At last Arne had equipped himself and we crept forwards across the snow, crouching low now, as if that might make a difference. The figure in the tower moved several times, facing our way for a heart-stopping moment, but showed no signs of interest.
“Do it here.” Snorri caught Arne’s shoulder. I think the Dead-Eye would have closed to fifty yards if they’d let him.
“Odin, guide my arrow.” Arne removed a glove and set a shaft to his bow.
On a still day with warm hands and no pressure on the outcome, it was a shot I might hope to make four times in five. Arne loosed his shaft and it hissed away, invisible against the sky.
“Miss.” I stated the obvious to break the still moment that held us all. The shot had gone so wide the man in the tower hadn’t even noticed it.
Arne tried again, taking deep breaths to steady himself. Fingers white on the bowstring. He loosed.
“Miss.” I hadn’t meant to say anything, the word just spoke itself into the expectant hush.
Arne pulled away his face guard and gave me a sour look. He ran his tongue over an array of teeth, most brown, one black, one grey, one white, two missing. He took another arrow, one of maybe a dozen remaining, and returned his attention to the tower. Three breaths, hauled in, released slowly, and he took the shot.
To be fair I waited several seconds. It was lucky all three shots had gone high rather than striking the stonework. The man on the tower hadn’t so much as flinched. “Miss,” I said.
“You fucking do it!” Arne shoved the bow at me.
Safe in the knowledge I couldn’t do much worse, I stripped off a glove and strung an arrow. The wind made an agony of my fingers within moments. Those moments would be all I had before the wind stopped them hurting and made them useless. I lined up on the man, guessed at compensation for the wind, and shifted my aim yards to the right. The lack of time helped. It stopped me thinking about what I intended to do. I’m told that I killed men in the Aral Pass, but I’ve no clear memory of it. On the mountain with Snorri a man had pretty much impaled himself on my sword—and I’d apologized to him for the accident before I knew what I was saying. That had all been in hot blood. But here I crouched, arms trembling, blood as cold as it had ever been, ready to punch an arrow through a man’s chest, to take his life without warning, without seeing his face. A different matter entirely.
“Miss.” I whispered it as I let fly.
Two heartbeats passed and I was sure I’d done no better than Arne.
“Yes!” The man spun around as if from a sudden impact. “Yes!” Snorri shouted.
“Shit!” That from Tuttugu as the guardsman remained standing, advanced to the wall, unsteady and clutching his arm, then turned to flee.
“Hel! Shoot him again!” Snorri shouted.
The man had descended by steps to the main wall and was running hell for leather towards the far tower where presumably his companions were housed. Why he wasn’t watching from that tower, I couldn’t tell you.
“We’re done.” I gestured at the distant wall. The man could be glimpsed every half second or so as a dark streak through the crenels notched down into the battlements.
Arne snatched his bow back, strung an arrow, and loosed it at the sky. “A pox on all the gods.” He spat and his phlegm froze before it landed.
“Why waste another arrow?” I watched the walls, wondering if they would come out to kill us or leave us to freeze.
The man fell with a thin cry, nailed as he and Arne’s arrow arrived together at the third crenel before the tower door, six yards short of his sanctuary.
“Dead-Eye!” A quad punched Arne in the shoulder.
“Dead arm if you’re not careful.” But he sounded pleased.
Snorri had already hurried away from us, towards the walls. We gave chase. It seemed to take forever to cross the hundred-yard gap. He had out a long coil of rope, knotted for climbing and stored away from the ice for this moment. At one end a grapple hook that looked suspiciously like the anchor from a small fishing boat. He threw it over the wall and it caught first time. Snorri had already reached the top as I made it to the base of the wall. A quad went up next, then Arne, then me, slipping and cursing now the knots were slippery with ice from the others’ boots. The body of the man Arne shot plummeted past me as I reached the halfway point. I bit off another complaint and kept my mouth shut after that.
• • •
With only Tuttugu yet to climb, we pulled our packs up on a rope and then hauled Tuttugu after them. That effort at last got a little warmth into my blood. I helped him to his feet after his rather undignified struggle between the battlements to reach the walkway.
