Prince of Fools

TWENTY-NINE

Snorri watched the advance through a crack he’d opened in the shutters. I felt the wind’s knife even at my place by the fire.

“They’re coming to the front gate.”

“How many?” I asked.

“Two dozen, a few more perhaps.”

I had been expecting an army, but it made sense that there were so few. Supporting any significant numbers out here on the edge of survival would be a huge undertaking, and pointless if there were dead men to do the bulk of the labour. But that made me wonder once again about the captives. They had sold the men south. I’d not given it much thought before, but surely if they wanted captives for digging in the ice then. . It made no sense at all-they would have killed any captives they kept and let them serve the same purpose in death, tireless and requiring no sustenance.

“There are no captives!” I spoke it aloud-not a whisper, not a shout, just a statement.

“About fifty dead ranked behind those. . at least that’s all I can see in their lights, but it’s a tight-packed group.” Snorri continued his report. “There may be necromancers and Island men amongst them-I can’t tell.”

“What-” I couldn’t find the right words. “Why-” If there were no captives. . where were Freja and little Egil?

“Men coming to the doors.” Snorri crossed over to the central murder-hole. “Oil.”

Ein came across with the iron bucket of oil they’d had heating on the fire. Carrying it with padded tongs. Apparently boiling water would freeze and spread as it fell, landing as a dust of ice crystals.

Three muffled thuds from below as someone hammered on the great door. Snorri pulled the cover of the murder-hole clear and Ein poured. When the bucket was empty Snorri replaced the cover, muting the screams.

“What now?” Tuttugu, wide-eyed, recovered enough to be terrified.

“Jal, back to the roof to watch,” Snorri said.

“The steps will kill me if nothing else does.” I shook my head and made what speed I could up the coiled stair.

From the roof I could see what Snorri had described, and nothing more. Perhaps what he saw had been the sum of them. Heart pounding, and shaking with both the cold and with the thought of what the dark might hide, I made a circuit of the guard wall. Nothing. No other light. Nothing to see at all. That worried me, both in general and for some other reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

For long minutes only the wind howled, the Vikings held their ranks in the lee of the walls, the dead behind them, and nothing moved. A dread grew in me, but it hardly required any extra malign influence for that. There were dead things out there, wanting us to share their state; only a madman wouldn’t be quaking.

With only the lights to watch, I watched the lights. I wondered how I could ever have fooled myself they were just embers from the bone-fire blown out across the ice field. The mind spends half its time in self-deception, it seems. Or maybe I’m deceiving myself. . I watched the lights a moment longer, then slapped my brow. It’s not often that people actually do slap their brow when a sudden realization illuminates their skull from the inside, especially without an audience. But I did it. And then I ran down the icy stairs, two and three at a time, swearing at the pain with each impact.

“What? What is it? What did you see?” All three of them together as I hunched over my hurt, clutching my ribs, fighting to draw breath.

“Give him some room.” Snorri, stepping back.

“I-” The cut on my leg had broken past the stitches Ein had set there while I slept, blood running down my thigh.

“What did you see?” Tuttugu, white-faced.

“Nothing.” I gasped it out and drew a breath.

“What?” Three blank looks.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just the Hardanger men’s lanterns.”

Another moment of incomprehension.

“There’s no fire on the wall.” I pointed in the rough direction of Snorri’s great pyre.

“It can’t have gone out,” Ein said. “It’ll still be hot this time tomorrow.”

“Yes.” I nodded. When I came down to report the visitors from the Bitter Ice, the bone-fire had been ten yards of orange embers with flames licking over them when the wind gusted.

“I’ll go check.” Ein took up a lantern from the mantelpiece and went to the heavy door that connected back to the corridor and halls beyond. A pounding from down below stopped him in his tracks. It sounded more like a battering ram than the crash of shield on wood that we’d heard before.

“Tuttugu! Oil!” And Snorri hauled the cover from the murder-hole. He stared down, brow furrowing. “There’s nothing th-”

BOOM!

The sound of the impact drowned him out.

“Hel! It’s coming from the inside!” Snorri whipped round towards Ein, who stood at the doorway with his back towards it.

“I’ll find out-” Ein bit his sentence short and staggered forwards, accompanied by a splintering thud. Something sharp and thick and gore-coated now jutted from beneath his sternum. A moment later the door came off its hinges and the horror beyond shook the door and Ein’s corpse from the appendage it had impaled them both with.

