The Wheel of Osheim

TWENTY-EIGHT

Charland reminded me of the Thurtans. Which is never a good thing. The peasants were muddier and rougher than one might encounter in more civilized southern climes but at least we weren’t so far north that we’d slipped out of Christendom. By and large your Christian peasant knows his place better than the heathen, being more likely to tug the forelock and respect the God-given authority of a nobleman. In the north few jarls are more than two generations away from the bloody-handed reaver who carved out the miserable clutch of rocks they currently claim to rule.

Fortunately, apart from being dank and overburdened with streams, lakes, ponds, rivers, bogs, marshes, fens, and mires, Charland had been blessed with ten years of unbroken peace. This meant that with coin in one’s pocket one could cross large distances in short order on well-maintained roads, and find half-decent accommodation each evening.

The closeness that had grown between Snorri and Kara, and between Snorri and the boy, on our journey south, started to grow again. There’s a magnetism about the Viking that draws people in, and something in the man needed to be a father. Some women grow broody for a babe at breast; perhaps some men need a son to raise. At best I had served Hennan in the role of disreputable uncle, but Snorri took on a broader responsibility, teaching the boy without ever seeming to be a teacher, everything from tying knots to throwing knives, reading the lie of the land to reading the runes of the north scratched into the dirt.

Watching the three of them, I’ll own to pangs of jealousy, but mixed with caution. In some ways it was like envying a man on a high cliff edge the view, whilst being thankful no such urge steered my own feet to any such precipice. Snorri loved too easily: that capacity for love, for unselfish giving of himself, drew people to him but at the same time opened him to the possibility of grave hurt. With axe in hand Snorri had proved himself nigh unstoppable, needing to fear nothing. And yet here he was handing the world a stick to beat him with. In Osheim a man has a hard enough time hanging on to his own skin. Taking a child in was bad. Taking a son in was like holding a knife to your throat and asking the world to cut you.

Only as the border with Osheim grew closer did the air of prosperity and good cheer start to wane. Villages grew fewer and farther between, fewer people kept to the roads, fields looked poorly tended and swathes of forest grew unchecked, their interiors dark and worrisome.

Hundreds of miles behind us, deep in hostile territory, my grandmother and the flower of Red March’s army would be fighting a desperate battle to hold on to Blujen and maintain the siege of Lady Blue’s tower. Little time could remain to them, and not much more remained to everyone else according to the oft-repeated prophecies of doom. And yet with each mile that passed beneath Murder’s hooves I wanted to slow down, to drag the journey out, to do anything but step once more into Osheim and let the Wheel draw me down into the horrors at its midst.

“The world is changing.” Kara rode alongside me as we forded a stream that cut across our trail through the ill-named Bright Forest. She had that tone she used when being profound-I think she copied it from Skilfar.

“It is?” I’d really rather it wasn’t. Then we could go home. “Can’t you feel it?” She nodded up at the bright line where the trees failed to meet across our path. The sky had a brittleness to it. As if a sufficiently loud noise might shatter it and set the pieces tumbling down. “Everything is growing thin. Magic is spilling through the cracks.”

“That spell of yours, trapping the unborn in the hedgerow, worked well.”

“Better than it should. Better than I’ve seen outside the Wheel.”

That night we camped in the woods, a cold, black night in which the whole forest seemed to move around outside the thin walls of the tent.

Somewhere on along the course of the next day, following old and overgrown lumber trails through a nameless expanse of woodland, we passed into the kingdom of Osheim close to the point where it meets with both Charland and Maladon. Already we were north of Os City where King Halaric cowered on the edge of his own domain as if scared to venture any farther into it.

After another day the trees also appeared to lose courage and their advance gave way to a miserable and blighted heathland where the only things to slow the wind were frequent heavy downpours, sometimes laced with wet snow.

In the distance a shadow loomed, a bruise on the sky, letting us know the Wheel waited, letting Hennan know he was coming home. That night I felt the pull of the Wheel for the first time in nearly a year, though it seemed then as if it had always been there, ever since it first sunk its hook as we fled the Red Vikings. I slept fitfully, a poor meal of dried meat and hardtack roiling around in my stomach, and in every moment I knew the Wheel sat out there in the distance, I knew exactly the direction, and I knew that my legs, restless with the need to take me there, would not let me spend long asleep.

