The Liar's key

SIX

Our hasty departure from Olaafheim saw us putting in two days later at the port of Haargfjord. Food supplies had grown low and although Snorri wanted to avoid any of the larger towns, Haargfjord seemed to be our only choice.

I patted our bag of provisions. “Seems early to restock,” I said, finding it more empty than full. “Let’s get some decent vittles this time. Proper bread. Cheese. Some honey maybe. .”

Snorri shook his head. “It would have lasted me to Maladon. I wasn’t planning on feeding Tuttugu, or having you borrow rations then spit them out into the sea.”

• • •

We tied up in the harbour and Snorri set me at a table in a dockside tavern so basic that it lacked even a name. The locals called it the dockside tavern and from the taste of the beer they watered it with what they scooped from the holds of ships at the quays. Even so, I’m not one to complain and the chance to sit somewhere warm that didn’t rise and fall with the swell was one I wasn’t about to turn down.

I sat there all day, truth be told, swigging the foul beer, charming the pair of plump blond serving girls, and devouring most of a roast pig. I hadn’t expected to be left so long but before I knew it I had reached that number of ales where you blink and the sun has leapt a quarter of its path between horizons.

Tuttugu joined me late in the afternoon looking worried. “Snorri’s vanished.”

“A clever trick! He should teach me that one.”

“No, I’m serious. I can’t find him anywhere, and it’s not that big a town.”

I made show of peering under the table, finding nothing but grime-encrusted floorboards and a collection of rat-gnawed rib bones. “He’s a big fellow. I’ve not known a man better at looking after himself.”

“He’s on a quest to open death’s door!” Tuttugu said, waving his hands to demonstrate how that was the opposite of looking after oneself.

“True.” I handed Tuttugu a leg bone thick with roast pork. “Look at it this way. If he has come to grief he’s saved you a journey of months. . You can go home to Trond and I’ll wait here for a decent-sized ship to take me to the continent.”

“If you’re not worried about Snorri you might at least be worried about the key.” Tuttugu scowled and took a huge bite from the pig leg.

I raised a brow at that but Tuttugu’s mouth was full and I was too drunk to hold on to any questions I might have.

“Why are you even doing this, Tuttugu?” I ran ale over my loose tongue. “Hunting a door to Hell? Are you planning to follow him in if he finds it?”

Tuttugu swallowed. “I don’t know. If I’m brave enough I will.”

“Why? Because you’re from the same clan? You lived on the slopes of the same fjord? What on earth would possess you to-”

“I knew his wife. I knew his children, Jal. I bounced them on my knee. They called me ‘uncle.’ If a man can let go of that he can let go of anything. . and then what point is there to his life, what meaning?”

I opened my mouth, but even drunk I hadn’t answers to that. So I lifted my tankard and said nothing.

• • •

Tuttugu stayed long enough to finish my meal and drink my ale, then left to continue his search. One of the beer-girls, Hegga or possibly Hadda, brought another pitcher and the next thing I knew night had settled around me and the landlord had started making loud comments about people getting back to their own homes, or at least paying over the coin for space on his fine boards.

I heaved myself up from the table and staggered off to the latrine. Snorri was sitting in my place when I came back, his brow furrowed, an angry set to his jaw.

“Snolli!” I considered asking where he’d been but realized that if I was too drunk to say his name I’d best just sit down. I sat down.

Tuttugu came through the street doors moments later and spotted us with relief.

“Where have you been?” Like a mother scolding.

“Right here! Oh-” I swivelled around with exaggerated care to look at Snorri.

“Seeking wisdom,” he said, turning to narrow blue eyes in my direction, a dangerous look that managed to sober me up a little. “Finding my enemy.”

“Well that’s never been a problem,” I said. “Wait a while and they’ll come to you.”

“Wisdom?” Tuttugu pulled up a stool. “You’ve been to a völva? Which one? I thought we were headed for Skilfar at Beerentoppen?”

