Europa

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “And I promise she’ll be dead in a few moments.” Ragnar hefted his axe and started down the steps toward her.

  There were only six steps and no room at the bottom for a second person, and as soon as the old man had taken his second step, Wren swung her sling at his face. He took the blow on his fist and then raised his axe to strike her with the butt of its bone handle.

  “Ragnar!” Halfdan shoved through the men and grabbed the head of the raised axe. The two of them struggled over the weapon for a moment and Halfdan lost his grip, leaving Ragnar off-balance on the stairs. Wren grabbed the walls on either side of the sunken stairs and hurled herself up onto the snowy grass just as Ragnar tumbled down into the bottom of the steps at the foot of the steel door.

  Finding her sling empty, she grabbed a stone from the pouch on her belt and lurched up to her knees, but Ragnar’s three friends hadn’t moved. They all leaned back, arms folded over their chests, axes standing in the snow against their legs. They were frowning down at Ragnar. The old man groaned and tried to push himself up, but he had fallen at an awkward angle into the stone well at the bottom of the steps and his legs were wedged against the wall under his body.

  “You!” Halfdan shoved one of the silent three. “Get him out of there.”

  The man took his time, lingering to give Halfdan a few dirty looks and to make it plain that he wasn’t afraid of the burly guard, but he did go down the steps and he hauled Ragnar up off the floor and helped the older man back up to the frozen earth.

  Halfdan grabbed the man’s shirt and yanked him forward. “That girl in there is Skadi’s prisoner, and Skadi says she doesn’t die. Understand?”

  Ragnar tried to shove himself free, but Halfdan’s huge fist remained buried in his shirt. Ragnar said, “She’s no girl anymore, she’s one of them!”

  “That’s right, she’s got the plague,” Halfdan said. “And the queen’s going to cure the damn thing, and to make a cure she needs a beast to test it on. So either you leave that girl in there, or we can send you out into the hills to find another one on your own.”

  “Look at you, thinking you’re somebody because your cousin was king. Well, Ivar’s dead now, isn’t he? And you’re nobody.” Ragnar struggled with the warrior again and this time managed to get his shirt free and he limped back a few steps. He spat in the grass. “And the only cure for the plague is a blade through the neck.”

  Halfdan nodded. “Maybe. I’ll keep that in mind if you ever get bit. Or if I think you’ve been bit. Now get out.” He looked at the others. “All of you, get out.”

  The men rocked slowly from foot to foot, shifting their weight and casting dark glances at one another, but they all turned and trudged back toward the castle gate. Wren avoided the eyes of the man whose hand she broke, and when they were all gone around the corner of the castle, she dropped to the ground to sit on the side of the stairs and blew out a long breath.

  “You all right?” Halfdan shuffled a little closer and squinted down at the steel door of the cell.

  “As fine as fine can be,” she said. “I just hope Freya comes back soon with that ring. It’s exhausting being this brave all the time.”

  Chapter 11. Flies

  Freya looked at the huge drill on its rusting steel legs. Inside its body she could see chambers and boxes, tubes and strings, all made of different hues of steel and copper and tin. She tapped her spear on the long shaft of the drill and listened to the sound echoing down into the tunnel. The machine’s position on the slope made it lean out at a precarious angle, made all the more precarious by the crumbling appearance of the steel legs gripping the mountain’s face. The tunnel struck downward at the same vicious angle, its walls ribbed and grooved by the mechanical drill’s passing.

  “It’s going to be hard to climb down there,” she said. “And even harder to climb out. We should have brought a rope.”

  “We have one.” Leif strode across the pit to the engine and opened a small metal door, and pulled out a length of rope. “They used this to lower the workers into the tunnel. The machine lowered them down and pulled them out again, but since it’s broken now, we’ll have to do the lifting the old fashioned way.”

  Freya smiled. “Well, you’re the smallest of us, and the lightest. Are you volunteering to be lowered down there?”

  Leif frowned. “I’m not going down there. You’re the hunters. So hunt already.”

  Erik took the rope, pulling all of it free from the little drum inside the machine and letting it spill across the floor of the pit. Then he tied one end to the engine and tossed the rest of it down the tunnel. He looked at Freya and signed, “I’ll be quick.”