The sunrise found us already up and about, readying ourselves for travel.

“It’s stronger this time.” Snorri crouched over a little fire, heating oats and water in a small, blackened cauldron.

In the east the sun hid behind a louring bank of cloud, sending rosetinted rays fanning out across a pearl sky. To the north the Wheel waited, reeling us in.

“Much stronger,” Kara said. “It’s turning faster, approaching the breaking point.” She had an ethereal beauty in the dawn light, her eyes having that strange blurriness they take on when working witchcraft, stray hairs lifting up from her braids as if we stood in the midst of an electrical storm. The power of the Wheel echoed in her.

“How far now?” The land had run to the low hills and rolling valleys of Hennan’s homeland, the sky above us bruised a yellow-purple, and swirled in some great spiral about a centre point directly ahead of us. “About two miles less than when you last asked, Jal.” Snorri led the way, swaying to the gait of his steed, offering me no view but broad shoulders beneath a leather cape, and thick black hair reaching down past his neck.

“Twenty miles, maybe.” Kara took pity on me.

Hennan rode with me on Murder, perched on a collection of blankets secured to my saddle. His words had run out as we reached the margins of the Wheel-lands where his grandfather had once tended goats. Approaching from the south this time we saw no signs of life, either on four feet or on two, save once a pair of ravens flying west.

The countryside had not yet taken on the twisted and alien aspect encountered further in but everything about it felt wrong-the grass an unconvincing shade of green, the wind whisper-laden and beating strange patterns into the rushes that grew thick around the valley fens.

“Do you see them?” Snorri asked.

“No.” I had been hoping they were figments of my imagination. “What are they?”

“Figments of your imagination,” Kara said behind me, struggling to keep her nag from panic.

“Oh good.” It had seemed that shadowy shapes had been pacing us on both sides, quite far off, and either vanishing when I looked directly at them, or refusing definition, remaining indistinct blurs in the middle distances, like a stain on the eye.

“It’s bad. Very bad.” Kara glanced around. “The Wheel is reaching out this far and starting to put flesh on our fears. I had expected something like this, but much closer in.”

“Hell.” Several weeks’ worth of good intentions melted away like a snowball tossed into a furnace. “This is never going to work. We don’t stand a chance.” I’d spent my time worrying about what I might do if we really got to the heart of the Wheel, somehow allowing myself to gloss over the business of actually getting there. As I stared out at the indistinct shapes some of them started to look more solid, more sharply outlined. One in particular darkened and began to sprout long thin legs . . . “Shit! We need to run!” I hauled on Murder’s reins. He’d galloped me to safety before, he could do it again.

“Jalan!” Kara’s voice stabbed through me, taking the strength from my arms. “You need to calm down, empty your mind.”

“Empty my mind? What the hell are you talking about?” My mind was a bubbling cauldron, I’d never been able to still its voices, even enjoying a goblet of wine out on a balcony after a tumble in the sheets my thoughts would be a seething mass of this and that and maybe and when. “I can’t!”

“Then concentrate on something else, some good memory, something peaceful.”

“I . . . I can’t think of anything, damn it!” Every image that sprang to mind my imagination rapidly warped into some terrifying nightmare, and out across the grass yet another faint shadow grew darker and started to take on the shape of the horror in my head. I thought of Lisa DeVeer but no sooner had I pictured her, deliciously striped in light and shade, than my treacherous imagination started to speculate how the Wheel might hurt me with her-the flesh fell away around her mouth, revealing triangular teeth around a devouring hole. “I’ve got to go! I’ll get us all killed.”

I shook Murder’s reins, but Snorri leaned across and took them in one hand.

“Jal!” He snapped his fingers beneath my nose. “You don’t have to empty your mind, or fill it with something good, you just need to listen.” Snorri steered Murder back toward the Wheel and walked his horse on, slowly. “A story will lead a man through dark places. Stories have direction. A good story commands a man’s thoughts along a path, allowing no opportunity to stray, no space for anything but the tale as it unfolds before you.”

“What story have you got, Snorri?” Hennan asked. “Is it the one about the jötun who stole Thor’s hammer?”

