Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War)

by Lawrence, Mark

  “I mean, why bother?”

  “Magic.” Snorri puffed a breath through his lips. “It’s an old charm, a defence. They say old magic runs deepest. Skilfar makes her home here for a reason when she comes south.”

  “Well, I ain’t going back to stand them up again.” I lifted the torch higher. “Some kind of chamber up ahead . . .”

  As we drew closer I saw that the space might better be called a cavern, not for the nature of it—men had built this—but for the size of the place. Cavernous would be the word to use. The blackness within swallowed the light of my torch. A rust-covered floor stretched away and Builder statues filled the portion of the chamber I could see, all pointing outward from some hidden centre. To either side, tunnel mouths opened, statues marching away into the darkness. If the spacing held constant I guessed maybe eight or ten tunnels met here. Truly it must once have been a den of trains, coiling about each other like great serpents.

  Snorri nudged me on and I advanced with caution between the ranks. Some prurient part of me that is always on duty noted that the vast majority of the statues here were of women, all in the same kinds of stiff and awkward poses, my torchlight flickering across hundreds if not thousands of ancient but perky plasteek breasts.

  “Getting colder.” Snorri at my shoulder.

  “Yes.” I stopped, handed him the torch, and circled around a nude plasteek woman to stand behind him. “After you. She’s your Wicked Witch of the North after all.” Somehow the “wicked witch” part contrived to echo about the chamber, taking a damnably long time to die away.

  Snorri shrugged and went ahead. “Leave the horse.”

  The radial aisles of statues created a steady narrowing as we approached the centre, and soon Sleipnir would be knocking them over left and right. I let go her reins. “Stay.” She blinked one gunked-up eye at me, the other glued tight with secretions, and lowered her head.

  The temperature fell by the yard now and frost glittered on plasteek arms to every side. I hugged myself and let my breath plume before me.

  In the middle of the chamber a circular platform rose in four steps and in the centre of that, in an ice-clad chair, sat Skilfar: tall, angular, white skin stretched tight across sharp bones, draped in the skins of several arctic foxes and with a white mist running from her limbs as if they might be cold enough to shatter steel. Eyes like frozen seawater fixed upon Snorri’s torch and out it went, the firelight replaced instead by a star-glow that rose from the frost-wrapped limbs of her ancient guardians.

  “Visitors.” She rolled her neck, and ice crunched.

  “Hail Skilfar.” Snorri bowed. Behind him I wondered just what it was this witch did sitting here in the dark when she didn’t have us to talk to.

  “Warrior.” She inclined her head. “Prince.” Cold eyes found me again. “Two of you, bound by the Sister, how droll. She does enjoy her little jokes.”

  Little jokes? Anger rose, elbowing aside a measure of my sensible fear. “Your sister, madam?” I wondered how cold her blood was.

  “She would tell you she was everybody’s sister. If she ever spoke.” Skilfar rose from her chair, the freezing air flowing from her skin like milk, pouring to the floor. “A stench of ill dreaming hangs around you both.” She wrinkled her nose. “Whose taint is this? It was not well done.”

  “Are you twin to the Silent Sister?” Snorri, through gritted teeth, his axe moving.

  “She has a twin, certainly.” Skilfar advanced to the front of the platform, just yards from us. My face ached with the cold. “You don’t want to strike me, Snorri ver Snagason.” She pointed one long white finger at his axe, the blades now level with his shoulder.

  “No,” he agreed, but his body remained coiled for the blow.

  I found myself advancing, sword raised, though I’d no recollection of drawing it or desire to get any closer than I was. Everything held a dreamlike quality. My eyes filled with visions of the witch dying on the blade before me.

  Skilfar wafted the air towards her face, inhaling deeply through a sharp nose. “Sageous has touched your minds. You particularly, prince. But crude work. He normally has a more subtle hand.”

  “Do it!” The words burst from me. “Do it now, Snorri!” I clapped a hand to my mouth before I could damn myself further.

  Two bounds had him on the step below Skilfar, his axe high above her, the huge muscles of his arms ready to haul it down through her narrow body. And yet he held the blow.

