by Matt Larkin
Ole roared, rumbling forward like an avalanche. Not fast. Not at first, but his momentum built with each passing foot.
Starkad leapt to the side and Ole plowed into a pair of men standing on the circle’s edge. Sent them both sprawling in the snow.
Maybe Starkad could’ve lunged in and ended it right there, but he waited, allowed Ole to turn about and face him again. Too much honor to Hervor’s mind. Or maybe he hesitated over an old friendship. Either way, it stood to cost him.
Ole lunged forward, swinging that axe in great arcs.
There was no parrying an attack like that. Starkad twisted out of the way, unable to close the distance. When Ole swung again, Starkad spun around, whipping his sword toward Ole’s massive gut.
The big man moved faster than he had any right to and jerked his shield forward. The wooden circle caught Starkad’s sword, kept going, and slammed into his chest. The blow lifted Hervor’s lover bodily off his feet and flung him backward before he landed in the snow, gasping.
A heartbeat later and Ole was chopping down with that axe.
Hervor sucked in a sharp breath. Starkad rolled to the side, kicked his foot out, and caught Ole in the knee. The move stunned the larger man and he faltered, one leg giving out under him. Starkad rolled over backward and scrambled away.
Suddenly aware her hand was on Tyrfing’s hilt, Hervor released it. She couldn’t interfere. No one could. A holmgang was a sacred duel. Didn’t always have to be to the death, but this one was. It was the whole purpose of Starkad coming here.
The pair of them danced about. Or Starkad danced, narrowly avoiding vicious blow after vicious blow. Ole didn’t seem concerned with skill or grace so much as raw power. And he had a lot of it. He ignored a half dozen scratches Starkad scored on his face, arms, and legs. Just kept blundering forward, getting more and more wild.
Now he was fuming, spittle flying from his mouth as his axe cleaved the air, whistling.
Before that mara had ravaged him, Starkad would’ve ended this long ago. Now, Hervor wasn’t so sure it was hesitation slowing him. Pain and fatigue, maybe. Plus not being able to see so well. This had been a stupid plan. Odin’s stones, it was stupid. She should’ve killed Aun herself for even suggesting this.
Ole whipped his axe up in a rising arc. Starkad leapt to the side, narrowly avoiding being split from groin to skull. One of his blades came around and sliced into the side of Ole’s throat. The blundering oaf staggered. He raised his axe-wielding hand to his neck then stared at the blood on his knuckles. More of it dribbled out of his mouth.
Starkad twisted around behind him, whipping his other blade around to cut out Ole’s hamstring. The oaf roared in pain and pitched over into the snow.
Panting himself, Starkad stalked up behind him. Flipped his grip around on one of his swords. And drove it straight down through the back of the man’s neck.
The whole crowd had fallen silent. Staring at Starkad in disbelief.
Hervor shut her own half-open mouth.
Starkad looked to her, then limped away from the bloody circle, one hand to his side.
Hervor caught his arm as he drew nigh and led him toward the wood. Maybe nobody would’ve dared interfere with the holmgang. It didn’t mean none of those bastards Ole had brought from Reidgotaland wouldn’t murder them in their sleep in revenge.
It was best the three of them were fast away from Upsal, at least until Aun managed to come back with no few warriors loyal to his dynasty.
“You’re lucky to be alive you stupid fuck,” she whispered to Starkad.
“I love you too. ”
“Don’t change the godsdamned subject. Do you even care about Aun? I mean, really?”
“No.”
“No, of course you don’t.” She spat. “No, someone just has to mention silver or gold and your cock is hard, isn’t it? How many fortunes do you need to gain and lose, Starkad? When will it be enough?”
He shrugged off her shoulder. “Enough? I don’t know. I can’t …”
Can’t walk away. His godsdamned curse. And it had almost cost her him. Again.
“It’s for you, anyway,” he said.
“What?”
“The gold. You can use it to rebuild your home.”
She scoffed. “It would help. Wouldn’t have meant troll shit if you’d died, though. Besides, you think Hrethel will ever let Grandfather hold a title again? Some things can’t be fixed.”
Starkad groaned. “Gylfi.”
“What?”
“There’ll be a funeral.”
Stood to reason. The oldest, most famed king in all Sviarland, maybe all the North Realms. There’d be a mighty funeral, probably held off as long as possible, just to give people from all the kingdoms time to attend. “You didn’t even like him.”
“Like him?” Starkad shook his head. “It was more complicated than that.”
Everything always was with Starkad. Never a simple answer. Always another secret.
“I have to be there.”
Fair enough. At the moment, Dalar was probably a far safer place for them than Upsal, anyway.
9
S tarkad could not shake the sense of someone powerful pursuing them. An intuition, really, but since Wudga had awakened the Sight in him, he had to try to trust those instincts. Could their foes have realized they went into the sewers? Maybe they’d have checked the alley, seen that opened grate.
But these interconnecting tunnels were as much a maze as the city above, if not more so. And surely no one could track them through the waters down here. Even varulfur ought not to be able to follow their scents through this overpowering reek.
Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling. That nameless dread roiling around in his gut. The sensation of continuous peril coming for him. For … Hervor. And the others, too, now his responsibility.
