The Grimoire of Yule (The Shadows of Legend Book 1)

by Adam Golden

  Maelstrom’s simple presence cut through the filmy net of power that held reason and form together. The creature closed a thousand eyes as they formed and submerged all over its body, basking in the pulsing vines of impurity that coiled around existence. Probability unraveled as he watched, and pure possibility reigned as it was always meant to.

  On this one petty plane, tornados of sea water raged through the arid desert, cities melted into the ground or rocketed into the air without rhyme or reason. It was wondrous but small, so utterly insignificant compared with its greater works.

  On the larger, more cosmic plane, he watched as worlds blinked in and out of existence in numbers no scholar could fathom. Universes collided and blended, twining about each other like twists of spun sugar, or popped like soap bubbles on a gust of wind. All that was would be, or could be stood before him, malleable and ever-changing as soft clay. It was wondrous and terrible, the miracle of nothingness, the peace of entropy.

  The scattered consciousness of Maelstrom snapped back into its twisted form like a taut line suddenly cut, and it groaned from a dozen mouths. Magic somewhere close, magic nearly as old as blessed confusion. He could feel it straining against the promised pandemonium he’d been sent to bring forth. It fought to right the snarl he’d made of existence. It was weak, but at the same time strong and dangerous.

  Maelstrom snarled. It had to be stomped out. Reality quivered and screamed as an unfocused blade of bedlam ripped a hole in actuality, and the embodiment of formlessness vanished into the space between spaces. The creature gloried, a challenge. It would choke this last pinprick of plausibility and the clarifying fog of pure uncertainty would rule.

  Deep into the Darkness Peering

  Push! The silent scream boomed through the minds of the eight undead warriors yoked to Belsnickel’s will, and as one they heaved forward. The high-pitched chittering that filled the stygian darkness surged as they pressed. The enemy that pressed against them was invisible in the impenetrable dark, but the sense of milling and writhing bodies all about them was palpable. There was no order, no organization or tactics that he could detect, just a mad scramble to overwhelm his small force with sheer numbers.

  Only the inhuman strength and speed granted by the master’s curse had kept his small band of intruders from being overrun and trampled underfoot. The undead northmen’s weapons moved as constantly as his own, slashing, prodding, smashing back foes at speeds no mortal could have matched, and yet they were losing ground. Belsnickel could feel the exertion, not just in his own body, but in all of them. The curse made them strong, fast, and fearless, yet flesh remained flesh, and even their unnatural strength wasn’t limitless.

  The bronze clad giant’s heavy short sword cleaved deep into soft flesh, and the thick sticky spatter of unseen blood showered him, adding to the already thick coating of gore that painted the giant. Belsnickel wrenched his blade free before it could be trapped by the dying flesh of his enemy, and launched a savage front kick to clear the breach as he advanced.

  Kill! he commanded his thralls again. Push them back! Protect the Master!

  He felt them surge, battering through the tightening noose of flesh and bone around them with the sheer force of their unholy strength. His will raked their souls like a barbed goad, driving them relentlessly forward. The press on his left side slackened suddenly, and the insectile hum took on a note of panicked frenzy. The general’s senses quested in that direction, and a snarl rumbled from deep in his chest as he found nothing to recognize there. No presence at all. The master’s monster. It had to be. The hated creature was clearing his left flank single-handedly. The lessening of pressure should have been cause for relief, even pleasure, but that was overcome by a wave of suspicious revulsion.

  Belsnickel knew himself for a damned thing, but he had been a man once. Maybe not a good man exactly, he couldn’t claim that, even to himself. That creature though, the master’s Prancer, that one was different, evil. There was something gleeful in that silent, outwardly stoic little demon. It radiated a malevolent joy in what it was that repelled and disgusted Belsnickel. How black and twisted a soul would one need to not just accept but to revel in what they’d been forced to become?

  ‘And what kind of monster would make . . . ?’

