[EXCERPT FROM "THE RASH: A HISTORY OF THE COLLAPSE"]
Compiled by the Nordic Council Historical Commission, Year 207 After Rash
The world ended not with a bang, nor yet with a whimper. The world ended with a rash.
The Rash began as a discoloration of the skin, an itch, a mere blemish, and ended in agonizing pain, limbs maimed and twisted and deformed, madness, coma, and merciful death … for the lucky ones. For the unlucky ones, it ended in transformation to a ravening monster, so hideously deformed as to be unrecognizable as human, whether mentally or physically. It was contagious not just to human beings, but to every mammal with the strange exception of cats.
And no mammal that contracted the Rash ever recovered.
The Rash was contracted from the breath of the infected for a week or more before any symptoms showed, from any bite, even from a scratch inflicted by the appendages of the infected, no longer even identifiable as hands or feet.
There were those, both human and animal, that were immune to the Rash. And there were those who, though not immune, survived by chance or by swift action, escaping to islands or mountain fastnesses which could be defended against the infected. Iceland closed its borders very early and survived almost without infection; the Danish island of Bornholm closed its borders later and suffered great losses before the infected were destroyed, and even then small pockets of infection remained. In the other Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, villages survived here and there where they could be defended. Several brutally cold winters ravaged these survivors but at the same time the bitter cold kept the infected at bay while more defenses were built.
The world was lost to the Rash. Humanity was reduced from its teeming billions to little more than a hundred thousand in the Known World.
Ninety years passed before the Nordic Council sent its first explorers into abandoned Denmark.
[End of excerpt - Academic Archive of Mora, Sweden]
The vacation was not starting out well. When Uncle Trond offered the chance to go into the Silent World for three weeks in the off-season instead of sitting at home and training recruits or repairing gear, he had not mentioned the ten-day journey — each way! — by ship. Sigrun Eide had only learned of this after she'd already volunteered, when her best friend, Dagny Eide, pointed out that she was going to spend nearly half her vacation on a ship.
Granted, Uncle Trond had gotten her a cabin instead of a bunk in the hold, and, if she had to admit it, a few days lying down had done wonders for her injured neck. But after that … none of the other passengers spoke Norwegian; they appeared to be monolingual Icelanders. Most of the crew were the same, though the mess hall staff spoke Danish, which was somewhat intelligible.
“Where's the stairs to the top deck? I want to watch for grosslings.”
“Top deck? Gross…lings?” There was a quick discussion in Icelandic amongst the small crowd of servers who had gathered, before Emilía Jónsdóttir continued. “Oh. No. You cannot go to weather deck. Passengers are not allowed —”
“I'm not a passenger. I'm a troll-hunter, and I know there are grosslings, that's trolls and beasts, Rash monsters, in the seas.”
“Um, no one is allowed on weather deck. Crew are not allowed. It is dangerous.”
“Of course it's dangerous! There are grosslings, and I can't fight them from here!”
Another discussion in Icelandic.
“People on weather deck attract monsters. But there are few monsters here. Navy ship is nearby. We are safe if no one goes on weather deck.”
“But —!”
But there was no appeal. All Sigrun could do for the rest of the ten-day journey from Dalsnes, Norway, to the Öresund base was pace around the enclosed observation deck, glare out the reinforced windows at the empty ocean, and regale the mess hall staff with tales of troll hunting. Strangely, the other passengers seemed to leave the mess hall when they saw her flaming red hair through the door, though the off-duty crew would congregate to listen, those who were better at Danish translating her stories for those who spoke only Icelandic.
Still, it was a journey of crushing boredom. Even training recruits would have been better.
“We reach Öresund base,” Emilía told Sigrun. The server was out of breath, having run up the stairs and across the observation deck to tell her. “Come, watch this side.”
Just coming into view in the late winter morning, the Öresund base was amazing, quite the largest modern construction Sigrun had ever seen. A forest of steel towers supported multiple multilevel platforms, each level extending several meters further out than the one below, so that the topmost levels merged to form a single vast platform. Heavy chains linked several floating piers to the towers. To the east and west, pre-Rash bridges extended into the foggy distance, separated from the base itself by steel drawbridges, now raised.
Rather than tying up somewhere, the ship dropped anchor near a pier from which a rowboat set out to greet it. Finally allowed on the weather deck with two ship's cats and half a dozen armed crew members watching, Sigrun climbed down a rope ladder to the rowboat, her backpack and rifle slung over her back.
“Welcome to the Öresund base,” one of the two men rowing the boat said in Danish-accented Norwegian. “General Trond is here; he's meeting with other people but he'll come talk to you pretty soon. We have quarters arranged for you and, hmm, let's see … Oh! And the rest of your team will arrive in two days. I'm Lukas and I'm to show you around. Noah there doesn't speak Norwegian and doesn't like people anyway.” The aforesaid Noah looked up at his name and grinned before returning his attention to his oar. As Sigrun extended the back of her hand for the cat sitting between the men and wearing a Class B collar, Lukas added, “That's Eydis. We've got about a dozen Class Bs on the base, and three Class As.” Eydis deigned to touch Sigrun's hand with her nose before settling back to watch the surrounding waters.
“Not enough cats for such a big base, really. My clan's got more than that.”
“The base is entirely cut off from land with the drawbridges up, so we only have to worry about sea monsters. And you see” — he gestured up at the massive structure — “there's only a few places anything small could crawl up, and we just need a few cats to watch them. A leviathan could attack, of course, but we don't need cats to notice that!”
“Does that happen often? A leviathan, I mean?” Sigrun hadn’t gone into the seafaring side of troll-hunting, as it usually lacked the honor of chopping the foe’s head off. However, bored stiff as she was from the journey, she would have welcomed the excitement of hacking the tentacles off an attacking leviathan.
“No, no. There hasn't been one since I've been here, at least, and that's six years now. They don't come into these shallower waters much.”
“Guess there's not much chance of that then,” Sigrun said glumly, and Lukas grinned at her.
The conversation was interrupted as the rowboat reached a pier, Noah climbed out and tied it up, and Lukas and Sigrun followed. First Eydis and then the three humans climbed a steep metal staircase — very nearly a ladder — to an open catwalk which led to a closed steel door. Noah tugged on a handle attached to a wire threaded through a tiny hole in the wall next to the door and shouted something in Danish. The door swung slowly open, revealing a third man who allowed the three to pass before pulling the door shut and barring it with a heavy steel bar.
Lukas introduced the third man as Karl and, leaving Eydis to make herself comfortable in a cat-bed beside the door, the four proceeded up a stairwell lit by dim artificial lights. Having seen such lights before, on a troll-hunting expedition in Sweden, Sigrun refrained from gawking at them. She took some satisfaction in the men's expressions of slight disappointment. As with many men, she looked down on them a bit both figuratively and literally, as she was a very tall woman at 184 centimeters (a full six feet tall in the measures long forgotten since the coming of the Rash).
The lowest level of their platform featured crates and boxes stacked here and there among the steel towers supporting the higher levels; a freight elevator, its floor currently flush with the floor of the platform, showed how the supplies had been brought in. The sides of the level were open to the weather but heavily barred, with netting stretched across the bars to keep birds from nesting within. The air smelled of the sea, but not quite the sea as Sigrun was accustomed to it at home. Seagulls called outside, and waves lapped against the towers a dozen meters below. The footsteps of the four rang on the steel floor.
“Where's everybody else?” Sigrun asked, halting and looking around.
Stopping to look at her in alarm, Lukas answered, “General Trond just told me to meet you. I don't know of another ship.” He turned to ask the other two something in anxious Danish.
“No, no, it’s just this place is so empty. I can hear a couple of work parties, there and over there” — she pointed to areas from which sounds of work echoed — “but this place is obviously built for a lot more people. I thought this was a navy base, but it’s almost abandoned.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Lukas turned to reassure his comrades in Danish before returning to Norwegian. “Well, we built this place over decades to support the reconquest. The reconquests. It was built big enough for the army to stage out of. But after Kastrup, the whole effort was abandoned and so was the base, pretty much.” He too looked around at the echoing emptiness. “We're just a skeleton crew maintaining it so it doesn't rust away because, you know, we could never build it again. It's built out of oil drilling platforms, and the ones we didn't take, or you Norwegians didn't take, are all wrecks now. We have to maintain this, or give up our homeland forever.”
Sigrun shrugged. Lukas' explanation was rather more than she'd really needed, though she did understand the need to maintain any pre-Rash technology that any nation happened to have in good shape. With the world (so far as known) having a total population of less than a quarter million and all lands outside of the small safe areas being infested with ravenous monsters, there were severe limits on their resources and what they could make for themselves. Denmark was the most resource-limited of the five surviving nations. Iceland had its entire island; Sweden, Norway, and Finland were gradually taking back their parts of the European continent; but Denmark was reduced to the single small island of Bornholm, over 150 kilometers from the Danish homeland.
“Yeah, okay. So, you're supposed to show me around. What is there to see in this place?”
“You want to see the tanks? Before, uh, before Kastrup, the army drove or towed a bunch of pre-Rash tanks here for repairs. Most of them weren't ever repaired in the end because … you know. We take care of them and keep them from rusting, though, so they'll be available when we try again. Your team's supposed to get one of them, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. Let's see them. I'll pick out a good one while we wait for Trond!”
Noah and Karl stayed behind while Sigrun followed Lukas up another steep staircase … and another … and another. “We don't use the elevators except for freight,” her guide explained as he led the way up yet another staircase.
“It's okay. We climb mountains in the off seasons. Skiing, you know.”
“Ah, I hadn't thought of that. Well, here we are!”
“Here” was the top platform, open to the sky. Ordinary wooden-frame buildings stood in an orderly layout, recognizable as barracks, mess hall, administrative buildings, and so on. Lukas led Sigrun south to a long shed built along the west side of the platform, open on the east, away from the sea. Within were a line of vehicles, the most massive Sigrun had ever seen, the tracks alone standing higher than her head.
Gazing up at the barrels of the main guns, thinking out loud, Sigrun mused, “These are great. One shot from that thing would take down most giants. We should get some for the clan. Except …” She stared at it for a long moment. “This thing's so wide, it'd have to smash its way through the trees. That kind of noise would draw trolls from all over. Firing that gun would too. This thing would get swarmed as soon as it left the settlement! It doesn't have enough guns on the sides, so we'd have to have hunters on foot to defend it. But with all that noise … they'd be better off without it!” She turned to Lukas. “We can't take one of these into the Silent World.”
The Danish soldier was watching her with a slightly awed expression. “Uh, yeah. That's pretty much what we think happened to the Danish Army back then. Their soldiers weren't immune so they were getting sick and maybe turning, and the noise drew more and more grosslings, and finally the soldiers just abandoned the tanks, or died inside them … there were a lot of those. We could use them properly; that was the plan for the reconquest, but … Anyway, you're not getting one of these big ones. Come here and see yours.”
The tank assigned to Sigrun's team was tracked like the others, but far smaller than the first she'd seen and lacking the big gun, or any gun, to be precise. It was less than four meters wide, about ten long, and about four high. The interior was divided into two parts: a small rear compartment, empty at the moment and accessible only through double doors at the back since a divider had been crudely welded across to partition it off; and the main compartment, divided into a large sleeping or living area, a tiny office, and the driving compartment. There were five bunks, three attached to the divider, and the other two on the wall to their left, all folded up out of the way for travel. The opposite wall was all cabinets.
After prowling around inside for a few minutes, Sigrun nodded at Lukas. “As long as it's quiet, this'll do fine.”
“It's quiet,” her guide assured her. “Everything's been greased and tightened up. But it's, well, it's old and … old. It should be good long enough for your expedition, though.”
That wasn't as reassuring as he might have hoped, but Sigrun was willing to accept it. They went together to the barracks, which were larger than they needed to be, so she had a choice of several lower bunks, after which they repaired to the mess hall for a late lunch.
“Sit,” General Trond Andersen ordered without looking up from the papers on the desk before him. Mikkel Madsen sat in the single chair, uncomfortably small for such a big man, waiting without fidgeting for his employer to address him. A salt-scented breeze drifted through the open window of the small office, carrying with it the sounds of work on the Öresund naval base, and a single electric light bulb supplemented the sunlight that worked its way through the clouds. The room seemed to rock slightly as Mikkel's ears adjusted to stability after the journey by ship.
“I have the dossiers on your new team-mates,” The Norwegian soldier continued after several minutes. “These are not the ones we discussed.”
Mikkel raised an eyebrow. “No?”
“Onni Hotakainen, one of the Hollola woman's candidates, backed out,” Trond said, picking out two envelopes.
“That's the Finnish psychic?”
“The Finns call him a 'mage', but yes, that's him. He's known to suffer agoraphobia, which apparently is even more severe than Hollola disclosed. If she'd given me a chance, I might have been able to exert some pressure on him, but instead she dismissed the other candidate, Eero Virtanen, and grabbed Onni's sister and a cousin to replace them both. Which is both good and bad.”
“How so?”
“According to Hollola, the cousin, Lalli Hotakainen, is himself a 'mage', though weaker than Onni. He'll have to scout physically instead of psychically as we expected. That in itself would not be an issue, but the boy speaks only Finnish.”
Mikkel blinked. “I do not speak Finnish.”
“Yes. It's a pity your talents do not extend to languages.”
Mikkel didn't comment, privately considering that his talent in languages was not to be despised. He spoke fluent if accented Icelandic, the tongue of three quarters of the surviving human race, and in his native tongue of Danish, he could understand, and make himself understood by, most of the rest. But he knew no Finnish. That problem had never before arisen.
“However, he is a very accomplished scout, with some psychic powers, so we may even be better off with him than with his cousin.”
“Immune, I presume.”
“Yes, certainly. But illiterate in any language but Finnish, if he can even read that. For communicating with him, we have the sister, Tuuri Hotakainen. Besides Finnish, she speaks Swedish and Icelandic. Strong accent, but quite fluent. She will be your driver instead of Eero. She is not immune, so she'll stay in the tank. No issues there.”
Mikkel frowned. “She'll be our driver? Should I —?”
“Your records depict you as a farmer and medic. If you demonstrate the ability to drive a tank, it will raise questions.”
“Understood. But you said this was both good and bad. I fail to see the bad.”
“Tuuri Hotakainen is a skald, a scholar, literate in all three of the languages she speaks, plus a couple of dead languages, English and German.”
“Ah. Inconvenient. But at least she can't venture out to collect books on her own. I can take advantage of the disinfecting process to conceal that which she should not see. Yes, I think I can still manage.”
“Good. Now, the other two. Our troll-hunter, Captain Sigrun Eide, has the Luck.”
“Eide. That's part of your breeding program, correct?”
“Just so. And in Sigrun, we've succeeded well beyond our expectations for this generation. You'll find she's disorganized and impulsive, but she survives and prevails because of the Luck. It's quite extraordinary. Unfortunately we haven't managed to persuade her to contribute to the breeding program. You may be required to assist with that.”
The Dane stared at his employer, his face impassive as ever but his silence eloquent. He obeyed orders, yes, and generally did not question or argue, but to seduce and impregnate a woman on command? Loyalty only went so far.
“Hmm. Yes.” Trond set aside that envelope. “Perhaps we will let that go. Your genetics would introduce a wild card anyway. On the other matter, Sigrun is almost illiterate even in Norwegian, so she won't be a problem for you.”
“Illiterate?” Coming, as he did, from a literate Danish family, Mikkel found it hard to imagine a woman of the modern age who could not read or write.
“The Eide clan has been guided away from intellectual pursuits. Troll-hunting imposes strong selection pressure for the Luck, so we discourage them from pursuing other paths.”
“I see.” Mikkel dismissed the thought that Trond's organization, to which he had given his allegiance, was overstepping in its influence on the Eide clan.
Trond opened the fourth dossier. “Hmm. Emil Västerström. I hadn't realized —” He studied the dossier in silence for a moment. “Well, we can deal with this. The remaining member of the team is Emil Västerström, a Swedish Cleanser. The Cleansers have a problem with him because they think he wastes consumables — incendiaries and explosives — though they have not caught him at it. In fact, my agents have suggested that he is an untrained pyrokinetic, just coming into his full powers.”
“Useful.”
“But dangerous. However, my agents believe that he had learned from experience to control his powers fairly well, though they suspect that he is responsible for burning down the family’s factory some years ago, and that he knows this on some level and keeps a grip on his powers as a result.”
“They believe? They suspect?” Mikkel could have kicked himself as Trond gave him a hard look. It was not his place to question his betters.
“He’s a sport, not from one of our lines. It happens. One of our agents noticed him when he turned up among the Cleansers. I had not made the connection between him and his uncle, who helped plan this little jaunt.” Trond frowned down at the dossier. “And sent him along without notifying me.” He gave Mikkel a speculative look, sending a shiver of unease through him. “In any event, his powers have begun to grow lately, as he unconsciously uses them to assist his work. The Cleansers hold him in check, give him a framework. We will need a good observer to assess his powers and his control over them, away from that structure.”
“I see.”
“There is another aspect to this. He may become a threat.” Another hard look at Mikkel. “Pyrokinetics have a tendency to become unstable under pressure.”
Mikkel considered making a comment about the similarities between pyrokinetics and explosives, but kept quiet.
“You will watch him for signs of instability.” At his employee’s narrowed eyes and unspoken question, he clarified. “Things catching fire around him when he’s frightened or angry. People catching fire when they cross him. Such cases generally resolve on their own; pyrokinetics are resistant to fire but not immune to it, and when untrained, they lack the skill to keep their own fire from engulfing them. Of course, they tend to take others with them. We would like to avoid that with this one. If he exhibits signs of instability, he must not return from the Silent World.”
Mikkel blinked. He had always known that Trond's organization was ruthless, but he had never before been ordered to kill a human being. Grosslings in plenty, of course, but not a human being. Could he do it? More to the point, would he do it?
Trond watched his impassive face, waiting for a response.
“I suppose …” Mikkel began, pausing as he was struck by a thought. “It is likely that I myself will be the one who crosses him. Thus, any action on my part would be self-defense.”
“Just so. And if not you, one of the others.”
Mikkel nodded, silently. It would be the same as looking for grosslings, wouldn't it? Watch for an attack and respond as necessary?
“Here.” Trond passed the dossiers to his employee. “Study those. Sigrun is already here and I'll take you to meet her in an hour, and the other three will arrive in two days.”
Mikkel took the dossiers and began to read as Trond returned to his work.
Sigrun had just finished eating when General Trond appeared with Mikkel Madsen in tow.
Members of the Eide clan, like Sigrun, tended to be slender, their supple frames hiding a surprising strength. Accustomed as she was to her own clan, Sigrun saw Mikkel Madsen as downright brutish. He was tall; she estimated that he overtopped her by a good ten centimeters, for the elderly general's bald head didn't even reach his shoulders. And what shoulders! They were broad and heavy, as was his entire body. He was heavy-set, and his thick white coat failed to conceal a modest beer belly.
A warrior gone to seed, I suppose. But no, he's just a medic. Kept safe behind the warriors and never lifting a weapon in anger. That's probably all fat, not muscle.
Standing, surveying him from his feet to his head, Sigrun was struck by the sight of his hair. Dark blond and wavy, parted in the middle, it fell to his shoulders. His clean-shaven face was framed by long, thick sideburns, a style which Sigrun had never before seen. When she looked past the whiskers to his face, she saw why he preferred to draw attention away from it. Mikkel Madsen was not quite ugly, but he was plain. His broad, square face was dominated by a prominent nose, broken at least once, and a heavy brow with thick eyebrows.
“This is Mikkel Madsen,” Trond said, “and this is Sigrun Eide.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Mikkel said, his face expressionless and his eyes half-closed, as if bored or tired. His voice was a deep baritone and he spoke Danish, though he spoke so slowly and clearly that she had no difficulty understanding him.
As the two shook hands, Sigrun found his hand horny with calluses. Sigrun's own hands bore the calluses of an experienced knife fighter, but Mikkel was no knife fighter. Nor was his the soft hand of a pampered medic; rather, he had the hand of a manual laborer. His grip was firm but not crushing, for he made no attempt to assert dominance. Glancing down in surprise, she saw his hand seamed with small white scars. As he stepped back, he gave no sign that he had noticed her reaction.
“Mikkel will be your team's medic. He'll be responsible for the team's health and for the living conditions in the tank. Cooking, cleaning, disinfecting, general housekeeping. As the only Danish-speaker in the group, he'll also be responsible for the inventory of books, and his word will be final on which are to be kept and which discarded.”
“Books are books,” Sigrun said, puzzled. “Why discard any of them?”
“Some are of more interest than others to our potential buyers, and of more value. Now, I have work to do. You are at liberty until your other teammates arrive day after tomorrow.” He turned on his heel and left the two together.
Instead of talking to his new teammate, Mikkel gave her a polite nod and turned to look for a meal. After staring at his broad back for a moment, Sigrun ran after Trond. “General!” Sigrun called, being proper among strangers. Catching up to him, she asked, “Are you sure that guy's a medic?” It was implausible that Uncle Trond could be deceived — he was himself a master deceiver — but Mikkel's hand did not lie.
“He is. He's an army medic.”
“But he's … his hand felt like a laborer!”
“He's out of the army. He's been working on a farm.”
She shouldn't question his judgement, but … “Has he been out long?”
“Ten years. He wouldn't have been my first choice, nor my second, but this expedition is dangerous and under-funded. A doctor, or even a medic, with a secure position, isn't going to volunteer. Mikkel did. And he's good enough. You won't be out there long, after all, and if you get in trouble, you'll abort the mission and come back. He's good enough. Now, I'm busy.” He stalked off, leaving her to glare after him in frustration. When he disappeared into the administration building, Sigrun turned back to the mess hall, but stopped, thinking the better of it. She left her “good enough” teammate to his meal and set off to explore the base.
Mikkel did not turn his head to watch Sigrun go. He had heard her call after General Trond and, though he had not heard their discussion, he could guess it was about him. At his first sight of her, he had noted that she was tall — almost as tall as he was — and slender, with brilliant red hair, shoulder-length and flaring out to frame her delicate, heart-shaped face. In other circumstances he might have … but he had seen her dismay and disappointment (even disgust?) when he entered, and he had not missed her startled glance at his hand. The Dane knew he was no one's image of a medic; he looked like a thug or a dockworker, both of which he'd been. He pushed aside his thoughts of Sigrun and reached for his mug of beer.
The heavy plastic mug was too close to the edge of the table, and Mikkel's aim was off. With a clatter and a splash, the mug was on the floor and the half-dozen sailors at other tables were laughing and jeering. His face hot with humiliation, Mikkel requested a rag from the mess hall staff and cleaned up the spilled beer. He gave no response to the jeers; he knew from bitter experience that reacting would only make it worse. At least, he found once he'd returned the rag, no one had “accidentally” knocked his plate on the floor as well.
Hastily finishing his meal, Mikkel left the mess hall and wandered over to the railing where he could look out to the west, towards distant Iceland. The morning mist had become fog, and he could see little more than the sea below and a couple of small sailing ships, evidently fishing vessels. After some time, he heard footsteps behind him. Though he did know some members of the garrison, none of them were likely to approach him. Therefore …
“What are we looking at?” Sigrun asked.
“On a clear day, you could see Sweden to the right and Denmark to the left.”
“Well, yeah, but it's foggy today.”
“Look at those sailing ships down there. Do you know, those are built on a thousand-year-old design, the design of Viking longships?”
“Of course. I mean, we're Vikings.”
“True, I suppose. But … this bridge dives down into a tunnel under the water and comes up in Amager —”
“Amager? Aren't we going to Denmark?”
“Amager is an island. It's part of Denmark, just like Bornholm. Anyway, my point is that the bridge dives down into a tunnel. It does that because this” — he waved at the surrounding sea — “was a busy shipping lane. Ships came through here all the time, and some of them were enormous, so big that they might not fit under the bridge.” Sigrun leaned out to peer at the bridge, then looked back at him, impressed. Mikkel continued, “And so our ancestors, a century ago, dug a tunnel over four kilometers long under the sea. That's what they could do. And the Rash has knocked us back so far that we're building Viking longships.”
He stared down at the sailing ships far below, brooding.
“Uh … yeah, it's how things are,” Sigrun said.
“Yes. It's just how things are.” Mikkel sighed. “Do you know that men once walked on the Moon?”
“On the Moon? You made that up!”
“No, they really did. If we'd had just a little more time, we might have … It doesn't matter. Did you want to talk about something?”
“Nope, just saw you standing there!” Turning to look at the base, she leaned back against the railing. “So, you're a medic?”
Still looking down at the ships, Mikkel allowed himself a silent sigh. She likely thought herself subtle. “Yes, I was an army medic. I served almost two years.” It was very nearly true, and matched his army paperwork.
“Almost?”
“After the disaster, the Army discharged anyone who wanted to leave.”
“And you thought farming was better?”
Mikkel shrugged. Let her think whatever she wanted about his activities over the past ten years.
“I'm a troll-hunter! Captain of my team! The most best team of Clan Eide! And Clan Eide is the most best troll-hunting clan in the world!”
“I am certain of that. We are most fortunate to have you on this team.”
Sigrun gave him a puzzled look as his expressionless face and quiet tone failed to match his seemingly enthusiastic words. “Yeah! I wish the other guys would hurry up and get here. We have to spend two days hanging out just waiting!”
“The Finns are still on their way to Sweden. They'll meet the Cleanser there and come here by train.”
Sigrun sighed dramatically, then cheered up. “There's a soldier I met down below. I bet I can find something to do for two days!” And she trotted away.
Mikkel turned slightly to watch her go. I wonder why she said that. Did she actually want to make me jealous? When we've just met? No, I think she just blurts out whatever's on her mind. That's good. I shouldn't have to worry about her pulling any shenanigans on me.
He returned to gazing at the sea and let his mind wander. When it began to rain, he pulled up his hood and remained at the railing. Finally it was suppertime, and he got through the meal without embarrassing himself. Sigrun did not appear while he was eating. In the barracks, he chose a bunk well away from her. He woke twice in the night from nightmares.
Sigrun had returned to the barracks late, but still joined Mikkel for breakfast. She chatted about the defenses and bemoaned the fact that no sea monsters had turned up so she could practice with the harpoon. “And they even have cannons! They're on the fourth level down, and there's two on each side. I really wanted to fire one, or even just watch them fire one, but they said that would waste ammunition if there weren't any sea monsters. Maybe there'll be some out today!” As soon as she had cleared her plate and returned her tray, she waved a cheery goodbye and disappeared for the day.
With Sigrun gone, Trond busy, and the rest of the team somewhere in transit, Mikkel was at loose ends. The rain of the previous day had turned to freezing rain and sleet, so watching out to sea was out of the question. Though Mikkel had spent entirely too much time at the Öresund base while in the Army, he had not returned for many years. He spent the day touring the base by himself.
The last time he'd been there, the lower barracks had been full of exhausted soldiers, some even sleeping on the floors. The bunks and lockers were still there, but the thin mattresses and the bedding were gone, packed away somewhere in readiness for the next attempt at reconquering the monster-filled lands. His footsteps echoed in the emptiness.
In the rec room, he found Sigrun and another Norwegian demonstrating troll-killing techniques to a rapt audience. After watching for a while, he moved on to look at the defenses. The “cannons” were guns taken from tanks too big to salvage, too big to take through the tunnel and across the bridge to the base. No one on the crew knew him, and they were happy to show him their toys.
After a solitary lunch in the mess hall, Mikkel pulled up his hood and made his careful way across the icy platform to the tanks. Sheltered from the rain by the shed, he paced along the line of war machines until he found the right one. He laid his hand on its freezing side.
“The static's bad again,” Private Anders Christensen told Corporal Mikkel Madsen. “I can't even get a signal through to Kastrup.”
“How long's it been like that?” Mikkel continued to gaze though the tent flag into the dark night.
“Ever since the Sun set. Almost two —”
The sound of distant gunfire cut him off. Mikkel was out of the tent and running to his squad before he even consciously registered what he'd heard. His men were scrambling to pull on their boots and grab their rifles as the distant uproar grew louder. Explosions were mixed with the sharp cracks of firearms and the occasional boom of the big guns; the Kastrup garrison was using everything they had in the battle.
The company spent precious minutes organizing, but the delay was unavoidable. However well trained and well armed they were, if they charged a grossling swarm as a disorganized mob, they would be cut down in minutes. The battle of Kastrup was continuing as the company moved out into the darkness. As it was the night of the new moon, there was no light but that from their helmet lights and the three tanks allotted to the Tunnel Company.
“Halt!” At Captain Knudsen's shout, Mikkel and the other corporals turned to him while their men stood ready. “The fight's dying down. And I think I see fire. Lund!”
Private Lund had the best vision in the company. “Yes, sir, I see it too. Several buildings on fire and —” He stared hard in the direction of the other garrison. “And there's a swarm coming from that direction!”
They were outside their barricade in open ground. If the swarm was coming from Kastrup, then the garrison had already fallen, and pressing on in the darkness was suicide. Knudsen ordered a staged retreat to the barricade.
The sounds of battle at Kastrup had ceased entirely, and Mikkel's squad was rear guard, making for the barricade fifty meters away, when the swarm hit them. Haralds and Orn died first. Even in the uncertain light from their headlamps and the remaining tank, it was clear there was no question of rescue. They were dead, and the other four left them, continued their fighting retreat. Rifles cracked from the barricade: desperate attempts to stop the swarm without shooting their own men. Soren fell next, and Mikkel ordered Bjorn and Jozef to “get behind me, run, save yourselves”. They were just children, he thought, and he had seen too many children die.
He never saw the tentacle that lashed out of the darkness.
Mikkel Madsen woke up in the hospital at the Öresund base, the sole survivor of his squad. As he pieced together the story, Bjorn and Jozef had seen him struck down, grabbed him, hauled him to the retreating tank, and tossed him in before joining the soldiers at the barricade. He lay in the tank, unconscious, as the Tunnel base was attacked from two sides, by the swarm from Kastrup base, at the airport, and a second swarm directly from Kastrup. The medics were evacuated by tank along with the wounded who looked likely to survive. Those soldiers still on their feet, made for the tunnel as best they could.
Captain Knudsen himself closed and bolted the great tunnel door from the tunnel side to prevent the swarms from reaching the Öresund base. No one knew exactly what had become of Captain Knudsen, but he had not reached the base after closing the door.
As soon as he could stand, Mikkel joined the other medics in desperate efforts to save anyone they could. He was a soldier first, but he was trained as a medic, and they needed every hand.
A week later, Mikkel was discharged. As he struggled to face his future after Kastrup, General Trond Andersen made him an offer.
Eventually, inevitably, Mikkel found himself in the hospital on the third level down. Everything had been removed, down to the names on the doors. The only shrieks he heard were from the far-away seagulls, and the smells of blood, antiseptics, and fear were replaced by the clean salty smell of the sea. He stood silent in the middle of what had been the ward for a long time before he continued his tour.
After waving goodbye to her dour Danish teammate, Sigrun made her way to the rec room, where she had spent the previous evening playing Slap!, a card game which had become increasingly raucous and chaotic with the increasing inebriation of the players and audience. Her companions of the previous evening were either on duty or sleeping off hangovers, but there was a new group waiting, already primed with stories about the visiting troll-hunter. One of the sailors was a Norwegian, Filip Petersen, from one of the lesser troll-hunter clans.
Sigrun didn't ask why Filip was in the Danish Navy instead of hunting trolls in Norway; that was between him and his clan. Perhaps, she thought, he was just one of those who had a romantic view of the Danes' quixotic quest to recover their homeland. In any case, she was happy to find a fellow troll-hunter, and they spent the morning working out before consenting to the other sailors' requests for a demonstration of troll-hunting techniques.
“Strength is important for a troll-hunter,” Sigrun said, remembering her lessons as a recruit. “But you mustn't become musclebound. Even more important than strength are speed, agility, fast reflexes, and a flexible mind. Grosslings can suddenly grow tentacles, claws, big mouths — all kinds of things. And you've got to be —”
Without warning, Filip lunged at her and Sigrun nimbly jumped aside, bopping him on the head with her fist even as she jumped. The man fell to the ground and rolled over on his back, hands and feet in the air in a parody of a dead troll.
“Yes, like that,” Sigrun continued. “You've got to be ready for anything, ready to move if it grows a new piece, ready to spot the head or wherever the thing keeps its brains.” Looking up, she saw Mikkel behind the rapt faces of the sailors. “I don't know about sea monsters, though,” she admitted. “Never fought one. Do they grow tentacles and things?”
“Not that I've heard of,” one of the older sailors said, glancing at the others before replying. “They usually have tentacles, but I've never heard of one growing more in the middle of a fight.”
Filip got to his feet with a grin, bowed, and asked, “Shall we dance?”
With a laugh, Sigrun pretended to draw her dagger and stalked towards him. The audience was treated to a display of dodging and striking as Filip continue to play the role of a troll. When Sigrun held up a hand to stop the demonstration, the sailors applauded. The troll-hunters bowed, and Sigrun explained, “At home, we have model trolls with arms and things that pop out at you. The recruits have fun making them, so they're different every time.” As she spoke, she glanced towards the door, but Mikkel was gone. Just as well. He's never going to fight, after all.
Sigrun spent the rest of the day answering questions, demonstrating techniques, and telling increasingly fantastic tales of troll hunts of yore, before repairing to the mess hall for supper with her fan club. Once again, she played Slap! Late into the night.
“When do the others get here?” Sigrun asked, seating herself across from Mikkel and giving her breakfast porridge a look of distaste. They were alone in the mess hall, apart from the cook.
“Around fourteen hundred,” the Dane answered without looking up.
“Argh! At this rate, it'll be dark before we get to the Silent World!”
“I don't think it will be quite dark. There are some supplies coming on the train which will need to be loaded, and the inevitable last-minute briefing” — they both rolled their eyes at the thought — “and then we can get moving. Assuming we make good time on the bridge and in the tunnel, we should have a couple of hours of daylight once we get there.”
“Still wish we could get going. It's the worst part of hunting, just waiting for everyone to get ready.”
“You seemed comfortable enough yesterday.”
“Oh, that. I get tapped to train the recruits sometimes. I've given that lecture several times. And it's fun to fight, even if I'm just play-fighting. Sure wish we could get on with it, though.” He didn't respond, and she regarded him thoughtfully. He didn't seem to need or want company. Still, he was her teammate and she was his captain. She should spend at least a little time with him. “Anyway, what do we do between now and then?”
Mikkel glanced at her before turning his gaze back to his porridge. “A sailor told me there's a small library. It's probably just 'stirring sea stories', but you never know. There might be something of interest there.”
“We're going to spend three weeks messing around with books. Let's go to the rec room!”
“I fear I would not make a good surrogate troll.”
Sigrun guessed at the meaning of the word. “Well, no reason to demonstrate hunting again. Let's play cards! Do you know any card games? 'Go Fish'?” She didn't suggest Slap!, as it was a warrior's game requiring fast reflexes and agility. She thought it would be beyond the abilities of a farmer, even if he was also a medic.
“Yes, I know 'Go Fish'.”
Sigrun disregarded his resigned tone. “Good! Then we'll do that. Or maybe some of the sailors will know some other games.”
After a couple of hours of simple card games with three off-duty sailors, Heremod, a dark-haired sailor in his mid-thirties, tossed down his cards. “Hey, this is dull. Let's play for some stakes! Let's play poker!”
Sigrun's immediate impulse was to agree, but … I've got my pocket money. I'll probably win, but even if I lose it all, I don't need it. The big guy, though. Uncle Trond said he volunteered because he's in a bad position. I'm his captain. I don't want to humiliate him because he's broke, or get him into a game where he loses money he can't afford. “Nope, can't do that,” she said, grinning to take the sting out. “We're going to the Silent World this afternoon! Not a lot of shops in there, so I didn't bring any money. I bet my teammate over there didn't either.”
“I did not.”
There, I knew it. She regarded her teammate in puzzlement. Is he relieved? Pleased? Displeased? He doesn't seem to have any expression at all! This guy's weird, weird even compared to the civilians back in Dalsnes. At least I only have to deal with him for three weeks.
Torben, red-headed and still in his teens, jumped up. “Hey, I've got an idea! If we don't want to play for money, let's play for cookies!”
“We don't have cookies either,” Sigrun pointed out.
“But I can get some. I'm an assistant cook, and I just happen to know that we've got a batch of cookies all ready for tonight. I can grab a few dozen, and we can gamble with them!”
“Cookies produce crumbs,” Mikkel said as Torben darted out on his cookie-seeking mission. “And we would all be handling them. With our hands.”
“Yeah, okay,” Heremod said, “we'll play for cookies, but we'll use tokens to represent them. Dierk, do you have some paper?”
Dierk, another teen, hastily departed to find some paper. The older sailor and the two visitors played another round of Go Fish while waiting for supplies.
By the time Mikkel announced that he and Sigrun needed to meet their team, the poker players had gained an audience of more than a dozen off-duty sailors, and Sigrun realized she need not have worried about her teammate losing more than he could afford. On the contrary, with his superb poker face and quite evident skill, he had parlayed his stake of six cookies into over thirty. Sigrun had four, which she ascribed to good luck with cards, and Heremod had two.
If the big guy'd suggested poker, or had any money to play with, I'd've thought he was a cardsharp. But looking at Heremod, I think Heremod is the cardsharp, and not too happy at being bested. Just as well we didn't play for money. Uncle Trond wouldn't be happy if we got in a brawl over a card game. It would break up the monotony, though.
I wonder why the big guy's a farmer, though, when he could make his fortune gambling in Iceland. Maybe he just likes farming. What an awful thought!
The adventurers traded their tokens for cookies, Torben tossing in a satchel for Mikkel to carry his loot in, and the two departed to meet the train.
Sigrun had seen trains before, in her troll-hunting expeditions to Sweden. The Swedes had several working tracks within their cleansed areas, allowing fast transport from their two ports, their copper mines, and their iron mines, to their capital city of Mora. She had not, however, seen a train designed for running through a long stretch of the forbidden, infected world: Silent Sweden.
