The Wheel of Osheim

  The darkness washes after me like a wave racing up the beach, outpacing me to either side, freezing my heels. I fly through the doorway, contriving to trip on the doorstep, and sprawl headlong into the corridor beyond. Looking back in terror I see the blackness slam into the building, the doorway becomes a rectangle of night and a tremor runs through the floor, but not a wisp of the dark enters the passage where I lie and no hint of the horror outside can be seen. If she’s howling out there – I can’t hear her.

  I stand up, brushing the dust off me, still eyeing the darkness outside nervously. Steeling myself I risk a glance away, into the judges’ hall. It’s not what I expect. No courtrooms, no souls queuing for the verdict on their lives, no trio of Zeus’s bastards sitting in judgment. There’s nothing but a long corridor, too long to fit within the building, though the structure is huge. At the far end something burning and bright – a blue, a green, a promise. All I need do is walk forward and I’ll be home. I sense it in my bones. I don’t even need the Liar’s key. This is a true path, one the just may walk.

  I take a step forward and doors appear along both walls. A plain wooden door every ten yards, scores of them. I take another step and each one swings open, the closest ones first, then the next an instant later, and so on, creating a wave rippling off toward the distant blue-green promise.

  It’s easy to pass by the rooms behind the first doors. The first to the left is empty save for a discarded purse in the middle of the floor, to the right also empty but for a scattering of silver coins. The next pair are empty save for a discarded sword and a small closed casket.

  ‘Are you trying to tempt me?’ The laugh comes easy and I pick up the pace, not even looking in the rooms as I pass.

  A hundred doors on and I stop as if I’d hit a wooden post. The most delicious smell ever in the history of aromas has fastened itself to my nose and turns my head without permission. A table has been set in the room to my left. A simple table without cloth or silver, and on it rests a wooden plate where half a roasted chicken sits and steams. Instantly my mouth is full of drool, my stomach a tight and demanding knot. Every part of me screams with desire for that hot roasted meat. I’ve lived with famine in Hell for so long that my body literally howls in answer to the call of a good meal.

  Sobbing, I turn away, only to see in the room opposite a simple goblet of clear glass, brimming with water. I know in the moment I lay eyes upon it that this will be the purest of spring waters, gurgling free from beneath ancient rocks, and that gulping it down, letting it flow into my parched and death-touched throat, would take the thirst from me in a moment. To anyone who has not known the desiccation of death’s drylands the idea that a man might sacrifice himself for just a glass of water may seem insane. But it must be experienced to be understood. I have been dry in the desert of the Sahar. It is a small thing compared to the thirst that a day in Hell will put in a man.

  Even so, I tear myself away and stumble on, my body aching with the life awakened in it so suddenly by the proximity of the world after so very long walking the deadlands.

  More scents assault me, each more delicious than the one before. Apples, caramel, fresh baked bread … beer. Young beer, fragrant with hops, the sound of it pouring from the spigot … that nearly turns me. I catch glimpses of the rooms: one a meadow in sunlight, another a horse ready to ride, a magnificent beast, muscles bunched under dark hide, ready to gallop all day. There are rooms where treasure lies in drifts, gold enough to buy kingdoms whole. I focus my vision on that distant rectangle of green grass and blue sky, coming closer with each stride. My will is iron. I understand the test and will not be turned.

  I’m twenty yards from the end door. I can see the blue sky, the green of a garden, a wall behind it. It looks like the royal herb garden behind the messenger stables. I break into a run.

  ‘Come back to bed, Jal.’

  One sideways glance and I stumble to a halt, turn, take three steps back. I recognize the room, a bedchamber. The light slants through shuttered windows dividing the bed into parallel lines of light and shadow. Each bright line rises over her, describing her contours, tawny skin smooth across warm flesh. She lies naked, just as I left her, silken sheets rising halfway up her back and following her curves as faithfully as the light does.

  ‘Lisa?’

  She doesn’t speak, just makes that languid stretch that’s only possible in the moments between waking and sleeping.

