A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  The onlookers waited, chafing themselves against the cold.

  Hollow footsteps and scrapings could be heard from within, accompanied by the occasional slide or bump. But no voices yet. Still the others waited.

  Silence. A long silence. There was no movement at all from within. For all this time the four men on the quay stood watching, their attention focused on that jagged black hole where the door had been. But there was nothing further to see or hear. It was as though the ship had eaten their companions.

  Appa stamped his numbed feet in agitation. He did not like this at all. He was just about to cry out to them when a small barrel appeared at the doorway, teetered for a second as it rested against the jamb, then slid down the deck towards them. The four men leapt back in fright as it crunched against the gunwale, almost punching its way through the decayed timber. A moment later a second container appeared, and followed its mate. And then a third.

  Immediately after, an extremely pale face peered out of the doorway.

  Bolldhe hoisted himself up out of the deckhouse and, without hesitating for even a second, almost dived out of the door and slid on his front down the sloping deck to join the barrels. He did not stop to hand the containers to his waiting companions but instead simply left them where they were, leapt from the ship and walked off down the quayside without a word.

  Nibulus too emerged from the darkness. He disengaged the grappling hooks, slid down the deck on his back and helped Paulus transfer the containers to the quay. The Peladane was obviously not in quite as much of a hurry as Bolldhe had been, but he too wore a very grim countenance and said little.

  There had not been much left to search through, apparently, but the two men had succeeded in salvaging a firkin of ghee, a chest of tsampa and an entire puncheon of drel-sil. All were frozen solid and once defrosted would probably prove edible.

  ‘Shine on, you crazy goblin!’ Wodeman beamed. ‘There’s enough here to last us for weeks!’

  It was true. Here, in the last place on Lindormyn they would have hoped to find sustenance, they had managed to unearth a bountiful supply of fat, barley flour, dried meat, sweet potatoes, rice and beet sugar. It was the first real stroke of good fortune the company had met with since encountering Elfswith. Yet to see the looks on the faces of the two men who had discovered this haul, one could be forgiven for thinking they had instead come face to face with their own Benne Nighe.

  Neither Bolldhe nor Nibulus would talk of what they had witnessed below decks, and none of the others pressed them. It was getting late, so they decided to search the rest of the harbour for somewhere they could store their equipment and new supplies, and safely stable Zhang. They searched carefully and methodically, even exploring some of the rooms tunnelled directly into the rock face of the fjord.

  Yet again Finwald marvelled at how unsecured it all was. ‘Weren’t the Peladanes supposed to have sealed it all off after the siege was over?’ he said in astonishment.

  ‘According to the books, yes,’ Nibulus agreed, ‘but a determined robber will always find a way in.’

  ‘Luckily for us,’ Finwald replied. Nibulus was right: most of the original doors to the numerous rooms had either been prised open or had holes knocked into them just wide enough to squeeze through, or had simply been battered down. The company explored most of the rooms, and found all had been ransacked. Naturally anything of obvious value would have been plundered by the victors five hundred years ago, but subsequent raiding parties had stripped away floor tiles, columns, stone fittings; anything, in fact, that bore the mark of Vaagenfjord Maw and so could fetch a price on the relic-collectors’ market.

  Traces of old campfires there were too, and musty, filthy blankets, possibly only a few years or months old. As they searched, the company wondered if any adventurers were still lurking about even now . . .

  At length they found one small free-standing building intact enough to use as a base. An unremarkable but sturdy edifice, it had probably served as a storehouse for Drauglir’s fishing fleet. (Though the Rawgr and his netherworld company might not have required normal nourishment, such mortals as worked in his service definitely did.) This appeared to have escaped the worst ravages of the siege – and of time – and most importantly stood about as far away from the Maw itself as it was possible to get. Here they gratefully stabled Zhang and stored their new supplies.

