Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Freya and Erik finished quickly and let Wren see to the bowls, said their farewells, and strode out through the cloak room and through the iron door out into the bright morning sunlight in the cobbled courtyard. Leif was leaning against the wall just outside the door, and when they stepped out, he pushed off from the wall and glared at them.

  “I’m to be your guide on Mount Esja, and farther if needs be. The queen’s orders. But let’s be clear. This is your hunting trip, not mine. I don’t plan to die with you out there,” he said quietly. There was no fierce arrogance in his eyes or voice. He looked tired, even scared, which made him look even younger than before.

  Freya let her eyes flick down to the youth’s sword, reliving his words from last night, reliving the sight of his blade flying at her throat. Last night he had seemed vicious and deadly, but now he was something else entirely.

  Maybe he’d just come from an argument last night. Or he lost a friend. Or he was just scared at seeing a reaver in the castle cell. He’s lost dozens of friends to the reavers over the years. So all right. Today is a new day. Time to start over.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “We appreciate any help you can offer.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you do, but don’t expect much help from me.” Leif sniffed and turned away, and over his shoulder he said, “If we do find the demon, I’ll probably just let him kill you.”

  Or maybe he’s still a prick.

  “I want to stab him,” Erik signed. “Do you want to stab him?”

  Freya nodded.

  The hunters shouldered their spears and the three of them marched out into the streets and down the smaller lanes to the eastern seawall overlooking the bay. A grim-faced guard watched them step out through an iron door onto the gravel beach where the low tide had left a field of seaweed gleaming wetly in the cold air.

  The black water of the bay sloshed up on the shore flecked with green-white foam and froth. The beach was only a few paces wide between the base of the seawall and the edge of the inky water, and the gravel sloped down sharply between the two. Leif led the way along the strand back toward the southern side of the bay and Freya noted the armed men, all massive and scarred house carls, leaning on the wall above them every fifty paces.

  “This is a little faster than going back out the main gate,” Leif said. “But only at low tide, of course.”

  “And at high tide?” Freya asked.

  The youth pointed to the seawall beside them and Freya saw the dirty line of green and black slime several hand-spans above the wall’s base. “Oh.”

  “Every now and then, a reaver will try to come at the city this way,” Leif said. “But we always hear them on the gravel, or splashing in the water. By the time they’re close enough to see, there are at least twenty men on the wall waiting for them, and then it’s over quickly enough.”

  They rounded the base of the point and turned east toward Mount Esja, which rose gently from the nearby hills from a very wide base to a very distant peak. The frosted grass and scrub only rose a third of the way up its slopes, shifting to broad white sheets of gleaming snow for the second third, and from there up it was all black stone and gray ash. The summit exhaled a lazy trail of smoke into the cloudless sky.

  For two hours they hiked along an old footpath overgrown with grass and weeds, and Freya kept her eyes on the ground and her ears on the wind, searching. From time to time, Erik would point out a track or a trace, a bit of fur or a depression in the frozen mud, but most looked and smelled old. And the farther they climbed into the hills, closer to Esja and farther from the water, the warmer the air and the ground became.

  “How many reavers are there altogether?” Freya asked.

  “A few hundred, at least.” Leif did not turn back to speak and his soft voice was muffled by the wind. “They run in packs, and sleep in dens. There are two or three dens on the northeast face of Esja, and many more farther north and east beyond Thorskull where the deer and bear hunting is better. There are also five or six dens to the south near Gulbringa, which is probably why we haven’t heard from Torsberg in a long while. We’ve had refugees from all over with all sorts of stories over the last few years. Usually the reavers just kill the people they find. Only a handful get bitten and survive long enough to turn.”

  “Still, hundreds of reavers…” Freya frowned at the distant slopes of Esja. “Where should we start our search? Are we going to the ravine where you fought Fenrir the last time?”

  “No. The queen told me to show you the pit where the beast was found.” At this, the youth did look back for a moment. His mouth was hidden by the collar of his jacket but Freya could see how he narrowed his eyes, and she wondered if he was merely squinting against the light shining off the sparkling bay icebergs, or if he might actually be smiling at them.

