Shadows of the Short Days

by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson

  * * *

  Viscous. Warm. Soft. Like a mother’s womb. Like sex. Only better. More intimate. More obscene. More dangerous. Trapped in the intense moment just before the crash of orgasm.

  His name was Hálfdán Þorsteinsson. He was forty-six years old. He had a wife named Ingigerður Barkardóttir. She was beautiful, but tired, her eyes cold and distant. Garún felt their first kiss, their wedding night, the first time they held hands, all those moments pour over her in one continuous chain where one event merged with another.

  He had cared for Ingigerður, but didn’t love her. He’d loved her before, but a decade and three children later the feeling had eroded and faded into a numb sense of caring. Every time he went to Hafnía for his work he cheated on her at the same brothel. They knew him there and he always booked the same girls in advance. His two daughters, Drífa and Sæunn, were the same age as the whores working there and he found it uncomfortable. The desire, the guilty conscience, the self-loathing, all ran together into a thick ooze that drowned and clouded Garún’s mind.

  The stiftamtmaður. Stern, grave, strict. He prepared documents which the stiftamtmaður stamped and signed in what he felt was a complete and thoughtless autonomy, every official stamp like a death sentence. Hálfdán feared Trampe, but still considerably less than others. He stood closest to him, almost acting as official counsel, and was often made to be the bringer of bad news because whatever official was assigned to the task felt he didn’t have the courage to do so.

  He’s small. His father is whipping him. This was the only memory he had of his father. He didn’t remember his face, how he smelled, how his voice sounded. Only pain. He drowned out at sea. Hálfdán is terrified of sailing and hates the trips to and from Hrímland.

  Jörundur the Ninth is sitting on his throne, the divine engine that advises him. Controls him, according to some. Hálfdán is kneeling along with the rest, but still dares to cautiously look up and gaze upon the king. His face is gaunt and his eyes dull, his hair thin and dirty, the crown too small on his large head. With jagged teeth and an open mouth, he carries all the signs of the endogamy the royal line is known for. Behind him the obsidian throne towers. Through thick, greenish windows ancient organs can be seen floating, the brains of deceased kings that still rule through their descendant. Black cables pour from the throne into the crown. Suddenly the king meets Hálfdán’s gaze and he looks down, feels himself blush from shame and foolishness. He trembles and is about to wet himself. But the gaping fool says nothing.

  He is in Viðey, escorting officials. Noblemen. Tries to smile and participate in the conversation without being too forward. It does not become a Hrímlandic commoner. Trampe points out the defensive fortress, the tower, various precautions. His pride. His home. The eagle’s nest. Garún drowns in information. Pantries, rooms, servants, soldiers, cannons, powder. The layout of corridors and connections to rooms, parlours, the library and the basement. The basement that goes down to the docks. The ferry comes twice a day, mostly with supplies. The stiftamtmaður usually makes use of his private vessel, which is a modern piece of equipment powered by oil, even though the ferry is heading back to the city at the same time. This squandering and arrogance was a great source of annoyance to Hálfdán. Trampe never took a carriage, he only travelled in that obscenely expensive machine that spewed black smoke like a mobile factory.

  * * *

  Viðey was the key. She sank herself into his mind, devoured knowledge in great gulps. She knew how to get into Viðey. How you could sail by the rocks, enter the cavern, up the tunnels and from there move into Trampe’s bedroom. She had everything she needed. This insignificant, disgusting man and his life repulsed her. But she couldn’t stop.

  The next memory was of him at school, when he intentionally poured his inkwell over his writing exercise so he had to do detention, because he didn’t want to go home. Drífa was a baby and threw up over his polished dress shoes before he was going to a celebratory dinner. Ingigerður crying at the kitchen table. When he found his first grey hair. When he woke up in an alley in Hafnía and didn’t know where he was, penniless, his clothes torn.

  She devoured and devoured. Her hunger was insatiable, a bottomless pit she dived into. Joy, sorrow, regret, lies – regular details of everyday life were transformed into magnificent delicacies in front of her and she ate without inhibition.

