Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Not working very well, is it?” Snorri growled.

“If it wasn’t shielded from the wrong-mages it wouldn’t have lasted long, would it?” Kara said. “Why don’t both of you try?”

Normally I try to leave physical labour to the peasant classes, but with Cutter John bearing down on me I didn’t need a second invitation. Hennan and I joined Snorri, throwing our weight against the slab. I strained hard enough to rearrange several internal organs. Panic lends a man strength though and something gave with an unpleasant combination of snap and squelch. For a moment I was sure it was part of me that had broken, but it turned out to be the slab moving. Once started it moved more smoothly and moments later the slab stood a yard to the left in the muddy furrow it had cut through the sod. Revealed behind it was a dark rectangular opening.

Kara jumped down, orichalcum in hand, and entered the building. I spared a glance back at Cutter John. He ran with a degree of awkwardness due to his shortened arm, steady rather than sprinting, as if wanting to milk as much terror from me as possible.

“We’re going to have to leave the horses.” I hated to say it, and not just because Murder was so good at running away.

“I know.” Snorri ducked through the doorway, Hennan behind him.

I raised my hands, turning my palms up in a mixture of outrage and astonishment, but nobody was left to see it. Just me, and Cutter John, a hundred yards off now. “They’re not just fucking cows that you ride, you know!” I shouted at the Norses’ backs. No response. “Ah, shit on it!” I waved one hand at the horses, blinking my eyes to focus. A screeching eagle dived out of nowhere, sending all three bolting. I had the bird swoop again and turn them so they ran away from the Wheel. The other hand I held toward Cutter John and opened my fingers. A huge pit yawned underneath him and he vanished into it. I closed the hand again and the pit walls slammed together. It wouldn’t delay him long. With a last look at the fleeing horses I turned and followed on in to the blockhouse.

“It’s a hole.” I meant it on several levels. The blockhouse was a bare box, its corners dark with wind-blown detritus, bits of twig, grey rags, small bones. A stink of old urine hung about the place. Directly before us a ragged hole had been hacked through a yard of steel-reinforced Builder stone, and through it I could just make out the top of a circular shaft leading down.

“Wrong-mages must use this place for something, otherwise the years would have covered it over long ago.” Kara stepped to the edge of the shaft and peered down, holding the orichalcum out. “There are rungs.”

Kara went down first and I was happy to let her. Snorri followed, then Hennan.

“Why am I last?”

“It’s your imagination that’s trying to kill us,” Snorri called back from the shaft.

Kara’s illumination reached past the other two, casting a confusion of light and shadow on the ceiling above the hole. I shuffled my feet and waited for the boy to get out of the way so I could join them in the shaft. “Why is that?” I called after them. “Why me?”

I couldn’t make out the reply but I knew the answer already. My imagination had been attacking me my whole life-only here it had the weapons it needed. A vast underground machine, the crowning glory of the Builders, and all those engines deep below us now waking from their slumbers and devoting their energies to allowing my fears to make war on my hopes.

A quick look through the doorway showed the ground starting to heave in the spot where I buried Cutter John. Moments later I was on that ladder down into the unknown, with Hennan complaining I was stepping on his fingers.

“Are we safe here?” I peered around the tunnel, suspicious of every shadow.

We stood a little over a hundred yards beneath Osheim’s surface in a pipe-like tunnel perhaps six yards in diameter. Running along the centre, above our heads, a black pipe just a yard wide, stretched away into the darkness. I could see no means of support for it. Bands of silver-steel ringed the tunnel every few paces, each six inches across, like some kind of reinforcement. A hum, at first barely audible, filled the whole place, though after at short while, even though it grew no louder, you could feel it in your bones.

I coughed to check that everyone hadn’t gone deaf. The sound echoed away into the darkness. “I said-”

A sound from above cut me off. Someone missing a foothold.

“No,” Kara answered.

“How’s he even climbing? He’s only got one fucking arm!” It wasn’t fair. I’d escaped Cutter John twice, against all odds, only to deliver myself to him on the third occasion. Not even to him-to my own worst fears concerning him, wrapped up and made flesh by the power our idiot ancestors had left us.

“I left Karl and walked up the valley where he had stood guard,” Snorri said, moving away into the shadows. “In places the bones were heapedchest-high.”

Kara and Hennan followed. I stood for a moment, ears straining for Cutter John’s descent but heard only Snorri’s voice and that old magic of his folded about me, drawing me on. I walked after them, my feet pursuing the ancient passage the Builders had left us, while my mind followed the Norseman back into Hel, too busy with his tale for the moment to bother plotting its own destruction.

Snorri moves up the gorge, past the remains of the demons his first-born son has slain in defence of his step-family.

Above him the gyre in the sky tightens and narrows. Soon, Snorri knows, he will stand beneath its centre, at the eye of an invisible storm.

The gorge widens into a valley, angling down now, out of the highlands. Snorri hobbles on, his wounds stiffening, the injury to his shoulder still pumping blood, the pain all through him like white wire.

Ahead the valley reaches a neck after which it falls away too swiftly to be seen again, and beyond this narrow point a view opens up such as Snorri never imagined to see in Hel. He stands, his eyes filled with the Uulisk Fjord, soft with mist, its slopes spring-green, black woolly goats dotting the Niffr slopes high on the far side where the sun touches the land with gold. There should be a village here, houses scattered all the way down to the water’s edge-but all Snorri can see are the eight quays stretching out their slim fingers across the fjord, and a hundred yards back up the slope, a single house. Familiar even at this distance. His house.

Ice fills his veins. The gyre in the sky centres above that lone house. The great turning in the heavens, the labyrinth of stone beneath it, all have led him here, to his past, his present, a place with no future. Snorri sets his jaw, holds his axe close against his chest, and walks on, so full of broken emotions that he seems a man on fire, and yet the hand around his heart clutches colder than ever.

As he walks Snorri sees that slaughter has been done here too, the carnage strewn about. An arm here in the shadow of the rocks, a head there, offal strewn across a broad swathe of stone. Not misshapen demons but men, or beings like them, and not just men, but women too, shieldmaids armoured in the fashion of the north and bearing axes, spears, hammers. Each of them though, whether tall or short, broad or narrow, shares one trait that speaks of their origins. Every person there lies white-fleshed on the right, black on the left, the same with their armour, each axe or sword cast in a metal white as milk, their shields so black they might be holes cut into the day.

“Servants of the goddess.” Snorri kneels, wincing, to inspect a shieldmaid. An axe blow has sheared through the side of her helm. Hel must have sent her and the others to retrieve Freja’s soul and those of the children. Whoever killed them has not been gentle, but this was not the work of Karl’s sword. Snorri studies the woman’s white eye, reflecting the gyre above his shoulder, and her dark one, like a polished black stone. Her lips are drawn back in the snarl she wore when struck, the teeth behind serrated like a sawblade. Not human, then.