  “You’ll be careful,” she said.

  Erik grinned as he took hold of the rope in both hands and climbed slowly down into the darkness.

  “How does he plan to see anything down there?” Leif asked. “The sun is at the wrong angle. It’ll be black as death in that hole.”

  “He doesn’t need to see anything. It’s a tunnel, in a straight line, right? He just needs to follow it down and then let his ears and nose and hands tell him the rest.”

  Leif stood at the lip of the tunnel, frowning. “I don’t hear any flies.”

  “I don’t care what you don’t hear. Erik is a very good listener.”

  “I suppose he’d have to be since he can’t speak for himself.” Leif grinned at her. “What on earth do you see in him? He’s an ox. An overgrown imbecile, wiggling his fingers like some madman. Don’t tell me there aren’t any better men in Logarven.”

  Freya lashed out with her foot, but the youth leapt back, grinning. She turned her attention back to the hole. “He’s smarter than you.”

  Leif laughed. “What makes you so sure?”

  “He’s never been stupid enough to make me angry at him.”

  Leif’s smile faded.

  They stood in silence, Freya watching the tension on the rope as it shuddered in the dark tunnel, and Leif gazing out at the desolate mountainside. After a few minutes the rope went slack and fell to the ground.

  “Erik? Shake the rope once if you’re all right,” Freya called out. And a moment later, a limp shiver rippled up through the rope.

  “What do you think he’s going to find down there?” Leif asked. “Fenrir’s mausoleum full of demon statues and silver and pearls?”

  “More likely he’ll find a broken claw, some fur, a gnawed bone, or maybe some old scat.”

  Leif sighed and rolled his eyes. “The glory and the glamour of your trade are truly overwhelming.”

  The rope snapped back up and began shuddering gently, and Freya could hear the soft padding of Erik’s boots on the tunnel floor. It took the hunter longer to climb up than it did to climb down, and when he finally emerged into the light Freya’s back was sore from leaning over the lip of the hole for so long. Erik hauled himself up the last few steps and sauntered away from the tunnel, and sat down in a heap. His face shone with sweat as he massaged his hands together. After a moment he signed, “That’s a very deep hole.”

  Freya smiled as she knelt beside him. “I believe you. What’s at the bottom?”

  “Not much. I found where the shaft ends at the drill head. It’s enormous. But there’s no chamber down there for a demon. All I found were some rough pockets in the walls,” he signed. He untied a small cord on the side of his belt and held up the treasure dangling from the looped end. “This was in one of those pockets.”

  Freya sniffed the ancient dung. “No scent. No way to know what left it there.”

  “What about your flies?” Leif asked. He remained at his post on the top of the pit, showing no interest in coming any closer to the hunters and their discovery. “Did you find the flies that you heard in there?”

  “I heard them,” Erik signed. “But I didn’t feel any moving around in there.”

  “Well, maybe there’s something more interesting inside this.” Freya took the dung from the string and crumbled it in her bare hands. It fell to pieces, so
me as fine as sand, and much of it falling through her fingers to the ground.

  Erik picked up one of the fallen pieces. He raised his hand to sign, but a fat red fly buzzed up from the brown lump in his hand. The fly whizzed about Erik’s face, and he waved it away. Then he gasped and recoiled, pulling his hand to his belly and rubbing it hard with his other hand. Freya frowned, drew her knife, and after a moment of watching the buzzing fly, she slapped it down against the ground with the flat of her blade and crushed it. When she took her knife away, there was a large red smear on the stone.

  “Let’s see it.” She held out her hand to her husband, and he reluctantly showed her the angry red welt on the side of his palm. “Ugh. Bloodflies. Gross old dung-dwelling bloodflies. Next time, you should bring me some scat with pearls in it.”

  Erik smiled.

  “What is it? What happened?” Leif called down from his perch.

  “A mighty battle,” Freya said. She winked at her husband. “But he’ll live to fight another day.” They stood up and dusted themselves off, and shouldered their spears. Erik led the way back up to the edge of the pit and signed, “There’s nothing here. The trail’s too cold. Fenrir hasn’t been here lately.”

