Hall of Smoke

by H. M. Long

  “You are in the High Halls,” he replied. There was not a scrap of amusement or playfulness in his voice. He looked like a father hovering over a sick infant except more… angry. “You should not be here.”

  I laughed. “I’m not in the High Halls, Ogam. I’m in a dream. A memory.”

  “These are the High Halls, Hessa. And this bedamned mist knows you do not belong.” Ogam glanced at the fog in a resurgence of irritation and stood up. With a few flicks of his fingers, he drew something and blew on it. The rune for sight and clarity appeared, crystalizing in the moisture-laden air, and the mist vanished.

  The rune hovered above me against an utterly unearthly sky. To my baffled sight, it was not one sky, but four – or eight, or more. I couldn’t truly count them, for there was no place where one ended and another began – only a new and bizarre wedding of the two.

  The most distinct skies inhabited the four points of the compass. In one direction – west? – a quarter moon hung in violet twilight, while opposite the sun sank into smoldering amber cloud. In what should have been the north, white light slashed up into a midnight sheath of black, dancing and burning and swelling – a colorless, liquid rendition of the Northern Lights.

  I turned, craning to see the peak of Mount Thyr and what should have been south. The mountainside stretched up into a winter day of thick and obscure snow cloud, waterfalls of ice reflecting the violet and amber and opal light of the other directions.

  “It’s… it’s more than just a Hall.” Ogam broke through my awestruck silence, crouching back down and putting himself into my line of sight. As he did, his rune disintegrated into snowflakes and nothing remained between us and the ethereal sky. I reached out, catching the flakes on my hand and dazedly watching them melt.

  “Hessa, are you listening to me?” Ogam pressed. “How long have you been here? Gods below – you have not eaten or drunk anything here, have you?”

  My head felt like it was full of creaking, mud-caked wheels. His last sentence slipped by, empty in the wake of the uncanny sky and the revelation that I sat, living and breathing, in the world of the Gods.

  Even as an Eangi, I knew little more about the High Halls than the average Eangen – most knowledge was restricted to the High Priesthood. Only they were allowed to traverse this world before death. But I knew that the Halls were where the gods dwelled, held court, and where strange creatures resided. It was a surreal reflection of the world below, where mortals went after death to rejoice and tell of their deeds while they waited for their loved ones, whereupon they could lie down together under Frir’s care until the Unmaking of the World – when, they said, all of history would begin again.

  “This can’t be the High Halls,” I protested. “Even if the drink Quentis gave me acts like yifr… it can’t be. Where are the souls? And the gods? I’ve only seen you, and Quentis, and my own memories.” Belatedly, I added, “And Svala. Does that mean she’s… Ogam, does that mean she’s dead?”

  Ogam surveyed me for a substantial minute. His eyes were a touch too round and the muscles of his shoulders bunched with tension. “You saw Svala? She’s here? In body or spirit?”

  “I don’t know, I couldn’t tell,” I admitted. There were two ways a human could enter the High Halls: without their physical bodies, by means of yifr or death; and bodily, through a rift between the two worlds.

  My heart twisted in guilty, raw hope. If this was the High Halls, my mother should be here somewhere – along with countless others who had already perished.

  It was also where Eidr and Yske would have been, if I’d given the dead their rites back in Albor. If I hadn’t failed them. But they were still trapped in the earth, and I’d no idea how my mother, how my people gone before, would react to my presence. Would they know of my disgrace? Would they welcome me if I saw them, comfort or curse me?

  “Ogam, if this – if these – are the High Halls, where are all the souls?” I asked.

  “Frir has been shepherding them to her Hidden Hearth early. Yes – that’s Death, over there,” Ogam flapped a distracted hand at the violet quadrant of the sky, his thoughts clearly elsewhere. He either failed to notice how my expression faltered at this, or he didn’t care. “There’s too much happening right now to contend with humans underfoot.”

  I cleared my throat. “Then I need to leave too.”

  “Yes, you do. But I still don’t understand why you’re here in the first place. Why has this priest drugged you?”

