Gud i himmel, the cliff!
His numbed fingers scraped on something, slithered, clutched – and held. Frantically he twisted round, grabbed with his other hand and hung on, half crouching, while the snowfall slithered out into darkness. Under his fingers he felt a sharp edge of rock, cold, dry and infinitely welcome. When everything was quiet he hauled himself painfully up and leant there, gasping. He was out of the storm here, all right, but it was too dark to get any idea of just where ‘here’ was. The wind sounded distant and strange, and after a moment he realised why: it was mingling with the sound of the sea, rising from below. He shuddered. He had been too near the cliffs, right enough – as good as dancing blindfold on the edge of them. Sheer chance had led him into what must be one of the deep gullies leading down to the beach. He could just as easily have gone right over.
He still might, too. He couldn’t just stay here, safe as it seemed. The chill rock seemed to have drained the last heat out of him; he felt as if he’d never be warm again. If he could only make it down to the beach, though, the tide should still be out; he might just be able to get round to Oddsness village by following the cliffs. A better chance than the unsheltered clifftops offered, anyway. And there were still the hunters …
Carefully, but not too slowly, he began to feel his way along the rockface and down the steeply sloping path.
In places it was more like an irregular natural stair, and he would have to crouch on each step and feel cautiously around for his next foothold. Once, when his feet barely reached it, he had to give up and just risk the drop, not knowing whether it would be firm or wide enough. Sand squeaked between rock and shoe as he landed, but it was all right. He stopped for a rest, though he no longer felt so exhausted, and wondered about Jess. At least she ought to be all right: Neville and Harry would surely have got her back. But somehow he couldn’t see her face, however much he tried. It was Pru, always Pru – and far too clearly.
The sea sounded louder in his ears, louder and closer. Had he really come that far? Maybe. He was losing his sense of time here in the dark. But even as he thought of it, he realised he could actually see something now. A faint, glimmering wedge split the night in front of him – an opening. He seemed to be in a great cleft in the rocks – one that led out onto the beach. And it was definitely getting lighter. Maybe the clouds were breaking at last, and the moon was coming through. Certainly there didn’t seem to be a flake of snow in the air. He stumbled eagerly forward, and had just time to feel the sudden yielding of sand underfoot before he tripped on something in it – a stick, maybe – and fell flat.
In the giddy instant of falling, light came, and a greying sky whirled above him. He landed on his back, staring upwards, dizzy and disoriented. Shadow-cliffs loomed over him, looking far too high from this angle. There were no cliffs that high at Oddsness – no cliffs that high anywhere. And above them great dim outlines among clouds, gnarled, fantastical, like chains of rounded hills, almost spilling over the edge …
Dazed, uncomprehending, Hal rolled over and clutched at his head, squeezing his eyes tight shut as if to force out the strangeness. But when he opened them again, he saw the sea.
Vast, dark and empty, it stretched out before him to the horizon. Nothing broke its surface but the grey crests of the waves that came rolling steadily in to shore – far too steadily. No gale or blizzard drove these slow, steady breakers that came rumbling up the beach like some huge thing breathing, tossing and turning salt-bleached flotsam where they broke. Sea and sky grew out of a horizon hung with leaden, unmoving clouds; they stretched like a carved curtain across the whole sky. The light on them was too bright for moonlight. It was more like a grim winter’s dawn, pale and sourceless. But unlike dawn, it was unchanging.
