Prince of Fools

TWENTY-SEVEN

The trek to the Black Fort proved much as Snorri had described it. Only a lot worse. Although Edris might have followed us, or have been ahead in the race to the fort, in such a huge and empty expanse it’s impossible to think of yourself as chased or chasing. You are either alone, or not alone. We were alone, and our enemy pressed us on every side. The wind and the cold of the Uplands are things that must be experienced; words will not tame them into something that can be given over. We left behind trees, then bushes, then even the hardiest of grasses until the world was nothing but rock and snow. The snow patches joined each to the next to become unbroken. The days grew shorter with frightening speed, and each morning Baraqel would no longer harangue me but merely unfold his wings, golden with the dawn, and bid me be worthy of my line. Snorri would sit apart from us when the sun fell, plunging from the sky and drawing the long night behind it. In those moments, as ice devoured sun, I could see her walk about him: Aslaug, a lean beauty fashioned from the gloom, her spider form scurrying in her footsteps, black across the snow.

Each hour became a process of taking a dull future and squeezing it into a dull past through the narrow slot of the moment-a moment, like each other, crowded with pain and exhaustion, and with a cold that crept around you like a lover carrying murder in her heart. I tried to keep myself warm with thoughts of better times, most of them in someone else’s bed. Strange to say, and surely a sign of my brain’s slow freeze, although I could summon to mind countless moments of coitus, long limbs, smooth curves, waves of hair, the only face that would appear was Lisa DeVeer’s, showing-as it always did-part amusement, part exasperation, part affection. In fact, as the cold North sucked the life out of me I found myself remembering times outside her bed more than within it-conversations, the way she ran her fingers through her hair when puzzling, the cleverness of her replies. I blamed it on snow fever.

We camped in the lee of any outcrop we could find and burned charcoal from our packs to put a little warmth into our food. The snows south of the Bitter Ice would thaw occasionally. Maybe two years would pass, maybe five, but eventually a particularly high summer would melt them back to bare rock in all but the deep places, and so the ice we walked on was never thick enough to cover every rise and fold of the land. The Bitter Ice itself, however, that glacial sheet never melted, though it might retreat a mile or three over the course of lifetimes. And the land beneath it hadn’t seen the sun in centuries, maybe since Christ walked the world. Maybe never.

On the long march through an icy waste, no one talks. You keep your mouth closed to seal the heat in your body. You cover your face and watch a white world through the slit that remains. You put one foot before the next and hope that it’s a straight line you’re plotting-letting the rise and fall of the sun guide your progress. And while you try to force your body along the straightest path, the paths your mind follows become increasingly twisted. Your thoughts wander. Old friends revisit. Old times catch you up once more. You dream. With your eyes open, and with the plod and plod of numb feet to punctuate each minute, you dream.

I dreamed of Great-Uncle Garyus, lying broken in his high tower, older than sin and smelling only slightly better. His nurses cleaned him, carried him, fed him, took away a measure of his dignity every day, though he never seemed to lack for more.

Garyus probably would have thanked any god that could give him even a day of walking, even in a place like this. And even at the end of a day of such labour, bone-cold, bone-tired, hunched within my misery, I wouldn’t have swapped with him.

My great-uncle had lain there year upon year, placed by age and infirmity on death’s doorstep. The Red Queen had told us that there really was a door into death, and it seemed that Garyus had been knocking on it since the day he’d come broken into the world.

In my dreams I returned to that day with the sun slanting in past his shutters, when Garyus had folded my hands around that locket in his own, large-knuckled, liver-spotted, and tremulous. “Your mother’s likeness,” he had said. “Keep it safe.” And safe meant secret. I knew that, even at six.

I’d sat and watched that old and broken man. Listened to his stories, laughed at them as children do, sat silent and round-eyed when the tales turned dark. Most of that time I never knew him as my great-uncle. And none of that time did I know him as brother to the Silent Sister-though of course it seemed only right the Sister should be someone’s sister.

I wondered if Garyus were scared of his twin, the blind-eye woman, his silent sister. Could a person be scared of their twin? Would that be like being scared of yourself? I knew that many men were scared of themselves, frightened that they would let themselves down, that they would run rather than fight, choose the dishonourable path, the easy path rather than the hard. Me, I trusted myself always to do what was right-for Jalan Kendeth. The only times I scared myself were the rare occasions I was tempted to stand and fight, those few times when anger had gotten the better of me and almost stepped me into danger.

How much did Garyus, there in his tower with his stories and gifts for children, know of his sisters’ battles? I looked at those memories now as a puzzle. Was there another way to see them? Like those trick drawings where everything is obvious until someone tells you “the lump is a dent” and suddenly you see it-what was a bump is now a hollow, pushed in, not standing out-they all are, every rise and hollow reversed, the image has changed, its meaning flipped around, and try as you like you can’t see it as before: solid, unambiguous, worthy of your trust.

