And he took another step.
Garún.
* * *
The sun shone in the sky with an odd, flickering light. It was dark but still bright. An everlasting dusk followed him. Time eluded his grasp. Everything had already happened, was still to happen. He had reached Reykjavík. He was heading there. He was taking Mæja from Garún on his doorstep. Sounds of the cascading rain. He was meeting her for the first time at Karnivalið. Heart racing. Smiling. Laughing.
He focused on placing one foot in front of the other. It took every ounce of grit he possessed to keep on going. He knew he was well on his way when he crossed the Suðurnes channel in one, gigantic step. There was not much left.
* * *
Reykjavík was hiding behind her city walls. He had once thought them tall, but now he towered over them. The city was nothing but a sandcastle waiting to be swept away by the waves. And how easily he could be that wave, if only he mustered the will to do so. The city’s – the entire island’s – unavoidable end seemed so close at hand that he couldn’t be bothered to lay it all waste prematurely.
Garún’s suffering was maddening. He ached from her pain. She was there, in the city. There was so little distance between them now. He would not abandon her. Not again.
Biplanes buzzed around his head like flies. Men writhed on the walls like insects. Something hit him. Hail. No. Machine gunfire.
Garún.
He stopped just outside of the city walls. He had to think – to concentrate. Cannons at the walls pelted him with distracting explosive volleys. They were too insignificant to act on. There was so much noise coming from all the life and death piled up there behind the walls. She was drowned out in the sound, blended in to it.
She was all over the city. In Starholt, drunk and happy, sharing her bed with him. Painting the first work she sold, for ten krónur. Spraying delýsíð graffiti in secret spots, piling up the bonfire she wanted to ignite. Stabbing a man in the chest with a blue bone, laughing as he was transformed into a beautiful flower. Suffering in a dark hole downtown, buried and forgotten, losing fragments of herself with each day that passed. Smuggling herself into the city, hidden under furs of skuggabaldur …
But now … Now she was …
He had almost located her when a powerful seiður disturbed his concentration. Down at his feet, seiðskrattar had gathered on the fortifications of the main city gate. They worked together in weaving seiður against him. The air crackled with raw power.
He raised his arm, laden thick with moss-grown stone and broken rock, and he brought it down upon them.
The air erupted with a sorcerous storm, as the seiðskrattar attempted to fight back, but their power was nothing when faced with the landvættur itself at their gates. With a deafening explosion the southern gate collapsed under his fist. He took a step forward, then another. He tore through the city wall like paper.
People swarmed around his feet like ants. Past, present, future lives, all melding into one, relentless flow of life. Sorrow, regret, joy, hope. He moved through the city, crushing buildings beneath his feet, sweeping away entire city blocks, trying to pinpoint Garún’s voice. He saw her laughing with him in a bar, meeting for the first time. Them sleeping together in her apartment, the summer sun shining through her curtains. The first time they kissed, hesitant, their hearts racing in sync with one another.
Then he felt the source. Hegningarhúsið. He turned towards the city’s central area, the top of the hill of Skólavörðuholt where the split tower of Haraldskirkja loomed. And with determined, lethargic steps, the Stone Giant moved towards it.
Soldiers blasted him with mortars; squadrons of biplanes took to the air and bombarded him. The biplanes circled him, firing at will, and he distractedly blasted them out of the sky with piercing rays of black light. Seiðskrattar ambushed him on rooftops, channelling dreadful energies towards this leviathan of stone. None managed to break his stride. They all fell to the crashing wave of his footsteps, crushed under his fist, or erupted in blood as he seized hold of the torrents of seiðmagn around them and drove that energy back against their limited minds and bodies, melting iron and brick and concrete into glowing slabs in a deafening explosion.
With heavy steps he ascended Skólavörðuholt. He swung his arm carelessly, breaking through the tower of Haraldskirkja as he neared Hegningarhúsið. The tower collapsed upon the church, instantly reducing the Crown’s monument to rubble, a cloud of dust and detritus rising up from its ruins, crawling along the streets. He stood in front of Hegningarhúsið on Skólavörðustræti. People trampled each other, automobiles and carriages running down other people on the roads, crashing into each other. He tuned out the hectic drone of their pointless suffering. Garún was there, in the earth underneath the Nine. He was about to reach down for her when he found what he was looking for.
On top of the building were three tall stakes. A torso was impaled on each one, without head or limbs. Intestines, organs, limbs and heads were impaled on other, smaller stakes, all around them. Like saplings spread around three, bloody trees.
Garún.
That was the source of the scream. Right at his feet. The echo of her life and death, which still sounded and called out to him. Screamed out into the world. The desecrated remains of her soul, trapped in a torturous limbo. She had been given a traitor’s execution. A seiðskratti working with a galdramaður, her spirit unwound and threaded through her bones, trapping her soul in an inescapable cycle of torture. A ceaseless nightmare. On the other stakes were her friend, Katrín, and an innocent homeless man who was killed under the name of another woman, for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
