A part of her felt as if she was still standing there. Frozen in the same tracks. Felt as he was still screaming, forever and relentless. That she was still laughing hysterically.
It was pitch black. Completely and absolutely dark. It did not matter if she opened or closed her eyes. A dreamless sleep came and left, but she was never certain if she’d fallen asleep at all. What was the difference? The nightmare and the guilt never left her side.
The cell was around a metre and a half on each side. It was made from stone. There was no door, at least none that Garún could find with her searching fingers. No bed, no chair, no toilet, no bucket, or anything else. Just her and the darkness.
She was not confused. She knew exactly where she was.
She was in the Nine.
* * *
There was no end to the gossip about Hegningarhúsið on Skólavörðustígur. That its dungeons went hundreds of metres down into the ground. Kept on going until they encountered lava, and that was where the worst criminals ended up. In a man-made hell. Others said that those who ended up in the Nine were brainwashed and turned into the agents of the Crown. That was why no one ever returned. They were serving the Commonwealth somewhere else entirely. One story went that criminals were sentenced to carry demons in their bones. They were then slaughtered and harvested, the blue bones weaponised and sent to the front lines, to hidden arcane armouries. Others said that there was nothing in there. The house was completely empty. Except for one cell, which held nothing but a chair and a noose hanging from a ceiling beam.
None of this mattered. They were only rumours. The only thing that mattered was the truth:
No one returns from the Nine.
* * *
The darkness shuts you off. Pushes up against you, into every nook and cranny. Locks you inside your own body. You sense nothing but your own heartbeat, the buzz in your ears, your own foul breath.
She never heard them coming. The pain was not the worst part. The worst part was how absolutely shut off inside herself she was, which made every single blow that much heavier.
* * *
The guilt gnawed at her like a worm on the root of a tree. Nothing but hatred and poison. She should be trying to get herself out of there. She’d failed them.
Sometimes she let herself hope. That Katrín and Hraki were safe and, if not, that the people had risen up against their oppressors. Diljá and Hrólfur would still be in Reykjavík, working towards that goal. Regardless of everything that had happened. They might not understand why, but they would still keep fighting for what they believed. They’d accomplished their task, after all, and so much more than that. They’d brought down Loftkastalinn. She’d executed the stiftamtmaður.
Reykjavík was like a powder keg. And she was the spark. She had to believe that someone had taken her torch from her.
* * *
The light was like an electric shock. It paralysed her. She could not move. Had she been asleep? Was she still in her cell? She closed her eyes, tried to adjust to the light, but she just saw a blinding whiteness.
Slowly her eyes adjusted to the light.
On the table in front of her was an electric lamp shining directly into her face. She was tied to a chair. She could only see out of one of her eyes. The other was too swollen. She was only realising this now.
Someone was sitting at the other end of the table. It was impossible to see his face, but she saw his neat suit, the sheen of his polished cuff links.
“I’m not talking,” she said eventually. “Not a word.”
She was surprised by how weak and raw her voice had become.
“You won’t have to speak at all,” the man said.
There was something familiar about his voice. She heard a door close behind her. Someone walked up to them. She tensed up. Prepared herself for the coming pain.
But it never came. The person who’d walked in dragged a chair along the floor and sat at the table. A thin huldumaður. Viður.
She had no words. There was too much she wanted to say, so much that the weapons turned in her hands and fell to the ground.
“How much do you want, Þráinn? All of it?’ asked Viður in a casual voice. He did not look directly at Garún.
“Not all of it,” the man named Þráinn responded. “Not yet, anyway. The commissioner was quite clear on that. Let’s start with the bone, then the galdramaður. This Sæmundur.”
He nodded his approval.
She realised who the man behind the light was. That same, repugnant voice. It was the man who’d caught her after she bought delýsíð in the Forgotten Downtown. The officer she thought Sæmundur had killed.
She tried to free herself. Screamed. Viður moved closer, now staring at her intently. She refused to look at him, clenched her eyes shut.
But it was for nothing.
* * *
Hljóð.
A single word encompassing both silence and sound. One and the same.
For everything is sound.
His heart was no longer beating. Instead a thunderstorm raged inside him. His bones sang with reverberation.
Everything trembled. Everything quaked. Everything resounded.
The world was a stage. This was something he had been absolutely certain of. Every world and every dimension there was. Deceptions and illusions. But he now saw that was only a fraction of the truth.
Every world is a frequency. A sound wave. Only existing as long as the movement does, as the frequency rises and falls. In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, there was the word. The sound. The wave rises and the vibration, the reverberation, births existence. The frequency reaches its limit, and falls back down into nothingness. The world ends, only
