The Wheel of Osheim

The Ha’tari warrior continued to back away, bent double, both hands clutching his face. The skeleton rotated its skull toward us and started to run again, the sword trapped in its ribcage clattering as it came on.

‘This way!’ I turned to do some running of my own, only to see that skeletons were closing on the camp from all directions, gleaming white in the moonlight. ‘Hell!’

The sheik’s men had nothing better than daggers to defend themselves with, and I hadn’t even filched a knife from the evening meal.

‘There!’ Danelle caught my shoulder and pointed at the closest of several lamp stands that had been set between the tents, each a shaft of mahogany a good six foot tall and standing on a splayed base, the brass lamp cradled at the top.

‘That’s no damn use!’ I grabbed it anyway, letting the lamp fall and hefting the stand up with a grunt.

With nowhere to run I waited for the first of our attackers and timed my swing to its arrival. The lamp stand smashed through the skeleton’s ribcage, shattering it like matchwood and breaking its spinal column into a shower of loose vertebrae. The dead thing fell into a hundred pieces, and the phantom that had wrapped them sank slowly toward the fragments, a grey mist descending.

The momentum of my swing turned me right around and the daughters had to be quick on their feet to avoid being hit. I found myself with my back to my original foe and facing two more with no time to swing again. I jabbed the stand’s base into the breastbone of the foremost skeleton. Lacking flesh, the thing had little weight and the impact halted its charge, breaking bones and lifting it from its feet. The next skeleton reached me a moment later but I was able to smash the shaft of the stand into its neck like a quarterstaff then carry it down to the sand where my weight parted its skull from its body before its bony claws could reach me.

This left me on all fours amid the ruin of my last enemy but with half a dozen more racing my way, the closest just a few yards off. Still more were tearing into the sheik’s people, both the injured and the healthy.

I got to my knees, empty handed, and found myself facing a skeleton just about to dive onto me. The scream hadn’t managed to leave my mouth when a curved sword flashed above my head, shattering the skull about to hit my face. The rest of the horror bounced off me, falling into pieces, leaving a cold grey mist hanging in the air. I stepped up sharpish, shaking my hands as the phantom tried to leach into me through my skin.

‘Here!’ Tarelle had swung the sword and now pressed it into my grip. The Ha’tari’s blade – she must have recovered it from the remains of the first skeleton I put down.

‘Shit!’ I sidestepped the next attacker and took the head off the one behind.

Five or six more were charging in a tight knot. I briefly weighed surrender in the balance against digging a hole. Neither offered much hope. Before I had time to consider any other options a huge shape barrelled through the undead, bones shattering with brittle retorts. A Ha’tari on camelback brushed past me, swinging his saif, more following in his wake.

Within moments the sheik and his sons were dismounting around us, shouting orders and waving swords.

‘Leave the tents!’ Sheik Malik yelled. ‘This way!’ And he pointed up along the valley snaking between the dune crests that bracketed us.

Before long a column of men and women were limping their way behind the mounted sheik, flanked by his sons and his own armed tribesmen while the Ha’tari fought a rear-guard action against the bone hordes still being vomited forth from the damp sand.

A half mile on and we joined the rest of the sheik’s riders, standing guard around the laden camels they’d recovered from the surrounding desert.

‘We’ll press on through the night.’ The sheik stood in his stirrups atop his ghost-white camel to address us. ‘No stopping. Any who fall behind will be left.’

I looked over at Jahmeen, watching his father with strained intensity.

‘The Ha’tari will deal with the dead, won’t they?’ I couldn’t see mounted warriors being in too much danger from damp skeletons.

Jahmeen glanced my way. ‘When the bones rest uneasy it means the djinn are coming – from the empty places.’

‘Djinn?’ Stories of magic lamps, jolly fellows in silk pantaloons, and the granting of three wishes sprung to mind. ‘Are they really as bad as the dead trying to eat us?’

‘Worse.’ Jahmeen looked away, seeming less an angry young man and more a scared boy. ‘Much, much worse.’

3

‘So, about these djinn…’ We’d travelled no more than two miles and somehow it was daytime among the dunes, scorching hot, blinding, miserable as always. As we left the time-river rather than hasten into the next day we seemed to slip back into the one we’d escaped. The sun actually rose in the west in a reversal of the sunset we’d witnessed many hours before. The feeling was decidedly unsettling, and given my recent experiences ‘unsettling’ is no gentle word! ‘Tell me more.’ I didn’t really want to know any more about the djinn, but if the Dead King was sending more servants after the key I should at least know what I was running away from.