“Ekatri.” Snorri poured himself some of my ale. Tuttugu and I said nothing, only watched him. “She was closer.” And into our silence Snorri dropped his tale, and afloat on a sea of cheap beer I saw the story unfold before me as he spoke.

• • •

After leaving me in the dockside tavern Snorri had gone over the supply list with Tuttugu. “You got this, Tutt? I need to go up and see Old Hrothson.”

“Who?” Tuttugu looked up from the slate where Snorri had scratched the runes for salt, dried beef, and the other supplies, together with tally marks to count the quantities.

“Old Hrothson, the chief!”

“Oh.” Tuttugu shrugged. “My first time in Haargfjord. Go, I can haggle with the best of them.”

Snorri slapped Tuttugu’s arm and turned to go.

“Of course even the best haggler needs something to pay with. .” Tuttugu added.

Snorri fished in the pocket of his winter coat and pulled out a heavy coin, flipping it to Tuttugu.

“Never seen a gold piece that big before.” Tuttugu held it up to his face, so close his nose almost bumped it, the other hand buried in his ginger beard. “What’s that on it? A bell?”

“The great bell of Venice. They say beside the Bay of Sighs you can hear it ring on a stormy night, though it lies fifty fathoms drowned.” Snorri felt in his pocket for another of the coins. “It’s a florin.”

“Great bell of where?” Tuttugu turned the florin over in his hand, entranced by the gleam.

“Venice. Drowned like Atlantis and all the cities beneath the Quiet Sea. It was part of Florence. That’s where they mint these.”

Tuttugu pursed his lips. “I’ll find Jal when I’m done. That’s if I can carry all the change I get after spending this beauty. I’ll meet you there.”

Snorri nodded and set off, taking a steep street that led away from the docks to the long halls on the ridge above the main town.

In his years of warring and raiding Snorri had learned the value of information over opinion, learned that the stories people tell are one thing but if you mean to risk the lives of your men it’s better to have tales backed up by the evidence of your eyes-or those of a scout. Better still several scouts, for if you show a thing to three men you’ll hear three different accounts, and if you’re lucky the truth will lie somewhere between them. He would go to Skilfar and seek out the ice witch in her mountain of fire, but better to go armed with advice from other sources, rather than as an empty vessel waiting to be filled with only her opinion.

Old Hrothson had received Snorri in the porch of his long hall, where he sat in a high-backed chair of black oak, carved all over with Asgardian sigils. On the pillars rising above him the gods stood, grim and watchful. Odin looked out over the ancient’s bowed head, Freja beside him, flanked by Thor, Loki, Aegir. Others, carved lower down, stood so smoothed by years of touching that they might be any god you cared to name. The old man sat bowed under his mantle of office, all bones and sunken flesh, thin white hair crowning a liver-spotted pate, and a sharp odour of sickness about him. His eyes, though, remained bright.

“Snorri Snagason. I’d heard the Hardassa put an end to the Undoreth. A knife in the back on a dark night?” Old Hrothson measured out his words, age creaking in each syllable. The younger Hrothson sat beside him in a lesser chair, a silver-haired man of sixty winters. Honour guards clad in chain mail and furs flanked them, long axes resting against their shoulders. The two Hrothsons had sat here when Snorri last saw them, maybe five years earlier, gazing down across their town and out to the grey sea.

“Two only survived,” Snorri said. “Myself and Olaf Arnsson, known as Tuttugu.”

The older Hrothson leaned forward and hawked up a mess of dark phlegm, spitting it to the boards. “That for the Hardassa. Odin grant you vengeance and Thor the strength to take it.”

Snorri clapped his fist to his chest though the words gave him no comfort. Thor might be god of strength and war, Odin of wisdom, but he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t Loki, the trickster god, who stood behind what unfolded. A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom. And hadn’t the world proved to be a bitter joke? Perhaps even the gods themselves lay snared in Loki’s greatest trick and Ragnarok would hear the punch line spoken. “I seek wisdom,” he said.

