Haraldr’s arm swiped out and caught Mar’s boot, and Mar’s blade whirred past his face. Mar lifted a leg and milled his arms in a desperate effort to adjust his balance. He pitched sideways and Haraldr was able to raise himself to a crouch.
He had time to nod knowingly to the astonished blue eyes before Mar fell on his back, onto the tiles, and began sliding to the cornice of the roof. Now Mar’s sword chinged against the stone below. His legs were already over the cornice before he was able to turn onto his stomach. His momentum continued to pull him down. His icy eyes glimmered as his head disappeared. His huge hands clutched for the cornice. His hands did not disappear. Mar clung to the lip of the cornice like a strange human banner, arms outstretched, his entire body suspended in the void.
Haraldr knelt on the catwalk and waited. He glanced to the north and saw that the Blue Star’s army had captured the highest tiers of the stadium; the seats beneath held an audience of corpses. Down on the track the guildsmen, in neat ranks, spear shafts held high, began entering to reinforce the push into the palace. They shouted their improvised oaths for a while and then grew silent as they turned their attention to the curious drama high above them. Haraldr could hear his own steady exhalations. Eventually every head in the stadium was directed to the roof of the Imperial seating pavilion. And still Mar’s hands did not move from the cornice.
The sound was like no human sound: the last dragon, its black entrails ripped out so that the corpses it had devoured could bellow their dying rage. Mar’s hands flexed and his knuckles surged. Haraldr watched as the head, no longer Mar’s but the wolf’s, the dragon’s, his complexion as dark as a dead man’s blood, rose slowly above the cornice. Mar’s mighty arms propelled his entire torso above the roof-line. He swung his leg over the cornice. The demon had climbed back from the abyss, and the favour of Odin was on his face.
Haraldr was beyond terror. Mar’s eyes had turned red, as if washed in blood. Haraldr was drawn to them with dreadful fascination, lured as he had been by Abelas. Mar was a destiny that could not be killed.
‘Jump!’ growled Mar in the spitting voice of the beast. ‘Jump before I tear out your throat with my teeth. Jump.’ Mar crawled slowly up the perilous tiled incline, as if now even gravity was subject to his Rage. He was almost able to reach out and grab the catwalk when he began to slip back again.
‘No! No!’ bellowed Halldor. He watched in horror as Haraldr extended his hand to Mar. Fighting broke out as Mar’s men blocked Halldor and Ulfr from reaching the catwalk.
Mar’s grip was like a thunderbolt, and Haraldr knew that Odin had sent Mar back to settle the question he could not live, or die, without answering. He pulled Mar up to the catwalk. They both rose from their crouch. Mar stood an ell away and his breath was as foul as the slime of a carrion eater. His entire face twitched, as if hundreds of strings had been attached to his skin by some demonic puppet master. His trembling hands reached for Haraldr’s neck.
At the coldest, infinite core of his being, Haraldr acknowledged the bargain he had long ago made with fate. He lunged for Mar, clutched his arms around his byrnnied girth, and lifted him off his feet. Mar’s hands clamped Haraldr’s throat and his windpipe collapsed, and he knew that he would not breathe again in the middle realm until he and Mar had settled what lay between them deep in the spirit world.
For an immeasurable heartbeat there was a profound-stillness as the two Berserks’ flesh met on a plane where flesh did not exist. Haraldr was in the darkness entirely; he could not even see the black flame blasting him to numbness. He only knew that he at last held the dragon in his arms, could feel the huge, scaled beast throttling the last surge of life from his desperate, pumping neck. Embrace that death, the voice whispered.
The Varangians watched in awe as the two giant Berserks danced death, their faces purple, their eyes blooded with Odin’s insane favour. Mar’s head arched back with the mad force of his grip, and Haraldr’s knees sagged. And then a crack, a hideous, muffled, mortal crack, the sound of will and bone breaking in concert. Mar’s face instantly blanched and his hands fell from Haraldr’s neck. His head lolled and he went limp. His back had been snapped like a twig.
Haraldr felt the dragon burst into pure light. He held that light for a moment, as if embracing a dead comrade, and then flung Mar out into the void. He watched the body fall away like some fading vision in a dream. Mar hit the stone seats far below with a wet, melon-splitting sound.
Haraldr walked off the catwalk. The faces of Halldor and Ulfr were as chalky and wondering as Mar’s dying visage. ‘Who is in command now?’ shouted Haraldr to Mar’s men. Gris Knutson came forward, his eyes frightened, vacant.
Haraldr jerked Knutson up by the collar of his byrnnie; Knutson’s feet barely grazed the pavement, and his legs fluttered like a hanged man’s. ‘This is over,’ growled Haraldr, his voice still from the spirit world. ‘Disarm your survivors and take them north on the next tide. And tell the Northlands that the King of Norway is coming home, and that he will sate the ravens with his vengeance.’
Haraldr parted the silent, reverent ranks of his Varangians and descended the siege ladders to the stadium. Mar’s body lay on the steps beneath the Imperial Box. His fingers twitched and blood gushed from his mouth and pooled behind his head. His eyes were almost ice-white, a uniform colour to the delicate pale blue of his skin. He still lived. Haraldr bent and whispered, ‘You did not die a coward. In the Valhol tonight, tell the Kings of Norway the name of the champion who sent you as a sacrifice to them.’ Haraldr touched Mar’s forehead gently, almost as if consoling a child. ‘It was you who had my pledge-man Asbjorn Ingvarson killed, wasn’t it?’
Mar’s gory head tilted slightly forward. ‘Yes.’
Haraldr took his hand away. ‘Then we have settled between us.’
The blood gurgled in Mar’s throat, almost as if he were laughing. His words were whispered through pale red froth. ‘I left . . . you … a legacy . . . King . . . Haraldr.’ His purpled lips moved without speaking, and his feet twitched. Haraldr stood, descended to the track, and left Mar Hunrodar-son to die alone, his last words, if any, heard only by the ears of immortal stone.
‘Father!’ The Augusta Theodora rushed forward and kissed the Patriarch Alexius’s jewelled hands. ‘Father.’ She stood speechless, blood visibly pumping into her pale cheeks, unable to ask all the desperate questions that had been running through her mind.
Alexius made the sign of the cross at her forehead and then, uncharacteristically, gently stroked her braided brown hair. He had never looked more defeated. In his rough woollen cloak, his face virtually the colour of penitential ashes, his pacing eyes now exhausted, wounded gravely, he looked like the survivor of a shipwreck. ‘My child,’ he said quietly, ‘we may never see another day like this.’
‘Father, I was not even certain you were still . . . that you were safe. After what we heard yesterday . . .’
Alexius stared at the beige plaster walls of Theodora’s temporary refuge in the Church of St Mary Chalkoprateia. ‘The Mother Church has withstood the assault of the mad heretic Michael. The siege of the Hagia Sophia was lifted half an hour ago when the forces that had imprisoned me were called away to counter a greater threat.’ Alexius shook his head wearily. ‘I confess that the effluence of love and support for your sister has been a revelation to me. She has raised all Rome against the demon.’
Theodora wrapped her arms tightly around her torso, as if she were on the verge of doubling over with pain. ‘Father, is she . . .’
Alexius smiled as thinly as a dying man mocking himself. ‘Your sister is safe. I have been told that the mad heretic brought her back to the palace this morning. No doubt to save his own skin from the wrath of her people.’