“What happened? Where’s Katrín?’ Garún asked.
Diljá suddenly started to cry. Hrólfur turned from the window, his face mortified.
“They came tonight.” A long time passed before he continued. “They’ve connected us to Black Wings. I’m not sure what happened to Katrín.” He looked towards Diljá, as if expecting her to continue, but she only sobbed. “We’d just finished distributing the new magazine. We ran out of ink so we went home early. They blockaded the entire Melar-neighbourhood. Soldiers and police outside my apartment, interrogating the neighbours. I saw two seiðskrattar enter. They didn’t see me, so I ran. Met Diljá heading back towards Höfði. They’d also been at her place. We’d both hoped they didn’t know where the printing press was located. But the entire workshop was in flames.”
“But you?’ asked Garún. “Did they see you?’
Diljá had gathered herself. She sat motionless, frozen. A statue of grief.
“No,” she replied. “I was at Starholt, walking home, when Urður stopped me. She used to babysit me when I was a kid. She said that there was a raid in my street and I knew they’d taken all of them.”
Early on they had agreed to keep their private lives separate. The less they knew, the less harm they could do to one another if one of them was captured. But still details had seeped through. Garún knew that Hrólfur lived by himself and was a low-ranking scribe or accountant in some department of the city. She was unsure if he had something to lose or not. Diljá had a large family and lived with them in Starholt, like many of the huldufólk did. She had a lot of younger siblings. But Garún didn’t feel any sorrow or compassion. Just hatred for the Crown.
“What about Katrín? Why isn’t she here with you?’
Garún’s tone was a bit harsher than she’d intended. Katrín’s absence was unsettling, to say the least.
“There’s no reason to think they’re on to her as well,” Hrólfur said, annoyed. “She never goes to the press, not even to send in an article. She considers funding most of the costs her entire contribution to the printing work.”
“She still might have headed the same way you did. She lives downtown, right?’
“Yes. On Tjarnargata by the pond.”
“I hope she’s okay,” Diljá said. “At least her family is going to be okay. They wouldn’t dare take them.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Hrólfur said. “She might be a Melsteð, but that doesn’t matter to them. If they find out Katrín is a part of this, then they will pay. Treason is treason.”
Garún didn’t like this. She’d never fully trusted Katrín.
“Just now there are only two options – either Katrín is a traitor or she’s a prisoner of the Crown.”
“You can’t know that!’ Diljá said, shocked. “She might have escaped.”
“Then why isn’t she here?’ Garún started pacing the room. She hated this feeling of losing control. “You all had the hidden emergency portals into Rökkurvík. Everyone knew the plan in case of the worst. Regroup in the Forgotten Downtown.”
Garún always thought Katrín was naïve, a view reinforced when she couldn’t believe that the Crown would move against the journalists at Ísafold. Still, deep down, she admired her determination to fight against her own privilege.
“All right, let’s assume she might have escaped – but how long can she remain in hiding in Reykjavík? I seriously doubt she knows someone that can get her into the Forgotten Downtown. If they haven’t captured her already, it’s only a matter of time. We need to know what the situation is.”
“What do you suggest?’ Hrólfur asked.
“We can’t stay here. We need to get out of Rökkurvík. Regardless of whether Katrín betrayed us or is their prisoner, they probably have figured out that we are hiding here. If she’s out there we need to find her as soon as possible, or at least figure out what’s happened to her. I’ll head into Reykjavík and find out what’s happened while you find another place to hide here. Then we have to move. Diljá, did you talk to Kryik’traak?’
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Yeah, they were willing to set us up with a safe house.”
They nodded. It was settled. Garún was surprised how incredibly relieved she was. Relieved that she wasn’t the one who had to kick them off the edge, out of the false security of comfort – that the Crown was the one to do it for her. It was a horrible thing to think, to be glad that their relatives and friends were now at the mercy of the Crown. But that was how the pigs operated and had for years. It was a bittersweet feeling to not feel so alone. She wasn’t the only one in exile any more.