He looked down, and saw what had tripped him, sticking up out of the sand. He reached out gingerly and pulled it free. Light and dry as driftwood in his fingers, it was no stick. He flinched slightly at the feel of it, surprising himself: he handled bones enough in his line, even human bones. A lower arm bone, an ulna – he noted that in a detached, dreamy kind of way, and that it was longer than his own; it had belonged to somebody very large indeed. He laid it gently back on the sand and stood up, shakily. On either side those lowering cliffs curved outward, unbroken, into the hazy distance, forming the arms of an immense bay. He could not see to the limits of it. But as far as his vision reached there was no life, no movement, nothing except that gently rolling sea, the waves and the flotsam. He took a few steps down the beach towards it, feet grinding into coarser shingle – and stopped dead. At his feet, near the damp margin of sand, lay another bone, much eroded but recognisable – near it another, and then another. Those were vertebrae, almost certainly human. He stared down at the sea, unable to take another step. A wave broke with a soft rumble, and out of the surf rolled something rounded and white, tumbling up the beach to rest as the water fell away again. For an instant it sat there, grinning mockery as empty as its eyes, and then the next wave snatched it back like a disobedient child. Hal looked wildly from side to side. All the tumbling flotsam was – He stooped, dug in his fingers, then quickly dusted them clean on his coat. Now he knew what the shingle was, too.
The light wind tasted bitter on his lips. He turned and bolted for the cliff, hearing the bone fragments pop and scatter under him. But as he neared it he faltered, slowed, stood. The cliff towered above him, a citadel of smooth black rock, unyielding, unbroken. He reached out, to make sure it was no illusion. The stone was hard and cold, but the chill in him was deeper still. The crevice he had come through might never have existed.
There was a sudden, violent judder in the rock. He felt it twitch like the flank of an animal. Through earth and sky rang a deep, vibrating groan. His body throbbed with harmonies he couldn’t hear, deeper than the deepest organ chords. Hanging onto the cliff, he twisted round and saw that smooth sea become a rippling, boiling cauldron. Behind him the tormented rock quivered and cracked like a cannonshot. He threw himself aside as debris pattered down, and a moment later a massive boulder spun almost idly downward to thump into a fountain of sand where he had stood. Afraid of others, he looked up and saw that the heavy clouds were stirring at last, tearing and parting. Light shone through the gaps, slanting down in great rays through the icy haze in the air. But it was no wholesome sunlight. A stark, intense blue, it laid a steely tinge on seafoam and sand, deepening the shadows where it did not fall.
One glaring beam swept down the beach around him. Just where he had first fallen, he saw the sand convulse. It scattered aside as something thrust up through it, a dark stalk growing like a seedling in a time-lapse film. It writhed and twisted upward, swelled and spread at the top – not into a flower. A human hand raked at the sky. Beside it another arm thrust up, and a little way off another, and another, and still more. The beach rippled and surged as if a nest of burrowing things writhed in panic beneath it.
Sudden pain lanced into Hal’s leg with a jerk that almost overbalanced him. Crab-claw fingers, withered and dark, crooked out of the sand to grip at his ankle like the last handhold of a drowning man. Even as they clutched they grew, the withered muscles filling out like feeding leeches. With a strangled cry of disgust he tore free and staggered back, barely dodging another hand that came inching feebly out of the sand, beckoning, entreating. The whole beach seemed to be sprouting around him like some obscene parody of a cornfield, everywhere dark grainstalk arms rising and swaying in a dead wind. The harvest – Around the first outflung arm a squirming outline took shape in the sand.
Hal turned on his heel and fled through the rippling mass, staggering over things that leapt and twisted underfoot. A hand plucked at his clothes, tripping him. Black nails raked his cheek as he landed. He scrambled back on his feet, and in a fury of loathing kicked and trampled both hands back into the sand. He stumbled a few steps further, and no hands clutched. He was beyond the nimbus of the ghastly light. But where he had been, the beach was blackened now, a seething, beseeching
mass of arms.
From the heart of it a single figure heaved itself upright, swaying uncertainly, and raised its arms to the opening in the clouds. That was closing now, narrowing as if to focus the light. The figure shimmered in the intensity of it, and it seemed to Hal that it turned for an instant to look at him. Then the light flashed into an unbearable blue-white arc, blinding him. Another tremor lashed the beach, flinging him to his knees in a welter of bone fragments. By the time the seared streaks of colour faded from his sight, the clouds had healed, the sea was calm and the beach was as empty as he had first seen it. Stark as it was, it was peaceful again.
