She broke from the forest onto a bare rise and the whole valley opened before her. Blankets of grey cloud. Iced black mountains glowering beneath. The river. Even the fence line on the far side. She wondered if the men in the towers could reach her with their cameras. Was her flight being relayed to the hidden watchers for their afternoon amusement?
In that moment, halfway across the bare slope, knowing she could run no further, a late beam of sunlight caught her, ready to illuminate her final act, and even as she slowed and prepared to turn for the confrontation, she saw two figures coming towards her from the further treeline. One was cloaked, one was not. Both were armed. Both were running towards her, calling her name. She fell onto her knees and Brante was suddenly there, sweeping her up, pulling her into his strong chest, and Punnr was springing past them both and placing himself on the summit with sword levelled and shield across him.
‘We got you,’ Brante whispered into her ear.
The five pursuers reached the edge of the woods and fanned out.
‘Don’t take another step,’ Punnr challenged.
There was something lordly about him as he bestrode the summit, cloak caught in the upland breeze, long hair streaked across his cheeks, the clasp of Odin dazzling in the sunbeam, and the pursuers did indeed halt in the face of his anger. Brante joined him and Calder notched an arrow from behind them. If this was the end, they would face it together.
‘Erland, you faithless arsehole,’ Brante shouted. ‘You’re a marked man.’
From somewhere on the distant wind came the whir of helicopters, but no one noticed. The sunbeam dimmed and the summit was thrown once more into cold grey.
Ulf stepped forward. He held his spear low and he had one of the provision sacks over his shoulder. ‘Now then, let’s all keep calm. Only one of you needs to die.’
‘Fuck off, you snake,’ Brante answered.
Ulf smiled smugly and made a play of looking around at his companions and then back at the cluster of Thralls. ‘I count eight of us. The challenge ends when there are seven. So we require only one of you and this tiresome game is over. Who will it be? I’d prefer the little blonde who’s been giving us such a run around, but the choice is yours.’
‘What about the others?’
‘We came across the body of your female Thrall – Hertha. And I think your little archer over there did for Einar. Seeing you here, Brante, I can only assume you dispatched Eluf, who is no loss. And our new friend Erland gutted Torvald, for which I’ve forgiven him.’
‘What of Vidar and Gulbrand?’ demanded Brante.
Ulf sighed theatrically and heaved the provision sack from his shoulder. He pulled the strap open and shook two severed heads onto the soggy ground.
‘I killed Vidar within moments of discovering our weapons cache. He screamed like a pig. Gulbrand had more class when we came across him. But I’ve always thought he had outstayed his welcome. So come now, maths was never my strong point, but I believe we eight are all that remains of those fourteen brave souls that began the day. So I only need one of you. Which shall it be?’
Punnr looked at the heads and felt a new fury rising in him. He raised his face to the group before him. ‘We are the remaining Valhalla Thralls, Ulf, you bastard. If you come for us now, I’ll bury this blade in your brain.’
Ulf’s expression fluttered. Punnr looked mighty before him and he suddenly doubted that his superior numbers were enough to overcome these opponents. He tried to smile. ‘So we have a predicament.’
He was about to say more, when there was a thud behind him and a low gasp. All eyes swung to the source of the sound. The one called Dagfinn was looking in open-mouthed surprise down at his belly where the point of a sword had broken out, as though bursting from hibernation in his stomach. He released his spear and cupped the tip of the protruding blade as his lifeblood began to spill over his fingers. Erland stepped away, dragging his sword from the Perpetual with a mighty heave. He had lost the bandages on his nose during the course of the day and it looked healed, but wide and crooked, and somehow at odds with his long face. Dagfinn sank to his knees and then collapsed.
Ulf turned on Erland. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he demanded incredulously.
‘Solving the predicament. Now we’re seven.’
‘Are you mad?’ Ulf glared at him for interminable moments and then a look of knowing stole into his eyes. ‘I hadn’t thought you capable of such vision, but I won’t make that mistake again.’
