Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War) (27 page)

“Getting colder.” Snorri at my shoulder.

“Yes.” I stopped, handed him the torch, and circled around a nude plasteek woman to stand behind him. “After you. She’s your Wicked Witch of the North after all.” Somehow the “wicked witch” part contrived to echo about the chamber, taking a damnably long time to die away.

Snorri shrugged and went ahead. “Leave the horse.”

The radial aisles of statues created a steady narrowing as we approached the centre, and soon Sleipnir would be knocking them over left and right. I let go her reins. “Stay.” She blinked one gunked-up eye at me, the other glued tight with secretions, and lowered her head.

The temperature fell by the yard now and frost glittered on plasteek arms to every side. I hugged myself and let my breath plume before me.

In the middle of the chamber a circular platform rose in four steps and in the centre of that, in an ice-clad chair, sat Skilfar: tall, angular, white skin stretched tight across sharp bones, draped in the skins of several arctic foxes and with a white mist running from her limbs as if they might be cold enough to shatter steel. Eyes like frozen seawater fixed upon Snorri’s torch and out it went, the firelight replaced instead by a star-glow that rose from the frost-wrapped limbs of her ancient guardians.

“Visitors.” She rolled her neck, and ice crunched.

“Hail Skilfar.” Snorri bowed. Behind him I wondered just what it was this witch did sitting here in the dark when she didn’t have us to talk to.

“Warrior.” She inclined her head. “Prince.” Cold eyes found me again. “Two of you, bound by the Sister, how droll. She does enjoy her little jokes.”

Little jokes?
Anger rose, elbowing aside a measure of my sensible fear. “Your sister, madam?” I wondered how cold her blood was.

“She would tell you she was everybody’s sister. If she ever spoke.” Skilfar rose from her chair, the freezing air flowing from her skin like milk, pouring to the floor. “A stench of ill dreaming hangs around you both.” She wrinkled her nose. “Whose taint is this? It was not well done.”

“Are you twin to the Silent Sister?” Snorri, through gritted teeth, his axe moving.

“She has a twin, certainly.” Skilfar advanced to the front of the platform, just yards from us. My face ached with the cold. “You don’t want to strike me, Snorri ver Snagason.” She pointed one long white finger at his axe, the blades now level with his shoulder.

“No,” he agreed, but his body remained coiled for the blow.

I found myself advancing, sword raised, though I’d no recollection of drawing it or desire to get any closer than I was. Everything held a dreamlike quality. My eyes filled with visions of the witch dying on the blade before me.

Skilfar wafted the air towards her face, inhaling deeply through a sharp nose. “Sageous has touched your minds. You particularly, prince. But crude work. He normally has a more subtle hand.”

“Do it!” The words burst from me. “Do it now, Snorri!” I clapped a hand to my mouth before I could damn myself further.

Two bounds had him on the step below Skilfar, his axe high above her, the huge muscles of his arms ready to haul it down through her narrow body. And yet he held the blow.

“Ask the right question, child.” Skilfar glanced away from Snorri, meeting my gaze across the sea of statues. “Better that you shrug Sageous off for yourself. Safer than if I do it.”

“I—” I remembered Sageous’s mild eyes, his suggestions that had turned into truths as I’d considered them. “Who—who is the Sister’s twin?”

“Pah.” Skilfar snorted out a breath that wrapped white and serpentine around her thin torso. “I thought she would choose better.” She extended a hand towards me, clawed, talons of ice springing from her nails.

“Wait!” A shout. For some reason I saw my locket. Whole, its gems in place. “I— Who— Garyus! Who is Garyus?”

“Better.” The hand relaxed. Still no smile though. “Garyus is the Sister’s brother.”

I saw him, my great-uncle, twisted and ancient in his tower room, the locket in his hand. “I had a twin,” he had told me once. “They broke us apart. But we didn’t break evenly.”

On the step below Skilfar Snorri lowered his axe, blinking as if shaking off the dregs of sleep.

“And his blood could break this curse?” The question billowed white before me.

“His sister’s spell would be broken.” Skilfar nodded.

“How else can it be broken?” I asked.

“You know the ways.”

“Can’t you do it?” I tried a hopeful smile, but my frozen face wouldn’t cooperate.