The train was a single, long, windowless car. Mounted on the front was a massive buzz-saw above what might have been called a cow-catcher in pre-Rash days, though cow-catchers were not constructed of razor-sharp blades. The entire front of the train was coated with blood and grossling slime.
As the whole of the train came into view, even Mikkel was heard to gasp. Mounted on the top were a series of nine buzz-saws in groups of three. The middle three were missing, ripped away, and the mangled remains of a giant were draped over and into the car. As the train came to a halt, the maintenance crew rushed forward along with a couple of medics with a stretcher, and even a pair of medical cats.
“I know that white cat,” Mikkel murmured, perhaps only to himself. “That's Klara. She was here … before.” Sigrun glanced at him and said nothing. Medical cats were trained to comfort the wounded and many, including Sigrun, believed that a medical cat's purring and kneading on a wound would speed the healing. It had not occurred to the troll-hunter that one of the base's cats would have been known to her medic, though, in retrospect, it was not surprising.
One man was helped out; another was carried out on the stretcher, as was one cat. “Either of those our men?” Sigrun asked Mikkel.
“No,” Trond answered, coming up behind them. “Your men were not injured. Tuuri Hotakainen, the Finnish skald, your driver, may have been exposed.”
Mikkel turned sharply. “Exposed how?”
“She was in a compartment that was partially breached. She wasn't bitten or scratched and, according to the crew, she got her mask on in time. She should not be infected, though if she was going to stay on the base, she'd go into quarantine. As it is, she'll just go to the Silent World with you.”
“But if she's our driver —” Sigrun began.
“If she's infected, she'll drive the tank back as far as she can, and the rest of you will walk back to the tunnel.” There was no need to explain further what would happen in that case. The rest of the team was immune to the dreaded Rash; Tuuri was not, and if she had been exposed, she could contract the disease. The Rash had an incubation of one to two weeks, and there was no cure or treatment. If the patient was lucky, she would die of the disease about a week after developing symptoms. If she was not lucky, she would become a grossling, a monster, what the people of the Known World called a “troll”. Before that happened, the medic would provide the only care available: painless euthanasia.
“I will watch her drive,” Mikkel said. “I should be able to learn to drive the tank adequately before … before it may become necessary.”
Trond nodded. “Acceptable.”
Two men and a woman stepped out of the train together. One man was stocky, his shoulder-length blond hair fairly shimmering in the winter sunlight. The other man was slender with a messy shock of ash-blond hair; the woman beside him was pudgy and wore her ash-blond hair short, with a curly lock above her brow. The young men were about the same height, the woman somewhat shorter, and all sported white uniform coats similar to those which Mikkel and Sigrun wore.
“There's your team now,” Trond announced.
Gazing up at the walkway from the train station alongside Sigrun and General Trond, Mikkel studied the group. The full-figured young woman was Tuuri Hotakainen, shorter than the others, short even for a woman. Her hair, ash-blonde, hung straight to below her ears but had some wave to it where it lay on top; she'd cut off her braids since her picture was taken for the dossier. Her eyes, a blue so pale as to appear silver, now moved ceaselessly as she peered around the base. Her expression was curious, he thought, but not frightened.
Look behind you, girl, he thought at her. Look at the damage that giant did to that train. Look at the injured guards. Consider that if the giant had broken into your compartment first, you'd be injured like them, but you'd be headed for quarantine with just time enough to make your goodbyes before the last injection. Look behind you, be afraid, and go home. The Silent World is no place for you. But Mikkel was not a telepath, and Tuuri did not look back at the train.
Close behind Tuuri was her cousin, Lalli, a slender young man half a head taller and of similar coloring. His tousled hair seemed unfamiliar with a comb, unlike that of the young man beside him, Emil Västerström. Emil's straight blond hair, perfectly clean and shining with brushing, fell in a mane to his shoulders. He was as short as Lalli and more sturdily built. Beyond these team members were the three other sponsors: the Finnish Taru Hollola and the Swedish couple, Torbjörn and Siv Västerström. Mikkel eyed Taru with some suspicion. Why did you choose a non-immune psychic? And when he backed out, why did you saddle us — saddle me, as medic — with a non-immune driver? Are you playing some game that I don't understand?
He looked down at the bald head of General Trond, who had moved in front of him for a better view. She's the General's ally, though, and he reviewed those dossiers. He accepted this arrangement, so I suppose it's okay. It has to be. It's only for three weeks, after all, and the girl will stay in the safety of the tank. Mikkel returned to surveying his team members. Beside him, Captain Eide was waving enthusiastically at her new teammates.
So there he is. Emil Västerström: Swedish Cleanser, pyrokinetic. He doesn't look dangerous. He's just a child. He could almost be my son. In the world of the Rash, resources were too scarce to indulge the luxury of a long adolescence. At thirty-four, Mikkel had been a man for twenty years, and Emil, at nineteen, for five. What's that, there? A fresh bruise on his face? Perhaps he joined the fight against the giant. If so, he managed that without setting anything on fire, not even the giant.
Mikkel turned his gaze to Torbjörn. Why did you agree to send your nephew into the Silent World? Do you know what he is? Do you fear your own blood as the General does? Do you also want me to possibly kill this child?
Mikkel glanced sidelong at Trond. He didn't think Trond could read minds, but he wasn't sure, and his thoughts were becoming dangerous. Best to look at someone else.
Tuuri had seen them and was running down the ramp, her face alight with excitement, while Emil, the scout, and the sponsors followed more decorously. Mikkel regarded her with disbelief, and some of it must have shown in his face, for she halted with a smothered cry of alarm. Licking her lips, she looked back and forth between Mikkel and Sigrun, then ventured in Finnish-accented Swedish, “Y-you're so tall!”
The tension was broken as Sigrun, a quarter meter taller than the diminutive Finn, laughed. “Why, yes, yes I am! I like you already!”
Meanwhile, Emil approached Mikkel, offering his hand with an appropriately solemn expression. His face now impassive after his momentary lapse, the Dane shook the offered hand. Torbjörn instructed his nephew as if he were a small child: “Thank Trond for finding you such experienced and apt crew mates. Sigrun and Mikkel here will be your superiors.”
“Hrmh, that might be an unnecessarily generous description,” Trond put in before Emil could respond. “Let's say they're good enough.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Mikkel told Tuuri, shaking her hand carefully. It felt like a child's hand within his large paw.
“Uh … hi?” She seemed confused. Mikkel thought he would have to concentrate on speaking more slowly and enunciating more clearly. Sigrun seemed to have little difficulty understanding him, but Emil and particularly Tuuri would undoubtedly struggle. This would have been easier with a team of Danes, but then the Nordic Council would not have approved it. Mikkel sighed silently. He hated politics.
“So, ah, Sigrun,” Tuuri began, “Are you really a captain? I mean, not just our captain, like an actual captain captain?”
As Lalli Hotakainen, the Finnish scout and mage, paused to take a look at Mikkel — easily twice his size — Mikkel offered a handshake, but the scout turned and walked away.
“Of course!” Sigrun said with a chuckle. “You can't have some schmuck trying to lead this expedition.”
“Have you ever —” Tuuri attempted a question.
“Yes, I have. I've even killed a few with my bare hands!”
“Oh, t-that's not what I —”
“I'm pretty great.”
As Lalli approached his cousin, Sigrun slapped him on the back. “And you're my little mage, huh?” she asked. “Never worked with a Finnish one before. What's life like for you?” As the scout cringed away, she went on, “Don't feel like talking about it? That's cool, maybe later?”
Mikkel thought he'd better step in. “He doesn't know any Scandinavian languages. He won't understand what you're saying.”
The Norwegian looked from Lalli's bewildered face to Mikkel's expressionless face. “Uh? Well, how's that going to work?”
“Oh, I'll be translating for him!” Tuuri said, entirely too eager for a non-immune going into the Silent World.
“Great,” Sigrun said, looking down at her doubtfully. “But what if we're out and about without you, get attacked by a troll, and I yell 'RUUUUUN!', will you show up to translate?”
“No …” Tuuri's face fell. “But he's not stupid, he might figure that one out.”
Emil stepped up behind the scout, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. “You don't need to worry about him. He's surprisingly easy to communicate with. I haven't shared a single word with him, yet we already get along swimmingly. Isn't that right, Lalli?” he added, gently punching the other's shoulder.
Lalli gave Emil an outraged look before turning to demand something from Tuuri.
“Tuuri,” Emil hastened to say, “please explain to him that it was a friendly punch.”
Before the new teammates could interact further, Admiral Olsen arrived The commander of Öresund base, a portly elderly Dane with graying black hair in long braids, looked over the group before opening his arms wide in welcome. “Ah, so the rest of you have arrived!” He bellowed rather than spoke, for many years of supervising construction before the development of the famed Icelandic hearing protection remedy had rendered him somewhat deaf. “Welcome to my humble base! I'm delighted to once again see it used for a more glorious purpose than lowly trade and travel! Oh, it's been too long! Are you excited? I know I am!”
Torbjörn made the introductions, unnecessary in Mikkel's case. Less portly and less graying, but no less deaf, Olsen had been the commander a decade ago when Mikkel last saw him. “Everyone, this is Admiral Olsen. He's given us permission to cross the Øresund bridge to the other side of the Baltic sea, straight into the Silent World. He's an old friend of Trond's and has been very helpful.” Mikkel doubted that. He doubted whether Trond had any actual friends.
“Well, I believe this is a worthy cause! And don't worry, I won't tell anyone about the unauthorized looting that you plan on doing on the side!” Admiral Olsen's laugh was as loud as his speech.
“L-let's change the subject!”
Mikkel rolled his eyes. Someone — probably Torbjörn himself — had let slip that this was not, as the Nordic Council believed, a mere exploratory expedition to evaluate the Silent World after almost a century. Rather, it was an expedition to loot whatever books they could find, for private sale to restore the fortunes of the Västerström family and to make the fortunes of the other sponsors and the team members. At least, that was part of the intention. Torbjörn did not know the rest of the plan. Now, thanks to the Admiral, everyone in the vicinity knew there was an ulterior motive for the expedition, and word would soon get back to the Council. Well, that was Trond's problem. Mikkel would be in the Silent World, away from politics.
“You're right. We shouldn't waste time chit-chatting. We'll want these young warriors to have time to set up camp before nightfall!” With a dramatic gesture, the Admiral led the team and the sponsors away from the train station.
“Mister Olsen,” Tuuri said as they crossed to the vast main platform, “this base is so amazing! You must be very proud of it.”
“I know. It's an utter embarrassment! A shell of its old self! Overrun by Icelandic and Norwegian merchants! No military activity to speak of since our humiliating defeat a decade ago!” Mikkel, trailing along behind the others, nodded in agreement. Below, he heard shouts and thumps as a ship was unloaded, and behind him he heard similar noises as crates were carried from the train. “But one day soon we will reassemble our forces and march over the bridge to reclaim our old lands!” Mikkel shook his head. Not soon. Not after so many dead.
“Yes, I'm sure you Danes will be out there fighting like the rest of us very soon,” Trond sneered. “Like … a century from now.”
“How dare you, you weaselly little Norwegian?”
Yes, I'm just sure they're old friends, Mikkel thought.
“Oh, but here we are now,” the Admiral announced, pushing aside a heavy steel door. “Welcome to the edge of the Known World!”
Everyone, even Mikkel, went forward to look out … into dense fog. They could just see the edge of the bridge where the drawbridge would connect when lowered.
“You'd be impressed by the view if it weren't so cloudy!” Olsen admitted in somewhat less than his usual volume.
“Our vehicle is at the end of that row there,” Sigrun said, turning away and pointing for Tuuri's benefit.
“Ah! I've been waiting for this!” The Finnish driver, skald, engineer, ran down the line of tanks, looking up at each with excitement. “I can't believe we'll be using one of these! So much better than what I was expecting!” As she reached the end of the row, she skidded to a stop, saying something in Finnish which Mikkel thought was a curse. “Why did I have to go and get my hopes up? This one?”
The vehicle she had seen was an open-cabin three-seater vehicle towing a small trailer.
“No, no,” Sigrun assured her. “That one.” She pointed to a tank smaller than the others they'd passed, but much bigger than the little three-seater. As Tuuri studied the tank, so did Mikkel, for, unlike Sigrun, he had not seen it before.
“Well … it's pretty nice, I suppose. It could be a lot worse.” Tuuri glanced significantly at the little one. “Just wish I hadn't seen those first.” She looked back at the massive vehicles, armed and armored.
They're powerful, and we paid for them with blood. Rivers of blood. They're practical when you have a supply line to keep them fueled, but five people can't keep one of them running. We'd be gathering wood three days for every day we drove, I think. At least three. We have to settle for this one, even though it's not really a proper tank, unarmed as it is. He kept quiet, however, so as not to reveal how familiar he was with tanks.
“Chin up, stubby!” Sigrun said. “I'm sure this one is as sturdy as the rest! Would just need a fresh coat of paint to look just as good!”
Tuuri shrugged. “You're probably right.” On the other side of the tank, Emil was leaning on a side mirror, bored with the discussion, when, quite suddenly, the mirror snapped off under his weight. Blushing, he hastily tossed the mirror away.
“And you'll be able to head out as soon as we've got everything thrown on board,” Torbjörn put in, having missed the incident. Sigrun and Mikkel glared at Emil, but there was nothing they could do unless they wanted to call off the expedition.
“Broken!” Sigrun pointed at the place where the mirror should be. “It was broken before we got here.”
Torbjörn threw his hands up in frustration. “Shoot! I knew we should have asked to see pictures from both sides before paying for it!”
Giving up on glaring, Mikkel considered his Swedish teammate. The young man's face was bruised and scraped, and Mikkel was, after all, the medic on this expedition. “Your face is bothering you,” he said.
“E-excuse me?” Emil had difficulty with Danish just as Tuuri did.
“The scrape on your face. I could apply some ointment to help it heal faster.”
“Look, no offense to your people or your language, but you'll have to speak far slower and clearer if you want me to understand you.” Mikkel had some practice interacting with Swedes, and could make out what the other meant.
“Your face! Do you need help fixing your face?” Slow, clear, and very loud.
“What? I'm fine with my face, thank you very much!”
“Very well, then. Let me know if you change your mind.” Mikkel stalked away. He had done his best to be a dutiful medic.
“Anyone here waiting for two crates of food supplies?” a workman called, pushing a dolly with the promised two crates.
Torbjörn replied for the team, “That's us!” Putting his strength to good use, Mikkel helped load the crates and stack them alongside crates of explosives and incendiaries. Emil, the Cleanser, would handle those, and went in to check them over. He burst out, running to Mikkel and pointing to his face.
“My face! It's hurt!”
“It's a scrape,” Mikkel said, no longer inclined to be helpful.
“T-there's not a risk it'll leave a scar, is there?” Emil was remarkably handsome, with his golden blond hair, bright green eyes, regular features, and perfect teeth. A scar might ruin his appearance, though Mikkel thought women might well find a small scar — with a good troll-hunting story behind it — quite attractive.
Well, he was ordered to put pressure on Emil, he was annoyed at the young man's reaction to his offer of assistance, and besides, he should be punished for his carelessness. “A scar? No, I'm more concerned about cancer,” Mikkel said.
“W-what? What are you saying, man? Did you say 'cancer'?”
“Yes, yes, I did. Our ancestors used some pretty strange, lingering chemicals, and so close to shore, sometimes they mix with the sea fog, and when they get into an open wound like that … without proper treatment, a facial injury often turns into what we in the field of medicine call 'face-cancer'.”
“I didn't understand that mumbling, but please help me!”
Mikkel took down a first aid kit conveniently mounted on a nearby wall, and prepared to make a fool of the boy by bandaging up his face so thoroughly that he looked like the survivor of a severe troll attack.
Behind them, Torbjörn said, “I think everything is ready for you to head on out now. Tuuri, you know how to drive. Would you like to take the controls?”
“Aaaa, uh, why not. I mean, I've never driven anything but a tractor before, but if you think I can do it …”
“Sure you can!” Sigrun encouraged her. “How hard can it be?”
“Let's get you all on board, then!” Torbjörn opened the side door and gestured the women in. “I can't thank you all enough for being part of this magnificent mission! But now … let's all get rich!”
After Torbjörn and Siv hugged Emil goodbye, and Taru told Sigrun to take care of the young ones — in Icelandic, of which Sigrun knew not a word — the team finally set forth. Torbjörn called after them, “Remember to call us in the morning if the radio works! Now, onwards, you brave souls! And try not to break the bridge on your way over.” As Tuuri bumped into a shed as she mastered the controls, he added, “Seriously, please don't break it.”
The drawbridge took forever to lower. Hours — days — years — passed waiting for it, but at last it was down, and she was driving forward. The tracks clanked on steel, and then they were crunching on concrete. They were on the bridge.
Tuuri Hotakainen was driving a tank in the Silent World!
Tuuri wanted to jump up and down, to run around and around; she wanted to cheer; she fairly thrummed with excitement, but she was driving the tank and had to keep still. She risked a glance to her right, seeing Captain Eide beside her and Mikkel Madsen (what was his role again?) crowded against the right-hand side. How big they were! Especially Mr. Madsen. He was quite the biggest man she'd ever seen, not that she'd actually seen that many.
Focus on driving. I'm in the Silent World!
The bridge was in remarkably good shape. There were some frost-heaves and many patches, but she felt safe accelerating to the tank's best (though rather limited) speed. She had to get used to the controls, after all. Steer by speeding up one track and slowing or reversing the other: that was nothing like the wheeled tractors she'd driven at home in Keuruu. There were no brakes. Still, she could handle this. I'm in the Silent World!
The tank sped along the bridge at a satisfying speed, and she was looking ahead to the place where it sloped downwards to the tunnel …
CRACK! CRASH!
Tuuri flinched, seeing a large chunk of the bridge structure smash down onto and through the roadbed ahead and somewhat to their left.
TWANG!
One of the massive cables that supported the structure split, the ends whipping wildly about. Tuuri had read of people cut in half when lashed by the ends of quite ordinary cables; she was certain that the cable that had just failed could have cut their tank apart. Another ear-splitting twang made her flinch, but she kept driving. The bridge was collapsing and she had to get to the island where the road dived into the tunnel.
More of the bridge was falling behind them, the individual crashes blending into a continuous roar. Crowded against Tuuri's right side, Sigrun Eide swore inventively in Norwegian, and beyond her, Mikkel was muttering in unintelligible Danish. Tuuri found herself praying in between wordless shrieks of fear. Emil Västerström clutched the back of Mikkel's seat with one hand, the other braced against the wall as he fought to keep his feet in the wildly bucking tank. “We're gonna die! We're gonna die!” he gasped in terrified Swedish. Further back in the tank, Lalli leaned perilously far out of the side window, vomiting noisily.
The tank tipped to the right, slid several meters toward the edge and the sea below, before Tuuri guided it back to a more stable part of the disintegrating bridge. They were going uphill now, which was quite wrong as the bridge should angle downwards at this point. Even as she noted this, the front of the tank dropped with a sickening thump and, over the tumult of the collapse, Tuuri heard the engine whine and the front tracks snarl as they sought a grip on the roadbed ahead. The tank rocked just a little backwards while Mikkel and Sigrun leaned forward against the front of the tank as if their weight, small as it was against that of the whole vehicle, might tip the balance.
Perhaps it did.
The tracks caught at last and the tank lunged forward, throwing the two back into their seats. Tuuri pushed the tank to its best speed, faster than she would have believed it could handle, before pulling back to slow the tracks. “Stop, stop, stop!” she told the vehicle desperately as they approached the massive door that blocked the tunnel. “Please stop …”
And they stopped, just as the other two were shielding their faces against the expected collision. Behind them, the roar of the collapse continued.
Finishing her curses, Sigrun turned to Mikkel. “You Danes were supposed to maintain that bridge!”
“We do. We did. I don't —” The Dane did, as Emil had said, mumble as if he had a mouth full of porridge, but Tuuri understood those words.
So did Emil. “It didn't just collapse. I heard an explosion, just before that first piece fell.”
Exclaiming “What?”, the three in the front turned to stare at him.
“I'm a Cleanser, right? I deal with explosives all the time. I know explosives, and that was an explosion!”
“Sabotage?” Sigrun asked in a disbelieving tone. She turned to Mikkel again. “I thought your people wanted this expedition.”
“No Dane blew up this bridge,” Mikkel said slowly and distinctly, so that even Tuuri understood. “We want it too much. You saw how we care for it.”
“Then who else could have done it?” Sigrun demanded. “Who else is on your base besides Danes? That's where they came from, after all. Except … we're on an island right now. Anyone could have sailed here in the fog, walked up the bridge, planted a bomb —” She stopped.
“What if they're still here?” Tuuri asked for everyone.
“Blondy, you come with me,” Sigrun ordered, leaping to her feet and pushing past Tuuri. Mikkel followed immediately. “No!” Sigrun pointed at him. “You stay here. Fuzzyhead, tell the scout he needs to look for saboteurs.” Even as she spoke, she had a cabinet open and was pulling out rifles and pistols for herself and Emil. “Let's go.” And they were gone, Lalli grabbing his rifle and following.
Tuuri looked over at Mikkel, who was gazing at the closed door as if he could still see the others. Why did they leave him behind? Four would search faster than three … Oh. He's my guard. Of course. As a non-immune in the Silent World, she couldn't stay alone. Not ever. She could never just experience it. She sighed in frustration.
“The radio,” Tuuri said after a moment, her practical nature coming to the fore. “We have to tell the base.”
Mikkel stopped her. “No.” He was making a visible effort to speak distinctly. “If they are on the island still, we must fight them. But maybe they are not on the island. Maybe they are out there on the sea, in the fog. They meant to kill us, and now they must think we are dead. So we need to keep quiet, play dead, no radio, and go on into the Silent World where they cannot find us.” He gave her a hopeful look.
“I understood all that. No radio.” She nodded, in case he didn't catch all the words.
“Good. Come now. Let's see to the security.”
The tank's security system was mounted on the wall, and all the buttons and switches were labelled in Danish. Fortunately for Tuuri, written Danish is much closer to written Swedish than spoken Danish is to spoken Swedish, and she could make out how to use the controls.
“We will test it now,” Mikkel said. His face showed a trace of frustration at speaking so slowly. “I set the motion sensors.” He looked at her.
“Motion sensors. Yes. I understand.”
“I will go out and close the shutters. You will watch me. The video is here. This is the radar and here is the IR.”
“Yes! I'll watch! We'll test everything!” She was excited to be doing something useful in this crisis.
Mikkel pulled a shotgun from the weapons cabinet, slung it over his shoulder, and cautiously opened the main door just enough to look around. After studying the surroundings — or at least what he could see in the fog — he slipped out, and the door closed behind him with a reassuring clank.
Tuuri turned to study the sensor display. There he was in the video, moving along the side of the tank. The radar displayed his position as a blob, nothing else moving around them. He shone brightly on the IR as he closed and locked the heavy steel shutter over the window on the starboard side, the one Lalli had been leaning out of, made his wary way to the one on the port side, then finished circling the tank and returned. The cameras switched automatically to keep him in sight.
“I saw you the whole time. It was very clear. The radar and IR worked too.”
“Good. Now.” He led her to a cabinet. “Here is the water supply.” Opening it, he revealed hot and cold taps, and a hose coiled underneath in case they needed water elsewhere. “This is the chamber pot. For use when we cannot go out.”
Tuuri accepted the container, trying to interpret his words … “Oh!” She hadn't actually considered that aspect of their situation. Of her situation, in particular. She couldn't go out of the tank if there was any sign of grosslings in the vicinity, and the tank lacked toilet facilities. Well, this was going to be delightful.
“Are there trolls on the island? Or, um, beasts?”
“No. We — the Army — hunt here. Often. There are mice and rabbits, but they're immune. It's safe unless something comes out of the sea.”
Which something very well could. And just because he brought it up, I'm really feeling the need all of a sudden.
“Um, could I go out there? Behind a bush or something?”
Mikkel looked at her in silence for a long moment, then turned to study the sensors. “Nothing moving. Nothing hot on IR. I suppose it's safe enough. Let's go.”
Of course he'll go with me. This is not fun. Could I wait until Sigrun gets back? She considered her internal sensations. “Okay.” At least she would be outside in the Silent World.
They got through it with minimal humiliation for either, and were back in the tank when the other three returned.
“They were here,” Sigrun said. “We found where they tied up. They're not here now, though.”
Lalli hurried to Tuuri, reporting in Finnish, “The fog's about to lift. If they're out there and looking this way, they'll see us.” She translated for the others, wringing her hands anxiously.
“Get ready to move,” Sigrun said. “The big guy'll open the door, you get through, and he'll close it. Stop just inside. I'll look for threats.” She looked over at Mikkel. “Got that?”
He nodded, and the two of them jumped out and ran for the massive door. It was counter-weighted and could be moved by a lever, but the lever hung on a heavy hook next to the door. It was the work of a moment for Mikkel to pull down the lever, insert it in the housing, and push it forward to open the door. As ordered, Tuuri drove in until she was well clear of the door, then stopped. While Mikkel used the internal lever to push the door closed again, Sigrun ran ahead to look for lurking enemies.
There were no lights in the tunnel, Tuuri realized as the door swung closed and darkness closed in. The tank had lights … where was the switch … ah! Two large triangular lights mounted on top lit up the tunnel ahead of them, revealing no enemies, lurking or otherwise. Mikkel climbed into the tank and came forward; seconds later, Sigrun did the same.
“Okay,” the Captain said, “let's go to the Silent World.”
They blew up the bridge! They blew up the bridge!
As long as he'd had things to do — checking out the tank's systems, guarding Tuuri, managing the door to the tunnel — Mikkel could keep his thoughts away from the bridge. But now, sitting in the passenger seat, crowded against the right wall by Sigrun, he had nothing else to think about as the tank bored its way through darkness.
They blew up the bridge! All the tanks, the tanks we fought for, bled for, died for, are stuck on the base and we'll never be able to launch another attack, and our lands are lost forever!
“Someone tried to kill us,” Emil muttered in tones of disbelief just behind Mikkel's ear.
Oh, that's right. They blew up the bridge just to kill us. Somehow, the fact that the bridge was destroyed had loomed much larger in his mind than the fact that someone wanted them dead. We're lucky to be alive. He thought of those terrible moments when the bridge was falling away behind them and the tank was straining to pull them onto the intact section. Well, yes, of course we were lucky. We have Captain Eide, and she has the Luck.
“But why?” Sigrun asked, possibly only of herself. “Why would anyone want to kill us? Why go to that trouble?”
Is this a secret? The Icelanders know, though they keep it quiet. I did learn while working for the General, but it isn't his secret. Is there any reason not to speak? He couldn't think of any.
“When I was in Iceland, I learned about … well, there are people who think that we, we humans, that is, offended the gods —”
“What? Can you speak a little, uh, clearer?” Even Sigrun was having trouble understanding him.
He started again, slowly and distinctly, hoping they'd all get used to him soon. “In Iceland, there are people who believe that humans offended the gods, and so our world was taken from us and given to the Rash.”
“What was that? Something about gods? I thought you Danes were skeptics.” Like most Danes, like most Swedes, Mikkel was a skeptic and, from his tone, Emil likely was too.
“Other people believe this. Not me.” Try again to get that Swede to understand me. Maybe I should ask Captain Eide to translate. “Some Icelanders believe the gods punished humans by giving our world to the Rash.”
“Okay, I got it that time. But that's stupid. It's just a really bad disease.”
“Agreed. But they believe this, and they believe that trying to take our lands back from the Rash is evil and will cause us to be punished more. And they don't like immunes because we fight the Rash. They call themselves 'the Punished'. They're a pretty small group, and the Icelandic government tolerates them as long as they just talk. They would see an expedition to the Silent World as evil, but if they moved against us, they would have to conceal their actions so the government doesn't act against them. I'm sure they would blow up the bridge to kill us.”
“Why not just sabotage the tank? Or wait for us on the island? Why blow up the bridge?” Those were reasonable questions from Emil.
“I don't think they could sabotage the tank. Our people on the base are few, and know each other. A stranger couldn't tamper with the equipment, unnoticed. Anyway, that would delay us, not stop us.”
“If they waited for us on the island, we would fight back,” Sigrun said grimly. “We would send them all to Hel!”
“And we'd radio back to base,” Tuuri put in. “We'd tell them there were people here fighting us.”
“They could jam the signal,” Emil said, and Mikkel winced a little, thinking of static.
“Even so, there's the tank,” Tuuri said, patting the control panel. “Mr. Madsen said soldiers hunt here. If the bad guys, you know, killed us all, would they just leave it sitting around? If not, where could they hide it? Unless they could take it away …”
“Taking it away would require a big ship,” Mikkel said. “That would be hard to get without attracting attention, and would risk being seen even in the fog. They'd need a crew, too. And call me Mikkel. I'm not Mr. Madsen.” Bad enough that he bore the name; he didn't want to hear it every day. “You're right about the tank, though. General Trond knows about the Punished. He would work out who did it as easily as I did, if the tank were found and us all dead.”
“We'd take them with us,” Sigrun said, and Mikkel nodded.
“Perhaps, though we don't know how many there were. Anyway, it would be obvious we'd been attacked by humans, unless the Punished could arrange a giant attack. Getting a giant onto the island, or luring in a leviathan … I don't think they could manage that, because they're not immune. Well, of course they couldn't. That's why they blew up the bridge.”
“Blowing up the bridge is kind of obvious,” Sigrun said.
“The bridge collapsed into the sea, this part anyway, so most of the evidence is gone. If we'd gone with it, there'd be no one to say he heard an explosion. There'd be questions about maintenance, and Admiral Olsen would be recalled, and everyone would be relieved that it was only five people and a little tank that went in, and not the whole army in the next attack. Unless they suspected sabotage, which they wouldn't, they likely wouldn't find whatever evidence is left. Anyway, I think the Punished would do it this way, because if it were known that they massacred an official expedition of the Nordic Council, the government would have to act.”
“But they didn't massacre us,” Emil said.
“They blew up the bridge. And since you heard the explosion and we found where they tied up, as soon as we report in, my government will do a real investigation and insist that something be done about the Punished.” The General will make sure of that. But his status really is a secret.
“Well, if they wanted to keep us out of the Silent World, they messed up pretty bad,” Sigrun said, shrugging against Mikkel's shoulder. “ 'Cause we're stuck here now until Uncle Trond can arrange a rescue.”
There wasn't much to be said to that.
The tunnel was regularly drained, but at the moment it was awash in stagnant sea water, and the damp, chilly air stank, not just from the water, but from mold that oozed down the walls. At last the massive door loomed ahead in the tank's lights.
“Is this the end of it?” Tuuri ventured. “No more tunnel after this?”
“No more tunnel,” Mikkel answered heavily. He'd been here before and hadn't wanted to come back. “We'll be out in the open.”
“Let's get —” Sigrun began enthusiastically, pushing past Mikkel and Emil and pulling open the door.
“P-please don't exit the vehicle before I've parked it!” As Tuuri fumbled at the controls, the tank rumbled slowly forward into a bollard, stopping with a crunch. “There! Now you can leave.”
The water was ankle-deep by the tunnel door, not deep enough to overtop their boots as Sigrun leapt out, followed by Mikkel with Tuuri and Emil behind him. Lalli remained behind, no longer vomiting but curled up against the back wall in a ball of misery.
“We should stay in here until morning and then set off —” Mikkel began.
“Let's get this door open!” Sigrun cried, suiting actions to words by running over to lift the bolt and push at the heavy lever which operated the door.
Mikkel watched her in silence. Unlike all the others, he had been here before, and he was the second-in-command. He thought she should at least listen to his suggestions before shooting them down. But she's a troll-hunter and I'm a soldier. I suppose we have different approaches to risk. And anyway, who am I to worry about lines of authority? With some effort, he tamped down his annoyance at being dismissed.
Behind him Tuuri asked, “Hey, what are those names?”
“Those?” Mikkel did not turn. “It's the ones who fell during the great defeat of Kastrup.” He had read about the memorial but had never seen it. He did not want to read the names, did not want to remember his friends, his cousins, his men. Not now.
“Oh,” Tuuri answered in an uncertain tone.
“Yes, very sad,” Sigrun replied indifferently. “Emil, my right-hand warrior! Lend me your strength!”
Emil hurried to her side and they pushed together on the lever, making no progress. Sigrun was a tall woman, but she was slender and wiry rather than broad-shouldered and powerful. Though Emil was stocky, he was a city boy and had not spent his childhood doing hard physical labor on a farm.
Why had Sigrun called for Emil instead of Mikkel? Did she think his bulk was mere fat? Admittedly some of it was; in the past three years he'd put on weight that he didn't need. Still, his size was mostly muscle and he suspected that even now he was stronger than the rest of the team put together.
Mikkel observed their struggles for several seconds before joining them. “Allow me,” he told them, gesturing them to stand back. It was a matter of strength and weight, and he knew how to use both. Careful not to grunt with effort, he pushed the lever forward and was rewarded with a painful grinding as the door pulled slowly up and back across the ceiling.
Before them lay Silent Denmark, abandoned ninety years before.
Tunnel Base had changed in a decade of neglect. Mikkel wasn't sure if he wanted it to be just the same, or entirely different. In the event, it was somewhere in between.
As Lalli had predicted, the fog had lifted and the clouds were clearing, allowing the weak early-winter sun to illuminate the scene. Vines and tree roots draped across the tunnel entrance, and weeds and even bushes had grown up through cracks in pavement beyond. A light breeze rustled dead leaves and dry grass, and the air smelled of damp earth.
“Wasn't there supposed to be some sort of city here?” Emil asked, peering through the vines.
“I'm sure it's out there somewhere!” Sigrun studied the surroundings, looking up and around, cocking her head to listen, even sniffing. With a nod, she pushed confidently through the foliage. Mikkel opened his mouth to object but closed it without speaking. She was the troll-hunter, after all, and must know what she was doing. Emil trailed after her, followed by Tuuri.
“Stop,” Mikkel ordered, his heavy hand on the Finnish woman's shoulder. “It's not safe out there.”
“Captain Eide went out there. Emil's going —”
Emil yelped and jumped back, tangling with a vine. Something about the size of his torso dropped on his head. Without conscious thought, Mikkel drew his dagger and pushed Tuuri behind him. “Stay back!”
The Swede seemed to be swearing, and revolted rather than pained, so Mikkel took a moment to look down as he sheathed his dagger, so as not to miss the sheath or slash himself. That done, he lifted the mess off of Emil. It was a small troll, long dead and desiccated, though not much rotted since grosslings were always slow to decay. “Don't be alarmed,” he assured the younger man, “this thing's been dead for years.”
Emil pulled away, shuddering. “I wasn't alarmed. I'm grossed out!” His golden blond hair, which fell straight to his shoulders and had shone with brushing, didn't shine now, smeared with substances that didn't bear thinking about. The bandage which he wore, making him look like the survivor of a real grossling attack, was likewise befouled. As the younger man pushed through the vines in pursuit of Sigrun, the medic already regretted the prank which had led him to apply that bandage.
Shrugging at Emil's words, Mikkel turned to check on Tuuri, who had come up behind him. It was chilly and the winter sun was still up, conditions that few grosslings would brave, but “few” didn't mean “none”, as had been impressed upon every soldier. “Go back to the tank,” he told her in Icelandic, hoping she could understand that better than Danish. “This is too risky.”
“I heard you. You said it was dead. Dead for years.”
“It is dead. But the next thing that comes down those vines may not be. This is too risky. Go back to the tank.”
“Nothing's bothered Captain Eide or Emil.”
This wasn't the Army, and the young woman wasn't going to obey him without argument. “Tuuri, a lot of soldiers died here. Right out there. There were two swarms … the trolls may have wandered away after ten years, but they may not have, either.”
“The sunlight —”
“Some trolls are resistant to sunlight, especially when the Sun is low in the sky. And there may even be mouse-beasts in burrows out there. It's too risky for you to go out until we've thoroughly checked the area, and we haven't done that here.”
“Mr. — Mikkel, I mean, I've waited my whole life for this!”
“And you have your whole life ahead of you. If you're careful. Go back to the tank. Stay safe. I promise you will walk outside in the Silent World. But not here, not now.”
Tuuri hesitated for so long that he wondered if she would try to pass him anyway. He was physically strong enough to simply scoop her up and carry her to the tank like a recalcitrant child, but that was no solution. She wasn't a prisoner …
Her shoulders slumped and she turned back to the tank. Mikkel exhaled, a long, slow breath of relief.
“You promised,” she said as she climbed in without looking at him.
“I promised.”
With the non-immune safe in the tank, Mikkel pushed through the vines, looking around warily. Nothing jumped at him. Nothing even moved, but for the dead leaves shifting in the wind. To his right was the lever to close the door from the outside.
The lever is in the housing. Someone tried to open the door … someone survived the attack and tried to open the door. But he couldn't because Captain Knudsen bolted it from the inside. Someone tried —
No.
No.
Soldiers have been in and out through that door since the attack, and the last one through forgot, and it didn't matter because they always bolt the door. That's all.
“Oy! Big guy! Mikkel! Are you coming up here, or what?”
Mikkel wrenched his attention away from the lever and scrambled up the embankment. Three years of climbing nothing more challenging than the ladder in the barn had had their effect, and he was panting by the time he reached the top. He turned slowly, matching the terrain against his memory. When last he'd seen it, it had been a supply hub covered in well-trampled snow. Now the buildings — mere shacks — were gone, and in place of snow there was dead grass beaten flat by rain. Since the great defeat at Kastrup, the Army had burned the area twice, preventing the growth of trees that would impede the next invasion, though bushes had sprung up since the last fire. Still … There, we built a pyre over there, but it's gone, just a mound left. And there are the ruts from all the tanks we recovered, all stuck on Öresund base now with the bridge gone. All those lives lost for nothing.
