Three Ravens Tower

“As all Hikeda’ya know, when the children of our nobility reach the proper age, they are submitted to Yedade’s Box, and the way in which they escape the box or the way that they fail determines their path in life.

“When she was put to her test, the young Suno’ku seyt-Iyora broke free so swiftly that none present could remember any other child who had performed the feat so well.

“Thus it was later for Suno’ku as general: When no one else could have broken the siege at Tangleroot Castle, she led a small force there to save those trapped in the ruins and then fought her way out again, scattering the Northmen before her like chaff before a reaper’s blade. The rest of the besieged followed her, awed by her courage and skill, and when the trap was behind them she led them all north toward the shelter of the City Walls.

“The walls had been built during the time of our greatest power, when the Zida’ya still held Asu’a, when much of Nakkiga still existed outside the great mountain and the North was ours.

“But as our numbers diminished and the Northmen came across the cold sea and began their career of destruction through the lands of the Keida’ya, at our great queen’s order we fell back into the sheltering fastness of the mountain and eventually Nakkiga-That-Was stood deserted. Slowly the trees and grasses and the fierce winds began to take back the outer city. The great walls, a vast ring of stone that stretched for leagues around our mountain, fared little better. In the time of Sulen, the Thirteenth Celebrant, the Order of Sacrifice removed the last guards from the walls, calling them back to the city to better protect Nakkiga itself and the irreplaceable person of Queen Utuk’ku.

“So it was that Suno’ku and the rest of her charges, fleeing ahead of the mortal invaders, came at last to the Tower of Three Ravens and found it in a pitiable state, the tower itself gutted and long empty, the great walls it guarded now perilously weak. Although Lord Yaarike, Magister of the Builders, was with her, there was little his small number of workers could do to make repairs with the Northmen so close behind. Still, the Hikeda’ya were determined to make a stand there, trusting in Suno’ku’s generalship to keep the mortals from the mountain and from Nakkiga itself as long as could be managed.

“In the city, nothing was yet known of General Suno’ku’s mission, and after she took the largest part of the surviving warriors with her, the caverns of Nakkiga were silent with foreboding, the queen’s subjects fearful of what might come next if the invaders continued unchecked.

“They were right to fear.”

Overburdened with the duke’s own considerable weight, his horse nearly lost its footing on the steep track, sliding back a short distance in a flurry of gravel and scree. Isgrimnur reined up, eyeing the looming cliffs on either side with distaste.

“Tell me again how you know they are not lying in ambush for us,” the duke said.

The scout nodded. “There has been no movement that we’ve seen, Your Grace. I think the fairies are too few now—they’re all hiding in the tower, I’d say. Come, my lord, it’s just a little way more to the spot where we will make camp.”

Isgrimnur snorted. “Too few fairies? Don’t ever assume that, lad. Especially when we’ve followed them into their own lands.”

“My men and I found high ground to keep watch, my lord; we can see beyond this wall, all the way to their cursed mountain. This time, we would see any reinforcements long before they arrived. Just a little farther, my lord.”

Isgrimnur looked back on the line of mounted men making their slow way up the pass behind him, Sludig nearest, following like a faithful hound, then Brindur and his Skoggeymen, with Vigri and the Elvritshalla men close behind leading a train of foot soldiers. Two thousand able-bodied men left, at most. Could he really take such a small force into the forbidden lands of the Norns and hope to come out again in one piece?

But that doesn’t matter, does it? Isgrimnur thought. What matters is that we leave none of the fairies alive to threaten our lands again. If we can manage that, whatever befalls us, it would be a sacrifice worth making. He thought of his wife Gutrun, waiting for him not at Elvritshalla but far to the south, in the devastation of the Hayholt. She would be busy, he knew, with wounded men and women to care for and the new king and queen in need of her counsel and wisdom. At least she would have something to distract her from their lost son. Isgrimnur himself had spent too many nights under these cold, starry northern skies too pained to sleep, trying to think of ways things could have been different, that they could have beaten back the enemy without losing his son Isorn.

Wars don’t end, he thought suddenly. They become stories, told to children. They become causes that are taken up by those who were not even born when the war started. But they don’t end.

We are a fierce race, we men. We will give up even our short, precious lives for revenge—no, for justice. No wonder the immortals fear us.

The steep track angled to one side, following the line of the pass. As they came out from behind a massive cliff wall, Isgrimnur could suddenly see all the way to the top, to the darkening sky and the great, dark wall that girdled all of the Norn lands. It stretched thirty ells high across the top of the pass, a thing of monstrous black slabs laid flush one on another as though by the work of some gigantic mason.

In the middle of the pass, squarely above the climbing road and a gate that had long since been filled in with even more stone, a tower bulged out from the wall. The entire structure seemed oddly proportioned to Isgrimnur’s eye, but the tower’s crown was one of the strangest things he had ever seen, with three beak-like projections, the middle pointing forward and the others angled to either side, each one hanging out ten cubits or more beyond the wall. He thought the tower looked more like some huge weapon than a mere building, a battle mace for a sky-tall giant.

“Sweet Elysia, Mother of Mercy,” he said.

Sludig had reined up beside Isgrimnur; he looked as though he had bitten into an apple and discovered half a squirming worm. “This is an evil place.”

Another voice said, “Evil is in what mortals—and immortals—do. The place itself is but a place.” Ayaminu the Sitha-woman rode up beside them on her own horse, which despite its fine-boned slenderness seemed to have less trouble with the cold and the steep climbs than the Rimmersmen’s mounts, bred in cold northern lands. “Once it was a point upon the teeming earth like any other.”

“Does this abomination have a name?” asked Isgrimnur.

“That?” She made one of the barely perceptible gestures that passed for a shrug among her kind. “It is called Three Ravens Tower. You see the beaks, of course. They allowed the defenders to drop stones, or hot oil, or other even less pleasant things upon anyone trying to take the wall.”

Isgrimnur had not come to like the Sitha-woman’s company any better during the sennight they had pursued the Norns from Tangleroot Castle. He had found all the Sithi he met difficult to understand and even more difficult to parley with, and he found their reluctance to engage with their murderous cousins even more frustrating; but if the immortals Jiriki and Aditu had been frustrating, and their mother Likimeya close to maddening, Ayaminu made those three seem easy company. Despite accompanying the duke’s troop and offering an occasional bit of information, Ayaminu seemed otherwise unconcerned by the doings of the mortals or even their deaths, and did not seem to care at all whether they ever caught the Norns who had brought so much ruin to her own people as well as Isgrimnur’s. Many times he had wondered whether they harbored some kind of spy in their midst, though the men he had set to watch her had seen no evidence of any treachery.