The Wheel of Osheim

Snorri got his arms beneath him and launched himself to his feet as the dead men reached us. They had lost their speed now that the lichkin had fled, but they still had numbers.

Numbers didn’t seem to matter. Snorri went through them like a scythe. It reminded me of my glorious victory over the bucket-boys back at the opera house. Snorri waded through the dead like a prince of Red March wades through terrified street urchins. The axe is truly the weapon for such work. A sword is a tongue: it speaks and gives eloquent voice to violence, seeking out a foe’s vitals and ending him. An axe only roars. The wounds it gives are ruinous and in Snorri’s hands nearly every blow seemed to take a head or limb.

Two minutes later the Norseman stood amid the carnage of his work, perhaps a score of corpses now divided to the point at which necromancy could make nothing dangerous of them. I followed him into the throne room, casting nervous glances over my shoulder against the possibility of new foes advancing along the corridor. Many of the dead had swords, still scabbarded at their hips. I took one that looked to have been forged for service rather than show.

“Are . . . are you all right?” I looked about the hall. Snorri stood, head down, coated with other men’s blood, breathing heavily. He held his axe across his hips, one hand just below the head, the other at the far end of the shaft. He didn’t look all right. Neither did the hall, every surface soiled, the throne cast down, tapestries trampled, the whole place stinking of death and decay. “Snorri?” He seemed almost a stranger.

He raised his head, staring at me beneath the black veil of his hair, unreadable, capable of anything. “I . . .” His first word to me since we parted in Hell. It had been months for me—how many lifetimes would it have felt like in that place?

From the darkest corner of the hall a dead man rose from beneath a tapestry—some victory picked out in silver thread, now smeared with blood and foulness—he charged toward Snorri’s back, trailing the embroidered cloth like a banner. Snorri lashed out to the side, almost without looking, his axe an extension of his arm. The man’s head flew clear; his body stumbled, and collapsed.

“I am at peace,” Snorri said, and walked over to clap me in a warrior’s embrace.

TWENTY

“Lisa!” I broke away from Snorri, nearly tripping over one of the butchered corpses littering Hertet’s great hall. “Lisa!”

“The girl you wanted to marry?” Snorri stepped back, taking in his surroundings for the first time.

“We have to go!” I started toward the main doors. “I have family in trouble.”

Snorri shouldered his axe and followed, stepping over scattered pieces of armour and the occasional twitching corpse.

The great doors to Hertet’s throne room crossed each other at drunken angles, each clinging to the frame by a single hinge. I kicked the left one and sent it swinging back. The antechamber was a well-dressed charnel house.

“Christ.” Someone had put up a fight here—probably Grandmother’s elite. Dismembered bodies littered a floor awash with blood, a dozen or more mire-ghouls in the mix, many of the dead bloated and still smeared with stinking river mud.

“What country are we in?” Snorri at my shoulder.

“This is the palace in Vermillion. My uncle had a go at playing king. It didn’t work out very well.”

The front doors of Milano House lay in fragments, the wood grey with dry rot, corrupted by the lichkin’s touch. We went down the steps, Snorri holding up a shield he’d lifted from a fallen guard.

“Not your style?” I looked back, raising a brow.

“Ghoul darts are even less my style.” He followed me out onto the steps.

Enough torches had kept burning when dropped to surround the house in a loose halo of faint illumination. The story here ran similar to that inside. Broken corpses, scattered gore, half a dozen dead men in sight, wandering aimlessly, at least until the first of them spotted us.

“Run!” I shouted and took to my heels.

I stopped about ten yards later, realizing that Snorri wasn’t following me and that it was dark where I was going. I turned back toward him. “Run?”

Snorri gave me that grin that shows all those white teeth in the blackness of his beard. “I haven’t been walking all this time in Hel—” he paused to behead the first dead man to reach him, a savage and perfectly timed swing, “—to run from these sorry remains.” He didn’t so much decapitate the next man as swing his axe through the fellow’s head. Then two were on him together. I hadn’t time to see how he dealt with those because a serving woman in a torn dress had singled me out. She came on at an awkward, urgent lumbering, her grey hair fanned out in disarray, purple bruises around her neck where dead hands had choked the life out of her. I stuck my sword through her mouth and out the back of her head. A grisly business. I was still wrestling my blade out when Snorri strode past me. Even with her head a ruin she still clutched at me blindly. I had to dodge back and leave her flailing on the ground.