The Liar's Key
“We’re looking for a bad thing.”
And that was that. We kept going.
• • •
“So, who was Eridruin?” Sailing on a fjord is infinitely preferable to sailing on the sea. The water stays where it’s put and the shore is so close that even I might make it there if it came to swimming. This said, I would rather be sailing over rough seas away from any place famed for monsters than sailing toward it on the flattest of millponds. “I said, who was—”
“I don’t know. Tuttugu?” Snorri kept his eyes on the left shore.
Tuttugu shrugged. “It must ache Eridruin’s spirit to be famed enough for his name to survive but not quite enough for anyone to remember why they remember it.”
A stiff breeze had carried us inland. The day kept grey, the sun showing only brief and weak. By late afternoon we’d covered perhaps thirty miles and seen no sign of habitation. I had thought Harrowheim’s raiders came from further up the fjord, but nobody lived here. Tuttugu had the right of it. A bad place. Somehow you could tell. It wasn’t anything as simple as dead and crooked trees, or rocks with sinister shapes . . . it was a feeling, a wrongness, the certain knowledge that the world grew thin here, and what waited beneath the surface loved us not. I watched the sun sinking toward the high ridges and listened. The Harrowfjord wasn’t silent or lifeless, the water lapped our hull, the sails flapped, birds sang . . . but each sound held a discordant tone, as if the skylarks were just a note away from screaming. You could almost catch it . . . some dreadful melody played out just beneath hearing.
“There.” Snorri pointed to a place high upon the stepped shore to our left. Like a dark eye amid the stony slopes, Eridruin’s Cave watched us. It couldn’t be any other.
The Norsemen lowered the sails and brought us into the shallows. Fjords have deep shallows, diving down as steeply as the valleys that contain them. I jumped out a yard from the shore and managed to wet myself to the hips.
“You’re just going up there . . . right now?” I looked about for the promised monsters. “Shouldn’t we wait and . . . plan?”
Snorri shouldered his axe. “You want to wait until it gets dark, Jal?”
He had a point. “I’ll guard the boat.”
Snorri wound the boat’s line around a boulder that emerged from the water. “Come on.”
The Norsemen set off, Tuttugu at least looking as though he would rather not and casting glances left and right. He carried a rope coiled many times about him, and two lanterns bounced on his hips.
I hurried after them. Somehow I could think of no horror worse than being alone in that place, sitting by the still water as the night poured down the slopes.
“Where are the monsters?” It wasn’t that I wanted to see any . . . but if they were here I’d rather know where.
Snorri paused and looked about. I immediately sat down to catch my breath. He shrugged. “I can’t see any. But then how many places live up to their reputation? I’ve been to plenty of Giant’s This and Troll’s That, without a sniff of either. I climbed the Odin’s Horn and didn’t meet him.”
“And the Fair Maidens are a great disappointment.” Tuttugu nodded. “Who thought to set that name on three rocky isles crammed with ugly hairy men and their ugly hairy wives?”
Snorri nodded up the slope again and set off. In places it was steeper than stairs and I reached out ahead of me, clambering up.
I climbed, expecting attack at any moment, expecting to see bones among the rocks, drifts of them, tooth-marked, some grey with age, some fresh and wet. Instead I discovered just more rocks and that the growing sense of wrongness now whispered around me, audible but too faint to break apart into words.
Within minutes we stood at the cave mouth, a rocky gullet, fringed with lichen above and stained with black slime where the water oozed. Twenty men could march in abreast, and be swallowed.
“Do you hear it?” Tuttugu, more pale than he had ever looked.
We heard it, though perhaps the cave spoke different words to each of us. I heard a woman whispering to her baby, soft at first, promising love . . . then sharper, more strained, promising protection . . . then terrified, hoarse with agony promising— I spoke aloud to overwrite the whispers. “We need to leave. This place will drive us mad.” Already I found myself wondering, if I threw myself down the slope would the voice stop?
“I don’t hear anything.” Snorri walked in. Perhaps his own demons spoke louder than the cave.
I took a step after him, out of habit, then caught myself. Fingers in my ears did nothing to block out the woman’s voice. Worse, I realized there was something familiar about it.