Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War)

by Lawrence, Mark

  Only night stopped him. The light fled early, still new to the world after the winter darkness that had held the ice for months. Without sight a man can’t follow a trail. All he’ll find in the dark is a broken leg, for the hinterlands are treacherous, the rocky ground ice-clad and fissured.

  The night had lasted forever, a misery of cold, haunted by visions of the slaughter at Eight Quays. Of Karl, broken and dying by the Wodinswood, of Emy . . . Her screaming had followed Snorri into the wilderness and the wind spoke it all through the long wait for dawn.

  And when the light came, snow came also, falling heavy from leaden skies, though Snorri had thought it too cold for snow. He’d roared at it. Lofted his axe at the clouds and threatened every god he could name. But still the snow fell, careless, dropping into his open mouth as he shouted, filling his eyes.

  Snorri carried on without a trail to follow, lost in the trackless white. What else was there for him? He took the direction his quarry had taken and struck out into the empty wastes.

  He found the dead man hours later. One of the Islanders who had been dead on the deck of his ship as it sailed the North Sea bound for the mouth of the Uulisk. No less dead now and no less hungry. The man struggled uselessly, bound chest-deep in a drift whose soft snow had accepted his dead flesh, then locked about it as his efforts to escape compressed the walls of his prison into something hard as rock. He reached for Snorri, his fingers black with the freezing blood locked inside. A sword blow had opened his face from eye to chin, exposing a jawbone wrapped in freeze-dried muscle, shattered teeth, frost-darkened and bloodless flesh. The remaining eye fixed Snorri with inhuman intensity.

  “You should be solid.” He had found men dead in the snow before, their limbs frozen hard as ice. He stared a moment longer. “You’re no part of what is right,” Snorri told it. “This is Hel.” He lifted his axe, knuckles white on the haft. “But you didn’t come from there, and this won’t send you to the river of swords.”

  The dead man only watched him, straining at the snow, tearing at it, without the wit to dig.

  “Even the frost giants would want no part of you.” Snorri struck the man’s head from his shoulders and watched it roll away, spattering the clean snow with rotten blood, sluggish and half frozen. The air held a strange chemical scent, like lamp oil, but different.

  Snorri wiped Hel’s blades in the snow until all trace of the creature had gone, then walked on, leaving the body still twitching in the drift.

  • • •

  By the time a man reaches the Bitter Ice he will have seen nothing but a world in shades of white for day upon day. He will have walked upon ice sheets and seen no tree or blade of grass, no rock or stone, heard no sound but that of his own loneliness and the mockery of the wind. He will believe there is in all the world no place more cruel, no place less suited to the business of living. And then he will see the Bitter Ice.

  In places the Bitter Ice may be gained by snow-clad slopes as one might scale a mountain. In other places the ice shelf towers in a series of vast cliff faces, some frost-white, some glacial blue and offering clear depths. When the midnight sun shines on such faces, it reaches in and hints of shapes are revealed as if the ice has swallowed and held great ocean whales, and leviathans that dwarf even these, all trapped for eternity beneath a mile and more of glacier. For the Bitter Ice is just that, one huge glacier, spread across a continent, always advancing or retreating at a pace that makes men’s lives seem brief as mayflies.

  Snorri couldn’t believe the Broke-Oar would allow himself to be led up onto the high ice, whatever madness might infect the Islanders with their dead men. Greed drove Sven Broke-Oar; he would accept risk, but never suicidal risk. Armed with this assessment of the man, Snorri trekked along the margins of the ice cliffs, low on food, as numb with the cold as he had been with the ghouls’ poisons.

  When Snorri first saw the black spot he thought it part of dying, his vision failing as the wilderness claimed him. But the spot persisted, kept its place, grew as he staggered on. And in time it became the Black Fort.

  • • •

  “Black Fort?” I asked.

  “An ancient stronghold built at the farthest reach of the Bitter Ice. Miles from it now. Built in days when that land was green.”

