FIVE
Omar and Yusuf came to the outskirts of Hamada to see me off, Omar in the black robes of a student, Yusuf in the fractal patterned grey-onwhite of a master, his smile black and gleaming. They’d calculated me safe passage to the coast with a salt caravan. Travel with Sheik Malik, they told me, would not end well, though whether my downfall would have been at the sheik’s instigation, or by djinn or dead man, or perhaps through indecency with his lovely daughters, they didn’t say.
“A gift, my friend!” Omar jerked his head back at the three camels his man was leading behind them.
“Oh you bastard.”
“You’ll warm to them, Jalan! Think of the heads you’ll turn in Vermillion riding in on camelback!”
I rolled my eyes and waved the man forward to add my trio to the laden herd browsing karran grass a short way behind me. Soon all four score of them would be trekking the dunes with just me and twelve salt merchants to keep order.
“And give the Red Queen my father’s regards,” Omar said. “And my mother’s.”
Omar’s mother I liked. The second eldest of the caliph’s six wives, a tall Nuban woman from the interior, dark as ebony and mouth-wateringly attractive. Funny too. I guessed Omar’s sense of humour came from his father. Giving a man three camels after he’s been locked up for assaulting one is mean-spirited, and not at all amusing.
I turned to Yusuf. “So, master Yusuf, perhaps you have a prediction for me, something I can use.” Tradition has it that nobody of consequence leaves Hamada without some numerology to guide their way. Most come from failed students who ply their trade in whatever way they can, be it as accountants, bookmakers, or mystics selling predictions on the street. A prince, however, might hope for an audit of his possibilities and probabilities to be issued by the Mathema itself. And, since I knew Yusuf from my days in Umbertide, there seemed no harm in trying to coax one from a master.
Yusuf’s smile stiffened for a moment. “Of course, my prince. I’m afraid our halls of calculation are occupied with . . . notables. But I can do a quick evaluation.”
I stood there, trying not to let my offence show, while Yusuf scratched away with startling speed on a slate taken from inside his robe. “One, two, thirteen.” He looked up.
I pursed my lips. “Which means?”
“Ah.” Yusuf glanced down at the slate again as if seeking inspiration. “First stop, second sister, thirteenth . . . something.”
“Why can’t these ever be like, on the third day of spring give the fifth man you see four coppers to avoid disaster? See, that’s simple and useful. Yours could mean anything. First stop . . . on my way home? An oasis? A port? And second sister? My sister, the Silent Sister? Help me out here!”
“The calculation is done on the basis that you are told what I told you—if I wanted to tell you more I would have to do the calculation again and it would be a different answer, a different purpose. If I told you more now then it would disrupt the outcome and the numbers would no longer be true. Besides, I don’t know the answers, that’s where the magic comes in and it’s hard to pin down. You understand?”
“So, do it again. It only took you a moment.”
Yusuf showed me his black smile. “Ah, my friend, you have found me out. I have been processing your variables since we first met in that Florentine bank. I may have misled you when I implied that you were not important to the shape of things to come. I thought perhaps it would have been easier for you if you didn’t know.”
“Well . . . uh, that’s better.” I wasn’t sure it was. I’d been happier being outraged about not being important enough to factor than I was knowing that my actions mattered. “I, uh, should be going. Allah be upon you, and all that . . .” I raised my hand in farewell but Omar was too fast for me and launched himself forward into a hug that, truth be told, was pretty much a cuddle.
“Good luck, my friend.”
“I don’t need luck, Omar! And I have the figures to prove it . . . one, two, three—”
“Thirteen.”
“One, two, thirteen. That should see me safe. You come visit us in Red March when you’re bored with balancing equations.”
“I will,” he said, but I know from experience it takes practice to lie when cuddling someone, and Omar had not practised.
I disentangled myself and set off toward the front of the caravan.
“Don’t forget your camels, Jalan!”
“Right.” And with reluctance I angled my way toward the rear of the group being lined up, already tensing to dodge the first barrage of camel-spit.