Did Garyus know his younger sister thought she knew where death’s door lay?

“Jal.” A tired voice. “Jal.”

I thought of Garyus, the Red Queen’s brother, eyes aglitter in that narrow bed. Older than her, surely? Had he known her plans? How much of all this had that crippled old man set in motion?

“Jal!”

Shouldn’t he have been king? Wouldn’t he have been King of the Red March if he weren’t broken so?

“JAL!”

“What?” I stumbled, almost fell.

“We’re stopping.” Snorri, bowed and tired, the ice wastes making mock of his strength just as it did of all men’s strength. He raised a hand, pointing within his glove. I followed his direction. Ahead of us the walls of the Bitter Ice rose without preamble: sheer, beautiful, taller than my imagination.

• • •

We ate despite the effort it took, fumbling with dead fingers to make a spark, using the last of our kindling, lighting the charcoal to heat a pot and knowing there would be no heat but what our bodies made from then on.

That night for the longest time I didn’t sleep. The skies grew clear overhead and stars dazzled down upon us as the temperature fell away. Each breath hurt, drawing frozen razors of air into my chest. Death seemed both near and inviting. I shivered despite the furs, despite layers and more layers. And when at last dreams took me down I held no surety of ever waking.

In some dead hour past midnight the silence woke me. The unrelenting wind had for once relented, dropping away to nothing. I cracked open an eye and stared into the darkness. The miracle came suddenly and without warning. In one moment the sky lit with shifting veils of light, rolling through the colours, first red, then an eerie green, next a blue I’d not seen before. And always shifting, from one serpentlike form to the next. The silence and the scale of it kept the breath in my chest. The whole sky overwritten, a hundred miles and more of the heavens dancing with glory to some tune that only angels hear.

I know now that it must have been a dream, but in that moment I believed it with all my heart, and it filled me with wonder and with fear. Nothing before or since has made me feel so small, and yet that great and dancing mystery of light, huger than mountains, played out above an empty wasteland to no audience but me. . it made me feel, just for the briefest time. . significant.

In the morning Fimm did not rise.

“Now it is my turn.” Fjórir sewed his brother into his sleeping sack with a long bone needle and gut thread.

“Will he rise?” I eyed the sack, half-expecting it to move.

Snorri shook his head, solemn. Behind him Tuttugu rubbed his eyes. Of all of us the quins, now quads, seemed least moved.

“He’s frozen,” Snorri said.

“But.” My face felt too solid for frowning. “But you found a dead man struggling after a day or more in a snowbank.”

“The necromancers inject them with an elixir. Something of oils and salts, the Broke-Oar said. It keeps them from locking solid.” Snorri had told me this before, but the cold had frozen my memory.

“This army beneath the ice. . Olaaf Rikeson’s troops-the Dead King’s men-will need to thaw them and treat them in this manner. Unless they have some new magics it doesn’t seem possible. The effort involved to drag them frozen to the south, or to bear sufficient fuel north. .” I thought of the other part to the tale Snorri had told. The key that would open the frost giants’ gates-Loki’s gift. The key that would open anything. “Perhaps all they ever wanted was Rikeson’s key. That one thing.” And for some reason that thought worried me more than an army of corpses rising from the ice.

• • •

Snorri had aimed west of the fort so that the line of the Bitter Ice could lead us east towards it. If he had steered us wrong, then we were walking away from the fort into the ice-bound wastelands of the interior, where we would all die without the least inconvenience to anyone. Death seemed certain either way, and if turning back alone offered even the slightest hope of survival, then I would have been off without delay. Unfortunately, as Tuttugu had discovered in battle, running away is sometimes the least safe option, and whilst dying was the last thing I wanted to do, dying by myself seemed somehow worse.

I staggered on, across the unending whiteness, wondering if the Silent Sister had already watched my suffering when she looked beyond tomorrow. I crunched the ice, feet numb, the wind’s keening filling my head. Had she counted out each frozen step or just seen the great white shape of our trek across the snows? How many possibilities had lain strewn across the future for her? And how many of them saw us dead? Foot before foot, too cold for shivering, dying by degrees. Perhaps in some futures the crack that chased me had caught and destroyed me before I even reached Snorri; in others he may have killed me as I ran into him. Did she know for certain that her spell would find a home in us, be carried north to the very edge of the Bitter Ice? Did she know whether her magics would wither inside us or take root and grow into more than they had been? Was she certain, or was she maybe, like her great-nephew, a gambler always ready to roll those dice one time too many? I saw her narrow smile in my mind’s eye, and it did little to warm me. Foot before foot. Endlessly on.

• • •

Just as Snorri had described, the Black Fort took me by surprise. The landscape offered no clues, no buildup, no growing promise of journey’s end. One moment it was a featureless white wasteland, bounded on one side by the Bitter Ice; the next moment it was the same featureless wasteland, except there was a feature, a black dot.