He trudged forward, through the muck, to catch up to Baruch.
Odin’s cryptic warnings had not prepared him for this. Maybe they should have, but the Ás either didn’t know what they’d face here, or had chosen not to reveal it plainly. Who even knew what motivated Odin anymore? Manipulative bastard.
“I need to know what we’re up against,” he said to Baruch, keeping his voice low. Vebiorg would hear, no doubt. Damn varulfur had the ears of the wolves after all. But no sense in further terrifying the others until he had to. “You may have left this city as a child, but even at that age, you had to have known something was amiss here at night.”
Baruch glanced back at the others. His torch cast his face in shadows, but still, Starkad could make out a clear grimace. “I remember … hiding at night. It was just what we did. No one ever said why, but even orphans didn’t go out after sunset. We’d squat anywhere we could, huddled together, waiting for dawn.”
“I need more than that. What are those things?”
“I … People tell ghost stories at night. In case we weren’t frightened enough already. I remember a few. One tale, about the restless dead, they rise from the grave. They, uh … sustain themselves on the living.”
“Draugar.”
“Um …” Baruch kept looking back over his shoulder like he expected the creatures to sneak up on him if he even said it. “Maybe I thought so. I mean, draugar sometimes eat the flesh of the living, right? But these things, they could make you think they were human, at least some of them did. The story … it was a long time ago. But it said, sometimes those who went out at night, you’d find their bodies, pale and cold, like something sucked the life out of them. That lord … Fjolvor, he …”
“I know.”
“You think if I knew … If I had any idea what would …” Baruch shivered, looked ready to retch.
Tanna had paused in pursuing them to bite Fjolvor, who would’ve died anyway. Bite her and seem to be drinking the blood of her wound.
Given the choice, Starkad would’ve left Baruch to grieve in peace. He didn’t have that option, though. Not while Tanna and his minions were pursuing the rest of them.
“So the creatures in your stories?” Starkad asked.
“Vampires. That’s what they were called.”
“How do we kill them?”
“I don’t know. I was a godsdamned child, Eightarms. I haven’t thought of those stories in decades. And now my wife is dead.”
Starkad grabbed him by his left arm and jerked him to a stop. “I sympathize. I do. Truly. But we will all be dead if we cannot figure out how to fight back against these foes.”
“How do you kill a draug?” Baruch asked.
By now the others had caught up, were watching the conversation.
“You can burn it with fire. Or cut its head off.”
Afrid snorted. “Hardly makes them special. You encounter aught that setting it on fire and cutting its head off won’t kill? If so, that’s a place I want to visit even less than this one.”
Hervor groaned. “Cutting the head off something that godsdamned fast wouldn’t be easy.”
No, it wouldn’t. But they were going to have to try. “Keep moving.” He turned and pressed on.
The tunnel led into a domed chamber, with the center of it at a higher elevation, out of the muck. The crew all climbed up onto this, Afrid mumbling under her breath while kicking her boots like she could shake the filth off them. Or like she wouldn’t have to hop back in it to leave here. Five other tunnels exited this circular chamber, all but one of them low enough the muck flowed through them as well.
More interesting, though, the walls of the chamber were decorated with thousands upon thousands of multicolored stones. Layers of grime covered them, especially nigh to the water, but they seemed to be depicting a picture.
Instead of joining the others on the platform, Starkad grabbed a torch and walked closer to the wall. It was hard to tell where the picture began, but it seemed to be showing another city, one with spiked spires beneath a dark night sky.
In this city, numerous factions seemed to be held at uneasy peace. Factions of vampires?
Ancient bloodlines …
It was almost a voice in his head. A memory of a dream, maybe. A warning Odin had tried to give him in his sleep, and one he’d forgotten.
This looked like twelve of these factions. Twelve bloodlines.
Waiting for the changing of the world …
These creatures were ancient, from long before the Old Kingdoms. Before the mists, even, maybe. Naught like the city Starkad saw here existed on Midgard, at least not so far as he’d seen. In Utgard, perhaps, but maybe whatever this was had instead fallen into ruin long ago. Become naught but dust.
While still the vampires endured.
Sleeping away in the ages … Dead and deathless …
The picture continued, depicting what Starkad could only assume was the founding of the city by this very river. The founding of it by these ancient vampires. Wakened, somehow.
Miklagard had survived the mists, flourished where most of mankind faltered and dwindled. Because Otherworldly powers led them. Like the Serklanders who worshiped Fire vaettir, except these creatures might not be possessed by vaettir so much as tied to the ghost world. Living ghosts themselves, maybe.
“What are you doing over there?” Hervor called.
Starkad glanced back at the others. “I think … it’s not just Tanna. All the Patriarchs, even the emperor himself. They are immortals. These vampires.”
“Not possible,” Baruch said. “No. That cannot be. These were just stories …”
Starkad continued around the circle as it depicted the construction of the great towers of Miklagard. Rising as the empire rose. And finally, they fell into conflict with men whose hands were engulfed in flame: the Serklanders.
