They'd been walking for eleven days beyond the Five Forts, and in that time Hela hadn't heard a single bird or insect or breath of wind. Just the boots of the Einherjar on the permafrost and the click of Fenrir's claws and the creak of leather and steel as men shifted their weight with each stride.
The Grey Waste earned its name. The land was flat and colorless and the sky pressed down low over it, the same shade of iron as the ground beneath. Frost clung to the dead grass in crusts that didn't melt. The cold settled into everything, finding its way through wool and leather and skin and lodging itself in the marrow.
Soren walked at Hela's right shoulder with his necrosword drawn. He'd drawn it on the third day and hadn't sheathed it since. Grettir walked three paces behind, scanning the horizon in slow arcs. The rest of the column moved in their double file with a discipline that months of corrupted terrain had sharpened to reflex. Fenrir padded at Hela's left, wings tight against his body, his head swinging low. He hadn't slept the previous night and his green eyes swept the flat ground ahead of them and didn't stop.
On the eighth day they'd found the first village.
It was empty. Stone huts with hide roofs arranged in a rough circle around a dead fire pit. Tools scattered on the ground; bone knives and scrapers and a half-finished spear shaft with the sinew binding still damp. Bowls of frozen broth sat on flat stones inside the huts, the surfaces clouded with ice. Clothing hung on pegs and bedrolls lay flat. The whole place looked like everyone had stood up in the middle of a meal and walked away without taking anything with them.
Grettir crouched beside the fire pit and touched the ashes. They were cold. He looked at Hela and shook his head.
Soren found tracks outside the village's northern edge. Dozens of bare footprints pressed into the frost, all heading north, all in a straight line that didn't waver. The spacing was even and mechanical, the stride length identical from print to print, people walking in lockstep without shoes across frozen ground.
They'd followed the tracks for a day before the tracks ended at a ridge where the ground dropped into a shallow basin, and the basin was covered in fog that sat on the earth without moving, thick and white and still.
Now, on the eleventh day, the fog was everywhere.
It rose to their waists and pooled in the low places and hung motionless in the dead air. Hela walked through it and the cold of it climbed her legs and settled against her thighs. The frost on the ground had thickened into a continuous sheet of white ice that cracked under their boots. The light had dimmed and the iron sky had darkened to something closer to dusk, though by Hela's reckoning it was midday, and the horizon in every direction had dissolved into the same featureless gray.
Fenrir stopped.
The dragon planted his forefeet and lowered his head until his jaw nearly touched the ice, and a growl came from deep in his chest, low enough that it buzzed through the soles of Hela's boots. His scales rippled along his spine and his claws punched through the frost into the frozen earth below. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and the teeth were long and black and the gaps between them glowed faintly green from the fire banked in his throat.
Hela raised her fist and the Einherjar halted.
Then the fog moved.
It shifted to the north, pulling apart in slow curtains, and through the gaps Hela saw them.
They stood in a line across the basin's far edge, seventy yards out. Tall figures, taller than men, lean and angular beneath armor that shifted in color as they stood; now white as the frost beneath them, now dark as shadow, now dappled with the gray of the surrounding waste. The plates rippled with each movement, catching light from somewhere and bending it across their surfaces. Their skin, where it showed at the throat and the wrists and the gaunt planes of their faces, was pale as milk, and the veins beneath it were dark and branching and still. Their eyes were blue, a deep and burning blue, and the light from them spilled down the cheekbones in faint trails and faded before reaching the jaw.
They carried swords. The blades were thin and long and translucent, shards of crystal so fine they seemed almost to vanish when seen edge-on, and they gave off a pale cold light. No human metal had gone into the forging of those weapons. Hela had read enough in the Five Forts' archive to know that those blades shattered castle-forged steel on contact and broke through iron plate without slowing.
There were forty of them. Maybe fifty. They stood without moving, their blue eyes fixed on Hela, and the cold that came off them was staggering. The temperature dropped so fast that the moisture in the air crystallized and fell as a fine snow on her shoulders and on the Einherjar's armor and on Fenrir's scales.
Hela counted them again. Forty-seven.
She looked at the necrosword in Soren's hand. Black blade, smooth and sharp. Obsidian. Volcanic glass, refined and compressed and shaped by her will into weapons that exceeded anything a mortal smith could produce from the same raw material, but obsidian nonetheless. The same substance the Yi Tish garrison stocked in bundles of crossbow bolts behind every third merlon on the Five Forts' wall. The substance that, according to four thousand years of garrison records, killed the things standing seventy yards away.
Hela extended her right hand and a necroblade formed from her palm, black and long. She held it at her side and looked at the Others across the basin.
"Soren."
"My lady."
"On me. Wedge formation. Don't let their swords touch your steel; use the necroswords and nothing else."
Soren turned and spoke to the column. The Einherjar shifted without hesitation, spreading from their double file into a wedge with Hela at the point, fourteen men with black blades drawn and their weight forward. Fenrir moved to the left flank, his wings spreading halfway, his jaws parting, and the green glow between his teeth brightened.
