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

Bonarti’s scream was thankfully short, but his pain didn’t end with it. A moment later a hundred razor cuts opened all across him, no more than skin deep. With the lichkin anchored in Bonarti’s flesh I would have run, but he blocked my path away from the throne room and at the doorway corpses crowded, hungry-eyed, held back only by the lichkin’s desire to toy with its food. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

Bonarti faced me, eyes wide, mouth twisted into a grin he didn’t own. His skin began to peel away, a dozen broad strips flayed out slowly between parallel cuts. There comes a point where you get so scared that it really doesn’t matter where you’re running to as long as you are running. I knew that the half-doors and broken chances that lay behind the fractures all around me each led straight to Hell, but frankly Hell had already come visiting and terrible as every part of it was I would rather be running toward some part that didn’t contain a lichkin. The creature reached for me with Bonarti’s raw red hand, flayed skin dangling. With the same scream a man uses when steeling himself to some awful task, like cutting off a limb to escape a fire, I drove Loki’s key into the nearest fracture. The closest faultline shimmered through the wall beside me and had nearly faded to nothing before my hand reached it. The key found its socket and held there, anchoring the fracture. Bonarti’s wet fingers found my neck and, still screaming, I turned the key.

It seemed in that moment that the world broke. Rather than falling through the hole I’d made I flew back as something big burst out of it, barging me aside. Something big, hard, and fast.

Snorri swung overhead, his axe shearing through Bonarti Poe’s collarbone and deep into his chest. A heavy boot, shattering ribs, gave the leverage to wrench Hel’s blade clear. The Norseman’s next blow swept in from the side before Bonarti’s corpse hit the floor, taking off his arm at the elbow and carving toward his spine.

Snorri followed the corpse, roaring, reddish dust smoking from his hair and clothing. Behind him the fractured window into Hell started to close, reality still able to heal itself. Just.

The lichkin forced Bonarti’s body to crawl beneath the rain of axe blows. The ghosts rose to blind and tear at Snorri but he scarcely noticed, hewing deep into the meat of the man beneath him. White tendrils reached out, questing for other bodies, for dead flesh to inhabit, but the Northman struck them off with swift efficiency. Properly bound to a host as the lichkin are in the form of unborn, the thing could have drawn more effectively on the dead and the living to repair itself, but this unbound lichkin had become reckless, thinking to toy with its food, and in winding itself so tightly about Bonarti had become vulnerable.

The butchery continued unabated. Snorri knew his foe was buried deep inside the flesh before him. I glimpsed the whiteness of the lichkin where Snorri’s axe shattered Bonarti’s spine. A second later the creature began untangling itself from the ruin of the corpse. But, like me, Snorri seemed able to see it, his time in the deadlands lending something to his sight. His axe became a blur, hacking at the lichkin, somehow finding it solid in these moments where it tried to rid itself of flesh. Perhaps so long a time in Hell had given Snorri’s axe an edge that could find even the lichkin, or being wetted in the blood of devils had enchanted the blade— either way . . . it bit.

In Trond they hold contests to ward off the boredom of winter. One such requires the Norse to take an axe to the trunk of a fir tree about as thick as a man, and the first of them to chop entirely through it is the victor. Snorri’s assault on the lichkin held much of that contest in it, and before the thing escaped Bonarti’s ruin it came dangerously close to being cut through. In the instant that the last nerve-white tendril of it withdrew from the bloody remains before us the lichkin folded the world around itself and fell away into the deadlands. With an animal howl Snorri threw himself after it. If not for my strategically placed leg he would have vanished back into Hell in pursuit of his prey. As it was he sprawled, face-first, on Hertet’s sumptuous, though soiled, hall rug. The air rippled where the lichkin had punched its hole through the world, and lay still, the portal gone.

I glanced back at the dead men watching from the entrance to the throne room. Perhaps if I hadn’t they might have continued to stand there watching vacantly for another five minutes. My gaze seemed to animate them, and as one they surged forward.

“Get up!” I leapt to Snorri’s side and tried to raise him. Just touching him gave my hands back that death-dry feeling, making paper of my skin, sucking the vitality from my flesh. “Get up!” I’d have more luck lifting a horse.