Some of our protagonists are predators, others amongst them their prey, and you will not be able to tell which is which until all is revealed — albeit obliquely — in Lord of Slaughter’s ghastly last act, when we come face to face, finally, with “King Kill. The back-stabbing, front-stabbing, anywhere-you-like-and-plenty-of-places-you-don’t-stabbing murder god. Odin, one-eyed corpse lord, corrosive and malignant in his schemes and his stratagems. But of course you know all this, you’ve met him before.”

If not, know this: you surely should have done. I fear readers unfamiliar with Wolfsangel and Fenrir are apt to find Lord of Slaughter essentially impenetrable. Newcomers need not apply, unless they’re prepared to go back to where this grimdark Viking saga started.

This ultimate installment is both the least and the most accessible of the three volumes of The Claw. But do not mistake me: Lord of Slaughter is far from light or easy reading. You have to be intimately engaged with the fiction, on every level, to follow along without incident. As per the series’ standard, Lachlan’s prose is awfully involved — dense and intense, on the sentence level it straddles the poetic and the prosaic, demanding and rewarding in equal measure.

In the interim, the medieval metropolis of Constantinople is a pitch-perfect backdrop for this last lament of Loki and Odin; in terms of faith and society and civilisation, it represents a crossroads of sorts, where what was shares a space with what will be, when dark magic is no less likely a factor than science. And that is this book to a T. In this perilous place, at this tumultuous time, one imagines that almost anything is possible.

Lord of Slaughter is in sum as forbidding and ferocious a novel as its darkly ambitious predecessors, and though the barrier for entry is high — thus it is unlikely to earn M. D. Lachlan very many new admirers — it satisfies, and then some, those of us who have followed The Claw from its first fresh yet fetid flush.

And thank the mad gods for that!