C. Brittain - Voima

“We call. We call,” went the murmur up and down the line of the living.

The water from the spring splashed softly. Roric rolled over to see if there was any change. So far there was none.

“We call on the lords of death to take our brothers!” continued the warrior in a high, frightened voice when Eirik elbowed him. “Eat and drink what is offered here. Strike down those who struck our brothers down!”

“And especially,” said Eirik grimly, “drink the blood of this man.” He advanced toward Roric with his knife out.

“You still don’t dare to face me in open battle,” said Roric loudly, deliberately breaking the tense stillness. “No wonder they made you an outlaw! Killing a bound man is no way to show your men your courage, Eirik. You’d lost all your honor yourself long before the All-Gemot took it from you!”

But then he went abruptly silent and Eirik whirled away from him, as the soft splashing of the stream changed its note. The water rose in a wave that fell back with a boom, a boom that seemed to say, “We come.”

“No man escapes you!” shouted Eirik gleefully, his face transformed. “Even in the lands of voima, we make offering to the lords of darkness!”

“Cut my bonds, Eirik,” growled Roric, “and you can be a sacrifice to death yourself.”

The earth abruptly shuddered, and a chasm opened directly under the bodies of the slain. The other men leaped backwards as the dead disappeared with a roar of falling earth and stone. Roric, trying to roll further from the edge, spat out the sourness in his throat, a sourness of long decay.

And out of the chasm rose a mist, darker than the darkening air and more solid. It grew increasingly dense, seeming to take on an almost human shape, a shape with two coals burning red where the eyes should have been. And the shape had a voice.

“This land is mine,” it said, so deep that the split earth vibrated. “Immortal lands are immortal no longer but belong to me. Everything comes eventually to me, and it comes now sooner than expected. All shall end now, and there shall never again be renewal or birth.”

Eirik’s men fled, racing wildly down the ridge, but the renegade king stood his ground. “I’ve served you all these years,” he said, nervously licking his scarred lip. “You should reward me for all the dead I’ve sent to you.”

“No man escapes me, for all die sooner or later,” the voice replied, dark, enormously loud, satisfied, unanswerable. “No man comes living to Hel, but death comes to all mortals-and now to immortals as well.”

Roric jerked until the ropes bit into his flesh as a touch landed on his shoulder. He rolled around to see a Wanderer bending over him.

This time he could look at the face. It was the same face, burning with wisdom and power, which he and Karin had been forced to look away from before, but it was no longer lit from within by light, and the power was much diminished.

“This plan quite definitely was a mistake from the beginning, Roric No-man’s son,” said the lord of voima in a low voice, loosening Roric’s bonds.

“Kardan’s son,” he corrected, rubbing circulation back into his wrists, but the Wanderer only shook his head.

“Sending you that stallion originally,” he commented quietly, “was the only thing in the entire plan that ever benefited either us or you.”

Roric looked down the hill to see the other Wanderers and the Hearthkeepers, tattered and drooping. A glance at Eirik showed that he had not noticed their approach, having eyes only for the dark forces he had summoned.

They had defeated the dragon, then, thought Roric, rising to his knees. He slipped his hand into his belt pouch and turned over for a moment his little bone charm.

But if even immortals could now die, how much longer could either the Wanderers or the Hearthkeepers rule earth and sky? And if they were not there to bring about birth and renewal, how much longer could mortal realms endure? The sky overhead was now nearly dark, and in it showed neither moon nor stars.

He went forward slowly and silently, three steps, four steps, and still Eirik did not hear him. With a sudden bound he was on him, one elbow tight around the king’s neck, the other hand knocking his knife from slack fingers.

Eirik fought back, kicking behind him and trying to heave Roric off balance, but he clung on grimly. “What happens,” Roric shouted to the dark red coals before him, “what happens if a man comes living to your realm?”

The mist moved, thickening even more. “This has never happened. Men die in mortal realms and come dead to Hel.”

“You came when called to eat what was offered,” cried Roric, squeezing Eirik’s throat tighter as the king struggled, “but I’ll make you a better offer than any mortal ever made to the powers of voima! But with my offer comes a price. If you close this chasm, remove death from the realms of voima where it should never have come, you can have two live men in Hel!”

From the chasm came other voices, faint, avid, and cold as ice. “Life! Bring us life!”

“The wights of Hel… should have no voice,” said the being in the mist, not so loud, not so sure.

“Then if I brought life into Hel,” Roric yelled, “would there be voima there even if you had destroyed it in all the realms of earth and sky?”

“Life in Hel… would destroy the balance.” The voice was even more unsure.

“Yet by coming here, you yourself are destroying the fated balance,” grunted Roric, punching Eirik in the stomach. “If you won’t take us as an offering, take us as a threat! Close the chasm and leave immortal realms forever! Your balance is changing with every second that Hel is open to the forces of voima!”

Eirik doubled over abruptly, making Roric loosen his grip around his neck. There was no time to wait to see if the forces of death would agree. Roric kicked himself forward with all his strength, launching both him and Eirik over the edge and into the pit.

The chasm crashed shut above their heads. They fell for what could have been five minutes, still clawing at each other. “Don’t bother trying to kill me,” Roric gasped, getting a grip on the other’s head. “You can’t send me to Hel since we’re both going there already!”

As they fell through blackness, across the insides of his eyelids flitted images of old bones and dried brains. He fought against the images, trying to replace them with a vision of Karin, smiling at him as the wind played with her hair. If he was-even for an instant-to bring life to Hel, let it be the voima of love and triumph.

They reached bottom unexpectedly and hard, but not with the killing smash Roric had expected. They rolled apart, trying to recover their breaths. If no man had ever come living to Hel, he thought, then maybe a living man could not be killed here. It was bitterly cold, colder than a January night with the north wind blowing.

Neither of them spoke at once. Eirik seemed oddly diminished without his ready tongue. He showed no inclination to attack Roric again as both sat up slowly. Roric blinked and blinked again. There was faint light here.

And people. Not quite solid but people nonetheless, reclining listlessly on the dusty floor and looking at them. All were gray, hair and skin and eyes, gray against the gray floor, though Roric and Eirik still kept their own colors. The sound of their heartbeats, fast and hard, echoed through the tunnels, the only hearts here that beat.

“I know these men,” Eirik muttered, rising and looking around. “Some of them I killed myself.”

Their shapes were slightly misty, but on many Roric could see the marks of a death blow: a slit throat, a stomach sliced open so that the entrails looped out, a deep gash in the chest. “Wigla doesn’t miss you at all, ” Eirik said, low and fierce, to one whose throat had been cut so deeply that his head drooped, nearly severed. He was one of the more solid ones. Others had faded so much that they were little more than hints of a shape, through which the next figure was visible. Roric pulled out his bone charm, which had given at least a hint of solidity to the Wanderers’ hollow creation, but it had no such effect here.