The Wheel of Osheim

THIRTY

Snorri moves up the gorge, past the remains of the demons his first-born son has slain in defence of his step-family.

Above him the gyre in the sky tightens and narrows. Soon, Snorri knows, he will stand beneath its centre, at the eye of an invisible storm.

The gorge widens into a valley, angling down now, out of the highlands. Snorri hobbles on, his wounds stiffening, the injury to his shoulder still pumping blood, the pain all through him like white wire.

Ahead the valley reaches a neck after which it falls away too swiftly to be seen again, and beyond this narrow point a view opens up such as Snorri never imagined to see in Hel. He stands, his eyes filled with the Uulisk Fjord, soft with mist, its slopes spring-green, black woolly goats dotting the Niffr slopes high on the far side where the sun touches the land with gold. There should be a village here, houses scattered all the way down to the water’s edge-but all Snorri can see are the eight quays stretching out their slim fingers across the fjord, and a hundred yards back up the slope, a single house. Familiar even at this distance. His house.

Ice fills his veins. The gyre in the sky centres above that lone house. The great turning in the heavens, the labyrinth of stone beneath it, all have led him here, to his past, his present, a place with no future. Snorri sets his jaw, holds his axe close against his chest, and walks on, so full of broken emotions that he seems a man on fire, and yet the hand around his heart clutches colder than ever.

As he walks Snorri sees that slaughter has been done here too, the carnage strewn about. An arm here in the shadow of the rocks, a head there, offal strewn across a broad swathe of stone. Not misshapen demons but men, or beings like them, and not just men, but women too, shieldmaids armoured in the fashion of the north and bearing axes, spears, hammers. Each of them though, whether tall or short, broad or narrow, shares one trait that speaks of their origins. Every person there lies white-fleshed on the right, black on the left, the same with their armour, each axe or sword cast in a metal white as milk, their shields so black they might be holes cut into the day.

“Servants of the goddess.” Snorri kneels, wincing, to inspect a shieldmaid. An axe blow has sheared through the side of her helm. Hel must have sent her and the others to retrieve Freja’s soul and those of the children. Whoever killed them has not been gentle, but this was not the work of Karl’s sword. Snorri studies the woman’s white eye, reflecting the gyre above his shoulder, and her dark one, like a polished black stone. Her lips are drawn back in the snarl she wore when struck, the teeth behind serrated like a sawblade. Not human, then.

Though Hel has no sun there is a sun here in this memory of the Uuliskind, and it is setting. Ahead of him in the neck of the valley, black against the sunset, a lone warrior, wide, armoured in ill-matched pieces, arms spread, a buckler held in one hand, an axe in the other, its blade a wedge for piercing mail.

“Sven Broke-Oar?” For a moment Snorri knows fear. The giant is the only man to have bested him: his strength is not human. Weak from loss of blood and crippled by his injuries, he knows this fight to be beyond him. Still on his knees the Northman whispers a prayer, the first to pass his lips in an age. “All-father, I have done my best. Watch me now. I ask only that you give me the strength that has left me.” The prayer of a man who has met his challenges with an axe and a brave heart. The prayer of a man who knows this will not suffice. The prayer of a man who will not live to speak another.

Snorri rises with a snarl, careless of his wounds, knowing that the gods are watching him. He stands, clothed in the ichor of demons and the scarlet of his own blood, hardly distinguishable from the beasts he has slain in such numbers.

“I am ready.” If Hel has set Sven Broke-Oar between him and his family then Sven Broke-Oar will die the second death. “Undoreth!” he roars, and as if his shout is a spear launched at the heavens themselves the sky turns red as blood behind him. And then he charges.

The warrior holds his ground as Snorri races toward him. He wears an outsized shoulder guard of spiked black iron, a pot helm, visored to offer only a slit for his eyes and perforations at the mouth. Black bands of iron around his chest and middle girdle a thick shirt of leather and layered padding. Iron plates sewn to leather trews defend both legs. Every part of his armour bears the signs of battle, bright cuts, dull crimson splashes, dented metal, torn leather.

Twenty yards remain between them. The warrior raises his axe above him. Ten. The warrior tilts his head. “Snorri?” Five. And lets the axe fall.

Snorri, filled with battle-rage, swings his own axe in a decapitating arc, razored steel driven with the force of both arms. At the last moment mind over-rides muscle, and screaming with effort he pulls the blow, able to rob it of most of its power. Hel’s blade strikes the warrior’s gorget, coaxing a bright sound from the metal collar before falling away.

“Snorri?” Gauntleted hands fumble with the helm’s hinged faceplate.

