jotuncrown. The mountain had no gate, carvings, or statuary, no markers of residence, only a roughly quarried gap tall as ancient pines. Inside, as their eyes adjusted to the darkness, the humans were grabbed and chained and led deeper in. Soon Joy was able to see the interior was just as rugged as the entrance. There were no crystal towers such as the delven once made, only a series of monstrous caverns lit by vats of green troll-fire and by gaps rent in the mountain rock, pale-blue sky beyond. Here, there, everywhere were hollows in which the detritus of troll life were strewn, giant daggers, mounds of straw, penned goats, treasure bags, cauldrons, roasting spits. Joy tried not to look at those last, for sometimes they were occupied. She wondered why vast animated mounds of rock or earth must eat, for their captors had not done so thus far. But it seemed eat they did. A great reek filled the mountain halls, a mix of meats, dung, soot, moss, pine needles, dust. It made Joy sneeze.
She was initially grateful to enter the last cavern. It had a tunnel leading to the open air, through which passed a clean, cold breeze. The path of the wind divided the chamber into halves, with scores of smooth boulders scattered on one side and a single monumental rock rising on the other. Set into this rock was a chair so big, Joy at first thought it was a small house. It was formed of a blue-white block of ice, inset with priceless gems of all colors. The various crystals all flickered in the green firelight.
Upon this chair sat a gigantic troll, perhaps twenty feet tall when sitting. He was like a miniature version of the mountain, with two dark stony peaks for shoulders and a ruby-eyed summit for a head. The face was gnarled and fissured, with a prominent gash for a mouth. His arms were like promontories, ending in crystal extrusions that might have been claws. His legs were obscured by an axe big as a man, a black weapon crowded with red half-runes along the blade, the marks looking bloody, as though they’d been picked up from the murder of some old codex.
A great, gaping opening lay where the heart would be on a man, leading all the way through the troll-king’s body. A fluttering carpet, swirling with intricate colors, was rolled up and stuffed into the gap.
Joy gasped when she saw the carpet, for she remembered it.
“Deadfall!” she cried.
“I have that distinction,” hummed a voice from the carpet, a thin musical sound that recalled desert winds. “Long has it been since I traveled the Braid of Spice or plunged into the sea to seek out your Scroll of Years. I regret we must meet again in this way, A-Girl-Is-A-Joy.”
Joy forced herself not to glance backward to see Mad Katta’s reaction, for he and the carpet had once been friends.
A triumphant chattering erupted from scores of trolls filling the opposite side of the cavern; they dragged Joy forward first, even ahead of Princess Corinna. Joy kept her right hand firmly clenched.
“Kill her!” cried a troll. “A human child from beyond the sea has invaded our land and taught treachery to our changelings!”
“May I hack her fingers off?” jeered another.
And, “May I spin her head by the hair?” screeched a third, until the whole gallery joined in.
“May I bite?”
“May I boil?”
“Roast?”
“Or fry?”
But the great troll upon the throne of ice and crystal raised a hand with fingers that resembled stalactites, or else stalagmites. A voice filled the cavern; it was not a shout but a sort of sardonic purr. “Winter take your fury, ladies and gentlemen. These are strange, new times; Skrymir Hollowheart says, let us not be hasty. I sense we have an Easterner here, not unlike our friends the Karvaks.”
“I am nothing like them!” Joy shouted, and the trolls around her shrieked and tugged on her chains.
“Do you truly wish to become stew? Be silent. I will speak first with Princess Corinna. After all, she’s your superior in rank.”
Corinna held her chin high as she was dragged before the throne, and though Joy barely knew the princess, it hurt to see Corinna’s dignity scratched.
The troll-king snatched Corinna like a loaf of bread. His stony fingers enmeshed Corinna’s skull. The princess bit her lip but did not scream. Joy’s heart raced. A single squeeze would pop the princess’s head like a cork from a bottle,
yet Corinna studied her captor with an icy gaze. Skrymir said, “O princess, with my claws about you I could make Soderland cough up a great ransom. Yet I would rather wipe the contempt from your face and replace it with a portrait of my choosing. First I will scratch your right eye, so that a splinter of troll-stuff will enter it, and you will see the world as we do—that you may comprehend the Trollberg as beautiful. Next, I will with one of my fingernails carve away the window-pane of your left eye, but you will perceive it as no more than the shedding of a wart. All that will be left to you is troll-sight. As we render you to soup you will smile with glee. Thus do I show my love for the Kantenings! The manner of your death will terrorize your people for generations, and in between serving the Karvaks, parents will tell an eventyr about the horrid death of foolish Princess Corinna. But first of all, this will be known to your family in Svanstad. Hold still, my dear.”
