Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Wrong?”

“I failed them.”

“We all fail, Snorri. In the end we all fail. Often sooner.”

Snorri finds his hand pressed to his face, a weight of memory pushing him down, emotion choking him. “What was I supposed to do? Leave them? I could not let this stand. Win or lose, my fight is here. What else could I do?”

The raven shakes again, a stray feather floating down between dead branches. “Don’t ask me for counsel. I’m just a bird. Just memory.”

Snorri sniffs, ashamed of the tears he thought himself too dry for, feeling stupid and hurt. “I thought they would have gone before the goddess. I thought they would have gone before Hel and that she would have seen their goodness with her white eye and seen no evil with her black eye. They should be at Helgafell . . .” The holy mountain waited for the little ones and for those not slain in battle . . . though gods knew Freja must have fought to save her children. But Hel wouldn’t separate her from Emy and Egil . . . surely that couldn’t be the reward for her valour? Snorri’s head spins and it seems that Hel rotates about him so that he and the raven become the centre of all things, all pivoting on this one question. “Why are they out here?”

Snorri wipes his forearm across his eyes and draws breath to repeat the question, but the tree is empty, the branch bare. For a long moment he wonders if the bird was ever there. Then he kneels and retrieves a lone feather from the rust-coloured dust. Standing, he slips the feather into his coin pouch, and continues through the dead forest toward the distant hills.

The sky seems closer here, and although it remains monotone somehow it bears the threat of a storm. The whole region does, as if it holds its breath, waiting. The Northman sets his gaze upon a high ridge and, with teeth gritted, he begins the long ascent.

Snorri climbs, scrambling up rough slopes, clambering over rocks that hurt for no reason other than that he touches them-as if they are made of pain itself. Visions of Eight Quays fill his mind as he reaches, grips, hauls himself up, and repeats the process. His village rising above the Uulisk, above the quays that give its name, the scatter of huts that he knows well enough to navigate around in the blind night, sometimes blind drunk. He sees his own home, Freja at the door, golden hair all around her shoulders, blue eyes smiling, small crinkles at the corners, one hand on Emy’s shoulder, the other ruffling Egil’s hair, red about her fingers. Coming up behind her, looming head and shoulders above his stepmother, Karl, white-blonde like his true mother and promising to be as tall as his father. Even at fifteen he overtops most men.

How would Egil have grown from the scrawny energetic child, eager to investigate everything the world had to offer or to hide? Always into mischief of one sort or another. The boy had worshipped Snorri . . .

“I let him die.” Another hold. A snarl of effort. Another few feet of elevation gained. “I let them all die.”

Snorri looks up, blinking his vision clear. No pain he has suffered in Hel comes close to the ache that lodged in his chest the day he found Emy in the snow, mutilated by the ghouls that Sven Broke-Oar had brought to Eight Quays. That ache has grown around his heart-grown larger and tighter with each of their deaths, undiminished by passing time, an armour against what the world might offer, a prison too. It will end though. Here in Hel, it will end.

How long the climb takes him Snorri can’t say. Without night or day, without food or water, with no living thing close enough that its distance might be measured in so slight a thing as miles, time runs its own strange paths. Snorri couldn’t say how long the climb took but he feels, as he crests the ridge, that he has grown old somewhere along the way.

The ridge offers a view across a folded topography where a labyrinth of dry valleys, box canyons and deep rifts stretches away toward a dark horizon. The sky lies tainted with shadow, as if faint streamers of cloud have been strewn across it, clinging to the underside of the world above Hel. Each line of shadow forms some part of a pattern, a great gyre, its rotation too slow for the eye and centred on some vertex miles out, above the labyrinth.

“I see it.” Snorri sets his axe down for a moment, drawing a deep breath. “I’m coming for you, Freja.” He wipes the blood from his hands. “I’m coming for all of you.” He has a goal. Freja will be there with his children. All of Hel cannot stop him now.

Murder missed his footing on a loose rock and for a moment it jolted me from Snorri’s story. We’d come deep into the Wheel-lands, perhaps almost as far as on our first incursion. Standing stones, each taller than a man, ran in five close and parallel lines, radiating like a spoke, passing close by us and rushing on ahead toward a convergence at infinity. Heather grew over-tall in sickly and twisted clumps. I heard my name called among the stones . . . a pale long-fingered hand reached around the side of one close by, ancient with lichen. I closed my eyes and the story caught around me once more, swirling me along a different path.

• • •

A pale long-fingered hand creeps around the rock. The motion draws Snorri’s eye, turning his gaze from the dusty floor of the gorge to the steep and craggy side. He’s penetrated several miles into the labyrinth and overhead the shadow-stained gyre lies more pronounced than when he first saw it. And in all those dusty miles he hasn’t seen so much as a stray soul.

“Best come out and show yourself,” he calls, hefting his axe.

A narrow head peers over the edge of the jagged ledge, some thirty yards above the valley floor. At first Snorri takes it for a lichkin and his blood runs cold, but the thing is a sickly yellow rather than white, and its head is more like a bird’s, an unhealthy fusion of beak and head, rather than the eyeless wedge of a lichkin. It hauls itself into view with a screech like nails on slate, revealing small triangular teeth in its fleshy beak, and a gangling skeletal body with a crest of barbs running along its spine.

“A demon.” Snorri grins. “About time. Let’s see what you’ve got.” Behind the smile he knows this thing may make an end of him. The lichkin was overwhelming. He’s fought trolls in the living world and barely survived-their strength many times that of a man and their speed startling. Even so, the red song of war rises in him and the pain flees his limbs as if in fear.

The thing raises its head and utters a cry that echoes down the gorge, the sound of a scream terminated by a cut throat. It clambers down the cliff-like wall, dropping a few yards here and there, catching on with claws as long as fingers and as white as malice, loose stones rattling down with it, striking the ground only moments before its two three-toed and broad-splayed feet.

As the demon closes on him, cautious, hopping from side to side like a bird of prey, Snorri hears its call returned in several voices, distant but not distant enough.

It rushes him and his axe takes it on an upswing, sinking home where neck meets head, carving through its windpipe and up into its brain. The demon falls, convulsing, and Snorri lets go his axe to keep clear of flailing limbs. Moments later he advances on the corpse through the cloud of dust raised in its death throes, takes hold of the axe haft, sets a foot over one side of the demon’s face, and wrenches the blade free. Milky blood oozes from the wound with reluctance, stinking of corruption.

The first of the demons to answer their comrade’s call come boiling around a sharp turn in the gorge several hundred yards away. The leaders, three of them, hold small similarities with the one that Snorri has slain, but no two are the same. Others can be seen dimly in the dust cloud raised behind the swiftest of them. Many others.