The desert is hot and boring. I’m sorry, but that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s also sandy, but rocks are essentially dull things and breaking them up into really small pieces doesn’t improve matters. Some people will tell you how the desert changes character day by day, how the wind sculpts it endlessly in vast and empty spaces not meant for man. They’ll wax lyrical about the grain and shade of the sand, the majesty of bare rock rising mountainous, carved by the sand-laden breeze into exotic shapes that speak of water and flow . . . but for me sandy, hot, and boring covers it all.
The most important factor, once water and salt are covered, is the boredom. Some men thrive on it, but me, I try to avoid being left alone with my own im-agination. The key if one wishes to avoid dwelling on unpleasant memories or inconvenient truths is to keep yourself occupied. That fact alone explains much of my youth. In any event, in the desert silence, with nobody but camels and heathens to speak to, none of them with much mastery of Empire tongue, a man is left defenceless, prey to dark thoughts.
I held out until we hit the coast, but that last trek along the narrow strip of sand between the wideness of the sea and the vast march of dunes broke me. One chill night we camped beside the skeleton of some great ocean-going ship that had floundered close enough to port for the irony to be more bitter than the seawater. I walked among its bare and salt-rimed spars rising from the beach, and setting a hand to one ancient timber I could swear I heard the screams of drowning sailors.
That night sleep proved impossible to find. Instead, beneath the bright and cold scatter of the stars, my ghosts came visiting and dragged me back to Hell.
“Isn’t there supposed to be a bridge?” I ask, staring out across the fast-flowing waters of the River Slidr. It’s the first water I’ve seen in Hell. The river lies at least thirty yards wide, the opposite shore is a beach of black sand sloping up to a set of crumbling black cliffs. The cliffs vault toward the dead-lit sky in a series of steps, and above them clouds gather, dark as smoke.
“It’s the River Gjöll that has a bridge, not the Slidr. Gjallarbrú they call the bridge. Be thankful we don’t need to cross it, Módgud stands guard.”
“Módgud?” I don’t really want to know.
“A giantess. The far shore of that river is corpse upon corpse. They build the Nagelfar there, the nail ship that Loki will steer to Ragnarok. And behind that bridge stand the gates of Hel, guarded by the chained hound, Garm.”
“But don’t we need to—”
“We’re already past the gates, Jal. The key, the door, all that took us into Hel.”
“Just the wrong bit of it?”
“We need to cross the river.”
Thirst rather than a lack of caution draws me on, hurrying me down those last few yards of the shore.
I advance to the shallows. “Yeah. That’s not going to happen.” The riverbed shelves away rapidly and although the swift-flowing water lies unnaturally clear it soon becomes lost in darkness. Crossing a river like this would be a serious problem under any circumstances but as I kneel to drink I spot the real show-stopper. In defiance of all reason there are daggers, spears, and even swords, being borne along in the current, all silvery clean, and sparkling with sharpness. Some are pointed resolutely in the direction the current takes them, others swirl as they go, scything the waters all around.
Snorri arrives at my shoulder. “It’s called the River of Swords. I wouldn’t drink it.”
I stand. Further out the blades look like fish shoaling. Long, sharp, steel fish.
“So, what do we do?” I stare upriver, then down. Nothing but miles of eroded banks stepping up to the badlands on either side.
“Swim.” Snorri walks past me.
“Wait!” I reach forward to get an arm in his way. “What?”
“They’re just swords, Jal.”
“Yessssss. That was my point too.” I look up at him. “You’re going to dive in among a whole bunch of swords?”
“Isn’t that what we do in battle?” Snorri steps into the water. “Ah, cold!”
“Fuck cold, it’s sharp I’m worried about.” I make no move to follow him.
“Crossing the Slidr isn’t about bridges or tricks. It’s a battle. Fight the river. Courage and heart will see you across—and if it doesn’t then Valhalla will have you for you will have fallen in combat.”
“Courage?” I know I’m sunk before I start then. Unless simply wading in constitutes courage . . . rather than just stupidity.
“It’s that or stay here forever.” Snorri takes another step and suddenly he’s swimming, the water churning white behind him, his great arms rising and falling.
“Crap on it.” I stick a foot in the water. The chill of it reaches through my boot as if it isn’t there and shoots up the bones of my leg. “Jesus.” I take the foot out again, sharpish. “Snorri!” But he’s gone, a third of the way across, battling the waters.