Snorri lowers his axe and uses it to support himself, heaving in laboured breaths.

The faceplate comes free.

“Tutt?”

“I knew you’d come.” Tuttugu smiles. He lacks his beard, his chins raw where it was ripped away. The red slice Edris Dean’s knife made still marks Tuttugu’s throat, his face pale. His eyes though, they shine with joy. “I knew you’d make it.”

“What in Hel’s name? What . . . Tuttugu . . . how?”

“Ssshhh!” Tuttugu raises a hand. “Don’t speak her name-not here. She’ll send more of her guards, and they’re hard to beat.”

Snorri looks back at the body-strewn valley. “You did all this?”

Tuttugu grins. “They didn’t all come at once.”

“But still . . .”

“I couldn’t let Freja and the children be taken, Snorri.”

“But Karl . . .”

“Karl could fight the demons, they’re just beasts following their instincts to hunt down stray souls. But to go up against Hel’s servants as they carry out their orders? That could get him thrown out of Valhalla. We couldn’t have that.”

“But you . . .”

“I haven’t taken up my place yet, so they can’t throw me out. When you’re bound for the halls you keep your body in Hel . . . or a copy of it I guess . . . Anyway, I went looking for Freja instead of going where I was supposed to.”

Snorri reaches out and sets his hand on Tuttugu’s shoulder. “Tutt.” He realizes that he hasn’t any words.

“It’s all right. You’d do the same for me, brother.” Tuttugu clasps Snorri’s wrist then moves on to lead the way.

Snorri looks once more, out across the gorge that Tuttugu has held against all comers, then follows his friend down the slope toward the still waters below.

A rowing boat lies close to shore, tied to a boulder in the shallows. Just beyond the rock the fjord’s bed shelves sharply down, becoming lost in clear dark water. Snorri wades out and takes the rope. The awful thirst in him cries out to drink, but he hasn’t come for water.

Snorri climbs in, takes the oars. Tuttugu scrambles over the side to sit in the stern, and Snorri rows them out across the lake. There are no signs of pursuit back where the valley joins the fjord. The sky is the sky of the living world, dark with cloud, swirled as if by a god’s finger into a great spiral right above them. Thor’s work perhaps. Will the thunder speak before this journey ends?

An evening mist clings to the waters. The freshness of the air speaks of early autumn, carrying hints of wood smoke, fish, and the distant sea. Each dip of the oars draws him closer. In the valley fear had seized him-fear that his strength would not be enough to win through, and that at the last the way of the warrior would not bring him to his heart’s desire. Now a new fear grows in him, its voice louder with each pull of the oars. What will he find? What will he say? What future is there for them? Snorri came to save his children, and instead feels more a child himself with each passing moment-scared to face the family he has failed-scared that he will be unequal to whatever task might be required of him now.

Instinct slows his oars. He raises them, dripping, and the boat bumps gently against the Long Quay. Snorri loops the rope over an ancient post and clambers onto the walkway, his injuries making an old man of him.

The slopes before him are those he was born upon, where he was raised from cot to manhood, where he raised children of his own. Tuttugu and Snorri fished from the quays as boys, ran riot among the huts when the longboats sailed in spring, chased girls. One in particular. What had her name been? A grin twists Snorri’s mouth. Hedwig, Tuttugu’s sweetheart when they had been nine. She’d chosen Tutt over him, perhaps his only victory in all those years, and Snorri had taken it with poor grace.

Tuttugu stands with Snorri at the foot of the climb, waiting. Snorri catches himself delaying. Only his house lies on the slopes. His path is clear. And yet he stands here, not moving. The breeze tugs at him. Grass bends to its tune. High above on the ridges, goats move along their slow paths. Out over the fjord a gull slides down the wind. But none of them make a sound, not one single sound. And the house stands, waiting.

“I’ll watch the lake,” Tuttugu says.

Courage comes in many forms. Some strains come harder to one man than the next. Snorri digs deep for the courage he needs to do this thing that has held him for so long, drawn him so far and by such strange paths. He puts one foot in front of the next, does it again, and walks the beaten path that he has walked so many times before.

At the door to his house Snorri has to dig again. Images of the night Sven Broke-Oar brought the dead to Eight Quays fill his vision. The sounds of their screaming deafens him, their screams as he lay helpless beside the hut, buried by the snowfall from the roof.

Blind he puts his hand to the door, fumbles the latch, pushes through. The hearth lies cold, the bed beneath furs and the furs beneath shadows, the kitchen corner tidy, the ladder to the attic in is proper place. They stand, all three, with their backs toward him, Freja between her children, a hand on Egil’s shoulder, the other on Emy’s head. All three silent, unmoving, heads bowed.

