They kept a cold camp and set a watch. Snorri took the last hours, first sitting beneath the stars watching his breath plume and listening to the darkness for any sound of approach. Then, as whispers of dawn chased the lesser lights from the sky, he stood and paced to and fro along the ridge. He tried to make sense of the grey confusion of shapes where Uttgar stood. Slowly, the shadows ebbed, a tide withdrawing into the black depths of the fjord, and the ruins lay for all to see, their riddle unraveled by the sun’s eye.
“Odin’s teeth!” Olaf came to join him.
“You’ve never in your life sworn by Odin, let alone his teeth,” said Snorri.
Olaf sniffed. “Just trying it out for size, now that I’m a warrior. Besides, I’ve never in my life seen a log-walled hall that’s been knocked down like it was a child’s toy.”
Snorri nodded. The sight had taken him aback too. He had seen the aftermath of raids on villages, the dead lying where they fell, curled around the wounds that killed them. But always it had been fire that did the greatest damage. Once flames sank their teeth into timber, the only end was ashes and black ruin.
Audun, Erik, and Ulf joined them. Together the five men explored the splintered remains of Uttgar. The sod-roofed huts must have been much like those in Eight Quays, little more than green hummocks from a distance, grass growing thick enough for goats to jump up where the roof came nearest to the ground and spend the day grazing above the occupants’ heads.
“Hey!” Audun stood, lifting something bright in his fist.
The others came to see. Audun opened his hand. A bar of silver gleamed across his dirty palm. “From Magyar’s workshop, I guess.” He frowned. “Don’t trolls care for treasure?”
Ulf took the bar and echoed the younger man’s frown. “They covet gold, gems, whatever shines or sparkles. This they would take.”
“There’s another.” Erik moved quickly to claim it from the dirt.
“Don’t they like to eat too?” Olaf looked slightly queasy.
“Of course,” Audun snapped. As a child he had beaten Olaf often through the years. It stopped the day Snorri felled him with a log, though he was twelve and Audun seventeen.
“Why didn’t it eat him, then?” Olaf used his foot to lift a slab of sod from the fallen roof to reveal a man’s pale face, the side of his head a wet mess of red and white and grey. “Or that pig?” He nodded to the creature that had come nosing round the tumbled wall of another hut.
“It won’t be hard to track.” Snorri moved more of the scattered sod aside to reveal what he had first thought to be a posthole.
“Is that . . . a footprint?” Olaf asked, bending for a clearer view.
The imprint was far larger than any man’s foot, unnaturally straight-edged, and deep as a wheel rut from a laden cart.
“What do we do?” Audun asked, sounding more boy than man.
“We take the silver and whatever food we can carry,” Ulf said. “And then we do what we came to do. We hunt.”
By noon they crested the ridge and eyed the descent into the next valley. On the heights Snorri stood amid the lingering snow and turned to look down on the Uulisk, its grey waters beaten flat beneath the sun, glimmering here and there where the east wind could tease out a ripple. The troll’s footprints were black against the white, the icy crusts of snow squeezed back into water by its weight. Where there was no snow and only rock they followed by the marks its feet left on the stone.
“I’ve never been farther north than this,” Snorri said.
“I’ve never crossed the fjord before,” Olaf gasped, coming last to the ridge and leaning, hands on knees, to catch his breath.
Snorri kept his eyes on the view, all the vast reaches to which the Malvik jarls laid claim seemed spread before him. “You should not have come.”
Olaf straightened at that. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“We are.”
“Well then,” Olaf said, and sat heavily on a boulder, reaching for his waterskin. “Besides, I owe you. For keeping me safe all these years.”
Farther along the ridge Audun snorted but said nothing.
“I stood in front of a few bullies for you, Olaf. I can’t be saving you from the Iron Troll.” From what he’d seen, Snorri doubted he could save himself.
“We’ll see who saves who.” Olaf gulped from his skin.