  “We need to keep looking,” she said to Leif. “Is there anywhere else near here where we might pick up a trail? Some place that the reavers might have attacked recently?”

  The youth squinted at them each in turn. “I’m not here to give you a tour of Ysland. The queen told me to bring you here so you could begin your hunt. I have duties back in the city.”

  “I thought your duty was to protect that city, not to hide in it.” Freya shrugged. “But if you don’t know anything, then we don’t need you. We’ll go on alone.”

  Leif sneered at her. “There are a few farms to the northeast of here, out toward Glymur Falls. I can take you there if you want to look for more tracks or shit or whatever. But that’s as much time as I’m willing to waste on you two.”

  “Waste?” Freya frowned. “We’re looking for the rinegold that will help Skadi cure the reaver plague and save all of Ysland. How is that a waste of time?”

  “It’s a waste of time if you’re going to fail,” he said quietly as he turned to leave. “And I’ve faced Fenrir before. I know you’re going to fail.”

  Erik lowered his spear and mimed stabbing Leif in the back while making many ridiculous and angry faces. Freya laughed. Leif glanced back over his shoulder, but Erik already had his spear at his side and they all set out across the southern face of the mountain.

  As they rounded a jagged spire of volcanic rock, Freya paused to look back one last time at Ivar’s Drill, the crooked and rusting monument to Skadi’s dream, the king’s death, and the birth of a nightmare. But to her, the simple pillar of the engine seemed unworthy to mark so much hope and so much suffering, and she wondered what future generations would think of this strange metal marker alone on the mountainside.

  If there are any future generations to see it.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Leif led the hunters across the south face of Mount Esja and into the colder hills to the east where the heat of the volcano faded. The ground grew firmer and the grass browner, and eventually they found light dustings of snow on the ground and thin plates of ice on the puddles crunching and cracking beneath their feet.

  Looking up, Freya could see the distant peaks of the Hodur’s Hill, Bjorn’s Peak, and Thoris’s Glacier to the northeast, but between her and those ancient giants stretched a rippling, broken plain of hills, boulders, streams, and lakes that promised to slow all travelers to a fraction of their pace.

  As the sun glided lower in the western sky behind them, the shadows in the mountain passes grew deeper and darker and colder. The wind rose, whistling and whining through the narrow ravines. Freya paused at turn in the trail to gaze out over the southern plains, over the dark blot of Hengavik and the silvery sheet of Denveller Lake.

  Three nights. It’s only been three nights, and we’ve only walked from there to there.

  Her eyes flicked across the landscape again.

  It feels like it’s been a month, like a journey worthy of a saga or two. All those hours on the road, and the fighting, and the strangers. But it’s only been three nights.

  They were well onto the eastern face of Esja and descending quickly toward the lower hills when the sun finally kissed the western edge of the world and the shadow of the mountain painted the world in black and gray and more black. Stars gleamed in the eastern darkness and as the sunset reds washed out of the sky, the heavens transformed into a blue and violet sea sparkling with diamonds.

  Erik pointed to a crevasse just below the trail and signed, “We should be all right in there for the night.”

  Leif glanced back and groaned. “Oh, what does it want now? Do you need to feed it again? Does it need to piss?”

  “We’re going to sleep here.” Freya nodded down at the crevasse. “I’ll take the first watch. And if you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head, then you won’t have a tongue to keep for much longer.” She held the youth’s gaze for a moment, and then followed Erik down into the dark crack in the mountainside.

  Her husband placed the butt of his spear on the ground and the tip against the rock wall, and draped a blanket across it to form a simple little tent, and he slipped inside with their second blanket and was soon snoring softly. Leif gave the tent a quick glare before stretching out in a patch of starlight on the bare ground and closing his eyes.

  Freya climbed up to the top of the crevasse to look out at the mountainside. She saw the ancient lava flows frozen in time, and the gravel cascades resting in their dry river beds, and the thin clusters of grass standing in the cracks in the earth, shivering in the cold night breeze. Thick blankets of snow and thin sheets of ice glistened everywhere in white, gray, and blue. Overhead a thousand times ten thousand stars spread out from horizon to horizon, drawing crude images of wolves, bears, eagles, dragons, ships, and spears in the sky.

