“You should be solid.” He had found men dead in the snow before, their limbs frozen hard as ice. He stared a moment longer. “You’re no part of what is right,” Snorri told it. “This is Hel.” He lifted his axe, knuckles white on the haft. “But you didn’t come from there, and this won’t send you to the river of swords.”
The dead man only watched him, straining at the snow, tearing at it, without the wit to dig.
“Even the frost giants would want no part of you.” Snorri struck the man’s head from his shoulders and watched it roll away, spattering the clean snow with rotten blood, sluggish and half frozen. The air held a strange chemical scent, like lamp oil, but different.
Snorri wiped Hel’s blades in the snow until all trace of the creature had gone, then walked on, leaving the body still twitching in the drift.
• • •
By the time a man reaches the Bitter Ice he will have seen nothing but a world in shades of white for day upon day. He will have walked upon ice sheets and seen no tree or blade of grass, no rock or stone, heard no sound but that of his own loneliness and the mockery of the wind. He will believe there is in all the world no place more cruel, no place less suited to the business of living. And then he will see the Bitter Ice.
In places the Bitter Ice may be gained by snow-clad slopes as one might scale a mountain. In other places the ice shelf towers in a series of vast cliff faces, some frost-white, some glacial blue and offering clear depths. When the midnight sun shines on such faces, it reaches in and hints of shapes are revealed as if the ice has swallowed and held great ocean whales, and leviathans that dwarf even these, all trapped for eternity beneath a mile and more of glacier. For the Bitter Ice is just that, one huge glacier, spread across a continent, always advancing or retreating at a pace that makes men’s lives seem brief as mayflies.
Snorri couldn’t believe the Broke-Oar would allow himself to be led up onto the high ice, whatever madness might infect the Islanders with their dead men. Greed drove Sven Broke-Oar; he would accept risk, but never suicidal risk. Armed with this assessment of the man, Snorri trekked along the margins of the ice cliffs, low on food, as numb with the cold as he had been with the ghouls’ poisons.
When Snorri first saw the black spot he thought it part of dying, his vision failing as the wilderness claimed him. But the spot persisted, kept its place, grew as he staggered on. And in time it became the Black Fort.
• • •
“Black Fort?” I asked.
“An ancient stronghold built at the farthest reach of the Bitter Ice. Miles from it now. Built in days when that land was green.”
“And what— Who holds it? Was your wife there?”
“Not tonight, Jal. I can’t speak of it. Not tonight.”
Snorri turned his face to the blaze in the west. He sat, lit with the fire glow, and I saw the memories take him, back to the Wodinswood once again, where he had burned his son.
TWENTY-TWO
Maladon is Norse-land. Crossing from East Thurtan you see it almost immediately. In the use of the land, the monuments, rough-hewn works of stone, carrying a power and a beauty not seen in the roadside chapels of the Thurtans. Many of the houses are roofed with turf, and the roof beams sport curving prows to remember the longboats that bore their ancestors to these shores. Perhaps some are even those same timbers, taken from ships beached on once-hostile shores.
“These are Vikings, then?” I asked on passing our first Maladon peasants at work gathering in their harvest.
“Fit-firar. Land men. Good stock, brave, but the sea spat them out. A true Viking knows the oceans like a lover.”
“Says the man who has ridden a thousand miles rather than go by ship.”
Snorri harrumphed at that. I didn’t mention that now he wasn’t even riding but walking. Although technically both the horses were mine since I paid for them, I felt I was riding Sleipnir on sufferance and that any mention of it might get me turfed off, or at the very least mocked for being such a footsore southerner.
The mare bore deep scratches all along her neck, chest, and shoulders from our escape the night before. I’d spent much of the morning digging out splinters and cleaning the wounds. Both her eyes were scratched and thick with rheum. I did what I could with them but thought she might lose the left in time. Later I dug a good number of splinters from my own arms and two particularly painful ones from under my fingernails. I may not be much of a man but I count myself an excellent horseman, and a horseman takes care of his mount before himself. I’m not given to praying, but I said a prayer for Ron out on the grass and I’m not ashamed to say so.