  “Ask the right question, child.” Skilfar glanced away from Snorri, meeting my gaze across the sea of statues. “Better that you shrug Sageous off for yourself. Safer than if I do it.”

  “I—” I remembered Sageous’s mild eyes, his suggestions that had turned into truths as I’d considered them. “Who—who is the Sister’s twin?”

  “Pah.” Skilfar snorted out a breath that wrapped white and serpentine around her thin torso. “I thought she would choose better.” She extended a hand towards me, clawed, talons of ice springing from her nails.

  “Wait!” A shout. For some reason I saw my locket. Whole, its gems in place. “I— Who— Garyus! Who is Garyus?”

  “Better.” The hand relaxed. Still no smile though. “Garyus is the Sister’s brother.”

  I saw him, my great-uncle, twisted and ancient in his tower room, the locket in his hand. “I had a twin,” he had told me once. “They broke us apart. But we didn’t break evenly.”

  On the step below Skilfar Snorri lowered his axe, blinking as if shaking off the dregs of sleep.

  “And his blood could break this curse?” The question billowed white before me.

  “His sister’s spell would be broken.” Skilfar nodded.

  “How else can it be broken?” I asked.

  “You know the ways.”

  “Can’t you do it?” I tried a hopeful smile, but my frozen face wouldn’t cooperate.

  “I don’t wish to.” Skilfar returned to her chair. “The unborn have no place amongst us. The Dead King plays a dangerous game. I would see his ambition broken. Many hidden hands are turned against him. Perhaps every hand but that of the Lady Blue, and her game is more dangerous still. So no, Prince Jalan, you carry the Silent Sister’s purpose and the magics with which she sought to destroy the greatest of the Dead King’s servants. I’ve no interest in taking it from you. The Dead King needs his claws trimmed. His strength is like a forest fire.” I wondered at her choice of words. “But like such conflagrations it will burn itself out, and the forest will prevail. Unless of course it burns the very bedrock itself. Destroy the unborn; that will complete the spell’s purpose and it will fade from you. There are no other choices for you, Prince Jalan, and when there are no choices all men are equally brave.”

  “How?” I asked, without really wanting to know. “Destroy the unborn? How?”

  “How do the living ever defeat the dead?” She smiled a small cold smile. “With every beat of your heart, every hot drop of your blood. The truth of the Sister’s spell is hidden from me, but carry it where it leads you and pray it proves sufficient. These are the ends you serve.”

  Snorri came down the steps, dropping from one to the next, and stood at my side. “I have my own ends, Skilfar. Men do not serve the völvas.” He covered the blades of his axe with the leather protectors he had stripped off a minute before.

  “Everything serves everything else, Snorri ver Snagason.” No heat in the witch’s voice. If anything it felt colder than ever.

  To distract the pair of them from further disagreements, I raised my voice in a question. “Pray it proves sufficient? Praying’s all well and good, but I never set much faith by it. The Silent Sister had to take her enemies unaware. She had to paint her runes and slowly draw her net around them. Even then the unborn escaped when I broke just one rune . . . so say we do find some way to release this spell . . . how can it defeat even one unborn, let alone several?�
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  Skilfar raised her brows a fraction as if wondering herself. “They say some wines improve with age when bottled.”

  “Wine?” I glanced up at Snorri to see if he understood.

  “These magics couldn’t be carried by just any two men,” Skilfar said. “Magic requires the right receptacles. Something about this spell, about you two, just fits together. You’re her blood, Prince Jalan, and Snorri has something to him, something that suits him to this task. Pray or don’t pray, but the only hope you have is that the spell strengthens within you, because of who and what you are, because of your journey, and that when the time comes it will be stronger rather than weaker than it was.”

  “I’m not going north as a witch’s lapdog,” Snorri growled. “I’m bound there on my own purpose and I’ll—”

  “Why is she silent?” I elbowed the Norseman to shut him up, offering the question up to distract them both from the quarrel brewing on his lips. “Why does the Sister never speak?”

