blurring. Dust billowed and the screaming changed. Hod closed his eyes, listening to the keeper’s heart. He didn’t know faces.
“Dagmar!” he heard someone scream.
It was Dagmar. Of course. The man propped between the pillars was Dagmar, and he was about to bring down the temple.
“Run!” Dagmar roared. “Go!”
The sound was that of a mighty storm, like thunder and lightning, like Thor himself was taking his hammer to the temple walls. Hod stumbled back, the quaking beneath his feet worse than the tossing of the North King’s ship upon an angry sea. The fighting in the courtyard had ceased, the warriors around him more frightened of the quaking mount than the swords of their enemies.
He thought he heard Gudrun yell, cursing the gods, his voice echoing out through the entrance door, and Hod saw Alba and Ghost run, keeping each other upright as the temple continued to buck and break. Northmen began fleeing the mount, racing for the gates as the cobbles beneath them writhed, tossing the dead into the air and the living to their knees.
A groaning arose, inhuman and earsplitting, and the roof of the temple crashed down, abandoning the walls that had once supported it, a cloud of dust and debris mushrooming into the sky and coating the mount in white powder.
And then the world went still.
Hod could not hear the living, if any living remained, and the dead did not have heartbeats. He couldn’t hear, and he couldn’t smell.
The world was white instead of black, shallow instead of deep. Nothing existed but wintery silence.
The silence was almost worse than the screams.
“Bayr?” he whispered, but he could not feel his lips or hear the word when he released it.
“Ghisla?” he tried again.
She would not forgive him. He had fallen after all.
30
PACES
Ghisla curled herself around her palm, guarding her sacrifice as she crooned her song.
Her sisters sat with her, frightened but not willing to leave, confused but not willing to flee. When the forest began to quake beneath her, sending waves of fury up her legs, some of the women began to scream. But she did not. Her eyes were still sightless, the rune of the blind god still wet on her palm. She dared not stop feeding it. Hod needed her eyes.
The trees shuddered and the leaves shook, and the relentless black abated with a jolt. But the trembling continued, and the gods roared. She blinked, horrified, and tried again, tracing the shape of the rune with her bleeding finger and saying Hod’s name.
“Hody, Hody, Hody.”
But her eyes remained her own.
She traced the scar of the amulet on her right hand, shaking so hard she had to wipe away the blood and try again. But instead of dark she saw light. Instead of black she saw unrelenting white.
“I cannot see the mount,” she mourned, raising her gaze to her terrified sisters. She could not see the mount, and she could not see Hod.
Hod awoke in stages. His left foot screamed, and his right ear burned. Then his legs were being stung by a thousand bees, and his stomach repeatedly fell over a cliff. Someone beat against his back with a rod, and Ghisla’s eyes were gone. His own were flaming shards in his skull.
His throat tickled next, and he hummed, trying to clear it. Dust billowed from his lips and he began to choke.
“I dare not move him,” someone said.
He listened for their heartbeats and heard only his death rattle instead. He bucked and arched, desperate for breath, and his body responded with a lurch and a lungful of air.
“We thought you a dead man,” the stranger said.
“What’s wrong with his eyes?” another worried.
“There’s naught wrong with his eyes that wasn’t wrong before. He’s Blind Hod.”
“What happened?” Hod rasped.
“The temple . . . is no more.”
Then he remembered Dagmar, standing between the writhing pillars.
“Oh no.”
“Aye.”
“Where is Bayr of Dolphys?” he said, trying not to weep.
“He is here.”
“And the princess?”
“She lives too, blind man.”
“What of . . . the keepers?”
“They’re all gone,” the man sighed. “Buried with the Northmen.”
“Buried with their runes,” another man mourned, and Hod closed his burning lids and slid back into the inky abyss.
They slept in the clearing where Desdemona died, huddled together like rabbits in a warren. But Ghisla did not sleep. She never slept; she sang instead, one lullaby after another, and pled with Odin to spare his sons.
The daughters dared not return to the hill, and they could not head for Dolphys. Bayr was on the mount, and if he lived there