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

I didn’t care about Edris any more. I looked around and saw them both, the lichkin and my nameless sister. She stood, a pale spirit, grown into the woman I had glimpsed when I cut her from the Hel-tree. She held both Mother and the Red Queen in her, beautiful, strong, undaunted. The lichkin, nerve-white and naked, hiding in the blind spot of my eyes, reached to clothe itself in my sister’s ghost. She took its finger in hers and wound its whole body swiftly into a ball, larger than a head, then compressed the ball until it grew smaller, smaller, the size of a fist, an eyeball, a pea . . . gone.

Her image rippled like a reflection on water, changing, fading, shrinking, a younger woman, a child . . .

“Don’t go.” I tried to raise a hand to her.

Edris loomed behind her, blood drenching the grey shirt across his abdomen. “Don’t go,” he echoed me. “I’m sure I can find you another master.” His fingers worked to spell runes into the air, weaving a new web of necromancy to snare her once again.

My sister, a little child now, offered her tormentor a scowl I knew from the Red Queen’s face on the walls of Ameroth. She stamped her foot, punching down with both fists, and in an instant Edris was flung down, groaning alongside me in the fetid mess of the unborn remains. The groan became a snarl and he got to his knees, facing the faint traces that were all that was left of my sister, blocking them from my view. My sword, still jutted from between his shoulders, the hilt offered to me, swaying just out of reach.

I didn’t have the strength to move. But I had the desire, and I moved anyway. With one last burst of energy, I yanked the sword free and took his head with a wild swing, more by luck than judgment.

Edris knelt for a moment longer, blood spraying, then keeled over.

Of my sister, there was no sign.

It took me an age to reach the rear wall, crawling, inching through the filth whilst all around me the engines of the Builders screamed for the end of the world. Somehow my hand closed around the end of the key and I turned it to the middle, neutral, position.

And there, at the end of all things, I hesitated. Let Loki’s key finish its work and I would be guaranteed safe passage into the new world that the Lady Blue had so desired. A god. The status I had always sought, all that and far more, delivered into my lap. No longer the superfluous princeling eking out a life at the margins of my grandmother’s court. Turn the key back to the left, and the great engines would shut down, the magic would leave this place, and with nothing to drive it forward, the Wheel that the Builders set turning, changing the balance between desire and the solid stuff of the world, would slow and eventually stop. Perhaps it might even turn back and return us to the lives men had known all those long years since some fool scattered us across the face of the Earth.

Listen to the wise, though, and you would know they saw a doom postponed, not ended. The Silent Sister saw that same Wheel turn under the pressure of man’s greed for power and crack everything apart, pitching us minor mortals into fire and destruction. I could save myself now and end countless nations . . . or consign myself and all those people to the fire in a few short years. Beneath my hand the key smoked and all around me the engine whined and roared. The key still battled the lock, fighting for control, and the engine, without the fractal mirror to moderate its energies, ran wild.

The many screens to either side of me continued to show their portions of a larger scene, as if they perforated the wall, revealing what was happening in the mind of the machine beyond.

“I need—”

“Men don’t know what they need.” A figure turned, cutting across the first and unseen speaker. “They barely know what they want.” He looked like a short man, though there was nothing to measure him against and the screens showed him larger than life. Neither young nor old, his dark hair standing as if in shock. He wore a coat of many colours. But as he turned it became a golden jacket sewn all over with innumerable pockets. In the next moment, the blacks of a Florentine modern, replete with three-tiered hat. Whatever he wore, he looked familiar. “Me? I’m just a jester in the hall where the world was made. I caper, I joke, I cut a jig. I’m of little importance.”

“Professor . . .” I saw the old man’s face there, traces of him behind Loki’s confidence and cunning.

The god continued to address his unseen target. “Imagine though . . . if it were me that pulled the strings and made the gods dance. What if at the core, if you dug deep enough, uncovered every truth . . . what if at the heart of it all . . . there was a lie, like a worm at the centre of the apple, coiled like Oroborus, just as the secret of men hides coiled at the centre of each piece of you, no matter how fine you slice?”