A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  Bolldhe stopped dead. There ahead of him right in the middle of the cave could be seen a solitary figure swathed in white garments, squatting by a stream that leaked slickly through the cavern. The face was shrouded beneath a pointed white hood, and its attention was wholly focused on some task it was performing. Bolldhe shivered convulsively but called out cautiously.

  ‘Yorda?’

  Still the figure did not look up but continued in its task of washing clothes in the water. Bolldhe peered more closely, and saw that the stream ran red with blood from the same garments. The smell was like a sluice in an abattoir.

  He guessed it was not Yorda.

  ‘Messy devil, aren’t you?’ issued a voice from beneath the hood.

  Definitely not Yorda.

  ‘Who are you?’ Bolldhe asked tentatively, not moving from the spot.

  Again that voice, like dry twigs being snapped: ‘I’m old Benne Nighe, and I’ve got something that belongs to you.’

  Bolldhe did not budge. Having fled from his awful vision, his courage was completely spent. He began to quiver all over, and sweat beaded his face despite the freezing cold in the subterranean cavern.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, I’m not real,’ the clothes-washing figure assured him with perhaps the barest hint of mockery.

  Fearfully, more out of desperation than courage, Bolldhe finally padded closer. All he wanted now was to exit this awfulness, even if it meant facing more and greater terror to do so. It was an expedient like forcing one’s fingers down one’s throat to vomit.

  Just two yards off, and keeping the stream between himself and the apparition, Bolldhe stopped. He looked down at the filthy water and bloodied clothes, and straightaway recognized the garments as his own.

  The figure finally looked up at him, revealing a shrivelled, bark-skin huldre face utterly devoid of even the merest trace of humanity. Eyes white as an empty page suddenly dilated and, before he had the chance even to cry out, they drew him in. From somewhere distant Bolldhe could hear sounds like a funeral procession and the crackling of a great fire. Then the Benne Nighe’s eyes turned from white to red, and within them Bolldhe could see flames rising, reaching out to consume him.

  ‘Idiot!’ she spat. ‘Coward!’

  And Bolldhe was screaming in the fires of his own cremation . . .

  With a wail of anguish, Bolldhe awoke. It was absolutely freezing and he was being attacked by a terrible leather-faced devil in a white hood. Bolldhe pushed it away with a scream, lurched to his feet and immediately fell back onto the icy ground.

  ‘Bolldhe, you idiot! Get a grip, man!’

  He stared up at the devil blankly, not understanding where he was or what was going on.

  ‘The dream, remember?’

  ‘The dream . . .’ Bolldhe repeated dumbly. Strong hands held him down but not ungently. He looked up at the figure above him and gradually made out – for it was almost dark – only the shaman, the white hood a layer of snow covering his shaggy hair.

  Bolldhe stared about himself to check that this was all real and spotted the rest of the party going about their business down at the campsite. Never in his life had he experienced such an agony of fondness and a surge of relief as he experienced now, at the sight of such perfect, down-to-earth mundaneness: four men cooking food and setting up camp. He turned over onto his front, plunged his face into the snow and began sobbing until his whole body shook.

  Bolldhe could not forgive himself for breaking down like that. Especially in front of another person. He had never made such an absurd display before in his life, not even in front of his horse, and he felt stained, degraded to the level of every other human. He hardly heard Wodeman’s words at all as the sorcerer animatedly discussed the dream.

  Bolldhe had related every detail of his spiritwalk to Wodeman: the mysterious temple, Yorda, the caves, the Benne Nighe, everything. All, that is, except what he had seen beyond the ice wall. And that was simply because he could not remember what he had seen. It had been so terrible that he had recoiled from it, and the wall was now firmly back in place.

  Who would have thought one’s own soul could harbour the greatest terror in the world?

  ‘It’s not the first time it’s happened,’ he confessed. ‘Back in Eotunlandt, when I . . . killed that thief . . .’

  ‘Ah yes, we had all been wondering about that little episode,’ Wodeman admitted with uncharacteristic delicacy.

  ‘I can’t tell you what happened to me at that time, anymore than I can tell you what I saw in my vision just now. All I know is that on both occasions the vision was the same . . . but this time it was even stronger.’