“Christ don’t tell one of your monster sagas!” I could see it now, frost giants shambling out of the mist just as Snorri described them.

“Oh, it’s darker than that.” Snorri turned in the saddle to look back at us. “But if I tell it true there will be no space in you for anything else. You won’t think of Hel coming out of the Wheel for you, because I will have already laid it before you.”

And like that, riding toward the Wheel of Osheim, Snorri ver Snagason spoke for the first time of his quest through Hel. Perhaps Snorri’s storytelling had always been a kind of magic, and being so close to the Wheel had taken that gentle spellbinding and made something more powerful of it. All I know is that the words ran around me and like a bad dream I was back in Hell, seeing only what Snorri’s tale laid before me.

Snorri turns from the many-pillared hall of the judges and looks out into the Hel-night, alive now with the rushing wind of her approach. Jalan! The dry air shrieks it. Jalan!

There she stands before him, a child no older than his own sweet Einmyria, ghost-pale but lit with some inner glow. Gone. Now the swirl of the wind reveals her on his right, a slim young woman, hollow-eyed, clothed only in the wisps of what rides her, her head cocked to one side, studying Snorri with alien curiosity. The wind speaks again in a voice that stings, grit-laden and cold. Now she’s a baby, lying some yards to his right pale and silent, regarding him with eyes darker than Hel’s night. Tendrils of the lichkin to whom she is bound rise about her like translucent serpents, their light devoid of warmth. The child who has never seen the world, and the lichkin to whom she was given, both woven together, waiting to be unborn into the living lands.

Jalan!

“I’m not him,” Snorri says.

The unborn hisses, its shape twisting into some ugly thing without permanence or definition, the lichkin coming to the fore.

“You can smell it, can’t you?” Snorri says. “The destruction of one of your kind? He came against me in Hel and now he’s nothing.” Snorri raises his axe. “Try me?”

The wind howls and the ghost-like unborn breaks apart, swirling away toward the judges’ hall. Snorri shivers and lowers his axe, hoping he has bought Jal enough time to win clear.

In the distance, where the wind has dropped and the darkness fallen back to the ground from whence it was lifted, the dead-sky shows. It is the colour of sorrow and broken promises. Snorri starts to walk once more, the pain, thirst, and hunger of Hel woven into the meat of him so that each step is its own battle.

He hopes Jal will win through-the boy has grown in the time they have journeyed together. Less than a year, but the softness in him has been worn away to reveal some of the same steel so evident in the Red Queen, though perhaps Jal has yet to realize it. The afterlife feels too quiet without the prince’s constant complaining. Snorri misses him already. A grin creases his face. Even in Hel Jal can make him smile.

Snorri walks on, out into the wilds where Hel’s domain borders other places, the lands of ice and the lands of fire where the jötun dwell and build their strength for Ragnarok. Other places too, stranger places, all bound together by the roots of Yggdrasil. The land heaves and breaks as if frozen in its death agonies, mounded into compression ridges, scarred by deep rifts, stepping up toward daunting heights.

Few wander here, just the occasional soul bent around its purpose, and twice a troll-kin, hunched and moving swiftly through the scatter of rocks. In places monoliths stand, towers of black basalt, each carved with an eye as if to suggest the goddess watches even in the margins of her lands.

With Jal’s departure the Hel that Snorri crosses has grown closer and closer to the tales the skáld would sing in the long night around the dying fire of the mead hall. Snorri knows that Hel herself sits enthroned at the heart of these lands, split like night and day, as if Baraqel and Aslaug had been sliced head to groin and half of each bound into one being. Snorri, despite the depth of his conviction, can’t help but be glad his path has led him to the margins rather than to Hel’s court. He means to break Hel’s law, but he would rather not attempt it with her standing behind him.

In the distance hills rise from the blood-dust, dark with menace. The plain before them lies scattered with dead and twisted trees, ancient wind-stunted things, not one with a leaf on it, nor any hint of green across the whole swathe of the forest. Snorri sets off walking.

“Ccraaaawk!”

Snorri spins toward the sudden cry, axe ready. He sees nothing. Blood-dust rises around his feet, reaching his knees.