‘Creatures of invisible scorching fire,’ Mahood said on my right.

‘They will be drawn to the Builders’ Sun.’ Jahmeen on my left. They had bracketed me the whole journey, presumably to stop me talking to their sisters.

‘God made three creatures with the power of thought,’ Sheik Malik called back to us. ‘The angels, men, and djinn. The greatest of all the djinn, Shaytan, defied Allah and was cast down.’ The sheik slowed his mount to draw closer. ‘There are many djinn that dance in the desert but these are the lesser kind. In this part of the Sahar there is just one grand djinn. Him we should fear.’

‘You’re telling me Satan is coming for us?’ I scanned the dune tops.

‘No.’ Sheik Malik flashed a white line of teeth. ‘He lives in the deep Sahar where men cannot abide.’

I slumped in my saddle at that.

‘This is just a cousin of his.’ And with that the sheik urged his camel on toward the Ha’tari riding point.

The ragged caravan continued on, winding its way through the dunes, limited to the pace of the walking wounded, variously burned by the light of the Builders’ Sun, broken by the blast that reached us minutes later, and torn by the bones of men long dead, emerging from the sands.

I hunched over my malodorous steed, swaying with the motion, sweating in my robes and willing away the miles between us and the safety of Hamada’s walls. Somehow I knew we wouldn’t make it. Perhaps just speaking about the djinn had sealed our fate. Speak of the devil, as it were.

The Builders’ Suns left invisible fire – everyone knew that. There were places even in Red March still tainted with the shadow of the Thousand Suns. Places where a man might walk and find his flesh blistering for no reason, leaving him to die horribly over the next few days. They called them the Promised Lands. One day they would be ours again, but not soon.

I half-expected the djinn to come like that, like the light of the Builders’ Sun, but unseen, turning first one man then the next into columns of flame, molten fats running. I’d seen bad things in Hell and my imagination had plenty to work with.

In fact, djinn burn men from the inside.

It began with writing in the sand. As we snaked between the dunes their blindingly white flanks became scarred with the curving script of the heathens. At first, seen only where the sun grazed a slope at an angle shallow enough for the raised letters to throw a shadow.

None of us knew how long before Tarelle noticed the markings we had been riding between slopes overwritten with descriptions of our fate.

‘What does it say?’ I didn’t really want to know but it’s one of those questions that asks itself.

‘You don’t want to know.’ Mahood looked nauseous, as if he’d eaten one too many sheep’s eyeballs.

Either the entire caravan was literate or the anxiety infectious because within minutes of Tarelle’s discovery each traveller seemed to walk or ride within their own bubble of despair. Prayers were said in quavering voices, the Ha’tari rode closer in, and the whole desert pressed in against us, vast and empty.

Mahood was right, I didn’t want to know what the writing said, but even so part of me ached to be told. The lines of the words, raised against the smoothness of the dunes, drew my eye, maddening and terrifying at the same time. I wanted to ride out and scuff away the messages but fear held me back amid the others. The main thing when trouble strikes is to keep a low profile. Don’t draw attention to yourself – don’t be the lightning rod.

‘How much farther is it?’ I’d asked that question a few times, first in irritation, then desperation. We were close. Ten miles, maybe fifteen, and the dunes would part to reveal Hamada, another city waiting its turn to drown beneath the desert. ‘How much farther?’ I asked it as if repetition would wear away the miles more effectively than camel strides.

Finding myself ignored by Mahood, I turned to Jahmeen, and discovered that I was already the centre of his attention. Something in the stiffness of him, the awkwardness with which he rode his camel, gave me pause and my question stuck in my throat.

I met his eyes. He held me with the same implacable stare his father used – but then I saw it, a flicker of flame, glimpsed through the pupil of each eye.

‘What … what’s written in the sand?’ A new question stuttered out.