“Thanks.” He grinned, a nervous thing, quick then gone, and unslung his axe from across his back. An unusual weapon, closer to the armour-piercing wedge design favoured down south.
On the gritted ice beneath my feet, spatters of the tower guard’s blood—shocking colour after what seemed an eternity of white. The droplets captured my gaze. All the talk, all the travel, had come to this moment, these crimson splashes. From abstract to real—too real.
“Are we ready?” Snorri from before the door our man had been running for. The word no fought to get past my lips. “Good.” Snorri held his axe in a double grip, Arne a broadsword, the brothers each with a double-headed broadaxe, short-handled, a knife in the off hand. I drew my longsword, last of all of them. Satisfied, Snorri nodded and set his hand to the iron door handle. The plan did not have to be reiterated. It was, as plans go, a simple one. Kill everyone.
The door opened with a squeal of hinges, shedding ice, and we were through, crowding onto the steps beyond. Snorri closed it behind us and I shut my eyes, taking a moment to enjoy the simple ecstasy of being out of that wind. No winter night of Red March had ever been as cold as it was there in that corridor within the Black Fort, but without the wind it was a paradise compared to the outside. We all took a moment, several moments, stamping a touch of life back into our feet, swinging our arms to recover a little of that lost flexibility.
Snorri led on, down the steps and into a long corridor. We expected to find most of Sven Broke-Oar’s men in one spot. It’s what men do in cold places. They huddle by the hearth, shoulder to shoulder, for as long as they can stand each other’s company. With fuel so hard to come by, they would not light many fires.
Although in many places the interior walls were ice-clad, it felt hot in the Black Fort. My skin burned with it, life creeping back into my hands and even threatening to invade my fingers.
Arne lit a small lantern, the oil carefully hoarded during our long trip for just this purpose. Perhaps with its warmth Fimm would not have died in the night. The guard had carried no source of light, knowing his path through the dark.
At each door we paused and Snorri tried the handle. None of them were locked, though some were jammed and opening them quietly tested even Snorri’s strength. The first two proved empty: long, narrow chambers with no hint of their purpose save a lack of fireplaces that told us they had never been intended for habitation. A third chamber stood stacked high with blocks of the same basalt that formed the walls themselves. Materials for repair. A fourth had been used as a latrine, though not recently; the mounds of frozen dung gave not the slightest scent.
The fifth door yielded after a silent struggle, one loud scrape echoing along the corridor as it gave. We held still, waiting for the challenge, but none came. The horror of my situation had started to settle on me as my body began to recover. I grew warm enough to shiver at about the same time that I grew scared enough to shake.
“Hel.” Snorri drew back from the part-open door, his face thrown into eerie relief by the lantern held beneath it.
“Is it safe?” Tuttugu, unwilling to lower his axe.
Snorri nodded. “Take a look.” He beckoned me, raising the lantern overhead.
The scene reminded me of Sk
ilfar’s lair. Figures, row upon row, so close they leaned one upon the next, unable to fall. Men, shrouded in ice, bearded with frost, caught in every pose from curled in sleep to contorted in agony, but most just head down, captured in that plodding motion I knew so well from the past few days.
“Olaaf Rikeson’s men?”
“Must be . . .” Snorri pulled the door closed.
The next five halls all held frozen corpses, all warriors. Hundreds of them in total. Dead for centuries but ice-locked against the years. I wondered if whatever spirit a necromancer might return to them would be all the darker for those lifetimes spent with the devil.
The quads huddled together and the momentary joy we’d all known at escaping the wind faded swiftly in that grim place, surrounded on all sides by the ancient dead.
The corridor passed two sets of spiral stairs, coiling up and down in their narrow shafts. Snorri passed them by. This section seemed more often used, the walls free of ice, grit on the floor to make for surer footing.
