The Liar's key

TWELVE

That first day after I woke from the blood dream I spent cradling my hand in my lap and glowering at Kara. She kept her peace though. At least until I started fumbling at the laces of my trews to answer nature’s call. It’s a difficult business at the best of times, standing up in a small boat to relieve oneself over the side. Trying to stand in choppy seas whilst unlacing with an injured hand is doubly difficult.

“This would be a hell of a lot easier if some lunatic hadn’t stabbed me!” The laces confounded my awkward fingers yet again. “Christ’s whore!” I may have uttered a few more oaths, and called a certain völva’s good name into disrepute. .

“In the north we call that a little prick,” Kara replied, not looking over from her place at the tiller.

I’m sure she meant the injury, but Tuttugu and Snorri, being ignorant barbarians, laughed themselves hoarse at my expense, and thereafter I manfully ignored my wound, having found the edge of Kara’s tongue to be sharper than her needle.

• • •

Tuttugu and I kept our eyes north as often as not, watching for the sails of a longship. Any flash of white had us wondering if a pair of red eyes waited beneath, and behind that a deckful of the Hardassa. Thankfully we saw no sign of them. Perhaps after the events at the Black Fort the Dead King no longer held sufficient sway over the Red Vikings to have them dog our trail all the way to the continent. Or maybe we had simply outrun them.

• • •

In three days’ sail from Beerentoppen the Errensa had borne us so far south that the Norseheim coast now curved away from us, heading east. The Devouring Sea lay ahead, the last barrier to the continent, spreading out toward the shores of Maladon. Kara said her prayers, the Undoreth called on Odin and Aegir, I made one-sided bargains with the Almighty, and we parted company from the north for good or ill.

• • •

The Devouring Sea, or the Karlswater as those on its southern shores name it, has a poor reputation with sailors. Storms from the great ocean are often funnelled down into the Karlswater by the Norseheim highlands. Such storms are perilous enough out in the deeps, but in the shallow waters where we now sailed they would on occasion whip up rogue waves so huge that no ship could survive them. Such waves were rare but they could sweep the Karlswater clear. Aegir’s Broom the Vikings called them. The sea-god cleaning house.

I hung at the Errensa’s stern, watching Norseheim diminish behind us, compressed between sea and sky into a dark and serrated line. Then just a line. Then imagination. And finally memory.

“When I get to Maladon I’m paying a barber to shave this beard.” I ran my fingers up into the curls, bleached white-blond by the newly arrived sun, thick with salt and grease. My old crowd wouldn’t even recognize me, all scars, lean muscle, and wild hair. Still, nothing that a tailor, a man with a razor, and a month of comfortable living couldn’t set right.

“It suits you.” Kara looked up at me under her brows, blue eyes unreadable. She sat repairing a cover for one of the storage units. She’d warmed to me a little over the course of the journey, checking on my hand wound without apology but with a gentle touch. Twice a day she rubbed a sweet-smelling unguent at the entry and exit holes. I enjoyed the attention so much I somehow forgot to mention it had stopped hurting.

In exchange for Kara’s medical care I entertained her with tales of the Red March court. It never hurts to mention you’re a prince-a lot. Especially if you are one. She seemed to find my stories amusing, though I wasn’t sure she was always laughing at the parts I thought were funny. .

“A fish!” Snorri leapt up, rocking the boat. “Thor’s teeth! I caught one!”

He had too, a foot and a half of black slimy fish jerking back and forth in his hands, the line still trailing from its mouth.

“Only took you twelve days at sea!” I’d told him to give it up an age ago.

“I got one!” Snorri’s triumph couldn’t be dented by my jibes.

Tuttugu came over to slap him on the back. “Well done! We’ll make a fisherman of you yet.”

Of course Tuttugu had only to drop a hook over the side and it seemed the fish fought each other for the privilege of swallowing it. He must have hauled a score of them from the waves since we set sail. He’d taken to coaching Snorri and confided to me that the warrior had been a poor farmer too. Tuttugu worried that Snorri had nothing to fall back on-he had a talent for war but in the peace he might find life challenging.