The trek had worn us to our final strength-Fimm it had worn past even that-but we were none of us the shambling, frostbitten wreck that Snorri had been when he had last stumbled to the gates. We came with at least some measure of fight in us, some final reserve to draw upon. And, as little as I wanted to battle anyone, I knew for sure that without the chance to rest and restock in the shelter offered by the Black Fort, I for one would not survive a return journey.

Snorri led us closer. Urging swiftness. He wanted to be inside before the sun set-wanted Aslaug’s strength in the fight to come. The terrain offered no cover and we relied only on being white upon a white background to hide us, and also on the hope that nobody would be looking out for us. This latter proved an unfounded hope.

“Wait.” Ein, raising a gloved hand. “Man in the south tower.”

However well we blended against the snow, with the sun sinking behind us our shadow might yet announce our approach if the man were paying close enough attention.

The Black Fort is a squat, square construction with a crenellated tower at each corner. A central keep, barely taller than the outer walls, sits amidst a large courtyard. Snorri believed the keep unmanned and that the small garrison kept to chambers within the thickness of the walls around the main gates.

“The Dead-Eye will shoot him,” Snorri said. “Then we climb.”

Arne rubbed gloved fingers across his face guard, the soft hide frozen stiff and hanging with miniature icicles. The wind swirled around us, full of razors. “It’s a long shot.”

“Not for the Dead-Eye!” A quad slapped him on the shoulder.

“And the light’s failing.” A shake of the head.

“Easy!” Another quad.

A slump of shoulders. “I’ll get my bow ready,” Arne said. “Then we move closer.”

It took a damned long time, extracting and unwrapping the bow, finding the string, waxing that, flexing this, warming fingers, hooking one thing to another. They’d taught me archery back in Vermillion, of course. Every prince had to know the art. Rather than having us become crack shots, Grandmother was, apparently, more interested that we know and understand the possibilities and limitations of the weapon so that we could better utilize it en masse upon the battlefield. Even so, we still had to hit the bull’s-eye.

If all those long hours of much-resented archery practice had taught me anything, it was that wind will make a fool of even the best archer, a swirling, gusty wind especially so.

At last Arne had equipped himself and we crept forwards across the snow, crouching low now, as if that might make a difference. The figure in the tower moved several times, facing our way for a heart-stopping moment, but showed no signs of interest.

“Do it here.” Snorri caught Arne’s shoulder. I think the Dead-Eye would have closed to fifty yards if they’d let him.

“Odin, guide my arrow.” Arne removed a glove and set a shaft to his bow.

On a still day with warm hands and no pressure on the outcome, it was a shot I might hope to make four times in five. Arne loosed his shaft and it hissed away, invisible against the sky.

“Miss.” I stated the obvious to break the still moment that held us all. The shot had gone so wide the man in the tower hadn’t even noticed it.

Arne tried again, taking deep breaths to steady himself. Fingers white on the bowstring. He loosed.

“Miss.” I hadn’t meant to say anything, the word just spoke itself into the expectant hush.

Arne pulled away his face guard and gave me a sour look. He ran his tongue over an array of teeth, most brown, one black, one grey, one white, two missing. He took another arrow, one of maybe a dozen remaining, and returned his attention to the tower. Three breaths, hauled in, released slowly, and he took the shot.

To be fair I waited several seconds. It was lucky all three shots had gone high rather than striking the stonework. The man on the tower hadn’t so much as flinched. “Miss,” I said.

“You fucking do it!” Arne shoved the bow at me.

Safe in the knowledge I couldn’t do much worse, I stripped off a glove and strung an arrow. The wind made an agony of my fingers within moments. Those moments would be all I had before the wind stopped them hurting and made them useless. I lined up on the man, guessed at compensation for the wind, and shifted my aim yards to the right. The lack of time helped. It stopped me thinking about what I intended to do. I’m told that I killed men in the Aral Pass, but I’ve no clear memory of it. On the mountain with Snorri a man had pretty much impaled himself on my sword-and I’d apologized to him for the accident before I knew what I was saying. That had all been in hot blood. But here I crouched, arms trembling, blood as cold as it had ever been, ready to punch an arrow through a man’s chest, to take his life without warning, without seeing his face. A different matter entirely.

“Miss.” I whispered it as I let fly.

Two heartbeats passed and I was sure I’d done no better than Arne.

“Yes!” The man spun around as if from a sudden impact. “Yes!” Snorri shouted.

“Shit!” That from Tuttugu as the guardsman remained standing, advanced to the wall, unsteady and clutching his arm, then turned to flee.

“Hel! Shoot him again!” Snorri shouted.

The man had descended by steps to the main wall and was running hell for leather towards the far tower where presumably his companions were housed. Why he wasn’t watching from that tower, I couldn’t tell you.

“We’re done.” I gestured at the distant wall. The man could be glimpsed every half second or so as a dark streak through the crenels notched down into the battlements.

