Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

The descent put me in mind of our visit to Kelem in his mines, another ill-advised climb down into the dark unknown. The handholds in the poured-stone wall seemed to have been made when the shaft was lined, being moulded into the stone rather than hacked out, and proved considerably more trustworthy than Kelem’s rickety ladders. And thankfully the bottom took less time to reach. I estimated we’d descended thirty yards, certainly not more than fifty.

I joined the others in a square chamber of poured stone. Dim red light pulsed fitfully from a circular plate in the ceiling, making our shadows grow and shrink. It put me in mind of Hell.

“Lovely.” I drew my sword.

In the wall opposite a circular door of silver-steel a good six inches thick stood ajar on heavy, gleaming hinges. If ever a smith found a fire hot enough to melt the stuff there would be the wealth of a nation right there, just waiting to be forged into the best swords that money could just about afford to buy.

Corridors led off to the right and left, the left one blocked by an ancient collapse, the right by a more recent one, burn marks patterning the stone. I moved to peer past Snorri and over Hennan’s head through the gap where the vault door opened. A single small room lay beyond it, also lit by a pulsing red light in the ceiling. It held four cubicles of glass, two against one wall, two others opposite. Four silver-steel domes were set in the ceiling, one above each cubicle. You could imagine each a great sphere of silver-steel, nine-tenths of which lay hidden in the rock above with just a fraction showing. The nearest cubicle on the right and the farthest on the left lay dark, the glass fractured in strange patterns. A dead man stood in the cubicle closest on the left, illuminated by some unseen light source, his flesh all the colours of rot, some peeling from his bones, some having dropped off and yet hanging unsupported partway to a floor spattered with decay. A kind of harness secured him to the wall. The last cubicle held Dr. Taproot, as motionless as the corpse, worry crowding the narrowness of his face, his hands locked together, long fingers entwined mid-wrestle. He looked much as he had when I last saw him in the flesh, dust marks on the blackness of his circus-master’s coat, a white shirt across his thin chest, the buttons mother-of-pearl.

“What’s wrong with him?” Snorri asked.

“He’s stuck in time,” I said. “Glued into one moment.”

“And this one?” Hennan screwed up his face at the rotting body.

“I guess either he wasn’t stuck so firmly and time is slipping by for him, just very slowly, or the machine was turned on and caught him like that.”

“Machine?” Kara asked.

I nodded up at the silver domes. “Those, I guess.”

Snorri walked over to Taproot’s cubicle and opened the door, pausing to marvel at so large and flat and clear a piece of glass. He reached toward Taproot and I was glad to see some hesitancy in the move. I found it easier to like Snorri when he showed at least some sign of nerves. He frowned as his fingers met some resistance. He pushed and his hand seemed to slide around some second sheet of glass, this one curved and reflecting no light.

“I can’t touch him.”

“Can you break the glass?” I asked.

Snorri frowned. “I’m not sure there’s any glass here . . . it doesn’t feel like . . . anything. I just can’t touch him.”

Kara moved to stand with Snorri, looking tiny beside him-as most people do. “If he’s locked in time, and where we are time is flowing . . . then there must be a divide between those two regions, a barrier through which nothing can pass because there is no time for it to do so. It would be pointless to try and break such a wall-there wouldn’t be a meaning to the word ‘break’.” She furrowed her brow, lips pressed into a thin line. “Even the light from him shouldn’t reach us . . . perhaps the machine projects the last image of him for the benefit of those outside.”

“Well, we’re here to rescue him aren’t we? So we should get on and do it, or leave.” I didn’t much like the Builder hole with its pulsing red light, frozen corpse, and singular, easily blocked exit. In fact after my experi-ences in the Crptipa mines I was quite happy never to venture below ground again until my time came to be lowered in my coffin. “Hit it with your axe, Snorri. The way of the North!”

“There’s got to be some way of releasing him . . .” Kara started to walk around the sides of the cubicle as if the glass would yield more information on closer inspection.

I left her to it and glanced over at the time-locked corpse to make sure it hadn’t moved. I walked over to the doorway. If something the völva touched set the great metal disc swinging in on its hinges I would be the first to tumble out before the gap sealed. I stood beside the wall, had a yawn, scratched my nethers, and glanced at the corpse again. Still in the same position . . .

Kara had resorted to incantations, run out of those, and was swearing softly in Old Norse by the time I spotted the little silver buttons on the inner surface of the vault door, a grid of nine of them near the middle. I waited a while. She set her palms to the invisible surface that surrounded Taproot, closed her eyes, and began to concentrate, eyes screwed tight. After two minutes I could see the sweat on her forehead, like beads of blood in the pulsing red light. Another minute and she was trembling with the effort.

“ Hruga uskit’r! ” Kara threw up her hands. “Give me the damn axe.” She reached for Hel, and Snorri moved it out of her reach.

“Or we could just push these buttons,” I said. And reached to jab three at once.

“No!” Kara’s shout to start with, Snorri’s rising over her.

Too late to stop me, though. The lights went out, leaving us in total darkness. A moment later a noise that could only be the door swinging closed sounded just next to me, a dull and heavy clunk with as much finality as any judge’s death sentence ever held.

“Ohgodwe’reallgoingtodiedownhere!” The words escaped me in a breath.

“Jal!” A sharp reprimand from Kara, protective of her young charge.

“You don’t have the key?” Snorri asked in an even voice. “Without the key I’ll agree, we might well all die down here.”

“The key!” I reached for Loki’s black little blessing, feeling over my chest for the lump of it beneath my jerkin. My moment of relief proved short-lived. Nothing! “It’s somewhere. I put it somewhere!” Fear-blunted fingers began a wild search.

“Just wait!” Kara snapped. “I have the orichalcum. Let me get it out and we can see-”

“Got it!” I found the key. It had slid around on its thong and hung almost under my armpit. I pulled it out, lifted the thong over my head, and got a good grip on the key’s glassy surface. As my hand tightened about it a distant laughter, perhaps imagined, seemed to mock me from the dark. “Hurry up with that light!” I held the key before me like a weapon, ready to ward off any unseen horrors, and stepped forward, swinging it. Somehow I’d managed to lose my bearings and the twenty-ton door was proving elusive.

Something ahead of me made a soft thump on the floor. I froze. Silence, save for Kara’s muttered cursing in Old Norse again as she hunted her skirts for the orichalcum.

“What’s that stink?” Snorri sniffed. “It smells like the hold of a longship in high summer.”

I could smell it too. I had to pat myself to make sure it wasn’t something those moments of blind terror had squeezed out of me-but this was something even less pleasant than sewage. It put me in mind of the rear dungeons at the debtor prison in Umbertide. The stink of death.

“Ah!” Light blossomed from Kara’s hand, revealing the chamber once more.