Kitabı oku: «The Wheel of Osheim», sayfa 6

I stared up at the stars through a gap in the awning. ‘What time is it anyway?’

‘Lacking an hour to midnight.’

I lifted my head and looked around. It had been a rhetorical question. I had thought myself alone up here.

‘Who said that?’ I couldn’t make out any human figures, just low hillocks of cushions. ‘Show yourself. Don’t make me drink alone!’

A black shape detached itself from the most distant corner, close to the roof’s edge and the fifty-foot drop into the street below. For a moment my heart lurched as I thought of Aslaug, but it had been a man’s voice. A lean but well-muscled figure resolved itself, tall but not quite my height, face shrouded in shadow and long dark hair. He walked with the exaggerated care of the quite drunk, clutching an earthenware flask in one hand, and flomped bonelessly into the cushions vacated by Omar.

Moonlight revealed him in a rippling slice, falling through the gap between one awning and the next. The silver light painted him, from a grisly burn that covered his left cheek, down a plain white shirt to the hilt of a sword. A dark eye regarded me, glittering amid the burn, the other lost behind a veil of hair. He raised his flask toward me, then swigged from it. ‘Now you’re not drinking alone.’

‘Well that’s good.’ I took a gulp from my own pewter cup. ‘Does a man no good to drink by himself. Especially not after what I’ve been through.’ I felt very maudlin, as a man in his cups is wont to do without lively music and good company.

‘I’m a very long way from home,’ I said, suddenly as miserable and homesick as I had ever been.

‘Me too.’

‘Red March is a thousand miles south of us.’

‘The Renar Highlands are further.’

For some reason known only to drunkards that angered me. ‘I’ve had a hard time.’

‘These are hard days.’

‘Not just today.’ I drank again. ‘I’m a prince you know.’ Quite how that would get me sympathy I wasn’t sure.

‘Liba is straining at the seams with princes. I was born a prince too.’

‘Not that I’ll ever be king…’ I kept to my own thread.

‘Ah,’ the stranger said. ‘My path to inheritance is also unclear.’

‘My father…’ Somehow my train of thought slipped away from me. ‘He never loved me. A cold man.’

‘My own has that reputation too. Our disagreements have been … sharp.’ The man drank from his flask. The light caught him again and I could see he was young. Even younger than me.

Perhaps it was relief at being safe and drunk and not being chased by monsters that did it, but somehow all the grief and injustice of my situation that there hadn’t been time for until now bubbled up out of me.

‘I was just a boy … I saw him do it … killed them both. My mother, and my…’ I choked and couldn’t speak.

‘A sibling?’ he asked.

I nodded and drank.

‘I saw my mother and brother killed,’ he said. ‘I was young too.’

I couldn’t tell if he were mocking me, topping each of my declarations with his own variant.

‘I still have the scars of that day!’ I raised my shirt to show the pale line where Edris Dean’s sword had pierced my chest.

‘Me too.’ He pushed back his sleeves and moved his arms so the moonlight caught on innumerable silvery seams criss-crossing his skin.

‘Jesus!’

‘He wasn’t there.’ The stranger pulled back into the shadow. ‘Just the hook-briar. And that was enough.’

I winced. Hook-briar is nasty stuff. My new friend seemed to have dived in headfirst. I raised my cup. ‘Drink to forget.’

‘I have better ways.’ He opened his left hand, revealing a small copper box, moonlight gleaming on a thorn pattern running around its lip. He might have better ways than alcohol but he drank from his flask, and deeply.

I watched the box, my eye fascinated by the familiarity of it – but, familiar or not, no part of me wanted to touch it. It held something bad.

Like my new friend I drank too, though I also had better ways of burying a memory. I let the raw whisky run down my throat, hardly tasting it now, hardly feeling the burn.

