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

“I see it.” Snorri sets his axe down for a moment, drawing a deep breath. “I’m coming for you, Freja.” He wipes the blood from his hands. “I’m coming for all of you.” He has a goal. Freja will be there with his children. All of Hel cannot stop him now.

Murder missed his footing on a loose rock and for a moment it jolted me from Snorri’s story. We’d come deep into the Wheel-lands, perhaps almost as far as on our first incursion. Standing stones, each taller than a man, ran in five close and parallel lines, radiating like a spoke, passing close by us and rushing on ahead toward a convergence at infinity. Heather grew over-tall in sickly and twisted clumps. I heard my name called among the stones . . . a pale long-fingered hand reached around the side of one close by, ancient with lichen. I closed my eyes and the story caught around me once more, swirling me along a different path.

• • •

A pale long-fingered hand creeps around the rock. The motion draws Snorri’s eye, turning his gaze from the dusty floor of the gorge to the steep and craggy side. He’s penetrated several miles into the labyrinth and overhead the shadow-stained gyre lies more pronounced than when he first saw it. And in all those dusty miles he hasn’t seen so much as a stray soul.

“Best come out and show yourself,” he calls, hefting his axe.

A narrow head peers over the edge of the jagged ledge, some thirty yards above the valley floor. At first Snorri takes it for a lichkin and his blood runs cold, but the thing is a sickly yellow rather than white, and its head is more like a bird’s, an unhealthy fusion of beak and head, rather than the eyeless wedge of a lichkin. It hauls itself into view with a screech like nails on slate, revealing small triangular teeth in its fleshy beak, and a gangling skeletal body with a crest of barbs running along its spine.

“A demon.” Snorri grins. “About time. Let’s see what you’ve got.” Behind the smile he knows this thing may make an end of him. The lichkin was overwhelming. He’s fought trolls in the living world and barely survived—their strength many times that of a man and their speed startling. Even so, the red song of war rises in him and the pain flees his limbs as if in fear.

The thing raises its head and utters a cry that echoes down the gorge, the sound of a scream terminated by a cut throat. It clambers down the cliff-like wall, dropping a few yards here and there, catching on with claws as long as fingers and as white as malice, loose stones rattling down with it, striking the ground only moments before its two three-toed and broad-splayed feet.

As the demon closes on him, cautious, hopping from side to side like a bird of prey, Snorri hears its call returned in several voices, distant but not distant enough.

It rushes him and his axe takes it on an upswing, sinking home where neck meets head, carving through its windpipe and up into its brain. The demon falls, convulsing, and Snorri lets go his axe to keep clear of flailing limbs. Moments later he advances on the corpse through the cloud of dust raised in its death throes, takes hold of the axe haft, sets a foot over one side of the demon’s face, and wrenches the blade free. Milky blood oozes from the wound with reluctance, stinking of corruption.

The first of the demons to answer their comrade’s call come boiling around a sharp turn in the gorge several hundred yards away. The leaders, three of them, hold small similarities with the one that Snorri has slain, but no two are the same. Others can be seen dimly in the dust cloud raised behind the swiftest of them. Many others.

Lacking a bow, Snorri moves only to set his back to a boulder, then watches their approach, knowing their numbers will defeat him. The demons howl as they come, a motley bunch varying in hue from charcoalgrey to the white of curdled milk, some troll-tall and gangly, others squat and heavy, still others no larger than children and sporting vestigial wings.

Snorri rolls his shoulders and prepares to meet them all. It saddens him to die alone, at the hands of such ill-formed horrors, but he never expected to return from Hel, and an end in battle is perhaps the best he could have expected.

“Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout let demons tremble.”

In the last moments before the enemy closes Snorri knows a moment of peace. No parent should outlive their child. No hurt is greater than having sons and daughters die knowing that, at the last, you failed them. Snorri will die fighting to save them—this is as close as he can come to righting that wrong.

The first demon loses its raised forearm, and an instant later it loses its head to the same blow. The second demon, heavy-set and wolf-like, stops Hel’s blade by bedding it in brain and skull. Snorri follows the swing down into a crouch and the third demon, leaping for him, sails over his head into the boulder behind. Then they are upon him, in their dozens and in their scores.