Roric glared upward at the renegade king. The sky above was still pale, though everything around them was losing its color as dark came on.
“You’re definitely more trouble than you’re worth,” said Eirik with a sneer of his scarred lip. “If it hadn’t been for you, me and my men would still be living peacefully in what’s left of our kingdom, raiding and capturing those who didn’t know better than to come within a hundred miles.” He paused for a second, muttered, “Though that life’s been getting pretty thin lately,” then glared at Roric again. “First you show up with the princess, then it turns out that ship had come looking for you, you free the king’s son I was going to offer to the lords of death, and now between you and him I’ve lost half my men.”
“Where’s your fair lady Wigla?” said Roric mockingly. “Am I responsible for her disappearance as well?”
Eirik shook his head. “You fight like a berserker, like someone who doesn’t care if he lives or dies-only I, Eirik, am supposed to fight like that. And now you act like you want me to kill you in cold blood. Well, I wouldn’t let my men kill you, to let the princess make a great song to keep your spirit happy in Hel. And I’m not going to kill you quickly and cleanly now. You’re going to be the sacrifice.”
They dragged him up the cliff by the waterfall and back to where the bodies of those Valmar had slain were laid out. They added the men Roric had killed before they overpowered him.
Two of the king’s warriors had gone back into the cave by the pool but emerged in a moment with puzzled frowns. So Karin and Valmar were safely back home, Roric thought and grinned wolfishly.
The sounds of the fight between the Wanderers and the dragon had died away. Roric peered through the dimness but saw no sign of the lords of voima. “No use waiting for midnight,” said Eirik. “The day moves so slowly around here that it might be a week’s worth of waiting. We’ll make the sacrifices and get back to our own land with the booty.”
“How about Wigla?” asked one of his warriors, picking up Roric’s question.
Eirik growled and glared over his shoulder at Roric again. “She can do what she likes.” He turned back to his men. “Now, we don’t have any women so you two will have to do. And this spring will do instead of the boiling pool. Stand there with the bread and ale. I don’t have my lyre, but I should still be able to make a song.”
He considered a moment, arms crossed and forehead furrowed, then began to sing.
“Outlaws they called us, the men of the south,
“Renegade warriors to the Fifty Kings,
“But brothers in blood to the band of King Eirik,
“They fought, never shirking, till fate struck them down.
“Come death, take our brothers, to dark realms below!
“Take them now to the one realm that endures!
“In lands of immortals, as in human realms,
“Our swords serve the master whom no one evades.”
King Eirik snorted and shook his head. “Not one of my better songs. I really need the lyre. You, there! You have to do the calling.”
Roric noticed that neither Valmar nor he himself got any credit in the song for having killed Eirik’s men.
Two of the warriors stepped forward then while the rest went absolutely silent. They sprinkled the bodies with bits of bread and splashed them with ale. “We call on the lords of death,” piped up one in a shaking voice. “We call on those whose power is greater than all the lords of voima! Come, nameless ones of the night!”
“We call. We call,” went the murmur up and down the line of the living.
The water from the spring splashed softly. Roric rolled over to see if there was any change. So far there was none.
“We call on the lords of death to take our brothers!” continued the warrior in a high, frightened voice when Eirik elbowed him. “Eat and drink what is offered here. Strike down those who struck our brothers down!”
“And especially,” said Eirik grimly, “drink the blood of this man.” He advanced toward Roric with his knife out.
“You still don’t dare to face me in open battle,” said Roric loudly, deliberately breaking the tense stillness. “No wonder they made you an outlaw! Killing a bound man is no way to show your men your courage, Eirik. You’d lost all your honor yourself long before the All-Gemot took it from you!”
But then he went abruptly silent and Eirik whirled away from him, as the soft splashing of the stream changed its note. The water rose in a wave that fell back with a boom, a boom that seemed to say, “We come.”
“No man escapes you!” shouted Eirik gleefully, his face transformed. “Even in the lands of voima, we make offering to the lords of darkness!”
“Cut my bonds, Eirik,” growled Roric, “and you can be a sacrifice to death yourself.”
