The Wheel of Osheim

TWENTY-SIX

I let Snorri and Kara navigate us out of Blujen’s garden lands and on into northern Slov. Snorri’s instinct for the outdoors seemed as keen among the woods and fields of the central kingdoms as it had amid the icy rocks of Norseheim. Kara also proved her worth, casting her runestones wherever the road offered us choices and selecting the path of least resistance.

Slov was of course in a state of high anxiety with rumours running rife through the countryside and any town with a wall, girding its loins for war. Suspicion ran deep that any stranger might be a Red March spy, but even the fevered imagination of the Slovs was hard-pressed to picture the Red Queen recruiting giant Vikings, blonde völvas or red-haired northern lads as covert agents. I did my best to hide behind Snorri and say as little as possible during encounters. The approach worked well, becoming easier by the mile as we left the war zone behind us, and within a few days we had returned to the steady progress and comfortable tavern nights that we had enjoyed on the way.

Having consulted the maps at Grandmother’s headquarters and discussed the matter with a dangerous-looking man of hers who described his employment only as “travelling widely on state business,” we aimed to leave Slov along the Attar-Zagre border and pass swiftly into Charland, crossing the breadth of that ill-favoured nation before travelling the length of Osheim to the Wheel.

I’m not a man who likes travel. I do like to ride, it’s true, but generally I’d prefer to end the day where I started, i.e. home in the palace of Vermillion. I don’t approve of foreign places. Neighbouring countries are at best a necessary evil required to cut down on the amount of coastline, since the only thing worse than a long journey overland is a journey of any length over water. In short, even with the addition of decent roads, warm inns, and half-decent food, the business of getting from A to B is overrated.

I could regale you with a near-endless list of small towns passed through, lazy peasants encountered, provisions purchased, hooves shod, ale drunk, early morning frosts, the fiery colours of the fall, sunsets lingering in the west . . . but the truth is that by the time we met disaster nearly a hundred miles had passed beneath our hooves without a damn thing happening.

For a world reputedly on its last legs things seemed largely untroubled, at least to judge by what could be seen from the back of a horse in the middle of the Broken Empire. The sky remained variously blue or grey, showing no tendency to crack or burn. The land held the wet ochre hues of autumn with no sulphurous ravines opening up amid the stubbled fields, no tongues of fire licking from new-formed fissures. Even the hell that had been lapping at the walls of Vermillion seemed a distant dream now.

I tried on a couple of occasions to broach the subject of Snorri’s journeying in Hel. I would have got to it in my own time without Kara making eyes at me. My own time, however, would have been when we were both old men. Fortunately he just shook his head and reached for his ale. “Done is done, Jal. Stories tell themselves when the time’s right. And for some stories the time is never right.”

For the first week of our journey each shadowed space hung thick with threat. I knew Edris Dean to be out there somewhere, having fled the siege when things turned sour. I knew that the Unborn Prince would be stalking the kingdoms, bound on the Dead King’s business. And worse than Dean, worse even than the Unborn Prince, I knew my sister would be seeking me. Kelem had told me my sister required my death to seal her into this world. Marco had confirmed as much when we found him nailed to a tree in the drylands. My sister had escaped her long exile, breaking into our world through the wound left by the death of one brother. Unborn from hell and bound to a lichkin she would now be seeking the death of her last sibling to anchor her here. I needed something holier than my father’s blessing on a cross to break my sister from the lichkin. I kept my eyes open as we travelled, but church relics are thin on the ground in most places, so mostly I kept my eyes open for skinless horrors trying to pounce on me from the hedgerows.

All that would be enough to keep any man a prisoner to his fears, viewing each night as a long horror when his foes might come upon him unannounced. But somehow, after so many days passing without incident, the normality of the road shrunk the fears that should have had me wideeyed and shivering, to something almost abstract. Riding with Snorri on one side, Kara on the other, unexpected autumn sunshine on my back, the boy cantering ahead . . . it just didn’t seem possible that the world could hold such nightmares.

