Runeblade Saga Omnibus

by Matt Larkin

  Screaming, Hervor rolled to the side, swiping with the runeblade. It cleanly severed Loviatar’s leg at the knee, and the witch toppled over and fell face-first into the stone floor.

  Hervor shrieked, rose up, and cleaved the witch’s skull in two. Then she hacked into the corpse a half dozen more times.

  Hervor limped back down the walkway around the World Pillar, Wudga leaning on her shoulder. The dark-haired man had drifted in and out of lucidity all the way, but they were almost there. Loviatar’s minions were, thankfully, nowhere to be seen.

  In the distance, she caught sight of Höfund, limping back toward them. Must’ve chased off some more warriors—though it meant leaving their bodies defenseless. Hervor frowned at that.

  “I … uh … what happened to Ecgtheow?” Wudga said.

  Hervor flinched, keeping her eyes on the pillar up ahead. She’d done what she had to do. The man had brought it on himself. “He fell to the hiidet.”

  “Mmm.”

  Shit. What did that mean? Did Wudga now doubt her as well? It would be more than unfortunate if he too failed to return from Pohjola. With Odin’s blessing, maybe it wouldn’t come to that. She actually rather liked him, truth be told.

  Together, they returned to the base of the pillar. Väinämöinen had claimed he’d know when Loviatar fell. And the witch was dead.

  Tyrfing had seen to that.

  Repeatedly.

  Beneath the walkway, a figure knelt, a man of ashen skin and jet-black hair. The man had pounded a spike into the root and was collecting sap draining from it in a skin. And she knew him.

  “Volund.”

  The svartalf spared her the merest glance, a hint of a wry grin upon his face, then resumed his work.

  Hervor turned to Wudga at her side. He didn’t seem surprised to see his father.

  Not surprised, because they’d been working together all along …

  She shoved Wudga off her shoulder and he stumbled a few steps but managed to keep his feet. “You bastard.”

  Wudga quirked a smile. “I never denied my parentage.”

  She swiveled her gaze back and forth from father to son. “You planned this? You chose this mission … Because you’re working with the wizard, aren’t you?”

  Now Volund did fix her with his own dark gaze and, despite herself, Hervor backed away a step. “Tell me, shieldmaiden, have you kin left to you? And, with precious few remaining, would you not go to extraordinary lengths to aid those yet by your side?”

  “You are kin to Väinämöinen … both of you.” Odin’s stones. She had not seen this coming. “Men from Kvenland …” She backed away another step. “You had me kill the witch so you could access the World Pillar.” She licked her parched lips. All of it snapping into place. “The World Pillar is a root of the World Tree … but you cannot access the tree itself. The Aesir have claimed it.”

  Volund quirked his knowing grin and said naught more. And Wudga, that bastard, didn’t even meet her gaze, just limped over to where his father worked.

  Hervor had the sickening sensation of being a pawn in a game so large she couldn’t even see the board. Gods and alfar and sorcerers moved the lives of men about, caring naught for what befell those pieces … “Starkad … Did you orchestrate his affliction?”

  Volund chuckled. “If you seek someone to blame for your lover’s condition, you have need not look far, shieldmaiden. Sometimes, one needs but take advantage of circumstances already in existence.”

  Hervor spit. Her hand clinched around Tyrfing’s hilt over her shoulder. Maybe he was a svartalf. An immortal. A vaettr. But then again, she’d fought immortals before. “Did Väinämöinen ever intend to aid Starkad?”

  Again, that dark, infuriating chuckle. Volund bent, snatched up the skin filled with sap, and rose. And then, before her eyes, his form shifted, shrunk. In the space of a few heartbeats, he’d become a raven. With a startling caw, he took flight and disappeared into the night sky.

  Leaving her and Wudga alone. She glanced to where Höfund was still limping closer, though he was yet far off. “I ought to kill you.”

  Wudga shook his head. “You could try. And yet … your quest succeeded. Would it have, had not I been there? As my father has said, are you not largely to blame for this yourself?”

  He did know. Maybe he’d always known. Told by his father, perhaps. Whispers from the shadows.