The helicopters were much closer, coming in from the north. Ulf looked up and waved. ‘Let’s end this thing.’ He grinned wolfishly at Punnr, then swung around and jogged away across the slope in the direction of the tower. Signe and Havaldr, his two remaining Perpetuals went with him. Erland gave Punnr a long stare, then followed.
The helicopters lowered and the trees began to churn with the draft from their blades. Punnr turned to the others. Calder had sunk to her knees, tears in her eyes, but there was a ferocity in her expression. Brante’s shoulders sagged and he was pale.
Punnr planted his shield rim on the ground and his cloak swept out behind him as it was convulsed by the helicopters. ‘It’s over,’ he said simply.
XIX
‘Pairs, my lord?’ Radspakr said, keeping his voice level.
The Thane of the Valhalla Palatinate had arrived at the castle by helicopter an hour earlier when the Sine Missione had already been drawing to a close. He had been greeted by a worried Halvar who informed him that he should see the live feeds from the valley. Radspakr stalked to his office in the lower keep where, surrounded by computers and CCTV screens, he was in time to watch the Perpetuals’ pursuit of Calder and the confrontation on the hilltop. Another screen showed him edited highlights of what had already happened and he had sworn and sent the helicopters early lest he have no one left to initiate that evening.
Then he had made his way up the steps to the quarters of the Caelestis.
‘Yes, Radspakr, pairs. Stop worrying about it, man. We decided to play loose with the rules.’
‘With respect, lord, we do usually keep the initiates in larger groups for each Sine Missione because when they are grouped and armed with shields, they can defend themselves effectively and once one group has reached the tower it is relatively easy to keep the other group at bay. It tends to keep the body count down, which is no bad thing when they aren’t even Oathsworn yet.’
‘Well, this time we didn’t. Goddamn it man, we’ve had fatalities before. We wouldn’t arm them with iron blades if we only wanted them to bloody well tickle each other.’
‘Agreed lord, but we don’t usually have seven dead at this stage. I was expecting to return at least some of the losing Thralls to their old lives – sworn to secrecy on pain of death – and the losing Perpetuals would have gone back to the Schola for another year.’
‘You’re uncommonly full of qualms, Thane.’
‘Experience shows that killing off Thralls before the Oath-Taking necessitates a tangle of diplomatic delicacies. They tend to have jobs and colleagues and friends who will ask tricky questions about their disappearance.’
‘From what I saw, that one called Ulf was a real hothead, but his plan backfired.’
‘How so?’
‘Of the seven corpses the Vigiles are disposing of as we speak, I believe five of them were Perpetuals.’
Radspakr murmured his agreement. ‘Probably just as well. The loss of Perpetuals is not noticed beyond the Pantheon. They are, after all, Lost Children, and have been forgotten by society for years already. But those two Thralls will be missed. If the media get hold of this, they’ll have a field day.’
‘I don’t need a bloody commentary from you, Radspakr. The media isn’t your problem. Atilius will handle all that. The two Thralls will disappear quietly enough. Sad accidents.’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘Now I must leave. I’ll take your helicopter. Are you staying?’
‘I will remain for the Oath-Taking.’
Radspakr stalked back down the steps, chewing furiously on his lip. If truth be told, it wasn’t the body count which worried him. There had been plenty of fatalities in previous years and the Pantheon authorities always smoothed everything. No, it was the fact that the rules had been changed on a whim. This was unprecedented. At every previous Sine Missione the Thrall and Perpetual rivals were herded through the fence as a group and left to get on with it. It worked well enough. They usually split themselves into trusted parties and once the weapons caches were discovered, the action always kicked off.
So why meddle with the rules this year? Why the pairs and the separate starts? And why, oh why, would the meddler-in-chief be the Lord High Caelestis? Radspakr strode angrily towards his rooms, a frisson of anxiety licking up his spine.