“Well,” said Old Hrothson. “There’s always the priests.”

All of them laughed, even the honour guards.

“No really,” the younger Hrothson spoke for the first time. “My father can advise you about war, crops, trade, and fishing. Do you speak of the wisdom of this world or the other?”

“A little of both,” Snorri admitted.

“Ekatri.” Old Hrothson nodded. “She has returned. You’ll find her winter hut by the falls on the south side, three miles up the fjord. There’s more in her runes than in the smokes and iron bells of the priests with their endless tales of Asgard.”

The son nodded, and Snorri took his leave. When he glanced back both men were as they had been when he left them five years before, gazing out to sea.

• • •

An hour later Snorri approached the witch’s hut, a small roundhouse, log-built, the roof of heather and hide, a thin trail of smoke rising from the centre. Ice still fringed the falls, crashing down behind the hut in a thin and endless cascade, pulses of white driving down through the mist above the plunge pool.

A shiver ran through Snorri as he followed the rocky path to Ekatri’s door. The air tasted of old magic, neither good nor ill, but of the land, having no love for man. He paused to read the runes on the door. Magic and Woman. Völva it meant. He knocked and, hearing nothing, pushed through.

Ekatri sat on spread hides, almost lost beneath a heap of patched blankets. She watched him with one dark eye and a weeping socket. “Come in then. Clearly you’re not taking no answer for an answer.”

Snorri ducked low to avoid the door lintel and then to clear the herbs hanging from the roof stays in dry bunches. The small fire between them coiled its smoke up into the funnel of the roof, filling the single room with a perfume of lavender and pine that almost obscured the undercurrent of rot.

“Sit, child.”

Snorri sat, taking no offence. Ekatri looked to be a hundred, as wizened and twisted as a clifftop tree.

“Well? Do you expect me to guess?” Ekatri dipped her clawed hand into one of the bowls set before her and tossed a pinch of the powder into the embers before her, putting a darker curl into the rising smoke.

“In the winter assassins came to Trond. They came for me. I want to know who sent them.”

“You didn’t ask them?”

“Two I had to kill. The last I disabled, but I couldn’t make him speak.”

“You’ve no stomach for torture, Undoreth?”

“He had no mouth.”

“A strange creature indeed.” Ekatri drew out a glass jar from her blanket, not a thing northmen could make. A thing of the Builders, and in the greenish liquid within, a single eyeball, turning on the slow current. The witch’s own perhaps.

“They had olive skin, were human in all respects save for the lack of a mouth, that and the ungodly quickness of them.” Snorri drew out a gold coin from his pocket. “Might be from Florence. They had the blood price on them, in florins.”

“That doesn’t make them Florentines. Half the jarls in Norseheim have a handful of florins in their warchests. In the southern states the nobles spend florins in their gambling halls as often as their own currency.” Snorri passed the coin over into Ekatri’s outstretched claw. “A double florin. Now they are more rare.”

Ekatri set the coin upon the lid of the jar where her lost eye floated. She drew a leather bag from her blankets and shook it so the contents clacked against each other. “Put your hand in, mix them about, tip them out. . here.” She cleared a space and marked the centre.

Snorri did as he was bidden. He’d had the runes read for him before. This message would be a darker one, he fancied. He closed his hand around the tablets, finding them colder and heavier than he had expected, then drew his fist out, opened it palm up and let the rune stones slip from his hand onto the hides below. It seemed as though each fell through water, its path too slow, twisting more than it should. When they landed a silence ran through the hut, underwriting the finality of the pronouncement writ in stone between the witch and himself.

Ekatri studied the tablets, her face avid, as if hungry for something she might read among them. A very pink tongue emerged to wet ancient lips.

