Lord of Slaughter c-3

by M. D. Lachlan

  Through the clinging fog he heard something. Not a voice, not an animal cry but something resonating deeper within him, an emanation of something older than sound. It called to him. He pictured a sign, a jagged slash with a line through it. His skin rose into bumps as he heard it howl. He understood it, knew what it said.

  ‘I am here, where are you?’ It was the lady, she was calling to him, or rather something inside her was.

  He looked back at the palace but then turned away from the fight with its delicious scents of murder and battle. He was summoned and he could not resist.

  Azemar threw back his head and shouted, ‘I am here! Where are you?’ But his voice was the howl of a wolf.

  M. D. Lachlan

  Lord of Slaughter

  45 The Bloody Waters

  Air! A hand pulled him out of the water. It was flat dark, no glimpse of light. He lay gasping on cold rock.

  ‘We are through. Those men were sent by the gods, but they did not serve the gods’ purpose. Who was the white-haired one?’

  ‘His name is Ragnar.’

  ‘He followed you?’

  ‘He was sent to kill me, I think.’

  ‘I have seen him before.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a past life. I have fought him before. He is a powerful enemy. Did he have the sword?’

  ‘What sword?’

  ‘The one that is curved. Like a sickle moon.’

  ‘I saw no such sword.’

  ‘It will come, along with the stone.’

  ‘What stone?’

  ‘A magical stone. The Wolfstone.’

  Loys was so shaken he didn’t even think of the stone in his bag.

  ‘What is happening?’

  ‘A god is coming. His symbol is the three hanging knots; his presence is in the runes. When twenty-four are in one person, he is here, and the wolf will come to kill him.’

  ‘You have meddled with devils,’ said Loys.

  He longed to see. He took the bag from around his neck and felt inside, pulling out the flint, the lamp and the oil-soaked cloth. Very carefully he tore off a strip of the cloth. He placed it near the flint, which he struck against the iron. Quickly he had a spark, which he blew to a small flame. Now he could light the lamp.

  The chamber was almost a sphere, just big enough to stand in. Loys was sitting on a shelf of rock with the wolfman beside him.

  ‘What now?’ said Loys.

  ‘This is the world city. It is a flowering of the magical forces of the well. This is where the world tree draws its water. We’re on our way to that well.’

  ‘And if the god you’re seeking doesn’t come?’

  ‘He will come. The god is in three forms. He is one of them. The Vala’s vision revealed it. Beneath the comet, at that battle, the god who sleeps with the head at his feet. It was a sign — as Odin drank the waters of the well, next to the headless Mimir so the god would be found. He should have killed me when I asked.’

  ‘I thought you sought to kill him.’

  ‘He cannot be killed.’

  ‘I think Basileios can kill all the world if he so chooses. But he is far away.’

  ‘He will come.’

  ‘How can you avoid your fate?’

  ‘At the well. I will receive insight.’

  ‘How do you know where it is?’

  ‘I can hear it.’

  ‘What can you hear?’

  ‘The runes. There are runes within it. They are calling to others.’

  He stood and climbed to the top of the chamber. A small tunnel led away, scarcely wider than his shoulders. The wolfman wriggled in. Loys had no alternative but to follow, pushing the lamp before him. It was not even a crawl. He went forward like a snake, writhing on his belly, progressing by tiny increments. He had a terrible feeling of claustrophobia, a desire to breathe freely without the tunnel pressing in on his ribcage. He would have lacked the courage to go on if the wolfman had not been before him. Pulling himself through, using only his fingertips at points because his arms were so restricted, he found it very difficult to see, his head forced down by the narrowness of the tunnel. He moved the lamp on, fighting down panic.

  He had to go on, for Beatrice. He didn’t accept what the wolfman was telling him but it was clear there was demonic involvement. If Beatrice was caught up in this, he needed to get her out of it. That gave him strength.