“I don’t wish to.” Skilfar returned to her chair. “The unborn have no place amongst us. The Dead King plays a dangerous game. I would see his ambition broken. Many hidden hands are turned against him. Perhaps every hand but that of the Lady Blue, and her game is more dangerous still. So no, Prince Jalan, you carry the Silent Sister’s purpose and the magics with which she sought to destroy the greatest of the Dead King’s servants. I’ve no interest in taking it from you. The Dead King needs his claws trimmed. His strength is like a forest fire.” I wondered at her choice of words. “But like such conflagrations it will burn itself out, and the forest will prevail. Unless of course it burns the very bedrock itself. Destroy the unborn; that will complete the spell’s purpose and it will fade from you. There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.”

“How?” I asked, without really wanting to know. “Destroy the unborn? How?”

“How do the living ever defeat the dead?” She smiled a small cold smile. “With every beat of your heart, every hot drop of your blood. The truth of the Sister’s spell is hidden from me, but carry it where it leads you and pray it proves sufficient. These are the ends you serve.”

Snorri came down the steps, dropping from one to the next, and stood at my side. “I have my own ends, Skilfar. Men do not serve the völvas.” He covered the blades of his axe with the leather protectors he had stripped off a minute before.

“Everything serves everything else, Snorri ver Snagason.” No heat in the witch’s voice. If anything it felt colder than ever.

To distract the pair of them from further disagreements, I raised my voice in a question. “Pray it proves sufficient? Praying’s all well and good, but I never set much faith by it. The Silent Sister had to take her enemies unaware. She had to paint her runes and slowly draw her net around them. Even then the unborn escaped when I broke just one rune . . . so say we do find some way to release this spell . . . how can it defeat even one unborn, let alone several?”

Skilfar raised her brows a fraction as if wondering herself. “They say some wines improve with age when bottled.”

“Wine?” I glanced up at Snorri to see if he understood.

“These magics couldn’t be carried by just any two men,” Skilfar said. “Magic requires the right receptacles. Something about this spell, about you two, just fits together. You’re her blood, Prince Jalan, and Snorri has something to him, something that suits him to this task. Pray or don’t pray, but the only hope you have is that the spell strengthens within you, because of who and what you are, because of your journey, and that when the time comes it will be stronger rather than weaker than it was.”

“I’m not going north as a witch’s lapdog,” Snorri growled. “I’m bound there on my own purpose and I’ll—”

“Why is she silent?” I elbowed the Norseman to shut him up, offering the question up to distract them both from the quarrel brewing on his lips. “Why does the Sister never speak?”

“It’s the price she pays for knowing the future.” Skilfar looked away from Snorri. “She may not speak of it. She says nothing so that the bargain will remain unbroken by any accident or slip of tongue.”

I pursed my lips, nodding with interest. “Well. That’s . . . that sounds reasonable. In any event, we really must be going.” I reached out and tugged at Snorri’s belt. “She’s not going to help us,” I hissed.

Snorri, though, obstinate as ever, would not be pulled away. “We met a man named Taproot. He also spoke of hidden hands. A grey one behind us, a black one blocking our path.”

“Yes, yes.” Skilfar waved the question away. “The Sister set you on your path, the Dead King seeks to stop you. A reasonable ambition considering you’ve been sent to stop him gathering an army of dead men from the ice.”

“No one sent us!” Snorri said, louder than is advisable in front of an ice-witch. “I escaped! I’m bound north to save my—”

“Yes, yes, your family. If you say so.” Skilfar met his gaze, and it was Snorri who looked aside. “Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.”

Now that Snorri had mentioned Taproot’s whitterings and Skilfar lent them a measure of importance with her interpretation, I remembered something else he’d said.

“A blue hand behind the black, a red behind the grey.” The words tripped off my tongue.

Those eyes turned my way and I felt the winter settle cold upon me. “Elias Taproot said that?”

“Uh . . . yes.”

“Well now, that man has been paying closer attention than I gave him credit for.” She steepled white fingers beneath the angularity of her chin. “The Red and the Blue. There you have the battle of our age, Prince Jalan. Lady Blue and the Red Queen. Your grandmother wants an emperor, prince. Did you know that? She wants to make the Broken Empire whole again . . . seal all the cracks, seen and unseen. She wants an emperor because such a man . . . well, he could turn the wheel back. She wants this and the Lady Blue does not.”