“Is that over there … Copenhagen? We're this close?” Emil asked.
“Not quite, only the suburb area of Kastrup. If the main city ruins were that close, we could not be loafing around here this late.” Mikkel looked around. On either side of the little group of adventurers were the turret guns that had been removed from their tanks and mounted to defend the base. Grass and low bushes had grown up around them. “I suppose the field gives us enough cover for now.”
“Now, are we going to drive any closer today?” Sigrun asked, apparently of herself “The Sun is still up. A little, anyway.”
No, no, no! You don't know what's out there. You don't know what this island is like, abandoned to the grosslings for so long. Your villages are far from the major cities and protected by mountains. But here … there are tens of thousands of trolls in this city, and swarms of hundreds pouring out to attack … Though Mikkel was rarely at a loss for words, he was now. Troll-hunter culture was said to be formed around public displays of courage, so arguing for caution was likely to backfire. Still, how could he keep quiet? He opened his mouth to object, even at the risk of diminishing himself in Sigrun's eyes.
“Hmm,” Sigrun went on before he could speak. “No, can't do it. Too close to dark, I think. We don't want to be attracting any attention before we've even scouted out the place,” she added to the others, heading back down the steep slope, “but we do need to prepare our first salvage mission! We don't want to be wasting our time driving into too many dead ends or death pits tomorrow. Meaning it's time to send out the scout.”
Mikkel sighed in relief. They could at least spend one night in relative safety. He looked around once more for threats before gesturing Emil to precede him back down to the tank.
“Really?” Emil complained. “We had to climb all the way up here just to go right back down immediately?”
Mikkel ignored him, concentrating on not missing his footing and tumbling down the slope. It would not do to hurt himself the very first day of the expedition, especially now, when the collapse of the bridge meant their two-week expedition would be unavoidably extended, perhaps for months.
Back in the tank, Mikkel suggested that they close the door and remain in the tunnel for the night, Tuuri objected that sea water wasn't good for the tank, and Sigrun resolved the question by ordering Tuuri to plow through the debris and drive to the top of the nearest hill. As the tank ground its slow way away, Mikkel closed the door and hung the lever on its hook. The tunnel secure, Mikkel jogged after the tank, catching up when it stopped on the low hill. Looking around, he approved the location: they, and the tank's sensors, had a clear view in all directions.
With the tank parked, Emil frantically washed his hair while Sigrun took Tuuri and a yawning Lalli forward to discuss the night's scouting. Tuuri was essential for this process, translating between the two. Shaking his head in dismay at the communication problem, Mikkel turned his hand to setting up the main compartment for sleeping by folding down the bunks and making them up with sheets and blankets from the nearest cabinet. As he did so, he examined the hinges and concluded that the strongest bunk was the bottom one on the back wall, so that became his own. Everything arranged, he went forward to listen.
“… and afterwards we need a safe place to retreat to and set up camp at, tell him that,” Sigrun instructed. “And I want him back before daybreak; we should leave as soon as the sun is up. Oh, and explain to him that the lines on the map mean roads.”
Mikkel rolled his eyes as Tuuri spoke at length to her cousin. The kid was a scout, and had been for six years, ever since he was thirteen, the age of majority in Finland. He certainly knew how to read a map! As Tuuri finished, Lalli pulled up the hood of his outdoor jacket and mumbled something that Mikkel thought for a moment was “Okay.” Surely he had misheard.
After a brief further conversation, the little scout slipped silently out the door as Tuuri turned away to study the map again. Still gazing at the paper before her, she spoke again in Finnish, her tone worried, prompting Sigrun to look over at Mikkel, who shrugged.
“If you're talking to your cousin,” Sigrun said, “you should know that he already left.”
Tuuri turned to her in dismay, then leaned against the windshield, staring out into the gathering twilight. Mikkel watched her for a moment, but could think of nothing to say to reassure her. “Let's check the area,” he suggested to Sigrun. “I need a fire for our supper, and we'll all need a latrine.”
“Oh, yeah. Hey, Emil, let's go.”
Mikkel stopped to collect their perimeter sensors, which he set up with Emil's assistance while Sigrun prowled around, dagger in hand. That done, he sent Emil to get a shovel and dig a latrine. “I have to dig a latrine? I thought we were going to explore!”
“Haven't you ever dug a latrine?” Sigrun asked, slapping the younger man on the back. “I dug a lot of them when I was a recruit. Goes with being the youngest, you know!”
“Yeah, okay,” Emil sighed. By the time he finished the latrine behind a convenient bush, Mikkel had gathered sticks and tinder for a fire.
“Here, I understand you're good at building fires,” Mikkel said, handing him the flint and steel and pointing at the fuel. “Have at it.” He watched as the Swede arranged the wood and struck a spark on the first try. It did not surprise him that Emil's technique with the flint and steel was no better than his own, and that the spark had not come from the steel. The tinder caught and the fire was soon crackling merrily.
With everything arranged, Mikkel collected his cooking gear and the evening's food from the tank. “Tuuri, you may come out now.”
“Really? Really?” The small woman all but pushed him out of the way as she ran for the door. “Eee …” It seemed that words failed her outside the tank, and she stood gazing about with awe as he passed her and began to cook their supper.
“Hey, short stuff,” Sigrun called. “The latrine's over here. I'll guard.” That seemed to remind Tuuri of certain physical needs, and she ran to the captain at once.
Emil, still sitting beside the fire, wiped his hands on a handkerchief he had produced from somewhere. “Couldn't they have gotten us an immune driver?”
Mikkel shrugged. “She's not just our driver. She's a skald, an engineer, and a mechanic. I think we're going to need a mechanic. That tank isn't in the best of shape, and we're stuck here for a while.”
“Yeah, about that. Do you think the bad guys will follow us out here?”
“No, I don't think so.” Mikkel looked in the direction of the tunnel, unable to make it out in the uncertain light. “If it's the Punished, they … don't like immunes, so they won't have any with them. If they came here after us, they'd be committing an extremely unpleasant suicide.”
Before they could continue, Tuuri returned to sit beside the fire at Mikkel's left with Emil on the other side. “There are no walls,” she said softly. The Dane looked at her without speaking. “All my life there have been walls. When we lived in Saimaa, on the island, there was a wooden wall.” Her hands described things set in a line.
“A palisade,” Mikkel suggested.
“Yes, that's the word. And the livestock island had one too. We were never outside the walls, except in the boat going between them. Except once … And then we went to Keuruu, and Keuruu had walls too. Sometimes I helped defend the walls, and I got to go up in the watchtowers sometimes and just look out, although Onni didn't even want me to do that. But now …” She stared out across the field to the dark and distant city. “There are no walls.”
Corporal Mikkel Madsen retreats with his squad through darkness and wildly shifting lights. Tentacles reach from the swarm, ripping apart Haralds and Orn. “Keep going!” Mikkel shouts, slashing at a troll lunging for his legs. Rifles crack behind him, and he hopes the sharpshooters have steady hands. Soren trips, Mikkel reaches for him to pull him up, but a troll is there first, tearing into his torso. Mikkel leaves the corpse, orders Bjorn and Jozef to get behind him, and they retreat backwards. They reach the barricade, but there is no one manning it. The last tank is rumbling into the tunnel as the three race to join it.
Just a few more meters … just a few more … but the great door closes before them. Mikkel grabs the lever, pulls, throws himself on it, but the door will not open. It is bolted from the inside.
Bjorn and Jozef scream, but only briefly. Mikkel turns to see the swarm almost upon him, talons, fangs, tentacles, beaks reaching for him …
Bzzt!
Mikkel jolted awake, heart pounding.
Bzzt! Bzzt!
The perimeter alarm! Mikkel rolled out of his bunk … and back into it, to avoid Sigrun's feet as she dropped out of the top bunk. Tuuri was stirring and Emil just sitting up as the Captain darted to the control panel. Mikkel heard the clank of the door unbolting as she said loudly, “All right, the door's open. You can come in.” Returning to the living quarters from the small entryway behind the driving compartment, she told the others, “Scout's back.”
Bzzt!
“Good,” Mikkel answered, edging past her. “All of you stay put while I decontaminate him.”
Lalli pulled open the door and entered, watching Mikkel uncertainly as the Dane took goggles and an ultraviolet wand from a cabinet and turned to address Tuuri. “Tell him to give me his outer clothes, close his eyes, and hold out his arms.”
The cousins spoke for a moment before Tuuri answered. “He says he doesn't need decontamination because he didn't touch any grosslings.”
“Doesn't matter. It's the protocol for the expedition. He was out of everyone's sight so he might have touched something without noticing.” By nature, Mikkel was no stickler for rules, particularly for rules that he considered stupid, such as this one. Nine decades of tragic experience and cautious experimentation had shown that the Rash survived less than five minutes on a surface if exposed to the sun and less than twenty in the shade in warm weather, and even less in cooler weather such as they were experiencing. The Rash could not attack through intact skin and so was dangerous only if it could get into the mucous membranes of the nose or mouth or into the bloodstream through a cut or bite.
Still, given that Captain Eide treated him with disrespect verging on contempt, he thought it important that she view him as competent, reliable, and willing to follow orders. The Nordic Council — paranoid Icelanders — had set out a protocol for dealing with anyone who had been out of sight of the others and he meant to follow it until she, as captain of the expedition, ordered him not to.
With a sigh, Tuuri instructed her cousin, who rolled his eyes before pulling off his white outer garments, leaving him in the warm black inner clothes such as they all wore inside. Mikkel hung the gear neatly in a small closet and twisted a dial to activate the powerful UV lights within for fifteen minutes.
As the Finn closed his eyes and extended his arms, Mikkel donned the goggles and closed the door between the entryway and the living quarters so as to protect the eyes of the others. After swiftly shining the light over the scout's body, he put it and the goggles away. Lalli escaped into the living quarters and was immediately grabbed by Tuuri, who questioned him in rapid-fire Finnish.
The cousins went over the map together, Captain Eide watching from the side, as Mikkel deactivated the perimeter alarms and beckoned Emil to come outside with him. “We need wood,” Mikkel told him. “For the fire, and to fuel the tank. Stay within sight so we don't have to go through the decontamination routine.” The day was clear and very cold, not at all the sort of weather that grosslings favored, so the younger man was unlikely to encounter any even if he went for a stroll through the wood.
“Yeah, okay,” Emil said with visible reluctance, but set to work at once, picking up deadwood for Mikkel to cut to size with a hacksaw. Once more, the Cleanser built and lit the fire for the Dane to prepare a breakfast of fresh-cooked porridge. They had supplies for the first day in the tank, but thereafter they would be eating rations from the crates in the back compartment. Since their stay would certainly be longer than expected, Mikkel was already considering the problem of food. It was early winter, most birds would have gone south, and most normal mammals would be hibernating.
But that was a problem for another day. Stirring the porridge, listening with half an ear to Tuuri and Lalli discussing the map in incomprehensible Finnish, Mikkel thought about the Rash as he had so many times before.
The Rash was not extremely contagious. It was nothing like so contagious as measles, a disease he knew of only from histories. The surviving communities had been too small and too widely separated to sustain it and it had gone extinct within months after the Rash appeared. The Rash was not even so contagious as smallpox, he thought, which the Old World had eradicated decades before the Rash struck.
If the Rash had only infected humans, he mused, the Old World could have survived through quarantines and curfews; it would have been badly damaged but it could have survived. It was their misfortune that the Rash had infected every type of mammal except, strangely, cats, and it had been impossible to stop its spread through mice, rats, squirrels, and the rest of the mammalian class. The only non-immune survivors were human beings and their domesticated animals on a few islands and in mountain fastnesses – and even they could survive only through rigorous and often brutal quarantines.
If the Rash had merely killed every creature it infected, the Old World would surely have fallen, but the survivors could have returned from their refuges to the mainland a few generations later. The Danes would not have needed to send an army to reclaim Denmark, Mikkel thought, and the army would not have perished. He checked his hands, and they were no longer shaking. Not shaking at all.
Mikkel looked at his hands. They were shaking. He was so cold, and so very tired, and dawn was still over an hour away. He had been on the night watch for ten days now and he was weary.
Resting the shotgun on the barricade, he cautiously flexed the fingers of one hand and then the other. They were cold and stiff, but he could fire the shotgun if he needed to. He couldn't hit the broad side of a barn – he had failed every marksmanship test – but when a swarm of grosslings attacked, he had only to point the shotgun in the right direction and he was sure to hit something.
Movement caught his eye and the shotgun twitched toward it. A fireman had tossed an incendiary on the body of the latest grossling and was sprinting back to the barricade, but something with far too many legs had lunged out of the woods, moving fast enough to catch the fireman before it was in range of the shotguns —
Crack!
Even through his earplugs, the marksman's rifle was loud. The grossling staggered a few more steps before collapsing, and the fireman ran a few more steps himself, stopped, turned, and bravely ran back to toss an incendiary on that body too before racing back to the barricade. A cheer, audible even through earplugs, rose from the soldiers who welcomed him back.
The soldiers stood guard behind a chest-high barricade that surrounded the base; outside the barricade was a moat of light and ashes. The light came from large arrays of powerful bulbs mounted on wooden towers and powered by generators, and the ashes resulted from three weeks of nightly grossling attacks. While grosslings generally stayed wherever they happened to be, they were attracted to loud noises such as those caused by the construction of the base during the day and the fighting by night. The captain claimed that they had lured in and wiped out every mobile grossling within ten kilometers – but still more grosslings attacked every night. Some soldiers believed that they were also attracted to the artificial lights, that in some dim way the grosslings remembered when such lights meant home. Mikkel shuddered at that thought.
The klaxon sounded behind him: the lookouts had spotted a swarm. Mikkel flexed his fingers again, checked his shotgun, peered out at the woods beyond the lights. Things were moving there; things were crawling, slithering, oozing forward into view: masses of corruption both horrifying and pitiful.
The marksmen were firing now, but there were too many for them and the swarm was moving into shotgun range. With the rest of the soldiers, Mikkel opened fire.
Tuuri and Lalli were quiet now and Emil was regarding him oddly. He had missed something, Mikkel realized. Captain Eide held out her bowl: “Well?” Ah, the porridge was ready. He served them all except Lalli, who seemed to have fallen asleep, and the team settled down to breakfast and the new day.
The porridge was good, Sigrun thought, and the sponsors had even provided a little honey. The team was severely underpaid; the clan would have paid her more to train recruits than the Nordic Council was paying her to risk her life roaming around the Silent World. But a few inexpensive luxuries, the honor of being on the first expedition, and of course the promise of a share of loot, went a long way to make up for the underpayment.
If they wanted any loot, though, they needed to get to scavenging. Sipping her weak herbal tea, Sigrun considered the map, now marked up with the scouting report. Mikkel joined her in regarding it, and began, “If you want my opinion —”
“I've decided. Let's go to that place.” She did not want his opinion. She was captain of the expedition, though the Swedish sponsor had muddled the lines of authority by introducing her and Mikkel together to the rest of the team as “your superiors”. The sooner he understood that he was not in authority, the better. “Spot number 24, what do we have over there?”
“Number 24,” Tuuri answered, examining their instructions, “ 'Community space with a small private library. Possibly high value collection. Possibly junk. Remember to ask Torbjörn to research more.' So … might not be a great place for books, but —”
“No matter! It has a nice exit route, that's what's important.” And what a farmer wouldn't know to look for. “Because, trust me, we might need to make a very hasty retreat once me and Emil are done looting the place! Right, buddy?”
Emil choked slightly on his tea as she slapped him on the back. “Right. Right.”
“Mikkel, try to get a radio call in to base. Let them know what's up.” They'd kept radio silence the night before, just in case, but she thought they should be safe by now.
“Sure.” At least he doesn't argue about my orders.
“Emil, get yourself ready for action!” The Swede gulped some more tea. “Fetch the sensors. We need to get moving.”
While Tuuri checked that the tank was ready, and Emil left to fetch the perimeter sensors, Sigrun sipped her tea and watched Mikkel. While cooking, the Dane had worn the satchel he'd won at poker, which she found odd, but the reason soon became clear: he stopped Lalli, who was headed for the sleeping quarters, told him “Good job” (in Danish, which she knew he didn't understand), and handed him a cookie. She approved; Mikkel was at least useful for morale. The Finn examined the cookie as if he'd never seen one before, but finally bit into it. Intrigued, Sigrun saw his face change to something like awe, then become furtive as he sneaked into the little radio room into which Mikkel had disappeared. When the little scout reappeared with a handful of cookies and tiptoed away into the sleeping area, she couldn't conceal her grin.
Mikkel came out almost at once to examine the sensor panel. “Well?” Sigrun asked, suppressing the grin.
Without looking away from the panel, the Dane answered, “No luck. Intense static. I don't see any threats, but we need to move.” There was always static in the Silent World, somehow connected with trolls. Intense static usually heralded an approaching swarm — usually, but not always.
“As soon as Emil gets the sensors in.” Unless they had to flee an attack, she would not leave any equipment behind.
Mikkel left without answering and, checking the video feeds herself, Sigrun saw that he had joined Emil in collecting gear as fast as possible. When the weather was cold and clear, as now, a swarm was unlikely to venture out, so they were probably safe. Still, there was every reason to get moving.
In mere minutes, the two men were back, arms full of sensors, and the Captain turned to her driver. “Let's go! Spot number 24 awaits us!”
Mikkel settled into his position at the far right of the front bench, and Sigrun took the seat beside him, as before, while Emil watched over her shoulder.
Emil was reconsidering his life choices.
Torbjörn made it sound so easy. We'd have the tank; we'd have an experienced troll-hunter as captain; the trolls would be dug in for the winter; we'd only be here for a couple of weeks before heading back. And I'd come back a hero, one of just five members of the first expedition to the Silent World. But then someone tried to kill us by blowing up the bridge, and now we're trapped here for who knows how long. We have the tank, but it's not even armed, and if a giant like the one that hit the train comes after us … we don't stand a chance. Yeah, and maybe the trolls are dug in, and maybe they aren't. Captain Eide and Mikkel sure aren't acting like they think they are.
He studied the backs of two older team members. Sigrun's posture was relaxed, but her head was constantly moving, scanning around for threats. Mikkel was rigid, his head turning just a little back and forth, back and forth. Emil felt a wordless conflict between the two, like the charge in the air just before a thunderstorm, and he feared what might happen if the storm broke.
Sigrun interrupted her watchfulness to glance at Emil. “I probably should have asked you earlier: where are you at, killing-wise? Ever faced off a troll close up?” She turned again to look forward.
“Uhh … o-of course I have!” He didn't want to seem useless, and yet … she'd called him her right-hand warrior. He didn't want her to reject him later when she found out the truth. He swallowed hard. “Once. But it was really big, a giant! I punched it right in one of its faces!”
“Good man! That's the proper way to do it!” She gave him a grin before returning to searching for enemies.
Okay, he'd told the truth about the giant attack on the train, and she hadn't rejected him. Hadn't sneered at him. Yet. All I've done so far is dig a latrine and help take care of the sensors. Oh, and build fires for Mikkel. He looked at the man's rigid back again. I wonder why he doesn't build them himself. Surely he knows how. He's the medic, but he must have been doing manual labor for his hands to be so callused. I wonder what that's about. The Nordic Council had provided dossiers on the team members, which Torbjörn and Siv had handed over back in Sweden, but the dossiers were in Icelandic, which Emil couldn't read.
Another thought struck him. Oh, no, that's right, he's the medic! And I insulted him! He saw the scrape and he wanted to help me, and I sneered at the way he talked. I'm such an idiot! How could I forget that he was the medic? How could I just ignore a medic's concern for me? What if I waited too long, and the face cancer got me? He buried his face in his hands until the jolting of the tank forced him to grab the back of the bench.
Trying not to think about the poor impression he'd made on Mikkel, and the looming danger of face cancer, he forced his eyes back to Sigrun. She knows I'm not a troll-hunter. She won't expect me to really fight. Maybe she'll even teach me some things, so I'll look better to the Cleansers when we get back. If we get back. If I get back. Why did I ever agree to this? Such thoughts circled through his mind as the tank trundled forward in the dawn light.
The tank stopped. A barricade stretched left to right before them, worn down by a decade of rain and snow, and perhaps grossling attacks. “Um … Is this from when you people tried to reclaim your land, Mikkel?” Tuuri asked.
“Yes, this is as far as we got. This barricade here is a decade old.” His accent got thicker as he spoke, making him increasingly unintelligible to Emil. He said something about a mild winter and too much noise, and a single night. Emil knew the rough outlines of the story; he'd heard about it from his nanny when he was nine years old. The disaster that had annihilated the Danish Army at Kastrup in a single night was ancient history to him.
“Wow, yeah,” he said, looking ahead and wondering when they were going to get moving again. “I didn't understand most of that, but what I did understand was … sooo lame.”
Mikkel turned around to glare at him. “A lot of good soldiers I knew died.”
Emil understood that. Why did I say that? I've made things even worse! Why do I always babble like that! “Oh, uh, right, I mean … n-no offense?”
The Dane turned away with a grunt. Emil buried his face in his hands again.
“Did you work here?” Tuuri hastened to ask. “During the time of the attack, I mean. I know you served in the army around that time, but …” Of course not, stupid, Emil thought, but managed to keep quiet this time.
“Oh. Oh, no. I did serve at the Kastrup base, but I was … relocated a week before that fateful day.”
Sigrun laughed, then whispered to Tuuri all too audibly, “That means he was fired, right?”
“Either way,” Mikkel said, staring straight ahead without acknowledging Sigrun's whisper, “we're the first humans venturing this far since the dawn of our time.” His grim tone put an end to the discussion as the tank jerked forward and made for a badly damaged section of the barricade where it could push through. They rode in silence for some time.
The Old World had died, but it had gone down fighting. A chain-link fence stretched from building to building as far as they could see, separating them from their goal. It would have stopped most grosslings — the smallest could have gotten through but cats would have dealt with them — but something had created a sizeable gap in the fence. At Sigrun's gesture, Tuuri stopped the tank long enough for Sigrun to examine the fence carefully through the window. “Did a giant do that?” Tuuri asked in a dismayed tone.
“No,” Sigrun answered thoughtfully, “that was cut, not torn. Humans did this.”
Tuuri craned around Sigrun to ask, “Mikkel, did your people come here?”
“No, we —”
“Nah, this is old,” Sigrun interrupted. “See the rust, there and there? The cuts must be as old as the fence, or nearly.”
Emil winced. He was a boy again, trapped between Father and Uncle Torbjörn as they discussed the family factory, but there was no escape. Not here, not now.
He retreated to the side window, which they'd opened for travel, hoping for a troll, just a little one, to distract Sigrun and Mikkel.
Tuuri's voice carried. “You mean, they put up this big fence and then cut through it?”
“Somebody did. You see a lot of strange things in Old World cities. Things must have got kind of crazy at the end.” Emil looked forward to see Sigrun shrug, dismissing it. “Drive on.” Tuuri drove on through the gap in the fence.
Unlike some of the other streets they'd passed, the street beyond was neither clogged with decaying vehicles nor cleared by something pushing or even hurling vehicles out of the way. No, this street was clear, with vehicles neatly parked to either side, and Emil wondered if there had been no attempt to flee the city along this road, or if someone had kept it clear in hopes of a return to normal life.
They kept to the north, sunny side of the street. Many of the buildings had lost their roofs or even collapsed, which made them unlikely to harbor grosslings. Still, there were a few … Emil focused on something in a window. He couldn't see what it was: a grossling? A tree growing up through the floor? Just a shadow?
Impossible to tell.
The tank had been made as quiet as possible, but still its treads clattered over fallen pieces of vehicles and buildings so Sigrun ordered Tuuri to drive fast in the hope that, “By the time some grossling might get the great idea of trying to attack us we'll be long gone. Out of sight, out of mind. And if something does start following us, me and Emil will jump right out and take care of it! Isn't that right, Emil?”
Emil gulped. “Uh-huh. Yeah.” That was good enough for Sigrun, or at least she didn't comment on his lack of enthusiasm. He wondered if he had the courage to jump out and fight a troll.
Spot number 24 was a large, solid building in relatively good shape, even boasting an intact and locked front door, though Mikkel's crowbar made short work of the rusted lock. Some walls near the door had partially collapsed, and the windows were crusted over from years of dust and leaves, making the interior gloomy even in the bright sunshine.
Sigrun entered alone at first, leaving the three men hovering by the door as she scrambled over fallen beams, flashlight in hand. “You stay there. I'll make sure the place isn't a total death trap. I'll be back in a heartbeat.”
Emil glanced around. On either side of him, Mikkel and Lalli were watching the street. In the tank behind him, Tuuri had her mask on, ready to flee if attacked. Before him was the building where he would have to assist Sigrun. What if he messed up?
“Looks clean enough,” Sigrun said, returning. “I don't see anything that points to a nest. We can carry on. First, ground rules! Number one: we stay together! No wandering off on your own and getting lost in there. Number two: firearms are our last resort weapon. A cold blade through the brain is just as effective as any bullet, and, most importantly, won't wake the whole block. If your life really depends on it, sure, dish out some lead. But that also means the gig is up and we all better start running out and to the tank! Got it?”
Emil gulped. At least he would be with the other three; things couldn't go too wrong. “Got it.” Lalli said nothing, as one might expect, since he hadn't understood a word of her announcement.
“That's all the rules! Stay together, blade before bullets! Let's go!”
“I believe I should stay outside,” Mikkel said quietly.
“Oh good, you think so too. I wasn't sure if I should bring this up. I mean, you would be useful for carrying whatever we find. But with your size I'm worried that you'll get stuck in some doorway and block us from getting back out.”
Mikkel stiffened and Emil looked back at the tank, yearning to flee and hide. No, I'm a man now, and they aren't arguing about me anyway. It's not my fault! He wanted to side with Mikkel, the friendly medic. He wanted to side with Sigrun, the captain. He wanted to run away from the conflict. The air seemed to grow hot around him.
“Yes, thank you for your concern,” Mikkel replied almost evenly. “I personally think someone should stand guard out here.”
“Great, so we have many good reasons to leave you out here. Glad we got that resolved. Bye now!” Sigrun replied cheerfully and charged back into the building. Emil made to follow, but Mikkel stopped him.
“Let's get that bandage off. We wouldn't want you to be distracted by it in there,” he said, clearly enough that the Swede could follow his words.
“Off? You think that's wise? It's only been on for a day. I don't want to risk cancer.”
“Wounds don't cause cancer, even here.”
“… Huh?”
“I made that up.”
“Why?”
“It was a joke,” Mikkel replied, removing the bandage and pocketing it while watching Emil with a strange intensity.
“It's not a joke if it's not funny!” Emil's face burned with humiliation. He'd thought the medic was a friend, that he cared. But no, he was just another mocking bully.
“Well, I was amused.”
Emil glared at him for a moment, hot with anger, then grabbed Lalli's hand and dragged him along in Sigrun's wake, muttering as he went, “It wasn't funny!”
Emil wished he were slender and agile like Lalli, or tall and graceful like Sigrun. Instead, he was short and stocky, and he stumbled over fallen planks rather than stepping over them. At least he wasn't fat, not anymore. The Cleansers had worked the fat off of him.
The sun worked its way dimly through grimy windows, the entryway smelled of mold and rot, and it was silent but for the footsteps of the other two and the groans and cracks of planks as he stepped on them. Emil wrinkled his nose at the dust they kicked up and grumbled in disgust.
Sigrun looked back at him. “What?” she asked, her voice low.
“Kind of funky in here.”
She looked around, sniffing. “I smell gross, moldy old house. Is that what you smell? Gross, moldy old house?”
Emil shrugged. “Maybe? I don't really know what that's supposed to smell like. I haven't exactly spent much time inside any of those.” Cleansers entered buildings long enough to plant explosives or incendiaries, then ran outside to watch the fire.
Flashing his light around while Sigrun considered their path, Emil stopped, caught her sleeve. “Sigrun, look! I found some!” He darted to a warped bookcase and scooped up the hard-bound book he'd seen.
“Careful,” Sigrun said. “That's practically money in your hands.”
Emil opened it, eager to see what he'd found … and the pages disintegrated in a puff of moldy fragments.
“You broke it!” Sigrun exclaimed, forceful even in a whisper, as Emil coughed and Lalli backed away, pulling his collar over his nose and mouth. “You hapless, ham-fisted Swede!”
She could not have hurt him worse if she'd slapped him. He flinched, raising the remains of the book as if to defend himself. “It was already broken!” He held it out to her. “The whole thing's turned to mush. To garbage.”
She poked at the book he held and then another on a shelf. “Hmm … looks like you might be right about that. It's all garbage. Mushy, useless, absolutely worthless garbage.”
She's just another bully, leading me on to think I'm her “right-hand warrior”, when really she thinks I'm useless, worthless garbage. And Mikkel's a big fat bully, and Tuuri laughed at me when we met, just because some jerk spilled food on me when I was so exhausted that I fell asleep waiting, and now I'm stuck in the Silent World, maybe for the rest of my life, with people who mock me like everyone else.
“I came all the way out here for nothing,” he said, leaning his head on the bookcase. “It was all in vain.” I thought people would finally respect me — even just a little — because I was brave enough to come here, but they don't, and now I'm going to die here, for nothing.
“Nah,” Sigrun said, “you thought this is it? There's no way one bookcase would ever have counted as a 'private library'. There's got to be more of these in there somewhere. The best junk is always hidden deep inside these places anyway. Away from all that nasty moisture outside.” As she spoke, Lalli patted Emil on the back, reminding him that there was one person on the expedition who hadn't mocked him. “So chin up,” Sigrun continued, “I guarantee we'll find some decent enough stuff.” She flashed her light around and focused on a door. “Hopefully stuff without other stuff growing on it.”
Emil followed her for want of any alternative. At least Lalli was beside him.
There were skeletons.
Emil leapt back with a hiss of alarm. “S-Sigrun! We should — we should leave. Let's leave!” He kept his voice to a whisper. This room, with dozens of skeletons on gurneys, called for whispers.
Sigrun gave him an indifferent glance over her shoulder and whispered back, “No, no, it's okay.”
“What do you mean, 'it's okay'! You see them, don't you?”
“It's nothing to worry about.”
“How is it not? There's like a ton of dead —” His voice was trying to rise.
Sigrun took two steps to him and caught his face roughly between her gloved hands, forcing him to look her in the eye. “Look at me. Listen to me. It's okay.” Emil gulped. “Are you done freaking out now?” He gave a hesitant nod. “Good.”
“Wasn't freaking out,” Emil muttered. Great. I've made things even worse. She'll never let me live this down, and she'll tell Mikkel and Tuuri, and they'll all be laughing at me —
“Look, Emil,” she said, releasing him, “that's something you have to expect from any kind of common spaces. It's not like people crawled out in the streets to die. They tried to take care of each other, at least make people comfortable before the end. You learn to ignore it. Dead folks aren't dangerous, just kinda sad.”
Sigrun gestured at Lalli, who had backed against a wall and was staring at them with alarm. “And that's why we have our little scout with us,” she continued. “He'll pick up on anything sinister, and as long as he isn't scared, we don't have to be. Now, does he look scared to you?”
Emil was relieved to look at Lalli instead of Sigrun. The scout had reacted to the lessening tension in the room by stepping forward and looking around, sniffing. After a moment of silence, Sigrun nudged the Swede. “I'm really asking. I can't tell with him.”
As the scout yawned hugely, Emil answered, “No, I think that's just 'tired'.”
Sigrun grinned. “Good. 'Just tired' is good.” She put her arm around the young Cleanser and brought him further into the building, Lalli trailing along behind. After a few minutes, Emil contrived to slip away from her arm by stopping to check out a cabinet, as he hated to feel himself a captive. After that she led, he followed, and Lalli brought up the rear. As she had predicted, the deeper they got, the better the condition of the building.
Sigrun stopped so suddenly that Emil ran into her. Wrapping her arm around his shoulders again, she pulled him forward to see what had caught her eye. They stared together for a moment, then turned to grin at each other. Before them were closed double doors. The glass doors were dusty, like everything else, but through them in the dim glow of the flashlights, the explorers could see the private library, seemingly untouched by time.
“You were right,” Emil whispered. “I won't ever doubt you again.” He rubbed a clear space in the dust and peered inside, awed by what he saw. “Everything looks nice and dry in there.”
“Move over,” she answered, nudging him aside. “I'll get us inside.” The double doors were latched, but her dagger slipped between them to lift the latch. The thought crossed Emil's mind that the doors could not have been latched from the outside, but in his excitement at the find, he forgot to mention it.
Inside, all three sniffed at the air as they shined their lights about. There was no scent of rot, and the books looked intact. Emil turned slowly, seeing shelves full of books on three walls, and imagined going home with his share of this fortune. I'll be rich, and Torbjörn will be rich! No more humiliation from being poor. I can return to the Cleansers as a rich and famous explorer. My little cousins can have the tutors they deserve, instead of going to that horrible school. I just have to keep going until we can be rescued, and then … and then …
Sigrun was pulling books off a shelf; Emil noticed that she wasn't even looking at them. “So, should we pick and choose somehow?” he asked. “A lot of these titles seem a little useless to me.”
“Meh, books are books. As long as it's not falling apart and has words in it, I say it's good for taking.”
Emil pulled down a book and studied the back cover. Danish was close enough to Swedish for him to read it, but … “ 'Antigravity … propulsion'? These aren't even words!”
“Yeah, well. It's not our job to judge the books; that's what Mikkel out there is for. All we're supposed to do is carry out what we find and then call it a day.”
“Gotcha!” Emil pulled down more books, piling them along his left arm. He walked a bit farther, not watching his feet, as he daydreamed about the wealth he would bring back. Something crunched under his foot.
“Aaah! What did I just step on?” He recoiled at the sight of a skeleton on the floor.
“Whoa, whoa,” Sigrun said, putting her free arm around his shoulders. “It's okay. It's just another dead dude. No need to cry.”
“Not crying.” Emil gulped, took a breath. “Just startled.”
“Good. Let's haul these precious babies out of here, then. We can empty this entire room before it gets dark. As long as we don't drag our feet, that is.” As they turned away, Emil saw around the skeleton's outstretched right arm was a white cloth with a red cross, and in its right hand was a pistol. Its skull bore a hole between the eyes.
Mikkel was patrolling up the street, dagger in hand, when they came out. He ran — or rather lumbered, in Emil's uncharitable opinion — to them at Sigrun's call. “Here,” she said, piling her load of books into the Dane's arms and signalling Emil to do the same. “Put these away, and be ready. There's plenty more coming, and we'll be right back with the next load.” Lalli had brought only a single book, which he placed carefully atop Mikkel's burdens before joining the other two. Mikkel turned away to carry the salvaged tomes to the tank.
As the three returned to the library for their fourth load, Emil looked around in dismay. They had hardly made a dent in the collection, and the afternoon was getting late. Every book left behind would reduce his future fortune. “Sigrun, can we come back here tomorrow?”
“Nah. All the trolls around here will wake up tonight and smell that we've been here. They'll be alert tomorrow and it won't be safe, not with just one troll-hunter.”
At Emil's muttered “Right-hand warrior”, Sigrun grinned and slapped his back — gently, because they were still staying quiet. “That you are,” she said, missing the bitterness of his tone. “But you're a recruit right now. Give me a little time to train you up, and you'll be a troll-hunter to be proud of! So, let's gather up these treasures, and let's go.”
Emil gave her a wary glance. Did she mean it? Did she really consider him a recruit with potential? He shook his head, dismissing the thoughts. There were other problems to consider. “Um … I think we should bring Mikkel with us next time.” He waved at the stacks of books they'd pulled out. “I bet he could carry all this at once if we gave him a bag. Then we'd just follow him around and protect him.” He felt safe suggesting this since nothing threatening had appeared.
“I don't know. These old world buildings are so incredibly cramped. He'll just topple everything over in the hallways.”
Emil was uncomfortable defending Mikkel, but he did want to gather as many books as possible. “We've got a pretty clear path all the way through, though. We can at least give it a try. If he's too big to get through, he can just turn back.”
“All right, fine, we'll bring him with us next time.”
Through all this, Lalli had been leaning against a wall, yawning now and then. He had carried out only the one book, afterwards following the others in and out empty-handed, but Sigrun had made no comment and Emil would not criticize his only friend. Lalli was watching for danger, and that was enough.
As the two gathered up their latest loads, the scout straightened, turning to stare in alarm at something across the room. “Uhh, Sigrun,” Emil whispered, “look at Lalli. I'm pretty sure he's scared now. He's looking at that hole in the wall.”
The “hole in the wall” was a ventilation duct from which the cover had fallen, and out of which fresh slime was now oozing. Sigrun peered into it, playing her flashlight over the interior. “Do you see anything?” Emil asked, unable to see over her shoulder even when he stood on tiptoes.
“We might have got a visitor.”
“M-might have? You're not certain?” He could think of nothing that could produce such slime, except a grossling, but Sigrun knew far more than he, and he hoped there could be some other cause.
“Oh, sorry, buddy, poor choice of words. We've definitely got ourselves a visitor.”
“W-we should leave,” Emil quavered, and “We should kill it dead,” Sigrun said at the same time. At his dismayed expression, she continued, “Come on, it fits in an air vent, can't be very big. Just a puny little bastard. And you don't really want to leave all this behind, do you?” She waved a hand at the remaining books. “Finds like this are rare, you know. So, do you want to leave?”
Emil looked around, thinking what the books would mean to him, to his uncle, to his cousins, thinking what Sigrun would say about him if he backed out. After a moment, he sighed and answered with an effort. “No, I d-don't want to leave.”
“Good, it's settled. Now, let's go make sure there aren't any nests still hiding further in. If this thing is a lone squatter, it'll be no biggie, easy kill. But we do not want to be juggling more than one of them in a hole like this.” After another glance down the ventilation duct, she turned to study the room, which had a second, closed door at the back. “Let's split up. Each of us picks one direction to check out.”
