NINETEEN
As tyrants go, Uncle Hertet proved not to be too terrible. They dragged me dazed and disoriented into one of his grand drawing rooms where the “cells” proved to be a collection of large, comfortable armchairs to which eight or nine well-dressed men were lightly chained. I looked a beggar next to them and a housemaid rushed to get a dustsheet before the guardsmen thrust me into my own comfy chair.
“Hertet likes to keep his enemies close,” I said, reclining with a groan.
Few parts of me didn’t hurt.
“Prince Jalan?” A concerned voice from just behind me. “Are you injured?”
“I’m fine. The worst of the pain is in my . . . body.” I craned my neck to see who addressed me. Squinting against the remnants of double vision I made out a thin and balding man in the latest Rhone fashions, yellow buttons on a black velvet jacket. The two images joined to reveal him sharp featured, sporting a port-wine stain below one eye. “Bonarti Poe!”
On my list of likely rebels Bonarti Poe would be keeping me company in the weasel section at the very bottom. “What did you do? Rush my uncle screaming death threats?”
Poe gave a high-pitched and flustered laugh. “No! No, never!” He coughed into a lace-edged handkerchief. “The king considers me Count Isen’s man and mistrusts me.” Another cough and he raised his voice. “But there’s no man more loyal to the throne of Red March than Bonarti Poe!”
“Isen is against my uncle?” That sounded promising. Count Isen was madder than a bag of ferrets but very capable and with a standing army of his own.
“I’m sure the count’s loyalty is beyond reproach,” Poe replied. “But he cannot yet have expressed an opinion on the matter. Even with the swiftest of messengers and leaving his hall immediately the count can’t be anywhere near Vermillion. I fear the king has simply anticipated defiance where I’m sure none exists.”
I was far less sure, but the count’s opinion didn’t matter one way or the other if he was still down at his holdings in the south. “So we’re doomed to live out the rest of our lives in this damn awful dungeon then?”
I sunk further back into the chair and smiled at the maid standing attendance between two guardsmen at the door. A pretty girl with red curls. “They’ll move us to the Marsail cells come morning.” An ancient, crumbling lord I recognized but couldn’t name. “That silly boy’s too scared to spare the men right now.”
“Hmmm.” I tested my chain. It turns out that heavy chains are just for show. A light chain will hold a man. I had more chance of breaking off the chair leg that the other end was wrapped about. Actually, if not for the half dozen guards stationed around the walls, I could just turn the armchair over and slip the chain free. But with my sword gone, my knife confiscated, and the fact I had no intention of pitting myself against six trained guards, with or without a sword, my options were limited. “They seem to be having fun.” The sounds of conversation just reached us from Hertet’s court, a low continuous rumble interspersed with the occasional shriek of laughter or outburst of applause. “Scared out of their wits, most of them.” The Baron of Strombol, a portly but fierce little man governing a sizable territory in the mountains to the north. “Terrified of whatever is at our gates, frightened that the Red Queen won’t come back to save them, frightened that she will.”
“She isn’t dead?” I hadn’t believed it, not truly. I didn’t think she could die. Not a woman that tough. And the Silent Sister . . . she always seemed too old for death to bother with.
The baron threw up his hands, chain clattering. “Who knows? Hertet says she is, but I’ve had no word of it save his. Wishful thinking?” I pursed my lips. It was perhaps the best chance the heir-apparentlynot was ever going to get to wear the crown. Maybe he just decided to gamble. We both shared that weakness. I understood gambling. We sat and time passed. I took a goblet of wine and picked at a bowl of olives. I smiled at the maid and earned a scowl for staring. A few parts of me even stopped aching, though I knew I’d be walking like an old man tomorrow, if I could even stand. It would have been quite pleasant but for the nagging of an unwelcome conscience. I’d left Darin’s wife and child in the care of a necromancer and sent just a dozen men under the command of a shiny knight to save them. Along with a barbed conscience I also had “overwhelming terror” to spoil the evening for me. The certain knowledge that the forces at the Appan Gate would soon crumble if they hadn’t already, and the tide of dead citizenry would then swamp the palace walls and kill us all.
I had less than an hour’s uneasy rest before the screaming started. I recognized it immediately despite the sound reaching only faintly through the curtained windows. The death-scream, issuing from the mouths of corpses all across the palace compound.
“What the?” The baron shifted his bulk around in the narrow confines of his chair.
“The lichkin is here.” I’d intended it to be a resigned announcement but it emerged more as a squeaking whisper.
“The what?” Bonarti Poe looked as frightened as a man could be of something he knew nothing about.
“A bad thing,” I said.
By the sound of it the lichkin hadn’t come at the head of a breakthrough from the gate. The death-scream was too scattered and too quiet for that. Even so, there were many of the dead and the lichkin on its own was a thing to fear. In Hell a single lichkin had defeated Snorri ver Snagason in moments.
