Lord of Slaughter (45 page)

‘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.

‘I am fate and destiny,’ she said.

‘I am lord of the fallen. King of the dead.’

‘I am the maker of the dead. The weft of life and death runs through my hands.’

‘You shall not prevail.’

She twisted the threads pulling in her brother in her hands, twisted those that brought the rune bearers to the pool. The mad god battled to stop her. He sent visions to make her forget her weaving, mad-eyed ghosts that tried to tear her hands away from her thread. All the time he stared ahead, his eye fixed upon nothing, grunting and snuffling, looking for the howling rune, the one that would draw the wolf and bring about his earthly death. So they sat for a long time – the suicidal god and the girl who sought to bring him death – working to opposing ends that only the mad and the magical could understand.

47
Brother and Sister

He’d sensed her from almost his first step into the caves. The chamberlain knew she was waiting, in those tunnels, waiting for him. Behind the footfalls of the men who carried Styliane he heard another movement, faster, a patter of steps like those of a child.

When he held up his hand to tell his men to pause, the steps had gone, just the tight silence of the caves remained.

The way was easy for him to remember. He could not forget it, he had trod it so often in his dreams. Though the tunnel split, though many routes offered themselves, he knew which one to choose. The one he had travelled before. The others stretched away like ignored possibilities – things he could have done, other roads to other lives in which he had not been a murderer, not been this vessel for magic, cracked and damaged as it was.

The runes keened and sighed as he descended, gleaming and moving like bright fish in dark water.

Karas
.

He heard her voice in his mind.

Karas
.

The chamberlain crossed himself – a gesture of habit rather than faith.

He had loved Styliane as he had loved his other sister, loved his mother. The well had given him great things for one sacrifice, it would give him great things for another. He had protected Styliane, used his magic to raise her high, been careful to love her, no matter how much she opposed him. Because of that care and love she was appropriate as a sacrifice. The well required gifts that were hard to give. His eyes were wet when he looked at her, the runes jangling madness through his head as they pulled away from him, tumbling down into the dark as if drawn by invisible threads.

He checked her. She was still unconscious.
Why?
He found that disquieting. Something to do with the deaths that had swept the town? She’d been to the island, his spies told him. What had happened there? He would find out in the waters of the well. He would give and he would receive. Then he would banish the city’s affliction and return to his former life. He hoped he would grieve. He had not grieved for his mother or Elai until his grip on the runes began to fade. Grieving, however, was human – a connection to the mundane world and sanity where magic was a tool rather than …
What?
He could not put it into words. An ache behind the eyes, an inability to think or to reason, something that made shadows into spectres, reaching out to drag you from your bed at midnight, to consume you and turn you to darkness too.

Now the little stream dropped before him. He remembered his mother bumping down, the lamp in front of her, her arse soaked. A glimpse of the boy who would have found that funny came back to him.

A rune had lit up in him that day, a brilliant shining rune. But it had cast a shadow, something created by light but of the darkness.

‘Are you all right, sir?’

The little Greek watched him. The chamberlain realised his cheeks were wet with tears.

‘Go on. It’s not far now. When we reach the place you can return. I won’t need you from there.’

The man held up his lamp and looked closely at the chamberlain.

‘You’re bleeding. Your nose.’

The chamberlain touched his upper lip. A big gout of blood on his fingers, black in the torchlight.

‘Go on,’ he said. Lights swam at the edge of his vision and he thought he might faint.

The men slid down the smooth rock of the stream bed, one going in front of Styliane’s stretcher, the other behind. The chamberlain followed. Down again and he saw the glow of the rocks. His men hesitated.

‘It is a natural thing, I believe,’ said the chamberlain. ‘I have looked into it and such things are not unknown to miners. There’s no need for you to be afraid.’

The Greek said he couldn’t believe that to be so.

‘Get her into the pool and then you can go. Take her off the stretcher.’ He carefully set his lamp in a nook in the rock.

The chamberlain crawled past them down the passage. Here was the cave, the little crucible where his life had been renewed, the water blood in the red light. He drew in breath.

Something spread out in the water – a cold weed. Hair. There were bodies in there. In what state, after years in cold water? The horror would be useful to him, he thought, to jolt him from his everyday consciousness to where he could find and work the runes.

He lowered himself into the pool, gasping with the shock of the cold water that squeezed the breath from him. The men lowered Styliane. The chamberlain focused intently on her as she came into the pool, grasping her about the waist, pulling her to him, not wanting to see what was in the water next to him. His men all but ran away back up the passage. He recalled the words of the spell he had researched. His mother had not been alive to teach it to him, nor would she have done, he being a boy, but he had paid the price the merchants had asked for the ancient papyri. He had none of the herbs or mushrooms his mother had used in her ritual but he sensed he would not need them. The lamp guttered in the chamber; the light of the rocks breathed, as if they were living things. Around him he saw the runes. This was where they wanted to be. They had fought to return here, and he had followed them into the earth to win them again. He began the incantation.