She did not ensorcel me.

He was sure of that, convincing himself that he had known before he slept how this would turn out.

Should have cut her tongue out.

To push away that thought, he slapped both Ivarr and Thollákr. They staggered, then cried out, panicking.

‘I can’t see!’

‘Blinded, I’m blinded . . .’

Fenrisulfr thumped them and told them to shut up. ‘It’ll wear off,’ he promised. ‘Before night falls again.’

At least that was likely: he did not know Heithrún’s abilities for sure, but he remembered how his beloved Eira had been, the punishments she had wrought within the clan, and the harsher spells that Eira’s teacher Nessa cast in her time.

Brökkr came forward, leading a big man bound with leather ropes. ‘I had this one prisoner at the forest’s edge, where the witch didn’t see him.’ Behind the prisoner walked Ári and Davith with swords unsheathed. ‘A real fighter, and I didn’t let him get away.’

Brökkr was called Brökkr the Cloven, although not to his wounded face, because of the old purple-and-white axe wound that rippled down his features. It had cut into cheekbone and forehead, and distorted the shape of his lips so that it was not always possible to tell when he was being sarcastic.

Or challenging.

You want to fight me, is that it?

So much for the nurturing of his lieutenants. The previous two, forming their own bands, remained potential allies should there ever be advantage in combining into a larger fighting force; but while Brökkr had many of the same attributes, he liked taking shortcuts. Perhaps he thought that taking over a ready-formed reaver band would be easier than creating his own.

It’s what I did.

But that was irrelevant. Fenrisulfr pushed aside Ári and Davith’s blades, and used his own dagger to cut through the prisoner’s bonds. Then he waited while the big man’s blood slowly returned to his hands and feet. The man stamped with the pain but made no other sound, then loosened his shoulders and jogged on the spot, getting ready to accept the invitation which must be showing in Fenrisulfr’s eyes. No one had spoken, but everyone knew what was happening.

The prisoner was a fighter, knocked out by chance during the confrontation – everyone knew that skill and ferocity could still be overcome by the Norns’ contingencies – needing this to redeem himself.

When he was ready, he grunted and nodded, too far into warrior state for ordinary speech, and he snarled as Fenrisulfr laid his own dagger and sword on the shingles, then walked backwards, nine short paces.

‘Let him walk free if he beats me,’ Fenrisulfr commanded.

‘We’ll do that,’ said Brökkr, his cloven lips curling. ‘By Freya’s perfect buttocks, not to mention the sweetness of her golden cup, I swear it.’

There were smiles and frowns as the other reavers drew near enough to watch – first Sveinn and Nörthr, then Logmar followed by Torleik and the rest – but not too close, because anyone could get hurt when violence exploded.

Like now.

Stones flew at Fenrisulfr’s face as the fighter used the environment, kicking shingle as weapon and distraction, but his objective was obvious – sword and dagger – so Fenrisulfr whipped forwards, two long thrusting paces to cover the distance of nine short ones, hand and forearm deflecting the stones and then he was slamming the man’s left wrist across the body – knife – and the heel of Fenrisulfr’s right hand smashed the jaw around, then he clawed back, trying for the eyes, while his left arm wrapped the bastard’s knife hand close, and he pumped his knee twice into the spleen – again – then lower ribs, and spun him – knee deep into kidney – then slammed his right elbow into the back of the man’s neck – good – and ripped the dagger free from the weakened left hand before slamming it point first with a crunch exactly where the elbow strike had hit, severing the spine at the base of the brain.

It dropped, the dead thing.

The body lay atop Fenrisulfr’s sword, which the dead man had picked up but never had the opportunity to use, because Fenrisulfr had not let him.

Fuck you, Urd, Skuld and Verthandi!

His men gasped, some raising a fist in the shape of Thórr’s hammer or thumb-and-finger as the All Father’s eye, several stepping back, and he realised he must have uttered the curse aloud. His reavers would face vicious, bloody enemies as a matter of course; but to curse the Norns by name was a dangerous thing: they would not dream of it.

Brökkr the Cloven looked away, understanding the lesson here.

Good.

Fenrisulfr would not have to kill his lieutenant.

Not today.

SIXTEEN

LABYRINTH, MU-SPACE, 2604 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)

After a long sleep, Roger felt full of energy and cheerful optimism, bouncing right back from the surveillance-and-tracking exercise whose main difficulty had been the prior seventy standard hours of wakefulness, sleep deprivation forming the backbone of the test. He and Corinne, too tired to debrief in their favourite fashion, had gone to their separate rooms.

=The Logos Library.=

He nearly lost bladder control as Labyrinth’s words resonated in his brain.

‘What about it?’

But no elaboration followed, no indication that he had not just imagined the message – which here in Tangleknot Core was the only way of delivering information that could not be eavesdropped on and recorded.

A tiny non-urgent holo, hovering by his bedside, unfurled at his gesture. He had been assigned a free day – today – with leave to exit Tangleknot and go anywhere he liked within Labyrinth. As he used the ablution facilities, he wondered if this was another exercise or test, or whether it was a day off that he could spend with Corinne, in which case going to a library, even one that perhaps possessed an infinite knowledge store, was a long way down his list of possible activities.

But there was no reply from his attempted signal, and when he went along the dorm corridor to check first Corinne’s room and then his other classmates’, everyone had gone.

‘Rotation,’ said the first instructor he found, a hard-faced woman called Medina. ‘Only one or two people out of the group get R & R at any one time. Today, it’s you.’

If there was subterfuge, Medina’s skills were too advanced for him to read it.

Alone, Roger tuned his clothing to dark colours and went out to explore Cantor Circus and Hamilton Helix, where myriad Pilots went about their busy lives, here in the heart of Labyrinth. He poked around, found a café near the most elegant stretch of Legendre Level, and went inside.

Over daistral, he caught up on the news – in Tangleknot they were isolated – and saw that the legendary Dirk McNamara had been sighted once more in Labyrinth. Commentators made bets they would never pay out on regarding the duration of McNamara’s stay.

It would have been an interesting oddity and no more, had Roger not twice met Dirk McNamara’s mother, an even more shadowy figure from the past, among the study-carrels in the Logos Library. At the time, he had not appreciated just how unusual and striking those fleeting meetings were.

And how likely was it that the city-world’s mention of the Logos Library, the instant he woke up, had been a coincidence?

He finished his daistral, placed the empty goblet on the tabletop before him, and watched the goblet dissolve. When he stood, chair and table melted into the floor, and he spent a moment visualising coordinates and least-action geodesics before summoning a fastpath rotation.

It deposited him in the Logos Library.

There was no sign of Ro McNamara as Roger walked the infinite balconies and halls. Crystals were racked everywhere, indexed contents searchable via search engines not subject to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem or Turing undecidability. A primitive human might have thought that Labyrinth and the Logos Library were in themselves gods.