“A fine one.” Kara joined them, standing close beside Snorri. “A blackcod should always be boiled and eaten with winter greens.” The two of them seemed at ease in each other’s company. I watched them with a strange mixture of jealousy and satisfaction. Part of me half wanted Snorri and the völva to find the furs together. A good woman was the only hope for him. He needed something other than his grief.

I found it rather worrying that I might be considering sacrificing the pleasure I hoped to take in Kara. That didn’t sound like me at all. Especially after all the hours I’d spent imagining the ways I’d set her rune-charms clicking one against the other. . still. . if Snorri found himself a woman he might be able to let go of the madness that possessed him to seek a door into death and recover his lost family. And, whatever my plans, there was always a chance I would get dragged into the insanity. So after all I was giving up Kara in my own interest. I relaxed. That sounded more like me.

• • •

In the midst of the Devouring Sea, as far from land as I had ever been, I sat amid the heave and the swell on Kara’s small wooden boat and, with little to fix my mind upon, focused on Snorri instead. I watched him, leaning into the prow now, the wind streaming dark hair behind him, eyes on the southern horizon. As fierce a warrior as I’d ever known, with no give in him, no fear in the face of sword or axe. I knew why I was bound south-to claim the comforts and privilege of my birthright and live to a disgraceful old age. I knew what drew Snorri and, despite what he’d said days before, I couldn’t marry his words to any kind of sense. I’d seen plenty of what came back from the deadlands and none of it had been pretty.

I’d also noticed that since my long sleep he wore the key on a piece of rusting chain-as if he’d read my mind when I considered tearing it free and tossing it overboard. I felt a little hurt by his mistrust, however justified. I considered broaching the subject but watching him there, hunched around the pain of his poisoned wound and the older pain of his loss. . I let it lie. Instead I followed his gaze to the dark stain on the horizon that held his attention.

“That looks bad.” It looked worse than bad.

“Yes.” A nod. “Could get rough.”

The storm caught us half a day from the shores of Maladon. A cataclysmic war of the elements that even the Vikings called a storm. It made everything that I’d suffered on the sea before seem like mild discomfort. The wind became a fist, the rain its spears, gripped tight and driven into flesh. And the waves. . those waves will haunt my dreams until the day something worse comes along. The sea changed scale around us. A man out on the ocean always feels small, but amid waves that could overtop and sweep away castles, you understand what it is to be a beetle among stampeding elephants.

The wind drove us, without sails, skidding across foam-skinned behemoths. Turn to face it and the rain made you blind, the wind filling you as you tried to scream. Turn away and it became a fight to snatch a breath, so unwilling was the air to pause long enough to be captured.

I guess Snorri and the others were busy. They certainly seemed to do a lot of shouting and throwing themselves about. What they were busy with though I couldn’t tell you. Nothing they did could make any difference in the face of that assault. For my part I clung to the mast with both arms, and at times both legs. No lovers’ clinch was ever as tight as the embrace in which I held that wooden pole, and despite waves that washed across me until my lungs hammered for a chance to breathe, I kept my grip.

Small boats are, it turns out, highly resilient to being sunk. They bob up again and again in defiance of reason and expectation. My eldest brother, Martus, when ten or eleven, used to go to Morano Bridge with his friends, and sometimes Darin and I would sneak along to watch. The older boys would swim in the shallows, or go onto the bridge and drop their lines in the Seleen. When they got bored with not catching any fish they’d start looking for mischief. Martus would lead them along the many-pillared bridge wall, and piss on passing boats, or taunt local boys, safe in the knowledge that Father’s guards would protect him. Father always sent four guards with Martus, him being the heir.

