A lone Svartalf stood apart. He wore gleaming black armor and a strange, rune-inscribed, peaked leather cap, also dyed black. Our eyes met across the distance, and he scowled. He raised his arm and pointed at me. “Antafukl!” he cried, but no one paid him any mind.
Spirit bird? What a strange thing to say, I thought.
He whirled to glare at those closest to him, slapping those within reach. “Antafukl!” he repeated, pointing up at me. When his companions dismissed him, the Svartalf spat at their feet and strode to the next closest group and repeated his cry. That group laughed at him and went back to drinking and singing out of key.
The Svartalf whirled, glaring at me as if their behavior was my fault. He began a lurching, stuttering dance that was as different from Althyof’s graceful spinning as night was to day and chanted words that distance and wind made impossible to hear. The runes he cast appeared as sickly aureolin images written in the night in front of him.
Fear churned in my belly, and I dove toward the trees, hoping that by breaking his line of sight, he could not continue the kaltrar he was chanting at me, and it must have worked.
I turned east, wanting to avoid the harbor at all costs, and knowing the Dragon Spine Mountains should be close by. The black forest disgorged a sweeping set of hills at the foot of the mountains, and I angled upward, gaining altitude to fly above them.
Something nudged my side, and though I glanced that direction, there was nothing there. I blinked and shrieked my crow-call into the night. Something nudged me again and…
Thirty-nine
I awoke. Judging the time of day proved impossible inside the Great Forrest of Suel, so I had no idea how long I’d slept, only knowing it hadn’t been long enough. My mouth tasted like a latrine, and my lips were dry and gummed together.
Something nudged my side, and for a moment, the dream blossomed in my mind—the flight, the Svartalf, the oppressive loneliness—but only for a moment, and then it faded like early morning mist. I forced my eyes open, and the same oppressive black murk from the night before greeted me. I remained exhausted—as if I hadn’t slept at all.
Fretyi nudged my ribs again and whined a little. I looked at him, and he wagged his tail, seeming to smile. The morning sounds of my travel companions came from the camp behind me while I scratched the pup behind the ears. “Time to eat, eh, ravenous one?” He cocked his head to the side and treated me to a playful yip. “Yes, I’m getting up, and yes, I will find you some food.”
“About time you woke up,” said Jane. “I thought we’d have to tie you to Slaypnir.”
“I didn’t sleep much, judging by how I feel. What time is it?”
“Your guess is as good as anyone's. No one got much rest, though everyone slept.”
“It’s this place,” said Veethar. “Unnatural.”
As if that explains this place, I thought. Although, maybe to Veethar, it does.
“Come on, slug-a-bed. Everyone’s already eaten and ready. I’ll feed those bottomless pits you call puppies,” said Jane. “Come on, puppy,” she said in a lilting voice, and just like that, puppy and wife both forgot all about me.
“Veethar, what caused this place to…to…” I shrugged, not knowing the right words to describe the place.
Veethar shook his head. “Everything is broken. The chains of bits that make things as they are, seem to be corrupted, changed. The life here…feels less like life and more like the truykar.”
I glanced at the surrounding trees, remembering the shambling, maggot-infested truykar we’d encountered in the Darks of Kruyn and shuddered. “Are these trees…undead?” My imagination painted a picture of reaching tree limbs and grasping roots in the darkness surrounding our camp.
Veethar shook his head, though he didn’t seem sure of himself. “No, they are not revenant trees. I’m not even sure such a thing is possible.”
“If it were possible, the Dark Queen would be the cause,” said Meuhlnir.
“No, Tyeldnir, these trees are alive, but they live a corrupted life.” Veethar shook his head. “Even that makes no sense,” he muttered.
“On Mithgarthr, a forest called the Red Forest surrounds a nuclear power plant that exploded—”
“A what?” asked Freya from across the camp.
