They found the City of the Winged Men on the thirty-second day north of Carcosa.
The grasslands had thinned over the preceding week, the pale stalks growing sparser and shorter until the ground showed through in patches of hard gray clay that cracked under their boots. The sky was the same flat gray ceiling it had been for weeks. Fenrir walked at her left shoulder with his wings folded and his head low, sniffing the ground every few strides and snorting dust from his nostrils. He'd grown restless since Carcosa. The muscles along his flanks twitched at intervals, and he slept in short bursts with one eye cracked, and twice in the past week he'd woken snarling and brought the Einherjar to their feet with blades drawn before they realized Fenrir was just dreaming.
Soren walked at her right, three paces behind, his necrosword sheathed but his hand on the pommel. Behind him the Einherjar moved in their column of twos, fourteen men whose boots struck the clay in a single practiced rhythm.
Hela smelled it a mile out, a thick and rancid sweetness that wouldn't go away. Fenrir caught it too. He stopped walking and his head came up and his pupils narrowed to slits, and he stood rigid for ten heartbeats before continuing forward with his body lowered and his claws scoring deep lines in the clay.
The walls appeared through the haze as a line of irregular stone, low and crumbling, barely fifteen feet at the highest point. The same gray stone as the clay beneath their feet, quarried local and stacked without mortar in courses that had shifted and buckled over the centuries. Towers rose at intervals, but only two still held their full height. The others had collapsed into rubble mounds that spilled outward across the bare ground.
There was no gate. The wall's western face had a gap wide enough for a wagon, its edges worn smooth by the passage of bodies. Hela stopped at the gap and looked through it.
The street beyond was packed earth, rutted and stained. The buildings on either side were squat structures of the same gray stone, roofed with dried grass thatch that had gone black with age and moisture. Doorways gaped without doors. Windows were just holes cut into stone. And in the street, standing in loose groups of three and four and six, were the inhabitants.
Hela studied the nearest group.
They'd been human once. The basic architecture remained: two arms, two legs, a torso, a head set on a neck between shoulders. But from the shoulder blades of every one of them, growths protruded. Heavy masses of skin and muscle and fat that bulged outward and upward from the spine in shapes that looked, if you squinted, vaguely like wings. Some of the growths were small, fist-sized knobs that pushed the skin taut and shiny. Others were enormous, spanning three feet or more from the spine, their surfaces folded and ridged with veins that ran blue and purple beneath skin stretched thin enough to show the tissue underneath.
Of course, none of them could fly. None of the growths were wings in any functional sense. They were tumorous eruptions of flesh, heavy enough that the people who bore them walked with a permanent forward lean to compensate for the weight on their backs. The largest growths had begun to sag and split at their bases where gravity and movement had torn the skin, and a clear fluid wept from the splits and soaked down their backs into the waistbands of whatever cloth they wore.
And the growths weren't the only deformity. Extra fingers on hands that could barely close around a tool, and jaws that had widened or narrowed until chewing was visibly difficult, and spines curved laterally forcing the ribcage to compress on one side and flare on the other. Eyes that had migrated on the skull, one sitting higher than the other by an inch or more, and skin thickened into hide across the forearms and shins, or thinned to transparency across the chest, and she could see the lungs working underneath.
The nearest group saw her and stopped what they were doing. One held a clay bowl. Another held a stick sharpened to a point, possibly a tool, possibly a weapon. The third stood with empty hands at his sides and his mismatched eyes on her face, and the growths on his back shifted as the muscles beneath them tensed.
They didn't attack; they just watched.
Hela walked through the gap in the wall and into the city.
The smell was worse inside. It came from the bodies themselves and from the open sores along the edges of the growths and from the refuse in the gutters and from the thatch roofs that had begun to rot and leaked a dark liquid down the walls. Flies moved in clouds above every surface, and the drone of them filled the spaces between the buildings.
The inhabitants gathered as she walked. They came from doorways and alleys and from behind collapsed walls, their heavy growths swaying with each step, their faces turned toward her. Some looked confused and some looked hostile in a dull and exhausted way. They formed a loose crowd that thickened behind her as she moved deeper into the city, and none of them spoke. Some made sounds, grunts and clicks and a high whistling from throats that had partially closed or reshaped, but no words.
