Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“The Greeks have the River Styx, crossed by a ferryman who dumps you on a shore guarded by a huge dog named Cerberus. The Norse have the River Gjöll, crossed by a bridge that takes you to a shore guarded by a huge dog named Garm.”

“I don’t see your point.”

“It’s like you copied them item by item, just changing the odd detail and using your own names.”

The ensuing argument takes my mind off the unrelenting misery of walking the deadlands. Hell is hell, whatever mythology you dress it up in. Every part of me is dry. Every part hurts. Famine and thirst have set up home in me, bone deep. As the darkness grows, any hope in me wanes and my tongue lacks interest in conversation . . . but arguing, baiting the Northman, that still holds enough appeal to stop me lying down in the dust and waiting for my turn to blow on the wind.

Jalan.

It’s just the breeze, speaking my name into a pause in the conversation.

Jalan .

But when the wind speaks your name in the darkness of Hell there’s a chill that comes with it.

In time even the pleasure in enraging Snorri fades and I stagger on beneath a burden of unbearable pain and exhaustion. My surroundings might be only darkness and dust and a low but endless headwind, but in my mind I’ve returned to the singular hell that was our trip across the Bitter Ice. I’m there once more, with the Norsemen dying beside me step by step, Ein and Arne and Tuttugu, all of us trailing along in that white wasteland with nothing to draw us forward but Snorri ver Snagason’s broad back always moving on.

“Up!”

I find I’ve fallen to my knees, head bowed, unmoving.

“I got you.” Snorri’s hand closes around my upper arm and he lifts me to my feet.

“I’m sorry.” I stumble on.

“This place will wear any man down,” he says.

“I’m sorry.” I’m too exhausted to explain, but I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I had to be dragged through that door before I could live up to my promise, sorry to be leaving Snorri alone in Hell, sorry for his family, sorry I can’t believe in his quest, sorry I know he’ll fail. “Sorry for-”

“I know,” he says, and catches me before I fall again. “And no man who walks through Hell for a friend has anything to apologize for.”

“I-” A sound in the distance saves me from more foolishness, faint, then gone. “What’s that?”

“I heard it too.”

Having heard nothing but the wind for so long the strange cry seems full of portent.

It sounds again, a touch louder.

Jalan.

Louder than my imagination this time. A voice, speaking my name, or at least making the sound of it, making something unfamiliar of it.

“Run?” I find I have more energy left than I thought. Not enough to run, that’s just the fear talking, but enough to stagger along at a decent rate.

“Let’s keep going.” Snorri leads the way.

“But what is it?”

“What do you think it is?” he asks.

Jalan . It’s almost the way my Mother used to speak my name. The way a child might struggle to reproduce both syllables. I don’t want to say, as if naming my fear might make it real, but somehow I know what’s coming, what’s hunting us down. In Hell with its peculiar lack of directions, all your fears will find you soon enough. It’s my sister and the lichkin that has bound itself to her to make a corruption of her soul. If they kill me here my death will punch a hole through which they can emerge into the living world. The unborn queen, the rider and the ridden, birthed into dead flesh so many years after her conception. All my sister’s potential unleashed onto the world in the hands of a lichkin . . . To be honest, all that other stuff is just icing on a deeply unpalatable cake-I stopped caring after the “killing me here” bit. “Is that a light?” I point.

“Yes.” Snorri confirms that I’m not hallucinating through sheer terror.

JALAN! The howl comes from behind us, distant but by no means distant enough. JALAN! It turns out I can run.

Snorri jogs alongside me and with agonizing slowness the light resolves from one into a multitude, outlining the roof and many supporting columns of a towering building, all carved in white stone, just as we described it to each other.

Souls cluster in the darkness near the court. From time to time a new soul will run down the steps, a translucent recollection of a man or woman, not keeping a single shape but moving through memories of their life, moments of terror mostly. None of them lingers where the light falls, rather they run until the darkness takes them, as if the judges’ light burns them. They move away from Snorri and me too. Perhaps the life that still persists in us hurts to look upon with eyes where none remains.

We stop a hundred yards from the many-pillared hall. Walls rise behind the pillars, white and broad, every inch carved with scenes from legend. A doorway stands open, allowing the judged souls to flee their guilt. Our faces are cast into sharp relief by the slanting illumination. Even at this distance that light promises running water, warm air, green things growing.

The air seems brittle here, alive with possibility. I get that same sensation when the souls of the dead break through from the living world and I glimpse blue sky through the tears they make. This is a place of doors. I can feel the key on my chest, cold then hot, vibrating at some pitch beyond hearing. When Kara said the door between life and death lay everywhere, that was just words. I could no more spot that door in the midst of Hell than I could in a market square on a warm day in Vermillion. But here . . . here it seems that home is just a touch away. Here it seems that the door I need might just fracture out of nothing and stand before me. The living world is tantalizingly close, it just needs . . . some small thing to happen, like a lost word finally tripping off the tip of my tongue, and I would see the door . . .

My name rings out again, a howl, loud now, echoing off the walls, an undulating noise empty one moment, violent the next, full of hunger and malice. I take another step into the light. “You should come with me, Snorri.” The words are hard to say. “You’ve seen this place. Nothing good can be brought out of it.”

I wait for the anger, but there’s none in him. He hangs his head, refusing to look at the glow before us. “Arran Vale.”

“What?” I want to go, but I stay.

“Do you remember Arran Vale?” he asks.

“Um.” I should be running but Snorri’s bravery won’t let me. His image of who I am pins me here. I should be sprinting for the hall- instead I stand and try to answer him. Arran Vale? My mind races through names and faces and places, dozens, hundreds, all encountered on our long travels. “Maybe . . . a valley in Rhone? Near that little town with the one church and three whorehouses, where-”

“Hennan’s grandfather, the grandson of Lotar Vale.”

“Who could forget Lotar Vale? The hero you’d never heard of until the moment that old man said his name!”

“Doesn’t matter.” Snorri raised his head to fix me with that steady blue gaze of his. “What matters is that Arran Vale had a history, roots, something to live for, something to make a stand over.”

“All I remember is that you and Tuttugu were about to throw your lives away beside some old farmer you’d met only moments before, and all to defend his hut and its worthless contents from Vikings who probably wouldn’t have even bothered taking it anyway.” The ground is trembling now, the dust starting to dance. My sister is close and coming fast.

“A life lived well is one you’re not prepared to compromise just in order to draw it out for another day.”