  She wasn’t satiated until she swallowed the sweet memory of a newly formed human being, cradled in the dark warmth of its mother’s womb.

  * * *

  They could not risk digging a grave in the rocky fields, so they dragged the corpse out into the lava fields under cover of night. The scribe had choked when he had forgotten how to breathe, after Garún had finished. Katrín and Hraki had not spoken a word to her. They knew this was the quickest and safest way they had to extract the information they needed, and that there was no chance they could release the scribe or leave him alive. But what Garún had done was so repugnant, so absolutely immoral, that their feelings of revulsion could not be masked.

  Garún pushed the corpse with her foot and it rolled into a deep crevice. She and Hraki collected large stones and threw them after him. With luck the snow would soon fall and no one would find the corpse until the spring, if ever.

  Later that night Garún woke up to the sound of quiet crying. Katrín was lying on her side and cradling her numb hand. It must have been deep into the morning, but it was still dark out. Garún wanted to reach over and comfort her, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Katrín’s arm was worsening. It had become grey and dead, the skin like a clump of hardened lava. She could hardly move her fingers. She thought of Fæðey and her fate, and she had known Hraki was thinking of it as well. Neither of them said anything to Katrín.

  Garún slept with the delýsíð sheet bundled up as a pillow. Fuel to the fire burning inside her. Her dreams were a confused mess of her own self and the scribe’s memories. She felt as if she had another person living inside her. The delýsíð-induced rage was roaring in the background of these dreams, stitching together these different minds like a seam closing a wound.

  “Why are you doing this to yourself ?’ Hraki asked her one night, when Garún had woken up in the pitch dark, drenched in sweat, her teeth aching from grinding them together.

  “It keeps me on edge,” said Garún. “It helps me stay focused.”

  “It has changed you,” he said. “It’s going to break you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That bone you’re hiding … there’s a demon in there. But different from the skull you’ve got.”

  “It’s a last resort, Hraki, in case I’m cornered. Nothing else.”

  “It’s for him, isn’t it? Trampe. It always has been.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Go back to sleep. And mind your own fucking business.”

  He turned back to his sister, wiping the sweat off her brow. Her breathing was shallow and rapid.

  After having devoured the scribe’s memories Garún had clearly seen how ill-prepared and flawed their former plan had been. It was really a miracle that they had lived and managed to capture anyone at all. There was a response plan for almost every scenario. Invasion, rebellion, assassination, economic crisis, war, world war, a thaumaturgical catastrophe. Anything. In this case they had put into action the emergency response plan for a demonic invasion of manifestation grade 3-A, where an important military target was completely taken over by transmundane possession and transformation.

  The flaw was that most plans assumed to utilise Loftkastalinn’s power in some degrees, and if Loftkastalinn was about to fall a self-destruct sequence was to be initiated, which obviously had not happened. If the fortress hadn’t vanished the Crown would have been forced to completely annihilate the fortress – and possibly the entire city – by forcing the thaumaturgical power plant in Öskjuhlíð to go into limited meltdown. Experiments with this type of overcharging were
very limited and most likely they would have ended up with a complete meltdown, causing absolute destruction over a radius of several kilometres. It was still a better option than letting a demonic manifestation of this degree roam free. Unavoidable collateral damage that would pay off in the end. The thought made her sick. Not that they were ready to take such desperate measures, but how easily they could execute these plans. How thoughtlessly they converted lives into statistics. But this methodical planning for every possible event would be the cause of their downfall.

  After an event like this security would be so strict that it would be almost impossible to get to the stiftamtmaður, but Garún knew exactly how they would react. She saw the cracks, where she could get in and collapse this house of cards that they had built around themselves, like a small stream of water that freezes and shatters a boulder from the inside.