“A place that generates electricity by splitting atoms—like a controlled explosion of great power. Anyway, this plant, Chernobyl, had a huge steam explosion that blew the containment building to smithereens. After that, a fire broke out, and it spread the radiation in the wind, raining particles on the surrounding forest. Look, none of these details are important. The point is this: that radiation killed off all the microbes, insects, and fungi that cause dead things to decompose, so the trees, the leaves, everything that dies there, will never decay. When they die, they stand or lay where they fell, forever in the state they were in the day they died.”
Veethar shook his head. “No, that hasn’t happened here, and further, these trees, these leaves, they are still alive but frozen in time.”
“Even the leaves on the ground? They’re still alive?”
“Yes,” said Veethar with a shrug. “They follow the cycles of the year, but nothing dies, nothing decays.”
“That’s spooky,” said Sig.
Veethar nodded gravely. “I’ve seen nothing like it.” He walked over and petted the nose of the closest horse.
I ate a few bites of bread and cheese and submitted to Sif’s ministrations and scolding. Afterward, we set out on horseback, feeling as if we were riding at midnight.
We rode until we were tired and hungry before we ate and rested—or tried, anyway. It took real effort to fall asleep in that place.
Forty
“Everyone up!” shouted Veethar.
I groaned, feeling like I hadn’t slept more than five minutes. I cracked open my eyes, expecting full darkness, but full darkness under a star-filled sky. Instead, what greeted me was the ever-present velvety dark canopy of the Great Forest of Suel.
My legs were stiff, almost numb, and I groaned again. I tried to rub my face, to clear the sleep from my eyes, but my arms felt heavy, enervated. I turned my head to the side, and lurched in the other direction, my pulse slamming in my veins.
Between me and the underbrush crouched a spider the size of a large dog. Its four black orb-like eyes tracked my thrashing movements, its yellow-haired forelegs waving in the air. The fuzzy hair that coated the rest of its body was white with dark purple stripes.
I lurched away from the monster in a panic, and something ripped, and my left arm was free. I hoisted myself up to a seated position, not taking my eyes off the white and purple spider. It separated its forelegs, revealing fangs at least four inches long and dripping with a syrupy, clear liquid that was no doubt its venom.
“Everyone!” shouted Veethar again. “Wake up!”
I couldn’t move my legs—they had that tingling pins-and-needles numbness of restricted blood flow. A ropy, white substance covered my legs and attached them to the ground with thick strands of goo. I grabbed it, and my fingers stuck to it as if I had grabbed a rope made of super-glue. I broke several of the strands, and the huge spider near me hissed and clacked its fangs together. It skittered a step or two toward me, then Veethar was there, kicking it into the underbrush.
Keri and Fretyi growled and snarled, hunching low to the ground between the spider and me, tails rigid and straight out behind them, lips quivering back from their teeth.
“Up! Hank get up!” he yelled and ran to the other side of the camp.
“What are they?” mumbled Jane.
“Spiders, but big!” yelled Sig.
“Get up!” I bellowed. “I’m webbed to the ground, and the webbing contains a numbing agent.”
“Everyone up!” yelled Veethar. “They are all around us!”
I finished clearing the webbing off my legs and got to my feet. I belted on my pistols and bent to retrieve the floppy hat Althyof had enchanted for me. A rope of web came hurtling
out of the underbrush and slapped against the back of my hand. The numbness started right away, and I jerked my hand back, pulling the purple and white spider out of the underbrush by its own strand of webbing.
Keri and Fretyi leapt at the thing, snarling, each attacking from opposite sides of the spider as if they’d been hunting all their lives instead of eating scraps out of my hand. The web fell away, and the spider circled to face Keri, forelegs coming up. Fretyi ducked in and bit the spider’s back leg, shaking his head in violent arcs. The varkr pups were almost as tall as the spider but weighed considerably less. The spider hissed and whirled around, pulling Fretyi off his feet, and Keri shot in to grab a leg. I took two steps forward and kicked the spider as hard as I could with half-numb legs. The thing squealed and thrashed its legs, but the pups held fast, growling and grinding their jaws together. I kicked it again, this time angling for its head. When my foot connected with the spider’s head, there was a tearing sound followed by a pop, and it went spinning into the darkness ringing the camp.