* * *
Hrólfur and Diljá went to a storage unit down by the docks. Garún had scoped it out as a possible place to hide, at least for a while. The storage was an old fisherman’s workshop, filled with torn nets and fishing gear. There was no hint of the smell of fish, and as a result there was something uncomfortable about being there. As if it was a stage, not a genuine place.
By hanging by her fingertips from a broken window and letting go, she fell into Reykjavík, in a backyard just by Haraldskirkja. It was dark, which made it hard to tell what time it was. The short days of winter darkness now ruled in Hrímland. The city was covered in grimy slush. She turned up the electronic music. The noisefiend spoke to her like an old friend. A nerve-racking beat played under shady electronic music, winding and building up so she kept expecting the music to break like a wave, but it didn’t happen. This was a new variation of a familiar theme. Danger was around every corner, the smallest mistake could blow her cover. She picked up a steel-grey spray can and sprayed a symbol on the back of her jacket with the clear paint. Putting on the jacket was repulsive, as if she’d put on a bloody human skin, but she suffered through it. The symbol was a type of huliðshjálmur, for disguise or invisibility, and would make her less conspicuous. She put on the red-tinted goggles and headed towards the pond.
Garún scanned the streams of residual seiðmagn, looking for the passage of seiðskrattar. She listened intently to the obtuse messages of the noisefiend and searched for the telltale traces of seiðmagn they left behind, like waves in the wake of a ship. The huliðshjálmur would not work on them, but quite the opposite – it would make her glow like a beacon from the seiðmagn. She saw many traces of their presence, but none of them recent. Soldiers walked down Hverfisgata in pairs. Police officers were common enough downtown, even armed ones, but the army usually kept to their forts on the peninsula and Viðey. Garún was a natural at lying low when she needed to, something she’d had to learn early on as a blendingur in the city. The soldiers didn’t notice her as she walked past them, her head downcast. The huliðshjálmur had just dried and she felt better having it on, but it still felt repulsive. The difference was the same as between fresh and coagulated blood – each was disgusting in its own way.
Step by step the pond drew closer. She stopped outside a stately house and peeked through the kitchen window. The family inside was sitting down at the table, but paid her no mind, despite her being in clear sight. Inside the clock struck seven. Something made her linger. After a few weeks in the Forgotten Downtown this sight was so unfamiliar and unnatural. Like an overly stylised advertisement in the newspaper. She thought of dinners with her mother and grandmother. Now it seemed like a dream.
Katrín’s home was further down the street. The greatest and wealthiest families of Hrímlanders lived here, in exorbitant estates by the pond, and Katrín belonged to one of the more powerful ones. She was a Melsteð, an old and deep-rooted family that claimed many Hrímlandic people of prestige and power as their own. Mostly politicians and priests, but there were some known poets in between. Garún had never been able to trust her completely. Katrín belonged to the establishment, she had nothing to lose. She was the most active of the group in writing articles, where she used a male pseudonym. She was well educated and made some powerful points, Garún couldn’t deny that, but she’d never taken Katrín’s revolutionary spirit seriously. A
t best she attributed it to being the whim of a rich daddy’s girl – but now she feared that Katrín’s betrayal could be greater than she’d thought possible.
Of all the houses on the street, Katrín’s family home was the only one with its lights off. Garún lithely moved over the fence and sneaked into the yard. There was not a person to be seen. She went behind the house and found a basement door, a servants’ entrance. She tagged a stave of discord on the door’s window. Fine streaks cracked through the glass, which shattered soundlessly into fine dust. She let herself in.
Inside she was met with an overbearing silence. Garún moved into the kitchen. The cupboards were open and empty. Broken china littered the floor, cracking under her feet despite her best efforts. She sneaked upstairs into the lobby. The house was ransacked. Expensive sofas had been overturned, with ugly new gashes in the expensive upholstery. Paintings had been pulled off the walls, some of them cut. A portrait of a young lady, her face bearing more than a passing resemblance of Katrín, had been ripped from top to bottom. Shards of porcelain and glass were scattered on the floor. The wallpaper was half-torn off in places. Cracks in the plastered walls were visible.