Hal slumped back onto the sand, head hanging. The worst, the very worst thing was that he couldn’t believe he was dreaming or schizoid. He was here. Whatever happened to him here would matter. If, for example, those hands had held him … He looked away –
And sprang back, scrabbling frantically to get up. The dark figure beside him made no move. It simply stood, tall and still, in a great cowled robe the colour of the stone. No face was visible. He felt strangely certain that this was not what he had seen rise out of the sand. That had sprung up in violence and turmoil. This figure’s stillness and calm were at one with the world around him – and all the more awesome.
All it needs is a scythe …
It moved. Cloaked in shadow, it bent over him as he sprawled helpless. In the depths of the cowl he saw a glint like an eye, a gleam of gold. Light was growing, and a face swimming gradually into focus. A woman’s face, framed in long blonde hair, one blue eye open. On that side calm, serene, beautiful – on the other, slack, swollen, puffy and blackened with suffused blood, the eye closed. A dead face. As he had last seen it –
He found his voice. ‘Pru?’ he croaked.
She hangs between life and death. That is my kingdom, so I speak to you through her face. Do you know where you are?
He swallowed. ‘N … yes.’ The worst shock of all was realising that he had known, and never admitted it to himself. ‘Nastrand –’
Indeed. The Seastrand of the Dead. Do you know who I am?
Now he had to believe he was mad, and couldn’t. ‘You … you are Hela. You rule … in the myths you rule the kingdom of the dead.’
More, and less. But that will do. I need one who will know his way. I cannot leave this place. I am this place. And now it is being invaded – you saw. The face hung masklike before him, yet there was a terrible bitterness in the voice he heard. My peace is broken – what I hold in trust is taken. Old powers are stirring, long, long past their time, beyond hope of good or gain. Only hatred and envy remain. And it is your world they threaten with Hela’s stolen legions – all remaining that they can command. But as they breached my barriers, so also can I. I led you here before they could hurl you down as they sought, and so they have no power over you. You went looking for help. You would not have found it. I cannot give it – but I can send you as my messenger to where you will find it. Will you go?
The voice was less and less like Pru’s, more like the sea, rolling out of an infinite distance. Hal felt his fists clench convulsively till the nails dug hard into his palms. He desperately needed something solid to hang onto. He lay on a beach that was not sand, calmly talking to a goddess out of legends he’d thrilled to as a boy, studied as a man, without ever really believing in them for a single moment. The beach, the sea, the bitter cold, the face that hung over him were the landscapes of a dream, a delusion – but as real as the bite of pain in his fists. It was his own world that felt like the dream. And in this one he had no handhold, no basis of reason or logic to guide him.
The einherjar of legend walk in your world, and threaten it and all that you love. Is that not reason enough?
He stared at the ravaged face for a moment. Then something flared up in him, driving back the deadening bonds of cold – a great anger. ‘Yes,’ he growled, ‘it is. I will go.’
The hood drew back, and he clambered painfully to his feet before the figure. A fold of the robe lifted, gesturing down the empty beach to an outcropping of the cliff, great, jagged rock strata that stuck out of the sand like some perished giant’s bones.
Your way is there. And your enemies.
He waited, but it said nothing more. ‘You must tell me –’
You know enough. That is why I chose you.
Hal hesitated, then flung out an arm and flicked the shadowing hood right back, baring the hidden head and shoulders. Even in the dim light, Pru’s hair gleamed, lifting a little in the light breeze. The face remained serene, calm, in its living half. On one bare shoulder he saw a red mark – his own mouth had left that. ‘About her,’ he grated.
She will live. Beyond that I know nothing, and I shape nothing. Go now.
He found himself backing away down the beach, unable to take his eyes from the half-ruined face. He had to know more – or did he? He felt a strange kind of certainty, as if some unreadable inner self already knew where he must go, what he must do. Perhaps that eerie voice had told him more than he had heard. The figure seemed to be blurring with distance already, far sooner than it should. He saw the bare shoulders move, the hood rise again to cover the bright hair. Only for a moment he seemed to see something else in its shadows, a glimpse of dark curls – Jess? Suddenly she was clear in his mind again, etched sharp by anxiety. But he had seen no face … Then his foot slipped on rock, and he looked round sharply. He was already at the outcrop, and when he looked back again the great beach was empty.
