Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2015

Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Jacket illustration © Jason Chan

Map © Andrew Ashton

Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007531578

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780007531592

Version: 2017-10-23

Dedication

Dedicated to my mother, Hazel.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Map

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

For those of you who have had to wait a year for this book I provide a brief note to Book 1, Prince of Fools, so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the exquisite pain of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.

Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.

1 1. Jalan Kendeth (grandson of the Red Queen) and Snorri ver Snagason (a very large Viking) set off from Red March (northern Italy) for the Bitter Ice (northern Norway), bound together by a spell that cursed one of them to be light-sworn and the other dark-sworn.

2 2. Jalan is now dark-sworn and visited each sunset by a female spirit called Aslaug.

3 3. Snorri is light-sworn and visited each sunrise by a male spirit called Baraqel.

4 4. They travelled to the Black Fort to rescue Snorri’s wife and surviving child from Sven Broke-Oar and agents of the Dead King, including necromancers, unborn, and Edris Dean. This rescue failed. Snorri’s family did not survive.

5 5. Jalan, Snorri and Tuttugu, a fat and slightly timid Viking, are the three survivors of the quest to the Black Fort. They have returned to the port town of Trond and spent the winter there.

6 6. Snorri has Loki’s key, a magical key that will open any lock. The Dead King wants this key very much.

7 7. Of their enemy at the Black Fort it is possible that Edris Dean and a number of the Hardassa (Red Vikings) survived, along with a handful of necromancers from the Drowned Isles.

8 8. Jalan’s grandmother, the Red Queen, remains in Red March with her elder sister, known as the Silent Sister, and her misshapen elder brother, Garyus. It was the Silent Sister’s spell that bound Snorri and Jalan together.

9 9. A number of powerful individuals use magic to manipulate events in the Broken Empire, often standing as the controlling interests behind many of the hundred thrones. The Dead King, the Lady Blue, the ice witch, Skilfar, and the dream-mage Sageous, are four such individuals. Jalan met Skilfar and Sageous on the way to the Black Fort. The Dead King has attempted to kill Jalan and Snorri several times. The Lady Blue is engaged in some long and secret war against the Red Queen and appears to be guiding the Dead King’s hand, though perhaps he doesn’t know it.

Prologue

Two men in a room of many doors. One tall in his robes, stern, marked with cruelty and intelligence, the other shorter, very lean, his hair a shock of surprise, his garb a changing motley confusing the eye.

The short man laughs, a many-angled sound as likely to kill birds in flight as to bring blossom to the bough.

‘I have summoned you!’ The tall man, teeth gritted as if still straining to hold the other in place, though his hands are at his side.

‘A fine trick, Kelem.’

‘You know me?’

‘I know everyone.’ A sharp grin. ‘You’re the door-mage.’

‘And you are?’

‘Ikol.’ His clothes change, tattered yellow checks on blue where before it was scarlet fleur de lis on grey. ‘Olik.’ He smiles a smile that dazzles and cuts. ‘Loki, if you likey.’

‘Are you a god, Loki?’ No humour in Kelem, only command. Command and a great and terrible concentration in stone-grey eyes.

‘No.’ Loki spins, regarding the doors. ‘But I’ve been known to lie.’

‘I called on the most powerful—’

‘You don’t always get what you want.’ Almost sing-song. ‘But sometimes you get what you need. You got me.’

‘You are a god?’

‘Gods are dull. I’ve stood before the throne. Wodin sits there, old one-eye, with his ravens whispering into each ear.’ Loki smiles. ‘Always the ravens. Funny how that goes.’

‘I need—’

‘Men don’t know what they need. They barely know what they want. Wodin, father of storms, god of gods, stern and wise. But mostly stern. You’d like him. And watching – always watching – oh the things that he has seen!’ Loki spins to take in the room. ‘Me, I’m just a jester in the hall where the world was made. I caper, I joke, I cut a jig. I’m of little importance. Imagine though … if it were I that pulled the strings and made the gods dance. What if at the core, if you dug deep enough, uncovered every truth … what if at the heart of it all … there was a lie, like a worm at the centre of the apple, coiled like Oroborus, just as the secret of men hides coiled at the centre of each piece of you, no matter how fine you slice? Wouldn’t that be a fine joke now?’

Kelem frowns at this nonsense, then with a quick shake of his head returns to his purpose. ‘I made this place. From my failures.’ He gestures at the doors. Thirteen, lined side by side on each wall of an otherwise bare room. ‘These are doors I can’t open. You can leave here, but no door will open until every door is unlocked. I made it so.’ A single candle lights the chamber, dancing as the occupants move, their shadows leaping to its tune.

‘Why would I want to leave?’ A goblet appears in Loki’s hand, silver and overflowing with wine as dark and red as blood. He takes a sip.

‘I command you by the twelve arch-angels of—’

‘Yes, yes.’ Loki waves away the conjuring. The wine darkens until it’s a black that draws the eye and blinds it. So black that the silver tarnishes and corrupts. So black it is nothing but the absence of light. And suddenly it’s a key. A black glass key.

‘Is that…’ there’s a hunger in the door-mage’s voice ‘…will it open them?’

‘I should hope so.’ Loki spins the key around his fingers.

‘What key is that? Not Acheron’s? Taken from heaven when—’

‘It’s mine. I made it. Just now.’

‘How do you know it will open them?’ Kelem’s gaze sweeps the room.

‘It’s a good key.’ Loki meets the mage’s eyes. ‘It’s every key. Every key that was and is, every key that will be, every key that could be.’

‘Give it to—’

‘Where’s the fun in that?’ Loki walks to the nearest door and sets his fingers to it. ‘This one.’ Each door is plain and wooden but when he touches it this door becomes a sheet of black glass, unblemished and gleaming. ‘This is the tricky one.’ Loki sets his palm to the door and a wheel appears. An eight-spoked wheel of the same black glass, standing proud of the surface, as if by turning it one might unlock and open the door. Loki doesn’t touch it. Instead he taps his key to the wall beside it and the whole room changes. Now it is a high vault, clean lines, walls of poured stone, a huge and circular silver-steel door in the ceiling. The light comes from panels set into the walls. A corridor leads off, stretching further than the eye can see. Thirteen silver-steel arches stand around the margins of the vault, each a foot from the wall, each filled with a shimmering light, as if moonbeams dance across water. Save for the one before Loki, which is black, a crystal surface fracturing the light then swallowing it. ‘Open this door and the world ends.’

Loki moves on, touching each door in turn. ‘Your death lies behind one of these other doors, Kelem.’

The mage stiffens then sneers. ‘God of tricks they—’

‘Don’t worry.’ Loki grins. ‘You’ll never manage to open that one.’

‘Give me the key.’ Kelem extends his hand but makes no move toward his guest.

‘What about that door?’ Loki looks up at the circle of silver-steel. ‘You tried to hide that one from me.’

Kelem says nothing.

‘How many generations have your people lived down here in these caves, hiding from the world?’

‘These are not caves!’ Kelem bridles. He pulls back his hand. ‘The world is poisoned. The Day of a Thousand Suns—’

‘—was two hundred years ago.’ Loki waves his key carelessly at the ceiling. The vast door groans, then swings in on its hinges, showering earth and dust upon them. It is as thick as a man is tall.

‘No!’ Kelem falls to his knees, arms above his head. The dust settles on him, making an old man of him. The floor is covered with soil, with green things growing, worms crawl, bugs scurry, and high above them, through a long vertical shaft, a circle of blue sky burns.

‘There, I’ve opened the most important door for you. Go out, claim what you can before it all goes. There are others repopulating from the east.’ Loki looks around as if seeking an exit of his own. ‘No need to thank me.’

Kelem lifts his head, rubbing the dirt from his eyes, leaving them red and watering. ‘Give me the key.’ His voice a croak.

‘You’ll have to look for it.’

‘I command you to…’ But the key is gone, Loki is gone. Only Kelem remains. Kelem and his failures.

1

Petals rained down amid cheers of adoration. Astride my glorious charger at the head of Red March’s finest cavalry unit, I led the way along the Street of Victory toward the Red Queen’s palace. Beautiful women strained to escape the crowd and throw themselves at me. Men roared their approval. I waved—

Bang. Bang. Bang.

My dream tried to shape the hammering into something that would fit the story it was telling. I’ve a good imagination and for a moment everything held together. I waved to the highborn ladies adorning each balcony. A manly smirk for my sour-faced brothers sulking at the back of—

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The tall houses of Vermillion began to crumble, the crowd started to thin, faces blurred.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

‘Ah hell.’ I opened my eyes and rolled from the furs’ warmth into the freezing gloom. ‘Spring they call this!’ I struggled shivering into a pair of trews and hurried down the stairs.

The tavern room lay strewn with empty tankards, full drunks, toppled benches and upended tables. A typical morning at the Three Axes. Maeres sniffed around a scatter of bones by the hearth, wagging his tail as I staggered in.

BANG! BANG—

‘All right! All right! I’m coming.’ Someone had split my skull open with a rock during the night. Either that or I had a hell of a hangover. Damned if I knew why a prince of Red March had to answer his own front door, but I’d do anything to stop that pounding tearing through my poor head.

I picked a path through the detritus, stepping over Erik Three-Teeth’s ale-filled belly to reach the door just as it reverberated from yet another blow.

‘God damn it! I’m here!’ I shouted as quietly as I could, teeth gritted against the pain behind my eyes. Fingers fumbled with the lock bar and I pulled it free. ‘What?’ And I hauled the door back. ‘What?’

I suppose with a more sober and less sleep-addled mind I might have judged it better to stay in bed. Certainly that thought occurred to me as the fist caught me square in the face. I stumbled back, bleating, tripped over Erik and found myself on my arse staring up at Astrid, framed in the doorway by a morning considerably brighter than anything I wanted to look at.

‘You bastard!’ She stood hands on hips now. The brittle light fractured around her, sending splinters into my eyes but making a wonder of her golden hair and declaring in no uncertain terms the hour-glass figure that had set me leering at her on my first day in Trond.

‘W-what?’ I shifted my legs off Erik’s bulging stomach, and shuffled backward on my behind. My hand came away bloody from my nose. ‘Angel, sweetheart—’

‘You bastard!’ She stepped after me, hugging herself now, the cold following her in.

‘Well—’ I couldn’t argue against ‘bastard’, except technically. I put my hand in a puddle of something decidedly unpleasant and got up quickly, wiping my palm on Maeres who’d come over to investigate, tail still wagging despite the violence offered to his master.

‘Hedwig ver Sorren?’ Astrid had murder in her eyes.

I kept backing away. I might have half a foot over her in height but she was still a tall woman with a powerful right arm. ‘Oh, you don’t want to believe street talk, my sweets.’ I swung a stool between us. ‘It’s only natural that Jarl Sorren would invite a prince of Red March to his halls once he knew I was in town. Hedwig and I—’

‘Hedwig and you what?’ She took hold of the stool as well.

‘Uh, we – Nothing really.’ I tightened my grip on the stool legs. If I let go I’d be handing her a weapon. Even in my jeopardy visions of Hedwig invaded my mind, brunette, very pretty, wicked eyes, and all a man could want packed onto a short but inviting body. ‘We were barely introduced.’

‘It must have been a pretty bare introduction if it has Jarl Sorren calling out his housecarls to bring you in for justice!’

‘Oh shit.’ I let go of the stool. Justice in the north tends to mean having your ribs broken out of your chest.

‘What’s all the noise?’ A sleepy voice from behind me.

I turned to see Edda, barefoot on the stairs, our bed furs wrapped around her middle, slim legs beneath, and milk pale shoulders above, her white-blonde hair flowing across them.

Turning away was my mistake. Never take your eye off a potential foe. Especially after handing them a weapon.

‘Easy!’ A hand on my chest pushed me back down onto a floor that felt thick with grime.

‘What the—’ I opened my eyes to find a ‘someone’ looming over me, a big someone. ‘Ouch!’ A big someone poking clumsy fingers at a very painful spot over my cheekbone.

‘Just removing the splinters.’ A big fat someone.

‘Get off me, Tuttugu!’ I struggled to get up again, managing to sit this time. ‘What happened?’

‘You got hit with a stool.’

I groaned a bit. ‘I don’t remember a stool, I— OUCH! What the hell?’ Tuttugu seemed fixed set on pinching and jabbing at the sorest part of my face.

‘You might not remember the stool but I’m pulling pieces of it out of your cheek – so keep still. We don’t want to spoil those good looks, now do we?’

I did my best to hold still at that. It was true, good looks and a title were most of what I had going for me and I wasn’t keen to lose either. To take my mind off the pain I tried to remember how I had managed to get beaten with my own furniture. I drew a blank. Some vague recollection of high-pitched screaming and shouting … a memory of being kicked whilst on the floor … a glimpse through slitted eyes of two women leaving arm in arm, one petite, pale, young, the other tall, golden, maybe thirty. Neither looked back.

‘Right! Up you get. That’s the best I can do for now.’ Tuttugu hauled on my arm to get me on my feet.

I stood swaying, nauseous, hung over, perhaps still a little drunk, and – though I found it hard to credit – slightly horny.

‘Come on. We have to go.’ Tuttugu started to drag me toward the brightness of the doorway. I tried digging in my heels but to no avail.

‘Where?’ Springtime in Trond had turned out to be more bitter than a Red March midwinter and I’d no interest in exposing myself to it.

‘The docks!’ Tuttugu seemed worried. ‘We might just make it!’

‘Why? Make what?’ I didn’t remember much of the morning but I hadn’t forgotten that ‘worried’ was Tuttugu’s natural state. I shook him off. ‘Bed. That’s where I’m going.’

‘Well if that’s where you want Jarl Sorren’s men to find you…’

‘Why should I give a fig for Jarl Sorr—oh.’ I remembered Hedwig. I remembered her on the furs in the jarlshouse when everyone else was still at her sister’s wedding feast. I remembered her on my cloak during an ill-advised outdoors tryst. She kept my front warm but damn my arse froze. I remembered her upstairs at the tavern that one time she slipped her minders … I was surprised we didn’t shake all three axes down from above the entrance that afternoon. ‘Give me a moment … two moments!’ I held up a hand to stay Tuttugu and charged upstairs.

Once back in my chamber a single moment proved ample. I stamped on the loose floorboard, scooped up my valuables, snatched an armful of clothing, and was heading back down the stairs before Tuttugu had the time to scratch his chins.

‘Why the docks?’ I panted. The hills would be a quicker escape – and then a boat from Hjorl on Aöefl’s Fjord just up the coast. ‘The docks are the first place they’ll look after here!’ I’d be stood there still trying to negotiate a passage to Maladon or the Thurtans when the jarl’s men found me.

Tuttugu stepped around Floki Wronghelm, sprawled and snoring beside the bar. ‘Snorri’s down there, preparing to sail.’ He bent down behind the bar, grunting.

‘Snorri? Sailing?’ It seemed that the stool had dislodged more than the morning’s memories. ‘Why? Where’s he going?’

Tuttugu straightened up holding my sword, dusty and neglected from its time hidden on the bar shelf. I didn’t reach for it. I’m fine with wearing a sword in places where nobody is going to see it as an invitation – Trond was never such a place.

‘Take it!’ Tuttugu angled the hilt toward me.

I ignored it, wrestling myself into my clothes, the coarse weave of the north, itchy but warm. ‘Since when did Snorri have a boat?’ He’d sold the Ikea to finance the expedition to the Black Fort – that much I did remember.

‘I should get Astrid back here to see if another beating with a stool might knock some sense into you!’ Tuttugu tossed the sword down beside me as I sat to haul my boots on.

‘Astrid?… Astrid!’ A moment returned to me with crystal clarity – Edda coming down the stairs half-naked, Astrid watching. It had been a while since a morning went so spectacularly wrong for me. I’d never intended the two of them to collide in such circumstances but Astrid hadn’t struck me as the jealous sort. In fact I hadn’t been entirely sure I was the only younger man keeping her bed warm whilst her husband roamed the seas a-trading. We mostly met at her place up on the Arlls Slope, so stealth with Edda hadn’t been a priority. ‘How did Astrid even know about Hedwig?’ More importantly, how did she reach me before Jarl Sorren’s housecarls, and how much time did I have?

Tuttugu ran a hand down his face, red and sweating despite the spring chill. ‘Hedwig managed to send a messenger while her father was still raging and gathering his men. The boy galloped from Sorrenfast and started asking where to find the foreign prince. People directed him to Astrid’s house. I got all this from Olaaf Fish-hand after I saw Astrid storming down the Carls Way. So…’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Can we go now, because—’

But I was up and past him, out into the unwholesome freshness of the day, splattering through half-frozen mud, aimed down the street for the docks, the mast tops just visible above the houses. Gulls circled on high, watching my progress with mocking cries.

2

If there’s one thing I like less than boats it’s being brutally murdered by an outraged father. I reached the docks painfully aware that I’d put my boots on the wrong feet and slung my sword too low so it tried to trip me at each stride. The usual scene greeted me, a waterfront crowded with activity despite the fishermen having put to sea hours earlier. The fact that the harbour lay ice-locked for the winter months seemed to set the Norsemen into a frenzy come spring – a season characterized by being slightly above the freezing point of brine rather than by the unfurling of flowers and the arrival of bees as in more civilized climes. A forest of masts painted stark lines against the bright horizon, longboats and Viking trade ships nestled alongside triple-masted merchantmen from a dozen nations to the south. Men bustled on every side, loading, unloading, doing complicated things with ropes, fishwives further back working on the nets or applying wickedly sharp knives to glimmering mounds of last night’s catch.

‘I don’t see him.’ Snorri was normally easy to spot in a crowd – you just looked up.

‘There!’ Tuttugu tugged my arm and pointed to what must be the smallest boat at the quays, occupied by the largest man.

‘That thing? It’s not even big enough for Snorri!’ I hastened after Tuttugu anyway. There seemed to be some sort of disturbance up by the harbour master’s station and I could swear someone shouted ‘Kendeth!’

I overtook Tuttugu and clattered out along the quay to arrive well ahead of him above Snorri’s little boat. Snorri looked up at me through the black and windswept tangle of his mane. I took a step back at the undisguised mistrust in his stare.

‘What?’ I held out my hands. Any hostility from a man who swings an axe like Snorri does has to be taken seriously. ‘What did I do?’ I did recall some kind of altercation – though it seemed unlikely that I’d have the balls to disagree with six and a half foot of over-muscled madman.

Snorri shook his head and turned away to continue securing his provisions. The boat seemed full of them. And him.

‘No really! I got hit in the head. What did I do?’

Tuttugu came puffing up behind me, seeming to want to say something, but too winded to speak.

Snorri let out a snort. ‘I’m going, Jal. You can’t talk me out of it. We’ll just have to see who cracks first.’

Tuttugu set a hand to my shoulder and bent as close to double as his belly would allow. ‘Jal—’ Whatever he’d intended to say past that trailed off into a wheeze and a gasp.

‘Which of us cracks first?’ It started to come back to me. Snorri’s crazy plan. His determination to head south with Loki’s key … and me equally resolved to stay cosy in the Three Axes enjoying the company until either my money ran out or the weather improved enough to promise a calm crossing to the continent. Aslaug agreed with me. Every sunset she would rise from the darkest reaches of my mind and tell me how unreasonable the Norseman was. She’d even convinced me that separating from Snorri would be for the best, releasing her and the light-sworn spirit Baraqel to return to their own domains, carrying the last traces of the Silent Sister’s magic with them.

‘Jarl Sorren…’ Tuttugu heaved in a lungful of air. ‘Jarl Sorren’s men!’ He jabbed a finger back up the quay. ‘Go! Quick!’

Snorri straightened up with a wince, and frowned back at the dock wall where chain-armoured housecarls were pushing a path through the crowd. ‘I’ve no bad blood with Jarl Sorren…’

‘Jal does!’ Tuttugu gave me a hefty shove between the shoulder blades. I balanced for a moment, arms pin wheeling, took a half-step forward, tripped over that damn sword, and dived into the boat. Bouncing off Snorri proved marginally less painful than meeting the hull face first, and he caught hold of enough of me to make sure I ended in the bilge water rather than the seawater slightly to the left.

‘What the hell?’ Snorri remained standing a moment longer as Tuttugu started to struggle down into the boat.

‘I’m coming too,’ Tuttugu said.

I lay on my side in the freezing dirty water at the bottom of Snorri’s freezing dirty boat. Not the best time for reflection but I did pause to wonder quite how I’d gone so quickly from being pleasantly entangled in the warmth of Edda’s slim legs to being unpleasantly entangled in a cold mess of wet rope and bilge water. Grabbing hold of the small mast, I sat up, cursing my luck. When I paused to draw breath it also occurred to me to wonder why Tuttugu was descending toward us.

‘Get back out!’ It seemed the same thought had struck Snorri. ‘You’ve made a life here, Tutt.’

‘And you’ll sink the damn boat!’ Since no one seemed inclined to do anything about escaping I started to fit the oars myself. It was true though – there was nothing for Tuttugu down south and he did seem to have taken to life in Trond far more successfully than to his previous life as a Viking raider.

Tuttugu stepped backward into the boat, almost falling as he turned.

‘What are you doing here, Tutt?’ Snorri reached out to steady him whilst I grabbed the sides. ‘Stay. Let that woman of yours look after you. You won’t like it where I’m bound.’

Tuttugu looked up at Snorri, the two of them uncomfortably close. ‘Undoreth, we.’ That’s all he said, but it seemed to be enough for Snorri. They were after all most likely the last two of their people. All that remained of the Uuliskind. Snorri slumped as if in defeat then moved back, taking the oars and shoving me into the prow.

‘Stop!’ Cries from the quay, above the clatter of feet. ‘Stop that boat!’

Tuttugu untied the rope and Snorri drew on the oars, moving us smoothly away. The first of Jarl Scorron’s housecarls arrived red-faced above the spot where we’d been moored, roaring for our return.

‘Row faster!’ I had a panic on me, terrified they might jump in after us. The sight of angry men carrying sharp iron has that effect on me.

Snorri laughed. ‘They’re not armoured for swimming.’ He looked back at them, raising his voice to a boom that drowned out their protests, ‘And if that man actually throws the axe he’s raising I really will come back to return it to him in person.’

The man kept hold of his axe.

‘And good riddance to you!’ I shouted, but not so loud the men on the quay would hear me. ‘A pox on Norsheim and all its women!’ I tried to stand and wave my fist at them, but thought better of it after nearly pitching over the side. I sat down heavily, clutching my sore nose. At least I was heading south at last, and that thought suddenly put me in remarkably good spirits. I’d sail home to a hero’s welcome and marry Lisa DeVeer. Thoughts of her had kept me going on the Bitter Ice and now with Trond retreating into the distance she filled my imagination once again.

It seemed that all those months of occasionally wandering down to the docks and scowling at the boats had made a better sailor of me. I didn’t throw up until we were so far from port that I could barely make out the expressions on the housecarls’ faces.

‘Best not to do that into the wind,’ Snorri said, not breaking the rhythm of his rowing.

I finished groaning before replying, ‘I know that, now.’ I wiped the worst of it from my face. Having had nothing but a punch on the nose for breakfast helped to keep the volume down.

‘Will they give chase?’ Tuttugu asked.

That sense of elation at having escaped a gruesome death shrivelled up as rapidly as it had blossomed and my balls attempted a retreat back into my body. ‘They won’t … will they?’ I wondered just how fast Snorri could row. Certainly under sail our small boat wouldn’t outpace one of Jarl Sorren’s longships.

Snorri managed a shrug. ‘What did you do?’

‘His daughter.’

‘Hedwig?’ A shake of the head and laugh broke from him. ‘Erik Sorren’s chased more than a few men over that one. But mostly just long enough to make sure they keep running. A prince of Red March though … might go the extra mile for a prince, then drag you back and see you handfasted before the Odin stone.’

‘Oh God!’ Some other awful pagan torture I’d not heard about. ‘I barely touched her. I swear it.’ Panic starting to rise, along with the next lot of vomit.

‘It means “married”,’ said Snorri. ‘Handfasted. And from what I heard you barely touched her repeatedly and in her own father’s mead hall to boot.’

I said something full of vowels over the side before recovering myself to ask, ‘So, where’s our boat?’

Snorri looked confused. ‘You’re in it.’

‘I mean the proper-sized one that’s taking us south.’ Scanning the waves I could see no sign of the larger vessel I presumed we must be aiming to rendezvous with.