“Jesus!” A shriek. Something hot ran down my leg. I’d like to say it was blood. The thing blocked the corridor, a rolling mass of melted and blackened flesh, bones embedded, here a cloven helmet, there a skull, still smouldering-the stinking remnants of the bone-fire, quenched and animated into something more like a corrupt and giant slug than any man.

Snorri leapt past me, roaring and hacking. Chunks of steaming flesh flew across the room. The stench of the thing put me on my knees vomiting. Most of my puke went down the murder-hole, but there was nobody to receive the torrent. Snorri’s roaring continued for quite a while, punctuated by the booms from below.

At about the time I finally raised my head, Snorri paused in his assault. The nightmare had sagged in the doorway, spilling a yard or so into the room, overflowing part of the door and covering Ein’s legs to the hip. Apart from where Snorri sank his axe into it once more, for good measure, it didn’t seem to have any motion left in it.

“It’s done.” Tuttugu from beside the fire, nervous, almost hopping on his one good leg.

Tuttugu had barely shut his mouth when Ein’s head snapped up from the floor. The eyes he fixed me with were eyes I last saw on a mountain in Rhone and held the same undead hunger. Lips twitched but whatever the thing that was Ein had been about to say was cut off, with his head, by way of Snorri’s descending axe.

“Sorry, brother.” He snatched the severed head up by the hair and threw it into the blazing hearth.

“This isn’t all of it,” I said. There had been much more in the bone-fire than the mass before us.

By way of confirmation the doors below splintered open; in truth the restraints on the locking bar must have broken rather than the doors. Two men could have opened the gates from inside without much problem, but the insensate monster the necromancers had raised lacked the required dexterity or intelligence. Instead it had battered the locking bar free and now, spent like its smaller counterpart up above, it collapsed through the opening it had made.

“What now?” I needed somewhere to run.

“We run,” said Snorri.

“Oh, thank God!” Although I couldn’t do more than hobble with my shattered ribs. I paused a moment and looked at him. It seemed his final admission of defeat, Snorri running from the fight. “Where to?”

Already he’d pulled open the second door, the one leading to the chambers within the walls’ thickness on the left of the gatehouse, opposite those where we’d battled the Broke-Oar.

“There’s a strong-room in the keep. Iron doors. Many locks. We need to hold out for morning.” He hurried through into the freezing corridor beyond, breath steaming around him.

“Why?” I hollered after him, trying to keep up. I was all for running and hiding, but I hoped there was a better reason than delaying the inevitable. Behind me Tuttugu’s crutch clacked against the flagstones as he swung along with what speed he could muster.

“Why?” With almost no breath as I caught up a hundred yards on.

Snorri, waiting at the head of a flight of stairs, looked past me to the light of Tuttugu’s swinging lantern. “Hurry!”

“Why?” I almost reached to catch hold of him.

“Because we can’t win. Not in the dark. Maybe in the morning such magics, such creatures. . maybe they won’t be so strong. Maybe not. Either way, we’ll die in the daylight.” He paused. “I don’t care about Aslaug’s gifts. I don’t like what she’s tried to turn me into.” A grin. “Let’s go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.”

Snorri paused for me to answer. All I had to say was I didn’t think the sun would find us in a strong-room buried in the middle of the keep, but I kept those words behind my teeth. He grinned again, tentative this time, then turned and set off down the stairs. I followed, cursing that I had yet more icy steps to contend with, though fat Tuttugu and his broken knee would have a still harder time of it behind me.

Ice had sealed the door to the courtyard. Snorri broke it open and waited for us, the wind howling outside.

“How will we even get in?” I panted the question.

“I took keys off Sven Broke-Oar.” Snorri patted his jacket. “I’ve been over there already. Opened it all up. . I had to search. .” He hooded his lantern so no glimmer of it showed. Tuttugu did the same when he arrived puffing at the bottom of the stairs.

We stepped out into the courtyard. I could see nothing but a scattering of lights around the great doors as the Red Vikings came through. No doubt they’d be checking on their companions and stores first. Without food and fuel they faced a bleak future. Fort or no fort, the Bitter Ice would kill them all.

“Come.” Snorri led off.

“Wait!” I literally couldn’t see him. We could be separated and lose each other in the dark. The dawn was much less than an hour away but the sky held no hint of it.