The earth abruptly shuddered, and a chasm opened directly under the bodies of the slain. The other men leaped backwards as the dead disappeared with a roar of falling earth and stone. Roric, trying to roll further from the edge, spat out the sourness in his throat, a sourness of long decay.
And out of the chasm rose a mist, darker than the darkening air and more solid. It grew increasingly dense, seeming to take on an almost human shape, a shape with two coals burning red where the eyes should have been. And the shape had a voice.
“This land is mine,” it said, so deep that the split earth vibrated. “Immortal lands are immortal no longer but belong to me. Everything comes eventually to me, and it comes now sooner than expected. All shall end now, and there shall never again be renewal or birth.”
Eirik’s men fled, racing wildly down the ridge, but the renegade king stood his ground. “I’ve served you all these years,” he said, nervously licking his scarred lip. “You should reward me for all the dead I’ve sent to you.”
“No man escapes me, for all die sooner or later,” the voice replied, dark, enormously loud, satisfied, unanswerable. “No man comes living to Hel, but death comes to all mortals-and now to immortals as well.”
Roric jerked until the ropes bit into his flesh as a touch landed on his shoulder. He rolled around to see a Wanderer bending over him.
This time he could look at the face. It was the same face, burning with wisdom and power, which he and Karin had been forced to look away from before, but it was no longer lit from within by light, and the power was much diminished.
“This plan quite definitely was a mistake from the beginning, Roric No-man’s son,” said the lord of voima in a low voice, loosening Roric’s bonds.
“Kardan’s son,” he corrected, rubbing circulation back into his wrists, but the Wanderer only shook his head.
“Sending you that stallion originally,” he commented quietly, “was the only thing in the entire plan that ever benefited either us or you.”
Roric looked down the hill to see the other Wanderers and the Hearthkeepers, tattered and drooping. A glance at Eirik showed that he had not noticed their approach, having eyes only for the dark forces he had summoned.
They had defeated the dragon, then, thought Roric, rising to his knees. He slipped his hand into his belt pouch and turned over for a moment his little bone charm.
But if even immortals could now die, how much longer could either the Wanderers or the Hearthkeepers rule earth and sky? And if they were not there to bring about birth and renewal, how much longer could mortal realms endure? The sky overhead was now nearly dark, and in it showed neither moon nor stars.
He went forward slowly and silently, three steps, four steps, and still Eirik did not hear him. With a sudden bound he was on him, one elbow tight around the king’s neck, the other hand knocking his knife from slack fingers.
Eirik fought back, kicking behind him and trying to heave Roric off balance, but he clung on grimly. “What happens,” Roric shouted to the dark red coals before him, “what happens if a man comes living to your realm?”
The mist moved, thickening even more. “This has never happened. Men die in mortal realms and come dead to Hel.”
“You came when called to eat what was offered,” cried Roric, squeezing Eirik’s throat tighter as the king struggled, “but I’ll make you a better offer than any mortal ever made to the powers of voima! But with my offer comes a price. If you close this chasm, remove death from the realms of voima where it should never have come, you can have two live men in Hel!”
From the chasm came other voices, faint, avid, and cold as ice. “Life! Bring us life!”
“The wights of Hel… should have no voice,” said the being in the mist, not so loud, not so sure.
“Then if I brought life into Hel,” Roric yelled, “would there be voima there even if you had destroyed it in all the realms of earth and sky?”
“Life in Hel… would destroy the balance.” The voice was even more unsure.
“Yet by coming here, you yourself are destroying the fated balance,” grunted Roric, punching Eirik in the stomach. “If you won’t take us as an offering, take us as a threat! Close the chasm and leave immortal realms forever! Your balance is changing with every second that Hel is open to the forces of voima!”
Eirik doubled over abruptly, making Roric loosen his grip around his neck. There was no time to wait to see if the forces of death would agree. Roric kicked himself forward with all his strength, launching both him and Eirik over the edge and into the pit.