  Shortly before noon, Leif pointed out a cluster of purplish-red barberry bushes and they made a light meal of the little fruits. Freya ate sparingly as she gazed down over the distant bay to the tiny walled city, half-hidden by the fog creeping in off the sea.

  “Something wrong?” Erik signed.

  She shook head and said nothing.

  It took another two hours of steady hiking up the steep slopes of Esja, angling ever northward across the loose, ashy shale, before Leif paused again and pointed to a dark shape jutting out from the face of the mountain. “Ivar’s Drill.”

  It was a dim and distant shape, a gray figure leaning out into the cool empty air from a shallow depression in the ground. Everything was silent and still. And Freya saw only a spear of rock that would take another half hour to reach, and so on they marched. As they drew closer, Freya began to see the details of the drill. It was massive steel drum, with a tangle of what looked to be pots and pans poking out of the top. Six massive steel legs reached out from the drum to stand on the rocky slope, holding the machine steady. And when they finally reached the edge of the pit, the huntress looked down and saw the long steel arm of the drill reaching down into the darkness.

  She went over to the closest leg of the machine and scraped at the rust on it. The drill’s feet were nailed into the mountainside and rust-colored stains had trickled down the rock face from the feet, looking like dried blood on the ground. She looked out to the west again, and in the distance she could still see the faint gray blot of Rekavik surrounded on three sides by the dark waters of the bay.

  It started here. So close they could see the city. But the demon was buried here all this time, all these ages it was right here beneath their feet. A real demon, imprisoned by Woden himself.

  How many times did the people of Rekavik look up at Mount Esja without a care in the world, without any idea that Fenrir was sleeping right in front of them? And how many other monsters might there be buried in the earth, or under the sea, or in the sky right now, just waiting for some fool to wake them again?

  A snap of Erik’s fingers drew her attention back to the pit. He signed, “Has anyone ever gone down there?”

  “What the hell is he doing?” Leif asked, jerking his chin at the taller man.

  “He wants to know if anyone has ever gone down into the tunnel before,” Freya said. “And so do I.”

  “Of course not.” Leif hooked his thumbs in his belt and stared down into the darkness. “I’ve only been back here twice since Fenrir came out, and not for long, and not to go down there.”

  The huntress stared down into the darkness with him, the wind whipping through their long hair, silver-gold beside raven black. “I understand. It’s all right to be afraid.”

  The pale youth glared at her, but then he glanced at the hulking Erik and sauntered away along the pit’s edge. “So, are you going down there?”

  “Yes. There may be something in there that can tell us about Fenrir. What he eats and how he sleeps.”

  Leif snorted. “He eats men and he sleeps on a pile of bones.”

  Freya ignored him and looked up at Erik. “Ready?”

  He nodded and began shuffling down the steep slop
e of the pit to the tunnel’s mouth, where he rested one hand on the shaft of the drill and paused. His fingers said, “I can hear something in there.”

  Freya knelt beside him and placed her hand on the smooth rock wall of the tunnel, feeling the sharp grooves left by the drill. There were no shudders in the mountain, no vibrations telling tales of giant beasts moving about in the darkness below. “I don’t hear it. Is it like breathing? Do you think it’s Fenrir?”

  Erik shook his head and signed, “It’s very faint. I’m not surprised you can’t hear it. I’m not sure, but I think it sounds like flies. If there is something down there, it’s probably dead.”

  Chapter 10

  Wren huddled by the door of Katja’s cell. A light snow was falling on the city and beginning to lie thick upon the frozen mud and dead grass of the courtyard. Men crunched their way back and forth across the roads and the yards, but the snow fell in perfect silence. With an old blanket wrapped over her coat, Wren almost felt warm. At first when she sat down against the stone wall beside the cell door, the cold of the stone had nearly drained the heat from her body, but now the stone was warm and the blanket was warm and the stiff ache in her back was fading. She sighed and watched her breath twist and swirl in the chilly air.

