The preparation was complete; the ritual could start in earnest. He chanted the forbidden names of the void.
Svöl. Gunnþrá.
The knife’s edge ran smoothly down his hand.
Fjörm.
With a bloodied finger he drew symbols on the disfigured horses’ heads.
Fimbulþul. Slíður. Hríð. Sylgur. Ylgur. Víð. Leiftur. Gjöll.
Eleven names, eleven keys.
A gust of wind ran through the forest. Everything became still. The sky was grey and flat, the clouds were too close and too large. The circle had been sealed.
He took off his coat and neatly folded it. The stinking, worn shirt he wore had once almost been too small. Now it was draped on him as if on a hanger. When had he last eaten? It didn’t matter. He’d left worldly sensations behind. He placed the shirt next to the coat and took his place in front of the níðstangir. It was cold enough that he could see his breath steaming in the air, but he felt nothing against his bare flesh.
Bektalpher’s gaping maw was dark and swollen. Useless, jagged teeth jutted out of dark red gums and a three-forked tongue moved around them. The flesh around the mouth reeked, as if infested with rot. The veins were black and visibly pulsated. The demon was a growing tumour. Bektalpher breathed loudly, idle now that Kölski could roam free.
He closed his eyes and listened. Silence. Total silence. The forest, the city, the land held their breaths. He did the same. Then he filled his lungs with air and started to sing – að gala.
Tone. Steady and reliable. Deep. Up a minor second. Down a minor third. Then, up an augmented fourth. The tritone, diabolus in musica. The key to the ritual. Down a major seventh. Hold the tone. No words, no incantations, only sound – hljóð.
All his life Sæmundur had been taught that galdur was incomprehensible, but still rigidly bound into incantations and rituals, ceremonies where the most minute deviation could end the galdramaður. Doctrine and ideas set in stone were a hindrance; they were as limiting as the academics’ refusal to let galdramenn experiment or their fear of demons. But he now understood that they were partially right in Svartiskóli. Mastering the fundamentals, holding every detail in your mind simultaneously, was critical. Sæmundur hadn’t learned from Kölski how to raise a níðstöng, but he also didn’t need to. The tools were already in his hands, ready to be used with the right knowledge behind them. So he did what he had been indoctrinated never to do – he improvised the galdur. He had been experimenting with improvising, that night he played in the Forgotten Downtown, when he met Garún. But that was nothing like this. Then, the galdur had no purpose except to cause ecstasy and hallucinations, a form of metapsychosis, a rather simple and unremarkable effect. Now, he meant to bridge the void between the real and the unreal.
Bektalpher chanted rapidly. The demon spoke in tongues like a holy man touched by spirits. But the sounds the abomination made were not words, they had no meaning aside from their rhythm, frequency and volume. Sæmundur’s steady and deep tone provided the foundation Bektalpher built upon. Sæmundur stretched his last tone as far as he could, let it lethargically drop by a semitone. The sound waves reverberated through him entirely, growing stronger and stretching with the dropping tone.
Dissonance.
An enormous pressure overcame him as he felt the galdur open up to something else, a new source. Bektalpher tuned in with him so that he could no longer feel if he or the demon were chanting, or if another energy had taken over. Sæmundur felt odd, like when his consciousness had been split twice, thrice, when stealing the page from Rauðskinna. He both spoke in his own voice and controlled Bektalpher simultaneously. But he could not overthink what he was doing, could not structure the spell too much. The galdur had to be raw, untamed chaos. True to its nature.
Muscular spasms shook the horses’ heads. Black, coagulated blood ran out of their eye sockets. Their rigid jaws stretched open, audibly cracking. The eye sockets were filled with clots of blood, making it seem as if new, black eyes had grown. The air was thin, as if Sæmundur was on top of a mountain. He had to draw his breath deeper and deeper in order to fill his lungs with air.
The left níðstöng screamed. The shriek cut through bone and marrow, stabbing into the frontal lobe like a cold needle. The horse’s head on the right twitched and emitted a long, anguished wail that caused a lump in Sæmundur’s throat, grabbed his heart like a freezing claw. The bloddy symbols he had drawn on them moved and became disfigured, connected into new forms that he had not seen in any manuscript. The head at the centre reached up and opened its mouth as wide as it could. It made a noise, so loud that Sæmundur felt the sound waves crashing upon him, shaking through his entire body. Yet he heard nothing. His heartbeat slowed down and soon enough he didn’t have to breathe in or out any more. There was nothing but the tone, the sounds he emitted. Now his own multitude of voices, Bektalpher and the horses’ heads, sounded as one.
He closed his eyes in order to better focus. He was somehow still able to see the níðstangir and the ritual circle, which was rapidly changing. But outside it everything was a haze, distant, meaningless. He reached back his head and saw that above him was an incision in the world, like an infected wound, and beyond it …
Nothing.
From the void stretched a shadow, reaching down to earth. The lower it went, the more material it became, until it ended up in an overpowering dark of night around Kölski. The silvery eyes stared at Sæmundur. The demon smiled when Sæmundur noticed that cords of shadow lay between himself and
