Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

And there it was. As good as a betrayal. I’d asked the Lady Blue to plant a seed of hope in me. My reflection looked like both of us now-a mixture-her age on my bones, her words on my lips.

“There are ways known to those with power. True power that rests in the mind rather than in titles or lands or the command of great armies. I will bring those who serve me through the conjunction of the spheres and into a new world. But they have to be close at the last moment. Close enough to touch.”

“All I have to do is come through your wall and join you in that tower, eh?” It had been a faint hope at best, but I hadn’t expected it to sour so quickly.

“There is another way. For a man with Loki’s key.”

“I’m listening.” My hand found the key.

“The heart of the Wheel is the centre of the storm. When the worlds shatter like mirrors and all the pieces come sliding down, anyone standing at the heart of the Wheel will pass through without harm.” My reflection held little of me now, just my eyes staring from an old woman’s face.

“I’m told it’s not a place anyone would choose to wait.”

“The engines of the Wheel continue to change the world. The Wheel continues to turn but that was never the Builders” intention. The engines were built to turn it so far and no more, to hold it in place, to give a little magic to each Builder and change their world from one set thing into another. The fact the Wheel kept turning, ever so slowly, was a mistake, an unforeseen event. It’s us that turn the Wheel when we use the power it gives us, and the engines at Osheim help us to turn it considerably faster than we could on our own.

“Their war ended their interest in the matter, and a thousand years turned a little mistake that might have been corrected into a big one that cannot.” The Lady Blue watched me from the mirror, no hint of my face there now. She looked old, though not as ancient as Grandmother and her sister. Her face however, held far less vitality-the skin stretched tight across her bones, paper thin, her eyes clouded. “Some think the key might be used to disable the Wheel’s engines and that doing so might slow the inevitable conjunction. It’s possible, though unlikely, and such a waste . . . the key destroyed to buy a handful of months, a few years at best. Better by far to turn it the other way-put those engines into overdrive, spin the Wheel as the Builders once did and bring about the end in moments. The man who did it would be assured a place in the new order of things and a clean, sharp transition would make it easier for those skilled among us to survive the change and bring through with them not just a few followers but dozens, scores, maybe hundreds.”

“You sent Edris Dean to kill my mother.” I held to the anger-at least that felt clean and uncomplicated.

“It wasn’t an act of malice, Jalan. It was about survival. You know in your heart that when it comes down to burn or don’t burn, you would choose to save yourself over others. That’s honesty. That’s the truth at the core of what we are. You need to-”

Something whizzed past my ear and the world exploded.

I opened my eyes an indeterminate amount of time later and discovered the world less exploded than I had imagined it would be, albeit decidedly odd-looking, as if the entire house had fallen on its side. It took a moment to work out that I was the one who had fallen over.

Some tugging and grunting indicated that someone was attempting to get me back into a sitting position, although they were doing a piss-poor job of it.

“I’m all right.”

I sat up and drew a hand over my face, turning to find Hennan frowning at me. A glance down at my palm revealed it scarlet. “Shit! I’m not all right! I’m bleeding to death!” I staggered to my feet. Glittering shards of mirror lay all around, crunching under my boots.

“You’ve got a cut below your eye,” Hennan said. “A piece of it must have caught you when I threw the rock.”

“Threw?”

“The mirror was doing something to you. It was all blue-like the sky gone wrong. I threw a rock at it.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well.” I glanced about. Just me and Hennan in the blackened shell of a merchant’s house. “Good. Let’s go.”

I let Snorri and Kara navigate us out of Blujen’s garden lands and on into northern Slov. Snorri’s instinct for the outdoors seemed as keen among the woods and fields of the central kingdoms as it had amid the icy rocks of Norseheim. Kara also proved her worth, casting her runestones wherever the road offered us choices and selecting the path of least resistance.

Slov was of course in a state of high anxiety with rumours running rife through the countryside and any town with a wall, girding its loins for war. Suspicion ran deep that any stranger might be a Red March spy, but even the fevered imagination of the Slovs was hard-pressed to picture the Red Queen recruiting giant Vikings, blonde völvas or red-haired northern lads as covert agents. I did my best to hide behind Snorri and say as little as possible during encounters. The approach worked well, becoming easier by the mile as we left the war zone behind us, and within a few days we had returned to the steady progress and comfortable tavern nights that we had enjoyed on the way.

Having consulted the maps at Grandmother’s headquarters and discussed the matter with a dangerous-looking man of hers who described his employment only as “travelling widely on state business,” we aimed to leave Slov along the Attar-Zagre border and pass swiftly into Charland, crossing the breadth of that ill-favoured nation before travelling the length of Osheim to the Wheel.

I’m not a man who likes travel. I do like to ride, it’s true, but generally I’d prefer to end the day where I started, i.e. home in the palace of Vermillion. I don’t approve of foreign places. Neighbouring countries are at best a necessary evil required to cut down on the amount of coastline, since the only thing worse than a long journey overland is a journey of any length over water. In short, even with the addition of decent roads, warm inns, and half-decent food, the business of getting from A to B is overrated.

I could regale you with a near-endless list of small towns passed through, lazy peasants encountered, provisions purchased, hooves shod, ale drunk, early morning frosts, the fiery colours of the fall, sunsets lingering in the west . . . but the truth is that by the time we met disaster nearly a hundred miles had passed beneath our hooves without a damn thing happening.

For a world reputedly on its last legs things seemed largely untroubled, at least to judge by what could be seen from the back of a horse in the middle of the Broken Empire. The sky remained variously blue or grey, showing no tendency to crack or burn. The land held the wet ochre hues of autumn with no sulphurous ravines opening up amid the stubbled fields, no tongues of fire licking from new-formed fissures. Even the hell that had been lapping at the walls of Vermillion seemed a distant dream now.

I tried on a couple of occasions to broach the subject of Snorri’s journeying in Hel. I would have got to it in my own time without Kara making eyes at me. My own time, however, would have been when we were both old men. Fortunately he just shook his head and reached for his ale. “Done is done, Jal. Stories tell themselves when the time’s right. And for some stories the time is never right.”

For the first week of our journey each shadowed space hung thick with threat. I knew Edris Dean to be out there somewhere, having fled the siege when things turned sour. I knew that the Unborn Prince would be stalking the kingdoms, bound on the Dead King’s business. And worse than Dean, worse even than the Unborn Prince, I knew my sister would be seeking me. Kelem had told me my sister required my death to seal her into this world. Marco had confirmed as much when we found him nailed to a tree in the drylands. My sister had escaped her long exile, breaking into our world through the wound left by the death of one brother. Unborn from hell and bound to a lichkin she would now be seeking the death of her last sibling to anchor her here. I needed something holier than my father’s blessing on a cross to break my sister from the lichkin. I kept my eyes open as we travelled, but church relics are thin on the ground in most places, so mostly I kept my eyes open for skinless horrors trying to pounce on me from the hedgerows.