“My apologies, my lord,” she said in a quavering voice. “We are poor workers and do not have much. But all we have to offer is yours, only if you—”
Another woman stepped forth and placed a hand on her arm, softly but determinedly, slightly shaking her head. The old woman put away the tray and walked away, ashamed.
Sæmundur’s knowledge, and the entirety of his senses, had undergone such tremendous and rapid changes these last few days that regular, everyday happenings went completely unnoticed by him. He now felt the morbid fear that was lying in the air – fear of him, as if he was a butcher in a sheep shed. He now noticed children, hiding behind chairs and benches, underneath tables. Everyone stared at him but looked down in submission as soon as he glanced towards them. And there! In between them, the most awful monstrosity he had ever seen. That was the reason they were acting in this manner, not because of him.
Except that he was staring into a mirror. A filthy mirror hanging on the wall. He saw what the Suðurnesjamenn feared.
The hair and beard that remained hung in uneven patches. The cheeks were sunken, the flesh pale and stretched across the skull. The lips were gone, completely eroded, along with a great part of the flesh around the cheeks and mouth. The bare bone and teeth were shades of blue. An ugly hole was where his nose had been. But the worst part was the eyes. They were sunken and deep. The right one was crimson and the iris glowed dark blue. The left eye was worse. It was a void. Nothing. Not an empty socket, not the black of the pupil, but a void. Nothing. Blank. An abyss. A negative space the eye could not capture, the brain could not comprehend.
He was the king of the huldufólk on New Year’s Eve, who repaid lack of hospitality with cruelty. He was the horror in the darkness, who carried the promise of warm murder on its voice. He was the ancient creature who stole children and people into the night.
Without a word he picked up a piece of dried fish and some slices of rye bread, in the hope that the people would see that their offering had been accepted, that they had no reason to fear.
“I give you my thanks,” he said, but his mouth did not move in the reflection.
In surprised delight, mixed with a distant and elusive sense of horror, he realised it was not him doing the talking, but Bektalpher, or something else, a new growth upon his flesh. Of course. How could he speak, looking like a withered corpse?
“Your hospitality is to your great credit,” he managed to say, his thoughts in disarray. “I will now continue my journey.”
It had started to rain. Drops played on the iron roof. When he shut the door behind him he felt how the entire town breathed lighter. In harsh wind and rain Sæmundur walked out into the dark lava fields.
Þrjátíu og þrjú
The moon was out and strokes of clouds few and far between. Garún stood on the ruined battlements of Hrímland’s only medieval castle. There was not much left standing. The towers had collapsed long before, the wounds like badly healed bone fractures. Half-sunken stones littered the earth. Time and weather were ill custodians; to add to that, the earth shuddered and shook every few years. It was as if this land didn’t want to host anything at all. Or perhaps it knew that this place was cursed and best kept buried and forgotten.
She looked over abandoned farmsteads, bathed in the moonlit night. Low, grassy ruins of turf houses marked the landscape like ancient etchings. More recent concrete foundations stood silently, sometimes accompanied by a lone, crumbling wall, solemn like abandoned monuments, tombstones. Garún felt as if someone was watching them, but every time she looked towards the ruins she saw nothing except the dark.
Sálnanes was a landscape dotted with ruins, some ancient, others merely a few decades old. Every once in a while someone got the bright idea to start farming on Sálnanes, regardless of what folk tales and superstition said on the matter. It had rich soil, some of the best farmland in the country, and it should be used.
A few months later the farms would be abandoned. Every single one. No one knew exactly how it happened. The details were of no consequence. Everyone knew why.
To the north the city cast a faint yellow light towards the sky, its source mostly covered by the city walls. Black columns of smoke were still rising from Loftkastalinn’s chaotic attack, but they had grown fewer in number. Over Starholt a thicker and darker smoke was rising. Fresh fires. Perhaps retaliation from Kalmar. Or demonic mayhem.
They had rested through the night, in a castle chamber the siblings had sworn was safe. Garún was certain that the stories surrounding Sálnanes were nothing but folklore, but she was still not about to challenge them. They had sworn that it was a safe haven, and that they had stayed there before when times got tough. Back when they were young, presumably after Garún had left Huldufjörður. The village was only a short distance away to the south.
She had gone up there to clear her mind and smoke a cigarette, but she was nowhere closer to collecting herself. Her thoughts were static, a haze of fear, anxiety and regret. She felt exhausted. As if she wanted to sleep for ever and forget everything. The only thing that was any real source of energy to her was the delýsíð sheet, still up against her, burning with resentment, cradling the blue bone.
She went down the stairs into the courtyard. The open entrances to the castle stood black and empty, the doors ruined ages before. A rusty iron portcullis blocked off
