He was sailing the whale road with the Bloodsworn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ELVAR
Elvar stared through the rain and mist towards the fortress of Snakavik. It was hidden from view, wrapped in murk and rain-soaked clouds, but she knew it was there. She was sat on her sea-chest, her oar banked and stowed, the Wave-Jarl gliding across the green-black of a wide fjord on a half-crew of oarsmen. Grey, mist-shrouded cliffs rose either side of them, thick with nesting gulls, shrieking their hunger. It was a constant chorus in spring that Elvar had once grown deaf to, but now she was back it was all that she could hear.
Ahead, a shadow appeared in the mist, tall and wide as a mountain, taking shape as if it were breaking through the clouds.
Bjarn hissed, the boy sitting close to Elvar, holding his mother’s hand.
A snout and fangs longer than trees emerged from the mist high above them, eye sockets deep and dark, the mottled skull of a huge serpent taking shape.
“Mama,” Bjarn breathed, a tremor in his voice.
“It’s all right,” Uspa said, squeezing Bjarn’s hand. “It’s dead. That is Snaka’s skull, and the days of his dark deeds are long finished, though he has left his mark upon the land.”
Snakavik loomed out of the mist before them. Elvar craned her neck to look up at its heights. The western extremity of the Boneback Mountains began here, sharp slopes and mist-wreathed peaks disappearing into the distance. Out of that slope protruded the upper half of an immense, bleached skull of a serpent, long fangs bared, eye sockets empty holes: Snaka’s skull, its size impossible to comprehend unless you stood before it. Here it was that dread Snaka had fallen, oldest, father of the gods, slain on the day of Guefalla, shattering the world in his ruin and remaking it. Snaka’s fall had smashed the ground beneath him, allowing the sea to surge in and create the fjord they were now rowing upon. Earth had been hurled into the air and settled around his corpse, forming a mountain range that cut across the whole continent of Vigrie. The dead god’s flesh had long rotted away beneath heaped earth and rock, but the serpent’s skull, spine and ribs remained, a colossal and ever-present reminder of the legacy of the gods.
At least Snakavik is safe from vaesen, so we will be able to sleep at night without worry of being strangled by night-wyrms.
The bones of the gods were a shield against the vaesen, though Elvar was not sure why. Some latent power residing in the knit of bone and marrow. Whatever the reason, vaesen avoided any remnant or relic of the gods.
The sight of Snakavik made Elvar feel insignificant, like a rivet-nail tossed into a bucket of nails, and that was a feeling she’d fled Snakavik to escape. She sucked in a breath, trying to contain a swarm of memories long buried that were released by the sight of home, her eyes flickering to Grend. This had been his home, too, for more years than she had drawn breath, but if the sight of Snaka’s skull stirred anything inside the old warrior, his face did not betray it.
At the skull’s peak a fortress was built high upon a plateau of granite that the head emerged from, a mead hall and gate towers looking like horns and scales upon the snake-god’s brow.
Within, below and around the skull and surrounding slopes a fortress and harbour had been built, over many decades a town spilling out around it. Elvar could just make out the timber towers and ramparts that wound around the skull, dark lines against the bleached bone, small as veins from her distance. The glow of a thousand torches from the town within the serpent’s skull lit the eye sockets and open jaws as if ancient Snaka flickered with unholy fire.
The crew were silent as they rowed into the harbour of Snakavik, passing between the curved arches of fangs that burst from the water. The lower jaw of the dead serpent rested deep below the water line on the fjord’s bed, but the tips of his lower fangs reared out of the water like the bleached bones of a dead whale, the space between them wide enough for twenty drakkars to row side by side.
Sound changed as they rowed into the cavernous skull, echoing and swirling, loud yet strangely muted. Ahead of the Wave-Jarl the harbour and town sprawled upon a slope that reared into the heights of Snaka’s skull, bustling and teeming with life, more drakkars, knarrs, snekkes and fisher boats than Elvar could count moored to a snarl of piers and jetties. Behind her Agnar bellowed orders from the steering oar and guided them towards a pier with a free mooring space on it, Elvar seeing a fine-clothed harbour official striding down the pier towards them, a handful of well-armed guards at her back.
Jarl St?rr’s officials are as keen-eyed as ever for their coin.