My chair seemed suddenly less comfortable, more like an anchor holding the lamb for the slaughter. The illumination from the new king’s candles and lamps seemed to grow more dim by the moment, as if a second sunset were upon us, one that cared nothing for the works of men, only that the light must die. Shadows lengthened and grew darker, twitching with possibility.
And then the lichkin drew near. I could almost taste it through the outer wall of Milano House, stalking the night. Colours died, shade by shade, leaving the room subdued, and a great sorrow fell across us, blacker than the blackest of black dog days—the certainty that joy had fled and nothing would ever be right in the world again.
It lasted an age, but at last the sensation lifted by degrees. Poe’s weeping quieted to a deep heaving. The oppression eased enough for me to wonder how bad it must have been for the men out there in the dark with just the feeble illumination of torch and moon between them and that stalking horror. It had been terrible even when safe in the light, comfort, and security of the house.
A death-scream right below the window answered my question and made me lurch in my chair so badly it nearly tipped over. Men had died out there from sheer terror, and now they tore at their living comrades, spreading horror and panic.
Glancing about me, I saw that the curtains had developed grey patches where the material had rotted. The brass handles on the doors held a tarnished look. All of us, prisoners and guards alike, looked aged, as if we’d spent a week without sleep.
“We need to get out of here. We need to get out of here. We need—”
A skinny lord with a wispy moustache leapt to his feet, yanking at the chain restraining him. He’d turned the chair over and had managed to tug the chain from the leg before the guards beat him down. “Shut it! Just shut it!” One of the guardsmen in the struggle gained his feet, raw-knuckled from punching Lord Wispy in the jaw. He looked more scared than the fallen prisoner, the deep-set eyes in his piggy face as haunted as if they’d seen the butcher coming for his bacon. The sounds of fighting and panic reached us from outside. Screaming, both from the hungry dead and the terrified living, rang out toward the front of the house. We heard shutters splinter in the chamber next to us. “The windows! Barricade the windows!” I stood up, lifted my chair, releasing the chain from around its leg, and walked with it toward the curtains. None of the guards moved to stop me: instead they looked about for anything that might aid the effort.
I reached to help two guardsmen struggling with a heavy cabinet, the treasured pottery within spilling from its many shelves. Nobody commented on the fact that the chain on my wrist now hung loose, no longer tethering me to my seat. I helped with a suit of armour and its stand then moved off to get something else to use . . . and carried on going.
The sounds of the fight outside were terrifyingly familiar. If I closed my eyes I could have been back at the Appan Gate. New sounds close by of breaking glass and splintering wood lent a little more pace to my escape. I wasn’t sure quite how far I’d been dragged after being taken from the throne room, nor in which direction to head in order to leave the building. I wasn’t even entirely sure I wanted to go outside. I opened one door onto a library, not huge, but lined with books from floor to ceiling. The windows were uncurtained—half a dozen tall, narrow arches, each sealed with a dozen plates of puddle-glass, leaded together. As I moved to pull the door closed blood splattered the entirety of each window, save the top-most panes. A wave of it breaking against the building.
Despair washed over me, then lessened as the lichkin moved away again, tracking down more victims outside the house.
I slammed the door, turned, and saw Hertet hurrying down the corridor toward me, the crown askew upon his head. A group of knights followed at his back. His gaze slid across me unregistering, his face deathly pale. I noticed his cloth-of-gold robe bore a scarlet splatter across the middle as if someone had been gutted in front of him. I flattened myself to the door to let them by.
“It wants the key!” I shouted as he passed me. I’m not sure why I said it. Hertet stopped, seeing me for the first time. “Jalan. Reymond’s boy.”
He reached out and patted my hand. “You were always a good boy.” His other hand drew the key from beneath his collar. He tugged it and it came loose, though the chain looked too strong to break like that. “Here. You take it. You’ll know what to do.” He folded my hand around Loki’s key and moved on without a pause or a glance back. “We can go to the cellars and . . .”
I lost his voice beneath the tramp of mailed feet as the knights swept by. I stood for a moment in the corridor, sounds of chaos from the direction of the throne room, screams and howls ringing out at intervals from random directions. The blackness of the key held my gaze, cold and heavy in my hand. I managed to tear my attention from Loki’s gift and check both directions along the corridor, absently noting a long dark smear of blood along the wall panelling opposite and a painting, knocked from the wall, its frame splintered: the young Hertet staring out at me with heroic intent, footprints all over his face. At the far end of the corridor three women hurried by in silken finery, one old, two young, there one moment, gone the next.
The screaming from the throne room grew more desperate. Something struck the doors leading from it with enough force that the echoes trembled through my chest.
The key. The key had ended a lichkin in Hell. But that had been pure chance. Luck. My gaze returned to the blackness of it, unlocking the memories of that victory, and in an instant they had sucked me in.
