open. In the shadows a monster slumbered. A hound that might stand taller than a shire horse, and wide as the elephant in Taproot’s circus. It had that blunt yet wrinkled face of dogs bred for fighting rather than the hunt. One canine, of similar size to Snorri’s fingers and thumb all funnelled up together, protruded from the lower jaw, escaping slobbery jowls to point toward a wet nose.
‘It’s asleep.’ A hoarse whisper at his shoulder. ‘If we’re very quiet we can get away.’
‘This is her cave, Tutt. There aren’t going to be two. And this must be her guardian. It’s not here by chance.’
‘We could…’ Tuttugu rubbed furiously at his beard as if hoping to dislodge an answer. ‘You could lure it out and I could drop a rock on it from up there!’ He pointed to the cliff top.
‘I think that might … irritate her. I’ve met this woman, Tutt. She’s not someone you want to irritate.’
‘What then? We can’t very well walk up and pat the puppy.’
Snorri took a hand from his axe and dug beneath his furs to touch Loki’s key. Immediately he felt them, Emy, Egil, Karl, Freja, as if it were their skin beneath his fingers not the slickness of obsidian. ‘That’s exactly what we’ll do.’
With the need to run trembling in every limb, Snorri advanced into the cave, axe lowered, quiet but not creeping. A few yards in and he sensed he was alone. Turning, he beckoned Tuttugu. The other half of the Undoreth stood no further forward than when they last spoke, huddled in his leathers and quilted jacket, arms so tight about himself he almost squeezed his bulk thin. Snorri beckoned again, with more urgency. Tuttugu offered a despairing look at the heavens and hurried into the cave.
In close file the pair of them trod a silent path toward a tunnel leading from the back of the cave, some yards past the vastness of the dog. The size of the beast overwhelmed Snorri’s senses, the powerful dog-stink, the warmth of its breath as he passed within feet of that great muzzle. His back scraped the cave wall with each step. And at the closest point one huge eye rolled open amid the folded topology of the dog’s face, regarding Snorri with an unreadable look. For a moment he froze, hand tight on his axe, raising the weapon an inch or two before remembering how poorly it would serve him. With his gaze fixed on the tunnel mouth Snorri moved on, Tuttugu wheezing behind him as if terror had taken hold of his throat.
Twenty paces later they stood out of the hound’s sight in a tunnel too small for any pursuit. Snorri felt his body unclench. When the Fenris wolf came for him he had been able to attack, channelling his energy into the battle. Holding back all those instincts had wound every fibre of him to within a hair of snapping.
‘Come.’ He nodded ahead to the glow reflecting on the tunnel walls.
Another convolution of the passage brought them to a cavern, lit from above by fissures running through the thickness of the mountainside to a distant sky. A small pool lay beneath these vents, glowing with the light. The chamber, large as any jarl’s hall, lay strewn with the business of living. A pallet heaped with bed furs, a blackened hearth by some natural chimney in the rock, a cauldron before it, other pots stacked to one side, here and there sea-chests, some closed, others open to display clothes, or sacks of stores. Two women sat close together in oak chairs carved in the Thurtan style. Between them they held a scroll, the younger woman tracing a finger along some line of it while the elder watched and nodded.
‘Come in if you must.’ Skilfar raised an arm. Her flesh lay as white as it had when she held audience amid the conjunction of Builders’ tracks, guarded by Hemrod’s plasteek army, but it no longer smoked with coldness. Her eyes held that same wintry blue but they were the eyes of an old woman now, not some frost-sworn demon.
Snorri took a few paces into the chamber.
‘Ah, the warrior. But no prince this time? Not unless he filled out … a little.’ Skilfar cocked her head, looking past Snorri to Tuttugu, trying unsuccessfully to hide in his shadow. The younger woman with the braided hair put down her scroll, unsmiling.
Snorri took another step then realized he still had his axe in hand. ‘Sorry.’ He secured it across his back. ‘That beast of yours scared the hell out of me! Not that an axe would have helped much.’
A thin smile. ‘So you braved my little Bobo did you?’ Her glance flitted to the entrance behind him. Snorri turned. A small dog, stubby-legged, wrinkle-faced, and broad-chested had followed Tuttugu. It sat now, looking up at the fat man with sad eyes, one tooth protruding from its lower jaw above the folds of its muzzle.
‘How—’
‘Everything in this world depends upon how you look at it, warrior. Everything is a matter of perspective – a matter of where you stand.’
‘And where do I stand, völva?’ Snorri kept his voice respectful, and in truth he had always respected the wisdom of the völvas, the rune-sisters as some called them. Witches of the north as Jal had it. Though they stood at odds with the priests of Odin and of Thor the rune-sisters always gave advice that seemed at its core more honest, darker, filled with doubt in place of hubris. Of course the völvas Snorri had dealt with in the past were neither so famed nor so unsettling as Skilfar. Some said she was mother to them all.
Skilfar looked to the woman beside her, ‘Kara?’
The woman, a northerner with maybe thirty summers on her, frowned. She fixed Snorri with a disconcerting stare and ran the iron runes at the ends of her braids through her fingers. They marked her as wise beyond her years.
‘He stands in shadow,’ she said. ‘And in light.’ Her frown deepened. ‘Past death and loss. He sees the world … through a keyhole?’ She shook her head, runes clattering.
Skilfar pursed her lips. ‘He’s a difficult one, I grant you.’ She took another scroll from the pile beside her, tight-wrapped and ending in caps of carved whale tooth. ‘First dark-sworn and clinging to a lost hope. Now light-sworn and holding to a worse one. And carrying something.’ She set a bony hand to her narrow and withered chest. ‘An omen. A legend. Something made of belief.’
‘I’m looking for the door, völva.’ Snorri found his own hand at his chest, resting above the key. ‘But I don’t know where it lies.’
‘Show me what you have, warrior.’ Skilfar tapped her breastbone.
Snorri watched her a moment. Hardly a kindly grandmother, but far more human than the creature he and Jal had found amid her army of plasteek warriors the previous year. Which was her true face? he wondered. Maybe neither of them. Maybe her dog was neither the monster he’d first seen nor the toy that seemed to sit now by the tunnel mouth. When a man can’t trust his eyes what does he fall back on … and what does the choice he makes reveal about him? Lacking answers, Snorri drew forth the key on the thong that hung about his neck. It made slow rotations in the space before his eyes, from some angles reflecting the world, from others dark and consuming. Did Loki really fashion this? Had the hands of a god touched what he had touched? And if so, what lies had the trickster left there, and what truths?
Three slow claps, sounding to the tempo of the key’s revolutions. ‘Extraordinary.’ Skilfar shook her head. ‘I underestimated our Silent Sister. You actually did it. And tweaked the nose of this upstart “king of the dead”.’
‘Do you know where the door is?’ Snorri almost saw their faces in the flashes between reflection and absorption, Emy’s eye glimpsed in the moment, as if through a closing crack. The fire of Freja’s hair. ‘I need to know.’
