“We don’t need this on top of everything else,” said Hrólfur. “We need more allies. Not enemies.”
“I know someone who can parley with them,” Garún said.
She didn’t know where she was going with this. Why was she so certain that Sæmundur could clear the debt? But it was the only chance she could think of.
“We can’t have the Commonwealth and the náskárar up against us at once. This person has dealt with the Ram Eaters many times before. I’ll figure this out, don’t worry.”
“All right, then.”
“Thank you,” said Katrín in a soft voice. “And I’m sorry. For everything. For this whole mess.”
Garún nodded. “It will be fine. You don’t have to worry.”
But she was worried. Not that Sæmundur might find himself in harm’s way, but because he could mess everything up and make things worse. She felt around in her backpack for what he had handed her after they crossed together into Rökkurvík. When he had done whatever he did to those police officers.
It was a black, bulbous square, with two thin tendrils going out from each corner. The egg case of a skate. They were believed to cause luck, and if you found an unruptured one on the beach you were supposed to hold it between your hands and whisper your wish to it. She remembered going out by herself on early summer mornings, looking for the egg cases among the seaweed-covered rocks. Hoping to wish herself to a new and better life. When the others weren’t looking, she took the egg case in her hands and crushed it. Dissonant whispers escaped from it, fading rapidly away.
* * *
The pain shot through her arm, the sheer intensity of it shocking her even though she had now been expecting it. She jerked her hand away from the key rune, the delýsíð symbol barely dry on the smooth cavern wall. The pain lingered, a long needle threaded through the bones of her upper arm. She inspected the symbol again, scrutinising its form and trying to intuit the seiðmagn flowing from it. What was wrong? It looked right, felt right – it should have given her free access to the hidden network they had tagged across the city. She steeled herself and sprayed her palm quickly with blue delýsíð paint, placing it on the heart of the symbol.
A barrage of visions. Rapid fire, too quick to process, a ceaseless cacophony of sound and sight that was over before it truly began. Her vision cleared and vertigo set in. She was looking down a city street filled with carriages laden with goods. Traffic was at a standstill due to a barricade set up on one end of the street. A squad of police officers, armed with heavy skorrifles, went through each carriage thoroughly, opening crates and barrels filled with goods with absolute disregard of the tradesman or farmer standing by, yelling at them. She recognised the street – Hverfisgata, the traffic heading out of the city. A lot of people were shouting. Police raised their rifles to a group of older men, who were screaming in outrage and only became further incensed by looking down the barrels.
A crack, and she was pulled elsewhere. An empty alley. Two cats faced each other, swooping their tails back and forth in annoyance. Static, and she was inside a room, a mattress on the floor where a tangle of two bodies lay interwoven between sheets.
What the fuck? Who tagged this?
Then, an outlook of Austurvöllur, high up from the surrounding buildings. It was empty and desolate, the grave building of Lögrétta visible just to the right of her field of vision. It looked miserable, all grey stone laden with gravity. Funnily enough, the leftover materials from Lögrétta’s construction had gone into making Hegningarhúsið – better known as the Nine.
Only too fitting, she thought.
She tried to push her vision back towards the city street, which looked as if it was about to erupt into a full-on riot, but she felt as if her efforts didn’t accomplish anything. She was wrestling against some stronger, unseen current, which hadn’t been there before. Then her vision cut to a street-level symbol, looking through a wired net out into the street, where a different checkpoint was set up. Two officers were calmly talking to a man and a woman, their two children standing behind them. The woman was arguing loudly. Something was wrong with the paperwork.
“They’re my children,” the woman said. “They’ve been with us to the city dozens of times.”
A snap, and she saw the street again. A crowd had gathered at the barricade, pushing against the police. Behind the front lines were officers with skorrifles readied. They still hadn’t fired – these were ordinary folk, after all. Honest, working human men and women. Then, an unnatural crack in the air, screaming – her vision snapped elsewhere.
A mossy field, stretching out into the distant rocky terrain, undulating hills of jagged black lava. A line of carriages went out into the fields and Garún realised she was looking outside the city walls, near one of the gates. The line was at a standstill and people were agitated.
Then, the great rivers of Elliðaár entering the city, the flat barges of the marbendlar, pulled by the nykrar below the surface, lined up at the customs gate. They needed to get to the docks to trade with the outgoing ships.
Then, a room lit by a crimson light shining through tattered drapes, a room she was intimately familiar with but had only seen illuminated by flickering lights of oil lamps or tallow candles. Before her stood a creature clad in robes of dark sanguine, their black leather gloved hands poised in an odd gesture, frozen, the long-beaked ivory mask now familiar to her.
