‘Thóllakr and his thrall are under my protection. Swear by Thórr you’ll leave them unharmed, and tell your men to do likewise.’
‘Huh? You only have to give the order and we’ll—’
‘Swear.’
Brökkr wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand, snorted, then spat a red gob of snot onto the grass. ‘I swear by Thórr’s balls that Thóllakr and his woman will go unharmed. Good enough, chief?’
Fenrisulfr shook his head.
‘I’m not your chief.’
‘You’re dissolving the alliance? There’s no—’
‘I’m making you chief of both our bands,’ said Fenrisulfr. ‘You’re more than good enough.’
With care, he placed Brökkr’s sword flat on the ground.
‘You’re not . . . You mean it, Fenrisulfr, don’t you?’
Fenrisulfr stared at the sea, so huge and uncaring of mortal affairs, and wondered how he could ever have thought his life was so important.
‘I’m not sure that’s my name any more,’ he said, more to the waves than to Brökkr.
Without looking back, he walked down to his longboat, beached among the others. He told the men on guard about Thóllakr, that he and his woman were not be harmed and had orders to groom and exercise the roan gelding, across the causeway if Thóllakr wished. There was no hint in his tone that this was a final order.
Then he fetched the crystal tipped spear from on board the longboat, slapped the dragon prow and went off to be by himself until night fell and he could slip away and – Norns permitting, and damn them if they did not – never be seen by his reavers again.
He was thirty-three summers old to the best of his reckoning, stronger and faster than ever, as ruthless as he had to be, with no idea how he wanted to live the rest of his life, except that when he found the opportunity that must be out there, no one would wrest it from him.
They could try, of course.
I’ll still need enemies.
What else gave meaning to existence?
From time to time Chief Vermundr thought back to the days when Folkvar ruled the clan, and that young whelp Ulfr had shown so much promise that some people thought he would be made chieftain on Folkvar’s death, except that Eira had died and Ulfr had grown crazed and that was that: another young man gone to travel far, and by now he might be dead or rich, whatever the Norns decreed.
‘She’s gone, Father.’ His son Vítharr put a hand on Vermundr’s shoulder. ‘My mother has passed.’
‘I know.’
They were in the men’s longhall, just the two of them, their words strange in the emptiness.
‘I know, my son,’ said Vermundr again, his heart hollow.
He stared at the youth, feeling both proud and worried, because Vítharr was taking his mother’s death calmly but there was a streak of darkness inside him, and it could surface in cruelty from time to time. And avarice, when wandering storytellers sang of plunder and glory, of warriors founding new domains in the East. Some day Vítharr would take it in his mind to go, and perhaps that would be best for the clan, hard though it was to think so.
In his mind’s eye now, Vermundr’s beloved Anya came back to him, her spirit reaching out from dreamworld before Hel’s dread ship Naglfar took her to the Helway, to suffer in Niflheim, Niflhel, for ever.
I love you.
And I you, always.
He had first caught sight of her on entering Chief Snorri’s village, as was – on the day Arne became chief unofficially, later to be confirmed ceremonially, for Snorri had been killed in the fighting and only Arne had stepped up to organise the survivors. No one ever raised the subject of how soon Vítharr was born: seven months after Vermundr and Anya began courting, which was two months after they had met. Nor did anyone ever talk about the one eyed poet who had sojourned in the village beforehand, and tricked them into bloody conflict.
There was a cough from the longhall entrance.
‘May I enter?’
It was custom for even a volva to ask permission, this being the men’s hall, and she was new to the village and therefore still careful, though Vermundr had met her many years back, when they had been travelling to the Thing, and several times years later when she rode with traders. But last winter she had entered the village on foot, leading a daughter who was three or four summers old, and asked whether they had a volva she could talk to.
But there had been no one in that position for a long time, and little by little she had made herself useful, healing and counselling, until Vermundr asked her to move in to the old volva’s hut, once occupied by Eira, and Nessa before her.
Now she was here to comfort Vermundr’s tortured spirit.
‘Come in, Heithrún,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
She came inside and bowed to Vermundr, and nodded care fully to Vítharr.
It was always wise to be careful around him.
FORTY
COOLTH, 2606 AD
Jed Goran had never wanted to be a spy – or even a spy’s husband, more to the point – but Labyrinth had enemies and backing down from a fight had never been Jed’s way. Yet there was bravery and there was foolish unpreparedness, so as his bronze ship orbited Coolth he minimised the external-view holorama and reviewed the briefing holos.
So, Coolth.
Ice locked continents; oceans where schools of huge balaenae swam, singing songs of epic learning and grandeur, where once every Coolth year, each herd, some two thousand strong, would gather around their vast matriarch whose skin nodules would begin to pulse and finally burst open, tiny forms streaking upward to the surface and up into the sky, for the nymph form soared like birds, a lifecycle discovered by an early explorer called Rekka Chandri, the events of her real life distorted by the popularity of a twenty-fifth century holodrama series called Chandri, Space Explorer, which created an extended and improbable mythology of its own, in which Pilots were always mysterious and undefeated in space or hand-to-hand combat.
‘True enough,’ said Jed aloud, and grinned.
And what about Pilots’ ships, in the stories?
He slipped lightly into trance.
They were clueless about you, my love. And about Labyrinth’s existence.
Just as well, perhaps.
Jed returned his focus to the briefing material.
*
An hour later, they soared in to land next to Barbourville, an extended series of domes, some large enough to house potentially a thousand people – even though the entire station’s complement was no more than eight hundred – sitting securely on the icescape. It was historical coincidence that this, Coolth’s largest research station, bore the same name as one of Molsin’s former sky-cities that had perished in what people were calling the Conjunction Catastrophe – except that their understanding of what that meant was about to change.
Clara, white faced, had shared news with Jed before he left Labyrinth, information that was yet to spread among the realspace worlds: Molsin had fallen prey to the Anomaly, and final intelligence reports – before surveillance devices stopped functioning and Pilot ships in orbit transited to mu-space before the Anomaly could subsume them – showed the baby sky-cities reaching out to the wreckage of the true cities, such remains as still floated in Molsin’s orange skies, and joining quickglass to quickglass, forming one great floating structure that looked to be extending horizontally, perhaps eventually to cover the entire world like a spherical webbed shell.
And there were hints that it was already lowering tendrils to the hydrofluoric acid oceans below, though for what purpose, no analysts were willing to say for sure. What was clear was that Anomalous components like Rick Mbuli – killed fortuitously by Jed, over and over in his dreams and in waking flashes – had succeeded in carrying out the act that Petra Helsen had only faked, in order to get the sky-cities firing on each other out of panic: carrying out the absorption of individual human beings into one giant planetary gestalt, either part of or identical in nature to the original.