  Wodeman stared at him intently but held his silence.

  ‘I was eight years old,’ Bolldhe went on, ‘a period of my life I seem to have no memories of at all though normally I remember everything clearly. And what’s stranger still is that this gap has never before occurred to me – a part of my life was just washed away.’

  ‘Locked away,’ Wodeman corrected him. ‘Sealed in ice. Something happened to you when you were a child, something so terrible your mind couldn’t cope with it. You shut it away but it has left a mark – an engram – like an inscription on your brain.’

  ‘A carving,’ Bolldhe pointed out, ‘like all those other carvings . . .’

  ‘Of Pel-Adan.’

  ‘Right.’ Bolldhe shook his head. ‘That bastard really does know how to leave his mark on a man, doesn’t he?’

  ‘You’ve sensed deep down that your old faith has hurt you more than you can remember, haven’t you? Is that why you fled your native country?’

  ‘I didn’t flee. Nothing so dramatic. I just left, walked out.’

  ‘But the engram is important,’ Wodeman insisted, ‘maybe the key. There are so many other things significant in your dream, it’s hard to tell which is the most important. The tower? The rune? The Benne Nighe?’

  ‘Yorda?’ Bolldhe cut in and instantly wished he had not.

  ‘Your spiritwalker may or may not mean anything much. For most people it’s just a comfort figure, someone they trust, something to reassure them.’

  Bolldhe nodded in assent, glad that that bit was out of the way.

  ‘Some dreamers take the tower, some the deep place,’ Wodeman explained. ‘When you chose the tower, I thought you’d see the rune – that would’ve told us much.’

  He paused, giving Bolldhe a chance to explain himself, but Bolldhe did not say a thing. What’s he expecting? he thought, frowning. An apology?

  Wodeman shrugged. He knew Bolldhe well enough not to pursue too closely matters such as these. ‘Oh well, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now, but maybe the important point is your refusal to look at it.’

  ‘I’m a stubborn, arrogant sod.’ Bolldhe smiled. ‘But the Benne Nighe?’

  At that, Wodeman looked genuinely pained, an old weather-beaten tramp with ragged hair encrusted with ice, for once every bit like the disenfranchised and destitute old alcoholics that many of his people had become.

  ‘I fear your retreat from the engram may prove to be the finish of you,’ he admitted heavily, bluntly, ‘and the Benne Nighe the herald of your death, for that is the only time such spirits choose to visit us. But, then again, perhaps she just stands for death in general.’

  ‘Death . . . yes.’ Bolldhe shivered, a vague memory flitting through his mind, ruffling the backcloth of his consciousness. ‘There was much death behind that ice wall. The whole place was awash with blood, and I was right there in the middle of it, like a child staggering through the ruination of the slain . . .’

  He stood up, ready to leave. ‘I’m finished now,’ he announced. ‘I won’t be doing any more dreams for you. That’s it. But thank you, Wodeman; I feel better now, strangely enough. I just hope you feel adequately repaid for saving my life.’

  The Torca nodded sadly. He too realized there would be no more dreams. His job – his reason for coming along on this quest – was finally at an end. It was a relief
really, despite the limited success he had seen. At least now he no longer needed to strive, to rack his brains or to agonize. And, as he himself said, ‘We can get down to that campfire now; I don’t know about you, but I’m bloody freezing up here.’

  As they made their way down to the camp together, Bolldhe breathed in the air of Melhus. ‘Just smell it, Wodeman. Fire and ice – that’s all there is to this land.’

  ‘That’s what we need,’ Wodeman replied, a little more cheerfully. ‘Fire and ice are the stuff of creation!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Don’t be so dim, Bolldhe. Haven’t you heard the old stories? What do you get when those two elements come together?’

  Bolldhe thought for a moment. ‘Tepid slurry?’

  ‘Steam!’ (You cretin!) ‘The basis of creation. According to the beliefs of the Uldachtna tribe, life was created by the steam we see all around us now: warm droplets formed upon the rock, layer upon layer, until they eventually formed the skin of the very first woman. That is what we’re doing here – creating. So don’t lose all hope just yet.’

