Lord of Slaughter

51

‘Three have come.’

‘Future, present and past — virgin, mother and crone.’

‘The Norns are at the water, weaving the fate of men and gods.’

‘The Norns are at the well of fate. It took me so long to find and bring my sisters. It cost so much.’

Who was speaking? Women. The dead girl? Beatrice was one of them, she sensed it.

‘The wolf is coming.’

‘The god is nearly here.’

‘What is required?’

‘What is ever required?’

‘Death of the most dear.’

‘Death of the most dear.’

‘You will not have my baby!’ Beatrice cradled her belly. ‘Loys?’ He came to her, wading warily past the warrior, who seemed oblivious to him.

‘High prices are paid at the well of fate.’

‘Odin gave his eye; what will you give?’

‘What will you give to hear the oracle speak?’

A clatter and a groan from the entrance to the pool and the boy Snake in the Eye came skittering down. The sword was still in him but in his hand he carried Bollason’s head.

He wriggled down and sat on the shelf beside her.

‘Well, here’s a pretty thing,’ he said. ‘Do you not see how the runes come to me? See them in their orbits, eight and eight. Yet eight go missing. Why, they are sitting in the waters. How shall they come to me?’

On the other side of the pool sat the girl, arms around her knees on a shelf above the water. She was young and pale in the ghost light. Next to her sat an old man — one-eyed, his skin stained dark, a rope tight at his neck, his beard and hair a dirty white straggle. He too stared down into the well, his good eye wide, full of madness, his other just a decayed socket. In his hand he had a spear — a blackened, burned shard of wood, but wicked sharp — and he held it as if in deep concentration, like a fisherman waiting on a bank. At Rouen, in the Rouvray forest, she’d seen a body dug from a bog by peat cutters. The old man reminded her of that. He chilled her to the core.

The howl again, nearer and louder.

The man stirred. She had the sense he wasn’t seeing what she saw — he hardly seemed to notice her. His movements were slow, almost torpid, and she remembered how she had felt in her trance on the beacon tower. Was he even there? Or was he some sort of apparition, as the girl seemed to be?

The girl knows what to do; she will lead the way.

Loys pulled himself out of the water, his body convulsing with the cold. He went to Beatrice and she opened her arms to him. He held her tight, trying to make his trembling jaw say some words of comfort. Inside her something keened and moaned. That symbol, the one that said ‘wolf trap’.

That terrible boy, that half-man Snake in the Eye, was talking to her. Her cold-numbed brain hardly registered what he said. Death, death, he was talking about death. He put out his hand to Loys and made a little blowing motion. Loys didn’t pay any attention and the boy looked puzzled.

The howl came from the top of the stream and Beatrice turned to see the wolf.

It was Azemar, though he was terribly changed, his eyes flickering green gems in the lamplight, his body twisted and misshaped like an exhumed root, his muscles tight, so tight they seemed to contort him. He held one shoulder high, the other low; his hands were talons, his jaw long, full of teeth as big as boar’s tusks, and his tongue lolled from his head, black with blood.

Snake in the Eye’s eyes widened with fear.

‘I don’t wish to have any conversation with this fellow,’ he said and jumped into the water. The splash seemed to wake Mauger. He stared at his sword as if trying to work out what it was for.

Azemar — or the thing he’d become — spoke: ‘What is happening to me? I’ve come for you. All these lives I’ve come for you; don’t turn me away now. Aelis, Adisla, Beatrice, don’t turn me away.’

‘I do not belong to you, Azemar.’

‘Do you not recall the light on the hills? Do you not remember what we vowed on the mountainside? I am yours, returned. I am yours.’

‘I remember now,’ said Beatrice. ‘I remember, pain and suffering and a love that died on the teeth of a wolf.’

‘I do not want this,’ said Azemar, ‘but I cannot leave you. I am driven by things I cannot control. I have eaten. I have been consumed. A wolf’s eye watches me.’ He seemed tormented by his words and jumped out over the water, to cling to the side of the cavern, his great talons seizing the rock.

‘Do not let that thing near me!’ shouted Snake in the Eye. ‘He wants something from me, for sure.’

The story you told to the pale god.

Tell it now.

The girl’s voice was in Beatrice’s head.

Snake in the Eye answered it. ‘What story?

Of the god who dies to please the fates.

‘I know you, girl.’ Snake in the Eye had terror in his eyes.

You have always known me.

Snake in the Eye babbled, seeming to talk to no one: ‘There seem so few to slaughter here. I cannot go near the candle wall while he is in front of me.’ He pointed to Azemar.

The wolf Fenrir stands here, the god killer, seething and growling in his hungers. Someone else lies at the threshold, as befits her goddess. Her fate is unseen and undecided. Her skein is not yet woven, her death knot untied.

