• • •
We set off at a good pace, knowing the Hardassa men would be better provisioned, better equipped. . probably just plain better in all regards given that our second best warrior was likely a woman with a knife.
The sun came out to mock us, and Kara led the way, winding a path across slopes thick with heather and dense clumps of viciously spiked gorse.
“We’re getting closer to the Wheel aren’t we?” I asked an hour later, footsore already.
“Yes, we’ll just cut through the outer edge of its. . domain.”
“You can feel it too?” Snorri fell back to walk beside me, his stride free as if his wound no longer pained him.
I nodded. Even with four hours until sunset I could sense Aslaug prowling, impatient. Each patch of shadow seethed with possibilities despite the brightness all about. Her voice lay beneath all other sounds, urgent but indistinct, rising with the wind, scratching behind Snorri’s question. “It’s like the world is. . thinner here.” Even with an arm’s length between Snorri and me that old energy crackled across the shoulder facing him, buzzing in my teeth, a brittle sensation, as if I might shatter if I fell. With the old feeling came new suspicions, all of Aslaug’s warnings creeping into my mind. Baraqel’s hold on the northman would be strengthening with each yard closer to the Wheel. How long could I trust Snorri for? How long before he became the avenger Baraqel intended him to be, smiting down anyone tainted with the dark. .
“You look. . better,” I told Snorri.
“I feel better.” He patted his side.
“All magic is stronger here,” Kara called back without turning. “Quicker to answer the will. Snorri is more able to resist Kelem’s call, the light in him is battling the poison.” She picked up the pace, and glanced my way. “It’s a bad place to use enchantment, though. Like lighting a fire in a hay barn.” I wondered if Snorri had mentioned Harrowheim to her.
“What is this ‘wheel’ anyway? Some sort of engine?” I imagined a huge wheel turning, toothed like the gears in a watermill.
“No one alive has seen it, not even the wrong-mages who live as close in as they can stand. The sagas say it’s the corpse of a god, Haphestur, not of Asgard but a stranger from without, a wanderer. A smith who forged weapons for Thor and Odin. They say he lies there rotting and the magic of making leaks from him as his flesh corrupts.” Kara glanced up at me, as if to gauge my reaction.
I kept my face stiff. I’ve found heathens to be a touchy lot if you laugh at their stories. “That’s what the priests say. What do the völvas believe?”
“In King Hagar’s library on Icefjar there are remnants of books copied directly from the works of the Builders themselves. I understood them to say that the Wheel is a complex of buildings laid above a vast underground ring, a stone tunnel, many miles long and going nowhere. A place where the Builders saw new truths.”
I mulled on this one, walking another hour in silence. I pictured the Builders’ ring of secrets, seeing it all aglow in my mind’s eye while I tried to ignore each new blister. Less painful than the blisters, but somehow more distressing, was the sensation that each step took us closer to the Wheel, the world becoming fragile, a skin stretched too tight across bone, ready to give suddenly and without warning, and leave us falling into something new and much, much worse.
“Look!” Tuttugu, behind us but pointing ahead.
I squinted at the dark spot down in the shallow valley before us. “I didn’t think anyone lived in Osheim.”
“Lots of people live in Osheim, idiot.” Snorri made to deliver one of those playful punches to the shoulder that leave my arm dead for the next six hours. He paused though, feeling the old crackle of magic, as fierce across his knuckles as it was across my side. “Most of them live far south, around Os City, but there are farmers everywhere.”
I glanced around. “Farming what exactly? Rocks? Grass?”
“Goats.” Kara pointed to some brown dots closer at hand. “Goats and sheep.”
We hastened across the valley toward the lone hut. Somewhere in the back of my mind Aslaug whispered that Snorri had raised his hand against me, yet again, insulted me to my face. A low-born barbarian insulting a prince of the March. .
Coming closer we saw that the dwelling was a stone-built roundhouse, the roof thatched with dried heather and river-reeds. Apart from a shed a single winter from no longer being a shed, and a drystone wall for stock to shelter behind come the snows, there were no outbuildings, and no other dwellings lay in sight.
A handful of mangy goats bleated at our arrival, one from the roof. An axe stood bedded in a log before the doorless opening. The place seemed deserted.
“See if they left any furs.” I nodded at the door as Tuttugu drew up alongside us. “I’m freezing.” My clothes still felt damp and were doing a poor job of keeping out the wind.
Tuttugu looked up at Snorri who shrugged and walked on over to the doorway.
“Halloo, the house?” Snorri paused as though he heard something, though I couldn’t make out anything but the goat on the roof, bleating as if it were wondering how to get down again.
Snorri stepped up to the entrance. And then stepped back again. The long and gleaming prongs of some kind of farm implement following him out. “I’m alone here and have nothing you might want.” A voice gone rusty with the years. “Also no intention of letting you take it.” By inches a yard of wooden haft emerged, and finally on the other end an old man, tall but stooped, his hair, eyebrows, and short beard all white like snow, but thick, as if a thaw might give us back the younger man.
“More of you, eh?” He narrowed rheumy eyes at Kara. “Völva?” He lowered his pitchfork.
Kara inclined her head and spoke a few words in the old tongue. It sounded like a threat but the ancient took it well and gestured to his hut. “Come in. I’m Arran Vale, born of Hodd, my grandfather-” He glanced back at us. “But perhaps you’ve travelled too far to have heard of Lotar Vale?”
“You need to leave here, Arran.” Snorri stepped in closer, making his words clear. “Gather only what you need. Hardassa are coming.”
“Hardassa?” Arran repeated as if uncertain of the word, or of his hearing. He tilted his head, peering up at the Norseman.
“Red Vikings,” Snorri said. Old Arran knew those! He turned quickly, vanishing into his home.
“It’s us they’re after! We should take what we need and go!” I glanced back at the distant lip of the valley, half expecting to see Edris’s friends pouring down the slopes.
“That’s exactly what they will do when they spot this place,” Tuttugu said. “Take what they want. Re-provision. Their longship can hold a lot of goats.” Something in his eyes told me his own thoughts were circling the idea of goat stew even now.
“Hurry!” Snorri slapped a hand to the lintel-stone, leaning in.
I looked back again and a lone figure stood on the ridge, little more than a mile away. “Shit.” I’d been expecting it all this time, but that didn’t stop the truth of it from being a cold shock.
Arran re-emerged carrying nothing but his pitchfork and in the other hand a butcher’s knife. Across his back he’d secured a bow that looked as old as him and as likely to snap if bent.
“I’ll stay.” The old man looked to the horizon. “This is my place.”
“What part of Viking horde did you not understand?” I took a pace forward. Bravery of any kind generally makes me uncomfortable. Bravery this stupid just made me angry.
Arran didn’t look my way. “I’d be obliged if you’d take the boy though. He’s young enough to leave.”
“Boy?” Snorri rumbled. “You said you were alone.”
“I misled you.” The faintest smile on the bitter line of the old man’s lips. “My grandson is with the goats in the south vale. The völva will know what’s best for him-but don’t bring him back here. . not after.”
“You’re not even going to slow them down with that. . fork.”
“Come with us,” Tuttugu said, his face clouded. “Look after your grandson.” He said it like he meant it, even though it was clear the man had no intention of leaving. And if he did it would just slow us down.