“I think some Viking is rubbing off on me.” I made a show of brushing at my sleeve as Snorri moved his horse slowly past Murder. The stallion had mellowed a touch on the journey and would allow the other nags to take a turn in the lead, presumably viewing them as heralds who go before a great king to announce his imminent arrival. “I’m not finding this trip north quite as dreadful as the last one.”

“That’s the magic of the fjords.” Snorri grinned. “They call you back.

None travel as far as the Vikings-but we go back-the North calls us home.”

“Sentimental nonsense.” Kara caught us up riding close on my left side. “There are more Vikings settled on the Drowned Isles and south of the Karlswater than live in all of Norseheim.”

I could sense another of their interminable arguments coming on.

The pair of them could debate the smallest issue for hours in that singsong tit-for-tat way the Norse had. They would end up hair-splitting over some terminally dull point of Viking history. Suddenly the world would hinge on whether Olaaf Thorgulson, fourth son of Thorgul Olaafson, sailed from Haagenfast in the 28th year of the Iron Jarls or the 27th . . . I glanced around hurriedly for something to distract them before they got started.

“Fuck me! It’s the pope,” I said, not really believing it, for meeting her holiness on a backroad along the Zagre-Attar border seemed no more real a possibility than an unborn lurching out from the hedgerows. “That seems unlikely.” Snorri stood in his stirrups for a better view.

Ahead of us the road ran arrow straight, dividing the land, rising and falling with each undulation. Emerging from the hidden dip of the next valley a long caravan had begun to crest the next but one ridge. Even from a mile off I recognized the papal flag without difficulty, a purple cross fluttering horizontally on a white pennant. A dozen or more men carried a large sedan chair, its roof sporting a golden cross that screamed “steal me” across the intervening distance, and two squads of halberdiers, a score fore and aft, bracketed the affair, carrying enough pointy steel to make even the most hardened brigand turn a deaf ear.

“Well if it’s not the pope it’s someone damned important.” Father never got such an escort despite being a cardinal.

“We should steer clear of them,” Snorri said.

“Don’t worry, the church gave up burning heathens years ago.” I reached out to place a condescending pat on his shoulder. “You’ll be fine.

These days they only go after witches . . . oh.” I glanced back at Kara.

“Perhaps we should steer clear of them. A caravan that large is bound to have at least one inquisitor with it.”

Of course when the people you want to avoid are ahead of you on the best road in an unfamiliar region, and going in the direction you want to go, only more slowly . . . that tends to mean reducing your own pace and following them.

We rode behind at walking speed, keeping a good half a mile between us. Every now and then the papal convoy would come back into view, cresting one of the folds in the rolling landscape. It started to rain. “We could just ride past,” Hennan said.

“The boy has a point,” Snorri said. “At a canter we’d be ten seconds from rear to van.”

“They’re filling the road. They would need to stand aside for us,” I said. “They might ask our business-and if there’s an inquisitor with them then they would probably know it soon enough.” My fingers found the lump Loki’s key made under my jacket. Inquisitors had a nose for such things-though to accuse them of using enchantment would be little different from tying yourself to the stake and calling for a torch.

Explaining the key to an agent of the Roma Inquisition was not something I wanted to have to do. Men had had their tongues torn out for even speaking the names of false gods.

The rain thickened as the light failed, and still the clerics and their guards showed no sign of turning from the road to seek shelter for the night.

“We’ll be following them all the way to Osheim.” I spat rainwater.

The growing gloom felt oppressive, filled with all the threats that I’d become so adept at forgetting about of late. Unbidden, an image of Darin came to me, my brother lying dead by the Appan Gate . . . a moment later I saw my unborn sister’s hand move beneath his skin, seeking a way out. I had given Darin peace with the sword at my hip, but my sister had found the gate she needed only hours later, carving her path into this world through Martus’s still-warm corpse. Was she out there now? A creature of Hell, still raw from her false birth and hungry for my life? “Jal?” A hand on my shoulder. Kara’s hand.

