The Rot

by Siri Pettersen

  “You know, Hirka, this would be so much easier face-to-face. Shall we say tomorrow?”

  “What’s the news?” Hirka gritted her teeth. She knew with every fiber of her being that whatever was coming couldn’t be good.

  “Well, there are three things here, and not a lot of detail, I’m afraid. First of all, two men have had a fight. As men do. Rime and Svarteld. Svarteld is dead, I’m afraid. Rime is going to marry and start a family with a girl from the north. Do you know him? That sounds like much better news. And then finally, there’s been a fire at a teahouse. The owner died, but no one else was hurt. The fire was started by someone who disliked a girl who used to stay there. Dearie me, I have no idea where this came from, but we’ll find out together, sweetheart. Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow and we’ll talk more about it then, okay? Before more people get hurt.”

  Hirka didn’t reply. She couldn’t even open her mouth. The phone slipped from her hand and sailed toward the ground. Stefan came running, but he was too late. It hit the asphalt. A bus swept past. The sounds of the city mixed with the pulse throbbing in her ears. A barrage of noise. Stefan was screaming at her, but she couldn’t hear him over the roar. He held up the phone. She stared at it. The screen was smashed, white cracks stretching across the black glass like the silken threads of a spider’s web.

  MAIMED

  She’s half-blindling. She’s deadborn. One of them.

  Rime ought to have been disgusted, but they were nothing more than words. He knew who and what she was. She was Hirka. She’d never been anything but Hirka. They could call her what they liked. Menskr. Child of Odin. The rot. Or one of the blind. Deadborn. Nábyrn.

  Either way, she was Hirka. The tailless girl.

  Six months ago she’d been a piece in the game between Mannfalla and Ravnhov. A thorn in the Council’s side. What was she now? A piece in the game for the entire world? Caught between forces no one understood. In a world so different from Ym that Graal didn’t think Rime could even survive there.

  Well, he’d find out soon enough.

  He laced up his bag. Custom-made for Kolkagga, with straps for his scabbards. He wasn’t taking much. Knives. Kolkagga blacks. Food. Coins. Healing salve and bandages. Damayanti’s bottles. And a drawing of Hirka. The one the Council had used on the posters they’d pasted up all over Mannfalla. A sketch in black ink bearing little resemblance to her, apart from the blood-red hair. He was hardly going to master the language, so that was all he would have to find her.

  He strapped on his leather armor. Put on his bag and sheathed his swords at his back. Then he went out into his mother’s garden. Gesa’s garden. The pride of the An-Elderin family home. He’d stood here with Ilume the night after the Rite. After he’d watched the guardsmen drag Hirka off to the pits. Blindfolded, her tunic stained with blood.

  The garden lay dormant. Only a faint odor of decay betrayed the thaw. Spring would come soon, but the chances of him seeing it were slim. As were the chances of him enjoying the fragile ceasefire between ymlings and blindlings. He’d forged it with blindcraft. With a sacrifice he knew would come at a cost.

  Grief seized him. A dark void that threatened to swallow him whole. The void left by Svarteld. By Ilume. The disappointment in Lindri’s eyes. That bastard Darkdaggar, who’d sooner see him dead than sit at the Council table. Fellow Kolkagga he’d been forced to kill when he and Hirka were fleeing through Blindból, including Launhug, the man with an inking of Rime on his arm. An icon. What good had it done him, clinging to a survival myth? Idolizing a son of the Council?

  New death merged with old. The bare branches started to look like faces.

  Don’t start something you can’t finish.

  He had a job to do. Never again would he let the past and his mistakes hold him back. He would fight for as long as Graal saw fit to keep him alive. But there was nothing more he could do here.

  Rime followed the path to the square. Pulled his hood up. He already felt like a stranger. A traveler passing through the archways for the very first time. He left Eisvaldr, the city at the end of the city, taking to the streets of Mannfalla. He kept to dark, narrow alleyways until he reached the river. Then he knocked on Damayanti’s back door. He could hear men hollering from the entrance around the front.

