“There.” Snorri pointed to a place high upon the stepped shore to our left. Like a dark eye amid the stony slopes, Eridruin’s Cave watched us. It couldn’t be any other.
The Norsemen lowered the sails and brought us into the shallows. Fjords have deep shallows, diving down as steeply as the valleys that contain them. I jumped out a yard from the shore and managed to wet myself to the hips.
“You’re just going up there. . right now?” I looked about for the promised monsters. “Shouldn’t we wait and. . plan?”
Snorri shouldered his axe. “You want to wait until it gets dark, Jal?”
He had a point. “I’ll guard the boat.”
Snorri wound the boat’s line around a boulder that emerged from the water. “Come on.”
The Norsemen set off, Tuttugu at least looking as though he would rather not and casting glances left and right. He carried a rope coiled many times about him, and two lanterns bounced on his hips.
I hurried after them. Somehow I could think of no horror worse than being alone in that place, sitting by the still water as the night poured down the slopes.
“Where are the monsters?” It wasn’t that I wanted to see any. . but if they were here I’d rather know where.
Snorri paused and looked about. I immediately sat down to catch my breath. He shrugged. “I can’t see any. But then how many places live up to their reputation? I’ve been to plenty of Giant’s This and Troll’s That, without a sniff of either. I climbed the Odin’s Horn and didn’t meet him.”
“And the Fair Maidens are a great disappointment.” Tuttugu nodded. “Who thought to set that name on three rocky isles crammed with ugly hairy men and their ugly hairy wives?”
Snorri nodded up the slope again and set off. In places it was steeper than stairs and I reached out ahead of me, clambering up.
I climbed, expecting attack at any moment, expecting to see bones among the rocks, drifts of them, tooth-marked, some grey with age, some fresh and wet. Instead I discovered just more rocks and that the growing sense of wrongness now whispered around me, audible but too faint to break apart into words.
Within minutes we stood at the cave mouth, a rocky gullet, fringed with lichen above and stained with black slime where the water oozed. Twenty men could march in abreast, and be swallowed.
“Do you hear it?” Tuttugu, more pale than he had ever looked.
We heard it, though perhaps the cave spoke different words to each of us. I heard a woman whispering to her baby, soft at first, promising love. . then sharper, more strained, promising protection. . then terrified, hoarse with agony promising- I spoke aloud to overwrite the whispers. “We need to leave. This place will drive us mad.” Already I found myself wondering, if I threw myself down the slope would the voice stop?
“I don’t hear anything.” Snorri walked in. Perhaps his own demons spoke louder than the cave.
I took a step after him, out of habit, then caught myself. Fingers in my ears did nothing to block out the woman’s voice. Worse, I realized there was something familiar about it.
Snorri’s progress slowed as the cave floor sloped away, as steep as the valley behind us, but slick with slime and lacking handholds. The gradient steepened further, the cave narrowing to a black and hungry throat.
“Do not.”
A tall man stood between Snorri and me, in the shadow of the cave, in the space through which Snorri had just walked. A young man, clad in a strange white robe, sleeved and open at the front. He watched us through stony grey eyes, unsmiling. All the other voices retreated when the man spoke-my woman with her dead child, and the others behind her, not gone but reduced to the pulsing hiss you can hear in a seashell.
Snorri turned, taking the axe from his back. “I need to find a door into Hel.”
“Such doors are closed to men.” The man smiled then-no kindness in it. “Take a knife to your veins and you will find yourself there soon enough.”
“I have a key,” Snorri said, and made to resume his descent.
“I said, do not.” The man raised his hand and we heard the bones of earth groan. Plates of stone shattered away from the cavern roof, dust drifting in their wake.
“Who are you?” Snorri faced him again.
“I came through the door.”
“You’re dead?” Snorri took a step toward the man, fascinated now. “And you came back?”
“This part of me is dead, certainly. You don’t live as long as I have without dying a little. I have echoes of me in Hel.” The man tilted his head, as if puzzled, as if considering himself. “Show me your key.”
“Who are you?” Snorri repeated his first question.
Across from me Tuttugu stopped pressing the heels of his hands to his ears. His eyes widened from the slits they had been. He grabbed up his axe from the rocks and crawled to my side.
“Who? Who was I? That man is dead, an older one wears his skin. I’m just an echo-like the others echoing here, though my voice is the strongest. I am not me. Just a fragment, unsure of my purpose. .”
“Who-”
“I won’t bandy my name before a light-sworn warrior.” The dead man seemed to gather himself. “Show me your key. It must be the reason I am here.”
Snorri pursed his lips then released one hand from the axe to draw Loki’s key from beneath his jerkin. “There. Now, if you won’t help me, shade, begone.”
“Ah. This is good. This is a good key. Give it to me.” A hunger in him now.
“No. Show me the door, ghost.”
“Give me the key and I’ll allow you to continue along your path.”
“I need the key to open the door.”
“I thought that once. I had many failures. I called myself door-mage but so many doors resisted me. The key you hold was stolen from me, long ago. Death was the first door I opened without it. Some doors just require a push. For others a latch must be lifted, some are locked, but a sharp mind can pick most locks. Only three still resist me. Darkness, Light, and the Wheel. And when you give me the key I will own those too.”
Snorri looked my way and beckoned me. “Jal, I need you to lock the door after me. Take the key and give it to Skilfar. She will know how to destroy it.”
“I have something you want, barbarian.”
The door-mage had a child at his side, gripping her neck from behind. A small girl in a ragged woollen smock, bare legs, dirty feet, her blond hair thrown across her face as the man forced her head down.
“Einmyria?” Snorri breathed the name.
In one hand the child held a peg doll.
“Emy?” A shout. He sounded terrified.
“The key, or I’ll break her neck.”
Snorri reached into his jerkin and tore the key from its thong. “Take it.” He strode forward pressing it carelessly into the mage’s hand, eyes on his daughter, bending toward her. “Emy? Sweet-girl?”
Two things happened together. Somehow the mage dropped Loki’s key, and in reaching to catch it as it fell he let go of the child’s neck. She looked up, hair falling to the sides. Her face was a wound, the dark red muscle of her cheeks showed through, stripped of skin and fat. She opened her mouth and vomited out flies, thousands of them, a buzzing scream. Snorri fell back and she leapt on him, black talons erupting from the flesh of her hands.
I glimpsed Snorri amid the dark cloud, on his back, struggling to keep the child-thing from ripping out his eyes. Tuttugu lumbered forward, shielding his face, swinging his axe in an under-arm looping blow. Somehow he missed Snorri but caught the demon, the force of the impact knocking her clear. For a second she scrabbled at the muddy slope, shrieking at an inhuman pitch, then fell away, wailing, into the consuming blackness. The flies followed her, like smoke inhaled by an open mouth.