  The armored giant’s mind skittered away from the unfinished thought, but it was too late. The barbed net of force that animated him cinched tighter about his mind and the revenant staggered, roaring in anguish. His curse screamed inside him; to question was disloyalty, and disloyalty was to treason, infamy, blasphemy. The demon that had made itself his god punished such things mercilessly.

  He roared in frustrated rage. His bronze gauntleted hands clenched around the shoulders of the closest of the unseen swarm that buzzed about them, and Belsnickel swept the sleight-built enemy before him like a scythe, battering down enemies all around. He stomped forward, crushing those he felled under heavy ironshod boots, but there was always another there to meet him and force him back again.

  The limp corpse he swung was ripped from his steel grip and scores of slim hands grasped at him, pulling him off balance. His huge fists crunched against bone like rams and fingers tore through flesh-like spider silk. Hands slick with gore crushed and grasped desperately as Belsnickel tried to make a hole large enough to let him regain some momentum, but the press grew tighter, making it harder and harder to move. The undead general was mired, held anchored despite all of the desperate rage-fueled strength he could summon.

  His thralls fared even worse than their leader. They were floundering, swamped under a tide of muscle and bone that seemed to have no end. Belsnickel felt their determination as several of them tried to batter their way clear with their heavy round shields or hack through a wall of milling life with blades all but blunted by the sheer amount of bone and tissue they’d been asked to cleave. Wave after wave of burning twinges pulsed in his mind as his minions were battered, pressed, and slowly but inexorably pulled down by the writhing mass of enemies.

  Fight! Belsnickel’s mental voice thundered at them. ‘Protect your—’

  A crush of spare, sinewy bodies crashed down, and Belsnickel found himself buried in an avalanche of living flesh. He couldn’t win free, couldn’t move. Dozens of the dark shrouded attackers clung to each limb, anchoring him.

  ‘Master!’ he called in silent desperation ‘We . . . need . . . we cannot protect you . . .’

  —

  He felt them all go down, felt their exhaustion; their pain scored and scoured him, yet left him unfazed. Their panicked, desperate drive to win free, to put themselves between him and the tidal wave of enemies that surrounded them all washed over him, utterly ignored. He felt it all, but none of it could penetrate the cocoon of crippling shock. Some small part of him knew he should react, should do something, but his parts just weren’t responding the way they should. His mind, usually sharp and vibrant in its bustling activity, seemed shut off, closed behind a thick bubbled pane of glass. Do something? A sneering sort of wail shivered through him. What could he do?

  Nothing.

  He could do nothing. Fight? He couldn’t even make himself stand. Resist? He couldn’t resist the shuddering, heaving sobs that racked him as he lay there, awash in the snot, mucus, and spittle that ran out of him, crusting on his face, fouling his hair and beard. Lead? He clung to his knees, pulled them tight against his bulging gut as though trying to fold in on himself.

  Sange Klau, the fearsome Blood Claw. Ha!

  Nicholas, the subtle and influential prince of the church. Ha!

  Strongest . . .

  The most ridiculous of the lot. Strongest? He wasn’t even meat . . . even meat fought before the end. What was he now? He rolled the question around in his fractured, sluggish mind as the hands closed around him. Scores of horny, tough hands grasped and grappled, pushed and pulled, and he offered no more or less resistance than simple dead weight. Yes. Dead weight. That was what he was now. He was nothing, he felt too ponderous, too
heavy for that. What a relief nothingness would be.

  Gone! It cannot be gone, but it is. Gone.

  The lament screamed itself through him for the millionth time and his whole being twisted and writhed with the horror of it. His world shattered. The sun winked out at noon. No. It was far worse than that. Something far more fundamental than simple warmth or light, more profound than mundane sight had been snatched from him. His core had been ripped away in a moment of violation, more terrible and intimate than any he could have imagined. His magic. His power, the bedrock of his entire existence, was gone. Skittered away like dandelion fluff in a stiff wind. He’d dropped into that ebon crack before the mountain as one of the most powerful beings in existence, master of hosts, the dreaded last hope of all mankind. Now?

