jacket, arms so tight about himself he almost squeezed his bulk thin. Snorri beckoned again, with more urgency. Tuttugu offered a despairing look at the heavens and hurried into the cave.
In close file the pair of them trod a silent path toward a tunnel leading from the back of the cave, some yards past the vastness of the dog. The size of the beast overwhelmed Snorri’s senses, the powerful dog-stink, the warmth of its breath as he passed within feet of that great muzzle. His back scraped the cave wall with each step. And at the closest point one huge eye rolled open amid the folded topology of the dog’s face, regarding Snorri with an unreadable look. For a moment he froze, hand tight on his axe, raising the weapon an inch or two before remembering how poorly it would serve him. With his gaze fixed on the tunnel mouth Snorri moved on, Tuttugu wheezing behind him as if terror had taken hold of his throat.
Twenty paces later they stood out of the hound’s sight in a tunnel too small for any pursuit. Snorri felt his body unclench. When the Fenris wolf came for him he had been able to attack, channelling his energy into the battle. Holding back all those instincts had wound every fibre of him to within a hair of snapping.
‘Come.’ He nodded ahead to the glow reflecting on the tunnel walls.
Another convolution of the passage brought them to a cavern, lit from above by fissures running through the thickness of the mountainside to a distant sky. A small pool lay beneath these vents, glowing with the light. The chamber, large as any jarl’s hall, lay strewn with the business of living. A pallet heaped with bed furs, a blackened hearth by some natural chimney in the rock, a cauldron before it, other pots stacked to one side, here and there sea-chests, some closed, others open to display clothes, or sacks of stores. Two women sat close together in oak chairs carved in the Thurtan style. Between them they held a scroll, the younger woman tracing a finger along some line of it while the elder watched and nodded.
‘Come in if you must.’ Skilfar raised an arm. Her flesh lay as white as it had when she held audience amid the conjunction of Builders’ tracks, guarded by Hemrod’s plasteek army, but it no longer smoked with coldness. Her eyes held that same wintry blue but they were the eyes of an old woman now, not some frost-sworn demon.
Snorri took a few paces into the chamber.
‘Ah, the warrior. But no prince this time? Not unless he filled out … a little.’ Skilfar cocked her head, looking past Snorri to Tuttugu, trying unsuccessfully to hide in his shadow. The younger woman with the braided hair put down her scroll, unsmiling.
Snorri took another step then realized he still had his axe in hand. ‘Sorry.’ He secured it across his back. ‘That beast of yours scared the hell out of me! Not that an axe would have helped much.’
A thin smile. ‘So you braved my little Bobo did you?’ Her glance flitted to the entrance behind him. Snorri turned. A small dog, stubby-legged, wrinkle-faced, and broad-chested had followed Tuttugu. It sat now, looking up at the fat man with sad eyes, one tooth protruding from its lower jaw above the folds of its muzzle.
‘How—’
‘Everything in this world depends upon how you look at it, warrior. Everything is a matter of perspective – a matter of where you stand.’
‘And where do I stand, völva?’ Snorri kept his voice respectful, and in truth he had always respected the wisdom of the völvas, the rune-sisters as some called them. Witches of the north as Jal had it. Though they stood at odds with the priests of Odin and of Thor the rune-sisters always gave advice that seemed at its core more honest, darker, filled with doubt in place of hubris. Of course the völvas Snorri had dealt with in the past were neither so famed nor so unsettling as Skilfar. Some said she was mother to them all.
Skilfar looked to the woman beside her, ‘Kara?’
The woman, a northerner with maybe thirty summers on her, frowned. She fixed Snorri with a disconcerting stare and ran the iron runes at the ends of her braids through her fingers. They marked her as wise beyond her years.
‘He stands in shadow,’ she said. ‘And in light.’ Her frown deepened. ‘Past death and loss. He sees the world … through a keyhole?’ She shook her head, runes clattering.
Skilfar pursed her lips. ‘He’s a difficult one, I grant you.’ She took another scroll from the pile beside her, tight-wrapped and ending in caps of carved whale tooth. ‘First dark-sworn and clinging to a lost hope. Now light-sworn and holding to a worse one. And carrying something.’ She set a bony hand to her narrow and withered chest. ‘An omen. A legend. Something made of belief.’
‘I’m looking for the door, völva.’ Snorri found his own hand at his chest, resting above the key. ‘But I don’t know where it lies.’
‘Show me what you have, warrior.’ Skilfar tapped her breastbone.
Snorri watched her a moment. Hardly a kindly grandmother, but far more human than the creature he and Jal had found amid her army of plasteek warriors the previous year. Which was her true face? he wondered. Maybe neither of them. Maybe her dog was neither the monster he’d first seen nor the toy that seemed to sit now by the tunnel mouth. When a man can’t trust his eyes what does he fall back on … and what does the choice he makes reveal about him? Lacking answers, Snorri drew forth the key on the thong that hung about his neck. It made slow rotations in the space before his eyes, from some angles reflecting the world, from others dark and consuming. Did Loki really fashion this? Had the hands of a god touched what he had touched? And if so, what lies had the trickster left there, and what truths?
Three slow claps, sounding to the tempo of the key’s revolutions. ‘Extraordinary.’ Skilfar shook her head. ‘I underestimated our Silent Sister. You actually did it. And tweaked the nose of this upstart “king of the dead”.’
‘Do you know where the door is?’ Snorri almost saw their faces in the flashes between reflection and absorption, Emy’s eye glimpsed in the moment, as if through a closing crack. The fire of Freja’s hair. ‘I need to know.’ He could taste the wrongness. He knew the trap, and that he reached to close it around himself. But he saw them, felt them … his children. No man could step away. ‘I need to know.’ His voice rough with the need.
‘That is a door that should not be opened.’ Skilfar watched him, neither kind nor cruel. ‘Nothing good will come of it.’
‘It’s my choice,’ he said, not sure if it was or not.
‘The Silent Sister cracked the world to fill you and that foolish prince with magic. Magic enough to thwart even the unborn. Time was when you put a crack in the world it would heal quickly, like a scratch on skin. Now such wounds fester. Any crack is apt to grow. To spread. The world has become thin. Pressed on too many sides. The wise can feel it. The wise fear it.
‘Given time enough, and peace, the wound you bear will heal. Time still heals all wounds, for now. And the scars left behind are our legacy of remembrance. But pick at it and it will fester and consume you. This is true both of the crack the Sister ran through your marrow, and of the hurt the Dead King gave.’
Snorri noted she didn’t speak of the assassin’s cut. He didn’t trust her enough to volunteer the information, and instead set his teeth against the growing ache of it and the southward tug that seemed to pull on him by each rib.
‘Give me the key and I will set it beyond men. The spirits you have borne, both the dark and the light, are of a piece. Like fire and ice they are no friends of our kind. They exist at the extremes, where madness dwells. Man treads the centre line and when he wanders from it, he falls. You carry an avatar of light now but he lies as sweetly as the darkness.’
‘Baraqel told me to destroy the key. To give it to you. To do anything but use it.’ Snorri had endured the same speech dawn after dawn.
‘The dark then, whatever face it took to persuade you, you must not believe it.’
‘Aslaug cautioned me against the key. She said Loki bled lies, breathed them, and his tricks would lay creation in ruins given but an inch. Her father would feed all darkness to the wyrm just as soon as break the light.