The Burning Man, page 16
part #2 of Kingdom of the Serpent Series
The park was a vast, green sprawl of trees, lawns and duck ponds interspersed with life-size statues by the sculptor Gustav Vigeland. Veitch found his target in the dead centre, near the most impressive piece, a forty-six-foot-high sculpture of a mass of writhing bodies called The Monolith.
Standing next to the sculpture was a man in his mid-twenties with a sickly appearance, pale skin and lank brown hair. Every now and then someone would come up to him – an elderly person with frailty etched in their features, or a mother with a child swaddled tightly. With a kind expression, the man would exchange a few words with them, then take the person’s hand lightly. After a moment the visitor would try to press money upon him, and he would politely refuse.
Having seen enough, Veitch strode up to him. The man greeted Veitch cheerily in Norwegian.
‘Sorry, mate. Don’t speak the lingo.’
The man’s face brightened. ‘You’re British.’
‘London born and bred.’
‘Every time I hear the accent, I always get homesick.’ He took Veitch’s hand tentatively. ‘Jez Miller. From Swindon.’
‘Somebody has to be. Ryan Veitch.’
‘Are you here for help?’
‘What kind of help?’
Miller shifted uncomfortably. ‘People come to me … y’know, when they get sick.’
‘And you heal them?’
‘It’s a gift,’ Miller said bashfully. ‘I have to use it to help.’
‘Yeah, you’re the one I’m looking for all right. Come on, walk with me.’
Miller was taken aback, but did exactly what Veitch said. ‘You’ve been looking for me? But no one knows I’m here. I’ve lost touch with my family, and …’ His brow furrowed.
‘You can’t even remember why you’re here, right?’
‘Things have been a bit fuzzy for a while. I’ve been going to the doctor, but the medication isn’t working.’
‘You are so off the radar, mate, you don’t know it. Not even the big evil bastard running the universe could find you. But I did.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Miller looked troubled, as though he was half-remembering something long-forgotten. ‘How did you find me?’
Veitch held up an amber stone that glowed with a dull, warm light. ‘Picked this up in the Temple of the Dead in the Grim Lands. They’ve got all sorts of weird stuff stashed away there. It’s called a Trace-Stone. Locates missing objects. Or people.’
Miller tried to evaluate how sane Veitch was. ‘Why did you want to find me?’
‘Because you’re one of the two Keys.’
‘To what?’
‘To a whole load of trouble. Success or failure. My future.’ Veitch smiled tightly. ‘You got anyone here? Wife, girlfriend, kids? Boyfriend?’
Miller shook his head.
‘All right, here’s the deal. You come with me and I’ll show you everything you need to know. Why your memory’s so screwed up. The whole reason you’re here. Who wouldn’t want to know that?’
The hope in Miller’s face was evident. ‘You’re lying. How could you know something like that? Who are you?’
‘If you don’t come with me, you’ll never know.’
Miller dropped onto a bench and thrust his head into his hands. ‘I’d be crazy to go with a complete stranger. You might be someone who kills people.’
‘Yeah. I might.’
Miller looked deep into Veitch’s eyes. ‘Whatever I’ve got inside me, it makes me a good judge of character. I can see, deep inside you, there’s something good.’
‘Now you’re talking bollocks,’ Veitch snapped. He caught himself. ‘And just to prove you wrong, I’ll give you a choice. Come with me of your own free will, ’cause I reckon you’re a nice bloke and I’d really like you to think good things about me. Or I’ll make you come with me.’
Once again Miller tried to read Veitch. ‘Well … okay,’ he said hesitantly. ‘But I’ll yell if you try something.’
‘Like a girl, I bet. All right, shut the fuck up and follow me.’
Veitch marched along the network of paths with Miller constantly asking hesitant questions that got no answers. In the car park, Veitch motioned for Miller to get in the front of a four-by-four, while he went to the rear and checked all around before opening the boot.
Ruth lay inside, hands and feet tied together, tape across her mouth. She glared at Veitch hatefully.