“Excuse me? You said rule one was to remain together at all times.”
“Well, yes. But that's when we're first exploring and know nothing about the inside. Now we know our way in and out, and we need to check for nests. How could we ever get done if we stayed glued to each other?”
“I-I have some concerns with this arrangement.”
“Oh, yeah, I just figured out that problem too.” She pushed the two young men together. “You stay with Lalli. I bet he doesn't even understand what's going on. We can't be leaving him on his own.”
“Oh, yes, that's exactly what my concern was. Poor guy, all alone. I'll keep him close by. Got to make sure he doesn't wander off and get lost in here.”
“Good. We'll meet back here in fifteen minutes.” Emil started to point out that he certainly didn't have a precious pre-Rash watch, but fell silent. After all, he thought, he could estimate the time fairly well, and if he and Lalli came back early, how was Sigrun to know? “I'll take the death room,” Sigrun went on, “since you were so scared by that place.”
“Oh? Actually, I …” He hesitated, wanting to deny his fear but not wanting her to send him to the room full of skeletons. “I appreciate that. Thank you.” She punched him gently on the shoulder and strode out through the double doors.
Left without the experienced troll-hunter, Emil shivered, running his hand through his hair once, twice. “All right, Lalli,” he said at length, “let's get this done fast so we can —” He turned to his left, where the scout had been standing. “Lalli?” The scout was gone, not even his flashlight visible. “Lalli!” Emil covered his mouth fearfully. What might that shout have awakened?
Fine. I'll go alone.
I can do this.
Emil patted his weapons: dagger, pistol, Cleanser's belt slung bandolier-style across his body, loaded with small bottles of explosives and incendiaries. Reassured, he walked to the closed second door. Lalli had not left through that door; not even the soft-footed scout could have crossed the dust without a trace, nor opened the door without tearing the cobwebs. The Swede looked back at the library, seeing that the skeleton's bony hand pointed to this door. Sigrun had thriftily collected the pistol on a prior trip.
She called me her right-hand warrior and a recruit. She said she'd train me up to be a troll-hunter.
She called me a hapless ham-fisted Swede.
She hugged me.
She was angry that I destroyed the book.
She trusted me to look for the grossling.
Emil brushed away the cobwebs and opened the door, pushing aside the dust of decades. He shined his flashlight around carefully, checking the walls and floor, but not the ceiling. That lesson was yet to be learned. Seeing no signs of grosslings, he advanced down a short corridor. To the right were two doors; he looked inside, flashing his light around and seeing nothing. The dust and cobwebs were undisturbed, and though there were ventilation ducts, their covers were on, and nothing dripped from them.
He proceeded to a stairwell leading down and hesitated, looking down into the darkness. “Lalli?” he called, but the dust and cobwebs ate the echoes, and he looked around warily, fearing what he might have awakened. Still, all was silent and, setting his shoulders, he descended, testing each step and staying close to the wall where the wood was less likely to break.
Water had gotten into the lower level over the decades, and black mold trailed down the walls, making the air damp and musty. In places there were mushrooms, dead now in the cold. Somewhere water was dripping, and the building creaked now and then. Emil pulled his collar over his face as he checked each room, playing his flashlight over the floors and walls. Though the dust was undisturbed, he was still alert for grosslings; studying to be a Cleanser, he'd learned that, if left alone, grosslings could go into stasis for years, even decades, only to spring into action if an uninfected person or animal came near.
When he estimated that ten minutes had passed and he had found nothing alarming, Emil concluded that it was time to head back to the library. Following his own tracks down a hallway, he paused, listening. Had he heard something?
Scritch. Scrabble.
Emil's hand wavered between his pistol and his dagger, but in the end, he drew the dagger and advanced into an intersecting corridor. It's only a puny little thing. I'll kill it. I'll chop it up. I'll make Sigrun proud. I can do it! I have to —
Something splattered down on him. The flashlight jerked up by reflex rather than intent, flashing over a maw, fangs, claws, a massive slime-covered shape stretching from wall to wall, eyes glowing red as the light passed over them.
Walls tore, pieces pattering down. The huge troll pulled itself free and dropped. Emil flung his flashlight into its maw. Stumbling back in sudden darkness, the Cleanser flung an incendiary at the mass crashing to the floor where he had just stood. By the light of rising flames he fled, pursued by the troll's shrieks. As he rounded a corner, slipping in the dust, a second troll, many-legged and long-necked, the size of a large dog, leapt on him. Emil fell backwards, slashing at grasping limbs with one hand as he held the thing's long muzzle away with the other. “Sigrun!” he screamed, and twisted his head away from the snapping jaws. “Sigrun!”
Incredibly, Sigrun was there, decapitating the troll with one blow and yanking Emil to his feet.
“Th-there's one more back there!” Emil managed.
“There's probably a gazillion of them back there! We've got to get out of this dump before they're all slobbering down our necks!” She ran ahead, her flashlight showing her tracks. Behind her, Emil threw several more incendiaries and a bottle of oil in the face of the huge troll pulling itself after them.
To Emil's immense surprise, there was a stunning explosion, the shockwave from which knocked both fleeing humans off their feet. As they picked themselves up and ran, more explosions raged behind them. Racing up the stairs, jumping over fallen beams, dodging debris falling from the ceiling as the building shook — at last they saw the door before them and Mikkel beyond it, reaching in to pull them the last meter to safety.
“Lalli!” Mikkel shouted, his voice muffled in Emil's ringing ears. “Where's Lalli?”
“What?” Sigrun shouted back.
“Where's Lalli?”
Lalli! How could Emil have forgotten him? Explosions continued inside the building, and the little scout was lost in there! “Lalli!” Emil screamed, turning to run back into the building but caught by Sigrun's firm grip on his collar. “We have to go back!” He struggled to pull away.
An explosion high in the building showered them with fragments, and as they looked up in alarm, Lalli flung himself through the remains of a window. Mikkel moved, his arms outstretched, driven to his knees by the impact as he caught the falling scout. Lalli jerked away from him, turning briefly to glare at Emil before racing after the tank, already driving away at its best speed. Emil and Sigrun ran behind, leaving Mikkel to stagger to his feet and follow.
The four immunes soon caught up with the tank, as its top speed was little more than a jogging pace; they clambered into its back compartment, crowded with supplies and salvaged books. Tuuri shouted through the wall that she was heading for the next campsite as the others caught their breath.
Sigrun turned to Emil, grinning broadly, eyes bright with excitement. Being chased by grosslings and having a building blown up around her was the sort of thing that a Hunter like her lived for. She embraced him, crying, “Wasn't that the awesomest? I had my doubts, but there's some Viking in you after all! We'll make a great team! You and me and the little forest mage guy! We'll wreck this old city up real good, and take everything we find! What do you say? Are you with me?”
Lalli cringed into a corner as far from her as he could manage; Emil tried to smile and be brave before the stress overcame him and he lost his lunch on the floor. Mikkel took action, placing a heavy hand on Sigrun's shoulder. “If you would, Captain Eide, please have a seat.” He guided her to a crate of explosives and pushed her to sit before turning to Emil. “Sit down, Emil. Bend forward with your head on your knees. Good.” Leaving Emil sitting on another crate, he rummaged in a cabinet and came up with a rag. “Here. There's no water, but at least you can clean your face. Stay there.” He nodded at Lalli, who had straightened up and was now watching impassively.
Emil wiped his mouth, hating himself. Sigrun was pleased with me, she was happy, and I ruined it. I'll never live this down. And Mikkel will make me clean it, he'll throw me down on my knees and kick me to make me obey, and I'll vomit again from the smell and the humiliation …
“Hey, don't worry about it,” Sigrun said. “Lots of recruits are sick after their first fight. And my first captain, man, that guy was sick after every single fight. Carried two canteens, one for drinking and one for, you know, washing out his mouth. Fought like a very devil, though, every time. It's just the reaction. Nothing to worry about.” Emil sat up, gazing at her with something like worship.
Mikkel opened the door and, after studying their backtrail for a long moment, scraped up the mess with a snow shovel and tossed it out. To Emil's surprise — or perhaps not, once he thought about it — Lalli pushed past the Dane and jumped out. “Wait —” Mikkel said, but as there was no response, he shrugged and turned back. Lalli was fast. He could easily keep up.
Mikkel returned to his cabinet, pulling out some rags and a bottle of ammonia-based cleanser which killed the worst of the smell while stinging their noses. Emil watched him, puzzled. The big bully is just cleaning up the mess? Not making me do it? Not making fun of me? He looked over at Sigrun, who was leaning back with her eyes closed. Oh. She's here. He won't dare do anything to me when she's here. But when she's away … He shivered, remembering hazing in public school and in the Cleanser barracks.
By the time Mikkel finished cleaning, the tank was rumbling over soil rather than grinding over pavement, and shortly thereafter, it slewed to the left and stopped. Mikkel got to his feet, banged on the wall that separated the two compartments. “Tuuri, we need soap, towels, and clothes for everyone. Keep your mask on and toss them out the door.”
“Will do,” came the answer.
“There's a stream nearby,” Mikkel told the other two. “Lalli said it was safe as of this morning, so go over there and strip. Leave your clothes on the bank and get cleaned up. I'll bring you soap and such.”
Suddenly reminded of the filth that covered him, Emil gulped, holding down more vomit by main force, and ran for the door. He found the stream by its sound, placed his weapons in a nest of dry grass, and then, shuddering, yanked off his clothes and splashed into the stream, gasping at the cold. In that moment, he thought that freezing to death would be preferable to suffering the touch of grossling slime any longer. About five meters away, Sigrun ducked under the water, came up spouting and grinning. Emil thought Norwegians must not have bathtubs and must bathe in freezing streams all the time. He, on the other hand, had grown up in civilized Sweden and this was not what he was used to.
Mikkel tossed the soap to Emil, who immediately scrubbed his hair, his face, his hands, his hair again … until Sigrun called, “Hey! You going to share that, or what?” Shamefaced, he threw it to her. On the bank, Mikkel stripped to his long black underclothes, scrubbed a jacket, then another and another. Lalli, also in his underclothes, paced from the stream to the tank and back again, keeping watch.
When the two climbed out, Mikkel gave each a towel, pointed at a pile of clean clothes, and went back to scrubbing. Once Sigrun was dry and dressed, he called her over for a low-voiced discussion, after which she trotted off downstream. Emil thought he should step up and take his punishment; the longer Mikkel had to wait, the worse it would be. “May I help with something?” he asked.
“You can rinse those over there and hang them up to dry. They won't be dry by tonight,” he went on, as if musing to himself, “but we can't leave them out. No telling what might sniff them out.”
Emil took a breath and approached. The big bully wants me by the stream; most likely he means to throw me in, so my only dry clothes are soaked and I have to wear them wet the rest of the day. Very well. He could do much worse. He had fought bullies before, sometimes winning, though they always came back with friends, and then he always lost. But he knew he had no chance against Mikkel; he'd seen the man open the tunnel door alone after he and Sigrun together couldn't budge it. He picked up the clothes and knelt by the stream, his back crawling.
Nothing happened. Mikkel scrubbed at a pair of white outer trousers: Lalli's, Emil thought. Unable to bear the silence, Emil asked, “Where'd Sigrun go?”
“She's looking for herbs we can use. We're not well provided for in terms of medical supplies, you know, and maybe she can find us an anti-emetic herb.”
“What's a … anti-emmy … what?”
“An anti-emetic keeps you from vomiting.”
“Oh — I'm sorry about that. It was, just —” What was Mikkel going to do to him for making a mess and then sitting idle while the older man cleaned it up?
“Not for you. For Lalli.”
“Oh, right.” Emil thought of the scout vomiting as they crossed the bridge, and choosing to run after the tank rather than ride inside. “Yeah, I guess he's had a tough time.”
“Just so.”
Emil looked downstream, hopeful, but there was no sign of Sigrun. The two men worked, the wind whispered through bare branches, and Lalli paced from stream to tank and back again.
“What exactly happened in there?” Mikkel asked when the silence had grown long. “Why did you blow up the building? Why did you leave Lalli in an exploding building?”
“I, I didn't mean to. I mean, I didn't plant explosives. You can ask Sigrun! I was with her the whole time except, like, ten or fifteen minutes, and I didn't have any big explosives —”
“Understood, understood. Just tell me what happened. Why wasn't Lalli with you?”
“He went off by himself. I don't know why. See, we went back for another load of books, except there was a grossling, just a little one; it was in a vent and Lalli spotted it. It got away when Sigrun went to look at it, so she said we should check to see if there were more. If there was just the one, if it was just a rat-beast or something, we could keep going and bring out all those books.” He looked hopefully at Mikkel. If he understood that Emil had been trying to save all those books, trying to make him rich too …
Mikkel nodded, tossed him the trousers and picked up a black shirt, Emil's own. “So you checked for more?”
“Yes. Sigrun went by herself, but she said me and Lalli should stay together because he didn't understand. Only he didn't even understand that, and I just looked away for a minute, and he was gone. I mean, maybe you think I should have followed him, but we'd made all those tracks in the dust, and I didn't have any idea which one was his.”
“Certainly it would have been a difficult tracking job. Then what?”
Emil gave Mikkel a wary glance. Was that sarcasm? A veiled insult? He licked his lips and continued, describing his exploration. “And it was time to turn back, but I heard this noise … it was like, I don't know, claws clicking on the floor, so I went to kill it and, and, and something drooled on me!”
Mikkel looked up. “I wondered how you got slime on top of your head.”
Somehow his lack of sympathy made Emil feel better. “Yeah, there was a big troll on the ceiling, and it tried to drop on me, so I threw my flashlight and it broke —”
Mikkel winced at that, and Emil hung his head. There remained a lot of pre-Rash flashlights, for many survivors had stockpiled such things, and Iceland had a factory that made flashlights among other things, but a flashlight was still an expensive item and they had no spares. “Perhaps Lalli can find a replacement,” Mikkel said without much hope. If Lalli could find any still in their plastic packaging, in a shop rather than gathered up in the panic that accompanied the Rash, they'd have batteries that fit. More likely, Emil thought, he'd have to do without, unless a flashlight had been issued to Lalli, and he was willing to share.
Confused by Mikkel's behavior — he didn't act at all as Emil expected — the Cleanser cleared his throat and continued. “Then I threw an incendiary at it, and that slowed it down. I tried to run for it, but the little troll jumped me. I was fighting but I, I don't think I'd have made it if Sigrun hadn't come. She cut that thing's head off, just like that! But, you know, she said there were lots more, and the big one was after us. So I threw a can of oil and some more incendiaries at it, and, and, and I don't know what happened. It just blew up! And the rest of the building too!”
Mikkel's expression was strangely intent. “You could easily have killed Lalli or Captain Eide. Or yourself. You must be very careful with fire.”
Emil thought he might say more, but they heard Sigrun returning at that moment.
“I got your herbs,“ she said, tossing Mikkel a partially filled canvas sack, “and I found some sphagnum.” She dropped a second sack beside him; it squelched and water spilled out. “Half of that's ours.” She trotted off to the tank.
“Ours?” Emil asked, bewildered.
“Her and Tuuri,” Mikkel said, then, seeing his face, “What, don't you have any sisters?”
“No, I'm an only child.”
“I'm the eldest of five. I have two sisters. I gathered my share of sphagnum when I was younger.”
Emil frowned. He'd heard something about sphagnum in the Cleansers. The women had wanted it … “Oh!”
“Yes. They came expecting to be here three weeks at most. Now we don't know how long we'll be here, so they want a supply. I thought this area was too dry for it, or I'd have asked for it specifically.” He looked downstream. “Once we get all this cleaned up, I'll go get more.”
“Do you really think we'll need a lot?” Emil was familiar with sphagnum as part of a dressing for wounds.
“I hope not.” The medic looked down, scrubbed harder at the shirt. “I very much hope not.”
“Not for you. For Lalli.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I guess he's had a tough time.”
“Just so.”
Mikkel focused on the filthy trousers before him, but could not deflect his thoughts.
I have my orders. I accepted them.
But it was easy to accept, sitting there in the base. Not so easy when looking at a young man — practically a child — who trusts me so much, he works with his back to me.
Mikkel looked at Emil's back: broad for his size, with the play of muscles visible through his long-sleeved undershirt, as he had not donned his clean uniform jacket. The younger man stood, wrung out the jacket he was holding, and hung it over a branch. With a glance at Mikkel, he sat back down to rinse another jacket.
I was to determine if he loses control of his powers under stress. Which he does. Somehow, he lost control of his powers and blew up the building. He could easily have killed Captain Eide or Lalli or both. Or himself, or even me. He is a danger to everyone around him.
I am to ensure in this case that he does not return to the Known World. This is a duty I accepted, just as I accepted the duty to euthanize — no euphemism: to kill with my own hands — Tuuri if she should be infected.
Mikkel touched the hilt of his dagger.
But if Tuuri is infected, she will not, cannot, recover, and so death is the least bad option. Emil, however, can learn. He can learn to master his power and then he will not be a danger to others. He has time; we will not return to the Known World any time soon.
And if he kills someone in the meantime because I failed in my duty?
There was no answer to that. Mikkel tossed the trousers to Emil and went to work on the Swede's undershirt. The grossling slime had gotten inside his jacket and befouled the shirt as well. “What exactly happened in there?” he asked. “Why did you blow up the building? Why did you leave Lalli in an exploding building?”
Mikkel listened to the story, wincing at the loss of the flashlight, and was brought up short by Sigrun's words. There were lots of trolls in there? She's a troll-hunter; she would know if there was a swarm. And when Emil released his power to kill the troll pursuing them, might that power then have sought out the other trolls? All the other trolls?
According to General Trond, no one really knew how powers like pyrokinesis worked, but the effects acted somewhat independently of the user. The General likened them to an animal let loose to do the user's bidding, but a poorly trained and powerful animal, let off the leash, could do immense damage. Perhaps he didn't really lose control. He wanted all the trolls dead — only the trolls — but there were far more than he realized within the building, and so there were explosions all over the place. He just needs to … instruct his power a little more clearly.
Mikkel held up the shirt, saw another splotch of slime, and laid it down for more scrubbing. As Emil finished his story — “It just blew up! And the rest of the building too!” — Mikkel decided he should to help the younger man train his powers. But how, without revealing that he knew more than he should about such powers in general, and about Emil in particular?
“You could easily have killed Lalli or Sigrun,” he began, looking hard into Emil's eyes as if he could communicate his meaning telepathically. “Or yourself. You must be very careful with fire.” He hesitated, uncertain how to go on, and the moment was lost as Sigrun returned with his requested herbs and the sphagnum moss.
As Emil rinsed and hung up the last shirt, Mikkel told him, “We'll need a latrine now. Once I've gathered some sphagnum, I'll help collect fuel and then we'll set up the perimeter sensors.”
“O-okay,” Emil answered, glancing at Mikkel with an odd expression. Did he look frightened of me? Surely not. The kid isn't a telepath; he can't know what I was thinking. Still, Mikkel felt guilty for his thoughts.
As Emil disappeared into the back of the tank in search of a shovel, and Lalli passed to the other side in his patrol, Mikkel was briefly unobserved since the two women were already in the tank. He took advantage of the opportunity to grab his uniform and lever himself painfully to his feet. If not for the deep drift of dirt and dead leaves that cushioned the pavement outside Spot number 24, he'd certainly have broken something falling to his knees in catching Lalli, but better his knees than Lalli's back or head. All the same, he could feel his knees swelling, and kneeling as he cleaned the clothes had allowed them to stiffen.
Leaning against a nearby tree, Mikkel managed to pull on his uniform trousers and step into his boots before Lalli returned, followed shortly by Emil. Fortunately, he didn't need to bend his knees to lace up his boots or don his uniform jacket. His warm, black underclothes covered all but his feet, hands, and head, but they ripped easily and provided little protection against the wind, unlike his uniform. Properly attired, he headed for the tank carrying the two sacks which Sigrun had brought back. Inside the tank, Sigrun and Tuuri were examining the map, Tuuri referring frequently to her list of prospects. Mikkel pulled out two more canvas sacks from a cabinet — they had half a dozen more after that — and turned to Sigrun.
“Where did you find the sphagnum? I don't begrudge you your share, but I'd feel better if we had some more.”
“Oh, okay.” Sigrun took the sacks from him. He was too startled to tighten his grip and keep them from her. “I'll fetch some more.”
“I meant to go —”
“It's too dangerous for you.” She was out the door before he could respond.
Mikkel watched her go then, without turning to Tuuri, who had witnessed his humiliation, he asked, “Tuuri, did you try the radio again?”
“N-no, I'll do that now.”
“Thank you.” Still not looking at her, Mikkel gathered the perimeter sensors and went outside. Emil had just started on the latrine, so the Dane placed the sensors by the tank, took an axe from the back, and began chopping wood from the surrounding forest. The Sun was well up, and he believed any trolls within earshot would forget the noise before dark. Emil soon joined him, and Mikkel returned the axe to the tank so as to have free hands to collect the wood.
“Emil,” Mikkel said, having come up with an oblique approach to the problem, “how do cats detect grosslings?”
The younger man gave him another odd, fearful look before answering. “I-I don't know.”
“Just so. No one knows. It's not sight, sound, or scent, and no one knows what it is.”
“Uh, yeah, okay.” Emil's brows furrowed, and he looked at Mikkel with a perplexed expression.
“Some people have the same ability, you know. Finnish 'mages', for instance, are supposed to have it.”
Emil frowned. “Tuuri said Lalli's a mage. You mean he can detect grosslings like a cat?”
“I expect so. Probably better than a cat, or at least at longer range. And of course he would understand what he was seeing and be able to communicate it. To another Finn, anyway, if not to the rest of us.”
“Lalli's a mage … then … are you saying magic is real?”
“I didn't say that, not at all. Magic — waving a wand around, drawing little patterns, or reciting a spell — is a performance. The people who do it can't prove their actions have any effect. But that detection ability is real, even if the Finns choose to call it 'magic'. It's clearly reproducible, even if we can't explain how it works.” Ask the question. Ask me about other abilities. Think about your abilities with fires, and ask.
If Emil asked, then Mikkel could tell him rumors from Iceland about psychic powers (which they, like the Finns, called 'magic') such as manipulating things without touching them, reading minds … and affecting fires. Then Mikkel could truthfully tell the General that Emil had raised the question and that he had only answered with rumors. But Emil might get the idea to test his powers and gain better conscious control over them.
Mikkel was no telepath. “Wow,” Emil said, picking up another log. “I never thought about cats and magic that way.” When he said nothing more, Mikkel had to drop the subject.
By the time the two men finished collecting wood and setting up the perimeter sensors, Sigrun was back to stand guard, and Lalli was still prowling around, while Tuuri cut the sphagnum into strips. Mikkel stepped into the tank and pulled a rune-incised bottle and an eyedropper from his locker. Seating himself on his bunk, he held the bottle firmly between his legs as he opened it, for it was too valuable to risk knocking over with his clumsy hands. With the dropper filled, he screwed the top back on and restored the bottle to its place in the locker. Outside, he held up the dropper and said, “This is the Icelandic hearing protection remedy. You were all exposed to the explosions (except you, Tuuri), so I'm going to treat you.”
“Ah, good,” Sigrun said. “I was hoping the sponsors didn't cheap out on us. We use that stuff all the time at home. It works great!”
With so many fighting the constant dangers of Rash-creatures, the Icelandic hearing protection remedy was needed throughout the Known World to prevent or treat hearing damage from loud noises. Serving in the Danish Army, Mikkel and the other soldiers had used it after every watch, as even with their earplugs, their ears would ring from the gunfire. The remedy came in rune-incised bottles and users were warned not to decant it into other containers because it would lose its effect. Mikkel and other Danes thought that warning was nonsense … but they didn't decant it. Empty bottles were returned for a refund.
Sigrun submitted to the treatment, a drop in each ear, as did Emil and (with some Finnish scolding) Lalli. As he returned to his locker, Mikkel treated his own ears. Though he hadn't been as close to the explosions as the others, he didn't want to take any chances.
That taken care of, Emil built the fire as usual, and Mikkel prepared their supper. This was the last of the food that had been provided in the main compartment; in the morning, Mikkel would open one of the crates in the back and find out what the sponsors had given them. He hoped for flour and butter or lard, as he could make acceptable bannock with the right ingredients.
As they ate, Tuuri reported that she had not gotten through to Öresund Base as the static was too intense. Mikkel and Sigrun were both on edge as a result, and hurried everyone inside as evening shadows fell. The two older — and taller — members of the team strung clotheslines inside the tank so the freshly washed clothes could finish drying inside.
Lalli crawled under Mikkel's bunk for a nap before going scouting; when Mikkel turned to Tuuri, a question in his eyes, she shrugged, seeming embarrassed, so he chose not to ask why Lalli slept on the floor instead of in a bunk. Sigrun and Tuuri discussed the plan for the next day while Emil looked on. Not wanting to be dismissed again, Mikkel stayed away from them, busying himself with tidying up the tank and readying the bunks for the night.
The team turned in early, expecting a profitable run, and, despite the worries of the older team members that the intense static portended a swarm attack, the night was quiet. Mikkel slept fitfully and was awake when Lalli rolled out from under his bunk and pulled on his uniform in the dim moonlight. After the scout had left, Mikkel checked the defenses, finding that Lalli had set the perimeter sensors for a fifteen second delay and allowed the door to lock behind him. The Dane nodded in relief, still worried about a possible swarm. But he's a Finnish mage, so he can detect grosslings. If he's not worried, I shouldn't be.
Still … he seated himself in the passengers' seat in front, where he could see through the thick glass windshield. The Moon was approaching full, and shone brightly on the little clearing and the young forest beyond. According to plan, we'd be heading back when the Moon was a little past the third quarter. Instead, we're stuck here; we'll still be here in the dark of the Moon. In the Silent World in the dark of the Moon. Mikkel shuddered, tucking his shaking hands into his armpits.
At length, he slept.
Bzzt! Bzzt!
Jerking awake, for a moment Mikkel had no idea where he was. He was huddled uncomfortably in a corner and someone was screaming …
No.
It was the perimeter alarm. He got to his feet slowly and painfully, suppressing the urge to groan or wince. As he turned to work his way around the passenger bench, he found Sigrun already checking the controls.
“Just the scout,” she said, then turned to look at him, grinning. “Tough getting up in the morning, isn't it, poor old man?”
Not looking at her or answering, Mikkel edged past her in the narrow space beside the radio compartment and opened the door to let Lalli in. It was true, he thought resentfully, that he was the oldest member of the team. It was equally true that, at thirty-two, Sigrun was just two years his junior.
Lalli knew the routine from the previous morning. Stripping off his uniform jacket and dropping his uniform trousers, he passed them to Mikkel, then closed his eyes and held out his hands for UV treatment. The medic turned to the cabinet to get his goggles and the UV wand. “Please close your eyes and turn your back,” he told Sigrun.
“Is this really necessary?” she asked. “He looks clean and I don't think scouts do much fighting. And the Rash won't last long outside a grossling in this weather anyway.”
“No, I don't believe it's necessary,” he agreed, “for all the reasons you gave. But it is the protocol laid down by the Nordic Council.”
“Yeah, well, the Nordic Council isn't here, and we are. If it's not necessary, then skip it. Stupid to do stuff just because some dumb Icelanders told us to.”
“Certainly, Captain Eide.” Mikkel put the gear away, keeping his satisfaction from showing. He tapped the patient Finn on the shoulder, stepped out of the way, and gestured that he could go into the main compartment, where Emil and Tuuri were just waking. With a puzzled look, Lalli shrugged and proceeded while Mikkel hung the uniform in the UV cabinet. After a moment's hesitation, he switched on the UV lights, for they took little power and might remove other contaminants. That done, he pulled his own uniform from the clothesline, scooped up his boots, and exited, muttering as he did so, “I'll get the sensors.”
Out of sight by the back of the tank, he pulled on his uniform trousers and stepped into his boots. As he began to tie them, motion caught his eye and he jerked upright as Sigrun came around the corner and leaned against the tank.
“All right, Mikkel, what's wrong with you?” Her face was as impassive as his own.
He stiffened. That question was never a question. It was a rebuke, or a sneer.
“Nothing is wrong with me,” he said coldly, returning to tying his boots.
“Don't give me that. Warriors hide wounds to keep fighting. I've done it myself. But a good captain doesn't allow it, and I'm an excellent captain. I can see you're hiding some injury, and I want to know what it is, how bad it is, and how it happened. Now.”
Mikkel straightened, looked past her, and replied woodenly, “In catching Lalli, I bruised my knees. Nothing is broken, but they are bruised and swollen. I am entirely capable of carrying out my duties.”
“Ah. I should have thought of that. They're stiff, too, I'll wager.” Mikkel didn't answer. “Well, an honorable wound, honorably gotten in helping a comrade.” She grinned suddenly. “But no scars to show off in the mead-hall!” Sobering again, she added, “Don't hide wounds from me, Mikkel. You, of all people, should know better than that.”
He did, of course. “Yes, Captain Eide.”
“Oh, Hel. I don't need to be reassured of my position. You're Mikkel, and I'm Sigrun. Right?”
“Yes, ah, Sigrun.” It was progress, certainly, to have advanced to first names.
“Okay, good. I'll help you with the sensors. No need for the juniors to know you're injured.” Picking up the sensors required bending down and was easier with good knees, so Mikkel appreciated the help. With Sigrun helping, Mikkel soon had all the sensors and returned to the tank just as Emil and Tuuri were taking down the wash. Sigrun remained outside, on guard.
Emil rushed to help put away the sensors. At least he's quit looking at me like I might bite. I still have to find a way to talk to him about his powers. “Emil, please build a fire for breakfast. There should be enough firewood already. Tuuri, please try the radio again. The sponsors must have seen the condition of the bridge, and they surely think we've all drowned.”
“Is it safe?” Tuuri asked. “I mean, if the enemy is still out there, and they hear us …?”
Mikkel shrugged. “We're already trapped in the Silent World. It's not like they can make that any worse. I don't believe they'd try to come after us, but if they did, they'd run into all the grosslings we stirred up. I think we're safe. And the sponsors will be worried.”
“Will do!” Tuuri tossed the clothes on Emil's bunk and headed for the radio compartment while Emil left the tank. Mikkel picked up the clothes, hanging the uniforms properly in the UV cabinet, folding the underclothes, and putting them in the correct cabinets for the various team members. As he worked, he listened to Tuuri calling, over and over, for Öresund base. The static was still severe, but at length she got a reply and asked for the sponsors to be called.
While she explained the sabotage of the bridge, Mikkel left to open the crates in the back. He gave Emil a nod of thanks as he passed, for the Swede had a good fire going, just right for cooking porridge. In the back, he took a crowbar to the top crate, set the lid aside, and looked in to find … candles.
Mikkel pulled the first crate off, opened the second, and found it too full of nothing but candles. He closed the two crates and restacked them, giving himself a moment to rest his forehead against the upper crate in despair. We survived the bridge collapse because Sigrun has the Luck, but stupid Mikkel is on the expedition, and stupid Mikkel is a curse to himself and everyone around him. And now we're going to starve in the Silent World because stupid Mikkel didn't think to check the crates when I helped load them.
This was not a failing that he could quietly fix, and Sigrun couldn't fire him and bring someone else in to fix his error. Mikkel squared his shoulders and went forth to handle the latest disaster.
“May I borrow the radio for a second?” He asked Tuuri quite courteously.
“Oh, of course, go ahead.”
“Hello, this is Mikkel speaking,” he stated in his most professional tones.
“Well, hello, Mikkel! How are you doing?” Male, Swedish: Torbjörn then.
“I'm quite well, thank you.” As Torbjörn started to respond politely, Mikkel added, “We're out of food.”
“Uh … what?” That was Torbjörn.
“What?” That was Emil outside the tank.
“What?” And that was Sigrun charging into the tank.
“Yes. But we do have a surplus of candles. The two crates which were meant to contain our rations in fact contain candles.”
“Uh … hold on.” There was conversation somewhat away from the microphone; as the sponsors were speaking rapidly in Swedish, Mikkel couldn't make out what they were saying. Admiral Olsen's bellow was loud and clear, however: “How soon?!! I could arrange that today! But securing permission from the national security office will take … four weeks!”
Mikkel closed his eyes for a long moment. Four weeks. They should have had three weeks' food, and he could have stretched it to four. They would have been able to hold out, if they'd had the food. But he hadn't checked the crates as they were loaded, and now they would starve.
There were several thumps against the microphone, then General Trond took over. “Wait. We'll get you some supplies.” With that, he signed off and the team looked at each other in despair.
“Wait. We'll get you some supplies.”
Wait.
Sigrun hated waiting. The worst punishment her parents had used as she was growing up was to order her to sit down and stay quiet for an hour. By the end of that time, she'd agree to whatever restriction they imposed, rather than continue.
In the Silent World, however, there was no one to tell her to sit down. She ducked out of the tank and began a patrol. It was early morning still, and there might be a troll or two lurking around. Emil followed her out and settled beside his little fire; Mikkel headed for the stream where they'd bathed the previous evening. As Sigrun made her circuits, she saw Mikkel bend down to pick something green from the withered vegetation, and through the open side door, she saw Tuuri and Lalli with their heads together over the map.
Good for the scout, to make his report even in this disaster. I wonder if there're any prospects close enough for me to check them out by myself. I doubt Emil will want to go with me when he thinks we're going to starve to death.
Why didn't I check the supplies? Yes, the sponsors — and that loud-mouthed Danish guy — were all but shoving us onto the bridge, but I should have stood up to them. Should have insisted on taking some time. Why did I trust a bunch of Danes to do a proper job of supplying us?
Mikkel returned with a handful of greenery and disappeared into the tank.
I wonder what he's up to. I suppose he's pretending to work, or not wanting to sit on the ground with his bruised knees. The sponsors should have given us some camp stools.
Sigrun stopped, blinking at the door to the back compartment. How do you know they didn't? How do you know we have any ammo? Or Cleanser gear? For all you know, we've got nothing but crates of disassembled Swedish furniture in there. The Dane only checked the food crates. He wouldn't have checked the ammo.
Even as the thoughts occurred to her, she was climbing into the tank. Mikkel had left the crowbar by the food crates, so Sigrun snatched it up and pried open first the ammo crate and then the Cleanser crate. She let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding as she saw that both contained the expected supplies.
Okay, at least we can fight. And hunt for food, if we have to. I trust Uncle Trond, but … even Uncle Trond has limits. Maybe there's no way for even him to get us supplies …
With the door closed behind her, she continued her circuit around the tank, finding Mikkel setting up their tripod over Emil's fire and hanging their kettle from it. “What's this?” she asked.
“Mint tea. Better than nothing.”
“Ah.” There was nothing else to say. She continued her patrol, and Mikkel returned to the tank, producing thumps and clatters. Maybe he's also gotten suspicious of what else might have been left out.
Two more loops around the clearing, and she found Emil pouring five mugs of mint tea, and Mikkel offering her an … object.
The object appeared to be a small dark brown brick. Emil had one balanced on his knee as he sat cross-legged beside the fire, and through the side door she could see that Tuuri and Lalli each had one and appeared to be examining them.
“What is this?”
“Emergency rations. I found a box of them. Enough to keep us going for a week even if the General is unable to obtain supplies.”
“Are they supposed to look like this? How old is this thing?” She held it up close to her eyes. There was no apparent mold growing on it.
“There was no expiry date on the box. I expect they've been there since the coming of the Rash. These tanks didn't always get cleaned up very well. Especially after the … after Kastrup.”
“And you expect us to eat this?”
Mikkel shrugged. “Up to you. But I have nothing else to offer. I went through all the drawers and cabinets, and that's all we have.”
Sigrun sighed, sat down beside Emil, and gnawed a corner of the brick. It compared unfavorably with salted boot leather, and improved only slightly when dipped in the mint tea.
“If this is all we have to eat from now on,” the Swede muttered to her, “I want you to shoot me.”
“It's not that bad. Anyway, this place must have something for us to eat. Hey, Mikkel. You've been here before. Is there anything we can hunt for?”
“There are fish in the lakes and streams, and both resident birds and birds that overwinter here.”
“Yeah? Did the soldiers eat any of the birds? Did they taste good?”
“Gunfire scared off the birds.” Mikkel leaned against the tank's tread, looking down at his untouched rations.
“Sigrun!” Tuuri called. “Come! Hurry! They've found a way to save us!”
The whole team rushed into the tank as Lalli retreated to the sleeping compartment, and the last one in, Mikkel, closed and sealed the door.
The General himself had taken over the radio and gave their instructions. “There's an outpost pier not far from your current location. A supply dock built during the Danish reclamation attempt. If you miss it, you're blind. It's the one with the lighthouse. There the ship can drop off your replacement crates.”
Tuuri acknowledged and signed off, then waved the others to silence while she leaned around them to speak to Lalli, finishing with a question. Lalli nodded and answered briefly, and she replied in a firm tone.
Lalli started for the door without further response, and Mikkel opened the door and stepped aside while holding out one large hand to block his path and the other to offer Mikkel's own, still untouched, share of the rations. The scout paused for a moment, looking back and forth between the hands, then hesitantly accepted the food. No longer blocked, he dashed away down the street. Mikkel glanced at Sigrun and shrugged.
Tuuri was explaining to the others, “He said the lighthouse was close, so close we'd see it if there weren't buildings in the way. It's just there's a lot of stuff in the streets and he'll have to find a way for us to get through.” They all nodded. In theory, the tank could push most vehicles out of its way, but in practice, no one trusted it to hold together if they tried that.
“Okay, then!” said Sigrun happily. “Let's pack up and get out of here!” Tuuri stayed by the radio in a far better mood, and the other three clambered out to get to work.
Emil's fire had flared up and was now threatening to escape the circle of rocks that served as his fireplace. Mikkel rushed to throw a bucket of water on it. His cry of “Emil!” brought the other around just in time to catch the empty bucket, and one look sent the Swede rushing to the stream for more. Mikkel hastily gathered his cooking gear and looked over at Sigrun with annoyance.