One fine spring morning at the Morano Bridge Martus decided on a naval warfare simulation. In practice this meant having his friends haul large stones from the riverbank up onto the bridge and then him dropping them on passing mother ducks and the long trains of ducklings following in their wake. The thing is that it’s quite hard to sink a duckling with a rock. Especially when they’re coming out from under the bridge. The delay between the spotters on the upstream side and the emergence of the targets has to be judged, along with the exit point and the drop time. So for the best part of two hours Darin and I watched from the riverbank as Martus dropped a hundredweight of stones, some larger than his head, on a stream of fluffy ducklings led under the bridge by ill-advised mother ducks. And despite enormous splashes on all sides, the sucking drag of drowning stones, and a tumult of sizeable waves, those fluffy little bastards sailed on indefatigably, unsinkable yellow balls of downy defiance that drove Martus into ever greater rage. He didn’t get a single one, and when he raced down to tackle the last of them mano-a-duckling in the shallows, an angry swan burst from the reeds, evaded all four guards, and broke his wrist for him with a savage peck. Best day ever!

Anyway, Kara’s boat was rather like those ducklings. It had to be a kind of magic, but whatever the storm threw at us, it kept on floating.

• • •

The storm didn’t end, just weakened by degrees, each time resurging as my hopes grew, until by dawn it was merely torrential rain driven by a gale. I fell asleep still hugging the mast, soaked and frozen, knowing the sun had begun its climb into the sky but unable to see it behind the storm wrack.

I woke, shivering, and feverish once more, to the sound of gulls and the distant crash of breakers.

“Tie the jib off!” Kara’s voice.

“Turn her! Turn her!” Snorri, tight with anxiety.

“Big one coming!” Tuttugu, sounding as weary as I felt.

I lifted my head, unhooked a sore arm from the mast, and rubbed the salt crusts from my eyes. The sky lay a pale blue, ribboned with the remnants of rainclouds. The sun stood overhead, bright but without much warmth. I inched myself round to face the way the Errensa was pointing, unwilling to completely relinquish my grip on the mast. The wave before us ran on ahead, revealing a dark coastline of cliffs and coves, the high ground topped with grass and bushes. And beyond the headlands. . nothing. . no surly Norse mountains reaching for the sky and telling you to sod off. At last we’d reached Maladon. A rough enough dukedom to be sure, but with the decency to do whatever had to be done on the level rather than perched on the side of a ridiculously steep slope or huddled in the narrow margin between snowy uplands and icy sea. A weight lifted off my heart.

A delicious few seconds of hope, and then I noticed how the only sail we had was a scrap of tattered cloth strung between the bow and the mast, and just how big those breakers were, and how white they foamed before drawing back to reveal the black teeth of the rocks. The next second I noticed how upside-down we were and how cold the water rushing into my mouth was. For several minutes after that I spent most of my time thrashing wildly and gasping for air in between the breaking crests of waves that plunged me under then rolled me over and over before releasing their grip just in time for the next one.

I don’t recall finally crawling ashore, just the sand-level view of Snorri walking along the beach to find me. Somehow he’d kept his axe.

“Maladon,” I said, grabbing a handful of it as he hauled me to my feet. “I could almost kiss you.”

“Osheim,” Snorri said.

“What?” I spat out grit and tried to frame a better question. “What?” I asked again. Nobody goes to Osheim. And there’s a bloody good reason for it.

“The storm blew us east. We’re fifty miles past Maladon.” Snorri puffed his cheeks out and looked across the sea. “You all right?”

I patted myself down. No major injuries. “No,” I said.

“You’re fine.” Snorri let go of me and I managed not to fall. “Kara’s down the beach with Tutt. He cut his leg on the rocks. Lucky it’s not broken.”

“Seriously, Osheim?”

Snorri nodded and set off back, walking where the waves swept the sand, each of his footprints erased before he’d taken another ten steps. I spat some more grit and a decent-sized pebble from my mouth and followed with a sigh.

