A death-scream right below the window answered my question and made me lurch in my chair so badly it nearly tipped over. Men had died out there from sheer terror, and now they tore at their living comrades, spreading horror and panic.
Glancing about me, I saw that the curtains had developed grey patches where the material had rotted. The brass handles on the doors held a tarnished look. All of us, prisoners and guards alike, looked aged, as if we’d spent a week without sleep.
“We need to get out of here. We need to get out of here. We need—”
A skinny lord with a wispy moustache leapt to his feet, yanking at the chain restraining him. He’d turned the chair over and had managed to tug the chain from the leg before the guards beat him down. “Shut it! Just shut it!” One of the guardsmen in the struggle gained his feet, raw-knuckled from punching Lord Wispy in the jaw. He looked more scared than the fallen prisoner, the deep-set eyes in his piggy face as haunted as if they’d seen the butcher coming for his bacon. The sounds of fighting and panic reached us from outside. Screaming, both from the hungry dead and the terrified living, rang out toward the front of the house. We heard shutters splinter in the chamber next to us. “The windows! Barricade the windows!” I stood up, lifted my chair, releasing the chain from around its leg, and walked with it toward the curtains. None of the guards moved to stop me: instead they looked about for anything that might aid the effort.
I reached to help two guardsmen struggling with a heavy cabinet, the treasured pottery within spilling from its many shelves. Nobody commented on the fact that the chain on my wrist now hung loose, no longer tethering me to my seat. I helped with a suit of armour and its stand then moved off to get something else to use . . . and carried on going.
The sounds of the fight outside were terrifyingly familiar. If I closed my eyes I could have been back at the Appan Gate. New sounds close by of breaking glass and splintering wood lent a little more pace to my escape. I wasn’t sure quite how far I’d been dragged after being taken from the throne room, nor in which direction to head in order to leave the building. I wasn’t even entirely sure I wanted to go outside. I opened one door onto a library, not huge, but lined with books from floor to ceiling. The windows were uncurtained—half a dozen tall, narrow arches, each sealed with a dozen plates of puddle-glass, leaded together. As I moved to pull the door closed blood splattered the entirety of each window, save the top-most panes. A wave of it breaking against the building.
Despair washed over me, then lessened as the lichkin moved away again, tracking down more victims outside the house.
I slammed the door, turned, and saw Hertet hurrying down the corridor toward me, the crown askew upon his head. A group of knights followed at his back. His gaze slid across me unregistering, his face deathly pale. I noticed his cloth-of-gold robe bore a scarlet splatter across the middle as if someone had been gutted in front of him. I flattened myself to the door to let them by.
“It wants the key!” I shouted as he passed me. I’m not sure why I said it. Hertet stopped, seeing me for the first time. “Jalan. Reymond’s boy.”
He reached out and patted my hand. “You were always a good boy.” His other hand drew the key from beneath his collar. He tugged it and it came loose, though the chain looked too strong to break like that. “Here. You take it. You’ll know what to do.” He folded my hand around Loki’s key and moved on without a pause or a glance back. “We can go to the cellars and . . .”
I lost his voice beneath the tramp of mailed feet as the knights swept by. I stood for a moment in the corridor, sounds of chaos from the direction of the throne room, screams and howls ringing out at intervals from random directions. The blackness of the key held my gaze, cold and heavy in my hand. I managed to tear my attention from Loki’s gift and check both directions along the corridor, absently noting a long dark smear of blood along the wall panelling opposite and a painting, knocked from the wall, its frame splintered: the young Hertet staring out at me with heroic intent, footprints all over his face. At the far end of the corridor three women hurried by in silken finery, one old, two young, there one moment, gone the next.
The screaming from the throne room grew more desperate. Something struck the doors leading from it with enough force that the echoes trembled through my chest.
The key. The key had ended a lichkin in Hell. But that had been pure chance. Luck. My gaze returned to the blackness of it, unlocking the memories of that victory, and in an instant they had sucked me in.
Snorri stands before me, a monotone giant clad in the blood-dust of Hell. A fissure behind him gouts tongues of crimson flame and the air is thick with the stink of sulphur. I’m holding Loki’s key before me at waist height and the lichkin has gone, just a black stain lingering where its corrupted remnants fell to the ground. The key undid it. The lichkin took a step back when it blocked Snorri’s charge and impaled itself, just an inch, but it was enough. I turned the key and the lichkin came undone.
Snorri’s gaze is on my hand. He thought the key was safe with Kara, back in the living world.
“Well look at that,” I say, opening my fingers to reveal the key fully. “The thing is . . .” I struggle to come up with an explanation. “The thing to remember is that . . . without this we would both be dead.” I hold up my other hand to forestall him. “And not the good kind of dead. The really, really nasty kind.” I shudder, remembering the pain as the lichkin held me. I’ve never experienced anything close, and never want to again.
“You brought that key into Hel?” Snorri appears to have heard none of the words I so carefully brought up in my defence. “Into Hel?”
“You heard the bit about saving both our lives?”
Snorri looks scared. It’s one of the more worrying things I’ve seen in a life that lately has been more or less one worrying thing joined to the next. “We have to get it out of here. You have to take it back, Jal. Now!”
I look around. A wide and dusty valley dead-lit by a sky the colour of old sorrow. Fiery vents, a scattering of disturbingly shaped rocks. “How?” I’m not going to argue about leaving. I was doing my best not to come in the first place.
Snorri frowns, concentrating but unable to hold in his thoughts. “What were you thinking? This whole time you’ve being carrying . . .” He looks so disappointed in me that I almost see his point.
“The Ancient Greeks had a hall of judgment . . .” I say, mainly to distract him.
“The Greeks? What have the Greeks got to do with anything?”
“Well . . .” I often come up with my best plans by opening my mouth and listening to the words that come out. This time it doesn’t seem to be working. “Well . . . we’ve been trekking through your underworld, Hel’s domain. And now we’re in my Hell, or the Dead King’s Hell—”
“But the Greek mythology we’ve both known our whole lives! So both of us can shape it. Brilliant!”
The truth was I’d had ancient Greek mythology beaten through my thick layer of disinterest in my early teens by a detested tutor named Soros using a blunt cane and sharp sarcasm. I still have no idea why it was considered necessary, even if some in those regions have taken up the worship again. I did, however, learn it well enough to avoid the cane, if not the sarcasm.
“Anyway. The Greeks had a hall of judgment with three judges to direct the souls of the dead to their various rewards and punishments.” I start walking again. The lichkin might only be a stain on the ground but it’s a stain I don’t wish to stand next to any longer than I have to. I spit to clear the sulphur taste from my mouth. It doesn’t work.