The Wheel of Osheim

The ragged caravan continued on, winding its way through the dunes, limited to the pace of the walking wounded, variously burned by the light of the Builders’ Sun, broken by the blast that reached us minutes later, and torn by the bones of men long dead, emerging from the sands.

I hunched over my malodorous steed, swaying with the motion, sweating in my robes and willing away the miles between us and the safety of Hamada’s walls. Somehow I knew we wouldn’t make it. Perhaps just speaking about the djinn had sealed our fate. Speak of the devil, as it were.

The Builders’ Suns left invisible fire – everyone knew that. There were places even in Red March still tainted with the shadow of the Thousand Suns. Places where a man might walk and find his flesh blistering for no reason, leaving him to die horribly over the next few days. They called them the Promised Lands. One day they would be ours again, but not soon.

I half-expected the djinn to come like that, like the light of the Builders’ Sun, but unseen, turning first one man then the next into columns of flame, molten fats running. I’d seen bad things in Hell and my imagination had plenty to work with.

In fact, djinn burn men from the inside.

It began with writing in the sand. As we snaked between the dunes their blindingly white flanks became scarred with the curving script of the heathens. At first, seen only where the sun grazed a slope at an angle shallow enough for the raised letters to throw a shadow.

None of us knew how long before Tarelle noticed the markings we had been riding between slopes overwritten with descriptions of our fate.

‘What does it say?’ I didn’t really want to know but it’s one of those questions that asks itself.

‘You don’t want to know.’ Mahood looked nauseous, as if he’d eaten one too many sheep’s eyeballs.

Either the entire caravan was literate or the anxiety infectious because within minutes of Tarelle’s discovery each traveller seemed to walk or ride within their own bubble of despair. Prayers were said in quavering voices, the Ha’tari rode closer in, and the whole desert pressed in against us, vast and empty.

Mahood was right, I didn’t want to know what the writing said, but even so part of me ached to be told. The lines of the words, raised against the smoothness of the dunes, drew my eye, maddening and terrifying at the same time. I wanted to ride out and scuff away the messages but fear held me back amid the others. The main thing when trouble strikes is to keep a low profile. Don’t draw attention to yourself – don’t be the lightning rod.

‘How much farther is it?’ I’d asked that question a few times, first in irritation, then desperation. We were close. Ten miles, maybe fifteen, and the dunes would part to reveal Hamada, another city waiting its turn to drown beneath the desert. ‘How much farther?’ I asked it as if repetition would wear away the miles more effectively than camel strides.

Finding myself ignored by Mahood, I turned to Jahmeen, and discovered that I was already the centre of his attention. Something in the stiffness of him, the awkwardness with which he rode his camel, gave me pause and my question stuck in my throat.

I met his eyes. He held me with the same implacable stare his father used – but then I saw it, a flicker of flame, glimpsed through the pupil of each eye.

‘What … what’s written in the sand?’ A new question stuttered out.

Jahmeen parted his lips and I thought he would speak but instead his mouth opened so wide that his jaw creaked, and all that came forth was a hiss, like the sand being stripped from the dunes. He leaned forward, hand clasping around my wrist, and beneath his palm a fire ignited, trying to eat into me, trying to invade. My world became that burning touch – nothing else, not sight, or sound, or drawing breath, just the pain. Pain and memories … the worst memories of all … memories of Hell. And while I suffered and lost myself in them how long would it be before the djinn escaped Jahmeen and hollowed out my flesh, driving my own undernourished soul into Hell for good? I saw Snorri, standing there in my memory, standing there at the start of a tale I had no wish to follow, with that grin of his, that reckless, stupid, brave, infectious grin… All I had to do was hang onto the now. I had to stay here, in the now, with my body, and the pain. I just had to—

Snorri’s hand is clamped about my wrist, the other on my shoulder, preventing me from falling. I’m looking up and he’s framed against a dead sky from which a flat orange light bleeds. Every part of me hurts.

‘The door got away from you, hey?’ He stands me up. ‘Couldn’t hold it myself – had to pull you through quick before it shut again.’

I swallow the scream of raw terror before it chokes me in its bid for freedom. ‘Ah.’

The door is right in front of me, a faint silver rectangle scratched into the dull grey flank of an enormous boulder. It’s fading as I look at it. All life, all my future, everything I know lies on the other side of that door. Kara and Hennan are standing there, just two yards away, probably still staring at it in confusion.

‘Give Kara a minute to lock it. Then we’ll go.’ Snorri looms beside me.

Pretty soon Kara’s confusion will turn into anger as she realizes I’ve picked Loki’s key from her pocket. The thing just seemed to leap into my hand and stick to my fingers, as if it wanted to be stolen.

I cast a quick glance around me. The afterlife looks remarkably dull. They tell in children’s tales that the Builders made ships that flew and some would soar above the clouds and out into the blackness between stars. They say the richest of kings once taxed all his nobles into the poorhouse and built a ship so vast and swift, hung beneath a thousand-acre sail, that it bore men all the way to Mars that, like the Moon, is a world unto itself. They went all those untold thousands of miles and returned with images of a place of dull red rocks and dull red dust and a dry wind that blew forever … and men never again bothered to go there. The deadlands look pretty much like that … only slightly less red.

