The Ice King

by Michael Scott Rohan

  Slowly, gradually, he became aware that the floor was sloping more steeply. After a time – he only knew it was a long time – he began to think he could feel a slight leftward curve in the tunnel. But that might just be his imagination, filling in for his lack of real information. He was walking in limbo, far worse than the long climb up from the beach. There at least he’d had free air to breathe, and a feeling of space around him. Here there was nothing, and he could add nothing. He was used to humming or whistling on long walks, but here that would have been horribly out of place. Sound seemed to die stillborn in the heavy atmosphere, and too much noise might call who knew what down on him – another attack by those little monsters, probably. He was fairly sure what they were – svartalfar, dark elves, malignant little goblin-things that lurked in the shadows of the myths. He could remember other things there, too, worse things. With them he might not be so lucky. He trudged on, as quietly as he could, unable even to lose himself in daydreams. Everything he had once been, once known, seemed remote beyond recall, even the face he had followed till now. As years or centuries passed it blurred and faded, and there was only the leaden air and the relentless, lightless climb.

  The sudden brush of cold air came like a slap in the face. He flinched at the shock and flung up his fists. Then he groaned. ‘Satans ogsa, what am I doing? Jess, Jess kaereste, I am coming to pieces, cracking up …’ But he knew better. He couldn’t crack up, any more than he could feel hungry or thirsty or tired – physically. He sagged back against the wall. It was further away than he expected, and he fell heavily on one arm. The tunnel was opening out. He clutched at his arm, and almost laughed. He could still feel pain, all right. It challenged the shadowy neutrality around him, anchoring him in the reality of one memory, at least – that night in the trailer, when he’d wrenched his arm … It brought her face back vividly, rapt with pleasure, biting her lips to keep back the faint, gasping little cries.

  He looked up, unbelieving. He could hear them now.

  Light. He had been without it so long he could hardly make sense of what he saw. Faint as it was, it dazzled him – a vague glow in the darkness ahead, sharply cut off along one edge … His eyes managed to focus. It was shining round a sharp bend in the tunnel ahead, a thin foxfire light with only the faintest flicker in it. That was where the sounds were coming from, too. Hal picked himself up as quietly as he could and stalked forward, nervous, alert. A quick glance round the corner first, to be sure it was safe.

  What he saw rooted him to the spot.

  The stark light threw hard shadows over the twisting, threshing bodies – a woman’s, a man’s. They lay some way along the tunnel, but not so far that he couldn’t see them, all too clearly, the rider and the ridden. He could see the woman’s thigh muscles hollow as she arched up and back, her ribs stand out sharply against the glistening dark skin. He saw her taut breasts quiver till huge hands rose to contain them, flicker over them, crush them. Her own hands resting on the wide dark chest, flexing, splaying, digging in and clawing. Her head tossing, the hands sliding down to rein in the sudden emphatic thrusting of her hips, the sudden convulsion lancing through both bodies as one. Her head thrown back, right back, her spine arched till her closed eyes stared straight back at him. Then they opened, and he clung to the crumbling wall for support. Laughter spilled from her lips, terrible laughter that rang like shivered ice down the tunnel. He jammed his hands over his ears, his face against the wall, shivering violently with the shock. ‘It is – not – true!’ he whispered, and beat his hands on the wall, trying desperately to wake from what he knew was no dream. ‘It’s not true!’

  Long fingers, cool, slightly damp, stroked his cheek gently. ‘Oh yes it is – kaereste.’ He couldn’t close his eyes. Jess’s face, against the wall, inches from his own, smiling slightly – smiling through thin, dry, cyanosed lips, in skin suffused with shadow, glossy and tight so the muscles beneath showed clear. Her eyes sunken, overshadowed, no more than a cold glimmer like starlight on a lake … ‘So what’s all the fuss, hmm? Thought you wanted me here – all that mumbling about how I should see things, how I’d know my way around better. Thought you wanted me to come prop up that delicate little ego of yours comme toujours. Well, you got your wish. Aren’t you glad to see me?’ She chuckled lazily. ‘Oh, uh, sorry ’bout the little scene, only we got so bored just waiting, Jay’n’me. Thought you’d –’

  ‘Jay?’ choked Hal.