  The army of strong hands that had been carrying him like a sack of grain through the impenetrable dark vanished, and he thudded unceremoniously back to the rough granite floor. Something heavy and solid bit at his wrists. A strong hand closed in his snot-fouled hair and wrenched his head back painfully. Here came the knife, maybe that would bring peace. It probably wouldn’t, but at least it would be an ending. The click echoed in his ears and off the walls of what had to be a much smaller room than the cavernous foyer where all he’d been had died. The last of the cruel hands that held him were gone and he sagged to the floor, the heavy iron collar fixed about his thick neck ringing with a dull clang where it met the stone.

  Not to die then. He wouldn’t even be granted that. He was to live on, trapped in this endless cold darkness. Severed, maimed, and left to rot. A small shower of sparks exploded into life before him and a small, weak guttering flame limped into existence. The wizard-that-had-been curled himself in closer, hiding his face in his knees as the flame grew stronger and light blossomed in the dark. He heard the skittering steps of bare, callused feet scraping stone, and the rush of breath that came with the excitement of discovery. Gentle probing fingers touched him here and there, curious.

  “I see, I see. Yes, it is a shock at first . . . for the young . . . for the new. Not that there have been new for a very long time.” The voice was old. Not old in the way an old man was old, there was nothing of shriveling or weakness in it. The voice was old in the way that mountains are old, weathered and worn, made smooth by the scouring of wind and rain over inexorable march of eons. When it spoke of ‘a very long time’, it conjured images of newborn stars spitting their life, building refuse out into an endless dark, of liquid rock cooling into ancient spires, and long-lost lands of glacier cutting their way inch by inch across a wasteland of frozen rock. There was a solidity, a reality in that voice that breached the curtain of dull, insensate dread that surrounded the broken sorcerer.

  “The shock passes, sometimes slowly, but it passes,” the rough, gentle drone went on. “Best to be on with it.”

  Soft words and darkness transformed into pain and movement as a hard kick rolled the balled-up wizard onto his back and a weight settled on his chest. Long thick fingers, strong as vices, dug into his jaws, forcing his mouth open, and the rim of a rough iron cup clacked against his teeth. The sorcerer gasped and sputtered as a thick stream of cold liquid filled his mouth and throat. He tried to cough it up, but his unseen assailant clamped an iron hard hand down over his mouth

  “Swallow!” the slow sonorous voice demanded. “You’ll not waste it! Swallow.”

  There was no choice, his body spasmed, and the rich, almost cloyingly sweet liquid slid into him. It tasted of apples, or rather, it tasted of the perfection all apples might aspire to if fruit had aspirations. It warmed him like a blazing hearth fire despite its bitter chill, and somehow the rich fragrant brew seemed to dull the jagged edge of his despair, at least by a hair. His body ceased trembling and, for the first time in what felt like ages, he had some semblance of ability to direct his thoughts.

  “Ah, Eir’s water does its work, I think,” the voice said, sounding for all the world like a tired smile. “I am Volundr, and you, my young friend, have found what you sought in your folly.”

  A surprisingly high, bitter bark of laughter rang out then, and even without looking the shattered wizard got the sense of a flourish from the being behind the voice.

  “Welcome to the way beneath the mountain.” The words came grating and inexorable, like the falling of rocks from a cliff.

  The same strength that had manhandled him so easily moments before, dragged the sorcerer’s heavy frame to his feet and urged him forward. “Welcome to the White Queen’s black doom,” he said as the wizard looked out over a vast gloom lit by constellations of torchlight that threw jagged flailing shadows everywhere. The great granite walls were pockmarked and honeycombed by cave mouths stacked like pigeonholes in numbers beyond imagining. Scores of huge smelting furnaces and hundreds of working forges could be seen from his vantage point, making islands of grim red light in the dark. A discordant symphony of picks cracking rock, hammers rang on hot metal and the same eerie chittering noise that had filled the dark entrance chamber boomed everywhere.

