The Fall of Fenrir

Afterward, nobody could agree on what Venn had done.

Hrolf swore he had seen the boy walk straight up to the wolf's muzzle and lay a hand on it, the way a man lays a hand on a frightened horse. Brynja said that was nonsense, that he had run up its snout like a squirrel up a tree. Dagny the dwarf maintained, to the end of her days, that he had said something into the beast's ear, and that the wolf had listened. And Ottar the skald, who had been lying on his belly on the western rim with a lyre he had forgotten to play, put it into a verse so improbable that the whole hall refused to believe it and demanded it be sung every night for a year.

What Archie saw was simpler.

He saw a tall thin man in a linen shirt stand up in the clay of the ravine, swaying, with his hand held out in front of him as though he were offering a sugar lump. He saw the wolf's head come down. He saw the green moons of its eyes, vast and bright and bewildered, narrow on the small bare hand.

And then Venn Adebayo said, loudly, in a voice that carried to the farthest ridge: "I looked cool though, right?"

He jumped.

…

It was an absurd thing to do. It was the single most reckless act of a reckless life. He cleared the gap between himself and the wolf's snout in a bound that should have been physically impossible, and landed on the bridge of its nose, barefoot, arms flung wide. For one stupendous second he stood there, silhouetted against the red sky, with the vast jaws gaping beneath him and the tangle of glowing roots spread out around.

Then the wolf threw its head.

It did it with the instinctive violence of any animal that finds a thing on its face. The huge skull whipped up and sideways. Venn flew. He went spinning through the air like a leaf in a gale, arms and legs flailing, and struck the bank of the ravine with a sound that Archie felt in his own spine. He slid down the clay and lay in a heap at the bottom.

He did not get up.

"VENN!"

It was Zoe's voice. It split the dusk like a knife. She had flung herself off the arch of the root, thirty feet, and landed in a roll on the slope, and was running before she had stopped. She ran through the falling clay with the bow forgotten in her hand and her face a mask of terror.

"No," Archie heard himself say. "No, no, no, no—"

"Archie." That was Sera. Her voice was very calm. "Archie, look at me."

He looked.

She was standing a pace from him on the lip of the ravine, in the guttering light, with her hair stirring round her like smoke. The glow of the roots lit her face from below. She was weeping, silently, and smiling too, the way a person smiles who has made up her mind.

"It is time," she said.

"Sera—"

"I must sing it now. The last verse." She laid a hand on his arm. "The wolf is held, but it will not be held long. The Tree is failing. I can feel it in my own bones." She looked down into the ravine, where the huge beast heaved and tore at its bonds, and a great root snapped like a bowstring. "Go to him. Go to Venn."

"I can't leave you."

"You are not leaving me." Her eyes were bright. "You are going to him. It is a different thing."

"What if the song doesn't work?"

"Then it doesn't."

"What if it binds you?"

"Then I will be bound." She smiled. "But I do not think I will be. I think the Tree has been waiting for this a long time. I think it has been waiting for someone to ask it a question, and not just give it orders." She squeezed his arm. "Go."

He ran.

…

He reached the bottom of the ravine in time to see Zoe fall to her knees.

She was kneeling in the clay beside the crumpled shape, with both hands pressed against his chest. Her palms were red. A dark stain was spreading across the front of his linen shirt, and under her fingers, he saw, something was wrong with the shape of the ribs. They sat strangely. Venn's face was ashen, the lips blue, the eyes half open and glassy. His breath came in short wet sips.

"Venn," Zoe was saying, over and over, in a flat steady monotone. "Venn. Venn. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me."

His eyes moved. They found her face.

"Hey," he whispered.

"Hey."

"Did I do it?"

"You did it."

"Was it cool?"

"It was the coolest thing I've ever seen."

"I thought so." The ghost of a grin touched his mouth. "I'm sorry about the. About the jump. Jin said not to."

"Jin's going to kill you."

"Is he okay?"

"He's fine. He's got a concussion. He's yelling at the medic."

"Good." A cough shook him. A thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of his lip. "That's good. He yells when he's okay."

Archie knelt on the other side. He put his hand over Zoe's, over the wound, and felt the hot sticky pulse of the blood beneath, slow, too slow. He could not speak.

"Architect," Venn said.

"I'm here."

"Don't make the face."

"What face?"

"The one you're making." The dark eyes crinkled. "It's the funeral face. I'm not dead. I'm just. A little bit horizontal."

Archie laughed. It was a ragged, cracked, awful sound, and it turned halfway through into something else, and he bent his head until his forehead rested against Venn's shoulder.

"Hey," said Venn, gently. "Hey. It's okay, man."

"It's not okay."

"It's a little okay."

…

Above them, the world was coming apart.

Sera had begun to sing. It was the last verse, and it was not like the others. The earlier verses had been a tide, a slow sweet rolling swell. This was a spear. It rose from the lip of the ravine in a single enormous, unbroken, inhuman note, so pure and high that the clay itself seemed to ring, and the glowing roots writhed with it, and the whole length of the great Tree shuddered from crown to trunk.

The wolf screamed.

Its roar was drowned. The song swallowed it. The huge pinned body convulsed, and arched, and went rigid. Its eyes blazed. The white smoke streaming from its flanks was suddenly shot with gold, and gold again, and the light ran down its spine like lightning down a mast. The ravine shone. The sky shone. Even the burning horizon paled.

