Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Hurry!” Kara waved him on.

The air began to seethe around Hennan as he turned back toward the mirror, with quick steps, hands out in front of him as if he were breaking through cobwebs. Half-seen shapes moved around him like figures made of glass, seen only as a confusion of surfaces catching and distorting the light.

As he neared the mirror one of the shapes darkened, taking on colour. Something snake-like wrapped his wrist as he reached out with the tablet.

“No!” Hennan sounded angry rather than scared. The snake, or tentacle, or tendril became glassy as he stared at it, turning insubstantial again, and Hennan pressed the tablet against the mirror’s surface.

“ Brjóta .” For a moment the word hung in the air, trembling through the half-glimpsed horrors as the Wheel tried to give them form. In the next moment the mirror cracked with a splintering bang that left my ears ringing. A spiderweb of fractures ran across it, top to bottom. Immediately a klaxon rang out, strident, the light turning from a constant white to a pulsation of reds in shades from hot coals through to scarlet.

Hennan spun away, shaking off translucent hands, brushing past or through figures that loomed on all sides. He ran for us, each step slower than the next as if he were wading through a swamp. The air grew misty around him, but red as blood with the light’s warning.

“Don’t stop!” I roared.

A yard to go now. A thin crimson line opened along his cheekbone as a glassy claw sliced him. The mist took on a deeper stain.

All three of us stood at the boundary, screaming for him to push on.

He made it another foot, moving with agonizing slowness, before another cut opened up, this one deeper, running across his forehead, leaking blood.

We reached for him, though thankfully I had the sense to do it a split second later than the other two. Kara was quickest, lunging shoulder deep into the profound darkness that bloomed the moment her fingers crossed the boundary. Dark or not, she caught the boy and dragged him to us. I caught her in turn as she fell back. Her arm seemed unmarked but she lay in my lap, trembling as though dipped in the Norseheim sea, unable to catch her breath, eyes wide and staring.

“You’re all right.” Snorri lifted her from me.

I got up, pulling Hennan to his feet. With a rag from my pocket I wiped the blood from his eyes. We stood for a minute, all of us waiting for our hearts to stop trying to batter their way out of our chests. Kara shook herself free from Snorri and started to treat Hennan’s wounds with some paste from a leather pouch, the frightened girl banished once more to whatever part of her mind Kara kept her in, the völva back with us again, all business.

“We need to move.” I started back out through the door. Grandmother said the Silent Sister would know when the mirror broke. They would be beginning their final assault on the tower now and I wasn’t keen to find out if the Lady Blue had any more tricks up her sleeve.

Hennan brought up the rear and, glancing back, I saw the air around his shoulders mist briefly then fade, as if the shields that had once held to the painted boundary might now be failing, fractured as profoundly as the mirror.

Once I had them moving I let Kara lead the way with her map, and slipped into the middle of our little group just behind Hennan. “Good work there, lad.” I punched his shoulder in the way I’d seen Snorri dish out approval. “If I’m still marshal when I get back to Vermillion I’ll recommend you for a medal.” I rolled the word “when” silently in my mouth. I still didn’t know for sure what I would do once the key was in that final lock. I might have cut the Lady Blue off from coming to visit through the fractal mirror, but her words could still reach me. I could be a god in the new world-or burn with the peasants in the old . . .

“Look!” We reached one of the facets of the fractal mirror, finding it covered by a radial web of cracks, but Kara was pointing to the room beyond rather than the damage.

“I don’t see-” Then I did. The whole room gave the faintest of shudders and fine white clouds of plaster dust began to sift down over the polished furniture. “Come on!” Everyone’s time had been running out faster and faster. Now the Lady Blue’s time had run out, and somehow I didn’t think she would go gentle into her last goodnight.

Kara led us through the bulk of the sleeping leviathan, the engine that had broken free the Wheel that once steered the ship of the universe on its straight path through the unending night. The engine that even now nudged the Wheel further and further from true, threatening at any moment to steer us over some precipice into a fall that could shatter worlds.

The pulsing light throbbed throughout the structure, the siren penetrating all corners, making speech almost impossible.

“We have to hurry!” I shouted the words at Kara’s back in order to be heard. “We don’t have much time.” Since we broke the mirror I had been hearing various parts of the great engines come to life, or rather feeling it through the soles of my boots. Beneath the siren the labouring mechanisms groaned and whined, an unhealthy edge to the sound.

Kara turned away from the door in front of her and narrowed her eyes at me over Hennan’s head. “Perhaps the person with the key that opens everything should go first?”

I could hand the key over, but that would feel like handing over my choices. Instead I squeezed past and held key to door until the hidden locks surrendered and the metal slab slid out of my way.

We passed half a dozen facets of the mirror, positioned as if they might be windows into the interior of the Builders’ creations, but each showing the Lady Blue’s sanctum. Twice more I saw the room shudder and on the second time larger pieces fell from the ceiling, along with several mirror frames, and innumerable glittering shards as the broken mirrors had their teeth shaken from them.

“Up?” I looked up the narrow shaft, pulsing red.

“Up.” Kara nodded.

“Will Snorri make it? He’s quite fat.”

Snorri growled, the light gleaming on muscles slick with sweat as the temperature rose around us.

I drew a deep breath, and regretted it. “Smells like the rest of the Builders came in here to die.”

The tight confines of the shaft muted the siren, but as I clambered into the small chamber at the top it returned with full force. I stumbled to the mirror facet set into the wall and slapped the key onto one of the dead screens below it. “Make it stop!”

That last “stop” burst out into a silent room. Kara looked up at me as she climbed out of the hole.

“Well done.” Rubbing her ears, she stepped back to let Hennan out.

“Thank the gods for that.” Snorri squeezed out of the shaft, flexing his shoulders.

“We’re close now. The central chamber is next but one. Through there.” Kara pointed to a peculiar opening, tall, narrow, leading into what looked to be a small cupboard.

The sound of a door crashing open spun us all around. The Blue Lady stood in the doorway of the room beyond the mirror, arms spread as if about to cast some terrifying spell, grey hair in disarray, a cloak of midnight blue swirling around her. Her age shocked me. I knew her to have more than a hundred summers under her belt, but I’d not seen her like this, like something that might be piled in the corpse cart at the back of a debtors’ prison: bones wearing old skin that wrinkled up around each joint. Worse than her age was the way she moved, possessed of unnatural vitality, avid, eyes full of fever. She sprang at the surface between us, covering the distance in a moment. Her face filled the mirror, shrieking curses at us in a language I was glad I didn’t understand.