  But Bolldhe was not so sure. ‘Actually, Finwald told me fire isn’t even an element, just a process of change. But what have I changed into? A devil, judging by what I saw in my engram.’

  ‘Devils don’t cry, as you did. Only people can do that.’

  ‘And baby seals,’ Bolldhe reminded him, changing the subject quickly. ‘God, all that dream-magic just to thaw a memory! Couldn’t I just have held my head up against Appa’s kettle or something?’

  Wodeman then, for some reason, stopped dead. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there is another possibility. It’s just come back to me: something Nibulus told us back in that witch Nym Cadog’s dungeon, but you weren’t there. He told us about something the Peladanes are supposed to have found in Vaagenfjord Maw after the siege. Some great pit of falling souls, he said, like a gateway to hell itself. Somewhere time and space are missing. Said that there, if a man could brave it, he might find any knowledge he wanted. Any knowledge in the world . . . Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  But after a pause they both grinned and shook their heads. Some things really were a bit too far-fetched to believe.

  As they re-entered the camp, Wodeman enquired, ‘But you do feel something now, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Bolldhe admitted. ‘I feel different, happy now that I’ve opened up a bit. Maybe even higher spiritually.’

  And Nibulus too was happy as he greeted the returning dream-questers, for he, after all these years, had just succeeded in spelling out his full name in the snow with his own urine.

  The following day was their last full day of travelling before they reached Vaagenfjord Maw, and every member of the company knew it – even Appa, who had lain slumped across Zhang’s back in varying degrees of consciousness for the entire journey across Melhus. The pinnacle of Ravenscairn now loomed large before them, casting a shadow of silence and sobriety over the travellers. Each in his heart felt that this might be the last day they beheld sunlight before entering that place, and each of them breathed the chilly air with the appetite of a condemned man. How far away Nordwas seemed now, how long ago since they had set forth beneath the sunlit wind-rippled banners of Wintus Hall.

  As the sun dipped behind Ravenscairn one final time, and the evening sky was lit up by weird and terrifying ribbons of dancing light, they finally reached a road. ‘We’ve come to the end of the world,’ Appa ranted in moist-eyed horror, ‘the head of the Great Dragon Lindormyn! See his fiery breath – it will devour us all!’

  But the lights, disturbing though they were, concerned the rest of the company somewhat less than the megaliths. Two lines of standing stones, each three times as tall as an ordinary man and carved in the shape of the grotesquely distorted head of some terrible fiend from the Underworld, marched across the ice field in the direction of Ravenscairn. These formed the road – such as it was – that would take them to the very gates of the Maw. And these heads would be their last, leering companions for the remaining few miles of their journey.

  That night they decided to make camp away from the stare of those heads. They chose instead a sheltered spot beneath the overhang of a cliff. As they had done four days ago, they cut blocks of ice to build a protective wall to seal themselves in.

  They could not, however, seal themselves away from the fear. Even at this distance waves of dread seemed to emanate from the standing stones, and they could still see regular flashes of that dancing light. But it was the voices that kept them from sleep, as they had done on their first night on the island. Wailing, mournful, weird.

  Bolldhe got no sleep at all. The strangeness of this place was draining his soul, as it was the others, but for him there was something else. Though he had not mentioned it to his companions, he had kept looking back over his shoulder all day long.

  Almost as though he sensed they were being followed.

  ‘What in—’ Eorcenwold hissed, then hushed himself. The same voices that were troubling Bolldhe’s party many miles to the north-west and had been having a similar effect upon his own group suddenly stopped. In the eerie silence that followed all the thieves held their breath, sweated and seriously questioned their wisdom in coming to this island in the first place. It was a silence full of growing dread.

  Whatever those voices belonged to, they seemed to have sensed something. An evil presence was out there somewhere in the night, out on the black ocean, and, slowly but inexorably, it was approaching the island.

  ‘Get away from me! Get thee hence! Begone, foul deviants!’ the red-eyed stranger cursed. He swatted at the malignant little sprites as they flitted about his head and snatched at the yak-hide kirtle that billowed around his frame. ‘Ah, so sorely environ’d am I by hell’s arse-belched hobgoblins! Fire and fury, I hate these things. I hate this land, it torments me so!’