“Wunjo, face down, beneath Gebo. A woman has buried your joy, a woman may release it.” She touched another two face up. “Salt and Iron. Your path, your destination, your challenge, and your answer.” A gnarled finger flipped over the final runestone. “The Door. Closed.”

“What does all that mean?” Snorri frowned.

“What do you think it means?” Ekatri watched him with wry amusement.

“Am I supposed to be the völva for you?” Snorri rumbled, feeling mocked. “Where’s the magic if I tell you the answer?”

“I let you tell me your future and you ask where the magic lies?” Ekatri reached out and swirled the jar beside her so the pickled eyeball within spun with the current. “The magic might be in getting into that thick warrior skull of yours the fact that your future stands on your choices and only you can make them. The magic lies in knowing that you seek both a door and the happiness you think lies behind it.”

“There’s more,” Snorri said.

“There is always more.”

Snorri drew up his jerkin. The scrapes and tears the Fenris wolf had given him were scabbed and healing, bruises livid across his chest and side, but across his ribs a long single slice lay glistening, the flesh about it an angry red, and along the wound’s length a white encrustation of salt. “My gift from the assassins.”

“An interesting injury.” Ekatri reached forward with withered fingers. Snorri flinched but kept his place as she set her hand across the slit. “Does it hurt, Snorri ver Snagason?”

“It hurts.” Through gritted teeth. “It only gives me peace when we sail. The longer I stay put the worse it gets. I feel a. . tug.”

“It pulls you south.” Ekatri removed her hand, wiping it on her furs. “You’ve felt this kind of call before.”

Snorri nodded. The bond with Jal exerted a similar draw. He felt it even now, slight, but there, wanting to pull him back to the tavern he’d left the southerner in.

“Who has done this?” He met the völva’s one-eyed gaze.

“Why is a better question.”

Snorri picked up the stone Ekatri had named the Door. It no longer felt unduly cold or heavy, just a piece of slate, graven with a single rune. “Because of the door. And because I seek it,” he said.

Ekatri held her hand out for the Door and Snorri passed the stone to her, feeling a twinge of reluctance at releasing it.

“Someone in the south wants what you carry, and they want you to bring it to them.” Ekatri licked her lips, again-the quickness of her tongue disturbing. “See how one simple cut draws all the runes together?”

“The Dead King did this? He sent these assassins?” Snorri asked.

Ekatri shook her head. “The Dead King is not so subtle. He is a raw and elemental force. This has an older hand behind it. You have something everyone wants.” Ekatri touched the claw of her hand to her withered chest, the motion just glimpsed beneath the blankets. She touched on herself the same spot where Loki’s key lay against Snorri’s flesh.

“Why just the three? Sent in the midst of winter. Why not more, now that travelling is easy?”

“Perhaps he was testing something? Does it seem reasonable that three such assassins should fail against one man? Perhaps the wound was all they were intended to give you. An invitation. . of a kind. If it wasn’t for the light within you battling the poison on that blade you would belong to the wound already, busy rushing south. There would be no question of any delay or diversion to speak to old women in their huts.” She closed her eye and seemed to study Snorri with her empty socket a while. “They do say Loki’s key doesn’t like to be taken. Given, surely, but taken? Stolen, of a certainty. But taken by force? Some speak of a curse on those who own it through strength. And it doesn’t do to anger gods, now does it?”

“I mentioned no key.” Snorri fought to keep his hands from twitching toward it, burning cold against his chest.

“Ravens fly even in winter, Snagason.” Ekatri’s eye hardened. “Do you think if some southern mage knew of your exploits weeks ago, old Ekatri would not know of it by now in her hut just down the coast? You came seeking wisdom: don’t take me for a fool.”

“So I must go south and hope?”

“There is no ‘must’ about it. Surrender the key and the wound will heal. Perhaps even the wounds you can’t see. Stay here. Make a new life.” She patted the hides beside her. “I could always use a new man. They never seem to last.”

