a rope.”
“We have one.” Leif strode across the pit to the engine and opened a small metal door, and pulled out a length of rope. “They used this to lower the workers into the tunnel. The machine lowered them down and pulled them out again, but since it’s broken now, we’ll have to do the lifting the old fashioned way.”
Freya smiled. “Well, you’re the smallest of us, and the lightest. Are you volunteering to be lowered down there?”
Leif frowned. “I’m not going down there. You’re the hunters. So hunt already.”
Erik took the rope, pulling all of it free from the little drum inside the machine and letting it spill across the floor of the pit. Then he tied one end to the engine and tossed the rest of it down the tunnel. He looked at Freya and signed, “I’ll be quick.”
“You’ll be careful,” she said.
Erik grinned as he took hold of the rope in both hands and climbed slowly down into the darkness.
“How does he plan to see anything down there?” Leif asked. “The sun is at the wrong angle. It’ll be black as death in that hole.”
“He doesn’t need to see anything. It’s a tunnel, in a straight line, right? He just needs to follow it down and then let his ears and nose and hands tell him the rest.”
Leif stood at the lip of the tunnel, frowning. “I don’t hear any flies.”
“I don’t care what you don’t hear. Erik is a very good listener.”
“I suppose he’d have to be since he can’t speak for himself.” Leif grinned at her. “What on earth do you see in him? He’s an ox. An overgrown imbecile, wiggling his fingers like some madman. Don’t tell me there aren’t any better men in Logarven.”
Freya lashed out with her foot, but the youth leapt back, grinning. She turned her attention back to the hole. “He’s smarter than you.”
Leif laughed. “What makes you so sure?”
“He’s never been stupid enough to make me angry at him.”
Leif’s smile faded.
They stood in silence, Freya watching the tension on the rope as it shuddered in the dark tunnel, and Leif gazing out at the desolate mountainside. After a few minutes the rope went slack and fell to the ground.
“Erik? Shake the rope once if you’re all right,” Freya called out. And a moment later, a limp shiver rippled up through the rope.
“What do you think he’s going to find down there?” Leif asked. “Fenrir’s mausoleum full of demon statues and silver and pearls?”
“More likely he’ll find a broken claw, some fur, a gnawed bone, or maybe some old scat.”
Leif sighed and rolled his eyes. “The glory and the glamour of your trade are truly overwhelming.”
The rope snapped back up and began shuddering gently, and Freya could hear the soft padding of Erik’s boots on the tunnel floor. It took the hunter longer to climb up than it did to climb down, and when he finally emerged into the light Freya’s back was sore from leaning over the lip of the hole for so long. Erik hauled himself up the last few steps and sauntered away from the tunnel, and sat down in a heap. His face shone with sweat as he massaged his hands together. After a moment he signed, “That’s a very deep hole.”
Freya smiled as she knelt beside him. “I believe you. What’s at the bottom?”
“Not much. I found where the shaft ends at the drill head. It’s enormous. But there’s no chamber down there for a demon. All I found were some rough pockets in the walls,” he signed. He untied a small cord on the side of his belt and held up the treasure dangling from the looped end. “This was in one of those pockets.”
Freya sniffed the ancient dung. “No scent. No way to know what left it there.”
“What about your flies?” Leif asked. He remained at his post on the top of the pit, showing no interest in coming any closer to the hunters and their discovery. “Did you find the flies that you heard in there?”
“I heard them,” Erik signed. “But I didn’t feel any moving around in there.”
“Well, maybe there’s something more interesting inside this.” Freya took the dung from the string and crumbled it in her bare hands. It fell to pieces, some as fine as sand, and much of it falling through her fingers to the ground.
Erik picked up one of the fallen pieces. He raised his hand to sign, but a fat red fly buzzed up from the brown lump in his hand. The fly whizzed about Erik’s face, and he waved it away. Then he gasped and recoiled, pulling his hand to his belly and rubbing it hard with his other hand. Freya frowned, drew her knife, and after a moment of watching the buzzing fly, she slapped it down against the ground with the flat of her blade and crushed it. When she took her knife away, there was a large red smear on the stone.
“Let’s see it.” She held out her hand to her husband, and he reluctantly showed her the angry red welt on the side of his palm. “Ugh. Bloodflies. Gross old dung-dwelling bloodflies. Next time, you should bring me some scat with pearls in it.”
Erik smiled.
“What is it? What happened?” Leif called down from his perch.
“A mighty battle,” Freya said. She winked at her husband. “But he’ll live to fight another day.” They stood up and dusted themselves off, and shouldered their spears. Erik led the way back up to the edge of the pit and signed, “There’s nothing here. The trail’s too cold. Fenrir hasn’t been here lately.”
“We need to keep looking,” she said to Leif. “Is there anywhere else near here where we might pick up a trail? Some place that the reavers might have attacked recently?”
The youth squinted at them each in turn. “I’m not here to give you a tour of Ysland. The queen told me to bring you here so you could begin your hunt. I have duties back in the city.”
“I thought your duty was to protect that city, not to hide in it.” Freya shrugged. “But if you don’t know anything, then we don’t need you. We’ll go on alone.”
Leif sneered at her. “There are a few farms to the northeast of here, out toward Glymur Falls. I can take you there if you want to look for more tracks or shit or whatever. But that’s as much time as I’m willing to waste on you two.”
“Waste?” Freya frowned. “We’re looking for the rinegold that will help Skadi cure the reaver plague and save all of Ysland. How is that a waste of time?”
“It’s a waste of time if you’re going to fail,” he said quietly as he turned to leave. “And I’ve faced Fenrir before. I know you’re going to fail.”
Erik lowered his spear and mimed stabbing Leif in the back while making many ridiculous and angry faces. Freya laughed. Leif glanced back over his shoulder, but Erik already had his spear at his side and they all set out across the southern face of the mountain.
As they rounded a jagged spire of volcanic rock, Freya paused to look back one last time at Ivar’s Drill, the crooked and rusting monument to Skadi’s dream, the king’s death, and the birth of a nightmare. But to her, the simple pillar of the engine seemed unworthy to mark so much hope and so much suffering, and she wondered what future generations would think of this strange metal marker alone on the mountainside.
If there are any future generations to see it.
For the rest of the afternoon, Leif led the hunters across the south face of Mount Esja and into the colder hills to the east where the heat of the volcano faded. The ground grew firmer and the grass browner, and eventually they found light dustings of snow on the ground and thin plates of ice on the puddles crunching and cracking beneath their feet.
Looking up, Freya could see the distant peaks of the Hodur’s Hill, Bjorn’s Peak, and Thoris’s Glacier to the northeast, but between her and those ancient giants stretched a rippling, broken plain of hills, boulders, streams, and lakes that promised to slow all travelers to a fraction of their pace.
As the sun glided lower in the western sky behind them, the shadows in the mountain passes grew deeper and darker and colder. The wind rose, whistling and whining through the narrow ravines. Freya paused at turn in the trail to gaze out over the southern plains, over the dark blot of Hengavik and the silvery sheet of Denveller Lake.
Three nights. It’s only been three nights, and we’ve only walked from there to there.
Her eyes flicked across the landscape again.
It feels like it’s been a month, like a journey worthy of a saga or two. All those hours on the road, and the fighting, and the strangers. But it’s only been three nights.
