Prince of Fools

TWENTY-TWO

Maladon is Norse-land. Crossing from East Thurtan you see it almost immediately. In the use of the land, the monuments, rough-hewn works of stone, carrying a power and a beauty not seen in the roadside chapels of the Thurtans. Many of the houses are roofed with turf, and the roof beams sport curving prows to remember the longboats that bore their ancestors to these shores. Perhaps some are even those same timbers, taken from ships beached on once-hostile shores.

“These are Vikings, then?” I asked on passing our first Maladon peasants at work gathering in their harvest.

“Fit-firar. Land men. Good stock, brave, but the sea spat them out. A true Viking knows the oceans like a lover.”

“Says the man who has ridden a thousand miles rather than go by ship.”

Snorri harrumphed at that. I didn’t mention that now he wasn’t even riding but walking. Although technically both the horses were mine since I paid for them, I felt I was riding Sleipnir on sufferance and that any mention of it might get me turfed off, or at the very least mocked for being such a footsore southerner.

The mare bore deep scratches all along her neck, chest, and shoulders from our escape the night before. I’d spent much of the morning digging out splinters and cleaning the wounds. Both her eyes were scratched and thick with rheum. I did what I could with them but thought she might lose the left in time. Later I dug a good number of splinters from my own arms and two particularly painful ones from under my fingernails. I may not be much of a man but I count myself an excellent horseman, and a horseman takes care of his mount before himself. I’m not given to praying, but I said a prayer for Ron out on the grass and I’m not ashamed to say so.

In the distance the sky held an ominous yellow cast. “Some city?” I asked. Crath City stained the skies with the smoke of ten thousand chimneys, and that had been in summer, just cook-fires and industry. I hadn’t thought the North held such cities, though.

“The Heimrift.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t know what that is, do you?”

“I’ll have you know I was educated by the finest scholars, including Harram Lodt, the famed geographer who made the world map that hangs in the pope’s own library.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“It’s a set of volcanoes.”

“Fire mountains.” I was pretty certain that’s what a volcano was.

“Yes.”

“Finest scholars. Very clever men.”

• • •

A mile or two along the track we passed a hammer-stone, a crude representation of Thor’s hammer hacked from a piece of rock about five foot high and set by the road. Snorri seemed more interested in the pebbles lying around it. He bent to investigate, and I had to rein Sleipnir in or leave him crouched by the verge. Pride kept me there, waiting in the middle of the track rather than go back to see what the hauldr had found.

“Interesting rocks?” I asked when he finally deigned to join me.

“Rune stones. Wise men and völvas leave them. It’s a kind of message system.”

“And you can read it?”

“No.” Snorri admitted it with a grin. “But these ones were pretty clear.”

“And?”

“And our friendly dream-witch seems to have been right. The stones say Skilfar is at her Maladon seat. It’s been many years since that one came south.”

“If she’s the Silent Sister’s twin, we should stay well away. She’s nobody we should have dealings with.”

“Even if her blood could break this curse?” He reached up for me with his palm open and I shrank back.

“You don’t believe that?” I said. Sageous had no reason to tell the truth, and some men’s tongues are burned by truths in any case. They tend to leave mine a little sore, I’ve found.

“Believe she’s the twin. . and her blood might help us. Believe she’s not the twin and your reasons for fearing her go away. Both ways mean we should see her. Even if every word Sageous spoke was false, Skilfar is a völva of vast renown. I know of none more famed. If she can’t break this curse, then no one can. And even if she can’t break the spell, she will know about the necromancers and their doings at the Bitter Ice.” Snorri ran a finger along the blade of his axe. “Charging in didn’t serve me so well last time. Knowledge is power, they say, and I may need a better edge than this.”

I spat into the road. “Damn your barbarian logic.” It was all the counterargument I could muster.

“So it’s settled, then. We’ll go.” Snorri smiled and walked on up the track.

I nudged Sleipnir after him. “Surely if she’s so all-powerful she won’t just see the likes of anyone.”

“We’re not just anyone, Jal,” Snorri called over his shoulder. “I’m a hauldr of the Uuliskind. You and I bear unusual magics, and Sleipnir is possibly the descendant of a horse of legend.” Ten more paces and then, “And you’re a prince of somewhere.”