Hela stopped in what appeared to be a central square. The ground was worn to bare stone by generations of feet. A well stood at the center, its rim cracked, its rope frayed to strands. Around the square the buildings were taller, two stories, and faces peered down from the upper windows without moving.
She counted roughly three hundred visible in the square and the streets leading to it, and perhaps twice that in the buildings and the parts of the city she hadn't walked. A thousand souls at most, trapped in bodies that had been reshaped by whatever ambient corruption saturated this region; the same force that had twisted the demons along the Ash and warped the dragons above Stygai.
Soren stepped up beside her. His jaw was set and his forearm was taut where his hand gripped the sword.
"They're suffering," he said.
A woman near the well sat on the ground with a child in her lap. The child's growths had already begun, two lumps the size of apples rising between the shoulder blades, the skin over them red and inflamed. The child was crying, a thin sound that cut through the drone of the flies. The woman rocked the child and stared at nothing.
"Yes," Hela said.
She turned in a slow circle, taking in every face and every doorway, and felt for anything beneath the city that warranted attention: old magic, buried structures, residual divine charge, the signatures she'd found at Stygai and Carcosa.
There was nothing. The City of the Winged Men was exactly what it appeared to be: corrupted humans living in squalor on the edge of a wasteland, their bodies warped by forces they didn't understand and couldn't escape. There were no artifacts, no ancient texts, no hidden chambers or sleeping gods. The corruption was ambient, environmental, the runoff of greater powers whose centers lay elsewhere, and these people had simply had the bad luck to live in its path.
Hela lowered her hand.
"Kill them," she said.
Soren looked at her. His grip on the sword shifted but he didn't draw.
"All of them?"
"Every living thing in this city… put them out of their misery."
Soren held her gaze for two heartbeats. Then he drew his necrosword and turned to the Einherjar. He didn't need to raise his voice. The command moved through the column in gestures.
The Einherjar split into three groups.
Grettir took five men left, toward the eastern quarter where the density of buildings suggested a residential warren. Yoron took four men right, toward the lower streets near the crumbling wall. Soren kept three with him and Thurn and moved forward into the square. They advanced in clean lines with their necroswords drawn, the black blades catching no light from the gray sky.
The first group of inhabitants didn't understand what was happening until Grettir's blade opened the nearest man from collarbone to hip. The body folded and hit the ground, and the growth on his back split open and spilled its contents across the stone. Some ran and some stood frozen and some lunged forward with their sharpened sticks and their clay tools and their bare misshapen hands, and the Einherjar cut through them all.
Hela stood in the center of the square and watched. Fenrir had remained at the gap in the wall, his body blocking the exit, his head lowered and his jaws slightly parted.
The killing moved through the city in waves. The sound of it was meaty and wet, punctuated by the crash of bodies hitting stone and the splintering of thatch roofs as the Einherjar kicked through doorways and entered the buildings. Screams rose and shortened, and the thin crying of children cut off.
Yoron's group cleared the lower streets in twenty minutes. Grettir's took longer. The eastern warren was dense, its alleys narrow, and the inhabitants had barricaded several doorways with furniture and rubble. The Einherjar broke through each barricade and killed what they found behind it. One of the winged men, larger than the rest, with growths that had fused across his shoulders into a single hump of glistening tissue, threw himself at Thurn with a stone in each hand and landed a blow against his shoulder that cracked the pauldron. Thurn stepped inside the second swing and put his blade through the man's throat and twisted and pulled it free, and the man sat down on the ground with his hands at his neck and his blood running between his fingers, and Thurn kicked him onto his side and moved on.
It took less than an hour.
The city was quiet when the Einherjar reformed in the square. Their boots tracked blood across the stone and their blades dripped and their faces were spattered, and they stood in their lines and waited. The bodies lay where they'd fallen, in the streets and in the doorways and inside the buildings and at the base of the well where the woman with the child had tried to shield the infant with her body and had failed.