The Builders left us quite a few reminders of their era. Reminders that even someone like me, whose primary use for history books was for beating smaller princelings around the head with, could hardly ignore. A man who ignored the borders of Promised Land would find his skin falling off while twisted monsters ate his face. The Engine of Wrong in Atta, the bridges and towers still left scattered across the continent, the Vault of Voices in Orlanth, the time bubbles on the Bremmer Slopes, or the Last Warrior-trapped on Brit. . all these were well known, but none sent the same shiver up my spine as the Wheel of Osheim. It seemed that almost every fairy tale our nurses had spun to entertain my brothers and me when we were small had happened in Osheim. The worst of them happened closest to the Wheel. The tales Martus demanded, the most bloody and most twisted, all started, “Once upon a time, not far from the Wheel of Osheim,” and from there on it was time to hide behind your hands or cover your ears. Come to think of it, the women who looked after us when we were little were an evil bunch of old witches. They should have been hanged, the lot of them, not set to watch over the sons of a cardinal.

• • •

We sheltered in a dell behind the headlands, Snorri and me, while Kara poked around on the nearby heath and Tuttugu returned to the beach to see what might be salvaged from the wreck or lying washed up on the sands. Tuttugu’s leg still bore an angry red scar, but Snorri’s healing touch had rendered it serviceable, closing an ugly wound that had turned my stomach to look at. The effort had left Snorri flat on his back but far less incapacitated than on other occasions and before long he was sitting up to fiddle with his axe. Steel and saltwater are a poor mix and no warrior will leave his blade wet. I watched him work, pursing my lips. His swift recovery struck me as odd since the Silent Sister’s spell was supposed to have faded over the winter according to Skilfar, and such things should be harder, not more easy.

“Eggs.” Kara came back from rummaging across the heather-covered slope behind us. In her cupped hands half a dozen blue gulls’ eggs. You could probably tip the contents of all of them into a decent-sized chicken’s egg and not fill it. She sat down on grass between Snorri and me, crossing her long legs, bare and scratched and grimy and delicious. “How long do you think it will take to get to Red March?” Looking at me as if I would know.

I spread my hands. “With my luck, a year.”

“We’ll need horses,” Snorri said.

“You hate horses, and they hate you.” It was true though, we did need some. “Can Kara even ride? Can Tuttugu? Is Kara actually coming with us?” It seemed a hell of a journey to make on the whim of an old witch in a cave.

“If I still had the Errensa under me it would be a difficult decision,” Kara admitted. “But perhaps the storm was trying to tell us something. No going back until we’re done.”

Snorri raised a brow at that but said nothing.

“No going anywhere for me. Ever. I’m not leaving Red March again. Not if I live to be a hundred. Hell, I doubt I’ll set foot outside the walls of Vermillion again once I’m through the gates.” Righteous indignation swelled, driven past the bounds of my usual stoic good humour. I blame my fever and the fact of being sat in a grassy hollow, soaked, cold, exhausted, days from the nearest warm bed, flagon of ale, or hot meal. I kicked at the sod. “Fucking Empire. Fucking oceans. Who needs any of it? And now we’re in fucking Osheim. That’s just great. Fuck dark-sworn or light-sworn. I want some future-sworn. Could have seen that storm coming and got out of the way.”

“The Builders watched the weather from above.” Kara tilted a finger toward the heavens. “They could tell what storms would come but they still couldn’t stop the storm that was big enough to sweep them all away.”

“Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker. First thing you should do to a soothsayer is poke them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?’” My mood still ran sour. I couldn’t believe we’d been delivered up on the shores of a place where all my childhood nightmares ran riot.

“What will happen when I let go?” Kara held out one of her tiny eggs between thumb and forefinger, positioning her hand above a stone breaking through the sod between us.

“You’ll mess up this fine stone,” I said.

“Now you’re seeing the future.” A grin. She looked younger when she smiled. “And if you lunged forward and tried to stop me?”

My lips echoed her smile. I quite liked that idea. “I don’t know. Should we try?”

“And that’s the curse of the future-sworn. None of us can see past our own actions-not us, not the future-sworn, not the Silent Sister, not Luntar, not the Watcher of Parn, none of them.” Kara offered me the egg.

