Oathsworn 2 - The Wolf Sea Read Online Free Page B

bones. No one spoke and the gloom sidled up to the fire and curled there like a dog.
    Brother John winked at me from that round face with its fringe of silly beard and jingled a handful of silver in one fist. Ì have enough here for at least one mug of what passes for drink in the Dolphin,' he announced. 'To take away the taste of Finn's stew.'
    Finn scowled. 'When you find more of that silver, you dwarf, perhaps we can afford better than those rats with wings that I catch. Get used to it. Unless we get that blade back, we will eat worse.'
    Everyone chuckled, though the loss of the runesword drove the mirth from it. The pigeons in the city were fat and bold as sea-raiders, but easily lured with a pinch of bread, though no one liked eating them much. So the thought of drink cheered everyone except me, who had to ask where he had got a fistful of silver. Brother John shrugged.
    The church, lad. God provides.'
    `What church?'
    The little priest waved a hand vaguely in the general direction of Iceland. 'It was a well-established place,'
    he added, `well patronised. By the well-off. A well of infinite substance . .
    `You've been cutting purses again, holy man,' growled Kvasir.
    Brother John caught my eye and shrugged. 'One only. A truly upholstered worshipper, who could afford it. Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas, after all.'
    Ì wish you'd stop chewing in that Latin,' growled Kvasir, às if we all knew what you say. Orm, what's he say?'
    `He says sense,' I said. 'Love of money is the root of all evil.'
    Kvasir grunted, shaking his head disapprovingly, but smiling all the same. Brother John had no mirth in him at all when he met my eyes.
    `We need it, lad,' he said quietly and I felt the annoyance and anger drain from me. He was right: warmth and drink and a chance to plan, that was what we needed, but cutting purses was bad enough without doing it in a church. And him being a heretic to the Great City's Christ-men was buttering the stockfish too thick all round. All of which I mentioned in passing as we headed for the Dolphin.
    Ìt isn't a church to me, Orm lad,' he chuckled, his curls plastered to his forehead. 'It's an eggshell of stone, no more, a fragile thing built to look strong. There is no hinge of the Lord here. God will sweep it away in His own good time but, until then, per scelus semper tutum est sceleribus iter.'
    Crime's safest course is through more crime. I laughed, for all the sick bitterness in me. He reminded me of Illugi, the Oathsworn's Odin godi, but that Aesir priest had gone mad and died in Atil's howe along with Einar and others, leaving me as jarl and godi both, with neither wit nor wisdom for either.
    But, because of Brother John, we were all declared Christ-men now, dipped in holy water and sworn such — prime-signed, as they say — though the crucifixes hung round our necks all looked like Thor hammers and I did not feel that the power of our Odin-oath had diminished any, which had been my reasoning for embracing the Christ in the first place.
    The Dolphin nestled in the lee of Septimus Severus's wall and looked as old. It had a floor of tiles, fine as any palace, but the walls were roughly plastered and the smoking iron lanterns hung so low you had to duck between them.
    It was noisy and dim with fug and crowded with people, rank with sweat and grease and cooking and, just for one blade-bright moment, I was back in Bjornshafen, hugging the hearthfire's red-gold warmth, listening to the wind whistle its way into the Snaefel forests, pausing only to judder the beams and flap the partition hangings, so that they sounded like wings in the dark.
    Heimthra, the longing for home, for the way things had been.
    But this was a hall where strangers did not rise to greet you, as was proper and polite, but carried on eating and ignoring you. This was a hall where folk ate reclining and sitting upright at a bench marked you at once as inferior, yet another strangeness in a city full of wonders, like the ornate