He wept as he did so.
‘I’ve tried to stay away,’ he said, ‘but the fates are weaving for us and they bind us too closely. Come on, wake up. You must run from him.’
Snake in the Eye still sat, impaled on Mauger’s sword, clutching the hilt. He kicked Elifr’s leg to get his attention.
‘Now no one can doubt me, for I have a mighty wound,’ he said. ‘I ask you, sorcerer, could you live with a wound like this? I tell you, you could not.’
Elifr picked the woman up, saying nothing. He had no idea where to go or what to do. His original plan seemed best – go to the waters, perform a ritual and see if the well would talk to him – but he needed to get the woman somewhere dry and warm. There was no such place here. He headed towards the well.
‘There are many candles here for snuffing,’ shouted Snake in the Eye. Again the howl. ‘I cannot go to the wall if he is here – he’ll see me. Let me stand. Let no one doubt me – let me stand!’
Elifr pulled the woman down the little stream. Only then did he see what was happening at the well. Loys clung to one side, cowering from the warrior. The warrior was not in the pool; he crouched at the entrance, looking around him in wonder.
‘Who’s here?’ said Mauger. ‘Who is speaking to me?’ Bollason’s sword was in his hand.
Elifr heard the voice in his head, a woman whispering, singing and muttering. He is here, he is here. The voice was very clear.
‘Show yourself, woman. Ghosts won’t protect you, scholar.’
The woman in the wolfman’s arms began to stir. She opened her eyes.
‘Set me down,’ she said. ‘Can you hear her?’
‘I can hear her. Who is she?’
Beatrice was shivering and he was reluctant to put her down, but she wriggled out of his arms onto the floor.
‘She is the voice of the waters. She is my sister. I must go to her. Get away from me, Azémar – this place is death to you.’ She crawled towards the pool.
‘I am not Azémar.’
Her eyes scanned the cavern as if trying to make sense of what she saw.
‘Where is Loys? Where is my Loys?’
‘Here, Beatrice. Run. Flee this place.’ Loys stayed back in the water, fearful of Mauger. Beatrice cried out and slid down to the pool’s edge, oblivious to the warrior beside her, the cruel sword in his hand.
‘Who are you and and who is this old fellow?’ she said. ‘I do not like his looks. He has a noose at his neck.’ Beatrice’s eyes were wide, staring into nothing. ‘Why am I pursued by foul wonders? What is this thing writhing and howling in my breast?’
‘Beatrice! Beatrice!’ shouted Loys, but she showed no sign of hearing him.
His shout seemed to wake the warrior from his stupor and he jumped into the water. Loys tried to scramble up towards where Styliane lay but he was too cold and too scared.
The warrior stood in the pool, the water up to his chest. ‘Who is it? Who is calling me? You, child?’ He pointed his sword directly in front of him, staring into space.
Someone scrambled down the stream towards the well. It was the vala.
She came to Elifr and hugged him. He felt her warmth.
‘Mother,’ said Elifr. ‘So the fate is inescapable.’
‘Yes,’ said the vala, ‘as we foresaw. This is the price of wisdom, Elifr. It is no great thing.’
‘I feared this day above all others.’
‘The skein is spun,’ she said. ‘There is nothing to stand in your way. Better to suffer now for an instant than to face torture in eternal time. This is the appointed place.’
‘I had thought to offer myself to the waters.’
Again the howl shook the cavern.
‘He is here for you. Your certain death unless you act on what was revealed. My name is Uthr. I am a Norn and a spinner of fates, the waters whisper it. I need to go across the bridge of light.’
Tears came into the wolfman’s eyes, his face long in the glow of the rocks. ‘Then go.’
They waded out to the furthest part of the well, forty paces in under the low roof.
The howl was close now.
The wolfman held her and kissed her. Then he pushed her beneath the water.
51 The Norns
‘Three have come.’
‘Future, present and past – virgin, mother and crone.’
