Europa (26 page)

“So you’ve been here before?”

“Sure, when I was younger, back before the plague. I used to live a few leagues west of here, farther down the Botsna near the sea. I remember Kjartan didn’t have much, but there was furniture in here, and skins and furs. They were all gifts for the vala from over the years. But it looks like they took everything with them. They must have left before the reavers found them.” Leif stretched and groaned.

A dead end.

Freya sighed and leaned against the cool rock wall.

So now the real hunt begins, with no trail to follow, and no idea where Fenrir might be.

Erik wandered around the room, scraping his shoes on the floor and examining the walls. He paused to peer into a crack where two of the rocks didn’t quite touch, admitting a sliver of light and a whisper of the noise of the falls. He jerked back from the wall with a grimace and he looked at Freya, signing, “I don’t think they left in time.”

She followed him outside, back into the roar and the mist, and they circled the house. On the far side of the ledge, just in front of the huge column of churning white water of the larger waterfall, there was a narrow crack running up the face of the rock wall, and jammed into that crack just a little above Erik’s head was a metal spike, perhaps the broken shaft of an old steel spear. And hanging from that spike was a body.

It was only half a body, the legs and pelvis, possibly a woman’s from the look of the hips, and it was dangling upside-down from the ankles, which were bound together with a hemp rope that had rotted down to its last threads. The bones themselves were bleached white from the sun, and every one of them was covered in huge, glistening brown slugs.

The rest of the body, the ribs and arms and skull, were missing. But Freya spotted a bit of white in the cracks in the rock around the hanging legs, and she reached down into a gap full of small stones and pulled out a single broken rib.

“It can’t be Kjartan,” Leif said.

Freya could barely understand him over the noise of the falls, but she read his expression and the man’s name on his lips, and drew his meaning. She recognized all too well that the bones were not a man’s, and were small for a grown woman as well, so if it was not a child, it was certainly an elderly woman’s body.

Kjartan’s mother, the vala. Another dead vala.

Freya inhaled a long sigh of the cold wet mist and wiped her hair back from her face. She patted Erik on the arm and signed, “There’s nothing here. We should go back—”

She broke off when she saw the look on her husband’s face change and his eyes snapped to the left. Freya spun to look just in time to see a tall man with brown skin and midnight hair step out of the shadows from behind the waterfall.

The stranger’s face wore many fine lines around his eyes and mouth, as though from years of worry and sorrow, but his brow and cheeks were quite smooth and strong. His hair was thick and wild and wavy, even weighed down with the damp of the mist, and there were faint streaks of gray at his temples and the edges of his stubbled jaw.

Freya couldn’t begin to guess how old he might be, thirty or sixty or anywhere between, but his dark eyes sparkled with amusement and a faint grin curled his lip. She smiled and raised a hand in greeting. “Hello there!”

“Son of a bitch!” Leif whipped his sword free of its sheathe and gripped it in both hands.

Freya looked at the youth. “Hey, language!” But Erik grabbed her shoulder before she could stalk toward him. “What are you—oh.”

The stranger wore a long dark blue coat with bright silver buttons down the right side, but the coat was open to reveal the man’s finely tailored shirt and trousers and shining black boots, and his sword. It was no Yslander sword. The hilt was slender with a woven grip, and the guard was a square plate instead a bar, and instead of a pommel there was a simple black cap below the grip.

That’s a pretty little sword.

Freya raised an eyebrow.

It looks like a snake.

The stranger smiled a cold and humorless smile, and he called out, “Leif of the Blackmane! The shining sword of Rekavik! It’s been ages, young man, just ages. How have you been?” He rested his hand on the butt of his sword.

“You’re dead!” Leif hissed, his sword shaking in his hands.

The stranger held out his empty hands as though inviting the youth to embrace him. “Not at all, young man. Why? Aren’t you happy to see me again?” He spoke with a strange accent, and his smile widened to flash his brilliant white teeth at the young warrior.

Freya wrapped her fingers around her favorite knife, and found the bone handle cold to the touch. She called out over the roar of the falls, “Leif! Who is this?”