The upper floor was the same. The bedrooms were ruined. Floorboards had been torn up, every drawer had been pulled out, the furniture shattered. Garún tried to identify which room belonged to Katrín, but her parents clearly had only had daughters, as the three bedrooms aside from the master bedroom all obviously belonged to girls. The master bedroom was covered in down and feathers. The mattress and bedding were shredded. The feathers almost covered a large coagulated pool of blood in the middle of the floor. A sticky set of footprints was at the edge of the blood.
The audioskull’s music changed with a jolt; the bass dropped and a panicked rhythm started playing. Garún slid behind the open bedroom door. She looked through the crack between the door and the frame. Two police officers moved slowly up the stairs. Of course the house was still being monitored. She silently cursed herself – how had she missed them? There was too much background threat in the music.
They were young, both of them. Probably inexperienced. One was trying to grow a respectable moustache, which was still nothing but feeble down on his upper lip. They’d find her. The huliðshjálmur wasn’t strong enough for this. The one with the moustache nodded towards the other and headed towards the master bedroom. They were armed with heavy skorrifles with bayonets attached.
Slowly, silently, she pulled out the can of delýsíð. The officer moved into the bedroom with his rifle readied. They knew she was there. They had probably been waiting for her. When he’d entered and was just about to turn back, she leaped out and sprayed him right in his face.
Abstract delýsíð painting was something that had fascinated Garún a lot. She’d worked with delýsíð for a long time in her artwork, but she’d always relied on forms and certain colours to shape the effects of the delýsíð in a clearer way. She’d never used both clear and formless delýsíð, never tried to get the psychosomatic effects she wanted without using any kind of art as the framework. Now she focused with all her power to shape an illusion out of nothing but her raw will. To paint a picture in the man’s mind of his fellow officer as a monster, so that he would see his partner as Garún did. As a danger and a threat. She tried to connect all of this to the fear of the terrorist and traitor he’d come here to capture, but it was too much for a hack job like this one and she felt control slip from her hands.
He screamed and tried to rub the spray out of his eyes. Immediately his partner came running down the hallway and aimed his skorrifle. Garún dodged from the doorway, pointed to the hall and screamed at the officer.
“There she is! There she is!’
The delýsíð-blinded officer stopped rubbing his eyes and looked towards his partner. Garún flinched when she saw what she’d done to the man. His eyelids had been burned away, shrivelled to nothing, and dark purple fluids streamed from the corners of his eyes. His eyes were rigid and bloodshot, the dilated pupils like bottomless pits. In their centres were burning white dots. A quivering smile appeared on his lips. He aimed his weapon towards his friend.
“Þorgeir, don’t—”
The gunshot silenced him. Garún waited until she heard the body hit the floor. Before the blinded police officer could rid himself of the hastily made seiður, Garún pulled up her knife and stuck it in deep under his chin. The blade disappeared into the soft flesh and she felt the point crack through cartilage. The officer gurgled and his body became rigid. She saw the glint of steel behind his teeth, where the dagger came up through his tongue and into the roof of his mouth. Blood came gushing over her hands, a waterfall streaming from his mouth and the wound, and she pulled the knife out. He collapsed, shaking, choking on his own blood. Then he stopped moving.
Garún searched the bodies before she got out. She took two more knives in addition to the one she had, and a token of protection one of them carried around his neck. The necklace was a small skull moulded into some kind of metal, decorated with runes and symbols. Yellow rat’s teeth jutted out of the awkwardly shaped lump of metal. On the skull’s forehead was the seal of the king, meaning that this artefact was consecrated by a royal seiðskratti. Could this have blocked the noisefiend? Garún was unsure what the item’s purpose was, so she crushed it under her heel. She felt as if she heard a scream in the distance, but it had to be her imagination.
* * *
She managed to get out unseen, as far as she knew. Were they monitoring the house to capture Katrín, or her accomplices? If she’d betrayed them, why had the house been turned upside down? What were they searching for? The pool of blood on the floor. Footprints smudged with blood. Feathers everywhere. The feathers had been spread after the blood had been spilled. They had been lying on top of it, white and untouched like ships on a red sea. Someone had been injured before they tore through the place. If Katrín had betrayed them, the Crown was already in the Forgotten Downtown. If not, Katrín would eventually break and tell them about the emergency portals.
