there for over two hours with his head sunk on his hands. When the lights went out, he groaned. Signy stood and stared at him fiercely through the darkness before she sent for candles and oil lamps. There were tears in her eyes, who knows what for? She herself did not know. She came and stood behind him in the candlelight, her hands on his neck, and tried to rub the knots of tension away.
Conor watched her in a mirror opposite. 'Maybe the way up is blocked. Do you think we're already dead?' he asked.
'Not yet,' she answered. She leaned against the wall, dunking to herself, if he doesn't go to get the knife soon, I'll have to make him.
'Siggy will make sure he can get to us,' she said at last.
Conor looked up at her with a curious little smile. 'And what will he do with you?' he asked her. 'He'll think of you as a traitor against his own family, won't he?' By that smile she knew he did not really believe it, but she had no idea how much he knew of her double role.
Soon after, the distant footsteps of the bombing stopped, but as yet there was no sound of fighting in the tunnels and passages of the bunker. Elsewhere, the servants waited. In among them an old woman with a fierce face sat close to Vincent, and tried to comfort him when he wept. She had strange black eyes that gave nothing away, and deep lines on her face. Her hair was strangely textured, full of grey and white and red. For the last couple of years she had been nanny to the boy, more of a mother than his mother was. Cherry, old but still strong, was not with her mistress today. Signy did not want her there for the final hours.
At six o'clock in the evening, the first sounds of fighting began to come down from the upper corridors. Signy was becoming scared; if she left it much longer the soldiers would be here and she would lose her chance. But she did not say anything to Conor; she still hoped that he would be unable to resist the urge to go to rescue the precious dung, to have one last look before the end. And sure enough, as the sounds of the battle came down, Conor grew agitated and cast little looks at her which he tried to hide. Another fifteen minutes and he got up and left the room. Signy, sitting at the table with a cup of tea in her hands, nodded and tried not to show her excitement.
Conor closed the door behind him and still she waited, trembling with desire. She would give him five minutes and then she'd go to the room with the great safe built into the floor. She didn't have to wait so long. Conor burst into the room where she sat, white with fear.
'Where is it? Where is it? What have you done?' he cried.
Signy jumped up. What was this? No need to ask what he meant. She pushed past him, past his fingers clutching at her, and ran into the room where the safe was built into the solid floor, just a few metres down the passageway. There it was, the sight she had never seen – the thick door gaping open out of the floor. She ran to look in. It was empty.
'What have you done with it?' she hissed, but even as she spoke she was certain this was no trick he was playing. Conor was terrified. Despite everything he had somehow believed that nothing could harm him so long as he had the knife. Now he had opened the safe and the sacred treasure was gone.
He stared at Signy in disbelief. If not her, who else? No one else even knew! This was one lie too far.
'You have no right,' he hissed, furious, in fear for his life truly for the first time. In the adjacent room, the servants trembled. Murder was in the air.
But Signy was staring around her as if she would be shown the clue. 'But who? Who…?'
And even as she spoke she knew the answer; there could only be one answer. She turned her head to look for her before she reached the end of her sentence and heard it – the furious, scared hiss of the trapped animal coming in through the door to the next room, where Cherry had been waiting and watching for this moment of discovery.
'You!' hissed Signy. 'You!' In the last moment, the shape-changer had been more faithful to the gods than to her mistress, who wanted to change what the gods saw.
Signy ran for her; Cherry without another sound pelted out from the doorway as she opened it Conor stood in Signy's way, but she brushed him to one side. He stared at her in horror. He had never seen before so much as a hint of the strength she had given to herself during her time in the tank. Cherry came quickly to a locked door, but rather than change to her human form – so great was her habit of never doing this in front of Conor – she tried to double back and then Signy had her. There was a ferocious second of clawing and struggle before Signy had her by the neck. She whipped the little body, one, two, three times like a rag, and then dashed her brains out on a sideboard by the door.
'There, you traitor!' she hissed, and flung the body down at her feet.
At the door, Conor stood, the blood gone from his face, staring at the smashed mess on the floor. Suddenly, the woman he had known and loved for so many years was as fast as an animal, as strong as a machine. Where had all this been hiding for so long? And why was she destroying this animal she had loved? Signy stood there before him panting, her face white, tears streaming down her face. She had shown herself to him at last but even now, Conor was more scared about the knife.
'You've done this… you've done all this,' he cried. Only now, half mad with fear, was he able to act against her. He went for her throat with his hands like claws but she brushed him aside. He half fell but managed to seize a heavy glass sculpture from the sideboard. He brought it back to smash against her head… but there he paused, mid-murder. Signy was the one thing Conor was never able to destroy. There was never any danger to her from him.
Signy stepped to one side and knocked the glass out of his hand. It fell to the carpet with a heavy thud. Then she grabbed his arm, swung him round like a child and had her knife in his back.
'Goodbye, my darling,' she whispered in his ear, and took the knife home up to the hilt in his blood. Conor gasped, his eyes swivelled to try and meet hers, and he fell dead to the floor.
It seemed to Signy in that second that her heart broke. It took her by surprise and before she knew it she was on her knees, grieving over the body of the man who had loved her, and whom she loved back in spite of the deformities of the years and the acts of bloody treachery. Now everything had been taken from her, the last by her own hand. She bent her blood-spattered face over the body, heart-broken, amazing herself, and wept for what might have been until her throat was dry.
Some time later, she became aware of sounds around her – the servants huddled up in terror in the nearby rooms, the sounds of battle coming down the passages towards the apartments. She didn't care for any living thing now; she was horrified with this world that had no Conor in it. She sat up and looked at the dead cat a few metres away and shook her head. She had never dreamed that Cherry would betray her. For the first time she was truly alone with her ambition.
As she stared, there was a noise to one side she turned her head and saw… her son. Vincent, taking all his courage into his hands, had made his way out of the room next door to see what had happened, and been confronted with his dead father and his bloodstained mother. The soldiers from above were drawing in and he wanted to know…
'Mother?' he asked. 'What's going to happen to me?'
Signy stared back at him. It was of course she who had trapped Siggy and his men in the tunnel. She had intended to feed and water them, although whether or not she would have done it is another matter. A few years later, when all the power was safely in her hands, she might even have released them. But Cherry had stolen the knife. Signy understood very well that Siggy was now out and that there were no walls strong enough to keep him in when he had that knife in his hand. Her plans were all undone, but she still had certain advantages. For one thing, her brother had no idea that she was now his enemy. For another, she had his son.
'Mother?' asked the child again. Signy rose up on her knees; then she made up her mind. She stood up suddenly, scarcely noticing how her son winced as she did so. Ignoring him, she went to wash the tears and blood off her face. Then she seized him by the arm. 'Come with me, we'll go and meet your father.' The lad stared at Conor- this was his father, and his father was dead! Signy half led, half dragged him down the passage, where she knew Siggy would be coming up.
Odin's knife was miraculous, but the stone was hard. It took Siggy two hours to cut his way through the half metre of rock blocking him off from the rest of the passage. It was another half an hour before the hole was large enough for a man, and one after the other, Siggy, Styr and their men crawled back into the main tunnel.
As far as Siggy was concerned, it was Conor who had trapped them and Signy who had somehow stolen the knife and got it to him down the ventilation shaft. Therefore he went to finish his task full of fury and anxiety that