  “He’s trying to… kill my Eangi Fire.” Even the memory of Quentis made rational thinking harder. “He wants me to tell him what I’m doing – looking for Omaskat – and where Eang is. He comes into my visions, or comes to visit me here, I suppose. And he watches my memories. Can he do that? Kill the Eangi in me? Watch my memories?”

  “Many things are possible in the High Halls that are not in the Waking World, if you know how to… utilize them,” Ogam answered, but he had gone very still. “What do you mean, kill your Eangi Fire?”

  I frowned at him. “That’s all I know.”

  “Is there anything else in the drug?”

  I stared past his shoulder, considering this, but the sight of the uncanny sky threatened to drag my mind towards the souls of the dead, my mother, and the emptiness of the High Halls. “I think it’s different every time. He’s trying things. And… he has real power, Ogam. Ried came back from the dead and Quentis and his god sent him back to sleep.”

  “Ah.” Ogam shifted to kneel in the grass before me, countenance wrapped in concern. The poppies bent out of his way, like peasants before a king.

  I leant forward in turn. “How can his god be so strong in Eangen?”

  When he didn’t immediately reply, I opened my mouth to repeat myself. But the Son of Eang held up a hand. I pressed my lips together, and silence fell.

  After a few thoughtful moments, I began to fidget. I bent the head of a poppy towards myself and stared at its black heart in the varied celestial lights – black to grey to fringed with gold. I felt at the petals, delicately so as not to tear them. Then I let the poppy go and watched it sway.

  After my fourth time setting the poppy swaying, Ogam’s hand closed around my wrist and set it in my lap.

  “I still haven’t found Eang, Hessa,” Ogam began, “but I did find Gadr. He’s… not himself, skulking about the mountains, hiding. I also found the bodies of two rivermen at the Pasidon. Someone – or many someones – are hunting the gods and anything like us.”

  “The gods are hunting gods,” I observed, unruffled and eloquent in my stupor. “Like Ashaklon was hunting Oulden. But the rivermen aren’t proper gods.”

  “No, they didn’t dwell in the High Halls long enough for that,” Ogam muttered, so low I barely heard him. “I think they are hunting the Eangi too. I have yet to find any alive, but I did find… bodies with Eangi collars, pierced by arrows of bone. Those weapons did not come from the Waking World.”

  My gaze grew glassy, the weight and emotion of this revelation seeping through my inebriation. I’d met every Eangi in the land at one point or another. “Who?”

  “Chief priests from the coastal Addack villages. I don’t know their names.”

  “And… who, who killed them?”

  The Son of Winter shook his head, eyes drifting across the meadow towards the amber sunset in the east. It had nearly vanished by now, deepening into a twilight that mirrored the western Realm of Death.

  “I don’t know that either,” Ogam admitted. “I don’t even know where my own mother is – I’ve searched every corner of these Halls, and nearly all of Eangen. I can’t sense her life, nor her death. If you’ve seen her, Hessa, you must tell me. Hessa?”

  “I’m listening,” I protested, though my addled wits were overwhelmed. Only one thought managed to crystalize. “Ogam, you have to help me escape.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Of course you can. You should. You’re Eang’s son, and she’s my patron. In her stead, I’m your responsibility.” />
  Ogam scowled. “You may be stupid with widow root, but I am still a god, and we’ve been through this before. Do not instruct nor command me. There is much you do not know.”

  I laughed at that, bitter and more than a little unhinged. “Then why won’t someone tell me?”

  “Because you have your task, and that is all that should matter to you, Eangi. Go kill Omaskat.”

  “But how am I supposed to escape? Quentis keeps me drugged.” My bitterness boiled into righteous indignation. It was a frightening feeling, lined with guilt, but grounded in the pillars of the religion Eang herself had handed us. “I’m an Eangi. Your mother should hear me, should come to my aid. But she can’t, or won’t.”

  Ogam snorted at the last. “And she shouldn’t have tried to murder me at birth, but here we are. Well, perhaps it will comfort you to know why I cannot help you. I am with the child and Sixnit.”

  “Really?” A fragile, reckless smile found its way onto my lips. “They’re together? They’re safe?”