There was no missing or mistaking our target. The air grew warm, thick with the smell of smoke and cooking, something meaty stewing in a pot if I were any judge. My mouth began to water immediately. Just the scent of that hot food had me ready to kill for my supper. The door at the end of the corridor stood taller than the side doors, studded with black iron, muffled sounds emerging.
We looked, one to the other, preparing to organize for an entry. As often happens in life, the decision was taken from us. A heavyset Viking emerged without warning, calling some insult back over his shoulder.
Arne’s arm flickered and the hatchet he’d carried so long at his hip now sprouted from the dark red curls of the man’s beard. It didn’t look quite real. Snorri and the others surged forwards without a sound save for boots on stone. The man scrabbled at the hatchet, blood pouring down his neck, and fell beneath them.
I found myself standing with only Tuttugu at my side. He gave an embarrassed grin and jogged off after the others. That left me alone in a corridor with frozen dead men packed into all the rooms to either side. The first battle cry rang out, Snorri’s roar of joyous violence as the others barged through the big door behind him. I screwed up whatever courage I could find and set off after Tuttugu, sword at the ready.
The sight beyond the door proved arresting. So arresting that even with all his momentum Tuttugu had come to a dead halt and I ran into his back, sandwiching my blade between us. A score or more Red Vikings had been crowded into the far end of the hall before the large fireplace. Stone tables ran nearly the length of the hall, and I could only think this was where Snorri had been brought and hung upon the wall.
The Hardanger men, Red Vikings as they’re known, hailed from a tribe darker in colouring than the Undoreth, more red heads amongst them, more dark-haired men, a tough breed, broad in the chest and blunt-featured. They weren’t armoured or armed for war, but Norse warriors are seldom beyond reach of their axes and will always wear a knife or hatchet.
Snorri had leapt onto the table to the left and run its length, taking the head from one man sitting at it, close to the door, and carving a furrow through the face of another sitting on the opposite side, farther along, closer to the fire. He’d dropped amongst the crowd by the hearth, swinging in great red arcs. Hardanger men scattered away into the length of the hall, grabbing their weapons, putting space between themselves and Snorri, only to be engaged by the quads, broadaxes flashing firelight as they ploughed flesh.
A quad went down, a backhand swing by a black-haired Viking burying an axe in his neck. The man was fearsomely fast, tall, lean, muscles like knots in rope along dirt-stained arms. Tuttugu ran forwards, screaming as if gripped by the worst kind of terror, and hammered his axe into the black-haired man’s chest before he could wrench his own axe from the quad’s vertebrae. I saw Hardanger men hurrying along either wall of the hall, weapons drawn. A path that would see them converge on the doorway where I stood. In response I chased after Tuttugu, between the tables. Sometimes advance is the best form of retreat. Inadvertently I kicked the severed head of the first man to die and sent it rolling away towards the melee.
Crimson arcs decorated the far end of the hall. The fire smoked with spattered blood and a hand sizzled there, forearm still attached. Men staggered back from Snorri’s blizzard of sharp iron, some with gaping wounds, guts vomiting from slits running groin to shoulder, others screaming, blood jetting from sliced limbs with sufficient pressure to stain the ceiling five yards above us. Others still hurled themselves at Snorri and the Undoreth with deadly intent, axes swinging.
The noise of it, the stink, the colour. The room revolved around me, the din fading in and out, time seeming to slow. Tuttugu hauled his narrow axe from his enemy’s sternum. I heard the crack of bone, saw the blood gush, the man fall away, arms reaching, face dark with fury, not understanding that he’d died. A big red-haired man with a two-handed sword rushed at Tuttugu. Behind me three men vaulted the tables, two from the left, one from the right, eager to wet their blades. The door to the left of the great fireplace burst open, disgorging more Vikings, the first with an iron helm, studded all over, a crosspiece noseguard beneath. The man behind him raised a wide round shield, a spike on its central boss. More men crowded behind.
A spear sprung from a quad’s chest as he rushed the doorway. The force of it took him backwards, white hair flying. Blood sprayed across me from closer at hand, filling my eyes, filling my mouth with salt and copper. I heard screaming and knew it was mine. The Red Vikings closed on me from both sides and I watched them from behind a crimson veil. My sword flickered out—
• • •
“Jal?” Faint beneath the pounding in my ears, the thunder in my chest, the harshness of each drawn breath. “Jal?”
