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

That made a kind of sense. I chewed on it as I climbed. By the top I’d lost the thread and was more concerned with the ache in my arms and the business of not falling.

TWENTY-FIVE

We stood with Dr. Taproot at the fort’s shattered gates, an island amid a sea of mist, the skies above us bible black and strewn with diamonds.

“You have to come with us!” I said. “Who could be more help to us in stopping the Wheel than a real live honest-to-God Builder! Your people built the damn thing!”

“And I have spent a thousand years failing to turn off the machines that drive it,” Taproot replied. “The key has assembled what it needs to do the job.” He spread his arms toward the four of us. “If I were required for your success then the key wouldn’t let me leave—it would find a way to keep me here. That’s how the thing works. Loki’s a tricky bastard. So stick with your plan. Go to Osheim and try the key.”

“That’s your best advice, Taproot? Try it?” Snorri seemed unimpressed.

“You must have more than that.” I tried to keep the whine out of my voice. “Where’s the wisdom of the ages? I ask you! I mean, you’re older than my grandmother. Hell, you’re older than Kara’s.” I waved toward the völva. Taproot made Skilfar’s three hundred years seem youthful.

Taproot smiled apologetically and gestured up at the night sky. “The light of the sun is new-born, hot from the fires of heaven, and speaks cruel truths as the young are wont to—but starlight, starlight is ancient and reaches across an emptiness unimagined. We are all of us young beneath the stars.”

“Very pretty,” I said. “And not much help.”

“My boss had it on a sampler behind his desk.” Taproot shrugged.

“Loki?” Snorri rumbled, his face a mask. “You worked for Loki?”

“Trust me, it would do you no good to know.” Taproot started to pick his way across the debris toward the rippled surface of the mist, lapping the slope just beneath us.

“Trust you?” I called after him. “Loki is the father of lies!” I thought of Aslaug. Even she had warned me against Loki.

“A lie may be built of many truths, and the truth fashioned from innumerable falsehoods stacked heaven-high.” Taproot waved a longfingered hand at us over his shoulder. “Good luck on your quest. I’ll do what I can to buy you time. Don’t waste it.”

He stood knee-deep in the mist, the slow currents reaching up to wind the whiteness about him. Three more strides and he was gone.

I found his lens in my hip pocket late on the second day. Fingers hunting a coin discovered the cool smoothness of glass and I fished out the silver hoop. The old man must have slipped it in there—perhaps as we stood at the bottom of the shaft. I held it up to the sun, letting the light sparkle through it.

“What’s that?” Hennan nudged his horse my way. He was a decent rider by now.

“Just some toy.” Watch me. I held it to my eye and peered at the boy. He looked no different. With a shrug I let it slip back into my pocket.

Two more days took us through increasingly war-torn country. We reached the rearguard of the Red Queen’s army and passed into the outskirts of Blujen. We camped in the rain, our tent pegs driven into mud made black by ashes. Fires burned in the woods, they burned on the ridges to the west, and in the ruins before the city walls and out beyond them. Flames guttered in the windows of empty stone shells that were once the homes of rich men.

We crowded four into a tent that would have been snug for just Snorri and me and, in orichalcum light, watched the rain dribble through the wax-cloth. Several companies of Milano skirmishers had their camps set around us. On the foremost tent pole we flew the crossed spears of Red March to dissuade patrols from skewering us through the cloth and asking questions afterward. Come morning we would make the journey over the rubble of the city gates and into Blujen town to find the Red Queen. A trip better made in daylight if you hoped to survive it.

Occasionally a distant cry would break the night. Red March forces were still playing deadly games of hide and seek with the surviving Slov defenders amid the burning ruins. I hoped to be in and out with minimal delay, two Slov armies were rumoured to be only a day away, their outriders already circling through the farmlands just a mile from Blujen’s walls.

Sleep came quickly as it does at the end of most days on which you’ve covered thirty miles. I lay dreamless until Kara woke me, crawling over my blanket to the flaps, her hair brushing across my lips. She disappeared into the night and sleep went with her, leaving me stranded in the darkness, alone with my thoughts. Also a snoring Viking and a boy who kicked in his slumbers. Time passes slowly under such circumstances, but even taking that into consideration there comes a point when you realize that you’re not getting back to sleep, the völva has been gone too long for just answering nature’s call, and that no matter how you lie a rock will still be sticking into you.