SNAFU: Hunters

“My runes stopped it once. If I can find where it came from, I might be able to block its way and trap it in the earth.”

The grim smile widened. “Well then, what are we waiting for? It’s gorged itself and gone to rest; let’s finish this before it wakes again.”

Egil shook his head. “We cannot all go. We have injured men.”

“And the king must be warned,” Hreyth said. “Gunnleif, too, for that matter; they’ll have greater worries if this evil descends.”

“You heard them,” Valhild said to Thrunn. “Get horses. Take our wounded, and the bodies of our dead, and ride for Langenvik.”

* * *

Egil bound Hreyth’s arm with two sticks, and strips cut from her cloak. “You’re hurt,” he said, tying more of the grey cloth into a sling. “Are you certain?”

The pain was considerable. It gnawed the way the wicked squirrel Ratatoskr gnawed the bark of Yggdrasil as he ran up and down its great ash trunk,  but she could not let it dissuade her.

“I work the runes. It must be done.”

Valhild approached, settling her helm securely in place. “Thrunn’s off,” she said. “Gods willing, Anbjorn and Atli survive the journey, and the tale be believed when they get there.”

“Gods willing, we survive our journey as well.” Egil donned his own helm and helped Hreyth to her feet.

“What a tale we’ll have to tell if we do!” Valhild clapped him on the back. “Over mead-bowls in the king’s feasting-hall! Hailed as heroes, shining with silver and gift-given gold, our names long remembered in saga and song.”

“And if we don’t survive?” asked Hreyth, clutching her bag of rune-marked bones in her sling-bound hand.

The big woman laughed. “Then I trust you’ll put forth a good word to the All-Wise All-Father for us, so that even if we do not fall in battle, we’ll still tell our tale over mead-bowls in his feasting-hall!”

They’d left their three horses loosely tethered with some that had belonged to Ulfvir and his men, and proceeded to the rocky ridge from behind which the first hail of arrows had come… and from fissures in which Hreyth had noticed the curling, coiling, issuing mists. The broken boulder reared there, cracked nearly in half to reveal a narrow crevice running throat-like into the earth.

Its wound looked recent, perhaps frost-made over the past winter, perhaps sundered by tremor-quakes as Ymir stirred in his giant-god sleep. Scree and shards gritted underfoot at each step, stone chips and flecks sifting loose as they passed.

“I go first,” Egil said in a tone brooking no argument.

Hreyth followed him, and Valhild brought up the rear. The way was narrow indeed and grew narrower still, until Valhild could not even have drawn her great blade. Her shoulders and Egil’s scraped the rough passage walls. The air was cool, heavy with moisture. Thin shafts through the rock let in weak threads of sunlight; otherwise, they went in a deepening darkness.

Until Hreyth, with one of her mismatched eyes, again glimpsed the waxing and waning strange glow, etching lines not unlike runes themselves in the misty shadows opening ahead.

Here was a roundish cave-chamber of tapering formations, joined columns, and shallow ridge-lipped pools where drips plinked and rippled. At the heart of it brimmed a well – a well rich with power, seidr-magic.

This, yes, this was the source of it. This cousin to Mimir’s Well, where Odin had made sacrifice in exchange for knowledge. This well, which drank rather than quenched, which took rather than gave, which stole and consumed rather than bestowed.

Across its glass-black surface, images seemed to whirl and flow… images, visages, spirit-faces; bodies drifting, floating weightless as if in liquid, trailing hands and limbs and hair…

“Do you see them?” she whispered.

“I see only water,” said Egil.

“As do I,” Valhild agreed, adding, “What do you see?”

“Later. I’ll begin setting the runes. Be ready.”

“For what?” Valhild asked, eyebrows lifting.

“I wish I knew. But, if anything comes up from the well, hold your breath.”

Their expressions suggested they found this scant comfort, and Hreyth felt the same. Held breath against a power such as this? A power that had drawn life from so many men, leaving only stones in their place? Dotting the river-valley with them, silent standing warnings of an incomprehensible danger; and she had come, a young rune-caster of uncertain parentage, armed with little more than her witch-queen mother’s lore…

But she had come, and as she’d told Egil, it must be done.

She reached into her bag of rune-marked bones – old and worn smooth, ivoried, rolling and clicking beneath her fingers. One by one, she brought them out and set them in a ring around the well’s rim.

The spirit-fraught glassy surface heaved in a sudden, terrible bulge as her circle neared completion. Hreyth sprang back, gasping. Her heel caught on the lip of a shallow pool. The last rune-bone clattered to the cavern floor.