  “Yes, Gadr had the baby in the mountains. But now I cannot leave them exposed.” Ogam ran his hands agitatedly through his hair. “I need to find a safe place to hide them before I can do anything else. Gods below. Svala. You said you saw her here in the Halls. Where?”

  “In a memory, by the blacksmith in Albor,” I told him. “But the way she acted, what she said – she wasn’t part of my original memory.”

  For a second Ogam’s expression remained strained. Then, like the dawning of a new day, revelation struck. He stood up. “I have to go.”

  I scrambled upright. “Where? To find Svala?”

  Ogam ignored my question. “I am sorry, Hessa.”

  “Sorry?” I repeated, my voice thin. I’d never felt so blind, so utterly without guidance. “Sorry for what? Ogam, wait. What am I supposed to do?”

  Ogam had started to walk away, but at the last moment he spun back and gesticulated at the expanse of the High Halls around us. “Do you remember what I once told you, about the gods needing to dwell in the High Halls?”

  A shadow crossed my face. He’d mentioned that in Souldern. “Yes. You were toying with me.”

  “Was I?” Ogam challenged, arching one snowy eyebrow. “You know what? Feast, little Eangi, feast and drink the splendors of the High Halls while you yet live. Feast like the gods and the immortal dead. Then let’s see how long that misled priest can keep you under his boot. The rune I used to disperse the mist; do you know it?”

  “Yes.”

  Ogam smiled with a dark, satisfied mischief in his eyes. “Then fill that human belly of yours and give it a try. The mist will return – it’s trying to hide the Halls from you, in a way, because you don’t yet belong.

  But once the magic of this place is in your belly and blood, everything will change.”

  I stared at him, ensnared between indignation and hope and a dozen new questions. But for once, I was almost glad for Quentis’s potions muddying my mind. Then I might not have to consider what any of this actually meant.

  “In fact,” Eang’s son continued as he turned away, “I think you’ll find all your runes more useful here than your own world – though do be careful. Time and space are malleable here, and many of the rules of the Waking World may not apply.”

  “Ogam,” I called again as he reached the tree line and ducked under the rustling leaves of a grey poplar. “I can’t do this. It’s forbidden.”

  “And I’m unforbidding it,” he shot back. “I’m granting you a privilege, as is my right as a god. You want me to act like Eang’s son, honor her pact with you? There. I grant you the privilege of feasting in the Halls while you live.”

  My conscience creaked, torn between dogma and need. “Please don’t lie to me.”

  “I am not.” He scowled back at me with such gravity and candor that I couldn’t help but believe him. “I truly am not.”

  I swallowed. “All right. And what about Quentis’s poison?”

  “I’d say that the more you eat and drink, the less it will affect you.” Lifting a finger to his lips, he added with a spark of his legendary mischief, “Just do not tell my mother. Or my aunt. Or anyone else, for that matter. Agreed?”

  He pushed aside another branch and was gone.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  After Ogam’s departure I sat with my back against a pillar of the shrine, staring up at the unveiled sky and waiting for my thoughts to sort themselves out. The division of the heavens had changed slightly; the amber sun had completely set and stars had come out, though the north still rippled with patterns of white light and the moon in Frir’s realm had become full.

  To the south, above the peak of Mount Thyr, the afternoon waned. The shadow of its heights and crags toppled all the way down the forested mountain to where Albor should have lain, obscure now in the darkness.

  I preferred it that way. With the village out of sight, it was easier not to wonder what my former home would look like here. Unseen, it did not matter if the town was whole, as in my memories, or as burned and charred as it was in the Waking World. No one I loved was there to welcome me.

  Gradually, my mind began to grasp more practical, manageable matters. So, Ogam had invited me to eat and drink of the High Halls, yet I was to hide it from Eang and the other gods?

  Even my dull mind was sharp enough to question the need for secrecy, and to mistrust the mischief in the Son of Winter’s eyes. But what else could I do? No one was coming to help me. I needed to cure myself.

  I climbed back to my feet and turned full circle, surveying each tree around the meadow. There was still enough light from the waning southern afternoon to see berry bushes here and there, and when I cocked my good ear, I picked out the sound of a stream nearby.

