The deeper the corridors took us the stronger the alchemy in the air, stinging my eyes, scouring my lungs. After what must have been a mile or more of corridors and galleries we started to see doorways, carved into the salt, the arches elaborately worked but lacking any door, instead just filled with a crystalline wall of the native salt, as if a new chamber were to be excavated but plans had changed.
The air grew thicker by degrees, and warmer, as if with Hel’s promise, for surely the infernal fires could not lie much further below us. The salts changed too—from tasting like the salt of the sea to something sour that burned the tongue. The colours changed, the white adopting a taint of deepest blue that seemed to lend depth to every surface. The air lost its dryness, becoming humid as our path led deeper, so that where earlier on the sweat had been sucked from my skin before it had a chance to even show, now the air refused to take it and left it running down my limbs in trickles that did nothing to cool me.
At last the spider brought us by a long flight of steps and a short corridor into a natural cavern where rock occasionally showed through the salt-clad walls and everything had a rounded, lumpen look to it. Another turn revealed a bleached wooden bridge crossing a fast-running rill that carved down through the salt, hot and steaming as it ran. Beyond the bridge lay a chamber of wonder.
“Holy Hel!” Kara invoked the heathen goddess that rules the Norse in their afterlife should death not take them to Valhalla. A cold bitch by all accounts, split nose to crotch by a line dividing a left side of pure jet from a right side of alabaster.
“Fuck me.” I feel Christendom provides the more apt responses in such situations. The cavern ran before us in a wide and writhing tunnel, as if some great wyrm had burrowed here, and on every side the salts lay in vast crystals, forests of them, some a yard long, hexagonal in cross-section and so thick I might not get my hands to meet around them. Others were ten yards long and thicker than I stood tall, each face flatter than anything man can make, the angles sharp and perfect.
I knew this place. I had seen it in the visions Kara’s magic gave me. I had seen it in a mirror in my grandmother’s memories. The Lady Blue fled to these caverns after she murdered the elder Gholloth, first of my line. That bound them, Kelem and the Blue Lady. But which had been the hand behind the move I didn’t know—only that both had played the game and played it against my family. However I turned it this placed Kelem’s hand on Edris Dean’s shoulder on the day he came to Vermillion.
The spider moved between, beneath, and over the crystals without interrupting its pace, flowing around each obstacle in a whirring interplay of legs. We moved more slowly, struggling to extract any use from each lungful of scalding, over-moist air, and sweating water faster than a man could piss it away. A lethargy wrapped me, like a hot wet blanket, and I found myself paused halfway across a massive crystal shard that Snorri had just struggled over. The crystal plane beneath me returned the light of Kara’s lantern, tinting it deepest indigo. The whole shard seemed to glow with some inner fire, burning at its core impossibly far beneath me. It felt for a moment that I sat upon the surface of a calm sea, fathoms deep, with only the thinnest sheet of some brittle substance to hold me up, to keep me from sinking down to where that fire burned . . . Exhaustion bowed me, a great weight, dragging my head down toward the crystal’s surface. Loki’s key slipped from my wet shirt, dangling on its thong, the blackest I had ever seen it, its tip just a finger’s breadth above the surface that supported me . . .
“Jal!” Kara barked the word from behind me, her voice seeming to scratch like fingernails on a slate, filling me with irritation. “Jal!”
I turned my head to her, reluctant, and met her stare.
“Don’t,” she said. “The world is broken here.” She frowned, sweat running down her brow, plastering her blond hair to her forehead. Her eyes seemed defocused . . . witchy I’ll call it for lack of a better word. She tasted the air. “This is a place of doors.”
“Well . . . so they say.” I waved a hand around us. “I haven’t seen one damn door since we left the surface.”
She glanced at the crystal beneath me. “There’s a portal here. An almost-door . . . to let that key touch it would be a mistake. I don’t know where or when it might take you.”
“When?”
But she didn’t answer, just looped her hands so Hennan could scramble over the shard. The boy had wrapped rags about his hands. A good move. Mine were cut from sharp edges and already stinging with the salts.