  His knees were raw, his elbows too. He went on, moving the lamp a little, snaking forward, resting, moving the lamp. The darkness around him seemed so tight, like a great hand that could reach out at any moment and snuff out his little light.

  Ahead of him, a light wavered. The lamp was taken from him. The wolfman signalled for Loys to be silent then helped him out. They were in another small cave, but this one was half flooded from a waterfall that tumbled down from a tunnel that entered near the ceiling.

  The water poured away down another low tunnel. In there was the light, not quite torchlight but a soft and constant red. The wolfman climbed down through the stream, his movements inaudible beneath the trickling of the water.

  Loys strained to listen. There were voices. A mumble of words, a drone.

  ‘In the sacred waters where the three streams meet,

  Goddess who is three in one,

  Goddess of the night and of the dark of the night,

  Here by the waters

  I pay the price of lore.’

  He recognised the voice now. It was unquestionably that of the chamberlain.

  Suddenly the voice faltered. Above him a skittle-skattle sound of someone bumping down the stream bed, a cough and a curse. Someone else was coming.

  46

  A Girl Weaving

  In the cave’s pool sat a dead girl. Elai knew she was dead by the coldness of her hands, her absence of breath. The ritual of herbs and meditations had worked, and she had gone to the threshold of where she needed to be.

  In those three streams were the fates of all men. In that pool waters entwined, eddied and knotted to weave the skein of human destiny. Three faces of the goddess Hecate, three fates, three Norns — the name of those women came so naturally to her — three streams whose flow not even the gods could resist.

  But he had tried to resist. What was his name? Odin. Her mother had said the name and though it was strange to her, the syllables seemed to resonate in her bones. Her ancestors had followed that grim fellow, the waters told her.

  She put her hand above her to touch the stream that flowed into the pool.

  She said its name. Uthr. What was. To her right another stream trickled down. She said its name. Verthani. What is. A third entered in front of her under the surface of the water — she could feel its flow. She said its name. Skuld. What must be. The language was strange to her but completely comprehensible. Not the Greek her mother used to worship the goddess. Older, far older. She thought of Odoacer, who had taken his wolf warriors to Rome, who had made the emperor kneel. Had he spoken that way, her mighty ancestor?

  Her fingers played in the flow of the unseen stream. It wound and twisted in her hands. Its movement fascinated her. On impulse she went to where the stream left the pool, put her fingers into its sucking flow. It was so seductive. It did not feel like water at all, but rather like an endless length of beautiful thread, soft and pliable, moving through her hands.

  A rhyme came into her mind.

  Thence come the women strong in wisdom,

  Three to the dark waters down beneath the tree.

  Uthr is one named,

  Verthani the next, and Skuld the third.

  Mightily wove they the web of fate,

  While Bralund’s towns were trembling all.

  And there the golden threads they wove.

  And in the moon’s hall fast they made them,

  The wyrd of men and gods.

  One of those names resonated above the others: Skuld. What must be.

  ‘That is my name,’ she said into the ghost light of the rocks. ‘Something is
owed here.’ Her voice came back to her as the dead echo of the small chamber.

  The well had asked for her death and that of her mother. It had showed her clearly what was her fate, and that of so many others if she was too weak to make the sacrifice.

  Death, eternally, again and again, agony and torture, denial and madness. Some things were in the water, bright shining things, and she wanted pick them up, as if her soul was a shrine to be decked with candles and trinkets.

  What were these things? Shapes, symbols, runes. That was the word. What did these runes do? They held the universe together. They were the connections between things — the things that allowed sense and reason. They were understanding — the foundations and the structure of the sane mind. But they were not meant to be seen, not meant to be touched and used. The ability to do that was the key to magic and to madness.

  ‘We have tired of the tale the god has to tell.’

  The god had intended to set his runes inside her, to drag her to his death. Did he think he could cheat her, blind her and control her? The water flowed around her and she fell in on herself. She was not sitting in a pool of water. She sat in a pool of thoughts, of visions and memories, a stream of words, fears, hopes and disappointments running out of it over her fingers into blackness. She could manipulate it, change its course.