Damned if I ever wanted to see another witch long as I lived-I hadn’t even wanted to see the first one-but options were running short if I didn’t want to find myself on a boat sailing heathen seas in search of an unborn captain of the Dead King’s army.

I drew level with the Norseman. “So how do we find her?”

“That’s the easy part,” Snorri said. “We catch a train.”

• • •

What a train might be I had no idea, but I wasn’t going to let the Viking taunt me with my ignorance again, so I followed without complaint.

We passed a few farmsteads, locals carting the harvest to be sold and stored against the winter. All of them remarked us, Snorri in particular, and whilst it still irked that a commoner, and Norseman at that, upstaged a full-blooded prince of Red March, it was pleasing to see he was as much a rarity in his stature in the North as in the South. Part of me had secretly worried that all men might be built along Snorri’s lines up amongst the fjords and I might find myself a dwarf amidst giants.

Some amongst the fit-firar tried to speak to Snorri in the old tongue of the North, but he answered them in the Empire Tongue with good humour, thanking them for their courtesy. Each person we encountered told the same story about Skilfar. The völva had arrived without warning a month earlier, and none had seen her save those foolhardy enough to seek her out. Snorri asked for the nearest station, and armed with directions we abandoned the road north and headed out across open country.

The station turned out to be nothing more than a broad and grassy ditch in the ground, overhung on one side by some kind of stone lip. We reached it under grey skies and a chill drizzle.

“She lives in a ditch?” I’d heard of trolls living under bridges and witches in caves. .

“Now we follow the tracks,” Snorri said, and headed off along the side of the ditch, bound north and east.

In time the ditch became shallow, then invisible, but we carried on through moor and meadow, finding the line again, now as a ridge, raised a yard above the surrounding terrain. Not until we reached the uplands did I first get an impression of what a fearsome creature the train must have been to leave such tracks. Where a man might go around, or weave a path of least resistance up a slope, the train had just ploughed on. We walked in one place along a rock-walled ravine thirty yards deep where the train had scored its path through the bedrock.

Finally the land rose in a series of more substantial hills and still the train had kept its course. Ahead of us a circular hole waited, punched into the hillside, ten yards in diameter and blacker than sin. The rain strengthened, trickling down my neck and carrying its own cold and peculiar misery with it.

“Yeah. . I’m not going in there, Snorri.” Sir George might have followed his dragon into the cave, but damned if I was hunting train down in the bowels of the earth.

“Ha!” Snorri punched me on the shoulder as if I’d made a joke. It really hurt, and I reminded myself not to make any actual jokes with him in arm’s reach.

“Seriously. I’ll wait here. You let me know how it went when you come back.”

“There are no trains, Jal. They’re long gone. Not so much as a bone left behind.” He looked back across the rough country behind us. “You can stay here alone, though, if you like, while I go in to see Skilfar.” He pursed his lips.

Something in the word alone, spoken in empty country, made me change my mind. Suddenly I didn’t want to be left standing out in the rain. Besides, I needed to hear what this witch had to say about the curse, rather than whatever Snorri might remember of her words or choose to share. So together we went in, Snorri taking the lead and me guiding Sleipnir behind.

Within a hundred yards the circle of light to our rear did little but offer a reminder that once upon a time we could see.

“I’ve still got two torches.” I reached for my pack.

“Better to keep them,” Snorri said. “There’s only one way to go.”

Horrors stalked us in the dark, of course. Well, they stalked me. I imagined the pale men from the forest padding behind me on quiet feet, or waiting silent to either side as we marched past.

We walked for miles. Snorri trailed a stick along the wall so he wouldn’t lose contact with it, and I followed the sound of scraping. Sleipnir clip-clopped along behind. In places the roof dripped or slime hung in long ropes. Every five hundred yards or so a shaft led up, no thicker than a man and offering a pale glimpse of sky. Strange plants clustered around these openings, reaching for the light with many-fingered leaves. In other places partial collapses saw us clambering up mounds of loose rubble, Sleipnir’s hooves dislodging small avalanches of broken rock. In one section some huge piece of Builder-rock blocked all but a narrow gap to one side and we had to edge through. Snorri allowed me to light the torch for that transit but had me quench it in a standing pool thereafter. I didn’t argue-both torches would most likely have been burned out along the path we’d taken so far, and what the light revealed looked boring enough, with no monsters on show, not even a discarded skull or shattered bone.