Arne snatched his bow back, strung an arrow, and loosed it at the sky. “A pox on all the gods.” He spat and his phlegm froze before it landed.

“Why waste another arrow?” I watched the walls, wondering if they would come out to kill us or leave us to freeze.

The man fell with a thin cry, nailed as he and Arne’s arrow arrived together at the third crenel before the tower door, six yards short of his sanctuary.

“Dead-Eye!” A quad punched Arne in the shoulder.

“Dead arm if you’re not careful.” But he sounded pleased.

Snorri had already hurried away from us, towards the walls. We gave chase. It seemed to take forever to cross the hundred-yard gap. He had out a long coil of rope, knotted for climbing and stored away from the ice for this moment. At one end a grapple hook that looked suspiciously like the anchor from a small fishing boat. He threw it over the wall and it caught first time. Snorri had already reached the top as I made it to the base of the wall. A quad went up next, then Arne, then me, slipping and cursing now the knots were slippery with ice from the others’ boots. The body of the man Arne shot plummeted past me as I reached the halfway point. I bit off another complaint and kept my mouth shut after that.

• • •

With only Tuttugu yet to climb, we pulled our packs up on a rope and then hauled Tuttugu after them. That effort at last got a little warmth into my blood. I helped him to his feet after his rather undignified struggle between the battlements to reach the walkway.

“Thanks.” He grinned, a nervous thing, quick then gone, and unslung his axe from across his back. An unusual weapon, closer to the armour-piercing wedge design favoured down south.

On the gritted ice beneath my feet, spatters of the tower guard’s blood-shocking colour after what seemed an eternity of white. The droplets captured my gaze. All the talk, all the travel, had come to this moment, these crimson splashes. From abstract to real-too real.

“Are we ready?” Snorri from before the door our man had been running for. The word no fought to get past my lips. “Good.” Snorri held his axe in a double grip, Arne a broadsword, the brothers each with a double-headed broadaxe, short-handled, a knife in the off hand. I drew my longsword, last of all of them. Satisfied, Snorri nodded and set his hand to the iron door handle. The plan did not have to be reiterated. It was, as plans go, a simple one. Kill everyone.

The door opened with a squeal of hinges, shedding ice, and we were through, crowding onto the steps beyond. Snorri closed it behind us and I shut my eyes, taking a moment to enjoy the simple ecstasy of being out of that wind. No winter night of Red March had ever been as cold as it was there in that corridor within the Black Fort, but without the wind it was a paradise compared to the outside. We all took a moment, several moments, stamping a touch of life back into our feet, swinging our arms to recover a little of that lost flexibility.

Snorri led on, down the steps and into a long corridor. We expected to find most of Sven Broke-Oar’s men in one spot. It’s what men do in cold places. They huddle by the hearth, shoulder to shoulder, for as long as they can stand each other’s company. With fuel so hard to come by, they would not light many fires.

Although in many places the interior walls were ice-clad, it felt hot in the Black Fort. My skin burned with it, life creeping back into my hands and even threatening to invade my fingers.

Arne lit a small lantern, the oil carefully hoarded during our long trip for just this purpose. Perhaps with its warmth Fimm would not have died in the night. The guard had carried no source of light, knowing his path through the dark.

At each door we paused and Snorri tried the handle. None of them were locked, though some were jammed and opening them quietly tested even Snorri’s strength. The first two proved empty: long, narrow chambers with no hint of their purpose save a lack of fireplaces that told us they had never been intended for habitation. A third chamber stood stacked high with blocks of the same basalt that formed the walls themselves. Materials for repair. A fourth had been used as a latrine, though not recently; the mounds of frozen dung gave not the slightest scent.

The fifth door yielded after a silent struggle, one loud scrape echoing along the corridor as it gave. We held still, waiting for the challenge, but none came. The horror of my situation had started to settle on me as my body began to recover. I grew warm enough to shiver at about the same time that I grew scared enough to shake.

“Hel.” Snorri drew back from the part-open door, his face thrown into eerie relief by the lantern held beneath it.

“Is it safe?” Tuttugu, unwilling to lower his axe.

Snorri nodded. “Take a look.” He beckoned me, raising the lantern overhead.

The scene reminded me of Skilfar’s lair. Figures, row upon row, so close they leaned one upon the next, unable to fall. Men, shrouded in ice, bearded with frost, caught in every pose from curled in sleep to contorted in agony, but most just head down, captured in that plodding motion I knew so well from the past few days.

“Olaaf Rikeson’s men?”

“Must be. .” Snorri pulled the door closed.

The next five halls all held frozen corpses, all warriors. Hundreds of them in total. Dead for centuries but ice-locked against the years. I wondered if whatever spirit a necromancer might return to them would be all the darker for those lifetimes spent with the devil.

The quads huddled together and the momentary joy we’d all known at escaping the wind faded swiftly in that grim place, surrounded on all sides by the ancient dead.