‘Drink to dull the pain, my brother!’ I’m an amiable drunk. Given enough time I always reach the point where every man is my brother. A few more cups and I declare my undying love for all and sundry. ‘I’m not sure there’s a bit of me that isn’t bruised.’ I lifted my shirt again, trying to see the bruising across my ribs. In the dark it looked less impressive than I remembered. ‘I could show you a camel footprint but…’ I waved the idea away.

‘I’ve a few bruises myself.’ He lifted his own shirt and the moonlight caught the hard muscles of his stomach. The thorn scars patterned him there too, but it was his chest that caught my eye. In exactly the spot where I have a thin line of scar recording the entry of Edris Dean’s sword my drinking companion sported his own record of a blade’s passage into his flesh, though the scar was black, and from it dark tendrils of scar spread root-like across his bare chest. These were old injuries though, long healed. He had fresher hurts – better light would show them angry and red, the bite of a blade in his side, above the kidney, other slices, puncture wounds, a tapestry of harm.

‘Shit. What the hell—’

‘Dogs.’

‘Pretty damn vicious dogs!’

‘Very.’

I swallowed the word ‘bastard’ and cast about instead for some claim or tale that the bastard wouldn’t instantly top.

‘That sibling I mentioned, killed when I saw my mother killed…’

He looked up at me, again just the one eye glittering above his burn scar, the other hidden. ‘Yes?’

‘Well she’s not properly dead. She’s in Hell plotting her return and planning revenge.’

‘On who?’

‘Me, you.’ I shrugged. ‘The living. Mostly me I think.’

‘Ah.’ He leaned back into the cushions. ‘Well there you’ve got me beat.’

‘Good.’ I drank again. ‘I was starting to think we were the same person.’

The boy came back, refilling my cup from his jug and moving the lanterns closer to us to light our conversation. The man said something to him in the desert tongue but I couldn’t follow it. Too drunk. Also, I don’t know more than the five words I learned in my year living in the city.

With the lamplight showing me the fellow’s face I had a sudden sense of déjà vu. I’d seen him before – possibly recently – or someone who reminded me strongly of him. Pieces of the puzzle started to settle out of my drunken haze. ‘Prince you say?’ Every other rich man in Liba seemed to be a prince, but in the north, where we both clearly came from, ‘prince’ was a richer currency. ‘Where from again?’ I remembered but hoped I was wrong.

‘Renar.’

‘Not … Ancrath?’

‘Maybe … once.’

‘By Christ! You’re him!’

‘I’m certainly someone.’ He lifted his flask high, draining it.

‘Jorg Ancrath.’ I knew him though I’d seen him just the one time, over a year ago in that tavern in Crath City, and he hadn’t sported such a burn then.

‘I’d say “at your service”, but I’m not. And you’re a prince of Red March, eh? Which would make you one of the Red Queen’s brood?’ He made to put his flask down and missed the ground, drunker than he had seemed.

‘I have that honour,’ I said, my lips numb and framing the words roughly. ‘I am one of her many breeding experiments – not one that has best pleased her though.’

‘We’re all a disappointment to someone.’ He swigged again, sinking further back into his cushions. ‘Best to disappoint your enemies though.’

‘These damnable mathmagicians have put us together, you know.’ I knew Yusuf had let me go too easily.

Jorg gave no sign of having heard me. I wondered if he’d passed out. A long pause turned into midnight, as it often does when you’re very drunk. The distant hour bell jolted him into speech. ‘I’ve made plenty of seers eat their predictions.’

‘Got their sums wrong this time though – I’m no use to you. It should have been my sister. She was to have been the sorceress. To stand at your side. Bring you to the throne.’ I found my face wet. I’d not wanted to think about any of this.

Jorg mumbled something, but all I caught was a name. Katherine.

