Europa (30 page)

Ivar screamed and hurled himself at the man, both enormous claws reaching out, his bright fangs yawning wide and his black tongue rising in his open maw.

The white blade slashed in three luminous arcs across the monster’s body, and then Omar grabbed her and jumped down the slope. They crashed down the icy patch that Freya had trampled a moment ago, and they slid headfirst into the body of the reaver she had stabbed.

But they both rose to their knees and looked up the slope in time to see the demon king’s arms peel off his body at the shoulders with a sick, wet sucking sound and thump down into the snow. The beast’s body leaned forward and crashed to the ground. As the shoulders struck the earth, the impact shook its fur and the head tore free of the neck and rolled down the ravine floor until it bumped up against Freya’s boot. She saw the burnt and blackened stump at the severed throat, and the only blood trickling out of the head came through the mouth, not the wound.

For a moment she couldn’t quite accept that it was simply over, that the huge beast was already dead, and that she was still alive without a scratch on her.

“You saved my life,” she said softly. “That was… amazing.”

He nodded and smiled. “Why thank you, fair lady. It was, wasn’t it?” They rose to their feet and stood together for a moment to catch their breath.

“You were dead?” she asked.

He nodded. “Momentarily, I suppose. I hit a rock under the snow. Out like a light. Sorry. Did I miss much?”

“Not really.”

Freya moved first, stepping over the glaring head of the dead king to trudge back up the slope one more time. She paused just one step away from the body. Even dead, even headless, even with its arms lying apart from its shoulders, the corpse was still enormous, unnatural, and terrifying. It looked like four bears sleeping together in a den, stretching on and on, mound after mound of flesh and fur in the snow.

She head Omar’s boots crunching up the path behind her and she started forward again. A quick glance at the claw at her foot showed no hint of rinegold so she circled around the body to the other severed arm and kicked the snow from the long, bony fingers. The light from Omar’s sword came closer and fell upon the body.

“It’s here.” She stared at the metallic gleam between the fox-fur and the ice. “It’s actually here.”

Omar stepped up beside her and looked down. “Of course. Did you really doubt it?”

“Every minute,” she said. “I mean, what were the chances that it would still be on his finger? After five years in the wilderness, shouldn’t it have been smashed or lost by now?”

Omar grinned as he knelt down and lifted the claw. It was three times the size of his own brown hand. “You call it rinegold, for the color of course, but it’s not any sort of gold at all. It’s nothing so soft or malleable as that. Forging raw sun-steel is very similar to forging common steel from iron ore. Challenging, but not impossible. However, once the sun-steel is charged with aether and souls, once it begins to glow with this light and heat, it becomes far harder than steel. When that happens, the sun-steel cannot be reforged or unmade by any common fire or forge.”

Freya nodded at the ring on Ivar’s claw. “That’s not glowing.”

“No, it isn’t. A sword needs about fifty souls to have a steady light in it, and even then it’s a dull orange sort of gleam. This old thing has about ten thousand souls in it.” He glanced at his sword a moment, and then slipped it away into its clay-lined scabbard. With the blade’s light shielded, the ravine was plunged back into the shadows of the night and the pale shine of the stars.

Freya blinked in the sudden gloom, trying to restore her night vision.

“This little trinket probably only has a dozen or so souls in it, and all of them valas, I suppose.” Omar cracked the claw back and forth as he worked the ring of Rekavik off it. He grunted at the task for a moment before Freya offered him a knife, which he used to remove the claw and then he slid the ring easily off the stump. He handed the knife back. “Thank you. You see? Even though his finger grew to be twice as thick, the ring is still perfectly round. It must have pinched off the blood and nerves in this finger though. Ah well.” He tossed the claw aside and straightened up.

Freya sighed.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t want to kill any more of them. They’re people. They’re all victims, like Katja and Erik. Someone’s sister, someone’s husband. How many did you kill on the hilltop tonight?”

“Six.”

She nodded. “And he spoke. He spoke to me. He wasn’t quite sane, I don’t think. He was in heat, and very much so. I can’t imagine what that did him, year after year. But he could still think and speak, and… and we just killed him.”

