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A Trick of the Light – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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A Trick of the Light

Josh Reynolds

Lukas was tired.

Exhaustion had become the sum totality of his existence. Fatigue-poisons pumped through his system, slowing everything to a glacial pace. More than once, he stumbled, nearly losing his footing on the ice. The palms of his hands and the soles of his feet were raw and bleeding, where they were not numb.

Everything hurt.

Not just from the cold and the effort. The ache he felt went deeper than that, into the very marrow of him. His gut churned, as if something sought release. A gout of breath escaped his lips, and a groan. A laugh pursued the groan. The laugh circled like a scavenger bird, before dissolving into agonised chuckles.

Everything hurt.

Lukas looked at his hands, to make sure that they were still his. They were bigger than he remembered, thicker. Patches of red – some of it hair, not blood – marked his bare arms. He curled his fingers into fists, and his knuckles popped like shifting ice. Something inside him shifted, changing position, growing larger. Nausea ripsawed through him.

He stumbled and sank to one knee, head bowed against the wind sweeping down from the north. The cold thrummed through him, teasing every nerve. His skin was thicker now, but the cold was as sharp as a serpent’s fang. He could see farther, but his eyelids were crusted with ice. His lungs were bigger, but they were filled with the cold. Nonetheless, a fire burned in him.

They called it the Canis Helix, those priests in the great mountain. But he knew it was the blood of the gods. A red, wet wolf, let loose inside him, hollowing him out and filling his empty skin with its strength. A spasm of pain rippled through him, as his spine realigned.

‘Click, crack, pop,’ he grunted, mimicking the sound of shifting bones. His jaw sagged and something that was as much a moan as a laugh slipped out, to dart from rock to rock until it was swallowed by the vast, white emptiness which surrounded him.

The wilderness into which he had been abandoned was a labyrinth of ice and occasional spurs of stone, of flurrying snow and arctic mist and freezing temperatures. The thick packed ice shifted underfoot, cracking and reforming. High above, great trees clustered against the jagged fangs of rock, marking the border between sky and earth. Past this border, the great peaks of Asaheim. And at their heart, the Fang – the greatest of them all, stretching upwards into the eternal night-sea where the stars floated, like a dagger driven up into the belly of the sky.

‘Or maybe it’s just drool dripping down from the Star-Wolf’s muzzle,’ he muttered. His fingers ached. He looked down. ‘Ha,’ he said, wonderingly. Curved splinters of bone had pushed through his fingertips. Those were new. He laughed and then winced, clutching himself with his new claws.

It hurt to laugh. Lukas did it anyway, forcing the sound out. Laughter was a weapon. His only weapon. The ice, the cold, the gods and their priests, even his own people at times, all wanted him dead. He’d nearly died on the day of his birth, when he’d been cut from his mother’s belly, blue-faced and silent. His father had almost cast him to the waves then, but even dying, his mother had been as fierce a she-wolf as ever trod the deck of a raiding ship. And so little Lukas had survived. Had grown, and learned the truth of life, from a broken father and a dead mother, and a tribe which gave little thought to either.

And so, he laughed. The wind howled, and he laughed. He forced himself to his feet, and the cold lashed at him. Trying to knock him down. Trying to make him bow. The world, and its men and gods, had always sought to make him bow.

Instead, Lukas laughed.

And when he could no longer laugh, he slumped. He was tired. He wanted this to be over. One way or another. He sat on his haunches, waiting. His least twitch was echoed and redoubled, swelling to fill the emptiness. He turned, studying the way he’d come. The path he’d taken was clear, his deep-set tracks marring the snow. Sweat steamed on his body, filling the air with his scent. His trail was obvious. Even a blind man could follow it.

‘I know you’re there,’ he said, softly.

Knowknowtherethere came the echo. It mingled with the fading echoes of his laughter, to give the impression that something, somewhere, found this situation amusing.

‘Push on, boy. Push on, before it catches up.’

He turned, listening. There were many voices on the wind. But this one was familiar. He shook his head. ‘Kveldulf – go away, you’re dead.’

‘Do I look dead, boy? On your feet, we’ve leagues to go yet, and this meat won’t carry itself. Up. Up!’

