Prince of Fools

TWENTY-EIGHT

I woke before the heat of a fire. My side ached like a bastard, but the heat felt wonderful and if I didn’t move a single muscle it was almost comfortable.

Gradually other hurts made themselves known. A throbbing pain in my thigh, a stabbing pain in my arm, a generalized wretchedness from all the muscles I could name and many I couldn’t.

I opened an eye. “Where’s Snorri?”

They’d laid me out on one of the long tables at the end closest to the hearth. Ein and Tuttugu sat before the fire, Tuttugu binding a splint about his knee, Ein sharpening his axe. Both had cleaned and stitched their wounds, or had the other do it.

“Burning the dead.” Tuttugu pointed towards the far door. “He’s building a pyre on the wall.”

I tried to sit up and lay back cursing. “There’s not enough wood, surely? Why not leave them to freeze?”

“He found the wood store, and he’s been knocking doors off hinges, ripping down shutters.”

“But why?” I asked, not sure I wanted an answer.

“Because of what will be coming from the Bitter Ice,” Ein said. “He doesn’t want the bodies raised against us.” He didn’t say that his last three brothers lay amongst them, but something in his face told it anyway.

“If they’re frozen they won’t be able to. .” I tried to sit again. Sitting is an important precursor to running away.

“Might not freeze in time,” Tuttugu said.

“And Snorri doesn’t want anything left to be defiled after. .” Ein set his whetstone down and admired his edge in the firelight.

Between them the two men I’d saved had managed to make my blood run cold. That “in time” and that “after” were not encouraging. A corpse would freeze solid overnight.

“We’re expecting. . trouble. . before morning?” I tried to make it not sound like whining, and failed.

“No ‘we’ about it. It’s what Snorri says. He says they’re coming.” Tuttugu tightened the bindings about his knee and whimpered in pain.

“How does he know?” I made a third attempt to sit, galvanized by fear, and succeeded, ribs grating.

“Snorri says the dark told him.” Ein set his axe down and looked my way. “And if he doesn’t end this in the dark, then you’ll have to do it in the light.”

“This-” I eased down from the table and the pain cut me off. “This is madness. He finds his wife and child, and then we go!” I left off the “finds them dead or alive” part. “Broke-Oar is dead-it’s done.”

Without waiting to be contradicted, I hobbled off towards the far door. The blood smears, drying to black and deepest scarlet now, showed the way. Where Snorri found the energy to drag approaching thirty corpses out along that corridor and onto the fort wall I didn’t know, but I did know that he would have neither the fuel, stamina, nor time to add the frozen dead of Olaaf Rikeson’s army to his pyre.

The stairs up to the outer door were slippery with blood, already freezing where it had dripped from one step to the next. Opening the door, I found the night lit with a vast blaze, the wind trailing orange flame out over the battlements. Even with all that heat not twenty yards off, the cold bit me immediately, the alien cold of a landscape that held in it nothing for men or for any other living thing.

Snorri stood silhouetted against the inferno. I could see corpses and timbers, some black against the hot glow, others melting into it. Even the wind’s strength couldn’t keep the scent of roasting flesh from my nostrils. The walkway ran with hot fats, burning even as they spilled down the inner wall.

“It’s done, then?” I had to raise my voice above the crackle of the fire and the wind’s discontent.

“They’re coming, Jal. The dead men from the Bitter Ice, the necromancers who herd them, Edris and the rest of the Broke-Oar’s following.” He paused. “The unborn.”

“What the hell are you doing out here, then?” I shouted. “Search for your wife and let’s be gone.” I ignored the fact that I could barely walk the length of the corridor and that if his child were here we couldn’t march across the Uplands with him. Such truths were too uncomfortable. Besides, the woman and boy were probably dead, and I would rather die trying to cross the ice than facing necromancers and their horrors.

Snorri turned away from the fire, eyes red with smoke. “Let’s go in. I’ve spoken the words. The flames will carry them to Valhalla.”

“Well, not Broke-Oar and his bastards,” I said.

“Even them.” Snorri glanced back at the blaze, a half-smile twisting his split lip. “They died in battle, Jal. That’s all it takes. When we arm against the jotün and the jotnär at Ragnarok, all men with fire in their blood will stand together.”

We walked in side by side, Snorri matching my snail’s pace as I hobbled down the stairs, mis-stepping once and uttering every foul word I knew until I reached the bottom. “We can’t stay here, Snorri.”

“It’s a fortress. Where better to stay when your enemies march?”

He had me there.

“How long was I out? How much time is left?”

“It’s two hours until dawn. They’ll be here before that.”

“What will we do?” Sven Broke-Oar had been bad enough. I had no desire to wait to see whatever it was that had terrified a monster like him.