“He must still have so much of the fox’s soul in him,” Omar said. “Enough to transform him so completely into this prehistoric animal, a giant three-tailed summer fox. But also enough for him to understand his fox-soul. These others, the reavers, they’re just tainted a little bit. It must be like a splinter in their minds, just enough fox instincts to confuse them and keep them raving. But Ivar had enough fox in him to be both a fox, and on some level, a man at the same time. He was still in control, to some extent. Fascinating.”

Freya shrugged. “I guess.”

“I’m a little curious what you planned to do with that.” Omar pointed up at the rock poking out over the edge of the ravine wall and the woven hair cord tied to the small stone under it.

Freya looked up and sighed again as she touched the back of her head and felt the strange new shape of her hair.

What a waste.

“After Ivar’s leg was caught in the snare, I was going to throw a loop of this cord over his hand,” she said. “When he yanked the stone off the ledge, it would roll down the slope, pinning him down and stretching him over the ground out so I could get the ring off his hand without killing him.”

“Ah. Well, there’s an old saying among generals. No plan survives first contact with a giant transgendered fox monster.” He smiled.

She nodded back.

What a strange man.

“Come on,” she said, trotting down the path to retrieve the king’s huge deformed head. “We still have a lot of work to do.”

She reached for the head, but froze. There had been a sound. The crunch of fresh snow.

“Omar!”

A small reaver leapt down from the ravine wall directly onto the unsuspecting man, knocking him back over one of Ivar’s arms and pinning Omar on his shoulders.

Freya ran up the slope, snatched her dangling hair cord, and jumped onto the reaver’s haunches. It reared back with a scream that was almost human. She wrapped the cord around the beast’s throat and fumbled a single loose knot before a bony elbow smashed her in the ribs and threw her back into the snow with the wind knocked from her lungs. Gasping and wheezing, she reached up and yanked on the cord.

The tiny stone popped free of the wall and the large, round stone rolled smoothly over the edge and smashed down onto the reaver’s head. Stone and bone crashed into the ground with a muted crackle, and the creature stopped moving.

Freya straightened up slowly, clutching her ribs as she regained the ability to breathe. Omar climbed back over the severed arm and wiped at the bloody gashes on his face, which were already knitting themselves back together again.

He gestured at the stone. “I thought it was supposed to roll down the hill.”

Freya looked down at the fresh body. It almost looked human in its hairy nudity, almost like a boyish woman with freakish hands and knobby knees, but she was just too tired to feel anything except the cold relief that she was still alive. There had been too many shocks, too many floods of fear and adrenaline, too many strange sights and sounds, and too many long hours in the dark and the cold. All the sad words she had just spoken over the king’s body seemed hollow and stupid.

“Yeah, well, I thought it would roll down the hill.” She smiled a little.

And then she laughed. She covered her mouth, feeling foolish, but the moment itself was foolish, standing over the monstrous bodies and bemoaning her cut hair and poorly designed snare.

Omar laughed with her, but he stopped himself and said, “We need to get out of here before more of those things come sniffing around.”

The walls of the crevasse were slick with fresh ice and their fingers were too cold and numb to climb anyway. The eastward path led down to the shores of Redar Lake, a place neither of them knew but both suspected to be wide open with nowhere to hide from prowling reavers. So westward they went, climbing uphill through the narrow crevasse until the walls sloped away and they could clamber off the trail and strike out for the south.

They hadn’t gone far when the pale claws of dawn appeared in the eastern sky and Freya was the first to admit that she needed a rest. Omar merely nodded and sat down beside her on the leeward face of a low hillock where very little snow had gathered during the night.

“I’ll keep watch,” he said. “I’m not tired yet. Not that I’m ever really tired.” He held the rinegold ring between two fingers, staring through the yellow circle at the earth at his feet.

Freya hesitated. He may have been an ally, he may have even been a friend, but he was still a stranger. He claimed impossible things, but he had also done impossible things, and she was far from ready to turn her back to him. She considered foregoing her rest and pressing on, running all the way back to Rekavik to deliver the ring so she could sleep in a room where she felt safe.

