by Tad Williams
“She is brave, yes. And fierce. I saw her at Tangleroot Castle. And at Three Ravens Tower.” There were moments when Viyeki remembered the bright-haired warrior as he had first seen her there, and he could almost believe that she could save them all. But they were only moments. “I must go now. I dare not leave my governors in charge too long.”
“I know what you mean,” said Naji. “The unsaddled goat quickly begins to bite.” And then he did a strange thing, extending his arm and hand for the other to clasp. “May we both bring credit on our order in this evil time, Host Foreman Viyeki. Who knows when we will see each other again?”
And Viyeki, who had spoken truthfully but spitefully about Naji’s shortcomings many times of late, was shamed. He put out his own hand and clasped Naji’s arm just below the elbow. “Yes, order-brother. May we both make our master proud. And if we do not see each other again in this world, we will meet in the Garden.”
They parted, Naji to his other business, Viyeki back to the depths and his workmen who would not work. And if the High Magister’s wisdom was not available to him, he knew he must solve the problem himself. He owed it to his queen and his people.
As he walked down the front steps of the order-house, the iron ram crashed against the outside of the gates once more, shaking all that was not solid bedrock. Even the bells of the temple towers swayed from the shock and uttered softly, like the moans of frightened children.
Isgrimnur never slept well in the field. Part of it was the absence of Gutrun, of course, of his wife’s familiar, soothing shape in the bed next to him, of her voice that calmed him in the night and reminded him that there was more to life than his worries. On this night he had been slipping in and out of thin sleep for hours, and also in and out of a dream in which Isorn his eldest son—his dead son—rushed at a gate that broke and gave way. Behind it lay the darkness of an endless pit. As Isorn struggled at the edge of this terrible fall, his father tried to call to him but could not make any kind of warning cry. Then, as his dream-self flailed, speechless and helpless, something hit the side of Isgrimnur’s tent with a loud enough noise to send him tumbling out of the dream and onto the floor.
He shouted for his house-carls as he scrabbled in the darkness for his sword. “Haddi—Kár! To me!” Again something struck the tent, this time scratching and clawing so that the wall bulged first in one place, then another. Some heavy shape was trying to rip its way in—a bear, perhaps, or worse, a troop of murderous, white-skinned Norns. “To me!” he shouted. “Where are you all?” At last he found Kvalnir. His fingers closed on the sword’s hilt, and in a moment, he had worked it out of the scabbard.
“Duke Isgrimnur!” Haddi was just outside the tent. He sounded like a terrified child. “We are . . . there are . . . !”
Isgrimnur kicked off the blankets still tangling his legs and staggered upright, then pushed his way out the tent flap. He had only a moment to stare at Haddi, a trained killer who looked like a terrified child, then the bustling, thumping noise started again behind him, but this time the tent yawed and then collapsed beneath the assault. Isgrimnur could see only the dim outlines of something struggling in the midst of the poles and bunched hides. “What in the Holy Name of the Aedon is happening?” the duke bellowed.
Haddi, bizarrely, had fallen to his knees on the snowy ground and was now praying. All around, other shapes moved between the tents of the duke’s commanders, some running, others limping or even crawling. Isgrimnur could make no sense of what had happened, only that it must be some terrible disaster. Had the earth shaken? Had a great tree fallen?
A muted noise of something being torn dragged his attention back to his fallen tent, where a dark shape rose from the wreckage. For a brief moment the duke thought he had been right in his first guess, that it was a bear or some other large animal: the thing was crouched and hard to make out except for a gleam of broken teeth. Then it struggled upright and he could see it full in the starlight. It was man-shaped, draped in rags dusted with snow and tattered until they were little more than cobwebs, but the eyes above the grinning jaws were empty black holes.
Duke Isgrimnur had only a moment to gape at this incomprehensible apparition before it lurched toward him, muddy hand grabbing at the empty air. The duke lifted Kvalnir and moved crabways, keeping the great blade between him and the dismal thing. The night was full of despairing cries, but when Isgrimnur called he heard no answering shouts, and he felt a moment of utter terror thinking all his men might have been attacked and killed in their sleep.