He felt hideously alone and unsure of himself. The path that must lie ahead of him – in the myths there was only one way out of Hela’s kingdom, and few, if any, ever passed it. He cudgelled his brain for more details, but they wouldn’t come. That shocked him. It was the kind of thing any archaeologist absolutely had to know, to explain signs and symbols and images, and he’d always thought he did. But for years now his knowledge of mythology must have been slipping away from him, shrivelling up in a mass of dry detail – just one more thing he could always look up in his library. A lot of use that was to him now! Legend didn’t come alive for him any more, not the way it did for Jess. Only now it was alive, and with a vengeance. She might know more. If only – He stamped that thought out sharply. This was the last place in the universe – or outside it – he should want to see her.
He stared up at the jagged slope and the gnarled ridge above it, straining his eyes. If he wanted her so much, that was his best – his only – hope of ever seeing her again. Was that why he’d been given a glimpse of her? As an encouragement? Or a warning?
‘You and your goddamned threats!’ he shouted furiously down the beach. ‘You think I need them? Keep your claws off her!’ But the soft wind whipped away his words before they could even echo, and the sea whispered on, unmoved. He could only turn and begin to climb.
The way was clear, in places a rough rock stair like the one he had come down, elsewhere a path that wound through gloomy rifts and crevices in the rock, so deep and narrow that only the faintest streak of pale sky showed overhead. But the footing was easy, as if worn smooth by many feet, and he had other things to worry about. This was the Path of the Dead, and the Vikings had shrouded, it in menace. And beyond it, what? His enemies, that was about all he could be sure of. The hunters would be on his trail again.
He walked on and on. Time lost its meaning in the unchanging twilight, the sheer mechanical action of walking, the rhythm of his footfalls grating softly on the dry rock. He never felt tired or hungry or thirsty, though hours or years could have been passing. Only the terrible chill stayed with him but it, too, was a negative thing, an absence of heat, and hardly bothered him now. He found it all too easy not to think as he plodded on, to let his mind wander off into vague memories – and all too dangerous. He concentrated, and traced an image on the darkness ahead – a special smile, lazy and loving, to bring the only kind of warmth he could expect in this dark place.
I’m not dead yet, kaereste – not by a long chalk. He sighed. He did want he
r here, despite himself. He couldn’t help it. Once before, after his divorce, she’d salvaged his life when it was in ruins. Now you are the last of it I can hang onto. I will get back to you yet …
He looked up defiantly at the sky – and stopped short. When had it changed? High overhead there was something like a gigantic roof, an enormous tangle of matted shadow-shapes through which only a dim blue-green light filtered down. The cleft was shallower here. He could see most of the sky, and the massive web covered it all. And now he had stopped he could hear something, too – a remote rumble, like a continuous storm in the distance. He reached out to touch the rock wall, and felt the vibration in his fingertips. Whatever it was, it must be large. He shrugged sharply, and strode on. He’d find out soon enough.
Now the path grew swiftly steeper, and the sound of his footsteps changed. He was walking over broken rock, even gravelly soil. Little avalanches rattled and skittered down the slope, sounding surprisingly loud even over the growing rumble ahead. Two high, jagged boulders leaned like broken gateposts over the narrowing path. He squeezed between them and found himself at its abrupt end – a steep cliff, its heights lost in the shadowy canopy. The lower levels looked climbable, but as he came closer he slowed, unwilling to believe what he was seeing, until at last he stood, dazed, at the foot of it, and reached out to touch the rough surface. He snatched his hand away as if it had burnt him, but it was not hot; it had the cool firmness of living bark. The sheer impact of the realisation left him gasping for breath. He knew now what the great vaulting was, and his thoughts withered away under the immensity of it, and what must lie above. He was no more than a mote, a tiny parasite clinging and cowering at the very root of the world.
The Ice King Page 21