I take the opportunity to put the key back around my neck on its thong. I find it hot in my grasp, reflecting nothing, not even the sky. I wonder if I call on Loki will the true God see and drown me for my betrayal? I hedge my bets by calling on any deity that might be listening.
“Help!”
The way I see it is that God must be pretty busy with people appealing to him all the time, so he probably appreciates it when prayers cut to the chase.
I pause to consider the injustice of a Hell that contains no lakes that drown heroes and let cowards float, but instead holds test upon test over which someone with nothing to recommend them save a strong arm may triumph. Then, without further consideration I run three steps and dive in.
Swimming has never been my forte. Swimming with a sword at my hip has always resulted in swifter progress, but sadly only toward the bottom of whatever body of water I’m drowning in. The Slidr however, proves unusually buoyant when it comes to sharp-edged steel and Edris Dean’s blade rather than dragging me down, holds me up.
I thrash madly, my lungs too paralysed by the cold even to begin pulling back the breath that escaped me when I hit the river. The iciness of the water is invasive, seeping through blood and bone, filling my head. I lose contact with my limbs but it’s not drowning that concerns me—it’s keeping warm. Deep in my head, in the dark spaces where we go to hide, I’m crouched, waiting to die, waiting for the ice to reach me, and all I have to burn are memories.
I reach for the hottest memory I have. It isn’t the blind heat of the Sahar, or the crackling embrace of Gowfaugh Forest engulfed in flame. The Aral Pass unfolds, dragging me back into that blood-soaked gorge packed with men at war, men screaming, men at cut and thrust, men fallen about their wounds, time running red from their veins, men dying, whispering beneath the cacophony, speaking to their loved and lost, calling for their mothers, last words twitching on blue lips, bargains with the Devil, promises to God. I see another man slide back from my sword, leaving it black with gore. By now it’s too dull to slice, but a yard of steel is still deadly whatever edge it carries.
The Aral Pass carries me a third of the way across the Slidr. I find my focus and realize the river’s sharp load has not yet cut me open but there’s still too far to go and the opposite shore is slipping by too fast. In the distance I hear a roar, a low, steady, wet-mouthed roar. A long silver spear passes beneath me, too close. I start to swim again, pounding artlessly at the water, and this time it is the bloodshed at the Black Fort that drives me on. I remember the sick sound as my sword point pierces an eye, crunching through the bony orbit and into the Viking’s brain. In an instant the fire is gone from him, a meat puppet with his strings all snipped. An axe cleaves the air in front of my face as I sway back. A high table catches me in the back and I topple onto it, twisting, throwing my legs into the spin. A broadsword hammers into the planks where my head was and I’m over the table, on both feet, swinging, shearing through the arm that held that sword.
The battle madness of the Black Fort releases me at last, panting amid tumbled corpses. I’m two-thirds of the way across the Slidr, still in the choppy, swift-moving clarity of the river. Downstream, in the distance, the valley is choked with mist. That roar has grown louder, filling the world, trembling in the depth of my bones.
I strike out for shore, desperate now. Something bad waits for me in that mist but I’m running out of fight and time. The coldness takes me and all I have to burn is my duel with Count Isen, the high, sharp crash of blade on blade as he tries to kill me and I weave my defence from desperation. It’s not enough. I’m still ten yards from shore and going under. There’s a sharp agony in my leg that reaches me even though the limb is frozen and numb. I’ve been hit. The waters close over me. I surface once more and see that before reaching the rising mist the whole Slidr vanishes as if itself cut by a massive sword. The thunder is louder than thought. I’m being dragged to the falls. I go under again and none of that matters: a shoal of knives is bearing down on me and I’ve no air to scream with.
Somehow, against all sense, my sword is in my hand. A fine way to drown. But then I remember it’s not my sword and the heat that was in my blood in the moment I took it fills me once more. Edris Dean wielded this sword against me, seeking my life as he had sought that of my mother, and of my sister, warm in the womb. I battled him before Tuttugu’s corpse. The corpse of my friend, a coward who died a hero’s death. I remember how it felt to drive my sword between Edris Dean’s ribs, to sink it into the meat of him, to feel it bedded in his flesh and to rip it out again, grating across bone. I open my mouth and roar, careless of the river, and there I stand, dripping in the shallows, sword in hand, and above me the mist from an endless waterfall rises in clouds that dare the sky. The Slidr plunges over a rocky lip just ten yards on. Swords leap from its clear waters as gravity takes the river and hauls it swiftly away.
