The Wheel of Osheim

‘That sort of pagan nonsense might—’

‘It’s from the bible.’ Snorri stops again.

‘Oh.’ I stop too. He’s right, I guess. I’ve never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy. ‘Why have we stopped?’

Snorri says nothing, so I look where he’s looking. Ahead of us the air is splintering and through the fractures I see glimpses of a sky that already looks impossibly blue, too full of the vital stuff of life to have any place in the drylands of death. The tears grow larger – I see the arc of a sword – a spray of crimson, and a man tumbles out of nowhere, the fractures sealing themselves behind him. I say a man, but really it’s a memory of him, sketched in pale lines, occupying the space where he should be. He stands, not disturbing so much as a mote of dust, and I see the bloodless wound that killed him, a gash across his forehead that skips down to his broken collarbone and through it into the meat of him.

As the man stands, the process is repeating to his left and right, and again twenty yards behind them. More men drop through from whatever battlefield they’re dying on. They ignore us, standing with heads bowed, a few with scraps of armour, all weaponless. I’m about to call out to the first when he turns and walks away, his path close to our own heading but veering a little to the left.

‘Souls.’ I mean to say out loud but only a whisper escapes.

Snorri shrugged. ‘Dead men.’ He starts walking too. ‘We’ll follow them.’

I start forward but the air breaks before me. I see the world, I can smell it, feel the breeze, taste the air. And suddenly I understand the hunger in dead men’s eyes. I’ve been in the drylands less than an hour and already the need that just this glimpse of life gives me is consuming. There’s a battle raging that makes Aral Pass look like a skirmish: men hack at each other with bright steel and wild cries, the roar of massed troops, the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying. Even so I’m lunging forward, so desperate for the living world that even a few moments there before someone spears me seem worth it.

It’s the soul that stops me. The one that punched this hole into death. I meet him head on, emerging, being born into death. There’s nothing to him, just the faint lines that remember him – that and the howling rage and fear and pain of his last seconds. It’s enough to stop me though. He runs over my skin like a scald, sinks through it, and I fall back, shrieking, overwritten by his memories, drowning in his sorrow. Martell he’s called. Martell Harris. It seems more important than my own name. I try to speak my name, whatever it is, and find my lips have forgotten the shape of it.

‘Get up, Jal!’

I’m on the ground, dust rising all around me. Snorri is kneeling over me, hair dark around his face. I’m losing him. Sinking. The dust rising, thicker by the moment. I’m Martell Harris. The sword went into me like ice but I’m all right, I just need to get back into the battle. Martell moves my arms, struggles to rise. Jalan is gone, sinking into the dust.

‘Stay with me, Jal!’ I can feel Snorri’s grip on me. Nothing else, just that iron grip. ‘Don’t let him drive you out. You’re Jalan. Prince Jalan Kendeth.’

The fact of Snorri actually saying my name right – title and all – jolts me out of the dust’s soft embrace.

‘Jalan Kendeth!’ The grip tightens. It really hurts. ‘Say it! SAY IT!’

‘Jalan Kendeth!’ The words tore from me in a great shout.

I found myself face to face with the thing that used to be Sheik Malik’s son, Jahmeen, before the djinn burned him hollow. Somehow the memory of that Hell-bound soul pushing into me, stealing my flesh had brought me back to the moment, back to fighting the djinn for control using whatever tricks I’d learned in the drylands.

The grip on my wrist is iron, anchoring me. And the pain! With my senses returned to me I found my whole arm on fire with white agony. Desperate to escape before the djinn could slip from Jahmeen and possess me in his stead I headbutted him full in the face and wrenched my arm clear. A heartbeat later I drove both heels viciously into my camel’s sides. With a lurch and a bugle of protest the beast took to the gallop, me bouncing about atop, hanging on with every limb at my disposal.

I didn’t look back. Damsels in distress be damned. Before I’d broken that grip I’d felt a familiar feeling. As the djinn had tried to move in, I in turn had been moving out. I knew exactly what Hell felt like and that was exactly where the djinn was trying to put the bits of me it didn’t need.

About a mile on, still following the channel between the two great dunes that had hemmed us in, my camel stopped. Where horses will frequently run past the limit of their endurance given enough encouragement, camels are beasts of a very different temperament. Mine just decided it had had enough and came to a dead halt, using the sand to arrest its progress. An experienced rider can usually pick up on the warning signs and prepare himself. An inexperienced rider, scared witless, has to rely on the sand to slow them down too. This is achieved by allowing the rider’s momentum to launch him or her over the head of his or her camel. The rest takes care of itself.

I got up quick enough, spitting out the desert. Put enough fear or embarrassment into a man and he’s immune to all but the very worst pain. Back along the winding route I’d ridden between dune crests a sandstorm had risen. Four main things worried me about it. Firstly, unlike dust, sand takes a hell of a wind to rise up into the air. Secondly, rather than the traditional advancing storm-wall, this storm appeared to be localized to the valley between two dunes, no more than two hundred yards apart. Thirdly, the wind was hardly blowing. And finally, what wind there was blowing toward the sandstorm and yet it seemed to be advancing on me at quite a rate!

‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ I leapt toward my camel and scrambled up his side. Somehow my panic panicked the camel and the damn thing took off with me halfway into the saddle. I lay, sprawled across its hump for twenty yards, hanging on desperately, but it’s hard enough to stay on a galloping camel if you’re in the right place and sadly sometimes desperation isn’t a sufficient adhesive. My camel and I parted company, leaving me with a handful of camel hair, an ill-smelling blanket, and a seven-foot drop to the ground.

The outer edges of the sandstorm were on me before I’d managed to get back any of the air that the impact sent rushing from my lungs. I could feel the djinn in there, more diffuse than it had been when confined inside Jahmeen, but there none the less, scraping sandy fingers across my face, burning around every grain the wind carried.

This time the invasion came indirectly. The djinn had tried to overwhelm me and kick my soul into Hell, but for whatever reason, perhaps because I’d just come from there, or perhaps due to the magic that runs in Kendeth veins, I’d resisted. Now it took away my vision and my hearing, and as I hunched there trying to snatch a breath that wouldn’t burn my lungs, hoping not to be buried alive, the djinn prickled at the back of my mind, seeking a way in. Again my memories of the Hell-trip surged forward, Snorri grabbing me, trying to help me drive that stranger’s soul out, trying to help me keep my body.

‘No way.’ The words came through gritted teeth and narrowed lips. The djinn wouldn’t fool me twice. ‘I’m Jalan Kendeth and I’m wise to your tri—’

But the sand is dust now, choking dust, and I’m being hauled through it by a big hand, fingers knotted in my shirt.

‘I’m Jalan Kendeth!’ I shout it then fall to coughing. The dust mixed with my saliva looks like blood on my hands – exactly like blood. ‘—alan’ cough ‘Kendeth!’

‘Good man!’ Snorri sets me on my feet, slapping the worst of the dust off me. ‘One of the dead ran into you – almost took your body right off you!’

I feel I was somewhere else, somewhere sandy, doing something important. There was something I had to remember, something vital … but quite what it was escapes me even as I search for it.

‘Take my body? They … they can do that?’ More spluttering. My chest aches. I wipe my hands on my trousers. They’ve seen better days. ‘The dead can take your body?’

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’.