“Raw?” The sun had broken through and I was starting to feel human enough to eat. I couldn’t remember when I’d last had a good meal. Even so, my appetite hadn’t returned to the degree where raw gull’s egg looked like something I wanted oozing over my tongue. “No?” Kara shrugged, and putting her head back she broke the egg into her mouth.

Watching her it was hard to imagine that Skilfar or the Silent Sister might have been like this once-young women overburdened with cleverness and ambition, setting foot on the path to power.

“I wonder what it is that the Silent Sister sees with that blind eye of hers. Things she can’t even speak of.”

Kara wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “And if she moves to change them. . she can no longer see how they will end. So how terrible does the future have to look before you reach in to that clear pool to change it and have the silt rise up all around your hand so you’re as blind as everyone else-knowing it won’t settle again until the day, the hour, the moment of the thing you most fear?”

“I’d change everything bad that ever looked like happening to me.” I could think of a long list of things I would have avoided, with “leaving Red March” right at the top of it. Or maybe getting into debt with Maeres Allus should be at the top, because leaving Red March did actually save me from a horrific death at his torturer’s hands. But then getting into debt had been such fun. . hard to imagine all those years living as a pauper. . I suppose I could have pawned Mother’s locket. . My head started to spin. “Well. . I suppose. . It’s a complicated business.”

“And if you changed those bad things how would you know that the change wouldn’t lead to worse things that would now wait for you unseen in the years to come?” Kara ate another of the eggs and handed the rest to Snorri. They looked lost in the wideness of his palm.

“Hmmm. Perhaps the evil old witch got what she deserved after all.” It sounded as though looking into the future might be as much of a pain as looking into the past. The moment was clearly the place to be. Except this moment which was wet and cold.

• • •

An hour later Tuttugu returned carrying a makeshift sailcloth sack into which he’d loaded his salvage. There wasn’t much of it, and nothing to eat save a tub of butter that had already been rancid when purchased in Haargfjord more than a week back.

“We should go!” Snorri slapped his thighs and stood.

“Better than starving here, I suppose.” I set off, unburdened with sword, pack, rations, or any other defence against danger and privation other than the knife at my hip. A fine knife it must be said, also purchased in Haargfjord, a brutal bit of sharp iron, intended for intimidation, and not yet used in any more deadly endeavour than peeling fruit.

Snorri and Tuttugu followed in my wake.

“Where are you going?” Kara remained where we’d left her.

“Um.” I squinted at the sun. “South. . east-ish?”

“Why?”

“I. .” It had seemed right. It occurred to me as I considered the question that something good waited for us in the direction I’d led off in. Something very good. We should probably hurry.

“It’s the draw of the Wheel,” she said.

Snorri frowned. Tuttugu ferreted about in his beard, hunting inspiration.

“Crap.” Nanna Willow had told us this one a dozen times. Nanna Willow had come to us from my grandmother’s personal staff, a stick of a woman, dry as bones, and not given to taking any shit from unruly princes. When the mood took her she’d tell us fairy tales-some so dark they’d even have Martus wanting a nightlight and a kiss to ward off the spirits. And practically every victim in the abattoir of Nanna Willow’s bedtime tales was led into Osheim by the draw of the Wheel.

“This is the right way.” Tuttugu nodded as if to convince himself and pointed ahead.

For my part I turned on a heel and hurried back to Kara’s side. “Crap,” I repeated myself. Part of me still wanted to follow the line Tuttugu indicated. “It’s all true, isn’t it? Tell me there aren’t boggen and flesh-mauls too. .”

“The path to the Wheel grows strange.” Kara spoke the words as if quoting them. “And then more strange. If a man ever reached the Wheel he would find all things are possible. The Wheel gives anything a man could want.”

“Well. . that doesn’t sound too bad.” And so help me my feet started taking me south again. South and a little east. Tuttugu set off again too, just ahead of me.

“It’s the monsters that stop them reaching the Wheel.” Kara’s voice, an unwelcome nagging behind me. Even so, the word “monsters” was enough to stop both me and Tuttugu. We’d both seen more monsters than we ever wanted to.