Hela walked the square's perimeter once, stepping over the fallen, looking at them, broken men and women and children whose bodies had been wrong since before they drew breath.
She stopped in the center of the square and stood over the sealed well.
War was her domain and death was her medium.
She'd known since Asshai what she needed: a method of propagation, a way to carry her power beyond what her own hands could reach, the way fire carried R'hllor and cold carried B'gnu-Thun and the sea carried the Drowned God.
She raised her right hand.
The flame came from within her. It climbed from her palm in a tongue of green fire, and the air around it shimmered and the flies within ten feet dropped dead, but Hela felt no heat from it. The same green as the etchings in Stygai and Fenrir's eyes and the light that had pulsed above the dragon graveyard, a fragment of the Eternal Flame.
It sat in her palm and burned, and the Einherjar stepped back.
Soren's face went pale and Thurn's hands tightened on his sword. Grettir looked at the flame and then at Hela's face and then at the flame again, and his mouth opened slightly and didn't close.
Hela knelt.
She pressed her fist against the stone of the square. The green flame spread from her knuckles outward across the ground in branching lines that followed the cracks in the stone and the seams between the paving and the ruts worn by generations of feet. It moved fast, spreading in every direction at once, and the lines traced through the streets and into the alleys and through the doorways of every building in the city.
The lines reached the first body and crawled up through the pooling blood and across the skin and into the open wounds where the growths had split. The body jerked and the back arched and the fingers curled and uncurled.
The eyes opened, and they burned green.
The flame kept spreading. Everywhere it touched dead flesh the same thing happened. Backs arched and fingers curled and eyes opened with green fire burning behind the pupils, steady and cold and aware.
The woman by the well sat up. The child in her arms sat up with her, its small hands gripping her sleeve, its eyes burning the same green. The man Thurn had killed in the alley rose to his feet with the wound in his throat still open but no longer bleeding, the edges of it sealed with a faint green glow.
They rose across the city. Bodies that had been warm minutes ago climbed upright on legs that no longer shook under the weight of their growths, and jaws that had been slack in death closed with purpose, and hands that had been limp found weapons on the ground and picked them up, sharpened sticks and stones and crude tools gripped by fingers that moved with coordination.
The growths on their backs were still there, still misshapen, still heavy. But the bodies bore them differently now. The forward lean was gone. The spines straightened beneath the weight and held. The muscles that had strained and failed in life locked and functioned, powered by something that didn't care about torn ligaments and compressed vertebrae.
Three hundred rose in the square. More came from the eastern warren and the lower streets, walking in files through the alleys with their green eyes burning, their footfalls striking the stone in a rhythm that matched the Einherjar's own. They gathered in the square and stood in rows that formed without instruction, shoulder to shoulder, facing Hela.
The flies were dead or fled. The city was silent.
Hela stood. The green flame in her palm had gone out, but traces of it still flickered along the cracks in the stone. She looked at the army standing before her, dead faces with eyes that held no fear and no pain and no confusion. The suffering was over. The corruption remained in their flesh, the growths and the deformities and the wrong proportions, but the agony of carrying it was gone. They stood in their broken bodies and waited.
Hela turned her hand over and looked at her palm, and the skin was unmarked.
"They are yours," Soren said. He stood at her shoulder, his blade sheathed, his voice quiet.
"Yes," Hela said.
"What are they?"
"Draugr," she said.
This was her Song – or a part of it, at least. Death was the medium, and the dead were the vessels, and the Eternal Flame was the spark that turned a corpse into a conduit.
Fenrir padded into the square from the gap in the wall. He walked between the rows of the Draugr without interest, his head high and his tail swaying. He reached Hela and pressed his snout against her hip, and she put her hand on the ridge above his eye. He rumbled once, deep in his chest, and settled beside her.
Hela looked south and east, past the crumbling walls, past the dead grasslands, toward the horizon.
“Northwest," she said to Soren. "The Five Forts."
Soren inclined his head. He turned to the Einherjar and gave the march order, and the column formed. The Draugr fell in behind them without command, their heavy bodies moving in lockstep, their green eyes fixed forward.
The City of the Winged Men emptied.