by Matt Larkin
“Hervor …” one of the bodies called to her as she passed.
She grit her teeth, forced herself not to look. Eyes forward.
“Hervor …”
“Hervor …”
They were calling her. They, too, wanted to count her among their number. The damned calling out to their own.
Ecgtheow didn’t react. Either didn’t hear them, or was lost in his own waking nightmare. She locked her gaze on his shoulders, careful to not let it stir in the least. Not allow it to glimpse her periphery and the horrors begging her to join them.
Even as her mind’s eye played it out, showed a thorn bending down for her. Waiting for her to thrust herself upon it. As if the torment it offered might somehow come as a relief from the unending agony and lies her life had become. It waited for her …
She ground her jaw until it felt like her teeth would crack open.
Ecgtheow had paused before a hut large enough to have housed a jarl’s court. He glanced back at her. “Think Loviatar is in there?”
Hervor nodded, desperate to focus on aught other than suicide and eternal damnation. If she killed the witch-queen, maybe all this would end. Waiting for no invitation, she pushed past Ecgtheow and charged the hut. Kicked in the door and burst inside.
A woman screamed.
A great mass of people clad in furs and rough garb huddled around a fire pit, staring at her in obvious fear. No warriors among them, at least none with obvious weapons. Women, children, old men. All hiding here in some chief’s place—hiding from her.
Her grip tightened around Tyrfing’s hilt. It was hungering for blood. Feeding it the tree monster may have satisfied the curse, but it wanted more. She could feel it. It wanted these people. All of them.
Hel’s frozen underworld.
She turned back to Ecgtheow, intent to tell him to back away. That they had to go before she did something she’d never live down.
A seven-foot tall man stepped out of the shadows and plowed into Ecgtheow, sending him flying out the door. Hervor dove to the side, barely avoiding being snared by his mighty hand. The man was coated in shadows, his form obscured, fluid even. He wore a helm that seemed like reindeer antlers, jutting out so far it almost scraped the rafters. He was clad in a bear-skin but no other obvious armor.
Twin battle-axes dropped into his hands and he bellowed, swinging with one and then the other.
Hervor threw herself sideways, rolled, and swept Tyrfing up just in time to block the descent of another of those axes. The man recoiled from the impact and she used his hesitation to lunge forward, sweep her runeblade at his arm.
The blade nicked the shadow man’s forearm, but he jerked away, faster than a man of his size ought to be. He spun, leaping in the air and hurling one of the axes at her with his momentum.
Hervor yelped, leapt to the side, the axe soaring within a hairsbreadth of her face.
Already the warrior was charging her again, fighting with no regard for his own safety. Maybe because he wasn’t even fucking real. Wasn’t really alive so why should he care if he died?
Her, on the other hand …
Hervor ducked, dodged, parried. Fell onto the defensive under the warrior’s relentless attacks. A living man ought to have tired from swinging so violently about, but this warrior just kept flailing away like his weapon weighed no more than a feather.
Whatever it weighed, though, it was no runeblade.
Grunting as her foe came on again, Hervor brought Tyrfing up in a two-handed parry. Tyrfing slid up the haft of the axe and its blade caught on her crossbar. She jerked the blade down, slicing off all the warrior’s fingers.
The axe tumbled from his bloody grasp and she whipped Tyrfing back around, burying it into the man’s chest. He instantly exploded into ash and vanished into the air, even as Ecgtheow was blundering back into the hut.
Hervor shot him a glare. “You’re late.”
She looked back to the gathered villagers. They still clung to one another, not one of them had risen during the entire fight. They just stared at her, wide-eyed, as if she’d gone mist-mad.
Maybe they hadn’t even seen the fight?
Either way, she ducked out of the hut, Ecgtheow on her heels. “I’m starting to think we can’t find the others in this place. Maybe the thing to do is to push past here and try to regroup beyond the village.”
Ecgtheow shrugged, then grunted assent.
With a last glance at the hut, Hervor trotted onward, eager to put the twisted village as far behind her as possible.