I flinched and nearly lashed out. “What?” The word came out with a harsh edge.

“Someone’s coming,” she said.

The clatter of hooves drew closer as we pulled to the left side. A single horse, being ridden hard.

The man emerged from the murk and rain and was nearly lost from sight again before he pulled up, his mount rearing and whinnying a complaint.

“Has the cardinal’s escort passed you by?” He threw his hood back.

Black hair plastered his brow, the face beneath gaunt, teeth bared in exhaustion or threat.

“No,” I said. “Which cardinal? What are they doing out here?” The man ignored me, pulling his hood down and turning his horse back to the road. Perhaps the “out here” offended him. I keep forgetting people not from Red March tend to regard their own country as the centre of empire.

“Which cardinal?” I shouted.

“Hemmalung.” A shout across his shoulder, almost lost amid the rain andhoof-beats.

“Why does it matter what his name is?” Hennan asked. “Her name,” I said. An idea had started to intrude, an idea so big that only a corner of it had managed to poke through my skull so far. “Hemmalung is Charland’s second city.” The truth was I couldn’t name the first city, or any others, or any single fact about the kingdom-but I knew Hemmalung was a city because I knew the cardinal that kept her see there.

“And her name is?” Snorri leaned in to hear, drawing a hand down across the short black thicket of his beard as if to squeeze the rain out. “Gertrude.” I remembered her as a thickset woman in her late fifties, thin lipped, deep-sunken eyes, greying curls. She had visited Father at Roma Hall on more than one occasion. “I’m going to ride on ahead and reintroduce myself to the good cardinal.”

“Why?” Kara looked as bedraggled as her horse, the rain dripping off the ends of both their noses. “We could find an inn. Take shelter for the night. Chances are they’ll be out of our way come tomorrow.”

“There’s something she has that I need. Snorri can tell you what it is.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“We were told about it in Hel . . .” I cocked my head expectantly, and finding Snorri still looking blank, and my ear filling with cold water, I cycled my hand. “By a dark soul deservingly nailed to a rather big tree . . .”

“Marco?” Snorri threw up his hands in exasperation. “You shouldn’t believe anything he had to say!” He turned to Kara. “Jal thinks a cardinal’s seal will split his sister from the lichkin that brought her out of Hel.”

“It will!” I felt sure of it. “The dead can’t lie.” Then less sure. “Can they?”

“It’s nonsense anyway.” Snorri kicked his horse into motion. “If a cardinal’s seal is so holy a thing then how do you expect to part Cardinal Gertrude from hers?”

“I’ll steal it.” I glanced toward Hennan. “I’m as god-fearing as the next prince, and scrupulously honest, but desperate times-”

“You stole Loki’s key from Kara,” the boy said.

“Ah, well . . . that was mine in the first place. Anyhow-stop confusing the issue. I’ll take it.”

“You’ll ‘take it’?” Snorri raised a brow. I’ve spent several hours trying to learn the knack of elevating a single eyebrow, but the talent eludes me. It’s probably some inbred northern thing.

“How?” Kara asked. “You’re not making sense.”

“Post-coitally.” Sitting there on a wet horse in the rain it didn’t sound very appetizing. Remembering the last time didn’t whet my appetite either. “You slept with a cardinal?” Snorri leaned in, surprise and amusement warring for control of his features.

“Well, technically there was no sleeping involved.” I aimed for the right tone of reserved nonchalance. I’m not sure I hit it. “But we knew each other in the biblical sense, yes.”

“Aren’t your cardinals . . . old people?” Hennan asked. “How long ago was this?” Kara asked.

I nudged Murder to a faster pace, trying to shake off the curious Norse pressing me on all sides. “A long time ago.”

“How long?” Snorri caught up. “Not long ago you were twelve. You weren’t twelve were you?”

“Of course not. Much older than that.”

“He’s lying.” Kara, back on my left.

“A little older.” I could hear Snorri sniggering above the rain. “If you must know, Gertrude was my first. She was very gentle-” Laughter from both sides cut me off.