Sigrun ignored him. Was something there, just at the back of the tank? She had caught a movement out of the corner of her eye … Her dagger was in her hand without conscious thought, and another slight movement behind a bush brought her at a run. The troll was small (was this a child? — she dismissed the thought), and she dispatched it with ease. At least she'd accomplished something, she thought, as she returned, cleaning her dagger on a handful of leaves and grinning at the medic.
“Troll,” she said cheerfully before returning to scanning the surroundings. Trolls, grosslings that had once been human, were dismayingly common in cities. Only perhaps one Rash victim in a ten became a grossling, but there had been unthinkable numbers of humans in Old World cities. That was why Hunters stayed out of cities, and Cleansers like Emil simply burned them instead of trying to clear them out or salvage anything from them.
The Cleanser returned with his bucket and poured it carefully on several spots which hissed and smoked in response, then dumped the rest in the middle of the crude fireplace. “All out,” he said confidently.
“Good,” said Mikkel. “Get all the gear together and dump it in the tank. We'll sort it later. Then come help me with the firewood.” They both got to work and had the tank loaded and provisioned within minutes, while Sigrun continued her patrol. The two men and Sigrun then each independently circled the tank, looking for anything that might rattle or come loose, before jumping inside and locking it up.
“So, let's get going,” Emil urged.
“No, we're waiting for Lalli,” Mikkel answered, stowing the kettle.
“But then — what was the hurry? We could have taken our time!” He twisted, wincing. In the rush to store the firewood as fast as possible, he had likely lifted more weight than he was accustomed to.
“Hurry up and wait, Emil, that's a warrior's life,” Sigrun said. “We're ready to move whenever the twig shows up. In the meantime, we can just rest.” She suited actions to words by hopping up and stretching out on her bunk, as sleeping was one way to avoid the tedium of waiting.
Two hours later, Sigrun was almost asleep, Tuuri was in the driver's seat gazing dully about with half-closed eyes, Emil was trying to stay awake beside her, and Mikkel was reading as he sat on his bunk.
The proximity sensor made everyone jump. “Lalli!” Tuuri cried joyfully. Mikkel was slow to get out of the way; Sigrun nearly kicked him in the face as she jumped down. The two of them rushed forward to see Lalli signalling “this way” to the tank. Tuuri put the tank in gear and they were finally on their way to get some food.
Tuuri felt a little — just a little — guilty about bringing Lalli along on this expedition.
I thought he wanted to come. He seemed to agree with my plans, but you never really know with Lalli, I guess, and some things that he's said since then mean … and anyway the expedition isn't going the way anyone had planned. I certainly didn't intend to get trapped here. A few weeks, and then back to the base, and then another expedition once Onni sees that I can handle it. Once everyone sees that I can handle it.
But if Lalli gets killed out there, I'll never forgive myself. And Onni will always be beside me as a reminder. He tried so hard to bring us up after … after things went wrong.
Bzzt! Bzzt!
“Lalli!” There he was, none the worse for wear. Tension she hadn't been aware of flowed out of her.
Emil started back to full wakefulness at her glad cry, looking forward at the scout and then backward at Sigrun and Mikkel, now running to the front. He jumped to his feet, edged between the seats, and took up a position behind Tuuri. As the other two approached the seats, Sigrun stopped to disable the perimeter alarm, letting Mikkel slide into the seat first, then crowded him against the window as she sat down.
“Finally! Let's go, go, go!” Sigrun was on the edge of her seat, pounding the dashboard as if that would make the tank move.
Tuuri obeyed with a will, putting the tank in gear and creeping forward to follow her cousin. He led the way to a street which had been roughly cleared: vehicles lay crushed against the collapsing buildings, some upside down.
Did a giant come through here? And is it still around? But, no. Lalli would know if something like that were still around. He'll lead us through safely.
Tuuri risked a glance at her two superiors. They were a study in contrast, both very tall, but Mikkel broad-shouldered and pudgy (not that Tuuri was in a position to criticize), and Sigrun sleek and slender. As Tuuri drove, Mikkel sat quietly, arms folded, scanning back and forth. Sigrun, meanwhile, leaned forward to peer through the windshield, leaned over Mikkel to stare through his window, craned her neck to see past Tuuri, jumped up to look back at the sensors … Tuuri did her best to ignore the Captain's constant motion.
Emil was still behind Tuuri, watching over her shoulder. She was conscious of his presence, aware of his proximity. Onni had ensured that she was trained in self-defense for the rare occasions when he wasn't around to intimidate anyone who even looked like he might bother her, but the fact remained that she was tiny, even compared to Emil, who was quite short for a Swede, and that, at the moment, the tank required her full attention. If the Swede leaned forward, if he reached down … but no, he wouldn't do that and, anyway, Sigrun would never allow it. Tuuri did her best to ignore Emil as well.
Things got harder after that first street. At times, Tuuri had to push one tread forward, very slowly, while pushing the other tread back, equally slowly, Lalli standing on a piece of debris and guiding her with gestures. The tank scraped against several vehicles, and after the second one, Sigrun said something savage, which Tuuri made note of as a probable Norwegian curse. The Captain leapt from the passenger seat and darted out of the tank before Tuuri could even shout a warning. At least the tank was moving at a crawl.
“Oh, I might crush her! I can't keep —”
“She's climbing the ladder,” Mikkel said, his deep voice slow and careful. “She's getting on top. She'll be fine up there.”
Tuuri glanced over, seeing him leaning forward to study the mirror on that side. “I don't have a mirror. It got broken off somehow.”
“Hmm. You should ask Lalli to keep an eye out for a car — preferably a truck — inside a garage or something. It would help if we could find an intact mirror to attach over there.”
“Oh! Yeah, that's a good idea.” As she spoke, Emil moved to the passenger seat beside Mikkel; Tuuri felt some relief that he wasn't quite so close to her. Not that she really thought he would bother her, but, well, he was a young man and she was a young woman, and he might want to explore that aspect of things.
At length they reached the causeway to the lighthouse, which proved to be too narrow for the tank. Tuuri parked; Sigrun slid down the windshield and hopped down off the front; Mikkel and Emil climbed out of the tank. The Dane headed for the back as Emil joined Sigrun and stood looking around. Tuuri pulled on her mask and followed the others.
Sigrun moved to block her. “Wait in the tank, fuzzy head!”
“Lalli!” Tuuri called. “Is this place safe?”
“No. This is a weird foreign country. It is dangerous.” Lalli leaned on the tank, looking off into the distance.
“Is this place, right here, safe for me? Are there grosslings nearby that might attack me?” Sometimes one had to be very precise with Lalli.
“No grosslings here. It is safe for you. For now.”
“Lalli says there are no grosslings anywhere nearby,” she reported in Swedish.
“Oh, all right. It's on your heads though. Come on!”
The cold and windswept lighthouse platform was a miserable place to wait. Nonetheless, only Emil complained and he merely muttered under his breath, ignored by the rest. Lalli, of course, first spotted the sail of their relief ship and pointed silently out to sea while the others cheered.
The ship would not approach. Instead, the crew fired a harpoon sturdy enough to take down a leviathan, driving it quite accurately into the wooden door of the lighthouse, and then used the ropes trailing behind it to ferry over two crates, each on its own small boat. They then cut the ropes as a woman shouted in Icelandic, “Tell your Norwegian friend that if he ever contacts me again I will destroy him!” The sailors immediately raised their sails, and the ship ran as the wind caught it.
Sigrun, who knew no Icelandic, shouted back, “Thank you!” Tuuri glanced at her and decided not to translate. The “Norwegian friend” must be General Trond, she thought, and she wondered how the General had arranged this delivery if the woman — presumably the captain — disliked him so much. Still, the crates were here, and Mikkel and Emil were hauling them up onto the supply dock. Mikkel had taken a couple of crowbars from the back of the tank; he gave one to Emil and each man set to work on a crate.
Mikkel had his crate open first. Sigrun peered into it, pulled out a handful of carrots, and sneered, “Really? They couldn't send us some real food?”
Mikkel's mild voice had a slight edge as he replied, “Vegetables are important, Sigrun. Perhaps we won't develop scurvy now.” As he spoke, he and Sigrun stiffened, staring at Emil and Lalli opening the other crate perhaps five meters away. Tuuri had just time to wonder what was wrong, when something moved in that crate as Emil raised the top. Sigrun's pistol was in her hand so fast that Tuuri didn't see her draw it; Mikkel raised his crowbar, pushing Tuuri behind him to shield her with his body.
Emil slammed down the lid of the crate, shouting, “There's something in the crate!”
“What? Shoot it!” Sigrun shouted. Tuuri peeked around Mikkel's ample torso to stare in disbelief. Was it a troll? Had General Trond asked for supplies and gotten a troll?
“I … think it was a person!” Emil answered at somewhat lower volume.
“Then don't shoot it and let it out!”
Mikkel muttered “Stay!” to Tuuri, and he and Sigrun dashed forward. Tuuri didn't stay, of course. She followed, being careful to keep behind Mikkel as she did so.
As Lalli, Sigrun, and Mikkel crowded around, Emil lifted the top of the crate again to reveal a very tall, very thin young man with an extraordinarily long, thick, red braid. Sigrun took one look at him and snarled, “Saboteur!”
The young man sat up and asked hesitantly in Icelandic, “Excuse me, is this Bornholm?” His gaze skipped from face to face, stopping for a moment on Tuuri's face as she peeked around Mikkel.
“No,” Mikkel answered slowly in the same tongue, “definitely not.” He glanced down at Tuuri, rolled his eyes, and gestured to direct the stranger's attention to the ruined city not far away.
“Ummm,” the young man quavered, “I — I — I think I maybe got off at the wrong place.” He looked again at Tuuri, apparently seeing her as the least hostile person around.
“Yes,” Mikkel replied, “I believe it's safe to assume as much.” More kindly he continued, “What's your name?”
“I — ah — Reynir, Reynir Árnason,” the stowaway stammered. "They'll come back for me, right?"
At the same time, Sigrun demanded, “What's he saying, Mikkel? We don't need a saboteur on top of everything else. Let's dump that crate of rabbit food, nail him in, and toss him in the drink! His ship can come get him if they want him back.”
Mikkel ran a hand through his hair, the first nervous gesture Tuuri had seen him display. “No, we shouldn't do that. I don't think he's a saboteur. I don't know what he's doing here, but I don't see how he could be one of them. This doesn't make sense. We need to radio back to base and find out what they know.”
“I don't need explanations; I want to get rid of this saboteur!” Glaring at Mikkel, she added, “All right, we'll keep him for the moment. We'll come back for the food later.” Pointing to Emil, she ordered, “Emil, you're in charge of the prisoner!”
“Come along, Reynir,” Mikkel said, and the young man obeyed after another nervous survey of the team. Emil followed close behind, the crowbar ready in his hand.
“We're out of food again, and you've sent us a saboteur!” Sigrun shouted into the microphone as soon as Torbjörn answered Tuuri's call.
“What? Food? Saboteur? What?”
“Sigrun, if I may,” Mikkel said, reaching for the microphone. When she shoved it into his hand, he went on, “Torbjörn, we've had a problem and I need to speak to the General. Now, please.”
“Yes, yes, sure, but a saboteur? Siv …” His voice trailed off as he turned away from the microphone. Sigrun made a few comments under her breath which Tuuri mentally noted as more Norwegian curses.
“What's going on over there, Mikkel?” General Trond demanded.
“We've got two crates. One contains vegetables. The other is about a third full of cans of something. A young man stowed away in that crate. He appears to be Icelandic and gives his name as Reynir Árnason. What do we know about the ship he came from?”
“It's the Túnfiskurinn, an Icelandic cargo ship out of Reykjavík, running a route carrying food from the greenhouses to Bornholm.”
“Does it have quarantine facilities? Does it put in anywhere unsafe?”
“No, of course not. It's a cargo ship, Mikkel.”
“And the crew? Immune? Or not?”
“Icelandic, and I doubt any are immune. The captain, Ása Harðardóttir, certainly is not. She won't have taken any risks. Your stowaway won't be infected, no.”
“It seemed improbable, but with our non-immune here, I was concerned.”
Tuuri looked up at Mikkel in astonishment. Mikkel really thought that guy might be infected? That makes no sense at all. This situation is making everyone paranoid. She took off the mask which Mikkel had told her to keep on even inside the tank.
“Sigrun called him a saboteur,” Trond said. “Do you think he is?”
“I don't see how he can be, no. The Punished blew up the bridge —”
“You think it was the Punished. It might not be. I'm looking into that.”
“Okay, someone blew it up. They meant for us to go with it. So why take our food? And if they did that, how could they plan to have this ship, with this man on board, in the right place for you to call on them? And why send him anyway? No, it just doesn't seem possible that he is one of the saboteurs.”
“My thinking as well.”
“But then I don't know why he's here. I'll have to ask.”
“You do that,” Trond said. “I'll have my agents in Reykjavík look into him.” Mikkel returned the microphone to the desk, clearly finished with the conversation.
“Wait!” Sigrun said from her position by the door. “I want to get rid of him. I want him out of here now!”
“We can't get rid of him,” Mikkel answered. “We have to keep him. He's stuck here, just like we are, until a rescue can be arranged. Knowing the Nordic Council, that may take weeks.”
“We don't need a saboteur on the loose, and we don't need a useless mouth to feed.”
“I agree. But that's our situation. I'll talk to him, try to find out why he's here. Tuuri, I know Lalli's a mage. Can he detect lies?”
“He can't understand that man's words —”
“I didn't ask that. Can he just detect that someone is lying?”
“I don't know.” Tuuri handed the microphone to Sigrun and ducked past Mikkel to look for Lalli. He was outside, patrolling around the tank. “Hey, Lalli. Can you tell if someone's lying? Even an Icelander?”
Lalli stopped, frowning at her. “Why is that man here?”
“That's what we want to know. Mikkel thinks he'll lie to us, so he wants you to tell us if he does. Can you do that?”
“Yes, if I must.” Her cousin sighed. “It will take me a few minutes to prepare. Outside. Away from the shouty woman.”
“Thanks, Lalli.” She passed the word on to Mikkel.
“Right. Sigrun.”
The Captain turned from berating Torbjörn. “Yeah, what?”
“Can you guard the stowaway while Emil and I fetch the food?”
“Yeah, I can guard the saboteur.”
Mikkel nodded without comment. “Emil, let's go.” The men left together as Sigrun moved to glare at their, well, call him their guest. Tuuri took the microphone to sign off, then moved to her driver's seat and put her head in her hands.
How has this expedition become such a disaster?
“I didn't understand all you and Sigrun said,” Emil began as they trotted up the causeway, “but I think she said that guy's a saboteur, and you said he's not?”
“That's right.” Mikkel took care to speak slowly and distinctly. “I don't believe he's a saboteur.”
“Why not? I mean, he sneaked in here.”
“True, but now he's trapped here along with us. If he does anything that would harm us, stop us from returning, then he'll die right alongside us. And then too, this whole situation makes no sense if the saboteurs engineered it.”
“They want us to die here —”
“They tried to kill us by blowing up the bridge. And almost succeeded.” Mikkel thought back to the heart-stopping moment when the tank strained to pull itself off a falling slab. “We were very lucky to survive. But now think about the food. Why steal it and give us candles instead, which we can eat?”
“Wait, did you just say that we can eat candles?”
“Yes, that's right. They're tallow candles. Mutton fat, according to their wrappers. We can eat them if we have to; they'll keep us alive though we won't enjoy it. I'd rather melt them for fat to fry something more palatable, though.”
A cry overhead made Emil look up. “Can we eat seagulls?”
“If we have to. I understand that their taste is … undesirable. But if you're hungry enough, you don't care about taste.”
“Have you ever been that hungry?” Emil asked curiously as they lifted the crate of vegetables.
“No.” Not … quite. There had been lean times in Rønne, after he'd been fired again, when he'd seriously considered the seagulls at the port, but always he'd found some odd job or another before resorting to them. “Getting back to the food: if they wanted to tamper with it in case we survived the collapse of the bridge, why not just poison it? Use the right poison, and we wouldn't know until it was too late. That's what I would have done.”
Mikkel kept his face perfectly straight as Emil regarded him uneasily over the top of the crate. “I guess so, yeah.”
“And then there's this Icelander. He can't have been on that ship in the expectation that we would call for food at just the right time, when the ship was nearby, and that the General would contact exactly that ship for help. Too many things had to go just right, or rather just wrong, to get him here. That can't have been planned.”
They set the crate in the back of the tank, shifting the candle crates out of the way, and returned for the other crate.
“Then who switched the crates, and why? And why is he here?”
“I have no idea as to who switched the crates or why. I'm sure the General is looking into that. Admiral Olsen too, I expect.”
“Is that the loud-mouthed Danish admiral? He doesn't like you. I saw him shouting at you. Could he have ordered them switched?”
“No, the Admiral doesn't like me, but he's a good man.” A lot of good men don't like me, usually for good reason. “He wouldn't pull a trick like that — it reflects badly on his base — and he certainly wouldn't endanger four innocent strangers just to make my life miserable.”
“Okay, so then why's that guy here?” The Swede was persistent; Mikkel had to give him that.
“I have no idea. He asked if this was Bornholm, and when I said it wasn't, he said he got off in the wrong place. Why he thought he was going to Bornholm by hiding in a crate is beyond me. We inspect everything on the quarantine island. I'll question him when we get back. Assuming Sigrun hasn't killed him already.”
“Yeah, she's pretty mad. She said something about throwing him into the sea, I think.”
“She did indeed.” Mikkel allowed himself a slight smile. He thought Sigrun in a towering rage was beautiful. Beautiful like a volcano, that is, to be admired from a distance, hoping it would not target you.
Before lifting the second crate, Mikkel pulled out a can and determined that they had received cans of tuna fish. He shrugged. It was good enough.
Returning to the front of the tank, he found Sigrun still by the door, standing guard over the Icelander, who was huddled in a back corner, abjectly miserable. Lalli and Tuuri were sitting side by side against the front wall, Tuuri murmuring to her cousin. Emil took one look at the situation and retreated to the cockpit.
Mikkel glanced over at Tuuri, who nodded. “Reynir,” Mikkel said. The young man sat up, watching him with eyes filled with fear. “Do you speak Danish?” Mikkel asked in that language. “Or Norwegian, or Swedish?”
The Icelander licked his lips. “I think you're asking about languages. And I don't speak anything but Icelandic.” He hung his head at that admission.
Mikkel switched languages. “That's fine. I speak Icelandic. Tuuri — that's her over there — does as well. My other teammates do not. Now then, what were you doing in that crate?”
“I — it's — it was stupid. I'm stupid. I just thought I'd go to Bornholm, but now you're going to send me back to Iceland and —”
“No, we're not. We can't.”
“What?”
“We can't send you back. We're all stuck here in the Silent World. We were supposed to return over the Øresund bridge, but it, ah, collapsed. Arranging for a quarantine vessel to be sent here for our rescue will take weeks, and you can't be rescued any faster.”
“But — but —”
“In other words,” Mikkel went on remorselessly, “we're in charge of you until our mission is complete and we can all be safely extracted in accordance with proper protocol.” The Icelander buried his face in his hands. Mikkel didn't want to crush the young man, so he tried to make a better connection with him. “Why don't you tell me how you came to be in that crate?”
“I'm stupid,” Reynir moaned. “Oh, I'm so stupid. I just … I just wanted to … to visit a foreign country. Just once.” He sighed deeply. “Like my older brothers and sisters do. They have the best jobs and get to travel everywhere all the time! They're all immune, because my parents got them through the Dagrenning program. But not stupid me!” He lowered his voice to mutter, “I was probably a mistake.”
Mikkel nodded. He knew about the Dagrenning program; everyone did. The program provided both excellent pregnancy care and adoption services, with one caveat: immune children were adopted only by Icelanders. Iceland was the largest, wealthiest, and safest nation in the Known World, but the people of Iceland had not been swept by the Rash as those of the other nations had, and their immunity rate was dismally low. Whereas half the population of Denmark was immune to the Rash, and immunity in Finland was thought to approach two-thirds, immunity in Iceland was perhaps seven percent. The Icelandic people needed a far higher immunity rate, lest they be trapped on their island, unable to move out into the world of the Rash. The Icelandic government, therefore, encouraged any efforts to raise the immunity rate, including the adoption of immune infants from other nations.
“They barely ever visit home,” the Icelander continued, “a couple times a year maybe, but when they do, they always have the coolest things to tell! As a kid I loved the stories, but after a while they only made me realize just how boring my life was. Really, really boring! Just watching sheep all day long. And I didn't even have the option to leave, because of that dumb ban on non-immune people travelling internationally!”
Mikkel allowed himself a frown. During the decades when Iceland cut itself off from the rest of the world, the other four surviving nations had established their own trading arrangements, and, given their limited populations, they were forced to allow non-immunes to take part. They had worked out reasonable quarantine procedures so that there had not been a single outbreak caused by trade after the first decade or so. But when the Icelanders came out of their island fastness with their much larger population (three times that of all the others put together) and their greater wealth, they largely took over trade and they were therefore able to impose their own paranoid restrictions on non-immunes. But that was the one policy that the other nations had, finally, been able to get them to reverse. Mikkel liked to think that the General had had a hand in that.
“At least, that's what I thought. That's what Mom and Dad told me. But then my brother told me I could leave any time I wanted to because the ban was lifted, oh, years ago! And … that means they lied to me.” He shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. “I guess they wanted at least one of us to stay at home. That's what my brother said, anyway. I understand, I mean, if we were all in danger all the time … Well, anyway, the military for sure wouldn't take me; they weren't about to take a non-immune, but my brother said that a trade ship might, though he said I should just go to Reykjavík instead of going abroad. Of course someone who's been abroad would say that! After that, I planned my escape, packed my things, and left! I didn't care what my parents thought!” His expression as he said that spoke louder than his words as to his regrets.
“I caught the stagecoach to Reykjavík, and it was awesome! I'd never been more excited in my whole life! Well, Reykjavík was pretty neat, I suppose." His expressive face showed his disappointment. "But there was no time for sight-seeing! I had to get down to the docks and find a ship going somewhere even neater! There was only one ship leaving that day, but it was going to Bornholm! In Denmark! The most southern place in the whole world! Sun and warmth and colorful flowers and palm trees! Whatever palm trees are,” he added uncertainly.
Mikkel hid a smile, not wanting to appear to mock the unhappy lad. Bornholm was home and he loved it, but the other's excitement was — well, if he had made it to Bornholm, he would have been profoundly disappointed. If they got out of the Silent World alive, Mikkel could try to take him to Bornholm to see Rønne's city garden. It did have colorful flowers, in season, even if it had no palm trees.
“At first, they didn't want to hire me onto the ship. They said they were fully staffed, so I said I'd work for nothing, just to get experience, you know. So they said they'd take me on to do kitchen stuff like washing dishes. I could barely believe how easy it all was! The very first ship I tried accepted me on board!”
Mikkel thought the crew had seen him coming and taken advantage of his naïveté to get free work.
“Only then the cook told me they didn't have a license to let anyone ashore in Denmark. They just unload in the harbor and head back out, and I couldn't go ashore at all, not even though we'd be quarantined going back to Iceland. So … I thought that was it. I surrendered to the boring work and the thought of going back home again to face my mom and dad … and then these guys came in and they said they were unloading two crates. I thought we were there already even though it seemed like the trip was shorter than they told me, and … well, it seemed like such a good idea at the time to just … just … just hide in a crate and go ashore. I'm really sorry I took out all those cans of tuna. There's still some left though … and so I thought they'd find me when they opened the crates in Denmark and then they'd be mad at me, but I really didn't hurt anything … and you know what happened next.”
Mikkel glanced at Tuuri and Lalli to confirm what he already believed. Lalli looked bored, staring at the wall, and Tuuri was watching Reynir with sympathy. So he's not lying. He really is just an innocent child who did a very foolish thing. Tuuri must be thinking he's trapped by his genetics, just as she is. That may be helpful if they can bond over their limitations while we're stuck here. At least she's got spare masks, so they won't have to share one.
“I'm really sorry,” Reynir ventured. “I promise I won't eat a lot. And if you need help washing dishes or anything —”
“It's quite all right. I'm capable of working around situations such as these.” Mikkel had never actually been in a situation quite like this, but there had to be something he could do. “And in a worst-case scenario, we can always eat you.”
“That's … fair, I suppose,” the younger man answered, looking dolefully at his feet as Mikkel turned to explain the situation to Sigrun and Emil.
“So he's a moron and we're stuck with him.” Sigrun leaned her head back against the door as Mikkel finished reporting what he had learned from Reynir. Her eyes, an interesting shade of violet, were closed, and her elegant lashes lay against her smooth skin, which lacked the freckles that so often go with red hair.
Mikkel yanked his mind back to business. “I believe that is an accurate summation of the situation, yes.” He paused but she did not comment. “I expected you to dispute his story.”
“Nah. I've never met an Icelandic saboteur, but I'm pretty sure if I did, he wouldn't cower in a corner and snivel.”
Mikkel glanced over at the still-cowering Reynir, who fortunately could not understand the conversation. “Just so.”
“Well, I'm no babysitter, and you're the only one who can talk to him, so he's your problem.”
“I can talk to him! I speak Icelandic!” Tuuri said from beside Mikkel's elbow.
Sigrun gave the Finnish woman a look of disbelief. “You do?”
“Yes, I learned it after Swedish. They're really quite similar languages, you know.”
Sigrun rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Then you two can deal with him. Now, we should make plans. Where's the nearest book place?”
Tuuri ducked into the small compartment that served as office and radio room, bringing out their map and holding it against the wall for the others to see. Emil craned his neck to see past his taller team members.
“There's a library here —” Tuuri began.
“No,” Mikkel said, “that one was too close to the airport. It was destroyed in the fighting.”
“I thought you Danes valued old books,” Emil said.
“We do. We didn't destroy it. I mean, the modern army didn't. The last stand of the Danish Army against the Rash was there, at the airport. That's when it happened.”
Tuuri ran a finger across the map. “What about this one? Oh, wait, it's near the airport too.”
“But it's out there past the runways. We didn't go that far, so I don't know how it fared. It might be all right. However, notice that it's quite near the park, that green area. There shouldn't be a lot of trolls there, and there might well be birds that we could hunt.”
Sigrun looked thoughtful. “I'd like to have some goose or duck or something; that's lots better than tuna and rabbit food.” She touched the pistol on her hip. “Might not be a good idea to shoot them though; the noise could stir up the trolls. I wish I'd known we'd be hunting. I'd have brought my crossbow.”
“Crossbow?” Mikkel looked at her with some respect, though he supposed he should not have been surprised. “I doubt we could find one of those around here, but a regular bow … Archery was a sport before the coming of the Rash. Tuuri, please ask your cousin to scout around for a sporting goods shop. Ideally, one with fishing equipment as well as bows and arrows.”
“Sure!” Tuuri turned to address Lalli at length.
“Okay,” the scout said, finishing with a yawn, then pushed past the others to the door and disappeared into the ruins. Mikkel watched him go. This time he had heard the word clearly; Lalli did have one word in common with the rest of the team.
“Great, now we get to wait some more.” Sigrun drummed her fingers on the wall behind her for a moment. “I'm going to patrol.”
Tuuri looked up from rolling the map. “Lalli said there are no grosslings around here.”
“There weren't when he looked, maybe. They could be creeping up on us now.” With that, the troll-hunter was out the door.
“Reynir,” Mikkel said, and the Icelander jumped to his feet, all arms and legs and absurdly long braid. “Go to the front and talk to Tuuri.”
“Yes, sure, thank you!”
Mikkel rolled his eyes as the younger man hurried forward, brushing past Emil.
“So what do I do?” Emil asked. “Build a fire?”
“No, I don't think there's any need for that. We're not likely to be here long, and those emergency rations should hold everyone until supper.” As he spoke, Mikkel felt a pang of hunger; he had given his ration to Lalli. Glancing down at his unfortunate paunch, he thought he could stand to miss a meal or two. “I have to deal with something, but you may as well take a nap. Unless you'd like to try to read a little? I'm afraid the books are all in Danish, though.”
“I'll pass. I guess I'll take that nap.” Emil pulled down his bunk as the Dane left to make his way to the back compartment.
As Mikkel suspected, the vegetables had been carelessly packed, and a sack of potatoes was crowded against a sack of onions. Shaking his head, he removed the onions and stored them in a cabinet. That done, he surveyed the supplies and nodded, satisfied. They wouldn't starve for a while, even if the hunting were poor.
The tank was almost quiet, with Lalli and Sigrun outside and Emil dozing but not sleeping, and thus not snoring. Tuuri and Reynir talked in soft tones inside the small radio compartment, and the ancient manual typewriter clattered at intervals. The official purpose of the expedition was to document the current condition of the Silent World, and Tuuri took her duties as skald and reporter quite seriously. Mikkel settled himself comfortably on his bunk and returned to his book, the “Field Guide to Medicinal Plants & Herbs of Denmark”. He had a working knowledge of some herbs — those in his mother's herb garden — but the book made it clear that nature provided far more medicine. Many of the books recovered the previous day had been of little worth, but this one might save some of their lives.
Bzzt!
Mikkel jumped, his hand jerking and tearing a page. Muttering a word which would have displeased his mother, he smoothed the page as best he could, closed the book, laid it on the bunk, and got to his feet. Emil was on his feet as well, and the two non-immunes had run to Tuuri's locker for protective masks. After looking them over and confirming that Reynir had adjusted his mask correctly, Mikkel opened the outer door.
Lalli entered first, glancing back over his shoulder at Sigrun, who was all but treading on his heels. The scout turned to his cousin, speaking in a tone of complaint. Tuuri's cheerful, calming answer made him roll his eyes, but they went together into the radio compartment to examine and mark up the map.
Reynir turned to Mikkel, eyes wide and worried. “Tuuri said you have to hunt for food, and it's all because of me. I'm so sorry. I was so stupid —”
“Done is done. I expect we'd want to hunt anyway, in time, if we had had a crate full of tuna fish.”
“Is … is there anything I can do to help? Anything at all? I can mop the floors, or wash the windows — oh, wait, I can't wash the windows because I'd have to go outside —”
Mikkel held up a hand to stop the Icelander's babbling. “Right now, neither of us can do anything. Tuuri will drive us to whatever cache Lalli has found, and then Sigrun and Emil will raid it. If Lalli has found archery equipment, Sigrun will go hunting. You and I will wait quietly.”
“O-okay. I, um, I can help fix supper.”
Mikkel refrained from rolling his eyes. “Yes, we'll see about that at supper time.”
With the Finnish discussion concluded, Lalli pushed between Mikkel and Reynir and escaped out the door, while Tuuri took her place behind the controls. “Oy, Mikkel!” Sigrun said, pointing at his accustomed seat beside the right-hand window. Mikkel obediently took his seat, the Captain scooted in beside him, and Reynir and Emil found places behind the seats. Lalli ran ahead of the tank, and Tuuri followed him.
The sporting goods shop did not look promising. Its plate-glass windows had broken and the roof on the left side had collapsed. Still, Lalli had led them there, so there must be something usable inside.
“Sigrun,” Mikkel said as she pulled on her sturdy white outer clothes, “while you're in there, please look for a parka, long underwear, boots, anything like that which might fit our guest.”
“Oh, right, him.” Sigrun paused, glanced forward at the driving compartment, where Tuuri sat ready to take the tank to safety and Reynir chatted from the seat beside her. “The idiot doesn't have anything useful.”
“Just so.” There was little else to say. Any clothing in that shop, or any other, was likely to be a mass of rot, but they had to try. The Icelander had nothing but the clothes he stood up in, and those were too light for the cold of full winter. Sigrun's unkind comments on the young man's intelligence were not entirely unjustified, for he seemed to have assumed that the Danes on Bornholm would take care of his needs after finding him in a crate of tuna fish. Mikkel had to concede that they might have, but the team in Silent Denmark could not.
“Let's go, Emil!” Sigrun leapt out of the tank, enthusiastic as ever, and Emil followed with a quick, cautious glance at Mikkel. Lalli, who had been stalking around while the two scavengers got ready, led them into the ruin while Mikkel clambered down to patrol around the tank, and the two non-immunes watched from within, wearing their masks just in case.
Within minutes, Emil came out with an armload of fiberglass fishing rods, which he thrust into Mikkel's arms before returning to the shop as Mikkel moved to store the rods in the back compartment. Soon the others came back, Lalli with several boxes, Sigrun with an unstrung bow in her hand, and Emil with three quivers full of arrows.
“The bow's okay, I guess,” Sigrun said, pulling a handful of bowstrings from her pocket and stringing the bow with little effort. “The pull's kind of light, but I can work with it. Those arrows, though! They're just target arrows. Might knock a duck down, I suppose, and stun it long enough for me to kill it, but pretty useless otherwise.” She gave the quivers a contemptuous look. “I'll use them to adjust the sights on this thing, in case we find some decent arrows. Oh, and all the parkas and things you wanted were torn up and rotten. Lots of vermin nesting in there. Good thing we didn't waste more than a couple of hours here.”
Mikkel nodded without looking up as he stashed a box of monofilament fishing line and another of lures. His idea had failed, but at least they had gear for fishing now.
Sigrun hopped out of the back compartment, calling “Come on, let's get moving! I want to get some hunting in before dark!” Emil followed, with Mikkel delayed by the need to stow the bow and arrows. As the last one in the main compartment, the Dane had hardly closed the heavy door when the tank lurched into motion. Stumbling sideways, banging his right knee against the door, Mikkel gritted his teeth to suppress a curse.
Ahead, in the driving compartment, Reynir sat against the right window with Sigrun beside him; Emil was out of sight between Tuuri's seat and the radio compartment. Mikkel could stand behind the passenger bench and watch over Reynir's shoulder, but he saw no reason to do so. Lalli was leading the tank and would perceive a grossling with his psychic powers long before Mikkel could spot it from inside the tank. Mikkel resolved to let the others keep watch, limped back to his bunk, leaned against the back wall with his book in his lap, and closed his eyes.
The kid is about the same height as Sigrun, but his shoulders are broader. Her clothes will be too small, and the other three as well. He'll have to wear mine, though they'll be too big. He imagined the tank breaking down, the group forced to travel on foot through a blizzard to a recovery site. My trousers will fall off him. Okay, belt loops, a rope belt; that'll hold them up. Sleeping, though …
The team was not well supplied, as the expedition had been equipped on a shoestring. Each team member had two uniforms, the sturdy white outer clothes; two sets of warm black outfits which they wore under their uniforms or within the tank; one set of night-clothes (pajamas); and some socks and smallclothes. Moreover, they had just two blankets apiece, and while the tank was heated, any wood they burned in heating would have to be replaced by gathering in the ever-shortening days.
He can't sleep naked, or he'll freeze. I'll have to give him my night-clothes. I can sleep in my spare underclothes. Then he can have one of my blankets, and we can use a couple of jackets apiece for further warmth. If things get bad — face it, things will get very bad as the winter wears on. And then, well, and then I'll think of something else. His thoughts turned to food and herbs to use for seasoning, and so the time passed as Lalli led the tank into the Kalvebod Common, now a forest.
With the tank parked, all the immunes climbed out to look around. Deciduous trees stood gold and red and brown with the remains of their autumn raiment, evergreens broodingly dark with their needles. Small birds settled in the trees from which they'd risen, alarmed by the clatter of the tank, and squirrels ran out to peer down at the intruders.
Sigrun turned to study the animals, then shrugged before ducking into the tank and grabbing a couple of sacks. “Come on, little Viking,” she ordered Emil, who was pulling on his own uniform. “Let's go a-hunting.” They left together as Lalli yawned and edged past Mikkel to climb back into the tank.
“Can we come out?” Tuuri asked in a plaintive tone.
“Not yet.” Mikkel turned in place, scrutinizing the underbrush. “Close the door and don't open it without confirming who's buzzing.”
Tuuri laughed. “You think a troll would use the buzzer?”
“I think a troll might bump the buzzer while pawing at the door. Don't open the door without confirming who's buzzing.” With that, Mikkel set out to make two wide circles around the tank, for if any grossling was hiding nearby, it should lunge at him despite the mid-afternoon sunlight. Lalli had checked the area, of course, but Mikkel preferred to rely on his own, more natural, senses. Satisfied some minutes later, he returned to the tank, climbing into the back compartment and collecting several potatoes, an onion, and some carrots in a bowl which he carried to the main door, pressing the buzzer and waiting for Tuuri to open it. He suspected that she delayed for almost a minute on purpose, to punish him.
She grinned as she opened the door, Reynir peering over her head. “Okay, it's really you.”
“Reynir, you wanted something to do.” He held out the bowl. “Wash these, peel them, chop them up for soup. Knives are in the cabinet closest to my bunk. Tuuri can show you the taps for water.” As Reynir accepted the bowl with enthusiasm, Mikkel addressed Tuuri, their eyes near level as she stood in the tank. “Stay in the tank for now while I gather firewood. Once I start cooking, you may come out so long as you stay close to me. Until then —”
“Don't open the door without confirming who's buzzing. I got that the first ten times.”
Mikkel nodded without comment. The door clanked shut as he turned to his next task. Almost two hours later, he had refueled the tank and had an adequate pile of deadwood for his fire. As he had encountered no grosslings, he deemed it safe for the non-immunes to join him as he built his fire, set up a tripod, and hung his pot for soup. Reynir presented his bowl of chopped vegetables with pride, settling beside Mikkel to tend the fire and stir the soup as it cooked.
After thanking Mikkel politely but without warmth for the chance to sit outside the tank, Tuuri sat beside Reynir, gazing around with interest and pointing out different species of trees. The Finnish woman was annoyed with him, Mikkel could see, and he told himself that it made no difference. His duty was to keep her alive and healthy, not to keep her happy. At least her attitude hadn't affected Reynir. Not so far, anyway.
