He gasped aloud and sank to his knees with the sheer scale of it. All that bulked blackness WAS the silver, age-dark and heaped up like old lumber. Bowls, ewers, wine pitchers, statues, plates, cups, most of them decorated with embedded gems, half buried in seas of coins and armrings, fastened together by age and ice.
There were shields, too, spearheads, blades, even bits of armour, crushed together with great platters fixed with mother-of-pearl, silver statues of animals with gold fangs, dancing girls poised on alabaster bases, gleaming, cold-frozen birds with amber eyes and ivory wings.
Under our feet was a massive auroch horn, banded in silver and jasper, a necklace of silver with porphyry stones, a great two-handed silver cup studded with deep-green serpentine, the mask from an ancient helmet, fixed with staring amethyst eyes.
Finn lifted each one, letting them fall from fingers numb with wonder and cold, then unearthed a half-bent silver plate, big as a wheel, crowded and leaping with ornamental life — palm leaves and lilies and grapes, silvered birds clinging and fluttering among branches, all twined together into an endless network of gleaming buds and plumes. Coins spilled from it like water, a ringing chime of riches.
He knelt, this man who never bowed the knee and his head and his shoulders shook as he wept at the sheer immensity, at the fact that, after everything that had happened and all who had died, the wild hunt of the Oathsworn ended here, now.
I was not sure whether he wept for those who had died, or what we had found, or that we had found it at all after all our trouble. Nor did he. It was a sky-cracking moment, seeing Finn shed tears.
Eventually, he laid the great wheel of silver plate reverently down and fumbled The Godi out its sheath, stood it point down on the silver-litter and clasped his hands on the hilt, head bowed.
'All Father, one of your own gives thanks this night,' he said. 'Warrior he, faithful he, with companions you know and who walk with you already and who died here. To them I say: "Not now, but soon." To you, I give our thanks and your names.'
Then he started to recite them, grim and cold names, one by one. As godi, I should have been more reverent, but I had experienced One Eye before and did not think he deserved all this for bringing us here — we had already paid dearly and were not finished, I was sure of that. Distracted, I looked round and saw, from the corner of my eye, a balk of wood and moved to it across an ice-slither of floor.
It was the collapsed mouth of our old tunnel, the one we had dug into the side of the howe when first we had arrived here with Einar leading us. I remembered Illugi, slamming the butt of his staff into the ground a step away from here, calling on the gods — who were deaf to him by then — to aid us all against the black fetch that was Hild. It had splashed, I remembered, for the howe was flooding. .
It had not flooded, all the same. The timber sticking from the wall was from the cart-planks we had used to shore up the tunnel and I remembered floundering in the sucking mud, felt the crushing panic of it while Hild sliced through the supports with the scything rune sword she wielded in her desperate, savage, snarling desire to get to me. The water had been flooding in then, pouring down the balka as it always did when it rained on the steppe, making a lake here, save in the drought of really high summer.
I laid a palm on the cold, slick freeze of that timber. In there, she was. Her efforts had brought the tunnel down, sealed the howe and left only a slick of water inside it in the end. If she had died, she lay only a few feet away, perhaps only inches, still grasping the other sword; I touched the wall, but it was iced as tempered steel, too hard to dig out the truth of it.
'Vafud, Hropta-Tyr, Gaut, Veratyr,' intoned Finn, then finished, unclasping his hands from The Godi's hilt and climbing to his feet like an old man.
'By the Hammer, Orm boy,' he kept saying, shaking his head. 'Just look at it.'
I blew on my numbed fingers and laid the other hand, lamb-gentle, on one shoulder; he blinked once or twice, then took up his torch and sword and puffed out his cheeks.
'Well, I have stood here and seen it for myself,' he said and his eyes were bright when I met them. 'All the silver of the world. Now I know. Now I know, boy.'
We moved down between the frowning balkas of riches, guttering torchlight throwing eldritch shadows and bouncing diamond-sharp darts back from the hanging icicles that made a silver hall for a warlord's hoard.
From his mouldering brocade cushion, Atil grinned and watched us go with his dark, dead eyes.
We found Lambisson a little way down one of the rat-nest passages — or, rather, he found us, for he was crouched in the dark and we came up in the red glare of torches. He was sitting on a pile of scraped-together spoil, all the lighter stuff such as coins and neckrings, little items you could put in a bucket. He looked like a mad frog on a stone.
'Brondolf,' I said to him, companionably and stopped well short of him, beyond blade reach, for he was just a shadow against the dark to me and I did not know what he had in his hands, or where Short Eldgrim was.
'You must be Orm Bear Slayer,' came the voice, a whisper of a thing, faint as a Norn thread in that place. Finn moved closer, held up the torch and we saw him more clearly.
Lambisson was all but gone. The white raven had made a wasteland of his dreams, turned his mind to silver-white while tearing his face to a raw sore and he was so thin his fine tunic hung on him like a drying net on a beach. Hunger and sickness had leached his life away and he no longer resembled the Brondolf Lambisson I had seen, seal-sleek and confident in his fancy mail and helm on a hillside long before. That man was dead; this one surely would be soon enough.
Yet he had a steel handful that gleamed sharp in the twilight between us and could still summon up a laugh, like moth wings, as he shifted his eyes away from the glare of Finn's light.
'I do not remember your face and we scarcely met,' he sighed out to me. 'I remember Einar, but not you. Yet the Norns wove us together more fixed than brothers. Is that not strange, Orm Bear Slayer? I know you better than any woman I ever had.'
The laugh fluttered out again and was lost in the dark. Finn moved sideways and I squatted.
'Not so strange,' I answered. 'The Norns weave and we can only wear what they make.'
'This is a poisoned serk, right enough,' he whispered back — then flung some iron into his voice. 'It would be better, I am thinking, if your companion stayed still.'
Finn stopped at once, waved an acknowledging hand and squatted, as if by a friendly fire.
'I am Finn Bardisson from Skane,' he said easily. 'I can kill you if I want to, Brondolf Lambisson, whether you have blade or not. It is better you know this from the start.'
'I want Short Eldgrim,' I added. 'There need be no killing here. Frey witness it, there has been enough of that. All I want is Eldgrim.'
He stirred and I saw the head droop, but the steel-holding hand was steady enough.
'You speak as a friend,' he hissed. 'We can never be that.'
'No, but we need not be enemies.'
There was silence for a heart-beat or two, then he said: 'Do you like my new fortress, Bear Slayer? Fine, is it not. Rich.'
The chuckle that came with it was the hiss of a corpse's last breath. 'Rich enough to save Birka, I had thought — but that place is dead.'
'Keep it,' I replied flatly. 'I want Eldgrim. Then you can fill your boots and go away with no fighting at all.'
He leaned forward, that ice-sore face even bloodier in the light of my torch, patched by the black of cold rot eating his cheeks. He shook his head, his eyes glittering like rime; blood oozed from the cracked remains of his blackened lips.