Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Lichkin.” Snorri names the beast and takes three paces toward it, timing his swing. He roars as the head of his axe tears through the air, muscles bunching as they drive it forward. The lichkin blurs beneath the blow, surging up to catch Snorri by the neck, the other hand on his stomach, lifting him high off the ground and slamming him down with a sick-making crunch. Dust billows up around the impact and I can’t see how he landed, though with so many boulders around it’s unlikely to be well. “Shit.” At last I remember to draw my sword. It sings out of the scabbard, the deadlight burning along the runes that mark its length. My hand is shaking.

Snorri’s axe rises, unsteady amid the billowing dust, and the lichkin snatches it, continuing the motion to bring it round and down in a circle that buries the blade roughly where I expect Snorri’s head to be. The impact is dull and final. I can just make out the axe handle, pointing up unsupported as the lichkin abandons it and stalks toward me, the dust still rising smokelike about it. Terror comes off the thing like heat off a fire.

“Oh crap.” I thrust my off hand down the neck of my jerkin and bring out Loki’s key. “Look, you can have it, just let me-”

The lichkin charges and it’s so fast I think I must have been frozen in place. One moment it’s there at the edge of the dust cloud and the next it has one hand wrapped around my throat and the other around the wrist of my sword arm. The thing’s touch is foul beyond imagining. Its white flesh joins mine, seeming to merge. It feels as if innumerable roots are sinking into me, burrowing between veins, each afire with an acidic agony that leaves no space even for screaming.

I’m held, useless and immobile while that white wedge of a face inspects me and all I can do is beg to die, unable to get the words past a jaw locked so tight that I expect my teeth to break in the next moment, to just shatter all in one go.

The lichkin’s head tilts down toward Loki’s key, held between us, pointing forward, my arm rigid and paralysed.

I glimpse some large and smoking object, past the lichkin’s head, rushing toward us. At the last moment I see it’s Snorri, dust rising from him with each pounding step. He’s empty-handed, as if he thinks to tear the creature apart by main force. The lichkin turns, faster than thought, and catches him by the shoulders. Despite its thinness the lichkin is rooted to the ground and absorbs all the momentum of the Viking’s charge, needing just a single sharp step backward.

I stand, still frozen in the moment. Edris Dean’s sword has fallen from the hand the lichkin released but not yet hit the ground. My eyes follow its progress and see that in stepping back the lichkin has driven itself against the black shaft of Loki’s key, the head of which has pushed an inch into the white flesh.

All I can do is turn it.

And as the key turns the blackness of it invades the lichkin’s alabaster, darting along its length in ebony threads, each in turn forking and branching, staining, corrupting. Gravity reaches for me and I’m falling, pulling the key clear, but even as I hit the ground and the dust rises all around, I see the lichkin start to come undone, as if it were a thousand strands, a thousand thin white tubes, now grey and putrefying, each peeling apart from the next, the whole thing opening, spreading, falling.

“Vermillion!” A banging on the carriage roof, the rough voice of whatever lout currently had the reins. I sat up with a jerk, soaked in sweat.

“Oh thank Christ!” Shudders ran through me. I looked at my wrist, expecting to see the scald mark of the lichkin’s hand still there. Lisa gave a sleepy murmur, face hidden by her hair, head in my lap. The old priest, Father Agor, narrowed pale eyes at me in disapproval.

“Did he say Vermillion?” I raised the shade and peered out, squinting against the brightness. The suburbs of Vermillion bumped past. “At last!”

“We’re there?” Lisa, blinking, face creased where she lay on me, strands of hair stuck in the corner of her mouth.

“We’re here!” My grin so broad it hurt my face.

Lisa gripped my hand and smiled back, and suddenly all was right in the world. At least until I remembered Maeres Allus.

Minutes later Lisa and I disembarked outside the courthouse on Gholloth Square and stood stiff and stretching, looking around with disbelief. Father Agor tossed a coin to a porter who received his luggage from atop the carriage and set off after the priest, a case under each arm. Our silent merchant friend departed, a boy with a mule carrying his trunk, leaving Lisa and me alone on a crowded street as the carriage rattled off to whatever stables would receive it.

On my journey south with Snorri I’d spent much of my waking day planning and anticipating my return to Vermillion. Travelling with Lisa, I had hardly spoken a word on the subject-perhaps fearing to jinx it, or unbelieving that after all I had endured our home would be waiting there to take us in once more as if nothing had changed. But here it was, busy, hot, wrapped around its own concerns and indifferent to our arrival. A large number of troops had been assembled on Adam Plaza, their supplies heaped against the side of the war academy.

“Will you take me home, Jal?” Lisa turned from the street and looked up at me.

“Best not. I’ve met your eldest brother, and he doesn’t like me.” Lord Gregori would have sliced me up himself if I hadn’t hidden behind my rank and made him goad Count Isen into doing the job for him.

“I live at the palace now, Jal.” She looked at her feet, head down.

“Oh.” I’d forgotten. She had meant the rooms in the Great Jon’s apartment in the guest wing. The ones she had shared with her husband. “I can’t. I’ve got something really important I need to do straight away.”

She looked up then, disappointed.

“Look.” I waved my hands as if there were something to look at that might actually explain it. “You don’t want me there. Not when you meet with Barras. And you’ll hardly come to grief between here and the palace gates.” She kept those big eyes on me, saying nothing.

“ I would have married you, you know!” The words took me by surprise but they were out now and words can’t be unsaid. Instead they hang between you, awkward and uncomfortable.

“You’re not the marrying type, Jal.” A tilt of the head, surprise touching her face.

“I could be!” Maybe I could. “You were . . . special . . . Lisa. We had a good thing.”

She smiled, making me want her all the more. “Mine wasn’t the only balcony you climbed, Jal. Not even within my father’s grounds.” She took my hands. “Women like to have their fun too, you know. Especially women born to families like mine, who know they’re going to be married for their father’s convenience rather than by their own choice.”

“Your father would have jumped at the chance of a prince for one of his daughters!”

Lisa gave my hands a squeeze. “Our brother did jump at the chance.”

“Darin.” His name tasted sour. The elder brother. The one not to be seen staggering drunkenly from bordellos in the predawn grey, or gambling away other men’s money. The one not past his eyes in debt to underworld criminals.

Suddenly I couldn’t stand her kindness a moment longer. “Look. I’ve got this matter to attend to. It can’t wait. I really have to do this. And-” I rummaged in my jacket’s inner pocket. “I need your help.” I withdrew Loki’s key, wrapped inside a thick velvet cloth bound tight with cord. “Keep this for me. Don’t open it. For God’s sake don’t touch it. Don’t show it to anyone.” I folded her hands about the package. “If I don’t come to the palace within a day present it to the Red Queen and tell her it’s from me. Can you do that? It’s important.” She nodded and I released her hands. And somehow, although that key was by far the single most valuable thing in the kingdom of Red March, something I had fought and bled for, literally walked across Hell to keep, I felt no pang at letting Lisa DeVeer take it. Only a sense of peace.