25
Rumbling storm clouds billowed all around Starkad, battering him and stripping all sense from his mind and all hope from his soul. He barely noticed as that rumble gradually subsided. For the first time in an age, he wasn’t falling, though he couldn’t recall having hit aught either. He lay upon a rocky floor—a cavern, perhaps.
Only the barest flicker of light made it to him, far away and pathetic, a candle against the night. All around him, shadows danced and stretched, seeming thick as tar. Like a nest of serpents, those shadows crawled over Starkad, ensnaring and crushing his limbs, his chest, his throat.
Darkness pulled him under, into oblivion. He lay in the shadows, convulsing and pathetic. And after another age, he found the shadows had so saturated him, they no longer held him prisoner. He pushed himself up, blinked, and trembled with a rush of trepidation he could not explain, except to think he was not alone in the darkness.
Teeth grit, he gained his feet. The shadows were so thick, he couldn’t make out much. Beside him, a veritable forest of skeletons lay piled up. A stack of bones taller than he was, as if hundreds of the slain had been left to rot in great heaps.
The thought left him queasy as he wandered through the caverns. Stalactites and stalagmites segmented off some paths and obstructed others, often coming together to form columns. More skeletons lay scattered about, broken and dusty.
He pressed on toward the distant, flickering lights far ahead. A few dozen candles, maybe? Torches, perhaps, or braziers if they lay farther than he judged. Either way, his only sign of the living.
Fire is life.
That much seemed to hold true in any world. The cavern opened up more ahead. Blundering forward, Starkad lurched to a sudden stop. The floor dropped away into a chasm that descended into unknown depths.
He sucked in a sharp breath and backed away, then followed a narrow ledge around the pit. Beyond this, the ground became even more uneven, forcing him to navigate rising and falling rock piles, while avoiding yet further drops.
In the far distance, a spire came into view. One of the flickering lights came from up there, in a high window. The others seemed spaced out along the top of the walls beneath that tower. Most like, they were braziers, then. Watch fires, of a sort, in this dark world.
Of a sudden, dark figures melted up out of the shadows, converging around him. Men and women with jet black hair and swarthy skin in varying shades of ashen gray.
One of them strode forward, chuckling, shaking his head. His long black hair stretched down over his bare, tattoo-marked chest. “Oh. I have thought to hunt for you, to tempt some mortal wretch to open the way to your world that I might feast upon your wilted soul. But it seems the twisted weavings of urd run thick with bitter irony and you fall back into the darkness that engendered your so-called glory.”
Starkad reached for his blades over his shoulder, but none were to be had.
Something struck him from his blind side, cracking on his skull. He toppled to the ground, a flash of lights before his eye. “Who …?” His speech was slurred and thick.
“You do not recognize me without Jorund’s faltering host to contain me?” The svartalf chuckled. “Bring him.”
Svartalfar heaved him up by his forearms and half-dragged him along, toward the fortress in the distance. Starkad struggled to make his mind work through the haze.
Jorund … Jorund had been possessed by a svartalf … Skafinn. So their leader here was the same one
, and obviously quite vexed at Starkad forcing him back to his own world.
The fortress itself stretched up into the concealed reaches of this cavernous realm, the peak of its spire lost in shadow. The place put even the great works of the Old Kingdoms to shame. All of it was carved from black stones, jutting out at vicious angles that seemed apt to slice the air itself to ribbons. Jagged crenellations ringed the top, beyond which lay the braziers Starkad had seen from a distance.
A natural stone bridge spanned a crevice with no bottom in sight, offering the only ingress Starkad could see. A spiked iron gate five times his height closed off access to the main entrance. As the svartalfar drew nigh, though, the gate creaked upward, sliding into unseen recesses.
Even with his eye adjusted to the darkness, there was barely enough firelight to see inside the castle. The shadows here writhed like living things, coiling and flowing over every surface, dancing just out of reach of the few sconces that lined the inner walls.
Starkad swallowed, his head finally beginning to clear. There was something he had to do. Something needful for him to escape this place … though from the look of this fortress, escape might no longer be an option.