Tuttugu hobbled between us and set a hand on Snorri’s shoulder. “Take a hold, Jal.”

I held on to Tuttugu, and in a blind convoy we set out, crunching over the ice and snow, across the expanse of courtyard.

The Red Vikings might be busying themselves securing their old holdings, but I worried more about those who had brought them here. The night felt haunted-the wind speaking with a new voice, more chill and more deadly than before, though I hadn’t thought it possible. We pressed on, and with each step I expected some hand to be laid upon my shoulder, pulling me back.

Sometimes our worst fears aren’t realized-though in my experience it’s only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house. In any event we reached the keep and Snorri set a great iron key into the lock of the subdoor that sat within a greater portal large enough to admit wagons. With effort he turned the key-I thought to find the lock too frozen, but again my fears were unfounded; the lock had after all been built in the cold by people who understood the winter.

Snorri led the way inside. He closed the door, locked it, unhooded his lantern. We stood for a moment, the three of us, looking at each other’s pale, blood-spattered faces, our breath pluming before us. “Come.” Snorri pressed on, threading through various empty chambers, more doors, more stairs-less icy here deep within the building. We hurried through deserted halls, shadows swinging all around us with the sway of our two lanterns. Our bubble of tentative illumination sailed through a consuming darkness. Our footsteps echoed in those cold and empty places and it seemed we made an awful clatter. I pushed the phrase loud enough to wake the dead to the back of my mind. Side passages yawned at us as we passed, dark with threat. Onward, through a tall archway into a long hall, an iron door standing ajar at the end of it.

“There.” Snorri gestured with his axe. “That’s our stronghold.”

Salvation! In the worst of times even temporary salvation feels like a blessing. I glanced back at the archway, convinced some grave horror would step from the shadows at any moment and tear after us. “Hurry!”

Snorri jogged across and, with a squeal of hinges, pulled the door wide for us to pass through. Beyond it lay a narrow corridor set with a series of thick iron doors. It was as well that Snorri had unlocked them on his previous visit or we’d be fumbling with keys while the shadows reached for our backs. When he pulled the first one closed behind us, the sound of him locking it was a special kind of music to my ears. My whole body slumped as that awful tension eased.

I wondered where Freja and Egil might be and hoped it was somewhere secure. I didn’t mention it, though, in case Snorri decided to go out searching for them again. If they’d lasted this long they’d last a little longer, I told myself. In my mind’s eye I pictured them, clothing their names in Snorri’s descriptions, Freja capable, determined. . She wouldn’t give up hope, not in him, not while her son lived. I saw the boy too, scrawny, freckled, inquisitive. I saw him smile-the easy grin his father had-and scamper off about some mischief amongst the huts of Eight Quays. I couldn’t picture them here, couldn’t imagine what this place might have made of them.

I leaned back against the wall for a moment, closing my eyes and trying to convince myself that the grave-scent hanging in the air was imagination. Perhaps it was, or perhaps the pursuit had been as close as I feared, but either way the locking of that door was a good thing. A very good thing indeed. Snorri shot home heavy bolts, top and bottom. Better still.

“Keep moving.” He waved me on, careful not to touch me; the air crackled and spat if we got too close and my skin glowed so bright I could almost light the way. Four doors stood between the hall and the strong-room. Snorri locked all four behind us, bolting them too in case the enemy held additional copies of the keys.

With the last door sealed behind us we collapsed upon the sacks heaped around the walls. The lanterns revealed a small cubic room without windows or any exit but the one we entered by.

“What’s in the sacks?” Tuttugu asked, patting one that protruded from beneath him.

“Black corn, wheat flour, some salt.” Snorri gestured at two barrels in the opposite corner. “Crushed ice, and in the other one, whiskey.”

“We could survive a month on this,” I said, trying to imagine it.

“Daylight. That’s all we’re waiting for. In the morning we attack.” Snorri looked grim.

As much as I wanted to argue, it made sense. No relief would come, no reinforcements were inbound. Either they would break in eventually, or we would starve in our own filth. Even so, I knew when it came to leaving, to actually putting ourselves in the hands of the unborn, they would have to drag me. I’d rather slit my wrists and be done with it.

“What’s out there, Snorri?” I lay back and watched the shadows dance on the ceiling. “Did Aslaug tell you that? Did she say what she’d seen in the darkness?”