Snorri’s mouth took on a stiff-jawed look as if I’d insulted his mother. ‘You’re in it.’

‘Oh come on…’ I faltered beneath the weight of his stare. ‘We’re not seriously crossing the sea to Maladon in this rowboat are we?’

By way of answer Snorri shipped the oars and started to prepare the sail.

‘Dear God…’ I sat, wedged in the prow, my neck already wet with spray, and looked out over the slate-grey sea, flecked with white where the wind tore the tops off the waves. I’d spent most of the voyage north unconscious and it had been a blessing. The return would have to be endured without the bliss of oblivion.

‘Snorri plans to put in at ports along the coast, Jal,’ Tuttugu called from his huddle in the stern. ‘We’ll sail from Kristian to cross the Karlswater. That’s the only time we’ll lose sight of land.’

‘A great comfort, Tuttugu. I always like to do my drowning within sight of land.’

Hours passed and the Norsemen actually seemed to be enjoying themselves. For my part I stayed wrapped around the misery of a hangover, leavened with a stiff dose of stool-to-head. Occasionally I’d touch my nose to make sure Astrid’s punch hadn’t broken it. I’d liked Astrid and it sorrowed me to think we wouldn’t snuggle up in her husband’s bed again. I guessed she’d been content to ignore my wanderings as long as she could see herself as the centre and apex of my attentions. To dally with a jarl’s daughter, someone so highborn, and for it to be so public, must have been more than her pride would stand for. I rubbed my jaw, wincing. Damn, I’d miss her.

‘Here.’ Snorri thrust a battered pewter mug toward me.

‘Rum?’ I lifted my head to squint at it. I’m a great believer in hair of the dog, and nautical adventures always call for a measure of rum in my largely fictional experience.

‘Water.’

I uncurled with a sigh. The sun had climbed as high as it was going to get, a pale ball straining through the white haze above. ‘Looks like you made a good call. Albeit by mistake. If you hadn’t been ready to sail I might be handfasted by now. Or worse.’

‘Serendipity.’

‘Seren-what-ity?’ I sipped the water. Foul stuff. Like water generally is.

‘A fortunate accident,’ Snorri said.

‘Uh.’ Barbarians should know their place, and using long words isn’t it. ‘Even so it was madness to set off so early in the year. Look! There’s still ice floating out there!’ I pointed to a large plate of the stuff, big enough to hold a small house. ‘Won’t be much left of this boat if we hit any.’ I crawled back to join him at the mast.

‘Best not distract me from steering then.’ And just to prove a point he slung us to the left, some lethal piece of woodwork swinging scant inches above my head as the sail crossed over.

‘Why the hurry?’ Now that the lure of three delicious women who had fallen for my ample charms had been removed I was more prepared to listen to Snorri’s reasons for leaving so precipitously. I made a vengeful note to use ‘precipitously’ in conversation. ‘Why so precipitous?’

‘We went through this, Jal. To the death!’ Snorri’s jaw tightened, muscles bunching.

‘Tell me once more. Such matters are clearer at sea.’ By which I meant I didn’t listen the first time because it just seemed like ten different reasons to pry me from the warmth of my tavern and from Edda’s arms. I would miss Edda, she really was a sweet girl. Also a demon in the furs. In fact I sometimes got the feeling that I was her foreign fling rather than the other way around. Never any talk of inviting me to meet her parents. Never a whisper about marriage to her prince … A man enjoying himself any less than I was might have had his pride hurt a touch by that. Northern ways are very strange. I’m not complaining … but they’re strange. Between the three of them I’d spent the winter in a constant state of exhaustion. Without the threat of impending death I might never have mustered the energy to leave. I might have lived out my days as a tired but happy tavernkeeper in Trond. ‘Tell me once more and we’ll never speak of it again!’

‘I told you a hundr—’

I made to vomit, leaning forward.

‘All right!’ Snorri raised a hand to forestall me. ‘If it will stop you puking all over my boat…’ He leaned out over the side for a moment, steering the craft with his weight, then sat back. ‘Tuttugu!’ Two fingers toward his eyes, telling him to keep watch for ice. ‘This key.’ Snorri patted the front of his fleece jacket, above his heart. ‘We didn’t come by it easy.’ Tuttugu snorted at that. I suppressed a shudder. I’d done a good job of forgetting everything between leaving Trond on the day we first set off for the Black Fort and our arrival back. Unfortunately it only took a hint or two for memories to start leaking through my barriers. In particular the screech of iron hinges would return to haunt me as door after door surrendered to the unborn captain and that damn key.

Snorri fixed me with that stare of his, the honest and determined one that makes you feel like joining him in whatever mad scheme he’s espousing – just for a moment, mind, until commonsense kicks back in. ‘The Dead King will be wanting this key back. Others will want it too. The ice kept us safe, the winter, the snows … once the harbour cleared the key had to be moved. Trond would not have kept him out.’

I shook my head. ‘Safe’s the last thing on your mind! Aslaug told me what you really plan to do with Loki’s key. All that talk of taking it back to my grandmother was nonsense.’ Snorri narrowed his eyes at that. For once the look didn’t make me falter – soured by the worst of days and made bold by the misery of the voyage I blustered on regardless. ‘Well! Wasn’t it nonsense?’

‘The Red Queen would destroy the key,’ Snorri said.

‘Good!’ Almost a shout. ‘That’s exactly what she should do!’

Snorri looked down at his hands, upturned on his lap, big, scarred, thick with callus. The wind whipped his hair about, hiding his face. ‘I will find this door.’

‘Christ! That’s the last place that key should be taken!’ If there really was a door into death no sane person would want to stand before it. ‘If this morning has taught me anything it’s to be very careful which doors you open and when.’

Snorri made no reply. He kept silent. Still. Nothing for long moments but the flap of sail, the slop of wave against hull. I knew what thoughts ran through his head. I couldn’t speak them, my mouth would go too dry. I couldn’t deny them, though to do so would cause me only an echo of the hurt such a denial would do him.

‘I will get them back.’ His eyes held mine and for a heartbeat made me believe he might. His voice, his whole body shook with emotion, though in what part sorrow and what part rage I couldn’t say.

‘I will find this door. I will unlock it. And I will bring back my wife, my children, my unborn son.’

3

‘Jal?’ Someone shaking my shoulder. I reached to draw Edda in closer and found my fingers tangled in the unwholesome ginger thicket of Tuttugu’s beard, heavy with grease and salt. The whole sorry story crashed in on me and I let out a groan, deepened by the returning awareness of the swell, lifting and dropping our little boat.

‘What?’ I hadn’t been having a good dream, but it was better than this.

Tuttugu thrust a half-brick of dark Viking bread at me, as if eating on a boat were really an option. I waved it away. If Norse women were a highpoint of the far north then their cuisine counted as one of the lowest. With fish they were generally on a good footing, simple, plain fare, though you had to be careful or they’d start trying to feed it to you raw, or half rotted and stinking worse than corpse flesh. ‘Delicacies’ they’d call it … The time to eat something is the stage between raw and rotting. It’s not the alchemy of rockets! With meat – what meat there was to be found clinging to the near vertical surfaces of the north – you could trust them to roast it over an open fire. Anything else always proved a disaster. And with any other kind of eatable the Norsemen were likely to render it as close to inedible as makes no difference using a combination of salt, pickle, and desiccated nastiness. Whale meat they preserved by pissing on it! My theory was that a long history of raiding each other had driven them to make their foodstuffs so foul that no one in their right mind would want to steal it. Thereby ensuring that, whatever else the enemy might carry off, women, children, goats, and gold, at least they’d leave lunch behind.

‘We’re coming in to Olaafheim,’ Tuttugu said, pulling me out of my doze again.

‘Whu?’ I levered myself up to look over the prow. The seemingly endless uninviting coastline of wet black cliffs protected by wet black rocks had been replaced with a river mouth. The mountains leapt up swiftly to either side, but here the river had cut a valley whose sides might be grazed, and left a truncated floodplain where a small port nestled against the rising backdrop.

‘Best not to spend the night at sea.’ Tuttugu paused to gnaw at the bread in his hand. ‘Not when we’re so close to land.’ He glanced out west to where the sun plotted its descent toward the horizon. The quick look he shot me before settling back to eat told me clear enough that he’d rather not be sharing the boat with me when Aslaug came to visit at sunset.

Snorri tacked across the mouth of the river, the Hœnir he called it, angling across the diluted current toward the Olaafheim harbour. ‘These are fisher folk and raiders, Jal. Clan Olaaf, led by jarls Harl and Knütson, twin sons of Knüt Ice-Reaver. This isn’t Trond. The people are less … cosmopolitan. More—’

‘More likely to split my skull if I look at them wrong,’ I interrupted him. ‘I get the picture.’ I held a hand up. ‘I promise not to bed any jarl’s daughters.’ I even meant it. Now we were actually on the move I had begun to get excited about the prospect of a return to Red March, to being a prince again, returning to my old diversions, running with my old crowd, and putting all this unpleasantness behind me. And if Snorri’s plans led him along a different path then we’d just have to see what happened. We’d have to see, as he put it earlier, who cracked first. The bonds that bound us seemed to have weakened since the event at the Black Fort. We could separate five miles and more before any discomfort set in. And as we’d already seen, if the Silent Sister’s magic did fracture its way out of us the effect wasn’t fatal … except for other people. If push came to shove Aslaug’s advice seemed sound. Let the magic go, let her and Baraqel be released to return to their domains. It would be far from pleasant if last time was anything to go by, but like pulling a tooth it would be much better afterward. Obviously though, I’d do everything I could to avoid pulling that particular tooth – unless it meant traipsing into mortal danger on Snorri’s quest. My own plan involved getting him to Vermillion and having Grandmother order her sister to effect a more gentle release of our fetters.

We pulled into the harbour at Olaafheim with the shadows of boats at anchor reaching out toward us across the water. Snorri furled the sail, and Tuttugu rowed toward a berth. Fishermen paused from their labours, setting down their baskets of hake and cod to watch us. Fishwives laid down half-stowed nets and crowded in behind their men to see the new arrivals. Norsemen busy with some or other maintenance on the nearest of four longboats leaned out over the sides to call out in the old tongue. Threats or welcome I couldn’t tell, for a Viking can growl out the warmest greeting in a tone that suggests he’s promising to cut your mother’s throat.

As we coasted the last yard Snorri vaulted up onto the harbour wall from the side of the boat. Locals crowded him immediately, a sea of them surging around the rock. From the amount of shoulder-slapping and the tone of the growling I guessed we weren’t in trouble. The occasional chuckle even escaped from several of the beards on show, which took some doing as the Clan Olaaf grew the most impressive facial hair I’d yet seen. Many favoured the bushy explosions that look like regular beards subjected to sudden and very shocking news. Others had them plaited and hanging in two, three, sometimes five iron-capped braids reaching down to their belts.

‘Snorri.’ A newcomer, well over six foot and at least that wide, fat with it, arms like slabs of meat. At first I thought he was wearing spring furs, or some kind of woollen over-shirt, but as he closed on Snorri it became apparent that his chest hair just hadn’t known when to stop.

‘Borris!’ Snorri surged through the others to clasp arms with the man, the two of them wrestling briefly, neither giving ground.

Tuttugu finished tying up and with a pair of men on each arm the locals hauled him onto the dock. I clambered quickly up behind him, not wishing to be man-handled.

‘Tuttugu!’ Snorri pointed him out for Borris. ‘Undoreth. We might be the last of our clan, him and I…’ He trailed off, inviting any present to make a liar of him, but none volunteered any sighting of other survivors.

‘A pox on the Hardassa.’ Borris spat on the ground. ‘We kill them where we find them. And any others who make cause with the Drowned Isles.’ Mutters and shouts went up at that. More men spitting when they spoke the word ‘necromancer’.

‘A pox on the Hardassa!’ Snorri shouted. ‘That’s something to drink to!’

With a general cheering and stamping of feet the whole crowd started to move toward the huts and halls behind the various fisheries and boat sheds of the harbour. Snorri and Borris led the way, arms over each other’s shoulders, laughing at some joke, and I, the only prince present, trailed along unintroduced at the rear with the fishermen, their hands still scaly from the catch.

I guess Trond must have had its own stink, all towns do, but you don’t notice it after a while. A day at sea breathing air off the Atlantis Ocean tainted with nothing but a touch of salt proved sufficient to enable my nostrils to be offended by my fellow men once more. Olaafheim stank of fresh fish, sweat, stale fish, sewers, rotting fish, and uncured hides. It only got worse as we trudged up through a random maze of split-log huts, turf roofed and close to the ground, each with nets at the front and fuel stacked to the sheltered landward side.

Olaafheim’s great hall stood smaller than the foyer of my grandmother’s palace, a half timbered structure, mud daubed into any nook or cranny where the wind might slide its fingers, wooden shingles on the roof, patchy after the winter storms.

I let the Norsemen crowd in ahead of me and turned back to face the sea. In the west clear skies showed a crimson sun descending. Winter in Trond had been a long cold thing. I may have spent more time than was reasonable in the furs but in truth most of the north does the same. The night can last twenty hours and even when the day finally breaks it never gets above a level of cold I call ‘fuck that’ – as in you open the door, your face freezes instantly to the point where it hurts to speak, but manfully you manage to say ‘fuck that’, before turning round, and going back to bed. There’s little to do in a northern winter but to endure it. In the very depths of the season sunrise and sunset get so close together that if Snorri and I were to be in the same room Aslaug and Baraqel might even get to meet. A little further north and they surely would, for there the days dwindle into nothing and become a single night that lasts for weeks. Not that Aslaug and Baraqel meeting would be a good idea.

Already I could feel Aslaug scratching at the back of my mind. The sun hadn’t yet touched the water but the sea burned bloody with it and I could hear her footsteps. I recalled how Snorri’s eyes would darken when she used to visit him. Even the whites would fill with shadow, and become for a minute or two so wholly black that you might imagine them holes into some endless night, from which horrors might pour if he but looked your way. I held that to be a clash of temperaments though. If anything my vision always seemed clearer when she came. I made sure to be alone each sunset so we could have our moment. Snorri described her as a creature of lies, a seducer whose words could turn something awful into an idea that any reasonable man would consider. For my part I found her very agreeable, though perhaps a little excessive, and definitely less concerned about my safety than I am.

The first time Aslaug came to me I had been surprised to find her so close to the image Snorri’s tales had painted in my mind. I told her so and she laughed at me. She said men had always seen what they expected to see but that a deeper truth ran beneath that fact. ‘The world is shaped by mankind’s desires and fears. A war of hope against dread, waged upon a substrate that man himself made malleable though he has long forgotten how. All men and all men’s works stand on feet of clay, waiting to be formed and reformed, forged by fear into monsters from the dark core of each soul, waiting to rend the world asunder.’ That’s how she introduced herself to me.

‘Prince Jalan.’ Aslaug stepped from the shadows of the hall. They clung to her, dark webs, not wanting to release their hold. She pulled clear as the sun kissed the horizon. No one would mistake her for human but she wore a woman’s form and wore it well, her flesh like bone, but dipped in ink so it soaked into every pore, revealing the grain, gathering black in any hollow. She fixed me with eyes that held no colour, only passions, set in a narrow and exquisite face. Oil-dark hair framed her, falling in unnatural coils and curls. Her beauty owed something to the praying mantis, something to the inhumanity of Greek sculpture. Mask or not though, it worked on me. I’m easily led in matters of the flesh. ‘Jalan,’ she said again, stepping around me. She wore tatters of darkness as a gown.

I didn’t answer, or turn to follow her. Villagers were still arriving, and the cheers and laughter from inside the hall were drawing more by the minute. None of them would see Aslaug but if they saw me spinning around and talking to the empty air it wouldn’t look good. Northmen are a superstitious lot, and frankly with what I’d seen over the last few months they were right to be so. Superstition though does tend to have a sharp end, and I didn’t want to find myself impaled on it.

‘Why are you out here in the wilds with all these ill-smelling peasants?’ Aslaug reappeared at my left shoulder, her mouth close to my ear. ‘And why,’ – a harder edge to her tone, eyes narrowing – ‘is that light-sworn here? I can smell him. He was going away…’ A tilt of her head. ‘Jalan? Have you followed him? Tagged along like a dog at heel? We’ve talked about this, Jalan. You’re a prince, a man of royal blood, in line for the throne of Red March!’

‘I’m going home.’ I whispered it, hardly a twitch in my lips.

‘Leaving your beauties behind?’ She always held a note of disapproval when it came to my womanizing. Obviously the jealous type.

‘I thought it time. They were getting clingy.’ I rubbed the side of my head, not convinced that Tuttugu had gotten all the splinters out.

‘For the better. In Red March we can begin to clear your path to succession.’ A smile lit her face, the sky crimson behind her with the sun’s death throes.

‘Well…’ My own lips curled with an echo of her expression. ‘I’m not one for murder. But if a whole bunch of my cousins fell off a cliff I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.’ I’d found it paid to play along with her. Whilst I’d rejoice in any misfortune that fate might drop upon my cousins, three or four of them in particular, I’ve never had an appetite for the more lethal games played at some courts with knife and poison. My own vision for my glorious path to the throne involved toadying and favouritism, lubricated with tales of heroism and reports of genius. Once selected as Grandmother’s favourite and promoted unfairly into the position of heir it would just be a case of the old woman having a timely heart attack and my reign of pleasure would begin!

‘You know that Snorri will be plotting your destruction, Jalan?’ She reached an arm around me, the touch cold but somehow thrilling too, filled with all the delicious possibilities that the night hides. ‘You know what Baraqel will be instructing. He told you the same when Snorri kept me within him.’

‘I trust Snorri.’ If he had wanted me dead he could have done it many times over.

‘For how long, Prince Jalan? For how long will you trust him?’ Her lips close to mine now, head haloed with the last rays of the sunset. ‘Don’t trust the light, Prince Jalan. The stars are pretty but the space between them is infinite and black with promise.’ Behind me I could almost hear her shadow mix with mine, its dry spider-legs rustling one against the next. ‘Returning with your body and the right story to Vermillion would earn Snorri gratitude in many circles for many reasons…’

‘Good night, Aslaug.’ I clenched what could be clenched and kept from shuddering. In the last moments before the dark took her she was always at her least human, as if her presence outlasted her disguise for just a heartbeat.

‘Watch him!’ And the shadows pulled her down as they merged into the singular gloom that would deepen into night.

I turned and followed the locals into their ‘great’ hall. My moments with Aslaug always left me a touch less tolerant of sweaty peasants and their crude little lives. And perhaps Snorri did bear watching. He had after all been on the point of abandoning me when I most needed help. A day later and I could have been subjected to all the horrors of handfasting, or some even crueller form of Viking justice.

4

Three long tables divided the mead hall, now lined by men and women raising foaming horn and dripping tankard. Children, some no more than eight or nine, ran back and forth with pitchers from four great barrels to keep any receptacle from running dry. A great fire roared in the hearth, fish roasting on spits set before it. Hounds bickered around the margins of the room, daring a kicking to run beneath the tables should anything fall. The heat and roar and stink of the place took a moment’s getting used to after plunging in from the frigid spring evening. I plotted a course toward the rear of the hall, giving the dogs a wide berth. Animals are generally good judges of character – they don’t like me – except for horses which, for reasons I’ve never understood, give me their all. Perhaps it’s our shared interest in running away that forms the bond.

Snorri and Borris sat close to the fire, flanked by Olaafheim’s warriors. Most of the company appeared to have brought their axes out for the evening’s drinking, setting them across the tabletop in such a crowd that putting down a drink became a tricky task. Snorri turned as I approached, and boomed out for a space to be made. A couple of grumbles went up at that, soon silenced with mutters of ‘berserker’. I squeezed down onto a narrow span of arse-polished bench, trying not to show my displeasure at being wedged in so tightly among hairy brigands. My tolerance for such familiarities had increased during my time at the Three Axes as owner and operator … well, in truth I paid for Eyolf to keep bar and Helga and Gudrun to serve tables … but still, I was there in spirit. In any event, although my tolerance had increased it still wasn’t high and at least in Trond you got a better quality of bearded, axe-wielding barbarian. Faced with the present situation though, not to mention a table full of axes, I did what any man keen on leaving with the same number of limbs that he entered with would do. I grinned like an idiot and bore it.

I reached for the brimming flagon brought to me by a blonde and barefoot child and decided to get drunk. It would probably keep me out of trouble and the possibility that I might pass the whole trip to the continent in a state of inebriation did seem inviting. One worry stayed my hand however. Though it pained me to admit it, my grandmother’s blood did seem to have shown in me. Snorri or Tuttugu had already mentioned my … disability to our hosts. In the troll-wrestling heart of the north being a berserker seemed to carry a good deal of cachet, but any right-thinking man would tell you what a terrible encumbrance it is. I’ve always been sensibly terrified of battle. The discovery that if I get pushed too far I turn into a raging maniac who throws himself headlong into the thickest of the fighting was hardly comforting. A wise man’s biggest advantage is in knowing the ideal time to run away. That sort of survival strategy is somewhat impaired by a tendency to start frothing at the mouth and casting aside all fear. Fear is a valuable commodity, it’s commonsense compressed into its purest form. A lack of it is not a good thing. Fortunately it took quite a lot of pushing to get my hidden berserker out into the open and to my knowledge it had only ever happened twice. Once at the Aral Pass and once in the Black Fort. If it never happened again that would be fine with me.

‘…Skilfar…’ A one-eyed man opposite Snorri, speaking into his ale horn. I picked out the one word, and that was plenty.

‘What?’ I knocked back the rest of my own ale, wiping the suds from my whiskers, a fine blond set I’d cultivated to suit the climate. ‘I’m not going back there, Snorri, no way.’ I remembered the witch in her cavern, her plasteek legion all around. She’d scared the hell out of me. I still had nightmares…

‘Relax.’ Snorri gave me that winning smile of his. ‘We don’t have to.’

I did relax, slumping forward as I let go of a tension I hadn’t known was there. ‘Thank God.’

‘She’s still in her winter seat. Beerentoppen. It’s a mountain of ice and fire, not too far inland, it’ll be our last stop before we leave the north just a few days down the coast and strike out for Maladon across open sea.’

‘Hell no!’ It had been the woman that scared me, not the tunnels and statues – well, they had too, but the point was that I wasn’t going. ‘We’ll head south. The Red Queen will have any answers we need.’

Snorri shook his head. ‘I have questions that won’t wait, Jal. Questions that need a little northern light shed on them.’

I knew what he wanted to talk about – that damned door. If he took the key to Skilfar, though, she’d probably take it off him. I didn’t doubt for a moment that she could. Still, it would be no skin off my nose if she stole it. A thing that powerful would be safer in the old witch’s keeping anyhow. Far from where I intended to be and out of the Dead King’s reach.

‘All right.’ I cut across the one-eyed warrior again. ‘You can go. But I’m staying in the boat!’

The fellow across from Snorri turned a cold blue eye my way, the other socket empty, the firelight catching the twitch of ugly little muscles in the shadowed hollow. ‘This fit-firar speaks for you now, Snorri?’

I knew the insult to be a grim one. The Vikings can think of nothing worse to call you than ‘land man’, one who doesn’t know the sea. That’s the trouble with these backwater villages – everyone’s tetchy. They’re all ready to jump up at a moment’s notice and spill your guts. It’s over-compensation of course, for living in freezing huts on an inhospitable beach. At home I’d damn the fellow’s eyes … well eye at least … and let one half of the palace guard hold me back while the other half beat him out of town. The trouble with a friend like Snorri is that he’s the sort to take things at face value and think I really did want to defend my own honour. Knowing Snorri he’d stand by clapping while the savage carved me up.

The man, Gauti I think Snorri had called him, had one hand on the axe before him, casual enough, fingers spread, but he kept that cold eye on me and there was little to read in it that wasn’t murder. This could go very wrong, very quickly. The sudden urge to piss nearly overtook me. I smiled the bold Jalan smile, ignoring the sick feeling in my stomach, and drew my dagger, a wicked piece of black iron. That got some attention, though less than in any place I’d ever seen an edge drawn before. I did at least get the satisfaction of seeing Gauti flinch, his fingers half closing about his axe hilt. To my credit, I do look like the kind of hero who would demand satisfaction and have the skill to take it.

‘Jal…’ Snorri with a half frown, gesturing with his eyes at the eight inches of knife in my hand.

