The Wheel of Osheim

A heartbeat later the unborn crashed into Baraqel, his sword descending upon it. Even a twelve-foot angel couldn’t stop the creature dead. The dragon body it wore had been fashioned from the corpses of fifty men or more and Baraqel was thrown aside. But wings of bronze and gold spread to absorb the momentum and his furnace-bright sword struck the unborn’s head from its shoulders in a single blow.

Dark crimson blood vomited from the unborn’s neck in a lumpy torrent while the whole serpentine length of its body convulsed, whipping back and forth. A moment later it warped and tore like dough, corpse heads and disembodied eyes appearing along its back, new limbs forming, ending in rib-bone claws or half a dozen spinal columns thrashing like tentacles. Another convulsion and the mutated mass of it wrapped Baraqel in a coil, bearing him to the ground.

“Come!” Snorri snatched up my sword and, limping, ran into the fray.

“Come? You just took my bloody sword. What am I supposed to use? Bad language?”

I drew my dagger and stood watching. The fight confused my eye: rapid, furious coils of dead flesh black against the angel’s brilliant limbs, bright wings fluttering, black claws tearing, and occasionally a glimpse of that burning sword sending shadows sprinting back across the field. I spotted Snorri here and there, like a mouse harrying an Indus python, Edris Dean’s blade cutting through the necromancy that sustained the unborn, but surely with cuts too small to matter.

I looked at the four inches of iron in my fist, then looked back for Murder, only to find him gone, even his viciousness turned to terror at the sight and sounds of such a battle. The half-expected red tide of the berserker failed to rise in me, just a bitterness, an anger that this creature woven of the worst of men’s hatreds that settle into the deepest rifts of Hell, had haunted me for so long. The unborn had been the start of my journey, breaking my life apart, and now it looked like being the end of it too. I held the dagger out before me. Die fighting alongside Snorri in the light—or alone a few minutes later in the dark? Sometimes the coward’s choice aligns with that of the hero.

Kara told me I was screaming “Undoreth” when I charged. I don’t have any memory of it, but I’m sure it would have been “Red March.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Go away, damn you, and tell Ballessa I want kippers for breakfast.” I screwed my eyes tight against the daylight. “And draw those damned curtains!”

“Time to get up, your majesty.” The maid sounded sarcastic rather than respectful.

I tried to snuggle down into the bedclothes and found them wet and cold. “What the hell?” I opened my eyes, blinking against a bright light close to my face. All of me hurt. At least it had stopped raining.

“How are you feeling?” Kara, squatting at my side wet-haired and smeared with mud. She held the orichalcum up between us.

“I’m dying.” With one hand I wobbled my jaw. “I think I broke my everything.”

“He’s fine,” she called over her shoulder.

Snorri loomed out of the night and offered a hand to haul me to my feet. Hennan appeared from nowhere, more mud than boy, and got under my other arm to help me up as Snorri pulled.

I drew a deep breath and regretted it. “Smells like a funeral in a latrine.”

“That’s just you.” Snorri clapped an arm around my shoulders and steered me toward the stinking ruins of the unborn. Long feathers littered the rutted ground, the light dying from them as I watched.

“Baraqel?” I asked.

Snorri shook his head. “They destroyed each other.”

The box of ghosts lay bedded in the mud nearby, its glow drawing my eye. I gestured toward it. “Get that, Hennan.” As he ran for it I added, “Don’t let it touch your skin.”

He returned, holding it gingerly, his sleeves over his hands. I shrugged Snorri’s arm off and stepped forward to take the box. Before it could summon some ancient relative I called into it, “Baraqel!”

At once that same fuzzy light lit in the box’s depths and as I held it away from me a Builder ghost sprang into being above the opening. I could see something of Baraqel in the man before me, the same blade of a nose, the eyes somewhat hollow above prominent cheekbones, the broad expanse of forehead, but it was the way this ghost burned with many times the light of any seen before convinced me this was Baraqel.

“Entanglement detected.” The voice of the box. “Bareth Kell.”

The ghost met my eyes and spoke with its own voice. “Call me, Barry.”

“I—” The things always unnerved me. “Are you dead?”