Skafinn led the way through winding, maze-like corridors. The occasional glint of torchlight off metal made it seem like spikes or razors decorated the walls, ready to impale or shred any who drew too nigh. After long wandering, the corridor opened up into a great chamber lined by a series of columns on either side. Dark metal spikes jutted from each column in a web of blades and death. Farther up, barely visible, carved monstrosities of stone hung from the columns, leering down upon the hall.
Starkad could not make out the ceiling nor the walls through the darkness, which was broken only by a torch on every other column, and those shedding far less light than he’d have expected of the flames. As they trod down this hall, a raised dais came into view, drenched in shadow such that he could make out little of the occupant until they reached the foot of the steps.
The figure wore sharp-ridged armor of interlocking metal sheets unlike aught Starkad had ever seen. The edges of that armor looked like razors as well. The man’s eyes held a faint luminescence—or perhaps an opalescence, glimmering in the darkness. The figure leaned forward, black hair hanging around the edges of his face, almost concealing his faint smirk.
“Starkad Eightarms …”
“Volund?”
The great smith leaned back on his throne, his armor creaking ever so faintly. He spread his hands as if in a magnanimous gesture, a man welcoming a friend into his home. But Volund had no friends, so far as Starkad knew.
Starkad swallowed. Skafinn had not served Volund, last Starkad had heard. “What happened to Rathwith?”
Volund’s smirk only deepened. “Wandering in exile, assuming naught has devoured his essence. If he yet survives the void, he no doubt struggles to hold on to the tattered remnants of his soul. Defeat … comes with a hefty price, does it not, Eightarms?”
“And you are king here now?”
“A prince. Our people have not had a king in eons …” But that might change. Volund didn’t say it, but his ambition seemed to hang in the air. “I am, of course, bound by certain traditions, you know. And you did get my son to turn against his heritage … While not altogether unplanned for, I cannot say I welcomed the betrayal.”
Starkad kept his mouth shut. A pit opened in his stomach, a nameless fear of what he knew must come next.
Volund shifted again, almost seeming in pain. “I see you already understand where this is going.”
Skafinn cracked Starkad between the shoulder blades. He dropped hard to the ground, slamming his knees on the stone and only half noticing as he tried to get his breath back. In the hidden recess of the ceiling, iron cranked above.
When Starkad managed to look up, a spiked metal chain was descending, nigh level with him now. Starkad tried to rise, but Skafinn drove him down with another blow. The svartalf wrapped the chain around Starkad’s ankles and spikes the length of a finger joint punched through his flesh, scraping clear to his bones. He gasped in pain.
The creaking sounded again, and the chain jerked taut, pulling him upside down to hang from his ankles. Blood dribbled down his legs. Over his stomach. Dripped into his face and stung his eye.
Starkad grunted at the pain of it, then grit his teeth, refusing to give Volund the satisfaction of further crying out.
“Well,” Volund said, now seeming to hang upside down from the ceiling. “Traditions being what they are …”
The chain turned, ever so slightly, as Starkad struggled against it. As it twisted, he caught sight of Skafinn donning a clawed metal glove, the palm and back of the hand lined with knife blades. Starkad’s captor stalked around until he stood before Starkad. Then he lunged forward, digging claws into Starkad’s gut. The svartalf jerked his hand downward, tearing gouges from Starkad’s belly up to his chest.
Now Starkad gasped once more, barely about to keep from crying out. He sucked in deep breaths. Blood poured over his face. Trickled into his nostrils. Obscured his vision.
Skafinn sneered, then placed a clawed finger at the bottom of Starkad’s abdomen. With agonizing slowness, he dug the claw into Starkad’s gut. Then he pulled slowly, ripping open a wide tear.
Starkad gave over any attempt not to scream. He howled. Skafinn dug his hand inside, wrapped it around Starkad’s intestine, and slowly drew it out.
As Starkad’s scream finally gave out—his breath spent—he heard cawing from the shadows above, like a raven sat upon one of the carved monsters.
Volund cocked his eye, a hint of a wry smile crossing his face. “That will be enough, Skafinn.”