  This is a doorway into the past. The air itself shimmers with doorways, fractures in the world, each leading to new possibilities, new versions of my life. If I had stayed with her that morning, if I had turned at the door when she called to me, still half-tangled in her dreams, if I had slid in beside her once more … none of this would have happened. I would have missed Grandmother’s address. I would never have seen Snorri. He would have made his own way home. I would have lived on as I always had. Perhaps I would have asked Lisa to marry me and spent her dowry buying off Maeres Allus, and the idle, easy, soft days of my life would have carried on.

  That one thought overwhelms me. Go back. Turn it back. Do it over. That one thought and the glorious aliveness of her after so very long in the deadlands. Lisa DeVeer, long, lean, lovely, warm, soft, vital. Go on along the corridor and return to the now, to the palace of Vermillion where she is married and the world stands against me … or turn here at the last moment and step back into that first morning where it all went wrong and could so easily have been avoided.

  One step is all it takes. The rest I don’t even remember. I lay a hand on her hip and sit at her side. I start to kick off my boots. Lisa reaches up to draw me down to her, turning slowly, dark hair cascading over her shoulder.

  She hasn’t any face, just a funnel of flesh from which a score of cobra fangs jut, venom dripping from their sharpness. I fall off the bed with a shout of horror, my shirt ripping, most of it still hanging in her clawed fist. I pull the key and would run for the door but there is no door. I scrabble backwards across the bedroom floor as the thing that isn’t Lisa rises from the bed. Trapped in a corner, I reach up to throw the shutter wide but all it reveals is the dead sky of Hell – damnation waits for me out there. In the deadlight the shimmers where the worlds brush against one another show more clearly and Not-Lisa looks more like something made rather than grown, unclean flesh on old bones. She moves from the bed, awkward, limbs jerking, and steps my way.

  In desperation I shove the key toward the closest place where the light fractures. It’s not a door but it might almost be. It’s a half-chance and I take it. I feel Loki’s key engage with something, locking its teeth into the stuff of being … and I turn it.

  A moment later I’m tumbling out into the oven of the Sahar, scaldingly hot sand, blind white heat, a place that eats hope and buries the bones … and it feels great.

  ‘Marshal?’ Someone shook my arm, hard. ‘Marshal!’

  It’s Bonarti Poe, white-faced and trembling. The key released my gaze and I found myself sitting in the corridor exactly where I was when Hertet first pressed it into my hands.

  ‘How long have I—’

  ‘I think everyone’s dead!’ Poe looked back along the passage. A hideous scream rang out to contradict him – the kind of howl heard in torture chambers.

  ‘We should leave.’ I got to my feet, using the wall for support. It was dark, just one lamp guttering in a niche between us and the door to the throne room, its oil nearly spent.

  ‘T-they said you know about … this thing that’s attacking us?’ Bonarti had yet to relinquish my arm.

  ‘I’ve seen one in Hell.’

  ‘Oh Christ.’ His grip started to hurt so I shook him off. ‘But you know how to beat it, right?’

  The door at the end of the corridor burst into pieces, saving me from a reply. The lichkin stood there like a wound on my eye, there but invisible, glimpsed the next moment, not as the raw white nerve but shrouded in ghosts, wearing the grey souls of men as a skin.

  The air between us ripple
d, fault-lines and fractures seen in an instant then gone, some brilliant, some dark. This was the doom Luntar had warned us of. Not the lichkin dealing out deaths by the score, or thousand, but the breaking of creation. I’d seen the same fractures where the judges’ hall stood on the boundary between worlds, and here the Dead King’s creature caused two worlds to collide, leading the denizens of Hell back into their bodies and into the lands of the living. It’s in the nature of any crack to spread and, with the slow turn of the Wheel driving them, the fractures would spread ever faster and further. The Wheel of Osheim might lie untold miles away but its influence reached into the heart of every place, driven by the vast unslumbering machinery of the Builders, still pulsing with their energy though they lay dead a thousand years.

  The lichkin came on slowly as if daring us to run. I knew how fast the thing could be and made no move that would spark it into action. Instead I hung onto those last few moments of life remaining to me. Bonarti, lacking my understanding, ran for it. He got two steps before the lichkin hit him in the back. It flowed into him like a string of sinew sucked up by a hungry mouth. I caught a nerve-white flicker as the last of its thin body vanished beneath the skin to wrap his spine. The lichkin’s shroud of ghosts peeled away as it found flesh, winding themselves smoke-like about the paralysed man.

