Fenrir Wakes

The wolf came back at sunset, and this time it brought the dark with it.

It rose out of the east in the long red light with the burning behind it like a cloak, and where it walked the cracked plain heaved and fell. It did not howl. That was the first terrible thing. All its howling was done. It came on in silence, an enormous bone-colored shape, head low and shoulders rolling, with those twin green moons of eyes fixed on the Tree. Smoke streamed from its flanks. Where Sera's light had struck it the wounds had not healed; they smoldered, orange-edged, like coals under ash.

"It's angry," said Zoe.

"It's hurt," said Archie.

"Is there a difference?"

"With animals? Not much."

They stood on the high root at the head of the ravine, the whole company, with the sun sinking behind them and the plain stretched out below like a burned map. Hrolf's men were drawn up in three ranks on the western ridge. Brynja's sisters sat their horses along the lower arch, spears upright, pennons snapping in the wind. Dagny the dwarf and her mason-kin crouched in the shadows of the roots, with great coils of rope and little kegs of black powder strapped to their backs, their beards braided back for the fight. And beneath the trunk itself, small and still, with her harp upon her knees and her loosened hair stirring in the wind, sat the Keeper of the Tree.

Archie looked at the line of them, and he thought: It's a drawing.

It was. It was the best he had ever done. Each figure was placed. Each angle was true. He had spent a night and a day moving them about the field in his head, as one sets the stones in an arch, and they stood now in perfect balance, each bearing the weight of the next. He could feel the whole structure. He could feel where it would hold, and where it would crack.

Please let it hold.

"Ready?" said Zoe.

"No."

"Me neither."

She smiled up at him. Her face was streaked with ash and her braid had come undone and the bow in her hand was bent like a sickle moon. He thought, with a sudden pang of the heart, that he had never seen anyone so alive.

"Go on," he said. "Take your post."

"Archie."

"Mm."

"Whatever happens." She took a breath. "I wanted to say I'm glad it was you."

"Glad what was me?"

"Everything." She grinned, a bright wavering flash. "Don't make it weird. I'll tell you properly. After."

She went away along the root with her bow over her shoulder. He watched her go until she had vanished into the shadow of the arch, and then he turned and looked at the wolf, and the ground shook under his feet.

…

Venn ran at the rise of the first star.

He ran from the foot of the Tree, from the very base, where the cracked clay met the roots, and the sound of his feet on the baked earth was lost almost at once in the hammer of the wolf's paws. He ran with his head down and his arms pumping and his hammer abandoned somewhere behind him, on the stump where he had been sitting. He was in a plain linen shirt. He was barefoot. He looked like a boy running across a field, and the gray beast bearing down on him was the size of a hill.

Jin ran at his shoulder.

He did it badly. He had never been athletic; he had spent twenty years at a desk. He ran with his elbows out and his glasses bouncing on his nose and his coat flapping behind him like a flag. But he did not fall behind. He kept his eyes on the pale shape ahead of him and he kept his feet moving and his lips shaped one word, over and over, which Archie, watching from the root, could not hear and did not need to.

Venn. Venn. Venn.

"Come on!" roared Venn, over his shoulder, delirious with joy. "Come on, you ugly mutt! This way! This way!"

The wolf's head swung.

It was a vast, slow, deadly turn, and every man on the ridge felt it like a hand closing round the heart. The green eyes found the two small figures. The nostrils flared. The jaws unhinged, and the dark mouth gaped, and a gust of hot fetid wind swept across the field, and Venn laughed, a high wild laugh, and swerved left with a flick of his hips like a quarterback.

The wolf followed.

…

It followed along the ravine.

That was the plan; and it worked, at first, with a beauty that took Archie's breath away. The beast came across the plain in great loping strides, shaking the earth, with its eyes on the runners ahead and its mind on nothing but meat. It entered the mouth of the ravine without pause. The walls closed round it, thirty feet of loose clay on either side, and Venn and Jin ran before it down the narrow bed, and above, on the rims, a hundred silent figures lay flat in the shadow with their hearts in their throats.

"Not yet," murmured Archie. "Not yet. Let it get deeper."

"Shieldbearer," Hrolf breathed, at his elbow. "It's fast."

"Hold."

"They're slowing."

They were. He could see it. Venn's stride had begun to falter. His shoulders hunched. He was running with his hand pressed hard against his ribs, and every few paces he stumbled. Jin had him by the elbow. They were only forty yards ahead of the jaws. Thirty. Twenty.

