The Wheel of Osheim

The unborn, clothed in its body of many corpses, swung its dragonlike head, ripping Hel from Snorri’s hands and catching him across the side from hip to armpit. The angle was wrong for biting but the force of the impact lifted the Northman from his feet, flinging him bodily through the air and hurling him on a trajectory that carried him off the road, through the top of the hedgerow, and into the field where he hit the mud about a yard in front of me with a dull thud.

In my limited experience, any blow that lifts a man off his feet tends to be the blow that kills him. One time I saw a stallion kick one of the stable-lads at the palace. His feet left the ground and he flew perhaps a fifth of the distance Snorri covered. I don’t know if he was dead before he landed but if he wasn’t it couldn’t have been long after. They rolled him over and I saw the sharp fractures of his ribs all around where the hoof caught him. The rest of the bones had been driven into his lungs.

Compared to the unborn the hazards of galloping cross-country in the dark were nothing. I should have been out of both sight and earshot before Snorri hit the ground but instead I found myself kneeling in the mud, rolling him over. His whole left side was a mess of gore.

“C-could . . . have gone better.” He croaked the words as air leaked back into his lungs.

“You’re . . . hurt.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. On the other side of the hedges the unborn roared and thrashed. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Perhaps it was eating Kara. I’d imagined a lot of sorry ends for myself, but none had featured being slaughtered in the mud by a monster on a lonely stretch of road.

Snorri groaned and rolled onto his good side, grasping at his ribs. His hand came away messy and my stomach lurched.

“I’m in one piece.” He managed a scarlet-toothed grin and I realized the gore had come from the unborn. “Odin’s blood!” Snorri got into a sitting position, hunched like a man broken on the inside.

“How are you even alive?” I stood up, backing away a step. It seemed that the relatively slow velocity and large area of the impact had conspired to get Snorri airborne without turning his body to pulp.

I reached down to help him up but before he could gain his feet the hedgerow burst open, the unborn forcing a path.

“Shit!” I drew my sword: a toothpick would have been as much use. “What are you doing?” Snorri was still on the ground wrestling something glowing from the pack at his hip. “Put it away!” Light would just help it find us faster.

Too late, the huge nightmare head swung our way and the cold malice of those hidden eyes pierced me. I stood, paralysed, on the point of dropping my sword and running for it, abandoning all honour for the privilege of dying fifty yards further from the road. The thing lurched forward with a hideous gargle, but seemed unable to break free from the hedge. Black root-like loops had encircled its feet.

“Kara!” The völva must have been working on the entanglement spell that had had such marvellous effects against the Red Vikings near the Wheel of Osheim. The strength returned to my hand, fingers tightening on my sword hilt. I glanced down at Snorri. “What the hell?” He had the ghost-box, its glow making black silhouettes of his hands as he opened it, pointed toward his face.

“We need Baraqel!” He shouted it into the mouth of the box where a chaotic speckling of light and dark boiled.

At the hedge the unborn roared and threw itself forward, centuriesold roots groaned and creaked under the strain. Several burst apart with loud retorts. Elsewhere, dead flesh tore to let the bonds slip and reformed afterwards.

Snorri got to his knees. “The key, Jal, it’s the way to let him out. He lives in here.”

“It doesn’t work like that, you stupid great . . . Viking.” But even as I said it I pulled out Loki’s key and pointed my trembling blade in the direction of the unborn, which was now uprooting the last hawthorn that had been anchoring it down.

“Yes it does!” Snorri stood, one arm clutching his side, the other holding the box out toward me. “Yes. It. Does.” The look he gave me held such conviction I started to believe it too.

Bone claws dug into the mud and the unborn surged into motion. I dropped my sword.

“Baraqel!” I roared, taking the ghost-box and aiming its mouth toward the unborn. I thrust the key into the box’s base and turned it.

The light that lanced out I had seen once before, though that time I had been inside a tent that had almost burst into flames. Now as then the Builders’ Sun’s light turned the darkness into the blind whiteness of dunes beneath the hottest sun. The unborn screamed, its flesh bubbling. In the next moment the impossible brightness of that unnatural illumination cut off and in its place Baraqel stood, as we had seen him once before at the wrong-mages’ gate, a glowing angel with a sword cut from the sun, nine foot long and burning. In the instant he appeared I knew him. No one else quite managed that look of disapproval when their eyes found me.