* * *
Viðey was the key. She sank herself into his mind, devoured knowledge in great gulps. She knew how to get into Viðey. How you could sail by the rocks, enter the cavern, up the tunnels and from there move into Trampe’s bedroom. She had everything she needed. This insignificant, disgusting man and his life repulsed her. But she couldn’t stop.
The next memory was of him at school, when he intentionally poured his inkwell over his writing exercise so he had to do detention, because he didn’t want to go home. Drífa was a baby and threw up over his polished dress shoes before he was going to a celebratory dinner. Ingigerður crying at the kitchen table. When he found his first grey hair. When he woke up in an alley in Hafnía and didn’t know where he was, penniless, his clothes torn.
She devoured and devoured. Her hunger was insatiable, a bottomless pit she dived into. Joy, sorrow, regret, lies – regular details of everyday life were transformed into magnificent delicacies in front of her and she ate without inhibition.
She wasn’t satiated until she swallowed the sweet memory of a newly formed human being, cradled in the dark warmth of its mother’s womb.
* * *
They could not risk digging a grave in the rocky fields, so they dragged the corpse out into the lava fields under cover of night. The scribe had choked when he had forgotten how to breathe, after Garún had finished. Katrín and Hraki had not spoken a word to her. They knew this was the quickest and safest way they had to extract the information they needed, and that there was no chance they could release the scribe or leave him alive. But what Garún had done was so repugnant, so absolutely immoral, that their feelings of revulsion could not be masked.
Garún pushed the corpse with her foot and it rolled into a deep crevice. She and Hraki collected large stones and threw them after him. With luck the snow would soon fall and no one would find the corpse until the spring, if ever.
Later that night Garún woke up to the sound of quiet crying. Katrín was lying on her side and cradling her numb hand. It must have been deep into the morning, but it was still dark out. Garún wanted to reach over and comfort her, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Katrín’s arm was worsening. It had become grey and dead, the skin like a clump of hardened lava. She could hardly move her fingers. She thought of Fæðey and her fate, and she had known Hraki was thinking of it as well. Neither of them said anything to Katrín.
Garún slept with the delýsíð sheet bundled up as a pillow. Fuel to the fire burning inside her. Her dreams were a confused mess of her own self and the scribe’s memories. She felt as if she had another person living inside her. The delýsíð-induced rage was roaring in the background of these dreams, stitching together these different minds like a seam closing a wound.
“Why are you doing this to yourself ?’ Hraki asked her one night, when Garún had woken up in the pitch dark, drenched in sweat, her teeth aching from grinding them together.
“It keeps me on edge,” said Garún. “It helps me stay focused.”
“It has changed you,” he said. “It’s going to break you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That bone you’re hiding … there’s a demon in there. But different from the skull you’ve got.”
“It’s a last resort, Hraki, in case I’m cornered. Nothing else.”
“It’s for him, isn’t it? Trampe. It always has been.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Go back to sleep. And mind your own fucking business.”
He turned back to his sister, wiping the sweat off her brow. Her breathing was shallow and rapid.
After having devoured the scribe’s memories Garún had clearly seen how ill-prepared and flawed their former plan had been. It was really a miracle that they had lived and managed to capture anyone at all. There was a response plan for almost every scenario. Invasion, rebellion, assassination, economic crisis, war, world war, a thaumaturgical catastrophe. Anything. In this case they had put into action the emergency response plan for a demonic invasion of manifestation grade 3-A, where an important military target was completely taken over by transmundane possession and transformation.
The flaw was that most plans assumed to utilise Loftkastalinn’s power in some degrees, and if Loftkastalinn was about to fall a self-destruct sequence was to be initiated, which obviously had not happened. If the fortress hadn’t vanished the Crown would have been forced to completely annihilate the fortress – and possibly the entire city – by forcing the thaumaturgical power plant in Öskjuhlíð to go into limited meltdown. Experiments with this type of overcharging were very limited and most likely they would have ended up with a complete meltdown, causing absolute destruction over a radius of several kilometres. It was still a better option than letting a demonic manifestation of this degree roam free. Unavoidable collateral damage that would pay off in the end. The thought made her sick. Not that they were ready to take such desperate measures, but how easily they could execute these plans. How thoughtlessly they converted lives into statistics. But this methodical planning for every possible event would be the cause of their downfall.
After an event like this security would be so strict that it would be almost impossible to get to the stiftamtmaður, but Garún knew exactly how they would react. She saw the cracks, where she could get in and collapse this house of cards that they had built around themselves, like a small stream of water that freezes and shatters a boulder from the inside.
Þrjátíu og fjögur
Reykjanes. The living lava fields. Black and rough, rocky and hostile. Blades of yellow grass jutted out of black sand, moss locked its claws into the