Snorri stands before me, a monotone giant clad in the blood-dust of Hell. A fissure behind him gouts tongues of crimson flame and the air is thick with the stink of sulphur. I’m holding Loki’s key before me at waist height and the lichkin has gone, just a black stain lingering where its corrupted remnants fell to the ground. The key undid it. The lichkin took a step back when it blocked Snorri’s charge and impaled itself, just an inch, but it was enough. I turned the key and the lichkin came undone.
Snorri’s gaze is on my hand. He thought the key was safe with Kara, back in the living world.
“Well look at that,” I say, opening my fingers to reveal the key fully. “The thing is . . .” I struggle to come up with an explanation. “The thing to remember is that . . . without this we would both be dead.” I hold up my other hand to forestall him. “And not the good kind of dead. The really, really nasty kind.” I shudder, remembering the pain as the lichkin held me. I’ve never experienced anything close, and never want to again.
“You brought that key into Hel?” Snorri appears to have heard none of the words I so carefully brought up in my defence. “Into Hel?”
“You heard the bit about saving both our lives?”
Snorri looks scared. It’s one of the more worrying things I’ve seen in a life that lately has been more or less one worrying thing joined to the next. “We have to get it out of here. You have to take it back, Jal. Now!”
I look around. A wide and dusty valley dead-lit by a sky the colour of old sorrow. Fiery vents, a scattering of disturbingly shaped rocks. “How?” I’m not going to argue about leaving. I was doing my best not to come in the first place.
Snorri frowns, concentrating but unable to hold in his thoughts. “What were you thinking? This whole time you’ve being carrying . . .” He looks so disappointed in me that I almost see his point.
“The Ancient Greeks had a hall of judgment . . .” I say, mainly to distract him.
“The Greeks? What have the Greeks got to do with anything?”
“Well . . .” I often come up with my best plans by opening my mouth and listening to the words that come out. This time it doesn’t seem to be working. “Well . . . we’ve been trekking through your underworld, Hel’s domain. And now we’re in my Hell, or the Dead King’s Hell—”
“But the Greek mythology we’ve both known our whole lives! So both of us can shape it. Brilliant!”
The truth was I’d had ancient Greek mythology beaten through my thick layer of disinterest in my early teens by a detested tutor named Soros using a blunt cane and sharp sarcasm. I still have no idea why it was considered necessary, even if some in those regions have taken up the worship again. I did, however, learn it well enough to avoid the cane, if not the sarcasm.
“Anyway. The Greeks had a hall of judgment with three judges to direct the souls of the dead to their various rewards and punishments.” I start walking again. The lichkin might only be a stain on the ground but it’s a stain I don’t wish to stand next to any longer than I have to. I spit to clear the sulphur taste from my mouth. It doesn’t work.
“You’re thinking to leave the deadlands that way?” Snorri asks. “Because after the hall of judgment there’s a big dog named Cerberus, and if you don’t get eaten by him then it’s the River Acheron and the River Styx, that’s the rivers of woe and hate. The ferryman is supposed to be a—”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m not dead. I shouldn’t be here. As soon as I reach the judges they’ll see that I’m in the wrong place and send me back home. It’s what they do—send people where they belong.”
“You think so?” Snorri looks doubtful, which is the opposite of what I need.
“I believe so,” I say. “And that’s what counts.” It strikes me that in this Hell a man of sufficient will, a man willing to sacrifice anything, might bend the world itself around his desire and create of himself whatsoever he wished. It also strikes me that I am not such a man.
Snorri’s long stride brings him level with me. “So all we need to do is to get you to the judges’ hall.”
“That is one of the weaker parts of the idea,” I admit, slowing to look about for clues, but of course there aren’t any. Just dust and rocks.
Snorri keeps walking. “You haven’t figured this place out yet.” He calls it over his shoulder. “Direction doesn’t matter. It’s like in dreams. The things you want come to you. The things you don’t want as well.”
I hurry to catch up. “We’re just going to walk in this direction?”
“Yes.”
“Until we find it?”
“Yes.”
“Kara said the door would be everywhere,” I say, always eager to avoid a long walk.
“If you see it before we get there let me know.” Snorri snorts. “Now what do you think this hall is going to look like? What are the judges’ names?”
We walk through a valley that slowly becomes a plain, beneath a sky that darkens by degrees, settling shadows upon us. All the while we talk about the underworld of Hades and the gods of Olympus and the legends that the ancients set about it all. After the Thousand Suns many lost faith with the God of Rome and turned to older gods whose failures lay too far back to recall. As we remember the shape and history of Hades we find ourselves walking into it, or rather that part of the deadlands shaped by the faith of those who believe such tales.
“What is it with pagan hells and dogs?” I ask. “And rivers?”
“What do you mean?” A defensive tone enters Snorri’s voice.
“The Greeks have the River Styx, crossed by a ferryman who dumps you on a shore guarded by a huge dog named Cerberus. The Norse have the River Gjöll, crossed by a bridge that takes you to a shore guarded by a huge dog named Garm.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“It’s like you copied them item by item, just changing the odd detail and using your own names.”