The corridor passed two sets of spiral stairs, coiling up and down in their narrow shafts. Snorri passed them by. This section seemed more often used, the walls free of ice, grit on the floor to make for surer footing.

There was no missing or mistaking our target. The air grew warm, thick with the smell of smoke and cooking, something meaty stewing in a pot if I were any judge. My mouth began to water immediately. Just the scent of that hot food had me ready to kill for my supper. The door at the end of the corridor stood taller than the side doors, studded with black iron, muffled sounds emerging.

We looked, one to the other, preparing to organize for an entry. As often happens in life, the decision was taken from us. A heavyset Viking emerged without warning, calling some insult back over his shoulder.

Arne’s arm flickered and the hatchet he’d carried so long at his hip now sprouted from the dark red curls of the man’s beard. It didn’t look quite real. Snorri and the others surged forwards without a sound save for boots on stone. The man scrabbled at the hatchet, blood pouring down his neck, and fell beneath them.

I found myself standing with only Tuttugu at my side. He gave an embarrassed grin and jogged off after the others. That left me alone in a corridor with frozen dead men packed into all the rooms to either side. The first battle cry rang out, Snorri’s roar of joyous violence as the others barged through the big door behind him. I screwed up whatever courage I could find and set off after Tuttugu, sword at the ready.

The sight beyond the door proved arresting. So arresting that even with all his momentum Tuttugu had come to a dead halt and I ran into his back, sandwiching my blade between us. A score or more Red Vikings had been crowded into the far end of the hall before the large fireplace. Stone tables ran nearly the length of the hall, and I could only think this was where Snorri had been brought and hung upon the wall.

The Hardanger men, Red Vikings as they’re known, hailed from a tribe darker in colouring than the Undoreth, more red heads amongst them, more dark-haired men, a tough breed, broad in the chest and blunt-featured. They weren’t armoured or armed for war, but Norse warriors are seldom beyond reach of their axes and will always wear a knife or hatchet.

Snorri had leapt onto the table to the left and run its length, taking the head from one man sitting at it, close to the door, and carving a furrow through the face of another sitting on the opposite side, farther along, closer to the fire. He’d dropped amongst the crowd by the hearth, swinging in great red arcs. Hardanger men scattered away into the length of the hall, grabbing their weapons, putting space between themselves and Snorri, only to be engaged by the quads, broadaxes flashing firelight as they ploughed flesh.

A quad went down, a backhand swing by a black-haired Viking burying an axe in his neck. The man was fearsomely fast, tall, lean, muscles like knots in rope along dirt-stained arms. Tuttugu ran forwards, screaming as if gripped by the worst kind of terror, and hammered his axe into the black-haired man’s chest before he could wrench his own axe from the quad’s vertebrae. I saw Hardanger men hurrying along either wall of the hall, weapons drawn. A path that would see them converge on the doorway where I stood. In response I chased after Tuttugu, between the tables. Sometimes advance is the best form of retreat. Inadvertently I kicked the severed head of the first man to die and sent it rolling away towards the melee.

Crimson arcs decorated the far end of the hall. The fire smoked with spattered blood and a hand sizzled there, forearm still attached. Men staggered back from Snorri’s blizzard of sharp iron, some with gaping wounds, guts vomiting from slits running groin to shoulder, others screaming, blood jetting from sliced limbs with sufficient pressure to stain the ceiling five yards above us. Others still hurled themselves at Snorri and the Undoreth with deadly intent, axes swinging.

The noise of it, the stink, the colour. The room revolved around me, the din fading in and out, time seeming to slow. Tuttugu hauled his narrow axe from his enemy’s sternum. I heard the crack of bone, saw the blood gush, the man fall away, arms reaching, face dark with fury, not understanding that he’d died. A big red-haired man with a two-handed sword rushed at Tuttugu. Behind me three men vaulted the tables, two from the left, one from the right, eager to wet their blades. The door to the left of the great fireplace burst open, disgorging more Vikings, the first with an iron helm, studded all over, a crosspiece noseguard beneath. The man behind him raised a wide round shield, a spike on its central boss. More men crowded behind.

A spear sprung from a quad’s chest as he rushed the doorway. The force of it took him backwards, white hair flying. Blood sprayed across me from closer at hand, filling my eyes, filling my mouth with salt and copper. I heard screaming and knew it was mine. The Red Vikings closed on me from both sides and I watched them from behind a crimson veil. My sword flickered out-

• • •

“Jal?” Faint beneath the pounding in my ears, the thunder in my chest, the harshness of each drawn breath. “Jal?”

I could see the flagstones, awash with blood, black points of my fringe hanging before my eyes, dripping.

“Jal?” Snorri’s voice.

I was standing. My hand still held my sword. A table to either side. Corpses leaking-some under the tables, some sprawled across them.

“Jal?” Tuttugu, nervous.

“Is he safe?” A twin. Or perhaps just Ein now.