“Ha!” Erik slapped Olaf’s shoulder, causing him to choke. “You were right, Snorri. He is funny!”
The trail led north and east. Far ahead the Bitter Ice waited, but Snorri could not imagine that the troll roamed such great distances. Its lair would likely lie no farther than another day’s travel.
“I wonder what it was shouting,” Olaf said.
“Shouting?” Snorri frowned.
“Yes, the old woman said it was shouting. Not roaring.”
Ulf came up behind them, shaking his head. “You focus on where its mouth is, not what noise is coming out of it. We’re hunting an animal. Armour or no. A brutal animal.”
As the day wore on, Snorri sensed a change in Ulf. The warrior was a serious man not given to wasting his words, but somehow he seemed to grow more quiet and more grim-faced with each passing mile.
“Trouble?” Snorri asked later when they paused where two ice-gouged valleys came together.
“The troll is taking us to Dragsil.”
Snorri blinked. “Dragsil is a real place?” In the long winter many tales were told, and not all were true. If a story began “North of the Uulisk,” then you knew to take it with a pinch of salt. Apart from along the fjord’s shore, nobody lived north of the Uulisk. The land between the Uulisk and the Bitter Ice lay in great folds of frozen rock. No crops could be grown there. Even the hardiest goats starved.
Ulf nodded. “My father saw it with his own eyes.” He sighed, tugged at his beard, black but streaked with iron grey, and carried on toward the northern valley.
The others followed, unspeaking. The tales told that Dragsil was a place of the Builders. The chambers carved into the mountainside had survived the Day of a Thousand Suns, though the people inside had not. It was said that the tunnels were still, so many centuries later, haunted by the ghosts of those who had died there. The priests of Odin warned against all such places. There were, they said, no doors to Valhalla to be found within.
The setting sun showed them the peak that the troll seemed bound for, painting its sides a cold red.
“Who has a tale of Dragsil?” Audun asked at camp after they had eaten. The boldness of the request was undercut by the hint of fear in his voice.
Ulf and Erik grunted and shook their heads.
“I remember one,” said Snorri. “Only the bones of it though, not the full telling. It seems to me that Dragsil is mentioned in many winter tales, but almost always as a place that the hero avoids. Or somewhere a cruel jarl threatens to send someone.”
“So . . . ‘going on a troll hunt’ and ‘a visit to Dragsil’ are pretty much the same thing,” Olaf said. “Just another way to say ‘a very bad idea.’ And we are going to Dragsil on a troll hunt.”
“Scared, Olaf?” Audun taunted from his furs.
“Always,” Olaf agreed. “But I would rather be scared in Dragsil than most other places. I spoke to Groa about Dragsil.”
Audun barked a disbelieving laugh, but it was true. When the old witch had come to Eight Quays two summers previously, few had dared the interior of the hide tent she had pitched up on the step-fields. The priesthood and the völvas had scant regard for each other, and many men would cite the priests’ counsel as their reason for avoiding old Groa and her ill-smelling tent, but the true reason was fear. An older kind of fear.
Of all the boys and young men of Eight Quays, only Olaf had bowed his head and entered, calling out his greeting ahead of him. Snorri had thought Olaf would be the last to consider it, but later had to concede that his friend had a different sort of courage. A bravery bound closer to curiosity than to pride, more suited to withstanding the unknown than
the danger of a blade.
Olaf had never told Snorri what the völva had said to him among her bones and talismans, but he told them all some of it now.
“Groa asked me how I knew Odin existed. How I knew he lived and breathed. I had to think about that, because völvas don’t ask idle questions. I said to her that I knew because I had been told so. Because he is in a thousand stories. Because his name is written in stone.
“She told me that there is a difference between a life that is, a life that was, the story of a life, and the story of a life that never was, but that these differences are hard to pin down. Like the aurora they shift, and overlap, and change.