So what did it mean? That Miklagard’s wars with Serkland were all that held the vampire lords back from expanding their reach? But Serkland was being hard-pressed by the Vallanders since they’d allied with the Aesir. Maybe the other empire had begun to redirect its forces to the front at Andalus. Leaving the Miklagardians freer to press into Bjarmaland. Toward Holmgard.
So … Did they put these creatures in charge of every place they conquered? If they took Holmgard, if they enthroned a vampire king to rule it, they could use that as a staging ground to reach Sviarland or Kvenland. To flood their kind into all the North Realms.
Starkad swallowed, looked back at Hervor. They weren’t really paying attention. Didn’t realize what all this meant. And if they had, it might well have broken them. Most people couldn’t handle the truth that their world was so very fragile. That at any moment, it might collapse, beset by horrors on all sides .
And if their mission here failed, if they didn’t stop Tanna’s advance on Holmgard, they had more to lose than a single small kingdom.
Meaning, no matter what it took, Starkad would kill Tanna and claim Mistilteinn. These Miklagardian vampires would learn what men of the North Realms had in them.
10
L ong years of travels had brought Orvar to Miklagard once before, when fighting pirates on the Black Sea alongside his son. Another lifetime, really, and like the memories of his life, it was dimmed and distant, tainted by the red haze of fury that so consumed his every thought.
Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance.
For the world had failed him. For all he had known once, long ago, mattered naught.
Vengeance.
It coiled around his mind like a linnorm, venom-laced fangs sunken deep into his brain.
Vengeance.
Upon Hervor, first and most of all. Murderer. Murderer.
And she had dared to come here, even knowing he had picked away at those nigh to her one by one. Craven, perhaps, she had fled and left her Grandfather to his urd. As the old man wilted and withered, perhaps Hervor even hoped Orvar would put an end to him and spare her the pain of doing it herself .
He strode down the empty streets toward the tower rising up ahead of him. An impressive construction. One that had—in life—filled him with awe and inexplicable disquiet. Now, it almost beckoned.
Naught else of the deaths around Hervor seemed to have fazed her. For she had so little soul left in her, perhaps, and cared naught for any save herself. And Starkad Eightarms.
Hard to believe they had become lovers. Hard to believe she had love in her at all.
Fitting, then, that the last thing Orvar would take from her before ending her was Starkad.
Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance.
Long had he waited for its fulfillment. So long peering through the haze of red, waiting for her to break. Too long, for she was already a pathetic, heartless wretch before he had begun. Too long, and now he was done with her.
Vengeance, long awaited, and its time had come at last. And so Orvar would rip the beating heart from Hervor’s chest and bite deep into it, devour it whole and be sated. At least for a moment.
And dare to believe, to hope, that might abate the pain that wracked him.
For the deathless spend every moment trapped in the agony of dying.
Stone steps led up to the single doorway in the tower, the door made of steel—not iron, of course—with banded strips across it. Shut tight, though few in this city would dare approach in any event. Nachzehrer, some had called these creatures in the North Realms, those few who did not mistake them for draugar. And perhaps they were related, but not quite the same.
Orvar rapped hard upon the steel door.
It creaked open a moment later, and red pinpricks of eyes greeted him from the darkness beyond. Darkness and a hint of dust in the air, disturbed despite a lack of airflow.
“I am the Arrow’s Point,” he said. His Miklagardian was not good, but good enough. “Come to seek an audience with the Patriarch.”
The eyes winked out and the door creaked open further, inviting him into the darkness.
Orvar stepped inside, into a small landing beneath a stairwell.
An iron-like grip snatched his elbow and pulled him deeper inside.
The door slammed shut, leaving him in nigh to
total darkness. But then, like any other creature of the darkness, he needed little light with which to see.
His own eyes would no doubt have shone with red light as he turned toward the vampire holding his arm.
The creature flinched, ever so slightly, clearly unaccustomed to seeing aught else of the Otherworlds walking in its city. “Move.” Its voice a whisper, hardly the rasping hollow thing Orvar’s own voice had become.
Did vampires not fall prey to the rot of the grave? Or did they merely have a way to disguise its ravages?
Such questions mattered little, in truth.
Only one thing mattered.
Vengeance.
The drum, beating in his head, throbbing where his pulse ought to have been. A rhythm pounded out against his skull.
Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance.
The vampire guided him up the stairs, several flights of them, until they must have reached close to the top of the tower.
Nigh to seven years now he’d suffered the agonies of death. Until the drumbeat had faded into the background enough he could—for brief moments—almost forget it was there. But it was never gone. Just as he would never live again.
Vengeance.
On a large landing, a man sat on a gold-embroidered couch resting upon a covered dais. Every speck of it bespoke opulence and grandeur and hubris on a scale that would’ve put an Ás to shame. The dais’s overhang glittered in the light from the braziers set nearby, the sides of it seeming plated with actual gold, and that engraved with elaborate designs.
The walls were painted with equally intricate compositions, from flowing scripts to flowery red and gold patterns. Alabaster columns supported a small balcony that looked down on this landing from a higher floor on the tower.
On this couch lounged a man in an elegant crimson robe, seeming every bit the statesman, save for the crusting of dried blood over his chin and upper lip and, yes, even partway down his neck.