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

“Dear God!” I kicked Murder to greater efforts but he was already giving all he had. He might be as vicious a stallion as ever ran the fields of empire, but in this instance the same mad terror made cowards of us both.

Whatever the Unborn Prince was becoming one thing was certain— it wasn’t slow. The furious wet crunching thrash of the beast didn’t seem to be fading away into the distance as Murder stretched his legs. In truth it was growing louder, closer, and more furious.

The thud of heavy feet began to drown out the thunder of Murder’s hooves. Cold blood spattered across my back with each wordless roar of the monster. In moments a swing of its jaws would take me from the saddle. On the road ahead shapes loomed out of the murk, refusing detail to my rain-filled eyes.

“Save me!” A shout that emptied my lungs top to bottom.

With no alternatives left I veered right, hauling on Murder’s reins and kicking him into a huge jump that carried us clear of both the ditch and the six-foot hedge standing behind it. At the height of the jump I glimpsed my pursuer, just starting to overhaul me, but still on the road, trying to follow, too heavy to match our turning circle. The thing that the unborn had built itself into looked for all the world like a dragon from myth. A huge, raw, skinless dragon whose wet and flapping mouth housed rib-bone teeth.

The last I saw of the unborn before the hedge took it from view was of bloody feet with thigh-bone claws scrabbling for purchase on the cobbled road as it sought to turn, starting to present a broadside to the three riders in its path, all of whom were now trying to throw themselves from their mounts to get clear of the collision.

We landed with a jolting impact and I narrowly avoided smashing my front teeth out on the back of Murder’s head. Instinct told me to keep going, racing out in a straight line cross-country. Common-sense could only muster a faint cry from the corner at the back of my mind where it had been relegated, but since that cry concerned the inevitability of laming Murder while crossing rough ground in the dark at speed, and being stranded alone, waiting for the corpse-dragon to find me . . . I listened. I tugged hard to the left and brought him toward a dip in the hedge.

The unborn monster must have lost its footing and smashed into the horses side on. Two lay on their backs on the verge, legs flailing. The Norse appeared to have got clear without being crushed. Snorri had hold of Hennan, dragging him out of range of the hooves as the nearest mare tried to right herself.

The third horse went down with the corpse-dragon and now lay entangled with it, dwarfed by the beast, screaming in a register that would have loosened my bladder if I hadn’t passed that point several hundred yards back. As the unborn found its feet the horse, Hennan’s chestnut mare, Squire, “peeled” and became part of the monster, its flesh and bones being drawn up and redistributed across the manufactured body. The lantern one of the riders had been carrying lay smashed in a pool of dancing flame, casting the unborn into hideous relief.

Snorri, pressing Hennan into Kara’s care, returned on foot to the middle of the road.

“I have swum the River of Swords. I have whet my axe on jötnar bone in the cold places of the underworld. I am Snorri ver Snagason and I have slain your kind before.” He lifted his axe and somehow the edge of it cut a glimmer from the night. “This night you return to Hel.”

The corpse dragon shook itself, tattered flesh trailing beneath the muscular barrel of its body, supported on four thick legs. The head, its mouth wide enough to swallow a man, tilted first one way, then the other, bundled spines crackling deep within stolen flesh as it flexed. The porcelain mask now sat bedded in the beast’s forehead, a single white scale amid all that rawness. Two eye-pits regarded the Viking. The eyes I had met long ago in Vermillion’s opera house watched from their recesses— I couldn’t see them but I felt their hate.

“You.” At first it was the sound of blood gargling in a diseased throat, then somehow it was speech. “You dare to stand your ground against me?”

“Stand my ground?” Snorri looked very alone, there in the middle of the empty road, the rain dripping from every part of him. “Vikings don’t stand their ground!” With axe raised above his shoulder the poor madman began to charge.

The unborn seemed as surprised as me and stood watching as Snorri covered the distance between them. The closer he got the more huge the unborn seemed, the more unequal the contest.

As Snorri raced across the last few yards, roaring his battle-cry, the unborn swiped at him, a bone-clawed foot of raw meat, half as wide across as Snorri was tall. The Northman threw himself under the swing, feet first, sliding across the wet stones and somehow rising to bring Hel down in a violent arc that terminated at the centre of the unborn’s forehead, shattering the porcelain mask and burying the blade haft-deep.