The ensuing argument takes my mind off the unrelenting misery of walking the deadlands. Hell is hell, whatever mythology you dress it up in. Every part of me is dry. Every part hurts. Famine and thirst have set up home in me, bone deep. As the darkness grows, any hope in me wanes and my tongue lacks interest in conversation . . . but arguing, baiting the Northman, that still holds enough appeal to stop me lying down in the dust and waiting for my turn to blow on the wind.
Jalan.
It’s just the breeze, speaking my name into a pause in the conversation.
Jalan.
But when the wind speaks your name in the darkness of Hell there’s a chill that comes with it.
In time even the pleasure in enraging Snorri fades and I stagger on beneath a burden of unbearable pain and exhaustion. My surroundings might be only darkness and dust and a low but endless headwind, but in my mind I’ve returned to the singular hell that was our trip across the Bitter Ice. I’m there once more, with the Norsemen dying beside me step by step, Ein and Arne and Tuttugu, all of us trailing along in that white wasteland with nothing to draw us forward but Snorri ver Snagason’s broad back always moving on.
“Up!”
I find I’ve fallen to my knees, head bowed, unmoving.
“I got you.” Snorri’s hand closes around my upper arm and he lifts me to my feet.
“I’m sorry.” I stumble on.
“This place will wear any man down,” he says.
“I’m sorry.” I’m too exhausted to explain, but I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I had to be dragged through that door before I could live up to my promise, sorry to be leaving Snorri alone in Hell, sorry for his family, sorry I can’t believe in his quest, sorry I know he’ll fail. “Sorry for—”
“I know,” he says, and catches me before I fall again. “And no man who walks through Hell for a friend has anything to apologize for.”
“I—” A sound in the distance saves me from more foolishness, faint, then gone. “What’s that?”
“I heard it too.”
Having heard nothing but the wind for so long the strange cry seems full of portent.
It sounds again, a touch louder.
Jalan.
Louder than my imagination this time. A voice, speaking my name, or at least making the sound of it, making something unfamiliar of it.
“Run?” I find I have more energy left than I thought. Not enough to run, that’s just the fear talking, but enough to stagger along at a decent rate.
“Let’s keep going.” Snorri leads the way.
“But what is it?”
“What do you think it is?” he asks.
Jalan. It’s almost the way my Mother used to speak my name. The way a child might struggle to reproduce both syllables. I don’t want to say, as if naming my fear might make it real, but somehow I know what’s coming, what’s hunting us down. In Hell with its peculiar lack of directions, all your fears will find you soon enough. It’s my sister and the lichkin that has bound itself to her to make a corruption of her soul. If they kill me here my death will punch a hole through which they can emerge into the living world. The unborn queen, the rider and the ridden, birthed into dead flesh so many years after her conception. All my sister’s potential unleashed onto the world in the hands of a lichkin . . . To be honest, all that other stuff is just icing on a deeply unpalatable cake—I stopped caring after the “killing me here” bit. “Is that a light?” I point.
“Yes.” Snorri confirms that I’m not hallucinating through sheer terror.
JALAN! The howl comes from behind us, distant but by no means distant enough. JALAN! It turns out I can run.
Snorri jogs alongside me and with agonizing slowness the light resolves from one into a multitude, outlining the roof and many supporting columns of a towering building, all carved in white stone, just as we described it to each other.
Souls cluster in the darkness near the court. From time to time a new soul will run down the steps, a translucent recollection of a man or woman, not keeping a single shape but moving through memories of their life, moments of terror mostly. None of them lingers where the light falls, rather they run until the darkness takes them, as if the judges’ light burns them. They move away from Snorri and me too. Perhaps the life that still persists in us hurts to look upon with eyes where none remains.
We stop a hundred yards from the many-pillared hall. Walls rise behind the pillars, white and broad, every inch carved with scenes from legend. A doorway stands open, allowing the judged souls to flee their guilt. Our faces are cast into sharp relief by the slanting illumination. Even at this distance that light promises running water, warm air, green things growing.
The air seems brittle here, alive with possibility. I get that same sensation when the souls of the dead break through from the living world and I glimpse blue sky through the tears they make. This is a place of doors. I can feel the key on my chest, cold then hot, vibrating at some pitch beyond hearing. When Kara said the door between life and death lay everywhere, that was just words. I could no more spot that door in the midst of Hell than I could in a market square on a warm day in Vermillion. But here . . . here it seems that home is just a touch away. Here it seems that the door I need might just fracture out of nothing and stand before me. The living world is tantalizingly close, it just needs . . . some small thing to happen, like a lost word finally tripping off the tip of my tongue, and I would see the door . . .
My name rings out again, a howl, loud now, echoing off the walls, an undulating noise empty one moment, violent the next, full of hunger and malice. I take another step into the light. “You should come with me, Snorri.” The words are hard to say. “You’ve seen this place. Nothing good can be brought out of it.”
