A hand on Roric’s shoulder woke him. He was on his feet with his sword in his fist almost before he had his eyes open.
But then he saw who had touched him. A being twelve feet tall, gleaming white in the glow of the sunset, bent over them, and his face-but Roric could not bear to look at his face. He dropped his sword, grabbed Karin and held her to him, his head bowed and his body shaking all over. He would have offered the lord of voima his service and his honor, but no one would ever again ask any of this from him.
“This may sound strange coming from one of those you consider lords of earth and sky,” said a voice, faintly ironic, above them. “But I think we made a mistake.”
The Wanderers did not want people like him in their realm, Roric thought. One of them-this one? — had originally said they needed him, but they had never wanted a man with unpaid blood-guilt and the curse of incest on him.
Off across the hills moved dark, scuttling clouds, flashing with lightning. Roric looked at the storm so he would not have to look up at the lord of voima, then remembered that when he was here before there had not been any storms.
“We had never allowed mortals in our realm,” the voice continued. “When we first opened the rift to make it possible for you to enter, we never expected that other beings of voima would use the opportunity to bring you here, much less that so many other mortals would follow.”
This was not what Roric expected. So far it sounded as though the lords of voima were more disturbed over having King Eirik and his men in their realm than in the fact that he was Karin’s brother. He tried lifting his eyes slowly, but one glimpse of the face, gentle, merciful, and burning with terrible power, made him stagger.
“We are here to help you,” said Karin in a high, clear voice. Roric had not yet dared say anything. “We understand you planned to send our foster-brother to Hel on your behalf. Send us instead.”
Roric and Karin had finally fallen asleep clinging to each other, exhausted and in despair. How long had they slept? Long enough, Roric noticed, for the sun to slide still lower. Well, they need not worry how long the night might last in the realms of voima-where they were going it was always night.
“We are rethinking that plan, too,” said the shining white being. “We should have known after watching you all these years that mortals are unpredictable.”
Karin pushed back her tangled hair and looked at the Wanderer’s chest. “Then tell us what you want us to do,” she said firmly-as though, Roric thought in admiration, she was chiding King Hadros for giving contradictory orders.
“Though it is not what we expected in immortal realms,” said the Wanderer, again in that faintly ironic tone, “you may have already brought death here.”
“At home,” Roric said huskily, “I would try to find a way to pay the blood-guilt. I do not know what I can do here.”
“No, you have not brought death personally, Roric No-man’s son.” The voice sounded, Roric thought, not as calm as when he had spoken to this being, or another like him, outside the manor guest house. Instead the Wanderer seemed-distracted? “Why don’t you sit down, so we can talk more easily?” he continued.
Off in the other direction from the storm, a mountainside suddenly burst into flames. Orange fire went leaping up through the crowns of the trees, with a roaring they could hear even at this distance. The Wanderer extended an arm sharply and the fire went out at once, but the wind brought the smell of smoke to them.
Roric and Karin settled themselves carefully at his feet, and he sat on the grass as well, still towering over them. Roric’s heart was pounding as though it would burst from his chest. The little things he and Karin had noticed yesterday, the small changes in this lush realm of voima, the swarms of flies, the sour milk, were intensifying as the sun came closer to disappearing. And might some of this be due to his own presence here?
“We had thought a mortal would need to go to Hel for us,” the Wanderer continued, turning away from the scorched mountainside, “a mortal to ask a favor of the lords of death. But it may be that you mortals already have death with you wherever you go. We had not expected you could destroy that which we had created ourselves, or that you could make even an immortal bleed.”
The Wanderer was using “you,” Roric realized, not to mean him and Karin but mortals in general. Maybe Valmar? — but Valmar would never have destroyed the Wanderers’ own creation. Suddenly he grinned to himself through his failure and despair. By bringing King Eirik here he seemed to have stirred up events even more thoroughly than he had intended.
“Now that you have death here,” said Karin almost reprovingly, although Roric could feel her trembling, “are you planning to kill the women so they cannot succeed you?”
“There had been some who thought to do just that,” said the Wanderer thoughtfully. “I myself do not think it would either work or be desirable. Fate is bringing the time of our rule to an end, but if the Hearthkeepers are gone that does not necessarily mean that we shall succeed ourselves. We tried creating something of our own, sons to rule after us, but they ended up hollow, mockeries of us rather than true sons, and you mortals seem to have disposed of them anyway. It might be if the Hearthkeepers were dead that no one would rule the realms of voima, leaving the land here in perpetual night, and dark and chaos in mortal realms.”
“Your mother said it would never work,” said Karin bravely.
“Oh,” said the Wanderer, then fell silent. Karin squeezed Roric’s hand until her nails bit into his skin.
“Then if you have spoken to the Witch of the Western Cliffs, as you mortals call her,” the voice went on after a moment, “you know that the thought there is to try to reunite us with the Hearthkeepers.”
“Why don’t you just try it?” suggested Karin. Her voice shook as she spoke, but she still managed a tone of calm reason. Karin could talk almost anyone around, Roric thought in wonder. Was she going to try it on the lords of voima?
“Well, we already did,” he answered. As he spoke, all the leaves on the tree by them suddenly fell together from the branches. “We began our rule together. But we had to leave them. And since then they have been our foes, always eager for the end of our rule so that they may dominate once again, bitter that fate ordained the new day here that began our reign.”
“Were you fated to leave them?” asked Karin, brushing dry leaves from her shoulders.
“Perhaps it was the workings of fate, but it was the only decision we could make. As a mortal woman, you may recognize some of the difficulties we had in associating with immortal women. Our eyes were fixed on glory and honor, on wandering far, on ideas and discourse. We sought to discover the secret of creating ideal things through thought alone, not merely reshaping the lumpish stuff of the universe we had inherited. Yet they wished to stay in one place, to spend their time trying to guide you mortals, working to mold what is rather than create what is not, more interested in compromise than in deciding what is right, stressing the importance of feelings over reason… Why, several Hearthkeepers have even left immortal realms over the long years to ally themselves with mortal men, and there is one here now who considers herself in love with a mortal.”