The chasm crashed shut above their heads. They fell for what could have been five minutes, still clawing at each other. “Don’t bother trying to kill me,” Roric gasped, getting a grip on the other’s head. “You can’t send me to Hel since we’re both going there already!”
As they fell through blackness, across the insides of his eyelids flitted images of old bones and dried brains. He fought against the images, trying to replace them with a vision of Karin, smiling at him as the wind played with her hair. If he was-even for an instant-to bring life to Hel, let it be the voima of love and triumph.
They reached bottom unexpectedly and hard, but not with the killing smash Roric had expected. They rolled apart, trying to recover their breaths. If no man had ever come living to Hel, he thought, then maybe a living man could not be killed here. It was bitterly cold, colder than a January night with the north wind blowing.
Neither of them spoke at once. Eirik seemed oddly diminished without his ready tongue. He showed no inclination to attack Roric again as both sat up slowly. Roric blinked and blinked again. There was faint light here.
And people. Not quite solid but people nonetheless, reclining listlessly on the dusty floor and looking at them. All were gray, hair and skin and eyes, gray against the gray floor, though Roric and Eirik still kept their own colors. The sound of their heartbeats, fast and hard, echoed through the tunnels, the only hearts here that beat.
“I know these men,” Eirik muttered, rising and looking around. “Some of them I killed myself.”
Their shapes were slightly misty, but on many Roric could see the marks of a death blow: a slit throat, a stomach sliced open so that the entrails looped out, a deep gash in the chest. “Wigla doesn’t miss you at all, ” Eirik said, low and fierce, to one whose throat had been cut so deeply that his head drooped, nearly severed. He was one of the more solid ones. Others had faded so much that they were little more than hints of a shape, through which the next figure was visible. Roric pulled out his bone charm, which had given at least a hint of solidity to the Wanderers’ hollow creation, but it had no such effect here.
Eirik and Roric walked slowly between the rows of reclining figures, shivering with arms wrapped around themselves. The dead did not seem to feel the cold. Here were passages that glowed with their own dim light, featureless, stretching on before them endlessly, filled with dead men and women and children who looked at them without moving but with hungry eyes. Roric fought against an increasingly powerful sense of futility and loss. Karin was becoming harder and harder to remember.
He had saved the realms of voima from death, he told himself. He had kept the forces of darkness from immortal lands. It should have been a triumphal shout, but it seemed here no great glory, only a disturbance such as he and Eirik made in the dust with their feet as they walked down unending passages where sprawled the dead.
Eirik stopped abruptly. “Here are the men for whom we just made the offerings,” he said in a half-choked whisper. Roric too recognized them. He forced himself to look closely at the men whom he and Valmar had killed, resisting the urge to stumble on unlooking and the feeling that there was no use any more in doing anything. These men bore their death wounds but they were more solid than any of the others they had passed.
“Eirik!” one croaked.
The renegade king began walking rapidly. “Are they less misty because they’ve been dead such a short time,” Roric asked himself aloud, trying to find the question interesting, “or because of the songs sung for them?”
“The songs, of course,” growled Eirik. He seemed either more excited than Roric to be here in Hel-or more frightened. “Don’t you know that the dead never truly fade away as long as their songs and stories are remembered? Those others, those that were almost gone- None must have remembered them.”
“Why do they keep looking at us like that?” Roric muttered.
“Because we are alive,” said Eirik shortly. “Keep walking. Weren’t you ever taught not to go near a burial mound at night? The dead, even the dead who live on in story, want life. Anyone alive who lingers too long near them, or near the passage that leads from every burial mound down to Hel, will have the life drained out of him.”
Roric reminded himself that he had sought this death deliberately, the one way out of dishonor, even though he realized now there was no honor here. The glory and praise of the songs, which might keep the dead more solid for a little while more, was still only glory in lands under the sun.
Had he indeed saved the lords of voima? Death should be gone again from their realms, but they might still be so weak from their fight with the dragon that neither Wanderers nor Hearthkeepers would be able to rule earth and sky-in which case both their realm and mortal realms would end, either by slow decay or sudden cataclysm. And he knew in the coldness of his heart that even if one or the other of the forces of voima rallied, fate could not ordain their unending power. Eirik was right that there was only one force to whom all came in the end.