I wait for the anger, but there’s none in him. He hangs his head, refusing to look at the glow before us. “Arran Vale.”
“What?” I want to go, but I stay.
“Do you remember Arran Vale?” he asks.
“Um.” I should be running but Snorri’s bravery won’t let me. His image of who I am pins me here. I should be sprinting for the hall— instead I stand and try to answer him. Arran Vale? My mind races through names and faces and places, dozens, hundreds, all encountered on our long travels. “Maybe . . . a valley in Rhone? Near that little town with the one church and three whorehouses, where—”
“Hennan’s grandfather, the grandson of Lotar Vale.”
“Who could forget Lotar Vale? The hero you’d never heard of until the moment that old man said his name!”
“Doesn’t matter.” Snorri raised his head to fix me with that steady blue gaze of his. “What matters is that Arran Vale had a history, roots, something to live for, something to make a stand over.”
“All I remember is that you and Tuttugu were about to throw your lives away beside some old farmer you’d met only moments before, and all to defend his hut and its worthless contents from Vikings who probably wouldn’t have even bothered taking it anyway.” The ground is trembling now, the dust starting to dance. My sister is close and coming fast.
“A life lived well is one you’re not prepared to compromise just in order to draw it out for another day.”
“Well . . .” Reading out the list of things I would do to live another day would consume all of the extra day in question.
“The point is that there are things I’m prepared to die for. Times when it is right to make a stand, whatever the odds. And if Tuttugu and I would do what we did for Hennan’s grandfather—an old man we didn’t, as you rightly say, know. Then what do you think I’m prepared to do for my children? For my wife? Whether I can win is not a factor.”
We have had this conversation before. I didn’t expect him to have changed, but sometimes you owe it to a friend to try.
“Good luck!” I slap a hand to Snorri’s shoulder and I’m off. The dark behind him looks thicker as if a storm is rolling down on us. She’s there at the heart of it, the one whose mouth knows my name—my nameless sister and the lichkin who wears her soul.
I’m five yards away when he says, “Show me the key.”
I stretch out my hands, one toward Snorri, the other toward the door into the judges’ hall. “I’ve got to go!” The hell-night is boiling blackness behind him, the howl coming again so loud it drowns out my objections. Every hair I own tries to stand on end.
Even so, I pull the key from my shirt on the thong about my neck and run back to him. Snorri takes the knife from his belt and puts the blade to his palm.
“Jesus, no!” I wave my hand in what I hope is a negative pattern. “What is it with you northmen and cutting yourselves? I remember what happened last time you tried this Viking shit on me. How about we just shake hands?”
Snorri grins. “The key will be our link. You back in the world. Me here. Blood will bind us.” He cuts his palm and I wince to see it done, the blood welling up where the point of the knife passed.
“How do you know any of this?” I’m still hoping there’s a way out of this without having to slice myself open. A dark mist is rising now, pushing back the light. The souls scatter. They know a bad thing is coming. Suddenly I find myself ready to cut my damn hand off if it means I can leave. Even so, I stay, Snorri’s friendship holding me just the same way it very nearly pulled me through the door into Hell. “Blood will bind us? You’re just making it up as you go, aren’t you?”
Snorri meets my gaze, a slight shrug in his shoulders. “If I learned anything from Kara it’s that in magic it is will that counts. The words, the spells, scrolls, ingredients . . . it’s for show, or perhaps better to say they’re like a warrior’s weapons, but it’s the strength of the warrior’s arm that is what truly matters. He can kill you with his hands, weapon or no weapon.” He reaches out and folds his bloody hand about the key. “This will be our link. When you open the door you’ll find me.”
The dark has grown thick about us, and cold. It’s as if Snorri doesn’t see it, though: there’s no fear in him. Me, I have enough for both of us. A howling rises with the midnight, the sort a thousand wolves might make . . . if you set fire to them. Close now. Close and closing fast.
“How will I even find the door? How will I know you’re ready to return? Christ, look, I’ve got to go—”
“You need to will it to be so.” Snorri takes his hand back. There’s no blood on the key though it drips scarlet from his clenched fist. “It will work—or it won’t. Kara was to open the way for my return. Kara, or Skilfar, if she had taken the key back to her grandmother as she promised her. Now all I have is you, Jal. So keep the key safe and listen for my call.”
I tuck the key away. “I’ll listen.” It’s not much of a lie. I don’t even know what “listen” means. On my chest the key grows warmer as if falsehoods please it. I try to think of some last words for Snorri. “Farewell” sounds pompous. “Stay safe” is obviously not going to happen.
“Give them hell.”
The howl sounds so loud and close it’s like a punch. I’m running, running toward the light, that marvellous, living light, my sights set on the doorway.
“Be careful!” Snorri shouts after me. “They will test you.”