“Damn you, heathens!” I spurred Murder into a canter. “I’ll be back with the seal by morning. And if the guards catch you hanging around I’ll recommend you’re burned as witches.”

I let Murder have his head. Rain and murk kept visibility to thirty yards or less but I’ve never known a road run so straight, and the locals kept it well surfaced, shingle in the main but in some stretches cobbles or even paved. There’s something about galloping a horse that I’ll never tire of. It’s a sort of union that puts you in control of a power much greater than your own . . . control is too strong a word for it-if it were control much of the joy would go out of it-you’re a guide, a conduit. I think it’s as close to understanding sorcery as I’ve come.

Ten minutes later, soaked to the bone but flushed with the warmth of the ride, I knew I must be close to catching the cardinal. I slowed to a canter, not wishing to come on them by surprise and find myself accidentally impaled on a halberd before I could declare my intentions . . . or rather declare my lies, since my actual intentions would very likely see me impaled on purpose.

I nearly missed the horse, standing as it was off in the margins of the road amid the pouring rain. A lone dark horse, head down, back against the fringes of a small wood not far from the roadside. I’ve always had an eye for horse-flesh and this piece seemed familiar. Looking around I saw one spot among the shingle that seemed darker than the rest . . . perhaps stained with blood. I rode closer to the horse. It cantered off, skittish, but I saw enough to feel more certain it was the beast the messenger who passed us had been riding.

“An assassin?” I spoke the words aloud though there was nobody to hear and the rain overwrote them.

I turned Murder back to the road and continued at a slower pace, perplexed.

It didn’t take long to reach the column’s rearguard, shadowy in the rain, their halberds across their shoulders, swaying to the rhythm of the march.

“Traveller, coming through!” I thought it best to keep my anonymity as long as possible. At first none of them gave any sign of hearing me. “Traveller, coming through!” I shouted again, and as one they all stopped. Without a head turning my way, the rearguard, some two dozen men in all, stepped to the roadside.

“Coming through . . .” I walked Murder past their ranks-eight lines of three, none of them glancing as I drew level, all with the blank-faces that soldiers on household duty often affect, affording the illusion of privacy to those they watch over.

The sedan chair was a large one, big enough to hold six people if they were squeezed side by side. Lanterns hung from each corner of the rectangular roof, but none were lit. Cardinal Gertrude would be travelling with a personal secretary, an aide and a couple of priests at a minimum. Hopefully no space had been found for the inquisition.

“I’ll pay my respect to the cardinal . . .” I spoke loud enough to be heard above the thunder of rain on the tarred black roof of the enclosed chair. Properly the captain of her guard should have presented himself by now and demanded my credentials. Instead the whole column just stood there, ignoring me. “Now, look here . . .” The bluster ran out of my voice as still not one face turned my way. Icy water ran down my back along with the surety that something was badly wrong here.

I turned Murder on the spot, a fancy move the stallion had been well trained in. With both legs clamped tight to his sides I could feel the nervous play of his muscles-the horse was scared, and given that he got his name from his normal response to threat . . . that made me scared too. I looked at the sedan’s black and shiny door, the papal order blazoned there, beaded with water above the crown and scythe of Hemmalung. The bearers stood without motion, heads down, dripping, and suddenly no part of me wanted that door open.

As I watched, it seemed that the water pattering down beneath the door was darker than it should be, as if stained.

“I . . . uh . . . forgot something.” I bumped my heels against Murder’s ribs. “Sorry, my mistake.”

The sedan’s door began to open, slowly, as if the wind might have caught its edge and started to pull it wide. Some cold and ethereal hand sunk its fingers into my chest, lacing them between my rib bones and closing, tight.

A gust took hold and threw the door full open, slamming back against the sedan’s wall. What light remained to the day proved insufficient challenge to the darkness within, revealing only one thing-a white enamel mask such as a rich man might wear to a masquerade. The eyes behind that slit remained invisible, but they cut like broken glass even so. The mask from the Vermillion Opera!

