by Angus Watson
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I will tell you that you’ll find your friends Bjarni Chickenhead, Yoki Choppa and Gunnhild Kristlover in the longhouse, as well as the Owsla Morningstar and Luby Zephyr. They will be glad to see you. Everyone will be glad to see you.”
“Gunnhild’s here?”
Tor laughed. “There are few things I enjoy more than the look on Christians’ faces when they pitch up here.”
“So Gunnhild passed the twat test?”
“I’ll be honest, she was borderline. Ottar the Moaner loves her though. Picturing his joy when he sees her swung it for me.”
“Will Ottar be here soon?”
“That’s enough questions for now.”
“Can I ask one more?”
“You can try.”
“Do we stay here for ever?”
“No. You will stay here a good long while, but not for ever.”
“What happens afterwards?”
“That, my good Erik the Angry, is the next mystery. Life is better with a mystery. It’s one of the reasons you fools make up gods. The Vikings are the only ones to get it right so far.”
“The who?”
“I’ll tell you all about them another time. We are not short of time. Come, let us join the others in the hall. You look like you could do with a mug of mead and some mutton. The sheep taste better than they look. And when I say a mug of mead,” the god grinned just like Wulf, “I do of course mean many mugs.”
Erik and Tor walked side by side down the hill, towards the enormous longhouse.
“I guess you won’t tell me when the others are getting here?” asked Erik.
“I will not. But time is strange here, my friend. It won’t seem long until you are all reunited. I am looking forward to it.”
The singing grew louder as they approached the longhouse. Erik the Angry recognised the song. It was the same one that Freydis had sung as she’d walked along next to him that morning in a different world.
Chapter 6
Let’s Go
Finn had no idea how many warriors and warlocks they’d started with, but he counted fifteen still with them. Apparently well over half had been killed by the spiders, including Zeg, the man he considered to be his friend even though he’d laughed after throwing a squirrel into the Red River.
And his father.
He hadn’t cried yet. He kept expecting to see Erik walking along next to Chogolisa. Instead he saw Chogolisa walking next to Sitsi, head down, pulling the Warlock Queen’s dead child’s coffin.
Wulf was walking next to Finn. He hadn’t said anything. He was just there.
They headed on, across the baking, sun-smashed rock.
Finn wondered if any of them would make it as far as The Meadows, let alone defeat the Warlock Queen and walk away.
“We will be reunited in Valhalla,” said Wulf as the path crested a rise and a new view of mountainous red desert opened up ahead of them.
“You will. You and Erik are dead certs for Tor’s Valhalla.” Finn had always assumed he himself would be sent to one of the lamer god’s halls.
“As will you, Finn. You’re a warrior.”
Sassa Lipchewer kept one hand pressed over her bulge and carried her bow in the other, but they saw no more monsters that day.
The sun was near the horizon when Maya led them up a narrowing, stony but bush-choked valley, busy with yellow butterflies. Up ahead Sassa could see the mouth of a slot canyon.
“We’re going to camp here,” said Sofi, jogging back to them.
While the others made camp, Sassa led Wulf into the canyon. It was the narrowest they’d seen so far, with beautiful curves and patterns on its walls, as if it had been carved by a skilled and soulful sculptor. Her brother Vifil the Individual would have appreciated it, she thought.
“I can’t believe Erik’s dead,” she said.
“He has left this world, Sassa,” said Wulf. “But this world is not the end.”
“So when you died…?”
“I saw nothing. I wasn’t really dead, though. I know for certain that we carry on after this world, because it’s impossible that something as wonderful, lovely and complicated as you could simply cease to exist.”
Sassa wasn’t sure whether to cry or vomit at Wulf’s words, but she was distracted from both by spotting a great black wasp with red wings on the canyon wall. Wulf saw it, too, and crushed it with a flick of Thunderbolt. They looked around but there didn’t seem to be any more.
“I do not want to lose you again,” said Sassa. “And I don’t want to lose our baby. There’s so much danger ahead. Let’s go, Wulf. Leave the rest of them to it. We’ll make no difference.”
Wulf took her in his arms and hugged her for a long while.
“You know we can’t go,” he said eventually. “This is our quest as much as everybody else’s. We must finish it.”
“But we’ll die.”
“We will not. We will prevail and we will spend the rest of our lives knowing we saved the world. Our children will be brought up by world saviours.” He grinned at her.
Of course he was right. Of course they couldn’t back out now. And maybe they would both make it through whatever terrors were to come.
“You’re not to get smug,” she said, smiling herself.
“I’ll change my name to Wulf Worldsaver.”
“I’d rather live with the shame of abandoning our friends.”
“Okay. If I promise not to change my name, will you come with me and finish our quest?”
Sassa closed her eyes. She remembered the spiders, tearing warriors and warlocks to pieces. She pictured Erik’s bloody, disfigured face, and the worry and pain all over Finn’s and Chogolisa’s. She remembered the agony last time Wulf had died.
“Promise me you won’t die again,” she said.
“I promise.” He jutted his chin manfully in a mock-heroic pose. “I will never die.”