  Far above the fields of fire and ice did Red Eye fly. He cavorted and twisted like a wind elemental in his struggle to pluck the gamesome chittering sprites from his tangled hair. They pulled at the coif of white skin he wore on his head, leaving sooty deposits upon its satin Dhracusian immaculacy. They wrenched at the clasp of his knapsack, essaying to cause the bloodied heads therein to fall out to their ruin below. They fogged the lamp atop his staff and smarted the string of eyes that hung from it. And they spat tarred vitriol at the translucent stones of his chaplet. And ever Red Eye essayed to swat them, to clutch them, to eradicate their contaminating menace from his person. But they were as insubstantial as smoke, and would merely dissipate into wispy tatters of darkness in his grasp, only to reform, cackling, with a wicked phosphorus glow, in front of his face.

  It was a losing battle. He was a stranger in a strange land. It galled him in every particle of his being. The whole island of Melhus, it seemed, fixed him from below with its icy glare, its mountains a mass of cruel fangs, its breath black and stinking – the open maw of the World Serpent – and he felt as if he were going mad.

  His silent companion hovered nearby. Unmoving, it stood miles above the earth, inscrutable and unharried. A light layer of frost on its grey robe sparkled in the moonlight. Head becowled, it gave no impression of feeling or reaction, but Red Eye suspected it may even have been laughing.

  Still flying about like a witch, Red Eye continued to swat. ‘Of all the most detestable of imps we might have hap’d upon in this most detestable of lands,’ he cursed, ‘why had we to meet these smog-breathed, sulphurous sprites? These black-souled bituminous little bastards! O, despicable exhalations of Melhus’s deepest and foulest furnace, I entreat thee once more, get thee hence!’

  ‘They are what they are,’ Chance averred impassively. ‘Spirits of Olchor, the Father of Darkness. And they were here long before Drauglir. This is their home. They belong here.’

  ‘They belong in the vats of hell!’ Red Eye snapped, infuriated that his Syr companion should remain ignored by the sprites when he himself was so injuriously afflicted by them. ‘Back to the ele
ments whence they came!’ He soared away through the night sky and disappeared behind a vast poisonous cloud that basked in a sickly yellow moonglow. Still the swarm of sprites pursued him, squealing gleefully at his torment.

  Eventually, Chance reached out a hand, splayed its fingers and sent forth a pulse of green light into the cloud. From somewhere within could be heard the shrill wailing of agony and astonishment, then the sprites, condensed now into nothing more than smoking droplets of tar, fell in a black acid rain of despair to the ground.

  ‘Enough capering,’ the Syr stated. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The returning deity breathed heavily, wondering even amid his ire if this might be the first occasion he had ever had cause to thank one of the Skela. Though calmer now, his face was still flushed, the fiery indignation in his eyes but barely quenched by the Syr’s intervention.

  ‘We do not have long,’ Chance informed him. ‘Others of their kind will arrive very soon, I’d wager.’

  Red Eye’s mind reached out all around him, far and wide, feeling through the reeking darkness of Melhus’s poison atmosphere for their repugnant presence. There was no immediate sense of evil, but he would take no chances; they would not suffer him for long in their world. ‘We must speak quickly,’ he said.

  Together they descended and hovered above the labouring wayfarers, only a mile below now. Any closer would draw more sprite-kind from the earth

  ‘So,’ Chance intoned, the cowled head nodding towards the six men and the slough horse forcing their way over the last stretches of Melhus’s tundra, ‘the engram continues to thaw, and Bolldhe begins to guess something about himself. Perhaps now the time for guidance by your priests is at an end.’

  ‘If ever it started,’ Red Eye snorted. ‘Bolldhe may have divined the great virtue in Finwald, may even have esteemed his fortitude at times, but always has he mistrusted the man’s innate furtiveness. And as for Appa, the lukewarm counsel of that one has fallen on stony ears from the outset, and now, near dead on his feet, the aged cleric has become scant more than bootless impedimenta. Yet of all the priests that might have swayed Bolldhe, it is not one of my servants, but Erce’s, who has edified Bolldhe the most – Wodeman the dream-sorcerer, he alone who pauses to wonder if his presence on the quest has been of any avail.’