‘The Norns are at the water, weaving the fate of men and gods.’
‘The Norns are at the well of fate. It took me so long to find and bring my sisters. It cost so much.’
Who was speaking? Women. The dead girl? Beatrice was one of them, she sensed it.
‘The wolf is coming.’
‘The god is nearly here.’
‘What is required?’
‘What is ever required?’
‘Death of the most dear.’
‘Death of the most dear.’
‘You will not have my baby!’ Beatrice cradled her belly. ‘Loys?’ He came to her, wading warily past the warrior, who seemed oblivious to him.
‘High prices are paid at the well of fate.’
‘Odin gave his eye; what will you give?’
‘What will you give to hear the oracle speak?’
A clatter and a groan from the entrance to the pool and the boy Snake in the Eye came skittering down. The sword was still in him but in his hand he carried Bollason’s head.
He wriggled down and sat on the shelf beside her.
‘Well, here’s a pretty thing,’ he said. ‘Do you not see how the runes come to me? See them in their orbits, eight and eight. Yet eight go missing. Why, they are sitting in the waters. How shall they come to me?’
On the other side of the pool sat the girl, arms around her knees on a shelf above the water. She was young and pale in the ghost light. Next to her sat an old man – one-eyed, his skin stained dark, a rope tight at his neck, his beard and hair a dirty white straggle. He too stared down into the well, his good eye wide, full of madness, his other just a decayed socket. In his hand he had a spear – a blackened, burned shard of wood, but wicked sharp – and he held it as if in deep concentration, like a fisherman waiting on a bank. At Rouen, in the Rouvray forest, she’d seen a body dug from a bog by peat cutters. The old man reminded her of that. He chilled her to the core.
The howl again, nearer and louder.
The man stirred. She had the sense he wasn’t seeing what she saw – he hardly seemed to notice her. His movements were slow, almost torpid, and she remembered how she had felt in her trance on the beacon tower. Was he even there? Or was he some sort of apparition, as the girl seemed to be?
The girl knows what to do; she will lead the way.
Loys pulled himself out of the water, his body convulsing with the cold. He went to Beatrice and she opened her arms to him. He held her tight, trying to make his trembling jaw say some words of comfort. Inside her something keened and moaned. That symbol, the one that said ‘wolf trap’.
That terrible boy, that half-man Snake in the Eye, was talking to her. Her cold-numbed brain hardly registered what he said. Death, death, he was talking about death. He put out his hand to Loys and made a little blowing motion. Loys didn’t pay any attention and the boy looked puzzled.
The howl came from the top of the stream and Beatrice turned to see the wolf.
It was Azémar, though he was terribly changed, his eyes flickering green gems in the lamplight, his body twisted and misshaped like an exhumed root, his muscles tight, so tight they seemed to contort him. He held one shoulder high, the other low; his hands were talons, his jaw long, full of teeth as big as boar’s tusks, and his tongue lolled from his head, black with blood.
Snake in the Eye’s eyes widened with fear.
‘I don’t wish to have any conversation with this fellow,’ he said and jumped into the water. The splash seemed to wake Mauger. He stared at his sword as if trying to work out what it was for.
Azémar – or the thing he’d become – spoke: ‘What is happening to me? I’ve com
e for you. All these lives I’ve come for you; don’t turn me away now. Aelis, Adisla, Beatrice, don’t turn me away.’
‘I do not belong to you, Azémar.’
‘Do you not recall the light on the hills? Do you not remember what we vowed on the mountainside? I am yours, returned. I am yours.’
‘I remember now,’ said Beatrice. ‘I remember, pain and suffering and a love that died on the teeth of a wolf.’
‘I do not want this,’ said Azémar, ‘but I cannot leave you. I am driven by things I cannot control. I have eaten. I have been consumed. A wolf’s eye watches me.’ He seemed tormented by his words and jumped out over the water, to cling to the side of the cavern, his great talons seizing the rock.
