1633880583 (F) (36 page)

Like an unsheathed knife a crystalline fingernail shone in the cavern, but even as it plunged toward Corinna, rage quickened within Joy and she opened her hand.

The Runemark glowed a volcanic red.

Though she was chained, her legs were free. Her limbs tingled with strength, and she ran forward, scaled the throne, and kicked the outstretched hand.

A concussion like thunder exploded through the cavern. Crystalline fingernails snapped and scattered like glass. Skrymir Hollowheart roared, and Joy and Corinna fell to the cavern floor.

But they were not alone in the fight.

Mad Katta leapt forward, having slipped his bonds. His aim was perfect as he threw one of his blessed, discus-shaped sweetcakes. It hit Skrymir in the nose, and rock shattered; the troll-king hissed.

With a bellow, Inga broke her own chains and set about freeing Malin, Haytham, and Northwing.

Northwing, though still chained, closed her eyes while murmuring a chant.

Haytham shook his chains defiantly and turned to the onrushing troll Wormeye. “Haboob of the Hundred Hilarities! I ask you to interpret your mandate flexibly! In return I will reduce our agreement to six months.”

“Eh?” said Wormeye, before the soil of his torso exploded.

The troll fell to the cavern floor in two pieces.

Joy absorbed all this while struggling to her feet and helping Corinna to hers. As she rose she noticed that the gaps opening on the sky seemed filled with stars and nebulae, as though night had suddenly fallen, though a more brilliant night than any she’d known.

She had no time to consider this, however. Corinna was saying, “While he’s distracted! Move the axe! It is the work of Wayland, the Axe of Sternmark!”

Joy had no idea what that meant, but she could hear the capital letters. On a hunch she struck her chains against the blade. They split like kindling. Corinna did likewise, and together they grabbed the huge axe. Groaning, they shoved it out of reach.

Skrymir roared and slapped Joy across the chamber.

That she could roll with the blow was partly the result of Walking Stick’s training and partly the strange power of the Runemark. She tumbled down the tunnel leading to the outside air.

As she rose, she could not help but gaze out.

What she saw was impossible. An ocean, lit by a silvery moon, lapped at the mountainside, its waters just a few inches below where she stood.

Almost as strangely, two structures bobbed in the waters nearby, one of wood, the other with a foundation of wood but upper levels of stone. The wooden one reminded her somewhat of her home pagoda, and her eyes studied it first. Even though her friends needed her, she could not look away.

A wall of the lowest level was missing, and out of that wall gazed a familiar face. Gaunt was there, calling her name.

Joy was so shocked she wasn’t even sure what she said in reply. Then she gasped as she spied Innocence in the second structure.

Suddenly Skrymir Hollowheart grabbed her in one enormous hand, dragging her away from the tunnel.

“You have surprised me,” the troll-king growled. “I had assumed the report of a Runethane false, but the power has truly chosen you. You have even awakened the forces of this mountain, opening the way to the World-Tree.”

“Let us go!” Joy said. “What do you want with us?”

“A great deal! Behold!” As he wrenched her into the great chamber a mist fell over everything. She could no longer see her companions, nor any other trolls.

Now the mist cleared underfoot, and it seemed she floated high in the heavens over the Bladed Isles, looking down at a place where the two greatest landmasses met, as well as jagged, broken extensions of the next-largest isle.

“How—?” she began.

Skrymir laughed. “I am a lord of illusion, as well as of might.” They appeared to descend. Where the two great promontories stood, there was an enormous chain wrapping about them, linking them to a barren island in the strait.

Joy beheld riders upon what she judged the Spydbanen side. Some wore byrnies, swords, and shields in the Kantening style. Others were archers of the steppes. “Karvaks!”

“Indeed,” said Skrymir. “They have an interest in the human domains of these isles. I choose to indulge them, partly on behalf of the collegiality I owe the khatun. With my help they will conquer. This will make it much easier to achieve my true goal—control of that chain. With you, and that boy Innocence Gaunt, I can command the energies of the sleeping dragons of the isles and truly become myself. And what I truly am is a god.”

“What you truly are is insane.”

“Ah! You think so! Deadfall did at first! But it’s his gift to siphon and sift magic. With him I can tap all manner of power, whether or not the source is willing.”

“He speaks truly,” came the thin voice of the magic carpet.