The thing with no eyes stumbled toward him like a drunkard, head wagging, jaws snapping loosely. Only as Isgrimnur drew back his sword to ward it off did he see and recognize the bracelet on the thing’s clawing hand. It was gold that Isgrimnur himself had given out as war-booty after the battle for the Hayholt, a reward to his brave soldiers. This dead thing had been one of his own men.
The creature moved as crookedly as a wagon with a broken wheel but showed little fear of his sword, so instead of poking at it Isgrimnur strode forward, swinging Kvalnir in a broad arc to take the thing high in the neck. He felt the blow land, felt the bones beneath the rags snap, then the thing staggered to one side and toppled.
“Haddi! To me, curse you!” Isgrimnur called, but before he could find Haddi or any of his other liegemen, the thing the duke had just killed dragged itself back onto its feet.
“Damnation,” was all Isgrimnur could say.
With its neck cut mostly through, the dead man’s head hung limply to one side, bobbing and swinging as it staggered toward him. The duke cursed again and kept cursing as he lifted his sword and shoved it into the thing’s guts, or at least where its guts should be, then put all his weight into it so he could drive the living corpse back into the wreckage of the tent.
Even tangled in the tent’s hides, the eyeless thing still did not stop trying to get up, but by luck the duke had sliced through its backbone with his last thrust; now the struggling figure looked like two men huddled in a single costume for some holiday merriment, neither half able to get the other to cooperate. Isgrimnur swore again and hacked with broad Kvalnir until the head finally came off and the dead thing stopped moving.
Haddi had vanished, and none of Isgrimnur’s other servants were close by. The camp was in chaos, and now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark, the duke was unsettled to see how many of the shadowy shapes around him were not his living soldiers but corpses animated by witchcraft. He began shouting again for his men, but before any of them reached him he had to kill two more of the terrible things, including one that had only one leg but still hopped slowly after him with intent to murder. Using Kvalnir more like an axe than a sword, he managed to take off the heads of both revenants while sustaining only a few scratches, but already he was winded and seeing sparks at the edge of his vision. Terror was stealing his breath, making him feel as though he fought uphill at a fierce angle. Some terrible Norn magicks were at work, that seemed certain. How many of these creatures were there?
How many have we buried? he thought bleakly. That’s the answer.
Some of the duke’s men finally found him, their eyes bulging with horror as they begged him for answers he could not give. He took a moment to look up to the slope above the camp where they had buried most of the dead, a spot that received more sun than most, which had made the frozen ground easier to dig. A swarm of clumsy shapes were clambering from the burial trenches there, slipping and tumbling but always moving downhill toward the living.
“Take their heads off,” he told his men. “Without a head they fall and stay down. Take their heads!”
He was relieved to see a bulky shape he felt sure was Brindur gathering men of his own, and beyond that, like a single tree still standing after a great windstorm, Vigri’s banner had been raised and someone was waving it in the air, drawing more survivors.
As Duke Isgrimnur’s own small troop set about cutting down the dead
that surrounded them, he saw others doing the same. The rout was halted, the men recovering, and the tide of battle finally seemed to be turning, or at least he hoped so. But many of the Rimmersmen had realized what they fought and were weeping even as they cut and hacked at the clumsy dead things.
More cursed Norn tricks, Isgrimnur thought, and this one the foulest of all. Still, they could not hope to defeat our greater numbers with such slow-moving foes, even if they are our dead comrades. Something tugged at his thoughts, something beyond the moment’s struggle. But wait, what followed the last time they created such a horror? The White Foxes always have more than one purpose—
His mind suddenly clear, Isgrimnur began to bellow, “’Ware the gate, men! ’Ware the mountain! All eyes watch for the White Foxes!”
