Part 36 (1/2)

He heard words he didn't really understand: 'Let me go first. This treasure may be delicate and I should a.s.sess how best to move it.'

'We are taking everything from this tomb, merchant. Do not make me leave your body in payment.'

There was no idea of revenge in the wolf's brain as he snapped off Bodvar Bjarki's head, only hunger.

There was only hunger too as he watched Veles trying in vain to climb the rope out of the pit. He closed on him, ripped open his back with a single bite, gulped down a gob of meat, pawed him to the floor and tore away the flesh from his belly, sucking on his sweet entrails as the merchant screamed.

Vali might have been pleased to see Veles suffer for what he had done to him, or might have thought that it was too strong a punishment for the crime he had committed, but he was scarcely there inside the wolf to have feelings either way. He was not one thing any more; he was a crowd, a mob, each of its members screaming for attention. The sorcerer, the Whale People, the family of reindeer hunters, the pirate Danes were all in him, or rather he was them, his consciousness a wild jumble of digested thoughts and personalities. His mind was like a marketplace, each bidder yabbering to stake his claim. Above them all though was the keening voice of the wolf, providing direction, impelling his body to action.

Panic flooded down from above. Men were scrambling to replace the great slab of rock that had sealed him in, but no one could s.h.i.+ft it. They gave up and ran.

The wolf was out of the pit in a bound. There were things in his way, things that yelled and beat at him, so he swept them aside, cracked them in his jaws, allowed their juices and ichors to calm the hunger of his long incarceration.

When they were all dead, he lay down, heavy with what he had eaten, his brain torpid, his body growing as it put its meal to work under the frozen moon and the green fire skies of the winter's unyielding dark.

He was not Vali. His body was like a twisted musical instrument and the prince was a tune it could play, but it did not then, nor for a while, not until he heard her cry the agonised howl that called him to life inside the beast.

In the lowest cave of the Troll Wall it appeared to Adisla that she lay on a wonderful bed of straw covered with luxurious furs. She was back in her house. Her mother was there and Barth the Dane, Manni and all her brothers. The calm that had come down upon her with the lady's presence seemed like the snugness of her bed on a winter's morning.

Adisla knew the witch queen wanted her to call Vali. Adisla spoke his name. The witch looked into her eyes and stroked her hair. She wanted Adisla to repeat the name, she could tell, and she did so gladly after all the lady's kindnesses.

The witch queen looked down at Adisla and nodded to herself. She had been trying to work through the girl, to channel Adisla's tender thoughts in order to send them to the wolf and summon him. That, it appeared, was not going to work.

Gullveig allowed the barbed rune to surface in her mind. It made her s.h.i.+ver. Its presence felt almost toxic, as if she held it too long it would burn her, destroy her even. Then she sent it to the mind of the girl before her.

Adisla screamed as her illusion fell away. She was not in her bed at all; there was no house, no loving family around her. She was pinioned on a narrow wedge of sharp stones at the end of a tapering cave. The stones cut her and the weird light of oil lamps cast shadows that seemed like long cruel fingers, reaching out to tear her flesh. She was in agony.

As the rune spilled from the witch's mind, Adisla saw what was intended. She saw visions of death - hers and Vali's, Feileg's and Bragi's, in that life and in others, stretching away into time. And she saw what the witch herself didn't see. She saw Gullveig's true name, and that knowledge was more terrible than the bonds that tied her down, more terrible than the sharp rocks that cut her, more terrible even than Vali, transformed and murderous. Adisla knew that the lady wanted her to call Vali, and now she knew why.

'I will not,' she said.

Someone came into view. It wasn't the lady, but a pale and terrible child with an aged face. The witch queen opened her mind and it was as if all the ghosts and dreads that Adisla carried with her rose up to engulf her and drag her down. She saw her mother dying, Manni dead at the door, Vali slavering and grunting in that pit. Desperate to stop these nightmares swamping her, Adisla needed something to cling to, to blot out the vile images. The rune, s.h.i.+mmering and twisting in front of her, was her salvation, she thought, though she didn't know where that idea came from. She stared into it, focused on it and knew in an instant that she had made a terrible mistake. A blinding white light burst onto her eyes as the rune seemed to sear into her like a branding iron burning into her mind.

A howl burst from her lips and from her soul. More than a sound, it was a magical emanation. Vali, sleeping as a wolf on the rock, heard it as the witch intended and understood what it meant. It shook him from the fug of digestion. He stood upright on his back legs and looked to the south-west.

Feileg, watching Authun and Saitada from the top of the Troll Wall, sensed it too at the precise moment he decided to follow the travellers around the mountain.

The witch was pleased. Her magic couldn't call the wolf any more, he was too powerful, but the magic the wolf had weaved himself out of his connection to this girl was enough. He would come, she thought, to do her bidding.

