“So how do we reach Kelem’s part of the mine?” Kara looked about her, frowning at the lanterns burning in niches on the distant opposite wall.
“We’re in it,” I said, putting the orichalcum away. “The miners must pass on through to where they dig. They wouldn’t leave this much salt so close to the entrance if this weren’t barred to them. . also they’d make a profit. And those lanterns. . who wastes oil like that?”
“We’re being watched.” Hennan pointed to one of the dozen corridors leading off the main chamber. I squinted along the line of his finger. Something twinkled, there in the shadows.
Snorri started to advance in that direction, and as he did the thing that had watched us emerged into the light. A spider, but monstrous in size and made of shining silver. Its legs spanned a diameter of two yards or more, its gleaming body larger than a man’s head, studded with rubies the size of pigeon eggs and clustered like an arachnid’s eyes. It came on swiftly, its limbs a complex ballet of motion, reflecting our light back at us in shards.
“Odin.” Snorri stepped back. The only time I had ever seen something give him pause.
“Why silver, I wonder?” Kara held her blade before her.
“Why a bloody spider? That seems just as good a question.” I stepped behind Snorri. I don’t mind spiders as long as they’re small enough to fit under my heel.
“Iron corrodes.” Kara kept her eyes on the thing. “Clockwork soldiers wouldn’t last long down here. Not unless they were made of silver-steel like our friend here.”
“Friend?” Snorri took another step back and I moved to avoid being trodden on.
The spider stopped short of us and started back toward the darkness it came from, moving with exaggerated slowness.
“It’s a guide,” Kara said.
“To what?” Snorri made no move to follow. “A web?”
“It’s a bit late to worry about walking into a trap now isn’t it?” Kara looked around at him, anger and exasperation mixing on her brow. “You walked us a thousand miles for this, ver Snagason, against all advice. It’s been a trap the whole time. The web had you the moment you laid hands on that key. It should never have left the ice. Kelem sent assassins to take the key from you-now you’ve brought it to him yourself. His mark is on you and he has drawn you to him.” She gestured to his stained shirt, now pierced by the crystalline growths about his wound.
Kara shook her head and set off after the spider, turning up the wick in the last of our lanterns.
For the longest time our journey reduced to the whir and click of the spider’s clockwork, the tick-tick-tick of its metal feet on the stone, and the glimmer of long limbs in motion at the margins of the lantern light. It led us down salt-walled corridors, opening from time to time onto dark and cavernous galleries whose dimensions our light could not reveal. We descended by steps and by gradient, every turn leading down, never up. Twice we passed across broad chambers, the high ceilings lost in gloom and supported on columns of the native rock-salt left in situ. The remainder of the salt had been cut out in slabs long ago and transported to the surface uncomfortably far above us.
In one of these pillared chambers salt miners, now long dead, had carved a church and set it about with saints. Paul the Apostle stood before the arched entrance one white and glittering arm raised before him, fingers half-spread as if pointing out an important truth, the bible clasped to his chest, the expression on his face hard to see in white on white.
Once we travelled a corridor of Builder-stone, smooth and perfect for a hundred yards before crumbing away and returning us to the caverns. It seemed as if they had made some complex here, not valuing the mineral wealth around them, just digging into it to hide themselves away, only for later men to excavate around them.
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.”