“Crawwk!” A raven, black and glossy, perched on a tree some yards back, long toes curled around a dry twig. “Here’s an odd thing. A living man in Hel.” The raven tilts its head first one way, then the other, sizing Snorri up.

“Odder than a raven that can speak?”

“Perhaps all ravens can, but most don’t choose to.”

“What do you want with me, spirit?”

“No spirit, just a raven, wanting what we all want: to watch, to learn, to fly back and whisper our secrets to the All-father. And perhaps a juicy worm.”

“Truly?” Snorri lowers his axe, amazed. “You are Muninn? . . . or Huginn?” He recalls the names of Odin’s two ravens from the priests’ tales. Appropriately he recalled Muninn-memory-first, and Huginn- thought-took a little more thought.

The raven crawks, shakes its feathers, and settles. “Mother and father to us all. We all fly in their wake.”

“Oh.” Snorri’s disappointment colours the word. “You don’t speak to Odin then?”

“Everything that speaks speaks to Odin, Snorri son of Snaga, son of Olaaf.” The bird wipes its beak on the branch beside it. “Why are you here? Why heading out into the wilds?”

Snorri knows his destination-he hasn’t thought to question his path. “I’m here for my wife and children. It was wrong how they were taken from me.”

“Wrong?”

“I failed them.”

“We all fail, Snorri. In the end we all fail. Often sooner.”

Snorri finds his hand pressed to his face, a weight of memory pushing him down, emotion choking him. “What was I supposed to do? Leave them? I could not let this stand. Win or lose, my fight is here. What else could I do?”

The raven shakes again, a stray feather floating down between dead branches. “Don’t ask me for counsel. I’m just a bird. Just memory.”

Snorri sniffs, ashamed of the tears he thought himself too dry for, feeling stupid and hurt. “I thought they would have gone before the goddess. I thought they would have gone before Hel and that she would have seen their goodness with her white eye and seen no evil with her black eye. They should be at Helgafell . . .” The holy mountain waited for the little ones and for those not slain in battle . . . though gods knew Freja must have fought to save her children. But Hel wouldn’t separate her from Emy and Egil . . . surely that couldn’t be the reward for her valour? Snorri’s head spins and it seems that Hel rotates about him so that he and the raven become the centre of all things, all pivoting on this one question. “Why are they out here?”

Snorri wipes his forearm across his eyes and draws breath to repeat the question, but the tree is empty, the branch bare. For a long moment he wonders if the bird was ever there. Then he kneels and retrieves a lone feather from the rust-coloured dust. Standing, he slips the feather into his coin pouch, and continues through the dead forest toward the distant hills.

The sky seems closer here, and although it remains monotone somehow it bears the threat of a storm. The whole region does, as if it holds its breath, waiting. The Northman sets his gaze upon a high ridge and, with teeth gritted, he begins the long ascent.

Snorri climbs, scrambling up rough slopes, clambering over rocks that hurt for no reason other than that he touches them-as if they are made of pain itself. Visions of Eight Quays fill his mind as he reaches, grips, hauls himself up, and repeats the process. His village rising above the Uulisk, above the quays that give its name, the scatter of huts that he knows well enough to navigate around in the blind night, sometimes blind drunk. He sees his own home, Freja at the door, golden hair all around her shoulders, blue eyes smiling, small crinkles at the corners, one hand on Emy’s shoulder, the other ruffling Egil’s hair, red about her fingers. Coming up behind her, looming head and shoulders above his stepmother, Karl, white-blonde like his true mother and promising to be as tall as his father. Even at fifteen he overtops most men.

How would Egil have grown from the scrawny energetic child, eager to investigate everything the world had to offer or to hide? Always into mischief of one sort or another. The boy had worshipped Snorri . . .

“I let him die.” Another hold. A snarl of effort. Another few feet of elevation gained. “I let them all die.”

Snorri looks up, blinking his vision clear. No pain he has suffered in Hel comes close to the ache that lodged in his chest the day he found Emy in the snow, mutilated by the ghouls that Sven Broke-Oar had brought to Eight Quays. That ache has grown around his heart-grown larger and tighter with each of their deaths, undiminished by passing time, an armour against what the world might offer, a prison too. It will end though. Here in Hel, it will end.