  Bonarti’s scream was thankfully short, but his pain didn’t end with it. A moment later a hundred razor cuts opened all across him, no more than skin deep. With the lichkin anchored in Bonarti’s flesh I would have run, but he blocked my path away from the throne room and at the doorway corpses crowded, hungry-eyed, held back only by the lichkin’s desire to toy with its food. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

  Bonarti faced me, eyes wide, mouth twisted into a grin he didn’t own. His skin began to peel away, a dozen broad strips flayed out slowly between parallel cuts. There comes a point where you get so scared that it really doesn’t matter where you’re running to as long as you are running. I knew that the half-doors and broken chances that lay behind the fractures all around me each led straight to Hell, but frankly Hell had already come visiting and terrible as every part of it was I would rather be running toward some part that didn’t contain a lichkin. The creature reached for me with Bonarti’s raw red hand, flayed skin dangling. With the same scream a man uses when steeling himself to some awful task, like cutting off a limb to escape a fire, I drove Loki’s key into the nearest fracture. The closest fault-line shimmered through the wall beside me and had nearly faded to nothing before my hand reached it. The key found its socket and held there, anchoring the fracture. Bonarti’s wet fingers found my neck and, still screaming, I turned the key.

  It seemed in that moment that the world broke. Rather than falling through the hole I’d made I flew back as something big burst out of it, barging me aside. Something big, hard, and fast.

  Snorri swung overhead, his axe shearing through Bonarti Poe’s collarbone and deep into his chest. A heavy boot, shattering ribs, gave the leverage to wrench Hel’s blade clear. The Norseman’s next blow swept in from the side before Bonarti’s corpse hit the floor, taking off his arm at the elbow and carving toward his spine.

  Snorri followed the corpse, roaring, reddish dust smoking from his hair and clothing. Behind him the fractured window into Hell started to close, reality still able to heal itself. Just.

  The lichkin forced Bonarti’s body to crawl beneath the rain of axe blows. The ghosts rose to blind and tear at Snorri but he scarcely noticed, hewing deep into the meat of the man beneath him. White tendrils reached out, questing for other bodies, for dead flesh to inhabit, but the Northman struck them off with swift efficiency. Properly bound to a host as the lichkin are in the form of unborn, the thing could have drawn more effectively on the dead and the living to repair itself, but this unbound lichkin had become reckless, thinking to toy with its food, and in winding itself so tightly about Bonarti had become vulnerable.

  The butchery continued unabated. Snorri knew his foe was buried deep inside the flesh before him. I glimpsed the whiteness of the lichkin where Snorri’s axe shattered Bonarti’s spine. A second later the creature began untangling itself from the ruin of the corpse. But, like me, Snorri seemed able to see it, his time in the deadlands lending something to his sight. His axe became a blur, hacking at the lichkin, somehow finding it solid in these moments where it tried to rid itself of flesh. Perhaps so long a time in Hell had given Snorri’s axe an edge that could find even the lichkin, or being wetted in the blood of devils had enchanted the blade – either way … it bit.

  In Trond they hold contests to ward off the boredom of winter. One such requires the Norse to take an axe to the trunk of a fir tree about as thick as a man, and the first of them to chop entirely through it is the victor. Snorri’s assault on the lichkin held much of that contest in it, and before the thing escaped Bonarti’s ruin it came dangerously close to being cut through. In the instant that the last nerve-white tendril of it withdrew from the bloody remains before us the lichkin folded the world around itself and fell away into the deadlands. With an animal howl Snorri threw himself after it. If not for my strategically placed leg he would have vanished back into Hell in pursuit of his prey. As it was he sprawled, face-first, on Hertet’s sumptuous, though soiled, hall rug. The air rippled where the lichkin had punched its hole through the world, and lay still, the portal gone.