Eirik worked fast, Roric thought admiringly.
A quarter mile away a chasm appeared in the earth with a great rumbling. Again the Wanderer held out his arm. For several seconds nothing happened, then the chasm reunited with a smack. He kept his arm extended for almost another minute before turning back toward them. “That should keep it under control for a little while longer,” he commented.
No use being frightened of this, Roric told himself, staring with horrified eyes at the spot where the earth had split. This realm was disintegrating rapidly around them, but if they were not safe with a lord of earth and sky they would be safe nowhere.
“I must apologize for these distractions,” said the Wanderer. “It used to take only twelve of us to keep the realms of voima solid and functioning, with very little effort on our part-indeed, with most of our attention given to mortal realms. Now, even with our best efforts I am afraid these lands may soon collapse around us.”
“Nothing you have said,” said Karin, getting her voice under control with an effort, “sounds like a reason to kill the women.”
“Perhaps not,” agreed the Wanderer, “although they have been planning for some time to hold us captive once our powers waned, and they may even now be planning to kill us. But I told you that only some of us intended to use death against them and that we were rethinking our plan anyway… My own plan all along, which may still come about although there is very little time, was to die ourselves.”
Then even the lords of voima could feel despair, thought Roric. He dared a quick look upwards, but the expression on the Wanderer’s face did not look like one of despair.
“You see,” he continued, “when the last upheaval came, the Hearthkeepers became weakened, stripped of their greatest powers, when the sun set, and when the new sun rose, while they were still weak, we took control. If fate ordains the same pattern, then we ourselves shall weaken in the same way. But I thought this time to use that weakness. If we were not merely ourselves without our powers, but utterly destroyed, we might be reborn with even greater powers. A seed dies in the earth and gives rise to a stalk of wheat. A tree dies in the forest and gives rise to young and rapidly-growing trees.”
“A mortal dies,” said Roric, “and become a voiceless wight in Hel.”
“That of course was always the danger,” said the Wanderer dryly.
It was all very well, thought Roric, for immortal beings to play with the idea of death. His heart rate had settled down to a steady, rapid pace. He felt Karin’s arm against his as he concentrated on the little patch of grass between his feet. No matter what these immortals did to each other, he himself, in a long time or a very short one, would end up in Hel.
And there was only one thing he had to do before then. He had to get Karin safely home. She had said they should both go to Hel, but this he would never allow. Since she had made it clear she was not going without Valmar, then he would get his foster-brother home as well if there was still time before this entire realm collapsed. Maybe if Karin and Valmar made it back to Hadros’s court safely the two of them would still marry someday-it would make Hadros happy and would not matter to him, as he would be dead.
“So are you going to try your plan,” he asked, “now that you think death may already be here?”
“As the time comes to try it,” said the Wanderer, still dryly, “it seems less compelling than it originally did.”
“You brought our foster-brother here,” Roric said quickly, “Valmar Hadros’s son. If you do not need him now to go to Hel for you, then you can return him to mortal realms.”
Get Karin and Valmar out of here, he thought. Get them out fast, before the sun goes, before the Wanderers decide to use a mortal to test whether death is really here.
“Perhaps you are right,” said the Wanderer slowly. “We chose you, Roric No-man’s son, because you were already an outcast, so it would not matter what happened to you here. Valmar Hadros’s son chose us, but perhaps we should not have let him do it…”
“Then let’s find him,” said Roric, jumping to his feet and pulling Karin up with him. “Where is he now?”
“That,” said the Wanderer, “is something of a problem. “We had sent him to fight against the hollow men, the ones I mentioned.”
The ones I thought for a while actually were the lords of voima, Roric thought.
“But he has broken all contact with us. The Hearthkeepers are looking for him too. He has captured one of them.”
Roric shot Karin a puzzled frown. This did not sound like Valmar.
The Wanderer suddenly rose to his feet with a swirl of glowing white garments. “I did try speaking to the one you call my mother, Karin Kardan’s daughter. The suggestion there was to try to learn something from the two of you, but it seems that your only wish is to be home again. The best we can do at this point is to gather up all you mortals and return you to your own realm, so that we may face the fall of night and the rise of the Hearthkeepers without being distracted by you. I shall try to find Valmar Hadros’s son as well as the others.” He gestured with a white arm. “Climb that ridge, and wait for the rest.”
Roric wiped the sweat from his face as the being strode away across the landscape, where all the shadows were now heavy and black. Did the lords of voima really intend to send them all back?
“He said nothing,” said Karin determinedly, as though trying to convince herself, “about us being brother and sister. He would have known, Roric. It therefore cannot be true.”
“The Wanderers don’t know everything,” he said. “And when a change like this is taking place in the immortal realms, a little incest among mortals would not bother them. It does, however,” taking her hand, “matter to me. ”
“Then don’t take my hand as though you were still my lover,” she snapped, pulling it away. “Let’s get up on the ridge and wait for Valmar.”
She kept coming back to Valmar, Roric thought. He stopped himself just in time from asking sarcastically if the man she called her little brother mattered more to her than he did. Karin was only snapping at him, he thought, because she was so frightened. Besides, it would be best now if Valmar mattered to her more than he did.
There was no way he could pay the blood-fee to Hadros, no way he could again be Karin’s lover. He had run from his loss of honor, but there was only so long a man could run. And fate would come to every man whether he tried to evade it or faced it bravely.
The only way to salvage anything of honor was to end his story in glorious battle. Now all he needed was an enemy to fight.