Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Jalan!” Kara’s voice stabbed through me, taking the strength from my arms. “You need to calm down, empty your mind.”

“Empty my mind? What the hell are you talking about?” My mind was a bubbling cauldron, I’d never been able to still its voices, even enjoying a goblet of wine out on a balcony after a tumble in the sheets my thoughts would be a seething mass of this and that and maybe and when. “I can’t!”

“Then concentrate on something else, some good memory, something peaceful.”

“I . . . I can’t think of anything, damn it!” Every image that sprang to mind my imagination rapidly warped into some terrifying nightmare, and out across the grass yet another faint shadow grew darker and started to take on the shape of the horror in my head. I thought of Lisa DeVeer but no sooner had I pictured her, deliciously striped in light and shade, than my treacherous imagination started to speculate how the Wheel might hurt me with her-the flesh fell away around her mouth, revealing triangular teeth around a devouring hole. “I’ve got to go! I’ll get us all killed.”

I shook Murder’s reins, but Snorri leaned across and took them in one hand.

“Jal!” He snapped his fingers beneath my nose. “You don’t have to empty your mind, or fill it with something good, you just need to listen.” Snorri steered Murder back toward the Wheel and walked his horse on, slowly. “A story will lead a man through dark places. Stories have direction. A good story commands a man’s thoughts along a path, allowing no opportunity to stray, no space for anything but the tale as it unfolds before you.”

“What story have you got, Snorri?” Hennan asked. “Is it the one about the jötun who stole Thor’s hammer?”

“Christ don’t tell one of your monster sagas!” I could see it now, frost giants shambling out of the mist just as Snorri described them.

“Oh, it’s darker than that.” Snorri turned in the saddle to look back at us. “But if I tell it true there will be no space in you for anything else. You won’t think of Hel coming out of the Wheel for you, because I will have already laid it before you.”

And like that, riding toward the Wheel of Osheim, Snorri ver Snagason spoke for the first time of his quest through Hel. Perhaps Snorri’s storytelling had always been a kind of magic, and being so close to the Wheel had taken that gentle spellbinding and made something more powerful of it. All I know is that the words ran around me and like a bad dream I was back in Hell, seeing only what Snorri’s tale laid before me.

Snorri turns from the many-pillared hall of the judges and looks out into the Hel-night, alive now with the rushing wind of her approach. Jalan! The dry air shrieks it. Jalan!

There she stands before him, a child no older than his own sweet Einmyria, ghost-pale but lit with some inner glow. Gone. Now the swirl of the wind reveals her on his right, a slim young woman, hollow-eyed, clothed only in the wisps of what rides her, her head cocked to one side, studying Snorri with alien curiosity. The wind speaks again in a voice that stings, grit-laden and cold. Now she’s a baby, lying some yards to his right pale and silent, regarding him with eyes darker than Hel’s night. Tendrils of the lichkin to whom she is bound rise about her like translucent serpents, their light devoid of warmth. The child who has never seen the world, and the lichkin to whom she was given, both woven together, waiting to be unborn into the living lands.

Jalan!

“I’m not him,” Snorri says.

The unborn hisses, its shape twisting into some ugly thing without permanence or definition, the lichkin coming to the fore.

“You can smell it, can’t you?” Snorri says. “The destruction of one of your kind? He came against me in Hel and now he’s nothing.” Snorri raises his axe. “Try me?”

The wind howls and the ghost-like unborn breaks apart, swirling away toward the judges’ hall. Snorri shivers and lowers his axe, hoping he has bought Jal enough time to win clear.

In the distance, where the wind has dropped and the darkness fallen back to the ground from whence it was lifted, the dead-sky shows. It is the colour of sorrow and broken promises. Snorri starts to walk once more, the pain, thirst, and hunger of Hel woven into the meat of him so that each step is its own battle.

He hopes Jal will win through-the boy has grown in the time they have journeyed together. Less than a year, but the softness in him has been worn away to reveal some of the same steel so evident in the Red Queen, though perhaps Jal has yet to realize it. The afterlife feels too quiet without the prince’s constant complaining. Snorri misses him already. A grin creases his face. Even in Hel Jal can make him smile.

Snorri walks on, out into the wilds where Hel’s domain borders other places, the lands of ice and the lands of fire where the jötun dwell and build their strength for Ragnarok. Other places too, stranger places, all bound together by the roots of Yggdrasil. The land heaves and breaks as if frozen in its death agonies, mounded into compression ridges, scarred by deep rifts, stepping up toward daunting heights.

Few wander here, just the occasional soul bent around its purpose, and twice a troll-kin, hunched and moving swiftly through the scatter of rocks. In places monoliths stand, towers of black basalt, each carved with an eye as if to suggest the goddess watches even in the margins of her lands.

With Jal’s departure the Hel that Snorri crosses has grown closer and closer to the tales the skáld would sing in the long night around the dying fire of the mead hall. Snorri knows that Hel herself sits enthroned at the heart of these lands, split like night and day, as if Baraqel and Aslaug had been sliced head to groin and half of each bound into one being. Snorri, despite the depth of his conviction, can’t help but be glad his path has led him to the margins rather than to Hel’s court. He means to break Hel’s law, but he would rather not attempt it with her standing behind him.

In the distance hills rise from the blood-dust, dark with menace. The plain before them lies scattered with dead and twisted trees, ancient wind-stunted things, not one with a leaf on it, nor any hint of green across the whole swathe of the forest. Snorri sets off walking.

“Ccraaaawk!”

Snorri spins toward the sudden cry, axe ready. He sees nothing. Blood-dust rises around his feet, reaching his knees.

“Crawwk!” A raven, black and glossy, perched on a tree some yards back, long toes curled around a dry twig. “Here’s an odd thing. A living man in Hel.” The raven tilts its head first one way, then the other, sizing Snorri up.

“Odder than a raven that can speak?”

“Perhaps all ravens can, but most don’t choose to.”

“What do you want with me, spirit?”

“No spirit, just a raven, wanting what we all want: to watch, to learn, to fly back and whisper our secrets to the All-father. And perhaps a juicy worm.”

“Truly?” Snorri lowers his axe, amazed. “You are Muninn? . . . or Huginn?” He recalls the names of Odin’s two ravens from the priests’ tales. Appropriately he recalled Muninn-memory-first, and Huginn- thought-took a little more thought.

The raven crawks, shakes its feathers, and settles. “Mother and father to us all. We all fly in their wake.”

“Oh.” Snorri’s disappointment colours the word. “You don’t speak to Odin then?”

“Everything that speaks speaks to Odin, Snorri son of Snaga, son of Olaaf.” The bird wipes its beak on the branch beside it. “Why are you here? Why heading out into the wilds?”

Snorri knows his destination-he hasn’t thought to question his path. “I’m here for my wife and children. It was wrong how they were taken from me.”