  I began to forage, keeping close to the meadow. I nervously ate berries off the bush and, crouching in a pool of golden evening light, I drank water from a creek of clear meltwater. As my confidence grew, I stuffed my pockets with mushrooms and dug up root vegetables from a corner of the meadow. I made no effort to hunt – I didn’t have tools for cooking, and for all I knew, any of the rabbits or fowls that fled my path might be something far more powerful in disguise.

  By the time something like full dusk unfolded over the High Halls, my belly and pockets were nearly full. Satisfied, I began to head back to the meadow on a narrow, winding path.

  A low hum caught my ear. I turned, squinting into the shadows between the trees. There, barely discernable in the gloaming, a thousand sleepy bees converged around an ancient, hollow ash.

  I crept closer, leaving the path and picking my way over gnarled roots, lichen-covered rocks and pockets of moss. The bees ignored me, attending their tasks while I paused at the base of the tree.

  Honey streamed down the bark in amber waterfalls, rimed with a hardened crust and rivers of ants, before it disappeared into a yawning hole among the roots. I stuck a finger into the flow and licked it. Sweetness burst across my tongue, thick with the taste of forest and home, of pine and mountain flowers, and for an instant homesickness overwhelmed me.

  But so did strength. It prickled through my fingers, my veins, and infiltrated my heart itself. My heartbeat intensified and my vision sharpened a fraction.

  I slowly licked my fingers clean, taking stock of every sensation, every subtle change in my mind and muscles. Eventually the feeling receded, but I felt better than before. I cracked off dried pieces of honey to take back with me and retreated to the meadow.

  The next morning, I awoke from a restless sleep to find the fog had returned, though not so thickly as it once had. I ate and drank and tried to draw the rune that Ogam had used the day before to disperse the miasma, but it did not work for me.

  Another day came and went. Haunted by fog, I stayed close to the perceived safety of the meadow. I foraged and drank and slept, hoping that the next morning I would awake to find my mind clearer and my body stronger.

  But when my eyes opened again, Quentis had come. I didn’t see him immediately
; instead, I knew he was coming, as naturally as seeing him approach. He was a subtle change in the air, almost a draft, as if an unseen door between the Waking World and the High Halls had opened and closed.

  I climbed to my feet, moving with habitual care, but my limbs felt lithe and strong, and my head was blissfully clear.

  Careful not to betray my new strength, I faced Quentis over a swath of dew-heavy, closed poppies. Mist tickled across my cheeks, but it was even thinner than the day before. If anything, it seemed to be here for Quentis, and it formed a barrier between me and my enemy.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  The Arpa held his mixing bowl in one hand and regarded me like the Eangi war chief, Ardam, would when I lost yet another training bout. His other hand was stained with a mixture of muted orange, embedded now in the creases of his knuckles. As I watched him in return, he raised the hand to his lips and licked at it absently.

  “What do you want most in the world, Hessa?”

  “Leave me alone,” I hissed. Nonetheless, my thoughts flickered through a series of hopes and recollections. I saw my sisters and me as girls, cuddled safe against the winter’s cold. I saw Eidr, pulling my head gruffly into his chest on a bloody battlefield. Yske, singing. The Hall, rebuilt. Vistic as a grown man, at Sixnit’s shoulder.

  But these thoughts, as poignant as they were, stuttered when my eyes drifted to the shrine. Eidr and Yske were dead. Perhaps my sisters and father were too. The Hall of Smoke would never be rebuilt, not without Eangi to fill it. Sixnit was so far away and Vistic, this child I had bound myself to, how could he survive the world as it was now?

  The High Halls were all that was left to me. This field of poppies, the world beyond, they were my hope of being with my loved ones again. This place was my eternity – elusive and strange though it was.

  That thought bloomed and turned until I forgot Quentis altogether.

  If I killed Omaskat, Eang shrove me and I lived through the entire ordeal, what would the rest of my life look like? Eangen was scarred and scattered, her people fleeing towards the Western Sea. As one of the last Eangi, it would fall to me to help lead them – me and Svala.