Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War 1)

Ahead of us pale figures filled the tunnel, rank upon rank upon rank of them. Statues all of them, men and women, most of regular height, all naked and without genitalia. On every side of me lay toppled examples, my most recent foe reaching for the ceiling with a straight arm.

“Hemrod’s army,” Snorri said.

“What?” Some of the statues had eyes painted into their sockets, some hair, also painted, but most were bald, eyeless, many lacking definition, some to the degree that their fingers were fused, faces blank. Many struck oddly nonchalant poses, looking more like idle nobility than marching warriors. There was space to walk between each rank and somehow Snorri had ended up doing so, leaving me to crash into the first line.

“Hemrod,” Snorri said.

“Hemroids to you. I’ve never heard of him.” I took hold of the outstretched arm before me and pulled the figure to its feet. The thing had almost no weight to it. Whatever it had been fashioned from was far lighter than wood. I tapped it. “Hollow?”

“These are Builder things. Statues, I guess. Hemrod held sway in this region before the empire grew across his lands. When they buried him down here, they set an army of these plasteek warriors to guard him and to serve him in the life beyond. Perhaps they wait for Ragnarok with him in Valhalla.”

“Pah.” I stood and dusted myself down. “I’d want better soldiers. Look: I felled seven of them while fighting blind.”

Snorri nodded. “Though to be fair you did have a screaming girl to help you.” He glanced back down the tunnel. “I wonder where she ran off to.”

“Eat dung, Norseman.” I started off between the rows.

• • •

“Someone must keep standing them up, you know.” Snorri spoke from behind me.

I paused and swapped the torch from one hand to the other. My arm hurt from holding it overhead and dribbles of hot pitch kept escaping to burn my fingers.

“Why?”

“It stands to reason. They’ve stood here five hundred years and more. You can’t be the first to fetch up against one.”

“I mean, why bother?”

“Magic.” Snorri puffed a breath through his lips. “It’s an old charm, a defence. They say old magic runs deepest. Skilfar makes her home here for a reason when she comes south.”

“Well, I ain’t going back to stand them up again.” I lifted the torch higher. “Some kind of chamber up ahead . . .”

As we drew closer I saw that the space might better be called a cavern, not for the nature of it—men had built this—but for the size of the place. Cavernous would be the word to use. The blackness within swallowed the light of my torch. A rust-covered floor stretched away and Builder statues filled the portion of the chamber I could see, all pointing outward from some hidden centre. To either side, tunnel mouths opened, statues marching away into the darkness. If the spacing held constant I guessed maybe eight or ten tunnels met here. Truly it must once have been a den of trains, coiling about each other like great serpents.

Snorri nudged me on and I advanced with caution between the ranks. Some prurient part of me that is always on duty noted that the vast majority of the statues here were of women, all in the same kinds of stiff and awkward poses, my torchlight flickering across hundreds if not thousands of ancient but perky plasteek breasts.

“Getting colder.” Snorri at my shoulder.

“Yes.” I stopped, handed him the torch, and circled around a nude plasteek woman to stand behind him. “After you. She’s your Wicked Witch of the North after all.” Somehow the “wicked witch” part contrived to echo about the chamber, taking a damnably long time to die away.

Snorri shrugged and went ahead. “Leave the horse.”

The radial aisles of statues created a steady narrowing as we approached the centre, and soon Sleipnir would be knocking them over left and right. I let go her reins. “Stay.” She blinked one gunked-up eye at me, the other glued tight with secretions, and lowered her head.

The temperature fell by the yard now and frost glittered on plasteek arms to every side. I hugged myself and let my breath plume before me.

In the middle of the chamber a circular platform rose in four steps and in the centre of that, in an ice-clad chair, sat Skilfar: tall, angular, white skin stretched tight across sharp bones, draped in the skins of several arctic foxes and with a white mist running from her limbs as if they might be cold enough to shatter steel. Eyes like frozen seawater fixed upon Snorri’s torch and out it went, the firelight replaced instead by a star-glow that rose from the frost-wrapped limbs of her ancient guardians.