Snorri tries to speak but emotion grips his throat too tightly and he can form no words. The air comes from him in sharp panting breaths- the kind a man might make when a spear runs him through and he seeks to master the pain. He feels his face twist into a grimace, cheeks rising as if they might somehow hold back the tears. In the doorway of his house Snorri ver Snagason falls to his knees, pressed there by a weight greater than the snow that held him down, his strength stolen more effectively than by any venomed dart. Wracked by sobs, he tries to speak their names and still no sound will break from his lips.

Freja stands, golden hair coiling down her back, the woman who saved him, who was his life. Egil, fire-haired terror, cheeky, mischievous, a boy who loved his father and believed Snorri would wrestle trolls to keep him safe. And sweet Einmyria, dark as her father, beautiful as her mother, sharp, and clever, trusting and honest, too wise for her years, too short a time spent playing by the Uulisk.

“Only their sorrows are here.” Tuttugu steps in beside his friend, reaching down to put a hand upon his shoulder. “They didn’t need them any more. They won’t turn-their sorrow can’t see you, because you’re no part of it. When you leave this place they’ll be gone. But while you are here Freja and the children can hear you. What you speak here will reach them.”

Snorri wipes his face. “Where are they?”

Tuttugu sighs. “A völva told me this. One you’ve met before. Ekatri.

She came here.”

“She’s dead?”

“I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. That doesn’t matter. What she told me is the important thing, and it’s complicated so don’t interrupt me or I’ll forget parts and get it wrong.

“The magic that we see in the world-the necromancers, mages like Kelem, all that . . . it comes from the Wheel. It’s what the Builders did to us, to themselves. It made each of us capable of magic through nothing more than focusing our will. The Wheel allows wants to become real. Some of us are better at it than others, and without training none of us seem to be very good at it.

“The thing is-that even though most of us aren’t good at wielding the magic the Wheel gave us . . . together we can move mountains. When someone tells a story and that story spreads and grows and people believe it and want it . . . the Wheel turns and makes it so.

“All this.” Tuttugu flaps an arm at the fjord. “It’s here because we were told it was here, we wanted it to be here. I’m not just talking about this place. I mean all of Hel. I mean the souls, the rivers, every rock and stone, each demon, Hel herself, all of it. It’s not real-it’s what the Wheel has given us because the stories we tell ourselves have bound about us so tight, we believe them, we want them, and now we have them.”

Snorri heaves in a deep breath, his mind turning in great circles, as slow as the gyre above the house. “Where are my family, Tutt?”

Tuttugu grips his shoulder. “Before the Wheel there was an older magic, far deeper, less showy, more impressive. There still is. Nobody understands it. But we feel it’s there. Everyone has their own ideas about it, their own story to tell about it. Our ancestors told a story about Asgard and the gods. Perhaps it’s true. But this.” He waves again. “Is not it. This is the dream of men. Made for us.”

“Freja and the children are waiting by a gate that won’t open until the Wheel of Osheim is broken. Beyond it is whatever has always waited for us when we die. The true end of the voyage.

“You’ve seen this place. Didn’t it strike you as wrong? Is this really what we have waiting for us for all eternity?” The fat Viking slumps. “I’m no sage, Snorri. I can hardly pronounce ‘philosophy’, let alone make sense of it. But is this place where you want your children until the end of time? Even if Hel sends them to the holy mountain . . . Helgafell’s a place you can visit just like this one. Don’t you want something for them that is beyond our imagination, not a copy of it? That’s what Freja wants . . .”

“Who . . .” Snorri clears his throat, his words hoarse. “Who brought them to this gate?”

Tuttugu sighs again. “Ekatri. She said she knew you would come here, and that if you found Freja and brought her out, along with the children, it would be an awful thing for all of you, worse than death, not at first, but slowly, by degrees, you would start to hate each other, and in the end that hate would consume you all, utterly.

“Also you might break the world doing it.”

Snorri hangs his head. A hollow pain fills him, and next to it the complaints of cut and torn flesh are nothing.

“Speak to them, Snorri. They know you’re here. They’ve waited for you, and they will hear you. Go on,” Tuttugu says, his voice gentle. “They stayed because they knew you would come. Not because they needed you to come.” He turns to go, axe in hand.

Snorri glances through the doorway, down the slope to the lake. Three tall warriors are climbing from a scaled boat, each of them black on their left side, white on the right.

“Stay, speak,” Tuttugu urges. “I’ll deal with them.”

Snorri moves to stand by Tuttugu’s side, reaching for his own axe.

