Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Kara!” The völva must have been working on the entanglement spell that had had such marvellous effects against the Red Vikings near the Wheel of Osheim. The strength returned to my hand, fingers tightening on my sword hilt. I glanced down at Snorri. “What the hell?” He had the ghost-box, its glow making black silhouettes of his hands as he opened it, pointed toward his face.

“We need Baraqel!” He shouted it into the mouth of the box where a chaotic speckling of light and dark boiled.

At the hedge the unborn roared and threw itself forward, centuriesold roots groaned and creaked under the strain. Several burst apart with loud retorts. Elsewhere, dead flesh tore to let the bonds slip and reformed afterwards.

Snorri got to his knees. “The key, Jal, it’s the way to let him out. He lives in here.”

“It doesn’t work like that, you stupid great . . . Viking.” But even as I said it I pulled out Loki’s key and pointed my trembling blade in the direction of the unborn, which was now uprooting the last hawthorn that had been anchoring it down.

“Yes it does!” Snorri stood, one arm clutching his side, the other holding the box out toward me. “Yes. It. Does.” The look he gave me held such conviction I started to believe it too.

Bone claws dug into the mud and the unborn surged into motion. I dropped my sword.

“Baraqel!” I roared, taking the ghost-box and aiming its mouth toward the unborn. I thrust the key into the box’s base and turned it.

The light that lanced out I had seen once before, though that time I had been inside a tent that had almost burst into flames. Now as then the Builders’ Sun’s light turned the darkness into the blind whiteness of dunes beneath the hottest sun. The unborn screamed, its flesh bubbling. In the next moment the impossible brightness of that unnatural illumination cut off and in its place Baraqel stood, as we had seen him once before at the wrong-mages’ gate, a glowing angel with a sword cut from the sun, nine foot long and burning. In the instant he appeared I knew him. No one else quite managed that look of disapproval when their eyes found me.

A heartbeat later the unborn crashed into Baraqel, his sword descending upon it. Even a twelve-foot angel couldn’t stop the creature dead. The dragon body it wore had been fashioned from the corpses of fifty men or more and Baraqel was thrown aside. But wings of bronze and gold spread to absorb the momentum and his furnace-bright sword struck the unborn’s head from its shoulders in a single blow.

Dark crimson blood vomited from the unborn’s neck in a lumpy torrent while the whole serpentine length of its body convulsed, whipping back and forth. A moment later it warped and tore like dough, corpse heads and disembodied eyes appearing along its back, new limbs forming, ending in rib-bone claws or half a dozen spinal columns thrashing like tentacles. Another convulsion and the mutated mass of it wrapped Baraqel in a coil, bearing him to the ground.

“Come!” Snorri snatched up my sword and, limping, ran into the fray.

“Come? You just took my bloody sword. What am I supposed to use? Bad language?”

I drew my dagger and stood watching. The fight confused my eye: rapid, furious coils of dead flesh black against the angel’s brilliant limbs, bright wings fluttering, black claws tearing, and occasionally a glimpse of that burning sword sending shadows sprinting back across the field. I spotted Snorri here and there, like a mouse harrying an Indus python, Edris Dean’s blade cutting through the necromancy that sustained the unborn, but surely with cuts too small to matter.

I looked at the four inches of iron in my fist, then looked back for Murder, only to find him gone, even his viciousness turned to terror at the sight and sounds of such a battle. The half-expected red tide of the berserker failed to rise in me, just a bitterness, an anger that this creature woven of the worst of men’s hatreds that settle into the deepest rifts of Hell, had haunted me for so long. The unborn had been the start of my journey, breaking my life apart, and now it looked like being the end of it too. I held the dagger out before me. Die fighting alongside Snorri in the light-or alone a few minutes later in the dark? Sometimes the coward’s choice aligns with that of the hero.

Kara told me I was screaming “Undoreth” when I charged. I don’t have any memory of it, but I’m sure it would have been “Red March.”

“Go away, damn you, and tell Ballessa I want kippers for breakfast.” I screwed my eyes tight against the daylight. “And draw those damned curtains!”

“Time to get up, your majesty.” The maid sounded sarcastic rather than respectful.

I tried to snuggle down into the bedclothes and found them wet and cold. “What the hell?” I opened my eyes, blinking against a bright light close to my face. All of me hurt. At least it had stopped raining.

“How are you feeling?” Kara, squatting at my side wet-haired and smeared with mud. She held the orichalcum up between us.

“I’m dying.” With one hand I wobbled my jaw. “I think I broke my everything.”

“He’s fine,” she called over her shoulder.

Snorri loomed out of the night and offered a hand to haul me to my feet. Hennan appeared from nowhere, more mud than boy, and got under my other arm to help me up as Snorri pulled.

I drew a deep breath and regretted it. “Smells like a funeral in a latrine.”

“That’s just you.” Snorri clapped an arm around my shoulders and steered me toward the stinking ruins of the unborn. Long feathers littered the rutted ground, the light dying from them as I watched.

“Baraqel?” I asked.

Snorri shook his head. “They destroyed each other.”

The box of ghosts lay bedded in the mud nearby, its glow drawing my eye. I gestured toward it. “Get that, Hennan.” As he ran for it I added, “Don’t let it touch your skin.”

He returned, holding it gingerly, his sleeves over his hands. I shrugged Snorri’s arm off and stepped forward to take the box. Before it could summon some ancient relative I called into it, “Baraqel!”

At once that same fuzzy light lit in the box’s depths and as I held it away from me a Builder ghost sprang into being above the opening. I could see something of Baraqel in the man before me, the same blade of a nose, the eyes somewhat hollow above prominent cheekbones, the broad expanse of forehead, but it was the way this ghost burned with many times the light of any seen before convinced me this was Baraqel.

“Entanglement detected.” The voice of the box. “Bareth Kell.”

The ghost met my eyes and spoke with its own voice. “Call me, Barry.”

“I-” The things always unnerved me. “Are you dead?”

“I’m just a library entry, Jalan. Bareth Kell died many centuries ago in the third war.”

“But I know you. You’re Baraqel.”

The ghost shone brighter still. I shielded my eyes. “When the world burned I was one of the few who could leave their flesh and pattern myself onto the energy flux. I became a wraith, a spirit if you like. The Barry who lived in the meat where my mind was born . . . he burned. It was a sad time.”

“Baraqel? This is you, isn’t it?” I tilted the box and the ghost tilted with it. There was more to this ghost than some “library entry”-he felt alive, charged with energy and personality. I saw it as he leaned with the box, a peevish frown, something judgmental in the way he pursed his lips. “It is you!”

Baraqel gave a nod and a grudging smile. “It’s me. Or at least an echo of me resonating in this device. I won’t last long. Where’s the heathen? Bring him forward.”

Snorri stepped into the light. “Baraqel. You fought well.”