  With the help of Elfswith’s ice axes and a good fire, they had soon thawed and cooked some of their food. And then oh how they gorged themselves! The food may have tasted rather faded and more than a little bitter, but it was wholesome and brought a red cheer to their faces that tingled exquisitely. For a time the nightmare of the journey, the weirdness of Vaagenfjord and the horrors that might await them still within the Rawgr’s fastness were thrust far from their thoughts, and they feasted as enthusiastically as if they were in a tavern back in Nordwas. The ghee was particularly welcome, as they used it to smear their chapped faces and hands against the intense cold.

  After their feast they slept. This was the first proper shelter they had enjoyed since leaving Elfswith’s cave; it was almost warm and, after the unbelievable hardships of the past week, they slept long and deep. Not even thoughts of what they were to face on the morrow intruded into their exhausted slumber. At least that was how it went for the ones who had not explored the ship – those four lucky men who had not seen what Nibulus and Bolldhe had seen in the deckhouse.

  For Nibulus, a seasoned campaigner who had witnessed many an atrocity on many occasions – many perpetrated by his own men – it had chilled him enough to take the edge off his appetite and now keep his sleep light, fitful and troubled. For Bolldhe the night was proving both very long and very weird.

  Inside the galley they had found somebody, or some bodies. Hanging, frozen lumps of what had once been a person or some people were plastered all over the walls, ceiling and fittings. Moreover, things had been done to that flesh – certain ‘processes’ – that Bolldhe simply could not believe.

  What had done it, he wondered, and why? A wild beast, no matter how savage, would not have caused such carnage nor been so wasteful. And even a Jotun – an ice giant – though chaotic and cruel enough, would have lacked the necessary imagination and manual dexterity. No, there had been Evil of the greatest magnitude at work: an almost artistic hand behind its devilish intricacy that to Bolldhe’s glazed eyes bore the hallmark of . . . of what he could only describe as ‘correction’.

  Neither he nor Wintus had yet spoken a word of this to the others. For how could they? The fear pervading the company was already deleterious enough, without them knowing what he and the Peladane now realized: that Vaagenfjord Maw was far from empty and dead but contained an Evil the like of which none of them had ever even imagined even in their worst nightmares.

  All night long Bolldhe’s brain churned, replaying over and over what he had witnessed. All night he drifted between wakefulness and a half-sleep, never really sure which was which, always alert to the sounds of the harbour outside, sounds he was convinced were meant for his ears only. Sometime during the night he heard a low moaning from the quay. It could have been the wind, of course, that same wind surely responsible for the galley door of the lone ship rattling so urgently and loudly upon its hinges.

  A sudden crash – after which the door stopped rattling. That must have been a powerful gust indeed, but had the wind also caused the rhythmic creaking of deck boards that followed. A creaking that sounded so much like footsteps? Footsteps that descended onto the quay. Now they seemed to be stealthily approaching the very building they sheltered inside, heading unerringly through the freezing fog and darkness towards them. And surely no wind would make those scratching noises at the door . . . just like the spiders back in the tunnel, or something from the ship coming to reclaim the food that they had stolen? Bolldhe could no longer be sure now what was real and what was a figment of his dreams. Yes, it was a very long night indeed for Bolldhe.

  But morning did come,
of a sort. Dawn crawled with sluggish reluctance from blankets of grey, slithering hesitantly into a world that was frigid, vaporous and hateful. For Bolldhe it was a morning without any relief from the horrors that had stalked through his feverish imagination. His eyes were red from insomnia and his face grey-wan with dread.

  Not a word was spoken. The company prepared their second meal in this place, ate it in an absorbed silence and carefully avoided all eye contact. The torpid air around them was steeped with the rank odours of stale musk, horse flatulence, rotten fish and burnt drel-sil. A relentless chill had taken hold of them all, causing them to shake incessantly even as they pushed spoonfuls of warm food into their mouths.

  They made this meal last as long as they could, for they all knew what must inevitably follow. But there was no putting it off. As the final mouthfuls of what might be their last breakfast were forced down dry throats, the silence in the hut deepened further still.