“And you, völva?” Snorri asked. “What wheel?” I would have asked.

“Ah. Both courses require a terrible price be paid, and both are fraught with risk.”

“And there’s no third way?”

Skilfar shook her head. “I have cast the runes until they broke from falling. I see nothing but the red and the blue.”

Snorri shrugged. “Emperor or no emperor, it makes no difference to me. My wife and son, Freja and Egil, that’s what calls me to the ice. I’ll see Sven Broke-Oar die and have my justice. Can you tell me if he still bides at the Black Fort?”

“Still fixed upon your carrot, Snorri ver Snagason? Look past it. Look ahead. When the Uuliskind sail, do they navigate by staring at the water beneath their prow? You should ask why it might be that he is there at all. Do they dig beneath the ice just for more corpses? And if not, what else do they seek and to what purpose?”

Something like a growl, but worse, rose in Snorri’s throat. “The Broke-Oar—”

“Let’s go!” I yanked harder at Snorri’s belt before his temper buried both of us.

Snorri hunched his massive shoulders and made a stiff bow. “Gods keep you, Skilfar.”

I let him pass and made my own much deeper bow. Social standing is one thing, but I always feel a scary hell-born witch deserves as much bowing and scraping as it takes to avoid being made into a toad. “My thanks, madam. I’ll take my leave and pray your army keeps you safe.” With an instinctive sideways glance at a particularly well-formed young plasteek woman, I turned to go.

“Step carefully on the ice.” Skilfar called after us as if she had an audience. “Two heroes, one led willy-nilly by his cock, the other northward by his heart. Neither bringing their brain into any decision of import. Let us not judge them harshly, my soldiers, for nothing is truly deep, nothing holds consequence. It’s from the shallows that emotions born of simple wanting arise to steer us as they have always steered man, steered the Builders, steered the gods themselves, towards true Ragnarok, an end to all things. A peace.” She couldn’t resist a commentary. I guess it’s hard for even the wisest not to show off that they are wise.

Her words followed us from the chamber. I halted a short way into the tunnel to relight my torch. “Ragnarok. Is that all the North ever thinks about? Is that what you want, Snorri? Some great battle and the world ruined and dead?” I couldn’t blame him if he did. Not with what had befallen him this past year, but I would be disturbed to know he had always lusted after such an end, even on the night before the black ships came to Eight Quays.

The light kindling on my torch caught him in midshrug. “Do you want the paradise your priests paint for you on cathedral ceilings?”

“Good point.”

We left without further theological discussion. When my brand started to gutter and flare, I lit the last of our torches from the old, tired of being slapped in the face by slime ropes, tripped by stray plasteek legs, soaking my feet in cold pools, and stubbing my toe on blocks fallen from the ceiling. Also the possibility of ghosts disturbed me. For all my bravado in the witch’s chamber the long night of the tunnels had shattered my nerves. Her guardians looked more ominous by the minute; in the dancing shadows their limbs seemed to move. At the corner of my eye I kept seeing motion but when I swung round their ranks remained unbroken.

I’ve never been one for wandering in the dark. It seemed, though, that our light couldn’t last the journey. I held the torch high and prayed that before it failed we’d see a circle of daylight far ahead.

“Come on. Come on.” Muttered in short breaths as we walked. The plasteek soldiers had been left far behind, but for all I knew they stalked us just beyond the range of the torch’s illumination. “Come on.”

Somehow the torch kept going.

“Thank God!” I pointed up ahead to the long-awaited spot of daytime. “I didn’t think it would last.”

“Jal.” Snorri tapped my shoulder. I looked round, my gaze following his to my hand, raised above my head. “Holy sh—” The torch was a blackened stump, no longer even smoking. The fingers gripping it were, however, another matter, glowing fiercely with an inner light. At least they were until Snorri drew them to my attention. At that point they blinked out, plunging us into darkness, and I did what any sensible man would. I ran hell for leather for the outside.

A storm waited for us.