‘The Norn Verthani is here, mistress of the present, caller of the wolf, holder of the howling rune, mother. The wolf will kill her. Her destiny is foreseen. The Norn Skuld is here, the future, her fingers weaving in unseen currents, dead and so deathless. The crone Norn is here. Uthr. The past, immortal, for ever. She who rules the domain to which heroes fall. Men call her Memory and they call her Hel. We are three and he is three.’

‘Who?’ Snake in the Eye cast his eyes about him, desperate to find the source of the voice.

He waits unbodied in the waters, eight and eight and eight. Gods and men are drawn by the Norns, each to play his part.

‘What of Loys?’ said Beatrice.

One person can still die.

‘He can’t because I can’t see him,’ said Snake in the Eye. ‘Those that can be killed have been killed.’

He is hiding from fate, as you hid.

‘What is his fate?’ said Beatrice.

To die so you might shake free of your destiny of torment. The skein is woven, the threads of fate entangle him.

‘I would die a thousand times before I let him come to harm!’ said Beatrice.

He must die. The well has revealed it. The future is being spun.

As the ghost girl spoke again the white-haired warrior suddenly remembered what his sword was for. He came rushing at Loys through the water, but Azemar sprang off the rocks and knocked the sword aside.

‘For all that has happened, he is my friend,’ he said, his horrid tongue lolling from his saw-toothed jaws.

A voice from somewhere, a shrieking rhyme. It was not the voice of the girl. It was stranger, deeper. At first Loys thought it came from the bloody waters of the well but he realised it was the wolfman, his voice changed, different.

‘She saw wading there through harsh waters

Men who foreswore oaths and murders

And one who covets another’s beloved.

There the snake sucks

On the corpses of the fallen

And the wolf tore men — would you know yet more?’

Azemar’s great teeth ground at the warrior’s ear, his tongue slavering at his neck.

‘I have had my fill of murder,’ said Azemar, his voice like a rain-swollen door on flagstones. ‘I am a holy man and seek only peace. Do not provoke me.’

Mauger did what he had been trained to do since his earliest years. He struck at the wolf, cutting a huge slice out of its flank. The thing screamed terribly as the curved sword bit into its flesh, but it seized Mauger’s arm, tore it from its socket and threw it, still holding the sword, back up the stream.

Mauger’s remaining hand sought the wolf’s wound to tear it open, but he was too weak and too slow. The wolf picked him up and smashed him on the rocks. Then he leaped upon him and began tearing at his flesh.

Loys felt something warm on his fingers. He put up his hand. Blood. Not his own. Beatrice slumped against him. Azemar had knocked Mauger’s sword into her and she had an ugly wound in her side.

‘Help her! Help her!’

Elifr began to speak as if entranced: ‘We have struggled for nothing. Is the wheel turning again? Then the dead god will come and offer his sacrifice and the Norns will be bound to take it.’

‘No!’ shouted Loys. ‘No!’

‘Again and again will she suffer and die? All tenderness denied her, her life washed away on the blood tide.’ Elifr’s eyes were blank as he cradled the corpse of his mother under the water, and it was as if the words were not his own.

‘I will not let this happen!’ Loys tried to staunch the wound but the blood would not stop.

Azemar gulped and tore, his face grotesquely distorted, his wolf eyes green in the lamplight.

Elifr worked his ritual, muttering and whispering as he held the vala down.

‘The wolf shall be the bane of Odin

When the gods to destruction ride.

The wolf shall be the bane of Odin

When the gods to destruction ride.’

Azemar looked up from his feeding, his body like a wax effigy left too long in the sun. His eyes narrowed when he saw the wolfman.

Elifr gave a great cry and let go of the corpse in his arms. He leaped towards Loys, grabbing at his leg. ‘If you want to save her take off the stone,’ he said. ‘Take off the stone! The waters have shown me. Take off the stone!’

‘Why?’

‘To die. The god is coming.’

Loys’ hands were wet with Beatrice’s blood.

Azemar rose to his full height. He was huge — a head above even the tallest man, horribly muscled, his head a patchwork of flesh and hair but unmistakably that of a wolf. Still he fed on the body, gripping the torso in one hand, biting at it as if it was a hunk of bread.

Loys’ mind was numbed by the terror of the wolf-thing, by the sight of Beatrice, wounded and bleeding.

‘Take off the stone,’ said Elifr.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Take you across the bridge of light.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because you have no place in the god’s story. You are not divine nor cursed nor monstrous. You are a man and your skein is still unwoven.’

Beatrice lay dying and he could not imagine his life without her. Loys took off the stone and Elifr dragged him down into the water.