Jahmeen parted his lips and I thought he would speak but instead his mouth opened so wide that his jaw creaked, and all that came forth was a hiss, like the sand being stripped from the dunes. He leaned forward, hand clasping around my wrist, and beneath his palm a fire ignited, trying to eat into me, trying to invade. My world became that burning touch – nothing else, not sight, or sound, or drawing breath, just the pain. Pain and memories … the worst memories of all … memories of Hell. And while I suffered and lost myself in them how long would it be before the djinn escaped Jahmeen and hollowed out my flesh, driving my own undernourished soul into Hell for good? I saw Snorri, standing there in my memory, standing there at the start of a tale I had no wish to follow, with that grin of his, that reckless, stupid, brave, infectious grin… All I had to do was hang onto the now. I had to stay here, in the now, with my body, and the pain. I just had to—

Snorri’s hand is clamped about my wrist, the other on my shoulder, preventing me from falling. I’m looking up and he’s framed against a dead sky from which a flat orange light bleeds. Every part of me hurts.

‘The door got away from you, hey?’ He stands me up. ‘Couldn’t hold it myself – had to pull you through quick before it shut again.’

I swallow the scream of raw terror before it chokes me in its bid for freedom. ‘Ah.’

The door is right in front of me, a faint silver rectangle scratched into the dull grey flank of an enormous boulder. It’s fading as I look at it. All life, all my future, everything I know lies on the other side of that door. Kara and Hennan are standing there, just two yards away, probably still staring at it in confusion.

‘Give Kara a minute to lock it. Then we’ll go.’ Snorri looms beside me.

Pretty soon Kara’s confusion will turn into anger as she realizes I’ve picked Loki’s key from her pocket. The thing just seemed to leap into my hand and stick to my fingers, as if it wanted to be stolen.

I cast a quick glance around me. The afterlife looks remarkably dull. They tell in children’s tales that the Builders made ships that flew and some would soar above the clouds and out into the blackness between stars. They say the richest of kings once taxed all his nobles into the poorhouse and built a ship so vast and swift, hung beneath a thousand-acre sail, that it bore men all the way to Mars that, like the Moon, is a world unto itself. They went all those untold thousands of miles and returned with images of a place of dull red rocks and dull red dust and a dry wind that blew forever … and men never again bothered to go there. The deadlands look pretty much like that … only slightly less red.

The dryness prickles against my skin as if the air itself is thirsty, and each part of me is sore like a bruise. In the half-light the shadows across Snorri’s face have a sinister cast, as though his flesh is itself a shadow over the bone beneath and any moment might find it gone, leaving a bare skull to regard me.

‘What the hell is that?’ I point an accusing finger over his shoulder. I tried this once when we first met and earned not so much as a flinch. Now he turns, bound by trust. Quickly I pull Loki’s key from my pocket and jab it toward the fading door. A keyhole appears, the key sinks home, I turn it, turn it back, pull it clear. Quicker than a trice. Locked.

‘I don’t see it.’ Snorri’s still peering at the jumbled rocks when I turn back. Useful stuff, trust. I pocket the key. It was worth sixty-four thousand in crown gold to Kelem. To me it’s worth a brief stay in the deadlands. I’ll open the door again when I’m sure Kara won’t be waiting on the other side of it. Then I’ll go home.

‘Might have been a shadow.’ I scan the horizon. It’s not inspiring. Low hills, scoured with deep gullies, march off into a gloomy haze. The huge boulder we’re next to is one of many scattering a broad plain of fractured rock, dark and jagged pieces of basalt bedded in a dull reddish dust. ‘I’m thirsty.’

‘Let’s go.’ Snorri rests the haft of his axe on his shoulder and sets off, stepping from one sharp rock to the next.

‘Where?’ I follow him, concentrating on my footing, feeling the uncomfortable angles through the soles of my boots.

‘The river.’

‘And you know it’s in this direction … how?’ I struggle to keep up. It’s not hot or cold, just dry. There’s a wind, not enough to pick up the dust, but it blows through me, not around, but through, like an ache deep in the bones.

‘These are the deadlands, Jal. Everyone’s lost. Any direction will take you where you’re going. You just have to hope that’s where you want to be.’

I don’t comment. Barbarians are immune to logic. Instead I glance back at the rock where the door lay, trying to fix it in my memory. It’s crooked over to the right, almost like the letter ‘r’. I should be able to open a door out anywhere I choose, but I don’t much want to put that to the test. It took a mage like Kelem to show us a door in and the chances are he’s in the deadlands now. I’d rather not have to ask him to show me the exit.

We press on, stepping from rock to rock on sore feet, trudging through the dust where the rocks grow sparse. There’s no sound but us. Nothing grows. Just a dry and endless wilderness. I had expected screaming, torn bodies, torture and demons.