T
he port of Den Hagen sits where the River Oout washes into
the Karlswater, that stretch of brine the Norse call the Devouring Sea. A collection of fine homes huddle on the rising slopes to the east—well, fine for the North where every building crouches low, granite-built to withstand the weather that sweeps in from the frozen wastes. Log cabins, round houses, inns, ale-halls, and fish markets reach down to huge warehouses that fringe the docks like receiving mouths. Greater ships sit at anchor in the quiet waters of the bay; other vessels crowd the quays, masts rising in a profusion of spars and rigging. Seagulls circle overhead, ever mournful, and men fill the air with their own cries, voices raised to call out prices, summon fresh hands to load or unload, issue challenge, share jokes, curse or praise the many gods of Asgard, or to bring the followers of Christ to the small and salt-rimed church at the water’s edge.

“What a hole.” The stink of old fish reached me even on the cliff tops where the coast road snaked in from the west.

Snorri, walking ahead of me, growled but said nothing. I leaned forwards and patted Sleipnir’s neck. “Time for us to part soon, old one-eye.”

I would miss the horse. I’ve never liked walking. If God had meant man to walk he wouldn’t have given us horses. Wonderful animals. I think of them as the word
escape
, covered in hair and with a leg at each corner.

We wound down into Den Hagen, the road lined with shacks that looked as though the first winds of winter would clear them from the slopes. On a high corner overlooking the sea, seven troll-stones watched the waves. They looked like stones to me, but Snorri claimed to see a troll in each of them. He pulled open his weather jacket and jerked up the layers of his shirts to reveal a fearsome scar across the hard-packed muscles of his stomach. “Troll.” With a finger he implied a series of additional scars from hip to shoulder. “I was lucky.”

In a world where dead men walked, unborn rose from fresh graves, and the people of the pines haunted forests, I could hardly dispute his claim.

On the final stretch of the road we passed three or four hammer-stones set on the verges to honour the thunder god. Snorri checked for rune stones around each but found only a stray black pebble, river-smoothed and wide enough to cover his palm, bearing a single rune. Perhaps local children made off with the rest.

“Thuriaz.” He let it fall.

“Hmmm?”

“Thorns.” He shrugged. “It means nothing.”

 • • • 

T
he town boasted no wall, and nobody save a handful of sorry-looking merchants watched the entrance—not that there was an entrance, just an increase in the crowding of houses. After weeks of rough living and hard travelling, even a place such as Den Hagen has its appeal. Every piece of clothing on me still held its measure of rain from the storm that had lashed us for two days across the moorland fastness surrounding Skilfar’s seat. A man could have slaked his thirst on what he could squeeze from my trews. He’d have to be damnable dry to risk it, though.

“We could pop in there and see if the ale tastes any better here?” I pointed to a tavern just ahead, barrels placed in the street before it for men to rest their tankards on, a painted wooden swordfish hanging above the door.

“Maladon beer is fine.” Snorri walked on past the entrance.

“It would be if they forgot to salt it.” Foul stuff, but sometimes foul will do. I’d asked for wine back in the town of Goaten and they’d looked at me as if I’d asked them to roast a small child for my meal.

“Come on.” Snorri turned towards the sea, waving away a man trying to sell him dried fish. “We’ll check the harbour first.” A tension had built in him as we approached the coast, and when we first saw the sea from a high ridge he had sunk to his knees and muttered heathen prayers. Since the troll-stones he’d been walking with such purpose I had to nudge Sleipnir along to keep up.

Several boats were tied at mooring points along the dock front, amongst them one that required neither loading nor unloading.

“A longboat,” I said, spotting at last the classic lines that Snorri must have recognized from the coast road. I slipped from Sleipnir’s back as Snorri strode towards the vessel, breaking into a run over the last fifty yards. Even a landlubber like myself could see that the ship had been through rough times, the mast broken some yards short of its proper height, the sail ragged.

Without slowing Snorri reached the harbour’s edge and dropped from sight, presumably onto the unseen deck of the longboat. Cries and shouts went up. I prepared myself for the sight of carnage.

Making a slow advance and peering over the side, with the caution of a man not wanting a spear in the forehead, I expected to be met with a boat full of blood and body parts. Instead Snorri stood amidst the rowing benches grinning like a loon with six or seven pale and hairy men crowding around him, exchanging welcome punches. And all of them trying to talk at once in some godforsaken language that sounded like it needed to be retched up from the depths of a man’s belly.

