“Which direc—” Snorri was already too far away to hear me even if he hadn’t been shouting his battle cry. He’d stormed off down the corridor behind me. I followed as best I could, trying to hold the door across my back while I stumbled after him, keeping my head down, reaching over my shoulders to hold the door in place. Shouts and screams ahead indicated that Snorri had gotten to grips with his hated bowmen, but by the time I got there it was all blood and pieces. The main difficulty lay in not slipping over in the gore. Several more bolts hit the boards across my back with powerful thuds, and another skipped between my ankles, letting me know that I’d left a gap. Fortunately I had just ten yards to reach the exit. With the door scraping the floor behind me, and just the tips of my fingers exposed, I broke out into the night air. My traditional moment of triumph at escaping yet again was curtailed by a muscular arm that reached from the darkness and yanked me to one side.

“I’ve got a boat,” Snorri growled. Normally when you say someone growled something it’s just a turn of phrase, but Snorri really put something feral into his words.

“What?” I shook my arm free, or he let it go, a mutual thing, neither of us liking the burning needling sensation where his fingers gripped me.

“I’ve got a boat.”

“Of course you do, you’re a Viking.” Everything seemed rather surreal. Perhaps I’d been hit in the face one too many times since Alain made a grab for me in the opera house only an hour or two earlier.

Snorri shook his head. “Follow. Quick!”

He took off into the night. The sounds of men approaching down the warehouse corridor convinced me to give chase. We crossed a wide space stacked with barrels and crates, passed dozens of hanging nets, the sails of riverboats poking up above the river wall beside us. By moonlight we crossed a quay and descended stone steps to the water, where a rowing boat lay tied to one of the great iron rings set into the wall.

“You’ve got a boat,” I said.

“I was a mile downstream, free and clear.” Snorri tossed his sword in, stepped in after it, and picked up an oar. “Something happened to me.” He paused, staring for a moment into his hand, though it held only darkness. “Something . . . I was getting sick.” He sat and took both oars. “I knew I had to come back—knew the direction. And then I found you.”

I stood on the step. The Silent Sister’s magic had done this. I knew it. The crack had run through us, the light through me, the dark through him, and as Snorri and I separated, some arcane force tried to rejoin those two lines, the dark and the light. We had drawn away from each other, the river carrying Snorri west, and those hidden fissures started to open again, started to tear us both apart just so they could be free to run together once more. I remembered what happened when they joined. It wasn’t pretty.