"He can come down now," Mrs Keener said, and the frost giants untied Backdoor and dumped him unceremoniously over the side of the scaffold. "It's Gid's turn."
Every instinct I had was screaming at me to resist, to fight, to do everything I could to escape. The berserker blackness inside me strained, wanting desperately to be allowed to cut loose. Reining it in took every ounce of self-control I had. This wasn't about me any more. This was about all those soldiers out there at the foot of the scaffold, hugging themselves, stamping their feet in the battle-churned snow. My survival no longer mattered. Theirs did.
The ropes were tied chafingly tight. I hung suspended above a puddle of Backdoor's blood, which was congealing swiftly in the cold. It had poured onto the scaffold's planks like rainfall. Mine would soon be added to it.
I wanted desperately in that moment to be able to see Cody again, one last time. Tell him I wished I'd been a better dad and I was sorry I hadn't tried harder to make things work with his mother.
That not being possible, I searched out Freya in the crowd and locked gazes with her. I would keep looking at her throughout what was coming.
"And thus we arrive at the main event," said Mrs Keener. "Gideon Coxall has got his own back on the man he reckons was a traitor, and now he himself is gonna suffer and die in the exact same way. If I were a betting woman, I'd wager money on him lasting a good sight longer than the previous fella. Made of tough stuff, this Gid. Pure rawhide."
"Enough of the showman bollocks," I said. "I'm ready. Just give the order and let's do it."
"You don't want me bigging you up? Very well. Oh, but there is one thing I feel I oughtta mention. In the spirit of full disclosure and such."
"Go on, then," I said impatiently.
"You were definitely right about me having a man on the inside. I like to think of him as my mole. Not in the sense of someone who passes on secrets but in the sense of someone who digs holes in the ground and undermines people."
"So?"
"Well…" She drew the word out: way-ell.
Then she dropped the bombshell.
"Weren't him."
She was looking towards Backdoor's corpse.
"Weren't him at all."
I thought I'd lost the power of speech.
"Just felt you should know," she said, "seeing as you went to so much trouble fingering the fella and getting him executed and all. You were so certain you had your guy, I really didn't have the heart to tell you you were wrong. 'Sides, it was more fun this way, going along with you, giving you your head like a wild Appaloosa, seeing how far you'd take it. And you took it all the way, Gid. Right as far as you could. My, but you're a cold, hard son of a gun. Anybody gets the wrong side of you, whoa nelly, they better look out! You have no qualms about terminating them with extreme prejudice."
She stroked my cheek.
"And I have to say, I find that kinda attractive. Sexy, even. I can see now what Freya Njorthasdottir sees in you. You're as forthright and ruthless as she is. It's a match made in Gimle."
I managed to stir my lead-weight tongue. "I don't believe you. This is bullshit. You're trying to trick me. It was Backdoor. It fucking was."
"So you've persuaded yourself. But I swear, hand on heart, I never clapped eyes on the man before today. He wasn't lying either when he said the same about me."
"But…"
"It's the most delicious thing watching you squirm like this, like a worm on the hook. It's the gravy on my biscuits. You just put an innocent man through the most obscene, brutal torture imaginable. Not wishing to get all Oprah on you, but how does that make you feel?"
Gutted. Appalled. Shattered.
Livid.
"You — you fucking bitch!" I roared. "You could have said. Any time, you could have said."
"And why would I have done that, when stringing you along meant I could have this moment of exquisite tormenting? Psychological pain can be far harder to bear than physical pain, and far more rewarding to inflict."
I lunged at her, although the ropes made it a useless gesture.
"Now, now, none of that," Mrs Keener chided, wagging a finger. "Don't be getting mad at me. If you should be mad at anyone, it's yourself."
"Who, then?" I said thickly. "Who was it?"
"Don't you know?"
I had an inkling. There was only one person left it could have been. But I'd trusted him. I'd considered him a friend.
"He's right over there." She motioned towards the onlookers. "Looking kinda shifty, it has to be said. No need for that, honey," she called out to him. "Don't have to pretend it ain't you I'm talking to. It's all right. It doesn't matter now if folks know who you are and what you did. You're safe. You're under my protection. In fact, why not come up here and take a bow? You've done good work, far as I'm concerned. You deserve your moment of glory."
The man she was addressing broke free from the crowd, passed through the cordon of frost giants, and made his way, a little sheepishly maybe, up onto the scaffold.
He stood beside Mrs Keener, and she placed a friendly, conspiratorial arm round his broad boxer's shoulders.
"Wotcher, bruv," Cy said to me. "How's it hanging?"
Seventy
There was a twinkle in Cy's eye as he spoke.
"Yes, I was the one fucking with you, not Backdoor," he said. "It was me. Me, the black guy. Just because someone's black don't mean he's above suspicion. In't we supposed to be colour-blind these days? Positive discrimination's as bad as the negative kind. No reason to think my skin tone makes me whiter than white."
He chortled at his own wit.
"Mrs Keener hired me to be an agitator," he went on. "To be a — how'd you put it, Mrs K?"
"A destabilising influence."
"That's it, a destabilising influence. Just to make her victory that bit more likely. Sow a little uncertainty here, start a little infighting there, classic psy-ops stuff. It wasn't hard to get recruited to Odin's army. No one was exactly vetting us, were they? You turned up, you were in, that was more or less it. Odin was grateful just to have the warm bodies. My job, my real job, once I'd joined up, was to gain someone's confidence, someone influential. Get close to them, then keep them off-balance, off their game."
"If the head's unsteady, the whole body wobbles," said Mrs Keener.
"Me," I croaked. "I was the head."
"Got it in one," said Cy. "I wasn't going to try for Odin himself. Too big a target, and too remote. Hard to get his trust, harder still to manipulate him. So I started on Thor. Kept challenging his authority, antagonising him, pissing him off. Not a painless tactic on my side, but it seemed the way to go… until you came along. Soon as I met you, I knew you were the one. You had that take-charge look about you. You were a newcomer, but you were going places. Plus, we had similar backgrounds, we were on the same wavelength. We had a bond going from the start. You liked me. That made you the perfect mark."
"The perfect chump, more like."
"Same difference. Look, d'you really want me to spell out everything I did, how I made it all work? Because it feels like I'm monologuing here, and I know you've got stuff you'd much rather be getting on with."
I was about to tell him that he could happily shut up because I wasn't interested in hearing anything more that came out of his lying fucking gob.
But then I spotted something out of the corner of my eye.