I looked up. Three Undoreth watched me at a safe distance, Snorri glancing towards the doorway through which the reinforcements had come.

“Baresarker!” Ein smacked his fist to his chest.

Snorri spared me a grin. “I’m starting to understand the hero and devil of Aral Pass!” His sealskins were ripped wide across his hip, exposing an ugly wound. Another deep cut on the muscle mounded around the join of shoulder and neck bled copiously.

My free hand started to shake uncontrollably. I looked around the room. The dead lay strewn. Around the hearth they lay in heaps. Arne sat on the table behind me, deathly pale, his cheek ripped so badly I could see through to the rotten teeth, half of them smashed out of his jawbone. The spreading pool of crimson around him told me that dentistry was the last of his worries. A wound to his thigh had cut the artery deep in the meat of him.

“Jal.” Arne offered me a broken grin, his words blurred by the face wound. He slumped down, almost graceful. “It was a great shot, though, wasn’t it. . Jal?”

“I-” My voice cracked. “A great shot, Arne. The best.” But the Dead-Eye was past hearing. Past everything now.

“Snorri ver Snagason!” A roar issuing from the doorway beyond the hearth.

“Sven Broke-Oar!” Snorri shouted in return. He hefted his axe and approached the fire. “You must have known I’d be back. For my wife, my boy, my vengeance. Why would you even sell me?”

“Oh, I knew.” The Broke-Oar even sounded pleased about it, which, now that the strange sense of dissociation was fading, brought all my fears back from whatever corners of my mind the battle madness had driven them into. “It was hardly fair to rob you of your fight now, was it? And we of the Hardanger do love our gold. And of course my new masters have expenses. The elixir they need for the dead in these cold climes requires oils from Araby, and those are hard to find. A man must trade good coin for such exotics.”

Even dazed I recognized the taunt. Telling Snorri he’d financed this horror with his own flesh and failure. Whatever was said of the Broke-Oar, none called him stupid.

Ein, Tuttugu, and I went to stand at Snorri’s side. Another chamber lay beyond the doorway, most of it out of our line of sight. A Red Viking lay half in one room, half in the other, his head split wide. Ein tugged the spear from his brother-Thrir if the order had held true.

“There’s more to it than that, Broke-Oar. You could have killed me and still had nine-tenths and more of your blood gold.” Snorri paused as if struggling to voice his question. “Where’s my wife? My boy? If you’ve harmed-” He snapped his jaw shut on the words, the muscles in his cheeks working.

Tuttugu hastened to bind Snorri’s side with strips from a cloak, Ein holding Snorri back as the warrior made to advance. Snorri relented and let them-the shoulder wound would bleed the strength from him soon if not staunched.

“There’s more to it than that,” Snorri repeated.

“It’s true, Snorri.” A touch of sadness in the Broke-Oar’s voice. Despite his reputation the man sounded. . regal, a king declaiming from his throne. Sven Broke-Oar had the voice of a hero and a sage, and he wound it around us like a spell. “I’ve fallen. You know it. I know it. I bent in the wind. But Snorri? Snorri ver Snagason still stands tall, pure as autumn snow, as if he stepped from the sagas to save us all. And whatever else I might be, Snorri, I am a Viking first. The sagas must be told, the hero must have his chance to stand against the long winter. Vikings we-born to hold against trolls, frost giants, even the sea. Even the gods themselves.

“Come, Snorri. Let’s make an end of this. Just you and me. Let your friends bear witness. I stand ready.”

Snorri started forwards.

“No!” I grabbed hold of his arm and heaved back with whatever strength I had left. The curse flared between us, the resulting blast shredding his sleeve and throwing me back across the table, afterimages of ink and sunlight overwriting my vision. The scent of burned air filled my nostrils, a sharp astringency that took me back to that street in Vermillion, running as if all Satan’s devils were at my heels, the cobbles cracking open behind me.

“What in Hel?” Snorri spun in my direction.

“I know-” Only a whisper came. I coughed and spoke again. “I know bastards.”

Ein bent and picked up the discarded shield. Tuttugu took another two from a display on the wall.

“These are your last moments, Broke-Oar!” Snorri shouted, and, bearing the shields high and low, Tuttugu and Ein stepped towards the doorway.

Crossbow bolts hammered into the shields in the instant Snorri’s guardians crossed the archers’ line of sight. Snorri unleashed a wordless roar and, pushing between his companions, launched himself into the next room.

I followed, still a touch dazed. If I’d had my wits about me I would have sat down with Arne and played dead.

Sven Broke-Oar stood at the far side of a chamber smaller than the one we’d come from, dwarfing the three crossbow-men beside him. I won’t say he made Snorri look small, but he sure as hell stopped him looking biggest. The man’s mother must have slept with trolls. Handsome trolls, though. With his great red-gold beard plaited across his chest and his hair flowing free, the Broke-Oar looked every inch a Viking king, down to the gold chasing at the edges of the scarred iron breastplate he had on. He held a fine axe in one hand, the iron buckler on his other about the size of a dinner plate, smooth and thick.

