C. Dale Brittain (63 page)

“The dead … cannot wake.
 
They must not wake.”

Too bad Eirik didn’t have his lyre, Roric thought.
 
This would make a good song.
 
“You hear them.
 
You see them.
 
They
are
waking now.
 
Is two living men too many for you?”

“You do not want it, mortals,” said the voice from the mist, expressionless and cold.
 
“You would not want the dead to become animate again, to rise from their burial mounds in mortal realms.
 
If the dead do not stay dead, then the balance will be overturned and the earth shall collapse from too many of the living.
 
One
living man would not destroy the balance—I should be able to restore it.
 
But two …”

“Then listen to me!” Roric cried.
 
“I shall
leave,
so that they may fade again, all those whose stories do not burn in story and song.”

“You cannot leave Hel,” said Eirik, turning on him, and his eyes too had turned to coals.

“Just watch,” said Roric.
 
“First I ran from dishonor, when I knew that love and honor could not be found together.
 
Then I determined to run no more, to fight dishonor by giving my life in battle.
 
When
you
would not take it, Eirik Eirik’s son, I came here living.
 
And I have discovered something.
 
There may be honor in how one dies, but the real honor is in living one’s life as well as one can, until fate spells the end.
 
There is no honor to be found in fleeing from failure to death.”

“Then what
do
you want?” growled Eirik.

“Life itself.
 
All the powers of birth, growth, and love.
 
I thought to find them in the realms of the lords of voima, but I found that even those lords can only guide and reflect that which comes from mortal life.
 
And I shall not find those powers here.
 
Love and birth come only to mortals who still live beneath the sun, but who know that they are not immortal and must seize life while they can.”

“All the burial mounds in the world,” said the voice so deep and so low he felt the words as much as heard them, “lead to this tower.”

“Then one should also be able to climb back the other way,” said Roric as confidently as he could.
 
He backed away from the tower, looking around for some way that might lead out of here.
 
“Outlaw!
 
Are you coming with me?”

“No,” said Eirik quietly, almost in a mumble, then, “No!
 
I was cast out, made a renegade, with all men’s hands against me.
 
The woman I could have loved if she had given me a chance rejected me—and not even for another man, but for
no
one.”
 
He lifted his head proudly.
 
“But I have a power here that all the Fifty Kings cannot match.
 
If there is no dying in Hel—as you and your friend Valmar made clear is not the case in the Wanderers’ realm!—then I have found the only way for mortals to become immortal.
 
Only here, in the court of the forces of darkness, shall all men and women yield to me in the end!”

“I may be an outlaw too,” said Roric, in a voice he deliberately made loud and cheerful to echo through the halls of the dead, “but I know a woman who loves me.
 
If not her lover anymore, I can still be her brother and do all within my strength to ensure her happiness.”

“You shall return here!” said Eirik harshly.
 
“I shall be alive, a spot of color and breath and living blood, serving the all-powerful forces, when you come down gray from the mound where they put you.”

“Of course I shall return,” said Roric.
 
“If life was valueless because short, it would have no meaning at all.
 
If we thought only on the end that fate ordains, of the destruction of even the immortals, none of us would seek love or renewal.
 
But before I see you here again, I—though not you—shall have been alive.”

Eirik looked at him a moment, an expression that might really have been a smile on his scarred lips.
 
“I won’t need this sword any more,” he said suddenly, unbuckling it.
 
“Take it back to the Wanderers.
 
Tell them to send me my lyre instead!
 
If I could make my songs for the dead here, maybe I could put a little life in their eyes.”

The dark misty shape swirled for a moment, as though concerned about maintaining the balance with even one living man here if that man was King Eirik.
 
“I’ll see what I can do about the lyre,” said Roric with a grin.

But how was he, in spite of his bold words, going to get out of here and back to mortal lands?
 
Suddenly Gizor One-hand stepped forward.

“I shall help you, Roric,” he said, his voice almost animate.
 
“Someone who returned living from Hel would have his song sung for a thousand years—and they will also long tell the tale of the dead man who helped him.
 
You can return via my burial mound.
 
The way is above you.
 
Jump.”

Jump?
 
Roric looked up without seeing anything but a distant gray roof, but he had to trust Gizor’s word for it.
 
He buckled on the singing sword and sprang upwards, on legs that suddenly seemed enormously powerful.
 
Gizor jumped with him, pushing from behind.
 
He grabbed for a handhold on the ceiling far above the sunless sea and tower of death.
 
Over him a passageway opened, a passage leading upwards, and he kicked his way into it.
 
He looked down between his feet for a last glimpse of the outlaw king.
 
Then he turned away, thinking no more of Hel to which fate would still one day destine him, but would not yet.
 
He thoughts were of Karin and her love.

The climbing was straightforward, even easy at first.
 
Gizor was close at his shoulder.
 
Roric went fast, his hands gripping first rocks, then soft earth.
 
Constantly the passage opened before him.

But then the climb gradually became harder.
 
Time slowly began to have meaning again, and he thought he had climbed two hours, three hours.
 