Like an unsheathed knife a crystalline fingernail shone in the cavern, but even as it plunged toward Corinna, rage quickened within Joy and she opened her hand.
The Runemark glowed a volcanic red.
Though she was chained, her legs were free. Her limbs tingled with strength, and she ran forward, scaled the throne, and kicked the outstretched hand.
A concussion like thunder exploded through the cavern. Crystalline fingernails snapped and scattered like glass. Skrymir Hollowheart roared, and Joy and Corinna fell to the cavern floor.
But they were not alone in the fight.
Mad Katta leapt forward, having slipped his bonds. His aim was perfect as he threw one of his blessed, discus-shaped sweetcakes. It hit Skrymir in the nose, and rock shattered; the troll-king hissed.
With a bellow, Inga broke her own chains and set about freeing Malin, Haytham, and Northwing.
Northwing, though still chained, closed her eyes while murmuring a chant.
Haytham shook his chains defiantly and turned to the onrushing troll Wormeye. “Haboob of the Hundred Hilarities! I ask you to interpret your mandate flexibly! In return I will reduce our agreement to six months.”
“Eh?” said Wormeye, before the soil of his torso exploded.
The troll fell to the cavern floor in two pieces.
Joy absorbed all this while struggling to her feet and helping Corinna to hers. As she rose she noticed that the gaps opening on the sky seemed filled with stars and nebulae, as though night had suddenly fallen, though a more brilliant night than any she’d known.
She had no time to consider this, however. Corinna was saying, “While he’s distracted! Move the axe! It is the work of Wayland, the Axe of Sternmark!”
Joy had no idea what that meant, but she could hear the capital letters. On a hunch she struck her chains against the blade. They split like kindling. Corinna did likewise, and together they grabbed the huge axe. Groaning, they shoved it out of reach.
Skrymir roared and slapped Joy across the chamber.
That she could roll with the blow was partly the result of Walking Stick’s training and partly the strange power of the Runemark. She tumbled down the tunnel leading to the outside air.
As she rose, she could not help but gaze out.
What she saw was impossible. An ocean, lit by a silvery moon, lapped at the mountainside, its waters just a few inches below where she stood.
Almost as strangely, two structures bobbed in the waters nearby, one of wood, the other with a foundation of wood but upper levels of stone. The wooden one reminded her somewhat of her home pagoda, and her eyes studied it first. Even though her friends needed her, she could not look away.
A wall of the lowest level was missing, and out of that wall gazed a familiar face. Gaunt was there, calling her name.
Joy was so shocked she wasn’t even sure what she said in reply. Then she gasped as she spied Innocence in the second structure.
Suddenly Skrymir Hollowheart grabbed her in one enormous hand, dragging her away from the tunnel.
“You have surprised me,” the troll-king growled. “I had assumed the report of a Runethane false, but the power has truly chosen you. You have even awakened the forces of this mountain, opening the way to the World-Tree.”
“Let us go!” Joy said. “What do you want with us?”
“A great deal! Behold!” As he wrenched her into the great chamber a mist fell over everything. She could no longer see her companions, nor any other trolls.
Now the mist cleared underfoot, and it seemed she floated high in the heavens over the Bladed Isles, looking down at a place where the two greatest landmasses met, as well as jagged, broken extensions of the next-largest isle.
“How—?” she began.
Skrymir laughed. “I am a lord of illusion, as well as of might.” They appeared to descend. Where the two great promontories stood, there was an enormous chain wrapping about them, linking them to a barren island in the strait.
Joy beheld riders upon what she judged the Spydbanen side. Some wore byrnies, swords, and shields in the Kantening style. Others were archers of the steppes. “Karvaks!”
“Indeed,” said Skrymir. “They have an interest in the human domains of these isles. I choose to indulge them, partly on behalf of the collegiality I owe the khatun. With my help they will conquer. This will make it much easier to achieve my true goal—control of that chain. With you, and that boy Innocence Gaunt, I can command the energies of the sleeping dragons of the isles and truly become myself. And what I truly am is a god.”