‘Do not let that thing near me!’ shouted Snake in the Eye. ‘He wants something from me, for sure.’
The story you told to the pale god.
Tell it now.
The girl’s voice was in Beatrice’s head.
Snake in the Eye answered it. ‘What story?
Of the god who dies to please the fates.
‘I know you, girl.’ Snake in the Eye had terror in his eyes.
You have always known me.
Snake in the Eye babbled, seeming to talk to no one: ‘There seem so few to slaughter here. I cannot go near the candle wall while he is in front of me.’ He pointed to Azémar.
The wolf Fenrir stands here, the god killer, seething and growling in his hungers. Someone else lies at the threshold, as befits her goddess. Her fate is unseen and undecided. Her skein is not yet woven, her death knot untied.
‘The Norn Verthani is here, mistress of the present, caller of the wolf, holder of the howling rune, mother. The wolf will kill her. Her destiny is foreseen. The Norn Skuld is here, the future, her fingers weaving in unseen currents, dead and so deathless. The crone Norn is here. Uthr. The past, immortal, for ever. She who rules the domain to which heroes fall. Men call her Memory and they call her Hel. We are three and he is three.’
‘Who?’ Snake in the Eye cast his eyes about him, desperate to find the source of the voice.
He waits unbodied in the waters, eight and eight and eight. Gods and men are drawn by the Norns, each to play his part.
‘What of Loys?’ said Beatrice.
One person can still die.
‘He can’t because I can’t see him,’ said Snake in the Eye. ‘Those that can be killed have been killed.’
He is hiding from fate, as you hid.
‘What is his fate?’ said Beatrice.
To die so you might shake free of your destiny of torment. The skein is woven, the threads of fate entangle him.
‘I would die a thousand times before I let him come to harm!’ said Beatrice.
He must die. The well has revealed it. The future is being spun.
As the ghost girl spoke again the white-haired warrior suddenly remembered what his sword was for. He came rushing at Loys through the water, but Azémar sprang off the rocks and knocked the sword aside.
‘For all that has happened, he is my friend,’ he said, his horrid tongue lolling from his saw-toothed jaws.
A voice from somewhere, a shrieking rhyme. It was not the voice of the girl. It was stranger, deeper. At first Loys thought it came from the bloody waters of the well but he realised it was the wolfman, his voice changed, different.
‘She saw wading there through harsh waters
Men who foreswore oaths and murders
And one who covets another’s beloved.
There the snake sucks
On the corpses of the fallen
And the wolf tore men – would you know yet more?’
Azémar’s great teeth ground at the warrior’s ear, his tongue slavering at his neck.
‘I have had my fill of murder,’ said Azémar, his voice like a rain-swollen door on flagstones. ‘I am a holy man and seek only peace. Do not provoke me.’
Mauger did what he had been trained to do since his earliest years. He struck at the wolf, cutting a huge slice out of its flank. The thing screamed terribly as the curved sword bit into its flesh, but it seized Mauger’s arm, tore it from its socket and threw it, still holding the sword, back up the stream.
Mauger’s remaining hand sought the wolf’s wound to tear it open, but he was too weak and too slow. The wolf picked him up and smashed him on the rocks. Then he leaped upon him and began tearing at his flesh.
Loys felt something warm on his fingers. He put up his hand. Blood. Not his own. Beatrice slumped against him. Azémar had knocked Mauger’s sword into her and she had an ugly wound in her side.
‘Help her! Help her!’
Elifr began to speak as if entranced: ‘We have struggled for nothing. Is the wheel turning again? Then the dead god will come and offer his sacrifice and the Norns will be bound to take it.’
‘No!’ shouted Loys. ‘No!’
‘Again and again will she suffer and die? All tenderness denied her, her life washed away on the blood tide.’ Elifr’s eyes were blank as he cradled the corpse of his mother under the water, and it was as if the words were not his own.
‘I will not let this happen!’ Loys tried to staunch the wound but the blood would not stop.