The soup was simmering when the others returned, Sigrun carrying a headless goose by the feet, and Emil with the sacks. Sigrun dropped the goose beside Mikkel. “This guy charged us. I took it out with my dagger. Didn't even need a bow. Do you know how to cook it?”
“I do.” The implied insult stung, but Mikkel let it go, gesturing at the pot. “The soup is ready. Reynir, please remove the pot from the tripod while I fetch the bowls.” Letting the Icelander deal with the pot, which his own clumsy hands might have spilled, Mikkel retrieved a ladle and their five bowls from the tank. Since Lalli was asleep, they had sufficient bowls for the moment. The Dane shook his head as he returned. A shortage of dishes was the least of their problems, but he made a mental note to talk to Tuuri about it all the same. Perhaps his asking for her help would improve her attitude.
Returning, he found that Emil had emptied his sack, producing four slightly withered apples. “These are the best I could find,” the Swede said, looking at Mikkel nervously. “The rest were full of worms.” He shuddered at the final word.
“That's fine. Four is much better than none.” Mikkel thought of the many ways he might have used four apples, if he had flour, or spices, or indeed anything to cook with them. With a sigh, he accepted his bowl of bland vegetable soup from Reynir.
Hunger pangs quelled for the moment, the group turned to other activities. Sigrun took the bow and a quiver of arrows to adjust the sight while Emil watched. When Mikkel began to pluck and clean the goose, Reynir twisted his braid anxiously. “I could do that, Mikkel. I could help!”
“All right. Here. Keep the feathers, though.”
Tuuri looked up from notes she was making. “Why? What use are they?”
“At the moment, I don't have a use for them. But we might find one, so we may as well keep them. We can always throw them out later.”
“Huh.” She shrugged and looked back at her notes.
“Are you interested in the plants around here? I'm going to see if there are any edible or medicinal herbs. Just right around the tank, of course.”
“Sure!” She leapt to her feet, pique seemingly forgotten. “I haven't studied Danish plants; I should have, but we didn't have any books about them in Keuruu. Let's look!”
By the time Reynir finished plucking and cleaning the goose, Mikkel and Tuuri had found small patches of dill, dandelion greens, fennel, and wild mint, and all offenses were forgotten. Tuuri brought out their kettle and hung it over the fire for mint tea before sitting down with her notepad to record all the plants, both useful and otherwise, that they had found. Meanwhile, Mikkel stuffed the goose with dandelion greens and one chopped-up apple, wired its wings close to the body, hung the goose from a tripod he constructed beside the fire, and placed a pan with a little water beneath it to catch the drippings. Reynir quickly volunteered to turn the goose occasionally.
With all others occupied, Mikkel fetched his spare uniform trousers, a rope, and his sewing kit. Short pieces of rope would serve for belt loops; two long pieces would act as a belt for the trousers and another for the jacket. As he sewed, Tuuri looked over in puzzlement. “What's that for?”
“Our guest has no clothes for deep winter. I'm adding belt loops so he can wear mine if he needs to.”
“Oh!” Tuuri looked at the oblivious Icelander and back at Mikkel. “Your clothes will be too big.” Mikkel didn't point out that that was the reason for the belt loops. She added thoughtfully, “Maybe we should look for some clothes for him.”
“Sigrun did. She found nothing usable.”
“That was just one place. Lalli can look while he's scouting. He's really great at finding things if he knows what you need.”
“Clothes for our guest, then, and blankets. Oh, and dishes. We have only enough dishes for five, and while we can make do, it would be convenient to have more.”
“I'll tell him that. I bet he can find some things.”
With that resolved, they worked quietly, side by side, until the goose was ready and the other two joined them.
“This isn't bad,” Sigrun said, wiping her mouth at the end of the meal.
“It’s okay,” Emil agreed.
In a day filled with such problems and failures, Mikkel appreciated even so little praise.
“I'm sorry, Emil,” his nanny says, “but your father won't make it home in time for supper tonight either. He has far too much work in need of his attention. And you know how important his work is.”
Emil grits his teeth. Of course his father won't be home for supper on his birthday. His father wasn't home for supper yesterday or the day before, either. His father misses far more suppers with his only child than he ever attends.
“But you do know that doesn't mean you're any less important to him, don't you?” She is kind; she is the only person in the world who cares for him.
“Yeah, yeah,” he snarls, taking out his frustration on her despite the many times he's resolved not to. “Where's my cake? I'm supposed to have a cake!”
She brings him a chocolate cake, and he eats far too much, far too quickly. Nauseated at the sight of the remains, he turns to look out the window. The factory is burning in the valley below the mansion. It is always burning; it will always burn.
“You must be very careful with fire,” Mikkel says.
Emil turns in surprise. Mikkel stands behind him, incongruous in a white apron and chef's hat. Emil shakes his head. “It wasn't my fault.”
“You must be very careful with fire.”
Emil woke. Wow, that was weird. Not the way the dream normally goes. He sat up, peering around in the moonlight. The others breathed evenly in their sleep, and Lalli's back was just visible under Mikkel's bunk. Emil sniffed. Smoke!
Getting to his feet as quietly as he could, Emil looked around. There was no fire in the tank; he was certain of that. Mikkel and Reynir had doused the cooking fire, but had they missed a coal? He stole over to the sensor panel, checking the infrared and seeing the glare of fire near the tank. He switched off the perimeter sensors, opened the UV cabinet, and stepped into his boots. His night-clothes were warm enough for the short time he would spend outside.
It was the work of mere minutes to drown the fire with the hose from the outside tap. Emil coiled the hose and put it away, opened the door … and nearly fell over as he jumped back with a strangled shriek. Mikkel regarded him in silence for a moment, then backed into the radio compartment and waited.
Over the course of the day, Emil had come to believe that Mikkel didn't mean to punish him for leaving the man to clean up his vomit. But now, seeing the big Dane waiting for him in the moonlight, he believed his reckoning had come. He gulped, resolved not to wake the others no matter what, and entered quietly, locking the outer door, putting his boots away, and resetting the sensors before joining Mikkel in the radio compartment.
Mikkel closed the door. “Why did you go outside?”
“The, uh, the fire … it … I thought maybe it wasn't quite out …” Emil didn't want to say that Mikkel and Reynir hadn't drowned the fire properly.
“Yes, I saw the fire on the IR after you went out. How did you know?”
“The smoke, I-I smelled the smoke.”
“Did you?” Emil ducked his head in confusion and looked away. How could he answer that? “Very well,” the Dane continued. “Let's get back to bed. Tomorrow will be busy.” Mikkel opened the door and gestured him to go.
“Oh … okay.” This encounter hadn't gone at all the way he expected, and he didn't know how to respond.
They walked together to the bunks, and just as Emil sat down on his bunk, Mikkel murmured, “The air intake is in front, and the air is filtered. There was no smoke in here.” He rolled onto his own bunk, turning his back to the room.
Emil lay awake for a long time. What does he want? Why was he awake in the middle of night, and why did he scare me like that? And then all he did was ask how I knew about the fire, as if he didn't know. I did smell smoke. And yet … he's right about the air intake and the filters, so then … I couldn't have smelled it.
Emil closed his eyes. He told me to be very careful of fire. He said it twice. But, no, he didn't say it; that was a dream. I just remembered it. Twice.
He looked over at Mikkel's back, wondering if the man was truly asleep this time. What is it about him and fire? He had me lighting fires for him, and he keeps talking about fire.
Emil frowned, reviewing the previous two days. No. He talks to me about fire. I haven't heard him mention it to anyone else. And then there was that weird question he asked me: “How do cats detect grosslings?” Why should I care about that? Well, except that he said Finnish “mages”, like Lalli, can detect grosslings too. I didn't know that. And then what did he say? “It's not sight, sound, or scent, and no one knows what it is.” I wonder what detecting grosslings feels like for Lalli.
As he drifted off to sleep, a thought crossed his mind. I wonder if it feels like smelling them.
Lalli returned from scouting as the team was finishing breakfast. Tuuri began questioning him at once, interrupted by Sigrun: “Hey, short stuff, let him eat. He missed supper last night, and he doesn't need to miss breakfast too. The kid's just skin and bones already.”
“Oh, all right.” Tuuri gave brief instructions in Finnish as Mikkel took his own dishes and utensils to the tap, washed them, and brought them back for Reynir to refill. Leftover vegetable soup, a chunk of roast goose, and mint tea made an adequate, if unconventional, breakfast. Lalli accepted the food and seated himself against the tank to eat well away from the rest of the team.
“I told him we needed more dishes and stuff,” Tuuri said. “He'll look for them next time he goes out.”
“Good,” Mikkel answered. “I don't want him to take any risks, though. We can get along with what we have.”
“Yeah …” She looked over at her cousin. “He's a really good scout. He's hardly ever been hurt. Only … this is a different country. And he never goes into cities, I mean, back in Finland.”
Mikkel nodded. There was nothing to say about that.
“Hey, Mikkel,” Sigrun said. “There's something I'm wondering about. How come you Danes haven't dug out all the books in this place already? I mean, that Swedish guy said they're going to sell the books to Danes because you guys like old knowledge. So, why haven't you just got them already?”
“It's been tried. During the first attempted reconquest, in the year 54, there were raids for books and anything else that might still be useful. But there was a failure of quarantine in Rønne, and they ended up losing a lot of people and burning half the city. The Rash wasn't in the soldiers themselves, of course — they were all immune — but someone must have brought back something with a grossling inside. Or that was the assumption, at least. Maybe a sea grossling got past the shore patrol and it was just coincidence that it happened then.”
He shrugged. That had all occurred before they were born. “Anyway, they set up the quarantine island after that, and when we went in, we were forbidden to go off scavenging. Once the perimeter was set up, there was organized scavenging inside the perimeter, but the selection of books at the airport was rather limited to start with, and after so many decades, what was there had mostly rotted. If we'd been able to expand the perimeter, to take in some of the city, then we would have gotten any books that are still legible.”
“More books for us, then.” Sigrun's tone was indifferent, and Mikkel shot her a resentful glance under his brows. The disaster at Kastrup was a distant story for her, a living memory for him. After a moment, he sighed, pushing away the emotion. Her world, their world, had been shaped by disaster after disaster, tragedy after tragedy. No doubt she reserved her grief for the dead that she had known, as he did for those he had known.
Lalli ate quickly, finishing as Mikkel and Reynir were washing the dishes and other gear from breakfast. Leaving his dishes and utensils on the ground, he followed Tuuri and Sigrun into the tank to discuss their next move.
“Take this stuff inside,” Mikkel told Reynir. “I'll show you where to put it away after I check that everything's ready to go. Emil,” he added, switching to Danish, “please make sure the fire is out.” With that, he circled the tank, checking that everything was locked down and secure. When he returned, Emil was stowing the hose that carried water from the tank. Mikkel made a mental note to top off the water supply at the next opportunity.
“Thank you. I don't want to risk a wildfire.”
Emil straightened and turned to face the Dane, closing his hands into fists as he folded his arms. In a voice that shook a little, he said, “But you did.”
“What?”
Emil hunched his shoulders, blinking rapidly. “You did. Last night. You let it burn.”
“Oh. Oh, no. That was an accident. I would never take that risk on purpose! If you hadn't woken up and put it out, then —”
“Then you would have!” He gave the big Dane a glare before dropping his gaze.
“No. I didn't know about it until I saw it on the sensors.”
“But you did! You were watching to see if I would take care of it.”
“I was not.” Mikkel had been mentally berating himself all morning for having frightened the young man, but he had not considered what Emil would think about his being awake at all. “Look, Emil, do you have bad dreams here?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on. “I do. All the soldiers did, back then. I woke up from a bad dream, and I was trying to get back to sleep when you got up. I followed you because I didn't want you outside without a backup. I thought you'd just gone out to relieve yourself, so I checked the sensors to make sure nothing was creeping up on you.”
“And then you scared me! On purpose!”
“Yes, and I do apologize. It was cruel and stupid and I shouldn't have done it. I apologize.” His apology was sincere. He'd seen the chance for a jump scare and he'd taken it, and he'd regretted it ever since. The only thing to be said for it, he thought, was that he'd terrified a budding pyrokinetic in the dead of night, and hadn't been burned for his actions. It was good evidence that Emil did have control over his powers, even if he didn't recognize them.
Much of the tension went out of the younger man. “Oh. I guess — Okay. Then, were you telling the truth? Really telling the truth? There was no smoke?”
“Yes, that was the truth. There really was no smoke.”
“But I smelled it. I did!”
“I believe you.”
Emil opened his mouth and closed it again. After a moment, he gave a helpless gesture with open hands. “Then you think I can … perceive things that you can't?”
Mikkel paused, considering how much he could say without violating his orders. “When I was in Iceland some years ago, I heard stories of people who could sense things most people can't. And as I said the other day, Finnish mages supposedly can. So I don't rule out a priori the possibility that you can perceive fire through some other sense. And you did detect the fire when I didn't, when no one else did.”
All the defiance had gone out of Emil. “But, then, that —”
“Oy! We're ready to go! Are you two still messing with that stupid fire?”
The two men turned to see Sigrun standing in the doorway, hands on her hips.
“We can talk later,” Mikkel said, and led the way into the tank. As soon as they were inside, Lalli hopped out and ran to lead the way.
“The little mage guy says the library over by the runway is ruined, no way there are any good books in there,” Sigrun said, once Mikkel had taken his place on the right side of the passenger bench, and she had settled beside him. “There's a couple of other sites that he checked out, but they're all burned up.” Lightning had caused many fires in abandoned cities. “So we're going to try a school that's on the list. It's not a great prospect, but while we're checking that out, he'll find us a bridge over to the other side of the city.”
Mikkel nodded. Amager was a small island with few sites identified by the sponsors; the real prizes — including the one he was looking for — were on Zealand. Unfortunately, no one knew if there was any usable bridge crossing the canal between the islands.
“Well, that was a waste,” Sigrun said as she and Emil clambered empty-handed through the wrecked front of the school.
“No books?” Mikkel had been patrolling outside, crowbar in hand, while they searched.
“There were books, yeah. Some vermin beasts got in there and pulled them all down, tore them up, made a nest in them. Everything's covered with slime and mold. And beast pieces.”
Mikkel frowned. “Lalli didn't warn you about the beasts?”
“No reason to. They're all dead already. Something tore them to little bits. A while ago, I think. The slime's all dried up. Speaking of him, is he back yet?”
“Not yet.”
Sigrun muttered something under her breath, adding aloud, “Well, if we have to hang around, let's do something useful. Come, my right-hand warrior! We shall seek — what is it we need?”
Assuming this was directed to him, Mikkel answered, “Blankets. Any clothes that will fit the Icelander. Dishes. Utensils. Salt.”
“The idiot needs salt?”
“He doesn't, but I do. I've got some herbs, but salt will improve the taste of whatever I fix.” Deep in the city, game might be hard to come by, and he feared he really might have to cook the tallow candles.
“Yeah, okay.” She looked around. The buildings at the east end of the road seemed slightly less ruinous than those to the west, so the two scavengers headed that way. Mikkel watched them go, worrying. Sigrun was an experienced troll-hunter, and she had the Luck, but Emil was not experienced and not necessarily in control of his powers. There was nothing he could do, however, except to return to his patrol. Chilly though it was, the Sun was bright, so few grosslings could venture out without injury. Still, “few” is not “none”, and he meant to ensure that no threat approached the tank and the two non-immunes sheltering within.
What killed the vermin beasts? Mikkel paused as he passed the wrecked entry to the school. They had to have been there for a while, time enough to pull down and shred the books, so they weren't killed by survivors. Another grossling? Grosslings do eat other grosslings, but these weren't eaten. Sigrun said they were torn apart and the pieces were still there. He gazed at the ruin, frowning. There's probably nothing to show what happened, and I can't take the time to go in there anyway. Still, I wonder what happened, what might still be lurking around here. He turned his attention away, scanned the surrounding buildings, and resumed his patrol.
Lalli returned first, passing Mikkel without acknowledging his presence and climbing into the tank. Mikkel watched just long enough to be sure that the scout placed his outer gear in the UV cabinet and that Tuuri and Reynir were wearing their masks. He doubted that Lalli would bring any contamination into the tank, but the Rash was far too deadly to allow any risks.
Some fifteen minutes later, Mikkel whirled around at the sound of a low boom from the east. He ran a dozen meters before stopping himself. I can't leave the non-immunes unguarded. Lalli can't protect them alone. If Emil's killed Sigrun, or himself — He didn't want to finish that thought. With difficulty, he turned back to his patrol, watching the ruins with extra care, for grosslings awakened by the explosion might brave the sunlight to get at the uninfected.
To Mikkel's great relief, within minutes, Sigrun and Emil returned, soot-smeared but grinning. “We got you some salt!” Sigrun called cheerily.
Emil held up a canvas sack. “And some knives and things!”
“I believe I heard an explosion.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” Sigrun said with a shrug. “Troll jumped out at us, and my right-hand warrior” — she gave Emil a fond smile — “blew it up. No biggie.”
Mikkel looked hard at her and then at Emil. He needed to talk to the Swede, but not in front of Sigrun. “I see. Well, Lalli is back, so I presume we have our directions.” He accepted the sack and checked it as the other two climbed into the tank. Though he did not expect to find a small grossling inside, it was second nature to check anything from the Silent World. Inside, he found four steak knives with small rust spots, two spoons, and an unopened box of salt. The box was hard, of course; sufficient humidity had gotten into it to cause the salt to cake, but that was all right. So long as nothing had grown in it, he could scrape it for seasoning.
Mikkel took his place on the passenger bench in front, and the team set forth for the island of Zealand and greater Copenhagen.
“So? What's the hang-up?” Sigrun leaned forward, peering through the windshield in search of foes.
Tuuri was leaning forward as well. “I'm not crossing that bridge until I've taken a good look at it. It's not in good shape.” Mikkel thought that was an understatement, as part of the south side had collapsed and much of the rest of the pavement was buckled.
“The scout said we could cross,” Sigrun said.
“Yeah, well, he's a scout. I'm an engineer, and I want to look at that before I risk crossing it.”
Sigrun sighed in annoyance. “Right. Okay. You, Icelander!” She pointed at Reynir where he stood behind Tuuri's seat. “Mask on, and stay out of the way!”
“Reynir, please put on your mask and wait in the back while we check the bridge,” Mikkel translated.
“You two come with us,” Sigrun instructed, turning to Mikkel beside her and Emil where he stood behind their seat. “Uniforms, all. Let's get this done.” As the four of them pulled on their sturdy white uniforms and gathered weapons, she continued to address Tuuri. “You stay close, and you obey orders! If I say run, or Emil does, you run! You get back to the tank and lock up while we deal with it. Understand?”
Tuuri swallowed, perhaps perceiving the risks clearly for the first time. “I understand, yes.”
Mikkel had not missed his exclusion from those who would give orders, but he did not comment as he checked the sensors before opening the door. The Captain leapt out first, alert with her dagger ready. Like Mikkel himself, she did not entirely trust the sensors and took a long moment to survey their surroundings, even peering under the tank, before gesturing the others out. Tuuri climbed down, looking around with a mixture of excitement and fear, followed by Emil and finally Mikkel, who pushed closed the door before turning to survey the surroundings in his turn.
“Sigrun!” he said. “Something moved in that ruin!” He'd seen just a glimpse of movement in one of the ruins that lined the street leading to the bridge, not enough to identify it as troll or beast (that is, human or non-human grossling).
Sigrun held up a hand to stop the other two while she studied the indicated ruin. “I don't see anything,” she said after more than a minute. “You stay here and watch those ruins. We'll guard the driver.”
“Will do.” Mikkel didn't turn to watch the others go; he had eyes only for the ruins. He suspected that the Captain didn't believe there was anything there, but he knew what he'd seen. Another flash of motion, and he raised the crowbar he had brought from the tank. He had a dagger as well, of course, but he had always been more effective with something longer. When the grossling lurking in the ruin charged, Mikkel would be ready.
And yet the grossling did not charge.
Mikkel patrolled behind the tank, scanning back and forth across the ruins. He could not allow a grossling in one ruin to distract him from what might lurk in another. The light breeze brought him a murmur of voices from the other three, and carried the sound and scent of uninfected humans onward to the ruins, alerting anything within. The afternoon sun shining on the ruins should keep any Rash monsters under cover, but that would not excuse letting down his guard.
Several minutes later, the voices from behind him changed: Sigrun ordered, “Back to the tank! Go!” Mikkel risked a glance, seeing Tuuri running for the tank while Sigrun and Emil slashed at something too low for him to see. He jogged to his left, positioning himself between the Finn and the ruins before him. Until the others called for him, he would maintain his patrol, ensuring nothing attacked from behind while they fought their current foe.
Soon, Emil ran to the tank, calling, “In the tank, Mikkel!” The Dane obeyed after one last survey of the ruins, and the two men climbed in. Emil closed the door behind them.
“Wait,” Mikkel said, “what about Sigrun?”
“She's watching the water troll to make sure it doesn't latch onto the tank as we go over it. She'll jump in once we're past the bridge.”
Mikkel caught himself against the wall as the tank started forward without warning. “Water troll?”
“It was under the bridge, out of the sunlight. It sent its tentacles after us, but we chopped them off. It never got near Tuuri!” He beamed with pride.
“Well done. Now if the bridge will just hold together …” The bridge groaned and crumbled under the weight of the tank, and Mikkel caught his breath as a chunk fell away with a crash. Still, the tank kept moving, its treads taking it over a gap that would have stymied a wheeled vehicle.
Some tense minutes later, the tank stopped and Emil opened the door to admit Sigrun as she jogged up, flushed with excitement and grinning broadly. Impassive, Mikkel stopped her. “Wash your dagger outside,” he ordered, “and you too, Emil. And those need to go in the cabinet with your uniforms.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Her grin undimmed by his stern tone, Sigrun turned to the outside tap as Emil hopped down to join her. Mikkel took the opportunity to strip off and stow his own uniform in the UV cabinet, finishing in time to stand by as the other two did the same. Tuuri still wore her own uniform, but that could wait, he thought, as she hadn't been in contact with any grosslings.
As the tank ground forward once more, Mikkel turned to regard Lalli, who was sleeping under Mikkel's own bunk, and Reynir, who sat on the same bunk, knees drawn up to his chin, huddled against the wall as far as possible from the door. It occurred to the Dane that the Icelander had no idea what was going on, since neither Mikkel nor Tuuri had taken the time to tell him. “Reynir. The bridge to Zealand was in poor shape and there was a troll under it, but no one was hurt and we're safely across. All the contaminated gear is in the UV cabinet, but I want you to keep your mask on for the next fifteen minutes, so we can be certain you are safe. Do you have any questions?”
“N-no. Or — I, uh, there was a troll? I didn't think there would be trolls here, with the Rash and all.”
Mikkel frowned before realizing the problem. “Ah, yes, I remember you think you have 'trolls' in Iceland, but they're not the same. We use that word for Rash monsters that used to be human beings. A Rash monster that used to be an animal is a beast. All Rash monsters together are grosslings, and extremely large grosslings are giants. All equally contagious, of course.”
Reynir muttered the words before looking back at Mikkel. “You're sure it's safe? I mean, if there was a Rash monster, a troll …”
“The troll will not follow us. It is wounded, and in any case, the Sun is shining.”
“I guess … okay. Where are we going now?”
“Someplace to make camp for the night.”
An hour later, as the Sun was low in the early winter sky, Tuuri brought the tank to a halt in an open area within abandoned Copenhagen. This had been a parking lot, for they could still see upthrust slabs of concrete here and there between the dead grasses and leafless bushes. A stream ran along one side; on closer examination, Mikkel found that it was a collapsed pipe. Too shallow for a water troll, it was perfect for refilling their water supply, and he dragged a hose over at once.
While the pump worked, Sigrun, Mikkel, and Emil scattered to check the surroundings for grosslings. Nothing lunged at them, and Mikkel heard small creatures scurrying away from him in the dead leaves. That was a good sign, for such small creatures would have been prey for trolls, if any were nearby. When the three returned to the tank, the two men heaved a chunk of concrete out of the way, the resulting hole making an adequate latrine with little more digging.
“I wish we had a cat,” Sigrun grumbled. “A cat could check for grosslings in a heartbeat.”
“Trained cats are too expensive,” Mikkel said.
Sigrun glanced at him in annoyance. “Well, we could have gotten a common cat.”
“We'd have to keep it caged or leashed, and sooner or later, it would get out and tangle with something too big for it.” All cats were immune to the Rash, could detect grosslings, and had an instinct to attack them. An untrained cat would launch a frenzied attack on any grossling it detected.
“I should have asked Mom and Dad for one of the clan cats.”
“It might have been wise.” Mikkel felt a flash of jealousy, quickly squelched, at her casual assumption that the leaders of the Eide clan, her loving parents, would have allowed her to take one of the clan's precious cats. “But done is done.” At her reluctant nod, he dropped the subject and gestured to clouds building in the west. “It looks like rain tomorrow.”
She turned to regard the clouds as well. “Hmm. Rain? Or snow?”
Mikkel sniffed the air. “Just rain, I think.”
“Too bad. The grosslings will wake up some, if it's just rain.”
“Perhaps we should just camp here all day, and not venture out for scavenging.”
“Nah. There's a couple of sites near here, and me and the kid can check them out without going too far.”
Mikkel shrugged. Excursions were Sigrun's responsibility. If she wanted to scavenge during a blizzard, he would certainly claim the authority as medic to overrule her, but she would do no such thing, and he knew it. Scavenging in the rain? More dangerous than scavenging on a sunny day, but not greatly so; trolls would nest inside buildings, anyway. So long as the explorers were well-dressed for the weather, he could raise no objections.
Once the perimeter sensors were set out and Emil had built a fire and started a pot of mint tea, Tuuri joined the others, leaving Lalli to sleep. As she seated herself by the fire and sipped her tea, Reynir peered fearfully from the doorway.
“Is it really safe for us, out here?” he quavered.
“Captain Eide is here to protect us,” Tuuri answered. “And the Sun is shining, for now, anyway.” From his seat by the fire, Mikkel glanced at the two, but stayed out of the discussion, suspecting that his customary sarcasm might make an appearance. He too was there to protect them.
“My parents said the cities in the Silent World were crawling with Rash monsters, and if I ever went near them, I would die.”
“There aren't any here now, are there? Look, Emil set up sensors, so we'll know if anything comes, and you can run back into the tank if you get scared. Come on, be brave! This is our world too!”
Shoulders hunched, biting his lips, the Icelander ventured forth to sit by the fire as close to the tank door as possible. He looked over at Mikkel, who was laying out his cooking gear and vegetables. “May I help? I can chop vegetables again.”
“Certainly.” The Dane passed over the bowl of vegetables, the cutting board, and his big knife. Switching to Danish, he went on, “Tuuri, please check in with the sponsors tonight.”
“Oh, I did that already, while you were doing stuff out here. They're going back to Mora tomorrow, on a ship because the train isn't fixed yet. That giant really tore it up! Uh … are there giants like that around here?” She lost a little of her confidence, looking at the surrounding ruins.
“Yes.” At her look of dismay, he regretted his blunt honesty. “Where there are trolls, there may be giants. However, giants are rare and there aren't likely to be any close to us. The noise of the train doubtless attracted them from many kilometers around. Our tank, on the other hand, is quiet and we will not follow a fixed path as did the train.”
“So we need to be quiet?” She hunched her shoulders, holding her mug close to her with both hands.
Mikkel remembered construction equipment roaring by day and massed gunfire by night. He remembered a giant striding across the cleared perimeter on its huge, jointed legs. “In general, yes. But it takes a lot of noise to draw a giant. You may safely converse, even out here.” He rubbed his right leg, soothing the memory of pain. “If a giant approaches through these ruins, we will hear it coming. They are not stealthy.”
Emil pushed another stick into the fire. “What about explosions? Are they dangerous? Attracting giants, I mean?” He looked over at Mikkel, his eyes dark with worry.
“That is a concern. Ideally we will avoid explosions, though I concede that there will circumstances when they must be used. Fortunately, grosslings have short memories, or at least so we were told in Army briefings. And I believe Sigrun said something to that effect yesterday, or perhaps the day before. So if you do find it necessary to set off an explosion, we'll hastily relocate and leave any active foes behind to forget about it. It would be best if you refrain from setting off explosions during the night, of course.”
Emil nodded, a little shamefaced, and busied himself with the fire.
Gritting his teeth so as not to groan, Mikkel got to his feet. Sigrun was just passing on her patrol around the tank, so he fell in step with her. “I'm making stew with the remainder of the goose tonight, so if you go out tomorrow, please hunt for more food. Another goose, a rabbit, or some squirrels, anything like that.”
“Will do!” Sigrun surveyed the ruins. “I don't know what might live around here, though. This place is kind of weird.”
“You mean because it's ruined and infested with grosslings?”
“No! Or, well, yes.” She waved a hand at the surroundings. “There are grosslings, sure, but not like I'd expect. This place is warmer than Norway, right?” At his nod, she continued, “So there ought to be at least as many grosslings as in our cities. Only there aren't! When we went hunting yesterday, we didn't run into a single grossling. Not one.”
“Oh.” Mikkel looked away. “We were close to the airport. We — I mean the Army — made so much noise building the base that grosslings were attracted from kilometers around. And then we had to fight them, and that made even more noise and attracted even more.” He shrugged. “So there wouldn't be many left except those that were immobile or stuck within buildings. Like the ones you did run into.”
“Hah. So there're more on this side of that canal.”
“I expect so. We should be wary.”
“I'm always wary.” She grinned and trotted off on her patrol while he turned back to prepare supper.
Reynir sits on the thwart in the center of a rowboat. The air smells fresh, and the water is almost still, lapping gently against the hull. There are oars in the boat, but Reynir does not row. He has nowhere to go and is content to sit and enjoy the light filtering through the fog which conceals the world around him.
There is a splash at the stern, the boat rocks, and Reynir turns to look. To his horror, a skeletal dog — a grossling, a beast — is climbing into the boat. Terrified, he throws himself backwards and out of the boat. He hits the water with a splash, but rather than sinking in, he finds himself sprawled on the water. It is wet on his hands, but bears his weight; it is like deep, waterlogged, moss. Without pausing to consider the situation, he jumps to his feet and flees from the boat. Behind him, the skeletal dog whines.
He sees nothing but water and fog; he hears nothing but his splashing footsteps and his terrified breathing. Is the beast closing on him? He risks a look over his shoulder and sees only fog and water. Ripples circle from his footsteps, marking each, and he wonders what might see those ripples, what might hide deep in the fog. As he watches, the ripples melt into the gentle waves within a meter, and are gone.
Reynir holds his breath, and the world is silent. He hears no pursuit. When he can hold his breath no longer, he gasps and looks around. Where should he go? He knows only that he must not go back to the boat. Seeing that the fog seems thinner and the light brighter to his left, he trots in that direction, ripples circling behind him.
The fog clears, and Reynir finds himself in bright sunlight. Ahead, a grove of birch trees grows directly out of the water. Within the grove there is a raft, and on the raft there is a man. The man lies half-curled on his side, facing towards Reynir, and appears to be asleep. As he approaches, Reynir realizes that he knows the man: it is the team's scout, Tuuri's cousin.
“Hi!” Reynir says as he enters the grove. He does not expect the man to understand him, but hopes his cheerful tone will convey his meaning.
The scout leaps to his feet with an expression compounded of outrage and fear. “Get out!” he cries, thrusting his hands towards Reynir as if to shove him away, though they are many meters apart. With this gesture, branches and roots of the nearest trees bend, creaking, to strike at the Icelander.
Reynir jumps back, tripping and falling once more on the strange water. “Okay, sorry, sorry, I'm going!” He scrambles to his feet and flees.
Before long, the fog closes in again, and he heads for the only bright spot he can see. When the fog clears this time, he sees ahead a low, rocky shore. A high granite cliff rises from the shore on the left, and a forest grows beyond the shore to the right. The autumn leaves of the forest whisper in a light breeze. Between the cliff and the forest, there is a rough track leading from the shore, and beside this track there sits a man on a boulder.
The man hugs his legs to him, his face pressed to his knees. His posture radiates distress, and Reynir instinctively moves to help him. “Hey!” he says, scrambling up the rocks to the man. “Hey! Are you all right?”
The man jumps up, shocked and angry, seizes Reynir by the collar, and cries, “You dare attack me in my own space?”
“No, no, I'm just — I was —” Reynir finds the man strangely familiar, though he is sure he's never seen him before. His hair is ash-blond, and his face …
“Bah, you're weak.” The man releases him, pushes him away. “Not worth fighting. Tell me your name, and I'll guide you whither you must go.”
“I know you! You're in that photograph Tuuri has! She said you were her brother. Onni? Is that right?”
“What? You know Tuuri? Wait — you're the saboteur!”
“No, no, I mean, yes, I know Tuuri, but I'm not a saboteur. I just kind of stowed away —”
“Okay, yes. Tell me, how is my sister? Is she all right? Is she … happy?” The man's expression has gone from anger to desperate hope.
“I think she's fine. She drives the tank, and she reads the books the others gather. Oh, and she talks to me when we have to stay in the tank. But I never asked if she was happy.” He hangs his head in shame at his failure.
“Onni, let me in! Let me in!” Reynir turns to see who is shouting, and is surprised to see the scout, who seems to be pounding on an unseen wall. Onni waves a hand, and the scout falls forward before catching himself and running to his cousin.
Onni looks back and forth between the other two, before turning back to Reynir. “I am glad to know that my sister has a second mage to protect her. But now you must go.” He waves a hand again, and the fog closes in on Reynir.
Reynir blinked up at the ceiling, dimly lit by telltales and what little moonlight made its way through the clouds. That was weird. It was so vivid, like it really happened. Why — that was a dream.
As a child, he had believed that he did not dream as everyone else did. When he asked his mother why, she told him that he must dream; everyone dreamed, but he didn't remember his dreams because they weren't important. On the contrary, he suspected that he didn't remember his dreams because he wasn't important. The non-immune fifth child, a simple shepherd, unable ever to travel or see the rest of the Known World: how could he be important?
I remember a dream! That means I'm important! And the dream must be important too, surely. Onni said — Onni said his sister had a second mage to protect her. He meant me. He meant me! Onni said I'm a mage! He hugged that thought to himself. I'm a mage. I can do … well, something. I'll figure out something I can do for Tuuri, and then I'll be important to these people. I'll help them. Somehow, I'll help them.
Over the sound of rain pattering on the roof and walls, he heard movement. Turning on his side, he saw Lalli getting to his feet. The scout stopped for a moment, staring at him, and Reynir would have sworn that Lalli's eyes glowed faintly blue. Then the moment was past, and the little Finn went forward to fiddle with the sensors and then slip out the door.
Reynir stared at the closed door. I wonder if he wants his bunk back. Mikkel told me to sleep here, and Tuuri said he always slept under Mikkel's bunk, but maybe that's all wrong. I'll ask tomorrow. Oh, I wish I weren't such a burden to everyone!
With that dismal thought, he closed his eyes and was soon asleep once more. If he dreamed, he did not remember in the morning.
Mikkel pulled on his warm undershirt with a sigh of relief. He sniffed at himself to confirm that his hasty sponge bath had improved his odor. As he was overweight and had slept in his clothes, he'd woken up thinking he stank of sweat, and had hurried out to clean up before the rest of the team noticed.
Tossing his dirty clothes on the wet grass next to the tank, he turned to his shaving equipment: a bar of soap, a pearl-handled cutthroat razor that he'd found in a little shop in Reykjavík, and a battered hand-mirror that he'd found in an abandoned farmhouse on Bornholm. Even as he soaped his face, his attention was caught by a movement beyond the awning under which he sheltered.
Mikkel dropped a hand to his dagger and studied the figure approaching through the rain. Black and white — not the usual troll colors — humanoid in shape, but distorted somehow. He squinted, trying to force his vision to make sense of what he saw. Though he perceived motion with ease, he had difficulty with the third dimension and now, as always, struggled to separate figure from ground.
As the figure approached, its identity became clear. It was Lalli, returning from scouting, and his outline was distorted because he was carrying a box on his right shoulder, braced by his right hand, and swinging a canvas bag in his left hand.
Bzzt!
Mikkel had not deactivated the sensors, fearing the rain might make grosslings active by day. They buzzed now as the scout passed through them. A momentary scowl crossed the Finn's normally emotionless face, though he did not otherwise respond. He marched up to the Dane and handed him the bag before lifting the box with both hands and passing that over as well. That done, he turned away to enter the tank.
Both bag and box were surprisingly heavy for their size, and Mikkel set them on the ground to examine. The box was covered with dust and spiderwebs, now damp on top from being carried through the rain. Retrieving his already dirty shirt to wipe the box clean, he was amused to find that Lalli had brought him a set of stoneware dishes: four place settings with dinner plate, salad plate, and soup bowl. The bag contained two plastic mugs and a heavy box, also dirty, which proved to contain stainless steel flatware (dinner forks, salad forks, dinner knives, steak knives, dinner spoons, and teaspoons) for eight.
The Dane smiled slightly, imagining setting out a feast with all the dishes and flatware … on the muddy ground around a campfire. His smile faded as he thought about the food situation. There was sufficient porridge for breakfast for several weeks, but for other meals, he had nothing but vegetables and some tuna, plus tallow for thickening. Besides reminding Sigrun to hunt, he should try fishing while the scavengers were away, if the tank parked near water.
Mikkel returned to shaving. Soon, hearing footsteps in the tank, he moved the razor away lest his hand jerk and cut him. Emil hopped out of the tank and sat down, setting out his own shaving equipment, more elaborate but similar to Mikkel's own. The young Swede, with his fine blond hair, didn't need to shave every day, or even every other day, so Mikkel had not seen him shave before. The two men settled down to take care of their faces in comfortable silence.
