Valkyrie's Song by M. D. Lachlan

Author:M. D. Lachlan [Lachlan, M. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

24 A Wolf Cage

The man guarding the entrance to the tunnel died quickly, mundanely, his neck snapped back then torn, the delicate flesh peeling beneath Loys’s fingers, the vertebrae severing as easily as the cooked bones of a fish.

Before that moment and after it, under the power of the wolfstone, Loys would think of the horror of it all. The blood, yes, the salt beef smell of it, the chicken leg crunch of the spine, the little breath the man gave as he died – as if trying to say something profound or moving, not accepting fate had denied him the time even for that. All those horrors, yes, he would think of and the littler, quieter horror that niggled at the corners of his sleep like a draught at the fireside: the horror of knowing he no longer found such things horrific.

Before that moment, and after, he would think of the words of Saint Paul in his Epistle to Timothy: ‘Even though I was once a blasphemer and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.’ And he would wonder if grace could be extended to the man who had gone the other way, who had slipped from knowledge and faith to the level of a brute.

At the moment he tore Dýri’s mortal soul from its flesh, he did not think at all and there was no horror. A man opposed him. A man fell. By the time Loys jumped into the passage beneath the crypt, Dýri was just the taste of blood on his lips – a nectar that set his body tingling and burned away the human fog that sat on his senses.

He could see nothing but that was unimportant. Water was ahead, he could smell it, people too. Behind him he heard Freydis and Gylfa arguing.

The passage was low – he could feel it touching his head even though he crouched. Even if he hadn’t have touched it, he would have known it was low. It smelled low, the air had a squeezed, musty tang to it. She was down there, he heard the rune mewling and calling for him, hooking him on.

He was forced to crawl. The soil was damp and pungent. This was bone-rich earth, rotting treasures all around. He had a strong urge to dig at the wall but he did not follow it.

He knew that he needed to put the wolf stone back on like a six-cup-drunk knows he needs to stop drinking. He felt no urge to do so. For an instant he sat, puzzled, forgetting his purpose, wondering why he was not in the crypt guzzling the wet feast he had prepared.

Things were shirking from him in the darkness ahead, as if fear was a bow wave that preceded him. The runes. He could not tear them, he could not kill them. Why did they fear him? That human thought was a lodestar to him, leading him from the darkness of his wolf mind.

‘The point is not to want to do it; the point is to do it.

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