Snorri shrugs. ‘Best not get in their way.’ He waits for me to recover, impatient to follow the souls we saw.
‘Dust and rocks.’ I’m not ready yet. I rasp a breath in. ‘Is that as scary as Norse storytellers can make the afterlife?’
Again the shrug. ‘We’re not like you followers of the White Christ, Jal. There’s no paradise foretold, no roaming in green pastures for the blessed, no everlasting torment for the wicked. There’s only Ragnarok. The last battle. No promise of salvation or a happy ending, only that everything will end in blood and war, and men will have one last chance to raise their axes and shout their defiance at the end of time. The priests tell us that death is just a place to wait.’
‘Marvellous.’ I straighten. Holding out a hand as he tries to move off. ‘If it’s a place to wait why be in such a hurry?’
Snorri ignores that. Instead he holds out a fist, opening it to reveal a heaped palm. ‘Besides, it’s not dust. It’s dried blood. The blood of everyone who ever lived.’
‘I can make you see fear in a handful of dust.’ The words escape me with a breath.
Snorri smiles at that.
‘Elliot John,’ I say. I once spent a day memorizing quotes from classical literature to impress a woman of considerable learning – also a considerable fortune and a figure like an hourglass full of sex. I can’t remember the quotes now, but occasionally one of them will surface at random. ‘A great bard from the Builders’ time. He also wrote some of those songs you Vikings are always butchering in your ale halls!’ I start to brush myself down. ‘It’s just pretty words though. Dust is dust. I don’t care where it came from.’
Snorri lets the dust sift through his fingers, drifting on the wind. For a moment it’s just dust. Then I see it. The fear. As if the dust becomes a living thing, twisting while it falls, hinting at a face, a baby’s, a child’s, too indistinct to recognize, it could be anyone … me … suddenly it’s me … it ages, haggard, hollow, a skull, gone. All that’s left is the terror, as if I saw my life played out in an instant, dust on the wind, as swiftly taken, just as meaningless.
‘Let’s go.’ I need to be off, moving, not thinking.
Snorri leads the way, following the direction the souls took, though there’s no sign of them now.
We walk forever. There are no days or nights. I’m hungry and thirsty, hungrier and thirstier than I have ever been, but it gets no worse and I don’t die. Perhaps eating, drinking, and dying are not things that happen here, only waiting and hurting. It starts to hollow you out, this place. I’m too dry for complaining. There’s just the dust, the rocks, the distant hills that never draw any closer, and Snorri’s back, always moving on.
‘I wonder what Aslaug would have made of this place.’ Perhaps it would have scared her too, no darkness, a dead light that gives no warmth and casts no shadows.
‘Baraqel would have been the best ally to bring here,’ Snorri says.
I wrinkle my lip. ‘That fussy old maid? He’d certainly find plenty of subject matter for his lectures on morality.’
‘He was a warrior of the light. I liked him,’ Snorri says.
‘We’re talking about the same irritating angel, yes?’
‘Maybe not.’ Snorri shrugged. ‘We gave him his voice. He built himself from our imaginations. Perhaps for you he was different. But we both saw him at the wrong-mages’ door. That Baraqel we could use.’
I had to nod at that. Yards tall, golden winged with a silver sword. Baraqel might have been a pain but his heart was in the right place. Right now I’d be happy to have him in my head telling me what a sinner I was if it meant he would spring into being when trouble approached. ‘I suppose I might have misjudged—’
‘What?’ Snorri stops, his arm out to stop me too.
Just ahead of us is a milestone, old, grey, and weathered. It bears the roman runes for six and fresh blood glistens along one side. I look around. There’s nothing else, just this milestone in the dust. In the distance, far behind us, I can just make out, among the shapes of the vast boulders that scatter the plain, one that looks crooked over to the right, almost like the letter ‘r’.
Snorri kneels down to study the blood. ‘Fresh.’
‘You shouldn’t be here.’ There’s blood running in rivulets down the face of the boy who’s speaking, a young child not much taller than the milestone. He wasn’t there a moment ago. He can’t be more than six or seven. His skull has been caved in, his blonde hair is scarlet along one side. Blood trickles in parallel lines down the left side of his face, filling his eye, dividing him like Hel herself.
‘We’re passing through,’ Snorri says.
There is a growl behind us. I turn, slowly, to see a wolfhound approaching. I’ve seen a Fenris wolf, so I’ve seen bigger, but this is a huge dog, its head level with my ribs. It has the sort of eyes that tell you how much it will enjoy eating you.
‘We don’t want any trouble.’ I reach for my sword. Edris Dean’s sword. Snorri’s hand covers mine before I draw it.
‘Don’t be afraid, Justice won’t hurt you, he just comes to protect me,’ the boy says.
I turn so I have a side facing each of them. ‘I wasn’t afraid,’ I lie.
‘Fear can be a useful friend – but it’s never a good master.’ The boy looks at me, blood dripping into the dust. He doesn’t sound like a boy. I wonder if he memorized that from the same book I used.
‘Why are you out here?’ Snorri asks him, kneeling to be on a level, though keeping his distance. ‘The dead need to cross the river.’
The hound circles around to stand beside the milestone, and the boy reaches up to pat his back. ‘I left myself here. Once you cross the river you need to be strong. I only took what I needed.’ He smiles at us. He’s a nice-looking kid … apart from all the blood.
‘Look,’ I say. I step toward him, past Snorri. ‘You shouldn’t be out here by y—’
Suddenly the hound is bigger than any Fenris wolf ever was, and on fire. Flames clothe the beast, head to claw, kindling in its eyes. Its maw is a foot from my face, and when it opens its mouth to howl, an inferno erupts past its teeth.
‘No!’ I screamed and found myself face to face with the djinn, at the heart of the sandstorm. Somehow I’d resisted its attempts to drive me out of my body again. Perhaps that child’s hell-hound had scared it out. It certainly scared a whole other mess right out of me, double quick!
I saw the djinn only because each wind-borne grain of sand passing through its invisible body became heated to the point of incandescence, revealing the spirit shaped by the glow, trailing burning sand on the lee side where the wind tore through it. Here before me was a demon as I had always imagined them, stolen from the lurid imaginations of churchmen, horns and fangs and white-hot eyes.
‘Fuck.’ My next discovery was that being chest-deep in sand made running away difficult. And the discovery after that was worse. Through the storm I could make out a body, lying sprawled on the dune behind the djinn. A momentary lull allowed a better view … and somehow it was me lying there, slack-jawed and sightless. Which made me the one doing the watching … an ejected soul being sucked down into Hell!
The djinn held position, just before me, illustrated by the glowing sand tearing through its form. It just stood there, between me and my body, close enough to touch. It didn’t even have to push me, the dune seemed eager to suck me down. Scared witless, I dug my arms down and tried to draw my sword but the sand defeated me and my questing hand came up empty. I grabbed the key off my chest, unsure of how it was going to help … or if it even was the key, since there had appeared to be an identical one hanging about my