How long the climb takes him Snorri can’t say. Without night or day, without food or water, with no living thing close enough that its distance might be measured in so slight a thing as miles, time runs its own strange paths. Snorri couldn’t say how long the climb took but he feels, as he crests the ridge, that he has grown old somewhere along the way.

The ridge offers a view across a folded topography where a labyrinth of dry valleys, box canyons and deep rifts stretches away toward a dark horizon. The sky lies tainted with shadow, as if faint streamers of cloud have been strewn across it, clinging to the underside of the world above Hel. Each line of shadow forms some part of a pattern, a great gyre, its rotation too slow for the eye and centred on some vertex miles out, above the labyrinth.

“I see it.” Snorri sets his axe down for a moment, drawing a deep breath. “I’m coming for you, Freja.” He wipes the blood from his hands. “I’m coming for all of you.” He has a goal. Freja will be there with his children. All of Hel cannot stop him now.

Murder missed his footing on a loose rock and for a moment it jolted me from Snorri’s story. We’d come deep into the Wheel-lands, perhaps almost as far as on our first incursion. Standing stones, each taller than a man, ran in five close and parallel lines, radiating like a spoke, passing close by us and rushing on ahead toward a convergence at infinity. Heather grew over-tall in sickly and twisted clumps. I heard my name called among the stones . . . a pale long-fingered hand reached around the side of one close by, ancient with lichen. I closed my eyes and the story caught around me once more, swirling me along a different path.

• • •

A pale long-fingered hand creeps around the rock. The motion draws Snorri’s eye, turning his gaze from the dusty floor of the gorge to the steep and craggy side. He’s penetrated several miles into the labyrinth and overhead the shadow-stained gyre lies more pronounced than when he first saw it. And in all those dusty miles he hasn’t seen so much as a stray soul.

“Best come out and show yourself,” he calls, hefting his axe.

A narrow head peers over the edge of the jagged ledge, some thirty yards above the valley floor. At first Snorri takes it for a lichkin and his blood runs cold, but the thing is a sickly yellow rather than white, and its head is more like a bird’s, an unhealthy fusion of beak and head, rather than the eyeless wedge of a lichkin. It hauls itself into view with a screech like nails on slate, revealing small triangular teeth in its fleshy beak, and a gangling skeletal body with a crest of barbs running along its spine.

“A demon.” Snorri grins. “About time. Let’s see what you’ve got.” Behind the smile he knows this thing may make an end of him. The lichkin was overwhelming. He’s fought trolls in the living world and barely survived-their strength many times that of a man and their speed startling. Even so, the red song of war rises in him and the pain flees his limbs as if in fear.

The thing raises its head and utters a cry that echoes down the gorge, the sound of a scream terminated by a cut throat. It clambers down the cliff-like wall, dropping a few yards here and there, catching on with claws as long as fingers and as white as malice, loose stones rattling down with it, striking the ground only moments before its two three-toed and broad-splayed feet.

As the demon closes on him, cautious, hopping from side to side like a bird of prey, Snorri hears its call returned in several voices, distant but not distant enough.

It rushes him and his axe takes it on an upswing, sinking home where neck meets head, carving through its windpipe and up into its brain. The demon falls, convulsing, and Snorri lets go his axe to keep clear of flailing limbs. Moments later he advances on the corpse through the cloud of dust raised in its death throes, takes hold of the axe haft, sets a foot over one side of the demon’s face, and wrenches the blade free. Milky blood oozes from the wound with reluctance, stinking of corruption.

The first of the demons to answer their comrade’s call come boiling around a sharp turn in the gorge several hundred yards away. The leaders, three of them, hold small similarities with the one that Snorri has slain, but no two are the same. Others can be seen dimly in the dust cloud raised behind the swiftest of them. Many others.

Lacking a bow, Snorri moves only to set his back to a boulder, then watches their approach, knowing their numbers will defeat him. The demons howl as they come, a motley bunch varying in hue from charcoalgrey to the white of curdled milk, some troll-tall and gangly, others squat and heavy, still others no larger than children and sporting vestigial wings.

