Hrothgar nodded. With his left hand he lifted Mr Li up by his collar, and with his right he planted a savage uppercut onto Mr Li’s chin, hurling him instantly into the all-encompassing blackness of deep unconsciousness.
It was dark when Mr Li awoke. Pain throbbed with dull persistence inside his head, sending its seismic waves rippling out from the epicentre, located on the right side of his jaw, where Hrothgar had broken it. Dried blood cracked and flaked from the edges of his swollen mouth when he opened it, and a bitter chill had soaked through his skin and had burrowed like a legion of termites into the very marrow of his bones. Peering through the gloom, he found that he was clad only in his underwear. Ants were crawling all over his flabby gut, and some other sort of insect was biting at the skin of his thick right calf. He reached down and swatted feebly at the pest as he tried to sit up, shivering uncontrollably against the cold, his broken teeth chattering like slipping gears in his mouth.
With blurry vision he tried to scrutinise details in the darkness, but it was as impenetrable as the dense foliage around him. Fear saturated every cell of his body, and panic lashed its whip against his bare back, alternately freezing and scalding his skin in turns. Mustering up what seemed to require a herculean amount of effort, he crawled on his hands and knees through the damp carpet of leaves to the nearest tree. Gripping its trunk with unsteady, shivering hands, he managed to eventually raise himself up to his feet, after which he leaned against the rough bark for a few moments, grateful for the stability it offered. As an icy breeze whipped through the forest, he tried to peer up through the canopy of leaves above, but he could see nothing but shadows and blotches of inky blackness. He listened intently to the symphony of the wild night, battling to sift through the shrill whine of billions of insects, the radar-blip beeps of bats, and the haunting hoots of owls for some sign of a more comforting human sound.
What then cut through the night orchestra, however, froze the blood in his veins and caused his knees to crumple instantaneously beneath him: the roar of a bear. It was just upwind from him.
He clamped a clammy hand over his mouth to suppress the scream that was desperately struggling to escape from it.
Run, run, flee, now! NOW!
Somehow strength came flooding into his limbs with the urgency of a glacier collapsing, and Mr Li bolted blindly into the darkness. As he took off, however, another bear roar blasted brassily through the night. This one was immediately to his left. His attempt at flight was as blind as it was ineffectual, for even sprinting at full tilt he could hear the huge beasts crashing through the undergrowth alongside him, running parallel to him at an unrelenting pace. He shrieked and wailed as he ran, tripping and stumbling over roots as thorny branches and clawed vines ripped and slashed at his skin.
It was then that a blinding and percussive flash exploded somewhere between the centre of his eyes, while a shock wave tore through his body. For a half-second the lurching sensation of being airborne turned his stomach – and then he hit the ground with a slamming impact that expelled all of the air from his lungs. Somehow Mr Li realised, through the daze in which his mind was now swimming, that he had run directly into a tree branch.
It was as he lay gasping for breath that he saw them, pushing through the screen of boughs and leaves like two ghosts materialising from the aether: two enormous white bears. They looked like polar bears, but how was that possible? Two polar bears in a forest in the Hengduan mountains in China…
Mr Li tried to scream, but his empty, winded lungs allowed nothing but a plaintive wheeze to escape from between his lips. The bears walked up to him, staring coldly at him with their obsidian eyes all the while. He whimpered and sobbed as they sniffed at his body with what seemed to be a morbid curiosity.
And then they started to eat him.
One bear gripped his right hand between its massive jaws, and the other bit down on his left foot. With a sickening crunch the beasts clamped their mouths shut in unison, breaking his bones as their hydraulic-press jaws and dagger teeth tore through skin, muscle and sinew. A burst of agonising pain shot up his arm and leg, and through the gloom Mr Li saw that his hand and foot had both been bitten off, and that the bears were chewing on them. Air rushed back into his lungs and he screamed hoarsely with maddened, horrified desperation … again, and again, and again.
The bears did not care. After they had swallowed his right hand and left foot, they took turns to bite off and devour his remaining appendages, ignoring his screams and howls of anguish all the while. When they were done with his limbs they wandered off into the darkness, leaving him to convulse and wail in the night.
Time oozed by like the dragged-out minutes of a nightmare, and through the silently howling wall of pain Mr Li heard footsteps approaching, crunching ever so softly upon the mess of dead leaves.
‘Hello uncle.’
The half-eaten man looked up and tried to say something, but all he could manage was a pitiful gasping.
‘Let’s insert the bile extraction tube,’ another voice said, this horrifying suggestion delivered with clinical impartiality.
‘Yolkov…’ Mr Li whispered hoarsely.
‘That’s who you thought I was,’ Sigurd said. ‘But when you reach the gates of hell, tell them that Sigurd Haraldsson sent you there.’
Hrothgar pulled a carpet knife and a length of dirty rubber tubing from his coat.
‘Not quite ideal surgical tools, but it doesn’t matter, does it? I’m sure we can get to his bile duct