  And if she drew Tyrfing, there would be no turning back.

  “Consider, Hervor. Had Väinämöinen not come to you, where would Starkad be now?”

  “He was your friend, too.”

  Wudga nodded. “Then we are both lucky the quest was accomplished.”

  At the cost of a lot of lives.

  Finally, Hervor released Tyrfing’s hilt. Maybe there had been enough blood for one day.

  With a shake of her head, she turned and started for Höfund. The two of them would have a long, painful journey out of Pohjola.

  When she glanced back, Wudga was gone.

  33

  Death, when it comes with a certainty, hardly felt a burden anymore. Maybe the burden, the fear, came from knowing you might die. Staring right in its face without the merest chance of survival, that didn’t leave much room for fear, Ecgtheow supposed.

  What was the point of fearing something that could only go one way?

  Urd had come for him at last.

  His broadsword dragged behind him, scraping over the obsidian stones all around.

  The wound in his leg gave him a mighty limp, had to be said, and burned like Hel’s spit. Not just the fires, either, he supposed. Tyrfing had a poison to it, already scorching through his veins.

  Poison wouldn’t kill him, though.

  The horde of kobolds, croaking and hopping about the twisted landscape before him—they’d be the ones to do it. At least two dozen of the little trollfuckers.

  Better than dying of poison, he supposed.

  He continued on toward the pack of hideous creatures, spitting out a glob of blood and mucus and Hel knew what else. And those kobolds, they didn’t bother closing in. Not when he was coming right to them. They knew it, sure as he did. There just wasn’t a damn place left to go here.

  All the doors were closed.

  A man came here, after he died, assuming you believed shamans like Pakkanen. So what happened to a man who died and was already in this place? That thought gave him pause. And maybe a hint of the fear coming back, truth be told.

  What happened to your soul if you died already in the land of the dead? Would valkyries come for him at all?

  A bit of uncertainty, and back came the burden, the fear taunting him.

  Suppose he would find out the answer soon though.

  He drew up his sword before him and let out the best growl he could manage.

  Almost as one, the kobolds erupted in a wave of croaking, slobbering chaos headed for him.

  All that remained now was to give a death his ancestors could be proud of. To make a stand that would honor Ylva. To fight one last time, so little Beowulf could think of his father’s name with pride.

  One final battle.

  Ecgtheow roared defiance at those little fuckers.

  34

  The darkness shifted around Starkad, writhing in waves and melding with the twisted landscape of jagged obsidian peaks. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here. He’d been with Hervor not too long ago and then … Just lost in the dark. Wandering through a miasma of shadows and chaos, ever seeking any sign of light.

  A faint glow in the sky with no apparent source kept him out of total blackness, true, but he could make out so little in the distance, it made it hard to choose a destination. Hard to even be certain he had not wandered in circles for the past hour.

  “Did you think I would let you go?” The feminine voice emerged from the darkness behind him.

  Starkad spun and backed away. It took a moment to focus on the form lounging upon an obsidian shelf level with his head. She laid back, arms and legs
splayed, completely naked. It was Ogn, but not as she had been in life, nor even as she’d seemed when he saw her in Alfheim.

  She still had the elongated, purple tongue, flicking between a maw of irregular fangs. But now, a half dozen black spiraling horns jutted from her skull, parting her blonde hair. Her fingers ended in claws. Tattered, bat-like wings flopped lazily against the rock, jutting from her back. Darkness swirled in her eyes. A serpentine tail twitched by her side. Black fluid oozed from her trench as she rubbed at it with a single finger.

  “It ought to have broken you,” she purred. “Left you so hollow that I might have sucked you dry.” She pursed her lips and ran her tongue over them, somehow leaving him both hard and nauseated all at once. “But I want more than your seed, my darling. I want all that you are or ever could have been.” She chuckled, then moaned, as if all this excited her, as if actually pleasuring herself. “Oh … Dear sweet Starkad. You ought to have broken in half and been left a weeping wreck of what you once were.”

