by Ross Lawhead
“What you want is not so different from what we want. We wish every dark day for deliverance, that our presence and purpose underground were not necessary, that war was not our constant reality. But this is the world we chose to enter—what else should we do?”
“It’s a world that you also dragged others into—innocents like Daniel and Freya, and all the children before them. My family—generation upon generation of my family over hundreds of years, down to Alex, the youngest generation—we’re all wrapped up in it as well. What reason do you have for involving us?” Vivienne asked.
Modwyn spread her hands. “This is the world we are in. The lengths we went to, the measures we took, were reasonable.”
“And my brother Alex—who now styles himself Gád Gristgrennar. He looked too much into this world and became warped by it. Do you take responsibility for him?”
“We are not responsible for all the wickedness that men do.”
“And yet you claim to be their salvation?”
“I make no such claim. All must do as much as they may in this world to cast a light into the darkness. And fail or succeed, Niðergeard has striven to be the brightest light.”
They continued the rest of the walk in silence until they reached the ground floor of the Langtorr. Frithfroth led them across the hall and through the door beneath the tapestry.
Vivienne and Freya braced themselves for the stinging stench that was about to hit them and followed the two Niðergearders through.
“Okay, Modwyn,” Freya said. “Where is it?”
“Underneath the stairs, on the far side, where they join the wall.”
Freya followed Modwyn across the room, through the biers of dead knights. A few times Freya saw Modwyn’s skirts catch and the regal woman awkwardly free herself. Good, Freya thought.
“Vivienne, I suppose you’ve already been to the Beacon?”
“No, I swear, I know nothing of this.”
There was a stairway underneath the one that circled around the Slæpereshus, which meant that they had to walk around the entire room to get to it; none were eager to walk straight through. Even in the low light Freya could see that Modwyn’s eyes were streaming with tears. She wondered if it was due to the acrid air or sorrow over the lost knights.
The second stairway descended a few flights and then became a snaking tunnel with no slope. Within a few minutes, they came across a gruesome barrier. The corpses of about thirty yfelgópes were lying in a mangled heap, all at the same spot in the tunnel. The pile of their bodies nearly reached the ceiling, but the years of decay had diminished them and they now lay in a sunken, sticky heap.
“I hate this,” Freya said as she tried to negotiate the morbid barrier without actually looking at it. Vivienne groaned. Her boot slipped on something nasty and she swore. “What happened to them?”
“I did,” Modwyn said as she took her first step into the pile of bodies. “I ended their lives the moment they stepped across the threshold of the Langtorr. They were like tiny sparks cast from a fire that I tamped out.”
Freya swallowed back bile and finally made it through the stomach-turning pile. She scuffed her boots against the ground to try to remove as much of the crud from them as possible, and made a mental note not to ever wear them again. The air started to fill with a sickening smell that they had awakened from the bodies they disturbed.
Modwyn walked beside her now and they continued in silence. After a time the tunnel ended in a room that contained a wrought iron circular staircase, which they ascended.
Freya was hit by the smell—different from the decay of death that they had just walked through; this was a living rank filth, which was more like the smell from a zoo—a human zoo.
Freya lifted her lamp higher and slowly turned around inside what she assumed was once the Beacon. Rubble and metal furniture had been piled against the walls, completely blocking any doors, windows, or other portals.
The building—or the inside of it, at least—was round and tapering to a flat roof, rather like the inside of a beehive, if it were hollow. The rubble was not confined to just the walls, but hunks of stone lay in a thick layer on the ground. Freya didn’t know where it came from, at first, but shining the lamp around a little, she decided that it was the remains of the upper floors of the tall structure—floors that were not of wood and masonry, but that had once been carved from solid stone. Broken benches and twisted pieces of metal chairs added to the piles.
And there were people, littered about as randomly as the stones. Some of them were knights, some of them were the Niðergeard townspeople—the stonemasons and metalsmiths who kept the city and the knights in repair. The rest of them were yfelgópes. At first Freya thought that they were all dead, but as light poured into the room, heads swivelled toward her. And although the light was very dim to Freya, they shielded their eyes from it—knights and yfelgópes alike.
Both of these things, the sight and the smell, came to her at the same time, as did the sound. A voice was droning in low, croaky, and cracked intonations—with long, slow, and deep basso profundo notes, each of them as long as a breath.
“Where’s that sound coming from?” Freya asked. “It’s ghastly.”
“There,” Modwyn said, pointing toward the far wall, where a ragged silhouette sat in a lumpy, hairy heap, singing its dreary, dire song.
Where are the fighters; are they fled, or failed—
Where the field of battle; the fight would be brought—
The enemies and attackers do not advance anymore,
What damage their hands could do against us—
Our camp in ruins, crows eat our store,
The minds of men, barren and masterless;
Carrion carcasses carrying life, but
where has passion gone, when parted it our chests—
The fire, from our hearts, not from brands has been flung.