Citrine-colored blood coursed from the spider’s neck, and when it hit the ground, it hissed and ignited in a flash of sickly yellow flame, consuming the old leaves there in a blinding flash. The varkr pups yelped and ran behind me, whining. The spider lurched around a few steps, spraying flaming blood everywhere and fell in a heap.
Webbing stuck to the back of my hand still, and an icy numbness was spreading across my hand. I detached the goop and let it fall next to the spider.
“Dad! Help!” yelled Sig.
I turned to where he’d been sleeping. Thick strands of the webbing crossed Sig’s chest and legs, gluing him to the ground, and a spider stood above him. I lurched in his direction, but before I’d gone three steps, Skowvithr was there, silvery blades bared. Keri and Fretyi bolted toward the spider, snarling and barking to raise the dead.
“Their blood ignites in the air!” I yelled.
Skowvithr nodded and slashed at the webbing holding Sig fast. The spider bounced up and down—almost as if it were a petulant child, pissed off that someone was breaking its sandcastle. When his arms were free, Sig batted the spider away—and into the smoldering fire.
The spider yelped and leapt through the air, four feet off the ground. It landed near Mothi, who scooped it even higher into the air with the flat of one axe and then batted it into the trees with the other. “How many of them are there?”
Everyone was on their feet, staring into the woods surrounding us, and everyone but Veethar had web hanging from their bodies. “Get the web off,” I said. “It keeps on numbing you even without the spider. Anyone see any more of the bastards?”
Keri and Fretyi growled in unison—noses pointed toward the woods, tails held stiff parallel to the ground. “Pups! Stay!” I said. Keri glanced at me for a second and whined, but then snapped his eyes back into the forest.
“I don’t like this,” said Veethar. “Arachnids don’t act like this.”
“Or grow this large, but hey, who wants to be picky,” mumbled Althyof, picking webbing out of his hair and beard.
“Have you heard of these before?” asked Jane.
“No,” said Veethar.
“Well, they seem afraid of us, now that we are upright,” said Meuhlnir. “They don’t want to face us awake. At least for now.”
“And how many days must we be in this forest?”
He shrugged. “Three more. Four, maybe.”
“Four days without sleep,” said Jane.
“We can mount a watch. Some of us sleep, and some of us keep the spiders away,” said Mothi.
We set a schedule, and we were not among the first to stand watch, so Jane and I pulled our bedroll closer to the fire. “It had to be spiders,” I muttered.
“Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from the mean old spiders.”
“Don’t joke, I’ll hold you to it.”
We tried to sleep, but spiders tried to get to those of us trying to sleep whenever the watchers drifted more than five feet away. The constant activity made it impossible to drift off to sleep—never mind the spiders.
I sat up with a sigh.
“This will not work,” mumbled Jane.
“No,” I sighed. I glanced around, and no one on the sleep shift was sleeping. “We might as well move out. Maybe the next place won’t allow giant, mutant spider freaks to join the country club.”
Everyone agreed, so we packed up and moved out. Riding through the Forest was like a nightmare in and of itself: the reaching branches, the monotonous quality of the light—or lack thereof—and the constant skittering in the brush of spiders paralleling our course.
“How will we be able to do this?” whispered Jane, riding beside me.
“Look at it this way: it will only take two days if we don’t sleep.”
“But the horses can’t go twenty-four hours a day. And you know what being over-tired does to you.”
“Makes me handsome and irresistible?”
“Don’t make me punch you.”
“Yes, dear.”
“That’s better. Now, answer my question and make it snappy.”
“Yes, dear. I don’t know the answer, but we don’t have much choice, either way.”
“You call that an answer?”
“Yes, dear.”
Time took on a monotonous, unreal feeling, with no difference between periods of alertness and periods of lethargy. We rode where Veethar led us, swaying in our saddles, trusting him to guide us through the foul place. No one spoke much on the first day, and we spoke even less as the days and nights blurred together. The interminable ride was punctuated only by rest periods for the horses, in which we sat around a campfire while lassitude tried to steal us away. We ate mechanically, the food tasteless and textureless.