Tuttugu shakes his head, closing his faceplate. “You didn’t come here for this.” He turns away. “Neither of us can count the number of battles you saved me in. Now it’s my turn. Go.”

Snorri looks once more at his friend and nods.

“We’ll meet again in Valhalla.” Tuttugu grins. “I’m not facing Ragnarok without you beside me.”

“Thank you.” Snorri inclines his head, eyes full once more.

Tuttugu squeezes Snorri’s shoulder a last time and leaves the house.

As the long silence wore on I began to glimpse the tunnel, Kara’s orichalcum light throwing our shadows across the curve of the wall, no sound, our footsteps deadened by the dust of a thousand years.

“Did you speak to them?” My voice came rough and echoed ahead, following the arc of the Wheel, vanishing into the darkness.

“I did,” Snorri said. “And it gave me peace.” The Viking paced a hundred yards before he spoke again, and while he held quiet I started to hear distant hints of pursuit from behind us.

Snorri cleared his throat. “When I came out of the house Tuttugu was waiting for me. He said he would guard them as long as he could. I told him I would stop the Wheel’s engines and free Freja and my children from Hel. Or die trying.”

“Where will they go?” I hadn’t quite followed that part, or thought Tuttugu capable of delivering such a speech. But then, I’d underestimated the man time and again.

“To whatever has always waited for us beyond life,” Snorri said. “They will be free of the Wheel. Released from man’s dreams and stories and lies. You’ve seen it yourself, Jal. Is that where you want those you love to spend eternity?”

My mother was assuredly in Heaven, but on the other hand my father, cardinal or not, was definitely in Hell if the rules he occasionally preached held any truth. Most importantly though, it was not where I wished to spend forever.

“What’s this?” Hennan pointed to a sign fixed to the wall, so covered in grime that we had nearly passed it by.

“We don’t have time!” I stared back into the darkness, ears straining for those sounds again. At any moment Cutter John could race into view.

“International . . .” Kara was already rubbing dirt away from the sign with her sleeve. “Kollaboration . . .”

“It looks like gibberish to me, come on!” The lettering was alien, though faintly familiar.

“It’s an old version of Empire tongue, very corrupted.” She rubbed away more of the dirt. The sign seemed to be enamelled metal and in many places corrosion had broken up the surface beneath the grime. “I can’t read the rest. The first letters are bigger though. I.K.O.L. That last word might be ‘Laboratory’.”

“What’s a laboratory?” Hennan asked, looking up at me for some reason.

“It’s something that wastes your time while monsters creep out of the dark to kill you,” I said.

“There’s a picture here too.” Kara wiped at it with her filthy sleeve. “It can’t be . . .”

Despite my fears I moved to join her. Beneath the large title running several feet across the top of the sign were three pictures, side by side, head-and-shoulders portraits, painted with exquisite detail. A balding grey-haired man with glass lenses over his eyes; a middle-aged man, black-haired and serious, his face divided by a beak of a nose; and a young man with a wild shock of brown hair, his features narrow, eyes large and dark.

“Professor Lawrence O’Kee,” I read, puzzling through the twisted lettering. “Dr. Dex-no, Fexler Brews, and Dr. Elias Taproot!”

“Taproot was in charge of the Wheel?” Snorri asked, looming over us as Hennan wriggled between Kara and me for a closer view.

“Important enough to be on this sign,” Kara said. “I’m guessing this one is in charge, though.” She set her finger to the oldest of the three, the professor.

The sound of running brought an end to the questions, feet pounding the dusty tunnel, coming up fast behind us. I started off without the others, sprinting into the darkness and got about twenty paces before hitting something very solid. I saw a dim outline with just enough time to get my arms up-even so, the next thing I knew was being helped up off the floor by Snorri.

“Where is he?” I threw my head left and right, hunting the gloom for Cutter John.

“The footsteps vanished when you hit the bars.” Kara stood behind me with the light.

“Bars?” I saw them now, gleaming pillars of silver steel, each as thick as my arm.

The sound of charging feet started up again behind us, maybe fifty yards back. I pushed Snorri away and fumbled for the key. It slipped from my fingers, treacherous as ice, but the thong held it and I caught it again. “Open!” I tapped it against the closest bar and all of them slid back into their recesses, the top half into the ceiling, the bottom into the floor.

I stepped over before they sunk from sight and turned, sharpish, the others following. The shadows spat Cutter John out at a dead sprint. “Close!” I slapped the key against the gleaming circle of a bar, now flush with the floor. I stood, frozen by the sight of that goggle-eyed monster racing toward me. Snorri jerked me back, but not before I saw Cutter John leap for the narrowing gap . . . and miss. He hit with awful force and I swear those bars rang with it.