  After two hours of sitting in the snow, she sat up and peered around the corner at the courtyard and the iron door in the castle wall. Two of the older guards stood near the door by a small brazier that held a crackling peat fire. “You know, my lord,” she said with an upward glance at the gray sky, “I have often thought it was foolish to do a foolish thing, even for a good reason, and it seems to me that sitting here in the cold to protect a locked door is quite a foolish thing. I mean, had you seen fit to fill the hearts of the people with fear and hate toward poor Katja, then yes, I could see the honor and purpose in staying here. But you obviously have other designs for Rekavik today. This gentle snow, for instance. That’s a very nice touch, I think. Good work, my lord. I shall celebrate your wisdom over there by that warm fire.”

  She scrambled to her feet, tugged her blanket more tightly around herself, and trudged through the soft snow to the guards and the crackling, sparking pile of burning moss beside them. The men nodded in greeting and she nodded back. Holding her hands over the fire, Wren felt the blood and the feeling creeping back into her flesh.

  In no time at all she was smiling and talking cheerily to the two grim-faced men-at-arms, who seemed content to listen and nod in reply from time to time. She told them about her journey from Denveller, and the frogs on Delver Island, and the giant carcass in Hengavik, and she was about to describe the miller and his brother when a stream of glaring, bearded men stomped through the doorway, frowned at the guards, and stomped across the courtyard and into the castle.

  Wren blinked. “Who were they?”

  “No one,” the shorter guard said. “Ragnar Svensson and his friends. Just a few idiots who like to complain to the queen about the walls and the fishing and the weather. They show up about once a month to demand that Skadi fix everything with her magic, and she tells them where they can stick their whining, and they go home again. Hmph. They’re a bit early this month. Usually they wait until the new moon to make their noise. Bunch of jackasses.”

  “Early?” Wren looked from the castle door to the corner of the building that hid the stairs down to Katja’s cell. She wrapped her hands up in the folds of her blanket and paced slowly and quietly back along the castle wall to the cell and descended the steps.

  Wren peered in through the narrow, barred window in the steel door, but the cell was utterly dark except for the tiny patch of light falling through the window, which Wren’s head was now blocking. So she saw nothing inside. “Katja? Are you awake? Can you understand me? Katja? It’s Wren. Well, you probably don’t remember me, especially now that you’re a ravenous monster and all, but I’m a friend of your sister’s, and I’m going to keep you safe, all right? You just need to stay quiet, just like you are now, and everything will be fine. You’ll see. The Allfather won’t abandon us now, not after coming so far. Journeys like this one, they don’t end in the middle. They go on and on, like in the old sagas. Sometimes they go on for years, but they always end the right way. You didn’t survive all this time just to die in some cell, in the middle of the story, and I—”

  Wren paused to frown. “Unless of course, this might not be your story at all. It could be my story. In that case, maybe you will die, and it’ll make me sad, so sad that I can’t cure the plague until a handsome young man comes along to make me smile again.”

  She smiled at the cold door. “But no, that won’t happen. You and I aren’t exactly close, so it wouldn’t make me that sad if you died. I mean, I would be sad, Allfather knows I’d hate for anything to happen to you, but I can’t say it would break my heart more than anyone else’s death. After all, we’ve never even met really. Never even spoken.”

  The young vala hunched down on the cold steps for a moment to blow some warmth into her thin fingers. “Then again, maybe this is your sister’s story. Oh, now that makes more sense. After all, she’s the one on the long journey and actually doing all the work, isn’t she? And if you died, it really would break her heart, I suppose. She might fall into a black state indeed, full of sorrow, maybe even starving herself in a tower by the sea, refusing to see her own poor Erik. Or she might go berserk and kill us all, kill every last person in Rekavik and burn the city to the ground, and then spend the rest of her life wandering the earth to repent her crimes and earn her way back into Woden’s good graces. Aye, I can see that story well enough. Worthy of a saga.”