‘Perhaps … she never had a name. She never saw this world.’ I stopped, my throat choked with the foolishness too much drink will put in a man. I drained my cup. There’s a scribe who lives behind our eyes scribbling down an account of events for our later perusal. If you keep drinking then at some point he rolls up his scroll, wraps up his quills, and takes the night off. What remained in my cup proved sufficient to give him his marching orders. I’m sure we continued to mutter drunkenly at each other, King Jorg of Renar and I. I expect we made a few loud and passionate declarations before we passed out. We probably banged our cups on the roof and declared all men our brothers or our foe, depending on the kind of drunks we were, but I have no record of it.

I do remember that I confided my problems with Maeres Allus to the good king, and he kindly offered me his sage advice. I recall that the solution was both elegant and clever and that I swore to adopt it. Sadly not a single word of that counsel remained with me the following day.

My last memory is an image. Jorg lying sprawled, dead to the world, looking far younger in sleep than I had ever imagined him. Me pulling a rug up across him to keep off the cold of the desert night, then staggering dangerously toward the stairs. I wonder how many lives might have been saved if I had just rolled him off the roof’s edge…

Many men drink to forget. Alcohol will wash away the tail end of a night, erasing helpful advice, and the occasional embarrassing incident, whilst trying to weave a path home. Unfortunately if you’ve developed a talent for suppressing older memories, accumulated while depressingly sober, then alcohol will often erode those barriers. When that happens, rather than sleep in the blessed oblivion of the deeply inebriated you will in fact suffer the nightmare of reliving the worst times you’ve ever known. A river of whisky carried me back into memories of Hell.

‘Jesus Christ! What was that thing?’ I gasp it between deep breaths, bent double, hands on my thighs. Looking back I see the raised dust that marks our hasty escape from the small boy and his ridiculously vast dog.

‘You did want to see monsters, Jal.’ Snorri, leaning back against another of the towering stones that punctuate the plain.

‘A hell-hound…’ I straighten up and shake my head. ‘Well I’ve seen enough now. Where’s this fucking river?’

‘Come on.’ Snorri leads off, his axe over his shoulder, the blades finding something bloody in the deadlight and offering it back to Hell.

We trek another mile, or ten, in the dust. I’m starting to see figures in the distance, souls toiling across the plain or clustered in groups, or just standing there.

‘We’re getting closer.’ Snorri waves his axe toward the shade of a man a few hundred yards off, staked out among the rocks. ‘It takes courage to cross the Slidr. It gives many pause.’

‘Looks like more than a lack of courage holding that one back!’ The stakes go through the soul’s hands and feet.

Snorri shakes his head, walking on. ‘The mind makes its own bonds here.’

‘So all these people are doomed to wander here forever? They won’t ever cross over?’

‘Men leave echoes of themselves…’ He pauses as if trying to recall the words. ‘Echoes scattered across the geometry of death. These are shed skins. The dead have to leave anything they can’t carry across the river.’

‘Where are you getting this from?’

‘Kara. I wasn’t going to spend months travelling to death’s door with a völva and not ask her any questions about what to expect!’

I let that one lie. It’s what I did, but then I never had any intention of ending up here.

We slog up a low ridge and beyond it the land falls away. There below us is the river, a gleaming silver ribbon in a valley that weaves away into grey distances, the only thing in all that awful place with any hint of life in it. I start forward but immediately the ground drops in a crumbling cliff a little taller than me and at its base a broad sprawl of hook-briar, black and twisted, as you’ll see in a wood after the first frosts.

‘We’ll have to go a—’ I break off. There’s movement on the edge of the briar. I shift to get a better view. It’s the boy from the milestone, lunging in among the thorns, leaving them glistening. ‘Hey!’

‘Leave him, Jal. It is the way it is. It has been like this for an age before we came and will be like it after we leave.’

If we leave!

‘But…’

Snorri sets off to find an easier route down. I can’t leave, though. Almost as if the briar has me hooked too. ‘Hey! Wait! Keep still and I can get you out.’ I cast about for a way down the cliff that won’t pitch me in among the thorns.

