The mask was covered in sigils, hand-drawn in red paint. She recognised them; it was the visage that had appeared when she had tried to regain access to the delýsíð network. They had been the one who killed Jón and the others at the City Hall protest. They had stood up on the roof above the crowd, manipulating the uncolour.
Katrín gasped and moved away from the window. The beak turned in the direction of the sound. That was when the soldiers came to the end of the courtyard, where the staves of destruction were hiding. For a moment the air buzzed with energy. Garún felt the seiðskratti look in confusion at the energy about to be unleashed. She couldn’t help but smile at their surprise.
The courtyard exploded. Lightning ran over the ground, into the door they had exited, and another explosion sounded. Dust and shards of rock were blasted out. The soldiers shouted something at each other.
She aimed and pulled the trigger. The gun fired, the click and following gunfire like when a heart skips a beat. She barely saw anything from the smoke from the explosion, only vague forms. There was no time to wait for the dust to settle. She aimed the other pistol and fired again before throwing herself away from the window just as she felt a bullet rush past her head, hitting the wall behind her. The concrete shattered and she got dust in her eyes. She cursed herself for not wearing the thaumaturgical goggles. She pulled them down from her forehead, grabbed the weapons and the ammunition case and ran up the stairs. The air simmered behind her and the wall she had been standing at imploded with a deafening sound. She didn’t look back, just kept running. Why hadn’t they accounted for a seiðskratti in all their planning? Katrín was still down there, but she couldn’t turn back now. Not while they could still escape. Katrín had to take care of herself now.
Upstairs, she loaded the guns as quickly as she could and got into position by another window. Two soldiers were lying still on the ground. One of them had been torn in two, his intestines dragged out of his body like an unspooled thread. The other two had taken shelter behind a dumpster. The stiftamtmaður was nowhere to be seen, so he had to be hiding with them. The soldiers fired at the windows on the other side of the courtyard, where Hraki and Styrhildur were located. The seiðskratti hadn’t moved a single step. They slowly turned towards the window where Katrín had last been lying in ambush.
The seiðmagn moved around the seiðskratti like a torrent of colour and visual hallucinations. Small flares popped into being, in sync with the gunshots from Hraki and Styrhildur. Some kind of protective shield was in place around them. It was a waste of bullets to fire at the seiðskratti; they should have realised that and focused on the soldiers instead. But her delýsíð shots had a chance of harming them. They manipulated every shred of seiðmagn in the environment around themselves, but the delýsíð Garún had laced the trap with had confused them. They were surrounded by seiður hostile to them; the seiðmagn in the environment refused to come properly under their control.
Explosions sounded in the distance. Loftkastalinn. The buildings were too tall to see the fortress, but it didn’t matter. It had worked, no matter how Sæmundur did after the fact. The seiðskratti was absorbing too much seiðmagn, too fast. Garún couldn’t believe they were withstanding it, controlling the vicious current of seiðmagn raging around them. There was only so much the human body could take, no matter what thaumaturgical measures had been taken to strengthen it. Garún had been lucky at first, surprising them with the trap. There wouldn’t be a next time. They were aflame with energy. Except in one place. Where the red runes didn’t properly reach, the neckline where the mask met the stiff collar.
Garún slowly took a deep breath and aimed. She emptied her mind and slowly let her breath out.
She was a silent battlefield, drenched in blood. She was a wasteland. She was still and cold hatred.
The gunshot sounded. The sour smell of smoke filled her senses. Something around the seiðskratti cracked, some inner shield she hadn’t seen despite the goggles.
They stumbled backwards and dropped to one knee. Sparks flew off them and the air shimmered with heat. Blood flowed from their neck and they pressed their hand weakly against the wound. The earth rose up around them. Dirt and rock flew up and rained back down on the seiðskratti. The blood flowing from their neck was moving around them, in unpredictable strings and half-formed symbols, a serpent of blood. Garún aimed the other pistol. Exhaled. Fired.
The flash of sorcerous light blinded her. She stumbled back and tore off the glasses. A quake shook the building and she fell down on the floor.
Then – a deathly silence, so complete that Garún thought she had lost her hearing. For a moment everything was still before a deafening roar shook everything. The building rumbled and pieces of concrete cracked and fell from the ceiling. Garún was lying in a huddle, hands over her head, as if that would help if a slab of concrete fell and crushed her head.
As soon as the earthquake was over Garún scrambled to her feet and stumbled down the stairs. She was dizzy and she felt her head for a wound, but found no blood. Downstairs a thick cloud of dust covered everything.
“Katrín?’
She made her way through the rock that covered the entire floor, making sure not to stumble where fissures had formed in the floor.
“Katrín!’
“I’m here,” she heard down the hallway.
Katrín’s face was bloody, but it looked as if it wasn’t a major wound. Her right hand was lying