She could listen to no more of this. Her friends were struggling somewhere beyond this illusion.
Help
, she called out silently, not knowing whom she asked.

Help arrived.

Inga Peersdatter leapt through the mists, scrambled up the Skrymir’s rocky body, and began smashing the troll-jarl’s nose. Skrymir dropped Joy to swat at the intruder.

Joy staggered through the mists. She could see nothing now. “Inga? Where are you? I can’t see—”

She felt a hand on her shoulder. Katta’s voice said gently, “It can be frightening to go without sight. But you are not alone.” He murmured a chant, and the fog dispersed.

The conference with Skrymir had taken only seconds. Her friends were not yet defeated but stared down the trolls, who seemed to easily match her companions but were unwilling to advance with their leader preoccupied. Inga was still scrambling around Skrymir’s shoulders, avoiding his hands, kicking and punching when she could. At any moment the balance would tip, and they would rush forward.

“I . . .” Joy said. “I don’t . . .”

“Carpet,” Malin said. “Troll hearts very important. Eventyr Number Thirty-Six.”

“Deadfall,” Katta mused, “has the potential to become good.”

“That’s it,” Joy said, and followed Inga’s lead.

She leapt at the troll-king’s chest, diving through the gap where his heart should be.

Power flared from the mark on her hand, and the carpet tore free of its prison. Together they landed hard upon the icy throne.

“Will you help?” she asked the carpet.

“Yes,” it said.

“Help us escape.”

Deadfall unrolled itself with a crack like a whip. She dove on, and it launched itself high, sweeping Inga away from Skrymir and into the air.

It swooped around the chamber and dove among the companions. Joy was amazed. In her elders’ tales, the carpet had been described as spasmodic in flight. Clearly its luck had changed, as had theirs. They all got on.

But as the carpet rose to escape through the tunnel, Skrymir cried out, “Ah! To hell with it all!” The Axe of Sternmark was in his hands, and with its red runes blazing, he struck.

“No!” Inga was at the carpet’s edge. With her own trollish strength she protected her companions, blocking the blow.

The axe chopped her arm clean off. She fell from Deadfall to the cavern floor, writhing there.

“No!” screamed Malin. “No! Go back!”

“Do as she says, old friend,” said Katta.

“No,” hummed Deadfall, “we are leaving this place.”

“He is right,” Princess Corinna said.

With a curse Northwing leapt off the carpet.

With a strength belying the shaman’s years, Northwing tumbled with the fall and rose unharmed. “Get out of here!” Northwing shouted, before kneeling beside Inga, chanting.

“Deadfall, no!” said Joy. “Go back for them!”

But Deadfall heeded neither rage nor weeping and instead shot through a tunnel into what was now, inexplicably, a high alpine valley of deepening shadows, filled to brimming with the tents of the steppes.

CHAPTER 19

DRAUG

The Straits of Tid were star-domed and moonlit. Innocence, Steelfox, Dolma, Nine Smilodons, and Red Mirror swam to a skerry jabbing out of the water. The two Karvak soldiers took longest to catch their breath, as they were swimming in armor. At least the strange night was warm.

Steelfox’s falcon circled the area and landed upon her wrist. “I take it you know something of this mad place.”

“They’re the Straits of Tid,” Innocence said.

“To compound my ignorance with an unknown term is not entirely helpful.”

“Apologies,” Innocence said. “All I know of this place is that it allows a form of dream-travel through time and space. I didn’t realize one could travel into it physically.”

“Intriguing,” Steelfox said. “So one could swim to days gone by, or days to come?”

“Yes, or to places far off.” Innocence looked across the waters to the mountain rising into the night. “I want to get to that mountain. That’s where I saw a friend, peering out.”

“Liege,” said Nine Smilodons. “Look at the stone of this tiny place.” He gestured at the onyx-like stuff of the skerry. It was polished enough that in places one could see reflections, and Nine Smilodons’ own reflection blinked back at them. But this Nine Smilodons looked leaner, more weathered, and stood beneath the sail of a Kantening ship.

Red Mirror pointed at another spot, where his reflection was of a gangly youth who could have been Red Mirror’s younger brother. “That is I,” said the warrior, “when I was Innocence Gaunt’s age.”

Innocence looked at the stone, and in place of himself there was a baby being jiggled by a red-haired woman. He looked down at his feet, and instead of his own reflection he beheld a white-bearded old man.