‘Is this what you expected?’ I lengthen my stride and catch up with Snorri again.

‘Yes.’

‘I’d always thought Hell would be more … lively. Pitchforks, wailing souls, lakes of fire.’

‘The völvas say the goddess makes a Hel for each man.’

‘Goddess?’ I stub my toe on a rock hidden in the dust and stumble on, cursing.

‘You spent a winter in Trond, Jal! Didn’t you learn anything?’

‘Fuckit.’ I hobble on. The pain from my foot almost unmans me. It’s as if I’ve stepped in acid and it’s eating its way up my leg. If just banging my toe hurts this much in the deadlands I’m terrified of being on the wrong end of any significant injury. ‘I learned plenty.’ Just not about their damned sagas. Most of them seemed to be about Thor hitting things with his hammer. More interesting than the stories Roma tries to feed us, true, but not much of a code to live by.

Snorri stops and I hobble two paces past him before realizing. He spreads his arms as I turn. ‘Hel rules here. She watches the dead—’

‘No, wait. I do remember this one.’ Kara had told me. Hel, ice-hearted, split nose to crotch by a line dividing a left side of pure jet from a right side of alabaster. ‘She watches the souls of men, her bright eye sees the good in them, her dark eye sees the evil, and she cares not for either … did I get it right?’ I hop on one leg, massaging my toe.

Snorri shrugs. ‘Close enough. She sees the courage in men. Ragnarok is coming. Not the Thousand Suns of the Builders, but a true end when the world cracks and burns and the giants rise. Courage is all that will matter then.’

I look around at the rocks, the dust, the barren hills. ‘So where’s mine? If this is your hell where’s mine?’ I don’t want to see mine. At all. But even so, to be wandering around in a barbarian’s hell seems … wrong. Or perhaps a key ingredient in my personal hell is that nobody recognizes the precedence of nobility over commoners.

‘You don’t believe in it,’ Snorri says. ‘Why would Hel build it for you if you don’t believe in it?’

‘I do!’ Protesting my faithfulness in all things is a reflex with me.

‘Your father is a priest, yes?’

‘A cardinal! He’s a cardinal, not some damn village priest.’

Snorri shrugs as if these are just words. ‘Priests’ children seldom believe. No man is a prophet in his own land.’

‘That sort of pagan nonsense might—’

‘It’s from the bible.’ Snorri stops again.

‘Oh.’ I stop too. He’s right, I guess. I’ve never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy. ‘Why have we stopped?’

Snorri says nothing, so I look where he’s looking. Ahead of us the air is splintering and through the fractures I see glimpses of a sky that already looks impossibly blue, too full of the vital stuff of life to have any place in the drylands of death. The tears grow larger – I see the arc of a sword – a spray of crimson, and a man tumbles out of nowhere, the fractures sealing themselves behind him. I say a man, but really it’s a memory of him, sketched in pale lines, occupying the space where he should be. He stands, not disturbing so much as a mote of dust, and I see the bloodless wound that killed him, a gash across his forehead that skips down to his broken collarbone and through it into the meat of him.

As the man stands, the process is repeating to his left and right, and again twenty yards behind them. More men drop through from whatever battlefield they’re dying on. They ignore us, standing with heads bowed, a few with scraps of armour, all weaponless. I’m about to call out to the first when he turns and walks away, his path close to our own heading but veering a little to the left.

‘Souls.’ I mean to say out loud but only a whisper escapes.

Snorri shrugged. ‘Dead men.’ He starts walking too. ‘We’ll follow them.’

I start forward but the air breaks before me. I see the world, I can smell it, feel the breeze, taste the air. And suddenly I understand the hunger in dead men’s eyes. I’ve been in the drylands less than an hour and already the need that just this glimpse of life gives me is consuming. There’s a battle raging that makes Aral Pass look like a skirmish: men hack at each other with bright steel and wild cries, the roar of massed troops, the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying. Even so I’m lunging forward, so desperate for the living world that even a few moments there before someone spears me seem worth it.

It’s the soul that stops me. The one that punched this hole into death. I meet him head on, emerging, being born into death. There’s nothing to him, just the faint lines that remember him – that and the howling rage and fear and pain of his last seconds. It’s enough to stop me though. He runs over my skin like a scald, sinks through it, and I fall back, shrieking, overwritten by his memories, drowning in his sorrow. Martell he’s called. Martell Harris. It seems more important than my own name. I try to speak my name, whatever it is, and find my lips have forgotten the shape of it.