  “And what— Who holds it? Was your wife there?”

  “Not tonight, Jal. I can’t speak of it. Not tonight.”

  Snorri turned his face to the blaze in the west. He sat, lit with the fire glow, and I saw the memories take him, back to the Wodinswood once again, where he had burned his son.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Maladon is Norse-land. Crossing from East Thurtan you see it almost immediately. In the use of the land, the monuments, rough-hewn works of stone, carrying a power and a beauty not seen in the roadside chapels of the Thurtans. Many of the houses are roofed with turf, and the roof beams sport curving prows to remember the longboats that bore their ancestors to these shores. Perhaps some are even those same timbers, taken from ships beached on once-hostile shores.

  “These are Vikings, then?” I asked on passing our first Maladon peasants at work gathering in their harvest.

  “Fit-firar. Land men. Good stock, brave, but the sea spat them out. A true Viking knows the oceans like a lover.”

  “Says the man who has ridden a thousand miles rather than go by ship.”

  Snorri harrumphed at that. I didn’t mention that now he wasn’t even riding but walking. Although technically both the horses were mine since I paid for them, I felt I was riding Sleipnir on sufferance and that any mention of it might get me turfed off, or at the very least mocked for being such a footsore southerner.

  The mare bore deep scratches all along her neck, chest, and shoulders from our escape the night before. I’d spent much of the morning digging out splinters and cleaning the wounds. Both her eyes were scratched and thick with rheum. I did what I could with them but thought she might lose the left in time. Later I dug a good number of splinters from my own arms and two particularly painful ones from under my fingernails. I may not be much of a man but I count myself an excellent horseman, and a horseman takes care of his mount before himself. I’m not given to praying, but I said a prayer for Ron out on the grass and I’m not ashamed to say so.

  In the distance the sky held an ominous yellow cast. “Some city?” I asked. Crath City stained the skies with the smoke of ten thousand chimneys, and that had been in summer, just cook-fires and industry. I hadn’t thought the North held such cities, though.

  “The Heimrift.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t know what that is, do you?”

  “I’ll have you know I was educated by the finest scholars, including Harram Lodt, the famed geographer who made the world map that hangs in the pope’s own library.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a set of volcanoes.”

  “Fire mountains.” I was pretty certain that’s what a volcano was.

  “Yes.”

  “Finest scholars. Very clever men.”

  • • •

  A mile or two along the track we passed a hammer-stone, a crude representation of Thor’s hammer hacked from a piece of rock about five foot high and set by the road. Snorri seemed more interested in the pebbles lying around it. He bent to investigate, and I had to rein Sleipnir in or leave him crouched by the verge. Pride kept me there, waiting in the middle of the track rather than go back to see what the hauldr had found.

  “Interesting rocks?” I asked when he finally deigned to join me.

  “Rune stones. Wise men and völvas leave them. It’s a kind of message system.”

  “And you can read it?”

  “No.” Snorri admitted it with a grin. “But these ones were pretty clear.”

  “And?”

  “And our friendly dream-witch seems to have been right. T
he stones say Skilfar is at her Maladon seat. It’s been many years since that one came south.”

  “If she’s the Silent Sister’s twin, we should stay well away. She’s nobody we should have dealings with.”

  “Even if her blood could break this curse?” He reached up for me with his palm open and I shrank back.

  “You don’t believe that?” I said. Sageous had no reason to tell the truth, and some men’s tongues are burned by truths in any case. They tend to leave mine a little sore, I’ve found.

  “Believe she’s the twin . . . and her blood might help us. Believe she’s not the twin and your reasons for fearing her go away. Both ways mean we should see her. Even if every word Sageous spoke was false, Skilfar is a völva of vast renown. I know of none more famed. If she can’t break this curse, then no one can. And even if she can’t break the spell, she will know about the necromancers and their doings at the Bitter Ice.” Snorri ran a finger along the blade of his axe. “Charging in didn’t serve me so well last time. Knowledge is power, they say, and I may need a better edge than this.”