“She told me that the Builders made machines of many kinds, and that some of those machines were made just to watch the Builders and to store the stories of their lives, and to give them new lives inside those stories. Groa said the ghosts of the Builders are not true spirits but the memories of those who died, their stories, stored in the machines that watched them all their lives. She told me that there are many such stories, untold numbers, down in the deep and hidden worlds of their machines.”
Olaf fell silent, and Audun snorted again, but Snorri knew that his friend had shared something of worth. Before they slept, Snorri went on to tell the bits of the winter tale he remembered, but he only had fragments. Sigurd of Hardanger, a hero of the old sagas, had set his mind on braving Dragsil’s halls and taking the treasures that surely must have been left there by the kings before the suns. The warrior had come with axe and sword, blessed by the gods and their priests. He had wandered empty hall after empty hall, and eventually had slept before quitting the place in disgust.
Sigurd returned to the Uulisk to find it settled on both shores by a people who knew neither his name nor the names of the jarls to the south and west. He walked on through a changed world where towns sat on what had been barren shore and where even the völvas had no memory of him. He had been erased from his own life.
“Or,” suggested Olaf, sleepily, from the dark mound of his bundle, “he just slept for an awful lot longer than he thought he did.”
They came to Dragsil early on the next day. Snorri laboured up the slope behind Ulf, who seemed immune to fatigue. The others were strung out behind them, Olaf far below. It had been Snorri’s idea to outpace him. That way there would be at least one survivor to tell their tale. And he wanted it to be Olaf.
Ulf and Snorri sat on an outcrop watching the others toil up the mountainside. The windows and doorways of Dragsil gaped a few hundred yards above them, dark and empty. Stretching south and east, the land heaved and rolled like a sea caught in a high wind and suddenly frozen in place. Some rock faces caught the sunlight, others lay in shadow, and in all that vastness there was nothing, not man nor tree, to give the eye scale.
“That,” Snorri said, indicating the panorama of stone and sun, “is how I know that the gods live.”
Ulf grunted an assent. He didn’t speak again until Erik arrived with Audun hard on his heels, red-faced and gasping, having struggled to close the gap between them.
“If this were a troll we would have smelled it by now.” Ulf stood, leaning on his poleaxe and staring up at the empty windows cut into the rock. “Trolls stink. But this one has walked two days without scat or sign.”
“At least it should be easy to find.” Snorri was ready for the fight now. The Builders’ ruins were the end of this journey. He would meet whatever challenge they held and he would win or he would lose, but it would be done.
“Odin watch us.” Ulf raised his weapon to the cold skies. “Thor watch us.” It wasn’t a plea for aid. It was a demand for witnesses. “Undoreth we.”
Snorri, Erik, and Audun joined in, voices loud. “Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout gods tremble.”
Without further talk, the four men began the last climb, while hundreds of yards farther down a slope of broken stone that was closer to vertical than to horizontal, Olaf Arnsson scrambled upward with grim determination, spit flecking his lips, too little breath to spare for cursing.
Ulf had brought torches and a single precious lantern fueled by whale oil. He had anticipated that their quarry might run to ground. A troll is best avoided, but if a man’s wyrd sets one in his path, then better to meet it in the open beneath a noonday sun. So seeking one out in its lair was a new kind of foolishness.
The empty halls of Dragsil were far more extensive than Snorri had ever dreamed possible. Even the dwarves of legend had never carved such spaces into the roots of the mountains.
The four men passed a hundred chambers and saw nothing but stone and dust and rust. The place felt old and lonely and empty. Snorri’s skin didn’t prickle beneath the gaze of hidden watchers. The corridors didn’t echo with the sorrow of a vanished people. It was just deserted.
All that changed as they advanced along a seemingly endless tunnel that ran straight as a die into the mountain. Its ceiling was arched, and low, so that Snorri had to dip his head just an inch. He wondered how the troll had squeezed its bulk this way, but the floor bore not just the scratches of its iron shoes but a host of such scratches, as if the troll had made this journey a thousand times before.