The Others watched. Their blue eyes tracked the formation change and none of them moved.
Hela walked forward.
The ice cracked under her boots and the fog curled away from her legs. The Einherjar matched her pace behind her. The distance closed to sixty yards, then fifty, then forty. The cold intensified with every step, pressing against her face and her hands and finding the seams in her clothing, and frost formed on her eyelashes and on the hilt of the necroblade where her fingers gripped it.
At thirty yards, the Others moved.
Three figures at the center of their line stepped forward together, crystal blades rising into guard positions that were precise and practiced. Their movement was fluid and silent, their feet barely disturbing the frost. And then the flanks followed, the line curving forward into a crescent that aimed to envelop whatever came at it from the center.
Hela broke into a run.
She crossed the thirty yards in a handful of seconds and met the first Other with the necroblade coming up in a rising cut that started at her hip and ended above her opposite shoulder. The blade punched through the shifting armor at the sternum and continued upward through the collarbone and out the top of the shoulder. The armor didn't resist the obsidian at all. Smoke rose from the wound and the creature's flesh began to melt, and the armor ran and the bones crumbled and the whole thing collapsed into a steaming puddle that sank into the frost. The creature's sword hit the ground and shattered.
So. Obsidian worked.
The second Other lunged for Hela's left side, its crystal blade driving toward her ribs. She pivoted left and let the blade pass behind her back and brought the necroblade down across the creature's extended arm. The arm separated at the elbow and the sword shattered when it struck the ice and the severed flesh dissolved into smoke. Hela reversed the blade and took the creature's head off in a single horizontal cut.
The Einherjar hit the line.
And after that it was just killing.
Soren split the nearest Other's skull with a two-handed overhead cut and the creature dissolved around the blade. Thurn sidestepped a crystal blade and drove his necrosword through the creature's midsection and it melted. Grettir parried one crystal blade with his necrosword and the blade shattered on contact; he stepped into the second creature's reach and punched his blade through its throat. He turned and killed the disarmed one before it could retreat. Yoron roared and killed three in quick succession.
The Others fought back. Their crystal blades were fast and their footwork was clean and their coordination was excellent, each one adjusting to cover the gaps as their companions fell. A crystal blade caught one of the Einherjar, a man named Drengar, across the upper arm where his pauldron met his chainmail sleeve. The steel links shattered on contact, bursting apart, and the translucent edge passed through the gap and the leather beneath and opened a wound from shoulder to elbow. Drengar cursed and shifted his sword to his left hand and kept fighting, and Thurn stepped in beside him and killed the Other that had cut him.
But the crystal blades couldn't touch the necroswords. Every parry between obsidian and crystal ended the same way: the crystal blade cracked and shattered and fell apart in glittering splinters, leaving the Other unarmed. The creatures seemed to register this, their blue eyes tracking the black blades. Three of them adjusted and tried to circle wide, striking from angles that avoided the necroswords entirely. Soren read it and sent two men to close the gap, and the flanking Others were cut down before they completed the arc.
Hela killed the rest of them steadily, finding the openings in the crescent formation, her blade rising and falling. Each body dissolved into smoke and wet frost.
The last Other died against Grettir's blade, pinned against a rise where the basin's edge sloped upward. The creature parried twice and its crystal blade shattered on the second parry, and Grettir stepped forward and drove his necrosword through its chest. It looked down at the blade in its torso. The blue light in its eyes pulsed once, and then it dissolved.
The basin went quiet. Wet smears and thin smoke and the glittering fragments of shattered crystal swords covered the ground where the Others had stood. The fog had thinned during the fighting, and through the gaps she saw further across the waste than she had in days.
Soren wiped his blade on his thigh. His breath came in white plumes. Drengar sat on a stone with his right arm cradled against his chest while Yoron cut the ruined chainmail away from the wound and bound it with strips torn from a cloak.
"Obsidian," Soren said. He turned the necrosword in his hand and studied the edge. Unmarked. "So we've just been carrying the answer this whole time."
Hela let her own blade dissolve back into her hand. The obsidian flowed into her skin and vanished, and she flexed her fingers once and looked north.
The fog had pulled back another hundred yards, and through the clearing air she saw the second line.
They came out of the north in a mass that stretched across the full width of the basin and beyond it on both sides, walking in ranks, shoulder to shoulder, their feet shuffling through the frost. They wore no armor. Some wore the remains of clothing; furs and hides and woven cloth, torn and frozen and crusted with ice. Others wore nothing at all. Their skin was gray and mottled where it hadn't frozen entirely, and their eyes burned the same blue as the Others' but dimmer and duller.
They were all dead. The villagers whose tracks Hela had followed from the empty settlement, and nomads and wild people from the deeper waste, and soldiers in rusted fragments of armor that might've been Yi Tish centuries ago. Bodies that had been lying in the permafrost for years or decades or longer, dug up and set walking by the cold that animated them. Their jaws hung open and their fingers curled into claws and they moved with the stiff and relentless gait of things that didn't need to breathe or rest or think.