  Nibulus licked his bowl clean, stared into it for a moment, then, with great deliberation, placed it on the floor. The others stopped whatever they were doing to watch as he solemnly drew himself up to his full height, looked each one of them in the eye in turn, then let out a deep, soul-felt sigh, almost deflating.

  ‘Come on then,’ he said at last in a voice that was unusually high-pitched and unsteady. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  He went over to the door, heaved away the barrels they had placed against it, kicked away the makeshift wedges, and opened it wide. A grey fog rolled in, bringing with it darkness rather than light.

  Without another word the Peladane strode outside, and his men followed as boldly as they could manage. Each carried torches and rations a-plenty for the days ahead. Bolldhe went last, and tarried just long enough to run a trembling hand over Zhang’s fleecy neck. He could not bear to look the beast in the eye, however, and after the briefest of hesitations followed the others, slamming the door behind him.

  Then they were there. Out of the shroud of fog the Maw came at them, and one by one the travellers’ footsteps faltered, then stopped, till they just stood gaping upwards.

  Before them, stretching out on either side and soaring up sheer to immeasurable heights, stood the black ice-frosted face of Vaagenfjord Maw. It was a wall of rock, in truth a vast cliff, but a cliff that had been shaped – chiselled by countless minions over the centuries – until a fortress-wall regularity was evident. It was not smooth, however, for this was natural rock, its surface scored by great furrows, gouged with hollows and twisted by strange outcroppings that covered it like carbuncles on the skin of a giant. Between clouds of fog these nodules of stone would appear, staring down at the little questers below. In the fascinated minds of the men from the south they would take on the semblance of hideous fiends and loathsome gargoyles, before again being cloaked by the fog. And when next revealed in another gap in the fog, it would appear they had multiplied, joined now by diabolic companions that had skittered down from higher places to glare at the intruders below.

  Further up could be seen rows of windows: great architraved and embrasured black oblongs about twenty foot high, arranged in ranks that stretched almost the entire width of the fortress. Between these openings massive horns of rock jutted out, too smooth and pointed to be natural. They seemed to serve no purpose other than to emphasize that this wall marked the boundary between the world of the living and the underworld of rawgrkind.

  Truly this was an abode befitting the mightiest of D’Archangels. A far cry from the forlorn ruination and decay of the harbour that sprawled before it, Vaagenfjord Maw seemed a bastion of indomitable hell-wrought strength that laughed at men’s puny efforts to destroy it. In fact, so inconceivably massive was it that it seemed to possess its own field of gravity, which even now pulled the errants in towards it with an irresistible force as if to crush them into nonexistence at its stony heart. Before it they were – what were they? – they were six tiny ants that had wandered too far from their nest.

  And there, at the base of the cliff, right at its centre, was the gate. A colossal aperture whose mighty doors had been cast down and lay shattered upon the crumbled steps that led up to it, this gaping hole was utterly, utterly black. Indeed it was the blackness of complete oblivion, the end of all things – of light, life, even time. It looked exactly what it was: the gateway to hell.

  The Peladane looked round at his men appraisingly. ‘Well?’ he asked, trying to clear a dryness from his throat. ‘What do you think?’

  The question was unspecific, but thereby he hoped to gauge the mettle of these men who would accompany him into this dread place. In particular, he wanted to hear what Bolldhe had to say. But Bolldhe was without speech. All he could think was, Go in there? We might as well try to pass through the sun or drink the ocean dry!

  None other of the company responded either. They all looked pale and tiny, their white, bony little faces peering out from the shaggy bulk of their bearskins, looking for all the world like a straggle of schoolchildren in toggled, hooded coats who had inadvertently strayed out of their own territory to find themselves suddenly in the presence of the hard kids from the wrong side of town. Both Appa and Wodeman cast their glances down and would say or do nothing. Paulus ignored the Peladane’s look and just stared all about him. Only Finwald was prepared to say anything, and that was merely a weak, ‘I never imagined . . . In all these years, I thought . . .’