Other voices picked up the duke’s call and added their own, lifting their warnings above the shouts and curses of those fighting the dead. As Isgrimnur hacked the head from a stumbling thing that would have pulled down one of his soldiers from behind, a sentry’s horn sounded raggedly from the base of the mountain near the gates. He heard some of his men shouting, “The gate!” and “The mountain!” and “The gates are open!” Another screamed, “The whiteskins are coming!”
Isgrimnur cursed himself for being right, and also for not being right swiftly enough. “That is the real danger!” he bellowed. “Men, close up. Fight your way toward the Nakkiga Gate. We are attacked! The Norns are trying to flee the mountain!”
But that did not make sense, he realized even as he shouted it. Where would the Norns flee to? The mountain was surely their last refuge. Still, it was clear now from the eddying shapes moonlight made of the battling men that those nearest the gate, the sentries and the engineers tending the siege weapons, were bearing the main brunt of a wave of attackers.
“It’s the ram, damn it!” the duke cried out as he finally understood. “Hurry to the ram! Vigri! Brindur! They mean to destroy the ram!”
His men could replace the great tree that was its body, he knew, but if the Norns managed to ruin or make off with the mighty iron head of the bear, it could not be replaced before winter came. There was not enough iron left in the camp to forge another without leaving the army weaponless.
“Leave the dead where they are and cut your way toward the gates!” he shouted. It was like a dream, like his dream, like falling helplessly into darkness. “By all that is holy, does no one hear me? Protect the ram!”
Porto would never forget that night—the night the dead woke up. He and the rest of Aerling Surefoot’s men had found a new tunnel on the mountain, killed its single guard after an exchange of arrows, then blocked the passage at the end of the cavern with heavy stones and logs. With so much to do, they had not returned from the mountainside until after dark. It had been a fearful task, clambering down those icy, treacherous slopes when they did not dare light a torch for fear of lurking Norn bowmen, so by the time they reached the bottom the Mountain Goats had collapsed into sleep in a great huddle without bothering to find their way back to their designated fires.
Porto woke at the first shouts, but in his weariness he took the cries for something less fearful—men brawling among themselves perhaps, a common thing during this long, bone-chilling siege. It was only when he heard the great, creaking noise of the Nakkiga gates swinging open and the nearest sentries shouting their alarms, that Porto realized something dire was happening.
Mounted shadows swept outward from the gate, cutting down all before them in an unnatural near-silence. Even the cries of their victims were louder than the muffled hooves of the attackers’ mounts. Then, as Porto hurried forward, trying to find one of the scattered groups of soldiers to join, he saw that the duke’s camp was being attacked not just from the front, but from the rear as well, creating terrible confusion.
A man-shaped figure came staggering toward him out of the dark. At first he thought it was some hideously wounded Northman—which, in a way, it was, although this one’s wounds had killed him days or weeks earlier. The thing barely had eyes, just gleaming wetness deep in the sockets, and its rotting shroud exposed gaping, bloodless wounds in its face and chest.
The dead, he realized, terrified but also strangely unsurprised. The Norns have raised the dead. Our dead.
He dodged the thing’s clumsy reach but was almost caught by a swipe from the rusting knife clutched in its other hand. The thing did not even seem to realize it was armed, swinging both arms aimlessly, and Porto thanked God and all the saints that the things were slow as he leaped past it and brought his sword around hard enough to slice the dead man’s neck to the bone. The corpse stumbled, then slowly turned toward him as if its head were not half severed. Porto dragged his sword free and this time hacked at the corpse’s legs until he smashed its shin into a ragged white pulp of bone and unbleeding flesh and the thing finally toppled. Meanwhile he could hear the cries of his fellows as the shadowy White Foxes from the gate darted in and out among the Northmen, dealing death and terrible wounds, seemingly at will.
Porto finally severed the corpse’s head from its shoulders, stilling its movements, but he had been driven away from the nearest group of his fellow soldiers and now stood by himself in a swirling chaos of men and shadows. Some of the dark shapes seemed impossibly swift, others slow as dying insects. He called out for Aerling and the rest of the Mountain Goats but he might as well have been shouting in an empty forest.
