Wolfsangel

12

The witch queen had sensed the first death like someone dozing on a summer day might sense a cloud go over the sun. Things had moved quickly then — candles had been lit to pierce the tomb dark of the caves, sisters disturbed from their ritual sufferings, boys dispatched to find the corpse.

Authun was not yet back home from the Wall with the infant Vali when Gullveig located the first body.

The girl was lying in the lower tunnels, close to the wet rocks, near the deep pool where the rite of the water rune was performed. She was hanged, a rough rope thrown over a jutting rock, a triple knot tied at the neck. The witch queen had touched the girl’s cold smile and then the rope. She knew what those knots meant, the three tight interlocking triangles — the dead lord’s necklace, sign of the god Odin, the berserk, the hanged, the drowned, the wise and the mad, the god to whom she had dedicated her life.

The witch queen touched the white of the girl’s throat, her magic-widened senses drinking in the resonances of the child’s death. The bruises had the sense of a delicious stain, she thought, blackberries and dark wine. She took up the girl’s hair in her fingers and breathed in. Baked bread, cinders, straw bedding and dried flowers were the odours of her death. The girl had gone home. It was a suicide, Gullveig was sure.

The dead child had not been unhappy. She had been scared when she had first entered the caves, but the presence of the queen — at twelve years old a child herself — had reassured her and the witches had touched her mind to bring her calm. The pain and suffering of the rituals had not come easily to her, but she had endured, seen the aim, felt her mind widening as her grip on sanity loosened.

She was to have been the inheritor of the rune of water, to carry the resonance of that ancient symbol within her, to sustain it and be sustained by it. Two girls had been trained. When the old witch who was their mentor died it would be decided who would nurture the rune and who would participate in lesser rituals — to help, to fetch and carry. Now there was only one girl to continue the magic. If anything happened to her the rune would cease to manifest in the physical realm and the sisters’ power would diminish.

There was something else Gullveig could sense in the magical signature of the girl’s death, a feeling of heaviness — the heaviness someone drowning feels as their clothes fill with water, the heaviness of a downward current as it sucks the strength from a swimmer’s limbs. There was a magical presence there, the witch could tell, and it had flowed from the rune the girl had been given to learn. That should not have happened. The witches had suffered losses before but they had been physical ones — sisters frozen, smothered or suffocated by smoke when a ritual had gone wrong. The runes had been within their control for generations. Until that day.

The witch leaned forward and tapped her tongue on the girl’s cheek. The taste was of ocean depths, sightless and empty voids. Gullveig felt the pulling tides, the tug of groping blind sea beasts, the weight of waters above her, all seeming to say, ‘Come lower. Descend, lose sight of the light and give yourself to this heavy darkness.’ She shivered. There would be more of these deaths, she knew, as certain as people of lesser sensitivities know that one wave follows another.

The following years proved her right. Sometimes there were no deaths from one summer to the next; in others there might be two.

Knowledge of the girls’ passing came to the witch queen in different ways. One death presented itself as a lurch in the consciousness, like when you suddenly pull back from the brink of sleep. Another came as a feeling of disquiet from a dream that didn’t stop when she woke. Still another arrived like the taste of tar in the back of her mouth, a nausea that she could not shake until she saw the corpse.

Gullveig held their pale bodies in her arms, touched the bruises at their necks, put her fingers to their swollen lips, stroked their broken limbs and felt an unbearable pressure in her head.

Loki had told her the truth, she thought. Odin was acting against her, killing her sisters. She was certain of one thing — this creeping harvest was only a prelude. Odin would not be content taking one or two lives, nibbling away at her power from the shadows. He was coming, as himself and in force.

It had taken her nearly sixteen years to find him, which did not surprise her. If the god did not know himself then it would take a huge effort for a mortal to identify him. She had managed it, through the old and trusted ways — meditation, ritual and suffering. At first his presence had been elusive in her mind, glimpsed like the glimmer of a fish in water, gone almost as soon as it was there. But over weeks and months, in waking and sleeping she had tracked him, through her agony-induced trances.

She saw herself wandering under the empty spaces of the northern evening until, so startling they shook her from her trance, she saw a pair of pale blue eyes looking at her from a field of snow and heard the lonely howl of a wolf. It was him, the god, appearing in just a fleeting vision, but it was all that she needed. She was on his trail.

She did not see, and could only barely sense, the pale woman with the ruined face who watched her in her meditations. She knew though that there was a presence who walked at her side, hating her, just out of sight. It was that presence that guided her. All the queen could tell was that something travelled with her in her meditations and seemed to know what would harm her. She had sensed its excitement rising when she had caught sight of Odin. The witch did not find this particularly disturbing. She had lived all her life alongside strange entities, faces that flickered from the firelight, shadows on rock that seemed to glower with carnivorous intent. Sleeping or waking, she was never far from the suffocating spirits of the dark.