When stiff arms enfolded me without warning, I screamed loud enough to collapse the roof and went down swinging wildly. My fist made contact with something hard, and the pain only amplified my distress. A hollow clattering went up on all sides.

“Jal!”

“Get off! Get the fuck off!”

“Jal!” Snorri, louder this time, tense but calm enough.

“Oh you fucker!” Something hard jabbed me in the eye as my assailant fell away, clattering.

“Now would be the time for that torch, Jal.”

Silence, except for my panting and the nervous stamp of Sleipnir’s hooves.

“Fuckers!” I got my knife in hand and slashed the air a couple of times for good measure.

“Torch.”

“I’ve got- It’s somewhere.” A minute or two of fumbling straps and digging through my pack and I’d set flame to tinder. The torch took the fire and spread its glow. “Christ Jesu!”

Ahead of us pale figures filled the tunnel, rank upon rank upon rank of them. Statues all of them, men and women, most of regular height, all naked and without genitalia. On every side of me lay toppled examples, my most recent foe reaching for the ceiling with a straight arm.

“Hemrod’s army,” Snorri said.

“What?” Some of the statues had eyes painted into their sockets, some hair, also painted, but most were bald, eyeless, many lacking definition, some to the degree that their fingers were fused, faces blank. Many struck oddly nonchalant poses, looking more like idle nobility than marching warriors. There was space to walk between each rank and somehow Snorri had ended up doing so, leaving me to crash into the first line.

“Hemrod,” Snorri said.

“Hemroids to you. I’ve never heard of him.” I took hold of the outstretched arm before me and pulled the figure to its feet. The thing had almost no weight to it. Whatever it had been fashioned from was far lighter than wood. I tapped it. “Hollow?”

“These are Builder things. Statues, I guess. Hemrod held sway in this region before the empire grew across his lands. When they buried him down here, they set an army of these plasteek warriors to guard him and to serve him in the life beyond. Perhaps they wait for Ragnarok with him in Valhalla.”

“Pah.” I stood and dusted myself down. “I’d want better soldiers. Look: I felled seven of them while fighting blind.”

Snorri nodded. “Though to be fair you did have a screaming girl to help you.” He glanced back down the tunnel. “I wonder where she ran off to.”

“Eat dung, Norseman.” I started off between the rows.

• • •

“Someone must keep standing them up, you know.” Snorri spoke from behind me.

I paused and swapped the torch from one hand to the other. My arm hurt from holding it overhead and dribbles of hot pitch kept escaping to burn my fingers.

“Why?”

“It stands to reason. They’ve stood here five hundred years and more. You can’t be the first to fetch up against one.”

“I mean, why bother?”

“Magic.” Snorri puffed a breath through his lips. “It’s an old charm, a defence. They say old magic runs deepest. Skilfar makes her home here for a reason when she comes south.”

“Well, I ain’t going back to stand them up again.” I lifted the torch higher. “Some kind of chamber up ahead. .”

As we drew closer I saw that the space might better be called a cavern, not for the nature of it-men had built this-but for the size of the place. Cavernous would be the word to use. The blackness within swallowed the light of my torch. A rust-covered floor stretched away and Builder statues filled the portion of the chamber I could see, all pointing outward from some hidden centre. To either side, tunnel mouths opened, statues marching away into the darkness. If the spacing held constant I guessed maybe eight or ten tunnels met here. Truly it must once have been a den of trains, coiling about each other like great serpents.

Snorri nudged me on and I advanced with caution between the ranks. Some prurient part of me that is always on duty noted that the vast majority of the statues here were of women, all in the same kinds of stiff and awkward poses, my torchlight flickering across hundreds if not thousands of ancient but perky plasteek breasts.

“Getting colder.” Snorri at my shoulder.

