Wolfsangel c-1 Read online

  He followed them from the top of the ravine around to the back of the mountain. At first he thought they were beggars. The woman was dressed in rags and the man no better. Only the curved sword that the man carried in his hands said that they were people of a different station altogether. Feileg, who had no real appreciation of gold or jewellery, was still dazzled by the magnificence of the scabbard, catching the winter sun in white flashes.

  He decided to wait until night, take the man’s sword while he was sleeping, then he could bargain it back for information. But they did not stop to make camp, travelling on as the sun weakened to a smoky dusk. Eventually they came to the long cave that Feileg had already inspected. He followed them inside using all his hunter’s stealth and watched as the woman piled flat slabs one on top of another. Then she reached up with a stick and fished something from the crack in the cave’s ceiling. It was a knotted rope and she began to climb it.

  Feileg felt like running forward, pulling her out of the way and climbing the rope into the dark, but had noticed the bearing of the white-haired man. He was old but he was strong. The wolfman was confident he could take him in a fight but saw no point. And the woman? Feileg knew the sisters never left the darkness so she wasn’t a witch. However, she seemed to know the caves and might lead him where he needed to go.

  So he watched. The man held a candle while she climbed, then she lit another at the top and he went up. The rope was then pulled up and the light faded. Feileg gave it as little time as he dared, grabbed the stick and leaped up onto the pile of rocks. He poked around above him with the stick until he snagged the rope and tugged it free. Then he pulled himself up into the dark. Something else was under his hand. It was a pole and he guessed it would be used to knock over the pile of rocks and cover the tracks of anyone entering the cave. He left it where it was.

  After a steep climb he came to where the rope was fastened. Here, the fissure sloped into a level tunnel. There was no light at first, but a wolf is a creature of smell, not sight. The human musk and the fish stink of the candle led him on until, faintly, he saw a glow.

  He followed the trail down through the tunnels and the cracks, trusting to the scents when he couldn’t see a light. Feileg knew his chances of finding Adisla in that labyrinth were very small indeed but these two were his only hope. He didn’t know where they were going but they were going somewhere and they had light. That had to be better than crawling purposely through the dark.

  As he descended, Feileg began to feel there was something else in the darkness, something that didn’t wish him well. He had no wolfstone to protect him, no gift from a god to keep him safe. The dark seemed like an animal itself, one that rubbed against him, licked his flesh, knew him even. Something, Feileg sensed, was crawling over his mind, sniffing at his thoughts, marking them with its own scent. The witch, he could tell, knew he was there.

  On instinct, he tried to lose himself, to cut away that human part, to just be a wolf hunting in the dark, as Kveld Ulf had taught him to be. He felt the pressure in his head lift and move away. She had gone, but he knew that to get what Adisla wanted — to bring back the prince — he would have to confront the witch face to face. Even at a distance, her presence had seemed like a spider creeping over his brain.

  Feileg was sweating now. The candlelight had stopped moving forwards. As he drew nearer it became stronger, its glow more golden. He edged his way to a corner and looked round.

  The old man with the sword was standing in front of what seemed to be a hill of gold. The treasure was piled from the floor to the ceiling of the cavern, and the chamber was not low. The man had put on a byrnie and a helmet and was holding a shield that seemed more for show than war. Feileg looked at the way the man stood in his war gear, the confidence that seemed to shine from him. He knew this would be no easy opponent, no merchant’s bodyguard to be smashed and dashed.

  In front of the old warrior was a child, a haggard girl in a dirty bloody shift, carrying a broken spear shaft.

  Then the light had gone. In the flash of a flint being struck Feileg saw the man and his companion, but the girl had vanished. Another flash. And another, and the girl was there, stabbing at the warrior with her spear shaft. Feileg saw her fall and then it was dark again.

  And Feileg knew. The ragged little girl was the witch and the only hope for the prince Adisla loved. If the warrior was attacking her, that made him his enemy. It was flat dark but Feileg could hear the man breathing, smell his sweat, hear the movement of the rings on the byrnie.