He scraped the ice from his eyes. Kveldulf was as he remembered, tall and iron-haired, with his plaited beard and hauberk of dragon-hide. Kveldulf, who bore the scars of a troll’s claws on his face. Kveldulf, who’d been ripped open and strung like a red trail across the white by a trick of the light. The phantom crouched, blood from his wounds pooling beneath him. Kveldulf grinned. Bone shone through the ragged tatters of his cheek. ‘There, boy. Pick it up.’ A gore-stained finger pointed. The elk lay on the ice, steam rising from it still. ‘Get that on your shoulders and let’s go. The others are waiting.’

He remembered the elk. He remembered tracking it, with Kveldulf and the others, for three rises of the moon, into the north wind. Following spots and splashes of blood. ‘It ran us a good race, boy, but nothing escapes us,’ Kveldulf said. ‘Up now. The tribe needs meat. Can’t let them starve, boy, even if they do throw rocks at you on occasion.’

‘You never threw rocks at me.’

‘No. But I thought about it. Up.’

He pushed himself up. Kveldulf was right. The tribe needed meat. They had been counting on the hunters. The season had been bad for them. The sea ate their island home bite by bite as the weather turned and the waters rose. No man knew how much the landscape would change with the turning of the season, and solid ground was an illusion. The sea had its due eventually, and inexorably.

His childhood had been spent aboard ship, as the tribe navigated across the icy waters. It had been a savage, sea-borne existence – grinding, deadly tedium, broken by moments of sheer terror. When they’d finally found a scrap of rock to call their own, little had changed. They’d exchanged many-tentacled things with razor-beaks for ice trolls, and drowning for starvation. It was all faintly ridiculous. Lukas had learned to laugh early, and often. The others hadn’t understood. They hadn’t got the joke.

‘We fought so hard, and for what?’ Lukas said. ‘A bit of rock that will sink into the sea sooner or later, and carry all of us with it, that’s what.’ He looked around. The elk was gone. So was Kveldulf. ‘You weren’t here,’ he said. He wanted to howl. Kveldulf was dead. They were all dead. Killed by a trick of the light, with only him to tell the tale.

And that was the cruellest joke of all. Because no one would ever hear it, and even if they did, no one would believe him. He’d told too many stories, made too many boasts, to ever be believed in anything he said. Lukas Lie-Tongue. The son of a witch and a pickled corpse. Fit only for bedding women, avoiding work and being pelted with stones.

‘Not a bad life,’ he said, half-hoping Kveldulf would come back to tell him how wrong he was.

When no reply came, he shook his head and pushed on. The only sound was the crunch of snow. It echoed strangely, hesitantly. Crunchcrunch. As if someone were stepping on his shadow. He wanted to turn, but he didn’t want Kveldulf to yell at him again. The tribe was counting on them. They needed meat. It was soon to be the Time of Ice and Fire, and they would have to move, to flee the rising waters and seek higher ground.

Only the tribe had already moved. And Kveldulf was dead. It had been months since the others had died. Months into the season of upheaval, when the ice melted and the seas rose. He clutched at his head, trying to shake his thoughts into coherency. What was the past, and what was the present? The wolf in him growled. For beasts, all time was the present.

‘But I’m not a beast, am I?’ he said. ‘Not yet.’ His grip tightened, drawing blood. The pain was good. It brought clarity with it.

He knew who he was, where he was. And he knew why. This was a test of worth. The second test of Morkai, the great two-headed wolf who guarded the gates of the underworld. The Sky Warriors were testing him. To see if he deserved a place among them. And so they had forced a wolf into his belly, and cast him out into the wilds of Asaheim, to see if the beast chewed its way free of his flesh.

‘Those the Canis Helix does not kill, it transforms forevermore.’

A rough voice, like the crash of waves against the hull of a ship. He looked up, into the wise, ancient eyes of the Rune Priest who had overseen his first test, when he’d first stepped through the Gates of Morkai. The Sky Warrior loomed over him, taller than even Kveldulf and thrice as broad in his frost grey war-plate and thick robes of wolf-fur. Bone fetishes and runestones were set into the crannies of his armour, and each one crackled with untold power. A face like carved wood, inset with gleaming yellow stones for eyes, glared down at him, in judgement.

‘There is a shadow on your trail.’

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A Black Library Publication

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