In the months leading up to Morgan’s disappearance, Tyler guessed the unknown man must have left her life or, at least, the romance collapsed. He watched his sister and noted the changes in her. She became sombre and spent more time at the flat. She was physically fitter than he had ever known her and any curves she once displayed had long since morphed into muscle. She ate carefully, no longer drank and even started to manage the little household with more precision. Disciplined, was the word that sprang to his mind. Morgan had become disciplined in a way he would never have imagined.
But he saw something else too. A new fear that rippled around her eyes, that made her pick at her food, that dropped her into bouts of silence, that painted her face with blotches of fatigue, that forced her out of the door each night even when he knew she wanted to stay. Perhaps he should have said something or followed her into the city. Maybe he might have been able to intercede in the direction her life was taking, but his own emptiness prevented him.
Then one inevitable morning in March he stumbled back from a night around the estate to find a huge home-cooked lasagne awaiting him, along with a short note and something next to it wrapped in tissue paper.
Tyler. I must go away and I don’t know when I’ll be back. I can’t explain why, but you have to trust me. I’ve raised the monthly amount into your account to £2,000. Use it to get a fucking grip on your life. Get off the estate before those coke-dealing scumbags beat the crap out of you. Rent a place somewhere else and try to be somebody.
I love you, little brother.
There were smudges on the note, as though it had been raining, and the last line had been written lower down the page at an angle, like a last-minute addition scrawled as she raced from his life. He picked up the object and eased away the tissue paper. Inside was an ivory amulet fastened to a length of cord. He knew the design. He had seen it across Edinburgh. And actually, if he was truthful, he had known about his sister’s secret life all along, ever since those early years when her face looked so full of wonder. It had been toying with her and now it had come to claim her.
He had lost his sister to the Horde.
Calder looked at herself in the mirror above the washbasin. Her face felt like leather, parched and baked by the Highland air. Blotches ringed her eyes and streaks of grime criss-crossed her cheeks. She had a graze on her chin that wanted to bleed. She had untied her hair and it fell in frizzy neglected curls to her shoulders. She leaned forward and examined the pools of her eyes. Something about them had changed. What had Freyja said? By day’s end you will have aged, you will be wiser and you may be crueller.
And you will be a murderer too, she thought. She had killed another human being and not in the heat of the moment. She didn’t even have that small consolation to cling to. She had planned and stalked and looked him in the eye in the calculated moments before she loosed her arrow and now he was no more and she wondered if he once had a family who would have mourned him and what his life could have been if it hadn’t set him on an unstoppable trajectory to the Sine Missione.
Her hands wouldn’t stop trembling. They had shaken all through the helicopter flight back to the castle, when she had been squashed against Ulf and she had squirmed as far away from him as her strap would allow, but no contortion would remove the pressure of his shoulder. She had hated the idea that he would notice the weakness in her hands, but with the completion of the Sine Missione he had sunk into his own thoughts and stared out the window at the passing scenery. There had been another helicopter on the lawn behind Sveinn’s Mead Hall and two expensive cars around the front, but the returning group had seen no one new as a subdued Halvar led them into the corner tower and showed them up the stairs to the rooms they had barely used.
Calder’s eyes dropped to her thin shoulders and the delicate lines of her collarbones. She had always been petite, but now the months of training had hardened her contours and burned away every last scrap of surplus flesh. A young girl from the Schola had been waiting in her room and had set about removing her greased and brittle clothing. Then she had used a sponge to wet her all over and applied a revolting mix of pumice and ash. Calder had been too exhausted even to comment and surrendered herself to the girl’s good intentions. Next had come olive oil, dribbled over the ash mix until she looked as if she had emerged blackened from an oil slick. But the girl was an expert. She picked up a curved metal implement and scraped the mix from her arms, legs, buttocks, neck, back and chest, then sponged her once more with warm water, and even in Calder’s dazed state, she could feel the pores of her skin rejoicing in a cleanliness they had rarely known.