“Yes.” I stopped, handed him the torch, and circled around a nude plasteek woman to stand behind him. “After you. She’s your Wicked Witch of the North after all.” Somehow the “wicked witch” part contrived to echo about the chamber, taking a damnably long time to die away.

Snorri shrugged and went ahead. “Leave the horse.”

The radial aisles of statues created a steady narrowing as we approached the centre, and soon Sleipnir would be knocking them over left and right. I let go her reins. “Stay.” She blinked one gunked-up eye at me, the other glued tight with secretions, and lowered her head.

The temperature fell by the yard now and frost glittered on plasteek arms to every side. I hugged myself and let my breath plume before me.

In the middle of the chamber a circular platform rose in four steps and in the centre of that, in an ice-clad chair, sat Skilfar: tall, angular, white skin stretched tight across sharp bones, draped in the skins of several arctic foxes and with a white mist running from her limbs as if they might be cold enough to shatter steel. Eyes like frozen seawater fixed upon Snorri’s torch and out it went, the firelight replaced instead by a star-glow that rose from the frost-wrapped limbs of her ancient guardians.

“Visitors.” She rolled her neck, and ice crunched.

“Hail Skilfar.” Snorri bowed. Behind him I wondered just what it was this witch did sitting here in the dark when she didn’t have us to talk to.

“Warrior.” She inclined her head. “Prince.” Cold eyes found me again. “Two of you, bound by the Sister, how droll. She does enjoy her little jokes.”

Little jokes? Anger rose, elbowing aside a measure of my sensible fear. “Your sister, madam?” I wondered how cold her blood was.

“She would tell you she was everybody’s sister. If she ever spoke.” Skilfar rose from her chair, the freezing air flowing from her skin like milk, pouring to the floor. “A stench of ill dreaming hangs around you both.” She wrinkled her nose. “Whose taint is this? It was not well done.”

“Are you twin to the Silent Sister?” Snorri, through gritted teeth, his axe moving.

“She has a twin, certainly.” Skilfar advanced to the front of the platform, just yards from us. My face ached with the cold. “You don’t want to strike me, Snorri ver Snagason.” She pointed one long white finger at his axe, the blades now level with his shoulder.

“No,” he agreed, but his body remained coiled for the blow.

I found myself advancing, sword raised, though I’d no recollection of drawing it or desire to get any closer than I was. Everything held a dreamlike quality. My eyes filled with visions of the witch dying on the blade before me.

Skilfar wafted the air towards her face, inhaling deeply through a sharp nose. “Sageous has touched your minds. You particularly, prince. But crude work. He normally has a more subtle hand.”

“Do it!” The words burst from me. “Do it now, Snorri!” I clapped a hand to my mouth before I could damn myself further.

Two bounds had him on the step below Skilfar, his axe high above her, the huge muscles of his arms ready to haul it down through her narrow body. And yet he held the blow.

“Ask the right question, child.” Skilfar glanced away from Snorri, meeting my gaze across the sea of statues. “Better that you shrug Sageous off for yourself. Safer than if I do it.”

“I-” I remembered Sageous’s mild eyes, his suggestions that had turned into truths as I’d considered them. “Who-who is the Sister’s twin?”

“Pah.” Skilfar snorted out a breath that wrapped white and serpentine around her thin torso. “I thought she would choose better.” She extended a hand towards me, clawed, talons of ice springing from her nails.

“Wait!” A shout. For some reason I saw my locket. Whole, its gems in place. “I- Who- Garyus! Who is Garyus?”

“Better.” The hand relaxed. Still no smile though. “Garyus is the Sister’s brother.”

I saw him, my great-uncle, twisted and ancient in his tower room, the locket in his hand. “I had a twin,” he had told me once. “They broke us apart. But we didn’t break evenly.”

On the step below Skilfar Snorri lowered his axe, blinking as if shaking off the dregs of sleep.

“And his blood could break this curse?” The question billowed white before me.

“His sister’s spell would be broken.” Skilfar nodded.

“How else can it be broken?” I asked.

“You know the ways.”

“Can’t you do it?” I tried a hopeful smile, but my frozen face wouldn’t cooperate.

