Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Loki’s key leads all sorts of people to it.” Kara turned her angry stare from me to her bread and soup. “Particularly once it settles in one place.”

The speed with which she looked away caught my attention. A practised liar gets good at noticing the failings of those with less practice. I glanced at Snorri, then back at Kara. “Snorri put his blood on the key to bind it to him. That’s why when I used it to open the door there he was standing on the other side.” I rested my chin in my hand, noticing how stubbly it was. A day in Snorri’s company and I was already starting a beard. “But originally it was you who was supposed to help him return, you who tied your piece of string to his toe . . . or whatever it is witches do when they want to find something. And I’ve been in Vermillion for the best part of a month . . .” I pointed a finger at her. “It was Snorri turning up that made you get old Isen to abandon his post, wasn’t it?”

She looked up, scowling and without an answer, but the colour in her cheeks said enough. I looked back at Snorri but he was concentrating on his food and I couldn’t see what expression he wore. “Well.” I paused to finish my wine and wave at the table-boy for some more. “It’s been lovely. And it was nice to see you again, young Hennan. But Snorri and I are on a very dangerous mission where speed is of the essence, so we will have to take our leave.” I snagged a leg from the cold roast chicken set at the middle of the table. “Once we’ve finished our meal.” I let the table-boy fill my goblet. The local red proved highly palatable. “So we must bid you adieu and let you make your own way to your destination.”

“Where are you going?” Hennan asked. It had been less than half a year but he’d sprung up like a summer weed, his face taking on the longer, more angular shape it would keep as a grown man, providing the world didn’t fall to pieces first. “We could come too.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m not taking a child into mortal danger.”

“But where are you going?” Kara repeated the boy with the same lack of decorum.

“That, I’m afraid to say, is a state secret.” I gave her my best princely smile.

“Osheim,” Snorri said.

“That’s where I was taking Hennan,” Kara replied, not missing a beat. “He has relatives not far from the Wheel.” She nodded to where I’d tied up Murder and Squire. “You have four horses.”

“You don’t know how to ride.” It seemed easier than “no.”

“We’ve spent a rather tedious summer as Count Isen’s prisoners. Though he did insist on referring to us as guests and allowed us some freedoms. Sir Thant taught us both to ride.”

I looked over at Snorri, not expecting any support after his rapid and treacherous disclosure of our destination. “You see? It’s the Wheel. It even gets to völvas in the end. She even thinks it’s her idea . . .” I faced Kara again. “No. You’d slow us down. Besides, we may be hunted-you’d be much safer on your own.”

Kara’s jaw took on a familiar determined set. “You don’t think you’ll have more chance with us? You think we’re useless?”

“Hennan’s just a boy!” I spread my hands. “I don’t think you quite understand what’s at stake-”

“Hennan lived his whole life a day’s walk from the centre of the Wheel. His family lived in that valley for at least four generations, probably forty. Any sons of that line who felt the draw of the Wheel walked in a century ago. What could be more valuable to you than someone who can resist the glamours there when you might be losing your reason?”

“We should take the boy home, Jal.” Snorri said it in the tone of voice that meant the matter had been decided. Combined with Kara’s underhand use of logic, and the fact that I was too exhausted, beaten up, full, drunk, and generally traumatized to want to argue, I let the Northman have his way.

For the next five days we rode east. Autumn continued to do a passable impression of summer, the mornings came crisp and the sunsets flowed warm and golden. Red March unfurled her beauty, dressed in the traditional colours of the season, and while we kept up a sharp pace the opportunity to bed down in good inns and dine at open houses along the roadside took much of the sting from the exercise. In truth there are few better ways to spend a day than riding through the March on a fine day in the fall of the year.

The four of us renewed our acquaintance with various degrees of hesitation. Hennan proved shy at first, keeping his mouth closed and his ears open, but when he finally did reach the point of asking questions they came in a deluge.

Kara kept her reserve longer, clearly not having forgiven me for stealing the key and denying her a triumphant return to Skilfar. I did point out that Count Isen would likely have taken it off her with potentially disastrous consequences, but that logic didn’t seem to placate the völva.

Snorri, true to his word back at the palace, appeared to be at peace, enjoying our company though showing no signs of wanting to talk about what had happened to him. I’d been terrified every moment I spent in Hell: to be left there alone lay beyond my imagination. I was quite happy for it to stay there too.

It didn’t take long though for Hennan’s questions to turn to what happened to Snorri and me when we passed through the door in Kelem’s cavern. I soon found myself sharing Snorri’s desire to let things lie.

“What did you see?”

“I . . .” I really didn’t want to think about it. I certainly didn’t want to put it into words. Somehow saying it out loud would stop it being a nightmare, something unreal and belonging wholly to that other place. Speaking of it in the light of day would bring it firmly into the realm of experience, a real and concrete thing that had to be dealt with. I might have to start thinking about what it all meant: the idea that after a short span on Earth an eternity in such a place might be waiting for us was a deeply depressing one. It’s all very well when death is a mystery that churchmen fritter away the best part of Sunday droning on about. Seeing it for yourself at first hand is a profound horror and not something I wished to inflict on a child, or myself. “It’s too nice a day, Hennan. Ask a different question.”

Try as I might to bury the memories of Vermillion my old talent proved unequal to the task and they kept pace with me on the road, haunting each hedgerow, ready to spring into any quiet moment, or paint themselves across any blank canvas, be it sky or shadow.

My mind kept returning to Darin’s death, to the lichkin in Milano House, to my last glimpse of Martus. Each of those a stepping stone to the cold and ugly fact that my sister had at last emerged into the world so long denied to her. My sister, unborn, ridden by a lichkin, and still hungry for my death to further anchor her against the relentless pull of Hell.

I sought Kara’s wisdom on the subject, hoping the völva might have made some study of our enemy in the time we’d been parted.

“A man in Hell told me it took some holy thing to break an unborn,” I said, nudging Murder up close to Kara’s mare.

She shrugged. “It’s possible. It would have to be something very special. Some relic maybe. Perhaps in the hands of a priest. Sometimes faith moves more of the mountain than magic.”

“Wouldn’t Loki’s key be the best thing to unlock one thing from another? My sister from the beast that wears her? It’s holy-a god made it!”

Kara gave me a bleak grin. “Loki is a god, but who has faith in him?”

“But the key works! It could unlock-”

“The lichkin are monsters of many parts. Not born, not made, but accumulations of the worst parts of men, the filth that falls from souls purged in Hel.” Though the day was bright around us it seemed colder and more brittle as Kara spoke of such things. “When old hatreds sink to the deepest rifts of the underworld sometimes they fit together and interweave, perversions of the most twisted kind, detached from their owners, drift until they become entangled, and slowly over generations, something awful is built. But what is tangled together can be unravelled. Use the key and the lichkin will be undone, but your sister will be torn apart, shredded, still bound to the pieces of its crimes. You need something less destructive- something that will persuade the lichkin to release its hold and let her go.”