‘I’m not trying to get out.’ The boy pauses his lunging and looks up at me. Even from this distance his face is a nightmare, flayed by the briar, his flesh ripped, studded with broken thorns bedded bone-deep.

‘What…’ I step back as the ground crumbles beneath my foot and sandy soil cataracts over the drop. ‘What the hell are you doing then?’

‘Looking for my brother.’ Blood spills from torn lips. ‘He’s in there somewhere.’

He throws himself back at the thorns. The spikes are as long as his fingers and set with a small hook behind each point to lodge in the flesh.

‘Stop! For Christ’s sake!’

I try to climb down where the cliff dips but it breaks away and I scamper back.

‘He wouldn’t stop if it were me.’ The words sound ragged as if his cheeks are torn. I can hardly see him in the mass of the briar now.

‘Stop—’ Snorri’s hand grabs my shoulder and he pulls me away mid-protest.

‘You can’t get caught up in this. Everything here is a snare.’ He walks me away.

‘Me? Hasn’t this place had its hooks in you ever since you first held that key?’ They’re just words though, without heat. I’m not thinking about Snorri. I’m thinking about my sister, dead before she was ever born. I’m thinking about the boy and his brother and what I might do to save my own sibling. Less than that, I say to myself. Less than that.

I woke, still drunk, and with so many devils hammering on the inside of my head that it took me an age to understand I was in a prison cell. I lay there in the heat, eyes tight against the pain and the blinding light lancing in through a small high window, too miserable to call out or demand release. Omar found me there at last. I don’t know how much later. Long enough to pass the contents of a jug of water through me and leave the place stinking slightly worse than I found it.

‘Come on, old friend.’ He helped me up, wrinkling his nose, still grinning. The guards watched disapprovingly behind him. ‘Why do you northerners do this to yourselves? Even if God did not forbid it drinking is a poor bet.’

I staggered out along the corridor to the guards’ room, wincing, and watching the world through slitted eyes. ‘I’m never doing it again, so let’s not talk about it any more. OK?’

‘Do you even remember what happened to you last night?’ Omar caught me as I stumbled into the street and with a grunt of effort kept me on my feet.

‘Something about a camel?’ I recalled some sort of argument with a camel in the small hours of the morning. Had it looked at me wrong? Certainly I’d decided it was responsible for the footprint on my backside and all other indignities I’d ever suffered from the species. ‘Jorg!’ I remembered. ‘Jorg fucking Ancrath! He was up there, Omar! On that roof. You’ve got to warn the caliph!’

I knew there was bad blood between the Horse Coast kingdoms and Liba, raids across the sea and such, and that the Ancraths had alliances with the Morrow, which made Liba their foe. What I thought one man could do to the Caliph of Liba, especially if his head was like mine this morning, I wasn’t sure. This was, however, Jorg Ancrath who had destroyed Duke Gellethar along with his army, castle and the mountain they all sat upon. We had returned through Gelleth months after the explosion and the sky was still— ‘Christ! The explosion. In the desert! It was him, wasn’t it?’

‘It was.’ Omar signed for Allah’s protection. ‘He has met with my father and they are now friends.’

I stopped in the street and thought about that for a moment. ‘Starting his empire building young, isn’t he?’ I was impressed though. My grandmother had alliances in Liba – she’d reached out far and wide in the hope of good marriages – but her goal had been finding blood that mixed with her sons’ would produce a worthy heir, someone to fill in the gaps in the Silent Sister’s visions of the future … my sister. Jorg of Ancrath had other plans and I wondered how long it would be before they took him to Vyene to present his case to Congression and demand the Empire throne. ‘How far will it take him, I wonder…’

‘What do you make of him?’ Omar had come back for me, a caliph’s son waiting for me in the dusty street. He seemed strangely interested in my answer. It struck me then that I’d never seen him as clearly as I did there that morning, burdened by my self-inflicted pain. Soft, pudgy, Omar, the bad gambler, too rich, too amiable for his own good. But as he watched me with an intensity he saved for the roulette wheel I understood that the Mathema saw a different man – a man who would not only insert my answer into an equation of unearthly complexity, but one who might also solve it. ‘Can he match his ambition?’