“Come on.” Snorri dragged me forward.

“The bars will hold him,” I said. I almost believed it.

Fifty yards on the tunnel entered a chamber as big as the new cathedral at Remes. The black tube that had run along the tunnel core continued through the centre of the open space and vanished into a tunnel mouth on the opposite side. Its path took it into the jaws of a vast machine that sat upon the chamber floor fifty feet below us and extended another fifty feet above the point where the black tube passed through it.

Lights set into the ceiling, too bright to look at, lit the chamber from top to bottom as if it were a summer’s day. The air smelled of lightning, and throbbed with the heartbeat of huge engines.

We stood at the edge where the tunnel gave out onto a sheer fall to the floor far below. If there had ever been any supporting rail or stairs they hadn’t been made of such durable material as the bars back along our path or the titanic machine before us, and perhaps now accounted for the brownish stains down the walls and across the floor.

“There’s someone down there.” Hennan pointed.

At the base of the towering block of metal an alcove had been set into the bulk of the machine, an alcove lined with plates of glass all aglow with symbols and squiggles. In the middle of it, from our angle only visible from the shoulders down, stood a man in a white robe or coat of some kind, his back to us.

“He’s not moving,” Kara said.

We watched for a whole minute, or at least they did: I kept looking back in case Cutter John caught us up and pushed us over the edge.

“A statue?” Hennan guessed, stepping to the edge of the drop.

“Or frozen in time, like Taproot in that Builder vault.” Snorri pulled Hennan back.

Far behind us a dull clanging started to sound. “We should get down there and find out,” I said.

“How?” Kara approached the edge less boldly than Hennan, on hands and knees.

“Fly?” I flapped my arms. “We’re wrong-mages now after all!” I willed myself off the ground, lifting my shoulders, standing on tiptoes. Nothing happened save that I was forced to take a stumbling step forward to keep from falling, and was very glad I hadn’t tried closer to the drop. “Why won’t it work?”

“The Builders’ machines must place counter-spells to protect themselves. How else would they still be working after so many years?” Kara leaned head and chest out over the edge. Snorri beat me to the job of holding her legs. “There are rungs set into the stone of the wall, just like in the shaft we came down.”

She inched back, shook her legs free, then spun around to back over the edge, feet questing for the holds. With the strong suspicion that the clanging noise was the bars back along the tunnel surrendering to Cutter John, I slipped over the edge directly behind her.

A minute or so later all four of us stood on the chamber floor, feeling like ants, both in scale and significance. Snorri led the way to the alcove in the base of the machine. The towering silver-steel engine, through which the black core of the Wheel passed, occupied most of the chamber but a good twenty yards stood between the wall of the chamber and the outer skin of the machinery. The thing looked like no engine I’d ever seen. There were no wheels or cogs, no moving parts, but the structure seemed to be built of many sections and various pipes snaked across its surface, meeting and separating in complex patterns. The whole edifice hummed with power-not a comforting hum but an ungentle sound that carried within it unsettling atonal harmonies that could not have come from any human mind.

“It’s that man from the sign.” Hennan walked at Snorri’s side, a large knife that the Viking must have given him ready in his hand.

“Professor O’Kee,” Kara said.

He stood, frozen as Taproot had been, studying one of the glass panels and the pattern of lights glowing from it. Also in the alcove, somewhat surprisingly, was a messy pile of dirty bedding, a scattering of books, halfeaten food on a plate, and a stained armchair. Just before him, perhaps knocked by the hand resting on the semi-circular desk that ran along the length of the alcove, a small object, a slim cylinder, narrower and slightly longer than my finger, had been captured just after falling from the flat surface. It hung in mid-tumble about three feet off the ground.

I drew my sword and moved forward to prod it in the old man’s direction. I ran into the invisible wall well before I’d expected it, almost smashing my face into it as I’d only just begun to raise my blade.

“It’s big!” I said, to cover my embarrassment.

“Taproot called it stasis,” Kara said. “A stasis field.”

Snorri set his hand to the smoothness of the boundary between time and no time. “Use the key.”

“He’s not frozen,” Hennan said.

“Yes he is.” I patted myself for the ever-elusive key.

“That . . . thing . . . falling from the table is lower down now.”

I looked. The stylus did look a little closer to the ground, but it could easily be a trick of the eye. “Nonsense.”

“He’s right.”

It took me a moment to realize that I didn’t recognize the voice backing Hennan’s opinion. I turned to find that Snorri already had his axe uncomfortably close to the newcomer’s neck. “Who are you?” A Viking growl.