I never even thought of my dream, and the Svartalf runeskowld it had contained, but the scroll case at my side was ever in my mind, eating away at my resolve.
Forty-one
We spoke less and less, communicating by grunts and gestures—even between husband and wife. Sig and Mothi no longer played and joked, but rather slumped listlessly in their saddles. It even affected the horses, who plodded on with heads drooping.
It seemed to me that we’d been riding for far too long—weeks instead of days—but I had no concept of the geography of the Forest. I considered calling out to Veethar, but the idea of my voice breaking the silence of the Forest seemed…villainous. I nudged Slaypnir’s flanks with my heels—as close to giving him the spurs as I’d ever come. He lifted his head as if it took great effort and turned a baleful eye my way. “Catch Veethar up,” I said. “Please.”
Slaypnir dropped his head again—not in a gentle fashion, but all at once as though his neck muscles had melted—but he increased his pace a little. Veethar glanced at me as I pulled up next to him. His eyes seemed glassy, dazed. The idea of speaking to him was exhausting. “Are…you sure…we’re on the…right track?”
Veethar grunted. He opened his mouth but closed both his eyes and his mouth at the same time, while he reined his horse to stop. His eyes opened wide, and he shook his head as though fighting sleep. He shook his head again—more violently this time—glancing around as if he did not understand where we were or how we’d gotten there. When he looked up at me, concern wrinkled the skin around his eyes. “I—” he said with alarm in his eyes. He tilted his head to the side.
“What is it?” I asked.
His hand shot up and sliced through the air. He listened for a moment. “Do you hear it?” he whispered.
I cocked my head to listen, and there was something…at the edge of my hearing. There was a crash behind us, and I snapped my head around. Althyof lay on the ground next to his horse, unconscious. Then I understood the thing at the edge of my hearing.
…Svefn…Kvild…Truhmur…Svefn…Kvild…Truhmur…
The words repeated, over and over, at the edge of my auditory range. A harsh, grating voice uttered the words… “Sleep, rest, dream,” I muttered.
>
“And the runeskowld is the first to succumb?”
“It’s a kaltrar, no question, but nothing like the lausaveesa or triblinkr Althyof chants.”
“No,” said Veethar. “It’s filled with darkness, like this damn forest.”
“The Black Queen?”
Veethar shook his head. “I… I don’t think so.”
An image of a Svartalf in black armor and a black, runed leather cap flashed through my mind. The dream! “The first night!” I murmured.
“Yes?”
“That first night, I dreamed I was a bird. I flew north to the Stormur Syow—to a huge bay shaped like a three-leaf clover.”
Veethar nodded, eyes boring into mine.
“There were thousands of dragon ships in the harbor, and twenty times as many men, trolls, demons, and Svartalfar on the shore. They all seemed drunk, except one, one wearing black armor and a black leather cap with runes all over it. Do the Svartalfar have runeskowlds?”
Veethar shook his head, with a helpless gesture at Althyof. Someone else crashed to the ground behind us: Mothi.
“Wake up!” I yelled.
Veethar shook his head. “That won’t work. Haydnadlaysi!”
“Deafness?” I asked but couldn’t hear my own voice. I could, however, hear the kaltrar.
Veethar shook his head and canceled his spell. “We need Althyof.”
I turned to the fallen Tverkr, and Meuhlnir crashed to the ground next to Sinir. “This is getting out of hand,” I muttered. I walked to Althyof and bent over him. I grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. “Wake up!” His head lolled around as if his neck were broken and his eyelids didn’t even flutter. “Vakna!” I said, pulling as much power from the strenkir af krafti as I knew how, but Althyof slept on.
“We need a runeskowld to combat this,” Veethar said.
Knowledge of the runes filled my mind, thanks to the strange man hanging in Iktrasitl, the man who must have been Odin. I could see the pattern I needed, the runes seeming to fit together on their own. “Yek air Hank neelithi runeskowld,” I chanted. “Vakna, Althyof, hoospownti roona. Vakna, Althyof, hoospownti runeskowld. Vakna, Althyof!”
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 78
