Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

I had confided my problem to Jorg Ancrath that drunken night on a Hamadan rooftop. He’d given me some advice, that thorn-scarred killer, and there, in the hot darkness of the desert, it had seemed sound, a solution. Was he not, after all, the King of Renar? But then again he was just a boy . . . Also, whatever he’d said to me had been washed away by a river of whisky and all I could remember of it was the look in his eyes as he told me, and the completeness with which I had believed him to be right.

The carriage rocked and jolted, miles ran beneath our wheels and home grew ever closer. We overtook three long columns of soldiers marching toward the capital. Several times the road grew so crowded we had to edge along past idle baggage-trains, arguing teamsters, soldiers shouting commands down the line. And somehow amid all that rattle and clatter, the heat, the noise, the anticipation . . . I fell asleep.

I dreamed of Cutter John, grown vast and satanic, as if the reality weren’t bad enough. I saw him reaching for me with his remaining arm, pale and hung about with the grisly trophies of his trade, lips he’d taken for Maeres Allus and worn as bracelets. I tried to run but found myself bound to the table once again, back in Allus’s poppy halls. Those great white fingers quested for me, growing closer . . . closer . . . me screaming all the while, and as I screamed the walls and floor fell away, turning to dust on a dry wind, revealing a dead-lit sky, the colour of misery. Cutter’s hand shrank back, and in that moment, knowing myself once more in Hell, I actually shouted for him to grab me and lift me back, not caring what fate awaited me-for the best definition of Hell is perhaps that there is nowhere, no place, no time to which you would not run in order to escape it.

“Something’s wrong.”

I look up and see that Snorri has stopped ahead of me and is eyeing the ridges about us. “Everything’s wrong. We’re in Hell!” Words won’t shape it but even if all you’re doing is walking down a dusty gully following the flow of souls, Hell is worse than everything you’ve known. You hurt, enough to make you weep, you thirst, you ache with hunger, misery weighs on you as if it were chains about your neck, and just standing there feels like watching everything you’ve ever loved die wretchedly before you.

“There!” He points toward a jagged collection of rocks on the ridge to our left.

“Rocks?” I don’t see anything else.

“Something.” Snorri frowns. “Something fast.”

We walk on, bone tired. Here and there the earth is torn and fissured. Long tongues of flame lick out, flickering skyward, and the air is foul with sulphur, stinging my eyes and lungs. The gully broadens into a dusty valley, studded with boulders. The wind has carved them into alien shapes, many disturbingly like faces. I start to hear whispers, indistinct at first, becoming clearer as I strain to make sense of the words.

“ Cheat, liar, coward, adulterer, blasphemer, thief, cheat, liar, coward, adulterer- ”

“Are you hearing this, Snorri?”

He stops and lets me catch up. “Yes.” He glances around, still spooked. “Voices. They keep calling me a killer. Over and over.”

“That’s it?”

“. . . blasphemer, thief, cheat, liar, coward, adulterer . . .”

“You’re not getting ‘cheat’ or ‘thief’?”

Snorri frowns down at me. “Just ‘killer’.”

I cup a hand to my ear. “Ah, yes, it’s clearer now. I’m getting ‘killer’ too.”

“. . . coward, adulterer, blasphemer . . .”

“Blasphemer? Me? Me?” I spin around glaring at the rocky faces pointing my way. Every boulder for fifty yards seems to sport a grotesque set of features that wouldn’t look out of place on the statues that decorate my great uncle’s tower.

“ Anger: you have committed the sin of anger . . .” from a score of mouths.

“I’m not fucking angry!” I shout back, not sure why I’m answering but swept up by the tide of accusation.

“ Lust: you have committed the sin of lust . . .”

“Well . . . technically . . .”

“Jal?” Snorri’s hand settles on my shoulder.

“ Greed: You have committed the sin of greed . . .”

“Oh come on! Everyone’s done greed! I mean, show me a man - ”

“Jal!” Snorri shakes me, spinning me to face him.

“Yes. What?” I blink up at him.

“ Lust: You have committed the- ”

“All right! All right!” I holler over the voices. “I lusted. More than once. I’ll put my hand up to all seven, just shut up.”

“Jal!” A slap and my attention is firmly back on the Northman. “These aren’t things the gods care about. This is your creed. This is the nonsense churchmen rail against.”

He has a point. “So what?”

“The deadlands are shaped by expectation, but there are two of us and our faiths don’t agree.” He lets go of me. “We were in Hel’s domain, where she rules over all that is dead. But - ”

“But?”

“Now I think we’ve strayed into your Hell.”

“Oh God.”

“. . . thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain . . .” Bishop James’s voice, though my father’s second had never sounded quite so much like he wanted to peel my face off.

The underworld that Snorri’s twin-aspected goddess, Hel, rules over is a pretty horrendous place, but I have the feeling that my Hell of fire and brimstone, replete with sinners and with devils to roast them, might outdo it for nastiness.

“Let’s get back.” I turn around and start to retread our path. “How did we even end up here? You’re the believer.”

“ . . . unbeliever, unbeliever, burn the unbeliever- ”

“I mean you’re the one with the strongest faith.”

“. . . faithless, faithless, harrow the faithless- ”

“Not that my faith isn’t really strong too, praise Jesus!” I cross myself, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and not that half-hearted wave of the hand that Father does but the deliberate and precise action that Bishop James employs.

“It might not be you, Jal.” Snorri’s hand on my shoulder again, arresting my motion. I glance back and he nods ahead.

Something flits across the gap between two of the larger boulders scattered across the valley floor. I catch only the edge of a glimpse- something thin and pale-something bad.

“This is our enemy’s Hell. He’s brought it with him on the hunt.” Snorri has his axe in his hands now.

“But, nobody knows we’re here . . .” I put my hand to the key, lying beneath my jerkin, just above my heart. Suddenly it feels heavy. Heavy and colder than ice. “The Dead King?”

“It might be.” Snorri rolls his shoulders, blue eyes almost black in the deadlight and fixed upon the rock the creature has vanished behind. “If he’s somehow been alerted to our presence he could just want revenge for us keeping the key from him.”

“About that . . .”

The creature steals any further conversation, emerging from the shadows at the rock’s base and starting to run toward us with appalling speed. It drives forward on bone-thin legs, the power of each thrust veering it to one side, only to be corrected by the next so that it threads an erratic path through the boulder-field, weaving around them and leaving the stone faces screaming their horror in its wake. The thing puts me in mind of the white threads you’ll see in the muscle of a man laid open by a sword blow. Nerves, one of my tutors called them, pointing to the nightmarish drawings in some ancient tome on anatomy. It looks like a nerve: white, thin, long, dividing into limbs which in turn divide into three root-like fingers, its head an eyeless wedge, sharp enough to bury itself in a man.