I pushed aside some axe hafts and in a sudden move inverted my blade so the point hovered a quarter inch above the table. Again Gauti’s eye twitched. I saw Snorri quietly lay his hand on the man’s axe head. Several warriors half rose then settled back in their places.

One great asset in my career as secret coward has been a natural ability to lie fluently in body language. Half of it is … what did Snorri call it? Serendipity. Pure lucky accident. When scared I flush scarlet, but in a fit young man overtopping six foot by a good two inches it usually comes across as outrage. My hands also rarely betray me. I may be quivering with fright inside but they hold steady. Even when the terror is so much that they do finally shake it’s often as not mistaken as rage. Now though, as I set knifepoint to wood, my hands kept firm and sure. In a few strokes I sketched out an irregular blob with a horn at the top and lobe at the bottom.

‘What is it?’ The man across from me.

‘A cow?’ A woman of middle years, very drunk, leaning over Snorri’s shoulder.

‘That, men of the clan Olaff, is Scorron, the land of my enemies. These are the borders. This…’ I scored a short line across the bottom of the lobe. ‘This is the Aral Pass where I taught the Scorron army to call me “devil”.’ I looked up to meet Gauti’s singular glare. ‘And you will note that not one of these borders is a coastline. So if I were a man of the sea it would mean, in my country, that I could never close with my enemy. In fact every time I set sail I would be running away from them.’ I stuck the knife firmly in the centre of Scorron. ‘Where I come from “land men” are the only men who can go to war.’ I let a boy refill my tankard. ‘And so we learn that insults are like daggers – it matters which way you point them, and where you stand.’ And I threw my head back to drain my cup.

Snorri pounded the table, the axes danced, and the laughter came. Gauti leaned back, sour but his ill-temper having lost its edge. The ale flowed. Codfish were brought to table along with some kind of salty grain-mash and dreadful little sea-weed cakes burned nearly black. We ate. More ale flowed. I found myself talking drunkenly to a greybeard with more scar than face about the merits of different kinds of longboat – a subject I acquired my ‘expertise’ on in many separate pieces during innumerable similar drunken conversations with regulars back at the Three Axes. More ale, spilled, splashed, gulped. I think we’d got onto knots by the time I slipped gracefully off the bench and decided to stay where I was.

‘Hedwig,’ I grumbled, still half asleep. ‘Get off me, woman.’

The licking paused, then started up again. I wondered vaguely where I was, and when Hedwig’s tongue had got quite so long. And sloppy. And stinky.

‘Get off!’ I swiped at the dog. ‘Bloody mutt.’ I raised myself on one elbow, still at least half-drunk. The hearth’s glowing embers painted the hall in edge and shadow. Hounds slunk beneath the tables, searching for scraps. I could make out half a dozen drunks snoring on the floor, lying where they fell, and Snorri, stretched out along the central table, head on his pack, deep in his slumbers.

I got up, unsteady, stomach lurching. Although the hall smelled as if pissing in it might improve matters, I wove a path toward the main doors. In the gloom I might hit a sleeping Viking and it would prove hard to talk my way out of that one.

I reached the double doors and heaved open the one on the left, the hinges squealing loud enough to wake the dead – but apparently nobody else – and stepped out. My breath plumed before me and the moonlit square lay glittering with frost. Another fine spring night in the north. I took a pace to the left and started to answer nature’s call.

Beneath the splash of borrowed ale lay the slap of waves against the harbour wall, beneath that the murmur of surf slopping half-heartedly up the distant beach that slanted down to the river, and beneath that … a quiet that prickled the hairs at the back of my neck. I strained my ears, finding nothing to warrant my unease, but even in my cups I have a sense for trouble. Since Aslaug’s arrival the night seemed to whisper to me. Tonight it held its tongue.

I turned, still fumbling to lace my fly, and found instead that I needed to go again, right away. Standing no more than ten yards from me was the biggest wolf ever. I’d heard tall stories aplenty in the Three Axes and I’d been prepared to believe the north bred bigger wolves than might be found down south. I’d even seen a direwolf with my own eyes, albeit it stuffed and mounted in the entrance hall to Madam Serene’s Pleasure Palace down on Magister Street, Vermillion. The thing before me had to be one of the Fenris breed they spoke about in Trond. It stood as tall as a horse, wider in its shaggy coat, its mouth full of sharp ivory gleaming in the moonlight.

I stood there, stock still, still draining onto the ground between my feet. The beast moved forward, no snarl, no prowling, just a quick but slightly ungainly advance. It didn’t occur to me to reach for my sword. The wolf looked as though it might simply bite the sharp end off in any case. Instead I just stood there, making a puddle. I normally pride myself on being the type of coward who acts in the moment, running away when it counts rather than being rooted to the spot. This time however the weight of terror proved too great to run with.

Not until the huge beast charged past me, crashing open the double doors and rushing on into the great hall did I find the presence of mind to start my escape. I ran, holding my breath against the carrion reek of the thing. I got as far as the edge of the square, driven by the awful screams and howls behind me, before my brain dropped anchor. Dogs from the hall ran yelping past me. I came up short, panting – mostly in fear since I hadn’t run very far – and drew my sword. Ahead of me in the blind night could be any number of similar monsters. Wolves hunt in packs after all. Did I want to be alone in the dark with the beast’s friends, or would the safest place be with Snorri and a dozen other Vikings facing the one I’d seen?

All across Olaafheim doors were being kicked open, flames kindled. Hounds, that had been taken unawares, now gave voice, and cries of ‘To arms!’ started to ring out. Gritting my teeth, I turned back, making no effort to hurry. It sounded like hell in there: men’s screams and oaths, crashing and splintering, but strangely not a single snarl or wolf-howl. I’d seen dog fights before and they’re loud affairs. Wolves, it seemed, were given to biting their tongues – yours too, no doubt, if they got a chance!

As I drew closer to the hall the cacophony from within grew less loud, just groans, grunts, the scrape of claw on stone. My pace slowed to a crawl. Only the sounds of activity at my back kept me moving at all. I couldn’t be seen to be just standing there while men died only yards away. Heart racing, feet anything but, I made it to the doorway and eased my head around so one eye could see within.

Tables lay upended, their legs a short and drunken forest shifting in the fire glow. Men, or rather pieces of men, scattered the floor amid dark lakes and darker smears. At first I couldn’t see the Fenris wolf. A grunt of effort drew my eyes to the deepest shadow at the side of the hall. The beast stood hunched over, worrying at something on the ground. Two axes jutted from its side, one stood bedded in its back. I could see its great jaws wide about something, and a man’s legs straining beneath its snout, covered in a black slime of blood and slobber. Somehow I knew who it was, trapped in that maw.

‘Snorri!’ The shout burst from me without permission. I clapped a hand to my mouth in case any more foolishness might emerge. The last thing I wanted was for that awful head to turn my way. To my horror I found that I’d stepped into the doorway – the absolute worst place to be, silhouetted by moonlight, blocking the exit.

‘To arms!’

‘To the hall!’ Cries from all directions now.

Behind me I could hear the pounding of many feet. No retreat that way. The Norse will string a coward up by his thumbs and cut off bits he needs. I stepped in quickly to make myself a less obvious target, and edged along the inner wall, trying not to breathe. Vikings started to arrive at the doorway behind me, crowding to get through.

As I watched the wolf a hand, looking child-size against the scale of the creature, slid up from the far side of its head and clamped between its eyes. A glowing hand. A hand becoming so brilliant that the whole room lit almost bright as day. Exposed by the light, I did what any cockroach does when someone unhoods a lantern in the kitchens. I raced for cover, leaping toward the shelter of a section of table fallen on its side part way between us.

The light grew still more dazzling and half-blinded I staggered across a torso, fell over the table, and sprawled forward with several lunging steps, desperate to remain on my feet. My outstretched sword sunk into something soft, grating across bone, and a moment later an immense weight fell across me, taking away all illumination. And all the other stuff too.

5

‘…underneath! It’s taken six men to get him out.’ A woman’s voice, tinged with wonder.

I felt as if I were lifted up. Carried away.

‘Steady!’

‘Easy…’

A warm wet cloth passed across my forehead. I snuggled into the softness cradling me. The world lay a pleasant distance away, only snatches of conversation reaching me as I dozed.

In my dream I wandered the empty palace of Vermillion on a fine summer’s day, the light streaming in through tall windows overlooking the city’s basking sprawl.

‘…hilt deep! Must have reached the heart…’ A man’s voice.

I was moving. Borne along. The motion halfway between the familiar jolt of a horse and the despised rise and fall of the ocean.

‘…saw his friend…’

‘Heard him shout in the doorway. “Snorri!” He roared it like a Viking…’

The world grew closer. I didn’t want it to. I was home. Where it was warm. And safe. Well, safer. All the north had to offer was a soft landing. The woman holding me had a chest as mountainous as the local terrain.

‘…charged straight at it…’

‘…dived at it!’

The creak of a door. The raking of coals.

‘…berserker…’

I turned from the sun-drenched cityscape back into the empty palace gallery, momentarily blind.

‘…Fenris…’

The sunspots cleared from my eyes, the reds and greens fading. And I saw the wolf, there in the palace hall, jaws gaping, ivory fangs, scarlet tongue, ropes of saliva, hot breath…

‘Arrrg!’ I jerked upright, my head coming clear of Borris’s hairy man-breasts. Did the man never wear a shirt?

‘Steady there!’ Thick arms set me down as easily as a child onto a fur-laden cot. A smoky hut rose about us, larger than most, people crowded round on all sides.

‘What?’ I always ask that – though on reflection I seldom want to know.

‘Easy! It’s dead.’ Borris straightened up. Warriors of the clan Olaaf filled the roundhouse, also a matronly woman with thick blonde plaits and several buxom younger women – presumably the wife and daughters.

‘Snorri—’ I started before noticing him lying beside me, unconscious, pale – even for a northman – and sporting several nasty gashes, one of them an older wound sliced down across his ribs, angry and white-crusted. Even so he looked in far better shape than a man should after being gnawed on by a Fenris wolf. The markings about his upper arms stood out in sharp contrast against marble flesh, the hammer and the axe in blue, runes in black, trapping my attention for a moment. ‘How?’ I didn’t feel up to sentences containing more than one word.

‘Had a shield jammed in the beast’s mouth. Wedged open!’ Borris said.

‘Then you killed it!’ One of his daughters, her chest almost as developed as his.

‘We got your sword out.’ A warrior from the crowd, offering me my blade, hilt first, almost reverential. ‘Took some doing!’

The creature’s weight had driven the blade home as it fell.

I recalled how wide the wolf’s mouth had been around Snorri, and the lack of chewing going on. Closing my eyes I saw that brilliant hand pressed between the wolf’s eyes.

‘I want to see the creature.’ I didn’t, but I needed to. Besides, it wasn’t often I got to play the hero and it probably wouldn’t last long past Snorri regaining his senses. With some effort I managed to stand. Drawing breath proved the hardest part, the wolf had left me with bruised ribs on both sides. I was lucky it hadn’t crushed them all. ‘Hell! Where’s Tuttugu?’

‘I’m here!’ The voice came from behind several broad backs. Men pulled aside to reveal the other half of the Undoreth, grinning, one eye closing as it swelled. ‘Got knocked into a wall.’

‘You’re making a habit of that.’ It surprised me how pleased I was to see him in one piece. ‘Let’s go!’

Borris led the way, and flanked by men bearing reed torches I hobbled after, clutching my ribs and cursing. A pyramidal fire of seasoned logs now lit the square and a number of injured men were laid out on pallets around it, being treated by an ancient couple, both shrouded in straggles of long white hair. I hadn’t thought from my brief time in the hall that anyone had survived, but a wounded man has an instinct for rolling into any cranny or hidey hole that will take him. In the Aral Pass we’d pulled dead men from crevices and fox dens, some with just their boots showing.

Borris took us past the casualties and up to the doors of the great hall. A small man with a big warty blemish on his cheek waited guard, clutching his spear and eyeing the night.

‘It’s dead!’ The first thing he said to us. He seemed distracted, scratching at his overlarge iron helm as if that might satisfy whatever itched him.

‘Well of course it’s dead!’ Borris said, pushing past. ‘The berserker prince killed it!’

‘Of course it’s dead,’ I echoed as I passed the little fellow, allowing myself a touch of scorn. I couldn’t say why the thing had chosen that moment to fall on me, but its weight had driven my sword hilt-deep, and even a wolf as big as a horse isn’t going to get up again after an accident like that. Even so, I felt troubled. Something about Snorri’s hands glowing like that…

‘Odin’s balls! It stinks!’ Borris, just ahead of me.

I drew breath to point out that of course it did. The hall had stunk to heaven but to be fair it had been only marginally worse than the aroma of Borris’s roundhouse, or in fact Olaafheim in general. My observations were lost in a fit of choking though as the foulness invaded my lungs. Choking with badly bruised ribs is a painful affair and takes your mind off things, like standing up. Fortunately Tuttugu caught hold of me.

We advanced, breathing in shallow gasps. Lanterns had been lit and placed on the central table, now set back on its feet. Some kind of incense burned in pots, cutting through the reek with a sharp lavender scent.

The dead men had been laid out before the hearth, parts associated. I saw Gauti among them, bitten clean in half, his eye screwed shut in the agony of the moment, the empty socket staring at the roof beams. The wolf lay where it had fallen whilst savaging Snorri. It sprawled on its side, feet pointing at the wall. The terror that had infected me when I first saw it now returned in force. Even dead it presented a fearsome sight.

The stench thickened as we approached.

‘It’s dead,’ Borris said, walking toward the dangerous end.

‘Well of course—’ I broke off. The thing reeked of carrion. Its fur had fallen out in patches, the flesh beneath grey. In places where it had split worms writhed. It wasn’t just dead – it had been dead for a while.

‘Odin…’ Borris breathed the word through the hand over his face, finding no parts of the divine anatomy to attach to the oath this time. I joined him and stared down at the wolf’s head. Blackened skull would be a more accurate description. The fur had gone, the skin wrinkled back as if before a flame, and on the bone, between eye sockets from which ichor oozed, a hand print had been seared.

‘The Dead King!’ I swivelled for the door, sword in fist.

‘What?’ Borris didn’t move, still staring at the wolf’s head.

I paused and pointed toward the corpses. As I did so Gauti’s good eye snapped open. If his stare had been cold in life now all the winters of the Bitter Ice blew there. His hands clawed at the ground, and where his torso ended, in the red ruin hanging below his ribcage, pieces began to twitch.

‘Burn the dead! Dismember them!’ And I started to run, clutching my sides with one arm, each breath sharp-edged.

‘Jal, where—’ Tuttugu tried to catch hold of me as I passed him.

‘Snorri! The Dead King sent the wolf for Snorri!’ I barged past wart-face on the door and out into the night.

What with my ribs and Tuttugu’s bulk neither of us was the first to get back to Borris’s house. Swifter men had alerted the wife and daughters. Locals were already arriving to guard the place as we ducked in through the main entrance. Snorri had got himself into a sitting position, showing off the over-muscled topology of his bare chest and stomach. He had the daughters fussing around him, one stitching a tear on his side while another cleaned a wound just below his collarbone. I remembered when I had been light-sworn, carrying Baraqel within me, just how much it took out of me to incapacitate a single corpse man. Back on the mountainside just past Chamy-Nix, when Edris’s men had caught us, I’d burned through the forearms of the corpse that had been trying to strangle me. The effort had left me helpless. The fact that Snorri could even sit after incinerating the entire head of a giant dead-wolf spoke as loudly about his inner strength as all that muscle did about his outer strength.

Snorri looked up and gave me a weary grin. Having been at different times both light-sworn and now dark-sworn I have to say the dark side has it easier. The power Snorri and I had used on the undead was the same healing that we had both used to repair wounds on others. It drew on the same source of energy, but healing undead flesh just burns the evil out of it.

‘It came for the key,’ I said.

‘Probably died on the ice and was released by the thaw.’ Snorri winced as the kneeling daughter set another stitch. ‘The real question is how did it know where to find us?’

It was a good question. The idea that any dead thing to hand might be turned against us at any point on our journey was not one that sat well with me. A good question and not one I had an answer for. I looked at Tuttugu as if he might have one.

‘Uh.’ Tuttugu scratched his chins. ‘Well it’s not exactly a secret that Snorri left Trond sailing south. Half the town watched.’ Tuttugu didn’t add ‘thanks to you’ but then again he didn’t need to. ‘And Olaafheim would be the first sensible place for three men in a small boat to put in. Easily reachable in a day’s sailing with fair winds. If he had an agent in town with some arcane means of communication … or maybe necromancers camped nearby. We don’t know how many escaped the Black Fort.’

‘Well that makes sense.’ It was a lot better than thinking the Dead King just knew where to find us any time he wanted. ‘We should, uh, probably leave now.’

‘Now?’ Snorri frowned. ‘We can’t sail in the middle of the night.’

I stepped in close, aware of the two daughters’ keen interest. ‘I know you’re well liked here, Snorri. But there’s a pile of dead bodies in the great hall, and when Borris and his friends have finished dismembering and burning their friends and family they might think to ask why this evil has been visited upon their little town. Just how good a friend is he? And if they start asking questions and want to take us upriver to meet these two jarls of theirs … well, do you have friends in high places too?’

Snorri stood, towering above the girls, and me, pulling on his jerkin. ‘Better go.’ He picked up his axe and started for the door.

Nobody moved to stop us, though there were plenty of questions.

‘Need to get something from the boat.’ I said that a lot on the way down to the harbour. It was almost true.

By the time we reached the seafront we had quite a crowd with us, their questions merging into one seamless babble of discontent. Tuttugu kept a reed-torch from Borris’s roundhouse, lighting the way around piled nets and discarded crates. The locals, lost in the surrounding shadows, watched on in untold numbers. A man grabbed at my arm, saying something about waiting for Borris. I shook him off.

‘I’ll check in the prow!’ It took me a while to master the nautical terminology but ever since learning prow from stern I took all opportunities to demonstrate my credentials. I clambered down, gasping at the pain that reaching overhead caused. I could hear mutters above, people encouraging each other to stop us leaving.

‘It might be in the stern … that … thing we need.’ Tuttugu could take acting lessons from a troll-stone. He dropped into the other end of the boat, causing a noticeable tilt.

‘I’ll row us away,’ Snorri said, descending in two steps. He really hadn’t got the hang of deception yet, which after nearly six months in my company had to say something bad about my teaching skills.

To distract the men at the harbour wall from the fact we were smoothly pulling away into the night I raised a hand and bid them a royal farewell. ‘Goodbye, citizens of Olaafheim. I’ll always remember your town as … as … somewhere I’ve been.’

And that was that. Snorri kept rowing and I slumped back down into the semi-drunken stupor I’d been enjoying before all the night’s unpleasantness started. Another town full of Norsemen left behind me. Soon I’d be lazing in the southern sun. I’d almost certainly marry Lisa and be spending her father’s money before the summer was out.

Three hours later dawn found us out in the wide grey wilderness of the sea, Norseheim a black line to the east, promising nothing good.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘At least the Dead King can’t get at us out here.’

Tuttugu leaned out to look at the wine dark waves. ‘Can dead whales swim?’ he asked.

6

Our hasty departure from Olaafheim saw us putting in two days later at the port of Haargfjord. Food supplies had grown low and although Snorri wanted to avoid any of the larger towns Haargfjord seemed to be our only choice.

I patted our bag of provisions. ‘Seems early to restock,’ I said, finding it more empty than full. ‘Let’s get some decent vittles this time. Proper bread. Cheese. Some honey maybe…’

Snorri shook his head. ‘It would have lasted me to Maladon. I wasn’t planning on feeding Tuttugu, or having you borrow rations then spit them out into the sea.’

We tied up in the harbour and Snorri set me at a table in a dockside tavern so basic that it lacked even a name. The locals called it the dockside tavern and from the taste of the beer they watered it with what they scooped from the holds of ships at the quays. Even so, I’m not one to complain and the chance to sit somewhere warm that didn’t rise and fall with the swell, was one I wasn’t about to turn down.

I sat there all day, truth be told, swigging the foul beer, charming the pair of plump blonde serving-girls, and devouring most of a roast pig. I hadn’t expected to be left so long but before I knew it I had reached that number of ales where you blink and the sun has leapt a quarter of its path between horizons.

Tuttugu joined me late in the afternoon looking worried. ‘Snorri’s vanished.’

‘A clever trick! He should teach me that one.’

‘No, I’m serious. I can’t find him anywhere, and it’s not that big a town.’

I made show of peering under the table, finding nothing but grime-encrusted floorboards and a collection of rat-gnawed rib-bones. ‘He’s a big fellow. I’ve not known a man better at looking after himself.’

‘He’s on a quest to open death’s door!’ Tuttugu said, waving his hands to demonstrate how that was the opposite of looking after oneself.

‘True.’ I handed Tuttugu a legbone thick with roast pork. ‘Look at it this way. If he has come to grief he’s saved you a journey of months… You can go home to Trond and I’ll wait here for a decent sized ship to take me to the continent.’

‘If you’re not worried about Snorri you might at least be worried about the key.’ Tuttugu scowled and took a huge bite from the pig leg.

I raised a brow at that but Tuttugu’s mouth was full and I was too drunk to hold on to any questions I might have.

‘Why are you even doing this, Tuttugu?’ I ran ale over my loose tongue. ‘Hunting a door to Hell? Are you planning to follow him in if he finds it?’

Tuttugu swallowed. ‘I don’t know. If I’m brave enough I will.’

‘Why? Because you’re from the same clan? You lived on the slopes of the same fjord? What on earth would possess you to—’

‘I knew his wife. I knew his children, Jal. I bounced them on my knee. They called me “uncle”. If a man can let go of that he can let go of anything … and then what point is there to his life, what meaning?’

I opened my mouth, but even drunk I hadn’t answers to that. So I lifted my tankard and said nothing.

Tuttugu stayed long enough to finish my meal and drink my ale, then left to continue his search. One of the beer-girls, Hegga or possibly Hadda, brought another pitcher and the next thing I knew night had settled around me and the landlord had started making loud comments about people getting back to their own homes, or at least paying over the coin for space on his fine boards.

I heaved myself up from the table and staggered off to the latrine. Snorri was sitting in my place when I came back, his brow furrowed, an angry set to his jaw.

‘Snolli!’ I considered asking where he’d been but realized that if I were too drunk to say his name I’d best just sit down. I sat down.

Tuttugu came through the street doors moments later and spotted us with relief.

‘Where have you been?’ Like a mother scolding.

‘Right here! Oh—’ I swivelled around with exaggerated care to look at Snorri.

‘Seeking wisdom,’ he said, turning to narrow blue eyes in my direction, a dangerous look that managed to sober me up a little. ‘Finding my enemy.’

‘Well that’s never been a problem,’ I said. ‘Wait a while and they’ll come to you.’

‘Wisdom?’ Tuttugu pulled up a stool. ‘You’ve been to a völva? Which one? I thought we were headed for Skilfar at Beerentoppen?’

‘Ekatri.’ Snorri poured himself some of my ale. Tuttugu and I said nothing, only watched him. ‘She was closer.’ And into our silence Snorri dropped his tale, and afloat on a sea of cheap beer I saw the story unfold before me as he spoke.

After leaving me in the dockside tavern Snorri had gone over the supply list with Tuttugu. ‘You got this, Tutt? I need to go up and see Old Hrothson.’

‘Who?’ Tuttugu looked up from the slate where Snorri had scratched the runes for salt, dried beef, and the other supplies, together with tally marks to count the quantities.

‘Old Hrothson, the chief!’

‘Oh.’ Tuttugu shrugged. ‘My first time in Haargfjord. Go, I can haggle with the best of them.’

Snorri slapped Tuttugu’s arm and turned to go.

‘Of course even the best haggler needs something to pay with…’ Tuttugu added.

Snorri fished in the pocket of his winter coat and pulled out a heavy coin, flipping it to Tuttugu.

‘Never seen a gold piece that big before.’ Tuttugu held it up to his face, so close his nose almost bumped it, the other hand buried in his ginger beard. ‘What’s that on it? A bell?’

‘The great bell of Venice. They say beside the Bay of Sighs you can hear it ring on a stormy night, though it lies fifty fathoms drowned.’ Snorri felt in his pocket for another of the coins. ‘It’s a florin.’

‘Great bell of where?’ Tuttugu turned the florin over in his hand, entranced by the gleam.