‘What?’ I clutched my head. I didn’t have to fake it. ‘Jorg? Don’t know. Don’t care. I just want to go home.’

5

Omar and Yusuf came to the outskirts of Hamada to see me off, Omar in the black robes of a student, Yusuf in the fractal patterned grey-on-white of a master, his smile black and gleaming. They’d calculated me safe passage to the coast with a salt caravan. Travel with Sheik Malik, they told me, would not end well, though whether my downfall would have been at the sheik’s instigation, or by djinn or dead man, or perhaps through indecency with his lovely daughters, they didn’t say.

‘A gift, my friend!’ Omar jerked his head back at the three camels his man was leading behind them.

‘Oh you bastard.’

‘You’ll warm to them, Jalan! Think of the heads you’ll turn in Vermillion riding in on camelback!’

I rolled my eyes and waved the man forward to add my trio to the laden herd browsing karran grass a short way behind me. Soon all four score of them would be trekking the dunes with just me and twelve salt merchants to keep order.

‘And give the Red Queen my father’s regards,’ Omar said. ‘And my mother’s.’

Omar’s mother I liked. The second eldest of the caliph’s six wives, a tall Nuban woman from the interior, dark as ebony and mouth-wateringly attractive. Funny too. I guessed Omar’s sense of humour came from his father. Giving a man three camels after he’s been locked up for assaulting one is mean-spirited, and not at all amusing.

I turned to Yusuf. ‘So, master Yusuf, perhaps you have a prediction for me, something I can use.’ Tradition has it that nobody of consequence leaves Hamada without some numerology to guide their way. Most come from failed students who ply their trade in whatever way they can, be it as accountants, bookmakers, or mystics selling predictions on the street. A prince, however, might hope for an audit of his possibilities and probabilities to be issued by the Mathema itself. And, since I knew Yusuf from my days in Umbertide, there seemed no harm in trying to coax one from a master.

Yusuf’s smile stiffened for a moment. ‘Of course, my prince. I’m afraid our halls of calculation are occupied with … notables. But I can do a quick evaluation.’

I stood there, trying not to let my offence show, while Yusuf scratched away with startling speed on a slate taken from inside his robe. ‘One, two, thirteen.’ He looked up.

I pursed my lips. ‘Which means?’

‘Ah.’ Yusuf glanced down at the slate again as if seeking inspiration. ‘First stop, second sister, thirteenth … something.’

‘Why can’t these ever be like, on the third day of spring give the fifth man you see four coppers to avoid disaster? See, that’s simple and useful. Yours could mean anything. First stop … on my way home? An oasis? A port? And second sister? My sister, the Silent Sister? Help me out here!’

‘The calculation is done on the basis that you are told what I told you – if I wanted to tell you more I would have to do the calculation again and it would be a different answer, a different purpose. If I told you more now then it would disrupt the outcome and the numbers would no longer be true. Besides, I don’t know the answers, that’s where the magic comes in and it’s hard to pin down. You understand?’

‘So, do it again. It only took you a moment.’

Yusuf showed me his black smile. ‘Ah, my friend, you have found me out. I have been processing your variables since we first met in that Florentine bank. I may have misled you when I implied that you were not important to the shape of things to come. I thought perhaps it would have been easier for you if you didn’t know.’

‘Well … uh, that’s better.’ I wasn’t sure it was. I’d been happier being outraged about not being important enough to factor than I was knowing that my actions mattered. ‘I, uh, should be going. Allah be upon you, and all that…’ I raised my hand in farewell but Omar was too fast for me and launched himself forward into a hug that, truth be told, was pretty much a cuddle.

‘Good luck, my friend.’