As he rose out of Hel hunger and weariness assaulted him, and he thought with a grim smile that this must be a sign he was returning at last to mortal realms.
 
The air here seemed thick and sour, leaden in his gasping lungs.

The passage up which he climbed ended abruptly.
 
He paused, waiting for it to open again before him.
 
But he now seemed surrounded by solid earth.

He turned to Gizor for suggestions, but he had faded again as they climbed and was now only the faintest of outlines, without even a face.
 
Roric knocked at the solid earth before him with his fists, but the dirt was mixed with rocks and sand and packed hard.
 
“Thank you for bringing me here,” he said in case the wight could still hear him, for he did not want to be ungrateful although it was hard to sound sincere.

While he hesitated, breathing shallowly the fetid air that surrounded him, the entire earth trembled under him, and the roof of the tiny space in which he stood swayed and swayed again, threatening to collapse.
 
He threw his arms protectively over his head, but the swaying ceased in a moment.
 
He began digging wildly with his bare hands at the earth, and then heard a sound, the first living sound that had reached him:
 
the muffled scream of a stallion.
 
Then the earth again began to sway.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1

Valmar saw firelight flickering ahead of him in the tunnel.
 
Eirik’s men? he wondered.
 
But he heard no sound, none of the outlaw king’s boisterous conversation, not even the snores he would have expected if they were all asleep.
 
He crawled on as quietly as possible, his sword’s scabbard dragging behind him.

He came into a dimly lit chamber where something enormous and bulky reclined by the fire.
 
His hand closed around his hilt.
 
Against the far wall was a complicated web woven of string, but it looked as though it had been slashed in several places, for broken ends dangled.
 
Beyond the web was an enormous mirror which seemed to reflect something other than this room.
 
The bulky shape shifted and human eyes glinted at him.
 
“Do not fear me, Valmar Hadros’s son.”

Valmar emerged from the tunnel and rose to his feet.
 
“Are you the Witch of the Western Cliffs?” he asked cautiously.
 
He made himself let go of his sword hilt.
 
Karin had told him a little of the Witch.
 
“And if you are, am I still in mortal realms?”

He had not been able to get any detail of the witch’s shape.
 
She—or it—turned away from him, toward the web, and began slashing.
 
It was impossible in the dim light to see if the witch was using a knife or fingernails.
 
More rents opened, and more bits of string dangled down.

“You are in mortal realms, but not for long,” said the voice almost cheerfully.
 
“You humans have given me an idea.”

“Humans?
 
An idea?”
 
Valmar found his fingers twitching and clenched his fists.
 
He had come back to rescue or to avenge Roric, not to become caught in the webs of creatures of voima.

“Roric No-man’s son and Karin Kardan’s daughter,” said the witch in a matter-of-fact tone.
 
“They are very unlike, with different goals, different purposes.
 
In a mortal lifespan, there is no way they could ever possibly come to understand each other fully.
 
Yet they love each other.
 
They do not
need
complete agreement.
 
They have learned through facing desperate dangers that even creatures as different as men and women can act together.”

The witch was speaking as though Roric was still alive.
 
Valmar fought down shameful disappointment.
 
He should be delighted his foster-brother lived.
 
Karin was not his even if Roric was dead.

But a witch in mortal realms might not know what had happened in the realms of voima.
 
“Are you creating desperate dangers in ripping your weaving?

“You humans gave me that idea too,” the witch continued, glancing quickly at him.
 
“There are too many knots, too many tangles accumulated over the years.
 
Roric No-man’s son deals with tangles by trying something desperate and bold.
 
Karin Kardan’s daughter does not lose track of the final goal, no matter how difficult the way.
 
The first of the dangers to the realms of voima were those men who went through the rift, being taunted by Roric.
 
At his example, I then sent a dragon through.
 
When a dragon settled at my door many years ago, I had not realized the potential advantages!”

“The Wanderers and Hearthkeepers fought the dragon together.”

“They worked together for a short time, it is true.
 
But it will take more than that for our children to join together permanently.
 
They have known all along that without someone to guide and instruct you mortals, you will lose order and direction, return to scattered and violent bands roving through the forest as you once were.
 
But even that danger has not been enough to make them stop their attempts to circumvent the other’s power.
 
I need something even more desperate.”

“Then what do you intend?” asked Valmar.

“The outlaws and the dragon in the realms of voima were an excellent distraction while I prepared what I do now.
 
I am
unmaking.
”
 
The voice was harsh and booming, all its cheerful quality gone.
 
A shiver went up Valmar’s back.
 
No matter how strange and slow this witch might seem, if Karin was right it had given birth to the chief of the Wanderers.
 
“We made the realms of voima for them to live in, and most of us, the makers, built ourselves into the very fabric of those realms, asleep.
 
But now I who was left to watch am waking them.
 
If they awake—and if our children do not ease them quickly back into slumber—then the very substance of immortal realms shall crumble.”

Valmar was swept with a horror that made his whole body go stiff.
 
“And what will happen if immortal realms are destroyed?” he brought out between frozen lips.