“What you truly are is insane.”
“Ah! You think so! Deadfall did at first! But it’s his gift to siphon and sift magic. With him I can tap all manner of power, whether or not the source is willing.”
“He speaks truly,” came the thin voice of the magic carpet.
She could listen to no more of this. Her friends were struggling somewhere beyond this illusion. Help, she called out silently, not knowing whom she asked.
Help arrived.
Inga Peersdatter leapt through the mists, scrambled up the Skrymir’s rocky body, and began smashing the troll-jarl’s nose. Skrymir dropped Joy to swat at the intruder.
Joy staggered through the mists. She could see nothing now. “Inga? Where are you? I can’t see—”
She felt a hand on her shoulder. Katta’s voice said gently, “It can be frightening to go without sight. But you are not alone.” He murmured a chant, and the fog dispersed.
The conference with Skrymir had taken only seconds. Her friends were not yet defeated but stared down the trolls, who seemed to easily match her companions but were unwilling to advance with their leader preoccupied. Inga was still scrambling around Skrymir’s shoulders, avoiding his hands, kicking and punching when she could. At any moment the balance would tip, and they would rush forward.
“I . . .” Joy said. “I don’t . . .”
“Carpet,” Malin said. “Troll hearts very important. Eventyr Number Thirty-Six.”
“Deadfall,” Katta mused, “has the potential to become good.”
“That’s it,” Joy said, and followed Inga’s lead.
She leapt at the troll-king’s chest, diving through the gap where his heart should be.
Power flared from the mark on her hand, and the carpet tore free of its prison. Together they landed hard upon the icy throne.
“Will you help?” she asked the carpet.
“Yes,” it said.
“Help us escape.”
Deadfall unrolled itself with a crack like a whip. She dove on, and it launched itself high, sweeping Inga away from Skrymir and into the air.
It swooped around the chamber and dove among the companions. Joy was amazed. In her elders’ tales, the carpet had been described as spasmodic in flight. Clearly its luck had changed, as had theirs. They all got on.
But as the carpet rose to escape through the tunnel, Skrymir cried out, “Ah! To hell with it all!” The Axe of Sternmark was in his hands, and with its red runes blazing, he struck.
“No!” Inga was at the carpet’s edge. With her own trollish s
trength she protected her companions, blocking the blow.
The axe chopped her arm clean off. She fell from Deadfall to the cavern floor, writhing there.
“No!” screamed Malin. “No! Go back!”
“Do as she says, old friend,” said Katta.
“No,” hummed Deadfall, “we are leaving this place.”
“He is right,” Princess Corinna said.
With a curse Northwing leapt off the carpet.
With a strength belying the shaman’s years, Northwing tumbled with the fall and rose unharmed. “Get out of here!” Northwing shouted, before kneeling beside Inga, chanting.
“Deadfall, no!” said Joy. “Go back for them!”
But Deadfall heeded neither rage nor weeping and instead shot through a tunnel into what was now, inexplicably, a high alpine valley of deepening shadows, filled to brimming with the tents of the steppes.
CHAPTER 19
DRAUG
The Straits of Tid were star-domed and moonlit. Innocence, Steelfox, Dolma, Nine Smilodons, and Red Mirror swam to a skerry jabbing out of the water. The two Karvak soldiers took longest to catch their breath, as they were swimming in armor. At least the strange night was warm.
Steelfox’s falcon circled the area and landed upon her wrist. “I take it you know something of this mad place.”
“They’re the Straits of Tid,” Innocence said.
“To compound my ignorance with an unknown term is not entirely helpful.”
“Apologies,” Innocence said. “All I know of this place is that it allows a form of dream-travel through time and space. I didn’t realize one could travel into it physically.”
“Intriguing,” Steelfox said. “So one could swim to days gone by, or days to come?”
“Yes, or to places far off.” Innocence looked across the waters to the mountain rising into the night. “I want to get to that mountain. That’s where I saw a friend, peering out.”
“Liege,” said Nine Smilodons. “Look at the stone of this tiny place.” He gestured at the onyx-like stuff of the skerry. It was polished enough that in places one could see reflections, and Nine Smilodons’ own reflection blinked back at them. But this Nine Smilodons looked leaner, more weathered, and stood beneath the sail of a Kantening ship.
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