Snorri made to stand. “Keep the gold, völva.”

“Well, it seems my wisdom is valued today. Now that you’ve paid for it so handsomely perhaps you might heed it, child.” She made the coin vanish and sighed. “I’m old, my bones are dry, the world has lost its savour, Snorri. Go, die, spend yourself in the deadlands. . it matters little to me, my words are a pretty noise for you, your mind is set. The waste sorrows me, young and full of juice you are, but in the end, in the end we’re all wasted by the years. Think on it, though. Did those who stand in your path just start to covet Loki’s key this winter?”

“I-” Snorri knew a moment of shame. His thoughts had been so narrowed on the choice he’d made that the rest of the world had escaped him.

“As your tragedies draw you south. . wonder how those tragedies came to be and whose hand truly lay behind them.”

“I’ve been a fool.” Snorri found his feet.

“And you’ll keep being one. Words can’t turn you from this course. Maybe nothing can. Friendship, love, trust, childish notions that have left this old woman. . but, whatever the runes have to say, these are what rule you, Snorri ver Snagason, friendship, love, trust. They’ll drag you into the underworld, or save you from it. One or the other.” She hung her head, stared into the fire.

“And this door I seek? Where can I find it?”

Ekatri’s wrinkle of a mouth puckered into consideration. “I don’t know.”

Snorri felt himself deflate. For a moment he had thought she might tell him, but it would have to be Skilfar. He started to turn.

“Wait.” The völva raised a hand. “I don’t know. But I can guess where it might lie. Three places.” She returned her hand to her lap. “In Yttrmir the world slopes into Hel, so they say. In the badlands that stretch to the Yöttenfall the skies grow dim and the people strange. Go far enough and you’ll find villages where no one ages, none are born, each day follows the next without change. Further still and the people neither eat nor drink nor sleep but sit at their windows and stare. I’ve not heard that there is a door-but if you wish to go to Hel, that is a path. That is the first. The second is Eridruin’s Cave on the shore of Harrowfjord. Monsters dwell there. The hero Snorri Hengest fought them, and in his saga it speaks of a door that stands in the deepest part of those caverns, a black door. The third is less sure, told by a raven, a child of Crakk, white-feathered in his dotage. Even so. There is a lake in Scorron, the Venomere, dark as ink, where no fish swim. In its depths they say there is a door. In older days the men of Scorron threw witches into those waters, and none ever floated to the surface as corpses are wont to do.”

“My thanks, völva.” He hesitated. “Why did you tell me? If my plan is such madness?”

“You asked. The runes put the door in your path. You’re a man. Like most men you need to face your quarry before you can truly decide. You won’t let go of this until you find it. Maybe not even then.” Ekatri looked down and said no more. Snorri waited a moment longer, then turned and left, watched by a single eye floating in its jar.

• • •

“Assassins?” I lifted my head, the room continuing to move after I stopped. “Nonsense. You never mentioned any attack.”

Snorri lifted his jerkin. A single ugly wound ran down his side, far back, just past the ribs, salt crusted as he’d described. I may have seen it when Borris’s daughters were washing him back in Olaafheim after the Fenris wolf got hold of him, or perhaps he had been turned the wrong way. . in any event I didn’t recall it in my inebriation.

“So how much does it cost to hire assassins then?” I asked. “Just for future reference. And. . where’s the money? You should be rich!”

“I gave most of it to the sea, so that Aegir would grant us safe passage,” said Snorri.

“Well that didn’t bloody work!” I banged the table, perhaps a little harder than I meant to. I can be an excitable drunk.

“Most of it?” Tuttugu asked.

“I paid a völva in Trond to treat the wound.”

“Did a piss-poor job from what I could see,” I interjected, holding on to the table to keep from sliding past it.

“It was beyond her skill, and while we stay here it only grows worse. Come, we’ll sail at dawn.”

Snorri stood and I guess we followed, though I’ve no memory of it.