  Damayanti let him in, as arranged. Her clothes were as black as her hair. She looked like an augur. Not at all like the dancer he knew.

  She led him into a bedroom and locked the door behind them. He knew without asking that it was hers. It was surprisingly modest, with a bed as the only piece of furniture. It was in the middle of the room, covered in pillows and furs and big enough for three people. It had to have been built where it stood, because it didn’t look like it could be moved. The walls had panels decorated with animal bones. She opened one of them, pulling four torches out of the cupboard concealed behind it.

  She took his hand and led him to the bed.

  “What are you doing?” he asked hoarsely. It was the first time he’d spoken since he got there.

  She leaned toward him. Her lips seemed to get even redder. “We’re going to bed, Rime An-Elderin. You and I,” she whispered in his ear. Then she pulled back the covers and lifted the mattress. Moved some slats aside. There was a trapdoor in the floor below. She turned toward him again. “But we can take our time. There’s no rush,” she said. Desire and shame flickered across her features.

  She was unbelievable. He pointed at his throat. “You can betray me or love me. I’ll never let anyone do both. You made your choice a long time ago, Damayanti.”

  He opened the trapdoor and lit one of the torches. She looked like she was about to respond but then seemed to decide against it. She climbed down through the trapdoor and he followed. He didn’t ask where they were going. The trapdoor took them into a cellar. A tunnel with a damp earthen floor. They were near the river. They walked for a while until they came to a wall with a crack in it that they squeezed through. A draft tugged at the torches, drawing out the flames like fiery serpents.

  Where is she going? There’s only one raven ring in Eisvaldr.

  When they reached an opening between two brick walls, he realized where he was.

  “Are we …?”

  She nodded. “Inside the city walls. There are several underground sections, but the entrances were bricked up hundreds of years ago.”

  The wall meandered a little until they reached solid rock. They squeezed through another crack. The air grew thicker until they emerged in a large cave. This was far beneath Eisvaldr, and he suddenly realized what he was looking at: blindling construction. Like what he’d seen under the library. Maybe that was close by.

  Damayanti raised the torch, and Rime’s eyes widened. The stones were suspended from the ceiling. Huge. Heavy. In a perfect circle.

  The raven ring.

  He walked into the circle and stared up. “It’s the same ring. The same stones …” His voice bounced between them.

  “It’s the same one,” she affirmed, and lit a new torch with the old one, which was flickering out. He ran his hand across one of the stones. They were hanging at different heights, none of them quite reaching the ground. The ceiling was sloped, he now saw, and black. Completely black. With veins of shinier black running like roots through the rock. It was impossible to say whether these had been created by any living creature or whether they were formed by the Might itself. By a primordial force older than Graal. Older than the world. A hunger took hold of him. A hunger to know. To understand.

  To control.

  Here, in this place, was where he would leave the world? Here, where the weight of everything forgotten drove stone through earth?

  Damayanti pulled a bottle out of a pouch. “Promise not to take too much, Rime. You’ll want to, believe me. But it’s blood of the blind, and you have to choose whether you want to be master or slave. There’s nothing in-between.”

  “What are you?”

  She smiled wearily. “Whatever he tells me to be.”

/>   “Slave, then,” he answered, taking the bottle. Blood of the blind. Blood of the first. Traveler’s blood that would open the raven rings for him. Blood that became one with the Might, and that never died or dried up. Lifeblood, from something as terrible as the deadborn. What would he have done had he known that was all he needed to follow her? How far would he have hunted them for their blood?

  To Slokna and back.

  His anger came in waves. Anger at knowing that he could have left at any time. Without taking the beak. Without becoming Graal’s slave. Knowing that Damayanti would suffer for what she was doing was of little comfort.

  “And whatever you do, don’t give any to the humans,” she said. “They can’t handle it. That’s how they get the rot.”

  He heard himself laugh. What wouldn’t he have given to know the truth she now served him with such ease six months earlier? He’d never believed in the rot, but what did that matter, as long as Hirka believed? Now at least he could keep his promise to her. Find her. Bring her the truth about the rot.