“Unborn. Maybe a dozen of them. And the worst of them, the Unborn Captain. The Dead King’s hand in the North. All digging out troops for whatever war he’s planning. The troops are just a bonus. What they’re really after is Rikeson’s key. Not that Rikeson fashioned it. Aslaug says he tricked Loki out of it. Or Loki let it seem that way, but really it was Loki who tricked Olaaf Rikeson into taking it.”

Tuttugu stretched out his leg, sniffing and pulling his furs about him. He wrinkled his nose, disapproving of the air.

“Baraqel doesn’t tell me anything useful. I guess all the best secrets are told at night.” I didn’t pay too close a heed to Aslaug’s talk of Loki. It seemed the voices that the light and the dark used to speak to us were ones we’d given them, taken from our expectations. Only natural then that explanations should come to Snorri wrapped in heathen tales, whilst I got the true version, spoken by an angel such as one might see in the stained glass at the cathedral in Vermillion.

Vermillion! God, how I wanted to be back there. I remembered that day, the day I left the city-that crazy chaotic whirl of a day-and before I had even broken my fast on that morning the Red Queen had been bending our ears, all of us grandchildren, and at the last when I was desperate to be off about my own plans, hadn’t Grandmother been talking of tasks, of quests, of hunting for. . a key?

“Smells like something crawled in here and died.” Tuttugu interrupted my thoughts. He sniffed again, casting a suspicious glance my way.

I shushed him with a waved hand. The pieces were coming together in my mind. The Red Queen’s story about a door into death, an actual door. Who would ever want to open such a door?

“The Dead King-”

“Jal-” Tuttugu tried to cut across me.

“I’m thinking!” But death’s door couldn’t ever be opened-the lock had no. . “Loki’s key can open anything!”

“Jal!” Snorri surging to his feet. “Get down!”

An empty sack fell across my shoulders as I threw myself forwards, forgetting how much it would hurt. I heard grain shifting and spilling. The grave-stink intensified into something almost physical.

“No!” Tuttugu screamed, and threw himself at whatever had risen behind me, axe raised. I hit the ground and my world lit with the agony of the impact against my broken ribs. A meaty thud and through slitted eyes I caught a glimpse of Tuttugu flying back across the room. He hit the wall with the kind of crunch that meant he wouldn’t be getting up again.

I rolled over and the unborn towered above me, uncoiling long and scabrous limbs, shedding the full sacks and empty sacking that it had hidden beneath. A freshly skinned face peered down at me, the top of that wet and hairless scalp nearly scraping the ceiling. The eyes held the same feral hunger as those that had haunted me for all this long and wild flight from Red March, but they weren’t the same eyes that had set me running on the night of the opera what seemed a lifetime ago. These terrified but held little of that awful knowing.

I lurched aside and tried to crawl for the door as a hand made of dripping flesh and too many bones reached down for me.

“Jal!” Snorri leapt in. Snorri would always leap in. He hacked at the arm, sweeping it aside. The unborn clawed at him with its other hand, sickle talons shredding through many layers to the skin and muscle beneath.

I almost made it to the door. What I would have done there if I had reached it I can’t say. Scrabbled at the cold iron in desperation, most likely. The unborn saved me from those broken fingernails by spearing a long and unclean finger through my side and dragging me back. I fought every inch of the way, kicking and screaming. Mostly screaming.

Snorri charged again, soaked with his own blood, and the unborn caught him about the waist, raising him off the ground, talons sinking deep.

“Die, you bastard!” A howl as his eyes darkened. And with the last of his strength Snorri ver Snagason swung his father’s axe, hauling the heavy weapon through the air in a sideways swing, turning in the unborn’s grip, driving its talons deeper still but adding momentum to his blow. The blade cut through lantern light, trailing streaks of darkness. It sheared into the unborn’s head, splitting that unholy skull, and with a roar Snorri yanked the axe clear, splattering grey filth as he cracked the monster wide.

The unborn’s convulsions threw us both clear, scattering grain, salt, pieces of torn sack while it thrashed and diminished. I lay with blood pouring in a river from the dark hole the creature had put through me. Snorri found his feet again, though barely, swaying as he dragged his axe back towards the foe.

By the time the Norseman made it across the room, all that remained amidst a welter of old bones and shed skin, curled and blackened, was a small red thing. It looked almost like a baby. And, falling to his knees before it, Snorri bent double and wept as though his heart had broken.