  Here she was. Afzal had warned him he must confront her if he was to win his way free. Every instinct begged him to turn away from the horror and temptation she represented. To do so, or else to rush to her, bury himself in her so deep he’d never have to come out again. Fighting both urges, he clenched his jaw and scowled. Shook his head. “Maybe I’m stronger than you thought.”

  She snorted. “That fool wizard interfered.” She frowned and gnawed on her lower lip with those hideous fangs. “Thought to help you with his pathetic little bird. Without it, the worlds of the Spirit Realm would have left you a shriveled, shrieking mess long before you passed through them all.”

  “But I survived. It must vex you …”

  Now she grinned, and leapt off the rock, tail twitching as she stalked closer. Ogn drew a clawed hand along the line of his collarbone as she stalked around him, purring. “Do you think you have seen the extent of the horrors the Otherworlds hold for the souls of men? Do you think the Spirit Realm is the farthest, darkest realm to which I might take you?” She cackled. “Does it give you courage to believe the worst is behind you?” She backed away, shaking her head and snickering. “When you have not yet witnessed the extent of these realms, what hope for you might lay in the realms beyond …”

  Beyond the Spirit Realm? As in, further than the worlds of the vaettir. The thought had never occurred to him. Was it an idle threat? Did aught even exist beyond the extreme worlds he’d already visited? Starkad shook his head, unwilling to let her send him back on the defensive. “I loved you, Ogn.”

  “You killed me.”

  Had he? He’d killed her lover, the father of her child, though at the time, he hadn’t known Hergrimr was either of those things. “I tried to save you. I made a mistake, maybe. Maybe many. But you took your own godsdamned life. I didn’t force you to that. I came intending to marry you, and then, finding you missing, to save you from your abductor.”

  “I didn’t need saving!” she screeched. A beat of her wings carried her aloft, several feet away from him. “I didn’t ask you to come there!”

  He spread his hands and shook his head. “You never stopped haunting me. For years, you were the shadow in my dreams, my guilt. I thought it guilt … but was that really you? Have you in truth become a mara? I think you have.”

  “I am what you made me.”

  Starkad grimaced. “I had a hand in it. But you … you have become what your rage made you. What your own suicide made you. Whatever nightmare you fell into, whatever it shaped you into, you jumped in of your own volition.”

  She lunged forward with uncanny speed, her claws embedding in his shoulders. She bore him down to the ground and slammed him hard upon the rocks. “You loved me? You loved me? Love me now!” With one hand she pinned both of his up behind him. With the other she grabbed his trousers. Her claws shredded the laces and she jerked them open. “I’m going to suck your life out through your cock, you sniveling wretch!”

  Her bulbous tongue lathered over him, forcing an undesired response from his body. Starkad jerked his knee up and caught her under the jaw. The impact drove her teeth into her tongue and she jerked away, releasing his hands and grabbing her tongue with one of her own. She spat out a glob of dark blood and hissed at him even as he rose.

  “I’m going to enjoy forcing you to pleasure me. To tongue me for days on end. When you are dying of thirst, the only liquid to pass your lips will be—” Ogn stumbled, clutched both hands to her head and shrieked, doubling over in pain.

  The sound of her cry rent through Starkad’s mind like a hot iron and sent him reeling too.

  Strange, alien words like those of vaettir vaguely reverberated off the obsidian walls. He dropped to his knees. The world grew hazy, fading in and out of focus.

  “No!” Ogn bellowed. “No! Silence, song-crafter! I’ll bite your tongue clean off!”

  Starkad jolted to realize he was saying the same words as Ogn. That her voice was coming from his throat. “I’ll drag your soul screaming into the abyss! The horrors this one faced will seem but pale amusements compared to what I’ll—”

  Another of her shrieks stole her words and stopped Starkad’s as well.

  A flame rose inside him, a heat like something was ripping him in half. Darkness closed all around him.

  He slammed head-first into the ground. His body convulsed, thrashed, banging his skull against the rocks over and over.

  Until everything went black.