I don’t like the sound of that, but test or no test, I’m going home.
I close on the doorway racing past the soul of a young woman just coming out. I can see her terror in the faint lines of her. She runs, cowering, as if some great eagle might swoop upon her at any moment. I do pretty much the same thing, only in the opposite direction.
The darkness washes after me like a wave racing up the beach, outpacing me to either side, freezing my heels. I fly through the doorway, contriving to trip on the doorstep, and sprawl headlong into the corridor beyond. Looking back in terror I see the blackness slam into the building, the doorway becomes a rectangle of night and a tremor runs through the floor, but not a wisp of the dark enters the passage where I lie and no hint of the horror outside can be seen. If she’s howling out there—I can’t hear her.
I stand up, brushing the dust off me, still eyeing the darkness outside nervously. Steeling myself I risk a glance away, into the judges’ hall. It’s not what I expect. No courtrooms, no souls queuing for the verdict on their lives, no trio of Zeus’s bastards sitting in judgment. There’s nothing but a long corridor, too long to fit within the building, though the structure is huge. At the far end something burning and bright—a blue, a green, a promise. All I need do is walk forward and I’ll be home. I sense it in my bones. I don’t even need the Liar’s key. This is a true path, one the just may walk.
I take a step forward and doors appear along both walls. A plain wooden door every ten yards, scores of them. I take another step and each one swings open, the closest ones first, then the next an instant later, and so on, creating a wave rippling off toward the distant blue-green promise.
It’s easy to pass by the rooms behind the first doors. The first to the left is empty save for a discarded purse in the middle of the floor, to the right also empty but for a scattering of silver coins. The next pair are empty save for a discarded sword and a small closed casket.
“Are you trying to tempt me?” The laugh comes easy and I pick up the pace, not even looking in the rooms as I pass.
A hundred doors on and I stop as if I’d hit a wooden post. The most delicious smell ever in the history of aromas has fastened itself to my nose and turns my head without permission. A table has been set in the room to my left. A simple table without cloth or silver, and on it rests a wooden plate where half a roasted chicken sits and steams. Instantly my mouth is full of drool, my stomach a tight and demanding knot. Every part of me screams with desire for that hot roasted meat. I’ve lived with famine in Hell for so long that my body literally howls in answer to the call of a good meal.
Sobbing, I turn away, only to see in the room opposite a simple goblet of clear glass, brimming with water. I know in the moment I lay eyes upon it that this will be the purest of spring waters, gurgling free from beneath ancient rocks, and that gulping it down, letting it flow into my parched and death-touched throat, would take the thirst from me in a moment. To anyone who has not known the desiccation of death’s drylands the idea that a man might sacrifice himself for just a glass of water may seem insane. But it must be experienced to be understood. I have been dry in the desert of the Sahar. It is a small thing compared to the thirst that a day in Hell will put in a man.
Even so, I tear myself away and stumble on, my body aching with the life awakened in it so suddenly by the proximity of the world after so very long walking the deadlands.
More scents assault me, each more delicious than the one before. Apples, caramel, fresh baked bread . . . beer. Young beer, fragrant with hops, the sound of it pouring from the spigot . . . that nearly turns me. I catch glimpses of the rooms: one a meadow in sunlight, another a horse ready to ride, a magnificent beast, muscles bunched under dark hide, ready to gallop all day. There are rooms where treasure lies in drifts, gold enough to buy kingdoms whole. I focus my vision on that distant rectangle of green grass and blue sky, coming closer with each stride. My will is iron. I understand the test and will not be turned.
I’m twenty yards from the end door. I can see the blue sky, the green of a garden, a wall behind it. It looks like the royal herb garden behind the messenger stables. I break into a run.
“Come back to bed, Jal.”
One sideways glance and I stumble to a halt, turn, take three steps back. I recognize the room, a bedchamber. The light slants through shuttered windows dividing the bed into parallel lines of light and shadow. Each bright line rises over her, describing her contours, tawny skin smooth across warm flesh. She lies naked, just as I left her, silken sheets rising halfway up her back and following her curves as faithfully as the light does.
“Lisa?”
She doesn’t speak, just makes that languid stretch that’s only possible in the moments between waking and sleeping.
This is a doorway into the past. The air itself shimmers with doorways, fractures in the world, each leading to new possibilities, new versions of my life. If I had stayed with her that morning, if I had turned at the door when she called to me, still half-tangled in her dreams, if I had slid in beside her once more . . . none of this would have happened. I would have missed Grandmother’s address. I would never have seen Snorri. He would have made his own way home. I would have lived on as I always had. Perhaps I would have asked Lisa to marry me and spent her dowry buying off Maeres Allus, and the idle, easy, soft days of my life would have carried on.
That one thought overwhelms me. Go back. Turn it back. Do it over. That one thought and the glorious aliveness of her after so very long in the deadlands. Lisa DeVeer, long, lean, lovely, warm, soft, vital. Go on along the corridor and return to the now, to the palace of Vermillion where she is married and the world stands against me . . . or turn here at the last moment and step back into that first morning where it all went wrong and could so easily have been avoided.