  “It’s the price she pays for knowing the future.” Skilfar looked away from Snorri. “She may not speak of it. She says nothing so that the bargain will remain unbroken by any accident or slip of tongue.”

  I pursed my lips, nodding with interest. “Well. That’s . . . that sounds reasonable. In any event, we really must be going.” I reached out and tugged at Snorri’s belt. “She’s not going to help us,” I hissed.

  Snorri, though, obstinate as ever, would not be pulled away. “We met a man named Taproot. He also spoke of hidden hands. A grey one behind us, a black one blocking our path.”

  “Yes, yes.” Skilfar waved the question away. “The Sister set you on your path, the Dead King seeks to stop you. A reasonable ambition considering you’ve been sent to stop him gathering an army of dead men from the ice.”

  “No one sent us!” Snorri said, louder than is advisable in front of an ice-witch. “I escaped! I’m bound north to save my—”

  “Yes, yes, your family. If you say so.” Skilfar met his gaze, and it was Snorri who looked aside. “Men who’ve made choices always feel they own their destiny. Few ever think to ask who shaped and offered up those choices. Who dangles the carrot they think they’ve chosen to follow.”

  Now that Snorri had mentioned Taproot’s whitterings and Skilfar lent them a measure of importance with her interpretation, I remembered something else he’d said.

  “A blue hand behind the black, a red behind the grey.” The words tripped off my tongue.

  Those eyes turned my way and I felt the winter settle cold upon me. “Elias Taproot said that?”

  “Uh . . . yes.”

  “Well now, that man has been paying closer attention than I gave him credit for.” She steepled white fingers beneath the angularity of her chin. “The Red and the Blue. There you have the battle of our age, Prince Jalan. Lady Blue and the Red Queen. Your grandmother wants an emperor, prince. Did you know that? She wants to make the Broken Empire whole again . . . seal all the cracks, seen and unseen. She wants an emperor because such a man . . . well, he could turn the wheel back. She wants this and the Lady Blue does not.”

  “And you, völva?” Snorri asked. “What wheel?” I would have asked.

  “Ah. Both courses require a terrible price be paid, and both are fraught with risk.”

  “And there’s no third way?”

  Skilfar shook her head. “I have cast the runes until they broke from falling. I see nothing but the red and the blue.”

  Snorri shrugged. “Emperor or no emperor, it makes no difference to me. My wife and son, Freja and Egil, that’s what calls me to the ice. I’ll see Sven Broke-Oar die and have my justice. Can you tell me if he still bides at the Black Fort?”

  “Still fixed upon your carrot, Snorri ver Snagason? Look past it. Look ahead. When the Uuliskind sail, do they navigate by staring at the water beneath their prow? You should ask why it might be that he is there at all. Do they dig beneath the ice just for more corpses? And if not, what else do they seek and to what purpose?”

  Something like a growl, but worse, rose in Snorri’s throat. “The Broke-Oar—”

  “Let’s go!” I yanked harder at Snorri’s belt before his temper buried both of us.

  Snorri hunched his massive shoulders and made a stiff bow. “Gods keep you, Skilfar.”

  I let him pass and made my own much deeper bow. Social standing is one thing, but I always feel a scary hell-born witch deserves as much bowing and scraping as it takes to avoid being made into a toad. “My thanks, madam. I’ll take my leave and pray your army keeps you safe.” With an instinctive sideways glance at a particularly well-formed young plasteek woman, I turned to go.

  “Step carefully on the ice.” Skilfar called after us as if she had an audience. “Two heroes, one led willy-nilly by his cock, the other northward by his heart. Neither bringing their brain into any decision of import. Let us not judge them harshly, my soldiers, for nothing is truly deep, nothing holds consequence. It’s from the shallows that emotions born of simple wanting arise to steer us as they have always steered man, steered the Builders, steered the gods themselves, towards true Ragnarok, an end to all things. A peace.” She couldn’t resist a commentary. I guess it’s hard for even the wisest not to show off that they are wise.

