Another pair of soldiers followed behind Trampe. Garún gripped the the pistol, ready to aim and fire. Her heart pounded rapidly in her chest, but not from fear. From hatred. From many weeks of accumulated rage, tormenting her awake and asleep. Something else exited the tunnels behind the soldiers. Something they hadn’t accounted for. A dreadfully familiar sight that sent her heart sinking to her stomach.
The seiðskratti was dressed in a heavy and unshapely robe. They were covered in dark red symbols from head to toe, causing the mind to reel and become disoriented, drawing power as roots absorb water. The black mask was fitted with thaumaturgical glass, making it seem red-eyed from pure malice, the ivory beak curved and sharp. Distant and cold, like a vulture.
The mask was covered in sigils, hand-drawn in red paint. She recognised them; it was the visage that had appeared when she had tried to regain access to the delýsíð network. They had been the one who killed Jón and the others at the City Hall protest. They had stood up on the roof above the crowd, manipulating the uncolour.
Katrín gasped and moved away from the window. The beak turned in the direction of the sound. That was when the soldiers came to the end of the courtyard, where the staves of destruction were hiding. For a moment the air buzzed with energy. Garún felt the seiðskratti look in confusion at the energy about to be unleashed. She couldn’t help but smile at their surprise.
The courtyard exploded. Lightning ran over the ground, into the door they had exited, and another explosion sounded. Dust and shards of rock were blasted out. The soldiers shouted something at each other.
She aimed and pulled the trigger. The gun fired, the click and following gunfire like when a heart skips a beat. She barely saw anything from the smoke from the explosion, only vague forms. There was no time to wait for the dust to settle. She aimed the other pistol and fired again before throwing herself away from the window just as she felt a bullet rush past her head, hitting the wall behind her. The concrete shattered and she got dust in her eyes. She cursed herself for not wearing the thaumaturgical goggles. She pulled them down from her forehead, grabbed the weapons and the ammunition case and ran up the stairs. The air simmered behind her and the wall she had been standing at imploded with a deafening sound. She didn’t look back, just kept running. Why hadn’t they accounted for a seiðskratti in all their planning? Katrín was still down there, but she couldn’t turn back now. Not while they could still escape. Katrín had to take care of herself now.
Upstairs, she loaded the guns as quickly as she could and got into position by another window. Two soldiers were lying still on the ground. One of them had been torn in two, his intestines dragged out of his body like an unspooled thread. The other two had taken shelter behind a dumpster. The stiftamtmaður was nowhere to be seen, so he had to be hiding with them. The soldiers fired at the windows on the other side of the courtyard, where Hraki and Styrhildur were located. The seiðskratti hadn’t moved a single step. They slowly turned towards the window where Katrín had last been lying in ambush.
The seiðmagn moved around the seiðskratti like a torrent of colour and visual hallucinations. Small flares popped into being, in sync with the gunshots from Hraki and Styrhildur. Some kind of protective shield was in place around them. It was a waste of bullets to fire at the seiðskratti; they should have realised that and focused on the soldiers instead. But her delýsíð shots had a chance of harming them. They manipulated every shred of seiðmagn in the environment around themselves, but the delýsíð Garún had laced the trap with had confused them. They were surrounded by seiður hostile to them; the seiðmagn in the environment refused to come properly under their control.
Explosions sounded in the distance. Loftkastalinn. The buildings were too tall to see the fortress, but it didn’t matter. It had worked, no matter how Sæmundur did after the fact. The seiðskratti was absorbing too much seiðmagn, too fast. Garún couldn’t believe they were withstanding it, controlling the vicious current of seiðmagn raging around them. There was only so much the human body could take, no matter what thaumaturgical measures had been taken to strengthen it. Garún had been lucky at first, surprising them with the trap. There wouldn’t be a next time. They were aflame with energy. Except in one place. Where the red runes didn’t properly reach, the neckline where the mask met the stiff collar.
Garún slowly took a deep breath and aimed. She emptied her mind and slowly let her breath out.
She was a silent battlefield, drenched in blood. She was a wasteland. She was still and cold hatred.