There were hundreds of them. Wights.
Soren drew up beside her. He looked at the advancing mass and his jaw tightened and his hand flexed around the grip of his sword.
"Yeah," he said. "There are a lot of them."
Hela raised her hand.
The green flame came again, climbing from her palm in a single tongue of cold fire that threw emerald light across the fog and the frost and the faces of the Einherjar. Soren stepped back. Every man in the wedge felt it; a heat that settled in the chest and pressed against the ribs.
Hela closed her fist around the flame and drove it into the frozen ground.
The fire spread through the ice in branching veins of green light that raced south, away from the advancing wights, back across the basin and over the ridge and through the frozen scrub, three miles south to the shallow valley where an army stood in the dead grass.
The Draugr felt it.
They'd been marching behind the Einherjar column since the Five Forts, trailing at half a day's distance, moving in the same tireless lockstep through the Grey Waste that they'd held since the City of the Winged Men. Hela had kept them back deliberately; out of sight of the Yi Tish garrison and out of the Einherjar's immediate path. A reserve. Seven hundred bodies standing in the frozen scrub three miles south, their green eyes dimmed to embers, waiting. And now those eyes flared bright, and hands tightened on sharpened sticks and stones and crude tools, and spines that had been bowed under the weight of tumorous growths straightened and locked.
The entire mass of them, every dead inhabitant of the City of the Winged Men, turned as one toward the north and began to run. Their footfalls struck the ground in a rhythm that matched the pulse of the green veins still glowing beneath the frost. They moved across the open waste, their misshapen bodies casting long shadows, the growths on their backs swaying with each stride. They didn't tire and they didn't slow.
In the basin, Hela stood and pulled her fist from the ground. The veins of green fire still pulsed beneath the ice, branching outward in a web that connected her to the army she'd made.
The wights were four hundred yards out.
"Pull the men back to the ridge," Hela said to Soren. "Hold there."
Soren looked at her and then at the approaching wights and then south, where nothing was visible yet but where the ground had begun to tremble beneath their boots.
He pulled the Einherjar back. They reformed on the ridge in a tight line, fourteen men with black blades drawn, and Drengar fighting left-handed with his wounded arm strapped to his chest. Fenrir climbed the ridge and took position behind the line, wings half-spread, his green eyes fixed on the basin below.
The wights crossed the two hundred yard mark. Their shuffling gait had quickened and the blue light in their eyes brightened as they closed the distance, and the cold that preceded them drove the temperature down until the fog itself began to freeze; tiny ice crystals forming in the air and drifting downward.
Hela stood at the front of the ridge and watched them come.
Behind her, to the south and east, the ground shook.
The Draugr crested the far ridge at a run. Seven hundred bodies pouring over the frozen earth in a wave of gray skin and green eyes and the heavy lumpen shapes of their growths bouncing and swaying as they moved. They carried their crude weapons high and their mouths were open and their jaws were working, but they made no sound. They ran without breathing and without shouting.
Hela stepped to the side of the ridge and let them pass.
They poured down the slope and into the basin and hit the wight line at full stride.
Dead flesh struck dead flesh across a front two hundred yards wide. The Draugr slammed into the wights with the momentum of their downhill charge and the front rank of the blue-eyed dead buckled and went down under the weight. Bodies tangled and limbs locked. The Draugr swung their sharpened sticks and stones and crude tools into the wights, driving the points into skulls and throats and torsos. A Draugr woman; the same woman who'd died by the well with her child in her arms, grappled a wight twice her size and bore it to the ground and drove a pointed stone through its eye socket until the blue light went out.
The wights fought back. Clawed hands tore at the Draugr, ripping flesh from bones, pulling the tumorous growths from their backs in wet tearing sounds. Teeth found necks and shoulders and bit down. But the Draugr didn't feel it and didn't flinch and didn't stop. A Draugr whose arm had been torn off at the shoulder kept swinging with the other. A Draugr whose legs had been shattered crawled forward on its elbows and drove its weapon into the ankle of the nearest wight and toppled it.
The two armies ground against each other across the basin floor. Green eyes and blue eyes locked in a melee of mass and violence and persistence. The Draugr's green fire flickered along their wounds and sealed them, holding the bodies together and keeping the limbs functional even as the damage accumulated. The wights had no such advantage. Each wound they took stayed and each limb they lost didn't come back.
The fog churned around them, kicked up by hundreds of shuffling and stamping and grappling feet, and the basin filled with the wet sounds of bodies breaking against bodies.
Hela stood on the ridge and watched her Song at work.
Fenrir raised his head and roared. The sound rolled across the basin and echoed off the frozen hills, and the green fire in his throat blazed bright enough to throw shadows a hundred yards in every direction. The Einherjar stood on the ridge behind Hela with their necroswords drawn and their eyes on the carnage below, and not one of them moved.
And Hela's dead were winning.