The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

“Dead?” Hennan shrugged. “This place doesn’t trouble my family the way it does other people.”

“Well it scares the shit out of me.” I closed my eyes, trying to get back into Snorri’s tale. “We’re heading to the heart of the Wheel. Let me know when we get there.”

“The centre of the Wheel is nothing but chaos.” Urgency coloured Hennan’s voice and that note of worry kept me with him despite the pull of Snorri’s words. “The heart of the Wheel is in the ring, the place where the machine is controlled from.”

I scowled. “How do you know all this?”

“Stories my grandfather told m—”

“Goat-herders’ tales?” I spat, angry that the boy had risked my life for this. Already my imagination was conjuring fiends in the darkness behind my eyelids and very soon the Wheel would make them real. “You never asked me who Lotar Vale was!” A shout now. “Who?”

Hennan punched me in the kidney. Me! A prince of Red March, punched by some heathen peasant! “My grandfather’s grandfather. Lotar Vale. He was the most famous wrong-mage of his time. He managed to return to the margins and raise a family there. He knew this place!”

“Shit! Snorri!” I turned Murder. “Snorri!”

Glancing back I saw Snorri lifting his head as if from a dream, Kara shaking herself free.

In the distance, about a quarter mile along the curve of the Wheel, a blocky shape broke the monotony of the landscape: a small building of some sort. “We need to get there!” I pointed. “Hold tight.” I kicked Murder into a canter. Cold terror washed me, and rising with the fear came grey shapes, lifting from the heath like mist and congealing into more substantial forms as I looked. “Ride!”

Demonic shapes, dead men, clockwork devils with knives for fingers, witches, black and dripping tentacles reaching from tar pits, pine-men, vast devil-dogs, burning wolves, djinn . . . the products of my over-fertile imagination populated the heath so thickly there was scarcely room for them all.

“Jal!” Snorri from behind. “Jal! It’s all you!”

He was right. There wasn’t room enough in the Wheel for all my fears—no one else’s nightmares stood a chance of gaining elbow room. “Clear your mind!” Kara shouted. Advice as useless as any I’d heard.

They should take away her cauldron.

The horrors converged on all sides, removing any clear path. I tried to ride down a half-formed Fenris wolf, but the thing, though misty, proved solid enough to shoulder Murder aside and we went down screaming. Falling off a horse is a quick way to get yourself a broken neck. Having a horse fall under you will often add a broken thigh-bone to your injuries. Fortunately I’ve had a fair bit of practice falling off horses and the heather provided an almost soft and quite bouncy landing. I ended up sprawled across a spiky green gorse bush, whimpering, more in fear than pain.

“Jalan Kendeth.” A cold and sibilant voice.

I looked up. Cutter John stood above me, pincers in hand, that same skull’s grin he wore when Maeres Allus told him to take my lips. Something whirled above my head, its passage terminating in a meaty thunk. Snorri’s axe jutted at an angle from Cutter John’s chest, one of the twin blades buried up to the haft.

Cutter John took three quick steps back, then stopped. He looked down at the axe, curious, then bringing up the ugly elbow stump of the arm Snorri severed so long ago, he knocked the axe free. “No interruptions this time, Jalan.” Cutter John returned his pale, overlarge eyes to me, the wound in his chest bloodless.

On all sides the monsters from the dark corners of my mind stood waiting, bleeding mist, one into the next. They walled away Snorri and Kara. I couldn’t see Hennan among the press of them. I couldn’t even see Murder, though I heard his panic. Of all of them only Cutter John seemed truly solid, as real as the ground he stood upon.

I hadn’t the strength to get up. I’d come halfway across the world to be gruesomely murdered by my own worst fears. Everything I’d predicted had come true. The Wheel had given me the rope and here I was, hanging myself.

“. . . yourself . . .” Kara’s voice, growing further away, almost drowned out by Murder’s whinnying, half-fear, half-anger.

Cutter John raised the pincers in his hand again and stepped aside to reveal the stained wooden table to which I had once been tied in Maeres Allus’s poppy-filled warehouse.

“. . . defend . . .” Kara, strident and penetrating despite the distance. Defend? I staggered to my feet, drunk with terror, and drew my sword. Cutter John knocked it to the ground with a backhand blow. I’d need an army to stop him! For some reason an image of Skilfar’s army of plasteek guardians flashed into my mind. “Christ! Help me!” A despairing wail, and one that expected no answer. But all of a sudden there she stood, a plasteek mannequin, nude, pink, stiff-armed, between me and Cutter John.