I could see the flagstones, awash with blood, black points of my fringe hanging before my eyes, dripping.
“Jal?” Snorri’s voice.
I was standing. My hand still held my sword. A table to either side. Corpses leaking—some under the tables, some sprawled across them.
“Jal?” Tuttugu, nervous.
“Is he safe?” A twin. Or perhaps just Ein now.
I looked up. Three Undoreth watched me at a safe distance, Snorri glancing towards the doorway through which the reinforcements had come.
“Baresarker!” Ein smacked his fist to his chest.
Snorri spared me a grin. “I’m starting to understand the hero and devil of Aral Pass!” His sealskins were ripped wide across his hip, exposing an ugly wound. Another deep cut on the muscle mounded around the join of shoulder and neck bled copiously.
My free hand started to shake uncontrollably. I looked around the room. The dead lay strewn. Around the hearth they lay in heaps. Arne sat on the table behind me, deathly pale, his cheek ripped so badly I could see through to the rotten teeth, half of them smashed out of his jawbone. The spreading pool of crimson around him told me that dentistry was the last of his worries. A wound to his thigh had cut the artery deep in the meat of him.
“Jal.” Arne offered me a broken grin, his words blurred by the face wound. He slumped down, almost graceful. “It was a great shot, though, wasn’t it . . . Jal?”
“I—” My voice cracked. “A great shot, Arne. The best.” But the Dead-Eye was past hearing. Past everything now.
“Snorri ver Snagason!” A roar issuing from the doorway beyond the hearth.
“Sven Broke-Oar!” Snorri shouted in return. He hefted his axe and approached the fire. “You must have known I’d be back. For my wife, my boy, my vengeance. Why would you even sell me?”
“Oh, I knew.” The Broke-Oar even sounded pleased about it, which, now that the strange sense of dissociation was fading, brought all my fears back from whatever corners of my mind the battle madness had driven them into. “It was hardly fair to rob you of your fight now, was it? And we of the Hardanger do love our gold. And of course my new
masters have expenses. The elixir they need for the dead in these cold climes requires oils from Araby, and those are hard to find. A man must trade good coin for such exotics.”
Even dazed I recognized the taunt. Telling Snorri he’d financed this horror with his own flesh and failure. Whatever was said of the Broke-Oar, none called him stupid.
Ein, Tuttugu, and I went to stand at Snorri’s side. Another chamber lay beyond the doorway, most of it out of our line of sight. A Red Viking lay half in one room, half in the other, his head split wide. Ein tugged the spear from his brother—Thrir if the order had held true.
“There’s more to it than that, Broke-Oar. You could have killed me and still had nine-tenths and more of your blood gold.” Snorri paused as if struggling to voice his question. “Where’s my wife? My boy? If you’ve harmed—” He snapped his jaw shut on the words, the muscles in his cheeks working.
Tuttugu hastened to bind Snorri’s side with strips from a cloak, Ein holding Snorri back as the warrior made to advance. Snorri relented and let them—the shoulder wound would bleed the strength from him soon if not staunched.
“There’s more to it than that,” Snorri repeated.
“It’s true, Snorri.” A touch of sadness in the Broke-Oar’s voice. Despite his reputation the man sounded . . . regal, a king declaiming from his throne. Sven Broke-Oar had the voice of a hero and a sage, and he wound it around us like a spell. “I’ve fallen. You know it. I know it. I bent in the wind. But Snorri? Snorri ver Snagason still stands tall, pure as autumn snow, as if he stepped from the sagas to save us all. And whatever else I might be, Snorri, I am a Viking first. The sagas must be told, the hero must have his chance to stand against the long winter. Vikings we—born to hold against trolls, frost giants, even the sea. Even the gods themselves.
“Come, Snorri. Let’s make an end of this. Just you and me. Let your friends bear witness. I stand ready.”