Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Dear God!” I kicked Murder to greater efforts but he was already giving all he had. He might be as vicious a stallion as ever ran the fields of empire, but in this instance the same mad terror made cowards of us both.

Whatever the Unborn Prince was becoming one thing was certain- it wasn’t slow. The furious wet crunching thrash of the beast didn’t seem to be fading away into the distance as Murder stretched his legs. In truth it was growing louder, closer, and more furious.

The thud of heavy feet began to drown out the thunder of Murder’s hooves. Cold blood spattered across my back with each wordless roar of the monster. In moments a swing of its jaws would take me from the saddle. On the road ahead shapes loomed out of the murk, refusing detail to my rain-filled eyes.

“Save me!” A shout that emptied my lungs top to bottom.

With no alternatives left I veered right, hauling on Murder’s reins and kicking him into a huge jump that carried us clear of both the ditch and the six-foot hedge standing behind it. At the height of the jump I glimpsed my pursuer, just starting to overhaul me, but still on the road, trying to follow, too heavy to match our turning circle. The thing that the unborn had built itself into looked for all the world like a dragon from myth. A huge, raw, skinless dragon whose wet and flapping mouth housed rib-bone teeth.

The last I saw of the unborn before the hedge took it from view was of bloody feet with thigh-bone claws scrabbling for purchase on the cobbled road as it sought to turn, starting to present a broadside to the three riders in its path, all of whom were now trying to throw themselves from their mounts to get clear of the collision.

We landed with a jolting impact and I narrowly avoided smashing my front teeth out on the back of Murder’s head. Instinct told me to keep going, racing out in a straight line cross-country. Common-sense could only muster a faint cry from the corner at the back of my mind where it had been relegated, but since that cry concerned the inevitability of laming Murder while crossing rough ground in the dark at speed, and being stranded alone, waiting for the corpse-dragon to find me . . . I listened. I tugged hard to the left and brought him toward a dip in the hedge.

The unborn monster must have lost its footing and smashed into the horses side on. Two lay on their backs on the verge, legs flailing. The Norse appeared to have got clear without being crushed. Snorri had hold of Hennan, dragging him out of range of the hooves as the nearest mare tried to right herself.

The third horse went down with the corpse-dragon and now lay entangled with it, dwarfed by the beast, screaming in a register that would have loosened my bladder if I hadn’t passed that point several hundred yards back. As the unborn found its feet the horse, Hennan’s chestnut mare, Squire, “peeled” and became part of the monster, its flesh and bones being drawn up and redistributed across the manufactured body. The lantern one of the riders had been carrying lay smashed in a pool of dancing flame, casting the unborn into hideous relief.

Snorri, pressing Hennan into Kara’s care, returned on foot to the middle of the road.

“I have swum the River of Swords. I have whet my axe on jötnar bone in the cold places of the underworld. I am Snorri ver Snagason and I have slain your kind before.” He lifted his axe and somehow the edge of it cut a glimmer from the night. “This night you return to Hel.”

The corpse dragon shook itself, tattered flesh trailing beneath the muscular barrel of its body, supported on four thick legs. The head, its mouth wide enough to swallow a man, tilted first one way, then the other, bundled spines crackling deep within stolen flesh as it flexed. The porcelain mask now sat bedded in the beast’s forehead, a single white scale amid all that rawness. Two eye-pits regarded the Viking. The eyes I had met long ago in Vermillion’s opera house watched from their recesses- I couldn’t see them but I felt their hate.

“You.” At first it was the sound of blood gargling in a diseased throat, then somehow it was speech. “You dare to stand your ground against me?”

“Stand my ground?” Snorri looked very alone, there in the middle of the empty road, the rain dripping from every part of him. “Vikings don’t stand their ground!” With axe raised above his shoulder the poor madman began to charge.

The unborn seemed as surprised as me and stood watching as Snorri covered the distance between them. The closer he got the more huge the unborn seemed, the more unequal the contest.

As Snorri raced across the last few yards, roaring his battle-cry, the unborn swiped at him, a bone-clawed foot of raw meat, half as wide across as Snorri was tall. The Northman threw himself under the swing, feet first, sliding across the wet stones and somehow rising to bring Hel down in a violent arc that terminated at the centre of the unborn’s forehead, shattering the porcelain mask and burying the blade haft-deep.

The unborn, clothed in its body of many corpses, swung its dragonlike head, ripping Hel from Snorri’s hands and catching him across the side from hip to armpit. The angle was wrong for biting but the force of the impact lifted the Northman from his feet, flinging him bodily through the air and hurling him on a trajectory that carried him off the road, through the top of the hedgerow, and into the field where he hit the mud about a yard in front of me with a dull thud.

In my limited experience, any blow that lifts a man off his feet tends to be the blow that kills him. One time I saw a stallion kick one of the stable-lads at the palace. His feet left the ground and he flew perhaps a fifth of the distance Snorri covered. I don’t know if he was dead before he landed but if he wasn’t it couldn’t have been long after. They rolled him over and I saw the sharp fractures of his ribs all around where the hoof caught him. The rest of the bones had been driven into his lungs.

Compared to the unborn the hazards of galloping cross-country in the dark were nothing. I should have been out of both sight and earshot before Snorri hit the ground but instead I found myself kneeling in the mud, rolling him over. His whole left side was a mess of gore.

“C-could . . . have gone better.” He croaked the words as air leaked back into his lungs.

“You’re . . . hurt.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. On the other side of the hedges the unborn roared and thrashed. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Perhaps it was eating Kara. I’d imagined a lot of sorry ends for myself, but none had featured being slaughtered in the mud by a monster on a lonely stretch of road.

Snorri groaned and rolled onto his good side, grasping at his ribs. His hand came away messy and my stomach lurched.

“I’m in one piece.” He managed a scarlet-toothed grin and I realized the gore had come from the unborn. “Odin’s blood!” Snorri got into a sitting position, hunched like a man broken on the inside.

“How are you even alive?” I stood up, backing away a step. It seemed that the relatively slow velocity and large area of the impact had conspired to get Snorri airborne without turning his body to pulp.

I reached down to help him up but before he could gain his feet the hedgerow burst open, the unborn forcing a path.

“Shit!” I drew my sword: a toothpick would have been as much use. “What are you doing?” Snorri was still on the ground wrestling something glowing from the pack at his hip. “Put it away!” Light would just help it find us faster.

Too late, the huge nightmare head swung our way and the cold malice of those hidden eyes pierced me. I stood, paralysed, on the point of dropping my sword and running for it, abandoning all honour for the privilege of dying fifty yards further from the road. The thing lurched forward with a hideous gargle, but seemed unable to break free from the hedge. Black root-like loops had encircled its feet.