“No man escapes me, for all die sooner or later,” the voice replied, dark, enormously loud, satisfied, unanswerable. “No man comes living to Hel, but death comes to all mortals-and now to immortals as well.”
Roric jerked until the ropes bit into his flesh as a touch landed on his shoulder. He rolled around to see a Wanderer bending over him.
This time he could look at the face. It was the same face, burning with wisdom and power, which he and Karin had been forced to look away from before, but it was no longer lit from within by light, and the power was much diminished.
“This plan quite definitely was a mistake from the beginning, Roric No-man’s son,” said the lord of voima in a low voice, loosening Roric’s bonds.
“Kardan’s son,” he corrected, rubbing circulation back into his wrists, but the Wanderer only shook his head.
“Sending you that stallion originally,” he commented quietly, “was the only thing in the entire plan that ever benefited either us or you.”
Roric looked down the hill to see the other Wanderers and the Hearthkeepers, tattered and drooping. A glance at Eirik showed that he had not noticed their approach, having eyes only for the dark forces he had summoned.
They had defeated the dragon, then, thought Roric, rising to his knees. He slipped his hand into his belt pouch and turned over for a moment his little bone charm.
But if even immortals could now die, how much longer could either the Wanderers or the Hearthkeepers rule earth and sky? And if they were not there to bring about birth and renewal, how much longer could mortal realms endure? The sky overhead was now nearly dark, and in it showed neither moon nor stars.
He went forward slowly and silently, three steps, four steps, and still Eirik did not hear him. With a sudden bound he was on him, one elbow tight around the king’s neck, the other hand knocking his knife from slack fingers.
Eirik fought back, kicking behind him and trying to heave Roric off balance, but he clung on grimly. “What happens,” Roric shouted to the dark red coals before him, “what happens if a man comes living to your realm?”
The mist moved, thickening even more. “This has never happened. Men die in mortal realms and come dead to Hel.”
“You came when called to eat what was offered,” cried Roric, squeezing Eirik’s throat tighter as the king struggled, “but I’ll make you a better offer than any mortal ever made to the powers of voima! But with my offer comes a price. If you close this chasm, remove death from the realms of voima where it should never have come, you can have two live men in Hel!”
From the chasm came other voices, faint, avid, and cold as ice. “Life! Bring us life!”
“The wights of Hel… should have no voice,” said the being in the mist, not so loud, not so sure.
“Then if I brought life into Hel,” Roric yelled, “would there be voima there even if you had destroyed it in all the realms of earth and sky?”
“Life in Hel… would destroy the balance.” The voice was even more unsure.
“Yet by coming here, you yourself are destroying the fated balance,” grunted Roric, punching Eirik in the stomach. “If you won’t take us as an offering, take us as a threat! Close the chasm and leave immortal realms forever! Your balance is changing with every second that Hel is open to the forces of voima!”
Eirik doubled over abruptly, making Roric loosen his grip around his neck. There was no time to wait to see if the forces of death would agree. Roric kicked himself forward with all his strength, launching both him and Eirik over the edge and into the pit.
The chasm crashed shut above their heads. They fell for what could have been five minutes, still clawing at each other. “Don’t bother trying to kill me,” Roric gasped, getting a grip on the other’s head. “You can’t send me to Hel since we’re both going there already!”
As they fell through blackness, across the insides of his eyelids flitted images of old bones and dried brains. He fought against the images, trying to replace them with a vision of Karin, smiling at him as the wind played with her hair. If he was-even for an instant-to bring life to Hel, let it be the voima of love and triumph.
They reached bottom unexpectedly and hard, but not with the killing smash Roric had expected. They rolled apart, trying to recover their breaths. If no man had ever come living to Hel, he thought, then maybe a living man could not be killed here. It was bitterly cold, colder than a January night with the north wind blowing.
Neither of them spoke at once. Eirik seemed oddly diminished without his ready tongue. He showed no inclination to attack Roric again as both sat up slowly. Roric blinked and blinked again. There was faint light here.
And people. Not quite solid but people nonetheless, reclining listlessly on the dusty floor and looking at them. All were gray, hair and skin and eyes, gray against the gray floor, though Roric and Eirik still kept their own colors. The sound of their heartbeats, fast and hard, echoed through the tunnels, the only hearts here that beat.
“I know these men,” Eirik muttered, rising and looking around. “Some of them I killed myself.”
Their shapes were slightly misty, but on many Roric could see the marks of a death blow: a slit throat, a stomach sliced open so that the entrails looped out, a deep gash in the chest. “Wigla doesn’t miss you at all, ” Eirik said, low and fierce, to one whose throat had been cut so deeply that his head drooped, nearly severed. He was one of the more solid ones. Others had faded so much that they were little more than hints of a shape, through which the next figure was visible. Roric pulled out his bone charm, which had given at least a hint of solidity to the Wanderers’ hollow creation, but it had no such effect here.
Eirik and Roric walked slowly between the rows of reclining figures, shivering with arms wrapped around themselves. The dead did not seem to feel the cold. Here were passages that glowed with their own dim light, featureless, stretching on before them endlessly, filled with dead men and women and children who looked at them without moving but with hungry eyes. Roric fought against an increasingly powerful sense of futility and loss. Karin was becoming harder and harder to remember.
He had saved the realms of voima from death, he told himself. He had kept the forces of darkness from immortal lands. It should have been a triumphal shout, but it seemed here no great glory, only a disturbance such as he and Eirik made in the dust with their feet as they walked down unending passages where sprawled the dead.
Eirik stopped abruptly. “Here are the men for whom we just made the offerings,” he said in a half-choked whisper. Roric too recognized them. He forced himself to look closely at the men whom he and Valmar had killed, resisting the urge to stumble on unlooking and the feeling that there was no use any more in doing anything. These men bore their death wounds but they were more solid than any of the others they had passed.
“Eirik!” one croaked.
The renegade king began walking rapidly. “Are they less misty because they’ve been dead such a short time,” Roric asked himself aloud, trying to find the question interesting, “or because of the songs sung for them?”
“The songs, of course,” growled Eirik. He seemed either more excited than Roric to be here in Hel-or more frightened. “Don’t you know that the dead never truly fade away as long as their songs and stories are remembered? Those others, those that were almost gone- None must have remembered them.”
“Why do they keep looking at us like that?” Roric muttered.
“Because we are alive,” said Eirik shortly. “Keep walking. Weren’t you ever taught not to go near a burial mound at night? The dead, even the dead who live on in story, want life. Anyone alive who lingers too long near them, or near the passage that leads from every burial mound down to Hel, will have the life drained out of him.”
Roric reminded himself that he had sought this death deliberately, the one way out of dishonor, even though he realized now there was no honor here. The glory and praise of the songs, which might keep the dead more solid for a little while more, was still only glory in lands under the sun.