  I spat into the road. “Damn your barbarian logic.” It was all the counterargument I could muster.

  “So it’s settled, then. We’ll go.” Snorri smiled and walked on up the track.

  I nudged Sleipnir after him. “Surely if she’s so all-powerful she won’t just see the likes of anyone.”

  “We’re not just anyone, Jal,” Snorri called over his shoulder. “I’m a hauldr of the Uuliskind. You and I bear unusual magics, and Sleipnir is possibly the descendant of a horse of legend.” Ten more paces and then, “And you’re a prince of somewhere.”

  Damned if I ever wanted to see another witch long as I lived—I hadn’t even wanted to see the first one—but options were running short if I didn’t want to find myself on a boat sailing heathen seas in search of an unborn captain of the Dead King’s army.

  I drew level with the Norseman. “So how do we find her?”

  “That’s the easy part,” Snorri said. “We catch a train.”

  • • •

  What a train might be I had no idea, but I wasn’t going to let the Viking taunt me with my ignorance again, so I followed without complaint.

  We passed a few farmsteads, locals carting the harvest to be sold and stored against the winter. All of them remarked us, Snorri in particular, and whilst it still irked that a commoner, and Norseman at that, upstaged a full-blooded prince of Red March, it was pleasing to see he was as much a rarity in his stature in the North as in the South. Part of me had secretly worried that all men might be built along Snorri’s lines up amongst the fjords and I might find myself a dwarf amidst giants.

  Some amongst the fit-firar tried to speak to Snorri in the old tongue of the North, but he answered them in the Empire Tongue with good humour, thanking them for their courtesy. Each person we encountered told the same story about Skilfar. The völva had arrived without warning a month earlier, and none had seen her save those foolhardy enough to seek her out. Snorri asked for the nearest station, and armed with directions we abandoned the road north and headed out across open country.

  The station turned out to be nothing more than a broad and grassy ditch in the ground, overhung on one side by some kind of stone lip. We reached it under grey skies and a chill drizzle.

  “She lives in a ditch?” I’d heard of trolls living under bridges and witches in caves . . .

  “Now we follow the tracks,” Snorri said, and headed off along the side of the ditch, bound north and east.

  In time the ditch became shallow, then invisible, but we carried on through moor and meadow, finding the line again, now as a ridge, raised a yard above the surrounding terrain. Not until we reached the uplands did I first get an impression of what a fearsome creature the train must have been to leave such tracks. Where a man might go around, or weave a path of least resistance up a slope, the train had just ploughed on. We walked in one place along a rock-walled ravine thirty yards deep where the train had scored its path through the bedrock.

  Finally the land rose in a series of more substantial hills and still the train had kept its course. Ahead of us a circular hole waited, punched into the hillside, ten yards in diameter and blacker than sin. The rain strengthened, trickling down my neck and carrying its own cold and peculiar misery with it.

  “Yeah . . . I’m not going in there, Snorri.” Sir George might have followed his dragon into the cave, but damned if I was hunting train down in the bowels of the earth.

  “Ha!” Snorri punched me on the shoulder as if I’d made a joke. It really hurt, and I reminded myself not to make any actual jokes with him in arm’s reach.

  “Seriously. I’ll wait here. You let me know how it went when you come back.”

  “There are no trains, Jal. They’re long gone. Not so much as a bone left behind.” He looked back across the rough country behind us. “You can stay here alone, though, if you like, while I go in to see Skilfar.” He pursed his lips.

  Something in the word alone, spoken in empty country, made me change my mind. Suddenly I didn’t want to be left standing out in the rain. Besides, I needed to hear what this witch had to say about the curse, rather than whatever Snorri might remember of her words or choose to share. So together we went in, Snorri taking the lead and me guiding Sleipnir behind.

