“Are you trying to tempt me?” The laugh comes easy and I pick up the pace, not even looking in the rooms as I pass.
A hundred doors on and I stop as if I’d hit a wooden post. The most delicious smell ever in the history of aromas has fastened itself to my nose and turns my head without permission. A table has been set in the room to my left. A simple table without cloth or silver, and on it rests a wooden plate where half a roasted chicken sits and steams. Instantly my mouth is full of drool, my stomach a tight and demanding knot. Every part of me screams with desire for that hot roasted meat. I’ve lived with famine in Hell for so long that my body literally howls in answer to the call of a good meal.
Sobbing, I turn away, only to see in the room opposite a simple goblet of clear glass, brimming with water. I know in the moment I lay eyes upon it that this will be the purest of spring waters, gurgling free from beneath ancient rocks, and that gulping it down, letting it flow into my parched and death-touched throat, would take the thirst from me in a moment. To anyone who has not known the desiccation of death’s drylands the idea that a man might sacrifice himself for just a glass of water may seem insane. But it must be experienced to be understood. I have been dry in the desert of the Sahar. It is a small thing compared to the thirst that a day in Hell will put in a man.
Even so, I tear myself away and stumble on, my body aching with the life awakened in it so suddenly by the proximity of the world after so very long walking the deadlands.
More scents assault me, each more delicious than the one before. Apples, caramel, fresh baked bread . . . beer. Young beer, fragrant with hops, the sound of it pouring from the spigot . . . that nearly turns me. I catch glimpses of the rooms: one a meadow in sunlight, another a horse ready to ride, a magnificent beast, muscles bunched under dark hide, ready to gallop all day. There are rooms where treasure lies in drifts, gold enough to buy kingdoms whole. I focus my vision on that distant rectangle of green grass and blue sky, coming closer with each stride. My will is iron. I understand the test and will not be turned.
I’m twenty yards from the end door. I can see the blue sky, the green of a garden, a wall behind it. It looks like the royal herb garden behind the messenger stables. I break into a run.
“Come back to bed, Jal.”
One sideways glance and I stumble to a halt, turn, take three steps back. I recognize the room, a bedchamber. The light slants through shuttered windows dividing the bed into parallel lines of light and shadow. Each bright line rises over her, describing her contours, tawny skin smooth across warm flesh. She lies naked, just as I left her, silken sheets rising halfway up her back and following her curves as faithfully as the light does.
“Lisa?”
She doesn’t speak, just makes that languid stretch that’s only possible in the moments between waking and sleeping.
This is a doorway into the past. The air itself shimmers with doorways, fractures in the world, each leading to new possibilities, new versions of my life. If I had stayed with her that morning, if I had turned at the door when she called to me, still half-tangled in her dreams, if I had slid in beside her once more . . . none of this would have happened. I would have missed Grandmother’s address. I would never have seen Snorri. He would have made his own way home. I would have lived on as I always had. Perhaps I would have asked Lisa to marry me and spent her dowry buying off Maeres Allus, and the idle, easy, soft days of my life would have carried on.
That one thought overwhelms me. Go back. Turn it back. Do it over. That one thought and the glorious aliveness of her after so very long in the deadlands. Lisa DeVeer, long, lean, lovely, warm, soft, vital. Go on along the corridor and return to the now, to the palace of Vermillion where she is married and the world stands against me . . . or turn here at the last moment and step back into that first morning where it all went wrong and could so easily have been avoided.
One step is all it takes. The rest I don’t even remember. I lay a hand on her hip and sit at her side. I start to kick off my boots. Lisa reaches up to draw me down to her, turning slowly, dark hair cascading over her shoulder.
She hasn’t any face, just a funnel of flesh from which a score of cobra fangs jut, venom dripping from their sharpness. I fall off the bed with a shout of horror, my shirt ripping, most of it still hanging in her clawed fist. I pull the key and would run for the door but there is no door. I scrabble backwards across the bedroom floor as the thing that isn’t Lisa rises from the bed. Trapped in a corner, I reach up to throw the shutter wide but all it reveals is the dead sky of Hell—damnation waits for me out there. In the deadlight the shimmers where the worlds brush against one another show more clearly and Not-Lisa looks more like something made rather than grown, unclean flesh on old bones. She moves from the bed, awkward, limbs jerking, and steps my way.
In desperation I shove the key toward the closest place where the light fractures. It’s not a door but it might almost be. It’s a half-chance and I take it. I feel Loki’s key engage with something, locking its teeth into the stuff of being . . . and I turn it.
A moment later I’m tumbling out into the oven of the Sahar, scaldingly hot sand, blind white heat, a place that eats hope and buries the bones . . . and it feels great.
“Marshal?” Someone shook my arm, hard. “Marshal!”
It’s Bonarti Poe, white-faced and trembling. The key released my gaze and I found myself sitting in the corridor exactly where I was when Hertet first pressed it into my hands.
“How long have I—”
“I think everyone’s dead!” Poe looked back along the passage. A hideous scream rang out to contradict him—the kind of howl heard in torture chambers.
“We should leave.” I got to my feet, using the wall for support. It was dark, just one lamp guttering in a niche between us and the door to the throne room, its oil nearly spent.
“T-they said you know about . . . this thing that’s attacking us?” Bonarti had yet to relinquish my arm.
“I’ve seen one in Hell.”
“Oh Christ.” His grip started to hurt so I shook him off. “But you know how to beat it, right?”
The door at the end of the corridor burst into pieces, saving me from a reply. The lichkin stood there like a wound on my eye, there but invisible, glimpsed the next moment, not as the raw white nerve but shrouded in ghosts, wearing the grey souls of men as a skin.
The air between us rippled, faultlines and fractures seen in an instant then gone, some brilliant, some dark. This was the doom Luntar had warned us of. Not the lichkin dealing out deaths by the score, or thousand, but the breaking of creation. I’d seen the same fractures where the judges’ hall stood on the boundary between worlds, and here the Dead King’s creature caused two worlds to collide, leading the denizens of Hell back into their bodies and into the lands of the living. It’s in the nature of any crack to spread and, with the slow turn of the Wheel driving them, the fractures would spread ever faster and further. The Wheel of Osheim might lie untold miles away but its influence reached into the heart of every place, driven by the vast unslumbering machinery of the Builders, still pulsing with their energy though they lay dead a thousand years.