‘How you doin’, darlin’?’ he said chirpily. ‘I hate treating you like this, but I needed to get our man in the bag before we sat down and had our little heart-to-heart. Won’t be much longer now.’
Just as the boot swung shut, Veitch had the vague impression that Ruth was mouthing something behind the insulating tape. He shrugged. She had a lot of fire in her, and he expected a broadside when they finally did sit down and talk.
As he climbed into the driver’s seat and pulled away, he didn’t notice a couple of stones in the car park begin to roll slowly of their own accord. They came together, then another, and another.
8
Cabs from Oslo’s railway station took Church, Hunter, Shavi, Laura and Tom into the centre of town. Burying themselves in their seats, they watched the flash of police cars passing regularly.
‘How many spiders?’ Laura said from the depths of her parka hood.
‘Impossible to tell.’ Church’s attention never left the street scene. ‘It only takes one or two at the top. People are good at obeying orders without question.’
Arriving at Vigeland Park in the early afternoon, they separated to lose themselves amongst the trees and duck ponds, eventually coming together again at The Monolith.
Shavi paced around for a few minutes, then said uneasily, ‘I do not understand. He should be here.’
‘Maybe he’s gone to feed the ducks,’ Laura said.
Shavi unconsciously rubbed the skin around his alien eye. ‘No. He should be here. But he is not.’
Tom had been scanning the park while they spoke. ‘Something is happening,’ he said.
What they had taken to be one of Vigeland’s sculptures was moving. It resembled a brutish man with a low brow and long, muscular arms, built from rocks and stones. A dull amber light leaked from its eyes. With each step, tremors ran through the ground.
Laura and Tom edged away.
‘Hang on,’ Church said.
‘Crazy leader,’ Laura muttered under her breath.
As the rock-thing approached, the park underwent a rapid change. Ponds and lawns faded away to be replaced by a wilder landscape of rock, gnarled trees and drifting mist. Bonfires were just visible in the distance.
The craggy Neanderthal lumbered up to them and levelled its burning gaze on each in turn. ‘Heroes all,’ it said in a voice like cracking granite. It nodded slowly as if this fulfilled a requirement. Gesturing with one heavy arm, it added, ‘This is the land as it was in time past when the warriors ground bone and blood into the soil. And this is how the land is now beyond Bifrost: timeless and wild where the true powers live in every rock and tree.’
‘What do you want with us?’ Church asked.
‘I bring a message from one of your kind. She summoned me from the dark place beneath the earth where I live with my people.’
‘Ruth?’
‘A Sister of Dragons who knows the practice of seior as only the great and wise Freyja knows it. She has been taken by another of your kind, he who carries the blade of black fire.’
Church grew cold. ‘Veitch? He’s alive?’
‘He lives. The Sister of Dragons wants you to know that he has the Creator Key and now he hunts the Destroyer.’
Hunter clapped a reassuring hand on Church’s shoulder. ‘We’ll find him before he hurts Ruth.’
‘How? We have no idea where he’s going or where this Destroyer is.’
‘The Shavster could ask his spooky friends again,’ Laura suggested.
‘I have already exhausted any advantage I might have over the Invisible World,’ Shavi replied. ‘I must wait a while before I contact it again.’
Tom pushed past the others to face the rock-creature. ‘Freyja brought the practice of seior to the Vanir and Aesir, did she not?’
‘She did.’
‘And Ruth is the greatest practitioner of seior in the Fixed Lands. The two are bound by the principles of the Craft. Freyja must help us.’
‘It is unwise to be so forward,’ the creature rumbled. ‘But should you wish to petition the goddess, travel to yonder hill and the grove where the golden apples grow.’ And with that, the creature shambled away, losing form as it went, disintegrating into rocks and stones.
‘Is that a wise course?’ Shavi asked. ‘You saw how Freyja was at the hotel.’
‘We can’t trust any of the blasted lot of them!’ Tom snapped. ‘But we do what we have to.’ He strode out for the hill without looking to see whether any of the others were following him.