Snorri rolls his shoulders and prepares to meet them all. It saddens him to die alone, at the hands of such ill-formed horrors, but he never expected to return from Hel, and an end in battle is perhaps the best he could have expected.

“Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout let demons tremble.”

In the last moments before the enemy closes Snorri knows a moment of peace. No parent should outlive their child. No hurt is greater than having sons and daughters die knowing that, at the last, you failed them. Snorri will die fighting to save them-this is as close as he can come to righting that wrong.

The first demon loses its raised forearm, and an instant later it loses its head to the same blow. The second demon, heavy-set and wolf-like, stops Hel’s blade by bedding it in brain and skull. Snorri follows the swing down into a crouch and the third demon, leaping for him, sails over his head into the boulder behind. Then they are upon him, in their dozens and in their scores.

Snorri leaves the protection of the boulder almost immediately. With massed attackers it is important not to get pinned against anything. A whirling axe makes a good deterrent, but if it gets stuck in an opponent’s body, even for a moment, then the wielder can go down under a wave of attackers. The Viking spins his way back across the uneven floor of the gorge, leaving severed demon limbs twitching in the dust. Their blood reeks of decay, making him retch as he retreats.

Snorri reaches the steep wall and fights close enough to it to keep his attackers to one side whilst still being able to swing, backing all the while. The dust cloud hides him from the bulk of his enemies, though they remain close, seeking him blindly, their hoots and howls filling the gorge.

Some huge creature with gangling arms, lumpen skin, and a boulderlike head strikes a blow that tears furrows down Snorri’s chest, missing the veins and tendons in his neck by inches. Snorri catches it on a rising swing, slicing its chest in return and hewing away the lower portion of its jaw. He skips back, hammering the butt of his axe haft into the fangfilled face of another demon on his right. The larger one falls away, becoming a shadow lumbering through the dust cloud.

A clubbed hand punches toward Snorri’s face, the owner black and well-muscled with hard shiny plates across its body and limbs. The Viking moves too slowly and a glancing blow sends him reeling toward the rock wall, vision doubled, blood running down his neck. More shapes crowd out of the dust, the noise and stink of them overwhelming.

A disembowelling swing opens two demons’ bellies, a third, brown and scabrous leaps for him and fouls his axe as he tries to ward it off. A demon-child covered in thorns grapples his legs and Snorri falls back against the rocks, roaring defiance. He loses his footing, legs torn by the thorn-child and falls on his side in the loose stone. A dark shape looms above him, a creature of trollish proportions, flame guttering from its empty eye-sockets and spilling from its open mouth. This one hefts a dead-wood club studded with sharp pieces of flint. The scab-covered demon still wrestles with Snorri’s axe and he hasn’t the strength to tear the weapon free.

“Undoreth!” A last cry as the burning troll lifts its club to finish him.

A bright sword takes its head, the body starting to fall, flame gouting from the stump of its neck. A figure in shining armour moves by, sturdy boot stamping on the back of the thorn-demon’s neck, sword reversing down in the scabbed demon’s chest. A moment later the figure is gone, swallowed by the cloud, but from the changing tone of the demonic blares and barks Snorri knows that the newcomer is wreaking havoc out there.

Snorri tugs his axe free and kicks off the thorn-demon, just in time to meet a new foe blundering into view. For seconds, or hours, Snorri fights on. Faced by two opponents, the demons come at Snorri less frequently and in smaller groups. Even so, they almost take him down on several occasions. He continues to back away, hewing heads and limbs, whirling his axe before him in a figure of eight, swift and razor-edged. He is bleeding from half a dozen wounds now and his breath comes ragged, a weariness in his limbs, blood and sweat in his eyes.

Twice he almost falls, once tripped by a rock, the second time by a skull, black bone, fangs protruding. Within a few more yards bones are crunching under his feet every second or third step back.

The ground changes character slowly, step by step, becoming more stony, the dust cloud thinning. Snorri catches glimpses of the warrior who has joined him. A giant of a man, a Viking, long white hair streaming out beneath his helm. He looks to have stepped from the sagas, his armour finer than that of any jarl, scroll-worked, runed, the iron faceguard of his helm fearsome to behold, the many iron scales of his mailed shirt each chased with silver.