Why do we wait, wakeful not watchful.
Swords lie silent, will they not sing—
The fallen cry vengeance beneath victorless feet.
Arms hanging leadenly a leader unleading
He dismisses his warriors and walks all alone.
Death walks between disdaining our lives
Not worth the cost to carry our souls.
It was another obstacle course to reach the speaker, but this time Freya was trying to avoid stepping on the living, not the dead. They looked anaemic, pale and blue, with hollow expressions on their faces. They did not appear diseased or emaciated—the Niðergearders did not need to eat, after all—but looking into each one was like looking into the face of death. And each one, so Freya imagined, asked the question “Why?” As if they asked it of the universe, and she just happened to be in the way of it.
“Is that him? Is that Godmund?” Vivienne asked, squinting into the gloom, not wanting to move forward.
The grizzled hair and jutting brow were unmistakable, but his cheeks were sunken and his jaw hung slack. “Godmund. Godmund! Come on, get up. What’s going on here?”
Black eyes turned toward her and shied away when she brought the lantern up.
“It’s me, Freya. I came here when I was young, with Daniel. We went on a mission to destroy Gád, remember?”
Godmund didn’t move or take his eyes off of her.
“We’ve come back. The others are bringing an army. We need you and the other survivors—” Freya looked around the room, still appalled. They didn’t seem like survivors. “We need you to help us.” Her words were losing their passion and conviction as she listened to what she was saying. These people were traumatised. They couldn’t fight. Godmund was still staring at her, dumbly.
“The Carnyx,” she said. “Why didn’t you blow the Carnyx?”
Godmund made a sound that made her think that he was going to start singing again—but then she found that he was laughing.
“To save us would be to destroy us. That is as certain as the darkness. Our general has abandoned us. No, worse! He conspires against
us. Our whole army, formed along a precipice, to do battle with the air. How do you fight the wind? To step forward is to perish. We are the walking fallen, still retreating, searching for a way out of the miserable reality. I have seen the hand that moves us in the darkness—a game of chess with all the pieces of one colour. A game of chance with a die that has just one side. A house on stone, but with walls of sand. What use has . . .”
Godmund continued babbling. Egads, thought Freya. He’s completely lost it.
“Honourable Godmund,” Vivienne broke in. “We need you to fight now. We need you to rise up and chase away the invaders of the surface world. It’s . . . it’s being invaded, Godmund: trolls, goblins, dragons, were-bears, ogres, all manner of sprites and hobs . . . the time has come!”
Godmund spat. “I have no honour. And neither do you.”
Freya could only look down on the ancient being, who was once a brave, bullheaded warrior. Uncomplicated to a fault, if anything, he seemed, even to Freya’s young mind, as the ideal general—smart and capable, but largely unquestioning of his command, which at that time had been Ealdstan and Modwyn.
“I understand the disenfranchisement, Godmund, I do,” said Freya. “But please answer my question: why didn’t you blow the Carnyx when you could to end all of this?”
“You have no conception of that which you ask.”
“So tell us.”
Godmund grimaced and bared his teeth, like a wolf defending his territory. “The curses that object will bring upon the world are too many and deep to account. The breadth of evil it would bring would be incomprehensible. It would open a hole and blow out all the goodness and hope in all the realms of this world.”
“How do you know this?”
“It speaks to me. It tells me its secrets.”
“Right. Okay. So . . . does that mean that it’s close by?”
Godmund raised a hand and gestured to the darkness behind him. Moving the light of the lantern, Freya saw the large copper horn propped against the wall. When she had seen it last it had been securely fastened into the centre of a small fortress, a fortress that lay within the second wall of the hidden city and that was designed to keep it and it alone safe. But the brilliant copper that had once glowed like fire was now dull and dim. A black patina was spreading across it, turning to an oxidized green in many places.
“It’s been here how long? Was it—did you bring it with you when you came here? When you escaped?”
“Yes, I brought it. It’s been here with me this short while, and we shall grow old and crumble apart together.”
“But—why just sit here?” Vivienne said. “Why not escape? Why not fight, as you have done for centuries?”
He did not reply.
“What happened, Godmund?” Freya said, her voice straining with frustration and annoyance. “Why are you so scared of fighting now?” She looked to Modwyn, to include her in the tirade. “Both of you, seriously, what happened here? What’s changed?”
“Nothing changed. Nothing. Here I lie. Buried, forgotten. There is no war to fight—there’s nothing to fight against. There is no evil army rising against us. We were tricked.”
“What?” Freya said. “But the yfelgópes. Daniel and I found gnomes, an elf. Alex—the man who brought us back here—he’s been finding trolls, dragons.”
“A dragon?” Godmund said, his eyes darting to Freya with the first sign of the fire of his previous passion—anger mixed with joy—that she had seen yet. “Did you see the dragon?”
“No. But he did,” Freya said with shaky conviction.
