Snow-Walker

Twenty-Two

A third I see, that no sunlight reaches,

the doors faced northward,

Through its smoke vent venom drips

serpent skins enskein that hall.

They crouched in a snow hole, the blizzard lashing them. Shards of snow stung Kari’s face; he tugged the scarves tighter.

The wolf had brought him here, leading him through the snow. Now it dissolved; became gray rags of mist that the wind whirled away. The man’s body lay half-buried; Kari scraped snow from the eyes and mouth, and lifted the head.

“Moongarm!”

He was cold, almost lost. Putting his thin fingers on the man’s wrist, Kari searched desperately within him for the frail soul, dragging it to the surface. Ravens descended around him.

“He’s gone,” one of them said harshly, crouching beside him.

“Not yet.”

The man gasped, his eyes flickered. Slowly the taints and wildness of the wolf were gathered into him; Kari felt them enter and flood the man. For a moment he had the impression of someone gentler, older; now it was gone, submerged. Moongarm’s amber eyes watched him, intent. Snow roared between them.

“I have to get back,” Kari said. “The others—”

“No!” He struggled up, his cracked fingernails gripping the boy’s shoulder. Kari waited, uncertain. The man was still savage with the beast nature that tormented him, but under that was fear, almost terror.

“Help me.” The words were quiet, nearly lost. “Only you can.”

Kari shook his head. “This power is your own.”

“I don’t want it!” Moongarm snarled. “It’s taking me over—you can see that, you with your ghost sight.” His face was gray, his hair streaked with ice. He crouched, head bent.

“When it began, I could control it; I could change my shape and my nature as I wished. I was free, Kari! I could become something else, something wild, strong, fierce, without the troubles men have!”

“Without reason either.”

“Yes. But free.”

“You still can.”

“It’s destroying me!” He paused, as if struggling for calm, his eyes wild and bright in his tangled hair. “Every time, it takes me longer to come back. Gets harder. And even when I fight my way to man shape, the rage is still there. I’m changing. I think more and more like an animal thinks. Moods sway me, hungers, fears. I can’t control them. After the bear died, I was savage; those three men were just enemies, scents; I slavered for them. I didn’t know their names, that they were Hakon, or Skapti, or even Brochael the Stubborn. I have to get the wolf out of me, Kari. I have to!”

Kari wiped snow from his face. He was chilled to the bone, desperate to get back to the bridge. “Why now?”

“The bridge. Once we cross it, anything might happen.”

“To me,” Kari said bitterly. The rainbow shimmers of the ice bridge came back to his mind.

“I need your sorcery. Reach in now and take the wolf out of me.” The man’s eyes were close; his fingers closed tight as claws on the boy’s arm. “Now, Kari! Before it devours me altogether. Before I run mad.”

Kari shivered, trying to think. Then he moved out of himself into Moongarm, walked down the trackways of wolf sight, saw the long loneliness of the man, the flung spears, the barking dogs, the blood on the snow. He tasted endless arctic nights, the itch of fur, irrational terror. Then the wind splashed him with ice. He shook his head.

“I can’t. Or if I did, it would kill you. It’s too deep in you, Moongarm. You welcomed it in, and it’s tangled about you. Why?”

“A woman once offered me a chance of strength and courage. I was a weak man, of no family, no importance. Like a fool I took it.” Numb with cold and hopelessness he stared up at the ravens. “Take it out, Kari.”

“No. One man is dead already because of me.”

Moongarm leaped up, sudden and supple. “Then if you can’t help, the gap will have me. The world’s throat can take one more morsel.”

“No!” Kari jumped up quickly.

“You won’t stop me, ravenmaster.”

“Won’t I?” Kari gave him a cold, amused look. “I may seem frail, Moongarm, but I can hold you to life. And I will!”

The wind blew his hair into his eyes; he shook it away. The shape-shifter stared at him through the scatter of snow.

“Then you will. And I must fight and struggle with myself. But if I can, Kari, I’ll escape it, wherever I have to go. To have a power you dare not use is worse than having none.”

“I know that,” Kari said bitterly. “Better than anyone.”

“Not much farther!” Brochael yelled.

He was lost in the snow squall ahead; Jessa couldn’t see Hakon either. Behind her somewhere, Skapti slithered. She rested for a moment, crouched, her head low. Inside her frozen gloves her hands were blue and numb; her legs and back ached unbearably. She felt exhausted.

The bridge had been endless; first the climb high into nothing but sky and storm, and now the long scramble downward, slipping and stumbling on the glassy slope. Briefly she thought of Kari and her anger and worry flared. Where was he? She was uneasy without him. Brochael must be too.

