“Jesus Christ! What was that thing?” I gasp it between deep breaths, bent double, hands on my thighs. Looking back I see the raised dust that marks our hasty escape from the small boy and his ridiculously vast dog.
“You did want to see monsters, Jal.” Snorri, leaning back against another of the towering stones that punctuate the plain.
“A hell-hound . . .” I straighten up and shake my head. “Well I’ve seen enough now. Where’s this fucking river?”
“Come on.” Snorri leads off, his axe over his shoulder, the blades finding something bloody in the deadlight and offering it back to Hell.
We trek another mile, or ten, in the dust. I’m starting to see figures in the distance, souls toiling across the plain or clustered in groups, or just standing there.
“We’re getting closer.” Snorri waves his axe toward the shade of a man a few hundred yards off, staked out among the rocks. “It takes courage to cross the Slidr. It gives many pause.”
“Looks like more than a lack of courage holding that one back!” The stakes go through the soul’s hands and feet.
Snorri shakes his head, walking on. “The mind makes its own bonds here.”
“So all these people are doomed to wander here forever? They won’t ever cross over?”
“Men leave echoes of themselves . . .” He pauses as if trying to recall the words. “Echoes scattered across the geometry of death. These are shed skins. The dead have to leave anything they can’t carry across the river.”
“Where are you getting this from?”
“Kara. I wasn’t going to spend months travelling to death’s door with a völva and not ask her any questions about what to expect!”
I let that one lie. It’s what I did, but then I never had any intention of ending up here.
We slog up a low ridge and beyond it the land falls away. There below us is the river, a gleaming silver ribbon in a valley that weaves away into grey distances, the only thing in all that awful place with any hint of life in it. I start forward but immediately the ground drops in a crumbling cliff a little taller than me and at its base a broad sprawl of hook-briar, black and twisted, as you’ll see in a wood after the first frosts.
“We’ll have to go a—” I break off. There’s movement on the edge of the briar. I shift to get a better view. It’s the boy from the milestone, lunging in among the thorns, leaving them glistening. “Hey!”
“Leave him, Jal. It is the way it is. It has been like this for an age before we came and will be like it after we leave.”
If we leave!
“But . . .”
Snorri sets off to find an easier route down. I can’t leave, though. Almost as if the briar has me hooked too. “Hey! Wait! Keep still and I can get you out.” I cast about for a way down the cliff that won’t pitch me in among the thorns.
“I’m not trying to get out.” The boy pauses his lunging and looks up at me. Even from this distance his face is a nightmare, flayed by the briar, his flesh ripped, studded with broken thorns bedded bone-deep.
“What . . .” I step back as the ground crumbles beneath my foot and sandy soil cataracts over the drop. “What the hell are you doing then?”
“Looking for my brother.” Blood spills from torn lips. “He’s in there somewhere.”
He throws himself back at the thorns. The spikes are as long as his fingers and set with a small hook behind each point to lodge in the flesh.
“Stop! For Christ’s sake!”
I try to climb down where the cliff dips but it breaks away and I scamper back.
“He wouldn’t stop if it were me.” The words sound ragged as if his cheeks are torn. I can hardly see him in the mass of the briar now.
“Stop—” Snorri’s hand grabs my shoulder and he pulls me away midprotest.
“You can’t get caught up in this. Everything here is a snare.” He walks me away.
“Me? Hasn’t this place had its hooks in you ever since you first held that key?” They’re just words though, without heat. I’m not thinking about Snorri. I’m thinking about my sister, dead before she was ever born. I’m thinking about the boy and his brother and what I might do to save my own sibling. Less than that, I say to myself. Less than that.
I woke, still drunk, and with so many devils hammering on the inside of my head that it took me an age to understand I was in a prison cell. I lay there in the heat, eyes tight against the pain and the blinding light lancing in through a small high window, too miserable to call out or demand release. Omar found me there at last. I don’t know how much later. Long enough to pass the contents of a jug of water through me and leave the place stinking slightly worse than I found it.