None were prepared for what they saw. Sword raised and ready, Bjólf found himself looking down upon the face of Gunnar, or what had once been Gunnar. His eyes were wild and red, his blue-tinged mouth foaming, and there was no trace of recognition in his features. Yet, distorted though they were, the features were still familiar, still his friend.
Bjólf hesitated. In shock, the others - for an instant - unconsciously loosened their grip. The creature immediately leapt forward, grasping at Bjólf, sending him flying, his hands slashed by the scattered shards as he fell. It stomped forward, glass crunching underfoot, towering over him, and, with a ghastly cry, reached down and gripped Bjólf's helm. He felt the metal begin to buckle between its huge hands, about to crush his head. In a last desperate move, he grabbed at the floor, felt the grainy texture under his fingers, the sting in his wounds, grasped at it, and flung it in the thing's face. The creature stiffened. Bjólf rolled out from beneath it as it crashed lifelessly to the ground.
All the party stood dazed, no sound but their panting and the harsh note of alarm that still sounded all around them. Halldís climbed painfully to her feet, looking upon the scene with an expression of growing horror. It seemed to Bjólf that her defiant spirit flickered, that her strong heart - feeling, passionate, human - now teetered on the brink of what it could take. But at least she was alive.
As he threw off his helm, a deep thud from the far room suddenly drew his attention. Then a clunk which seemed to reverberate through the whole of the floor, as of something heavy being moved. When he looked, he saw for the first time that the sliding door from which Gunnar had emerged had not completely closed. All along one side, a sliver of light broke through. At the bottom of it, wedged in the gap and keeping the door's edge from the frame, was a beautifully decorated golden scabbard.
"Open it," ordered Bjólf. Godwin and Úlf stepped forward. Others joined them, shoving axes, sword grips, anything they could find into the narrow gap, heaving against it.
"My contribution," coughed Skalla as they worked on it, his features now dimly visible in the light. "To help you to your goal."
Bjólf glared at the shadowy presence. "Why would you, of all people, wish to help us? To betray your masters?"
Skalla gave a shrug, heard more than seen. "Because it pleases me. Because I tire of them. Of life."
In response to a final, mighty effort, the door suddenly hissed open, illuminating the room. Skalla lay propped up in the corner, his breathing rough, his black leather armour wet with his own blood, the bolt protruding from his shoulder, and in his limp hand, lying upon the floor, the fine, gold hilted sword of Hallbjörn's ancestors.
Halldís stared at the precious blade for a moment; a blade she had thought forever lost. Memories stirred. He looked back up into her face. She met his gaze with cold eyes, at the man who had destroyed everything she had known and loved, helpless before her. She could not remember how many times she had wished for such a moment. Staring fixedly at him, she advanced slowly. Skalla nodded at the inevitability of it, almost laughed. She bent over him, took up her father's sword from his weakened hand, then turned and walked away. Without a word, Atli took up the gold scabbard and passed it to her. She sheathed the sword, and put it through her belt.
"You do not wish him dead?" said Bjólf.
Halldís shrugged. "I wish it. But what good is there in it?"
Bjólf nodded, then, turning to Skalla, grabbed him by his hauberk and hauled him to his feet. "Well then," he said, "you can come and meet the masters with us." And with that, he dragged him into the next room.
It seemed that in stepping through the doorway they had finally left behind everything that was familiar to them. None could relate anything here to the world they knew, even those with experience from years of voyages. Apart from a single, strange table or bench to one side, the room was featureless - so featureless that it was hard to see it as a real place at all. It seemed as if it were somehow half-finished - a weird, transitional zone between this world and another, as if whatever strange gods had created this corner of the universe had become distracted, and left it, forgotten, unstamped with any clear identity or purpose.
Every surface was as white and smooth as ice, as if all composed of the same impossible substance, a sickly, oppressive light that seemed, inexplicably, to filter from the high ceiling itself, with no clear source. And there, directly ahead - the only distinct feature in the whole scene, set into the white rear wall and almost as high as a man - was what appeared to be a huge circular shield, forged from steel, its metal shining in the light. All was so strange, so inhospitable, so hostile to life, that there was not one among the company who did not now feel the same deep dread that had afflicted Atli among the decaying, alien edifices in the grove of death.
