The Christians have priests, whom I am pleased to call sorcerers because it annoys them, but Christians condemn sorcery. They believe their nailed god could walk on water, heal the sick, and summon devils from the mad, but they claim those feats are not magic, and spit on those of us who understand that the world can never be explained, that magic belongs to the spirit realm, and that some men and women are given the ability to understand the inexplicable. Those folk are the sorcerers and sorceresses, and we revere them even as we fear them. They are not priests, our religion needs no men or women to tell us how to behave, but we do care about the will of the gods, and some folk are better than others at divining that will. Our sorcerers are often blind, like the man waiting for us outside the Skull Gate, because the blind can often see farther into the shadows where the restless spirits live. Ravn, Ragnar the Fearless’s father, had been a blind sorcerer, though he preferred to say he was a skald, what we would call a scop, or shaper, a man who makes poems. “I am a skald,” Ravn told me on our first meeting, “a weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making.” He had laughed at his own immodesty, but in truth he was much more than a man who made songs. I learned in my childhood to understand that Ravn the Skald, though blind, could see things we others could not. He could glimpse the spirit world, he could see truth in dreams, and discern the future in smoke.

And now Sköll’s fearsome sorcerer was at my gate.

The two men waited. It had taken me some moments to leave the upper ramparts, go through the Inner Gate, and so to the Skull Gate. Sköll had only the one companion, so I just took Finan, who muttered a prayer and fingered his cross as we left the gate and walked toward the waiting pair. The sorcerer had let go of the leash, and the small dog just sat quietly at his feet as his master clutched the wolf skull in both hands and muttered under his breath. Finan, a Christian, was not supposed to believe in a sorcerer’s skills, but Finan was no fool. Like most Christians he understood that there was a power in the shadows, and he feared it. I feared it too.

“Uhtred of Bebbanburg,” Sköll greeted me.

“Sköll of Niflheim,” I responded.

He laughed at that insult. “This is Snorri Wargson,” he said, indicating the muttering sorcerer. “He is Fenrir’s beloved.”

I had an impulse to touch the hammer around my neck, but managed to resist. Fenrir is a monstrous wolf, son of a god, who lies bound and fettered because even the gods fear him. In the last days, when chaos engulfs the world, Fenrir will free himself and the slaughter he makes will drench the heavens in blood, but until then he howls in his bonds, and Snorri, as if knowing my thoughts, put his head back and howled at the sky. The dog did not move.