Ein veered towards the two men on the left; Tuttugu charged the one to the right. Sven Broke-Oar advanced to meet Snorri.

There’s not much you can do about an axe swinging your way with a man’s strength behind it. Killing the axe’s owner before he completes his blow is your best option. With a sword you can impale your foe. But if like your foe you’re armed with an axe, then “swing faster and hope” seems to be the best advice on offer. And of course to swing at your man you need to be a certain distance off-exactly the same distance he needs you to be at in order to swing at you.

Snorri had a different solution. He reached out before him, axe extended, running faster than is possible for any man building for a swing. The turn of speed spoiled the Broke-Oar’s timing, his cutting edge arriving a split second too late, the haft of his axe just below the blade hammered into Snorri’s raised shoulder, while Snorri’s axe smashed into the Broke-Oar’s neck, not with the cutting edge but bracketing the man’s throat with the horns of the blade.

That should have been an end to it. A narrow piece of metal driven against a throat by a powerful man. Somehow, though, the Broke-Oar slammed his buckler into the side of Snorri’s head and fell back, clasping his neck. Both men should have been down, but instead they reeled, unsteady on their feet, then came together like bears, grappling.

Ein had killed one of his two opponents and now wrestled the second, both men clutching knives, trying to drive them into each other’s faces whilst stopping the other man doing the same. Tuttugu had killed his foe, but the Red Viking had loosed his dagger before Tuttugu split his head. I couldn’t see how bad the wound was, but the speed with which the blood spilled over the fat man’s hands where he clutched his belly said it couldn’t be good.

The two giants stood, fingers interlocked, straining one against the other. Purple in the face and spraying crimson with each explosive exhalation, the Broke-Oar forced Snorri down, inch by inch. Muscle heaped, veins bulged fit to burst, both men groaned and laboured for breath. It seemed bones must give-that in a sudden snap the immense forces would shatter limbs-but all that happened was that by degrees, pumping blood past the bindings on shoulder and side, Snorri gave, until with a swift release he was on his knees, the Broke-Oar still pressing down upon him.

Tuttugu took one dripping hand from his belly and bent with agonizing slowness to retrieve his axe. The Broke-Oar, without even seeming to have looked, kicked behind him and broke the Undoreth’s knee, sending Tuttugu sprawling with a scream of pain. Snorri tried to surge up and got a leg beneath him, but with a roar the Broke-Oar drove him back down.

Ein and the Hardanger man were still rolling on the floor, both cut now. I looked at my sword, already scarlet from tip to pommel. That’s Snorri there. I had to say it to myself. Companion through innumerable miles, through weeks of hardship, dangers. . The Broke-Oar pressed him lower, both men howling animal threats. A sudden twist and Sven Broke-Oar had Snorri’s throat in his huge right paw, their other hands still locked, Snorri’s unburdened hand trying to tear the fingers from his neck.

The Broke-Oar was exposed. Head bowed. “Christ, Jalan, just do it!” I had to shout the words at myself. And, reluctant at first, picking up speed, I ran towards them, sword overhead. I’d not wanted to hit the man in the tower, not even with an arrow from a hundred yards off. Sven Broke-Oar I wanted to die, right then, right there, and if it had to be me to do it. .

I brought both arms down, scything my blade through the air, and somehow in that instant the Broke-Oar tore his off hand from Snorri’s grasp and interposed his buckler. The shock of it rang through my sword as if I’d hit stone, shaking it from my grip. One swift lunge, pushing Snorri over backwards with the hand still locked to his throat, and the giant punched me just below the heart, a combined impact of broad knuckles and the edge of his buckler. The breath left me in a wordless whoosh, ribs snapped, and I fell as if hamstrung.

From the floor I saw the Broke-Oar flick off the buckler and lock his second hand around Snorri’s throat. I managed to draw the breath that Snorri couldn’t. The air wheezed into me like acid poured into my lungs, ribs grating around their fractures.

Sven Broke-Oar started to shake Snorri, slowly at first, then more fiercely as the younger man’s face darkened with the strangulation. “You should have stayed gone, Snagason. The North has nothing else like me. It takes more than a boy to bring me down.”

I could see the life leaving Snorri, arms falling away limp, and still all I could manage was the next breath. Ein had fallen away from his enemy, both of them lying spent. Tuttugu lay in a spreading pool of his own blood, watching but beyond helping.

“Time to die, Snorri.” And the muscles bunched in the Broke-Oar’s forearms, tightening a grip that could snap an oar.

Somewhere, unseen, the sun set.

Snorri lifted his arms. His hands closed on Sven Broke-Oar’s wrists, and where they touched the Hardanger man’s flesh it turned black. A snarl twisted the Broke-Oar’s lips as Snorri raised his head and pulled the fingers from his neck. A sudden, vicious downward yank and both the Broke-Oar’s forearms snapped, the bone jutting from crimson gore. A backhanded blow and he fell, sprawling beside Tuttugu.