“What monsters? You said anything a man could want!” I turned back, unwilling.

“Monsters from the id.”

“From the what?”

“The dark places in your mind where you make war on yourself.” Kara shrugged. “That’s how the sagas have it. You think you know what you want, but the Wheel reaches past what you think you know into the deep places where nightmares are born. The Wheel grows stronger as you get closer. At first it answers your will. As you get closer it answers your desire. And closer still it dances to your imagination. All your dreams, each shadowed corner of your mind, each possibility you’ve considered. . it feeds them, makes them flesh, sends them to you.”

Tuttugu joined us. I caught a whiff of him as he drew close. Old cheese and wet hound. It was only when we had a moment apart that you noticed it. We probably all reeked after too long in that little boat and it would take more than a quick sinking to wash it off. “You lead us, völva,” he said.

Only Snorri remained where he was, out on the moor with long grass dancing to the beat of the wind all about him. He stood without motion, still staring south where the sky held a purplish taint, like a fading bruise. At first I’d thought it was clouds. Now I wasn’t sure.

“After you.” I gestured for Kara to lead us. My imagination proved torment enough to me from one day to the next. Absolutely no way was I heading somewhere that could put flesh on any bone I dreamed up. Men are dragged down by their fears all the time, but in Osheim apparently that had to be taken far more literally.

Snorri remained where he’d first stopped, close enough to hear our conversation but making no move to return or go on. I knew what he would be thinking. That the great Wheel of the Builders might turn for him and bring his children back. They wouldn’t be real though, just images born of his imagination. Even so-to Snorri the exquisite pain of such torture might be something he couldn’t step away from. I opened my mouth to make some remonstration. . but found I had no words for it. What did I know of the bonds that bind father to son or husband to wife?

Raised in a culture of war and death I would have pegged a Viking warrior to be the most able of any man to put such tragedy behind him and walk on. But Snorri had never been the man I’d thought would lie behind the beard and the axe. Somehow he was both less than the fantasy and more at the same time.

I turned and walked back toward him. Anything I had to say seemed shallow beside the depth of his grief. Words are awkward tools at best, too blunt for delicate tasks.

I almost set a hand to his shoulder, then let it fall. In the end I settled for, “Come on then.”

Snorri turned, looked at me-as if from a thousand miles away-then twitched his lips, hinting at a smile. He nodded and we both went back together.

• • •

“Sail!” Tuttugu had returned to the ridge above the dell whilst I went to retrieve Snorri. Now he pointed out toward the ocean as we returned.

“Maybe we won’t have to walk after all,” I said as we reached Kara.

She shook her head at my ignorance. “You can’t just wave down a ship.”

“Why’s he jumping up and down then?”

“I don’t know.” Snorri said the words in a voice that suggested a slow-dawning suspicion. He left us and jogged up the slope toward the ridge. Kara followed on at a more relaxed pace and I dogged her heels.

Both men were crouched by the time we reached them and Snorri waved us down too. “Edris,” he hissed.

I edged alongside Tuttugu on my elbows, adding more mud to my costume.

“Shit.” I squinted at the flash of sail miles and more off the coast. “How the hell can you tell?”

I felt Tuttugu shrug beside me. “I just know. It’s the cut of the sails. . just the way of it. . Hardassa for sure.”

“How is it even possible?” I asked, becoming aware of Kara moving up beside me, her braid runes tapping as the wind played them out.

“The unborn knew where to dig for Loki’s key,” she said.

“It was under the Bitter Ice! Anyone who listened to the stories knew-oh.” The Bitter Ice stretched for scores of miles of ice cliffs and then reached back an unknown distance into the white hell of the north. How did they know where to dig?

“Something draws them to it,” she said.

“There’s unborn on that ship?” Suddenly I wanted to be home very badly.

Kara shrugged. “Maybe. Or some other servant of the Dead King who can sense the key.”

I shuffled back from the ridge. “We’d better move fast then.” At least running away was something I understood.