Mikkel had finished shaving and was cleaning his razor when Reynir peeked out of the tank. “Mikkel? Is it safe out there? I mean, the alarm went off.”
“Yes. The sensors are still set, and Lalli triggered them. But nothing else has, and I don't see any threats.”
The Icelander jumped out, looking around uneasily before seating himself close to Mikkel. “I, uh, I don't have a razor.” Mikkel reluctantly passed him the mirror and razor to deal with his reddish stubble. “Thank you. I'm sorry I'm causing so much trouble for you.”
“We'll deal with it.”
“You told me to sleep in Lalli's bunk, but I think I should sleep on the floor. I shouldn't take his bunk.”
“Sleep on the floor if you wish, but you'd better sleep under Emil's bunk if you want to avoid getting stepped on.”
Emil, who was cleaning his razor as they spoke, looked up at the sound of his name. “Are you talking about me?”
Mikkel switched to Danish. “I told Reynir if he wants to sleep on the floor, he should sleep under your bunk.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I'm asking about that.”
Emil stood and took his gear back into the tank as Mikkel turned back to Reynir. “As I said, sleep on the floor if you wish, but I don't believe Lalli will sleep in his bunk in any case. He didn't before you came.”
“Oh, okay. If you're sure. I guess I'll just use the bunk, then.” Falling silent, Reynir shaved with quick, practiced strokes, then held out the razor and mirror. “This mirror's in pretty bad shape.”
Mikkel restrained himself from snatching his things from the Icelander, taking them politely. While the mirror was indeed cracked and spotted, he'd had it since he was fourteen, and he didn't appreciate criticism. “It serves its purpose.”
“Uh, yeah.” Reynir seemed to realize that he'd overstepped and looked around as if searching for a distraction. “Oh! I think I'm a mage. So maybe I —”
Mikkel looked up sharply. “A mage? What can you do?” General Trond hadn't contacted him about Reynir's history, and when he did, he would hardly discuss psychic abilities where others could listen in. However, if Reynir wanted to volunteer the information, Mikkel wanted to hear it.
“Well, nothing yet.”
“Then why do you think you're a mage?”
“Onni told me so.”
“Onni? Tuuri's brother? How did she get through to him?” The omnipresent static made it impossible even for the big transmitter at Öresund base to punch a signal all the way through to the Hotakainens' home, Keuruu in Finland. A message to Onni would have to be sent by wire to Mora in Sweden, then relayed from ship to ship over to Keuruu. He could not imagine how Tuuri had arranged that.
“Oh, she didn't. I talked to him in a dream last night. Him and Lalli both, except Lalli was mad at me, so I thought I shouldn't sleep in his bunk.”
“You dreamed that you talked to Onni. I see.” Mikkel had heard of telepathy, but was doubtful about a telepathic contact all the way to Finland.
“You don't believe me. But it's okay. One day I'll find out what I can do, and then I'll help you and be great!”
“Fine.”
Emil returned, telling Mikkel, “I put some wood in the back yesterday to keep it dry, so I'll build you a fire now, right? Hey, what are those boxes?”
“Lalli brought us dishes and flatware.”
“That's good. I mean, I know we eat off dishes that other people ate off, after they're washed and all, but when you ate and then washed your stuff and just gave it to Lalli, that was kind of …”
“I washed the bowl and spoon carefully. Whether he used them five minutes later or five days later, they were just as clean.”
“I know, right, but it just seems kind of weird, I guess. Anyway, I'll build a fire.” Blushing in embarrassment, Emil hurried to the back of the tank, returning with an armload of wood and setting to work on a fire. Soon, as Mikkel placed a pot of porridge to heat, Sigrun came out, followed quickly by Tuuri.
“Do you still intend to venture out today?”
Sigrun looked out at the light rain. “Yeah, I think so. The rain's not too bad.”
“Will we move the tank? I need to make plans for the day.”
“Nah, the tank stays here for now. The little scout guy said the streets to the next spot are too messed up to drive through.”
“Very good. The porridge will be ready soon. Please do remember to hunt for some meat, if you get a chance.”
Mikkel took out the four new bowls and passed them out, setting aside older bowls for himself and Lalli, who had not yet joined the others for breakfast. As the others examined their garishly decorated bowls — bright yellow with red and purple flowers — Tuuri held hers up with a triumphant grin. “See? Lalli can find what we need. I just have to tell him what to look for.”
“Please ask him for blankets and whatever warm clothes he can find that will fit our guest, then.”
Tuuri looked over at Reynir. “Oh, yeah, right. We need that too.”
As the others settled around the fire and the rain drummed on the awning, Mikkel stirred the porridge and made a mental list of tasks for the day: collect firewood, do laundry, clean the tank, fish if time permits, make supper.
“Tuuri,” Mikkel said, and Tuuri looked up from her porridge. “I want Lalli to have a second bowl of porridge. Please tell him that. I don't think he eats enough.”
“Oh, sure.” Tuuri turned to her cousin, who sat far from the rest of the group and was scraping the bottom of his bowl. “Lalli, go get another bowl of porridge.” He looked up, shrugged, but obeyed. Tuuri addressed herself to her own bowl. If Mikkel was handing out seconds, she wanted some more; porridge with chopped apples was decidedly better than vegetable soup, which is what she anticipated for lunch and supper.
“Let's go, Emil,” Sigrun said with her usual exuberance. “Our fortunes await us!” She leapt to her feet and led the way into the tank, Emil following with rather less enthusiasm.
Tuuri looked over at her cousin. “Lalli? They're leaving. Aren't you going, too?”
“No.” He didn't even look up.
“No, I guess you were out all night.” He didn't dignify that with an answer.
I wish I were immune. I'd never stay behind. She looked down at herself. But then, she'd probably make me stay behind anyway because I'm too little to fight a troll. I could still shoot though … She lost herself in fantasies of bravely guarding Sigrun's back, until she finished her porridge. Getting to her feet, she bypassed the campfire to hold out her bowl to Mikkel.
As Mikkel ladled porridge into the bowl, Sigrun and Emil came out of the tank, rifles slung over their shoulders and canvas bags in hand. Emil wore his Cleanser gear, a bandolier crisscrossing his chest and loaded with small explosives and incendiaries. Mikkel turned, watching them leave, then scanned back and forth across the surrounding ruins. “Do you need something else?” he asked, noticing that Tuuri was still standing before him.
“No, I was just — just thinking about things.” She hurried to take her seat and dug into her porridge. He's immune, and she leaves him behind. Of course, he has to be here to defend us. She heaved a sigh. It always comes back to that. I'll never be able to live like them.
“When Lalli goes inside,” Mikkel said in Icelandic, “you two need to go with him.”
“What? But it's daylight.” Bad enough that she had to have a bodyguard with her all the time; she didn't want to be stuck inside too.
“It's too overcast. There are trolls that can come out in this kind of weather.”
“You can leave the sensors on. We'd know if anything came, and we'd run for the tank, so —”
“No. If we rely on the sensors, a fast troll could get you before you reached the tank, before I could stop it. Lalli can see, or perceive anyway, trolls from much farther away, so I think the risk is low while he's out here. But without him, you're not safe with just me.”
Tuuri's shoulders slumped and she poked at her porridge, no longer hungry.
“What can I do to help?” Reynir asked.
“As to that, I have tasks for both of you, if you want them.”
“Yes, sure!”
Tuuri rolled her eyes at the Icelander's enthusiasm.
“I'd like you to make up the bunks and fold them away. Except mine, since Lalli will be under it. Then sweep and mop the floor and wipe down the walls, but don't touch any of the controls.”
“Okay!”
“Tuuri, there's a handwritten journal that Lalli brought out of that first site. I want to read it, but I don't want to damage it. Are you willing to transcribe it for me?”
“Yes, I'll do that.” At least it was something to do while she was stuck in the tank, that didn't involve cleaning.
Dropping his bowl and spoon on the ground, Lalli jumped to his feet and disappeared into the tank. After an appealing look at Mikkel, who shook his head, Tuuri followed Reynir inside. Well, it is wet and gray out here. And cold. And maybe Mikkel's book will be interesting.
“Mikkel told me you know English,” Reynir said, leaning on his mop and looking at Tuuri with a hopeful expression.
Tuuri leaned back from her typewriter and stretched her aching back. “I do. It's one of the dead languages that skalds learn.”
“I know a little. My dad learned it from his grandparents. Lots of people in Iceland spoke it back then.”
“Really?” She switched to English and said, pronouncing the words carefully, “How do you do?” It was the beginning of a dialogue she'd memorized from a schoolbook.
“I, I don't know what you said,” Reynir answered in Icelandic. “I only know a few phrases. Like this one.”
Tuuri listened to his phrase before laughing so hard she could barely catch her breath. “Oh, Reynir, if you ever meet a real English speaker, you must say that to him.”
The Icelander looked hurt. “What's so funny? What does it mean?”
She relented. There was no point lying, as he would never meet a real English speaker, so the prank would never take effect. “You, ah, you told him to go away — very rudely, I might add — and then you said his mother was a dog.”
Reynir laughed as well. “And these other words?” He rattled off a dozen more words and phrases.
“Those are terrible!” Tuuri said once she mastered her laughter. “They're all swearwords and insults. Where did you learn them?”
“They're, um, they're what my father says when he trips over a lamb, or hits his thumb with a hammer, or something like that.”
“I'll have to make a note about the persistence of swearwords from dead languages in Iceland. The other skalds will love it! We don't — I mean, back in Finland — we don't meet Icelanders. We hardly meet Swedes, even. I never met one before we left Keuruu.”
“Is English really dead? I mean, are there really no Englishers left?”
“Not in the Known World, not that I've heard of, anyway. Maybe there are some elsewhere. I know England — that's their homeland — is south of here somewhere. It's an island, but it had a lot more people than Iceland, so they would've been wiped out. But they did have a lot of little islands all around the main one, so maybe some of them survived. I read that a Norwegian ship went down there a few years ago — the Vikings used to raid England, so those guys figured they could go down there and check it out. Only they never came back.”
Reynir's expressive face grew somber. “I guess a lot of explorers never come back.”
“Yeah.” Tuuri turned back to the typewriter.
Reynir mopped halfheartedly for a few minutes before asking, “What's Mikkel's book about?”
“It's a diary. The writer was taking care of a bunch of Rash victims in that place. It doesn't explain who he was. I can tell he didn't know anything about the Rash. At least, he didn't so far as I've gotten.”
“You know it was a man?”
“Lalli said there was a corpse with a medical symbol, that he thought was a man's corpse. I figure this diary belonged to that corpse. The only thing is, Lalli said somebody had shot the guy in the head. I'd like to know how that happened, but of course that won't be in the diary.”
“Well, no. Not if it's his diary.”
“But maybe there's something about someone he argued with.”
“Maybe he shot himself. Maybe he was infected.”
“Lalli didn't think so. I mean, he didn't think the man shot himself. This is like a mystery, you know, who killed him and why.” She sighed. “We'll never know, of course, but it's something interesting to think about, when we're stuck in here all the time.”
“You … you really want to go outside?”
“Yes! Don't you? Did you spend all your time cooped up inside, back in Iceland?”
“No, no, not at all. I was a shepherd. I was out with the sheep, you know, for days sometimes. I do miss it, but here … I mean, this is the only safe place for us.” He hesitated, mopping part of the floor he'd already mopped. “If we get rescued, you could come to Iceland. I could show you around. It's really beautiful, you know. We have hills and mountains and —”
“Volcanoes.”
“Yes, volcanoes. But only two that are active right now. The big one is way on the north side of the island; it's okay, and the little one is really safe. There are trails we could walk up to look at the lava flows.” He gave her a hopeful smile. “You might like it.”
She smiled back. He was a bit goofy, but he meant well, and he did have a pleasant smile. “It's a date.”
He blushed, her face heated, and they both hastily returned to their work.
Pock!
Mikkel jerked to his feet, sturdy branch raised as a club, and looked around wildly. Nothing moving around him, so what had tapped him on the head?
Look up. Always look up. That lesson was drilled into soldiers.
He looked up to find a squirrel looking down. The squirrel chittered, then turned to stare off into the distance. Mikkel frowned. Why had the squirrel dropped an acorn on his head?
The squirrel looked down, chittered again, turned away.
Mikkel rubbed his head. Had the squirrel sounded impatient? Surely not. Squirrels don't — He followed its gaze once more and saw movement. Troll!
The troll was upwind and had not spotted him, bent over as he had been, picking up deadwood. It was crawling to the south, moving away from the tank and from Sigrun and Emil, who had gone north in their exploration. He could let it pass. And yet, the squirrel. He glanced up at it before returning his attention to the troll.
It turned its head — or at least the mass at the front of its body — towards him, started forward in an uneven gallop. Mikkel took a step back and held the branch as an old-time baseball player would hold a bat. Wait … wait … The stench of the troll nearly made him gag. Wait … wait …
Mikkel swung. He had let the troll get too close; he struck with the middle of the branch rather than the end, and the body hit him, bowling him over. He scrambled to his feet, club still in hand. The creature lay on its left side, the right side of its head crushed. The several limbs on the right side thrashed in an effort to rise while the limbs on the left side hung limp.
Mikkel kicked the creature over and swung again, this time striking with full strength. After one last desperate spasm, it lay still and dead. He studied it for a moment, then looked up at the squirrel. It was gone.
It didn't intentionally warn me. Squirrels aren't that smart. (Are they?) And anyway, why would it care if I got eaten by a troll? And yet, and yet … if I'd stood up without noticing the troll, it might well have gotten me. He looked around at the forest, searching for trolls, searching for squirrels, searching for anything.
Nothing moved. Nothing had approached the tank while he was distracted. Mikkel looked down at the troll. He had chores to do and he could just leave it here. It would rot — eventually — or maybe some other grossling would eat it, though no natural animal would or could. This was once a human being. They don't choose to be infected or to change. It's just a nightmare that happens to non-immunes.
He looked around again, checking for anything that might attack him or the tank. He'd been paying too much attention to the tank and his work, and not enough to his own safety. The troll lay at his feet. After several seconds, he sighed and scanned the area with a different goal.
There.
He grabbed some of the creature's many limbs and dragged it over to a slab of concrete, frost-heaved and cracked, but largely intact. It was downwind from the tank, and small streams ran over the uneven pavement from the constant rain. There could be no better spot.
Mikkel left the corpse and returned to the back of the tank. Inside, he raised the lid of “Emil's box”, the box containing all the explosives and incendiaries, and almost reached in before stopping himself. He squeezed water from his luxuriant sideburns, dripping on the floor, and removed his glove before rummaging about with his dry hand and coming up with a small incendiary. Emil would not be happy if Mikkel dripped on his toys.
Not that Mikkel would mind if Emil was unhappy; that would be entertaining to watch. But with no prospect of rescue or resupply for many weeks, these explosives and incendiaries might spell the difference between life and death for all of them. Mikkel would not risk damaging them.
Incendiary in hand, he returned to the corpse and paused, checking all around and overhead. There was no sense getting so distracted by this that he missed another risk with no helpful squirrel to warn him. With all clear, he tossed the incendiary and backed away.
The troll's corpse caught fire, flames blazing upwards. A slight shift in the breeze brought stinking smoke back to him, and he coughed …
Ashes and blood. Blood and ashes and screams. Oh, the screams!
That was long ago and far away. The screams fell silent ten years ago.
They hadn't, of course. He heard them every night.
For a moment, he thought the gunfire was a memory too. No, that was here and now. He ran for the tank, meaning to grab his shotgun and —
No. I can't leave these children unguarded. I don't even know where Sigrun and Emil are, and I can't run around in the ruins searching for them. Especially not when that gunfire will have stirred up the trolls.
He pressed the buzzer beside the door and stepped back several paces to wait, watching all about for threats. He'd been out in the rain, the cold, and the dim sunlight for more than fifteen minutes, so any contamination should have been cleared, but he didn't mean to take risks. Tuuri opened the door wearing her mask, as he was pleased to see.
“Is Reynir wearing his mask?”
She glanced off to her right. “Yeah, he's got it on. We heard gunshots. Was that you?”
“No.” He climbed into the tank, pulling off his outside clothes and hanging them neatly in the UV cabinet. Placing his boots within, he closed the door and set the timer. He put on his clean outside uniform and slung his shotgun over his shoulder; if the others made it within sight of the tank, he could go out to help them in. “Both of you keep your masks on. Tuuri, take your seat. Be ready to drive. Reynir, up front with Tuuri. Stay out of the way.” Lalli was asleep and Mikkel saw no reason to wake the little scout.
“But we can't reach them,” Tuuri said as Reynir hurried past her. “Lalli said the streets —”
“We won't try. We don't know where they are anyway. About a kilometer away, I'd estimate, from the sound. But you must be ready to drive if they come running back with a swarm at their heels.”
Even as he spoke, Mikkel pulled down the folding table on which the four of them had eaten their lunch, and set his medical kit at one end. He heard gasps behind him; apparently it had not occurred to Tuuri or Reynir that they had been eating off his operating table. With hands that trembled only a little, he opened the kit and brought out a syringe and a bottle. Holding it up, he peered through the dark glass at the liquid within. He removed the cap from the syringe, brought it to the bottle, changed his mind, and laid it down with the bottle beside it. There's plenty for all of us. I won't waste it, though. Maybe I won't need it. This time.
Now there was nothing to do but wait for one or both of the others to return. And if they don't? Should we stay in this location for another night? One troll has already wandered by; others may turn up tonight.
Mikkel had no answers.
Some fifteen minutes later came the cries: “Help! Mikkel!” “Emergency!” Both were alive and able to shout. Mikkel caught himself on his table as his knees went weak in relief, but then he straightened, scooped up his bandages, and ran for the door. “Who needs medical attention?” he called as he yanked open the door.
Sigrun held her arms close to her chest, blood on her face and down her front; Emil's arms were likewise close to his chest, but Mikkel saw no blood on him. Somehow Sigrun was running easily despite the blood, but the medic started for her, already guessing at the injury.
“Cats!” Emil shouted.
Cats, Mikkel thought, bewildered, stumbling to a halt, where did they find cats?
Cats were all immune to the Rash, but every other mammalian species, though generally vulnerable, had immune members. In the decades since the onslaught of the Rash, ecologies were slowly growing back from those immune members. However, feral cats were almost never found in the Silent World, for cats hated grosslings and would attack without hesitation unless leashed or well-trained, and they had been wiped out almost everywhere they were not protected by humans.
The others reached him as he hesitated. "She is cold and wet and sick!" Emil stated, holding out a tiny, bedraggled kitten. "You have to fix her."
Sigrun crowded past him. “This one's wounded.”
“I see,” Mikkel said, not really seeing at all. “I will dedicate my time and effort to saving these wild and feral animals you found.” But they're cats. They're cats who've survived out here without humans to protect and train and control them. Incredibly valuable if they can be saved!
Sigrun laid the cat carefully on the operating table and stepped away. As he bent to examine her, the medic gave orders. “Sigrun, wash your face with soap and water. I'll attend to it later. Emil, dry off the kitten, wrap it up warm, and give it tuna.”
The cat was savagely torn. She hissed, clawing feebly at him. Still, she was too weak to resist as Mikkel carefully examined her wounds. He identified intestines torn apart and organs shredded or partially missing. He was astonished that the animal was still alive, but she wouldn't remain so for long. “Hush, shh, it will be all right,” he murmured, stroking her head gently, then turned to the syringe and the bottle.
He guessed at the dose for a cat, then doubled it. There's plenty for all of us, and if we somehow run out … there are always the firearms. He took a deep breath. He had never used that drug before, though he'd seen it used, too many times.
The grosslings were dead at last. They couldn't be driven back; they never retreated; you just had to kill and kill and kill …
Mikkel knelt beside his friend Christer Olsson. They'd worked and fought side by side ever since they landed in Rash-infested Denmark, but now … Christer was still alive, Mikkel saw with horror. A medic making his way along the line joined Mikkel on the ground.
“Are you hurt?” he asked. For a moment, Mikkel thought he was asking Christer, and wanted somehow to laugh at the absurdity of the question. But no, he was asking Mikkel. Mikkel looked at himself and quite suddenly felt the pain of a gash down his left arm.
“A little — some — but my friend —”
The medic had pressed a syringe against the injured man's arm. As the drug went in, Christer took a last agonized breath, sighed, and went limp.
“That's going to make her feel better?” Emil asked, looking up from drying off the kitten. Now that it was cleaned up, Mikkel could see it was a fluffy calico with a creamy body, black legs, an orange hood over head and neck, and an orange tip to the tail.
“Yes,” Mikkel said flatly, injecting the entire contents of the syringe. The cat flinched for a moment and then relaxed as Mikkel stroked her flank kindly and crooned, “There, there.”
“Really? That's it? So I just wasted my time carrying her here,” Sigrun complained as he gathered up the corpse a few moments later.
“You gave her a better way to go.” It was the only comfort he could offer.
“What?” Emil objected, shocked. “You didn't even try!”
Mikkel looked down at the torn body in his arms, seeing another lying on the bloody ground. “Trying isn't always a beneficial course of action, Emil.”
“I tried so hard! A lot! Earlier!” Mikkel felt warm, not embarrassed but …
He realized what was happening. “Emil, perhaps giving the cat a proper burial will give you a sense of closure. How does that sound? Emil? Will you come with me?” He started for the door without giving the Swede a chance to argue.
“I'll come —” Sigrun began.
“No!” He realized his mistake and tried again. “Please let me handle this, Sigrun. Please stay with the children.” He kept moving, jumping down to the ground outside. Follow me, Emil. Don't follow me, Sigrun. Please let this work.
As he pulled his shovel from the back of the tank, he heard footsteps behind him: Emil, and beyond him, Lalli. Mikkel's lips tightened; he didn't want anyone else endangered, but there was nothing he could do about the scout.
“You killed a cat!” Emil stalked behind him as he looked for a good site for burial.
“I had no choice —”
“You did! You could have patched her up!”
“No, Emil, I couldn't.” He laid the body gently on the ground and began to dig. “I'm just a medic, not a surgeon, and all I have to work with is a glorified first aid kit.”
“But you didn't even try.”
“If we could get back to the base, then I would have tried, yes. I would have tried to stop the bleeding and keep her alive while Tuuri rushed us back.” He was sweating inside his warm clothes. Because of the exertion of digging? Or because Emil was losing control? “Most likely she would have died on the way, and even if we got her there alive, they probably couldn't have saved her. But I would have tried.” The soil was soaked from the continuing rain, and heavy, though not frozen. He dug quickly. “Emil, I would have saved her if I could. But I couldn't, I knew I couldn't, and I have limited supplies. I can't — we can't — afford to waste supplies on a lost cause.” The grave was deep enough. Mikkel set the shovel aside and reached for the body.
“No. I'll do it.”
Mikkel stepped back and checked around for enemies, though with Lalli nearby, his own efforts were hardly needed.
“Please go away.”
“Emil —”
“I understand what you said. I just want to be alone for a while.”
Mikkel nodded. Solitude was hard to come by in the crowded tank. “Very well. Lalli's here to stand guard, but it'll soon be dark, and you need to get back before then.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
As Mikkel turned away, Emil laid the cat in the grave and pulled a small bundle of fur from his pocket. Mikkel turned back in surprise. “What is that?”
“A kitten. There were … there were these four that drowned. I could only save that one.” He looked up sharply. “You have to take care of that one! You have to!”
“I will do my best.” And Mikkel returned to the tank.
Emil glared at the Dane's retreating back. He sounded so honest and compassionate. But then, he sounded honest and compassionate when he pretended to care that I might get face cancer. But … He looked down at the torn body, stroked her fur so it lay neatly. She does look really bad. This much is true: he's just a medic, and his kit isn't much. So maybe he really couldn't do anything for her. And he did pet her.
He placed the four kittens close to their mother, patting each awkwardly as he did so. His face was only wet from the rain, surely. He reached for the shovel, then stopped himself. Shoveling dirt onto them would be too brutal. Instead, he took handfuls of wet dirt and packed them gently around the little corpses until all were covered. When he could no longer see the fur, he stood and finished the job with the shovel.
Emil turned to Lalli. “Let's go.” Lalli didn't move, his gaze fixed on something hidden in the rain. Emil followed his gaze. “I don't see —”
But then he did see. Pacing slowly towards him through the rain was the dog.
Lalli had laid out a route for them to hit three spots before circling back to the tank.
The first spot was a bust. Part of the roof had fallen in, pigeons had made themselves at home, and everything was coated with pigeon droppings and crawling with the vermin attracted to pigeon droppings. Sigrun took one look at the mess, shuddered, and shooed Emil out the door.
The building at the second spot was largely intact. That is, it was intact on the outside. Once the two had worked their way through collapsed walls and ceilings for perhaps ten meters, Sigrun held up a hand. “Emil, turn around and go back exactly the way we came in, and don't knock anything down.”
Standing on the broken sidewalk, Emil looked back at the building and then at Sigrun. “There was a troll? Lalli didn't —”
“Nah, I'd have dealt with a troll. No, that whole place was about to come down on our heads. Books are good, but not worth us getting squished. Let's try the next place.”
The third spot was a “crap building” as Sigrun called it, a place where grosslings wouldn't nest because it was constructed with such flimsy materials that anything that nested within would freeze solid in Winter. Still, it wasn't collapsing, and Sigrun led the search for books. Their first finds were plastic “books” which, when opened, proved to contain shiny silver disks. They looked at each other, and Emil ventured, “I think that's a gramophone. It's a voice recording. If you put it in a spinning device, the sound of a whole book will come out of it.”
“So even better than plastic books? Wow, if our books were like this even I might read one.” She grinned at him. “Hah, just kidding! Why would I ever? Listening to books wouldn't make them any less boring.” She shrugged and tossed the thing into their salvage bags.
They were not far into the building when they jerked around at a sound. The deer passing in the street was nearly as startled as the humans. “Is that a beast?” Emil whispered, dropping his rifle into firing position.
“Just a deer, not a beast. We should — no, let it go. Don't tell Mikkel. He'll be mad we didn't shoot it, but the trolls are too active in the rain. No sense stirring them up.” As half a dozen more deer followed the first, the two went back to their search. The actual books were badly rotted, and the scavengers tossed them aside, but continued to collect “gramophones”.
“Sigrun, I think I heard something again.”
“All right, go check it out. I'll get the rest of this and then we can leave.”
“Never mind,” Emil muttered. “In that case, I definitely didn't hear anything.”
“Don't be a wimp! Just make sure it's not something that'll follow us.”
Emil gulped, made his way through the half-ruined building, water dripping on him from holes in the roof, and shadows moving as dangling weeds and debris shifted in the wind. As he came to a second exit where the door had fallen away from its hinges, he heard the sound more distinctly: hissing and spitting.
Good. Sounds like cats fighting. Wildcats, here! I'll just check —
He stepped out the door and looked to his right. Rather than the cats he expected, there was a single cat clinging to a pole, the rain running red-tinged below it. At the base of the pole was a scruffy dog, peering up and and snarling. As Emil hesitated in the doorway, the dog turned to glare at him with eyeholes that oozed tentacles of Rash corruption.
It's a beast! Oh, poor dog, it's suffering. It's wearing a collar; it's been suffering since the coming of the Rash! “Don't move for a tiny moment,” Emil told it gently, “and I'll take care of you. That's it, good boy.” He raised his rifle. “It'll be over very soo—”
The dog beast lunged just as he pulled the trigger. He hit it several times as he emptied his rifle, but not in the head. The creature collapsed, bleeding.
“Sorry! I'm sorry! I told you not to move! I'm so sorry!” His hands trembled as he pulled out another magazine, but before he could reload, the beast was up again. Its back split open, its ribs extended to form many thin legs, and the thing charged at him, snarling. Emil jerked in shock, dropped the magazine, turned and fled into the building, shouting, “Sigrun! Help me!” It was humiliating to need rescue again, but humiliation was better than death. Sigrun would kill the thing. Sigrun could kill anything.
“Stay where you are!” Sigrun shouted from somewhere in the ruin.
Determined not to burn down another building, Emil managed to pull out another magazine and reload even as he ran. He turned to fire once more at the pursuing monster, but missed the head yet again as the beast galloped unevenly on its mismatched legs.
Quite suddenly, the creature crossed into a patch of watery sunlight and stopped, snapping shut its jaws. It stared at him as he desperately — and clumsily — pulled out yet another magazine. The dog beast's eyes cleared, the Rash corruption driven back by the light, and a dog's sad eyes gazed back at him. Emil took his chance to look down at the rifle, and when he looked up again, the creature was limping away through a collapsed wall into the rain. He raised the rifle, wanting to shoot again, but not wanting to cause the beast more pain.
“Wait!” he called. “Come back! You can't just go on living like … like that.”
But the dog vanished into the rain.
Shhhk!
Emil glanced over at Lalli. “No, please, put that away. Let me. It's, it's my duty.” He shaped his hand as if holding a dagger and brought it down to his sheath.
Lalli watched, shrugged, sheathed his dagger.
The dog beast limped towards them, its head bowed. The rain ran red off its sides. Perhaps five meters away from Emil, it lowered its body to the muddy ground and laid its head on its paws. Emil approached, knelt, stroked its gray fur. “Don't run away now,” he told it, his voice soft and soothing as he drew his dagger.
This time, he did not miss.
“You saw only one cat?” Mikkel asked as he applied surgical tape to the claw marks on Sigrun's jaw. He had washed and disinfected her face himself, not entirely trusting her to have done it right. The scratches were not so deep as he had feared and required no stitches, just some surgical tape to hold them together as they healed.
“Yeah. She was up a pole and didn't want to come down. Not very grateful when I got her down.” She touched the tape. “There was a grossling around that went after Emil. He shot it, or shot at it, maybe. We should ask him if he hit it.”
“But there were five kittens? And they were all together?”
“Yeah, in a den that was filling with water.”
“But five? And only one cat?”
“Weird, isn't it? But the cat was feral; you said so yourself. Maybe they're different.”
They'd have to be different, Mikkel thought. He knew from a few old Icelandic books that before the Rash, cats had been very different. Not very smart, not very trainable … and they had so many kittens that they were often surgically sterilized to keep them from breeding! Modern cats, well, they were so smart that the smartest could almost talk, but they bred almost as slowly as people: one or possibly two kittens in a birth, one birth every couple of years. Not infrequently, they were born sterile. Cats were immune, yes, and apparently always had been, but they had been affected by the Rash, no doubt about it. And yet this mother cat, surely exposed all her life, had produced five kittens. He wished he'd had any chance of saving her.
A cat like that would be a prize above any book.
After submitting to Mikkel's ministrations, Sigrun clambered into her bunk. Like any good soldier, she could drop off to sleep in minutes, and did. Tuuri was holding the kitten, cooing over her, with Reynir beside her, dangling his long braid for the kitten to bat at.
Mikkel was interrupted in his cleaning up and putting away as Lalli came in yawning, making straight for his usual spot under Mikkel's bunk, and Emil followed, visibly shaken. There was blood on his right sleeve.
“Stop,” Mikkel said.
Emil looked at him, bewildered, then down at the sleeve to which he was pointing. “Oh, oh no.” He moaned but obediently climbed back out of the tank to wash away the blood. That done, he climbed in, pulled off his uniform and gloves, and jammed them in the decontamination chamber.
“What happened out there, Emil? Where did that blood come from?” Mikkel asked in concern.
Emil shot him a distrustful glance, then sighed, dropped his gaze, and turned slightly away. “It … it … there was a dog. A dog beast, I mean. It followed us from the school, where the cat was.”
“You're sure it followed you?” Mikkel glanced at the radar. If one grossling had followed them back, another could do the same. He saw nothing threatening, and turned back to Emil.
“Yes, it — I recognized it. It was old. It had a collar.”
Mikkel nodded. A dog beast with a collar must have dragged out its misery for ninety years.
“I shot it back at the school … or shot at it. It had treed that cat, and I shot, and then it grew these weird extra legs, and it chased me until … I don't know what happened. It was chasing me and all of a sudden it just stopped and those legs, I dunno, kind of pulled back into its body, and it just … walked away. Whimpering. I didn't get the rifle reloaded in time …”
Mikkel frowned at his words. He'd heard rumors of dog beasts that behaved more like dogs than grosslings. Some said that occasionally they turned away from attacking humans, apparently because they remembered that good dogs didn't bite.
“So I thought it was gone and then there was the cat and the kittens, those poor drowned kittens. Is the kitten okay?” Emil craned his neck to look past Mikkel at Tuuri.
“She's fine,” Tuuri said. “We gave her some tuna and some water, and she's all dry and warm. She's fine.”
“Ah, thank you.”
“What happened out there?” Mikkel said again.
“Yeah, what happened just now, right. You went back and Lalli saw something. I thought it was a grossling … well, it was. It was the dog. He was all normal again and he just … lay down in front of me like he was so, so tired. So I killed him. That was his blood on my sleeve. I promised I'd bury him in the morning. And … I think I just want to go to bed now.”
The weather had turned cold, and the rain was changing to sleet. Mikkel cooked supper in the tank rather than outside as usual, so the little electric stove could add some warmth to the interior. Emil refused supper, rolling over to face the wall when Mikkel shook him awake. Lalli woke up and ate in silence while Tuuri and Reynir ate and chattered happily about the kitten. Sigrun grumbled over her vegetable soup.
“All I have to cook with is vegetables and tuna. If you want meat, you're going to have to hunt for it.”
“Yeah, well, how do you expect me to do that? I got that one bird 'cause it rushed me, but not likely to get another one that way. And I won't shoot just for food. Too many trolls running around in the rain.”
“We have the bow and —”
“And crap arrows! Not like I can take a deer or a rabbit or something with those things.”
“I don't think there was a lot of bow-hunting around Copenhagen, so we're not likely to come up with hunting arrows. The arrows we have, themselves, seem adequate for hunting. The problem is the points, wouldn't you agree?”
“They don't have points. Stupid practice arrows.”
Mikkel drummed his fingers on the table for a moment. “Maybe we can come up with better points. Somehow.”
“Sure. How?”
“There's limestone underlying this city, so we might find flint. Maybe in a ditch or roadcut. Anywhere, really, that the geology is exposed.” He kept his face perfectly straight. “So we can probably chip flint pebbles into arrowheads for you. Our ancestors used flint arrowheads for a long time, and they didn't have fiberglass arrows.”
“They didn't have fiberglass arrows?” Sigrun stared at him in disbelief. “How could they possibly hunt?”
Mikkel returned her disbelieving stare. “You do know that history goes back a very long way, right?”
Sigrun laughed in delight. “You should see your face! Yeah, man, I know. A long time ago, they used sticks or something.”
“Ah, yes. Something like that. You know, we're stuck here for weeks, so there's no hurry to find books. They've been here all these decades; they'll be here in a week or two.”
“You want to do something else?”
“Exactly. I'd like us to take time to look for flint, do some fishing, set some traps and see if we can at least get a rabbit, and have the scout find us some supplies, like clothes and blankets for our guest.”
“Hmm. Yeah, that does make sense. Can't stay here, though. Two nights here is already longer than I like to stay. For sure not staying tomorrow.”
“Understood.”
“Especially since there's been two grosslings here already.” Mikkel didn't answer. Sigrun grinned at him. “The dog, of course, and you burned something stinky out there.”
“A troll, yes. Not large. I dealt with it.”
She sobered. “I don't like my medic dealing with trolls. Too risky.”
“I wouldn't have tangled with it if I could have avoided it. I was gathering firewood and it attacked.”
“Not wounded?”
“Not at all.”
Sigrun nodded. “I guess that kind of stuff can't be helped. Well.” She looked around at Emil's back and Tuuri and Reynir petting the kitten. “Are the perimeter things on?”
“No, but I'll take care of that.”
“Fine. We need to set watches. You take first, I'll take second, and I'll kick my boy awake for third.”
Mikkel nodded, checked the radar again, and went out into the sleet to set the perimeter sensors.
The sleet changed to snow during the night. There were no alarms.
Mikkel stares down at the sea far below. Sunlight reflecting off the waves sends bolts of pain through his throbbing head, and he shivers in the icy wind, for he left his army greatcoat in the barracks.
“You're an idiot.”
Mikkel turns. Leaning against the railing to his right is a man, a head shorter than him, balding, probably in his late forties or fifties, wearing a Norwegian army uniform with a general's insignia. Mikkel straightens automatically. He is a soldier, even now. “Perhaps.” He returns to looking over the railing at the sea.
“You won't even try to hit back?”
“We won't. We're running back to Bornholm with our tails between our legs.”
“The Army won't. That doesn't mean you can't.”
“They've locked up the boats and put guards on them.”
“Bah. I can get you a boat so you can go back to Kastrup and kill some trolls before they tear you apart. Though I suppose throwing your life away to kill a few more trolls is marginally less idiotic than jumping.”
Mikkel rolls his eyes in silence, not believing the Norwegian can or will get him a boat.
“But if you're smart — which so far you don't seem to be — you can help eradicate the Rash from the world.”
Curiosity is Mikkel's besetting trait. Even now, he can't resist that lure. “How?”
“You can join our organization and —”
“Oh.” He turns away. “I'm 'temperamentally unsuited' to army life.”
“I don't mean the Norwegian Army.”
Mikkel turns back. “What do you mean?”
General Trond's smile doesn't reach his eyes.
Mikkel woke with a start. Why had he dreamed of that? It was better than dreaming of Kastrup, since there was no blood or death, but he'd spent far too much time thinking about that moment. Over the past ten — almost eleven — years, he had not been able to decide whether it was the best decision of his life … or the worst mistake in a lifetime of mistakes. In that time, he had spied and stolen; he had carried messages and guarded strangers; and he had scarcely argued or questioned his orders. There was little he could be proud of in his life, but at least he had never killed a human being, not intentionally, nor accidentally, nor even by omission.