The fire died and Godmund’s gaze became blank again.
“I don’t understand,” Freya said to Vivienne. “If the horn is really as bad as he says—if it’s really so terrible—then why make it at all? And once it’s made, why go to so much trouble to make sure no one ever uses it?”
“I do not trust his grip on reality,” Vivienne said. “But we’ve found it now. There is no point in not using it.”
“Really, Viv? I thought you would be more cautious. I thought you might want to study it, or . . . or . . .”
“Or what, indeed? Now that Modwyn is awake, and anyone is free to enter the Langtorr once more, they could easily overrun us. With no easy way out of the tower—I’m not sure how long we’d have to wait for a portal to open, or how many may enter through it when we find it—I think that we are now in very, very deep trouble. I look around and I see yfelgópes in this very room, and I think we need help. Blow the horn.”
Freya was taken aback. It was unlike herself to actually minimize the danger of the situation that she was in, but Vivienne was right—they were in a tight spot.
She crossed slowly over to the horn and laid a hand on it. It felt cold and unremarkable beneath her fingers. She felt a moment of doubt.
“Seriously, Godmund,” she said, turning. “What actually, tangibly happens when the horn gets blown? No more philosophy.” Godmund lowered his brow, leaned forward, and said in a quiet, gravelly voice, “Destruction. The destruction of this realm.” Freya straightened. His voice was quiet enough that she was certain no one else had heard him, and he was holding her gaze in such an even and intense manner—was he trying to communicate something else to her? Did he want her to do it?
“Good enough for me.” Freya hoisted the heavy horn to her lips . . .
And blew.
_____________________ II _____________________
Alex and Ecgbryt surveyed the town of Gudesberg through binoculars. They were north of the city, in a forest, their ragtag war band left behind in the mouth of the enchanted cave that had opened beneath a crevice to allow them egress.
They had not been successful in recruiting any more of the European knights to their cause since Blanik, and the Hussites were proving to be hard to integrate into the group.
“By what name did you call this land?”
“Germany. It’s Germany, Ecgbryt. This is supposed to be the resting spot of Charlemagne and his knights.”
“Charlemagne?”
“King Charles the Great. Or Emperor Karl.”
“You mean Karolus? The Imperator Romanum? I thought legend said that he was waiting in a well some distance north of here—Nürnberg is its name.”
“Yes, there or in Austria, or any number of other places. There are more than a few legends of mountain activity here, however, so I thought it would be worth looking into. It’s said to open every seven years, but I’m not sure where . . .” He passed the binoculars to Ecgbryt.
“If it is as you say, then come the evening, it would be well to walk around the hill. Are you certain of this place? It looks a modern township.”
“No, quite the opposite,” Alex said. “It looks positively medieval.”
“The buildings are so large. I cannot tell—all looks modern to my eye. I am often saddened that naught from my time is still to be seen. It makes me feel as if I am in a different realm than the one I was born to. Only Niðergeard feels like home.”
“I think—”
“Hold! Do you hear that?” Ecgbryt swung a large arm out and smacked his palm down on Alex’s chest.
“Hear what?” Alex asked, winded.
“It is a call! A summons! We must go!”
“What? Wait!”
Ecgbryt had already turned and was charging through the woods, back to the enchanted crevice in the forest. Alex tore after him, trying desperately to keep up with the knight’s enormous stride.
Ecgbryt reached the entrance to the underground realms ahead of Alex and halted. Still sprinting, Alex nearly knocked into him.
“They are gone!” Ecgbryt exclaimed, stepping into the dark recess. “Retreated farther in? But what—meotodes meahte!”
“What? What is it?”
“Do you see? Hanging in the air, it is—is that some sort of portal?”
Alex rounded a corner and saw what appeared to be a shimmering patch of air encircling the cavern. Some sort of strange optical effect was taking
place—it appeared as if the tunnel in front of them was truncated somehow—squeezed in on itself like a concertina—and also straightened. There were no winding paths, and at the end of the tunnel, he thought he could see the dim, twinkling lights of Niðergeard. He felt like he was looking down a distance of many miles—hundreds of miles if that really was Niðergeard—but that he could cross that distance in just a few steps.
It must be the Carnyx, Alex thought. They must have found it and used it.
“I hear the call,” Ecgbryt said. “I must answer,” and he stepped forward and vanished from sight.
This is it! Alex drew a deep breath, and then he too stepped over the threshold.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Blowing of the Horn
_____________________ I _____________________
The horn emitted a low, tremulous note that reverberated in the very stones around them.
The air filled up with the sound, as if with water. Time slowed, and also sped up. Freya kept her lips on the horn as the note spread from moments to hours to days.
And all around her was still, the horn the stillest of all, fixed in the air, as immovable as a star. She was not holding it; she was hanging from it. Everything else revolved around Freya as slowly as the movement of the planets. She could sense time moving quickly, many hours in just one second.