Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

“Well now, that man has been paying closer attention than I gave him credit for.” She steepled white fingers beneath the angularity of her chin. “The Red and the Blue. There you have the battle of our age, Prince Jalan. Lady Blue and the Red Queen. Your grandmother wants an emperor, prince. Did you know that? She wants to make the Broken Empire whole again. . seal all the cracks, seen and unseen. She wants an emperor because such a man. . well, he could turn the wheel back. She wants this and the Lady Blue does not.”

“And you, völva?” Snorri asked. “What wheel?” I would have asked.

“Ah. Both courses require a terrible price be paid, and both are fraught with risk.”

“And there’s no third way?”

Skilfar shook her head. “I have cast the runes until they broke from falling. I see nothing but the red and the blue.”

Snorri shrugged. “Emperor or no emperor, it makes no difference to me. My wife and son, Freja and Egil, that’s what calls me to the ice. I’ll see Sven Broke-Oar die and have my justice. Can you tell me if he still bides at the Black Fort?”

“Still fixed upon your carrot, Snorri ver Snagason? Look past it. Look ahead. When the Uuliskind sail, do they navigate by staring at the water beneath their prow? You should ask why it might be that he is there at all. Do they dig beneath the ice just for more corpses? And if not, what else do they seek and to what purpose?”

Something like a growl, but worse, rose in Snorri’s throat. “The Broke-Oar-”

“Let’s go!” I yanked harder at Snorri’s belt before his temper buried both of us.

Snorri hunched his massive shoulders and made a stiff bow. “Gods keep you, Skilfar.”

I let him pass and made my own much deeper bow. Social standing is one thing, but I always feel a scary hell-born witch deserves as much bowing and scraping as it takes to avoid being made into a toad. “My thanks, madam. I’ll take my leave and pray your army keeps you safe.” With an instinctive sideways glance at a particularly well-formed young plasteek woman, I turned to go.

“Step carefully on the ice.” Skilfar called after us as if she had an audience. “Two heroes, one led willy-nilly by his cock, the other northward by his heart. Neither bringing their brain into any decision of import. Let us not judge them harshly, my soldiers, for nothing is truly deep, nothing holds consequence. It’s from the shallows that emotions born of simple wanting arise to steer us as they have always steered man, steered the Builders, steered the gods themselves, towards true Ragnarok, an end to all things. A peace.” She couldn’t resist a commentary. I guess it’s hard for even the wisest not to show off that they are wise.

Her words followed us from the chamber. I halted a short way into the tunnel to relight my torch. “Ragnarok. Is that all the North ever thinks about? Is that what you want, Snorri? Some great battle and the world ruined and dead?” I couldn’t blame him if he did. Not with what had befallen him this past year, but I would be disturbed to know he had always lusted after such an end, even on the night before the black ships came to Eight Quays.

The light kindling on my torch caught him in midshrug. “Do you want the paradise your priests paint for you on cathedral ceilings?”

“Good point.”

We left without further theological discussion. When my brand started to gutter and flare, I lit the last of our torches from the old, tired of being slapped in the face by slime ropes, tripped by stray plasteek legs, soaking my feet in cold pools, and stubbing my toe on blocks fallen from the ceiling. Also the possibility of ghosts disturbed me. For all my bravado in the witch’s chamber the long night of the tunnels had shattered my nerves. Her guardians looked more ominous by the minute; in the dancing shadows their limbs seemed to move. At the corner of my eye I kept seeing motion but when I swung round their ranks remained unbroken.

I’ve never been one for wandering in the dark. It seemed, though, that our light couldn’t last the journey. I held the torch high and prayed that before it failed we’d see a circle of daylight far ahead.

“Come on. Come on.” Muttered in short breaths as we walked. The plasteek soldiers had been left far behind, but for all I knew they stalked us just beyond the range of the torch’s illumination. “Come on.”

Somehow the torch kept going.

“Thank God!” I pointed up ahead to the long-awaited spot of daytime. “I didn’t think it would last.”

“Jal.” Snorri tapped my shoulder. I looked round, my gaze following his to my hand, raised above my head. “Holy sh-” The torch was a blackened stump, no longer even smoking. The fingers gripping it were, however, another matter, glowing fiercely with an inner light. At least they were until Snorri drew them to my attention. At that point they blinked out, plunging us into darkness, and I did what any sensible man would. I ran hell for leather for the outside.

A storm waited for us.

The port of Den Hagen sits where the River Oout washes into the Karlswater, that stretch of brine the Norse call the Devouring Sea. A collection of fine homes huddle on the rising slopes to the east-well, fine for the North where every building crouches low, granite-built to withstand the weather that sweeps in from the frozen wastes. Log cabins, round houses, inns, ale-halls, and fish markets reach down to huge warehouses that fringe the docks like receiving mouths. Greater ships sit at anchor in the quiet waters of the bay; other vessels crowd the quays, masts rising in a profusion of spars and rigging. Seagulls circle overhead, ever mournful, and men fill the air with their own cries, voices raised to call out prices, summon fresh hands to load or unload, issue challenge, share jokes, curse or praise the many gods of Asgard, or to bring the followers of Christ to the small and salt-rimed church at the water’s edge.

“What a hole.” The stink of old fish reached me even on the cliff tops where the coast road snaked in from the west.

Snorri, walking ahead of me, growled but said nothing. I leaned forwards and patted Sleipnir’s neck. “Time for us to part soon, old one-eye.”

I would miss the horse. I’ve never liked walking. If God had meant man to walk he wouldn’t have given us horses. Wonderful animals. I think of them as the word escape , covered in hair and with a leg at each corner.

We wound down into Den Hagen, the road lined with shacks that looked as though the first winds of winter would clear them from the slopes. On a high corner overlooking the sea, seven troll-stones watched the waves. They looked like stones to me, but Snorri claimed to see a troll in each of them. He pulled open his weather jacket and jerked up the layers of his shirts to reveal a fearsome scar across the hard-packed muscles of his stomach. “Troll.” With a finger he implied a series of additional scars from hip to shoulder. “I was lucky.”

In a world where dead men walked, unborn rose from fresh graves, and the people of the pines haunted forests, I could hardly dispute his claim.

On the final stretch of the road we passed three or four hammer-stones set on the verges to honour the thunder god. Snorri checked for rune stones around each but found only a stray black pebble, river-smoothed and wide enough to cover his palm, bearing a single rune. Perhaps local children made off with the rest.

“Thuriaz.” He let it fall.

“Hmmm?”

“Thorns.” He shrugged. “It means nothing.”

• • •

The town boasted no wall, and nobody save a handful of sorry-looking merchants watched the entrance-not that there was an entrance, just an increase in the crowding of houses. After weeks of rough living and hard travelling, even a place such as Den Hagen has its appeal. Every piece of clothing on me still held its measure of rain from the storm that had lashed us for two days across the moorland fastness surrounding Skilfar’s seat. A man could have slaked his thirst on what he could squeeze from my trews. He’d have to be damnable dry to risk it, though.