‘Venice. Drowned like Atlantis and all the cities beneath the Quiet Sea. It was part of Florence. That’s where they mint these.’

Tuttugu pursed his lips. ‘I’ll find Jal when I’m done. That’s if I can carry all the change I get after spending this beauty. I’ll meet you there.’

Snorri nodded and set off, taking a steep street that led away from the docks to the long halls on the ridge above the main town.

In his years of warring and raiding Snorri had learned the value of information over opinion, learned that the stories people tell are one thing but if you mean to risk the lives of your men it’s better to have tales backed up by the evidence of your eyes – or those of a scout. Better still several scouts, for if you show a thing to three men you’ll hear three different accounts, and if you’re lucky the truth will lie somewhere between them. He would go to Skilfar and seek out the ice witch in her mountain of fire, but better to go armed with advice from other sources, rather than as an empty vessel waiting to be filled with only her opinion.

Old Hrothson had received Snorri in the porch of his long hall, where he sat in a high-backed chair of black oak, carved all over with Asgardian sigils. On the pillars rising above him the gods stood, grim and watchful. Odin looked out over the ancient’s bowed head, Freja beside him, flanked by Thor, Loki, Aegir. Others, carved lower down, stood so smoothed by years of touching that they might be any god you cared to name. The old man sat bowed under his mantle of office, all bones and sunken flesh, thin white hair crowning a liver-spotted pate, and a sharp odour of sickness about him. His eyes, though, remained bright.

‘Snorri Snagason. I’d heard the Hardassa put an end to the Undoreth. A knife in the back on a dark night?’ Old Hrothson measured out his words, age creaking in each syllable. The younger Hrothson sat beside him in a lesser chair, a silver-haired man of sixty winters. Honour guards clad in chainmail and furs flanked them, long axes resting against their shoulders. The two Hrothsons had sat here when Snorri last saw them, maybe five years earlier, gazing down across their town and out to the grey sea.

‘Two only survived,’ Snorri said. ‘Myself and Olaf Arnsson, known as Tuttugu.’

The older Hrothson leaned forward and hawked up a mess of dark phlegm, spitting it to the boards. ‘That for the Hardassa. Odin grant you vengeance and Thor the strength to take it.’

Snorri clapped his fist to his chest though the words gave him no comfort. Thor might be god of strength and war, Odin of wisdom, but he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t Loki, the trickster god, who stood behind what unfolded. A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom. And hadn’t the world proved to be a bitter joke? Perhaps even the gods themselves lay snared in Loki’s greatest trick and Ragnarok would hear the punch line spoken. ‘I seek wisdom,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said Old Hrothson. ‘There’s always the priests.’

All of them laughed, even the honour guards.

‘No really,’ the younger Hrothson spoke for the first time. ‘My father can advise you about war, crops, trade and fishing. Do you speak of the wisdom of this world or the other?’

‘A little of both,’ Snorri admitted.

‘Ekatri.’ Old Hrothson nodded. ‘She has returned. You’ll find her winter hut by the falls on the south side, three miles up the fjord. There’s more in her runes than in the smokes and iron bells of the priests with their endless tales of Asgard.’

The son nodded, and Snorri took his leave. When he glanced back both men were as they had been when he left them five years before, gazing out to sea.

An hour later Snorri approached the witch’s hut, a small roundhouse, log-built, the roof of heather and hide, a thin trail of smoke rising from the centre. Ice still fringed the falls, crashing down behind the hut in a thin and endless cascade, pulses of white driving down through the mist above the plunge pool.

A shiver ran through Snorri as he followed the rocky path to Ekatri’s door. The air tasted of old magic, neither good nor ill, but of the land, having no love for man. He paused to read the runes on the door. Magic and Woman. Völva it meant. He knocked and, hearing nothing, pushed through.

Ekatri sat on spread hides, almost lost beneath a heap of patched blankets. She watched him with one dark eye and a weeping socket. ‘Come in then. Clearly you’re not taking no answer for an answer.’

Snorri ducked low to avoid the door lintel and then to clear the herbs hanging from the roof stays in dry bunches. The small fire between them coiled its smoke up into the funnel of the roof, filling the single room with a perfume of lavender and pine that almost obscured the undercurrent of rot.

‘Sit, child.’

Snorri sat, taking no offence. Ekatri looked to be a hundred, as wizened and twisted as a clifftop tree.

‘Well? Do you expect me to guess?’ Ekatri dipped her clawed hand into one of the bowls set before her and tossed a pinch of the powder into the embers before her, putting a darker curl into the rising smoke.

‘In the winter assassins came to Trond. They came for me. I want to know who sent them.’

‘You didn’t ask them?’

‘Two I had to kill. The last I disabled, but I couldn’t make him speak.’

‘You’ve no stomach for torture, Undoreth?’

‘He had no mouth.’

‘A strange creature indeed.’ Ekatri drew out a glass jar from her blanket, not a thing Northmen could make. A thing of the Builders, and in the greenish liquid within, a single eyeball, turning on the slow current. The witch’s own perhaps.

‘They had olive skin, were human in all respects save for the lack of a mouth, that and the ungodly quickness of them.’ Snorri drew out a gold coin from his pocket. ‘Might be from Florence. They had the blood price on them, in florins.’

‘That doesn’t make them Florentines. Half the jarls in Norseheim have a handful of florins in their warchests. In the southern states the nobles spend florins in their gambling halls as often as their own currency.’ Snorri passed the coin over into Ekatri’s outstretched claw. ‘A double florin. Now they are more rare.’

Ekatri set the coin upon the lid of the jar where her lost eye floated. She drew a leather bag from her blankets and shook it so the contents clacked against each other. ‘Put your hand in, mix them about, tip them out … here.’ She cleared a space and marked the centre.

Snorri did as he was bidden. He’d had the runes read for him before. This message would be a darker one, he fancied. He closed his hand around the tablets, finding them colder and heavier than he had expected, then drew his fist out, opened it palm up and let the rune stones slip from his hand onto the hides below. It seemed as though each fell through water, its path too slow, twisting more than it should. When they landed a silence ran through the hut, underwriting the finality of the pronouncement writ in stone between the witch and himself.

Ekatri studied the tablets, her face avid, as if hungry for something she might read among them. A very pink tongue emerged to wet ancient lips.

‘Wunjo, face down, beneath Gebo. A woman has buried your joy, a woman may release it.’ She touched another two face up. ‘Salt and Iron. Your path, your destination, your challenge and your answer.’ A gnarled finger flipped over the final runestone. ‘The Door. Closed.’

‘What does all that mean?’ Snorri frowned.

‘What do you think it means?’ Ekatri watched him with wry amusement.

‘Am I supposed to be the völva for you?’ Snorri rumbled, feeling mocked. ‘Where’s the magic if I tell you the answer?’

‘I let you tell me your future and you ask where the magic lies?’ Ekatri reached out and swirled the jar beside her so the pickled eyeball within spun with the current. ‘The magic might be in getting into that thick warrior skull of yours the fact that your future stands on your choices and only you can make them. The magic lies in knowing that you seek both a door and the happiness you think lies behind it.’

‘There’s more,’ Snorri said.

‘There is always more.’

Snorri drew up his jerkin. The scrapes and tears the Fenris wolf had given him were scabbed and healing, bruises livid across his chest and side, but across his ribs a long single slice lay glistening, the flesh about it an angry red, and along the wound’s length a white encrustation of salt. ‘My gift from the assassins.’

‘An interesting injury.’ Ekatri reached forward with withered fingers. Snorri flinched but kept his place as she set her hand across the slit. ‘Does it hurt, Snorri ver Snagason?’

‘It hurts.’ Through gritted teeth. ‘It only gives me peace when we sail. The longer I stay put the worse it gets. I feel a … tug.’

‘It pulls you south.’ Ekatri removed her hand, wiping it on her furs. ‘You’ve felt this kind of call before.’

Snorri nodded. The bond with Jal exerted a similar draw. He felt it even now, slight, but there, wanting to pull him back to the tavern he’d left the southerner in.

‘Who has done this?’ He met the völva’s one-eyed gaze.

‘Why is a better question.’

Snorri picked up the stone Ekatri had named the Door. It no longer felt unduly cold or heavy, just a piece of slate, graven with a single rune. ‘Because of the door. And because I seek it,’ he said.

Ekatri held her hand out for the Door and Snorri passed the stone to her, feeling a twinge of reluctance at releasing it.

‘Someone in the south wants what you carry, and they want you to bring it to them.’ Ekatri licked her lips, again – the quickness of her tongue disturbing. ‘See how one simple cut draws all the runes together?’

‘The Dead King did this? He sent these assassins?’ Snorri asked.

Ekatri shook her head. ‘The Dead King is not so subtle. He is a raw and elemental force. This has an older hand behind it. You have something everyone wants.’ Ekatri touched the claw of her hand to her withered chest, the motion just glimpsed beneath the blankets. She touched on herself the same spot where Loki’s key lay against Snorri’s flesh.

‘Why just the three? Sent in the midst of winter. Why not more, now that travelling is easy?’

‘Perhaps he was testing something? Does it seem reasonable that three such assassins should fail against one man? Perhaps the wound was all they were intended to give you. An invitation … of a kind. If it wasn’t for the light within you battling the poison on that blade you would belong to the wound already, busy rushing south. There would be no question of any delay or diversion to speak to old women in their huts.’ She closed her eye and seemed to study Snorri with her empty socket a while. ‘They do say Loki’s key doesn’t like to be taken. Given, surely, but taken? Stolen, of a certainty. But taken by force? Some speak of a curse on those who own it through strength. And it doesn’t do to anger gods, now does it?’

‘I mentioned no key.’ Snorri fought to keep his hands from twitching toward it, burning cold against his chest.

‘Ravens fly even in winter, Snagason.’ Ekatri’s eye hardened. ‘Do you think if some southern mage knew of your exploits weeks ago old Ekatri would not know of it by now in her hut just down the coast? You came seeking wisdom: don’t take me for a fool.’

‘So I must go south and hope?’

‘There is no must about it. Surrender the key and the wound will heal. Perhaps even the wounds you can’t see. Stay here. Make a new life.’ She patted the hides beside her. ‘I could always use a new man. They never seem to last.’

Snorri made to stand. ‘Keep the gold, völva.’

‘Well, it seems my wisdom is valued today. Now that you’ve paid for it so handsomely perhaps you might heed it, child.’ She made the coin vanish and sighed. ‘I’m old, my bones are dry, the world has lost its savour, Snorri. Go, die, spend yourself in the deadlands … it matters little to me, my words are a pretty noise for you, your mind is set. The waste sorrows me, young and full of juice you are, but in the end, in the end we’re all wasted by the years. Think on it, though. Did those who stand in your path just start to covet Loki’s key this winter?’

‘I—’ Snorri knew a moment of shame. His thoughts had been so narrowed on the choice he’d made that the rest of the world had escaped him.

‘As your tragedies draw you south … wonder how those tragedies came to be and whose hand truly lay behind them.’

‘I’ve been a fool.’ Snorri found his feet.

‘And you’ll keep being one. Words can’t turn you from this course. Maybe nothing can. Friendship, love, trust, childish notions that have left this old woman … but, whatever the runes have to say, these are what rule you, Snorri ver Snagason, friendship, love, trust. They’ll drag you into the underworld, or save you from it. One or the other.’ She hung her head stared into the fire.

‘And this door I seek? Where can I find it?’

Ekatri’s wrinkle of a mouth puckered into consideration. ‘I don’t know.’

Snorri felt himself deflate. For a moment he had thought she might tell him, but it would have to be Skilfar. He started to turn.

‘Wait.’ The völva raised a hand. ‘I don’t know. But I can guess where it might lie. Three places.’ She returned her hand to her lap. ‘In Yttrmir the world slopes into Hel, so they say. In the badlands that stretch to the Yöttenfall the skies grow dim and the people strange. Go far enough and you’ll find villages where no one ages, none are born, each day follows the next without change. Further still and the people neither eat nor drink nor sleep but sit at their windows and stare. I’ve not heard that there is a door – but if you wish to go to Hel, that is a path. That is the first. The second is Eridruin’s Cave on the shore of Harrowfjord. Monsters dwell there. The hero Snorri Hengest fought them, and in his saga it speaks of a door that stands in the deepest part of those caverns, a black door. The third is less sure, told by a raven, a child of Crakk, white-feathered in his dotage. Even so. There is a lake in Scorron, the Venomere, dark as ink, where no fish swim. In its depths they say there is a door. In older days the men of Scorron threw witches into those waters, and none ever floated to the surface as corpses are wont to do.’

‘My thanks, völva.’ He hesitated. ‘Why did you tell me? If my plan is such madness?’

‘You asked. The runes put the door in your path. You’re a man. Like most men you need to face your quarry before you can truly decide. You won’t let go of this until you find it. Maybe not even then.’ Ekatri looked down and said no more. Snorri waited a moment longer, then turned and left, watched by a single eye floating in its jar.

‘Assassins?’ I lifted my head, the room continuing to move after I stopped. ‘Nonsense. You never mentioned any attack.’

Snorri lifted his jerkin. A single ugly wound ran down his side, far back, just past the ribs, salt crusted as he’d described. I may have seen it when Borris’s daughters were washing him back in Olaafheim after the Fenris wolf got hold of him, or perhaps he had been turned the wrong way … in any event I didn’t recall it in my inebriation.

‘So how much does it cost to hire assassins then?’ I asked. ‘Just for future reference. And … where’s the money? You should be rich!’

‘I gave most of it to the sea, so that Aegir would grant us safe passage,’ said Snorri.

‘Well that didn’t bloody work!’ I banged the table, perhaps a little harder than I meant to. I can be an excitable drunk.

‘Most of it?’ Tuttugu asked.

‘I paid a völva in Trond to treat the wound.’

‘Did a piss poor job from what I could see,’ I interjected, holding onto the table to keep from sliding past it.

‘It was beyond her skill, and while we stay here it only grows worse. Come, we’ll sail at dawn.’

Snorri stood and I guess we followed, though I’ve no memory of it.

7

I woke the next morning under sail and with a head sore enough to keep me curled in the prow groaning for the mercy of death until well past noon. The previous evening returned to me in fragments over the course of the next few days but it took an age to assemble the pieces into anything that made sense. And even then it didn’t make much sense. I consoled myself with our steady progress toward home and the civilized comforts thereof. As my head eased I planned out who I would see first and where I’d spend my first night. I would probably ask for Lisa DeVeer’s hand, assuming she hadn’t been dragged to the opera that night and burned with the rest. She was the finest of the old man’s daughters and I’d grown very fond of her. Especially in her absence. Thoughts of home kept me warm, and I huddled in the prow, waiting to get there.

The sea is always changing – but mostly for the worse. A cold and relentless rain arrived with the next morning and plagued us all day, driven by winds that pushed the ocean up before them into rolling hills of brine. Snorri’s dreadful little boat wallowed around like a pig trying to drown, and by the time evening threatened even the Norsemen had had enough.

‘We’ll put in at Harrowheim,’ Snorri told us, wiping the rain from his beard. ‘It’s a little place I know.’ Something about the name gave me a bad feeling but I was too eager to be on solid ground to object, and I guessed that even driven as he was the Norseman would rather spend the night ashore.

So, with the sun setting behind us we turned for the dark coastline, letting the wind hurl us toward the rocks until at the last the mouth of a fjord revealed itself and we sailed on in. The fjord proved itself a narrow one, little more than two hundred yards wide, its shores rising steeper than a flight of stairs, reaching for the serrated ridges of sullen rock that cradled the waters.

Aslaug spoke to me while the two Norsemen busied themselves with rope and sail. She sat beside me in the stern, clad in shadow and suggestion, impervious to the rain and the tug of the wind.

‘How they torment you with this boat, Prince Jalan.’ She laid a hand on my knee, ebony fingers staining the cloth, a delicious feeling soaking into me. ‘Baraqel guides Snorri now. The Norseman doesn’t have your strength of will. Where you were able to withstand the demon’s preaching Snorri is swayed. His instincts have always been—’

‘Demon?’ I muttered. ‘Baraqel’s an angel.’

‘You think so?’ She purred it close by my ear and suddenly I didn’t know what I thought, or care overmuch that I didn’t. ‘The creatures of the light wear whatever shapes you let them steal from legend. Beneath it all they are singular in will and no more your friend or guardians than the fire.’

I shivered in my cloak wishing I had a good blaze to warm myself by right now. ‘But fire is—’

‘Fire is your enemy, Prince Jalan. Enslave it and it will serve, but give it an inch, give it any opportunity, and you’ll be lucky to escape the burning wreckage of your home. You keep the fire at arms’ length. You don’t take a hot coal to your breast. No more should you embrace Baraqel or his kind. Snorri has done so and it has left his will in ashes – a puppet for the light to work its own purposes through. See how he looks at you. How he watches you. It’s only a matter of time before he acts openly against you. Mark these words, my prince. Mark—’

The sun sank and Aslaug fell into a darkness that leaked away through the hull.

We drew up at the quays of Harrowheim in the gathering gloom, guided in by the lights of houses clustered on the steepness of the slope. To the west some sort of cove or landslip offered a broad flattish area where crops might be grown in the shelter of the fjord.

An ancient with a lantern waved us alongside his own boat where he’d been sat picking the last fish from his nets.

‘You’ll be wannin’ me ta walk you up,’ he said, all gums and wisps of beard.

‘Don’t trouble yourself, Father.’ Tuttugu getting onto the quay with far more grace than he showed on land. He stooped low over the man’s boat. ‘Herring, eh? White-Gill. Nice catch. We don’t see them for another few weeks up in Trond.’

‘Ayuh.’ The old man held one up, still flipping half-heartedly in his fingers. ‘Good ’uns.’ He put it down as Snorri clambered out, leaving me to stagger uncertainly across the rolling boat toward the step. ‘Still. Better go with you. The lads are twitchy tonight. Raiders about – it’s the season for ’em. Might fill you full of spear before you know it.’

My boot, wet with bilge water, slipped out from under me at ‘raiders’ and I nearly vanished into the strip of dark water between quay and boat. I caught myself painfully on the planks, biting my tongue as I clutched the support. ‘Raiders?’ I tasted blood and hoped it wasn’t a premonition.

Snorri shook his head. ‘Not serious stuff. The clans raid for wives come spring. Here it’ll be Guntish men.’

‘Ayuh. And Westerfolk off Crow Island.’ The old man set down his nets and came to join us, making an easier job of it than I had.

‘Lead on.’ I waved him forward, happy to trail behind if it meant him getting speared rather than me.

Now that Snorri had mentioned it I did recall talk of the practice back at the Three Axes. The business of raiding for girls of marriageable age seemed something that the people of Trond felt beneath them, but they loved to tell tales about their country bumpkin cousins doing it. Mostly it seemed to be an almost good-natured thing with a tacit approval from both sides – but of course if the raider proved sufficiently unskilled to get caught then he’d earn himself a good beating … and sometimes a bad one. And if he picked a girl that didn’t want to get caught she might give him worse than that.

Men emerged from the shadows as we walked up between the huts. Our new friend, Old Engli, put them quickly at their ease and the mood lightened. Some few recognized Snorri and many more recognized his name, leading us on amid a growing crowd. Lanterns and torches lit around us, children ran into the muddy streets, mothers and daughters eyed us from glowing doorways, the occasional girl, bolder than the rest, hanging from a window recently unboarded in the wake of winter’s retreat. One or two such caught my eye, the last of them a generously proportioned young woman with corn-coloured hair descending in thick waves and hung with small copper bells.

‘Prince Jalan—’ I managed half a bow and half an introduction before Snorri’s big fist knotted in my cloak and hauled me onwards.

‘Best behaviour, Jal,’ he hissed between his teeth while offering a wide smile left and right. ‘I know these people. Let’s try not to have to leave in a hurry this time.’

‘Yes, of course!’ I shook myself free. Or he let me go. ‘Do you think I’m some sort of wild beast? I’m always on my best behaviour!’ I stomped on behind him, straightening my collar. Damn barbarian thinking he could teach a prince of Red March manners … she did have a very pretty face though … and squeezable—

‘Jal!’

I found myself marching past the entrance into which everyone else had turned. A quick reversal and I was through the mead hall’s doorway into the smoke and noise. Mead hut I’d call it – it made Olaafheim’s hall look big. More men streamed in behind me while others found their seats around the long benches. It seemed our arrival had occasioned a general call to broach casks and fill drinking horns. We’d started the party rather than crashed in on it. And that gives you a pretty good picture of Harrowheim. A place so desolate and starved of interest that the arrival of three men in a boat is cause for celebration.

‘Jal!’ Snorri slapped the tabletop to indicate a space between him and Tuttugu. It seemed well meaning enough but something in me bridled at the gesture, ordering me to my place, somewhere he could keep an eye on me. As if he didn’t trust me. Me! A prince of Red March. Heir to the throne. Being watched over by a hauldr and a fisherman as if I might disgrace myself in a den of savages. Me, being watched over by Baraqel even though I no longer had to suffer him in my head. I sat down still smiling, but feeling brittle. I snatched up the drinking horn before me and took a deep swig. The dark and sour ale within did little to improve my mood.

As the general cacophony of disputes over seating and cries for ale settled into more distinct conversations I began to realize that everyone around me was speaking Norse. Snorri gabbled away with a lean old stick of a man, spitting out words that would break a decent person’s jaw. On my other side Tuttugu had found a kindred spirit, another ginger Norseman whose red beard spilled down over a stomach so expansive it forced him to sit far enough back from the table that reaching his ale became a problem. They too were deep in conversation in old Norse. It was starting to seem that the very first person we met was the only one among them who could speak like a man of Empire.

Back in Trond most of the northmen knew the old tongue but every one of them spoke the language of Empire and would use it over beers, at work, and in the street. Generally the city folk avoided the old tongue and its complications of dialect and regional variation, sticking instead to the language of merchants and kings. In fact the only time the good folk of Trond tended to slip into Norse was when seeking the most appropriate swear word for the situation. Insulting each other is a national sport in Norseheim and for the very best results competitors like to call on the old curses of the north, preferably raiding the stock of cruel-things-to-say-about-someone’s-mother that is to be found in the great sagas.

Out in the sticks however it proved to be a very different story – a story told exclusively in a language that seemed to require you swallow a live frog to pronounce some words and gargle half a pint of phlegm for the rest. Since my grip on Norse was limited to calling someone a shithead or telling them they had very pert breasts I scowled at the company and opted to keep my mouth shut unless of course I were pouring ale into it.

The night rolled on and whilst I was deeply glad to be out of that boat, out of the wind, and to have a floor beneath me that had the decency to stay where it had been put, I couldn’t really enjoy being crammed among two score ill-smelling Harrowheimers. I had to wonder at Engli’s tale of raiding since the whole male population seemed to have jammed themselves into the mead hall at the first excuse.

‘—Hardassa!’ Snorri’s fist punctuated the word against the table and I became aware that most of the locals were listening to him now. From the hush I guessed he must be telling the tale of our trip to the Black Fort. Hopefully he wouldn’t be mentioning Loki’s key.

To my mind the Norse vilification of Loki seemed an odd thing. Of all their heathen gods Loki was clearly the most intelligent, capable of plans and tactics that could help Asgard in its wars against the giants. And yet they spurned him. The answer of course was all around me in Harrowheim. Their daughters weren’t being wooed, or seduced, they were being taken by raiders. In the ancient tales, to which each Viking aspired, strength was the only virtue, iron the only currency that mattered. Loki with his cunning, whereby a weaker man might outdo a stronger one, was an anathema to these folk. Little wonder then if his key carried a curse for any that sought to take it by main strength.

Had Olaaf Rikeson taken it by force and drawn down Loki’s curse, only to have his vast army freeze on the Bitter Ice? Whoever had given Snorri that wound had more sense than the Dead King. Using half a ton of Fenris wolf to claim the key might seem a more certain course but such methods might also be a good way to find yourself on the wrong end of a god’s wrath.

‘Ale?’ Tuttugu started filling my drinking horn without waiting on my answer.

I pursed my lips as another thought struck me – why the hell did they call them mead halls? I’d emptied several gallons from various drinking horns, flagons, tankards … even a bucket one time … in half a dozen mead halls since coming north and never once been offered mead. The closest the Norse came to sweet was leaving the salt out of their ale. While pondering this important question I decided it time to go empty my used beer into the latrine and stood with just the hint of a stagger.