  She thought of Wren in the castle of Rekavik, perhaps talking with Skadi and Thora about ghosts and death and monsters, eating warm food and sleeping on soft beds. She pitied the girl and her lonely life trapped in Gudrun’s tower, all alone with a madwoman, and she was glad that Wren would have these days and nights among decent people. Even strange company was better than no company at all.

  And then she thought of Katja, deformed and insane, snarling and drooling, and locked in a cold windowless cell buried in the earth under the castle’s wall.

  Does her head still hurt from when I kicked her?

  Freya curled up as she sat on the lip of the crevasse, wrapping her arms around her knees. A few days ago they’d been talking about taking a few days to visit their cousins to the south in the river lands, down near Kivaberg.

  If only we had left then, left Logarven far behind, left before the demon came… But this was no one’s fault. No one was in a hurry to leave and no one had any reason to linger. It was just bad timing. Bad luck. Nothing more.

  She stared at the rolling hills off to the east and the distant snowy mountains gleaming blue and green beneath the shining stars and the rippling auroras.

  But luck can be changed.

  A wolf, a real wolf, howled in the darkness far to the north, and Freya smiled, and she howled back.

  If there are still wolves out there, then the reavers must not be so frightening, or so many. Maybe Leif was wrong. Maybe there are only a few of them. Maybe Erik and I already killed half of them in Denveller. Maybe they were starving and dying, and the last three in the world died at our hands beneath Gudrun’s tower. Maybe the plague is already over.

  When the stars told her that midnight had come, Freya climbed down into the crevasse and shook Leif awake. “Your watch.” She paused only long enough to make sure the youth was truly awake and moving about, and then she slipped into Erik’s tent and curled up in his warm arms with a smile on her lips.

  She was still smiling when the sound of st
ones tumbling down the slope snapped her eyes back open. It was a small sound, a distant sound, but it was far more noise than she had heard all evening.

  Maybe it’s nothing.

  Freya blinked.

  Or maybe it’s something hunting us.

  She crawled out of the tent as quietly as a ghost and looked around for Leif, but there was no sign of him. Frowning, she climbed up to the top of the crevasse and peered out over the mountainside below. Gravel crunched under a foot, and Freya’s eyes widened. Two dark shapes were creeping up through the shadows. Two long, crooked, inhuman shapes.

  For the first moment, she felt nothing and did not move. She just watched them, watched how they moved, how their long bodies reached and pulled and stretched from handhold to foothold, from ledge to ledge. She watched them pause to sniff, cocking their heads to listen with their tall hairy ears, and sometimes even nipping at each others’ legs when they came too close together.

  When the reavers passed behind a rocky outcropping, Freya dropped down into the crevasse and yanked the blanket from their spears, letting the starlight spill on her husband’s face, which shone bright with sweat. She grabbed her spear and shook Erik, and he woke suddenly with a jerk and wild look in his eyes.

  A nightmare? I’ll have to ask him about it later.

  “Two reavers coming up the slope to the east,” she signed.

  He nodded and took his spear. “Where is Leif?” he signed.

  Freya squinted into the shadows, but could not see the black-haired youth anywhere near them. “I don’t know,” she signed.

  Together they climbed back up out of the ravine on the higher western end and knelt down behind a low line of broken stones. After a moment, they spotted a reaver at the far edge of the crevasse where it leaned out, sniffing and peering down into the darkness. Erik wiped the sweat from his brow and shivered, and then he pointed to the beast and nodded, and Freya nodded back.

  Erik took a long silent breath. Then he leapt to his feet, took three running steps down the slope, and hurled his spear. The bolt of steel flashed through the starlight and slammed straight through the reaver’s back and clanged on the rocks beneath it. The beast yelped once and toppled forward, tumbling clumsily into the crevasse with the spear stuck fast through its ribs. Erik heaved a sigh and turned back to their hiding place as his fingers said, “Well, that’s one of—”