Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

Snorri blinks, seeing but not understanding. The warrior takes off his gauntlets and puts them in his belt. The hands beneath are scarred, the fingers crooked from old breaks. “They want the key,” he says.

“What?” Snorri’s face tingles, his mouth works but no words come.

“They want the key-the last words I spoke to you. I wanted to say more. To tell you I loved you. To thank you for finding me. To say goodbye.”

“Karl!”

“Father.”

The two men meet in a fierce hug.

Murder stumbled again and jolted once more from the story I glanced around-but I could see none of the Osheim’s horrors: my eyes were too blurry.

“I could come with you, Father.”

“No.” Snorri sets a hand to his son’s shoulder. “Your place is in Val halla. They will understand . . . this.” He lifts his axe toward the carnage stretching back along the gorge. “But more would be too much. We both know it.”

Karl inclines his head.

“I’m proud of you, son.” It doesn’t seem real-to have Karl there before him and to be saying goodbye again. Snorri wants to take his boy home, but a man stands before him. A man with a seat waiting for him in Asgard, a seat at a table in Odin’s own hall.

“We’ll sit together one day, Father.” Karl smiles, almost shy. “That we will.”

Snorri takes his boy in his arms one last time. A warriors’ embrace.

He lets him go. If he were to stay any longer he would be unable to leave.

The child he raised has become a man. Even before he died. The Karl who had played on the shores of the Uulisk fjord, who had chased rabbits, tended goats, played with wooden swords, loved his father, laughed and danced, fought and raced . . . that boy had had his time and that time was good. Even before Sven Broke-Oar tore their world open, that boy was safe in memory and now a young man wears his clothes. Snorri walks away, not trusting himself to speak further, not looking back, wounds forgotten, his arms remembering the feel of his son.

“Jal!” A tug at my arm. “Jal!”

“What?” I shook off the vision of Snorri and Karl. A desolate heath surrounded us, the horses plodding on, the wind blustery and promising rain. Just ahead of me Snorri rode with head lowered, wrapped in memory, still telling his story. I wanted to follow him back into it. “Jal!” Hennan’s voice at my ear.

Above us the sky had become a purple wound, a gyre that drew the eye. The dreary landscape about us hung thick with maybes, all of them bad. I turned in the saddle. Hennan, immediately behind me, pulled my sleeve again. “What?”

“We’ve passed over the Wheel!” He pointed back to a low ridge in the heath, like an ancient earthwork, stretching off in both directions in a straight line . . . though as I followed it with my eyes a slight curve revealed itself.

“You’ve been watching?” My gaze flitted to the monstrous shapes already starting to gather in the middle distance. They looked uncomfortably close to the demons Snorri had described. “How come you’re not . . .”

“Dead?” Hennan shrugged. “This place doesn’t trouble my family the way it does other people.”

“Well it scares the shit out of me.” I closed my eyes, trying to get back into Snorri’s tale. “We’re heading to the heart of the Wheel. Let me know when we get there.”

“The centre of the Wheel is nothing but chaos.” Urgency coloured Hennan’s voice and that note of worry kept me with him despite the pull of Snorri’s words. “The heart of the Wheel is in the ring, the place where the machine is controlled from.”

I scowled. “How do you know all this?”

“Stories my grandfather told m-”

“Goat-herders’ tales?” I spat, angry that the boy had risked my life for this. Already my imagination was conjuring fiends in the darkness behind my eyelids and very soon the Wheel would make them real. “You never asked me who Lotar Vale was!” A shout now. “Who?”

Hennan punched me in the kidney. Me! A prince of Red March, punched by some heathen peasant! “My grandfather’s grandfather. Lotar Vale. He was the most famous wrong-mage of his time. He managed to return to the margins and raise a family there. He knew this place!”

“Shit! Snorri!” I turned Murder. “Snorri!”

Glancing back I saw Snorri lifting his head as if from a dream, Kara shaking herself free.

In the distance, about a quarter mile along the curve of the Wheel, a blocky shape broke the monotony of the landscape: a small building of some sort. “We need to get there!” I pointed. “Hold tight.” I kicked Murder into a canter. Cold terror washed me, and rising with the fear came grey shapes, lifting from the heath like mist and congealing into more substantial forms as I looked. “Ride!”

Demonic shapes, dead men, clockwork devils with knives for fingers, witches, black and dripping tentacles reaching from tar pits, pine-men, vast devil-dogs, burning wolves, djinn . . . the products of my over-fertile imagination populated the heath so thickly there was scarcely room for them all.

“Jal!” Snorri from behind. “Jal! It’s all you!”

He was right. There wasn’t room enough in the Wheel for all my fears-no one else’s nightmares stood a chance of gaining elbow room. “Clear your mind!” Kara shouted. Advice as useless as any I’d heard.

They should take away her cauldron.

The horrors converged on all sides, removing any clear path. I tried to ride down a half-formed Fenris wolf, but the thing, though misty, proved solid enough to shoulder Murder aside and we went down screaming. Falling off a horse is a quick way to get yourself a broken neck. Having a horse fall under you will often add a broken thigh-bone to your injuries. Fortunately I’ve had a fair bit of practice falling off horses and the heather provided an almost soft and quite bouncy landing. I ended up sprawled across a spiky green gorse bush, whimpering, more in fear than pain.

“Jalan Kendeth.” A cold and sibilant voice.

I looked up. Cutter John stood above me, pincers in hand, that same skull’s grin he wore when Maeres Allus told him to take my lips. Something whirled above my head, its passage terminating in a meaty thunk. Snorri’s axe jutted at an angle from Cutter John’s chest, one of the twin blades buried up to the haft.

Cutter John took three quick steps back, then stopped. He looked down at the axe, curious, then bringing up the ugly elbow stump of the arm Snorri severed so long ago, he knocked the axe free. “No interruptions this time, Jalan.” Cutter John returned his pale, overlarge eyes to me, the wound in his chest bloodless.

On all sides the monsters from the dark corners of my mind stood waiting, bleeding mist, one into the next. They walled away Snorri and Kara. I couldn’t see Hennan among the press of them. I couldn’t even see Murder, though I heard his panic. Of all of them only Cutter John seemed truly solid, as real as the ground he stood upon.

I hadn’t the strength to get up. I’d come halfway across the world to be gruesomely murdered by my own worst fears. Everything I’d predicted had come true. The Wheel had given me the rope and here I was, hanging myself.

“. . . yourself . . .” Kara’s voice, growing further away, almost drowned out by Murder’s whinnying, half-fear, half-anger.

Cutter John raised the pincers in his hand again and stepped aside to reveal the stained wooden table to which I had once been tied in Maeres Allus’s poppy-filled warehouse.

“. . . defend . . .” Kara, strident and penetrating despite the distance. Defend? I staggered to my feet, drunk with terror, and drew my sword. Cutter John knocked it to the ground with a backhand blow. I’d need an army to stop him! For some reason an image of Skilfar’s army of plasteek guardians flashed into my mind. “Christ! Help me!” A despairing wail, and one that expected no answer. But all of a sudden there she stood, a plasteek mannequin, nude, pink, stiff-armed, between me and Cutter John.