  I glanced back at the dead men watching from the entrance to the throne room. Perhaps if I hadn’t they might have continued to stand there watching vacantly for another five minutes. My gaze seemed to animate them, and as one they surged forward.

  ‘Get up!’ I leapt to Snorri’s side and tried to raise him. Just touching him gave my hands back that death-dry feeling, making paper of my skin, sucking the vitality from my flesh. ‘Get up!’ I’d have more luck lifting a horse.

  Snorri got his arms beneath him and launched himself to his feet as the dead men reached us. They had lost their speed now that the lichkin had fled, but they still had numbers.

  Numbers didn’t seem to matter. Snorri went through them like a scythe. It reminded me of my glorious victory over the bucket-boys back at the opera house. Snorri waded through the dead like a prince of Red March wades through terrified street urchins. The axe is truly the weapon for such work. A sword is a tongue: it speaks and gives eloquent voice to violence, seeking out a foe’s vitals and ending him. An axe only roars. The wounds it gives are ruinous and in Snorri’s hands nearly every blow seemed to take a head or limb.

  Two minutes later the Norseman stood amid the carnage of his work, perhaps a score of corpses now divided to the point at which necromancy could make nothing dangerous of them. I followed him into the throne room, casting nervous glances over my shoulder against the possibility of new foes advancing along the corridor. Many of the dead had swords, still scabbarded at their hips. I took one that looked to have been forged for service rather than show.

  ‘Are … are you all right?’ I looked about the hall. Snorri stood, head down, coated with other men’s blood, breathing heavily. He held his axe across his hips, one hand just below the head, the other at the far end of the shaft. He didn’t look all right. Neither did the hall, every surface soiled, the throne cast down, tapestries trampled, the whole place stinking of death and decay. ‘Snorri?’ He seemed almost a stranger.

  He raised his head, staring at me beneath the black veil of his hair, unreadable, capable of anything. ‘I…’ His first word to me since we parted in Hell. It had been months for me – how many lifetimes would it have felt like in that place?

  From the darkest corner of the hall a dead man rose from beneath a tapestry – some victory picked out in silver thread, now smeared with blood and foulness – he charged toward Snorri’s back, trailing the embroidered cloth like a banner. Snorri lashed out to the side, almost without looking, his axe an extension of his arm. The man’s head flew clear; his body stumbled, and collapsed.

  ‘I am at peace,’ Snorri said, and
walked over to clap me in a warrior’s embrace.

  20

  ‘Lisa!’ I broke away from Snorri, nearly tripping over one of the butchered corpses littering Hertet’s great hall. ‘Lisa!’

  ‘The girl you wanted to marry?’ Snorri stepped back, taking in his surroundings for the first time.

  ‘We have to go!’ I started toward the main doors. ‘I have family in trouble.’

  Snorri shouldered his axe and followed, stepping over scattered pieces of armour and the occasional twitching corpse.

  The great doors to Hertet’s throne room crossed each other at drunken angles, each clinging to the frame by a single hinge. I kicked the left one and sent it swinging back. The antechamber was a well-dressed charnel house.

  ‘Christ.’ Someone had put up a fight here – probably Grandmother’s elite. Dismembered bodies littered a floor awash with blood, a dozen or more mire-ghouls in the mix, many of the dead bloated and still smeared with stinking river mud.

  ‘What country are we in?’ Snorri at my shoulder.

  ‘This is the palace in Vermillion. My uncle had a go at playing king. It didn’t work out very well.’

  The front doors of Milano House lay in fragments, the wood grey with dry rot, corrupted by the lichkin’s touch. We went down the steps, Snorri holding up a shield he’d lifted from a fallen guard.

  ‘Not your style?’ I looked back, raising a brow.

  ‘Ghoul darts are even less my style.’ He followed me out onto the steps.

  Enough torches had kept burning when dropped to surround the house in a loose halo of faint illumination. The story here ran similar to that inside. Broken corpses, scattered gore, half a dozen dead men in sight, wandering aimlessly, at least until the first of them spotted us.

  ‘Run!’ I shouted and took to my heels.

  I stopped about ten yards later, realizing that Snorri wasn’t following me and that it was dark where I was going. I turned back toward him. ‘Run?’