“I don’t wish to.” Skilfar returned to her chair. “The unborn have no place amongst us. The Dead King plays a dangerous game. I would see his ambition broken. Many hidden hands are turned against him. Perhaps every hand but that of the Lady Blue, and her game is more dangerous still. So no, Prince Jalan, you carry the Silent Sister’s purpose and the magics with which she sought to destroy the greatest of the Dead King’s servants. I’ve no interest in taking it from you. The Dead King needs his claws trimmed. His strength is like a forest fire.” I wondered at her choice of words. “But like such conflagrations it will burn itself out, and the forest will prevail. Unless of course it burns the very bedrock itself. Destroy the unborn; that will complete the spell’s purpose and it will fade from you. There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.”

“How?” I asked, without really wanting to know. “Destroy the unborn? How?”

“How do the living ever defeat the dead?” She smiled a small cold smile. “With every beat of your heart, every hot drop of your blood. The truth of the Sister’s spell is hidden from me, but carry it where it leads you and pray it proves sufficient. These are the ends you serve.”

Snorri came down the steps, dropping from one to the next, and stood at my side. “I have my own ends, Skilfar. Men do not serve the völvas.” He covered the blades of his axe with the leather protectors he had stripped off a minute before.

“Everything serves everything else, Snorri ver Snagason.” No heat in the witch’s voice. If anything it felt colder than ever.

To distract the pair of them from further disagreements, I raised my voice in a question. “Pray it proves sufficient? Praying’s all well and good, but I never set much faith by it. The Silent Sister had to take her enemies unaware. She had to paint her runes and slowly draw her net around them. Even then the unborn escaped when I broke just one rune. . so say we do find some way to release this spell. . how can it defeat even one unborn, let alone several?”

Skilfar raised her brows a fraction as if wondering herself. “They say some wines improve with age when bottled.”

“Wine?” I glanced up at Snorri to see if he understood.

“These magics couldn’t be carried by just any two men,” Skilfar said. “Magic requires the right receptacles. Something about this spell, about you two, just fits together. You’re her blood, Prince Jalan, and Snorri has something to him, something that suits him to this task. Pray or don’t pray, but the only hope you have is that the spell strengthens within you, because of who and what you are, because of your journey, and that when the time comes it will be stronger rather than weaker than it was.”

“I’m not going north as a witch’s lapdog,” Snorri growled. “I’m bound there on my own purpose and I’ll-”

“Why is she silent?” I elbowed the Norseman to shut him up, offering the question up to distract them both from the quarrel brewing on his lips. “Why does the Sister never speak?”

“It’s the price she pays for knowing the future.” Skilfar looked away from Snorri. “She may not speak of it. She says nothing so that the bargain will remain unbroken by any accident or slip of tongue.”

I pursed my lips, nodding with interest. “Well. That’s. . that sounds reasonable. In any event, we really must be going.” I reached out and tugged at Snorri’s belt. “She’s not going to help us,” I hissed.

Snorri, though, obstinate as ever, would not be pulled away. “We met a man named Taproot. He also spoke of hidden hands. A grey one behind us, a black one blocking our path.”

“Yes, yes.” Skilfar waved the question away. “The Sister set you on your path, the Dead King seeks to stop you. A reasonable ambition considering you’ve been sent to stop him gathering an army of dead men from the ice.”

“No one sent us!” Snorri said, louder than is advisable in front of an ice-witch. “I escaped! I’m bound north to save my-”

“Yes, yes, your family. If you say so.” Skilfar met his gaze, and it was Snorri who looked aside. “Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.”

Now that Snorri had mentioned Taproot’s whitterings and Skilfar lent them a measure of importance with her interpretation, I remembered something else he’d said.

“A blue hand behind the black, a red behind the grey.” The words tripped off my tongue.

Those eyes turned my way and I felt the winter settle cold upon me. “Elias Taproot said that?”

“Uh. . yes.”

“Well now, that man has been paying closer attention than I gave him credit for.” She steepled white fingers beneath the angularity of her chin. “The Red and the Blue. There you have the battle of our age, Prince Jalan. Lady Blue and the Red Queen. Your grandmother wants an emperor, prince. Did you know that? She wants to make the Broken Empire whole again. . seal all the cracks, seen and unseen. She wants an emperor because such a man. . well, he could turn the wheel back. She wants this and the Lady Blue does not.”