  Quiet as a wolf over snow, he sped towards him and struck.

  Anyone Feileg had ever faced had been put down by his first attack, and Authun was no different. The king went sprawling to the floor with Feileg on top of him, but even as he hit Authun, Feileg knew he was in a fight. There was no fatal breath of shock for the king, no moment where he needed to work out what had happened to him and adjust. In an instant he had locked out the arm Feileg had put to his throat, driven into the elbow joint with the heel of his hand and forced the wolfman off him, twisting to stand as he did so. All that without sight.

  If Feileg had been a less flexible man, Authun would have had him at his mercy, using his arm to pinion him through the shoulder to the floor. Instead, Feileg rolled away and broke Authun’s grip, but now the momentum of the fight had changed. Authun was standing, Feileg was on the floor, barrel-rolling away from him.

  Feileg felt the king’s shin in his side as Authun kept pace with him. The warrior was keeping contact with him so as not to lose him in the dark. Feileg flipped back and heard the sword cut the air.

  Feileg was now on his feet. The king’s byrnie jingled like a reindeer sled as he moved and told Feileg exactly where he was. The wolfman sprang again. The king could not see him but heard him exhale as he leaped. Authun crouched behind his shield to offer a smaller target and the wolfman went over his head, falling badly on the uneven floor.

  There was a mournful sound from far away, like the mountain wind, though they were too far underground to be able to hear that.

  All the air had been driven out of Feileg’s lungs by his fall, and Authun moved towards him, drawn by the sound of his panting.

  The noise again. It couldn’t be wind, not here. And it sounded more animal. Authun struck into the darkness but his sword sparked on the floor. There was another flash. Saitada was trying desperately to light a candle. In the instant of light he saw the wolfman about to spring.

  Feileg hit him again, but Authun blocked with his shield and bounced him aside. Authun could sense his man was tiring. He wished he had a shorter weapon than the Moonsword with him. If he let the wolfman close with him, he could finish him at close range with a knife.

  The flint hit steel once more and Authun caught a glimpse of his opponent. It was enough. The Moonsword sliced out and caught the advancing Feileg across the thigh. The wolfman screamed as he crashed into Authun. The king battered him down with his shield. Feileg was howling, but a deeper sound stopped Authun dead — a rumbling snarl like a rock slide. It was a very large animal, probably a bear, and it was close. The noise distracted the king and the wolfman rolled away.

  Feileg couldn’t stand — that much was clear to Authun, who could hear him dragging himself away in the dark. With another enemy so close, Authun couldn’t risk grubbing about to finish him off, but he knew men in battle could get up from terrible wounds and Feileg’s groans gave him away. However, the wounded wolfman was useful to the king. If there was a bear in the cave it would be drawn to the coughing and groaning man on the floor. Then Authun would know where both his opponents were.

  Finally, Saitada had the candle lit.

  The wolfman was trying to get up while behind him floated two points of green light. When Authun’s eyes adjusted, he felt himself shiver.

  It was a wolf, but bigger than any wolf he had ever seen. It was bigger than any man, half again bigger than any white bear. How had it got into the caves? The tunnels were surely too narrow. The creature
snapped its jaws and looked at him, coughing and hacking.

  ‘Fa… fath…’ If Authun had not known better he would have said the beast was trying to speak.

  He made himself loosen his grip on the Moonsword, shook the tension from his limbs, breathed out and walked towards the wolf. To his right Authun noticed the wolfman crawling away. Let him go, he thought. He would be dead from loss of blood before long, and even if he survived wouldn’t be back to attack him any time soon. The fury that allows a man to forget mortal wounds is a short-lived thing, Authun knew.

  Five paces from the creature he stopped. He was struck that its front right limb was more like a human arm than the foreleg of a wolf but most of all he noticed its teeth — each as big as a boat nail.