‘I don’t need luck, Omar! And I have the figures to prove it … one, two, three—’

‘Thirteen.’

‘One, two, thirteen. That should see me safe. You come visit us in Red March when you’re bored with balancing equations.’

‘I will,’ he said, but I know from experience it takes practice to lie when cuddling someone, and Omar had not practised.

I disentangled myself and set off toward the front of the caravan.

‘Don’t forget your camels, Jalan!’

‘Right.’ And with reluctance I angled my way toward the rear of the group being lined up, already tensing to dodge the first barrage of camel-spit.

The desert is hot and boring. I’m sorry, but that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s also sandy, but rocks are essentially dull things and breaking them up into really small pieces doesn’t improve matters. Some people will tell you how the desert changes character day by day, how the wind sculpts it endlessly in vast and empty spaces not meant for man. They’ll wax lyrical about the grain and shade of the sand, the majesty of bare rock rising mountainous, carved by the sand-laden breeze into exotic shapes that speak of water and flow … but for me sandy, hot, and boring covers it all.

The most important factor, once water and salt are covered, is the boredom. Some men thrive on it, but me, I try to avoid being left alone with my own imagination. The key if one wishes to avoid dwelling on unpleasant memories or inconvenient truths is to keep yourself occupied. That fact alone explains much of my youth. In any event, in the desert silence, with nobody but camels and heathens to speak to, none of them with much mastery of Empire tongue, a man is left defenceless, prey to dark thoughts.

I held out until we hit the coast, but that last trek along the narrow strip of sand between the wideness of the sea and the vast march of dunes broke me. One chill night we camped beside the skeleton of some great ocean-going ship that had floundered close enough to port for the irony to be more bitter than the seawater. I walked among its bare and salt-rimed spars rising from the beach, and setting a hand to one ancient timber I could swear I heard the screams of drowning sailors.

That night sleep proved impossible to find. Instead, beneath the bright and cold scatter of the stars, my ghosts came visiting and dragged me back to Hell.

‘Isn’t there supposed to be a bridge?’ I ask, staring out across the fast-flowing waters of the River Slidr. It’s the first water I’ve seen in Hell. The river lies at least thirty yards wide, the opposite shore is a beach of black sand sloping up to a set of crumbling black cliffs. The cliffs vault toward the dead-lit sky in a series of steps, and above them clouds gather, dark as smoke.

‘It’s the River Gjöll that has a bridge, not the Slidr. Gjallarbrú they call the bridge. Be thankful we don’t need to cross it, Módgud stands guard.’

‘Módgud?’ I don’t really want to know.

‘A giantess. The far shore of that river is corpse upon corpse. They build the Nagelfar there, the nail ship that Loki will steer to Ragnarok. And behind that bridge stand the gates of Hel, guarded by the chained hound, Garm.’

‘But don’t we need to—’

‘We’re already past the gates, Jal. The key, the door, all that took us into Hel.’

‘Just the wrong bit of it?’

‘We need to cross the river.’

Thirst rather than a lack of caution draws me on, hurrying me down those last few yards of the shore.

I advance to the shallows. ‘Yeah. That’s not going to happen.’ The riverbed shelves away rapidly and although the swift-flowing water lies unnaturally clear it soon becomes lost in darkness. Crossing a river like this would be a serious problem under any circumstances but as I kneel to drink I spot the real show-stopper. In defiance of all reason there are daggers, spears, and even swords, being borne along in the current, all silvery clean, and sparkling with sharpness. Some are pointed resolutely in the direction the current takes them, others swirl as they go, scything the waters all around.

Snorri arrives at my shoulder. ‘It’s called the River of Swords. I wouldn’t drink it.’

I stand. Further out the blades look like fish shoaling. Long, sharp, steel fish.

‘So, what do we do?’ I stare upriver, then down. Nothing but miles of eroded banks stepping up to the badlands on either side.