That the room was empty was immediately apparent. Where the masters had retreated to was not.
"Where?" demanded Bjólf. Skalla nodded towards the great disc of metal in the far wall.
Bjólf understood now that it was some kind of doorway. As he approached, dragging Skalla with him, the lights flickered and dimmed. One by one, the glow from the devices along the benches fizzled out until only a few points of light remained. Skalla looked about him. "They are trying to shut you out," he said. The explanation meant nothing to Bjólf, but he sensed urgency in the words.
"Open it," he said, shoving his captive forward.
Skalla slumped against the wall next to the great metal door, staining it with his blood, his breathing laboured. "Yes, why not," he said with a humourless laugh, coughing.
He raised no latch, reached for no key. Instead, he pulled off his gauntlet and jabbed a finger repeatedly at a strange metal box upon the wall, from which glowed a tiny red light. It emitted a series of unpleasant, high-pitched sounds as he did so. "They do not know that I know this," he said. The fact seemed to amuse him.
The red light changed to green. There was a heavy clunk, and, with a deep hum, the huge steel door swung slowly open, bathing them in light.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
MEETING THE MASTERS
Atli had always thought the worst nightmares were those that came in the dark. He had imagined the darkness filled with shadows, with the threat of unknown, indeterminate creatures, half-hidden or perhaps never revealed, grasping at him from the gloom. With demons, with shapeless monsters, with the hands and voices of the dead. Now he had witnessed these things, seen sights with his own eyes that eclipsed all his most terrible imaginings. For a time, he had begun to believe there were no nightmares left.
The new nightmare - the undreamt of horror - came in cold, sterile light, reflecting off every dead surface, eating into his eyes, into his depleted brain. The shadowless light of the masters' final refuge.
Inside was a fevered, searing vision of ugliness whose weirdly ordered, clean surfaces only made it seem the more delirious, the more utterly insane. Along either side of the room, on starkly white, featureless benches, stood strange things that hummed, and buzzed, and gave off a dead light. Above them on one wall, in cabinets made entirely of glass, were row upon row of vessels - some, like great glass urns, filled with noxious-looking liquids in which were suspended human heads, hands, foetuses and unidentifiable body parts, their lifeless flesh grey and pallid. Here and there, empty eyes stared out, dead mouths lolled open.
At the back of the room, the space opened out into a circular space in which more banks of lights - more than could be counted - blinked and glowed and flicked on or off, arrayed on surfaces in which, here and there, shapes and even pictures - tiny, phantasmic images of people - crackled and moved, as if forever imprisoned behind glass, trapped, like the dead flesh in the great jars, but somehow alive, like shrunken human cattle.
Upon the left side, coming into view as they passed, was a sealed chamber behind glass. Inside, attached to a gleaming metal table, which had been angled upward to give the clearest possible view of what lay upon it, was a man. His body had been cut open, the covering of fle
sh pulled open by metal clamps, its whole surface pierced by long, steel needles, held in place by complex, shining apparatus. The revealed organs within, still pulsating with life - or whatever now passed for it - were attached to hundreds of tubes through which unnaturally-coloured fluids flowed. Before their horrified gaze, the heart beat, the lungs pumped, and upon his face, the eyes flickered, the mouth moved, seeming to appeal desperately to them from a silent world beyond pain.
None could doubt it now. It was from here that the pestilence had come. It was from here that had spread the unfathomable, inhuman intelligence that had wrought those ghastly creations in flesh - of the dead and the living.