Chapter 7
Menagerie
They walked up through the slot canyon the following day, then through more gullies and along narrow valleys. It was hot, but not as crazily hot as it had been, and they saw no monsters and no tornados, firenados or other lethal horrors.
Maybe, Finn thought, maybe the Warlock Queen was dead! Or dead again… What did you call it when the dead died? Point was, maybe they were going to arrive at The Meadows and find it was all over.
And his father would have died for nothing. He almost cried. No, he told himself. We don’t mourn the dead. He kept repeating the words to himself, willing himself to believe them.
Almost immediately after he’d dared think their quest was over, Finn thought he could hear something like animals crying and roaring in the distance.
He caught up with Sofi. “Can you hear anything?”
She nodded. “The monsters at The Meadows.”
“But I thought we were still—”
“We’re more than ten miles from the edge of The Meadows and there’s a mountain between us and them.”
“But they must be—”
“They are very big. And there are a lot of them.”
She sped ahead. The conversation was over.
The noise became louder as they approached the ring of mountains surrounding The Meadows, then climbed it. As they neared the top it was loud enough to make conversation difficult.
Everywhere else they’d travelled the vegetation was thicker as they climbed. Here it was all dead. The miniature pines that had cheered him on other parts of their odyssey were naked and twisted, bent twigs like the fingers of the dead snagging at the questers.
The only signs of animal life were bright white skeletons of birds, lizards and mammals, so thick on the ground that it was impossible to avoid stepping on them, crunching bone and desecrating little corpses.
Nobody spoke.
They climbed.
Finn walked behind Thyri’s swinging behind. He tried to ogle her out of habit more than anything else, but he didn’t have the en
ergy or the will.
Fear sat in his stomach like a heavy ball of rotting meat.
He tried to listen to Thyri’s thoughts, to take his mind off what was coming, but didn’t get anything. He considered trying to listen to the minds of the monsters over the mountain, but after what had happened with the spiders, he didn’t dare. He was sure the Warlock Queen would kill him the next time he tried to mess with one of her creatures.
He fell back to walk with Freydis and Ottar. They were already holding Sitsi’s and Paloma’s hands, so he joined at the end, holding Ottar’s. He and Paloma swung the little boy in the air every few steps. By the way Ottar laughed, it was the funniest thing imaginable.
Ottar’s unashamed and wholly natural laughter was a bright torch, dispelling the gloom on the dreadful mountainside and in Finn’s heart.
Finally, they arrived at the summit and looked out over The Meadows.
It was worse, much worse, than Finn had thought it could be.
Far away–someone had said it was a dozen miles–was The Pyramid. It was a great black triangle, high and solid as a mountain, rising from the desert like a spear point from a murdered man’s back. A tornado–a tornado, for the love of Loakie–rose from The Pyramid’s tip, slender at first, but wider and wider until it blended with the black, swirling clouds above. Lightning flashed down through the tornado, striking the tip of The Pyramid. The body of the tornado shifted sinuously but its point stayed fixed to the point of the man-made mountain.
The great basin of The Meadows stretched all around The Pyramid. At first glance Finn thought it was filled with a sea–grey-green and shifting. But then he realised that, no, all the land between their mountain and The Pyramid, all the land bound in by mountains more than twenty miles away to the south, west and north, was heaving with writhing, crawling creatures.
There were huge multi-limbed monsters with great claws, stings, fangs, branches, spikes, crests, fins and even long floppy tentacles. There were gigantic, sharp-toothed hairy creatures and others made of black goo that looked like they’d crawled from the deepest oceans. A group of giant scorpions caught Finn’s eye. They were larger–much larger–than Beaver Man’s Plains Strider.
Nearer were a couple of things hopping about that looked a lot like rabbits but were bigger than the church in Hardwork, and several bear-like beasts rearing out of the monstrous maelstrom.
Further away the largest of all the giants, much larger than even the scorpions, were great, glistening lumpen slugs, hills of shining flesh, with waggling, useless looking limbs and multiple mouths.
Above these beasts the sky was busy with impossible, bloated, flying animals. Something that looked like a fish with long, slender wings, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, opened its great mouth, folded its wings and dived. It plunged towards one of the slug mountains. The vast organism wobbled like a fat man’s gut as the flying fish monster sank into it like a punching fist. The mountain of shining flesh splayed out then coalesced, closing around and enveloping its attacker. Moments later, a fish’s face strained outwards from the shining wall of flab. The skin burst in an explosion of goo and the fish-bird’s head emerged, screaming and screaming.
Its eyes widened and the screaming became gulps as it was sucked back into the body of the beast-mountain. Gooey flesh closed over it, and it was gone.
“Deep. Throat. A. Goat,” said Sassa Lipchewer.
Next to her was Sitsi, mouth open.
At this distance Finn could see only the details of the very largest animals. There were many, many more smaller ones teeming about, if the adjective “smaller” could be applied to creatures larger than the thunder lizards. The quarter-mile-long fish-bird, for example, had been only one of many flying things attacking the ground-based beasts. All over shapes were plunging out of the sky at the animals below. It also looked like many of the land animals were fighting each other. A giant rabbit screamed and bucked as huge hairless dogs–like the ones they’d seen dead shortly after Finn had been stung by the wasps–bit at its ears and neck.
