The Hall of the Fallen

The wolf withdrew at dawn, and nobody cheered.

It did not flee. It went back across the cracked plain in the manner of a tide, slowly, with its shoulders hunched and its great green eyes turned over its shoulder, and where Sera's light had touched it the smoke of its body hung in tatters. A hundred yards off, it lay down on the burnt clay and began to lick its wounds. Behind it the red glare on the horizon rose and fell, rose and fell, like the slow breath of a sleeper.

"It'll be back," said Hrolf.

"Yes."

"Tonight, or tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, I think," said Archie. "It's hurt. It needs time." He leaned on his shield, which had lost a third of its rim and now sat on his arm like a bitten biscuit. "So do we."

The old veteran grunted. He looked tired beyond saying, with a livid cut across his forehead and his gray beard singed to stubble on one side. He had been fighting since the first night. He looked up at the great trunk, where a faint green glow still pulsed along the length of the wounded root, and his hard face softened.

"She's mended it," he said.

"Mostly."

"Yes. Mostly." He rubbed his jaw. "I'll tell you something, Shieldbearer. In forty years of this I've never seen the Keeper smile. Not once. Not at a wedding. Not at a birth." He shook his head. "Last night, I saw her laugh."

"I know."

"What did you say to her?"

Archie considered the question.

"I offered her a seat at the table," he said.

…

Valhalla was not a place so much as an agreement.

He learned this on the second evening, when Brynja came to fetch them. The hall, she explained, was not in the sky, as the skalds sang. It was here, in the roots, in the hollow beneath the Tree, and it had been here all along. The einherjar had simply gone on gathering. They had gone on tending the fires, and passing the cups, and telling the old stories, until the gathering had taken on a shape of its own.

It was a cavern.

It was a vast, warm, firelit chamber, hollowed from the heart of a root as thick as a cathedral. The walls were living wood, ridged and glossy, hung with shields and banners and the horns of dead stags. Long tables ran down the length of the floor. A hundred fires burned in stone braziers, filling the air with the scent of pine smoke and roasting meat. There were benches, and barrels, and a smoking pit. Dogs dozed under the tables. A boy of nine or ten tore down the aisle with a wooden horse, pursued by a girl with a hobbyhorse of her own, shrieking.

And everywhere, there were people.

Archie had never seen so many. They filled the hall from end to end, soldiers and farmers and smiths and dwarves, jostling shoulder to shoulder on the benches. A woman suckled a baby at the end of a table. Two old men argued over a game of runes. A cluster of dwarf-wives sat knitting something enormous and gray, passing the wool from hand to hand. A wounded giant, a young one, with a bandage round his head and sorrowful blue eyes, had been given a barrel to sit on. He was being fed soup by a toddler.

"Jötnar," Jin said, faintly. "Frost giants. Are they allowed—"

"Not all of them marched," said Brynja. "Some fled." She shrugged. "In the end, we are all of us just trying to live."

She led them to a table near the head of the hall.

It was already laid. A great round loaf, still steaming. A haunch of venison. A platter of smoked fish and a jug of something amber. Hrolf was there, and the dwarf mason Dagny, and a young skald with a scraggly beard and an alarmingly clean tunic, who rose when they approached and said, in a high nervous voice, "I am Ottar, son of Ottar. I make the songs."

"You're the one who sings at dawn," Zoe said.

"I try."

"It's lovely."

Ottar went the color of a boiled beet.

…

They ate.

It was the first real meal they had had in a week, and they ate it ravenously. Venn, who had been carried in on a litter and propped at the table's end with cushions at his back, put away a whole trout, a dish of beans and three honey cakes before Zoe made him stop. Jin ate with grave concentration and said little, though he was seen to give half his bread to the giant's toddler. Archie ate slowly. He found that his hands were not quite steady. He kept looking round at the faces in the firelight, and finding, to his confusion, that he wanted to remember every one.

"This is a hell of a wake," said Venn, with his mouth full.

"It's not a wake," said Zoe.

"Isn't it?"

"It's a party."

"It's both," said Brynja.

She sat opposite them, across the table, with her helm beside her and a horn of mead in one hand. In the firelight her face was softer than it had been on the field. She had loosed her braid. Her red hair lay over one shoulder in a rope.

"This is what we do," she said. "On the night before. We drink to the ones who've gone. And we drink to the ones who haven't." She raised the horn. "It is the old custom. My mother taught it to me. She said that if you cannot be afraid, you must at least be fed."

"Wise woman," said Jin.

"She was." Brynja's voice dipped. "She died three winters ago. At the Battle of the Ford. I carried her myself." She turned the horn in her hand. "She was a Valkyrie too, you know. Of the old line. She taught me the spear, and the songs, and how to sit a horse in a storm. And when I was seventeen, she said, Brynja, my daughter, there is only one thing I cannot teach you. How to say goodbye."