  The king smiled. This was a rare death, he thought, one worthy of the tales of the skalds, but there was only the scarred woman there to witness it. He almost wished he hadn’t mortally wounded his previous opponent. His old friend Varrin would have loved to have died fighting such a monster, he thought. The face of the drowned man came into his mind again. He had killed him, and for what? What had been made by his ambition, what future secured, what treasures won?

  The beast hacked and coughed again. Was it trying to speak? It didn’t matter. Authun had wanted death and here was his perfect enemy — the opponent who could not be pitied, the monster, the useful fiend who could be struck without compunction.

  Authun raised the Moonsword. It was as if the animal caught his intent the instant it arose in the king. It snarled forward in a blur, knocking him to the floor. The byrnie saved his back on the rough stone but the wind was knocked from him.

  Authun could not let that concern him.

  Feileg bit down his agony and watched in the flickering candlelight as the king rolled away from the beast’s jaws, wriggling underneath it to slash up with his sword. The wolf was cut, its blood splashing onto Authun’s face.

  The creature howled and leaped away from Authun but did not take long to recover. It charged again, but this time swiped at the king’s sword arm with its man-like arm. Authun had been ready to duck the charge but the attack on his weapon surprised him. He’d expect that from a man but not an animal. There was a clatter as the Moonsword went flashing across the cave. For the first time in his life Authun had been disarmed in battle.

  Now the fight really started, the wolf driving into the king with tooth and claw, the king turning and ducking, dodging and jumping and — when that failed — catching the attacks on his shield.

  Even through his pain Feileg had to admire the old warrior. Though empty-handed and fighting such an enemy, he didn’t lose his head. All the time, as he slipped past the creature’s attacks or rolled and twisted away, he was working his way towards where his sword lay. Feileg had to wonder why the warrior’s companion didn’t help him. The woman just sat in the candle glow, calm as if she was listening to a story by the fire.

  The king was getting close to his sword. He was unharmed, though the animal had torn holes in his byrnie and ripped his shield to splinters. Feileg summoned his strength and crawled forward. The battle was almost on top of him, the old warrior crouching to feel for his sword. Feileg put his hand on the Moonsword, picked it up and dragged himself away into the shadows.

  Authun did not pause; he simply readjusted his retreat, giving ground with each one of the wolf’s attacks, back towards the hoard of gold and the weapons that lay within it.

  Feileg pulled himself to his feet and limped towards the nearest tunnel. Pushing himself along the wall of the passage he made his way into the darkness, the sounds of the fight fading in his ears. He felt his way down and down. The tunnel seemed endless but he couldn’t afford to rest. He drove himself on, away from the old warrior, away from the teeth of the wolf, and after some time had the sense that he was in a larger cave.

  Then he heard something, a whimper. It was some distance away, and for a moment he dared to think it was Adisla. He ran his hand across the wall of the cave and limped on, clutching his wounded thigh with one hand, the Moonsword pressed under his other arm. The wall opened into another corridor. It was small, mercifully small, not much wider than a man. The beast would not be able to get down there. From below he heard the voice again.

  ‘Help me.’ His stomach leaped. It was Adisla.

  He pushed himself on, the going terribly hard on the uneven floor.

  ‘Help me!’ The voice was louder now. Yes, no mistake, it was her.

  Around a curve in the tunnel he could see a light.

  54

  Tracking

  The creature was hungry. The need to eat saturated his mind as the first light appeared like the nimbus of the sun from behind a rain cloud at the edge of the great slab that sealed him in. But he had not lost his animal caution and watched from the darkness to see what it was that had freed him. Wolves do not rush in until they know the odds, and the creature, who only had a weak notion of his invulnerability, wanted to see his opponents before striking.

  But then they had come down into the pit and other beast feelings had taken over. If an animal stays somewhere long enough, it regards that place as its den. The creature felt threatened.

  He heard words he didn’t really understand: ‘Let me go first. This treasure may be delicate and I should assess how best to move it.’

  ‘We are taking everything from this tomb, merchant. Do not make me leave your body in payment.’

  There was no idea of revenge in the wolf’s brain as he snapped off Bodvar Bjarki’s head, only hunger.