I slammed both heels into Murder’s sides and he took off like a bolt loosed from a crossbow. The Unborn Prince left the cardinal’s sedan with sufficient violence that splintered fragments of it winged past my ear as I bent to the gallop. He came after us with a rushing like a great wind tearing through a forest. A wet ripping sound chased us down the road. The halberdiers turned as we thundered by, trying to bring their weapons into play but they proved slow and strangely uncoordinated, even for guardsmen of the more ceremonial variety. I had to duck low to avoid the blades of the last two halberds, and then we were free and clear, Murder and me against the darkness and the rain.

Glancing back is seldom advisable, especially when in full flight from danger. What are you going to do, run faster? It didn’t work out well for Lot’s wife and although I’ve learned few lessons from the bible, that one I should have hung on to. At least I hung onto my horse, though just barely. Perhaps the darkness saved me, concealing enough of the detail to preserve my sanity. As the Unborn Prince tore past the guardsmen, cardinal’s robes flapping, each man ripped open in a red butchery of tattered flesh and white bones. The contents of their bodies vomited out toward the prince and where they struck they stuck, flowing, reorganizing, so that stride by stride he grew and changed.

“Dear God!” I kicked Murder to greater efforts but he was already giving all he had. He might be as vicious a stallion as ever ran the fields of empire, but in this instance the same mad terror made cowards of us both.

Whatever the Unborn Prince was becoming one thing was certain- it wasn’t slow. The furious wet crunching thrash of the beast didn’t seem to be fading away into the distance as Murder stretched his legs. In truth it was growing louder, closer, and more furious.

The thud of heavy feet began to drown out the thunder of Murder’s hooves. Cold blood spattered across my back with each wordless roar of the monster. In moments a swing of its jaws would take me from the saddle. On the road ahead shapes loomed out of the murk, refusing detail to my rain-filled eyes.

“Save me!” A shout that emptied my lungs top to bottom.

With no alternatives left I veered right, hauling on Murder’s reins and kicking him into a huge jump that carried us clear of both the ditch and the six-foot hedge standing behind it. At the height of the jump I glimpsed my pursuer, just starting to overhaul me, but still on the road, trying to follow, too heavy to match our turning circle. The thing that the unborn had built itself into looked for all the world like a dragon from myth. A huge, raw, skinless dragon whose wet and flapping mouth housed rib-bone teeth.

The last I saw of the unborn before the hedge took it from view was of bloody feet with thigh-bone claws scrabbling for purchase on the cobbled road as it sought to turn, starting to present a broadside to the three riders in its path, all of whom were now trying to throw themselves from their mounts to get clear of the collision.

We landed with a jolting impact and I narrowly avoided smashing my front teeth out on the back of Murder’s head. Instinct told me to keep going, racing out in a straight line cross-country. Common-sense could only muster a faint cry from the corner at the back of my mind where it had been relegated, but since that cry concerned the inevitability of laming Murder while crossing rough ground in the dark at speed, and being stranded alone, waiting for the corpse-dragon to find me . . . I listened. I tugged hard to the left and brought him toward a dip in the hedge.

The unborn monster must have lost its footing and smashed into the horses side on. Two lay on their backs on the verge, legs flailing. The Norse appeared to have got clear without being crushed. Snorri had hold of Hennan, dragging him out of range of the hooves as the nearest mare tried to right herself.

The third horse went down with the corpse-dragon and now lay entangled with it, dwarfed by the beast, screaming in a register that would have loosened my bladder if I hadn’t passed that point several hundred yards back. As the unborn found its feet the horse, Hennan’s chestnut mare, Squire, “peeled” and became part of the monster, its flesh and bones being drawn up and redistributed across the manufactured body. The lantern one of the riders had been carrying lay smashed in a pool of dancing flame, casting the unborn into hideous relief.

Snorri, pressing Hennan into Kara’s care, returned on foot to the middle of the road.