Sitsi Kestrel, of course, could see all of this with perfect clarity. Looking at her wide, horror-filled eyes, for the first time Finn did not envy her eyesight.
“They’re killing each other,” said Finn. “So if we wait, they’ll die and we can walk to The Pyramid.”
“They’re being created as fast as they’re dying,” said Sitsi. “They’re growing out of the ground. They are the ground. It’s all monsters. And we’d better act soon.” She pointed to the north-west.
There, at the top edge of The Meadows, were six more black pyramids. “I thought there was just one—” Finn started.
He saw that they were moving. The six gigantic pyramids in the north were all, impossibly, swaying from side to side as they were carried on the backs of enormous beasts.
“The Warlock Queen means to spread over the world, creating new centres of horror,” said Maya. “The disasters and death flooding from The Meadows are only the beginning.”
Thunder boomed from the clouds above The Pyramid, making everyone jump, apart from Sofi who pressed her hands over her ears. The thunder reverberated around the basin as more silent lightning crackled above The Pyramid. The mass of monsters teemed and pulsed.
Despite the sea of beasts more extraordinary than anything from his wildest nightmares, Finn’s attention kept returning to the great black pyramid in the middle of it all. He could feel its power. He wanted to go to it and he wanted to flee from it. He wanted to open his mind out to it, and he wanted to dash his mind out on the nearest rock from sheer terror of it.
He looked about for Erik to see what he made of it all, then he remembered.
“Can you see a door into The Pyramid itself?” Sofi asked Sitsi. “There should be one three-quarters of the way up.”
“There’s no way in,” said a Warrior. “This has got worse, much worse. We should turn round now and—”
“There is an opening halfway up The Pyramid,” Sitsi interrupted. “If we can get to The Pyramid we could climb it easily enough. It’s steep but it’s made of volcanic stone so it will be grippy. But that’s all moot, because there’s no way we can forge a path to it.”
The captain of the Owsla glanced at Finn. “There is a way,” she said.
Finn’s eyes went as wide as Sitsi’s. Why had she looked at him when she’d said that?
They walked back down the mountain.
“Well, that was interesting,” said Keef to Finn. “A nice little sortie. If we keep up this brisk pace we’ll be back in Hardwork in time for tea.”
Finn wished they were going back to Hardwork. Instead they were walking back down the barren mountain to a relatively safe camping spot. Sitsi, Sofi and Wulf were in earnest conversation. Finn and Keef had walked ahead.
They were to attack at dawn. The monsters would be a little more sluggish then, according to Maya, and there would be enough light to see what they were doing. Finn couldn’t decide if he was relieved that they weren’t going to plunge into the basin of horror immediately or frustrated that they weren’t just going to get on with it.
“This time tomorrow,” said Finn, “we might be walking down this mountain on the way back to Hardwork, world saved.”
“That’s not going to happen.” Keef sounded serious for once.
“You don’t think we’re going to make it?”
“I’m going to make it. Don’t know about you. But we won’t be walking down the mountain because there’s a valley to the north-west we can walk out through once we’ve killed all the beasts. You don’t climb a mountain when you don’t have to.”
They were forced to descend single file for a while, hopping down a dry rocky gully between dead trees. They emerged onto a stony hillside, dotted with red barrel cactus. They were the first living plants since the top of the ridge.
Finn jogged to catch up to Keef. He’d talked to Thyri and Paloma. There was one more difficult conversation to have before they were all slain by the monsters.
“Yup.”
“How do you feel about Bodil staying with Olaf?”
Keef blinked. “I’m Hird, Finn. Not a girl. If you want to talk about feelings, find Freydis. Then ask her if she knows any girls a lot lamer than herself who want to talk about their feelings.” He swung Arse Splitter around his head and brought it down with a “Yah!”, bisecting a barrel cactus.
“Okay… Look, Keef. There’s something I need to ask you.”
“What?” he said, then “Wooo-TAH!” as he dispatched another barrel cactus.
“Why do you hate barrel cactuses so much?”
Keef stopped arseing about and looked at him. “Now that,” he said, “is a much more interesting question than I was expecting. Is it really what you want to ask?”
“No.”
“How disappointing.”
“Do you know that Bodil’s baby is mine, not yours?”
Keef gave him a look that could have deflated a field full of barrel cactuses. “What of it?”
“I wanted to thank you for looking after her, and being ready to look after the child.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. I’m sorry, though, that you had to. I should have—”
“You should have.”
“I was terrified and freaked out and, well, it was Bodil.”
Keef stopped and looked at Finn with his remaining eye. The sky and the land behind him were blood-red. “Finn,” he said. “I’ll let that one go, but badmouth Bodil one more time and I will barrel-cactus you.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry. I wanted to say that I think I would have stepped forward by now, if she was still with us and hadn’t stayed with Olaf Worldfinder, I mean.”
The Berserker contemplated him an uncomfortably long while with his beady eye, then nodded. “That’s easy to say.”
“I think I would have done.”
“I’m bored of this. What is it that you require of me?”
“I want to say I’m sorry.”
“You want me to forgive you?”