"Archie," Hrolf said hoarsely.

"Hold."

Ten yards. The wolf's breath was on their backs.

"Now!"

Dagny's mallet fell on the first peg.

It was a small sound. A single flat crack. For a long second nothing happened, and Archie's stomach turned over, and he thought: I was wrong. I miscalculated. The clay won't give. Then, on the western wall of the ravine, a seam opened. A hair-thin crack ran through the clay from top to bottom, widening as it ran. A kegs-worth of black powder went up with a whump, and the wall bulged outward, and slid.

It came down like a wave.

Tons of earth and stone poured into the ravine in a single roaring cascade, and the wolf was in the middle of it. It howled. It did not stop. It plunged on through the falling clay with its head down and its shoulders heaving, but the walls were collapsing on both sides now, and the ground itself seemed to turn to liquid under its feet. Roots exploded out of the banks. They were thick as ships' cables, and they lashed across the ravine in a net, tangling its legs, coiling round its flanks.

"The Tree is moving!" cried Brynja. "It moves!"

It did. The ancient wood groaned and heaved. Root after root tore itself free of the earth and whipped across the gap, binding, seizing. The wolf bellowed. It reared against the net, jaws gaping, claws raking at the wall, and for a moment it seemed that nothing in the world could hold it. Then a great gnarled root came down across its back with a sound like a thunderclap, and pinned it to the floor of the ravine.

"Got him," breathed Hrolf.

Archie did not answer. He was looking at the two figures at the far end of the ravine. They had been caught in the slide.

…

Jin was down.

He lay half-buried in the clay with one arm flung out and his glasses gone, and he was not moving. Beside him, Venn was on his knees. Venn had been dragging at his shoulders, hauling him out of the earth, panting and cursing, and now he stopped and put two fingers to his friend's throat.

"He's alive!" Venn screamed. "He's alive! I've got him!"

"Get out of there!" Archie yelled. "Venn! The root's going to shift!"

"I'm trying!"

The wolf thrashed. The net of roots bulged and strained. One snapped with a crack like a gunshot, and a shower of splinters rained down on the ravine. The pinned beast heaved its great body half up from the floor, and the green eyes swung round and found the two figures, sprawled in the clay not fifteen feet from its jaws.

"No," whispered Archie.

Venn looked up.

He saw it. His face went still. For a moment he did not move at all; he only looked at the monster looming above him, with the red sky behind, the way a man looks at a thing he has known all his life was waiting for him. Then he gathered Jin in his arms, with an effort that tore a cry from his throat, and began to run again.

He ran with his friend over his shoulder, barefoot, in the clay. He ran as he must have run through Piedmont Park in the green mist, long ago, with the sprinklers on. He ran like a man who was never going to stop. The wolf's jaws snapped shut a hand's breadth behind his heels.

He reached the foot of the western bank. He flung Jin up at the waiting hands. He went to climb after, and stopped, and doubled over, clutching his chest.

"Venn!" Zoe's voice, high and breaking, from the arch. "Venn, climb!"

He lifted his head. He was gray as ash. He looked up at the rim of the ravine, thirty feet of crumbling clay, and a faint, astonished smile touched his face.

"Oh," he said. "That's a lot."

Then he fell to one knee, and the wolf bore down.

…

"Sera," shouted Archie.

She was already on her feet.

She had risen at the first crack of the wall. She stood now at the lip of the ravine with her loosened hair streaming and her palms upraised and the whole of her small brown body shaking like a lit candle. The harp lay at her feet. She did not need it. She opened her mouth, and a note came out of her, low, clear, sustained, that seemed to rise out of the ground itself.

It was the rootsong.

It was nothing Archie had ever heard. It had no words. It had no tune, in any sense he knew: it rose and fell like a tide, like breathing, a deep slow river of sound that rolled out across the plain and into the wood and the clay and the bones of the world. The Tree answered. He felt it in his teeth. Every root in the ravine began to glow, faint green and gold, and the glow ran along them like fire along a fuse, until the whole writhing net was lit from within.

The wolf screamed.

It was a sound like tearing metal. The roots clenched. The pinned beast convulsed, once, twice, and sank back into the earth, and its green eyes swung to the tiny figure on the rim.

For the first time that night, it looked afraid.

Venn, on his knees in the clay, looked up at it.

"Hey," he said, hoarsely, to nobody. "Hey, big guy. Over here."

He reached out his hand.