  Starkad groaned. Blinked. A haze of flickering firelight stung his eyes. Both his eyes. He had two, although he could see naught from one, and the other seemed cloudy as well. He lay in a bed, in a dark room.

  The only sound came from the crackle of a brazier and the faint panting of another man, slumped upon the floor. Starkad sat, then pitched straight out of the bed finding he had not the least bit of strength left in him.

  His legs felt pulverized. His ribs battered. His skin felt aflame. His stomach rumbled as if he had not eaten in a moon or more.

  And his head felt as though a troll had jumped up and down on it.

  Groaning, he managed to look up at the other man. That was … the singer from Kvenland. Blond hair, streaked with gray. Simple clothes.

  The singer … the wizard.

  “What happened?” Starkad’s throat was raw, cracked.

  The other man rubbed his face. Now that Starkad looked closer, a sheen of sweat covered the Kvenlander’s brow. “I exorcised the mara with a song.”

  “Exorcised … You cast her out. She’s … she’s still out there.”

  The Kvenlander chuckled lightly. “If beings from beyond our realm can be destroyed, such matters lie far beyond human Art. But those cast out through exorcism or the destruction of their hosts, they pay a price for it. It takes them time to regain their strength, or so some believe. Either way, she is out of you.”

  Maybe. But Ogn hated Starkad, blamed him for all that had befallen her, and not entirely without cause.

  “Yes,” the Kvenlander said, as if reading his face. “They are eternal, so far as I know.”

  “She’ll come after me again. If not in life, then …”

  The man frowned in apparent sympathy.

  Starkad shook himself. Whatever had happened, it was past. “Hervor. Where is she?”

  “Off in Kvenland. She fought for you and won. I imagine now she already makes her way back, seeking you.”

  Starkad struggled to push himself up, but only managed his knees. “I have to go there, have to meet her.”

  The other man shook his head. “You have not the strength to step outside for a piss. You will be long in recovering from such an ordeal, I think. And some of what you lost will not return.”

  Starkad put a hand to his eye, waved it front of his face, then blanched at being unable to see it. “You’re a sorcerer.”

  “If you prefer the term. Men call workers of the Art by so many titles, and all apply, or none, perhaps. I am a singer of songs.”

  Starkad swallowe
d, shook himself.

  Ogn had taken a great deal from him, it seemed. Some of it, he couldn’t quite remember. Much of what he did recall, he wished he didn’t. A haze had settled on his memories, and not just those from the nightmare worlds. His past, his childhood, he could feel things were missing now. Gone from him, like faded dreams, leaving only the impressions of events that might once have seemed clear.

  Such was the price of his survival.

  She had taken from him.

  But maybe she had given something to him as well.

  In the end, Hervor had come for him. Crossed this world and the Otherworlds to find him. And maybe she had become all he’d once dreamed Ogn might be.

  Something worth living for.

  Epilogue

  The song came to him, tickled his wandering and restless mind, and pulled him from dreams he’d have chosen not to leave behind. The song, peaceful and beautiful, stole Odin’s reprieve from him.

  Waters poured away from him in great showers as the mud shoved him up, rejecting his presence within the lake. It parted around him, guiding him back to the shore like a mighty hand, and left him to retch forth the fluid choking his lungs.

  Odin convulsed. Shivered. Looked up at Väinämöinen as the wizard’s song finally ended. And beauty and peace shattered around Odin as silence settled in.

  He coughed up more water, then turned to glare up at the song-crafter through his drenched gray hair.

  “A move is made, and the turn is passed, so chance must be given once again.”

  Odin panted, half-frozen. So, Väinämöinen had accomplished whatever aim he’d intended—whatever end he’d kept Odin imprisoned for. And now he was releasing Odin, clearly not intending to murder him. Probably a mistake.

  Odin surged strength into his limbs from the power the apple had given him. He launched himself upward faster than most men could have hoped to have reacted. One hand he clutched around Väinämöinen’s throat, the other he slapped over the song-crafter’s mouth. Growling, Odin hefted the man off the ground and into the air and charged away from the lake like that. He carried the Kvenlander several steps until he could slam him against a tree.