One step is all it takes. The rest I don’t even remember. I lay a hand on her hip and sit at her side. I start to kick off my boots. Lisa reaches up to draw me down to her, turning slowly, dark hair cascading over her shoulder.
She hasn’t any face, just a funnel of flesh from which a score of cobra fangs jut, venom dripping from their sharpness. I fall off the bed with a shout of horror, my shirt ripping, most of it still hanging in her clawed fist. I pull the key and would run for the door but there is no door. I scrabble backwards across the bedroom floor as the thing that isn’t Lisa rises from the bed. Trapped in a corner, I reach up to throw the shutter wide but all it reveals is the dead sky of Hell—damnation waits for me out there. In the deadlight the shimmers where the worlds brush against one another show more clearly and Not-Lisa looks more like something made rather than grown, unclean flesh on old bones. She moves from the bed, awkward, limbs jerking, and steps my way.
In desperation I shove the key toward the closest place where the light fractures. It’s not a door but it might almost be. It’s a half-chance and I take it. I feel Loki’s key engage with something, locking its teeth into the stuff of being . . . and I turn it.
A moment later I’m tumbling out into the oven of the Sahar, scaldingly hot sand, blind white heat, a place that eats hope and buries the bones . . . and it feels great.
“Marshal?” Someone shook my arm, hard. “Marshal!”
It’s Bonarti Poe, white-faced and trembling. The key released my gaze and I found myself sitting in the corridor exactly where I was when Hertet first pressed it into my hands.
“How long have I—”
“I think everyone’s dead!” Poe looked back along the passage. A hideous scream rang out to contradict him—the kind of howl heard in torture chambers.
“We should leave.” I got to my feet, using the wall for support. It was dark, just one lamp guttering in a niche between us and the door to the throne room, its oil nearly spent.
“T-they said you know about . . . this thing that’s attacking us?” Bonarti had yet to relinquish my arm.
“I’ve seen one in Hell.”
“Oh Christ.” His grip started to hurt so I shook him off. “But you know how to beat it, right?”
The door at the end of the corridor burst into pieces, saving me from a reply. The lichkin stood there like a wound on my eye, there but invisible, glimpsed the next moment, not as the raw white nerve but shrouded in ghosts, wearing the grey souls of men as a skin.
The air between us rippled, fault-lines and fractures seen in an instant then gone, some brilliant, some dark. This was the doom Luntar had warned us of. Not the lichkin dealing out deaths by the score, or thousand, but the breaking of creation. I’d seen the same fractures where the judges’ hall stood on the boundary between worlds, and here the Dead King’s creature caused two worlds to collide, leading the denizens of Hell back into their bodies and into the lands of the living. It’s in the nature of any crack to spread and, with the slow turn of the Wheel driving them, the fractures would spread ever faster and further. The Wheel of Osheim might lie untold miles away but its influence reached into the heart of every place, driven by the vast unslumbering machinery of the Builders, still pulsing with their energy though they lay dead a thousand years.
The lichkin came on slowly as if daring us to run. I knew how fast the thing could be and made no move that would spark it into action. Instead I hung onto those last few moments of life remaining to me. Bonarti, lacking my understanding, ran for it. He got two steps before the lichkin hit him in the back. It flowed into him like a string of sinew sucked up by a hungry mouth. I caught a nerve-white flicker as the last of its thin body vanished beneath the skin to wrap his spine. The lichkin’s shroud of ghosts peeled away as it found flesh, winding themselves smoke-like about the paralysed man.
Bonarti’s scream was thankfully short, but his pain didn’t end with it. A moment later a hundred razor cuts opened all across him, no more than skin deep. With the lichkin anchored in Bonarti’s flesh I would have run, but he blocked my path away from the throne room and at the doorway corpses crowded, hungry-eyed, held back only by the lichkin’s desire to toy with its food. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
Bonarti faced me, eyes wide, mouth twisted into a grin he didn’t own. His skin began to peel away, a dozen broad strips flayed out slowly between parallel cuts. There comes a point where you get so scared that it really doesn’t matter where you’re running to as long as you are running. I knew that the half-doors and broken chances that lay behind the fractures all around me each led straight to Hell, but frankly Hell had already come visiting and terrible as every part of it was I would rather be running toward some part that didn’t contain a lichkin. The creature reached for me with Bonarti’s raw red hand, flayed skin dangling. With the same scream a man uses when steeling himself to some awful task, like cutting off a limb to escape a fire, I drove Loki’s key into the nearest fracture. The closest faultline shimmered through the wall beside me and had nearly faded to nothing before my hand reached it. The key found its socket and held there, anchoring the fracture. Bonarti’s wet fingers found my neck and, still screaming, I turned the key.