The air was chill at the top of the hill and autumnal mists floated amongst the trees where the apples glittered in the wan light.
‘I’m going to have me one of those,’ Laura said. Tom called out for her to stop, but she had already plucked the golden fruit. In her eyes, Tom could see the gleam of a strange attraction overcoming rational thought.
‘Chill out, Grandpa,’ she said, until she saw Tom’s horrified expression. A second later blood began to speckle the apple’s shimmering surface. Laura threw it away in disgust. ‘Jesus. It’s bleeding.’
‘The blood of the gods,’ Tom whispered.
As Laura tried to wipe the gore from her hand, it began to spread, sticky and wet. Soon her entire arm was dripping. Blood continued to run from the apple, across the floor towards the others; the faster they moved away, the faster it ran.
Tom sprinted into the trees, which now formed a dark, dense forest. He allowed himself one backward glance and wished he hadn’t. Laura, Shavi, Church and Hunter were covered in blood from head to foot, fighting for their lives as it flooded into their mouths.
9
Tom felt the full weight of his age as he ran. His knees protested, his chest burned, his heart pounded so hard he thought it would burst. He felt as if he had lived with fear from the moment the queen of the Court of the Yearning Heart had taken him from the world. Always running, always scared of the past, the present, the future. He hated himself, but he couldn’t stop running.
The blood continued to drip from the fruit overhead. He had avoided every splash so far, but it was only a matter of time before he was tainted. Behind him, his friends were dying, like the others he had left behind to their fate at the Court of the Final Word.
The irony made him sick. Across his homeland he was known as a great hero: Thomas the Rhymer, who would return to save the land in its time of greatest need. In truth, he was selfish and weak and scared. Worthless.
Tears stung his eyes. He tried not to think of Church, who had befriended him and shown him so many valuable lessons, and of the others who each in their own small way had made his dark life a little brighter.
He drove himself on, but after nearly eight hundred years of sickness and self-loathing he had finally reached his limits. He crashed onto the soft loam and cried out, ‘Take me, damn you! Take me and let them go!’
For a long moment he lay face-down, his head reeling with the insane rush of emotions. When his mind finally began to clear and he realised it was not all over, he slowly looked up to see Freyja standing next to a tree, her smile teasingly sexual, but her eyes dark and unfathomable.
‘Mortals can never resist the golden apples,’ she said.
‘Save them,’ Tom pleaded.
Freyja plucked one of the apples and held it before her so that the glow illuminated her beautiful face. ‘You are offering your life in exchange for theirs? Of what value is that to me?’
‘The All-Father ordered you to give us safe passage,’ Tom gasped.
‘And so I did. But this is a new matter. A transgression greater still. The golden apples are the very power of the gods. To steal one is a crime that demands the highest penalty.’
‘You set a trap. You knew once we were in the grove it was only a matter of time until one of the apples was taken.’
Her laughter was soft and gentle and contemptuous. ‘Your little sister has a great mastery of seior, but she is far beneath me. After all, I brought seior to the gods. When she conjured here in our Great Dominion, she presented an … opening.’
‘What do you want? Revenge?’
‘Revenge implies some notion of equality. You are mortals, for all your great abilities, and consequently barely worthy of my attention.’ Holding the apple delicately, Freyja sat on a fallen tree. As she examined the fruit’s gleaming skin, Tom had the strangest feeling that it was not an apple at all, but something sentient.
‘This is the axe-age, the sword-age,’ she continued, ‘that precedes the great catastrophe Ragnarok. The seeds of this destruction were sown in the beginning, when this flawed existence emerged from the fire and the ice.’
Tom was struck by how Freyja’s mythic account echoed the Gnostic beliefs that Church had come to understand as the truth: of a flawed universe ruled by the Void.
‘The one your people know as Loki has a part to play and now he has already joined the forces of dissolution. Will the World Serpent curled around Midgard with its tail in its mouth soon burst forth? Will Asgard fall? Will Bifrost burn? Can such wonder and beauty ever fail?’
