M. Lachlan: Lord of Slaughter

You have always known me.

Snake in the Eye babbled, seeming to talk to no one: ‘There seem so few to slaughter here. I cannot go near the candle wall while he is in front of me.’ He pointed to Azemar.

The wolf Fenrir stands here, the god killer, seething and growling in his hungers. Someone else lies at the threshold, as befits her goddess. Her fate is unseen and undecided. Her skein is not yet woven, her death knot untied.

‘The Norn Verthani is here, mistress of the present, caller of the wolf, holder of the howling rune, mother. The wolf will kill her. Her destiny is foreseen. The Norn Skuld is here, the future, her fingers weaving in unseen currents, dead and so deathless. The crone Norn is here. Uthr. The past, immortal, for ever. She who rules the domain to which heroes fall. Men call her Memory and they call her Hel. We are three and he is three.’

‘Who?’ Snake in the Eye cast his eyes about him, desperate to find the source of the voice.

He waits unbodied in the waters, eight and eight and eight. Gods and men are drawn by the Norns, each to play his part.

‘What of Loys?’ said Beatrice.

One person can still die.

‘He can’t because I can’t see him,’ said Snake in the Eye. ‘Those that can be killed have been killed.’

He is hiding from fate, as you hid.

‘What is his fate?’ said Beatrice.

To die so you might shake free of your destiny of torment. The skein is woven, the threads of fate entangle him.

‘I would die a thousand times before I let him come to harm!’ said Beatrice.

He must die. The well has revealed it. The future is being spun.

As the ghost girl spoke again the white-haired warrior suddenly remembered what his sword was for. He came rushing at Loys through the water, but Azemar sprang off the rocks and knocked the sword aside.

‘For all that has happened, he is my friend,’ he said, his horrid tongue lolling from his saw-toothed jaws.

A voice from somewhere, a shrieking rhyme. It was not the voice of the girl. It was stranger, deeper. At first Loys thought it came from the bloody waters of the well but he realised it was the wolfman, his voice changed, different.

‘She saw wading there through harsh waters

Men who foreswore oaths and murders

And one who covets another’s beloved.

There the snake sucks

On the corpses of the fallen

And the wolf tore men — would you know yet more?’

Azemar’s great teeth ground at the warrior’s ear, his tongue slavering at his neck.

‘I have had my fill of murder,’ said Azemar, his voice like a rain-swollen door on flagstones. ‘I am a holy man and seek only peace. Do not provoke me.’

Mauger did what he had been trained to do since his earliest years. He struck at the wolf, cutting a huge slice out of its flank. The thing screamed terribly as the curved sword bit into its flesh, but it seized Mauger’s arm, tore it from its socket and threw it, still holding the sword, back up the stream.

Mauger’s remaining hand sought the wolf’s wound to tear it open, but he was too weak and too slow. The wolf picked him up and smashed him on the rocks. Then he leaped upon him and began tearing at his flesh.

Loys felt something warm on his fingers. He put up his hand. Blood. Not his own. Beatrice slumped against him. Azemar had knocked Mauger’s sword into her and she had an ugly wound in her side.

‘Help her! Help her!’

Elifr began to speak as if entranced: ‘We have struggled for nothing. Is the wheel turning again? Then the dead god will come and offer his sacrifice and the Norns will be bound to take it.’

‘No!’ shouted Loys. ‘No!’

‘Again and again will she suffer and die? All tenderness denied her, her life washed away on the blood tide.’ Elifr’s eyes were blank as he cradled the corpse of his mother under the water, and it was as if the words were not his own.

‘I will not let this happen!’ Loys tried to staunch the wound but the blood would not stop.

Azemar gulped and tore, his face grotesquely distorted, his wolf eyes green in the lamplight.

Elifr worked his ritual, muttering and whispering as he held the vala down.

‘The wolf shall be the bane of Odin

When the gods to destruction ride.

The wolf shall be the bane of Odin

When the gods to destruction ride.’

Azemar looked up from his feeding, his body like a wax effigy left too long in the sun. His eyes narrowed when he saw the wolfman.

Elifr gave a great cry and let go of the corpse in his arms. He leaped towards Loys, grabbing at his leg. ‘If you want to save her take off the stone,’ he said. ‘Take off the stone! The waters have shown me. Take off the stone!’

‘Why?’

‘To die. The god is coming.’

Loys’ hands were wet with Beatrice’s blood.

Azemar rose to his full height. He was huge — a head above even the tallest man, horribly muscled, his head a patchwork of flesh and hair but unmistakably that of a wolf. Still he fed on the body, gripping the torso in one hand, biting at it as if it was a hunk of bread.

Loys’ mind was numbed by the terror of the wolf-thing, by the sight of Beatrice, wounded and bleeding.

‘Take off the stone,’ said Elifr.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Take you across the bridge of light.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because you have no place in the god’s story. You are not divine nor cursed nor monstrous. You are a man and your skein is still unwoven.’

Beatrice lay dying and he could not imagine his life without her. Loys took off the stone and Elifr dragged him down into the water.

Loys fell, fell through water, fell through air, through darkness pricked with light, through a tree made of light, caught in threads of light.

Above him the pool stretched up like a shaft, a glimmering disc of silver at its top, the threads that suspended him spinning down from three points.

‘I am falling.’

‘You are falling.’

As he’d removed the stone, a tide had swept over him — of water, yes, but of voices and of images, strange emotions of fear, anger, love and hate. New words formed in his mind to describe new ways of feeling. One was like a purr — he could hardly say it, but it reminded him of a cat in the monastery at Rouen that the abbot had joked he was sure sniggered behind his back. Then another feeling like the tight-stomached, dry-throated sensation a warrior has the instant before battle begins. Yet another — a stolid sadness, a resentment, the way an old man resents his body.

Falling, falling, falling still.

‘Where am I?’

‘At the well of fate, where the Norns weave the skeins of men.’

Next to him was a girl no more than thirteen years old, her flesh pale and her eyes eaten. Bubbles were coming out of his mouth and Loys realised that, in some strange way, they must be underwater. He was falling, but he was falling upwards.

He had been at the base of a great tree and now he span up through its roots that stretched out like the feet of mountains — massive, more like things of stone than wood.

Things flashed past him in the dark, faces of light, creatures of light.

He was tumbling but up, towards the stars that spread above like the lights of a great army. Up through branches and leaves, and everywhere the light, pouring out of him, pouring out of the god who flew beside him.

A noise was in his ears, a crashing and breaking of branches. A great thump drove all the wind from him. He was on a strange riverbank. The river flowed beside a path and a broken wall.

‘What boat is this?’ It was a longship which seemed constructed of thousands of tiny petals, pale as bone.