  Her words followed us from the chamber. I halted a short way into the tunnel to relight my torch. “Ragnarok. Is that all the North ever thinks about? Is that what you want, Snorri? Some great battle and the world ruined and dead?” I couldn’t blame him if he did. Not with what had befallen him this past year, but I would be disturbed to know he had always lusted after such an end, even on the night before the black ships came to Eight Quays.

  The light kindling on my torch caught him in midshrug. “Do you want the paradise your priests paint for you on cathedral ceilings?”

  “Good point.”

  We left without further theological discussion. When my brand started to gutter and flare, I lit the last of our torches from the old, tired of being slapped in the face by slime ropes, tripped by stray plasteek legs, soaking my feet in cold pools, and stubbing my toe on blocks fallen from the ceiling. Also the possibility of ghosts disturbed me. For all my bravado in the witch’s chamber the long night of the tunnels had shattered my nerves. Her guardians looked more ominous by the minute; in the dancing shadows their limbs seemed to move. At the corner of my eye I kept seeing motion but when I swung round their ranks remained unbroken.

  I’ve never been one for wandering in the dark. It seemed, though, that our light couldn’t last the journey. I held the torch high and prayed that before it failed we’d see a circle of daylight far ahead.

  “Come on. Come on.” Muttered in short breaths as we walked. The plasteek soldiers had been left far behind, but for all I knew they stalked us just beyond the range of the torch’s illumination. “Come on.”

  Somehow the torch kept going.

  “Thank God!” I pointed up ahead to the long-awaited spot of daytime. “I didn’t think it would last.”

  “Jal.” Snorri tapped my shoulder. I looked round, my gaze following his to my hand, raised above my head. “Holy sh—” The torch was a blackened stump, no longer even smoking. The fingers gripping it were, however, another matter, glowing fiercely with an inner light. At least they were until Snorri drew them to my attention. At that point they blinked out, plunging us into darkness, and I did what any sensible man would. I ran hell for leather for the outside.

  A storm waited for us.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The port of Den Hagen sits where the River Oout washes into the Karlswater, that stretch of brine the Norse call the Devouring Sea. A collection of fine homes huddle on the rising slopes to the east—well, fine for the North where every building crouches low, granite-built to withstand the weather that sweeps in from the frozen wastes. Log cabins, round houses, inns, ale-halls, and fish markets reach down to hug
e warehouses that fringe the docks like receiving mouths. Greater ships sit at anchor in the quiet waters of the bay; other vessels crowd the quays, masts rising in a profusion of spars and rigging. Seagulls circle overhead, ever mournful, and men fill the air with their own cries, voices raised to call out prices, summon fresh hands to load or unload, issue challenge, share jokes, curse or praise the many gods of Asgard, or to bring the followers of Christ to the small and salt-rimed church at the water’s edge.

  “What a hole.” The stink of old fish reached me even on the cliff tops where the coast road snaked in from the west.

  Snorri, walking ahead of me, growled but said nothing. I leaned forwards and patted Sleipnir’s neck. “Time for us to part soon, old one-eye.”

  I would miss the horse. I’ve never liked walking. If God had meant man to walk he wouldn’t have given us horses. Wonderful animals. I think of them as the word escape, covered in hair and with a leg at each corner.

  We wound down into Den Hagen, the road lined with shacks that looked as though the first winds of winter would clear them from the slopes. On a high corner overlooking the sea, seven troll-stones watched the waves. They looked like stones to me, but Snorri claimed to see a troll in each of them. He pulled open his weather jacket and jerked up the layers of his shirts to reveal a fearsome scar across the hard-packed muscles of his stomach. “Troll.” With a finger he implied a series of additional scars from hip to shoulder. “I was lucky.”

  In a world where dead men walked, unborn rose from fresh graves, and the people of the pines haunted forests, I could hardly dispute his claim.

  On the final stretch of the road we passed three or four hammer-stones set on the verges to honour the thunder god. Snorri checked for rune stones around each but found only a stray black pebble, river-smoothed and wide enough to cover his palm, bearing a single rune. Perhaps local children made off with the rest.

  “Thuriaz.” He let it fall.

  “Hmmm?”