‘Still getting my land legs.’ I set a hand to Tuttugu’s shoulder for support and, once steady, set off for the door.

My lack of the local lingo didn’t prove an impediment in the hunt for the latrine – I let my nose lead me. On my return to the hall the faintest jingle of bells caught my attention. Just a brief high tinkle. The sound seemed to have come from an alley between two nearby buildings, large, log-built structures, one sporting elaborate gables … possibly a temple. With a squint I could make out a cloaked figure in the gloom. I stood, blinking, hoping to God that this wasn’t some horny but myopic clansman who was going to attempt to carry me off to a distant village even more depressing than Harrowheim.

The figure held its ground, sheltered in the narrow passage. Two slim hands emerged from dark sleeves and pushed back the hood. Bells tinkled again, and the girl from the window revealed herself, a saucy quirk to her smile that required no translation.

I cast a quick glance at the glowing rectangle of the mead hall doorway, another toward the latrines, and seeing nobody looking in my direction, I hastened across the way to join my new friend in the alley.

‘Well, hello.’ I gave her my best smile. ‘I’m Prince Jalan Kendeth of Red March, the Red Queen’s heir. But you can call me Prince Jal.’

She reached out to lay a finger across my lips before whispering something that sounded as delicious as it was incomprehensible.

‘How can I say no?’ I whispered back, setting a hand to her hip and wondering for a moment what the Norse for ‘no’ actually was.

She wriggled out from beneath my palm, bells tinkling, setting her fingers between her collarbones. ‘Yngvildr.’

‘Lovely.’ My hands pursued her while my tongue considered wrestling with her name and decided not to.

Yngvildr skipped away laughing and pointed back between the buildings, more sweet gibberish spilling from her mouth. Seeing my blank look she paused and repeated herself slowly and clearly. The trouble is of course that it doesn’t matter how slowly and how clearly you repeat gibberish. It’s possible the word ‘pert’ was in there somewhere.

High above us the moon showed its face and what light it sent down into our narrow alley caught the girl’s lines, illuminating the curve of her cheek, her brow, leaving her eyes in darkness, gleaming on her bell-strewn hair, silver across the swell of her breasts, shadows descending toward a slender waist. Suddenly it didn’t really matter what she was saying.

‘Yes,’ I said, and she led the way.

We passed between the temple and its neighbour, between huts, edged around pigsties where the hogs snored restless in their hay, and out past log stacks and empty pens to where the slope mellowed toward Harrowheim’s patch of farmland. I snatched a candle-lantern hanging outside one of the last huts. She hissed and tutted, half-smiling, half-disapproving, gesturing for me to put it back, but I declined. A tallow stub in a poorly blown glass cowl was hardly grand theft and damned if I were ending the night with a broken leg or knee-deep in a slurry pit. Wherever Yngvildr planned to get her first taste of Red March I intended to get there fit enough to give good account of myself.

So we stumbled on in our small circle of light, out across a gentle slope, the earth rutted by agriculture, holding hands now, her occasionally saying something which sounded seductive but might well have been an observation on the weather. A little more than a hundred yards out from the last of the huts a tall barn loomed up at us out of the night. I stood back and watched as Yngvildr lifted the locking bar and drew back one of the plank-built double doors set into the front of the crude log structure. She looked back over her shoulder, smiling, and walked on in, swallowed by the darkness. I considered the wisdom of the liaison for about two seconds and followed her.

The lamp’s light couldn’t reach the roof or the walls but I could see enough to know the place held hay bales and farm implements. Not many of either, but plenty to trip over. Yngvildr tried once more to make me abandon the lamp, pointing to the doorway, but I smiled and pulled her close, kissing the arguments off her lips. In the end she rolled her eyes and broke free to close the door once more.

Taking my hand Yngvildr led the way deeper into the barn to a point where a ladder led up to a split-level above the main hay store. I followed her up, taking time to admire the grubby but well-formed legs disappearing into the shadows of her skirts. At the top a large pile of loose hay had been formed into something vaguely nest-shaped.

Now a hay barn in Red March in the spring or fall can be a half decent place to tumble the odd peasant girl or friendly farm lass, though they never tell you quite how itchy straw is in those bawdy tales, or how sharp, or how it gets into all manner of places where neither partner in the enterprise really ever wants to get anything sharp or itchy. A hay barn in Norseheim in the spring however is akin to an icehouse. A place where no sane man, however keen he might be for a spot of slap and tickle, would part with any layers, and where anything that pokes its head into the frigid air is apt to shrivel and die. I set the lamp down beside us, and with my breath pluming before me, wondered if there were any way I could slip back to the mead hall right now while retaining some shred of pride. Yngvildr on the other hand seemed keen to proceed as planned and with smiles, gestures, and presently with impatient jerks of the head as she went to all fours, indicated that I should hurry up with my end of the bargain.

‘Just give me a minute, Y – Yng – … dear lady.’ I held my hands out over the lamp to warm them. ‘Cold air is never flattering to a man…’

Norse women can be quite proactive and Yngvildr proved no exception, backing me to the wall and rucking up a considerable number of coarse skirts to initiate proceedings. A bit of numb-fingered fumbling and with the bare minimum of undressing Yngvildr and I were locked together in a style not uncommon in farmyards, with me providing the somewhat abused filling in a sandwich between the barn wall and my latest ‘conquest’.

Despite the biting cold, the itchy straw, and the hard planks I did eventually start to enjoy myself. Yngvildr was after all attractive, enthusiastic and energetic. I even began to warm up a bit and start ringing her bells. Reaching forward I took hold of her shoulders and put some effort into seeing what kind of notes I could get out of her. The ringing became louder as our excitement mounted … and more deep throated…

‘That’s it! Louder! I’ll bet no Norseman has rung your—’

The realization that even the best lover in the world wouldn’t be able to coax so deep or multitudinous a clanging from Yngvildr’s tiny copper bells caught me in mid boast. I opened my eyes and, still being rhythmically pounded back against the wall, peered over the edge of the upper floor to see that the lower barn was full of cattle, with more of the beasts coming in through the door, each with a large cow-bell around its neck.

‘You—offff! You didn’t—offff! Close the door properly!’

Yngvildr appeared too occupied to care or notice and seemed to think my commentary was me urging her to greater efforts. For a few moments more I knelt there, trying not to let my head bang the timbers.

‘Yes … perhaps we could quiet things down…’ Her enthusiasm appeared to be attracting more cattle by the second. ‘Sssh!’ It made no impression on her. I stared, somewhat helpless, down at the bovine sea below and those that weren’t busy helping themselves to the hay, or just crapping on the floor, stared back up at me. It wasn’t until I heard over the noise of Yngvildr’s bells, her panting, and the clanging of cow bells, the sound of men approaching that I started to panic.

‘Dear lady, if you could just—offff!’ I banged my head quite hard that time, adding anger into the mix of rising panic and involuntary lust. ‘Shut up!’

It sounded as if there were quite a few Harrowheimers approaching, their voices more curious than alarmed. Presumably when they saw that the cows had entered the barn it would inject a little more urgency into the situation. Lord knew what they’d do if they caught the foreigner in the act of despoiling their maiden!

‘Time to stop, Y—’ I banged my head again while struggling for her name. ‘Stop! They’re coming!’

Unfortunately Yngvildr seemed to take my urgency as further encouragement and proved wholly disinclined to stop. I could just make out the glow of a lantern off in the field through a small window above the doors.

‘Get! Off!’ And with considerable effort I managed to shove Yngvildr far enough to disengage and free myself from the wall. As she fell forward, onto her face unfortunately, her shoulder caught the lamp and sent it tumbling.

‘Oh shit!’ It’s remarkable how quickly fire takes hold of straw. I backed away on my arse, kicking out at the burning clumps nearest to me. They promptly dropped over the edge into the main barn. Seconds later a great mooing went up from below us, rising rapidly into notes of animal panic. Yngvildr rolled over, hay stuck to her mouth, and looked about in bewilderment – an expression that moved quickly through fury to terror.

‘No! No, no, no, no, no!’ I tried beating at the burning hay but just helped the fire to spread. Meanwhile down below the cattle had gone into full stampede, ripping off the barn doors in their eagerness to be outside. By the high-pitched yells just audible over the general din of the herd it seemed as though the locals drawn by the cows’ unusual behaviour were having their curiosity rewarded with a good trampling.

‘Come on!’ Always the gentleman I led the way to ensure it was safe, sliding down the ladder at reckless speed without a care for splinters. Already the air hung thick with smoke, hot as sin. Choking and wheezing I made for the back of the barn, reasoning there must be a door there and that would be closer. Also, although the fire headed my list of priorities in a big way, I didn’t want to jump from it directly into the frying pan. Slipping out the back might allow me to escape unobserved and weasel out of the whole thing.

‘Shit!’ I stopped in my tracks, confronted by a small door blocked by several bales of hay, all already smouldering. Yngvildr staggered into my back, sending me stumbling forward toward the nearest bale, across which flames flickered into being as though angered by my approach. The smoke blinded me, filling my eyes with tears and swirling around so thickly that only flames showed through. Yngvildr thrust something into my hand, choking out words rendered no less comprehensible by her lack of breath. It appeared to be some kind of farm implement, two sharp iron spikes on the end of a wooden haft. Somewhere at the back of my mind the word ‘pitchfork’ bubbled up, though I probably would have applied the same label to any number of peasant tools. More gibberish as Yngvildr shook my arm and pushed me forward. The girl had clearly gone mad with fear but keeping a cool head and showing the innovative thinking we Kendeths are famed for I set to hefting the burning hay aside with the device. The severity of the situation must have coaxed new strength from my muscles as I managed to toss the bales left and right despite my lack of breath and each of them outweighing me. With the last of my energy and with the fire roaring at my back I kicked the door open and the both of us burst out together.

The light of the blaze through the doorway cast a sudden cone of illumination into the darkness, catching five or six grey-clad men hurrying away across the field. I didn’t care what they were up to but in the heat of the moment, and discovering with a yell that the pitchfork I held clutched before me was on fire, I threw the thing at them. My interest in the implement ended the second it left my scorched hands as I realized that my cloak was also ablaze.

Yngvildr and I hobbled back across the field, accompanied by the agitated lowing of the herd and lit from behind by the spiralling inferno that had consumed the barn within moments of us escaping it. As we reached the margins of the village we found our path blocked by dozens of Harrowheimers, all standing around their huts and hovels, open mouthed, their faces glowing with the reflection of the fire at our backs. Snorri loomed large among them.

‘Tell me you didn’t…’ The look he shot my way made me fairly sure that bits of my cloak were still smoking.

‘I—’ I didn’t get a chance to start lying before Yngvildr wriggled out from beneath my arm where I’d been using her for support and began talking at a startling rate and volume. I stood, somewhat bewildered, as the wench gestured her way through some great pantomime of what I presumed must be recent events. Part of me expected her to drop to all fours for a full display of just how the southern monster had despoiled the flower of Harrowheim.

Yngvildr paused to snatch a breath and Tuttugu called to me, ‘Which way did they go?’

‘Um—’ Fortunately Yngvildr saved me from having to invent an answer while guessing what she’d said. With her lungs refilled she launched into the next stage of her tale.

‘A pitchfork?’ Snorri asked, glancing from Yngvildr to me, an eyebrow raised.

‘Well, one improvises.’ I shrugged. ‘We princes can turn most objects into a weapon in a pinch.’

Yngvildr still had plenty of go in her and continued to spill her story with the same volume but the crowd’s attention wandered from her, drawn into the shadows where three warriors were emerging from the field, one brandishing what looked to be the pitchfork in question and barking out something that sounded uncomfortably like an accusation. I took Yngvildr protectively by the shoulders to use as a shield.

‘Now see here! I—’ My bluster ran out temporarily while I tried to think what defence I might offer that wouldn’t get me used as a target for axe-throwing practice.

‘He says, when they caught up with the raiders they were pulling this out of their friend’s backside,’ Snorri said, a grin cracking within the close-cropped darkness of his beard. ‘So, you rescued Yngvildr and chased off, what? Six of them? With a pitchfork? Splendid.’ He laughed and slapped Tuttugu across the shoulders. ‘But why would they fire the barn? That’s the bit I don’t understand. There’ll be hell to pay over it come the clan-meet!’

‘Ah,’ I said, trying to give myself pause for all the lies to sink in. Yngvildr appeared to be a highly creative girl under pressure. ‘I think maybe that was an accident? One of the idiots must have taken a lamp into the barn – probably they were planning to collect a few girls there before setting off for home. Must’ve got knocked over in the excitement…’

Snorri repeated what I’d said in Norse for the gathered crowd. A silence trailed his last word and two score and more of Harrowheim’s eyes stared hard at me through the flame-lit gloom. I figured if I shoved Yngvildr at the feet of the nearest ones and ran for it I might lose them in the night. I’d tensed for the shove when without warning a cheer went up, beards split into broad smiles full of bad teeth, and before I knew what was happening we’d been swept along the muddy streets and back into the mead hall. This time they managed to squeeze twice as many bodies into the place, half of them female. As the ale started to flow once more and I found myself squashed between Yngvildr and an older but no less comely woman that Snorri assured me was her sister rather than her mother, I started to think a night in Harrowheim might have its charms after all.

We left on the morning tide with sore heads and foggy recollections of the night’s events. The rain had let up, the relentless wind had relented, and the true story of how their largest barn got burned flat had yet to emerge. It seemed the best time to depart. Even so I would have dallied a day or three, but Snorri had an urgency about him, his humour gone. When he thought no one watching I saw him hold his side above the poisoned wound and I knew then that he felt that pull, drawing him south.

Sad to say neither Yngvildr nor her still less pronounceable sister came to see me off at the quay, but they had both managed a smile when Snorri hauled me from the furs that morning and I let that warm me against the cold wind as we set sail.

As the distance took Harrowheim I didn’t feel quite so well rid of this Norse town as I had of Trond, Olaafheim, and Haargfjord. Even so, the glories of Vermillion beckoned. Wine, women, song … preferably not opera … and I’d certainly search out Lisa DeVeer, perhaps even marry her one day.

‘We’re going the wrong way!’ It had taken me the best part of half an hour to realize it. The fjord had narrowed a touch and there was no sign of the sea.

‘We’re sailing up the Harrowfjord.’ Snorri at the tiller.

‘Up?’ I looked for the sun. It was true. ‘Why? And where do I know that name from?’

‘I told it to you four nights ago. Ekatri told me—’

‘Eridruin’s Cave. Monsters!’ It all came back to me, rather like unexpectedly vomiting into your mouth. The völva’s mad tale about a door in a cave.

‘It was meant to be. Fated. My namesake sailed here three centuries ago.’

‘Snorri Hengest died here.’ Tuttugu from the prow. ‘We should see Skilfar. She’ll know of a better way. Nobody comes here, Snorri. It’s a bad place.’

‘We’re looking for a bad thing.’

And that was that. We kept going.

‘So, who was Eridruin?’ Sailing on a fjord is infinitely preferable to sailing on the sea. The water stays where it’s put and the shore is so close that even I might make it there if it came to swimming. This said, I would rather be sailing over rough seas away from any place famed for monsters than sailing toward it on the flattest of millponds. ‘I said, who was—’

‘I don’t know. Tuttugu?’ Snorri kept his eyes on the left shore.

Tuttugu shrugged. ‘It must ache Eridruin’s spirit to be famed enough for his name to survive but not quite enough for anyone to remember why they remember it.’

A stiff breeze had carried us inland. The day kept grey, the sun showing only brief and weak. By late afternoon we’d covered perhaps thirty miles and seen no sign of habitation. I had thought Harrowheim’s raiders came from further up the fjord, but nobody lived here. Tuttugu had the right of it. A bad place. Somehow you could tell. It wasn’t anything as simple as dead and crooked trees, or rocks with sinister shapes … it was a feeling, a wrongness, the certain knowledge that the world grew thin here, and what waited beneath the surface loved us not. I watched the sun sinking toward the high ridges and listened. The Harrowfjord wasn’t silent or lifeless, the water lapped our hull, the sails flapped, birds sang … but each sound held a discordant tone, as if the skylarks were just a note away from screaming. You could almost catch it … some dreadful melody played out just beneath hearing.

‘There.’ Snorri pointed to a place high upon the stepped shore to our left. Like a dark eye amid the stony slopes, Eridruin’s Cave watched us. It couldn’t be any other.

The Norsemen lowered the sails and brought us into the shallows. Fjords have deep shallows, diving down as steeply as the valleys that contain them. I jumped out a yard from the shore and managed to wet myself to the hips.

‘You’re just going up there … right now?’ I looked about for the promised monsters. ‘Shouldn’t we wait and … plan?’

Snorri shouldered his axe. ‘You want to wait until it gets dark, Jal?’

He had a point. ‘I’ll guard the boat.’

Snorri wound the boat’s line around a boulder that emerged from the water. ‘Come on.’

The Norsemen set off, Tuttugu at least looking as though he would rather not and casting glances left and right. He carried a rope coiled many times about him, and two lanterns bounced on his hips.

I hurried after them. Somehow I could think of no horror worse than being alone in that place, sitting by the still water as the night poured down the slopes.

‘Where are the monsters?’ It wasn’t that I wanted to see any … but if they were here I’d rather know where.

Snorri paused and looked about. I immediately sat down to catch my breath. He shrugged. ‘I can’t see any. But then how many places live up to their reputation? I’ve been to plenty of Giant’s This and Troll’s That, without a sniff of either. I climbed the Odin’s Horn and didn’t meet him.’

‘And The Fair Maidens are a great disappointment.’ Tuttugu nodded. ‘Who thought to set that name on three rocky isles crammed with ugly hairy men and their ugly hairy wives?’

Snorri nodded up the slope again and set off. In places it was steeper than stairs and I reached out ahead of me, clambering up.

I climbed, expecting attack at any moment, expecting to see bones among the rocks, drifts of them, tooth-marked, some grey with age, some fresh and wet. Instead I discovered just more rocks and that the growing sense of wrongness now whispered around me, audible but too faint to break apart into words.

Within minutes we stood at the cave mouth, a rocky gullet, fringed with lichen above and stained with black slime where the water oozed. Twenty men could march in abreast, and be swallowed.

‘Do you hear it?’ Tuttugu, more pale than he had ever looked.

We heard it, though perhaps the cave spoke different words to each of us. I heard a woman whispering to her baby, soft at first, promising love … then sharper, more strained, promising protection … then terrified, hoarse with agony promising – I spoke aloud to over-write the whispers. ‘We need to leave. This place will drive us mad.’ Already I found myself wondering if I threw myself down the slope would the voice stop?

‘I don’t hear anything.’ Snorri walked in. Perhaps his own demons spoke louder than the cave.

I took a step after him, out of habit, then caught myself. Fingers in my ears did nothing to block out the woman’s voice. Worse, I realized there was something familiar about it.

Snorri’s progress slowed as the cave floor sloped away, as steep as the valley behind us, but slick with slime and lacking handholds. The gradient steepened further, the cave narrowing to a black and hungry throat.

‘Do not.’

A tall man stood between Snorri and me, in the shadow of the cave, in the space through which Snorri had just walked. A young man, clad in a strange white robe, sleeved and open at the front. He watched us through stony grey eyes, unsmiling. All the other voices retreated when the man spoke – my woman with her dead child, and the others behind her, not gone but reduced to the pulsing hiss you can hear in a seashell.

Snorri turned, taking the axe from his back. ‘I need to find a door into Hel.’

‘Such doors are closed to men.’ The man smiled then – no kindness in it. ‘Take a knife to your veins and you will find yourself there soon enough.’

‘I have a key,’ Snorri said, and made to resume his descent.

‘I said, do not.’ The man raised his hand and we heard the bones of earth groan. Plates of stone shattered away from the cavern roof, dust drifting in their wake.

‘Who are you?’ Snorri faced him again.

‘I came through the door.’

‘You’re dead?’ Snorri took a step toward the man, fascinated now. ‘And you came back?’

‘This part of me is dead, certainly. You don’t live as long as I have without dying a little. I have echoes of me in Hell.’ The man tilted his head, as if puzzled, as if considering himself. ‘Show me your key.’

‘Who are you?’ Snorri repeated his first question.

Across from me Tuttugu stopped pressing the heels of his hands to his ears. His eyes widened from the slits they had been. He grabbed up his axe from the rocks and crawled to my side.

‘Who? Who was I? That man is dead, an older one wears his skin. I’m just an echo – like the others echoing here, though my voice is the strongest. I am not me. Just a fragment, unsure of my purpose…’

‘Who—’

‘I won’t bandy my name before a light-sworn warrior.’ The dead man seemed to gather himself. ‘Show me your key. It must be the reason I am here.’

Snorri pursed his lips then released one hand from the axe to draw Loki’s key from beneath his jerkin. ‘There. Now, if you won’t help me, shade, begone.’

‘Ah. This is good. This is a good key. Give it to me.’ A hunger in him now.

‘No. Show me the door, ghost.’

‘Give me the key and I’ll allow you to continue along your path.’

‘I need the key to open the door.’

‘I thought that once. I had many failures. I called myself door-mage but so many doors resisted me. The key you hold was stolen from me, long ago. Death was the first door I opened without it. Some doors just require a push. For others a latch must be lifted, some are locked, but a sharp mind can pick most locks. Only three still resist me. Darkness, Light, and the Wheel. And when you give me the key I will own those too.’

Snorri looked my way and beckoned me. ‘Jal, I need you to lock the door after me. Take the key and give it to Skilfar. She will know how to destroy it.’

‘I have something you want, barbarian.’

The door-mage had a child at his side, gripping her neck from behind. A small girl in a ragged woollen smock, bare legs, dirty feet, her blonde hair thrown across her face as the man forced her head down.

‘Einmyria?’ Snorri breathed the name.

In one hand the child held a peg doll.

‘Emy?’ A shout. He sounded terrified.

‘The key, or I’ll break her neck.’

Snorri reached into his jerkin and tore the key from its thong. ‘Take it.’ He strode forward pressing it carelessly into the mage’s hand, eyes on his daughter, bending toward her. ‘Emy? Sweet-girl?’

Two things happened together. Somehow the mage dropped Loki’s key, and in reaching to catch it as it fell he let go of the child’s neck. She looked up, hair falling to the sides. Her face was a wound, the dark red muscle of her cheeks showed through, stripped of skin and fat. She opened her mouth and vomited out flies, thousands of them, a buzzing scream. Snorri fell back and she leapt on him, black talons erupting from the flesh of her hands.

I glimpsed Snorri amid the dark cloud, on his back, struggling to keep the child-thing from ripping out his eyes. Tuttugu lumbered forward, shielding his face, swinging his axe in an under-arm looping blow. Somehow he missed Snorri but caught the demon, the force of the impact knocking her clear. For a second she scrabbled at the muddy slope, shrieking at an inhuman pitch, then fell away, wailing, into the consuming blackness. The flies followed her, like smoke inhaled by an open mouth.

With that deafening buzz receding I noticed the laughter for the first time. Looking away from the cave’s throat I saw that the mage remained crouched on the ground, the key still before him on the rock. He wasn’t looking at Snorri, just the key, he tried again to pick it up but somehow his fingers passed through it. Another awful, bitter laughter broke from him, a noise that ran through my teeth and made them feel brittle.

‘I can’t touch it. I can’t even touch it.’

Snorri scrambled to his feet and rushed the man, throwing him back with a roar. The mage went tumbling, fetching up hard against a rock. Snorri scooped up the key and rubbed his shoulder where he’d barged his foe aside, an expression of disgust on his face, as if the contact sickened him.

‘What have you done with my daughter?’ Snorri advanced on the mage, axe raised.

The man didn’t seem to hear. He stood staring at his hands. ‘All these years and I couldn’t pick it up … Loki must have his little jokes. You’ll bring it to me though. You’ll bring me that key.’

‘What have you done with her?’ Snorri, as murderous as I’d ever heard him.

‘You can’t threaten me. I’m dead. I’m—’

Snorri’s axe took the man’s head. It hit the ground, bounced once and rolled away. The body remained standing for long enough to ensure it would feature in my nightmares, then toppled, the neck stump bloodless and pale.

‘Come on.’ Snorri started to climb down the cave’s black gullet, backing into it on all fours, feet first, questing for edges to hold his weight. ‘Leave him!’