  She saw the remaining symbols in the water, keening for their sisters. Her death, her self-sacrifice, had trapped the runes in the pool but not all of them. Some had gone away, fearing their fate, each one a fragment of a god.

  Where had they gone? Did it matter? She would call to them and they would come back, to be released by death, back to be trapped in the pool. Then the eternal dumbshow would stop.

  The god had not reckoned with her magic. He had asked for her mother’s death and for that of her brother but he hadn’t understood who she was. He knew only she was a magical creature, not who she truly was — a Norn, one of the three sisters who spin the fates of all humanity. She laughed as she realised what had happened. The god had mistaken her for an incarnation of himself, an empty vessel into which he could pour his runes. She was to die for him after the runes had assembled within her. But she had pre-empted him and gone to death before he could fill her with his magic. It had not occurred to him she could manifest herself in the realm of men too. As Odin began to claim her for his own, to put the runes within her, to inhabit her flesh and offer that flesh to the wolf so he might live, suffer and die, she had done what he had not thought possible. She reached out into the stream, twisted the current through her fingers, felt it as a multitude of threads and drawn out those she recognised as belonging to her brother.

  The threads trembled with the deep currents of his ambition, the hot flow of his jealousies, and she had weaved them together into a skein of murder. He had killed her and thwarted the dead god’s will.

  ‘Odin,’ she said, ‘you could not live in me. I am stronger than you and my magic cannot be gainsayed. Here by these dark waters that feed the tree on which all worlds grow, I will have what I am owed.’

  How many had he tried to set inside her? Twenty-four in their orbits of eight — twenty-four, a magic number, a god’s number. When twenty-four runes came to life inside any human, then the old god was present and ready to face his little fate on earth so he might avoid his bigger one in eternal time.

  He had tried to make her his sacrifice, as he had done to her sisters in times past. Sisters? Did she mean Styliane? No. Others — sisters bound to her eternally.

  Where were they? Uthr. Verthani. The strangeness of those words struck her. Have they taken flesh as I have? Where were these thoughts coming from? From the water. She saw the god’s wake, a trail of blood dripping throughout human history. He should pay the price for that.

  The raven’s wing is black

  Scarlet stains the snow’s white field.

  The dirge-voice was in her head. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like him, the one who was speaking. Are you here for your sacrifice? She’d known him a long time, longer than she remembered. The dead god. Odin, Hecate, Mercury — that many-formed fellow. He was near. She saw a hill, grey in a raw dawn, and on it a tree where men dangled and choked from hanging ropes, their legs doing the dead god’s dance. She saw the gold of kings thrown into waters rich with loam, holy slaves bound and drowned, around their necks the dead god’s symbol — the sticky, tricky triple knot.

  Then she saw him, near her in the water in the blood glow of the rocks — his bloated corpse face, the black rope at his neck, his good eye staring at her, the other torn and ragged. He chanted a dissonant song:

  ‘Under the gallows tree they worship me;

  By the moon they call me;

  Triple-knotted, triple-faced, triple-looking.

  Three times I suffered to sacrifice

  Myself unto myself. In the branches

  Of that terrible tree.’

  She heard mad bursts of poetry:

  ‘It is said, you went with dainty steps in the city, and knocked at houses as a vala.

  In the likeness of a fortune teller

  You went among people.

  Now that, I think, betokens a base nature.’

  The words seemed to have a great power. They fell as earth to bury her, and she stretched out her hands to shovel them away. She heard a drum, its beat toiling and slow above her. The god’s will was bound by cold irons to eternal death, and she knew what he offered. Death, again and again, spreading like a stain across the light of the world.

  ‘Lady,’ said the god, ‘it seems to me I know your name. I mistook you for someone.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘For myself.’

  His mind roamed over hers, a sensation of cold fingers on her face, a desperate pulling and upending of things within her, as if her soul was a house and he a miser searching for a coin within it.

