The Wheel of Osheim. Mark Lawrence

Just touching the ground leaves my fingers bloody. How long the leather soles of my boots will last, and what will become of my feet after that, I can’t say.

      We see more souls here, grey clusters of them, flowing like dirty water along the dry valleys, men and women and children, heads down, unspeaking, drawn onward by some call I can’t hear.

      We follow, twisting and turning through the black hills, the valleys becoming deeper, broader, more thick with souls. The Slidr is less than a memory now, Hell has parched me again. I feel my skin dying, desiccating, flaking away.

      ‘Wait.’ For no reason a gorge on to our left catches my eye, high above us, emptying out of the valley side.

      ‘This is the way.’ Snorri gestures after the departing souls ahead of us, more drifting by. His eyes are red with burst veins, like a man who has forgotten how to sleep. I feel worse than he looks.

      ‘Up there.’ I point at it. ‘There’s something up there.’

      ‘This is the way.’ Snorri repeats, starting off after the souls, head down once more.

      ‘No.’ And I’m climbing over boulders, a dozen paper-thin cuts on my palm where I reach out to steady myself. ‘It’s up here.’

      ‘I don’t sense it.’ Snorri turns toward me, exhausted, the souls dwarfed as they flow around him.

      ‘It’s here.’ I keep climbing, drawing my sword to balance myself, to give myself some support that doesn’t require touching the rocks.

      It’s a scramble to reach the gorge and my hand stings as if vinegar has been poured into each cut. I advance along the narrow path that leads up between the gorge’s clifflike walls, Snorri a short way behind me, cursing.

      It’s silent here out of the wind, at least it is once Snorri stops complaining. A pervasive quiet, ancient and deep. Our footfalls sound like sacrilege. If it were water that carved these valleys it has been gone since before man walked here. In a hell built from loneliness this seems the most desolate and most lost place that the damned might ever walk.

      ‘There’s nothing here, Jal, I tol—’

      The narrow walls draw back just ahead of us. There’s a dell, perhaps a plunge pool where some long-dead river once fell. A single tree stands there, black, gnarled, the bare fingers of its branches stark against the dead-lit sky. Its trunk is mottled, a sickly white against the black, rising from the broad base toward the heights where the first branches divide.

      Advancing, I see that the tree is both further away and more huge than I had imagined. ‘Help me up.’ There’s a step in the gorge, taller than I am. Snorri boosts me to the top. I cut my leg through my trousers. More acid slices from the bubble-fractured rock. I reach for Snorri and help him join me.

      Drawing closer we see that the tree, though leafless, is laden with strange fruit. Closer still and the diseased trunk reveals its secret. Bodies are nailed to it. Hundreds of them.

      If this tree were the size trees are supposed to be then we would be ants. It must be some offspring of Yggdrasil, the world-tree that stands in the heart of all things and from which worlds depend. The branches which bear fruit droop like those of the willow, dangling almost to the ground. Some reach so low I could stretch up and touch them, but I’ve no wish to. The fruit are dark and shrivelled, some a couple of feet across, some no bigger than a man’s head, all grotesque, unsettling in a way I can’t define.

      The low groaning of the tree’s victims reaches us now. Men and women are pinned to its trunk, young and old, so crowded their limbs overlap, their splayed forms fitted together like interlaced fingers or the pieces of a puzzle.

      We come amid the thick and sprawling tangle of the tree’s roots to its trunk, as wide as the Mathema Tower and taller still. One patch of whiteness draws my eye, paler than the others and low to the ground.

      ‘Hello Marco.’ I step closer, sheathing my sword, looking up at him. There he is, nailed among the hundreds, hands and feet pinned by black spikes of iron. Scores of heads turn my way, slowly, as if it takes great effort, but only Marco speaks.

      ‘Prince Jalan Kendeth.’ His gaze lifts. ‘And the barbarian.’

      ‘I’m glad you remember me.’

      ‘There are few curses worse than having your name spoken in Hell,’ he says.

      That takes the wind from my sails. ‘W-well.’ I swallow and try to speak without stammering. ‘I’d rather have my name spoken in Hell than be nailed to a tree in Hell for all eternity.’

      Marco hasn’t an answer to that.

      ‘I remember you,’ Snorri says. ‘The man with the papers. You had Tuttugu tortured. Why are you on this tree?’

      ‘Maybe this is where torturers go,’ I say.

      ‘It would take a forest to house them,’ Snorri says. ‘This tree would not suffice.’

      ‘So some more specific crime…’ I frown. This place scares me. All of Hell scares me, but this place is worse.

      ‘A worse crime.’ Snorri’s gaze wanders across the bodies, all naked, all pierced by nails, hanging on gravity’s rack.

      ‘Get me down and I’ll tell you,’ Marco says, always the banker. I can see the desperation in his eyes, though.

      ‘You put yourself there.’ Snorri turns to study the closest of the hanging fruit. He reaches up to touch it. ‘Ah!’ And snatches his hand back as if stung. A flush of colour spreads across the wizened husk, a fleshy pink. We watch, Snorri still rubbing his fingers. The fruit swells, like a chest inflated with a deep breath. The thing’s true shape resolves. We see limbs, coiled in tight, flesh tones mottling the previous lifeless black. The transformation lasts as long as the breath that Snorri drew in, and with his exhalation the ‘fruit’ shrivels back to its dark dry husk.

      ‘It … it was…’

      ‘It looked like a baby,’ I whisper. Only too small, head too big, limbs too tiny, fingers webbed.

      ‘An unborn.’ Snorri turns back to Marco. ‘That’s the fruit of this tree? Your crimes?’

      I’m not listening: my eyes have found another of the tree’s fruit. Just one among hundreds, maybe thousands, but it draws me. I can’t look away. Every other thing blurs, and I’m walking toward it.

      ‘Jal?’ Snorri calls me from somewhere distant.

      I reach up with both hands and clasp the desiccated husk. The pain isn’t in my fingers, it’s in my veins, in the marrow of each bone as something is drawn from me. Thick arms wrestle me away and I’m on the ground looking up at the unborn, pink and tiny … wet and dripping with life.

      ‘What are you doing?’ Snorri hauls me to my feet. ‘Have you gone mad?’

      ‘I…’ I look at the pink thing, this almost-child. I draw Edris Dean’s sword and the script along the blade has run crimson as if the symbols themselves are bleeding. ‘This is my sister.’

      Though some magic has drawn me to her our connection ends there. I’ve never met her – she has never grown – and I have had two brothers teach me that there’s nothing holy in blood bonds. Given my elder brother, Martus, and a random stranger both dangling over a precipice and only time to save one of them, it would be my day to make a new friend. Especially if the stranger were young and female. All I have to link me to this … creature … is the memory of watching Mother die. Only sorrow binds us, and now she’s been corrupted. This nameless child has been wrought into some terror, a terror that needs to kill me to escape into the living world and keep its place there…

      I hold my bleeding sword and watch the thing before me, pink, ugly, wet and raw. Snorri stands beside me and says nothing. A cry escapes me, a harsh noise, as short and sharp as the arc of my blade. Steel slices. The unborn drops, and where she hits the ground there is only dust and small dry bones.

      ‘Jal.’