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

“It’s a hole.” I meant it on several levels. The blockhouse was a bare box, its corners dark with wind-blown detritus, bits of twig, grey rags, small bones. A stink of old urine hung about the place. Directly before us a ragged hole had been hacked through a yard of steel-reinforced Builder stone, and through it I could just make out the top of a circular shaft leading down.

“Wrong-mages must use this place for something, otherwise the years would have covered it over long ago.” Kara stepped to the edge of the shaft and peered down, holding the orichalcum out. “There are rungs.”

Kara went down first and I was happy to let her. Snorri followed, then Hennan.

“Why am I last?”

“It’s your imagination that’s trying to kill us,” Snorri called back from the shaft.

Kara’s illumination reached past the other two, casting a confusion of light and shadow on the ceiling above the hole. I shuffled my feet and waited for the boy to get out of the way so I could join them in the shaft. “Why is that?” I called after them. “Why me?”

I couldn’t make out the reply but I knew the answer already. My imagination had been attacking me my whole life—only here it had the weapons it needed. A vast underground machine, the crowning glory of the Builders, and all those engines deep below us now waking from their slumbers and devoting their energies to allowing my fears to make war on my hopes.

A quick look through the doorway showed the ground starting to heave in the spot where I buried Cutter John. Moments later I was on that ladder down into the unknown, with Hennan complaining I was stepping on his fingers.

“Are we safe here?” I peered around the tunnel, suspicious of every shadow.

We stood a little over a hundred yards beneath Osheim’s surface in a pipe-like tunnel perhaps six yards in diameter. Running along the centre, above our heads, a black pipe just a yard wide, stretched away into the darkness. I could see no means of support for it. Bands of silver-steel ringed the tunnel every few paces, each six inches across, like some kind of reinforcement. A hum, at first barely audible, filled the whole place, though after at short while, even though it grew no louder, you could feel it in your bones.

I coughed to check that everyone hadn’t gone deaf. The sound echoed away into the darkness. “I said—”

A sound from above cut me off. Someone missing a foothold.

“No,” Kara answered.

“How’s he even climbing? He’s only got one fucking arm!” It wasn’t fair. I’d escaped Cutter John twice, against all odds, only to deliver myself to him on the third occasion. Not even to him—to my own worst fears concerning him, wrapped up and made flesh by the power our idiot ancestors had left us.

“I left Karl and walked up the valley where he had stood guard,” Snorri said, moving away into the shadows. “In places the bones were heapedchest-high.”

Kara and Hennan followed. I stood for a moment, ears straining for Cutter John’s descent but heard only Snorri’s voice and that old magic of his folded about me, drawing me on. I walked after them, my feet pursuing the ancient passage the Builders had left us, while my mind followed the Norseman back into Hel, too busy with his tale for the moment to bother plotting its own destruction.

THIRTY

Snorri moves up the gorge, past the remains of the demons his first-born son has slain in defence of his step-family.

Above him the gyre in the sky tightens and narrows. Soon, Snorri knows, he will stand beneath its centre, at the eye of an invisible storm.

The gorge widens into a valley, angling down now, out of the highlands. Snorri hobbles on, his wounds stiffening, the injury to his shoulder still pumping blood, the pain all through him like white wire.

Ahead the valley reaches a neck after which it falls away too swiftly to be seen again, and beyond this narrow point a view opens up such as Snorri never imagined to see in Hel. He stands, his eyes filled with the Uulisk Fjord, soft with mist, its slopes spring-green, black woolly goats dotting the Niffr slopes high on the far side where the sun touches the land with gold. There should be a village here, houses scattered all the way down to the water’s edge—but all Snorri can see are the eight quays stretching out their slim fingers across the fjord, and a hundred yards back up the slope, a single house. Familiar even at this distance. His house.

Ice fills his veins. The gyre in the sky centres above that lone house. The great turning in the heavens, the labyrinth of stone beneath it, all have led him here, to his past, his present, a place with no future. Snorri sets his jaw, holds his axe close against his chest, and walks on, so full of broken emotions that he seems a man on fire, and yet the hand around his heart clutches colder than ever.