“My lord. I have only begun—”
“Enough.” Volund rose from his throne and drifted toward Starkad, the shadows pooling and dancing around him like vile escorts.
Starkad gurgled, spat out his own blood. If Skafinn had pierced his bowels he’d be in for a long, agonizing death. The thought settled in his mind, niggling him. Shouldn’t … shouldn’t he have died already? Hadn’t he wanted to die?
Volund limped down the stairs, supporting himself on a metal staff topped with two curving, spiked fork tines. “Leave us.”
Skafinn sputtered in almost human indignation.
“Leave us.” Volund’s tone brooked no further discussion and, almost at once, Skafinn and his warriors turned and fled the throne room.
Starkad gasped again, finding it hard to even stay conscious.
Volund stalked past him, circling once, limping with every step. He never took his gleaming eyes off Starkad, but Starkad couldn’t begin to guess what went on behind them. Finally, the smith-turned-prince pressed on and touched something on a column. The chain cranked once more, this time lowering Starkad back to the floor.
Starkad collapsed in a heap, unable to even form a coherent thought, much less speak.
“Traditions …” Volund murmured. “Ah, burdensome at times. We are left with reputations to maintain, you see.”
Starkad groaned.
Volund knelt then. The prince began unwrapping the chain from Starkad’s ankles. As each spike popped from his flesh, Starkad winced at the fresh jolts of pain.
“Well … traditions being fulfilled, I fear the time has come to bid you farewell, my friend.” Volund pulled the last of the chain away from Starkad’s legs.
Starkad rolled over just a hair, teeth grit against the pain of even that much moving. Then, gingerly, cringing at the pain, he eased his intestine back inside his belly. “Kill me …?”
“Oh … I rather think your soul can take a bit more. It is strong—at least it was before you found yourself drawn into the Spirit Realm. Not so much remains of it now. When it breaks, one or another of those you call vaettir will feast upon it and drink in glorious power. But not myself, Eightarms. I will send you on your way.”
“I c-can’t walk …”
Volund sneered. “Really. You will bemoan your pain to me? Whine,
like a dog over the agony of walking? Do you think I, of all people, will offer you sympathy? Has Odin so badly mischosen his would-be emissary?” The prince stood, leaning on his staff a moment. Then he let it clatter to the floor beside Starkad. “Get up, you simpering dotard. Show me your soul is worth more than a feast.”
Dotard? Fuck him. Starkad growled. Fuck the prince and all the godsdamned svartalfar and Odin too.
“Odin bought your power, drew it from this very world. It cost you … but then it cost him as well. Was it worth the price?”
Starkad sucked in deep breaths. He lunged for the staff and wrapped one hand around it. Metal scraped on stone as he pulled it vertical. Then he yanked himself to his knees, other hand grabbing the staff as well. His power … came from Svartalfheim. Long life … and stamina beyond that of other men. Maybe he’d never eaten the fruit of Yggdrasil … but he was still Starkad fucking Eightarms.
Growling, he pulled himself to his feet. The pain in his ankles, the agony in his gut, they dimmed, fueling rather than impeding his rage. “My power …”
“Yes … Come.” Volund limped away, between two columns toward a side wall of the chamber.
Leaning on the staff, Starkad pulled himself on after the svartalf. “I … ought to … kill you.”
Volund cast a sneer his way, one eyebrow raised. He said naught, nor perhaps needed to. A silent reminder that here, he had become a prince. That, if Starkad had gained a drop of strength from the World of Dark, Volund had bathed in it. Besides, in his own way, maybe Volund was helping him.
And so Starkad limped and shambled after the prince. Volund led him to an archway filled with mist so thick Starkad could not see half a foot into it. “Reality is not quite what humans think it. Hmm … It is tenuous and mercurial, among other things. Human logic and reason applies very little once you move beyond the human realm—if even there.”
And the way forward lay through the mist. And why not … beyond must lay Niflheim itself. The World of Mist. The land of Hel. And if he was to pass through this Spirit Realm to … confront his nightmares, his chance must lay within.