I turned away from the remains of the man, the ghost, the echo, whatever it was.

The whispers rose again. I could hear the woman crying, the sound rasping on my sanity.

‘Jal!’ Snorri calling me.

‘I said, do not!’

I turned, looking for the voice. My eyes settled on the severed head. The thing was staring at me.

I struggled to speak, but a voice deeper than my own answered instead. Somewhere deep below us the earth rumbled, the sound of stones that had held their peace ten thousand years and more now speaking all at once, and not in a whisper but a distant roar.

‘What?’ I looked to where Snorri hung, confusion on his face.

‘Better run.’ The head spoke from the floor, lips writhing as the words sounded inside my skull.

The roar and rumble of falling rock rushed toward us, rising from deep below, a terrible gnashing, as if the intervening space were being devoured by stone teeth.

‘Run!’ I shouted, and took my own advice. My last glimpse of the cave showed me Tuttugu running my way and Snorri behind him, still trying to haul himself clear of the drop-off.

I sprinted out beneath the hanging lichen and recoiled off Tuttugu as our paths crossed. The impact sent me sprawling and probably saved my life as my terror would have seen me racing out onto a killingly steep descent toward the fjord.

‘Quick!’ I wheezed the word while trying to haul air back into my recently emptied lungs.

Tuttugu and I staggered out onto the slope, clinging to each other, a rolling cloud of pulverized stone billowing behind us. We fell to the ground and looked back as the cave exhaled dust, like smoke whooshing from the mouth of some vast dragon. Buried thunder vibrated through us, resonating in my chest.

‘Snorri?’ Tuttugu asked, staring at the cave mouth without hope.

I made to shake my head, but there, emerging from the cloud, grey from foot to head, came Snorri, spitting and coughing.

He collapsed beside us, and for the longest time none of us spoke.

Finally, with the last traces of dust drifting out across the water far below, I stated the obvious. ‘No key in the world is going to open that for you.’

8

We returned to coast-hopping, the Norseheim shore leading us south. Given that Snorri’s options appeared to have reduced to the wastes of Yttrmir in the distant and unwelcoming kingdom of Finn, or a poisoned lake in still more distant Scorron, he settled for seeking out Skilfar as originally planned, his quest so far having added only questions rather than answers.

Aslaug came to me that first night, just as on the previous one on the fjord while we sailed away from the collapse of Eridruin’s Cave, and warned me against the Norseman’s plans.

‘Snorri is led by that key and it will be his ruin, just as it will ruin any who keep his company.’

‘They say it’s Loki’s key,’ I told her. ‘You don’t trust your own father?’

‘Ha!’

‘Can’t the daughter of lies see through her father’s tricks?’

‘I lie.’ She smiled that smile which makes a man smile back. ‘But my lies are gentle things compared to those my father sews. He can poison a whole people with four words.’ She framed my face with her hands, her touch dry and cool. ‘The key is locking you in to your fate even as it opens every door. The best liars always tell the truth – they just choose which parts. I might truthfully tell you that if you fight a battle at the equinox your army will be vic-torious – perhaps though, your army would have won on every day that month, but only on the equinox would you not survive the battle to see the enemy routed.’

‘Well, believe me when I say I’m stopping in Vermillion. Horses, wild or otherwise, couldn’t drag me to Kelem’s doorstep.’

‘Good.’ Again the smile. ‘Kelem seeks to own night’s door. It would be better it were never opened than that old mage gain control over it. Get the key for yourself though, Prince Jalan, and you and I might open that particular door together. I would make you King of Shadows and be your queen…’

She broke apart in the gloom as the sun set, her smile last to depart.

We restocked on staples and water at isolated communities, and passed the larger ports by. Seven days’ sailing from Harrowheim’s quays brought us to within sight of Beerentoppen, our last landfall in the lands of Norseheim. Seven days best forgotten. I thought I’d seen the worst of travel by sea when the Ikea brought us north. Before I passed out I’d seen waves big as a man slamming into the longboat, the whole vessel rolling about and seemingly out of control. Between Harrowheim and Beerentoppen however a storm overtook us that even Snorri acknowledged as ‘a bit windy’. The gale rolled up waves that would overtop houses, setting the whole ocean in a constant heaving swell. One moment our tiny boat sat deep in a watery valley, surrounded by vast dark mountains of brine, the next second would see us hoisted skyward, lifted to the very crest of a foam-skinned hill. It seemed certain the whole craft would be flipped into the air by one wave only to come crashing down into the arms of the next for a final embrace. Somewhere in that long wet nightmare Snorri decided our boat was called the Sea-Troll.

The only good reason to let dawn find you awake is that the previous night’s wine has not yet run out, or that a demanding young woman is keeping you up. Or both. Being cold and wet and seasick was not a good reason, but it was mine.

The predawn glow revealed Beerentoppen hunched amid the marches of its smaller kin who crowded the coast. The faintest wisp of smoke marked it out, rising from a blunt peak. The range lay on the westmost tip of the jarldom of Bergen and from these shores we would head out into open seas for the final crossing to the continent.

I watched the mountains with deep mistrust while Tuttugu angled us toward the distant shore. Snorri slept as if the ocean swell were a cradle, looking so comfortable it made me want to kick him.

Snorri had told me that any child of the north knew Skilfar could be found at Beerentoppen. Come the freezing of the sea, ’til the spring thaw, Skilfar bides in Beeren’s Hall. Few though, even of the elders, snaggle-toothed and grey, perched upon their bench in the jarl’s hall, could tell you where upon the fire-mountain she might bide. Certainly Snorri appeared to have no idea. I glanced across at the big and shadowed lump of him and was considering where best to kick him when he looked up, saving me the effort.

As the sun rose across the southern shoulder of the distant volcano Baraqel walked along its rays. He strode over the sea, advancing when each wave caught the day’s sparkle. His great wings captured the light and seemed to ignite, the fire reflecting in each bronze scale of the armour that encompassed him. I tried to sink out of sight in the boat’s prow. I hadn’t thought I would still be able to see the angel, and not being in the habit of greeting the dawn with Snorri, I hadn’t put the assumption to the test.

‘Snorri!’ The valkyrie stood before us, feet upon the waves, looking down from a height little shorter than the Sea-Troll’s mast. I registered his voice with mild horror. Had Snorri been able to see Aslaug and hear everything I said to her? That would be awkward, and the bastard had never said a word about it…

‘I need to find Skilfar.’ Snorri sat up, holding the boat’s side, he hadn’t much time, Baraqel would be gone when the sun cleared the mountain. ‘Where is her cave?’

‘The mountain is a place of both darkness and light.’ Baraqel pointed back toward the Beerentoppen with his sword, the sunlight burning on bright steel. ‘It is fitting that you and…’ Baraqel peered towards me and I lowered my head out of sight. ‘…he … are bound there together. Do not trust him though, this copper prince. The dark whore has his ear now and whispers poison. He will try to take the key from you before long. It must be destroyed, and quickly. Do not give him time or opportunity to work her will. Skilfar can do—’

‘The key is mine and I will use it.’

‘It will be stolen from you, Snorri, and by the worst of hands. You serve only the Dead King’s cause in this madness. Even if you evade his minions and find the door … nothing good can come through it. The Dead King – the very one who has worked these wrongs upon you – wants death’s door opened. His desire that it be opened is the sole reason your people, your wife, your children died. And now you seek to do that work for him. Who knows how many unborn are gathered on the far side waiting to come through in the moment that key turns in the lock?’

Snorri shook his head. ‘I will bring them back. Your repetition will not change this, Baraqel.’

‘The breaking of day changes all things, Snorri. Nothing endures beyond the count of the sun. Pile a sufficient weight of mornings upon a thing and it will change. Even the rocks themselves will not outlast the morning.’

The sun now stood upon the Beerentoppen’s shoulder, in moments it would be clear.

‘Where will I find Skilfar?’

‘Her cave looks to the north, from the mountain’s waist.’ And Baraqel fell into golden pieces, sparkling and dying on the waves, until in the end they were no more than the dancing of the morning’s light amid the waters.

I lifted my head to check the angel had really gone.

‘He’s right about the key,’ I said.

Tuttugu shot me a puzzled look.

Snorri snorted, shook his head, and set to trimming the sail. He took the tiller from Tuttugu and angled the Sea-Troll toward the base of the mountain. Before long gulls spotted the craft, circling about it on high, their cries added to the wind’s keening and the slap of waves. Snorri drew the deepest breath and smiled. Beneath a mackerel sky with the morning bright around him it seemed that even the most sorrow-laden man could know a moment’s peace.

When we made shore later in the day Snorri and Tuttugu had to drag me out of the boat like a sack of provisions. Days of puking had left me dehydrated and weak as a newborn. I curled up on my cloak a few yards above the high tide line, determined never to move again. Black sand, streaked with unhealthy yellows, stretched down to the breakers. I poked half-heartedly at the stuff, coarse and intermixed with pieces of black rock made brittle by innumerable bubbles held within the stone.

‘Volcanic.’ Snorri set down the sack he’d carried from the boat and took a handful of the beach, working it through his fingers.

‘I’ll guard the beach.’ I patted the sand.

‘Up you get, the walk will do you good.’ Snorri reached for me.

I fell back with a wordless bleat of complaint, resting my head against the sand. I wanted to be back in Vermillion, far from the sea and somewhere a sight warmer than the godforsaken beach Snorri had chosen.

‘Should we hide the boat?’ Tuttugu looked up from securing the last strap of his pack.

‘Where?’ I flopped my head to the side, staring across the smooth black sands to the tumble of rocks that ended the cove.

‘Well—’ Tuttugu puffed out his cheeks as he was wont to do when puzzling.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on it for you.’ I reached out and slapped his shin. ‘You say hello to Skilfar for me. You’ll like her. Lovely woman.’

‘You’re coming with us.’ Snorri looming over me, blocking out the pale morning sun.

‘No, really. You go traipsing up your mountain of ice and fire after your witch. I’ll have a little rest. You can tell me what she said when you get back.’

In silhouette Snorri was too dark for me to see his face but I could sense his frown. He hesitated, shrugged, and moved away. ‘All right. I can’t see any barns for you to burn or women for you to chase. Should be safe enough. Watch out for any wolves. Especially dead ones.’

‘The Dead King wants you, not me.’ I heaved onto my side to watch them start up the slope toward the rocky hinterland. The land stepped rapidly up toward the Beerentoppen foothills. ‘He wants what you’re carrying. You should have dropped it in the ocean. I’ll be safe enough.’ Neither of them turned or even paused. ‘I’ll be safe enough!’ I shouted at their backs. ‘Safer than you two, anyhow,’ I muttered to the Sea-Troll.

To a city man like me there’s something deeply unsettling about being in the middle of nowhere. Excepting Skilfar, I doubted another soul lived within fifty miles of my lonely little cove. No roads, no tracks, no hint of man’s work. Not even scars left by the Builders back in the misty long-ago. On one side the bulk and heave of mountains, impassable to all but the most determined and well equipped traveller, and on the other side the wide ocean stretching to unimaginable distances and depths. The Vikings had it that the sea held its own god, Aegir, and he had no use for men, taking their ventures upon its surface as impertinence. Looking out across to the bleak horizon I could well believe it.

A light rain began to fall, driven across the sands at a shallow angle by the wind off the sea.

‘Bugger.’ I took shelter behind the boat.

I sat with my back to the hull, the damp sand under my arse, legs out before me, boot heels pushing little trenches into the stuff. I could have got in and wedged myself back into the prow but I’d had enough of boats to last a lifetime.

I retreated again into my dream of Vermillion, eyes fixed on the black sand but seeing the sun-baked terracotta roofs of the west town, threaded by narrow alleys and divided by broad avenues. I could smell the spice and smoke, see the pretty girls and highborn ladies walking where merchants sold their wares on carpet and stall. Troubadours filled the evening with serenades and the old songs that everyone knows. I missed the crowds, relaxed and happy, and the warmth. I would have paid a gold crown for just an hour of a summer day in Red March. The food too. I just wanted to eat something that hadn’t been pickled or salted or blackened on an open fire. Along the Strada Honorous or in Adam’s Plaza the hawkers roamed with trays of sweetmeats or pastry trees laden with dangling delicacies … my stomach rumbled loud enough to break the spell.

Gull cries rang out, mournful across the desolation of that shore. Shivering, I huddled deeper into my cloak. Snorri and Tuttugu had long since vanished over the first ridge. I wondered if Tuttugu was wishing he’d stayed behind yet. In Vermillion I would have a day of hawking with Barras Jon, or be out at the horse track with the Greyjar brothers. Evening would see us all gathered at the Royal Jug, or down by the river in the Ale Gardens, preparing for a night of wenching, or should Omar join us, dice and cards at the Lucky Sevens. God, I missed those days… Mind, if I turned up at the Lucky Sevens now how long would it be before Maeres Allus heard I was under one of his roofs and invited me to have a private word? A smile twisted my lips as I remembered Snorri hacking the arm from Cutter John, Maeres’s torturer. Even so, Vermillion would not be a healthy place for me until that bit of unpleasantness was sorted out.

The cries of the gulls, earlier so poignant against the bleakness of the landscape, had grown raucous and swollen to cacophony.

‘Bloody birds.’ I looked for a stone but none lay to hand.

Throwing the first stone … a simple pleasure. Once my life had been one simple pleasure after the next. I wondered what Barras and the boys would make of me, returning in my heathen rags, leaner, my sword notched, scars to show. Less than a year would have passed but would things still be the same? Could they? Would those old pastimes still satisfy? When I finally rode through the Red Gates would I really be back … or had the moment somehow passed, never to be recaptured? I’d seen too much on my journey. Learned too much. I wanted my ignorance back. And my bliss.

Something splatted on my forehead. I reached to wipe the dribbles from my cheek, fingers coming away gooey with white muck.

‘Fucking bloody…’ Weakness forgotten, I lurched to my feet, fist raised in impotent rage at the gulls circling overhead. ‘Bastards!’ I wheeled seawards, intent on finding a stone lower down the beach.

Not until I’d found my stone – a nice flatish piece of black-grey slate, smoothed by the waves and with that perfect round-in-the hand feel – and started to straighten up for my reckoning with the gulls did I notice the longboat. Still a ways out among the very first breakers, sail furled, forty oars splashing rhythmically as they drove it forward. I stood, jaw hanging, shocked into stillness. To either side of the prow a red eye had been painted, staring forward, heavy with threat.

‘Shit.’ I dropped my stone. I’d seen this before. A memory from our trek north. Looking down upon the Uulisk Fjord. A longboat made tiny with the distance. A red dot at its prow. These were Hardanger men. Red Vikings. They might even have Edris Dean with them if the bastard had escaped the Black Fort. Two Vikings stood in the prow, round rune-marked shields, wolf-skin cloaks, red hair streaming around their shoulders, axes ready, close enough to see the iron eye rings and nose guards on their helms. ‘Shit.’ I scrambled back, grabbed my sword, snatched up the smaller of three bags of provisions, started running.

A winter of over-eating and over-boozing had done little for my fitness, the only exercise I got happening under the furs. The breath came ragged from my lungs before I even reached the first ridge. What had been a dull ache of ribs crushed beneath the weight of the Fenris wolf rapidly flared into the pain of dagger-driven-into-lung with each gasp of air. On reaching the higher ground I risked pausing to turn around. The Hardanger men had their longboat beached with a dozen of them busy around it. At least twice that number had already started up the slope on my trail, scrambling over the rocks as if catching a southerner would make their day. And yes, in the midst of them, bareheaded, a solid fellow in a studded leather jerkin, sword hilt jutting over his shoulder, iron-grey hair with that blue-black streak and bound at the back into a tight queue. ‘Edris fucking Dean.’ I seemed to be making a habit of being chased up mountains by the man.

The land rose toward Beerentoppen as if it were in a dreadful hurry. I panted my way through dense clumps of gorse and heather, struggled through stands of pine and winter-ash, and scrabbled over the patches of bedrock that lay exposed where the wind wouldn’t allow the meagre soil to gather. A little higher and the trees gave up trying, and before long my path angled across bare rock unbroken by any splash of green. I kept on, cursing Snorri for leaving me, cursing Edris for giving chase. No doubts now remained about who had been keeping watch on us in Trond. And if Edris was here and dead things were hunting us too it seemed certain that at least one necromancer escaped the Black Fort with him. Quite possibly the scary bitch from Chamy-Nix who’d stood the mercenaries Snorri killed back up again.

Snorri and Tuttugu had left no trail so Beerentoppen’s broken peak was all I had to guide me. Baraqel had told them where Skilfar was but damned if I could remember what he’d said. I stumbled gasping and spluttering around the vast boulders that decorated any even vaguely flat surface, and skittered a dangerous path across slopes littered with brittle stones that may have been spat from the volcano … or dropped by pixies for all I knew.

One skitter took me a little too far. I hit a rock, tripped, and sprawled, coming to a halt not more than a foot from a drop big enough to be the killing kind. ‘Shit.’ The closest of my pursuers were three hundred yards off and moving fast. I got to my feet, hands bloody.

I’m very good at running away. For best results put me in a city. Among streets and houses I do well. In such surroundings a good sprint, tight cornering, and an open mind when it comes to hiding places will see a man clear under most circumstances. The countryside is worse – more things to trip you up, and the best hiding spots are often taken. On a bleak mountainside it comes down to endurance, and when a fellow has been wrung out by sea sickness, not to mention rolled on by the kind of wolf that would only need two friends to bring down a mammoth … well, it’s not going to end well.

Fear is a great motivator. It returned me to my feet and set me jogging on. I didn’t dare look back for fear of missing my footing again. I clutched my side, rasped in one breath after the next, and tried to keep from weaving across the slope. Hope is almost as bad as fear for goading a man past the point at which he should give up. Hope persuaded me I was opening a lead. Hope convinced me the next rise would reveal Snorri and Tuttugu just ahead. When, in a sudden pounding of footsteps, the Hardassa man caught up with me and brought me down, I fell with a wheeze of surprise, despite it having been inevitable from the moment I spotted their longboat closing on the beach.

The Viking crashed down on top of me, pressing my face to the rock. I lay panting while the rest of the pursuit gathered round. My view offered only their boots but I didn’t need to see any more than that to know they would be a fearsome bunch.

‘Prince Jalan Kendeth. Good to meet you again.’ A southern accent, a touch winded.

The weight lifted from me as my captor rolled clear. I took my time getting into a sitting position. Looking up, I found Edris Dean staring down at me, feet braced against the slope, hand on hip. He seemed pleased. The dozen Red Vikings arrayed around him looked less pleased. More of them stretched out back down the slope, toiling upward.

‘Don’t kill me!’ It seemed like a good place to start.

‘Give me the key and I’ll let you go,’ Edris said, still with the smile.

The thing about staying alive is staying useful. As a prince I’m always useful … as an heir and a figurehead. As a debtor I was useful as long as Maeres believed I might be able to pay him back. As Edris’s captive, too far from home to be a good prospect for ransom, my only real use lay in being a link to Loki’s key. ‘I can take you to it.’ It might only mean a few more hours of life but I’d sell my own grandmother for that. And her palace.

Edris waved a couple of the Hardassa men forward. One took the rations sack I’d been too preoccupied to ditch, the other started to go through my clothes, and not gently. ‘My friends here tell me there’s only one reason to put in at this shore.’ He pointed up at Beerentoppen. ‘I don’t need you to find the witch.’

‘Ah!’ The Viking was being particularly thorough and his hands were freezing. ‘Uh. But. You need me to…’ I hunted for a reason. ‘Skilfar! Snorri’s got the key and he’s going to give it to Skilfar. You’ve got to catch him before he gets to her.’

‘I don’t need you for that either.’ Edris took the dagger from his belt. A plain iron pig-sticker.

‘But…’ I eyed the blade. He had a good point. ‘He’ll trade the key for me. You don’t want to fight him – didn’t go so well last time. And … and … he might throw the key away. If he threw it as you charged him you could spend a week hunting these slopes and still not find it.’

‘Why would he trade Loki’s key against your life?’ Edris sounded doubtful.

‘Blood debt!’ It came to me in a flash. ‘He owes me his life. You don’t know Snorri ver Snagason. Honour’s all he has left. He’ll pay his debt.’

Edris twitched his mouth in a sneer, quickly gone. ‘Alrik, Knui, he’s your responsibility. Take his weapons.’

The pair searching me and my belongings took away my sword and knife. Edris strode past, setting a good pace, the others following in his wake. ‘You keep up now, my prince, or we’ll have to cut you loose and take our chances.’

Alrik, a dark-bearded thug, started me off with a shove between the shoulders. ‘Quick.’ The Red Vikings spoke the old tongue among themselves and some had a few words of Empire. Knui followed on. I had no illusions concerning what was meant by ‘cutting me loose’.

Hurrying after Edris, I kept a good eye on the ground ahead, knowing a twisted ankle would see me gutted and left to die. Now and then I stole a glance at the mountain slopes to either side. Somewhere out there the necromancer might be watching, and even in these direst of straits I had time to be scared of her.

Climbing to the Beerentoppen crater with Edris in the lead proved every bit as horrific as running before him. Staggering up ever-steeper rock-faces, hands and knees raw, feet blistered and bruised, panting hard enough to vomit a lung, I actually wished I could be back in the Sea-Troll bobbing about on the ocean.

Hours passed. Noon passed. We got high enough to see across the snow-laden peaks north and south, the going becoming even more vertical and more treacherous, and still no Snorri. It astonished me that without knowing he was pursued Snorri had kept ahead of us. Especially with Tuttugu. The man was not made for climbing mountains. Rolling down them he’d be good at.

Afternoon crawled into evening and I crawled after Edris, driven on by the threat of Alrik’s hatchet and by well-placed kicks from Knui. The peak of the mountain looked to be broken off, ending in a serrated rim. The slopes took on a peculiar folded character, as if the rock had congealed like molten fat running from a roasting pig. We got to within a few hundred yards of the top when Edris’s scouts returned to report. They yabbered in the old tongue while I lay sprawled, willing some hints of life back into limp legs.

‘No sign of Snorri.’ Edris loomed over me. ‘Not out here, not in the crater.’

‘He must be somewhere.’ I half-wondered if Snorri had lied, if he’d gone off on some different quest. Maybe the next cove held a fishing town, a tavern, warm beds…

‘He’s found the witch’s cave, and that’s bad news for all of us. Especially you.’

I sat up at that. Fear of imminent death always helps a man find new reserves of energy. ‘No! Look—’ I forced my voice to come out less shrill and panicky. Weakness invites trouble. ‘No. I wanted Snorri to give Skilfar the key – but he didn’t agree. Chances are he’ll still have it when he comes out. He’s a hard man to argue with. And then you can trade.’

‘When a man starts changing his story it’s difficult to give credence to anything he says.’ Edris eyed me speculatively, a look that had probably been the last thing half a dozen men ever saw. Even so, the blind terror that had held me since sighting their longboat had started to ebb. There’s an odd thing about being among men who are casually considering your murder. On my ventures with Snorri I’d been plunged into one horror after another, and run screaming from as many of them as I could. The terror that a dead man inspires, trailing his guts as he lurches after you, or that cold chill the hot breath of a forest fire can bring, these are reactions to wholly alien situations – the stuff of nightmare. With men though, the regular everyday sort, it’s different. And after a winter in the Three Axes I’d come to see even the most hirsute axe-clutching reavers as fairly common fellows with the same aches, pains, gripes and ambitions as every other man, albeit in the context of summers spent raiding enemy shores. With men who bear you no particular ill will and for whom your murder will be more of a chore than anything else, entailing both the effort of the act and of the subsequent cleaning of a weapon, the business of dying starts to seem a bit everyday too. You almost get swept up in the madness of the thing. Especially if you’re so exhausted that death seems like a good excuse for a rest. I returned his stare and said no more.

‘All right.’ Edris ended the long period of decision and turned away. ‘We’ll wait.’

The Red Vikings distributed themselves across the slopes to seek the entrance to Skilfar’s lair. Edris, Alrik, and Knui stayed with me.

‘Tie his hands.’ Edris settled down against a rock. He drew his sword from its scabbard and took a whetstone to its edge.

Alrik bound my hands behind me with a strip of hide. None of them had brought packs, they’d just given chase. They had no food other than what they’d stolen from me, and no shelter. From our elevation we could see along the mountainous coast for several miles in each direction, and out across the sea. The beach and their longboat lay hidden by the volcano’s shoulder.

