‘She does that.’

‘Hmm. Well, good.’ Dirk’s obsidian gaze was on Roger now. ‘That answers my question.’

‘Sir?’

‘I needed to know you’re a fighter.’

The rest had no need to be spoken, because there had been non-verbal recognition between the two of them, at the primate and even reptilian level, the instant Dirk walked inside the hangar.

It takes one to know one.

In this case meaning a warrior who would die sooner than quit.

A soundless message pulsed through the hangar.

=A devil-may-care leader can bring a fleet to victory when even the best of the others would fail.=

Dirk looked up at the ceiling.

‘Are you talking about me or him?’

The response came so fast that Roger wondered if Labyrinth had anticipated the question.

=Yes.=

Roger and Dirk laughed together, and then they bumped fists.

Soon enough, the shit and chaos of battle would be upon them, the blood and screaming and awful fear, when desperation and focus and camaraderie would see them through or they would die; and none of that would matter except that Labyrinth herself needed to be safe, because she was the past, present and future of Pilotkind.

And here she had her defenders.

FORTY-THREE

EARTH, 798 AD

The stench of the middens was strong, as the man who had been Ulfr and Fenrisulfr rode past them on the edge of the city. This place was huge, a vast complex of longhalls and other buildings including wharves, and for the first time he believed the travellers’ tales were true: Lundenwic contained fully ten thousand folk, living together in one gigantic settlement, constructed around the ruined fortifications that once enclosed Londinium.

A quartet of warrior-guards was extracting tax from new arrivals. He pressed his knees inwards, and his mare walked forward and stopped.

‘And you are—?’ The warrior stared up at him.

‘My name is Wulf.’

He understood the puzzled, careful looks. They would sense that he could fight, and well – though they could not know of his berserkergangr ferocity and his ability to control it – and his cloak was of better cloth than theirs. But whether he was thegn or ceorl, the lowest of aristocrats or the highest of commoners and a freeman, they could not tell.

Wulf leaned over and handed the nearest guard a coin.

‘We all piss, shit and fart,’ Wulf told him, grinning. ‘Even eorls. Even kings.’

They laughed at that, fellow fighting men stuck with boring duty. And after five years of working to lose his accent, Wulf-once-Ulfr no longer sounded like a foreigner to beware of. His spear, slung against his saddle, had leather wrapped and tied around its head, and its haft was scarred: an old weapon, nothing special, giving no hint that it was tipped with crystal, not metal.

‘King Coenwulf will be shitting out westerners,’ said one of them. ‘On account of he’s chewed them all up.’

‘What is that?’ asked Wulf.

‘Deorwine has the right of it,’ said the nearest guard. ‘Our boys killed old Cartog what’s-his-face, King of Gwynedd. We heard yesterday. Sheep-shagging bastards, the lot of them.’

‘That’ll be Caradog ap Meirion.’ Wulf nodded. ‘Biggest sheep shagger of them all.’

The oldest guard shrugged, and Wulf knew exactly what he meant: kings fought kings and ordinary soldiers died, and afterwards what had changed?

‘I’ll see you men around,’ Wulf added.

‘Go well, friend.’

Wulf nudged his horse into a walk.

Over the coming weeks, his new neighbours became intrigued by and then accepting of the man called Wulf. With him, to his lodgings where his horse lived at ground level while he slept in the hay-insulated loft, he had brought a rolled cloak full of brooches and torcs, combs of carved bone, and similar lightweight trinkets that he could sell at a profit. He also bought such goods off travellers he met at the local inns and in the nearby market. The reputation he built up was one of fairness, never taking advantage of a wounded soldier down on his luck, nor selling at too high a margin to a love struck thegn eager to impress the maiden of his dreams, or perhaps her parents.

In the mornings he would ride out to exercise the horse, though for half the time he would run alongside her – of all the beasts in the Middle World, none could outlast a man provided he was fit: not a mare, gelding or stallion, neither a dog nor a bitch, not even a wolf.

He missed Brandr, his faithful war-hound, long dead, but would not dream of getting a replacement.

Maybe if I settle.

Even here in teeming Lundenwic, the notion of settling down seemed a strange and distant fantasy for a man who had wandered so far and seen so many things, and carried so much blood on his hands.

Part-way through his daily run, he would work his strength by lifting, pulling and pressing boulders and stones, and by throwing them hard across muddy meadows. And there was weapons practice, of course, for without daily discipline the skills would grow dull, and then he would be unequipped if violence fell upon him. Then he would die embarrassed, deserving to be carried off to Niflheim, ignored by Óthinn’s Death-Choosers.

Or whatever gods ruled here.

Perhaps none of the stories are true.

Except that the Norns clearly ruled men’s lives, and when he woke in the mornings he sometimes, just for a moment, held on to a fragment of a memory from the dreamworld; and in those times he was convinced that both Valhöll and the preparations for final war, for Ragnarökkr, existed for real.

When his stock of trinkets threatened to become large, too much to carry with him when he left his lodgings, he had a choice to make. Surprising himself, he hired two local men to alternate guard duty on his place. Osmund and Cerdic seemed honest enough, though not warriors he would trust in battle, not comrades; but some twenty days after they began working for him, he returned from his morning training to find Osmund poking around the lodgings, looking puzzled, while Cerdic was gone, along with the lightest and most valuable of Wulf’s goods.

‘I saw him walking, hurrying’ – Osmund gestured – ‘and wondered what was wrong, so I came here.’

‘Stay on guard,’ Wulf growled.

Osmund nodded, fast.

Wolves excel at tracking prey.

*

There were courts for justice, but not in Wulf’s world, for men could lie and how could a stranger tell which one told the truth? So Wulf trailed Cerdic, and watched him hide up among stacked coracles on a mudbank, clearly thinking he was safe, and planning to slip out when darkness fell. But Wulf stood in shadow for the remainder of the day, unmoving, until the sun grew large and scarlet, low in the grey sky, and then diminished.

Cerdic headed away from the crowded, muddy alleys, and Wulf followed.

The moon was already high, her light shining stronger as darkness grew, and Cerdic was close to the old Roman walls when Wulf fell on him from behind and that was that: Cerdic’s soul was gone to Niflheim.

All you had to do was not betray me.

Wulf had retrieved most of his goods from the body, wrapping them in scraps of leather one by one, and slipping them into the new pouch he wore at his right hip, when a whimper sounded from beyond the walls.

The old stones were the colour of bone in moonlight, and his sword came free of its oiled scabbard in silence as he heard the low laughter of men, and the single cut-off cry that had to be a woman. She would be one of the toothless whores who worked close to the ruins, snatched by a gang who could not be bothered to spend even the pittance she sought.

My reavers did worse.

But he would not allow this, all the same. There was no sound as he slid among dark gaps in the ruined walls, yet still they stopped, six grey figures, though the bundle on the silvery grass continued to struggle; and then Wulf laughed softly, knowing the effect it would have on them.