As they walked the silence of the halls seemed to alter, just the tiniest amount, but there began to be for the first time sounds as though voices were shouting a very long distance away. It was heard in no passage when they entered, but it built behind them as though they themselves were giving voice to the dead. Roric, experimenting to keep the sense of futility away, discovered that if he held his charm high the effect was intensified.
They kept on walking. He was intensely aware of the blood coursing through him, of the air entering and leaving his body with every breath, and it seemed almost obscene among these shadowy wights. They felt it too, for their eyes kept turning to them, and several spoke Eirik’s name clearly, rising on their elbows for a better look, as well as mumbling behind them when they had passed. At one point the renegade king reached for his sword, but he was carrying a singing sword, and at the sound of the first wild and sweet notes the dead began to sit up. Eirik slammed the blade back in the sheath and pushed Roric to greater speed.
They turned a corner and saw a gray figure whose body was a strange mix of solidity and mistiness. His bloody chest, punctured as though by spears or dragon teeth, was vividly clear, but his face beneath a misty crown was almost invisible. His sword too was clear, a long triangular blade and a hilt set with jewels.
“This must be a king out of legend,” said Roric in wonder.
“King Thaar, I think,” said Eirik in an undertone, “who killed the dragon many generations ago up in my kingdom-the dragon who first built up the hoard by the sea. Look at his wounds-they’re just like in the stories. And this must be the sword Irontooth.”
“Then even someone remembered in the stories,” said Roric slowly, “will not stay solid here forever, because only a few aspects of his life will be remembered.”
“If he’s got no face at least he can’t try to talk to us,” said Eirik grimly.
They could have walked for an hour or for a week. Here Roric felt no weariness, no hunger, even though still alive. The cycles of waking and sleeping, eating and drinking, which ruled mortal lands had no existence here. He almost decided that these passages would never end, that they would wander past rows of the dead until earth and sky themselves passed away.
He kept looking around as they walked until he realized that he was looking for Karin and Valmar. If he did not find them it should mean they still lived and were safely home in Hadros’s court. Karin they would forgive quickly enough when it was clear that he himself was gone.
But if he stayed here she would arrive some day, gray like all these people, growing more misty as her grandchildren slowly forgot her, at best able to croak his name in recognition. He summoned again the vision of her smile beneath a brilliant sky. He had intended to die for her, his sister, his lover, his life. But being here, surrounded by the dead and not dead himself, he more than anything wanted her with him-or rather to be back under the sun with her.
Roric stopped so abruptly that Eirik, walking behind, slammed into him with a solidity of flesh and bone alien to these halls. Before them lay Gizor One-hand.
He was handless even in death. “Roric,” he said through lips that did not move. “Roric,” and started slowly to rise. No one else among the dead, not even those for whom Eirik had sung the songs, had tried to stand up.
Eirik was gibbering at his shoulder. “I know that man. I cut off his hand, years ago.”
“And I killed him.”
“ You are not dead,” said Gizor, half crouching now. “You have the breath and blood of life in you.”
“And do you plan to take them from me, wight?” asked Roric. He hooked his thumbs into his belt, and his voice echoed and reechoed down the silent passages.
“Yes, of course he does!” blurted Eirik behind him.
“No,” said Gizor. “No.” His eyes, gray and hungry, flitted over them. “A wight could not draw the life from a man before he reached his fated end.” His voice, the only voice that had spoken clearly more than a word or two, became so faint it was almost intelligible as he straightened up. “But it is good to see, No-man’s son, that there is still life beneath the sun.”
The two mortals backed away warily. “You tried to frighten me with a children’s tale,” said Roric to the outlaw king, in an undertone and between his teeth. “There has never before been a living mortal here. Why should the dead be ready to attack the first ones they see? And I have never believed that story about burial mounds. They are places of glory, where we honor the dead. But why,” with a sudden thought, “did Gizor call me No-man’s son? Why did he not call me by my father’s name?”