She looked up again; the bridge led away into blown snow, but through that she thought she could glimpse something else now, a shimmer of colors.

“Come on.” Skapti gasped behind her. He settled the bag with the kantele in it more firmly on his back. “Not the time for dreaming, Jessa.”

“We’re all hung about with dreams,” she said, scrambling up.

“Are we? Well, this wind will blow them off. They’ll go sailing over the world’s edge like spindrift.” A gust rocked him; he grabbed at her. “Us with them, if you don’t get on!”

She felt her way on, one hand on the frail ice rail, the abyss roaring below. Her foot slid, testing the ice. Snow blinded her; she wiped it away, twice, and opened her eyes. The world was blurred. For a moment she stood still, in a sudden place of rainbows. Her hair and skin tingled; colored lights moved all about her, they crackled, spit blue and green and purple sparks, glimmered, rippled over her face. She shivered with the eerie charge.

“What is it?”

“Surt’s blaze. The aurora!” Skapti yelled. “It’s all around us.”

Blue and scarlet waves flowed over him; his clothes rippled gold and green. The crackle of colors enfolded them both, and under their feet the ice bridge broke the uncanny light and refracted it in a million tiny rainbows, deep within.

Not far ahead, someone called.

“That’s Hakon.” Jessa scrambled forward, slid, fell on hands and knees.

Skapti hauled her up. “Be careful!” he warned.

The bridge descended; they walked blindly into the colored air, and wonderfully, after a few steps, they came out the other side, straight into a sudden cold stillness, the wind ending abruptly, as if an invisible wall of power held it back. The shock of that stillness, the relief of it, was enormous, and they both stopped, high in the sky.

Below them, they saw the land of the Snow-walkers.

Astonished, Jessa stared out at it. The sky here was black, the stars brighter than she had ever seen them, a shining dust flung to the horizon. Stretching from the foot of the bridge for miles and miles was an unbroken ice sheet, smooth as marble, empty and featureless. Mountains rose in the distance, strange jagged peaks shining in the starlight, and among them, huge even from here, a building, a hall or fortress, tall and white and smooth behind a great encircling wall.

In silence they looked at it, across the miles of ice, at Gudrun’s hall, in its silent, empty land, long sought, long feared.

At the foot of the bridge Hakon and Brochael were sitting wearily.

Skapti said, “So this is the land of dreams.” His voice was oddly choked; she looked at him sideways and he smiled uneasily. “Poet’s visions, Jessa. Rarely do they come true.”

“Visions? Isn’t this real?”

“I don’t know anymore. I think we left the world behind a long time ago. This is somewhere else, beyond the edge. The spirit realm.”

“I wish Kari was here,” she muttered.

When they got down to him, she knew Brochael was thinking the same. He gazed anxiously up at the rainbow bridge, arching into light. “Where is he?”

“He’ll come.”

“If he doesn’t, I’m going back. We can’t do anything here without him.” He looked around uneasily. “Even the air smells of sorcery.”

It did. It was bitterly cold, and still, and had a strange tang of fear that Jessa found unnerving. Once or twice she thought she saw something move, out there on the ice, but the surface seemed empty, glimmering white.

Nothing would start a fire here, not even Brochael’s tinderbox, and they were so tired that they lay down and slept as they were, in a dirty, wind-tangled huddle at the bridge’s foot.

And it was then, in their sleep, that they knew the terror of the White People. Voices whispered around them faintly. Cold fingers touched their hair and faces. The Snow-walkers came walking through their dreams, touching, laughing, mocking. They made Jessa dream of home, her farm by the sea, and in an instant she saw it dwindle to a black, charred ruin, open to the rain. She saw Signi, in thin chains of ice, calling her name. She saw Wulfgar sitting alone in his hall, with a silvery woman at his shoulder, holding her hand out to him.

With a shiver of fear she opened her eyes.

They had been foolish to sleep; she knew that at once. Something had changed. Something was wrong. She stared around, dumbfounded.

A cage had been spun about them; fine spindly bars. They seemed easy to snap, but when Brochael struggled up and saw them, he tried to wrench them apart with his huge strength. Nothing happened. He couldn’t even grasp them. He swore, and looked at Skapti in alarm.

“It’s no use,” the poet said quietly. “Look out there.”

They turned and saw.

Sitting watching them was an old, old man, his face wizened, his hooded eyes evil and bright. Coats and cloaks muffled him; the blue starlight played over his face.

He smiled at them.

Jessa recognized him at once.