The gunshot sounded. The sour smell of smoke filled her senses. Something around the seiðskratti cracked, some inner shield she hadn’t seen despite the goggles.
They stumbled backwards and dropped to one knee. Sparks flew off them and the air shimmered with heat. Blood flowed from their neck and they pressed their hand weakly against the wound. The earth rose up around them. Dirt and rock flew up and rained back down on the seiðskratti. The blood flowing from their neck was moving around them, in unpredictable strings and half-formed symbols, a serpent of blood. Garún aimed the other pistol. Exhaled. Fired.
The flash of sorcerous light blinded her. She stumbled back and tore off the glasses. A quake shook the building and she fell down on the floor.
Then – a deathly silence, so complete that Garún thought she had lost her hearing. For a moment everything was still before a deafening roar shook everything. The building rumbled and pieces of concrete cracked and fell from the ceiling. Garún was lying in a huddle, hands over her head, as if that would help if a slab of concrete fell and crushed her head.
As soon as the earthquake was over Garún scrambled to her feet and stumbled down the stairs. She was dizzy and she felt her head for a wound, but found no blood. Downstairs a thick cloud of dust covered everything.
“Katrín?’
She made her way through the rock that covered the entire floor, making sure not to stumble where fissures had formed in the floor.
“Katrín!’
“I’m here,” she heard down the hallway.
Katrín’s face was bloody, but it looked as if it wasn’t a major wound. Her right hand was lying limp down her side, in the other she had her pistol in a death grip.
“Are you okay?’
Katrín frowned. “I think my arm is broken,” she said in a slightly slurred voice.
“Keep behind me. Is your gun loaded?’ Katrín nodded. “Good. Only shoot if they are close enough that you don’t have to aim.”
Garún started reloading her pistols with hands that, despite everything, moved quickly and calmly.
The courtyard was completely wrecked. Shards of glass and pieces of rock covered the ground. A huge fissure had opened in the earth and a pale yellow gas burst from it in great torrents. The crack went right across the courtyard and crawled up the building, which seemed to be on the verge of collapse. There was not a trace to be seen of the seiðskratti. Garún was glad she had the gas mask on, unsure if the fumes were toxic or not. Through the goggles she saw seiðmagn moving in angry tatters, like distorted black smoke in the wake of an explosion. The noisefiend emitted nothing but a long, relentless screech. She frowned and tore off the headphones.
They moved together towards the hole the seiðskratti had blasted in the wall. There was no movement visible. Styrhildur and Hraki appeared in a doorway on the other side. They seemed relatively unharmed. She signalled to them, nodding towards the dumpster.
She moved outside quickly and kept tight to the wall. There was no cover in the courtyard except for the dumpster, but the thick fumes would lower their visibility and give her some cover as long as she kept down. Hraki and Styrhildur moved towards the dumpster, their guns readied.
Styrhildur signalled Hraki to move on the left side of the dumpster. She moved to the right. Garún tried to get into a better position for visibility, but had a hard time due to the gas and smoke in the air. Styrhildur moved rapidly towards the dumpster. A soldier, covered in blood and grey wit
h dust, leaped forward and charged Styrhildur with his skorriffle in the air.
Garún froze. She didn’t dare take a shot – she could accidentally hit Styrhildur instead. Styrhildur fired her gun, but the soldier dodged and the shot missed. With a savage scream he stabbed her with his bayonet. The soldier jerked the gun rapidly to the sides, right – left, right – left, so Styrhildur’s entire body shook with the movement.
This couldn’t be happening. She heard Hraki scream. She felt everything sink and fade away. Just a moment earlier she had thought she had things under control. The plan was working. She ran towards Styrhildur without thinking. She fired, the soldier fell and she shot him again with her other pistol. Blood gushed out of his wounds and a red growth sprouted from his chest, like frozen lightning. The barbed weed bloomed with leaves in thaumaturgical colours, the delýsíð bullet a seed deep in the flesh.