“I have swum the River of Swords. I have whet my axe on jötnar bone in the cold places of the underworld. I am Snorri ver Snagason and I have slain your kind before.” He lifted his axe and somehow the edge of it cut a glimmer from the night. “This night you return to Hel.”

The corpse dragon shook itself, tattered flesh trailing beneath the muscular barrel of its body, supported on four thick legs. The head, its mouth wide enough to swallow a man, tilted first one way, then the other, bundled spines crackling deep within stolen flesh as it flexed. The porcelain mask now sat bedded in the beast’s forehead, a single white scale amid all that rawness. Two eye-pits regarded the Viking. The eyes I had met long ago in Vermillion’s opera house watched from their recesses- I couldn’t see them but I felt their hate.

“You.” At first it was the sound of blood gargling in a diseased throat, then somehow it was speech. “You dare to stand your ground against me?”

“Stand my ground?” Snorri looked very alone, there in the middle of the empty road, the rain dripping from every part of him. “Vikings don’t stand their ground!” With axe raised above his shoulder the poor madman began to charge.

The unborn seemed as surprised as me and stood watching as Snorri covered the distance between them. The closer he got the more huge the unborn seemed, the more unequal the contest.

As Snorri raced across the last few yards, roaring his battle-cry, the unborn swiped at him, a bone-clawed foot of raw meat, half as wide across as Snorri was tall. The Northman threw himself under the swing, feet first, sliding across the wet stones and somehow rising to bring Hel down in a violent arc that terminated at the centre of the unborn’s forehead, shattering the porcelain mask and burying the blade haft-deep.

The unborn, clothed in its body of many corpses, swung its dragonlike head, ripping Hel from Snorri’s hands and catching him across the side from hip to armpit. The angle was wrong for biting but the force of the impact lifted the Northman from his feet, flinging him bodily through the air and hurling him on a trajectory that carried him off the road, through the top of the hedgerow, and into the field where he hit the mud about a yard in front of me with a dull thud.

In my limited experience, any blow that lifts a man off his feet tends to be the blow that kills him. One time I saw a stallion kick one of the stable-lads at the palace. His feet left the ground and he flew perhaps a fifth of the distance Snorri covered. I don’t know if he was dead before he landed but if he wasn’t it couldn’t have been long after. They rolled him over and I saw the sharp fractures of his ribs all around where the hoof caught him. The rest of the bones had been driven into his lungs.

Compared to the unborn the hazards of galloping cross-country in the dark were nothing. I should have been out of both sight and earshot before Snorri hit the ground but instead I found myself kneeling in the mud, rolling him over. His whole left side was a mess of gore.

“C-could . . . have gone better.” He croaked the words as air leaked back into his lungs.

“You’re . . . hurt.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. On the other side of the hedges the unborn roared and thrashed. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Perhaps it was eating Kara. I’d imagined a lot of sorry ends for myself, but none had featured being slaughtered in the mud by a monster on a lonely stretch of road.

Snorri groaned and rolled onto his good side, grasping at his ribs. His hand came away messy and my stomach lurched.

“I’m in one piece.” He managed a scarlet-toothed grin and I realized the gore had come from the unborn. “Odin’s blood!” Snorri got into a sitting position, hunched like a man broken on the inside.

“How are you even alive?” I stood up, backing away a step. It seemed that the relatively slow velocity and large area of the impact had conspired to get Snorri airborne without turning his body to pulp.

I reached down to help him up but before he could gain his feet the hedgerow burst open, the unborn forcing a path.

“Shit!” I drew my sword: a toothpick would have been as much use. “What are you doing?” Snorri was still on the ground wrestling something glowing from the pack at his hip. “Put it away!” Light would just help it find us faster.

Too late, the huge nightmare head swung our way and the cold malice of those hidden eyes pierced me. I stood, paralysed, on the point of dropping my sword and running for it, abandoning all honour for the privilege of dying fifty yards further from the road. The thing lurched forward with a hideous gargle, but seemed unable to break free from the hedge. Black root-like loops had encircled its feet.