  Þrjátíu og fjögur

  Reykjanes. The living lava fields. Black and rough, rocky and hostile. Blades of yellow grass jutted out of black sand, moss locked its claws into the unweathered rock. The land was flat, but uneven, letting winds play recklessly. It was never the same any two days in a row, as if the lava had never stopped flowing even though it had hardened centuries earlier. Sæmundur stopped on top of a hill. Daylight came late in the day and it was grey and pale through the thick clouds. The black waste spread itself out before him. He took a deep breath of fresh air and smiled. It was good to be free of the city, the fear of being captured, other people in general. He sensed the flow of seiðmagn all around him. This would have remained invisible to him before, he couldn’t have felt or seen it without using Garún’s thaumaturgical goggles. In a way he did not actually see the seiðmagn, but this was still completely different from before. He felt it moving, almost breathing.

  They walked in silence, he and Kölski. It was pointless to bind the demon into shadow here in the wasteland. They crossed rocky hills and crevices, chasing some feeling, a presence that was so powerful all around that it was hard to discern where it was stronger and where it was weaker. It was like the wind, the sky over the earth, thin sunlight on a winter’s morning. The presence was the lava fields themselves, the conscious land.

  The Stone Giant. The southern landvættur.

  All Hrímlanders knew of the four landvættir, even though it was now forbidden to hold blót in their honour. Just as every person knew the cycles of high and low tide, or how the pitch black of winter is turned into the bright nights of summer, the vættir were known to all. The primal beings had not been seen for centuries, but that had never been considered to be reason to consider them mere myth or folklore. Sæmundur himself had never given them much thought before. He considered them a consequence of seiðmagn rather than being remotely related to galdur. Besides, how should he possibly communicate with these primordial beings? But that was before. Galdur was a force that could alter reality itself, but that was not all. Galdur was also a language that transcended the boundaries of time and causality. He felt that now he would be able to connect to this ancient, esoteric consciousness.

  If he could ever find it. Only a single feeling reached him, saturating his entire being. An insatiable thirst for more – for understanding, for transcendence. He had plenty of time, but he’d waited long enough.

  On the second day he came upon a battlefield. Corpses lay over rough stones, the thick moss absorbing the blood. Ravens sat and picked at the carrion. He made his way through the silent battleground. Dismembered limbs, bodies still with the weapons stuck in the killing wounds, men split in twain. Here no quarter had been given. The men were dressed in rags, armed with rusty swords and knifes, decaying shields of wood and leather. An unstable vortex of seiðmagn surrounded a particular spot, where shards of bone and body parts were scattered all around in a bloody mess. An unlearned kuklari had lost control of the seiðmagn he had tried to tame. Instead of being able to use it to cause harm, it had literally torn him to pieces.

  Sæmundur stopped in the middle of the bloodied field. With a raw voice he started the galdur. His voice carried on the wind, an arcane whisper that moved silently around. The world reverberated with hljóð – a word that could mean both sound and silence. Just as Kölski had said about darkness having an essence, so did the silence. He now understood that galdur was also in the silence. As a composer breaks up his work with the absence of sound, he used the silences as well to draw in the power from beyond, lying behind the entirety of creation.

  Faint shadows appeared like frost roses on glass, unclear and dark lights that indicated human forms, but not much more than that. He called to them, wove into the galdur a request of knowledge, of the battle and of the landvættur of the south. One by one they stepped forward, and he listened to their stories in the quiet stillness of the field.

  Their fates had been decided generations before. They could not recall their names, but they recalled their clans. Grindvíkingar, Keflvíkingar, Vogamenn, Njarðvíkingar, mercenaries and opportunists from Sandgerði, Garður and Hafnir. Generation after generation fought and avenged, spilled blood for the sake of blood. Alliances were formed and broken according to the way the winds blew.

  This time it was Grindvíkingar and Vogamenn who met Keflvíkingar and Njarðvíkingar, both parties with mercenaries on their side. Full of betrayal and counter-betrayal their voices crashed over Sæmundur in a contradictory flood of words, where every revenant was inconsistent with the next. With a high tone and a few choice words, which he had used years before when he put down Hóla-Skotta, he calmed the ghosts and made them listen. Where was the Stone Giant? Where was the vættur of the south?