The girl had left her and Calder spent an interminable time inspecting the detail of her still dirty face in the mirror. It told the outward story of the last twelve hours, but not the inner. There were fluffy white towels waiting for her on a chair next to the wash basin and their promise of comfort, of refinement, of civilisation itself, overwhelmed her. Somewhere out there across the hills, there were seven bodies being collected by the Vigiles in their role as libitinarii, removers of the slain, and here she was with fluffy towels and a tub behind her filled with hot water infused with bay, laurel and juniper. She ran a wet hand across her graze and through the grime on her cheeks and she tried to recognise the Lana Cameron she had once been. Unprompted, tears pricked at the corners of her eyes and broke their own trails through the dirt on her cheeks and then she couldn’t hold back and she gripped the edge of the washbasin as her body was wracked with shudders from her core.
Next door, Punnr lay in his bath and stared at the vaulted ceiling of his tower quarters. The boy had already gone through the ash ritual with him and then left him to his ablutions. He had sunk his head below the water and kept it there for an eternity, as though hoping the cleansing bay and juniper would ooze into his orifices and seek out his soul. He pummelled his long hair until it squeaked and scrubbed at his beard, then lapsed again into vacant stillness as the water steamed around his face.
Halvar and Freyja had been different on the return journey. Gentler. More respectful. The Housecarls knew the exercise had played out bloodily this year and they left them at peace with their thoughts. Now they were being provided with luxuries which they could never have expected, nor really wanted, as though the Pantheon was saying, Sorry, old chap, for making you do all those ghastly things.
And that was the catch picking at Punnr’s thoughts. Had he really done such ghastly things? Actually, he was somehow alive and in the final seven without having done much of anything. The fates had conspired to make him watch his friends either fall or find themselves forced to take blood. Brante and Calder had both killed to survive and he knew already that it had changed them. He had seen it in their faces. They had crossed a line. They could never return to being the people they were before that first night on Lady Stair’s Close. Through their actions, the Pantheon had already claimed them far more than any facile Oath-Taking could. And Punnr didn’t know how this made him feel. Should he rejoice that he had come through it still an innocent? Surely no man would lie in this bath and truly wish he had been forced to kill. Yet would his Thrall friends think differently of him now? The one who had cheated
the ultimate challenge.
He stepped out of the tub, towelled himself dry and dressed in the grey leggings and black tunic the boy had left draped over a stool. The tunic had gold swirls embroidered on the hem, cuffs and collar. Then he trod barefoot to the door and opened it, peeking down the corridor. It was empty. Leaving the door ajar, he stole across to the room opposite and knocked.
She was covered only in a towel when she opened it and he could see she had been crying.
‘Hi,’ was all he could think to say.
She didn’t reply, but eventually she stepped back and let him enter. Her room was fashioned identically to his, yet it smelt of peppermint oil and somehow felt entirely feminine. She sat on the stool in front of her washbasin and Punnr couldn’t help looking at her legs as the towel rode up her thighs. He dragged his eyes away and perched on the edge of her tub.
‘Are you okay?’ He knew it was a stupid question and regretted it immediately.
She stared at him with huge, reddened eyes. ‘Freyja told us we’d be crueller.’ She gave a dry laugh. ‘She was right.’
‘You did what you had to do – to survive.’
‘Live and let die, and all that, eh?’
‘I suppose.’
Punnr could see the back of her head in the mirror behind her, the wet tresses of her hair sticking to her naked shoulders. She was looking vacantly towards the window, lost somewhere. He waited until she spoke.
‘Once before I held a life in my hands. Someone so precious to me. And despite everything I tried to do, every journey I made, every prayer I gave, every tiny piece of information I researched, every night I sat awake, I watched that life ebb away and I was powerless to stop it leaving. I decided there was no god in the universe, no great force of good, and I raged silently at the world.’ She pulled the towel tighter around her breasts and hunched in on herself as the chill of the room reached for her. ‘I’ve carried that anger for many years. It’s always been there, somewhere inside me, making me who I am. Defining me. And you know what, it was that anger that propelled me through all those nights in the vault. Radspakr had selected me and perhaps he was right – perhaps the Pantheon was the answer for me.’
The Wolf Mile Page 16