‘Is she here?’ The necromancer plagued my thoughts, images of dead men rising kept returning to me, unbidden.

Edris let a long moment pass before a slow turn of the head brought his gaze my way. He gave me an uneasy smile. ‘She’s out there.’ A wave of his hand. ‘Let’s hope she stays there.’ He held his sword toward me. ‘She gave me this.’ The thing put an ache in my chest and made me shiver, as if I remembered it from some dark dream. Script ran along its length, not the Norse runes but a more flowing hand reminiscent of the markings the Silent Sister used to destroy her enemies. ‘Kill a babe in the womb with this piece of steel and the poor wee thing is given to Hell. Just waits there for its chance to return unborn. The mother’s death, the death of any close relative, opens a hole into the drylands, just for that lost child, and if you’re quick, if you’re powerful, all that potential can be born into the world of men in a new and terrible form.’ He spoke in a conversational tone, his measure of regret sounding genuine enough – but at the same time a cold certainty wrapped me. This was the blade that had slain Snorri’s son in his wife’s belly, Edris the man who started the foul work that the necromancers continued and that ended with Snorri facing his unborn child in the vault at the Black Fort’s heart. ‘You watch the slopes, young prince. The necromancer’s out there, and that one you really don’t want to meet.’

Alrik and Knui exchanged glances but said nothing. Knui took off his helm, setting it on his knees, and rubbed his bald scalp, scraping his nails through sweat-soaked straggles of red-blonde hair to either side. In places the helm had left him raw, bouncing back and forth on the long climb. The day had taken its toll on all of us and despite the awfulness of my predicament my head started to nod. With the horror of Edris’s words rattling about in my brain I knew I wouldn’t ever sleep again, but I lay back to rest my body. I closed my eyes, sealing away the bleakness of the sky. A moment later oblivion took me.

‘Jalan.’ A dark and seductive voice. ‘Jalan Kendeth.’ Aslaug insinuated herself into my dream, which up until that point had been a dull repetition of the day, climbing the Beerentoppen all over again, endless images of rocks and grit passing under foot, hands reaching for holds, boots scrabbling. I stopped dead on the dream-slopes and straightened to find her standing in my path, draped in shadow, bloody with the dying sun. ‘What a drab place.’ She looked about herself, tongue wetting her upper lip as she considered our surroundings. ‘It can’t really be this bad? Why don’t you wake up so I can see for real.’

I opened a bleary eye and found myself staring out at the setting sun, the sky aflame beneath louring clouds. Alrik sat close by sharpening his hatchet with a whetstone. Knui stood a little way off where the slope dropped away, watching the sun go down, or pissing, or both. Edris seemed to have disappeared, probably to check on his men.

Aslaug stood behind Alrik, looking down on the dark mass of his hair and broad shoulders as he tended his weapon. ‘Well this won’t do at all, Jalan.’ She leaned to peer behind me at my hands, wedged between my back and the rock. ‘Tied up! And you, a prince!’

I couldn’t very well answer her without drawing unwanted attention, but I watched, filled with the dark excitement her visits always provoked. It wasn’t that she made me brave exactly, but seeing the world when she stood in it just took the edge off everything and made life seem simpler. I tested the bonds on my wrists. Still strong. She made life simple … but not that simple.

Aslaug set one bare foot on the helmet Alrik had set beside him, and laid her finger against the side of his head. ‘If you launched yourself at him and struck the top of your forehead against this spot … he would not get up again.’

I gestured with my eyes toward Knui, just ten yards down the slope.

‘That one,’ she said. ‘Is standing next to a fifteen foot drop … How quickly do you think you could reach him?’

Under normal circumstances I’d still be arguing about the head butt. I would have guessed as zero the likelihood that I could pick myself up, cover the distance to Knui without falling on my face. To then knock Knui off the cliff while not following him over was surely impossible. I also wouldn’t have the nerve to try it, not even to save my life. But with Aslaug looking on, an ivory goddess smoking with dark desire, a faint mocking smile on perfect lips, the odds didn’t seem to matter any more. I knew then how Snorri must have felt when he battled with her beside him. I knew an echo of the reckless spirit that had filled him when the night trailed black from the blade of his axe.

Still I hesitated, looking up at Aslaug, slim, taut, wreathed in shadows that moved against the wind.

‘Live before you die, Jalan.’ And those eyes, whose colour I could never name, filled me with unholy joy.

I tilted away from the boulder that supported me, rocked onto my toes, and started to fall forward before straightening my legs with a sudden thrust. Suppressing the urge to roar I threw myself like a spear, forehead aimed for the spot on Alrik’s temple where Aslaug had laid her finger.

The impact ran through me, filling my vision with blinding pain. It hurt more than I had thought it would – a lot more. For a heartbeat or two the world went away. I recovered to find myself lying across Alrik’s unresisting form, head on his chest. I rolled clear, trying to see out of eyes screwed tight against the pain. Down the slope Knui had turned from the cliff edge and his contemplation of the sea.

Getting on your feet on a steep incline with your hands bound behind you is not easy. In fact I didn’t quite manage it. I lurched, half-stood, unbalanced, and set off down the mountainside flat out, desperately trying to get each foot in front of me in time to keep from diving face first into the rock.

Knui moved quickly. I aimed at him as the only chance for stopping my headlong dash. He’d already advanced a couple of yards and was unslinging his axe when, totally out of control, I cannoned into him. Even braced against the impact, Knui had no chance. Wiry and tougher than leather he might be, but I was the bigger man and carrying more momentum than anyone on a mountainside would ever want. Bones crunched, I carried him backward, we held for a broken second teetering on the cliff edge, and with a single cry we both went over.

Hitting Alrik had been harder and more painful than I wanted or expected. Hitting Knui proved much worse. Both were gentle taps compared to hitting the ground. For the second time in under a minute I passed out.

I came to lying face down on something soft. And damp. And … smelly. I couldn’t see much or move my arms.

‘Get up, Jalan.’ For a moment I couldn’t understand who was speaking. ‘Up!’

Aslaug! I couldn’t get up – so I rolled. The softness proved to be Knui. Also the dampness and the smell. His face registered surprise, the expression frozen in. The back of his head had … spread, the rocks crimson with it. I struggled to my knees, hurting myself on the stones. Aslaug stood beside me, against the cliff, her head and shoulders rising above the edge where Knui had stood. Shadow coiled up about her, vine-like, her features darkening.

‘Y – You said the drop was fifteen foot!’ I spat blood.

‘I was next to you, Jalan. How could I see?’ An infuriating smile on her lips. ‘It got you moving though. And any fall on a mountain can kill a man, with a little luck.’

‘You! Well … I.’ I couldn’t find the right words, the fear had started to catch up with me.

‘Better get your hands free…’ She pressed back against the stone, crouching now, indistinct as the horizon ate the sun and gloom swelled from every hollow.

‘I…’ But Aslaug had gone and I was speaking to the rocks.

Knui’s axe lay a little further down the slope. I shuffled toward it and with considerable difficulty positioned myself so I could start to saw at the hide strip around my wrists, watching all the while for other Hardassa men or Edris himself to come running into view.

Even a sharp axe takes a god-awful long time to cut through tough hide. Sitting there by Knui’s corpse it felt like forever. Every few seconds I let my gaze slip from lookout duty to check he hadn’t moved. I had a poor record with killing men on mountainsides. They tended to get up again and prove more trouble dead than alive.

At last the hide parted and I rubbed my wrists. Looking up, Aslaug’s second lie became apparent. She had said if I head butted Alrik where she pointed that he wouldn’t be getting up again. Yet there he was, standing at the top of the four-foot ‘cliff’ that Knui and I sat at the bottom of. He didn’t seem pleased. More importantly, he had his hatchet in one hand and a wide-bladed knife with a serrated back in the other.

‘Edris will want me alive!’ I considered running but didn’t want to bet against how well Alrik could throw that hatchet. Also he could probably catch me. I thought about the axe lying on the rocks behind me. But I’d never swung one. Not even for splitting logs.

The Viking’s glance flitted to Knui, lying there with the rocks painted a dark scarlet all around him. ‘Fuck Edris.’

Two words told me all I needed to know. Alrik was going to murder me. He tensed, readying himself to jump down. And an axe hit him in the side of his head. The blade sheared through his left eye, across the bridge of his nose, and stopped midway along the eyebrow on the other side. Alrik fell to the ground and Snorri stepped into view. He put one large foot on the side of Alrik’s face and levered his axe free with an awful cracking sound that made me retch.

‘How’s the Sea-Troll?’ Snorri asked.

‘I’m fine! Thank you very much.’ I remained seated and patted myself down. ‘No, not fine. Bruised and damn near murdered!’ Seeing Snorri suddenly made it all seem much more real and the horror of it all settled on me. ‘Edris Dean was going to gut me with a knife and—’

‘Edris?’ Snorri interrupted. ‘So he’s behind this?’ He rolled Alrik’s corpse off the drop with his foot.

Tuttugu came into view, glancing nervously over his shoulder. ‘The southerner? I thought it might just be the Hardassa…’ He caught sight of me. ‘Jal! How’s the boat.’

‘What is it with northmen and their damn boats? A prince of Red March nearly died on this—’

‘Can you carry us away from the Red Vikings?’ Snorri asked.

‘Well no, but—’

‘How’s the damn boat then?’

I took the point. ‘It’s fine … but it’s about a spear’s length from the longboat that these two came in.’ I nodded to the corpses at my outstretched feet. ‘And there are over a dozen more with it, and two dozen on the mountain.’

‘Good that Snorri found you then!’ Tuttugu rubbed his sides like he always did when upset. ‘We were hoping they’d come ashore somewhere else…’

‘How—’ I stood up, thinking to ask how it was that Snorri did find me. Then I saw her. A little further back from the edge from where Snorri and Tuttugu looked down on me. A Norse woman, fair hair divided into a score of tight braids, each set with an iron rune tablet, a style I’d seen among older women in Trond, though none ever sported more than a handful of such runes.

Snorri saw my surprise and gestured at the woman. ‘Kara ver Huran, Jal.’ And at me. ‘Jal, Kara.’ She spared me a brief nod. I guessed her to be about halfway between me and Snorri in age, tall, her figure hidden beneath a long black cape of tooled leather. I wouldn’t call her pretty … too weak a word. Striking. Bold-featured.

I bowed as she drew closer. ‘Prince Jalan Kendeth of Red March at your ser—’

‘My boat is in the next cove. Come, I’ll lead you there.’ She pinned me with remarkably blue eyes as if taking an uncomfortably accurate measure of me, then turned to go. Snorri and Tuttugu made to follow.

‘Wait!’ I stumbled about, trying to gather my wits. ‘Snorri!’

‘What?’ Glancing back over his shoulder.

‘The necromancer. She’s here too!’

Snorri turned back after Kara, shaking his head. ‘Better hurry then!’

I set both hands to the top of the ‘cliff’ and prepared to heft myself up onto the slope above when I saw my sword hilt jutting over Alrik’s shoulder. He lay on his side, not far from Knui. Above the nose his head was little more than skull fragments, hair and brain. I hesitated. I’d killed my first man with that sword, albeit mostly by accident – at least he was the first one I remembered. I’d notched that sword battling against the odds in the Black Fort, wedged it hilt-deep in a Fenris wolf. If I’d ever done anything that might truly count as manly, honourable or brave it was done holding that blade.

I took a step toward Alrik. Another. The fingers of his right hand twitched. And I ran like hell.

9

Deep gullies, rain-carved through ancient lava flows, brought us down to the cove where Kara’s boat lay at anchor.

‘It’s a long way out,’ I said, peering through the gloom. The footing in the gullies would have been dangerous in full day. Coming down in deep shadow had been practically begging for a broken ankle. And now with the night thick about us Kara expected me to swim toward a distant and slightly darker clot of sea that was allegedly a boat. I could see the gentle phosphorescence of the waves as the foam surged over the jagged rocks where the beach should be, and beyond them … nothing else. ‘A very long way out!’

Snorri laughed as if I’d made a joke and started to strap his weapons onto the little raft Kara had towed ashore when she arrived. I hugged myself, shivering. The rain had returned. I had expected snow – the night felt cold enough for it. And somewhere out there the necromancer hunted us … or had already found us and now watched from the rocks. Out there, Knui and Alrik would be stumbling along our trail, oozing, broken, filled with that dreadful hunger that invades men when they return from death.

While the others prepared themselves I watched the sea with my usual silent loathing. The moon broke from behind a cloudbank, lighting the ocean swell with glimmers and making white bands of the breaking waves.

Tuttugu appeared to share some of my reservations but at least like a walrus he had his bulk to keep him warm and to add buoyancy. My swimming might accurately be described as drowning sideways.

‘I’m not good in the water.’

‘You’re not good on land,’ Snorri retorted.

‘We’ll come in closer.’ Kara glanced my way. ‘I can bring her closer now the tide’s in.’

So one by one, with their bulkier clothing on the raft in tight-folded bundles, the three of them waded into the surf and struck out for the boat. Tuttugu went last and at least acknowledged how icy the sea was with some most un-Viking like squeals and gasps.

I stood on the beach alone with the sound of the waves, the wind, and the rain. Freezing water trickled down my neck, my hair hung in my eyes, and the bits of me that weren’t numb with cold variously hurt, ached, throbbed, and stung. Moonlight painted the rocky slopes behind the shingle in black and silver, rendering a confused mosaic into which my fears could construct the slow advance of undead horrors. Perhaps the necromancer watched from those dark hollows even now, or Edris urged the Hardassa toward me with silent gestures… Clouds swallowed the moon, leaving me blind.

Eventually, after far longer than I felt it reasonable for them to take, I heard Snorri calling. The moonlight returned, reaching through a wind-torn hole in the clouds, and the boat resolved from the darkness, picked out in silver. Kara’s looked to be a more seaworthy craft than Snorri’s rowing boat, longer, with more elegant lines and a deeper hull. Snorri ceased his labour at the oars still fifty yards clear of the shore and the hidden rocks further in. The tall mast and furled sails wagged to and fro as waves rolled beneath, gathering themselves to break upon the beach.

‘Jal! Get out here!’ Snorri’s boom across the water.

I stood, unwilling, watching the breakers smash, collapse into foam, and retreat, clawing at the shingle. Further out the sea’s surface danced with rain.

‘Jal!’

In the end one fear pushed out another. I found myself more afraid of what might be descending from the mountain beneath the cover of darkness than of what might lurk beneath the waves. I threw myself into the surf, shouting oaths at the shocking coldness of it, and tried to drown in the direction of the boat.

My swim consisted of a long and horrific repetition. First of being plunged beneath icy water, then thrashing to the surface, gasping a blind breath and finally a few seconds of beating at the brine before the next wave swamped me. It ended abruptly when a hooked pole snagged my cloak and Snorri hauled me into the boat like a piece of lost cargo.

For the next several hours I lay sodden and almost too exhausted to complain. I thought the cold would be the death of me, but hadn’t any solution to the problem or the energy to act on it if an idea had occurred. The others tried to wrap me in some stinking furs the woman had stashed away onboard but I cursed them and wouldn’t cooperate.

Dawn found us adrift beneath clear skies a mile or two off the coast. Kara unfurled the sail and set a course south.

‘Hang your clothes on the line, Jal, and get under these.’ Snorri thrust the furs at me again. Bearskins by the look of them. He pointed to his own rags flapping on one of the ropes that secured the sail. A woollen robe I’d not seen before strained to cover his chest.

‘I’m fine.’ But my voice emerged as a croak and the cold wouldn’t leave me despite the sunshine. A few minutes later I snatched up the furs with poor grace and stripped, shivering violently. I struggled to keep from toppling arse up between the benches, face in the bilge water, and I kept my back to Kara since a man is never flattered by a cold wind – not that she seemed interested in any case.

Wrapped in something that used to wrap a bear, I huddled down out of the wind close to Snorri and tried not to let my teeth chatter. Most parts of me ached and the bits that didn’t ache were really painful. ‘So what happened?’ I needed something to take my mind off my fever. ‘And who is Kara?’ Did he still have that damn key was what I really wanted to know.

Snorri looked out over the sea, the wind whipping a black mane behind him. I supposed he looked well enough in that rough-hewn barbarian sort of way but it always astonished me that a woman would look twice at him when young Prince Jal was on offer.

‘I think I’m hallucinating,’ I said, somewhat more loudly. ‘I’m sure I asked a question.’

Snorri half-startled and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Jal. Just thinking.’ He slid down closer to me, sheltering. ‘I’ll tell you the story.’

Tuttugu came forward to listen, as if he hadn’t seen the tale unfold before him the previous day. He sat tented in sailcloth while his clothes flapped on the mast. Only Kara stayed back, hand on the tiller, gaze to the fore, occasionally glancing up at the stained expanse of the sail, pregnant with the wind.

‘So,’ began Snorri, and just as so often before on our travels he wrapped that voice around us and drew us into his memories.

Snorri had stood in the prow, watching the coast draw near.

‘We’ll beach her? Yes?’ Tuttugu paused by the anchor, a crude iron hook.

Snorri nodded. ‘See if you can wake Jal.’ Snorri mimed a slap. He knew Tuttugu would be more gentle. The fat man’s presence cheered him in ways he couldn’t explain. With Tuttugu around Snorri could almost imagine these were the old days again, back when life had been more simple. Better. In truth when the pair of them, Jalan and Tuttugu, had turned up on the quay in Trond Snorri’s heart had risen. For all his resolve he had no love of being alone. He knew Jal had been pushed into the boat by circumstance rather than jumping of his own accord, but Tuttugu had no reason to be there other than loyalty. Of the three of them only Tuttugu had started to make a life in Trond, finding work, new friends, a woman to share his days. And yet he’d given that up in a moment because an old friend needed him.

An hour later and the beach lay far behind them. Snorri had climbed high enough to break clear of the pines, thick about Beerentoppen’s flanks. Tuttugu came puffing from the tree-line a minute later. They turned north and wound around the mountain on a slow and rising spiral. Snorri aimed to bring them to the north face where they could ascend directly, searching for the cave. They saw few signs of life, once an eagle, wings spread wide to embrace a high wind, once a mountain goat, racing away across broken slopes that looked all but impassable.

Within two hours they had the north to their backs and were ready to climb in earnest.

‘Troll country, I’d say.’ Tuttugu took a suspicious sniff, nose to the wind.

Snorri snorted and put his water flask to his lips. Tuttugu had never so much as smelled a troll, let alone seen one. Still he had a point: the creatures did seem to like volcanoes. Wiping his mouth Snorri started up the slope.

‘There!’ After another hour’s clambering Tuttugu proved to have the sharper eyes, jabbing a finger toward an overhang several hundred yards to their left.

Snorri squinted. ‘Could be.’ And led off, placing each foot on the treacherous surface with caution. Between their path and the cave lay a dark scree slope where any slip would likely see them sliding halfway back down in an ever-growing avalanche of loose, frost-shattered stone. Twice Tuttugu went down sharply on his backside with a despairing wail. Their luck held though and they made it to the firmer footing at the base of the cliffs into which the cave was set.

Snorri led again, Tuttugu in his wake sniffing. ‘I can smell something. It’s trolls. I knew it.’ He fumbled for his axe. ‘Bloody trolls! I should have stayed with Jal—’

‘It’s not trolls.’ Snorri could smell it too. Something powerful, animal, the kind of rankness that only a predator can afford. He shrugged the axe from across his shoulders, and took it in two hands, his father’s axe, recovered from the Broke-Oar on the Bitter Ice. Slow steps took him closer to the cave mouth, the dark interior yielding secrets as it grew to encompass his vision.

‘Hel’s teats!’ Snorri breathed the oath out before closing his jaw, which had fallen open. In the shadows a monster slumbered. A hound that might stand taller than a shire horse, and wide as the elephant in Taproot’s circus. It had that blunt yet wrinkled face of dogs bred for fighting rather than the hunt. One canine, of similar size to Snorri’s fingers and thumb all funnelled up together, protruded from the lower jaw, escaping slobbery jowls to point toward a wet nose.

‘It’s asleep.’ A hoarse whisper at his shoulder. ‘If we’re very quiet we can get away.’

‘This is her cave, Tutt. There aren’t going to be two. And this must be her guardian. It’s not here by chance.’

‘We could…’ Tuttugu rubbed furiously at his beard as if hoping to dislodge an answer. ‘You could lure it out and I could drop a rock on it from up there!’ He pointed to the cliff top.

‘I think that might … irritate her. I’ve met this woman, Tutt. She’s not someone you want to irritate.’

‘What then? We can’t very well walk up and pat the puppy.’

Snorri took a hand from his axe and dug beneath his furs to touch Loki’s key. Immediately he felt them, Emy, Egil, Karl, Freja, as if it were their skin beneath his fingers not the slickness of obsidian. ‘That’s exactly what we’ll do.’

With the need to run trembling in every limb, Snorri advanced into the cave, axe lowered, quiet but not creeping. A few yards in and he sensed he was alone. Turning, he beckoned Tuttugu. The other half of the Undoreth stood no further forward than when they last spoke, huddled in his leathers and quilted jacket, arms so tight about himself he almost squeezed his bulk thin. Snorri beckoned again, with more urgency. Tuttugu offered a despairing look at the heavens and hurried into the cave.

In close file the pair of them trod a silent path toward a tunnel leading from the back of the cave, some yards past the vastness of the dog. The size of the beast overwhelmed Snorri’s senses, the powerful dog-stink, the warmth of its breath as he passed within feet of that great muzzle. His back scraped the cave wall with each step. And at the closest point one huge eye rolled open amid the folded topology of the dog’s face, regarding Snorri with an unreadable look. For a moment he froze, hand tight on his axe, raising the weapon an inch or two before remembering how poorly it would serve him. With his gaze fixed on the tunnel mouth Snorri moved on, Tuttugu wheezing behind him as if terror had taken hold of his throat.

Twenty paces later they stood out of the hound’s sight in a tunnel too small for any pursuit. Snorri felt his body unclench. When the Fenris wolf came for him he had been able to attack, channelling his energy into the battle. Holding back all those instincts had wound every fibre of him to within a hair of snapping.

‘Come.’ He nodded ahead to the glow reflecting on the tunnel walls.

Another convolution of the passage brought them to a cavern, lit from above by fissures running through the thickness of the mountainside to a distant sky. A small pool lay beneath these vents, glowing with the light. The chamber, large as any jarl’s hall, lay strewn with the business of living. A pallet heaped with bed furs, a blackened hearth by some natural chimney in the rock, a cauldron before it, other pots stacked to one side, here and there sea-chests, some closed, others open to display clothes, or sacks of stores. Two women sat close together in oak chairs carved in the Thurtan style. Between them they held a scroll, the younger woman tracing a finger along some line of it while the elder watched and nodded.

‘Come in if you must.’ Skilfar raised an arm. Her flesh lay as white as it had when she held audience amid the conjunction of Builders’ tracks, guarded by Hemrod’s plasteek army, but it no longer smoked with coldness. Her eyes held that same wintry blue but they were the eyes of an old woman now, not some frost-sworn demon.

Snorri took a few paces into the chamber.

‘Ah, the warrior. But no prince this time? Not unless he filled out … a little.’ Skilfar cocked her head, looking past Snorri to Tuttugu, trying unsuccessfully to hide in his shadow. The younger woman with the braided hair put down her scroll, unsmiling.

Snorri took another step then realized he still had his axe in hand. ‘Sorry.’ He secured it across his back. ‘That beast of yours scared the hell out of me! Not that an axe would have helped much.’

A thin smile. ‘So you braved my little Bobo did you?’ Her glance flitted to the entrance behind him. Snorri turned. A small dog, stubby-legged, wrinkle-faced, and broad-chested had followed Tuttugu. It sat now, looking up at the fat man with sad eyes, one tooth protruding from its lower jaw above the folds of its muzzle.

‘How—’

‘Everything in this world depends upon how you look at it, warrior. Everything is a matter of perspective – a matter of where you stand.’

‘And where do I stand, völva?’ Snorri kept his voice respectful, and in truth he had always respected the wisdom of the völvas, the rune-sisters as some called them. Witches of the north as Jal had it. Though they stood at odds with the priests of Odin and of Thor the rune-sisters always gave advice that seemed at its core more honest, darker, filled with doubt in place of hubris. Of course the völvas Snorri had dealt with in the past were neither so famed nor so unsettling as Skilfar. Some said she was mother to them all.