  He held out the bottle. “And this heals wounds? Any wound?”

  She nodded. “It healed your throat. And Urd’s. And one of my girls wouldn’t be alive today if it hadn’t been for what people call blindcraft. She was torn open when she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. It works.”

  “Good,” Rime answered. He put his bag down on the ground. Took off his armor and pulled off his shirt. “How steady can you hold a sword, Damayanti?” She stared at him while he took off his shoes and trousers as well.

  She came closer. He stood naked before her. Her lips parted. She put a hand on his chest. Looked up at him. “What are you doing, Rime? You’ve made it clear you’re not going to give me any of this.”

  He drew one sword and handed it to her. “My tail,” he said.

  She staggered back. “You can’t! You’re going to maim yourself, just to … so no one can …”

  “Are you going to help me or do I have to do it myself?”

  “Rime, it doesn’t matter if you have a tail! It means nothing. They might not be like us, but they’re not … they’re not animals! They’ll understand.”

  “You think they’ll welcome me? Embrace me as one of their own? Like we did with her?”

  Damayanti shut her eyes. He knew that she understood. People were animals. No matter which world you were in. He wouldn’t get very far if he showed up in the human world with a tail.

  Damayanti gripped the hilt of the sword in both hands. “And when you come back? Do you think people will accept a cripple as Ravenbearer? One who’s maimed himself? This is madness!”

  Rime had expected her to refuse. And he couldn’t force her, which was a shame. It would have been easier with her help. But he was better off doing it himself than risking a half-hearted hack from someone who didn’t have the stomach for it.

  He took the weapon from her and kneeled on the ground. Gripped the blade of the sword with both hands behind his back and positioned it at the base of his tail.

  “Rime …”

  He shut her out. Shut everything out. This was simple. He had the strength. The blade was sharp enough to slice a man in half. All he needed to do was push the sword down.

  He bound the Might. Clenched his teeth. Tensed his arms. Then he pushed down as hard as he could. He heard his tail thump to the ground behind him. Damayanti stifled a scream with her hand. He didn’t move. No pain. Not yet. But it would come.

  And come it did. The floor grew sticky, and he directed the Might toward his heart to stop the bleeding. Damayanti fumbled for the bottle on the ground, whispering to herself. “Seer help me …”

  Rime tried to fight off the dizziness. She found the bottle, and he felt her cold hands on his back. Then a stinging sensation.

  That means it’s working.

  Hirka had said that once.

  Rime steadied himself, jaw locked. The wound was burning where his tail ought to have been. He could see it. Out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t bring himself to look at a part of his own body lying so unnaturally far away.

  He was someone else. He was about to leave Ym, through the same stone circle Hirka had used. He was a gaping wound. He was a fight he was bound to lose. He was pain.

  He was tailless.

  ISAC

  They parked in an alleyway a short distance from the hospital, next to two dumpsters. Hirka climbed out of the car. It was early in the morning. Stefan stuck his head out the window. “This is stupid, girl. This is how they get you, you know.”

  “I have to.” She didn’t have the energy to say more than that. They’d argued about it all the way there. Stefan couldn’t be part of what she was planning to do. He’d never allow it, or forgive her, so he couldn’t know.

  “Fine, but I’ll say it again, any sign of trouble and we’re leaving, okay? It doesn’t even have to be anything big. If anyone so much as slams a door too hard, we’re out of here.”

  He reached for the back seat and grabbed his beanie. Tossed it to her. “Here. At least try to hide your hair.”

  Both he and Naiell stayed in the car. They thought she was going to see Father Brody. But that wasn’t why she was here.

  She was here to see Isac, the man who had tried to kill Father Brody.

  If she’d told them that, she’d probably be tied up on the backseat by now—and for good reason. It was reckless. There were a whole load of reasons not to do it. Stefan had rattled off a fair few of them on the way from London to York. Like how the police were keeping an eye on the hospital since two of its patients had been at the scene in the church murders. Even worse, Graal could be watching. Or other Vardar, friends of Isac. Did blood slaves even have friends?