‘Swim.’ Snorri walks past me.

‘Wait!’ I reach forward to get an arm in his way. ‘What?’

‘They’re just swords, Jal.’

‘Yessssss. That was my point too.’ I look up at him. ‘You’re going to dive in among a whole bunch of swords?’

‘Isn’t that what we do in battle?’ Snorri steps into the water. ‘Ah, cold!’

‘Fuck cold, it’s sharp I’m worried about.’ I make no move to follow him.

‘Crossing the Slidr isn’t about bridges or tricks. It’s a battle. Fight the river. Courage and heart will see you across – and if it doesn’t then Valhalla will have you for you will have fallen in combat.’

‘Courage?’ I know I’m sunk before I start then. Unless simply wading in constitutes courage … rather than just stupidity.

‘It’s that or stay here forever.’ Snorri takes another step and suddenly he’s swimming, the water churning white behind him, his great arms rising and falling.

‘Crap on it.’ I stick a foot in the water. The chill of it reaches through my boot as if it isn’t there and shoots up the bones of my leg. ‘Jesus.’ I take the foot out again, sharpish. ‘Snorri!’ But he’s gone, a third of the way across, battling the waters.

I take the opportunity to put the key back around my neck on its thong. I find it hot in my grasp, reflecting nothing, not even the sky. I wonder if I call on Loki will the true God see and drown me for my betrayal? I hedge my bets by calling on any deity that might be listening.

‘Help!’

The way I see it is that God must be pretty busy with people appealing to him all the time, so he probably appreciates it when prayers cut to the chase.

I pause to consider the injustice of a Hell that contains no lakes that drown heroes and let cowards float, but instead holds test upon test over which someone with nothing to recommend them save a strong arm may triumph. Then, without further consideration I run three steps and dive in.

Swimming has never been my forte. Swimming with a sword at my hip has always resulted in swifter progress, but sadly only toward the bottom of whatever body of water I’m drowning in. The Slidr however, proves unusually buoyant when it comes to sharp-edged steel and Edris Dean’s blade rather than dragging me down, holds me up.

I thrash madly, my lungs too paralysed by the cold even to begin pulling back the breath that escaped me when I hit the river. The iciness of the water is invasive, seeping through blood and bone, filling my head. I lose contact with my limbs but it’s not drowning that concerns me – it’s keeping warm. Deep in my head, in the dark spaces where we go to hide, I’m crouched, waiting to die, waiting for the ice to reach me, and all I have to burn are memories.

I reach for the hottest memory I have. It isn’t the blind heat of the Sahar, or the crackling embrace of Gowfaugh Forest engulfed in flame. The Aral Pass unfolds, dragging me back into that blood-soaked gorge packed with men at war, men screaming, men at cut and thrust, men fallen about their wounds, time running red from their veins, men dying, whispering beneath the cacophony, speaking to their loved and lost, calling for their mothers, last words twitching on blue lips, bargains with the Devil, promises to God. I see another man slide back from my sword, leaving it black with gore. By now it’s too dull to slice, but a yard of steel is still deadly whatever edge it carries.

The Aral Pass carries me a third of the way across the Slidr. I find my focus and realize the river’s sharp load has not yet cut me open but there’s still too far to go and the opposite shore is slipping by too fast. In the distance I hear a roar, a low, steady, wet-mouthed roar. A long silver spear passes beneath me, too close. I start to swim again, pounding artlessly at the water, and this time it is the bloodshed at the Black Fort that drives me on. I remember the sick sound as my sword point pierces an eye, crunching through the bony orbit and into the Viking’s brain. In an instant the fire is gone from him, a meat puppet with his strings all snipped. An axe cleaves the air in front of my face as I sway back. A high table catches me in the back and I topple onto it, twisting, throwing my legs into the spin. A broadsword hammers into the planks where my head was and I’m over the table, on both feet, swinging, shearing through the arm that held that sword.