Across its glass-black surface, images seemed to whirl and flow… images, visages, spirit-faces; bodies drifting, floating weightless as if in liquid, trailing hands and limbs and hair…
“Do you see them?” she whispered.
“I see only water,” said Egil.
“As do I,” Valhild agreed, adding, “What do you see?”
“Later. I’ll begin setting the runes. Be ready.”
“For what?” Valhild asked, eyebrows lifting.
“I wish I knew. But, if anything comes up from the well, hold your breath.”
Their expressions suggested they found this scant comfort, and Hreyth felt the same. Held breath against a power such as this? A power that had drawn life from so many men, leaving only stones in their place? Dotting the river-valley with them, silent standing warnings of an incomprehensible danger; and she had come, a young rune-caster of uncertain parentage, armed with little more than her witch-queen mother’s lore…
But she had come, and as she’d told Egil, it must be done.
She reached into her bag of rune-marked bones — old and worn smooth, ivoried, rolling and clicking beneath her fingers. One by one, she brought them out and set them in a ring around the well’s rim.
The spirit-fraught glassy surface heaved in a sudden, terrible bulge as her circle neared completion. Hreyth sprang back, gasping. Her heel caught on the lip of a shallow pool. The last rune-bone clattered to the cavern floor.
Mist plumed from the well, wreathed her hand, gloved it, wrapped her arm, and pulled. It was insubstantial yet solid, mist made iron, iron made mist. It had her to the elbow, to the shoulder, to the throat.
From somewhere sounding far away, she heard Egil call her name, and Valhild shout a battle-cry.
The gasp she’d taken, she held. Struggling to do so, locking jaw and mouth, lungs already throbbing with a burning ache. The mist engulfed her head and chest.
She felt a tug at her belt — Egil, anchoring her with one hand as he groped along the floor for the fallen rune-bone. His boots slid as he, too, was inexorably pulled toward the hungry well.
Then came a violent, striking crash — metal on stone, steel on stone, the steel of Valhild’s great sword-blade, hewing and hacking at the cave ceiling’s formations. Sparks flew. Again and again, the strong steel struck, until stone cracked and shattered. Huge fanglike chunks of rock, some broken off in pieces and some at the root, smashed down.
The solid mist released abruptly. Egil and Hreyth pitched backward. As his free arm flailed, she saw the rune-bone in his fist and grabbed for it.
A heap of rubble filled the well, mounded there like some crude and makeshift cairn. Valhild stood astride the pile with her sword-hilt in both hands and the blade poised for a downward thrust.
Around the well’s rim, the rest of the rune-ring was — by god-miracle, praise Odin! — undisturbed. Hreyth slid the last bone into place. The rune upon it flashed an almost blinding gleam that raced around the circle in a line like fire.
The chamber’s air changed with an odd, pressuring pop. The cave walls shook; more rock-chunks fell from the ceiling and water sloshed over the lips of the pools. There was, for a moment, the sense of a vast, gusty sigh, an exhalation from the very lungs of the world.
The sense of seidr-magic dwindled to a fading echo, then was gone.
Hreyth released her long-held aching breath. Her gaze found Valhild’s in the gloom, then the familiar crags and outcrops of Egil’s scarred features beside her.
They had done it. They had lived. They had won.
Tales over mead-bowls, feasting-halls, hailed as heroes, shining with silver and gift-given gold, names long remembered in saga and song.
Through the half-collapsed passage, they picked their bruised and battered way back to surface and sunlight. The high river-valley spread green and peaceful before them, horses grazing in the new spring grass.
But, although the spell had been broken, it had not been unmade… and where so many brave men had once been, still remained only stones.
That Old Black Magic
James A. Moore
We didn’t find him. He found us.
We’d just loaded up on supplies, as much as we could at any rate, and we were headed out into the field. Somewhere along the way, the new guy was just there.
He was a slick sleeve. Not a bit of rank to him, but no one in their right mind would have looked at him and called him green. He was too old, for one. I was twenty when we met. I have to say he was ten to fifteen years older than me. New soldiers, those fresh from basic, they don’t look that way and they don’t move that way. He wore the same combat boots as everyone else, but he almost never made a noise when he walked, and I never heard a single sound that startled Jonathan Crowley.
Sergeant Marks took one look at him and scowled. “How long have you been here?” He looked at the man’s uniform and spotted the nametag exactly where it belonged. “Crowley! You listening to me?”
The man looked at him and nodded. “I’m not deaf the last time I checked.”
That was about all it took for the sarge to grab him by the arm and haul him out of the ranks. Being of sound mind and wanting to keep our bodies as close to that state as possible, we ignored the action and kept walking. Smart people don’t piss off their sergeants.
Twenty minutes later Crowley and Marks got back into the ranks. Not a word was said, but from that moment on, Crowley was one of us. He did his job, he took care of his equipment, and he kept to himself. I have never much trusted a quiet man. It seems to me that a man who keeps to himself is either full of too many dark thoughts or too many secrets, and I’m not so sure there’s much of a difference.
I think with Crowley it was dark thoughts.
Normandy was done.
We’d stormed the beach and done our best and paid a price that no one dared think about. It’s been decades and I can tell you with complete sincerity that when I close my eyes and the weather feels too much like France did, I can count on nightmares to come into my sleep and hunt for my soul. They are hungry dreams, too, and they sniff in every dark corner of my mind and under every hidden memory while they seek their prize.
What part of France were we in? Who knew any longer? I didn’t. How long had the war gone on? Too long.
I missed my home. I missed my family. I missed Jenny, even though she’d already sent me a letter that sounded a lot like she was looking to move on. I was young, but maybe not completely stupid. I knew what was written between the lines even though I was trying hard not to see those ugly, unwritten words.
According to the captain, we were in France and not far from Luxembourg. You couldn’t have proven it. All I saw was hills and trees and from time to time a field that had maybe once been planted with something to seed and was now growing a variety of muds. Frozen muds, mostly, as the weather had gone cold and we woke in the morning with frost on the ground and spent the days trying to stay warm.
Infantry. Love that word. It says so much if you’ve been a foot soldier. We were well armed. We had a little food left. We were getting colder every day as autumn snuck in and changed the remaining greens to differing shades of orange and yellow and blood red. I kept hearing that we had the Germans on the ropes, but all I saw was more of the same, and every time we turned around we were ducking back into the woods because this was not our territory, much as we were planning to take it back.
It was just past the point when we should have been walking any longer. It was dark, pure and simple. The only lights were coming from a building that was too far away to identify. We went for it anyway, because there comes a point where any shelter would be better than none and there was a chance that they would be friendly. Yes, we had tents. Not a one of us said a damned thing about trying to pitch them.