Prologue

...and a rictus grin was still on his face as Inghen the Red thrust her blade into the unconscious berserker's back.

Around the shield maiden rose brutal noises of death. Her men were beating down the other berserkers as if they were at a seal-culling, but Inghen paid no attention - she was busy. She carved upwards through the soft fat of Varg's back, her blade grating on bone every few seconds as she sawed through his ribs, and black blood gushed constantly out of the deep wound, flowing over her pale hands and drenching her dark breeches. But the expression on her face made her seem as casual as a peasant's wife cutting up the pig for winter.

Her knife ploughed on into the crimsoning flesh and chopped through the white ribs until one whole side of the flopping berserker's ribcage had become split from his spine, but despite the savage wound it seemed Varg still lived, although the moans escaping his madly grinning mouth were not those of a sane man. He burbled frothily to himself as Inghen thrust her blade into the blubber on the other side of his backbone, and it was a couple of seconds before his last breath hissed from his mouth. Ignoring this, Inghen repeated the previous operation from top to bottom of his spine, humming softly to herself, her face coldly impassive as she cut through his flesh and ribs, and warm blood flooded out over the tattered remains of the berserker's kirtle.

Finally, his ribcage hung limply from his torso, having become entirely detached from his spine. The shieldmaiden paused briefly to mop her brow, leaving a smear of blood across her forehead like war-paint. Then she thrust her hands into the left-hand gash and began to heave his ribs out, out, out, until they fanned out from his back in a gory mess, revealing the hot and glistening guts within. When this was done, she did the same on the other side, heaving the bones back, back and back, until the two sets of ribs splayed out on either side of his body.

With this was complete, Inghen reached into the bloody mess of entrails and took hold of the berserker's left lung, which she dragged slowly out of the tangle that surrounded it, hooking it round his ribs where it hung wet and palpitating, and dripping fat splatters of blood onto the muddy ground outside the nunnery entrance. Following this, she took the second lung and hung it from his right-hand ribs, and, holding the limp body by the neck since it showed signs of collapsing into the blood-spattered mud and joining the other beaten berserker bodies around it, she got to her feet and faced the red and golden sunset that smeared the western skies above the island.

'Now I give you to Odin,' she muttered hoarsely, gazing down impassively at the eviscerated corpse of her greatest enemy.

Perhaps it would be best to start from the beginning.