“And you, völva?” Snorri asked. “What wheel?” I would have asked.

“Ah. Both courses require a terrible price be paid, and both are fraught with risk.”

“And there’s no third way?”

Skilfar shook her head. “I have cast the runes until they broke from falling. I see nothing but the red and the blue.”

Snorri shrugged. “Emperor or no emperor, it makes no difference to me. My wife and son, Freja and Egil, that’s what calls me to the ice. I’ll see Sven Broke-Oar die and have my justice. Can you tell me if he still bides at the Black Fort?”

“Still fixed upon your carrot, Snorri ver Snagason? Look past it. Look ahead. When the Uuliskind sail, do they navigate by staring at the water beneath their prow? You should ask why it might be that he is there at all. Do they dig beneath the ice just for more corpses? And if not, what else do they seek and to what purpose?”

Something like a growl, but worse, rose in Snorri’s throat. “The Broke-Oar-”

“Let’s go!” I yanked harder at Snorri’s belt before his temper buried both of us.

Snorri hunched his massive shoulders and made a stiff bow. “Gods keep you, Skilfar.”

I let him pass and made my own much deeper bow. Social standing is one thing, but I always feel a scary hell-born witch deserves as much bowing and scraping as it takes to avoid being made into a toad. “My thanks, madam. I’ll take my leave and pray your army keeps you safe.” With an instinctive sideways glance at a particularly well-formed young plasteek woman, I turned to go.

“Step carefully on the ice.” Skilfar called after us as if she had an audience. “Two heroes, one led willy-nilly by his cock, the other northward by his heart. Neither bringing their brain into any decision of import. Let us not judge them harshly, my soldiers, for nothing is truly deep, nothing holds consequence. It’s from the shallows that emotions born of simple wanting arise to steer us as they have always steered man, steered the Builders, steered the gods themselves, towards true Ragnarok, an end to all things. A peace.” She couldn’t resist a commentary. I guess it’s hard for even the wisest not to show off that they are wise.

Her words followed us from the chamber. I halted a short way into the tunnel to relight my torch. “Ragnarok. Is that all the North ever thinks about? Is that what you want, Snorri? Some great battle and the world ruined and dead?” I couldn’t blame him if he did. Not with what had befallen him this past year, but I would be disturbed to know he had always lusted after such an end, even on the night before the black ships came to Eight Quays.

The light kindling on my torch caught him in midshrug. “Do you want the paradise your priests paint for you on cathedral ceilings?”

“Good point.”

We left without further theological discussion. When my brand started to gutter and flare, I lit the last of our torches from the old, tired of being slapped in the face by slime ropes, tripped by stray plasteek legs, soaking my feet in cold pools, and stubbing my toe on blocks fallen from the ceiling. Also the possibility of ghosts disturbed me. For all my bravado in the witch’s chamber the long night of the tunnels had shattered my nerves. Her guardians looked more ominous by the minute; in the dancing shadows their limbs seemed to move. At the corner of my eye I kept seeing motion but when I swung round their ranks remained unbroken.

I’ve never been one for wandering in the dark. It seemed, though, that our light couldn’t last the journey. I held the torch high and prayed that before it failed we’d see a circle of daylight far ahead.

“Come on. Come on.” Muttered in short breaths as we walked. The plasteek soldiers had been left far behind, but for all I knew they stalked us just beyond the range of the torch’s illumination. “Come on.”

Somehow the torch kept going.

“Thank God!” I pointed up ahead to the long-awaited spot of daytime. “I didn’t think it would last.”

“Jal.” Snorri tapped my shoulder. I looked round, my gaze following his to my hand, raised above my head. “Holy sh-” The torch was a blackened stump, no longer even smoking. The fingers gripping it were, however, another matter, glowing fiercely with an inner light. At least they were until Snorri drew them to my attention. At that point they blinked out, plunging us into darkness, and I did what any sensible man would. I ran hell for leather for the outside.

A storm waited for us.