  Within a hundred yards the circle of light to our rear did little but offer a reminder that once upon a time we could see.

  “I’ve still got two torches.” I reached for my pack.

  “Better to keep them,” Snorri said. “There’s only one way to go.”

  Horrors stalked us in the dark, of course. Well, they stalked me. I imagined the pale men from the forest padding behind me on quiet feet, or waiting silent to either side as we marched past.

  We walked for miles. Snorri trailed a stick along the wall so he wouldn’t lose contact with it, and I followed the sound of scraping. Sleipnir clip-clopped along behind. In places the roof dripped or slime hung in long ropes. Every five hundred yards or so a shaft led up, no thicker than a man and offering a pale glimpse of sky. Strange plants clustered around these openings, reaching for the light with many-fingered leaves. In other places partial collapses saw us clambering up mounds of loose rubble, Sleipnir’s hooves dislodging small avalanches of broken rock. In one section some huge piece of Builder-rock blocked all but a narrow gap to one side and we had to edge through. Snorri allowed me to light the torch for that transit but had me quench it in a standing pool thereafter. I didn’t argue—both torches would most likely have been burned out along the path we’d taken so far, and what the light revealed looked boring enough, with no monsters on show, not even a discarded skull or shattered bone.

  When stiff arms enfolded me without warning, I screamed loud enough to collapse the roof and went down swinging wildly. My fist made contact with something hard, and the pain only amplified my distress. A hollow clattering went up on all sides.

  “Jal!”

  “Get off! Get the fuck off!”

  “Jal!” Snorri, louder this time, tense but calm enough.

  “Oh you fucker!” Something hard jabbed me in the eye as my assailant fell away, clattering.

  “Now would be the time for that torch, Jal.”

  Silence, except for my panting and the nervous stamp of Sleipnir’s hooves.

  “Fuckers!” I got my knife in hand and slashed the air a couple of times for good measure.

  “Torch.”

  “I’ve got— It’s somewhere.” A minute or two of fumbling straps and digging through my pack and I’d set flame to tinder. The torch took the fire and spread its glow. “Christ Jesu!”

  Ahead of us pale figures filled the tunnel, rank upon rank upon rank of them. Statues all of them, men and women, most of regular height, all naked and without genitalia. On every side of me lay toppled examples, my most recent foe reachi
ng for the ceiling with a straight arm.

  “Hemrod’s army,” Snorri said.

  “What?” Some of the statues had eyes painted into their sockets, some hair, also painted, but most were bald, eyeless, many lacking definition, some to the degree that their fingers were fused, faces blank. Many struck oddly nonchalant poses, looking more like idle nobility than marching warriors. There was space to walk between each rank and somehow Snorri had ended up doing so, leaving me to crash into the first line.

  “Hemrod,” Snorri said.

  “Hemroids to you. I’ve never heard of him.” I took hold of the outstretched arm before me and pulled the figure to its feet. The thing had almost no weight to it. Whatever it had been fashioned from was far lighter than wood. I tapped it. “Hollow?”

  “These are Builder things. Statues, I guess. Hemrod held sway in this region before the empire grew across his lands. When they buried him down here, they set an army of these plasteek warriors to guard him and to serve him in the life beyond. Perhaps they wait for Ragnarok with him in Valhalla.”

  “Pah.” I stood and dusted myself down. “I’d want better soldiers. Look: I felled seven of them while fighting blind.”

  Snorri nodded. “Though to be fair you did have a screaming girl to help you.” He glanced back down the tunnel. “I wonder where she ran off to.”

  “Eat dung, Norseman.” I started off between the rows.

  • • •

  “Someone must keep standing them up, you know.” Snorri spoke from behind me.

  I paused and swapped the torch from one hand to the other. My arm hurt from holding it overhead and dribbles of hot pitch kept escaping to burn my fingers.

  “Why?”

  “It stands to reason. They’ve stood here five hundred years and more. You can’t be the first to fetch up against one.”