Styrhildur slowly fell to her knees. Her entrails slithered out of the open wound, slipping through her fingers. Hraki ran to Styrhildur, tore off his jacket and tried to press it against the wound, to keep her intestines in. Garún threw away the pistols and pulled out her knife. There was one soldier remaining. If it came to it, she would use the blue jawbone tucked away in her belt, but not until she had no other choice. Trampe was hiding behind the dumpster, crouching in the foetal position, covered in blood like the soldier next to him, or what remained of him. The ground was covered in body parts, fragments of bone and guts glued to the wall. The other soldier had clearly exploded alongside the seiðskratti from the rampant seiðmagn saturating the air.
Hraki kneeled next to Styrhildur, his jacket drenched in blood. She was pale as a sheet, her chin shaking like a whimpering child’s. He was crying but Styrhildur’s face was completely blank. She tried to say something, but nothing except blood came out of her.
“It’s going to be all right, it’s going to be all right,” Hraki kept repeating, and he held her close.
Katrín came running, despite her limp.
“Keep an eye on him, behind the dumpster,” Garún told her.
Katrín hesitated and looked from Garún to Hraki in confusion. He paid her no attention, still speaking to Styrhildur in his futile effort to keep her alive.
“Now! Or it was all for nothing!’
Katrín jumped and went to stand guard over the stiftamtmaður.
Garún kneeled next to Hraki. He held Styrhildur close against himself and was silently crying.
“Hraki.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. “She won’t make it.”
Air raid sirens sounded in the distance. Explosions burst out in random staccato. Sounds of war. Hraki didn’t make himself likely to move. Styrhildur’s breathing was shallow. Slimy entrails were leaking out from under Hraki’s jacket.
“We have to go.”
He acted as if he hadn’t heard her, still mumbling something to Styrhildur.
“Hraki!’ She pushed him, perhaps too hard. He fell back and was so startled that he dropped Styrhildur from his arms. “Before it’s too late! Then she will have died for nothing!’
Suddenly Hraki jumped up with his fists clenched white and punched her right in the face. He made ready to attack her again, but hesitated when he saw that her knife was ready in her hand.
“She’s not fucking dead yet, Garún! We’re not leaving her! If we bring her to Sálnanes, then she can make it!’
There was no time for arguing. They had to get the hell out of there. She had known that this could have happened, that they all could have died, but perhaps she hadn’t really believed it. She felt the deep pain of sorrow come pouring over her. The feeling was so overwhelming that she almost broke completely into tears.
No. She buried the feeling. Not now. She couldn’t face this. It was simply too much, too difficult. She buried her grief beneath her rage.
“All right,” she said. “But Katrín’s injured and we have a hostage. So you’re carrying her.”
He seemed to accept that.
Garún went behind the dumpster, where Katrín was aiming her gun at the stiftamtmaður. Something about her made Garún hesitate. She almost looked ashamed.
“We fucked up,” Katrín blurted out. “This isn’t Trampe.”
Of course she had never seen him with her own eyes, much like the majority of Hrímlanders, but there was a statue of him somewhere downtown and low quality images of him were regularly printed in the newspapers. He was unsightly, but carried a stern look, with strong wrinkles from worry. He seemed the type of man who only smiled on special days of celebration. When he sat in Lögrétta the balconies were closed for security reasons, but usually his seat stood vacant, a clear message of what he thought of Hrímland’s little parliament. He was a representative of the king, his powers were beyond reproach.
Count Trampe. Frederik Ditlev Trampe.
When she took a closer look at the man, she saw that he looked nothing like Trampe. He was huddled as far away from Katrín as he possibly could, like a terrified mouse. A thin face and a delicate, weak chin beneath large, teary eyes. His shoulders were square and bent, his chest seemed almost caved in. He looked like a common scribe or a petty criminal, not a nobleman. He clenched his eyes shut when Garún came into his view, quietly trembling. In all the excitement she hadn’t got a proper look of him. Had barely spared him a second glance. She’d only seen what she wanted to see.
He wasn’t the stiftamtmaður. But he was someone. He had to be.
“It’s his assistant,” said Katrín. “He’s inner circle, at least.”
Good enough.