Her haughty expression faltered. Tom instantly recognised the familiar emotion.
‘You think you know what this means, but you do not,’ she said. ‘Fenrir will break free and roam the Fixed Lands with his savage brothers, spreading death everywhere. The wolves will swallow the sun and the moon, and Yggdrasil, the Life-Tree, will shake to its roots. Hel will rise from misty Niflheim with her armies of the dead and sweep across the Vigrid Plain. And all the worlds shall burn, and Earth shall fall into the boiling ocean.’
A silence followed her words that extended far into the forest. The images she had conjured reminded Tom of the biblical Revelations he had read as a youth. There was only one story, filtered through different cultures, different beliefs.
Freyja stood before him, and her face was almost too fierce to look upon. ‘If you wish to live – if you wish to save your comrades at this moment – you must make a bargain with me. Even though it could mean the betrayal of your own and all they stand for.’
Tom steadied himself against a tree, fighting the deep chill of desolation rising through him. ‘What do you want?’ he said.
10
Church coughed and retched until his throat was raw. Finally he cleansed the last of the blood from his system. His gore-soaked clothes clung to him. Hunter and Shavi coughed up blood nearby, but Laura sat in a daze.
‘Okay, I am not taking the blame for that one,’ she said.
They were back in Vigeland Park. On the other side of the pond, a couple feeding the ducks watched them uneasily.
‘Drenched in blood in a public place. Not the best look for a bunch of wanted terrorists.’ Hunter helped Shavi to his feet. ‘We need to get cleaned up and out of sight. Where’s the Grateful Dead?’
On cue, Tom lurched out of a nearby copse. They were all transfixed by the intensity of his haunted expression.
Shavi took his arm. ‘What happened?’
Tom took a second to steady himself. ‘I persuaded Freyja to give us this.’
He showed them a gold ring in the shape of a dragon eating its tail. ‘It’s called Andvarinaut,’ he said. ‘When you wear it, you feel a pull in the direction of whatever you are searching for.’
‘Ruth,’ Church said, relieved.
Tom nodded non-committally.
‘Better give it to Church—’ Hunter began.
‘No!’ Tom’s eyes blazed. ‘Only I can wear this! Do you understand?’
‘Take a stress pill,’ Laura said. ‘Bit of a Frodo moment there.’
‘Only I can wear this,’ Tom repeated. He held out his hand. It twitched with the pull of the ring. ‘We head south.’
Church shifted his posture so he could feel the comforting weight of the sword on his back. ‘Whatever else happens, Veitch has had his last chance. If he’s hurt Ruth in any way, I’m going to kill him.’
The emotionless intensity of his words shocked them. Church went to the pond to wash some of the blood from him. No one followed.
Chapter Six
THE BULL, THE SERPENT, THE IVY AND THE WINE
1
‘This world is a beautiful place.’ Shavi stood at the rail looking out over churning black waves towards a sunset of red and gold against which storm clouds roiled, occasionally throwing out bolts of lightning.
Laura thought how delicately handsome his features looked in the depths of the hood of his bulky parka. The winds across the Baltic were biting. ‘You’ve just done too many drugs,’ she said.
Shavi laughed. They had grown easy in each other’s company as their memories of past times returned. ‘There has been a lot of pain on our journey together, but I would not change any of it.’
‘Not even the old git’s rambling stories about the good old days of the sixties?’
‘We come from such different backgrounds, but events have forged us into a unit. Underneath it all there are bonds of friendship that run so deep they are profound. Who would have thought such people could come together and like each other?’
Hunter lurched out of the door that led to their rough-and-ready quarters alongside the crew. ‘Bloody hate ships,’ he moaned. His words belied the effort to which he had gone to secure their passage after they had only just slipped through the fingers of a Security Service sting while crossing the border into Sweden. There had been roadblocks every mile of their eight-day journey south, forcing them to double-back, abandon vehicles, march miles through the cold and eventually stow away on a river barge before they eventually made their way to the port of Malmö.
‘Where is Church?’ Shavi asked.