The thing that followed her now was at least useful. The closer its attention, the nearer she was to the greatest harm of all — Odin.

A year after she had seen the eyes looking at her from the snow, her unseen hater had lead her to Disa, and so back to him.

The witch queen had almost ignored Disa’s call, she was so caught up in the search for her enemy, the god. It was the fourth day of her hanging ordeal — her flesh pierced by thick pins secured by cords to a slab overhanging a scree slope in a steep cave near the surface.

Disa’s words had come to her on a wisp of smoke from the cold air at the top of the Wall. Entreaties from village healers and wise women were not common — such women knew the risks of invoking the witch’s attention — but they were distracting when they came. But as Gullveig prepared to dismiss the call, she felt an interest from the thing at her side. Here, it seemed, was harm and therefore, perhaps, Odin.

The witch allowed her mind to float up over the grey rock, to mingle with the smoke and use it as a road to carry her back to its source.

In her house Disa breathed in the herb-laced fire and with it consciousness of the witch. She shook and trembled, throwing herself back off the chest. Then things became hazy, she felt terribly drowsy, and she had the sense that her body was not her own. There was an odd presence prowling through her head.

As Gullveig looked out through the healer’s eyes, she could see the room with the faces of the villagers gaping back at her. She could also see the youth at her feet. She knew him straight away — the wolf’s brother, the ingredient, the holy victim.

But there was someone else there too. At her side she saw a woman who she thought she remembered, beautiful but with a terribly burned face. In front of her, his form insubstantial and spectral in the firelight, was the god. He was beating a shallow drum with a bone stick, his eyes were piercing and on his head he wore a four-cornered blue hat. The drum was painted with runes, and as he beat it they seemed to fall from it, shaking to the floor and collecting at his feet before disappearing like snowflakes on warm autumn ground.

‘Lord Odin,’ said the witch.

She knew exactly where she was — that space that wasn’t a space, a nexus called into being by ritual, where sorcerers and spirits from remote and distant locations could allow their consciousnesses to assemble. The physical form of the woman with the burned face and that of the sorcerer might be miles from the house but their magical selves were there.

The woman with the burned face extended her hand towards her and Gullveig took it, as if for reassurance.

The god spoke to her. His language was strange, as was the name he called her, but she understood him perfectly. ‘Jabbmeaaakka, the wolf is ours. We have seen your intent and you will not prevail.’

There was a murmur of assent but it didn’t come from the people in the room. Others were collaborating with the god, she thought. The witch was terrified by his presence but she thought she had a chance. If the god did not know he was a god then he may not yet have come to his full power. That meant he could be defeated in magic, or at least beaten back.

She sent her mind like a belch towards the blue-eyed man, a poisonous stink of rot, mould, worms and the crawling things of the earth that spewed forward to engulf him. It wasn’t even really a spell, just an opening of her consciousness, a little glimpse of the places she had been and what she had seen there, enough to cook the brain of anyone who had not walked at least some of those paths themselves.

But something came back, a rhythm, an insistent beat that clouded her thoughts and made her long for sleep. She heard a strange rough singing, felt a blast of cold, saw white fields of snow, creatures thin as runes moving across them, and she longed to step into that cold.

Gullveig, however, was not a wise woman with potions and chants, a village seer or ragged prophet. She was the witch queen of the Troll Wall, lady of the shrieking runes, a creature born and raised to magic. She did not step into the cold; instead, her mind on the edge of disaster, a rune expressed itself in her, a rune like the point of a spear, its steel tip gleaming as it flew across a clear blue sky.

The drumming burst to a frenzy; raised voices became shouting; she had a taste in her throat, ash and sour milk, the smell of funeral fires, and when she looked again the blue-eyed man was gone. Had she killed him? She doubted it, but there were others about him and she sensed they had suffered from her attack.

Odin had felt weak to her, far from his full power. So he could not yet move against her. So what had he done? The girl with the ravaged face who sat by her side in the hanging cave stroked her hand and the answer came to Gullveig in an instant. He hadn’t the power yet to take on any of the witches directly so he was working where he could — at the girls who were being prepared to inherit the runes. If they died then there would be no women to continue the witches’ traditions. Gullveig would eventually be left alone and isolated. While his strength grew, hers would diminish.

She saw it was time to accelerate the pace of the magic. The wolfboy had been prepared. Now he had to meet his holy victim — the prince.