In that long corridor, Snorri felt himself walking back through the years, with decades and centuries falling behind him. The air grew warmer and tainted with alien scents, some remembering the blacksmith’s forge but others that bore no comparison and grated on his lungs.
They stepped at last from the corridor into a wide, round chamber with a domed roof too high above them for lantern or torch to drive away the shadow.
Perhaps thirty large alcoves gave onto the main chamber, their tall arched openings equally spaced around the room. Pieces of what looked like plate armour scattered the floor, though Snorri had never seen such metalwork before and relied on descriptions he’d heard from others, who had likely never seen it either. Some of the pieces looked to have been made for giants. Huge articulated metal limbs lay here and there, some disgorging a confusion of what looked like steel snakes, powdery residue, dark stains.
Ulf led the way in, holding his poleaxe almost vertical, with the heavy blade higher than his head. He moved slowly toward the center of the chamber. Erik followed, stepping around the detritus, turning like a dancer, an arrow strung to his bow straining for release. Snorri and Audun brought up the rear, Snorri clutching his axe two-handed, Audun with a shield on one arm and a torch in that hand, in the other a broadsword.
As they neared the center and began to see into all the recesses, it became apparent that the lantern hanging from Ulf’s wrist and the torch in Audun’s left hand were not the only lights in the chamber. At the back of three of the alcoves were glowing patches, the light unearthly and offering no illumination. Some patches were round as eyes, glowing with the greens and violets of the aurora. Others held the hot orange of the forge coals or the dull red of cooling iron.
“This is a place of spirits,” Audun hissed above the crackle of his torch.
“Perhaps,” Ulf replied in a conversational tone. “But that’s less dangerous than a troll nest, so be thankful.” He began to advance on the alcove with the most lights.
As they drew closer, Snorri could see that the red glow was leaking from either side of some large, dark object that blocked the source. Closer still and their own lights began to show them what stood before them.
“What in the name of Hel is that?” Audun gasped.
Snorri craned his neck. The thing was a giant, ten yards tall, so armoured that no inch of flesh showed. The head lay hidden in a great helm perforated with small holes through which a light like that of a banked fire could be seen.
“This is not our prey,” Ulf whispered and began to back away.
Snorri reversed without argument. There were no objections to be offered. Firstly, the creature could crush them like a man crushes ants beneath his heel. Secondly, the tracks they followed could not have been made by the giant before them. And finally, it could n
ot have left the chamber by the corridor. It was too large to fit more than an arm down that passage.
Snorri took another step back, gaze still fixed on the steel visor pinpricked with the light of a dying fire. Jarl Torsteff’s longboats had come down the Uulisk each seating forty rowers. The giant before him looked capable of hoisting such a vessel above its head.
The howl that came from behind them was so loud, so startling, and so alien that it nearly unmanned Snorri. He found himself on the edge of dropping the axe that his father and grandfather had carried into many battles. He found himself poised to run, a stranger to himself. The anger that filled him was at his own cowardice, but it served to turn him round.
“MMMmmmmmRRRRRYYYY!” The blast of sound came again, like nothing that a human mouth could make, or any animal that Snorri had heard.
The Iron Troll was far smaller than the giant they had been backing away from but far larger than Snorri. Just as reported, the armour on it allowed no flesh to show. Red Erik’s first arrow shattered into splinters against the troll’s face, or rather what must be the visor of a helm fashioned to look like a face, though more like the head of a beetle than of any troll Snorri had imagined.
“MMMMMmmmmmrrrRRRRRYYYY!” The sound blasted through a mouth that lay behind a rectangular slot protected by thick metal mesh. A shard of metal, a piece of a sword perhaps, jutted from the side of the slot, bedded in the mesh. Snorri took comfort in seeing that something had once at least partially penetrated the troll’s armour.
“Undoreth we!” Ulf’s poleaxe swung down in an arc that saw the blade impact where neck and shoulder joined.
Unfettered III Page 6