  There was only hunger too as he watched Veles trying in vain to climb the rope out of the pit. He closed on him, ripped open his back with a single bite, gulped down a gob of meat, pawed him to the floor and tore away the flesh from his belly, sucking on his sweet entrails as the merchant screamed.

  Vali might have been pleased to see Veles suffer for what he had done to him, or might have thought that it was too strong a punishment for the crime he had committed, but he was scarcely there inside the wolf to have feelings either way. He was not one thing any more; he was a crowd, a mob, each of its members screaming for attention. The sorcerer, the Whale People, the family of reindeer hunters, the pirate Danes were all in him, or rather he was them, his consciousness a wild jumble of digested thoughts and personalities. His mind was like a marketplace, each bidder yabbering to stake his claim. Above them all though was the keening voice of the wolf, providing direction, impelling his body to action.

  Panic flooded down from above. Men were scrambling to replace the great slab of rock that had sealed him in, but no one could shift it. They gave up and ran.

  The wolf was out of the pit in a bound. There were things in his way, things that yelled and beat at him, so he swept them aside, cracked them in his jaws, allowed their juices and ichors to calm the hunger of his long incarceration.

  When they were all dead, he lay down, heavy with what he had eaten, his brain torpid, his body growing as it put its meal to work under the frozen moon and the green fire skies of the winter’s unyielding dark.

  He was not Vali. His body was like a twisted musical instrument and the prince was a tune it could play, but it did not then, nor for a while, not until he heard her cry the agonised howl that called him to life inside the beast.

  In the lowest cave of the Troll Wall it appeared to Adisla that she lay on a wonderful bed of straw covered with luxurious furs. She was back in her house. Her mother was there and Barth the Dane, Manni and all her brothers. The calm that had come down upon her with the lady’s presence seemed like the snugness of her bed on a winter’s morning.

  Adisla knew the witch queen wanted her to call Vali. Adisla spoke his name. The witch looked into her eyes and stroked her hair. She wanted Adisla to repeat the name, she could tell, and she did so gladly after all the lady’s kindnesses.

  The witch queen looked down at Adisla and nodded to herself. She had been trying to work through the girl, to channel Adisla’s tender thoughts in order to
send them to the wolf and summon him. That, it appeared, was not going to work.

  Gullveig allowed the barbed rune to surface in her mind. It made her shiver. Its presence felt almost toxic, as if she held it too long it would burn her, destroy her even. Then she sent it to the mind of the girl before her.

  Adisla screamed as her illusion fell away. She was not in her bed at all; there was no house, no loving family around her. She was pinioned on a narrow wedge of sharp stones at the end of a tapering cave. The stones cut her and the weird light of oil lamps cast shadows that seemed like long cruel fingers, reaching out to tear her flesh. She was in agony.

  As the rune spilled from the witch’s mind, Adisla saw what was intended. She saw visions of death — hers and Vali’s, Feileg’s and Bragi’s, in that life and in others, stretching away into time. And she saw what the witch herself didn’t see. She saw Gullveig’s true name, and that knowledge was more terrible than the bonds that tied her down, more terrible than the sharp rocks that cut her, more terrible even than Vali, transformed and murderous. Adisla knew that the lady wanted her to call Vali, and now she knew why.

  ‘I will not,’ she said.

  Someone came into view. It wasn’t the lady, but a pale and terrible child with an aged face. The witch queen opened her mind and it was as if all the ghosts and dreads that Adisla carried with her rose up to engulf her and drag her down. She saw her mother dying, Manni dead at the door, Vali slavering and grunting in that pit. Desperate to stop these nightmares swamping her, Adisla needed something to cling to, to blot out the vile images. The rune, shimmering and twisting in front of her, was her salvation, she thought, though she didn’t know where that idea came from. She stared into it, focused on it and knew in an instant that she had made a terrible mistake. A blinding white light burst onto her eyes as the rune seemed to sear into her like a branding iron burning into her mind.