“You don’t recognize me?” The man wore the same long and closefitting white coat as O’Kee, with black trousers and shiny black shoes beneath. He was in his twenties, perhaps a few years older than me, dark hair in disarray, standing up in tufts as if he was in the habit of tugging on it, and thinning at the crown. His wide eyes sparkled with amusement, certainly more than I would show with a barbarian’s axe just inches from my face. Something about him did seem familiar.

“No,” Snorri answered. “Why should I recognize you?”

Kara stared at the man, brow furrowed. “You’re a Builder magician.”

“Oh come on! I’m staring you in the face.” He waggled his fingers under his chin and gestured with the other hand toward the alcove. “See?”

O’Kee had his back to us so it was far from obvious, but that was where the familiarity came from. He looked a bit like the older man, or at least how I remembered him from the picture. “You’re his son? Brother?”

“Son. In a manner of speaking.” A broad smile. “Call me Larry. In any case, your lad is right. Look, the pen has reached the floor.”

We all turned, expect for Snorri, too much the warrior to fall for simple misdirection. The cylinder had indeed hit the floor and was perhaps in the process of bouncing.

“It’s slo-time,” Larry said. “A year spent in there sees a century pass out here.”

“We need to speak to the professor,” I said.

“You could ask me?” He smiled.

“It’s a pretty big question,” I said. “We really need to talk to the man in charge. We’re going to turn it off.”

“What are you going to turn off?” Larry asked.

“This.” I waved my hand at the machine, which was nearly as big as a castle keep. “All of it.” I gestured toward the tunnel mouths at either side of the chamber. “The Wheel.”

“The professor can do it for us.” Snorri’s voice left no room for choice. “It’s his creation.”

Larry shrugged. “It’s the creation of hundreds, if not thousands, of the brightest minds of his age, but yes, he oversaw the project. He’s been working at turning it all off for the past thousand years-ten years in his time-but without success. There are a great many processes that must be exquisitely balanced for a successful termination of the operation. The smallest mistake in calculations could see the effect accelerate . . . or worse.”

“Even so, we will talk to him.” Snorri set a palm to the surface where the professor’s time met ours.

“Be my guest.” Larry opened his hands toward the professor. “But you’ll need the key. And if you don’t have that I’m afraid I’ll have to see you out.”

I glanced at Snorri, his face set in a grim frown, then back at Larry. Most people find an enormous Viking intimidating. Larry somehow conveyed the impression that he considered us all to be naughty schoolchildren.

“I have the key.” I pulled it out and was rewarded with the smallest hesitation from Larry before his grin broadened.

“Marvellous! Really marvellous. You’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting to see that again.”

“Again?” I shook my head at his nonsense and turned to the professor. “Open!” I jabbed the key at the barrier . . . and found no resistance. The “pen” bounced once more and rolled under the armchair. Professor O’Kee tutted. He tapped the glass plate he had been looking at-across which lights and lines and numbers were moving in bright and colourful confusion-and turned, bending to retrieve the fallen pen, only to be arrested halfway through the action by the sight of three heathens from the savage north and a prince of Red March.

“Oh thank God!” he said. “Larry, put the kettle on.”

“We’re here to turn the Wheel off,” Snorri said. “Will the kettle help with that?”

“Of course you are.” The professor offered us a genial smile and nodded toward my still-outstretched hand. “You’ve brought back my key.”

“Your key? This is Loki’s key. It was made in Asgard.” Snorri bristled.

“I’m sure it was.” The professor nodded and hobbled to his armchair. He didn’t look well. “I’d offer you all a seat, but I’ve only the one I’m afraid. Age before beauty and all that.”

Larry, who had been standing at the desk back in the alcove now returned with a cup of steaming brown liquid. He offered it to the professor who took it in a hand that quaked with old-man’s palsy, threatening to slop the contents over first one side, then the other. He got it to his lips without incident and took a noisy slurp.

“That’s tea!” I said. The others looked at me.

“Well done, lad.” The professor took another slurp and made a satisfied “ah.”

I nodded my head curtly, accepting the praise. My mother brought the leaves of the tea plant with her from the Indus, dried and pressed, and used to drink an infusion of them in hot water.

The old man looked up at Snorri. “There’s no kettle, just a hot water dispenser and very old teabags. It’s an expression-language clings on to things long after we’ve forgotten what they were.”

“You say it’s your key,” Kara challenged.

“In a manner of speaking. In several manners of speaking in fact.”

“You’re Loki?” I asked, allowing just a hint of mockery into the question.

The professor shot me a look that had some steel in it, and, blowing on his tea, drank deeply. “I guess we should get to it. I can’t spend too long outside slo-time or the rats will get me.”