But it was not just these sights, or these thoughts, that so horrified them. It was some other, indefinable quality about the whole of that nauseating interior - this world without shadows, in which everything was revealed, everything too sickeningly evident. The entire room seemed to hum with a kind of dull, aching malignancy that hated life, that sought by degrees to crush and mindlessly consume the spirit. The very air around them - stale and dead, like warmed air spent by corpses - made them feel sick, as if poisoned. It was a place in which life had become an irrelevance, an inconvenience - an anti-world, its physical being so drained and exhausted of humanity that not even its hollow ghost remained to attest to its one-time existence, and merely to look upon its dead matter was to know utter despair, to taste in the mouth the creeping canker of a death beyond death, to feel - as if a shuddering, tangible thing - the ultimate doom of the entire race.
Atli had not thought anything could be more terrible than those ghastly things they had encountered in the grove of death. He had been wrong.
And then there were the masters.
As Bjólf had advanced through the opening door into their cursed realm, there had been shouting from within - feeble, terrified voices exclaiming in a strange jabbering language. There was sudden movement, and a loud, repeated, sharp noise - like a log crackling in a fire, but of deafening volume, leaving their ears ringing. He strode towards the circular end chamber, towards its source - an angled, metal tool, the tube-end still smoking, the mechanism now clicking uselessly in the quivering, pallid hand of one of the masters. If this object ever had any dark magic, it was now used up. Bjólf wrenched it out of his weak grip and flung it to the floor.
In front of him, cowering in a corner, his hands raised as if to protect his face, was a small, feeble-looking man in a white coat - his thin, pale, wispy hair barely visible upon the shiny flesh of his barren, balding head, his smooth, pulpy flesh as colourless as a sickly infant. In front of his watery eyes, barely distinguishable from the rest of his bland, characterless face, were two discs of glass, held in place by a fine metal frame. Bjólf plucked them off him. The man whimpered as he did so. He examined them briefly, peered through them onto a blurry world, and, seeing no further use for them, flung them on the floor. The man scrabbled about for them on his hands and knees like a frightened rodent.
Some distance away, behind a solid, white bench, identically dressed, cringed three more puny, pale, smooth-skinned men.
Bjólf turned to Skalla, a look of sickened contempt on his face.
"These are your masters?"
"They wielded great power once," said Skalla, a note of apology in his voice.
"I had many reasons for leaving my home, but having great power was never one of them. So why did they leave theirs?"
"It's... complicated..."
"Do I strike you as a stupid man, Skalla?"
Skalla looked into Bjólf's steely, indefatigable eyes, then scanned the bloodied, battle-worn faces that were now arrayed so incongruously in those strange surroundings - faces that spoke of an unconquerable spirit, of a fierce loyalty that Skalla himself had never known.
"No," he said, "you don't." Then he sighed. "Their land is... here. And not here. It cannot be reached by any ship."
"I have no patience for riddles. Speak plainly."
Skalla narrowed his eyes, thought for a moment, then, nodding slowly, began again. "They come from another time. From a future a thousand winters hence. Their world is doomed - overrun with the draugr. They fought the pestilence, sought a cure." He shrugged. "Unsuccessfully...
"But they had also devised a means of escape. A mechanism, powered by a great furnace deep beneath our feet. They say it has the power of the sun. Their world fell about them. And so, they flung themselves from it, back here, to an age long before - before the world fell, before the pestilence. They meant to buy time, to continue their work, to find the remedy you yourselves sought..." His voice dwindled to nothing.
Bjólf looked at Halldís, as if seeking some confirmation or denial. She merely stared at the floor, fallen into a withdrawn silence, as if lost to him. For a time all stood saying nothing, the whole chamber seeming to throb with a weird energy that made their guts churn.
It was Halldís who spoke first. "They brought this disaster upon us," she said, her voice low and charged with a mixture of anger and despair. "Their own future was lost, and now their selfishness has doomed ours. There is no remedy. No hope. No respite." She turned and wandered desolately towards the back of the chamber, away from the others, as if seeking only solitude.
"I do not believe it," said Bjólf. "Will not believe it. The future is not set. They have proved it. If they can change things, why not us?"