  Again she frowned and picked at her lip. “So I suppose, if you do die, I’ll have to leave the city. I mean, I’d hate to die in Freya’s blood-fury. But then, maybe I could find her again, years later, and help her atone for her crimes and—”

  A hand jerked her back from the door and Wren tripped and fell down hard on the stone steps behind her. She hopped up, rubbing her rear and glaring at the four men standing in the snow above her. They wore sealskin coats without a trace of fur among them, and each of them clutched an axe or a hammer in one hand.

  The men from the courtyard.

  She pressed her lips tightly together for a moment before saying to the leader, “You must be Ragnar. I think you’re lost. The door to the castle is back around the other side.” She jerked her head toward the main door as she brought her hands together under her blanket and unwound her sling from her wrist.

  “Get out of the way, girl.” The speaker was a huge old bear with saggy jowls and thin white hair on his head and thick white brows over his squinting eyes. He had a deep voice and he spoke with a soft, unwavering drone. “We’ve come for the beast.”

  “She’s not a beast,” Wren said. “She’s a woman, a vala from the east. She’s just sick, poisoned. But we’re going to cure it. Skadi and me. I’m the, well, the vala of Denveller. We’re going to find a cure for it just as soon as Freya comes back.”

  “Freya? Is that the woman Leif left with this morning? “ Ragnar shook his head a little. “You won’t be seeing her again.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one comes back from the north. Even the warriors who go south lose half their numbers each time. Your friends will be dead by the end of the day.”

  “As the Allfather wills,” Wren said. “But Katja stays here. She’s not hurting anyone. She’s locked up. Can’t you see that?”

  “She’s got the plague. She’s one of those things now. An animal. A killer.”

  “No!” Wren shrugged her blanket off her shoulder so they could see the loaded sling in her hand.

  The men chuckled.

  “Get her out of there,” Ragnar said quietly.

  One of the men knelt down at the side of the stairwell and reached down toward Wren, but she whipped her sling around and smashed his fingers away. The man yanked his bleeding hand back with a hiss and he clutched his broken fingers to his chest. Wren kept her sling spinni
ng in front of her. “I promised to protect her.”

  “And I promise she’ll be dead in a few moments.” Ragnar hefted his axe and started down the steps toward her.

  There were only six steps and no room at the bottom for a second person, and as soon as the old man had taken his second step, Wren swung her sling at his face. He took the blow on his fist and then raised his axe to strike her with the butt of its bone handle.

  “Ragnar!” Halfdan shoved through the men and grabbed the head of the raised axe. The two of them struggled over the weapon for a moment and Halfdan lost his grip, leaving Ragnar off-balance on the stairs. Wren grabbed the walls on either side of the sunken stairs and hurled herself up onto the snowy grass just as Ragnar tumbled down into the bottom of the steps at the foot of the steel door.

  Finding her sling empty, she grabbed a stone from the pouch on her belt and lurched up to her knees, but Ragnar’s three friends hadn’t moved. They all leaned back, arms folded over their chests, axes standing in the snow against their legs. They were frowning down at Ragnar. The old man groaned and tried to push himself up, but he had fallen at an awkward angle into the stone well at the bottom of the steps and his legs were wedged against the wall under his body.

  “You!” Halfdan shoved one of the silent three. “Get him out of there.”

  The man took his time, lingering to give Halfdan a few dirty looks and to make it plain that he wasn’t afraid of the burly guard, but he did go down the steps and he hauled Ragnar up off the floor and helped the older man back up to the frozen earth.

  Halfdan grabbed the man’s shirt and yanked him forward. “That girl in there is Skadi’s prisoner, and Skadi says she doesn’t die. Understand?”

  Ragnar tried to shove himself free, but Halfdan’s huge fist remained buried in his shirt. Ragnar said, “She’s no girl anymore, she’s one of them!”

  “That’s right, she’s got the plague,” Halfdan said. “And the queen’s going to cure the damn thing, and to make a cure she needs a beast to test it on. So either you leave that girl in there, or we can send you out into the hills to find another one on your own.”