He readied himself. A shame his shield was smashed to splinters and his mail shirt somewhere at the bottom of the Dnipar. But he had something else. Something he had discovered on the plains of Bravik.

The shouts grew urgent. The wails of the slaves swirled like the gales in the north.

‘Ready!’ screamed Ramedios, cloak hitched into his belt, a short, broad blade in his hand.

‘Stay close,’ Erlan murmured again, eyes fixed on the onrushing prow. He could see faces in the bows now, shorn heads, curved beards, men half-naked with skin tanned dark as old hall-beams, bristling with steel.

Erlan tightened his belt. The leather was coarse as bark. It came from a dark place, and carried with it a dark power. The same power he had borne in his blood. He snorted. If Vassili was to be believed, it was the power of demons. Whatever its source, he needed it now. So he pushed up his sleeve, unsheathed Wrathling and then, laying its wicked edge against his forearm, he cut into his flesh.

Blood welled, but there was no pain. Instead he felt a kind of pleasure, released into his body in a rush. He put the cut to his mouth, tasted blood and swallowed it down.

Leikr’s gaze was welded on the other ship. The Greek crewmen were screaming war-cries to the wind. Grappling hooks arced into the air. Erlan’s ears filled with the groan of yawing wood and cries of terror.

Suddenly a dark heat ripped through him, his own thoughts and fears burning up like dry leaves in a fire. In their place his mind filled with other ancient thoughts, of rage, of blood-hunger, of terrible violence, rising up out of him like Jormungandr, the World Serpent, bursting from the deep. He felt an inhuman strength pouring into his limbs like liquid iron. His vision grew sharp as the fury engulfed him and the first sea-thief leaped aboard. . .

In the north they called it the berserker madness. Yet when it was on him, he felt there was a beautiful clarity to it. Flesh and bone became a harvest to be reaped. Faces flashed for long enough only to be cut down. Fear became a palpable thing, a wave to ride, radiating out from him. He could not run. Nor could they. And so they fell under Wrathling’s thirsty edge. A dozen. Fifteen. Maybe more. Dark faces. He heard a voice crying terrible curses, screaming to the Slain God to see his work.

And then something changed. His own mind began to slip back into his head like a returning tide, and suddenly there was a man he had never seen before, cowering against the shear-strake.