"How?" asked Halldís, despairingly. "All this might and power..." She reached out and ran her hands across a surface of glass, gazing distractedly at the red-painted metal shape that lay beneath. "They thought they had mastered it. But it has mastered them."
As she stood there, one of the feeble, white-coated men began to chatter urgently at Skalla.
"Shut him up," said Bjólf to Godwin. The Englishman hefted his axe.
"Wait!" said Skalla. Godwin halted. Skalla listened intently to the man's prattling, then turned to Bjólf. "He wishes her to move away from where she is standing."
"You understand their language?" frowned Bjólf.
"Of course," said Skalla. Then, still listening, he raised the brow above his good eye, and chuckled to himself. "Oh, that's good! That lever, the red one behind the glass. It appears that it will send them - this whole place - back to where it came from."
Bjólf could only stare at him in astonishment.
"He is now telling me that I should not divulge these things to you," said Skalla. "But because he never bothered to learn our language, he does not know that I already have."
"Such a simple thing can banish all this?"
"As they came, so can they leave. It has been set this way since the beginning. So they could escape quickly if things went wrong."
"And, even now, they have not done so?" said Halldís in disbelief.
"Christ in Heaven," muttered Njáll. "How much more wrong does it need to go?"
Skalla shrugged. "I believe nothing now would induce them to return to that place. It has become too terrible a memory. They call it 'Hel.'"
Bjólf recalled the way Magnus had used that word, how he had spoken of it not merely as a land of the dead, but a place of eternal torment.
"We could send them back, whether they like it or not," he said.
"And ourselves with them," said Skalla. "There's the catch."
Bjólf looked contemptuously at their surroundings, at the square images on the bench before him, showing the death-walkers swarming about the perimeter of the fortress. "What's left for us here?" He took a step towards the lever and smashed the glass with his fist. The white-coated men jabbered in panic as he did so, seemingly trying to appeal to Skalla. Skalla raised his hand to Bjólf.
"One more thing..." he said. "When Gandhólm is torn from this place, this land will be devastated in its wake. For miles around, all life will be utterly destroyed."
Bjólf hesitated.
"As far as Björnheim?" asked Halldis.
"Further."
It meant the end of everything she had ever known. Her friends, h
er family, her father's hall, the pastures she had played in as a child. Everything the pestilence had touched.
"Then the infection will be cleansed from this world," she said, and with sudden clear purpose took Bjólf's hand in hers and placed both upon the lever. One of the white-coated men leapt up, rushing at them, shouting incomprehensibly. Skalla swatted him to the floor, leaving the man's soft nose gushing blood.
Bjólf looked into her eyes, then back at his men. From every one of them came an almost imperceptible nod.
"See you in Hel, Skalla," he said.
They pushed on the lever, and everything around them erupted with blinding light.
They emerged through grey rubble and choking dust into an alien world.
The sun hung low in the blood red sky. What remained of the fortress sat on a great raft of soil and rock, pitched at a queasy angle like a grounded ship, like a huge clod of earth stuck roughly back in the place from which it had been wrenched. The ships, the harbour, the wooden rampart and all sign of the death-walkers from the fjord had been scoured from existence. Beyond, there were no trees, no sign of green.
In the distance, to the east, a great white structure spanned the valley - a wall of impossible dimensions. Other huge, strangely shaped edifices - some broken and collapsed - dotted the landscape. The fjord itself had disappeared entirely, as if boiled dry. The hard grey covering that the ground had now acquired was buckled and broken, pierced through with pipes and twisted metal and, as far as the eye could see, scattered with the chaotic heaps of rubble and wrecked machines. Where the soil was bare, it was cracked and scorched. It was as if the entire land had been laid waste.
Yet, even now, Bjólf had not abandoned hope. Brushing salt from his old friend's eyes as they had made their way out through the twisted corridors, Bjólf had found that Gunnar was not completely inert, but would stand where he was put, and would walk forward when pushed or pulled in that direction. He had bound him about the waist with a chain, and now hauled him along after them, whether hopeful that he may be restored, or out of pure sentimental attachment, none could tell.
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