Azémar gulped and tore, his face grotesquely distorted, his wolf eyes green in the lamplight.
Elifr worked his ritual, muttering and whispering as he held the vala down.
‘The wolf shall be the bane of Odin
When the gods to destruction ride.
The wolf shall be the bane of Odin
When the gods to destruction ride.’
Azémar looked up from his feeding, his body like a wax effigy left too long in the sun. His eyes narrowed when he saw the wolfman.
Elifr gave a great cry and let go of the corpse in his arms. He leaped towards Loys, grabbing at his leg. ‘If you want to save her take off the stone,’ he said. ‘Take off the stone! The waters have shown me. Take off the stone!’
‘Why?’
‘To die. The god is coming.’
Loys’ hands were wet with Beatrice’s blood.
Azémar rose to his full height. He was huge – a head above even the tallest man, horribly muscled, his head a patchwork of flesh and hair but unmistakably that of a wolf. Still he fed on the body, gripping the torso in one hand, biting at it as if it was a hunk of bread.
Loys’ mind was numbed by the terror of the wolf-thing, by the sight of Beatrice, wounded and bleeding.
‘Take off the stone,’ said Elifr.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Take you across the bridge of light.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you have no place in the god’s story. You are not divine nor cursed nor monstrous. You are a man and your skein is still unwoven.’
Beatrice lay dying and he could not imagine his life without her. Loys took off the stone and Elifr dragged him down into the water.
52 The Blood-Rooted Tree
Loys fell, fell through water, fell through air, through darkness pricked with light, through a tree made of light, caught in threads of light.
Above him the pool stretched up like a shaft, a glimmering disc of silver at its top, the threads that suspended him spinning down from three points.
‘I am falling.’
‘You are falling.’
As he’d removed the stone, a tide had swept over him – of water, yes, but of voices and of images, strange emotions of fear, anger, love and hate. New words formed in his mind to describe new ways of feeling. One was like a purr – he could hardly say it, but it reminded him of a cat in the monastery at Rouen that the abbot had joked he was sure sniggered behind his back. Then another feeling like the tight-stomached, dry-throated sensation a warrior has the instant before battle begins. Yet another – a stolid sadness, a resentment, the way an old man resents his body.
Falling, falling, falling still.
‘Where am I?’
‘At the well of fate, where the Norns weave the skei
ns of men.’
Next to him was a girl no more than thirteen years old, her flesh pale and her eyes eaten. Bubbles were coming out of his mouth and Loys realised that, in some strange way, they must be underwater. He was falling, but he was falling upwards.
He had been at the base of a great tree and now he span up through its roots that stretched out like the feet of mountains – massive, more like things of stone than wood.
Things flashed past him in the dark, faces of light, creatures of light.
He was tumbling but up, towards the stars that spread above like the lights of a great army. Up through branches and leaves, and everywhere the light, pouring out of him, pouring out of the god who flew beside him.
A noise was in his ears, a crashing and breaking of branches. A great thump drove all the wind from him. He was on a strange riverbank. The river flowed beside a path and a broken wall.
‘What boat is this?’ It was a longship which seemed constructed of thousands of tiny petals, pale as bone.
At the prow of the ship stood a man, tall with a shock of red hair. Loys was sure he had seen him at the palace. Here he was not dressed for court. His head was smeared in blood and his body wrapped in a cloak of white hawk feathers.
‘This is Naglfar,’ said the girl.
‘What is it?’
‘A ship.’
He nodded to the tall man.
‘Who is he?’
‘A god. Lord of lies. Enemy of death.’
‘How can a liar be an enemy of death? Lies breed death.’
‘How can you be mortal unless you lie to yourself? Somehow you all think you will live forever,’ said the god, turning to face Loys.
‘Go with us,’ said the girl.
‘To where?’
‘Death’s kingdom.’
‘To do what?’
‘You will see.’
Lord of Slaughter (Claw Trilogy 3) Page 36