  If they were watching, they were watching. She was done hiding. She knew she ought to have been scared, but she just felt numb. Dazed. Crushed by what Allegra had told her.

  Lindri and Svarteld were dead, and Rime was going to marry someone. A girl from the north. Sylja, most likely, if she knew Glimmeråsen.

  No! It can’t be true!

  Hope was all she had left. Hope that it was all lies. Venom and hate, meant to torment her. Still … too much of what Allegra had said rang true. The names. The city. That could only mean one thing. There was a way of communicating between worlds. After all, Urd had spoken to her father. He’d said as much himself. This had to have come from somewhere. Who other than Graal could have passed these lies on to Allegra?

  Nothing in the world would make Rime kill Svarteld. Nothing. They were more than Kolkagga and master. Svarteld himself had told her how he had dug Rime out of the snow, saving the boy as his parents were smothered by the weight of the avalanche.

  And Lindri … She pictured the teahouse in flames by the riverbank. Lindri sleeping on the second floor. Old, wise, and kind. With joints so stiff that he’d never have been able to save himself. Dead? Just because she’d stayed there?

  The hate growing in her chest was terrifying. She felt like she was being torn in two. Part of her whispered that no one would do something so heinous. The other part laughed. The dark, strong, violent part. It was beyond certain that there were people who would do such a thing. Graal among them.

  And Isac.

  She knew nothing about the man Isac had been before Graal had found him, before he’d been infected with the rot. But that didn’t matter, because she needed what he was now. One of Graal’s slaves. And now she had something he needed. Something she could use to buy the information she needed to find Graal. To find out what the book was for and how to get home. Home to Ym.

  A sound made Hirka jump. Birds. Just birds playing in the hedge by the main entrance. It would be spring soon. A new beginning. How many more beginnings would the humans get? How long did they have before the rot took over? The poison that was killing the world so slowly, no one could see it.

  She pulled the beanie down farther. Father Brody was in here somewhere, in the same building as the man who had shot him. Had the police made that
connection? Stefan seemed to think so.

  Hirka went in, making sure not to look at anyone. That was the trick. Pretending you’d been there before. Pretending you belonged, that you knew where you were going.

  She followed a round woman in white. The woman disappeared through a door and Hirka continued on alone, looking into the rooms as she passed. It was like walking around in a nightmare. Everything was white or green. Surreal. There was a sharp smell laced with sweat and fear … and soap. It reeked. All the furniture seemed to have machines growing out of it. There were sounds she didn’t recognize. Lights flickering in the ceiling. And this was where they brought people who were dying? Why? So their lives would end as quickly as possible?

  No, thank you. She wouldn’t be dying somewhere like this.

  She spotted a pair of feet at the end of a bed. The door was ajar. There was no one else in the room. A familiar odor of rot filled her nostrils, a smell she now knew humans couldn’t pick up on. But she wasn’t one of them. The blood of the blind flowed through her veins. What she could and couldn’t do remained a mystery.

  She slipped inside and closed the door behind her.

  Isac was lying in a bed that was higher at one end. A broken bed for a broken man. His skin was tinged blue and he was surrounded by machines that she had no interest in understanding. Things that beeped. There was a transparent tube sticking out of his hand. His blond hair was plastered to his temples. Daylight filtered in through the window, bouncing off everything. A dream. This was only a dream.

  Was this the kind of nightmare that Graal had planned for her? Strapped to a bed with tubes sticking out everywhere, draining her blood, all so he could use the raven rings and take back Ym, which he had lost a thousand years ago?

  “Isac?”

  He opened his eyes and gave a start. She could feel the knife in her boot but was surprised to find that she didn’t want to draw it. Instead, she put a hand on his arm. “Relax. I’m not here to hurt you.”

  She could tell he didn’t believe her, so she continued. “Not that I’m not tempted, of course. You deserve to be lying here. For what you’ve done.” She let go of his arm again. He gave her a tentative smile.