Garún gagged him, dragged a black cloth sack over his head and pushed him down to the ground. She forced his hands behind his back and quickly tied them.
“Get up.”
The man didn’t move, just kept lying on the ground. She grabbed under his armpits and yanked him up.
“Get on your fucking feet!’
They pushed him back up the stairs and to the rooftop. The portal to the Forgotten Downtown wasn’t far. Explosions sounded in the distance and the air stank of acrid smoke.
“Garún.” Katrín stopped and looked at something in the distance. She pointed forward with her good hand. “Look.”
In the sky floated a horror from another world. An unthinkable nightmare, forged from malevolence and dread. Its very existence was a crass violation of the natural order. Loftkastalinn squirmed with detestable life. Its cannons were gaping maws with hanging tongues, its chimneys spouted bile and blood, inhuman abominations crawled on its every surface like insects. Around the fortress swarmed a cloud of demons, some like bloated beetles, others slithering through the air like serpents. Every part of its surface squirmed, covered in eyes and mouths, hands and claws. An enormous fissure cut across the fortress and Garún realised that these were lips, which separated and showed a glint of enormous, terrifyingly human-looking teeth.
Loftkastalinn flickered like candlelight. Garún blinked, feeling as if her eyelid was twitching. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from it, even though every second of looking at it burned into her some irreversible, unseen wound. Writhing, unworldly tentacles took hold of the unrecognisable fortress, a warped nightmare of what it used to be. The flying fortress now belonged to other masters.
It flickered more rapidly, faster and faster. Garún’s eyes hurt but she couldn’t look away.
Then it disappeared. Erased. Nothing remained but the grey sky.
* * *
The Forgotten Downtown had changed.
They ran a risk going through it, but they still figured that it would be safer than going through the chaotic city streets. It was likelier that the patrolling officers in Rökkurvík would be caught unawares, and if they encountered trouble they could jump back and forth as they needed.
That part of the plan quickly changed as Garún realised that the number of portals connecting Reykjavík and Rökkurvík had significantly decreased. It was a lot harder than she recalled to listen for a potential gate, and she quickly starte
d to worry that she might not make it back so easily.
They ran down muddy paths, past decrepit houses, some of them practically ruins. Those houses which had been usable had been reduced to charred remains or broken, miserable wrecks. The sky was lit by a swarm of red lights, bathing everything in crimson. The hrævareldar were nowhere to be seen, and the streets were completely empty as well. Rökkurvík had regressed into a literal ghost town.
Katrín and Garún held the man upright between themselves, so he wouldn’t fall when he lost his footing. The black sack over his head decreased his humanity, making it easier to treat him like an object. Katrín carried a stiff look of pain, but she didn’t complain. Garún hoped that the arm was merely broken, not infected with the unleashed seiðmagn. She knew well what fate would await Katrín if it was. It would be better to go like Styrhildur, who remained motionless in Hraki’s arms. She might already be dead.
To wander at the limits of the Forgotten Downtown is like being lost in a fog. You’re uncertain where the town ends until you cross the boundaries, and the change is sometimes quick and abrupt, at other times slow and gradual. Garún had spent considerable time mapping out the Forgotten Downtown in her mind, as much as she possibly could, since nothing at the edge appeared to be exactly the same two times in a row.
They had started to run in the opposite direction without realising it. Garún was the first to notice and stopped.
“We’re heading back the way we came. We won’t get much further than this.”
Katrín was out of breath, and coughed nastily. She tried to hide it, but Garún noticed her teeth were stained with blood. If she was coughing blood because of her injuries or from smoking sorti, she didn’t know, but it hardly mattered. She held the prisoner while Garún looked for a nearby portal.
The path they were on could hardly be considered a road – a muddy trail that crossed the mire, almost undetectable. The houses were more spread out, without roofs or windows, sometimes only crumbling walls that stood over a pile of rocks. Garún went out into the mire towards a nearby abandoned ruin, the others followed. The audioskull buzzed in her ears and she looked for that unique static that indicated that a path into Reykjavík was nearby. It was hard to make it out. Something was deeply wrong with this place.
Shadows of the Short Days Page 37
