all at the same spot in the tunnel. The pile of their bodies nearly reached the ceiling, but the years of decay had diminished them and they now lay in a sunken, sticky heap.
“I hate this,” Freya said as she tried to negotiate the morbid barrier without actually looking at it. Vivienne groaned. Her boot slipped on something nasty and she swore. “What happened to them?”
“I did,” Modwyn said as she took her first step into the pile of bodies. “I ended their lives the moment they stepped across the threshold of the Langtorr. They were like tiny sparks cast from a fire that I tamped out.”
Freya swallowed back bile and finally made it through the stomach-turning pile. She scuffed her boots against the ground to try to remove as much of the crud from them as possible, and made a mental note not to ever wear them again. The air started to fill with a sickening smell that they had awakened from the bodies they disturbed.
Modwyn walked beside her now and they continued in silence. After a time the tunnel ended in a room that contained a wrought iron circular staircase, which they ascended.
Freya was hit by the smell-different from the decay of death that they had just walked through; this was a living rank filth, which was more like the smell from a zoo-a human zoo.
Freya lifted her lamp higher and slowly turned around inside what she assumed was once the Beacon. Rubble and metal furniture had been piled against the walls, completely blocking any doors, windows, or other portals.
The building-or the inside of it, at least-was round and tapering to a flat roof, rather like the inside of a beehive, if it were hollow. The rubble was not confined to just the walls, but hunks of stone lay in a thick layer on the ground. Freya didn’t know where it came from, at first, but shining the lamp around a little, she decided that it was the remains of the upper floors of the tall structure-floors that were not of wood and masonry, but that had once been carved from solid stone. Broken benches and twisted pieces of metal chairs added to the piles.
And there were people, littered about as randomly as the stones. Some of them were knights, some of them were the Ni?ergeard townspeople-the stonemasons and metalsmiths who kept the city and the knights in repair. The rest of them were yfelgopes. At first Freya thought that they were all dead, but as light poured into the room, heads swivelled toward her. And although the light was very dim to Freya, they shielded their eyes from it-knights and yfelgopes alike.
Both of these things, the sight and the smell, came to her at the same time, as did the sound. A voice was droning in low, croaky, and cracked intonations-with long, slow, and deep basso profundo notes, each of them as long as a breath.
“Where’s that sound coming from?” Freya asked. “It’s ghastly.”
“There,” Modwyn said, pointing toward the far wall, where a ragged silhouette sat in a lumpy, hairy heap, singing its dreary, dire song.
It was another obstacle course to reach the speaker, but this time Freya was trying to avoid stepping on the living, not the dead. They looked anaemic, pale and blue, with hollow expressions on their faces. They did not appear diseased or emaciated-the Ni?ergearders did not need to eat, after all-but looking into each one was like looking into the face of death. And each one, so Freya imagined, asked the question “Why?” As if they asked it of the universe, and she just happened to be in the way of it.
“Is that him? Is that Godmund?” Vivienne asked, squinting into the gloom, not wanting to move forward.
The grizzled hair and jutting brow were unmistakable, but his cheeks were sunken and his jaw hung slack. “Godmund. Godmund! Come on, get up. What’s going on here?”
Black eyes turned toward her and shied away when she brought the lantern up.
“It’s me, Freya. I came here when I was young, with Daniel. We went on a mission to destroy Gad, remember?”
Godmund didn’t move or take his eyes off of her.
“We’ve come back. The others are bringing an army. We need you and the other survivors-” Freya looked around the room, still appalled. They didn’t seem like survivors. “We need you to help us.” Her words were losing their passion and conviction as she listened to what she was saying. These people were traumatised. They couldn’t fight. Godmund was still staring at her, dumbly.
“The Carnyx,” she said. “Why didn’t you blow the Carnyx?”
Godmund made a sound that made her think that he was going to start singing again-but then she found that he was laughing.
“To save us would be to destroy us. That is as certain as the darkness. Our general has abandoned us. No, worse! He conspires against us. Our whole army, formed along a precipice, to do battle with the air. How do you fight the wind? To step forward is to perish. We are the walking fallen, still retreating, searching for a way out of the miserable reality. I have seen the hand that moves us in the darkness-a game of chess with all the pieces of one colour. A game of chance with a die that has just one side. A house on stone, but with walls of sand. What use has. .”
Godmund continued babbling.
“Honourable Godmund,” Vivienne broke in. “We need you to fight now. We need you to rise up and chase away the invaders of the surface world. It’s. . it’s being invaded, Godmund: trolls, goblins, dragons, were-bears, ogres, all manner of sprites and hobs. . the time has come!”
Godmund spat. “I have no honour. And neither do you.”
Freya could only look down on the ancient being, who was once a brave, bullheaded warrior. Uncomplicated to a fault, if anything, he seemed, even to Freya’s young mind, as the ideal general-smart and capable, but largely unquestioning of his command, which at that time had been Ealdstan and Modwyn.
“I understand the disenfranchisement, Godmund, I do,” said Freya. “But please answer my question: why didn’t you blow the Carnyx when you could to end all of this?”
“You have no conception of that which you ask.”
“So tell us.”
Godmund grimaced and bared his teeth, like a wolf defending his territory. “The curses that object will bring upon the world are too many and deep to account. The breadth of evil it would bring would be incomprehensible. It would open a hole and blow out all the goodness and hope in all the realms of this world.”
“How do you know this?”
“It speaks to me. It tells me its secrets.”
“Right. Okay. So. . does that mean that it’s close by?”
Godmund raised a hand and gestured to the darkness behind him. Moving the light of the lantern, Freya saw the large copper horn propped against the wall. When she had seen it last it had been securely fastened into the centre of a small fortress, a fortress that lay within the second wall of the hidden city and that was designed to keep it and it alone safe. But the brilliant copper that had once glowed like fire was now dull and dim. A black patina was spreading across it, turning to an oxidized green in many places.
