Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

Something in the word alone , spoken in empty country, made me change my mind. Suddenly I didn’t want to be left standing out in the rain. Besides, I needed to hear what this witch had to say about the curse, rather than whatever Snorri might remember of her words or choose to share. So together we went in, Snorri taking the lead and me guiding Sleipnir behind.

Within a hundred yards the circle of light to our rear did little but offer a reminder that once upon a time we could see.

“I’ve still got two torches.” I reached for my pack.

“Better to keep them,” Snorri said. “There’s only one way to go.”

Horrors stalked us in the dark, of course. Well, they stalked me. I imagined the pale men from the forest padding behind me on quiet feet, or waiting silent to either side as we marched past.

We walked for miles. Snorri trailed a stick along the wall so he wouldn’t lose contact with it, and I followed the sound of scraping. Sleipnir clip-clopped along behind. In places the roof dripped or slime hung in long ropes. Every five hundred yards or so a shaft led up, no thicker than a man and offering a pale glimpse of sky. Strange plants clustered around these openings, reaching for the light with many-fingered leaves. In other places partial collapses saw us clambering up mounds of loose rubble, Sleipnir’s hooves dislodging small avalanches of broken rock. In one section some huge piece of Builder-rock blocked all but a narrow gap to one side and we had to edge through. Snorri allowed me to light the torch for that transit but had me quench it in a standing pool thereafter. I didn’t argue-both torches would most likely have been burned out along the path we’d taken so far, and what the light revealed looked boring enough, with no monsters on show, not even a discarded skull or shattered bone.

When stiff arms enfolded me without warning, I screamed loud enough to collapse the roof and went down swinging wildly. My fist made contact with something hard, and the pain only amplified my distress. A hollow clattering went up on all sides.

“Jal!”

“Get off! Get the fuck off!”

“Jal!” Snorri, louder this time, tense but calm enough.

“Oh you fucker!” Something hard jabbed me in the eye as my assailant fell away, clattering.

“Now would be the time for that torch, Jal.”

Silence, except for my panting and the nervous stamp of Sleipnir’s hooves.

“Fuckers!” I got my knife in hand and slashed the air a couple of times for good measure.

“Torch.”

“I’ve got- It’s somewhere.” A minute or two of fumbling straps and digging through my pack and I’d set flame to tinder. The torch took the fire and spread its glow. “Christ Jesu!”

Ahead of us pale figures filled the tunnel, rank upon rank upon rank of them. Statues all of them, men and women, most of regular height, all naked and without genitalia. On every side of me lay toppled examples, my most recent foe reaching for the ceiling with a straight arm.

“Hemrod’s army,” Snorri said.

“What?” Some of the statues had eyes painted into their sockets, some hair, also painted, but most were bald, eyeless, many lacking definition, some to the degree that their fingers were fused, faces blank. Many struck oddly nonchalant poses, looking more like idle nobility than marching warriors. There was space to walk between each rank and somehow Snorri had ended up doing so, leaving me to crash into the first line.

“Hemrod,” Snorri said.

“Hemroids to you. I’ve never heard of him.” I took hold of the outstretched arm before me and pulled the figure to its feet. The thing had almost no weight to it. Whatever it had been fashioned from was far lighter than wood. I tapped it. “Hollow?”

“These are Builder things. Statues, I guess. Hemrod held sway in this region before the empire grew across his lands. When they buried him down here, they set an army of these plasteek warriors to guard him and to serve him in the life beyond. Perhaps they wait for Ragnarok with him in Valhalla.”

“Pah.” I stood and dusted myself down. “I’d want better soldiers. Look: I felled seven of them while fighting blind.”

Snorri nodded. “Though to be fair you did have a screaming girl to help you.” He glanced back down the tunnel. “I wonder where she ran off to.”

“Eat dung, Norseman.” I started off between the rows.

• • •

“Someone must keep standing them up, you know.” Snorri spoke from behind me.

I paused and swapped the torch from one hand to the other. My arm hurt from holding it overhead and dribbles of hot pitch kept escaping to burn my fingers.

“Why?”

“It stands to reason. They’ve stood here five hundred years and more. You can’t be the first to fetch up against one.”

“I mean, why bother?”

“Magic.” Snorri puffed a breath through his lips. “It’s an old charm, a defence. They say old magic runs deepest. Skilfar makes her home here for a reason when she comes south.”

“Well, I ain’t going back to stand them up again.” I lifted the torch higher. “Some kind of chamber up ahead. .”

As we drew closer I saw that the space might better be called a cavern, not for the nature of it-men had built this-but for the size of the place. Cavernous would be the word to use. The blackness within swallowed the light of my torch. A rust-covered floor stretched away and Builder statues filled the portion of the chamber I could see, all pointing outward from some hidden centre. To either side, tunnel mouths opened, statues marching away into the darkness. If the spacing held constant I guessed maybe eight or ten tunnels met here. Truly it must once have been a den of trains, coiling about each other like great serpents.

Snorri nudged me on and I advanced with caution between the ranks. Some prurient part of me that is always on duty noted that the vast majority of the statues here were of women, all in the same kinds of stiff and awkward poses, my torchlight flickering across hundreds if not thousands of ancient but perky plasteek breasts.

“Getting colder.” Snorri at my shoulder.

“Yes.” I stopped, handed him the torch, and circled around a nude plasteek woman to stand behind him. “After you. She’s your Wicked Witch of the North after all.” Somehow the “wicked witch” part contrived to echo about the chamber, taking a damnably long time to die away.

Snorri shrugged and went ahead. “Leave the horse.”

The radial aisles of statues created a steady narrowing as we approached the centre, and soon Sleipnir would be knocking them over left and right. I let go her reins. “Stay.” She blinked one gunked-up eye at me, the other glued tight with secretions, and lowered her head.

The temperature fell by the yard now and frost glittered on plasteek arms to every side. I hugged myself and let my breath plume before me.

In the middle of the chamber a circular platform rose in four steps and in the centre of that, in an ice-clad chair, sat Skilfar: tall, angular, white skin stretched tight across sharp bones, draped in the skins of several arctic foxes and with a white mist running from her limbs as if they might be cold enough to shatter steel. Eyes like frozen seawater fixed upon Snorri’s torch and out it went, the firelight replaced instead by a star-glow that rose from the frost-wrapped limbs of her ancient guardians.

“Visitors.” She rolled her neck, and ice crunched.

“Hail Skilfar.” Snorri bowed. Behind him I wondered just what it was this witch did sitting here in the dark when she didn’t have us to talk to.

“Warrior.” She inclined her head. “Prince.” Cold eyes found me again. “Two of you, bound by the Sister, how droll. She does enjoy her little jokes.”