“Rats?” I glanced around.

“Yes. Can’t stand the things.” He put down his cup. “It’s what the part of my mind that wants to kill me summons up to do the job.”

“But we’re shielded down here? We can’t work magic like we could on the surface . . .” I looked back up at the tunnel mouth high in the wall, expecting to see Cutter John standing there with his pincers at the ready.

“There’s a dampening field, yes, but the, ah, the unfortunate sideeffects of the experiment can still manifest, they just take a little longer. Inside the slo-time bubble I’m completely safe, but too long out in the chamber and the rats start creeping in.”

“Larry was out here,” I pointed out.

“Yes.” The professor looked at Larry. The family resemblance was quite remarkable now the young man stood beside the professor’s chair. “Well, Larry . . . Larry is-”

“A marvellous mechanical man,” Larry said, and executed a sharp bow.

The professor shrugged. “I built Larry to carry my data-echo-he is, as he says, an automaton, housing . . . well, me, or at least the copy of me that the machines hold. We have our little joke: I’m the father-”

“I’m the son,” said Larry.

“And Loki is the Holy Ghost,” the professor finished.

“I don’t understand,” Kara said. None of us did of course, but the völva valued knowledge above pride.

“You’ve met Aslaug of course?” The professor struggled out of his chair, falling back once and waving off Larry’s help on his second attempt. The automaton-some sort of clockwork soldier, I assumed-gave us an embarrassed look. “A number of my contemporaries escaped their bodies when the nuclear strikes went in, both starting and ending the war over the course of a few hours. They were able, with the help of the changes that our work here had wrought on the fabric of things, to project their intellects into various different forms. Aslaug was Asha Lauglin, a brilliant physicist. She projected onto negative energy states in the dark-matter field. The projections all think they survived. They didn’t of course, Asha Lauglin was carbonized in a nuclear explosion. She died eleven hundred years ago. Aslaug is a copy, just like Larry here, only one that became corrupted over the years, caught up in the folklore of the people who repopulated. Reshaped by their beliefs and the joint will of the believers-”

“And Loki?” Kara interrupted. I was pleased of it. I thought that the professor must be a teacher in addition to his other duties-few other people are so in love with the sound of their own voices.

“Loki is the copy of me that I projected. Only I didn’t die. That’s not a necessary part of the equation-although the effort involved, and the pain of it, are such that without the threat of imminent death to spur you few people are ever likely to undergo the process.”

“Loki is you?” I asked unnecessarily-my lips just wanted something to say.

“Not me, a copy of me. I don’t control him and we have . . . grown apart. But we share the same core and many of the same goals. His power to influence events is both enhanced and constrained by the trap into which he has fallen though.”

“Trap?” Becoming a god was a trap I would happily step into.

“The myth of Loki. It pre-dates me by a very long way, however old I may appear to you, young man. I fear my . . . let’s call it my ‘spirit-echo’ may have fallen into that particular trap owing to something as puerile as word-play.”

“I don’t follow.”

“My contemporaries at school used to call me Loki. I suppose I might have been somewhat of a joker back in those days, but really it was just how my name appeared on the register. Lawrence O’Kee. You see? L. O’kee. Simple as that.”

“So your spirit copy thinks he’s Loki . . .” Kara said.

“Yes.”

“And he isn’t.”

“No. But because he’s trapped in stories that a great many people believe, he has access to the power of their belief, which in turn is backed by what you call the Wheel. The changes our machines here have made to reality allow the belief of all those people to give Loki real power. Just as immediately above us those changes allow each of you to summon fire or fly or accomplish whatever it is you wish to accomplish. Before your imagination creates monsters to kill you of course.”

“What about the key?” I asked, holding it up.

The professor tapped it with a finger. For an instant it became a small silvery key of peculiar design and no more than an inch long. I nearly dropped it. By the time I stopped fumbling it the key was back to its usual black glassy appearance, reaching from the base of my palm to the tip of my index finger.

“It’s the authorization key for the manual control panel on the central processor complex. I gave it to my projection-to Loki-as a kind of back-up plan if my efforts to terminate the IKOL project didn’t succeed in the time available. To be honest it started off as more of a joke than a serious attempt to solve the problem. At that point I thought it might take me six months to close down the accelerator ring. I hadn’t imagined that I would spend the next ten years of my life working at it . . . and run out of time before the damn thing went critical.” The old man ran a hand through his thinning white hair. Exhaustion lurked in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Now the key looks as if it’s our only hope. I sent the key out with Loki to gather belief. The idea was to weave it into stories, to make it part of mythology. The more deeply it became embedded in the consciousness of the people the more strength it could draw from their collective will, from their sleeping imaginations. So, you see, the key has become a symbol that indirectly draws on the Wheel’s own power. If it works, the Wheel will effectively turn itself off.”