I step forward on trembling legs, weak in every limb, three more steps, two more, and I’m on the wet sand. I’ve no injuries that I can see.
A figure is running toward me, Snorri, slowing as he draws near, panting. “I—” He raises a hand, draws in a huge breath, “thought I’d lost you there.”
I look at the sword in my hand, the script etched into its blade, the water still dripping from it, diamonds turned rust red in the deadlight. “No. Not yet. Not today.”
We climb up the riverbank in silence, both of us wrapped in memories. As the Slidr dries from me I feel that somehow its waters have left me more . . . connected. I remember my battle at the Aral Pass. I remember the fight within the Black Fort. For the first time Jalan the berserker has met everyday Jalan and we’ve come to some sort of agreement. I’m not sure exactly what it is yet . . . but something has changed.
Hell on the far side of the Slidr proves steeper than before. Hills of black rock replace the dust, hills in which everything is sharp and that offer a traveller no chance for rest. Everywhere the stone looks as if it were soup on the boil, frozen in the instant, bubbles bursting from it, leaving a myriad edges, all razored. Just touching the ground leaves my fingers bloody. How long the leather soles of my boots will last, and what will become of my feet after that, I can’t say.
We see more souls here, grey clusters of them, flowing like dirty water along the dry valleys, men and women and children, heads down, unspeaking, drawn onward by some call I can’t hear.
We follow, twisting and turning through the black hills, the valleys becoming deeper, broader, more thick with souls. The Slidr is less than a memory now, Hell has parched me again. I feel my skin dying, desiccating, flaking away.
“Wait.” For no reason a gorge on to our left catches my eye, high above us, emptying out of the valley side.
“This is the way.” Snorri gestures after the departing souls ahead of us, more drifting by. His eyes are red with burst veins, like a man who has forgotten how to sleep. I feel worse than he looks.
“Up there.” I point at it. “There’s something up there.”
“This is the way.” Snorri repeats, starting off after the souls, head down once more.
“No.” And I’m climbing over boulders, a dozen paper-thin cuts on my palm where I reach out to steady myself. “It’s up here.”
“I don’t sense it.” Snorri turns toward me, exhausted, the souls dwarfed as they flow around him.
“It’s here.” I keep climbing, drawing my sword to balance myself, to give myself some support that doesn’t require touching the rocks.
It’s a scramble to reach the gorge and my hand stings as if vinegar has been poured into each cut. I advance along the narrow path that leads up between the gorge’s clifflike walls, Snorri a short way behind me, cursing.
It’s silent here out of the wind, at least it is once Snorri stops complaining. A pervasive quiet, ancient and deep. Our footfalls sound like sacrilege. If it were water that carved these valleys it has been gone since before man walked here. In a hell built from loneliness this seems the most desolate and most lost place that the damned might ever walk.
“There’s nothing here, Jal, I tol—”
The narrow walls draw back just ahead of us. There’s a dell, perhaps a plunge pool where some long-dead river once fell. A single tree stands there, black, gnarled, the bare fingers of its branches stark against the dead-lit sky. Its trunk is mottled, a sickly white against the black, rising from the broad base toward the heights where the first branches divide.
Advancing, I see that the tree is both further away and more huge than I had imagined. “Help me up.” There’s a step in the gorge, taller than I am. Snorri boosts me to the top. I cut my leg through my trousers. More acid slices from the bubble-fractured rock. I reach for Snorri and help him join me.
Drawing closer we see that the tree, though leafless, is laden with strange fruit. Closer still and the diseased trunk reveals its secret. Bodies are nailed to it. Hundreds of them.
