The Liar’s Key. Mark Lawrence

and an older but no less comely woman that Snorri assured me was her sister rather than her mother, I started to think a night in Harrowheim might have its charms after all.

      We left on the morning tide with sore heads and foggy recollections of the night’s events. The rain had let up, the relentless wind had relented, and the true story of how their largest barn got burned flat had yet to emerge. It seemed the best time to depart. Even so I would have dallied a day or three, but Snorri had an urgency about him, his humour gone. When he thought no one watching I saw him hold his side above the poisoned wound and I knew then that he felt that pull, drawing him south.

      Sad to say neither Yngvildr nor her still less pronounceable sister came to see me off at the quay, but they had both managed a smile when Snorri hauled me from the furs that morning and I let that warm me against the cold wind as we set sail.

      As the distance took Harrowheim I didn’t feel quite so well rid of this Norse town as I had of Trond, Olaafheim, and Haargfjord. Even so, the glories of Vermillion beckoned. Wine, women, song … preferably not opera … and I’d certainly search out Lisa DeVeer, perhaps even marry her one day.

      ‘We’re going the wrong way!’ It had taken me the best part of half an hour to realize it. The fjord had narrowed a touch and there was no sign of the sea.

      ‘We’re sailing up the Harrowfjord.’ Snorri at the tiller.

      ‘Up?’ I looked for the sun. It was true. ‘Why? And where do I know that name from?’

      ‘I told it to you four nights ago. Ekatri told me—’

      ‘Eridruin’s Cave. Monsters!’ It all came back to me, rather like unexpectedly vomiting into your mouth. The völva’s mad tale about a door in a cave.

      ‘It was meant to be. Fated. My namesake sailed here three centuries ago.’

      ‘Snorri Hengest died here.’ Tuttugu from the prow. ‘We should see Skilfar. She’ll know of a better way. Nobody comes here, Snorri. It’s a bad place.’

      ‘We’re looking for a bad thing.’

      And that was that. We kept going.

      ‘So, who was Eridruin?’ Sailing on a fjord is infinitely preferable to sailing on the sea. The water stays where it’s put and the shore is so close that even I might make it there if it came to swimming. This said, I would rather be sailing over rough seas away from any place famed for monsters than sailing toward it on the flattest of millponds. ‘I said, who was—’

      ‘I don’t know. Tuttugu?’ Snorri kept his eyes on the left shore.

      Tuttugu shrugged. ‘It must ache Eridruin’s spirit to be famed enough for his name to survive but not quite enough for anyone to remember why they remember it.’

      A stiff breeze had carried us inland. The day kept grey, the sun showing only brief and weak. By late afternoon we’d covered perhaps thirty miles and seen no sign of habitation. I had thought Harrowheim’s raiders came from further up the fjord, but nobody lived here. Tuttugu had the right of it. A bad place. Somehow you could tell. It wasn’t anything as simple as dead and crooked trees, or rocks with sinister shapes … it was a feeling, a wrongness, the certain knowledge that the world grew thin here, and what waited beneath the surface loved us not. I watched the sun sinking toward the high ridges and listened. The Harrowfjord wasn’t silent or lifeless, the water lapped our hull, the sails flapped, birds sang … but each sound held a discordant tone, as if the skylarks were just a note away from screaming. You could almost catch it … some dreadful melody played out just beneath hearing.

      ‘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 over-write 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.