  ‘Sure – big boy with all the meat – you know. See, he came back for me. All the way, just for me. Kind of flattering, don’t you think? So I’ve been drafted –’

  Hal gave a wordless cry of pain.

  ‘It’s your own fault – kaereste. Shouldn’t’ve let me go charging off on my own like that, should you? Very careless. You lose more ladies that way. But then you do seem to lose a lot of ladies, don’t you, Hal? First Helga, now me. Let me give you a hint, kiddo. Where it matters, you haven’t got it, Hal. It was always better with Jay, Hal. It’s better now, Hal –’

  He turned and screamed in her face. ‘Shut up!’ He bounced off the wall and tried to plunge past her, but she stepped into the centre, darkened skin gleaming, and barred his way. He looked around wildly but there was no sign of Colby. ‘Jess –’ he gasped. ‘Jessica – I can’t, I don’t want to hate you – let me go, let me pass –’

  She smiled, smoothly, and shook her head. ‘Afraid of hating me? Why? Hate has its uses. Never get to be einherjar if you don’t know how to hate –’

  ‘If – if you are einherjar, one of the warriors of Odin –’

  The light flared blue, the wood around them trembled and groaned like a living thing. ‘You watch how you use names, you hear?’ hissed Jess.

  ‘If you – you are one of his berserks, his immortals – well, I serve someone, too! Too late to save – what I care about, maybe! But I am still a messenger. Let me pass!’

  ‘Like hell!’ said Jess, and laughed. Cruel laughter, mocking him, his feelings for her, everything he cared for, the weakness of human affection itself. The same terrible laughter he had heard when –

  With a scream of pure agonised rage he flung himself on her.

  She sprang to meet him. Her weight slammed into him, smashed him back against the wooden wall so hard that bits flew out around them. Chill fingers clawed at his throat, closed in an iron collar. But he was furious now, seething with fright, grief, jealousy and sheer churning horror, and it all came shrieking out. Fresh cold air whistled through the tunnel as if driven by a distant storm, and the biting edge of it, like a seawind, set his blood tingling. He struck upward with both arms – and broke the iron grip. Black nails gouged firetrails up to his eyes, but he was on her now, hammering at her wildly. It was like hitting a wall of cold marble, but it caught her off balance and they fell together, entwined in deadly mockery of an embrace. Clawing and wringing and snarling at each other, they went rolling over and over back down the slope into the dark. Her nails slashed through his clothes to the flesh beneath, tearing at his ribs, but now he had his hands locked hard around her throat, yelling with exultation as he squeezed, twisted, wrenched –

  The body beneath him threshed convulsively and sagged, the hands fell away from his ribs, the head fell sideways. Hal fell on top of her and rolled aside, shuddering. For a minute he lay there, open-mouthed, staring, unable to take in what he had done. The face, the body he had loved – still loved – Panic swelled up to fill the emptiness left by rage, and idiot tears trickled down his face. His mind flailed and threshed like a captive beast, tearing itself against the bars of its cage. He dug his fingers into his hair to flood out his thoughts with pain. It steadied him, and he crawled over to her. He felt the chain and pendant she’d given him swing loose around his neck, a terrible dragging weight. Why had he ever hated these creatures so? Who was he to stand in their way? For all his smug self-righteousness, his show of civilisation, he’d found something worse, more vile, more brutal than any of them lurking inside himself. And not so deep insid
e, either. The thing he had most feared they would do, he had been able to do himself.

  His head bowed over the still breast, and the pendant swung and touched it –

  A rumbling vibration, like infinitely distant thunder, shook the air. The cold light dimmed, guttered, reddened like a dying candle. The shadows on the still face flickered, deepened.

  The slitted eyes flew open –

  In a different face. Longer, harder, more aquiline, half-hidden under the great straggling mane of hair that over-shadowed those eyes –

  The woman at Fern Farm.

  Emotion was burnt out of him. He could only stare. But when those long hands snaked up at his throat his own hands met them, caught them – and slowly, effortfully, forced them back down.