  Vaagenfjord Maw, meanwhile, loomed over them. A thin wind whistled around its wall, its broken door, its vacant windows, causing a tremor to run through the ancient stone. The wall stared down at them blankly, but they could sense in that tremor a feeling of anticipation. There was a definite sense of waiting. It had waited for half a millennium already, suffered the onslaught of the Peladanes, shrugged off the irritation of subsequent raiding parties, and upon this day, at long last, things were about to happen . . .

  Step by step the company ascended the steps to the gate. Their boots echoed menacingly in the hush. Step by step they drew closer to that darkness, until finally they were upon the threshold, its gaping mouth set to envelop their whole world.

  Nothing moved by that gate, not even the wind, and the fog did not dare enter. For wind and fog are of this world, and it seemed to Bolldhe and the company that nothing of this world could penetrate the Maw. They hesitated for a long moment and wondered just how they could bring themselves to step into that blackness ahead.

  There, poised, stood Nibulus. He had left his bearskins behind in the outhouse and was clad at last in his full suit of magnificent Tengriite armour. His head was encased in a dragon-crested helm, his face as yet unshielded by the sallet. The grim visage of the god Pel-Adan glared out from the newly polished plastron of red Tengriite that covered his chest, and over it all flowed the green Ulleanh cloak, mantled about the shoulders by a black-hemmed gold-braided white surplice. His Greatsword Unferth he bore over his right shoulder.

  By his side stood Paulus. The crows’ feathers adorning his cowl had been well greased with ghee so that they now shone with a plume-like defiance. He too had discarded his bearskins but retained a saiga-pelt jerkin beneath his coat.

  Behind these two fighters followed Wodeman, Finwald and Appa. Each now bore the tulwar Elfswith had given him. Ending in a squared rather than pointed tip, the tulwar had a short heavy sabre-like blade good for decapitation. Though easy to use after even scant training, they looked awkward in the hands of the three priests.

  Last came Bolldhe. In his left hand he held his unhooded already kindled lantern, while in the other he gripped the flamberge as though his life depended on it. He stared up and around at the mighty pillars flanking the blackness before them and to his surprise noted they had been scrawled with graffiti, though none of it in any script he could understand.

  Nibulus continued: ‘This is it, gentlemen. We’ve arrived. And, now it comes down to it, I have to admit I don’t understand what in all Lindormyn we’re doing here . . . It all just seems to have happened, doesn’t it?
Well, we’re here now, so I suppose we’d better go and slay a rawgr, or something.’

  He glanced up at the graffiti. ‘As you can see, this place is no stranger to looting parties – looks like half the northern world has been here at some time or another. Some made it back home, so we’ve heard, others were not so lucky. I—we don’t know what befell them, but at least we can be fairly sure there truly is something bad in there. I realize this clearly now and am sorry I doubted it before.’ He nodded to the two mage-priests apologetically.

  ‘And, by the looks of it, we’re almost certainly the smallest group to have ever ventured here. So why should we succeed where others failed? What, when it comes down to it, is so bloody marvellous about us? Well, the truth is, I’m afraid, that we are weak, weaker even than they. But I ask you to remember one thing: these people who now litter the Maw with their dirty bones, they came here solely for personal gain. We, I hope, are trying to achieve something better than that. While our numbers may be small, our true purpose must be our strength. We’ve got a mission here, and we must not let our fear get the better of us – as it did so many of these other poor souls.

  ‘Remember: fear, if terrible enough, can turn a man’s soul inside out and rob him of his true self. I’ve witnessed this myself so many times. We must not allow such fear to destroy us, for there is no character within the terrified man.’

  The other five now saw the Peladane in a different light. On this journey they had shared so much, experiences both terrifying and wondrous. Yet it was as if they had remained six strangers who walked the same road for only as long as it suited each his own particular purpose. A team they had never been, nor their objectives ever united.