Skilfar looked to the woman beside her, ‘Kara?’

The woman, a northerner with maybe thirty summers on her, frowned. She fixed Snorri with a disconcerting stare and ran the iron runes at the ends of her braids through her fingers. They marked her as wise beyond her years.

‘He stands in shadow,’ she said. ‘And in light.’ Her frown deepened. ‘Past death and loss. He sees the world … through a keyhole?’ She shook her head, runes clattering.

Skilfar pursed her lips. ‘He’s a difficult one, I grant you.’ She took another scroll from the pile beside her, tight-wrapped and ending in caps of carved whale tooth. ‘First dark-sworn and clinging to a lost hope. Now light-sworn and holding to a worse one. And carrying something.’ She set a bony hand to her narrow and withered chest. ‘An omen. A legend. Something made of belief.’

‘I’m looking for the door, völva.’ Snorri found his own hand at his chest, resting above the key. ‘But I don’t know where it lies.’

‘Show me what you have, warrior.’ Skilfar tapped her breastbone.

Snorri watched her a moment. Hardly a kindly grandmother, but far more human than the creature he and Jal had found amid her army of plasteek warriors the previous year. Which was her true face? he wondered. Maybe neither of them. Maybe her dog was neither the monster he’d first seen nor the toy that seemed to sit now by the tunnel mouth. When a man can’t trust his eyes what does he fall back on … and what does the choice he makes reveal about him? Lacking answers, Snorri drew forth the key on the thong that hung about his neck. It made slow rotations in the space before his eyes, from some angles reflecting the world, from others dark and consuming. Did Loki really fashion this? Had the hands of a god touched what he had touched? And if so, what lies had the trickster left there, and what truths?

Three slow claps, sounding to the tempo of the key’s revolutions. ‘Extraordinary.’ Skilfar shook her head. ‘I underestimated our Silent Sister. You actually did it. And tweaked the nose of this upstart “king of the dead”.’

‘Do you know where the door is?’ Snorri almost saw their faces in the flashes between reflection and absorption, Emy’s eye glimpsed in the moment, as if through a closing crack. The fire of Freja’s hair. ‘I need to know.’ He could taste the wrongness. He knew the trap, and that he reached to close it around himself. But he saw them, felt them … his children. No man could step away. ‘I need to know.’ His voice rough with the need.

‘That is a door that should not be opened.’ Skilfar watched him, neither kind nor cruel. ‘Nothing good will come of it.’

‘It’s my choice,’ he said, not sure if it was or not.

‘The Silent Sister cracked the world to fill you and that foolish prince with magic. Magic enough to thwart even the unborn. Time was when you put a crack in the world it would heal quickly, like a scratch on skin. Now such wounds fester. Any crack is apt to grow. To spread. The world has become thin. Pressed on too many sides. The wise can feel it. The wise fear it.

‘Given time enough, and peace, the wound you bear will heal. Time still heals all wounds, for now. And the scars left behind are our legacy of remembrance. But pick at it and it will fester and consume you. This is true both of the crack the Sister ran through your marrow, and of the hurt the Dead King gave.’

Snorri noted she didn’t speak of the assassin’s cut. He didn’t trust her enough to volunteer the information, and instead set his teeth against the growing ache of it and the southward tug that seemed to pull on him by each rib.

‘Give me the key and I will set it beyond men. The spirits you have borne, both the dark and the light, are of a piece. Like fire and ice they are no friends of our kind. They exist at the extremes, where madness dwells. Man treads the centre line and when he wanders from it, he falls. You carry an avatar of light now but he lies as sweetly as the darkness.’

‘Baraqel told me to destroy the key. To give it to you. To do anything but use it.’ Snorri had endured the same speech dawn after dawn.

‘The dark then, whatever face it took to persuade you, you must not believe it.’

‘Aslaug cautioned me against the key. She said Loki bled lies, breathed them, and his tricks would lay creation in ruins given but an inch. Her father would feed all darkness to the wyrm just as soon as break the light. Anything to upset the balance and drown the world in chaos.’

‘This is truly your will, warrior? Yours alone?’ Skilfar leaned forward in her chair now, her gaze a shiver that travelled the length of him. ‘Tell me – I will know the truth of it.’ The age of her wavered in her voice, a frightening weight of years that sounded little different from pain. ‘Tell me.’

Snorri set the key back against his chest. ‘I am Snorri ver Snagason, warrior of the Undoreth. I have lived a Viking’s life, raw and simple, on the shore of the Uulisk. Battle and clan. Farm and family. I was as brave as it was in me to be. As good as I knew. I have been a pawn to powers greater than myself, launched as a weapon, manipu-lated, lied to. I cannot say that no hand rests on my shoulder even now – but on the sea, in the wild of the evening storm and the calm of morning, I have looked inside, and if this is not true then I know no true thing. I will take this key that I won through battle and blood and loss. I will open death’s door and I will save my children. And if the Dead King or his minions come against me I will sow their ruin with the axe of my fathers.’

Tuttugu came to stand at Snorri’s shoulder, saying nothing, his message clear.

‘You have a friend here, Snorri of the Undoreth.’ Skilfar appraised Tuttugu, her fingers moving as if playing a thread through her hands. ‘Such things are rare. The world is sweetness and pain – the north knows this. And we die knowing there is a final battle to come, greater than any before. Leave your dead to lie, Snorri. Sail for new horizons. Set the key aside. The Dead King is beyond you. Any of the hidden hands could take this thing from you. I could freeze the marrow in your bones and take it here and now.’

‘And yet you won’t.’ Snorri didn’t know if Skilfar’s magics could overwhelm him, but he knew that having sought his motivations and intent with such dedication the völva would not simply take the key.

‘No.’ She released a sigh, the coldness of it pluming in the air. ‘The world is better shaped by freedom. Even if it means giving foolish men their head. At the heart of all things, nestled among Yggdrasil’s roots, is the trick of creation that puts to shame all of Loki’s deceptions. What saves us all are the deeds of fools as often as the acts of the wise.

‘Go if you must. I tell you plain, though – whatever you find, it will not be what you sought.’

‘And the door?’ Snorri spoke the words low, his resolve never weaker.

‘Kara.’ Skilfar turned to her companion. ‘The man seeks death’s door. Where will he find it?’

Kara looked up from the study of her fingers, frowning in surprise. ‘I don’t know, Mother. Such truths are beyond me.’

‘Nonsense.’ Skilfar clicked her fingers. ‘Answer the man.’

The frown deepened, hands rose, fingers knotted among the rune-hung braids, an unconscious gesture. ‘The door to death … I…’

‘Where should it be?’ Skilfar demanded.

‘Well…’ Kara tossed her head. ‘Why should it be anywhere? Why should death’s door be any place? If it were in Trond how would that be right? What of the desert men in Hamada? Should they be so far from—’

‘And the world is fair?’ Skilfar asked, a smile twitching on thin lips.

‘It – No. But it has a beauty and a balance to it. A rightness.’

‘So if there is a door but it isn’t anywhere – what then?’ A pale finger spinning to hurry the young woman along.

‘It must be everywhere.’

‘Yes.’ Skilfar turned her winter-blue eyes upon Snorri once more. ‘The door is everywhere. You just have to know how to see it.’

‘And how do I see it?’ Snorri looked about the cavern as if he might find the door had been standing in some shadowed nook all this time.

‘I don’t know.’ Skilfar raised a hand to stop his protest. ‘Must I know everything?’ She sniffed the air, peering curiously at Snorri. ‘You’re wounded. Show me.’

Without complaint Snorri opened his jacket and drew up his shirt to show the red and encrusted line of the assassin’s knife. The two völvas rose from their seats for a closer inspection.

‘Old Gróa in Trond said the venom on the blade was beyond her art.’ Snorri winced as Skilfar jabbed a cold finger at his ribs.

‘Warts are beyond Gróa’s art.’ Skilfar snorted. ‘Useless girl. I could teach her nothing.’ She pinched the wound and Snorri gasped at the salt sting of it. ‘This is rock-sworn work. A summons. Kelem is calling you.’

‘Kelem?’

‘Kelem the Tinker. Kelem master of the emperor’s coin. Kelem the Gate-keeper. Kelem! You’ve heard of him!’ An irritable snap.

‘I have now.’ Snorri shrugged. The name did ring a bell. Stories told to children around the fire in the long winter nights. Snorri thought of the assassins’ Florentine gold, remembering for a moment the fearsome swiftness of the men. Each coin stamped with the drowned bell of Venice. The ache of his wound built, along with his anger. ‘Tell me more about him … please.’ A growl.

‘Old Kelem stays salted in his mine, hiding from the southern sun. He’s buried deep but little escapes him. He knows ancient secrets. Some call him the last Mechanist, a child of the Builders. So old he makes me look young.’

‘Where—’

‘Florence. The banking clans are his patrons. Or he is theirs. That relationship is harder to unravel than any knot Gordion ever tied. Perhaps the clans sprang from his loins back along the centuries when he quickened. Like many children though they are eager to inherit – of late the banks of Florence have been flexing their muscles, testing the old man’s strength … and his patience.’ Skilfar’s gaze flitted to Kara, then back to Snorri. ‘Kelem knows every coin in this Broken Empire of ours and holds the beating heart of its commerce in his claw. A different type of power to imperial might or the Hundred’s thrones, but power none the less.’ In her palm lay a golden coin, a double florin, minted by the southern banks. ‘A different power but in its way more mighty than armies, more insidious than dancing in the dreams of crowned heads. A double-edged sword perhaps, but Kelem has lived for centuries and has yet to cut himself.’

‘I thought him a story. A children’s tale.’

‘They call him the Gate-keeper too. He finds and opens doors. It’s clear enough why he’s called you to him. Clear enough why you need to be rid of this key and soon.’

‘Gate-keeper?’ Snorri said. ‘Do they call him a door-mage as well?’ He felt his hands tighten into fists and saw for a moment a demon wearing Einmyria’s form, leaping at him, released by the mage in Eridruin’s Cave.

‘Once upon a time he called himself that, back in the long ago.’

‘And he is rock-sworn, you say?’

Skilfar tilted her head to study Snorri from a new angle. ‘To live so long a man must swear to many masters, but gold is of the earth and it was always his first love.’

‘I’ve met him … or a shadow of him. He barred the way to Hel against me, said I would bring the key to him.’ Snorri paused, remembering the demon and how his heart had leapt when he thought it his little girl. He forced his hands to unclench. ‘And I will.’

‘That’s madness. After the Dead King there is no one worse to give the key to.’

‘He knows where death’s door is though. Can you show it to me? Is there another choice? A better choice? One Kelem cannot deny me?’ Snorri tucked the key away and closed his jacket. ‘Get a codfish on the line and you have dinner. Get a whale on the line and you might be the dinner.’ He set a hand against the blade of his axe. ‘Let him reel me in, and we shall see.’

‘At least it saves me trying to ease his hook out of you without killing you,’ Skilfar said, her lips pursed. ‘Kara will go with you.’

‘What?’ Kara looked up at that, head turning sharp enough to fan out her hair.

‘No. I—’ Snorri couldn’t think of an objection other than it felt wrong. The sharp challenge in the woman’s regard had sparked an instant attraction in him. She reminded him of Freja. And that felt like betrayal. A foolish notion but an honest one, deep as bones.

‘But—’ Kara shook her head. ‘A warrior? What’s to be learned watching him swing his axe?’

‘You’ll go with him, Kara.’ Skilfar became stern. ‘A warrior? Today he is a warrior. Tomorrow, who knows? A man casts a million shadows, and yet you trap him within such a singular opinion. You travelled here seeking wisdom, girl, but all that I have here on these scrolls is information. The wise come into their majority out in the world, amid the muck and pain of living. It’s not all the dropping of runes and the wrapping of old platitudes in gravitas. Get out there. Go south. Burn in the sun. Sweat. Bleed. Learn. Come to me older, tempered, hardened.’ She tapped a finger to the scroll case on her lap. ‘These words have waited here an age already – they will wait on you a little longer. Read them with eyes that have seen the wideness of the world and they will mean more to you. There is a singular benefit in Snorri’s choosing of Kelem to show him the door. A thousand-mile benefit. On such a journey a man might grow, and change, and find himself a new opinion. Perhaps you can help him.’

Snorri stretched beside me. ‘And that was that.’ He stood, the boat shifting beneath his weight, and glanced at Kara. ‘Skilfar shooed us out and her little dog followed to see that we left. Kara followed on minutes later. She said there were men hunting us on the mountain and that we’d find you near the crater on the west face.’

I looked between them, Snorri, Tuttugu, Kara – the madman, the faithful hound, the baby witch. Three of them against the Dead King, and if he didn’t take them then Kelem waited at the end of their journey. And the prize if they won was to open death’s door and let hell out…

‘Florence, eh? The best path to Florence leads through Red March. You can drop me off there.’

10

Perhaps Kara had a magic about her that permeated her boat, or maybe I had found my sea legs at long last – either way, the voyage south from the Beerentoppen proved less horrendous than the many days with Snorri in the Sea-Troll. Kara had named her boat Errensa, after the valkyrie that swim beneath the waves to gather the war dead for Ragnarok. She knew the winds and kept her sails full, driving us south faster than a man can run.

‘She’s a fine looking woman,’ I told Snorri when he came to join me, huddled in the prow. The boat wasn’t large but the wind gave us privacy, overwriting our conversation and snatching the words away.

‘That she is. She’s got a strength about her. Didn’t think she’d be your type, Jal. And haven’t you been mooning over this Lisa of yours ever since we left Trond?’

‘Well, yes, I mean Lisa’s a lovely girl… I’m sure I’ll climb her balcony once or twice when I get back but…’ But a man has to think about the here and now, and right there and right then, Kara had all my attention.

Life aboard a small sailboat is not to be recommended, however attractive the company, and even when you don’t have to spend most of each day emptying yourself over the side. The food proved cold, monotonous, and in short supply. The nights continued to try to reinstate winter. My fever continued to keep me weak and shivering. And any hopes I had of exercising my charms on Kara died early on. For one thing it’s hard to play the enigmatic prince of romance when the object of your affections gets to watch you shit into the sea twice a day. For another, the very first time my hand wandered her way Kara took a long knife from out beneath the many pleats of her skirt and explained with unnecessary volume how she would use it to pin that hand to my groin should it wander again. Snorri and Tuttugu just watched me and rolled their eyes as if it were my fault! I cursed the lot of them for miserable peasants and retreated to nibble on our diminishing store of dry oatcakes – revolting things.

At sunset Aslaug came, rising through the boards of the hull as if the inky depths had kept her safe while day scoured the world. Tuttugu glanced my way, shuddered and busied himself with a net that needed repairs. Snorri stared hard at the spot from which Aslaug rose, his gaze unreadable. Did he miss her company? He hadn’t the look of a man who saw her clearly though, his eyes sliding past her as she moved toward me. I hope her words slid past his ears just as well.

‘Jalan Kendeth. Still huddled among northmen? Yours is the palace of Red March, not some creaking tub.’

‘You have a faster means of getting there?’ I asked, my mood still soured.

Aslaug made no reply but turned slowly as if hunting a scent, until she faced the stern where Kara stood beside the tiller. The völva saw Aslaug in the moment the avatar’s gaze fell upon her. I could tell it in an instant. Kara made no attempt to conceal that recognition, or her anger. Without taking her gaze from the spirit she tied off the tiller and stepped forward. She compensated for the swell, advancing as if the boat were set in rock.

‘Out!’ Loud enough to startle Snorri and Tuttugu, and to have me jump half out of my seat. ‘Out, night-spawn. Out, lie-born. Out, daughter of Loki! Out, child of Arrakni!’ Kara’s eyes blazed with the sunset. She advanced, one hand held before her, clutching something that looked rather like a human bone.

‘Well she’s a pretty thing!’ Aslaug said. ‘Snorri will take her from you. You know that don’t you, Jalan?’

‘Out!’ Kara roared. ‘This boat is mine!’ She struck the bone to the mast and all about the hull runes lit, burning with a wintery light. In that instant Aslaug seemed to collapse, flowing into some smaller shape, the size of a large dog, so wreathed in darkness it was hard to see any detail … other than it had too many legs. In a quick thrashing of long dry limbs Aslaug scurried over the side and was gone without a splash. I shuddered and looked up at Kara who returned my gaze, her lips set in a thin line. I opted to say nothing. The völva held like that, still with the bone to the mast, for another minute, then another, and then, with the sun gone behind the world, she relaxed.

‘She is not welcome here,’ Kara said, and returned to steering the boat.

‘She and Baraqel are all Snorri and I have in our corner. They’re ancient spirits, angel and … well… There are people after us, things, after us that work magic as easily as breathing. We need them. The Red Queen’s sister gave us—’

‘The Red Queen moves you on her board like all her other pawns. What she gives you is as much a collar as a weapon.’ Kara took up the tiller again. Adjusted course. ‘Don’t be fooled about these creatures’ nature. Baraqel is no more a valkyrie or angel than you or me. He and Aslaug were human once. Some among the Builders copied themselves into their machines – others, when the Wheel first turned, escaped their flesh into new forms.’

‘Aslaug never told me—’

‘She’s the daughter of lies, Jalan!’ Kara shrugged. ‘Besides, she probably doesn’t remember. Their spirits have been shaped by expectation for so long. When the Day of a Thousand Suns came their will released them and they were free. Gods in an empty world … then we came back. New men, roaming the earth as the poisons faded. New will. And slowly, without us knowing it, or them, our stories bound about the spirits and our will made them into something suited to our expectations.’

‘Uh.’ I leaned back, trying to make sense of the völva’s words. After a while my head started to hurt. So I stopped, and watched the waves instead.

We sailed on. Snorri and Kara seemed to find excitement in each newly revealed stretch of dreary Norse coastline. Even the sea itself could fascinate them. The swell is doing that, the wind is turning, the rocks are this, the current is westerly. Pah. I’d heard more interesting discussions between herdmen cataloguing the ailments of sheep. Or I probably would have if I’d listened.

A consequence of boredom is that a man is forced to look either to the future or the past, or sideways into his imagination. I tend to find my imagination too worrisome to contemplate, and I had already exhausted the possible scenarios for my homecoming. So, sulking in the Errensa’s prow I spent long hours considering the circumstances of my abduction from Red March and forced march across half of Empire to the Black Fort. Time and again my thoughts returned to great uncle Garyus and his silent sister – born a conjoined monstrosity, the rightful king and queen of Red March. Their father, Gholloth had set the chirurgeons to splitting them, but neither could ever be set upon the throne when age claimed him. He passed them over for Alica, the younger sister. My grandmother. A less obvious monster. But which of them ruled? Which of them had truly set Snorri and myself upon our path north? Which of them had gambled my life and soul against the Dead King? The blood-men with their sharp knives and blunt opinions had cut Garyus from his sister, but the twins had not split even. Garyus a broken teller of stories, his nameless sister a silent voyeur of years yet to come. And Grandmother, the Red Queen, the beating heart of the Marches for a generation, the iron queen with no give in her, her armies feared across the south, her name reviled.

In the empty hours memories plagued me as they are wont to do with nothing to drown out their whispering. Garyus had given me Mother’s locket, and over years I’d so wrapped it in lies that I couldn’t see its value when sat in my palm. Perhaps I’d been equally blind to its purpose. Dr Taproot, the man who had known obscure facts about the Scraa slopes and Nfflr ridges of the Uuliskind, had told me a thing about my mother and I had laughed at his mistake. Had I wrapped her life in as many lies as her locket? Did I look at her death with the same blindness that had hidden the locket’s nature from me?

It’s not like me to brood on the past. I’m not comfortable with uncomfortable truths. I prefer to round off the edges and corners until I have something worth keeping. But a boat and the wide sea give a man little else to do.

‘Show me the key,’ I said.

Snorri sat beside me trailing a line and hook into the sea. He’d caught nothing in all the hours he’d been at it.

‘It’s safe.’ He placed a hand on his chest.

‘I don’t think that thing can be described as safe.’ I sat up to face him. ‘Show it to me.’

With reluctance Snorri tied his line to the oarlock and drew the key from his shirt. It didn’t look like part of the world. It looked as if it had no place there in the daylight. As the key turned on its thong it seemed to change, flickering from one possibility to the next. I supposed a key that could open any lock had to entertain many shapes. I reached for it, but Snorri pushed my hand aside.

‘Best not.’

‘You’re worried I’ll drop it in the sea?’ I asked.

‘You might.’

‘I won’t.’ Hand held out.

Snorri raised a brow. A simple but eloquent expression. I had been known to lie before.

‘We came as close to dying for this thing as men can come, Snorri. Both of us. I have a right.’

‘It wasn’t for the key.’ Voice low, eyes seeing past me now. ‘We didn’t go for the key.’

‘But it’s all we got,’ I said, angry that he should deny me.

‘It’s not a thing you want to touch, Jal. There’s no joy in it. As a friend I say don’t do this.’

‘As a prince of Red March I say give me the fucking key.’

Snorri lifted the thong from about his neck and with a sigh dangled the key into my palm, still retaining the tie.

I closed my hand about it. For the briefest moment I considered ripping it free and arcing it out across the water. In the end I lacked either the courage or the cruelty to do it. I’m not sure which.

‘Thank you.’ The thing seemed to shift in my grasp and I squeezed it to force one form upon it.

There isn’t much I remember about my mother. Her hair – long, dark, smelling of softness. I recall how safe her arms felt. I remember the comfort in her praise, though I could summon none of the words to mind. The sickness that took her I recollected as the story I told about it when people asked. A story without drama or tragedy, just the everyday futility of existence. A beautiful princess laid low by common disease, wasted away without romance by a flux. Isolated by her contagion – her last words spoken to me through a screen. The betrayal a child feels when a parent abandons them returned to me now – still sharp.

‘Oh.’ And without transition the key was no longer a key. I held my mother’s hand, or she held mine, a seven-year-old boy’s hand encompassed in hers. I caught her scent, something fragrant as honeysuckle.

Snorri nodded, his eyes sympathetic. ‘Oh.’

Without warning the boat, the sea, Snorri, all of it vanished, just for the beat of a heart. A blinding light took its place, dazzling, dying away as I blinked to reveal a familiar chamber with star-shaped roundels studding the ceiling. A drawing room in the Roma Hall where my brothers and I would play on winter nights. Mother stood there, half bent toward me, a smile on her face – the face in my locket, but smiling, eyes bright. All replaced a moment later with the boat, the sky, the waves. ‘What?’ I dropped the key as though it had bitten me. It swung from Snorri’s hand on the thong. ‘What!’

‘I’m sorry.’ Snorri tucked the key away. ‘I warned you.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. Too young she was for the assassin’s blade. Taproot’s words, as if he spoke them in my ear. ‘No.’ I stood up, staggered by the swell. I closed my eyes and saw it again. Mother bending toward me, smiling. The man’s face looming over her shoulder. No smile there. Half familiar but not a friend. Features shadowed, offered only in rumour, hair so black as to be almost the blue beneath a magpie’s wing, with grey spreading up from the temples.

The world returned. Two steps brought me to the mast and I clung for support, the sail flapping inches from my nose.

‘Jal!’ Snorri called, motioning for me to come back and sit before the sweep of the boom took me into the water.

‘There was a blade, Snorri.’ Each blink revealed it, light splintering from the edge of a sword held low and casual, the fist at his side clenched about its hilt. ‘He had a sword!’ I saw it again, some secret hidden in the dazzle of its steel, putting an ache in my chest and a pain behind my eyes.

‘I want the truth.’ I stared at Kara. Aslaug hadn’t arrived with the setting sun. To me, that was proof enough of the völva’s power. ‘You can help me,’ I told her.

Kara sighed and bound the tiller. The wind had fallen to a breeze. The sails would soon be furled. She sat beside me on the bench and looked up to study my face. ‘Truth is rarely what people want, Prince Jalan.’

‘I need to know.’

‘Knowledge and truth are different things,’ Kara said. She brushed stray hair from her mouth. ‘I want to know, myself. I want to know many things. I braved the voyage to Beerentoppen, sought out Skilfar, all in search of knowing. But knowledge is a dangerous thing. You touched the key – against Snorri’s strongest advice – and it brought you no peace. Now I advise you to wait. We’re aimed at your homeland. Ask your questions there, the traditional way. The answers are likely not secrets, just facts you’ve avoided or misplaced whilst growing up.’

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