  ‘Not so strong here, are you?’ he grated between clenched teeth. ‘So you – forbandede bitch – you steal her face, make me think – drag me down – fight you all right, but no mistake this time, nej – and Pru – what you do to her I do to –’

  She twisted like a snake under him, and an immensely long leg doubled up and slammed hard into his stomach and groin. His grip broke and he was catapulted back against the wall. He rolled, agonised, on the splintered wood, momentarily aware of nothing but pain and failure, waiting for the blow that would finish everything. It never came. He heard footsteps, running steps that went pounding off up the tunnel ahead of him. Somehow he staggered to his feet and, still doubled up, went limping after her. But when he rounded the next corner there was nothing but more tunnel, and stronger light. He sagged down against the wall and wheezed for breath. He realised his hands were still clenching and clasping automatically: he would have tom her apart if he’d caught her, not for showing him a lie, but for showing him a truth. About himself. She might have changed, but that hadn’t. He had really believed –

  He buried his face in his hands. How could he call them monsters now?

  But after a while he raised his head, and let the cooling breeze play over it. More air, more light – he picked himself up, wearily. He might as well see where it was coming from. He limped unsteadily up the tunnel to its next corner, blinking in the brighter glow, turned it and scrambled up an uneven patch to a wide, irregular crevice. He stepped through – and stopped dead, scrabbling at the wall behind him for support.

  The urge to go scuttling back into the tunnel for shelter was overpowering. Shelter from the sheer vastness of the shaft he stood in, perched on a narrow ledge in its jaggedly irregular walls – cliffs of wood, not stone. But the wood was no longer living. He stood at the centre of the universe, the very heart of the World Tree, and it was hollow, rotten.

  He found himself crouching, cowering before it. Whether he looked up or down, distance held his eye hypnotically, an enormous weight of emptiness that seemed to be plucking him off his insignificant foothold. Insane urges warred in him, to rush wildly out or just as wildly back. In desperation he fought them down and fixed his eyes on the wall opposite. He could make out details on it, outcrops and openings, vast vertical rifts and smaller holes, nooks, crannies, clefts and openings like the one he had emerged from. And as he looked over to his right, relatively near him, he saw one fissure that spilled a narrow beam of light right across the shaft, onto the wall not far above him. Strong light, the colour of a cold winter sky – light that could come from the outside.

  He was on his feet in an instant, scanning the ravaged face of the wall. From here he could just about reach another ledge, from there what looked like the edge of a natural terrace, and after that – He shrugged. It had been the same story all along. That had to be his way, because there was no other. Carefully, without looking down, he reached out and tested his first foothold. It held. He rested his weight on it, and began to climb.

  The terrace turned out to slope like a steep roof. He had climbed worse, but only with ropes and crampons – not to mention other climbers. Once or twice he slid, badly, but after that it was easier; he was level with the light, and it lit his way like a beacon. At last he swung across, right into it, and collapsed half-blinded on the fissure floor. Unlike the tunnel it felt damp, almost slimy. He would have to watch his footing. He sat up and looked around for a handhold. Some sort of large vine or creeper grew up through the fissure, its tendrils carpeting the floor and hanging in great loops from the walls. It was as slimy as everything else, but at least it looked strong. He caught hold of a loop and swung himself up – and it leaped like a startled snake in his grasp. He yelped and let go, and the whole vast mass of creeper tore free and reared up like a striking cobra around him. Beyond it, out of the darkness of the shaft, other tendrils rose and swayed. He spun round and threw himself forward up the steep floor of the fissure an instant before the whole mass of tendrils came crashing down where he had been. Then he was running for his life, head down, never stopping, never looking back. His hand burned where he had touched the thing, as if the slime were some sort of acid – digestive, maybe. He thought of the other tendrils, and the hollowed heart of the Tree. In the legends there had been some monstrous thing that gnawed at it – Nidhoggr, that was the name. As long as the Norns, the weavers of destiny, tended the World Ash, Nidhoggr had been kept at bay – but it must have broken through long ages ago …