“I see myself,” Steelfox said, “on the day I bonded with the egg of my falcon.” Innocence saw a girl shaking in terror beside an egg. The flesh-and-blood Steelfox beside him noted him staring. He looked away. She said, “It is the way of my people not to record what is shameful, but it seems this stone remembers.”

Dolma was studiously shutting her eyes. “This little island,” she said, “seems not to access any particular time or space. Perhaps it is made of time and space.”

“I wonder what becomes of us if we die here,” Steelfox said. “At any rate, Innocence Gaunt, let’s be off to your mountain.”

It swiftly became clear swimming was something they were all rather bad at. If the mountain had been farther away, they might have drowned and discovered the answer to Steelfox’s question. As it was, Steelfox and Dolma helped Innocence sputter onto the rocky slope to which they clung, gasping.

“I think—” Innocence began.

Something stung his ankle, grabbed his leg, and dragged him into the water.

He splashed and grabbed the shore. Nine Smilodons gripped his arm. Innocence looked over his shoulder at a nightmare.

A blurred sailboat rode on the moonlit waters. It looked to have been chopped in half lengthwise, yet it stayed impossibly upright. Even its mast and sail were split in two. The lone occupant stood whole, albeit monstrous. It was a shadowed shape covered with seaweed, carrying a spear in one hand, with a single blazing red eye in the dark mass of its head.

The hand without a spear held a rope, attached to a grappling hook now stuck to Innocence’s foot.

“Draug!” Innocence cried, recognizing a description from stories.

Steelfox waded into the water, a risky business as the mountainous shore plunged sharply. She swung her sword and cut the line. Nine Smilodons dragged Innocence onto the slope and freed him from the grapple.

The Draug hissed. “Go back to your grasslands,” it said in a voice like a spatter of surf. “These isles cannot be tamed.”

“Whatever you are,” Steelfox called out, “you are a corruption, and we are coming to cleanse you.”

“We are eternal guardians of wyrd. Is it your fate to die?”

“I am a princess of the great Karvak nation. And this boy is under
my
protection!”

The Draug hissed again and raised its spear. But now the falcon Qurca screeched out of the sky and clawed the target of its red eye. It wept blood resembling molten metal. The Draug howled in fury, and its throw went wild.

“To me, Qurca!” Steelfox called, and she pointed her companions around the side of the mountain.

As she returned, Innocence said, “You were amazing.”

“Don’t waste breath. Where is that doorway of yours, Innocence?”

“It—it was right here!” He limped along a cliff, hands searching the stone, but there was not so much as a seam to show a tunnel had been there.

“Your time will run out!” called the Draug, for its half-ship still glided along the waters.

Steelfox said, “Keep searching. I will swim out to confront it.”

“No, you can’t,” Innocence said, surprised how frightened he was for the princess of the steppes. “They are like embodiments of fate. No encounter with them goes well.”

“Is that from experience or stories?”

“Stories,” he admitted.

“My father was told stories. That he was unimportant, weak, of inferior blood, fit to be subordinate only—and for a time a slave! He never believed those stories, and one day he became the mightiest man in the world. I will fight this Draug.”

Her words stirred something deep and angry in Innocence.

“No,” he said, turning to face the blazing eye. “I will.”

He raised his hand, and the mark on his forehead pulsed with pain. “Draug! I am Innocence Gaunt, chosen of the Heavenwalls of Qiangguo—a mightier civilization than you’ve ever dreamed! I bring the light of the East. Begone, horror of the West!”

Like a blast of wind, chi flowed from his hand. The waters split before the onslaught, and the boat buckled, groaned, and snapped along its width. Twice-rent, it sank into the waves.

The Draug bellowed its rage and fell into the Straits of Tid.

Innocence remembered his sensations when tearing the fabric of reality in Sølvlyss. Light flared in a huge circle upon the stone, and the stone within that spot faded away.

They tumbled into the tunnel.

When they regained their wits, the Straits of Tid were gone.

“You speak of amazing?” Steelfox exclaimed.

Innocence, shivering, no longer felt the power of the Heavenwalls. He swayed at the opening, beholding an alpine valley rimmed with ice and stone. Within its white-covered meadows were scores of farmhouses and a scattering of great halls. Beside them were thousands of the round tents of the Karvaks.