“You?” Snorri’s voice blending with Aslaug’s as he stood. “It’s me the North should walk in fear of.” He held the discarded buckler now, nothing but darkness in his eyes.

“Better.” From his place on the ground Sven Broke-Oar managed a laugh. “Better. You might even stand a chance. Make a ruin of them, Snorri, send them howling back to Hel!”

Snorri knelt beside Sven Broke-Oar, leaning in.

“They put a fear in me, Snorri, gods damn them. Gods damn them all.”

“Where’s Freja?” Snorri took Broke-Oar around the neck, pounding his head against the floor. “My son? Where is he?” Each question roared into the man’s face.

“You know!” Broke-Oar spat out a bloody answer.

“You’ll tell me!” Snorri set his thumbs against the Broke-Oar’s eyes.

I fainted at that point, just as Snorri started to press and Broke-Oar let out a scream that was half laughter.

Those dark and insensible moments were the only period of comfort I had in that black fort. Washed away too soon by the passage of what could only have been seconds.

“Time to die, Broke-Oar.” Snorri bent low over the fallen giant, hands crimson.

A wet red splutter, then, “Burn the dead-”

Sven Broke-Oar had time for no more. Snorri crushed his skull with a sharp blow of the heavy buckler.

“Snorri.” I couldn’t manage above a whisper, but he looked up, the darkness fading from his eyes, leaving them clear and ice-blue.

“Jal!” Despite his wounds he was at my side in a moment, seizing the hood of my winter coat, deaf to my protests. For one moment I thought he was going to help me, but instead he dragged me across to lie beside Ein.

The Red Viking next to Ein looked dead enough, but Snorri took the knife from the man’s hand and cut his throat with it just to be sure. “Alive?” He turned to Ein and slapped him. Ein groaned and opened his eyes. “Good. What can you do for him, Jal?”

“Me?” I lifted an arm. I don’t know why-perhaps to ward off the suggestion-and found that I’d been stabbed, high in the bicep. “Hell!” Rolling over was an agony, but it let me confirm another flash of memory from the red haze of my battle-I’d been cut on the thigh too. “I’m worse than Ein is.” With the injuries I’d taken without knowing or remembering them, it was almost true. But Ein had a stab wound in his chest. One that bubbled and sucked with each breath out and in. The killing kind.

“He’s worse, Jal. And you can’t heal yourself. We know that.”

“I can’t heal anyone without half-dying myself. It’d kill me.” Though dying would at least stop each breath being a torture. My side had been filled with broken glass, I was sure of it.

“The magic is stronger here, Jal; you must feel it trying to break out? I can almost see it glowing in you.” An edge of pleading in his voice. Not for himself, never that, but for the last of his countrymen.

“Jesus! You people will be the death of me.” And I slapped my palm to Ein’s stab wound-harder than necessary.

In an instant my hand flared, too bright to look at, and every ache I had became an agony, my ribs something beyond comprehension. I snatched my hand back almost immediately, panting and cursing, blood and drool dripping from my mouth.

“Good. Now Tuttugu!” And I felt myself dragged. I watched through one eye as Ein struggled to sit up, poking at the unbroken but bloodstained skin where the knife had slid beneath his ribs.

Snorri set me beside Tuttugu and we met each other’s gaze, both of us too weak for talking. The Viking, who had been pale to start with, now lay as white as frost. Snorri pulled Tuttugu around, moving him without effort despite his girth. He tugged Tuttugu’s hand clear of the stomach wound and drew in an involuntary breath.

“It’s bad. You’ve got to heal this, Jal. The rest can wait, but this will sour. The guts are cut inside.”

“I can’t do it.” I’d more easily stab a knife through my hand or put a hot coal in my mouth. “You don’t understand. .”

“He’ll die! I know Arne was too far gone, but this, this is a slow death-you can stop it.” Snorri kept talking. It washed over me. Tuttugu said nothing, only watched me as I watched him, both of us lying on the cold stone floor, too weak to move. I remembered him on the mountainside overlooking Trond, telling me he would run from every battle if only his legs were longer. A kindred soul, almost as deep in his fears as me, but he’d gone to war in the Black Fort even so.

“Shut up,” I told Snorri. And he did.

Ein came to join him, moving with an old man’s care.

“I can’t do it. I really can’t.” I pointed my gaze towards my free hand. The other still clutched my sword for some reason; it was probably glued on by all the gore. “I can’t do it. But no man should go to Valhalla with brothel rash.” Again, pointing with my gaze.

Finally Ein took the hint. I screwed both eyes shut, gritted my teeth, clenched what could be clenched, and he grabbed my forearm, setting my hand against the rip in Tuttugu’s belly.

It made healing Ein seem like a simple thing.