It seemed in that moment that the world broke. Rather than falling through the hole I’d made I flew back as something big burst out of it, barging me aside. Something big, hard, and fast.
Snorri swung overhead, his axe shearing through Bonarti Poe’s collarbone and deep into his chest. A heavy boot, shattering ribs, gave the leverage to wrench Hel’s blade clear. The Norseman’s next blow swept in from the side before Bonarti’s corpse hit the floor, taking off his arm at the elbow and carving toward his spine.
Snorri followed the corpse, roaring, reddish dust smoking from his hair and clothing. Behind him the fractured window into Hell started to close, reality still able to heal itself. Just.
The lichkin forced Bonarti’s body to crawl beneath the rain of axe blows. The ghosts rose to blind and tear at Snorri but he scarcely noticed, hewing deep into the meat of the man beneath him. White tendrils reached out, questing for other bodies, for dead flesh to inhabit, but the Northman struck them off with swift efficiency. Properly bound to a host as the lichkin are in the form of unborn, the thing could have drawn more effectively on the dead and the living to repair itself, but this unbound lichkin had become reckless, thinking to toy with its food, and in winding itself so tightly about Bonarti had become vulnerable.
The butchery continued unabated. Snorri knew his foe was buried deep inside the flesh before him. I glimpsed the whiteness of the lichkin where Snorri’s axe shattered Bonarti’s spine. A second later the creature began untangling itself from the ruin of the corpse. But, like me, Snorri seemed able to see it, his time in the deadlands lending something to his sight. His axe became a blur, hacking at the lichkin, somehow finding it solid in these moments where it tried to rid itself of flesh. Perhaps so long a time in Hell had given Snorri’s axe an edge that could find even the lichkin, or being wetted in the blood of devils had enchanted the blade— either way . . . it bit.
In Trond they hold contests to ward off the boredom of winter. One such requires the Norse to take an axe to the trunk of a fir tree about as thick as a man, and the first of them to chop entirely through it is the victor. Snorri’s assault on the lichkin held much of that contest in it, and before the thing escaped Bonarti’s ruin it came dangerously close to being cut through. In the instant that the last nerve-white tendril of it withdrew from the bloody remains before us the lichkin folded the world around itself and fell away into the deadlands. With an animal howl Snorri threw himself after it. If not for my strategically placed leg he would have vanished back into Hell in pursuit of his prey. As it was he sprawled, face-first, on Hertet’s sumptuous, though soiled, hall rug. The air rippled where the lichkin had punched its hole through the world, and lay still, the portal gone.
I glanced back at the dead men watching from the entrance to the throne room. Perhaps if I hadn’t they might have continued to stand there watching vacantly for another five minutes. My gaze seemed to animate them, and as one they surged forward.
“Get up!” I leapt to Snorri’s side and tried to raise him. Just touching him gave my hands back that death-dry feeling, making paper of my skin, sucking the vitality from my flesh. “Get up!” I’d have more luck lifting a horse.
Snorri got his arms beneath him and launched himself to his feet as the dead men reached us. They had lost their speed now that the lichkin had fled, but they still had numbers.
Numbers didn’t seem to matter. Snorri went through them like a scythe. It reminded me of my glorious victory over the bucket-boys back at the opera house. Snorri waded through the dead like a prince of Red March wades through terrified street urchins. The axe is truly the weapon for such work. A sword is a tongue: it speaks and gives eloquent voice to violence, seeking out a foe’s vitals and ending him. An axe only roars. The wounds it gives are ruinous and in Snorri’s hands nearly every blow seemed to take a head or limb.
Two minutes later the Norseman stood amid the carnage of his work, perhaps a score of corpses now divided to the point at which necromancy could make nothing dangerous of them. I followed him into the throne room, casting nervous glances over my shoulder against the possibility of new foes advancing along the corridor. Many of the dead had swords, still scabbarded at their hips. I took one that looked to have been forged for service rather than show.
“Are . . . are you all right?” I looked about the hall. Snorri stood, head down, coated with other men’s blood, breathing heavily. He held his axe across his hips, one hand just below the head, the other at the far end of the shaft. He didn’t look all right. Neither did the hall, every surface soiled, the throne cast down, tapestries trampled, the whole place stinking of death and decay. “Snorri?” He seemed almost a stranger.
He raised his head, staring at me beneath the black veil of his hair, unreadable, capable of anything. “I . . .” His first word to me since we parted in Hell. It had been months for me—how many lifetimes would it have felt like in that place?
From the darkest corner of the hall a dead man rose from beneath a tapestry—some victory picked out in silver thread, now smeared with blood and foulness—he charged toward Snorri’s back, trailing the embroidered cloth like a banner. Snorri lashed out to the side, almost without looking, his axe an extension of his arm. The man’s head flew clear; his body stumbled, and collapsed.
“I am at peace,” Snorri said, and walked over to clap me in a warrior’s embrace.