What is magic? Disa had sought to unite the wolfman with the prince so had called the witch. The witch had decided it was time to begin the spell to make her werewolf and so to bring the wolfman and the prince together. Was that a coincidence? Had this conjunction been caused by Disa’s ritual or was it an expression of the witch’s far more powerful magic, which worked away in her deep mind without needing to come to consciousness? Or had it come about through the strongest magic of all — that woven by the fates?

Whatever it was, Gullveig’s desire was now in harmony with Disa’s and it found expression in a spell. Gullveig reached through Disa to touch Vali.

Vali forced his heavy eyes open to watch as Disa’s body convulsed again. She coughed and shook, shivered and growled. Then she dropped onto the floor by Vali and crouched in front of him. She leaned forward, taking his face in her hands. Vali looked into her eyes and was afraid. It wasn’t Disa looking at him, he knew, but something far stranger, and whatever it was exuded cold. Vali felt her hands freezing on his face.

The witch, hanging from the torture rock, tried to work her spell, but Disa’s mind was inadequate to channelling her magic, too fastened to everyday reality. The healer needed to be sent somewhere that would banish her day-to-day consciousness completely and allow Gullveig to work through her.

Vali looked into Disa’s eyes. He could smell something. Burning. Disa, he realised, had pushed the edge of her skirt into the fire, almost surreptitiously, trying to avoid detection until the last moment.

The material caught and the room filled with light and movement and noise. Jodis pulled Disa from the fire, then people were on her, beating at her skirts, trying to extinguish the flames, but Disa was holding them off with one hand, extending the other towards Vali and hissing something under her breath. Two of the men got her down, someone else threw water, but still Disa fixed her eyes on Vali.

Vali felt a cold enter his mind, a creeping feeling of damp and dark. He fell back. Something had gone into him: it felt as though he had a toad stuck in his throat, a clammy, writhing thing that would not be coughed out. The only way to get rid of the hideous feeling was to stand, to go. He was overwhelmed by tiredness but not sleepy. He got to his feet.

His sympathy for Disa was like something on the tip of his tongue, known but distant beneath the nausea he was feeling. He had to move, he knew that. It was like the frustration of being trapped indoors through a long winter storm — dying to get outside but knowing it is impossible — but magnified many times.

He went to the back of the room, where Bragi had hung his sword next to his pack. He picked up both and left. No one followed him; they were all attending to Disa or watching her being attended to.

It was the long twilight of the northern summer. The sky was a pale silver and a big moon hung alongside a single bright star. Already, Vali noticed, the moon was not quite full. He had less than a month to save Adisla.

A large crow flapped from one tree to another and Vali’s body seemed to respond to the movement. Tired beyond thought, he saw himself start walking and noticed that he was going east along the shore of the fjord. Only his forward movement seemed to stop the nausea inside him. After that, he seemed to forget that he was travelling at all.

His movements seemed automatic, unconscious and unguided as he took the road from the village, only dimly aware of his surroundings. He was lost in a trance of thoughts of Adisla, of Disa, of the cold eyes of whatever had looked through her, and he didn’t really notice where he was until he woke.

He stood up, shook the moisture from himself and looked around. There was a depression in the grass. He had slept there, it seemed. It was dusk again. He checked his pack and his sword and looked to the distance. A dark blue range of mountains split the horizon, and he knew that was where he needed to go. The feeling of sickness was still with him and he thought that he wouldn’t bother with food, just go on until he found his wolfman.

He was high up on one side of a steep valley on a slope that, within yards of where he had woken, fell away as a cliff. He moved to the edge and peered down. There were two riders below him and they had made a camp. The men had laid blankets beneath a heavily leafed alder tree and made a small fire. They were preparing to sleep, he thought, taking advantage of the shelter of the tree.

One of them was Authun’s messenger, Hogni. Vali looked up at the mountains. A horse would halve his journey time. He dimly sensed he was enchanted and wondered if that was why his thoughts had suddenly come to clarity. Did the spell, or whatever was controlling the spell, want him to take a horse to speed him forward?

The men hadn’t seen him. It occurred to him to simply walk down the hill and command them to give him their horses. They were, after all, his father’s retainers and so owed him a duty of obedience. But his father had ordered that he should be tested against the wolfmen. Would they agree to give up their animals? And what was to stop them killing him right there if they felt like it? There were other people, cousins and uncles, with claims to Authun’s throne. If one of these men was of their party, Vali thought, they could run a spear through him and go home with no one any the wiser.

His hand instinctively went to his sword. Then he lay flat and waited for the men to sleep.