The Liar's Key

“You look . . . better,” I told Snorri.

“I feel better.” He patted his side.

“All magic is stronger here,” Kara called back without turning. “Quicker to answer the will. Snorri is more able to resist Kelem’s call, the light in him is battling the poison.” She picked up the pace, and glanced my way. “It’s a bad place to use enchantment, though. Like lighting a fire in a hay barn.” I wondered if Snorri had mentioned Harrowheim to her.

“What is this ‘wheel’ anyway? Some sort of engine?” I imagined a huge wheel turning, toothed like the gears in a watermill.

“No one alive has seen it, not even the wrong-mages who live as close in as they can stand. The sagas say it’s the corpse of a god, Haphestur, not of Asgard but a stranger from without, a wanderer. A smith who forged weapons for Thor and Odin. They say he lies there rotting and the magic of making leaks from him as his flesh corrupts.” Kara glanced up at me, as if to gauge my reaction.

I kept my face stiff. I’ve found heathens to be a touchy lot if you laugh at their stories. “That’s what the priests say. What do the völvas believe?”

“In King Hagar’s library on Icefjar there are remnants of books copied directly from the works of the Builders themselves. I understood them to say that the Wheel is a complex of buildings laid above a vast underground ring, a stone tunnel, many miles long and going nowhere. A place where the Builders saw new truths.”

I mulled on this one, walking another hour in silence. I pictured the Builders’ ring of secrets, seeing it all aglow in my mind’s eye while I tried to ignore each new blister. Less painful than the blisters, but somehow more distressing, was the sensation that each step took us closer to the Wheel, the world becoming fragile, a skin stretched too tight across bone, ready to give suddenly and without warning, and leave us falling into something new and much, much worse.

“Look!” Tuttugu, behind us but pointing ahead.

I squinted at the dark spot down in the shallow valley before us. “I didn’t think anyone lived in Osheim.”

“Lots of people live in Osheim, idiot.” Snorri made to deliver one of those playful punches to the shoulder that leave my arm dead for the next six hours. He paused though, feeling the old crackle of magic, as fierce across his knuckles as it was across my side. “Most of them live far south, around Os City, but there are farmers everywhere.”

I glanced around. “Farming what exactly? Rocks? Grass?”

“Goats.” Kara pointed to some brown dots closer at hand. “Goats and sheep.”

We hastened across the valley toward the lone hut. Somewhere in the back of my mind Aslaug whispered that Snorri had raised his hand against me, yet again, insulted me to my face. A low-born barbarian insulting a prince of the March . . .

Coming closer we saw that the dwelling was a stone-built roundhouse, the roof thatched with dried heather and river-reeds. Apart from a shed a single winter from no longer being a shed, and a drystone wall for stock to shelter behind come the snows, there were no outbuildings, and no other dwellings lay in sight.

A handful of mangy goats bleated at our arrival, one from the roof. An axe stood bedded in a log before the doorless opening. The place seemed deserted.

“See if they left any furs.” I nodded at the door as Tuttugu drew up alongside us. “I’m freezing.” My clothes still felt damp and were doing a poor job of keeping out the wind.

Tuttugu looked up at Snorri who shrugged and walked on over to the doorway.

“Halloo, the house?” Snorri paused as though he heard something, though I couldn’t make out anything but the goat on the roof, bleating as if it were wondering how to get down again.

Snorri stepped up to the entrance. And then stepped back again. The long and gleaming prongs of some kind of farm implement following him out. “I’m alone here and have nothing you might want.” A voice gone rusty with the years. “Also no intention of letting you take it.” By inches a yard of wooden haft emerged, and finally on the other end an old man, tall but stooped, his hair, eyebrows, and short beard all white like snow, but thick, as if a thaw might give us back the younger man.

“More of you, eh?” He narrowed rheumy eyes at Kara. “Völva?” He lowered his pitchfork.

Kara inclined her head and spoke a few words in the old tongue. It sounded like a threat but the ancient took it well and gestured to his hut. “Come in. I’m Arran Vale, born of Hodd, my grandfather—” He glanced back at us. “But perhaps you’ve travelled too far to have heard of Lotar Vale?”