The youth didn’t answer. He shuffled forward a few paces on the wet rock, keeping his sword pointed at the stranger.

The dark man leapt lightly across the wet ledges to stand between the hunters and the young warrior.

“Stay away from me!” Leif shuffled back.

“I intend to, young man, just as soon as I repay you for our last encounter.” The stranger stepped forward and drew his sword, and Leif screamed.

Freya stared at the young man. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

The Yslander’s sword clattered on the rock and tumbled into the river. The youth stumbled back, his face ashen, his mouth stretched wide in a silent scream, his neck straining with throbbing veins.

Still Freya stared in confusion. “What happened?”

And then Leif’s left arm fell off at the shoulder, leaving a blackened stump waggling in his severed sleeve. Leif stared down at his arm on the ground, and then he collapsed, struck his head on the rock ledge, and rolled back into the river.

Freya started forward. Erik tried to hold her back, but she shrugged him off and ran to the edge of the rock to look down into the frothing waters, but there was no sign of Leif. The dark man sighed and she jumped back, a knife in her hand. “Who are you?”

The man raised his sword, not to threaten her but to inspect it. The blade shone with a brilliant white light that cast his face in sharp lines and deep shadows, and the mist from the falls exploded into waves of scintillating rainbows. He smiled sadly, and slipped the sword away, and suddenly the ledge and the mist were quite dull and dim once more. “You’re not a friend of his, are you?”

“Who are you?” Freya shouted. Erik moved closer, his spear leveled at the man’s back.

He killed Leif, and Leif was a prick, but he wasn’t a murderer. At least, not yet, I don’t think. So what does that make this man?

The stranger inclined his head. “Perhaps it would be better if we spoke inside.”

“What?” she shouted over the falls and squinting through the mist. “Maybe we should go somewhere else to talk.”

“Indeed, fair lady.” The man turned and leapt lightly back across the ledges and slipped into the shadows behind the falls.

Freya frowned and put her knife away. Erik nodded at the falls, and she nodded at him, and they followed the stranger into the darkness. The rock ledges were slick and the rushing cascade was absolutely deafening, but Freya kept her spear close and minded her feet and soon she was standing inside the cave. Erik slipped once, but she caught him, and they stood side by side. The falls shimmered behind her like a curtain of crystal sparkling in the sunlight. But ahead of her she could see nothing at all.

“Hello?” she called.

The soft sigh of a sword being drawn echoed in the distance, and the stranger’s white blade appeared in the darkness, illuminating the rough stone floor, the vicious stalactites hanging overhead, and the man holding the shining weapon.

“Come along, fair lady,” he said. He headed back into the cave, taking the light with him.

Freya followed with Erik at her side, and they hiked up the gentle incline of the cavern until the falls were only a pale dot behind and below them, and their roaring was reduced to the gentle shushing of a stream or the wind in the grass. At first they saw nothing but stone walls, but soon they came upon a slope strewn with bones, pale white ribs and femurs and skulls, many smashed into fragments that crunched underfoot.

Above the bones, the stranger led them into a chamber where the floor was quite smooth and the hanging rock spears had all been broken off, leaving smooth little stumps above their heads. There were quite a few furs and skins piled up against one wall, which Freya took to be the man’s bed, but it was the only sign of human habitation. There were no other pieces of furniture, no tools, no clothes, nothing to cook with, and nothing to eat. At least, not that she could see.

“You live here?” she asked.

“I do indeed,” the stranger answered. He sat down on the edge of his bedding and plunged his sword into a crack in the floor beside him. The shining blade filled the chamber with its pale, dead light, but within moments Freya saw the stone floor begin to glow a dull red and the air grew warmer and drier. Tiny arcs of lightning writhed and snapped along the sword’s edge, hissing and buzzing like a living thing. Their host gestured to the floor near the sword and said, “Please, have a seat.”

They sat. The man on the bed rested his hands on his knees and gazed into the bright blade of his sword. “There were times, so many times, when I imagined what I would do if I ever saw Leif again. Flights of fantasy, day dreams, you know the sort. A bloody bit of torture, a grandiose duel, and many brave and poetic words from me, of course.” He smiled briefly. “I suppose I was just too surprised to see him today, too angry to think. Ah well.” He sighed and shifted his gaze to Freya and then Erik, and back again. “Is he your husband?”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t speak, does he?”