  Old powers are stirring, long, long past their time …

  Suddenly cold leaves thrashed around him, enveloped him as he fought and ripped at them, tripped and clutched him. He fell headlong on his face. After a second he rolled over, gasping and winded. No vine-thing towered over him; a roof of branches, heavy with spearhead leaves, swayed and rustled in a cool, keen wind. A gust parted them for an instant, and he caught the briefest glimpse of cloud, steel-grey and scudding fast. There were leaves all around him, some kind of thicket. After the paths he had walked it looked almost unbearably safe, natural and wholesome. He sat for a moment, blinking in the light, and then heaved himself to his feet, pushing the lower branches aside. He could see more sky now, grey and cloudy – but not the leaden, motionless clouds over the Beach far below. Here the clouds were all shapes, all shades, from pure white wisps to great stormy ramparts, dark and lowering, and they raced and seethed before the rushing wind. For a moment he simply stood and drank it all in. He had always loved stormscapes, and this was the wildest he had ever seen. A thought struck him, and he looked around him at the branches – masses of them rearing and plunging as the wind whipped at them, but no trunk visible. He looked down at his feet. They rested not on hard ground but on bark, dull grey with thick interwoven ridges like the Bridge so far below. In his panic he had blundered right out through the fissure onto a limb of the great Tree itself. He looked around and there it was, rearing high over the tossing branchtops, a great jagged grey wall that blotted out half the angry sky. There was something about it, though –

  The wind thrashed the branches again, and something among them caught his eye, something dark, bobbing and swaying almost overhead. He peered around cautiously before stepping out of the thicket for a better view, looked up –

  It was a human skeleton. A few rags that might once have been flesh or clothing hung from the darkened, encrusted bones. One leg had gone, and the hands – the lower jaw, too, so he could clearly see the twisted thong looped around its throat. Between its ribs the ragged end of a blackened spear-shaft stuck out. Hal backed away shakily – the image of another glade was all too clear in his mind. He looked down the wide avenue of branches and saw other shapes dangling there, some human, some animal, some past recognition. From here alone he could see hundreds, naked, pitiful things that capered and shivered in the cold wind.

  Sickened, he looked away hurriedly, back at the vast trunk. There was something – an image, a carving so immense his eyes had failed to take it in at first. The head and shoulders of a man, wreathed in a wild corona of flowing hair and beard that merged into the rough bark. There might be more of the body, but it was hidden from him by tossing branches. The sculpted face was long and gaunt, with high, broad cheekbones an
d a great aquiline blade of a nose. It had nothing of the impassive statue about it: lines of pain were graven over every inch. The high forehead and thick brows were clenched tight, the tongue lolled slightly through thin lips drawn back in a tight rictus of agony. One eye was closed. The other was a sunken socket, ravaged and empty.

  Hal stared, appalled. From cruder avatars in Viking craftwork, from the toppled pillar of the Fern Farm temple, he knew only too well who and what it represented. A god who, to regain a doubled power, went through the sacrificial ordeal of his own victims, the ultimate offering to himself. Who stooped from the Tree where he hung in ritual torment to snatch up dark power from the depths, creatures from the realms of the dead whom he gathered as warriors, einherjar to fight and fall for him and rise at sunset, healed, to fight once more. The image of Odin, Watcher, Wakeful, Wanderer, Deceiver, Lord of the Slain, caught in the shared instant of sacrificial agony, brooded over his offerings on the boughs below.

  Suddenly a harsh, croaking scream cut through the air. Things wheeled there, high overhead, dark bird shapes silhouetted against the darkening sky, two huge black ravens that came spiralling down the raging wind to circle above him. They croaked again, and he felt the great Tree heave and groan and tremble under him. He looked around wildly –

  Slowly, quite slowly, the vast image in the living wood was stirring, the lolling head lifting to turn blindly towards him. Unable to move, to speak, to breathe, he could do nothing but watch the tortured features, lined and grey as the wood around, lift and shudder like a moving mountain, the immense lips curl with the pain of effort. Nothing but consider, in some calm, detached fragment of his mind, a being who, in his unsparing, ruthless quest for power, hung for so long from the upholding Tree that it grew out around him – merged with him –