If this tree were the size trees are supposed to be then we would be ants. It must be some offspring of Yggdrasil, the world-tree that stands in the heart of all things and from which worlds depend. The branches which bear fruit droop like those of the willow, dangling almost to the ground. Some reach so low I could stretch up and touch them, but I’ve no wish to. The fruit are dark and shrivelled, some a couple of feet across, some no bigger than a man’s head, all grotesque, unsettling in a way I can’t define.
The low groaning of the tree’s victims reaches us now. Men and women are pinned to its trunk, young and old, so crowded their limbs overlap, their splayed forms fitted together like interlaced fingers or the pieces of a puzzle.
We come amid the thick and sprawling tangle of the tree’s roots to its trunk, as wide as the Mathema Tower and taller still. One patch of whiteness draws my eye, paler than the others and low to the ground.
“Hello Marco.” I step closer, sheathing my sword, looking up at him. There he is, nailed among the hundreds, hands and feet pinned by black spikes of iron. Scores of heads turn my way, slowly, as if it takes great effort, but only Marco speaks.
“Prince Jalan Kendeth.” His gaze lifts. “And the barbarian.”
“I’m glad you remember me.”
“There are few curses worse than having your name spoken in Hell,” he says.
That takes the wind from my sails. “W-well.” I swallow and try to speak without stammering. “I’d rather have my name spoken in Hell than be nailed to a tree in Hell for all eternity.”
Marco hasn’t an answer to that.
“I remember you,” Snorri says. “The man with the papers. You had Tuttugu tortured. Why are you on this tree?”
“Maybe this is where torturers go,” I say.
“It would take a forest to house them,” Snorri says. “This tree would not suffice.”
“So some more specific crime . . .” I frown. This place scares me. All of Hell scares me, but this place is worse.
“A worse crime.” Snorri’s gaze wanders across the bodies, all naked, all pierced by nails, hanging on gravity’s rack.
“Get me down and I’ll tell you,” Marco says, always the banker. I can see the desperation in his eyes, though.
“You put yourself there.” Snorri turns to study the closest of the hanging fruit. He reaches up to touch it. “Ah!” And snatches his hand back as if stung. A flush of colour spreads across the wizened husk, a fleshy pink. We watch, Snorri still rubbing his fingers. The fruit swells, like a chest inflated with a deep breath. The thing’s true shape resolves. We see limbs, coiled in tight, flesh tones mottling the previous lifeless black. The transformation lasts as long as the breath that Snorri drew in, and with his exhalation the “fruit” shrivels back to its dark dry husk.
“It . . . it was . . .”
“It looked like a baby,” I whisper. Only too small, head too big, limbs too tiny, fingers webbed.
“An unborn.” Snorri turns back to Marco. “That’s the fruit of this tree? Your crimes?”
I’m not listening: my eyes have found another of the tree’s fruit. Just one among hundreds, maybe thousands, but it draws me. I can’t look away. Every other thing blurs, and I’m walking toward it.
“Jal?” Snorri calls me from somewhere distant.
I reach up with both hands and clasp the desiccated husk. The pain isn’t in my fingers, it’s in my veins, in the marrow of each bone as something is drawn from me. Thick arms wrestle me away and I’m on the ground looking up at the unborn, pink and tiny . . . wet and dripping with life. “What are you doing?” Snorri hauls me to my feet. “Have you gone mad?”
“I . . .” I look at the pink thing, this almost-child. I draw Edris Dean’s sword and the script along the blade has run crimson as if the symbols themselves are bleeding. “This is my sister.”
Though some magic has drawn me to her our connection ends there. I’ve never met her—she has never grown—and I have had two brothers teach me that there’s nothing holy in blood bonds. Given my elder brother, Martus, and a random stranger both dangling over a precipice and only time to save one of them, it would be my day to make a new friend. Especially if the stranger were young and female. All I have to link me to this . . . creature . . . is the memory of watching Mother die. Only sorrow binds us, and now she’s been corrupted. This nameless child has been wrought into some terror, a terror that needs to kill me to escape into the living world and keep its place there . . .
I hold my bleeding sword and watch the thing before me, pink, ugly, wet and raw. Snorri stands beside me and says nothing. A cry escapes me, a harsh noise, as short and sharp as the arc of my blade. Steel slices. The unborn drops, and where she hits the ground there is only dust and small dry bones.