“No.”

The man nodded. “Well, that simplifies things in some ways, doesn’t it?”

“Who are you?” Freya asked.

“What a deeply philosophical question, probably more so for me than perhaps any other person in the world, in history, even. I have so very many names—”

“Just one will do,” Freya said.

Please don’t say Woden.

He raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Omar. Omar Bakhoum, at your service, fair lady.”

“And why did you kill Leif?”

The man called Omar smiled again and winked at her. “You don’t seem very upset about it. He wasn’t a close friend of yours, was he?”

“We’d only just met, and no, we won’t be mourning his death any time soon.”

Omar nodded and resumed gazing at his sword. “There’s no guarantee that he’s actually dead yet, you know. He survived the cut quite well, without a drop of blood lost. It wasn’t until two years ago that I could pull that trick off.”

“I saw that. The cut was burned over black before the arm hit the ground.” Freya pointed to the sword. “It burns as it cuts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does.”

“But you never cut him,” she said. “You just drew the sword and he screamed, just like that. Is it a magic sword?”

Omar laughed so hard and loud that the echo kept cackling and guffawing long after the man fell silent. He shook his head, then nodded. “Yes, and no, and maybe. But I did cut him. You just didn’t see it. It’s called iaido, the art of drawing the sword. My dear friend Daisuke has been teaching it to me.”

“Friend?” Freya glanced about the stone chamber.

“Oh don’t worry, he’s quite dead,” Omar said. “I killed him myself, but that was years ago and we’ve become rather good friends since then.”

Erik signed, “He’s mad.”

Freya signed back, “Maybe. Definitely dangerous though.”

Omar raised an eyebrow at their exchange, but only said, “You must think me crazy. Certainly, certainly. Any sane person would. But then again, the last person to trust me became the queen of Ysland in less than two years, so clearly there are advantages to listening to what I have to say.”

“Wait, the queen?” Freya leaned forward. “You know Skadi?”

“Indeed I do, fair lady. Or I did, for a time. As much as one can know a person without torturing them, anyway.”

Freya nodded slowly. “Maybe you should start at the beginning. Who are you, exactly? And how do you know the queen?”

“I come from the city of Alexandria,” Omar said, “in the province of Aegyptus, in the Empire of Eran, in the land of Ifrica, which is very far away. But none of that matters right now. And you didn’t come all the way out here with Leif to learn about the queen, did you? You want to know about the reavers, yes? But to understand the reavers, you need to understand where they came from, which takes us back to why I am here in your charming little country. So then, I will start with this sword of mine.”

He pointed at the shining blade standing in the crack in the floor. “We call the metal
sun-steel
. And if there is any genuine holy mystery in this world, it is in this metal. If it weren’t so bright right now, you’d see it has the color of copper or gold. But here’s the secret. The sun-steel draws in aether like a magnet draws iron shavings. It drinks up aether and it swallows the souls of men and women right along with it, living or dead makes no difference. And if you—”

“Rinegold!” Freya pointed at the sword. “You’re talking about rinegold!”

Omar smiled kindly and leaned back a bit. “Oh, good. You’ve heard of it. That will make this so much easier. Are you a vala?”

“No, but my sister was. Is. She
is
.” Freya pressed her lips together and glanced at Erik.

“Was, or is?” Omar tilted his head.

“What I mean to say is that she was bitten by a reaver three nights ago,” Freya said softly.

“Oh.” Omar nodded. “I understand. And I’m sorry.”

“It’s not as bad as all that, not yet,” Freya said. “Skadi said that if we could bring her the rinegold ring of Rekavik that the king wore, then she could talk to the ancient valas and cure the plague, and save my sister.”

“She said that, did she?” Omar sighed. “Is that why you’re out here? You’re looking for Ivar’s ring? Then she’s betrayed you, just as she betrayed me. She sent you to your death, and all for nothing.”

“I’ve never failed in a hunt before, and I’m not afraid of Fenrir.”