“Here, idiot!” I called out to him and he lumbered to my side, Gog scampering around his legs. Makin lifted the lantern but I kept him from opening the hood. “He’s not dead. He can wait.”
“Take more than an arrow,” Rike muttered.
Even so, light blossomed and we saw the shaft jutting from Gorgoth’s shoulder, the head buried only an inch deep or so, as if the leucrota’s flesh were oak.
“Makin! I said no—”
But it wasn’t Makin. The light bled from Gog’s eyes, hot and yellow.
I could have told Gog no, bundled him around a corner and left the woodsmen till morning, but the fire that burned in Gog at seeing Gorgoth harmed echoed a colder fire that lit in me when Sim hobbled through that door. I’d grown tired of saying no. Instead I took Gog’s hand, though the ghosts of flame whispered across his skin.
He looked up at me, eyes white like stars. “Let it burn,” I told him.
Something hot ran through me, up my arm, along the marrow of my bones, hot like a promise, anger made liquid and set running.
“What’s cooking?” The taunt rang out from the tree-line, somewhere out past an old cowshed sagging in its beams.
Gog and I walked toward the sound, slow footsteps, the ground sizzling where his bare feet touched wet grass.
“The hell?” Voices raised in concern in the dark of the woods. An arrow zipped through the night, wide of its mark, the glowing child a disconcerting target, fooling the eye.
We heard the hissing before we’d gone ten yards, a thousand snakes hissing in the darkness…or perhaps just steam escaping the trees as their sap started to boil. A laugh bubbled from me in the same way, escaping my heat. The anger I brought with me ignited, becoming too large for my body, detaching from the men who hurt Sim and becoming an end in and of itself, all-consuming, a glorious laughing ecstasy of rage.
A skin of flame lifted from Gog, washing over me in a warm wave. Back in the forest the first of the trees exploded, its fragments bursting into incandescent flame as they found air. Fire lifted around the intact trunks, rising through the spring foliage, making each leaf a momentary shadow. More trees exploded, then more, until the blasts became a continuous rumble of brilliant detonation. The cattle-shed ignited though it stood twenty yards back from the closest flame, one side of it just snapping into liquid orange fire. I saw a lone archer running from the edge of the forest, clothes alight. Farther back human torches staggered and fell.
That power, Brothers, is a drug. A fiercer joy than poppy-spice, and more sure to hollow you out. If Gorgoth hadn’t knocked me aside and snatched up Gog we neither of us would have stopped until no tree remained, no board or beam of Endless. Maybe not even then.
Dawn found us still in the wet grass behind that barn, a smoking hole in the forest before us, acres wide. Gog went hunting amid the embers and returned with a twitching tangle, Sim’s harp strings fused together and twisted by the heat. He took them with a curious smile, lopsided from his beating. “My thanks, Gog.” He held them up and shook them so they rattled one against the next. “A simpler song, but still sweet.”
And that was Endless.
We saw the smoke days from our goal, still skirting the borders of the Teuton kingdoms. A grey column reached miles into the sky, mountain high and higher still, as if Satan were trying to smoke the angels out of heaven.
The sight prompted Red Kent to curiosity. “What is a volcano, Jorg?”
“Where the earth bleeds,” I told him. Sim and Grumlow rode in closer to hear. “Where its blood bubbles up. Molten rock, like lead melted for the siege, poured red and runny from the depths.”
“It was a serious question.” Kent turned his horse away, looking offended.
Days later we could smell the sulphur in the air. In places a fine black dust lay on the new leaves even as they unfurled, and stands of trees stood dead, acre after acre bare and brown, waiting for a summer fire.
You know you’re entering the Dane-lore by the troll-stones. You start to see them at crossroads, then by streams, then in circles atop hills. Great blocks of stone set with the old runes, the Norse runes that remember dead gods, the thunder hammer and old one-eye who saw all and told little. They say the Danes choose one rock above another for troll-stones because they see the lines of a troll in some but not the next. All I can say is that trolls must look remarkably like chunks of rock in that case.
We hadn’t seen so many troll-stones before a rider joined us on the road. He came from the south, setting a fast pace and slowing as he caught our band.
“Well met,” he called, standing in his stirrups. A local man, hair braided in two plaits, each ending in a bronze cap worked with serpents, a round iron helm tight on his head and a fine moustache flowing into a short beard.
“Well met,” I said as he drew level at the head of our column. He had a shortbow on his back, a single-bladed axe strapped to his saddlebags, a knife at his hip with a polished bone handle. He gave Gorgoth a wide berth. “You should follow me,” he said.
“Why?”
“My lord of Maladon wishes to see you,” he said. “And it would be easier this way, no?” He grinned. “I’m Sindri, by the way.”
“Lead on,” I said. A band of warriors probably watched us from the woods, and if not, Sindri deserved to be rewarded for his balls.
We followed him a couple of miles along a trail increasingly crowded with traffic, wheeled and on foot or hoof. Occasionally we heard a distant rumble, not unlike a giant version of the lion Taproot