Something careened toward him, a huge dark shape that, only at the last instant, he saw was a horse and rider. He had only time to throw himself flat on the snowy ground before he felt the wind of the rider’s stroke pass just above him. When he rolled over the Norn had vanished into the dark again.
Porto did not know how long he had been fighting, or even whether many of his fellows still lived. His greatest fear, though, had not come to pass: he had destroyed half a dozen walking corpses and crippled several others, but none of the dead faces had been Endri’s. He hoped that if the demon-spell had roused the dead boy, the stones piled on his grave had kept him in the ground.
As he stood for a moment, head bowed, fighting for breath, he heard a shout of something like triumph. It didn’t sound like the poisonous cry of one of the Norns but like that of a good, hoarse mortal man, and he felt a sudden hope. What had happened?
The greatest knot of fighting was down by the gates, where Porto could see a large number of living men surrounding a single pale rider, who was slashing away on all sides with a blade that was invisible in the darkness but clearly swift and deadly. Then one of the mortal spearmen got in a lucky thrust and knocked off the rider’s helmet. The Norn’s horse reared, and Porto saw a gleam of moon-pale hair. It was the female Norn-warrior he had seen at Tangleroot Castle, he felt certain, the woman who had brought reinforcements to save her kin trapped in the ruins. Half a dozen Northmen’s bodies lay beneath her horse’s hooves, but she was fighting defensively, and even as he admired her speed and skill, Porto headed toward the fight to help his fellows. Thane Brindur and a few of his men were still trying to bring her down with hand-axes, swords, and jabbing spears, but the Norn woman made her horse spin so swiftly it seemed like magic, and each time her arm swung a man reeled back with a fountaining wound or collapsed where he stood.
Somebody called from the gate. This time it was no mortal voice, but a high, birdlike screech, and the Norn woman immediately wheeled her mount toward the sound, her sword cutting the air so swiftly that the soldiers she had been keeping at bay could only throw themselves on the ground and then crawl away to avoid being trampled or decapitated. The pale-haired warrior galloped back toward the gate and the shadows waiting for her there. The Northmen got to their feet and chased her, shouting in triumph.
We’ve driven them back, Porto realized. He had never really thought he would survive this storm of death and madness, but the Norn horde was retreating into the open gate, fleeing back into the mountain. Brindur led the chase
, but he was on foot and the Norns moved like wind itself, seeming to glide across the uneven ground. The Northmen could not catch them.
Porto slumped to his knees. The massive sally-gate groaned as it began to swing inward, then slammed thunderously shut behind the last of the Norns. A dozen or so Northmen leaped and shouted and pounded on the gates with their weapons, still seized by battle madness, as if they could conquer the entire mountain by themselves if only they might pass the threshold.
Porto could feel all his new wounds, the sharp cuts the shadowy Norns had dealt him and the scrapes and bloody weals left by dead fingernails. He was so tired that he almost lay down among his dead and wounded comrades to sleep, but feared he would be buried by mistake.
As he stood trying to get his breath back, his legs shaky as a newborn colt’s, he saw something crawling toward him. It was so low to the ground he wanted to believe it some scavenging animal that had crept out onto the field in search of human flesh, but it did not move like any natural thing.
He lifted his sword. The blade felt heavy as a chestnut-wood beam.
His terror that the dead thing would prove to be Endri, or some other comrade, ended when the crawling shape lifted its face to the starlight. He did not recognize its agonized mouth or staring eyes, but there was something strange about it that still caught his attention. He stood all but unmoving as the thing kept crawling toward his feet, his blade quivering with the effort of his aching arms to keep it upright. The slick wetness of the blood trail left on the snowy earth behind it caught his eye. As it drew near, it raised a wavering hand toward him; then, when the effort was apparently too much, it let its pale hand drop onto Porto’s boot.
“Help . . . me,” it gasped.
The terrible thing was not a moving corpse, Porto realized in shock, but a living man. This was one of his fellow soldiers, a mortally wounded Rimmersman leaving his blood smeared behind him.