“Kara!” The völva must have been working on the entanglement spell that had had such marvellous effects against the Red Vikings near the Wheel of Osheim. The strength returned to my hand, fingers tightening on my sword hilt. I glanced down at Snorri. “What the hell?” He had the ghost-box, its glow making black silhouettes of his hands as he opened it, pointed toward his face.

“We need Baraqel!” He shouted it into the mouth of the box where a chaotic speckling of light and dark boiled.

At the hedge the unborn roared and threw itself forward, centuriesold roots groaned and creaked under the strain. Several burst apart with loud retorts. Elsewhere, dead flesh tore to let the bonds slip and reformed afterwards.

Snorri got to his knees. “The key, Jal, it’s the way to let him out. He lives in here.”

“It doesn’t work like that, you stupid great . . . Viking.” But even as I said it I pulled out Loki’s key and pointed my trembling blade in the direction of the unborn, which was now uprooting the last hawthorn that had been anchoring it down.

“Yes it does!” Snorri stood, one arm clutching his side, the other holding the box out toward me. “Yes. It. Does.” The look he gave me held such conviction I started to believe it too.

Bone claws dug into the mud and the unborn surged into motion. I dropped my sword.

“Baraqel!” I roared, taking the ghost-box and aiming its mouth toward the unborn. I thrust the key into the box’s base and turned it.

The light that lanced out I had seen once before, though that time I had been inside a tent that had almost burst into flames. Now as then the Builders’ Sun’s light turned the darkness into the blind whiteness of dunes beneath the hottest sun. The unborn screamed, its flesh bubbling. In the next moment the impossible brightness of that unnatural illumination cut off and in its place Baraqel stood, as we had seen him once before at the wrong-mages’ gate, a glowing angel with a sword cut from the sun, nine foot long and burning. In the instant he appeared I knew him. No one else quite managed that look of disapproval when their eyes found me.

A heartbeat later the unborn crashed into Baraqel, his sword descending upon it. Even a twelve-foot angel couldn’t stop the creature dead. The dragon body it wore had been fashioned from the corpses of fifty men or more and Baraqel was thrown aside. But wings of bronze and gold spread to absorb the momentum and his furnace-bright sword struck the unborn’s head from its shoulders in a single blow.

Dark crimson blood vomited from the unborn’s neck in a lumpy torrent while the whole serpentine length of its body convulsed, whipping back and forth. A moment later it warped and tore like dough, corpse heads and disembodied eyes appearing along its back, new limbs forming, ending in rib-bone claws or half a dozen spinal columns thrashing like tentacles. Another convulsion and the mutated mass of it wrapped Baraqel in a coil, bearing him to the ground.

“Come!” Snorri snatched up my sword and, limping, ran into the fray.

“Come? You just took my bloody sword. What am I supposed to use? Bad language?”

I drew my dagger and stood watching. The fight confused my eye: rapid, furious coils of dead flesh black against the angel’s brilliant limbs, bright wings fluttering, black claws tearing, and occasionally a glimpse of that burning sword sending shadows sprinting back across the field. I spotted Snorri here and there, like a mouse harrying an Indus python, Edris Dean’s blade cutting through the necromancy that sustained the unborn, but surely with cuts too small to matter.

I looked at the four inches of iron in my fist, then looked back for Murder, only to find him gone, even his viciousness turned to terror at the sight and sounds of such a battle. The half-expected red tide of the berserker failed to rise in me, just a bitterness, an anger that this creature woven of the worst of men’s hatreds that settle into the deepest rifts of Hell, had haunted me for so long. The unborn had been the start of my journey, breaking my life apart, and now it looked like being the end of it too. I held the dagger out before me. Die fighting alongside Snorri in the light-or alone a few minutes later in the dark? Sometimes the coward’s choice aligns with that of the hero.

Kara told me I was screaming “Undoreth” when I charged. I don’t have any memory of it, but I’m sure it would have been “Red March.”