‘Get up, Jal!’

I’m on the ground, dust rising all around me. Snorri is kneeling over me, hair dark around his face. I’m losing him. Sinking. The dust rising, thicker by the moment. I’m Martell Harris. The sword went into me like ice but I’m all right, I just need to get back into the battle. Martell moves my arms, struggles to rise. Jalan is gone, sinking into the dust.

‘Stay with me, Jal!’ I can feel Snorri’s grip on me. Nothing else, just that iron grip. ‘Don’t let him drive you out. You’re Jalan. Prince Jalan Kendeth.’

The fact of Snorri actually saying my name right – title and all – jolts me out of the dust’s soft embrace.

‘Jalan Kendeth!’ The grip tightens. It really hurts. ‘Say it! SAY IT!’

‘Jalan Kendeth!’ The words tore from me in a great shout.

I found myself face to face with the thing that used to be Sheik Malik’s son, Jahmeen, before the djinn burned him hollow. Somehow the memory of that Hell-bound soul pushing into me, stealing my flesh had brought me back to the moment, back to fighting the djinn for control using whatever tricks I’d learned in the drylands.

The grip on my wrist is iron, anchoring me. And the pain! With my senses returned to me I found my whole arm on fire with white agony. Desperate to escape before the djinn could slip from Jahmeen and possess me in his stead I headbutted him full in the face and wrenched my arm clear. A heartbeat later I drove both heels viciously into my camel’s sides. With a lurch and a bugle of protest the beast took to the gallop, me bouncing about atop, hanging on with every limb at my disposal.

I didn’t look back. Damsels in distress be damned. Before I’d broken that grip I’d felt a familiar feeling. As the djinn had tried to move in, I in turn had been moving out. I knew exactly what Hell felt like and that was exactly where the djinn was trying to put the bits of me it didn’t need.

About a mile on, still following the channel between the two great dunes that had hemmed us in, my camel stopped. Where horses will frequently run past the limit of their endurance given enough encouragement, camels are beasts of a very different temperament. Mine just decided it had had enough and came to a dead halt, using the sand to arrest its progress. An experienced rider can usually pick up on the warning signs and prepare himself. An inexperienced rider, scared witless, has to rely on the sand to slow them down too. This is achieved by allowing the rider’s momentum to launch him or her over the head of his or her camel. The rest takes care of itself.

I got up quick enough, spitting out the desert. Put enough fear or embarrassment into a man and he’s immune to all but the very worst pain. Back along the winding route I’d ridden between dune crests a sandstorm had risen. Four main things worried me about it. Firstly, unlike dust, sand takes a hell of a wind to rise up into the air. Secondly, rather than the traditional advancing storm-wall, this storm appeared to be localized to the valley between two dunes, no more than two hundred yards apart. Thirdly, the wind was hardly blowing. And finally, what wind there was blowing toward the sandstorm and yet it seemed to be advancing on me at quite a rate!

‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ I leapt toward my camel and scrambled up his side. Somehow my panic panicked the camel and the damn thing took off with me halfway into the saddle. I lay, sprawled across its hump for twenty yards, hanging on desperately, but it’s hard enough to stay on a galloping camel if you’re in the right place and sadly sometimes desperation isn’t a sufficient adhesive. My camel and I parted company, leaving me with a handful of camel hair, an ill-smelling blanket, and a seven-foot drop to the ground.

The outer edges of the sandstorm were on me before I’d managed to get back any of the air that the impact sent rushing from my lungs. I could feel the djinn in there, more diffuse than it had been when confined inside Jahmeen, but there none the less, scraping sandy fingers across my face, burning around every grain the wind carried.

This time the invasion came indirectly. The djinn had tried to overwhelm me and kick my soul into Hell, but for whatever reason, perhaps because I’d just come from there, or perhaps due to the magic that runs in Kendeth veins, I’d resisted. Now it took away my vision and my hearing, and as I hunched there trying to snatch a breath that wouldn’t burn my lungs, hoping not to be buried alive, the djinn prickled at the back of my mind, seeking a way in. Again my memories of the Hell-trip surged forward, Snorri grabbing me, trying to help me drive that stranger’s soul out, trying to help me keep my body.