The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

“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.