  “Behold Nidavellir,” said the voice of his guide, somehow both light and morose at the same time. “Behold the Dark Fields, endless prison of the Dokkalfar. Welcome to the ranks of the irretrievably damned.”

  Dim Roads and Dark Days

  The old man’s speechmaking flowed over the Nicholas without touching him. It melded with the steel on steel as hammers rang on anvils, mixed with the dull crack of picks chipping at stone, and was washed away by the grunting, shuffling chorus of exertion of the unnumbered multitudes that swarmed below.

  The sounds blended into a formless noise that he filtered from his consciousness as automatically as he ignored the cramping stiffness in his legs and back. What a fool he’d been. What a fool he’d always been. It all seemed so clear to him now, his life was a string of monstrous idiocies that had led him to this end. How could he not have seen when there was still some chance? Some hope to salvage himself? He supposed such clear hindsight was one of the weapons of this place. The sure knowledge of the errors of one’s life and the simple steps that could have sidestepped doom were a powerful torment indeed. A bitter bark of laughter escaped his swollen, cracked lips. He should have known immediately. The second he woke in the dark and the emptiness descended on him, he should have realized the truth. It was so obvious to him now. That damned mountain had killed him with its last rumbling fury. He was buried under a million tons of ice and rock, lost, dead. He was dead and this was Hell.

  “You do not listen all that well, do you boy?” came the old man’s rumbling baritone. “Hel does not rule here, though she gathers a rich harvest. No, wait. You don’t know of Hel . . . ah . . . I see. Fear not, Nikulas, you live, and neither your grim desert god nor its demons have any power in this place. I have said you are in Nidavellir. The Underworld has not claimed you yet.”

  A rich laugh rolled like distant thunder, punctuating the old man’s pronouncement. It sounded fond, like that of a wise elder’s rueful enjoyment of a child’s folly. In his place, pressed tightly against the grating, a violent shudder rippled through the wizard as realization struck: he hadn’t spoken. Not only that, but the voice that replied to his unspoken thoughts had come, not through his ears, but through his mind. A whole new wave of shock crashed into the wizard’s stunned consciousness and forced him to react. He forced his heavy frame to move, rolling stiffly away from the wrought iron barrier and forcing himself to sit up against it.

  “How?” The word croaked out of him so hoarse and strained that he barely heard it himself.

  The old man waved a hand dismissively. “A trick of the Gleipnir net. No, I cannot read your mind. Well, not really, not without a great deal of effort. With experience comes the ability to glean surface thoughts. Yes, you can do it as well, though likely you’ll get little from me beyond what I send you. I’ve had a great deal of practice quieting my thoughts. Certainly, try.”

  Nicholas’ mind reeled at having questions he hadn’t actually asked an
swered faster than they occurred to him. He clamped down on his wayward thoughts, let out a great blast of breath, and hurled his consciousness outward. His probe was flung back at him, his hard-swung mental fist meeting a barrier thin as air but hard as iron.

  Nicholas squared his shoulders, took in another long breath, and reached out, more subtly this time. He’d spent long years learning to cast his mind outward, to send his mental self coursing along corridors and paths that most men never dreamed existed. He was a master at this. Once again, his mental probe struck the impenetrable bastion around the old man’s mind and recoiled, snapping inward with the force of a lash.

  “As I said, young one, I’ve had a great deal of practice,” came the same sonorous, self-assured voice of his host.

  “What is this . . . this net you spoke of? Glep . . .” the sorcerer asked.

  “The Gleipnir net. Gleipnir, the impossible chain?” he said it as though it should have been obvious, as though no one could help but know what he meant, but when the old man received no hint of recognition, a long-suffering sigh sounded in his guest’s mind and he went on.

  “It’s a thing of the Dokkalfar,” the old man explained, slowly, as though to a dense child. “One of their Great Works. It was made long past, in this very place, before it fell. A chain thin as a breath and strong as a sibling’s curse forged at the behest of the Gods themselves. It was made to fetter a beast no chain could hold, to bind what cannot be bound.”