Nobody spoke.

"I have said it forty times since," said Brynja. "I have yet to learn."

Zoe reached across the table and took her hand.

…

Ottar sang that night.

He stood on a bench at the head of the hall with his lyre in the crook of his arm, and the firelight turned his pale scraggly beard to gold, and for a moment, before he began, he looked as though he would faint. Then Hrolf coughed, and a dozen soldiers thumped their cups, and he drew a long breath.

It was a plain song. Archie did not understand all the words. It told of a tree that grew at the heart of the world, and a woman who came walking out of the fog and sat down at its roots and said, I will stay. It told of her long watch. It told of the many winters, and the burning, and the quiet. Ottar's voice was thin, and sweet, and a little flat, and as the verses went on, the hall fell silent. Even the dogs stopped panting.

At the end he sang a line, softly, that made Zoe catch her breath.

And at last she stood up from the root, and all the world stood with her.

The silence went on. Then someone began to weep, and someone else, and a rough old voice at the back called "Skål!" and the whole hall rose with a roar, and the cups were lifted, and the fires leapt, and Ottar sat down very suddenly on the bench with his head in his hands.

"That," said Venn, thickly, "was beautiful. I'm not crying. You're crying."

"I'm not."

"You are."

"It's the smoke," said Jin.

…

In the lab, the lawyers had come.

There were three of them, and they sat in a row on one side of a long conference table, in matching blue suits, with matching briefcases and expressions of well-practiced regret. Opposite them sat Luca Ferrara, in his rumpled cardigan, with a single elderly attorney at his elbow, a stooped woman named Ms. Okafor who had once defended a man for stealing a bridge. Otis sat at the foot of the table, taking notes.

"My clients," said the tallest of the three, "regret the necessity of these proceedings."

"I'm sure."

"They are, however, bound to protect their interests." He slid a folder across the table. "Cross Capital Partners holds a controlling stake in the FDRI Gate Mark II. They require immediate access to the system, and the surrender of all administrative keys."

"No."

"I beg your pardon?"

"No," said Luca. "I decline. The system is in an unstable state. Any outside intervention could endanger the subjects."

"The subjects are already in jeopardy, Dr. Ferrara. By your own admission."

"By his doing."

"We dispute that."

"I imagine you do." Luca laid his hands flat on the table. "I have given your clients my answer. Should they wish to take the matter to court, I will see them there. I would remind them that the discovery process will be extremely thorough."

The tall lawyer blinked.

"I mean to subpoena every document," said Luca gently. "Every email. Every server log. Every contract with CorVitae Industries and every payment made in its name. I mean to depose your clients under oath. I mean to put William Cross in a witness box and ask him, in front of a jury, what he intended to do with four people in a dream."

Ms. Okafor made a small, satisfied noise.

"I suggest," said Luca, "that you go away and think about it."

The lawyers rose. They went out in a row. The door closed behind them with a soft click.

Otis lowered his pen. His hand was shaking. "Was that okay?" he whispered.

Luca looked at him. For the first time in fifteen years there was something in his face that was almost mischief.

"I haven't the faintest idea," he said. "But I enjoyed it very much."

…

Archie found Sera on the highest root.

It was long after midnight. The feast had thinned. The great fires had burned low, and the soldiers had rolled themselves into their cloaks and gone to sleep along the benches, and only a few lights still burned in the far corners of the hall. He climbed out through a gap in the wood and up a long curving slope of root, under the stars.

She sat at the top, with her harp across her knees.

She did not look round. She was looking at the east, where the glow of the burning plain still pulsed against the sky. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders. In the starlight she looked very small. Archie sat down beside her, a little way off, and said nothing, and for a long while the two of them watched the horizon together.

"You are drawing," said Sera.

"Am I?"

"You have a pencil in your hand."

He looked down. He had. He had taken Thomas Crane's red stub out of his pocket without noticing, and was turning it over and over in his fingers.

"I haven't drawn anything in weeks," he said.

"Why not?"

"I don't know." He smiled crookedly. "I think I was afraid it would be too good."

"Too good?"

"It's a stupid thing."

"Say it."

"I was afraid," said Archie, "that if I drew something true, it would mean I was alive. And I wasn't sure I was ready."

Sera said nothing. She plucked a single note from the harp. It hung in the cold air, clear and clean, and died.

"Tell me something," she said. "Tomorrow, when the wolf returns. When the tree falls, or does not. Whatever comes." She turned her head. "What will you draw?"

He thought about it.

"The hall," he said. "Tonight. The fires and the dogs and the giant with the soup." He swallowed. "All of you."

"Then draw it now."

"It's dark."

"The stars are bright."

So he took a scrap of birch bark from his pocket, and held it against his knee, and drew.