stripped of skin and fat. She opened her mouth and vomited out flies, thousands of them, a buzzing scream. Snorri fell back and she leapt on him, black talons erupting from the flesh of her hands.
I glimpsed Snorri amid the dark cloud, on his back, struggling to keep the child-thing from ripping out his eyes. Tuttugu lumbered forward, shielding his face, swinging his axe in an under-arm looping blow. Somehow he missed Snorri but caught the demon, the force of the impact knocking her clear. For a second she scrabbled at the muddy slope, shrieking at an inhuman pitch, then fell away, wailing, into the consuming blackness. The flies followed her, like smoke inhaled by an open mouth.
With that deafening buzz receding I noticed the laughter for the first time. Looking away from the cave’s throat I saw that the mage remained crouched on the ground, the key still before him on the rock. He wasn’t looking at Snorri, just the key, he tried again to pick it up but somehow his fingers passed through it. Another awful, bitter laughter broke from him, a noise that ran through my teeth and made them feel brittle.
‘I can’t touch it. I can’t even touch it.’
Snorri scrambled to his feet and rushed the man, throwing him back with a roar. The mage went tumbling, fetching up hard against a rock. Snorri scooped up the key and rubbed his shoulder where he’d barged his foe aside, an expression of disgust on his face, as if the contact sickened him.
‘What have you done with my daughter?’ Snorri advanced on the mage, axe raised.
The man didn’t seem to hear. He stood staring at his hands. ‘All these years and I couldn’t pick it up … Loki must have his little jokes. You’ll bring it to me though. You’ll bring me that key.’
‘What have you done with her?’ Snorri, as murderous as I’d ever heard him.
‘You can’t threaten me. I’m dead. I’m—’
Snorri’s axe took the man’s head. It hit the ground, bounced once and rolled away. The body remained standing for long enough to ensure it would feature in my nightmares, then toppled, the neck stump bloodless and pale.
‘Come on.’ Snorri started to climb down the cave’s black gullet, backing into it on all fours, feet first, questing for edges to hold his weight. ‘Leave him!’
I turned away from the remains of the man, the ghost, the echo, whatever it was.
The whispers rose again. I could hear the woman crying, the sound rasping on my sanity.
‘Jal!’ Snorri calling me.
‘I said, do not!’
I turned, looking for the voice. My eyes settled on the severed head. The thing was staring at me.
I struggled to speak, but a voice deeper than my own answered instead. Somewhere deep below us the earth rumbled, the sound of stones that had held their peace ten thousand years and more now speaking all at once, and not in a whisper but a distant roar.
‘What?’ I looked to where Snorri hung, confusion on his face.
‘Better run.’ The head spoke from the floor, lips writhing as the words sounded inside my skull.
The roar and rumble of falling rock rushed toward us, rising from deep below, a terrible gnashing, as if the intervening space were being devoured by stone teeth.
‘Run!’ I shouted, and took my own advice. My last glimpse of the cave showed me Tuttugu running my way and Snorri behind him, still trying to haul himself clear of the drop-off.
I sprinted out beneath the hanging lichen and recoiled off Tuttugu as our paths crossed. The impact sent me sprawling and probably saved my life as my terror would have seen me racing out onto a killingly steep descent toward the fjord.
‘Quick!’ I wheezed the word while trying to haul air back into my recently emptied lungs.
Tuttugu and I staggered out onto the slope, clinging to each other, a rolling cloud of pulverized stone billowing behind us. We fell to the ground and looked back as the cave exhaled dust, like smoke whooshing from the mouth of some vast dragon. Buried thunder vibrated through us, resonating in my chest.
‘Snorri?’ Tuttugu asked, staring at the cave mouth without hope.
I made to shake my head, but there, emerging from the cloud, grey from foot to head, came Snorri, spitting and coughing.
He collapsed beside us, and for the longest time none of us spoke.
Finally, with the last traces of dust drifting out across the water far below, I stated the obvious. ‘No key in the world is going to open that for you.’
We returned to coast-hopping, the Norseheim shore leading us south. Given that Snorri’s options appeared to have reduced to the wastes of Yttrmir in the distant and unwelcoming kingdom of Finn, or a poisoned lake in still more distant Scorron, he settled for seeking out Skilfar as originally planned, his quest so far having added only questions rather than answers.
Aslaug came to me that first night, just as on the previous one on the fjord while we sailed away from the collapse of Eridruin’s Cave, and warned me against the Norseman’s plans.
‘Snorri is led by that key and it will be his ruin, just as it will ruin any who keep his company.’
‘They say it’s Loki’s key,’ I told her. ‘You don’t trust your own father?’
‘Ha!’
‘Can’t the daughter of lies see through her father’s tricks?’
‘I lie.’ She smiled that smile which makes a man smile back. ‘But my lies are gentle things compared to those my father sews. He can poison a whole people with four words.’ She framed my face with her hands, her touch dry and cool. ‘The key is locking you in to your fate even as it opens every door. The best liars always tell the truth – they just choose which parts. I might truthfully tell you that if you fight a battle at the equinox your army will be vic-torious – perhaps though, your army would have won on every day that month, but only on the equinox would you not survive the battle to see the enemy routed.’
‘Well, believe me when I say I’m stopping in Vermillion. Horses, wild or otherwise, couldn’t drag me to Kelem’s doorstep.’
‘Good.’ Again the smile. ‘Kelem seeks to own night’s door. It would be better it were never opened than that old mage gain control over it. Get the key for yourself though, Prince Jalan, and you and I might open that particular door together. I would make you King of Shadows and be your queen…’
She broke apart in the gloom as the sun set, her smile last to depart.
We restocked on staples and water at isolated communities, and passed the larger ports by. Seven days’ sailing from Harrowheim’s quays brought us to within sight of Beerentoppen, our last landfall in the lands of Norseheim. Seven days best forgotten. I thought I’d seen the worst of travel by sea when the Ikea brought us north. Before I passed out I’d seen waves big as a man slamming into the longboat, the whole vessel