“Give him the key, Jal.” Snorri stepped up close, looking down on both of us. “The professor will know what to do with it to turn the machine off.”

My hand closed of its own accord, fingers clenched about the coldness of the key. Giving up the key at this point felt like having my options taken from me. Turning the Wheel’s engines off now would supposedly give Snorri’s family a chance to slip into the unknown that awaited dead people in Builder times. Snorri wanted that . . . but an afterlife on this Holy Mountain didn’t sound so bad. And turning off the engine wouldn’t stop the Wheel turning, only slow it. Without the engines at Osheim the only thing to turn the Wheel and keep changing the way reality works would be us-every time a mage used magic it tore at the fabric of the world. The cracks would spread, the Wheel would turn, more slowly than before, but turn none the less, carrying us all toward the end. The world would still shatter-just in a few years’ time rather than a few weeks. Turn the key the other way and those last few weeks would compress into a last few seconds and, according to the Lady Blue, I’d face the end of the all things standing in the single most secure place, guaranteed safe passage into a new world, poised to rule not as a king or emperor but as a new god. The Blue Lady might have lied: I didn’t trust the bitch further than I could spit her, but she had made this her last hidey-hole for a reason.

“Jal?” Snorri smacked my shoulder.

“Sorry-drifted off there.” I uncurled my fingers, eyes on the key. “Well-”

“Access to the central processor complex is rather awkward.” The professor pressed both palms against his chest as if to preclude the possibility of anyone placing the key in his hand. Perhaps when he poked it the thing bit him back. “The real work was always done remotely in the control room.” He nodded toward somewhere high above us. “But for the super-fine control we need it’s best to be right there where the main processors are.”

I nodded as if any of that made sense.

“To reach the right chamber requires climbing seven or eight ladders and several tight squeezes. If I were a younger man . . . Besides, I’m not sure I could last long enough out of my slo-time to reach it.” His gaze fixed on a point over my shoulder. “I’m rather afraid it’s already started.”

I turned, following the professor’s stare, and found myself looking at a large black rat which was perched on a ledge on the side of the engine, a few yards above us. It watched us, unmoving, its eyes gleaming.

A loud thud behind me drew my attention from the rat.

“Shit.”

Cutter John uncurled from the hunched ball into which he’d been compacted by the fifty foot drop from the tunnel edge. I backed into the alcove, hauling Hennan with me by the shoulder. The professor moved to join me. Larry took a few paces forward and stood guard before the alcove. Kara drew her knife, sliding to one side as Snorri stepped forward to intercept. Cutter John ran straight for me at a flat sprint.

The Viking waited, perfectly still, until in the last split second he spun aside, bringing Hel round in a rising arc to take the monster beneath the chin.

The shout of triumph died in my throat as instead of hitting the floor in two pieces Cutter John was simply lifted by the force of the blow, the axe blade failing to bite into him. He landed heavily, but rose even as Snorri brought Hel overhead for a second chop.

“Larry is very reliable, but I would feel safer if . . .” The professor reached over to a nearby panel and tapped a glowing square. “There.”

I didn’t have time to say, “There what?” Immediately the scene outside accelerated to a pace that would have seemed comical if the contents weren’t so disturbing. With blinding speed Cutter John fended off a flurry of blows and struck one of his own that sent Snorri sprawling boneless across the floor. Somewhere in all that Kara must have come in from behind to have her own stab at Cutter John. I spotted her lying in his wake as he blurred toward us. The fight with Larry lasted a while longer, fists flying, neither man giving an inch. For a second, that must have been a minute or more outside, the two were locked together in a test of strength. Suddenly, in a blaze of sparks, Larry’s arm flew across the chamber. Cutter John backhanded him into the metal wall of the engine, and there he was, the torturer, his face pressed against the wall of our slo-time bubble.

I had been holding Hennan back. Now I didn’t have to. Cutter John’s face held an ugliness in it that would unman anyone.

“Oh this is bad,” the professor said. “Very bad.”

“Can’t you do anything?” Hennan yelled. “We need to help them!”

I echoed the sentiment-though it was mainly me I was thinking of when it came to help. I couldn’t speak, though. Fear had stolen my voice. And I couldn’t look away.

“Well,” the professor said behind me. “There’s always this . . .”

“A stick?” Hennan said. “How will-”

Something cracked around the back of my head. I saw two pieces of splintered walking stick fly by, one to either side of my face. After that it was all falling.