Prince of Fools. Mark Lawrence

on my cheekbones, my lips, forehead, like pins and needles, a kind of pressure building. He felt it too – I saw his eyes widen. The direction that had led me, the destination that had drawn me on … it was him. The same force had led Snorri here, and set him among Maeres’ men. We both recognized it now.

      The Norseman slowed his hand, fingers an inch or two from my neck. The skin there buzzed, almost crackling with … something. He stopped, not wanting to find out what would happen if he touched me skin to skin. The hand withdrew, returned full of knife, and before I could squeal he set to cutting my bonds.

      ‘You’re coming with me. We can sort this out somewhere else.’

      Abandoning me amongst loops of sliced rope, Snorri returned to the doorway, pausing only to stamp on someone’s neck. Not Maeres’s unfortunately. He ducked his head through, pulling back immediately, a quick bobbing motion. Something hissed past the entrance, several somethings.

      ‘Crossbows.’ Snorri spat on Daveet’s corpse. ‘I hate bowmen.’ A glance back at me. ‘Grab a sword.’

      ‘A sword?’ The man clearly thought he was still in the wilds among the overly hairy folk of the North. I cast my eye across the carnage, looking behind the table. Cutter John lay sprawled, the stump of his arm barely pulsing, an ugly wound on his forehead. No sign of Maeres. I couldn’t imagine how he’d escaped.

      None of them had any weapon more offensive than a six-inch knife, carrying anything larger within the city walls just wasn’t worth the trouble from town-laws. I took the dagger and kicked Cutter John in the head a few times. It really hurt my toes, but I felt it a price worth paying.

      I hobbled back round the table holding my new weapon and earned a withering look from the Norseman. He picked up the door. ‘Catch.’ I didn’t quite manage it. Whilst I hopped on my good foot, clutching my face and swearing nasally, Snorri quickly hacked the legs from the table and bearing it like a huge shield, advanced toward the corridor. ‘Get my back!’

      The fear of being left behind, and finding myself in Maeres Allus’s clutches again, spurred me into action. With some effort I picked up the door and together we propelled our shields into the corridor before stepping between them. Crossbow bolts thudded into both immediately, iron heads splintering partway through.

      ‘Which direc—’ Snorri was already too far away to hear me even if he hadn’t been shouting his battle cry. He’d stormed off down the corridor behind me. I followed as best I could, trying to hold the door across my back while I stumbled after him, keeping my head down, reaching over my shoulders to hold the door in place. Shouts and screams ahead indicated that Snorri had got to grips with his hated bowmen but by the time I got there it was all blood and pieces. The main difficulty lay in not slipping over in the gore. Several more bolts hit the boards across my back with powerful thuds, and another skipped between my ankles, letting me know that I’d left a gap. Fortunately I had just ten yards to reach the exit. With the door scraping the floor behind me, and just the tips of my fingers exposed, I broke out into the night air. My traditional moment of triumph at escaping yet again was curtailed by a muscular arm that reached from the darkness and yanked me to one side.

      ‘I’ve got a boat,’ Snorri growled. Normally when you say someone growled something it’s just a turn of phrase, but Snorri really put something feral into his words.

      ‘What?’ I shook my arm free, or he let it go, a mutual thing, neither of us liking the burning needling sensation where his fingers gripped me.

      ‘I’ve got a boat.’

      ‘Of course you do, you’re a Viking.’ Everything seemed rather surreal. Perhaps I’d been hit in the face one too many times since Alain made a grab for me in the opera house only an hour or two earlier.

      Snorri shook his head. ‘Follow. Quick!’

      He took off into the night. The sounds of men approaching down the warehouse corridor convinced me to give chase. We crossed a wide space stacked with barrels and crates, passed dozens of hanging nets, the sails of riverboats poking up above the river wall beside us. By moonlight we crossed a quay and descended stone steps to the water where a rowing boat lay tied to one of the great iron rings set into the wall.

      ‘You’ve got a boat,’ I said.

      ‘I was a mile downstream, free and clear.’ Snorri tossed his sword in, stepped in after it, and picked up an oar. ‘Something happened to me.’ He paused staring for a moment into his hand though it held only darkness. ‘Something … I was getting sick.’ He sat and took both oars. ‘I knew I had to come back – knew the direction. And then I found you.’

      I stood on the step. The Silent Sister’s magic had done this. I knew it. The crack had run through us, the light through me, the dark through him, and as Snorri and I separated some arcane force tried to rejoin those two lines, the dark and the light. We had drawn away from each other, the river carrying Snorri west, and those hidden fissures started to open again, started to tear us both apart just so they could be free to run together once more. I remembered what happened when they joined. It wasn’t pretty.

      ‘Don’t stand there like an idiot. Loose the rope and get in.’

      ‘I …’ The rowing boat moved as the current tried to wrest it from its mooring. ‘It doesn’t look very stable.’ I’ve always viewed boats as a thin plank between me and drowning. As a sensible fellow I’d never entrusted my safety to one before, and close up they looked even more dangerous. The dark river slurped at the oars as if hungry.

      Snorri nodded up at the steps, up toward the gap in the river wall they led to. ‘In a moment a man with a crossbow will stand there and convince you that waiting was a mistake.’

      I hopped in sharp enough at that, Snorri deploying his weight to stop me turning the boat over before I managed to sit down.

      ‘The rope?’ he asked. Shouts rang out above us, drawing closer.

      I pulled my knife, slashed the rope, nearly lost the knife in the river, tried again, and finally sawed at the strands until at last they gave and we were off. The current took us and the wall vanished into the gloom along with all sight of land.

       7

      ‘Are you going to be sick again?’

      ‘Has the river stopped flowing?’ I asked.

      Snorri snorted.

      ‘Then yes.’ I demonstrated, adding another streak of colour into the dark waters of the Seleen. ‘If God had intended men to go on water he would have given them …’ I felt too ill for wit and hung limp over the side of the boat, scowling at the grey dawn coming up behind us. ‘… given them whatever it is you need for that kind of thing.’

      ‘A messiah who walked on water to show you all it was exactly where God intended men to go?’ Snorri shook that big chiselled head of his. ‘My people have older learning than the White Christ brought. Aegir owns the sea and he doesn’t intend that we go onto it. But we do even so.’ He rumbled through a bar of song, ‘Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout gods tremble.’ He rowed on, humming his tuneless tunes.

      My nose hurt like buggery, I felt cold, most of me ached, and when I did manage to sniff through my twice-broken snout I could tell that I still smelled only slightly less bad than that dung heap which saved my life.

      ‘My—’ I fell silent. My pronunciation sounded comical, ‘my nose’ would have come out ‘by dose’. And although I had every right to complain, it might rile the Norseman, and it doesn’t pay to rile the kind of man who can jump on a bear to escape a fight-pit. Especially if it was you who put him in that pit in the first place. As my father would say, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine … but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err toward beating you with this stick.’ Snorri didn’t look