“Jal!” He glanced up and waved. “Get down here!”

I debated the matter, but there seemed no escape. I slung Sleipnir’s reins over one of the ship lines and went off to find a means of descent that didn’t involve breaking both ankles on arrival.

Disentangling myself from a rickety ladder of salty rope and rotting planks, I turned to find myself an object of study for eight Vikings. The most immediate thing to strike me was not the traditional Norse “fist of welcome” but the fact that most of them were identical.

“Quins now, is it?” I counted them off.

Snorri slung an arm about two of the five, white-blond types with ice-chip eyes and beards far more close-cut than the usual “big-enough-to-lose-a-baby-in” style of the North. “Sore point, Jal. These are Jarl Torsteff’s octuplets. Atta sits at Odin’s table now, in Valhalla, with Sex and Sjau.” He cast me a stern look and I kept my face a mask. “These are Ein, Tveir, Thrir, Fjórir, and Fimm.”

My guess was that I’d just had a lesson in counting to eight in Norse, and simultaneously a look at the meagre state of Jarl Torsteff’s imagination. I decided to call them the quins in any event. Less morbid.

“Also Tuttugu.” Snorri reached out to pummel the shoulder of a short fat man. A ginger beard fluffed out from both sides of the man’s head with great enthusiasm but failed to quite meet across his chins. Older this one, midthirties, a decade over the quins. “And Arne Dead-Eye, our greatest shot!” This last the oldest of them, tall, thin, melancholy, bad teeth, balding, grey in the black of his beard. If I’d seen him bent over weeds in a field I’d have thought him a common peasant.

“Ah,” I said, hoping we wouldn’t have to mix blood or spit in each other’s hands. “Delighted to make your acquaintance.”

Seven Vikings looked at me as if I might be some kind of hitherto unseen fish they’d just landed. “Run into trouble?” I pointed at the broken mast, but unless the thirty or so additional men required to fill the rowing benches were up at the Swordfish enjoying tankards of salt-beer, then the trouble had entailed much more than a shortening of the mast and some ripped sailcloth.

“Drowned Isles trouble!” A quin, possibly Ein.

“We don’t have a settlement on Umbra any more.” This another quin, directed at Snorri.

“Call them the Dead Isles now.” Tuttugu, jowls wobbling as he shook his head.

“Necromancers chased us onto our ships. Storms chased us south.” Arne Dead-Eye, looking at the calluses on his hand.

“Got wrecked on Brit. Took months to repair. And the locals?” A quin spat over the side and a remarkably long way out to sea.

“Been hopping along the coast ever since, trying to get home.” Arne shook his head. “Dodging Normardy’s navy, patrol boats off Arrow, Conaught pirates . . . And Aegir hates us. Sent storm after storm to beat us back.”

“I was expecting sea serpents next; a leviathan, why not?” Tuttugu rolled his eyes. “But we’re here. Friendly waters. Few more repairs and we can cross the Karlswater!” He slapped a random quin across the shoulders.

“You don’t know?” I asked.

Snorri’s brow furrowed and he moved to the side of the boat, leaning out to stare north across the open water.

“Know what?” From many mouths, all eyes on me.

I realized my mistake. Don’t board a man’s ship bearing bad news. You’re likely to leave again swiftly and by the wet side.

“We know there’s no word of the Undoreth in Den Hagen.” One of the quins, Ein with the scar at the corner of his eye. “No longships docking. Tales come from the Hardanger ports of raids along the Uulisk, but no detail. We’ve been here four days and that’s all we’ve discovered. You know more?”

“Snorri’s the one to tell it,” I said. “My stories are all from him and I’d not trust myself to remember them right.” And that turned all those pointed stares Snorri’s way.

He stood, towering above us all, grim, a hand on his axe. “It’s a thing that must be told where we can toast the dead, brothers.” And he walked to the harbour wall, climbing quickly up a series of jutting stones that I’d missed on my way down.