“Did you think the dead knew anything, Slut’s-get?” replied Eirik, but the insult sounded hollow, especially in a whisper. “Why should they in dying gain any knowledge they did not have in life?”
Gizor was standing now, still eyeing them with dead gray eyes. “You are not planning to avenge yourself on me here in Hel?” Roric asked boldly. He reached over and tugged at the sword at Eirik’s belt, and again a few notes of the songs of voima rang out before Eirik smacked his hand away.
Seeming to become more solid at that sound, Gizor swayed on his feet. “There is no vengeance in Hel,” he said slowly and expressionlessly, “any more than there is honor or voima. But you defeated me using what I taught you myself. My memory and honor live with you and in the only place they can live, in mortal realms.”
Roric nodded gravely, then turned to walk on. But there was a faint rustling behind him. He looked back. The wight was following them.
“Faster,” hissed Eirik. “He won’t keep up.” But Gizor did keep up, staying about ten feet back. The murmuring of the awakened voices of the dead grew slowly louder, and when Roric, against his will, glanced back again he saw that Gizor had been joined by other shadowy shapes.
He found himself walking faster and faster and glanced at Eirik to see how he was taking it. But the outlaw king now looked thoughtful and was muttering to himself. “So they do not attack the living. Perhaps a living man could become their leader.”
Roric stopped and turned around. “Why are you following us?”
“I thought you might need a guide,” croaked Gizor.
“And where will you guide us?” asked Roric. “As you must know,” making himself chuckle, “Hel has to be vaster than the earth itself to hold all those who have ever died, and living men would not want to wander its halls forever!”
“I can take you to the lords of death,” said Gizor expressionlessly.
“So the dead will guide the living if asked,” muttered Eirik as if in calculation.
“Then take us there!” cried Roric. He had already spoken once to Death, but it was either find something different among these endless halls or else lie down himself until he too faded away.
Gizor went before them, shuffling, and more and more of the dead rose as they passed and closed ranks behind them, continuing that faint mutter that had become like a conversation where one could not quite catch the words.
Again they walked through halls that all seemed the same, glowing with the same faint light, for a distance and a time that seemed to stretch out endlessly. But it was not unchanging now, for as living men passed through more of the halls of Hel more of the dead broke from their apathy to follow them. And then they turned a corner and saw a gigantic chamber before them.
Its ceiling was high, its spaces vast. It was wide enough that in the center spread a sunless sea, and on the shore stood a dark tower, its windows not squares of light but of even deeper darkness.
Gizor and the rest of the dead fell back as Roric and Eirik continued warily forward. As they approached the tower they could see within its darkness a mist just a little denser than mist should be. Shining in it were two points of light like coals almost burned out.
Eirik dropped to his knees. “I serve you, lord,” he said as though the words were wrenched from him. “I have always sent men to you, and now I come myself.”
“With a little help from me,” muttered Roric.
Faint and cold behind them, from all the passages they had traversed, came the muttering of the dead who had seen the living walk by. Gizor One-hand and the other shadowy shapes massed together. “You come here alive in blood and breath,” said the voice from the mist, colder than any of the voices of the dead. “You have brought life to Hel where life has never been.”
When Eirik did not answer, Roric said to the glowing eyes, “I warned you what would happen if you tried to take over the realms of voima. For we are more than living mortals-we are mortals who have walked where only the immortals go.”
“You are the only power that all must obey in the end,” Eirik was still murmuring.
Roric ignored him. He stood with a hand on his hip, and a line from an old story flashed through his mind, “The hero faced down the lords of death themselves.” But he was not a hero, and in spite of his own bold words the one to whom all came in the end could never be faced down.
“The dead should fade, forgotten.” Again the voice in the coils of mist sounded uncertain. “If they did not, Hel itself would not hold them all.”
“And I have started to waken them?” said Roric. “And does this ”-he held high his charm-“bring a hint of voima even to the dusty halls of death? Shall I test more fully the effects of the Wanderers’ singing sword?”
“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.