  ‘You know me, old one. As I know you. Maddener. Frenzied One. All Father. All Hater.’

  ‘I know you.’

  ‘What is my name?’

  ‘I dare not say it.’

  ‘My name is Skuld.’

  ‘Have you fallen to the world of breath?’

  ‘Did you think I would let you travel here unwatched?’

  ‘I have a bargain with you.’

  ‘Only for as long as you can honour it.’

  ‘I will honour it. By the runes that I am, I will honour it.’

  A great white tree stretched out to the stars above her. In the pool the symbols sparkled like shipwrecked treasure in the tales of children.

  ‘You play the fates falsely, Odin, made us share in your deaths, weave strange magics and sacrifice ourselves to ourselves. Now see what I weave for you.’

  She held up her hand. Crimson threads flowed from it, streaming out towards the god, entangling his pale body, pulling her towards him.

  He stretched out his hands, snapping the threads, and images appeared: a starved girl-child lying broken in a cave, a blonde-haired woman covered in blood and screaming, a wolf guzzling on her entrails.

  The god’s voice spoke:

  ‘These are the gifts I have given you:

  Death for life, life for death.

  I have bowed to your will.

  For you I have suffered agonies deep and long.’

  Elai heard herself speak: ‘Can you not hear how he howls for your blood? The wolf strains against the bonds with which you tied him.’

  Each sinew, each curve of the muscles of the corpse god’s pale and wounded torso seemed no more than the twist of a rune; the tattoos that stained the flesh of his body, his arms and his face were runes too. The god was the runes. He had promised to die for her — that was the destiny in the stream that played through her fingers — but he had killed her, in her many and various forms. She saw herself as she had been — a sorcerer in an animal mask looking out over a cold sea, a wolfman in his skins, many other things, male and female over many lives, trying to bring the god to his destiny of death. He had
torn her, tricked her and broken her heart, left her as a dead girl in the water — Odin, that ancient killer.

  ‘You have played me basely, lord. For this you will pay what you owe.’

  The god spoke:

  ‘I took a fetter and the fetter was called Thin,

  And I bound the wolf to a rock called Scream,

  The human rock, the living flesh, where I tied myself,

  So he might tear and I might die to please the Norns,

  Spinners of the fates of men and gods.’

  Elai replied, ‘Your destiny is to die. See the skein I have woven.’

  ‘If I am torn in this middle earth then you must honour your vow.’

  ‘You will not be torn,’ said Skuld. ‘I have trapped your runes within this pool. They cannot come to the flesh.’

  ‘Sixteen I pulled from the waters and threw them to the stars to be be born in men.’

  ‘Eight I kept here; sixteen shall return.’

  ‘I will pull them from the waters.’

  ‘You poured yourself into cracked cups. I will draw them here to die. Here I shall hold them while the wolf is freed to slay you. Such is your destiny as was woven when the world began.’

  ‘I am master of magic. You, the fates, are bound to my will,’ said the god.

  ‘Then we will stay and fight a while, you and I.’

  ‘I think that a good way to spend my days. I will call my servants.’

  ‘And I will call mine.’

  ‘Men will sing of how Odin sat and battled his wits against a Norn’s.’

  ‘They have sung already; the outcome is known.’

  ‘At Uthr’s well does Odin sit

  But the wolf comes slinking soon.’

  ‘On your own you cannot match me. I will have my death here. My bargain will be fulfilled.’

  ‘I am not alone. My sisters will come.’

  In the face of the dead god the girl saw fear.

  Her hands were in the magic pool, turning and directing the flow of the stream, weaving the water and the destinies of men and gods. The god sought to distract her from her work. It became cold in the chamber and it seemed to her she had wandered onto a moor locked in fog where spectres roamed. She was entombed in a sandy grave, the bones of dead men all around her. She flew over battlefields hearing the screams of the dead, seeing their tormented faces and knowing that with a turn of the threads in her hands she could save them from their fate.