 • • • 

S
norri led us to a dockside tavern where the drinking tables would afford a view of the longship. I didn’t judge it worth stealing, but perhaps he was wise not to put that to the test. After all, a place like Den Hagen would make anyone frantic to leave after a short while, so there might have been men there desperate enough to sail off in any untended vessel, even a leaking tub like the one that brought the Norsemen to harbour.

I walked along at the rear of the group with Tuttugu. “I thought longships would be, you know, longer.”

“It’s a snekkja.”

“Oh.”

“The smallest type.” Tuttugu managed a grin at my ignorance, though his mind must have been on what Snorri would tell. “Twenty benches. Skei carry twice as many. Ours is called
Ikea
, after the dragon, you know?”

“Yes.” I didn’t, but lying is easier than listening to explanations. I wasn’t even that interested in their boat, but it looked as though I might be trusting myself to it, and sooner than I wanted to. Twice the size of their snekkja still didn’t sound like a big ship—but the strength of the North had always been in swift boats, and many of them. I had to pray that with all that practice the damn things were at least seaworthy.

We drew up stools around a long bench, several locals wisely deciding to relocate to other tables. Snorri called for ale and sat at the head of the table, looking out across the length of it at the snekkja’s sails flapping above the harbour wall. The sky behind them held a complex mix of dark and moody clouds, some trailing rain, but all lit by the slanting rays of the afternoon sun.

“Valhalla!” Snorri swiped the first foaming tankard off the tray as the serving women brought them out.

“Valhalla!” A pounding of the table.

“A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.” Snorri had their attention. He paused to drink deep and long. “I didn’t fight at Einhaur, but I heard the tale of it from Sven Broke-Oar, if any straight word can come from his crooked tongue.”

The crew of the
Ikea
exchanged glances at that, muttering amongst themselves. The tone of the snatches I caught made it clear they shared a low opinion of the Broke-Oar.

“The battle at Eight Quays I fought in. A massacre more than a battle. My survival shames me every day.” He drank again, and told the story.

The sun dropped, shadows stretched, the world went by, but unnoticed. Snorri held us under the spell of his voice and I listened, sipping my ale without tasting it, even though I had heard it all before. All of it until he reached the Black Fort.

 • • • 

W
hen Snorri first saw the black spot he thought it part of dying, his vision failing as the wilderness claimed him. But the spot persisted, kept its place, grew as he staggered on. And in time it became the Black Fort.

Built of huge blocks carved from the ancient basalt fields beneath the snows, the Black Fort sat in squat defiance of the Bitter Ice, dwarfed by the vast and rising cliffs of the ice sheet just five miles to the north. In all the long years of the fort’s existence the ice had advanced, retreated, advanced again, but never quite reached those black walls, as if the fort stood as man’s final guardian against the dominion of the frost giants.

Strengthened by the sight, Snorri journeyed closer, drawing his sealskin cloak all about him, white with snow. An east wind picked up, scouring across the ice, picking up fine dry snow and driving it in eddies and streams. Snorri leaned into the teeth of the gale, the last scraps of warmth stolen away from him, each step threatening to end in a huddle from which there would be no rising.

When the fort’s bulk blocked the wind, Snorri almost toppled, as if his support had been snatched away. He hadn’t seen that he was so close, or truly believed that he would ever reach his goal. Nobody watched from the battlements. Each narrow window stood shuttered and snow-clad. No guard waited on duty at the great gates. Numb of hand and brain, Snorri stood, uncertain. He had carried no plan with him, just the desire to finish what had started in Eight Quays and what should have ended there. He had outlived two children. He had no desire to outlive Egil or Freja, only to battle to save them.

Feeble as he was, Snorri knew that he would only grow weaker waiting in the snow. He could no more scale the walls of the fort than he could climb the cliffs of the Bitter Ice. He took Hel in both hands and with his father’s axe he beat upon the doors of the Black Fort.

After an age a shutter high above broke open, scattering ice and snow upon Snorri’s head. By the time he looked up the shutters had closed once more. He pounded the door again, knowing his mind clouded with the slowness and stupidity that cold brings, but unable to think of an alternative.

“You!” A voice from on high. “Who are you?”

Snorri looked up and there in wolf furs, leaning out for a better look, Sven Broke-Oar, face unreadable in the red-gold swirl of his hair.