“Jal.” Snorri reaches for my shoulder. I shake him off.
Above the dust something intangible is rising, ghost-pale, changing, growing, shifting swiftly through many forms. All of them her. My sister. A sleeping baby, a tiny child staggering as they do when taking first steps, a young girl, long-haired, pretty, a tall woman, slender and beautiful with Mother’s looks, dark locks coiled about her shoulders. The images change more swiftly—a mother holding tiny hands, a woman, stern-faced, a power behind her eyes, an old woman on a tall throne. Gone.
I’m left standing there, tingles up and down my arms, across my cheeks, breath sharp and shallow, a pain in my chest. Why does this hurt me? Might-have-beens are lost every second of every day. Might-have- beens, plans that come to naught, pipe-dreams, they pour into nothing, swifter than the Slidr plunging over its cliff. I stand looking down at the tiny bones as they blacken and go to dust. Not might-have-beens: shouldhave-beens.
Marco laughs at me. An ugly sound, tight and full of pain, but laughter none the less, and from a man I never once saw smile in the living world. “It’s not finished, prince. Not over.” He groans, struggling to move but pinned by his extremities. “The tree bears what the lichkin leave behind.”
“Lichkin?” I’ve heard of them, monsters from the deadlands, things the Dead King brought into the world to serve his purpose.
“What do you think rides the children taken from the womb? What moulds their potential and uses that power? It is fair exchange.” He watches me dead-eyed. He could be talking of bargains made on the floors of Umbertide’s exchanges for all the emotion he shows. “Where is the crime? The child that would not have lived gets to live, and the lichkin that has never lived gets to quicken and walk in the world of men where it may feed its hunger.”
I look up into the distance above us, at the flesh-mottled trunk, tented by innumerable willow-like branches, each dangling its stolen life. Is Marco the worst man pinned there? It seems unlikely. I should hate him more fiercely. I should rush at him and hack him down. But this place burns emotion from you. In place of rage I feel hollow, sad. I turn and walk away.
“Wait! Get me down!”
“Get you down?” I turn back, the flame of anger guttering somewhere deep within. “Why?”
“I told you. I gave you information. You owe me.” Marco heaves each word out over a chest being compressed by his own weight.
“This tree will not stand long enough for me to owe you, banker. Not if it stands ten thousand years and you save my life every day.”
He coughs, black blood on his lips. “They’ll hunt you now—the lichkin and what parts of your sister it has taken. A brother’s death would open a door for them and let them emerge together, unborn, a new evil in the world. Your death would seal them into the lands above.”
The thought of being tracked through Hell by some monster bound about my sister’s soul scares me silly but I’m damned if I’ll let Marco see it. “If this . . . thing . . . seeks me out I shall just have to end it. With cold steel!” I draw my sword for good measure—the thing has, after all, been enchanted to end dead creatures as effectively as live ones.
“I can tell you how to save her.” He holds my gaze, eyes dark and glittering.
“My sister?” Saving her hadn’t been on my list—that’s Snorri’s forte. I want to walk away but something won’t let me. “How?”
“It can be done now that you’ve freed her futures from the tree.” His pain is clear in his face for once, his desperation. “You’ll get me down? You promise.”
“By my honour.”
“When you meet them in the living world, your sister and whichever lichkin wears her skin, any sufficiently holy thing will part them.”
“And my sister will . . . live?”
Marco makes that ugly sound again, his laughter. “She’ll die. But properly. Cleanly.”
“Sufficiently holy?” Snorri, rumbles the words beside me.
“Something of importance. It’s the faith of all those believers that will make it work. A focus. Not some church cross. Not holy water from a cathedral font. Some true symbol, some—”
“A cardinal’s seal?” I ask.
Marco nods, face lined with the pain and the effort of it. “Yes. Probably.”
I turn to go again.
“Wait!” I hear Marco gasp as he tries to reach for me.
“What?” I glance back.
“Release me! We made a bargain.”
“Do you have the paperwork, Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold? The correct forms? Are they signed? Witnessed? Do they bear the proper marks?”
“You promised! On your honour, Prince Jalan. Your honour.”
“Oh.” I turn away again. “That.” And start to walk. “If you find it, let me know.”