If Katrín was in hiding, she needed Garún’s help. Why hadn’t they discussed this? Garún didn’t know where she should be searching.
She tried to place herself in Katrín’s footsteps. How likely was it that Katrín had gone to her friends? Most likely all of them were of similar class and background as she was. Wealthy humans who had never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Possibly old schoolmates from the Learned School. It was very unlikely that any of her friends would give her shelter with the Crown on her heels. Maybe someone would. Garún knew so little about her life. She had assumed too much.
Black Wings had been struggling a couple of years earlier. People weren’t reading it, so there were few who were willing to take the risk of distributing it. Then Diljá heard of a columnist who had an article for them. It was a man, known for his severe and unreserved tone of voice, who had written a few bold pieces for Ísafold, but not controversial enough to cause any real trouble. Diljá let it be heard that Black Wings was interested and eventually they had managed to set up a meeting behind an abandoned factory on Gufunes.
Hrólfur didn’t want to go at all. He didn’t trust this fellow, but Diljá wanted new blood for the magazine. Garún agreed with her on that front. She was desperate for direct action, direct attacks on the Crown, but the others were unwilling to risk it. Not yet, they said repeatedly. When the time was right. As far as Garún was concerned, there wasn’t a wrong time to defy the Commonwealth.
She went with Diljá to the meeting and waited all day in the abandoned basement room of the factory, where they had a good view of the meeting spot. When the time was approaching three in the morning, a woman came walking along, not a man. She was in a dress cut in the latest fashions, a silken shawl over her shoulders, obviously imported. Garún wanted to ditch, certain it was a trap, but Diljá went out by herself to meet the woman.
For a long time Katrín only met Diljá to deliver articles and shorter pieces
. She continued using the same male pseudonym. Garún and Hrólfur kept their distance, unwilling to trust her with too much knowledge about how they operated for the longest time.
Then one day Diljá came with a piece from Katrín that was different. It was so long that it would take up almost the entire magazine. The article listed in the utmost detail how the Crown intended to take over the thaumaturgical energy source in Öskjuhlíð and use it exclusively for military purposes.
Valtýr Melsteð, Katrín’s father, had held a seat as goði in Lögrétta for decades. He regularly held unofficial meetings at their home, where old and new party members alike would meet to discuss policies and other plans. Nobody minded if Katrín was sitting in the adjacent living room while the meeting took place; the same went for her mother and sisters. She was a part of the family, one of them. She was a member of the party, after all. Besides, she was just a woman. What could one vapid girl really understand? What could she do?
Katrín’s father had met his party members to discuss the possible profits the state could receive from the full militarisation of Perlan. This was an unofficial meeting, to gauge the political situation, as this was likely to be opposed by many other goðar in Lögrétta. Katrín had found it easy to eavesdrop by knitting just outside the living room.
The power plant was owned by Innréttingarnar, a state-founded company established shortly after Hrímland joined Kalmar. It focused on promoting and investing in local enterprise. The woollen mills in Eimvogur and the shipyard in Gufunes were only a fraction of the company’s operations. Several decades earlier, when Vésteinn Alrúnarson had put forth his theories about the mechanical utilisation of seiður without need for a seiðskratti, the company had seen an opportunity and quickly started planning a thaumaturgical power plant in Öskjuhlíð. To this date, it remained their most remarkable and successful venture.
Technically the company was owned and run by the Hrímlandic state, which meant that Kalmar pumped funds into Innréttingarnar. Building up infrastructure and industries in their colonies would only serve to benefit them. On paper it was the king himself who was the head of the venture, but in actuality the head of the Kalmar colonial authority, Count Trampe, was the one secretly holding the reins – and the stiftamtmaður’s grip was tight. The board ran the company independently, but everything needed to be approved by Trampe. Most of the profits went to the Commonwealth, who trickled money back into the company as they saw fit. Trampe had been elated at the success of Perlan and quickly set his military engineers to work on creating a machine that could harness the sorcerous power. So, Loftkastalinn had risen to the skies.
Shadows of the Short Days Page 24