  The answers were vague. Poetic riddles, instructions from those who were no longer constrained by human fetters. Despite all the transformations that he had undergone, all the mysteries that had revealed themselves to him, he was still shackled to this mortal coil. The reality of these souls was completely unfamiliar to him.

  He is where the shell cracks and the wolves howl.

  You find him in the worm’s entrails, the wave’s foam,

  the poisoned edge of the sun.

  He is here. He is here and has never been here.

  You do not seek him. He seeks you. But you have vanished.

  He is the living lava! He lives!

  He lives! He lives! The chained giant still lives!

  Every answer struck some truthful chord, but it was only a fraction of the complete picture, which he could neither identify nor place. With a weary tone he put the spirits to rest, let them fade again into forgetful nothingness.

  * * *

  The sacrificial stone was filled with blood. It poured down on the floor in a steady stream. It was hot, and its stench was foul. The stone bowl was big enough for both of them. Styrhildur looked up at Garún, who cradled her in her arms.

  “You killed me.”

  Garún held her tight and tried to push Styrhildur’s intestines back in.

  “No! It wasn’t me. It was those pigs. Those fucking pigs.” Hot tears stung her eyes. She had a terrible pain over her chest, so she could barely breathe. There was a foul taste in her mouth. “I’m sorry, Styrhildur. I’m so sorry.”

  Seething hatred twisted Styrhildur’s face.

  “It was you. All along.”

  Garún couldn’t hold back. For the first time in so long she let herself cry.

  “It hurts at first, but then you get used to it.” Hálfdán was standing in front of them. “Before you know it you can’t stop.”

  Garún held Styrhildur tighter. He was here for her. She’d never let that happen.

  “You’re dead! I killed you!’

  He smiled mockingly, as if she’d unwittingly said something funny.

  “You’re me.”

  “No! Shut up! You’re dead, you’re nothing!’

  Styrhildur was cold and still. She was dying. Garún shook off her jacket and pushed it against her wound. The intestines writhed out of her body like an angry pit of snakes. The foul taste in her mouth was
stronger and she almost retched.

  “The first time is always difficult. It takes a lot. But still, somehow less that you would have thought. It’s in all of us, I suppose. Then comes the thirst.”

  He smiled and she noticed his teeth were stained red.

  She held Styrhildur even closer.

  “Shut up, you fucking pig!’

  “Please, Garún, don’t. Stop. I can’t any more. Please.”

  Garún loosened her hold. Styrhildur was weakly trying to push her away. New wounds had opened on her neck and by her collarbone. Dark red blood flowed out of her, into the bowl.

  The bad taste was different in Garún’s mouth. She didn’t feel it any more. On the contrary, there was a sweet and salty taste on her tongue. She was so thirsty. So incredibly thirsty.

  “Don’t …’

  Styrhildur fell quiet when Garún leaned over her yet again.

  * * *

  Sæmundur wandered through the lava fields, purposeful but aimless, following a vague but strong feeling that guided him like a compass following the magnetic poles. It was fleeting, uncertain, wandering, but still guiding him somewhere. Every day was shorter than the next. The sun rose and set rapidly, so exhausted that it barely managed to peek above the horizon. Winter was here. The cold didn’t affect Sæmundur, but he was still relieved it didn’t snow. He didn’t have the time to waste energy in melting snow or chanting at the land to avoid pitfalls and other dangerous traps of the lava.

  He didn’t feel tired so he didn’t rest. Occasionally he stopped to mutter a few incantations and words to try to sharpen his wits, try to locate the presence which was everywhere but nowhere. Usually it accomplished nothing, but sometimes he felt he was on the verge of uncovering something, locating the centre, but the knowledge slipped out of his grasp without exception.

  The Reykjanes peninsula-turned-island was a hostile and life-threatening place. The seiðmagn polluted the landscape and saturated everything. Simple beasts like foxes or sheep were transformed into other, uncanny creatures, if they survived the contamination. The endless fields of barren rocks were in constant flux, never giving reliable shelter from malevolent beings or fierce weather.