Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

There’s one benefit of doing very stupid things. They surprise people. Throwing the key across the room surprised Edris Dean just enough for me to clear my steel and sweep his belated thrust away from my belly whilst leaping backwards. A hot wet feeling across my hip let me know I hadn’t escaped unscathed, but at least Edris’s sword wasn’t sticking through me.

Edris thrust again and I turned his blade. Behind him all the panels in the far wall lit, torrents of numbers rolling down across them as if a river of digits were pouring over a cliff. The key, now bedded in the lock, started to smoke gently, as if the obsidian was giving off darkness as a vapour. All the previous grindings, groanings and shuddering seemed as nothing compared to the tortured sounds now reaching through the metal floor. Somewhere, deep in the heart of the Builders’ engines of calculation a cryptological war of codes and cyphers was being fought, as the key sought both to over-master the security that guarded the Wheel’s prime function, and to solve the problems that had defeated Professor O’Kee for so many years, allowing the engines to wind down in such a way that they didn’t pitch us over the fall we were seeking to avoid.

Edris swung at my head. I parried, the clash of steel almost lost in the cacophony around us. At the end of things, with so many ways to die surrounding me, I found fear to be less important to me than the fact that the man who butchered my mother stood before me. I parried again and lunged, cutting through his tunic and leaving a bright scratch across the mail underneath.

“If you kill me you won’t have time to force the key the other way!” I shouted. “And if you try to do it before you kill me I’ll cut your head off.”

Edris made a wild swing and leapt back. He wiped his mouth, bloody from a bitten tongue, and regarded me, breathing heavily.

Through the mirror facet on the wall between us I glimpsed Grandmother and the Silent Sister, both on all fours, their arms buckling under invisible weight, the Lady Blue stepping toward them in triumph.

“You came to save the world, Alica,” she hissed. “But you neglected to bring anyone to save you.”

The Sister managed to raise her head, her dark eye a hole into midnight, her blind eye a hole onto the noon-day sun. Snorri’s goddess, Hel, had such eyes. The old woman managed to raise a hand, fingers clawed, and for a moment the Lady’s advance halted, but only for moments. The Sister’s head dropped once more, face lost behind grey straggles.

Edris watched, as fascinated as me by the spectacle. The hands that had played us across their board our whole lives now met for a final reckoning.

“They didn’t bring me. I came.” A figure at the Lady Blue’s doorway, covered in masonry dust, ghost-grey. At first it didn’t look human: too bulky, too many limbs at odd angles.

A step forward and the new figure collapsed, now making a kind of sense. One man carrying another. The man on his knees, short, stocky, dark beneath the dust, the face of a clerk rather than a hero, despite his uniform and the sword at his hip. Captain Renprow, adjutant to the marshal in Vermillion, my right hand in organizing the defence.

“No!” If the mirror had truly been a window I might have thrown myself through it. The smaller figure, sent sprawling, rolling among the mirror shards, was twisted as cruelly as any victim upon Cutter John’s table. An old man, deformed, barely able to turn himself, and yet, in that moment as he raised his misshapen head, more noble than any man I’ve seen upon a throne.

“Madam.” Garyus’s voice came rough from his throat. The journey from Red March could not have been easy on him-the journey from the base of the tower still less so. “You underestimate how much a son of Kendeth is prepared to sacrifice for his sister.”

One twisted hand reached out and old fingers with over-large knuckles wrapped around the Silent Sister’s ankle. I saw the pain of even that small action in his face-the cold had always troubled Garyus’s joints, and in Slov the winter has teeth.

The Silent Sister flexed her shoulders then straightened her arms, head still lowered. The sound of shattering filled the air. She got to her knees, drawing in a rattling breath.

“Down!” The Lady Blue brought both hands together as if crushing something between them.

The Silent Sister stood, a slow, deliberate motion, accompanied at each stage by the sound of glass breaking until there was nothing left to break. In the Lady Blue’s hands the last two looking-glasses shattered. The Lady spread her fingers with a gasp and shards of mirror tinkled down amid dripping blood, her palms sliced by the fragments.

Alica Kendeth, the Red Queen, surged to her feet with a roar of fury, sword swinging.

With a cry the Lady Blue broke away from the contest, turning on a heel, somehow fast enough that the point of Grandmother’s sword only ploughed a furrow through her shoulder, and threw herself toward her last mirror. toward Osheim, and me. For a split second her image filled the facet. She hit the remaining fractures and they cut her like wires through cheese. And she was gone-nothing remaining on the mirror save a crimson wash, the room beyond seen dimly through it. Blood trickled down across the image of the Red Queen, her sword extended, the point against the mirror that her enemy had leapt through. I had little doubt that a visit to the fractal mirror far below us would reveal a wet heap of cleanly sliced body parts-the last remains of a woman who would have sacrificed one world to be a god in another.

Edris’s blade flickered my way. I almost didn’t turn it from my chest. My inattention earned me a shallow cut across my upper arm. The panels on the far wall burned red now and I thought I saw a figure moving beyond them, as if each were a window through the wall to some space beyond. The sound had died somewhat, reduced to deep metallic groans and the slow noise of a ratchet as one tooth after the next is drawn through it.

Edris feinted at me, our blades scraping edges. “I don’t have time to kill you,” he said. “Fortunately I brought someone with me who does.” He backed away and the unborn unfolded itself spider-like from the darkened ceiling where it had hidden in the shadows behind the pillars. It descended into the space Edris opened between us, a horror built from fresh meat rearranged about the bones of the men the Lady Blue had sent with Edris. A torso on thick legs, lowered by five raw and skinny limbs emerging from its open chest, each reaching two yards or longer, jointed in a dozen places, and ending in a sharp bone spike.

Edris turned his back and walked to the far wall and the key. “With that sword you stole from me maybe you’ll even send her back to Hell. But she’ll still be bound to the lichkin. Either way, it will buy me the time I need and I’ll deal with you myself afterwards if I have to.” He set his hand to the key and gasped as its lies wrapped him. “Though there isn’t going to be an after.” His wrist turned, forcing the key the other way, and the great engines howled a new note. “This is the way the world ends. No bangs, no whimpers, just the turning of a wheel.”

In the end there are few things more likely to squeeze stupidity and courage from a man in equal meas-ures-if indeed they are not both the same thing. Family will do it, and so will the sight of someone you hate with a passion about to seize their moment of triumph.

“Never underestimate what a son of Kendeth will sacrifice for his sister.” The words came from my lips without any hint of fear.

It wasn’t a berserk that took me. I think the rage that enveloped me the day I cut Maeres Allus’s throat had never truly let go, never bundled itself back into the tiny and forgotten space where I had once kept it, but mixed with my blood as with any other man, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud. The anger that raised my hand was all mine, owned and paid for. I threw Edris’s sword hilt over tip, turning through the air just as the key had. And just as Loki’s key struck home, Edris’s unholy blade did so too, taking him between the shoulder-blades.