Snorri cuts down a pair of identical demons, both as gaunt as old trees, with gnarled hands and skin like bark. He spits blood and heaves in a breath. He can see the remaining demons now, a shadowy horde, perhaps a dozen in total.

“Come, Hel-spawn!” He meant to shout it but it escapes in a gasp. “Let’s have you!” A glance at his shoulder reveals a ragged wound deep into the meat, pouring blood. He raises his father’s axe, preparing to charge. “I said, let’s-” But somehow his legs fail him and Snorri finds himself on his knees.

The demons send up a cacophony of roars, hoots, screams and barks, surging forward for the kill. And the armoured Viking runs to intercept them. He spins into their midst, body-checking one, beheading the next, destroying a face with an armoured elbow, drawing the next into a devastating head-butt. Then somehow he is clear, in space, swinging his blade again. It takes a minute, and for that minute Snorri remains on his knees, slack-jawed, held by the sight. It’s a dance, a violent, beautiful dance of steel, life taken at each beat, the warrior’s victory as inevitable as it is perfect. Sixty killing seconds.

At the last the warrior stands, gore-splattered, stained with the blood of his enemies, their corpses strewn about him, his sword sheathed, and behind him the dust settles. It’s like a fur drawn back from the bed, revealing three hundred yards, every step of the way littered with the dead, dozens, scores, many and more.

“What a tale we’ve woven here, brother.” Snorri stands to meet the warrior as he returns. It takes all his strength but he’s damned if he’ll meet such a man on his knees. “Who are you? Did the gods send you?”

“The gods forbade me from coming.” A deep voice, speaking Old Norse. Something in it familiar. Perhaps the accent or the tone.

Snorri looks down at his axe. His father’s father’s father had named it Hel. Perhaps some völva had seen its fate and suggested the title. Perhaps it was Skilfar, old even then. He looks up at the warrior, a man his own height, an inch taller, possibly. Snorri’s father stood as tall, had the same hair. “You . . . can’t be . . .” The hairs on the back of Snorri’s arms stand up and a cold chill commands his spine, his mouth too dry to say the words. “Father?” Tears fill his eyes.

The man reaches up with both hands and removes his helmet, shaking the hair from his face. It is not his father, though he has the same look.

“They’re waiting for you.” The warrior nods back up the gorge. Demon bones litter the rocky ground as far as the eye can see, drifts of them in places, skulls rolled to the walls, shattered, broken. “I’ve been keeping them safe as best I can. I knew you would come.”

Snorri blinks, seeing but not understanding. The warrior takes off his gauntlets and puts them in his belt. The hands beneath are scarred, the fingers crooked from old breaks. “They want the key,” he says.

“What?” Snorri’s face tingles, his mouth works but no words come.

“They want the key-the last words I spoke to you. I wanted to say more. To tell you I loved you. To thank you for finding me. To say goodbye.”

“Karl!”

“Father.”

The two men meet in a fierce hug.

Murder stumbled again and jolted once more from the story I glanced around-but I could see none of the Osheim’s horrors: my eyes were too blurry.

“I could come with you, Father.”

“No.” Snorri sets a hand to his son’s shoulder. “Your place is in Val halla. They will understand . . . this.” He lifts his axe toward the carnage stretching back along the gorge. “But more would be too much. We both know it.”

Karl inclines his head.

“I’m proud of you, son.” It doesn’t seem real-to have Karl there before him and to be saying goodbye again. Snorri wants to take his boy home, but a man stands before him. A man with a seat waiting for him in Asgard, a seat at a table in Odin’s own hall.

“We’ll sit together one day, Father.” Karl smiles, almost shy. “That we will.”

Snorri takes his boy in his arms one last time. A warriors’ embrace.

He lets him go. If he were to stay any longer he would be unable to leave.

The child he raised has become a man. Even before he died. The Karl who had played on the shores of the Uulisk fjord, who had chased rabbits, tended goats, played with wooden swords, loved his father, laughed and danced, fought and raced . . . that boy had had his time and that time was good. Even before Sven Broke-Oar tore their world open, that boy was safe in memory and now a young man wears his clothes. Snorri walks away, not trusting himself to speak further, not looking back, wounds forgotten, his arms remembering the feel of his son.