I can’t. I’m already struggling to keep my grip on my spear. I may not make it all the way back if I try. And besides, I’ll need my wits about me when we get back. When the queen and the people of Rekavik see Omar, and see Ivar’s head, or Fenrir’s head, or whatever they all make of it… well, that’s going to be an interesting day.

So she fell asleep.

When she woke up the sun was halfway to its zenith and a fresh snow was falling lightly through the still air. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, feeling slightly more solid, more real, more focused. Omar sat beside her, rolling the rinegold ring across his palms.

“You shouldn’t play with that,” she said. “I’d hate to lose it now and have to tell everyone that you dropped it in some hole in the ground by accident.”

“It would be no great loss, fair lady,” he said slowly. He sighed deeply and turned a very serious face toward her. “While you were sleeping, I took the liberty of speaking with the dead valas inside it. All nineteen of them. As far as I can tell, this ring is only three hundred years old and none of the wise old souls within it have ever heard of anything like this plague of yours.”

Freya frowned at him. “No, no, that can’t be right. Rekavik is an ancient city, everyone knows that. The valas have served its king for at least a thousand years.”

“I’m afraid the grand, sweeping histories of your capital city have been exaggerated. Rekavik as you know it is only two hundred years old. Before that, it was just another little fishing village of no particular importance.” Omar looked away. “I’m sorry.”

“The valas must be lying to you.” Freya stood up and rested her spear across her shoulder. “They’re no fools. They know you’re a stranger, a foreigner, an outsider. And a man, no less! They must be waiting for the ring to reach a vala before they reveal their true knowledge.”

“No, fair lady. It doesn’t work that way. The souls within a sun-steel object are prisoners, not gods. They cannot deceive or command. And I have more than four thousand years of experience controlling the occupants of sun-steel weapons and trinkets. Trust me, they are telling the truth.”

“But… but that means…”

“It means they can’t help us.” Omar stood and pocketed the ring. “It means we killed poor Ivar for nothing. And it means there is no cure.”

Wren lay awake in bed a long time, wrapped up tight in the blankets and squinting up at the gray daylight falling through her barred window. Eventually she kicked off the blankets and looked at her left hand. The cuts still looked like cuts, red and angry and torn. Nothing strange there. But the tiny hairs on the back of her hand looked darker. Or did they? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t remember ever looking at them before.

She sat up and felt a tiny wave of vertigo, and when she touched her forehead she found it slick with sweat. Wren stared at the beads of moisture on her fingers.

It’s happening. And I slept half the day away, letting it happen.

Slowly, numbly, she stood up and wiped away the sweat. She straightened her clothes and draped her blanket around her shoulders, letting the cloth hang crookedly on her left side to hide her hand, just in case. And then she left the room.

She passed a maid in the corridor, and then a dozen men in the dining hall, and then found Halfdan in the snowy courtyard talking quietly with three of the elderly guardsmen. After a moment he noticed her standing there, watching him, and he turned to her. “Good afternoon to you, little vala. How is your friend?”

For a moment she thought he was talking about the mad woman in the cellar, and she nearly panicked, wondering how he knew that she had found her. But then she remembered. “Katja is fine. She’s fine.” Wren nodded. “Well, she’s the same, anyway. Alive. Snarling. Hungry. I fed her some scraps last night.”

“Good. It’s probably best to keep her happy. A full stomach might go a long way to keeping her under control.” He grinned. “Hell, if she’s anything like me, a full belly will keep her asleep, too.”

Wren tried to smile back, but her face didn’t seem to have the strength to do it. “I need to ask you something.”

Halfdan’s grin faded and he led her away from the guards toward Katja’s cell. “What is it? You look like hell.”

“I didn’t sleep well,” she said. “Last night, I wandered around a bit and ended up in the potato cellar.”

The bearded warrior grimaced. “You heard her, didn’t you? The dark woman?”

“I saw her, too. She didn’t look any better than she sounded.” Wren swallowed. “Who is she? Why is she down there?”