On the island Adisla and all she had meant to him came to the front of Vali's thoughts. She was in danger, he knew, and he needed to go to her. The sea channel between the island and the land was nothing to him, the wide plains and the mountain pa.s.ses were nothing, nor fjords or swamps, valleys or cliffs. He took them all in devouring bounds, eating the distance between him and the girl, racing to the source of her cry at a pace no human, no horse, not even a bird could hope to match.

The resonance of her agony was his guide, a stream he could follow to its source. The frozen night of the far north melted into a pale dawn; farmsteads and sleigh trains flashed by; he flickered through forests, scattered herds of reindeer on wide plains, dropped from mountain peaks like a falling star and flew on towards his target as a warp in the light.

The caves slowed him. He forced his body down through the tunnels, only the power of his will strong enough to push him through. He didn't think where he was going; Adisla's scream called him on. In the shove and squeeze of his descent Vali came to himself, although it no longer seemed unusual to him that he had the form of a ma.s.sive wolf, nor that the caves glittered with a million scents. His memories came back to him but they only increased his pain. The woman he loved was suffering terribly and the only meaning of his life was to find her and take her agony away.

Then he was standing before his father, Authun, in a cave full of gold. The king was terrible in his war gear. Vali tried to tell him that Adisla was in danger. He knew that his father would not understand his concern for a farm girl but he wanted to implore him to put that aside and help him. Then Authun had struck at him, and it was as if Vali was an unwilling pa.s.senger in his own body, his protests useless as the wolf drove forward to attack.

Again the voices crowded in on him, again the dreadful howl of the wolf echoed through his head, a sound that he knew was as much part of him as his love for Adisla. He was losing his way, surrendering to the fury of the animal he had become. Authun was down, his s.h.i.+eld shattered, his weapon gone and the wolf was on top of him, Vali fading away like a drowsy rider on a hot day surrendering direction to his horse.

'Help me.' It was her voice.

Authun was. .h.i.tting him with something. He felt nothing.

'Help me.'

Vali was reaching out, trying to make the wolf's body answer her call.

'Help me!'

The wolf paused its attack and stood panting over the old warrior. Authun didn't stay still. He rolled from under the wolf and made for the h.o.a.rd pile, pulled out a jewelled sword and spun to strike at the animal's back, plunging the weapon down with two hands.

The sword dug into the wolf's spine and snapped, Vali felt nothing. He sent Authun sprawling to the floor with a back-handed blow from his forelimb.

'Help me!' Finally Vali had control over his movements. He broke from the combat and made his way down the pa.s.sage following Adisla's call.

55 Fenrisulfr.

Feileg was sick with the pain now and had to pause. After four breaths he limped on again. There was the smell of fish oil. Someone had a lamp down there. Yes, he could see the glow. He pressed on towards the light, the tunnel narrowing to a crack. He breathed in and slid sideways through.

The cave was no bigger than the inside of a longhouse, the ceiling falling to the floor at one end and forming a wedge of jagged rocks like an animal's jaws. Adisla was there, lying bound on the sharp stones, soaked in blood. Feileg's heart leaped as he saw her.

The witch, her face a mask of blood from a ruined eye, was standing staring vacantly into s.p.a.ce, a broken spear shaft in her hand. She had a piece of rope around her neck, tied with an elaborate knot at the front. Feileg recognised it as a hangman's noose, Odin's symbol. The wolfman was terrified of the magical child, appalled by what had happened to Adisla, but he forced himself to speak.

'Lady,' said Feileg, speaking to the witch but limping as fast as he could to Adisla, 'we are on an errand of great importance. A friend is bewitched and has taken the shape of a wolf. He is here, in the tunnels. We need you to use your arts to cure him. I have gold and can pay.'

Adisla was shaking and Feileg could see she had lost a lot of blood. She was tied down by leather cords secured to rusty pins in the rock. Feileg used the Moonsword to cut them. Then he held her to him and kissed her on the forehead. She was weak, scarcely able to move but she was saying something. Feileg bent his ear to her mouth.

'I have seen her mind,' she said, 'I have seen her mind. Run. Feileg, run.'

Feileg shook his head.

'I couldn't run if I wanted to, and I do not want to,' he said. 'I will stay here with you. It'll be all right. She will do what we ask, won't you, lady?'

Still the witch said nothing. There was a thump from the top of the tunnel.

'She put me to those rocks, Feileg. I have been cruelly treated.'

'Then she will make amends or she will die. She will cure him.'

'No, you don't understand.'

'She is all we have. We must make her do as we ask.'

'No Feileg, no.' Adisla was shaking and sobbing.

The wolf, Adisla sensed, was an expression of some huge and terrible magic. Gullveig imagined herself as manipulating this force, but Adisla, allowed into the web of the witch queen's mind, had seen with saner eyes. Something that was part of Gullveig but - at the same time - external to her and much more powerful was bending her to its own will. The thing, whatever it was, felt cold and hungry. It looked for death in the jaws of the wolf, and that death was linked to Adisla's own and to those of Feileg and Vali, again and again in an endless cycle of rebirth and slaughter, all that carnage expressed by the pulsing of that rune.