“Why in hell?” I had too many questions and my mounting outrage wouldn’t let me frame them.
“Couldn’t let him stand alone, Jal. Not after we’d led them to his home.”
“But. .” I waved an arm at everything in general. “Now we’re running away? With Tuttugu dead?”
“The old man died.” Snorri glanced at the boy. “Sorry, son.” He shrugged. “It’s not my land. Nothing to stay for after Arran fell.”
“I’m not dead.” A weak voice behind him. Then, less certain, “Am I?”
“No.” Kara hurried past us. “Let’s go.” She called the last part over her shoulder. A few runes still bounced across her back but most of her braids had lost theirs.
Tuttugu sat up, patting himself, a bewildered look on his face. He poked at the blood-soaked hole where his jerkin strained across his stomach. I understood then why Snorri was on his knees, head down.
“You healed him! And the light. .” I trailed off, looking past the Undoreth to where the Red Vikings stood, rubbing their eyes, some rising from where they’d fallen, looking around as they regained their sight. In between us, where Kara sowed her runes the ground seemed to heave in one place, sink in another. One of the Hardassa ceased blinking away his blindness and spotted us. He gave chase, axe high for the strike.
“Hell.” I glanced about. Snorri and Tuttugu looked in no state for battle. Kara, if she drew it, would have a thin knife to face down the axeman. That left me, my dagger, and a weaponless boy. I wasn’t sure of his age-ten? Eleven? Twelve? What did I know about children. I considered shoving the boy forward first.
The Red Viking ran a dozen more paces. To his left the ground rippled, the sod tore, and a vast snake arced from beneath the earth. It took him in its mouth, dived back, and in two heartbeats was swallowed by the soil as if it were a sea serpent on the ocean.
“What-?” I managed, an expression of my disbelief rather than a question. More snakes broke the surface, smaller ones no thicker than a man, seen only for scattered moments and gone. And the colour of them, drawn from no pallet I had ever seen, a pattern of crystalline brown and umber, confusing the eye, as if they were a thing apart from the world.
“Children of the Midgard Serpent-the great wyrm that wraps the world.” Kara sounded as amazed as I was.
“How long will they stay?” The snakes kept to where Kara had cast her runes, forming a barrier to protect us. Now that the other Hardassa were regaining their sight they backed away, shields raised, as if a shield could stop such serpents any more than could a castle wall.
“I don’t know.” Like me, Kara couldn’t look away. “This has never happened before. The casting can make a person imagine snakes, make them believe that the grass writhes before them and fear to tread there. . this is beyond. .”
“It’s the Wheel.” Tuttugu, still examining his torn and bloody jerkin where the spear impaled him.
“Let’s go.” Snorri stood with an effort. “It won’t take long for them to think to just go round.”
We opened a good lead while the Hardassa paused to take stock, tend their wounds, and consider their snake problem. In the hills and ridges beyond the valley we even lost sight of them, though it couldn’t be long before they overhauled us again.
• • •
“We’re heading closer to the Wheel?” It took an hour for me to notice: the business of putting one foot before the next had been consuming all my energy.
“Our only chance lies in magic-we can’t outrun them or outfight them.” Kara glanced back at the pursuit. “In this direction we grow stronger.”
Kara might be growing stronger but I felt weaker by the yard. Of all of us only the boy, Hennan, had any go left in him. The distant strain of a horn reached us and I found I could walk a little faster after all.
“Seems to me.” I took a few more steps before finding the effort required to finish the sentence. “That the Wheel has drawn you in too. Just took a bit longer.”
That was how Nanna Willow had it. The Wheel would pull you in. Quick or slow, but in the end you’d come, thinking it was your idea, full of good reasons for it. I wondered how Hennan and his grandfather had lived here so long without succumbing. Perhaps such resistance lay in their blood, passed one generation to the next.
The stain in the sky had grown darker and the oddly shaped rocks that broke the sod cast long shadows. Somehow my dread at meeting Aslaug in this place felt only a little less intense than my healthy fear of the sharp edges the Red Vikings were carrying after me.
We struggled on through an increasingly twisted land, across a wild heath where the occasional tree clawed slantwise toward the sky, angled by the north wind. Stones broke the sod with increasing regularity. Dark pieces of basalt that looked as if they had erupted from the bedrock but which must have been set standing by men. In places fields of such stones stood in rows, marching into the distance, aiming in toward the Wheel. I had no strength left to marvel at them. Later we passed black shards of volcanic glass, some pieces taller than a man, sharp as the blades the ancients made from the stuff. I saw my face reflected in gleaming obsidian surfaces, warped as if drowning in horror within the stone-and looked no more. Further still and the obsidian grew up in twisted and razor-edged trees.
Closer to the Wheel the rocks took on disturbingly human shapes, on a scale ranging from the size of a man’s head to larger than my father’s halls. I tried not to see the faces or what they were doing to each other.
I cast the occasional glance at Snorri as we went-trying to judge what kind of hold Baraqel might be gaining on him as we came nearer to the Wheel. Several times I caught him sneaking furtive glances my way, only confirming my doubts about him.
In one place we came across a ring of obsidian pieces, knife-sharp, each taller than Snorri, and aimed skyward though splayed as if some great force at the centre of the circle had pushed them outward. For fifty yards on every side the heath lay blasted, blackened earth with only the occasional twist of heather stem now turned to charcoal. Something silvery gleamed at the centre. Despite our need for haste, Kara angled us toward the ring.
“What is it?” Snorri posed the question to Kara’s back as she approached the standing stones. It looked as if softly glowing pearls laced the black earth within the ring, forming a rough outline of some explosion within. Kara passed between two of the shards and entered the circle. She went to one knee and scraped at the burnt soil with her blade. It seemed as though the glow intensified around her. A moment later she stood, something shining in her hands, making dark sticks of her fingers.
When she reached us I saw that what she held was neither silver nor a pearl. “Orichalcum.” She withdrew one hand. A bead of metal the size of a fist rested upon the palm of the other, its surface gleaming, lit with its own silvery light, but broken with sheens of colour like oil on water, moving one into the other, a slow dance, mingling and separating as I watched.
“Will it help us fight the Hardassa?” Snorri asked.
“No.” Kara led the way on. “Take it, Tuttugu.”
Tuttugu accepted the over-sized bead. Immediately the light in it died and it became merely shiny metal, like a solid drop of quicksilver.
“A magic was worked in that circle long ago.” Kara took the bead back and the glow returned. “Orichalcum leaks into the world at such sites, though I’ve never heard of it being found in such quantity. Skilfar has a piece.” She held her thumb and finger out to show how small, pea-sized. “One use for it is to assess a would-be völva’s potential. It has nothing to say of wisdom, but of affinity for enchantment it speaks volumes. This glow is my potential. Training and wisdom will help me put it to good use, as a warrior hones their strengths into skills.”