“Barricade ourselves in the gatehouse. Wait.”

As much as I liked the idea of defence, it didn’t sound like Snorri. His very name meant “attack.” To hold back sounded like an admission of defeat. But the man was all done in. I could see that. I could no more heal his wounds than I could my own. Just walking beside him set the air crackling with uncomfortable energies. Even with a yard between us, my skin crawled as if somewhere in the marrow of my bones, that crack, the one the Silent Sister’s magic had fractured into the world-between worlds-as if that crack were seeking to break out. It wanted to run through me and join its dark twin as it broke from Snorri, to join together and race towards the horizon, splitting and splitting again until the world lay shattered.

• • •

The gatehouse held several chambers, the foremost of which offered views down over the gate should a man be motivated to crack open the shutters and lean out. In addition three covered murder-holes would allow the pouring of whatever unpleasant liquid one might wish to flush upon the heads of any standing at the great doors. This close to the Bitter Ice, just pouring water onto unwelcome guests would be fatal for most. The room held a fireplace with wood stacked to either side and two copper buckets filled with coal. Tuttugu and Ein set to lighting a fire, both of them moving awkwardly as their injuries had stiffened. Tuttugu had fashioned a crutch from a spear, pieces of furniture, and a wadded cloak, but it was clear he could cover no great distance on it. Our serious fighting force consisted of Snorri and Ein, both much diminished by their injuries. Tuttugu and I together could have been defeated by a single determined twelve-year-old armed with a stick.

The doors and shutters were all of heavy construction, iron bolts oiled and locked in place.

“They’ll come over the walls,” I said.

“The dead won’t.” Snorri swung his arms to loosen them. He had Sven Broke-Oar’s axe now, or rather I suspected he had reclaimed his father’s axe from the man.

“Then the Hardanger men will.” Edris would be with them. I couldn’t say why he frightened me more than the Vikings, but he did.

“I doubt they have grapples, probably not even rope. But maybe.” Snorri shrugged. “We can’t patrol the walls of this fort with two men. They would just try in three places at once. They’ll get in or they won’t. Either way they will be cold. We’ll keep watch from the gatehouse roof and decide what to do when it needs to be done.”

“But it’s dark.”

“If they come in the night, Jal, they’ll carry lights, now won’t they? The ones that can climb need to see. I don’t know what the dead see, or if they need it to be light, but the dead I saw in Eight Quays were like the dead on the mountain by Chamy-Nix. They won’t be scaling walls.”

“And the unborn?”

“Let those come.” He made a sudden lunging strike at the air with his axe.

• • •

It fell to Tuttugu and me to keep watch, one taking a turn after the other. It made no sense for either man who could still fight to freeze his arse off on the roof. Tuttugu took the first hour. I could only guess what it cost him to climb the stairs with his shattered knee. I found him huddled in his furs, blue with cold and semiconscious when I hobbled up the long spiral of steps to relieve him an hour later. Ein had to come up to help his friend down again.

I stood my turn, there in the dark with the wind howling all about and nothing to see but the glow of the bone-fire by the east tower. I’d been warm for only a few hours, but already the bitter chill outside came as a shock. I found it hard to imagine we had endured it day after day.

In the dark, as I made a slow tour of the guard wall, my mind played tricks: voices on the wind, colours in the night, faces from my past come to visit. I imagined the Silent Sister, here on the ice, her tatters flying in the wind as she made her circuit of the Black Fort, painting out her curse across its walls as she went. She should be here, that old woman. She’d brought us to this, somehow, in some way I couldn’t quite fathom. It was her fault. I’d called her evil, the blind-eye woman, a witch burning people in their homes. And yet it seemed perhaps that on each occasion it had been an unborn or some other minion of the Dead King that had been her true target. The people had just been in the way. Or bait, perhaps.

As a prince I’d been taught that good opposes evil. I’d been shown the good, shining in chivalric honour, and the evil hunched about its wrongness, crowned with horns. And always I wondered where I fitted into this grand scheme, little Jalan built of petty wants and empty lusts, nothing so grand as evil, nothing closer to good than imitation. And now it seemed that the blind-eye woman of my childhood terrors was in fact a great-aunt of mine. Indeed, if Great-Uncle Garyus was the true king, then surely the Silent Sister, older than my grandmother, was his heir?

I knuckled my eyes through the stiff leather of my face guard, trying to knead the tiredness from them, perhaps the confusion too. I blinked to clear my blurred vision. Embers from the bone-fire danced on the wind, out against the blackness of the ice plain. Despite the wind, they hung there. Another blink, and another, wouldn’t clear them.

“Ah, hell.” Through numb lips.

Lanterns.

They were coming.