Sera was glowing.

She stood at the edge of the cliff, small and straight and shining, with her arms flung wide. Her loosened hair had turned to light. Her feet had left the ground. She was singing, and the song was pouring out of her in a river, and as it poured the glow poured out with it, from her chest, from her palms, from the crown of her head, until the whole of her body was a pillar of white fire.

She is going, thought Archie, in horror. She's giving it all.

Then, with a sound like a great door closing, it ended.

The light cracked. A hush fell over the plain. The song hung in the air like a held breath. In the center of the ravine, caught in the net of golden roots, the wolf lay quite still. Its eyes were closed. Its jaws were slack. The smoke had stopped.

And slowly, impossibly, it began to change.

It shrank. It softened. The pale bone-colored hide turned gray, then brown, and wrinkled like bark. The vast limbs knotted. The legs sank into the clay. Where the head had been, a great pale knot swelled out of the earth, and from it, branching and branching, rose a tall, slender trunk, leafless, silver-white. It was a tree. It was a young one, no more than fifty feet, with long arms and pale slim limbs, and as they watched, a single bud broke on its tip and opened into a leaf.

It was green.

"Gods," whispered Hrolf, from the rim. "Oh, gods."

There was no sound. The whole camp, the whole army, stood as though turned to stone. The skald had dropped his lyre. A dwarf was weeping openly into her beard. And on the lip of the ravine, in the thin gold light of the first real dawn that the world had seen in a hundred years, a woman lay on her back with her hair fanned over the clay and her eyes open to the sky.

…

Archie reached her first.

He did not remember climbing. He remembered only the feel of the earth under his hands, and the cold of it, and then she was in his arms, light as a bundle of reeds. Her lips were pale. Her skin was cool. He pressed his fingers to the hollow of her throat and found, faintly, like a bird in a hedge, a pulse.

"Sera."

Her eyelids flickered.

"You're alive," he said. "Sera. You're alive."

"Am I?" It was a whisper. A thread. "How strange."

"You did it. You, you beat it. Look."

He turned her head, gently, so that she could see. She looked out across the ravine, at the slim white tree on the clay, with its single bud. She looked for a long time. A tear slid from the corner of her eye and ran down into her hair.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that is lovely."

"It's yours."

"It is not mine." Her mouth trembled. "It is its own."

She turned to him. She reached up, with infinite slowness, and laid her fingers against his cheek, and he realized with a shock that the bark-like roughness was gone from them. They were soft. They were a woman's hands. They were warm.

"I am free," said Sera, in wonder. "Archie. I am free."

…

The door opened in the trunk at noon.

It did it quietly, without fanfare, as though it had merely remembered how. A seam of pale light split the old gray bark, and widened, and settled into an archway as tall as a man, edged with white. A breath of cold clean air rolled out of it, smelling of glass and silver. Archie turned his head and knew it at once.

Space Five.

Nobody cheered.

They stood in a ring in the roots, the four of them and Brynja and Hrolf and Dagny and a dozen others, in the slanting golden light, and looked at the door. Beside them, on a litter of furs and cloaks, lay Venn. His face was the color of old candle wax. Sera knelt at his side with her hand on his chest, and the green-gold light that ran from her fingers was thin, and flickering, and hard won. Zoe held his hand. Jin, with a bandage round his head and a livid bruise across one cheekbone, stood behind her, silent, with his arms folded.

"How is he?" said Archie.

"Alive," said Sera. She did not look up. "But the wound is deep. It is in the Dimension. If he dies here..." She stopped.

"If he dies here?"

"Then the mind dies with the body. There is no return. There is no pod. There is only the Tree." She lowered her voice. "I can heal him. I can mend the lung, and the ribs, and the blood. But it will take time. Six hours. Perhaps seven. And the door..."

"The door?"

"It is closing."

They all turned.

She was right. The archway shone as brightly as before, but at its edges, thin as hairs, the bark had begun to creep. Slowly. Inch by inch. The white light was narrowing. It was the same slow patient closing that had sealed the first door, only faster. Perhaps an hour. Perhaps two.

"It will not wait," said Sera. "The Tree wants to heal itself. It wants the wound closed. I cannot hold it open and mend Venn at the same time. Not both." Her voice shook. "You must choose."

Nobody spoke.

"You go now," she said, "and I will keep him. I will mend him, as long as it takes, and when he wakes I will care for him. He will be safe. He will be warm. I promise. But he will not be with you." She drew a breath. "He may not reach the other side."

"Or?"

"Or you stay. And wait. And pray the door stays open long enough, and that I am swift enough, and that the Tree is kind." She shook her head. "But if it closes before he is whole, you will be shut out. All of you. Perhaps for good."

The wind stirred the new leaf on the silver tree.

Zoe looked up at Archie. Her face was pale and wet and perfectly clear. She said nothing. She did not need to.

Jin looked at the door, and at the sun, and at Venn on the litter. His lips were pressed thin. He, too, said nothing.

It is my call, thought Archie.

It's always been my call. That's the thing about being the one who sees the drawing.

He looked at his friend's gray face. He looked at the slim bright tree on the clay, and the woman kneeling in the roots, and the old, old door narrowing in the light. He thought of a man in a gray suit with a stopwatch. He thought of everything he had learned in the last month about the cost of walking out of rooms.

And he thought: There is no right answer.

There never is.