The dryness prickles against my skin as if the air itself is thirsty, and each part of me is sore like a bruise. In the half-light the shadows across Snorri’s face have a sinister cast, as though his flesh is itself a shadow over the bone beneath and any moment might find it gone, leaving a bare skull to regard me.

‘What the hell is that?’ I point an accusing finger over his shoulder. I tried this once when we first met and earned not so much as a flinch. Now he turns, bound by trust. Quickly I pull Loki’s key from my pocket and jab it toward the fading door. A keyhole appears, the key sinks home, I turn it, turn it back, pull it clear. Quicker than a trice. Locked.

‘I don’t see it.’ Snorri’s still peering at the jumbled rocks when I turn back. Useful stuff, trust. I pocket the key. It was worth sixty-four thousand in crown gold to Kelem. To me it’s worth a brief stay in the deadlands. I’ll open the door again when I’m sure Kara won’t be waiting on the other side of it. Then I’ll go home.

‘Might have been a shadow.’ I scan the horizon. It’s not inspiring. Low hills, scoured with deep gullies, march off into a gloomy haze. The huge boulder we’re next to is one of many scattering a broad plain of fractured rock, dark and jagged pieces of basalt bedded in a dull reddish dust. ‘I’m thirsty.’

‘Let’s go.’ Snorri rests the haft of his axe on his shoulder and sets off, stepping from one sharp rock to the next.

‘Where?’ I follow him, concentrating on my footing, feeling the uncomfortable angles through the soles of my boots.

‘The river.’

‘And you know it’s in this direction … how?’ I struggle to keep up. It’s not hot or cold, just dry. There’s a wind, not enough to pick up the dust, but it blows through me, not around, but through, like an ache deep in the bones.

‘These are the deadlands, Jal. Everyone’s lost. Any direction will take you where you’re going. You just have to hope that’s where you want to be.’

I don’t comment. Barbarians are immune to logic. Instead I glance back at the rock where the door lay, trying to fix it in my memory. It’s crooked over to the right, almost like the letter ‘r’. I should be able to open a door out anywhere I choose, but I don’t much want to put that to the test. It took a mage like Kelem to show us a door in and the chances are he’s in the deadlands now. I’d rather not have to ask him to show me the exit.

We press on, stepping from rock to rock on sore feet, trudging through the dust where the rocks grow sparse. There’s no sound but us. Nothing grows. Just a dry and endless wilderness. I had expected screaming, torn bodies, torture and demons.

‘Is this what you expected?’ I lengthen my stride and catch up with Snorri again.

‘Yes.’

‘I’d always thought Hell would be more … lively. Pitchforks, wailing souls, lakes of fire.’

‘The völvas say the goddess makes a Hel for each man.’

‘Goddess?’ I stub my toe on a rock hidden in the dust and stumble on, cursing.

‘You spent a winter in Trond, Jal! Didn’t you learn anything?’

‘Fuckit.’ I hobble on. The pain from my foot almost unmans me. It’s as if I’ve stepped in acid and it’s eating its way up my leg. If just banging my toe hurts this much in the deadlands I’m terrified of being on the wrong end of any significant injury. ‘I learned plenty.’ Just not about their damned sagas. Most of them seemed to be about Thor hitting things with his hammer. More interesting than the stories Roma tries to feed us, true, but not much of a code to live by.

Snorri stops and I hobble two paces past him before realizing. He spreads his arms as I turn. ‘Hel rules here. She watches the dead—’

‘No, wait. I do remember this one.’ Kara had told me. Hel, ice-hearted, split nose to crotch by a line dividing a left side of pure jet from a right side of alabaster. ‘She watches the souls of men, her bright eye sees the good in them, her dark eye sees the evil, and she cares not for either … did I get it right?’ I hop on one leg, massaging my toe.

Snorri shrugs. ‘Close enough. She sees the courage in men. Ragnarok is coming. Not the Thousand Suns of the Builders, but a true end when the world cracks and burns and the giants rise. Courage is all that will matter then.’

I look around at the rocks, the dust, the barren hills. ‘So where’s mine? If this is your hell where’s mine?’ I don’t want to see mine. At all. But even so, to be wandering around in a barbarian’s hell seems … wrong. Or perhaps a key ingredient in my personal hell is that nobody recognizes the precedence of nobility over commoners.

‘You don’t believe in it,’ Snorri says. ‘Why would Hel build it for you if you don’t believe in it?’

‘I do!’ Protesting my faithfulness in all things is a reflex with me.

‘Your father is a priest, yes?’

‘A cardinal! He’s a cardinal, not some damn village priest.’

Snorri shrugs as if these are just words. ‘Priests’ children seldom believe. No man is a prophet in his own land.’