Mikkel had wondered sometimes whether General Trond was himself the product of one of the organization's breeding programs. Certainly, the force of his personality was such that when Mikkel was with him, almost anything the man said seemed reasonable. Mikkel had refused the General only once: he would not seduce Sigrun if ordered. But even the General had himself been doubtful of the advisability of the order, so perhaps he hadn't exerted his influence. On the other hand, Mikkel had accepted the order regarded the pyrokinetic: “If he exhibits signs of instability, he must not return from the Silent World.”
Mikkel rolled out of his bunk and stood, pausing to look down at Emil in the dim light of the telltales. The young Swede did exhibit signs of instability under stress. Without doubt, he had endangered Sigrun and Lalli, as well as himself, in the first exploration. In his anger about Mikkel's euthanasia of the cat, he had started to manifest heat in the tank.
Or had he?
Maybe I imagined it. I was so worried about the risk to the others, the possibility that he might manifest a fireball in the middle of the tank, that maybe I imagined the heat.
Or maybe I didn't.
Face it. He's dangerous to everyone around him.
I have my orders. I accepted them. If I disobey them, and he kills somebody, it's my fault.
But he's just a kid who's doing his best. He can learn.
I can wait. For now.
Mikkel straightened and gave a quiet sigh. He didn't, couldn't, know how long he could safely wait. After a moment, he pulled a towel from a cabinet and went forward. After closing the sleeping compartment door and checking the sensors, he took his uniform (still dirty from the day before) from the UV cabinet and slipped out to clean up, shave, and dress in the pre-dawn dimness.
When he reopened the door to the tank, he stumbled back in alarm and fell on his backside in the snow. It was a couple of centimeters deep and slushy, but his white uniform was water-resistant, and he merely got to his feet and brushed it off, glaring at Sigrun, who was turning red with the effort of suppressing her laughter as she stood just inside the door.
“Serves you right,” Sigrun said, snickering. “My little warrior said you did that to him.”
He nodded and brushed past her as she left the tank for her own morning necessities. As soon as he closed the tank door, Tuuri, wearing her mask, peeked out of the sleeping compartment.
“Can we come out now?”
“Yes, if you keep your masks on. Lalli will be back soon, and Sigrun may come back in.”
“Oh, Sigrun's out? Then I can go out too? Please?”
“It's not daylight yet.”
“Mikkel! Please!”
He turned to study the sensors, seeing nothing but Sigrun, who appeared to be pacing around, though she might say she was patrolling. “All right. It looks clear, so you can go if she agrees.”
“Oh, sure!” Sigrun said with cheerful enthusiasm. “Come on out, short stuff; the trolls are fine!”
The mask hid Tuuri's mouth, but the crinkles around her eyes showed her grin as she hopped out of the tank and ran to Sigrun. Mikkel watched her without expression, then opened the inner door. Emil and Reynir were up and dressed, and the non-immune was already wearing his mask.
“Emil, please escort our guest to the latrine. I need to fix breakfast. We'll move when it gets light and Lalli gets back.” He jumped down and the other two followed.
Dawn was breaking as Lalli returned with a laden canvas sack over his shoulder. He dropped it beside Mikkel and walked away while Mikkel opened the sack to check the loot.
The pre-Rash world had been almost unthinkably wealthy. Nearly everything in their shops was enclosed in plastic, and fabric that happened to be sheltered from sunlight, water, and vermin, was often usable close to a century after the coming of the Rash. Lalli had found half a dozen woolen blankets, eight pairs of wool socks, and three pairs of flannel pajamas in several sizes. Unwrapping and holding up the pajamas, Mikkel thought the largest would be short but wearable for Reynir, and the rest comfortable for everyone other than Mikkel himself.
“Thank you, Lalli.” He looked around. “Where's Lalli? I have porridge for him.”
“I'll take it to him,” Emil said, holding out his own bowl for a refill. With both bowls and spoons, he strode around the tank. Seconds later, he came back, still holding the bowls. “Tuuri, what is he doing?”
Tuuri, eating her breakfast beside Reynir, set down her bowl and got to her feet. “What's going on?”
“Come and see. He — he mutilated the dog.”
Mikkel and Reynir got to their feet as well and followed Emil and Tuuri around the tank. On the far side was a gory mess surrounding the dog beast's corpse.
“Oh, that?” Tuuri said. “Don't mind him. It's just mage stuff. He's honoring the spirit of the dog; it's something we Finns do.” She gave Mikkel and Emil, the resident skeptics, an uncertain look. Neither responded. “He'll be up in that tree for a little while, and then we can go.”
Mikkel frowned. Tree? He scanned the edge of the forest and spotted a shape in a dead tree. It wasn't a branch, so he gathered it was Lalli himself.
“Did I tell you that I'm a mage, too?” Reynir asked Tuuri.
“No, what, really? What can you do?”
“Well … nothing really. Yet, I mean. But I'm sure I'll figure out a skill soon!”
“No offense, but you're probably not a mage, then.”
“That's fine; you don't have to believe me. I'll ask your brother to teach me something cool next time we talk, then I'll be useful and great!”
“Okay,” Tuuri answered cheerily. She turned to grin and roll her eyes at Mikkel.
Mikkel didn't return the grin. “Tuuri, Reynir, please come back to the other side where Sigrun can defend you.” He switched to Danish. “Emil, Lalli doesn't appear to need us. Please come back to the other side. I'm sure Sigrun wants to make plans for the day.”
Emil stared down at the bloody corpse. “I promised to bury him. I can't just leave him like this.”
Mikkel looked around. The bright daylight and cold air would discourage grosslings, and with Sigrun available to protect the non-immunes, he and Emil could risk a brief distraction. “All right. I'll dig the grave. Tuuri, take Reynir; you two stay with Sigrun.”
After returning to the tank for the shovel, Mikkel led Emil to a flat spot close to the cats' grave. "We'll bury — ugh. Well. We'll bury it here anyway." Without taking time to look closely, he thought the dog's skull was missing.
The ground was hard, but not nearly so hard as it would become after days and weeks of freezing. Within an hour, Mikkel had an adequate if shallow grave into which they gently lowered the dog. As Emil shovelled the dirt back over the pitiful corpse, Mikkel collected heavy stones for a cairn. He sincerely hoped that this was the last grave he'd be digging.
The snow continued, more heavily now, and Sigrun was getting increasingly impatient by the time Mikkel and Emil returned from the burial. "What's the problem? What's the stupid forest guy doing up in a stupid tree? Why can't we get him down?"
"He's doing a mage thing," Tuuri said. "It doesn't take too long, I think. He has to come down before he freezes … I mean, he has to …"
"Oh. Umm. Yeah. Mages do what they have to do, but I wish he'd hurry up!" That last she shouted in the general direction of Lalli in his tree.
“Mikkel, will we be able to eat it, if they come back with a deer or a rabbit or, or something?”
Tuuri risked a glance across Reynir at Mikkel before returning her attention to the frost-heaved road. He stroked his chin before replying to the Icelander.
“I believe so, though it may depend on how hungry you are. I have seldom rendered food inedible for a sufficiently motivated diner.”
“Uh …” Reynir turned to Tuuri, who schooled her face to remain intent on driving, offering him no support. “No, I meant me and Tuuri. Is it safe for us? With the Rash and all?”
“Hmm. I was taught techniques for cooking that, in theory, should render the Rash harmless in meat. However, I had no opportunity to test them on non-immunes, and it has been some years since I learned. Just the same, I have confidence that you will survive. I'm almost certain of it.”
“Oh … thank you. That's great. Really. I'll help fix the veggies. I like veggies a lot.”
Tuuri giggled.
“What?” Reynir asked her. “There's lots of veggies for us.”
“No, no.” She hesitated, not wanting to anger Mikkel by contradicting his story. Still, she liked Reynir and didn't want him to go hungry out of fear. “He's just joking with you. They won't bring back a grossling. They can't eat grosslings any more than we can; grosslings are poisonous to everybody. And even if they bring back an infected animal, the Rash won't last long after it dies, and for sure not after it's cooked.”
She glanced at Mikkel again and caught a sly, fleeting grin. “It's most unlikely that they'll bring us an infected animal,” he said. “The scientists say the victory of the Rash was so complete in the Great Dying that there are no non-immune mammals left anywhere in the world except where we humans protect them. The non-immune gene is extinct in the wild.”
“Like we will be,” she said under her breath, but Mikkel heard her.
“No, you — that is, non-immune humans — will not go extinct, not unless all humanity goes extinct.”
“But we're just —”
“No. The non-immunity gene will go extinct among humans, yes, eventually, but just the gene. You and we are the same, Tuuri.”
Reynir spoke up, his brow wrinkled. “I don't understand. How can the gene go extinct? I mean, there are still non-immune people, even outside Iceland.”
Mikkel turned to him, seemingly glad for the chance to explain. “It's because immunity is what we call an autosomal recessive trait. That means you need two copies of the gene, one from each parent, to be immune. If you have one copy of the immunity gene and one of the non-immunity gene, you're a carrier of the trait. You're not immune yourself, but you can pass on the immunity gene to your children.”
Tuuri nodded, adding, “Most non-immunes outside Iceland are carriers. I know for sure my father was a carrier, since my grandma Ensi was immune. But I'm not sure about my mother, and I don't know about myself.”
“Just playing the odds,” Mikkel continued, “your mother likely was a carrier, and you likely are as well. Anyway, in time you may have children. The father will likely be a carrier, if he isn't immune himself. Some of your children, or maybe some of your grandchildren, will be immune, and they will be just as much your children or grandchildren as your non-immune children or grandchildren.”
He turned to Reynir. “It's like the way two white sheep can have a black lamb. If you wanted, you could have a whole flock of black sheep, all descended from white sheep. In the same way, eventually we can have a population entirely immune, but they'll be descended from people who might not themselves be immune.”
As Reynir gave a thoughtful nod, Mikkel turned back to Tuuri. “You aren't distinct from us; never think that!”
He had never spoken with such passion before. She stared at him until the tank tilted and she had to return her attention to driving.
“I can still help fix the veggies, though, right?”
“Yes, Reynir. In fact, I may allow you to fix the meat as well.”
By late morning, they reached the spot Lalli had marked on the map, where they would wait for Sigrun and Emil to catch up with them after hunting. Tuuri wished Emil had stayed behind, since Mikkel was much less strict when another immune was with them. Emil had asked to stay behind, and Mikkel had even said there was work for him, but Sigrun had insisted that Emil needed to go with her. Her reasons made sense; Emil did need to learn to hunt, and even an expert troll-hunter like Sigrun wasn't safe roaming around the Silent World alone. Still, Tuuri wished Emil had stayed with the group in the tank.
“Can we go out now, Mikkel? Look, there's hardly a cloud.” That wasn't entirely true, but the snow had stopped an hour before and most clouds had blown away to the east. “The trolls will all be hiding. Please?”
“Wait here.” Mikkel checked the monitors, then scooped the kitten out of her cozy nest of blankets and carried her out with him. Tuuri and Reynir crowded together to watch him on the monitors as he circled the tank closely and then a second time farther out. When he returned and tapped on the door, they moved to pass him.
“Tuuri, you may come out, but stay close. Here, take this.” He handed her the purring kitten. “Reynir, please go change into your new pajamas. We're going to do the wash today.”
“I, I can just wear my clothes. They don't need washing.”
“Yes, they do. Go change now, and bring all the bedding and dirty clothes.”
It was odd that Reynir resisted Mikkel's orders, even to such a limited degree, but Tuuri took no interest in their conversation. She stayed close to the tank, shuffling through the thin snow cover to a distance of five meters or so, glancing back at Mikkel now and then. The parking lot had been well-built, but the decades had cracked it, and frost had heaved up slabs here and there. Weeds grew in every crack, dead now in the cold, and bushes had established themselves in the larger cracks. Ruins rose on all sides, trees growing out of several.
I wonder what he'd do if I wandered too far away? He wouldn't yell at me; that could attract attention. I suppose he'd come out and order me to go back. And if I didn't? She pictured Mikkel picking her up and carrying her back to the tank like a child, and smiled at the image. But no, I won't wander off. It's too dangerous for Sigrun herself to go out alone, even in daylight.
She sighed and knelt to brush snow off a bush. One of her duties was reporting on the renewal of the ecosystems of the Silent World, and she meant to do her duty well. At a movement behind her, she turned to look at the others. She discovered why Reynir had wanted to wear his own clothes, dirty though they were.
Reynir's pajamas were bright yellow, faded in several places where the sunlight must have touched them over the decades. They bore a pattern of purple … things. The things resembled very fat human beings, but had tails and large, muzzle-like heads. Tuuri had never seen anything quite like them, and wondered why pre-Rash people would have made pajamas that featured trolls. All in all, the pajamas were some of the most ridiculous garments she'd ever seen, and they clashed horribly with the Icelander's hair and skin. Lalli had surely chosen them for exactly that reason. Tuuri couldn't restrain her laughter.
Reynir blushed and ducked his head, but Tuuri's laughter was irresistible; he joined her with his own. Even Mikkel, she saw, smiled a little as he watched them. When the merry moment was over, Reynir gave Tuuri a vague salute before pulling from the tank a large tin basin filled with bedding and clothing. He dumped the contents on the ground, filled the basin with hot water from the tank, and set to work scrubbing clothes while Mikkel hung clotheslines between the tank and leafless trees or ruined walls. Tuuri considered offering to help but … well, cleaning was Mikkel's job, and Reynir was a stowaway who fortunately enjoyed cleaning. She left them to it as she prowled near the tank, examining the vegetation.
At least I get to see when I'm driving. It's not really like being behind walls again. Except I can't go anywhere! It's like they have me on a leash; I can't go more than ten meters away, or Mikkel will yell at me. Sometimes even Keuruu seems better. At least there I could go up in the watchtowers — as long as Onni didn't catch me — and I could look out over the lake or into the forest …
Tuuri kicked at the snow. There wasn't even enough for a snowball fight, and anyway Mikkel was far too staid to ever get into such a fight. She glanced over at the men, and Reynir chose that moment to look up and smile at her. Even in those absurd pajamas, he was rather cute, and she smiled back before returning her gaze to the ruins around the parking lot. If only she could see beyond them. Realistically, there would only be more ruins, but she wanted to see!
Sighing, she turned to trudge back to the tank. She paused, studying the vehicle. Sigrun climbed up on top, back when we were looking for that outpost. Looking for food. There's a ladder … must be on the back.
Suddenly animated, Tuuri trotted to and into the tank, planting the kitten on the shoulder of a confused Reynir as she passed him. Inside, she took a rifle from the cabinet, checked that it was loaded, slung it over her shoulder, pocketed a box of ammunition, and trotted back out. “Hey, Mikkel, I want to climb up on the tank.” Both men looked up; Mikkel glanced around with a dubious expression. Before he could object, she continued, “I'd be safer up there than down here anyway. It would be harder for anything to reach me, right? Look, I've got my rifle and I'm a great sniper, so we'll all be safer if I'm up there where I can shoot anything approaching. Right? It's okay, right?”
Mikkel glanced around again before nodding with what she thought might be a resigned expression. “Yes, you may climb up there.” He stood and accompanied her to the back of the tank, watching her climb before returning to his work with Reynir.
On top of the tank, Tuuri did her own little dance. She could see over the ruins now, though the vista was just more ruins.
Still.
Still, she could see farther and there were no walls.
They heard the shot about an hour later.
“Tuuri, get down! Reynir, grab the wash and get in the tank, now!” Mikkel was pulling clothing off the lines as he spoke.
“No, I can snipe —” Hadn't he read the team's records? Didn't he know she was an excellent shot?
“Yes, yes, I know. But you're also our driver. If that shot stirred something up — if the others come running with a wounded giant at their heels — you need to be ready to drive. Immediately!”
Tuuri got down. She couldn't argue with his reasoning, but as she hurried into the tank, she daydreamed about being a hero, about shooting a giant just in time to save everybody, about showing them all that she wasn't just some non-immune baggage that they had to protect.
But she had to be the driver.
As Tuuri settled herself before the controls, Mikkel and Reynir dumped the wash in the middle of the sleeping compartment. Mikkel left, closing the door behind him, and Reynir strung new clotheslines across the compartment. “Do you think we're going to have to run?” he asked as he worked.
“No, Mikkel's just worrying over nothing. It's broad daylight; no giant's going to be running around out there. And there was only one shot. They were hunting, so obviously they shot something. A deer, maybe. Venison would be nice.” She leaned forward to look at the mirror on the righthand side. Mikkel was out of sight. “I've got to tell Lalli to find me another mirror. Remind me to do that, will you, next time he's awake?”
“Sure! I'll do that.”
Tuuri looked at the controls and sighed. After a moment, she turned around to look back at Reynir, her eyes narrowed. “Have you ever driven a vehicle?”
“I drove the wool to market last year.” The Icelander, arms full of blankets, blushed as he shifted his gaze from her face to the controls. “That was just a horse-drawn cart, though. I've never driven anything like this.”
Tuuri smiled slowly. “Let me show you how this works.”
Bzzt!
Reynir jerked back at the sound of the perimeter alarm. He might have crashed the tank if it had been running. Tuuri twitched as well, but recovered rapidly and scooted across the passenger bench to peer at the side mirror.
“It's Sigrun and Emil. The shot was just them shooting a deer. See? Mikkel was being paranoid.”
“He does have to protect us.”
“Oh, yes, sure. Story of my life. 'Stay here, go there, wait for Onni to protect you, you need a guard —' ”
“Onni's immune too?” It seemed most unfair that her brother and cousin were immune and she was not.
“No, no. But he's a mage, you know. He can detect grosslings like a cat. Well, Lalli can too, but Onni's better at it. And he can kill them without getting close enough to be infected.”
“Really?” Reynir stared at her. The Icelandic military doesn't accept non-immunes because we can't fight, but if Onni can …
“Yes, really. I saw him do it. It was … hmm, I think it was four years ago. Keuruu — that's the base we lived at — Keuruu was attacked by a swarm, the biggest swarm in decades, they said. I was up on the wall, sniping, and the hunters and guards were fighting below, keeping the trolls from damaging the wall. They'll claw right through the wall if you give them time, you know.
“Anyway, Onni was beside me, and this giant came out of the trees. It was an overgrown troll, not one of those amalgamated messes. I'm shooting, and so are the others, but it's carrying part of a truck or something like a shield. We're hitting it, but it's not stopping. And Onni says, 'Don't waste your bullets. I'll take it down.' I thought he was nuts, but he sings this runo and points at the giant, and it drops the shield and it … like … tears its own head off! It fell on a bunch of others and squished them.
“Doing that was pretty hard on Onni, though. He sat and held his head, then he went to the barracks and didn’t come out for hours. The rest of us cleared out the swarm. If that giant had gotten through, though, and we'd had to fight it too …” She shrugged with a half-smile.
Reynir slowly let out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Onni killed a giant! If he can teach me to do that, I won't have to be a shepherd ever again! I can join the military and fight to cleanse the world of the Rash! Somehow I've got to talk to him and learn to do that too. This whole horrible adventure will be some good after all. He basked in the thought for several seconds before remembering his original question.
“I'd better go help butcher the deer. Uh … it really is safe for us? You're sure?”
Tuuri laughed her delightful laugh. “Very sure. We ate a lot of venison in Keuruu. The hunters would bring one back every so often. Nobody ever got the Rash from it. Look, I'll go with you.”
Emil looked up from scrubbing his hands and snickered, drawing Sigrun's attention from the deer lying in the snow before her. She too laughed, and Tuuri joined in. Reynir had forgotten his garish pajamas, but now he grinned; if he could do nothing else, he could entertain the team.
Mikkel returned from the back compartment with butchery tools. Sigrun turned away as he approached, then turned back. “Oy, Mikkel!”
Reynir understood that much, but not the resulting argument. “What are they saying?” he asked Tuuri.
“Sigrun's upset that Mikkel threw away those disks they brought back yesterday.”
Reynir put a hand to his mouth. “Oh, no! Tell her that's my fault. I thought Mikkel said they were trash.”
“They are trash,” Mikkel said in Icelandic without turning, before returning to the argument.
Sigrun flung her hands up, snarled something, and stalked away.
“What was that?”
“Mikkel said Emil was stupid, and Sigrun said Mikkel was.”
Mikkel seated himself and began skinning the deer. “I didn't say Emil was stupid. I said he's ignorant and poorly educated.”
Tuuri giggled and ran to follow Sigrun.
Reynir watched her go, swallowed. I'm just a shepherd. If he thinks Emil is ignorant, what must he think of me? I'm such a burden to them. He looked down at Mikkel's slow, careful motions. Well, I know how to butcher sheep; a deer's not that different. He sat beside the Dane. “I can do that, if you like.”
Mikkel passed over the tools with muttered thanks and stood to survey the surroundings.
Reynir glanced at the rubbish heap. “What are those disks?”
“They're called deeveedies. Emil called them gramophones, but he was wrong. The devices to read gramophones are simple enough that we can make replacement parts or even make them from scratch. The devices to read deeveedies are complex electronics we can't repair. What few still work are far too valuable to use for children's entertainment, which is what those disks contain.”
The Icelander sighed. Like Emil, he didn't know the difference between a gramophone and a deeveedy.
Soon Mikkel and Reynir took the venison and hide to the unheated back compartment. When no one was looking, Reynir scooped up a disk as a souvenir of the Silent World.
When Tuuri announced Reynir would drive to their next camp, Sigrun claimed the far-right passenger seat, and Tuuri slid in beside her. Emil stood behind the women, Mikkel behind Reynir. With a gulp, the Icelander eased the tank forward.
Or rather, he tried to ease the tank forward. As it lurched forward and to the right, Emil cursed, Sigrun braced herself, and Tuuri shouted at Reynir in Finnish. Retching noises from the sleeping compartment sent Mikkel running to check on Lalli. Reynir pulled back, causing the tank to reverse and slew to the left. A crash from behind made him wince. Tuuri reached over and grabbed Reynir's hands, pulling them into the correct position.
“S-s-sorry! You'll have to drive.” Reynir looked over her head at Emil, white-knuckled and glaring at him, and Sigrun, giving him a thumbs-up with a broad grin.
“No, no, you need the practice.”
The outer door banged behind them, and they turned to see Lalli flee the tank. “Oh, look what I've done now.”
“Don't worry about him. He hates riding in the tank. Or in anything, really. Now, push forward like this …”
Reynir struggled to focus on her instructions and not on the feel of her small, strong hands on his own large, rough hands.
Night had fallen, bringing more snow, before the tank reached the agreed camp. The tank had gained some new scrapes and dents, but no parts had been torn off. Reynir peeled his cramped hands from the controls and flexed them. Sigrun clouted him on the shoulder as she passed, still grinning. Tuuri translated her comment as “Fun ride, kid.”
As Emil and Sigrun set perimeter alarms, Mikkel tossed the laundry on Emil's bunk, took out cooking gear, pulled down the folding table, and set out his gear. Seeing Reynir's puzzled look, he said, “We'll cook and eat inside tonight, so as not to attract trolls. Wait here; I'll bring the food.” The Icelander appreciated the decision, as his garish flannel pajamas were too light for the snowy weather. The Dane returned with vegetables and venison, and soon the two men had a hearty stew bubbling on the stove. Mikkel stood, stirring the stew, while Reynir folded laundry and Sigrun chatted noisily with Emil.
“You did well,” Mikkel said after a while.
“I d-don't think so. Lalli ran away and —”
“Lalli was asleep when you started. I should have awakened him and given him an anti-emetic.” At Reynir's confusion, he added, “That's a drug to settle his stomach. He suffers severe motion sickness, and I should have helped him.”
“But he's out there in the dark. And it's snowing.”
“He's run around in the dark and the snow before. He's an experienced scout; he'll be all right.”
“I told you so,” Tuuri put in.
Reynir bit his lip and nodded. He looked up at the door, and, almost as if his thoughts had summoned the scout, the proximity alarm sounded. Sigrun and Emil came to their feet, and Mikkel hurried to check the controls while Tuuri and Reynir donned their masks. After looking over the non-immunes, the Dane opened the door. Lalli climbed in, dropped a bundle at Mikkel's feet, and stripped off his outer clothing. Without a word to the others, he rolled under Mikkel's bunk and lay with his back to them.
“Is he mad at me?” Reynir whispered to Tuuri.
“No, he just doesn't like to talk.”
“I don't think he likes me.”
“Probably not. He doesn't really like anyone. Don't worry, honest.”
Mikkel shook out the bundle and handed it to Reynir: a long, heavy, dark blue wool coat.
“There, you see?” Tuuri said, grinning behind her mask. “He found that for you. Pretty soon, he'll find you some better clothes.” She looked him up and down and laughed; he joined her.
That evening, Reynir lay in his bunk, thinking of Tuuri's laughter and the feel of her hands on his.
A giant glares through the windshield, and Tuuri cowers away, pressing her fist to her mouth to suppress a scream.
“Why did you let that boy drive my tank?”
Tuuri turns, wide-eyed, to see a woman in the driver's seat. She is taller than Tuuri, a little older, slender, with short dark blond hair, and the severe lines of her clothes give the impression of a uniform.
“Boy?” She stares at the woman, bewildered. “Oh, Reynir. He's not a boy, he's —”
“Did you see how much damage he did? Scratches and dents! Do you know how hard those are to fix? Why did you let him drive?”
“I'm the only one who knows how to drive, so he has to learn in case I'm busy. Or, or, not able.” She glances back at the giant, which is still far too close but looking away. She hopes it will not hear their voices.
“You sure you know how to drive? You're better than he is, I suppose, but that's not saying much.”
“I only got to drive the bulldozer at home a few times. I've tried to do better.”
“Well, yes, you have improved. You're still not very good.” The woman turns and points out the side window. “And you still haven't gotten a replacement for this mirror. Do you plan to take care of that?”
“Oh, yes, I'm sorry! I'll tell Lalli to get a new mirror tomorrow.” Movement outside draws Tuuri's gaze. The giant bends down, stands with half a troll in its largest mouth. A smaller mouth sprouting from the creature's shoulder snatches at the torn flesh, and she shudders.
When Tuuri looks back, the driver's seat is empty.
Dawn had broken, and Lalli had not returned. Mikkel sat by the fire, eating his porridge and occasionally stirring the pot with his wooden spoon; Emil sat across the fire, closer to the tank, and ate while feeding the fire with twigs. Tuuri and Reynir sat together beside the open tank door, and Sigrun paced around, having already wolfed down her breakfast.
“Where is the scout?” Sigrun grumbled. No one answered.
Tuuri stared out at the desolate city, willing Lalli to return.
Watching for him won't make him come back faster. (If he's coming back.) Of course he is!
She looked around for something to distract her, and her gaze fell on the dents and scrapes on the tank. Those which she had caused were less noticeable than the new ones Reynir had caused. Indeed, she thought as she stood and examined them more closely, the paint was hardly scraped, and Mikkel could knock out the dents with a sledgehammer if she removed each panel.
The Silent World was so called because there had been no human communications from it since the Catastrophe, yet it truly was silent. The wind whispered through bare branches and broken windows, and far off and faint, geese honked. Sigrun's boots crunched in the snow, and spoons clinked against bowls. All else was silence, and Tuuri shivered at the thought of disturbing it with hammering.
Ting!
Tuuri jumped at the sound, but it was only the metal of the tank adjusting to the warming sun. With a pat on the tank, she sat back down beside Reynir to finish her breakfast.
Another sound: more crunching. To Tuuri's relief, Lalli was trotting back to the tank. Mikkel scooped porridge into a bowl, added a spoon, and stood. As Lalli made his way to the tank's door, he found himself facing Mikkel's considerable bulk. He looked at the bowl which Mikkel offered, at Mikkel himself, and at the bowl again. His shoulders drooped slightly as he accepted the bowl and walked away from the others before sitting to eat.
The Dane watched for a moment before returning to his seat and giving Tuuri a slight smile. She grinned back. At Keuruu, Lalli never ate enough for his active lifestyle, and sometimes collapsed and had to rest for a couple of days and eat until he recovered. Onni had seldom been able to coax or coerce Lalli to eat; Mikkel seemed to have found an effective method.
Sigrun paced about until Lalli set down his bowl and spoon and got to his feet with a doubtful glance at Mikkel. Sigrun and Tuuri followed him, Tuuri catching up as he reached the door.
“Lalli, wait. See this mirror? I need another one like this, as close as you can get, but for the other side. Will you look for one next time you go out?”
Lalli stared at the mirror, turned his head to stare at the tank as if he were looking through it, then nodded and climbed inside. The women climbed in after him, and Tuuri pulled out their city map for his usual description of passable and impassable roads. As soon as Sigrun decided on a site they could reach, Lalli disappeared into the sleeping compartment, Emil put out the fire, and everyone piled into the tank. Tuuri drove this time, as Lalli had said the tank would have difficulty with some streets.
A little over an hour later, Tuuri brought the tank to a stop in a frost-heaved parking lot, proud that she'd hit nothing along the way, and Sigrun and Emil hopped out to go scavenging while Mikkel plodded away in search of wood. Reynir set to work cleaning the interior while Tuuri tried to signal Öresund Base. Getting no response through the omnipresent static, she turned to transcribing the journal.
After a while, as Reynir swept around her feet, he asked, “What was Lalli doing yesterday, up in that tree?”
“That's a ceremony we do. He put the dog's skull on top of a tree so his spirit can return to the skies and then be reborn healthy and immune.”
“Do you do that for, um, all animals? Like sheep and cattle and chickens?”
“Yes, of course. Well, not chickens, because they're immune already.”
The Icelander looked dismayed. “We … we don't do that. And there are so many sheep …”
Tuuri couldn't restrain her laughter any longer. “I'm joking. We don't do it for farm animals. Just wolves and bears, really.”
He relaxed a little. “But that was a dog.”
“A dog, yes, but such a brave, strong dog. He had a collar, so he'd been infected since the Catastrophe. The Rash forces victims to kill anything they can, but that dog turned away from attacking Emil, and then he came to let Emil kill him. That took such strength. So Lalli honored him with the ceremony.”
Reynir swept a little more. “Do you do that for people?”
“No.” Tuuri shook her head at the thought. “No, people find their own way to the path of the birds. Mostly, anyway. If they don't, a psychopomp like Onni helps them find their way.”
“Onni's a psychopomp? Oh! That's what he meant!”
“What?”
“The first time I met him. In a dream, I mean, when he said I was a mage. Before that, he wanted my name so he could lead me to where I belong. It's a good thing I recognized him before he tried to lead me away!”
“Yes, but you're still alive, so if he led your spirit to where it belonged, he'd have just led you back to your body.”
“I guess that makes sense.” He knelt to scoop up his sweepings in a dustpan.
Tuuri searched for another topic. “So, what was that like in the mage-space? That place where you met Onni?” She looked at the typewriter, hating the wistful tone in her voice.
Reynir described the sea, the fog, Lalli's place, Onni's place, and his conversation with Onni.
“You walked on water? That's nothing special; we did it all the time in Keuruu.” He stared at her in such confusion that she laughed again.
“Oh, ice! We did that too,” he said, joining her laughter. “So, um, do you have a place in the mage-space too?”
“Those places are called 'havens'. Onni said even non-mages have havens, but they're far away from mages' havens, and somehow mages can't travel to our havens.”
“So you have one?”
“I guess so, but I don't really know. Maybe I've dreamed of it, but how would I know what's a dream of my haven, and what's just a regular dream?” She tried not to let her jealousy of mages show.
“I don't know if I have a haven. I suppose I do, but …” He shrugged. “I hope that boat, the one with the grossling dog, isn't my haven.”
Tuuri shuddered at the thought. Movement outside caught her attention: Mikkel returning with a load of wood. “I guess we'd better get back to work,” she said, placing her hands on the typewriter.
Reynir hastily put away the broom and took out the mop.
When Mikkel buzzed for entrance, the non-immunes donned their masks, and Tuuri waved Reynir back so she stood before the Dane, preventing him from climbing into the tank.
“Mikkel, we want to come out. The Sun is shining and there aren't any trolls around.”
“Did you reach the base?”
“No, but I know what you're thinking. The static isn't any worse than yesterday.”
Mikkel looked up at scattered clouds and back at Tuuri. “All right.” He held up a hand as she started forward. “Give me the kitten. If she confirms no trolls nearby, you two can come out so long as you stay close to the door.”
Tuuri gave Reynir a triumphant grin as she turned to go to the sleeping compartment for the kitten. Mikkel accepted the small, yawning animal, carried her around the parking lot for several seconds, and returned to hand the kitten to Tuuri. “Stay near the door.”
“I'm supposed to report on the ecology. I can't do that if I can't move around.”
Mikkel sighed. “Okay, I'll escort you around this area. We can't go far, though.”
“Thank you.”
Tuuri gave Reynir another grin as she darted into the tank to grab her notepad and pencil. He gave her an uncertain smile, then asked Mikkel, “Do you want me to do the laundry?”
“Yes, if you wish.” Tuuri shook her head in disbelief at the Icelander's enthusiasm for chores.
With the big man looming over her, Tuuri prowled about for hours, brushing snow away from interesting plants, picking the best to press. Though mint wasn't interesting to her, Mikkel picked every mint leaf and tucked it in his pocket.
As the short winter day drew to a close, Sigrun and Emil returned, dusty and disappointed. “No books,” Sigrun grumbled. “Well, there were books, but all moldy and disgusting. There were some little rat-beasts, though,” she added, brightening, “and my right-hand man, here, killed one by himself.”
Emil gave Tuuri a weak smile and hurried to build a fire for a supper of venison stew. The evening passed without alarms, and soon the team was inside the tank for the night.
“Stop.”
Emil stopped in his tracks at Sigrun's quiet order, looking around and even behind them for the danger she must have perceived. Seeing nothing troubling, he turned to her, puzzled.
“Tell me what you see.”
Emil licked his lips and spoke softly. “The snow is undisturbed except for our footprints, a row of footprints running along the street over there, and those tracks ahead from a bird that must have been here recently. The footprints — those other footprints — are kind of filled in by that snow this morning, so I can't tell which way they point. They're wide-spaced, like someone was running. We know Lalli scouted through here, so those are almost certainly his, and nothing to worry about.” He glanced at Sigrun, who was scanning around them as she listened and gave him no hints.
“To the left is a stone building in good shape. Those big windows must be thick plate glass. The door is closed. If a troll got in somewhere, that would be a good nest. I don't see any movement or signs of trolls, but the windows are grimy, so I might not see. If there's a troll in there and it comes after us, it'll try to break through the door or windows, giving us time to react. To the right is a collapsed building. A troll might make a nest in the basement or something, and if so, it would make a lot of noise coming out after us. There could be vermin beasts in there, I suppose. I, uh, don't see the danger.”
Sigrun nodded. “You've done well, but look again at the bird tracks.”
“The bird tracks. The bird landed there on the left, hopped across the street, and then … oh, I see. No wing-prints.” He gave Sigrun a look of dismay. “It didn't fly away.”
“Right. Something must've reached out of that collapsed building and snatched it up. There's something big in there, maybe a troll with a long arm or even a giant.”
Emil gripped an incendiary. “I can burn it.”
“Not yet. Too close to the site. We'll pass on this side and try to get by without fighting. Be ready, though.” She gave his shoulder a light punch. “We'll take care of it on the way back. Work first, fun later. Let's go get those books.”
The young man still didn't regard fighting trolls as “fun”, and doubted he ever would. Though Sigrun had said he'd done well in evaluating the situation, his failure to spot the danger proved he still had much to learn. He sighed under his breath as they walked on in single file, hands close to pistols and daggers. Sigrun, he noted, was still scanning their surroundings, not allowing herself to become fixated on the potential troll. He strove to do the same.
As they passed the spot where the bird's track ended, a tentacle snaked out from the ruin, reaching for them with a large, disturbingly human hand. Unable to catch them, it slipped back through a gap in the debris. Once they were well out of reach, Sigrun said, “I figured it grabbed the bird as soon as it came within reach, so we'd be safe. Good odds of that, but not for sure. You have to be ready for anything.”
“Do you think it'll come out after us?” Emil glanced back at the ruin but saw no movement.
“Nah, it doesn't like the sunlight. You saw how quick it pulled that tentacle back. If it does, though, you're right, it'll make a lot of noise.” She shrugged. “Trolls could pop out from anywhere. Keep looking around.”
They continued another couple of blocks in silence before reaching their target. This was another stone building, giving Emil hope that the books inside would be intact. At first, after he pried the door open and they flashed their lights inside, the site looked quite promising. Parts of the ceiling had fallen, but the structure seemed otherwise intact. Sigrun stood just inside, listening and breathing deeply through her nose. Emil did his best to emulate her.
“What do you think?” Sigrun asked after a moment.
“I, uh, I heard something move, but it was very small; I think it was a mouse. Maybe a mouse-beast. Not big, though. I don't see any mold in here, but this place smells moldy. I don't smell anything like a troll's nest.” He glanced at her, hoping his anxiety didn't show.
“I agree. Don't like that moldy smell, though. Ah, well, nothing to do but look.”
It soon became apparent that their initial impressions had been too hopeful. The entryway was intact, but the roof had fallen in further back. The bookcases they found bore books black with rot, and Sigrun grew increasingly disgusted with each room they inspected.
“Waste of time. You'd think the scout would check that there was any thing in the place worth taking.”
Emil always wanted to care for strays; his father had often punished him for trying to adopt unwanted puppies. Lalli struck him as a stray: unable to talk to anyone but Tuuri, who paid him little attention, and sent out on terrifying dangerous nighttime scouting missions for which no one seemed to thank him. And now Sigrun was criticizing the way he ran such missions.
“He works awfully hard, scouting out all those streets and all the dangers. He couldn't know about this place unless he took the time to break in and search it. And all the other sites he found routes to, as well. I, ah, I don't think it's fair —”
Sigrun looked over at him and shook her head. “Oh, aye, I understand. The twig's doing the work of two scouts. Just frustrating to — Whoa! Careful, there!”
She caught his arm and steadied him as he looked back to see what he'd tripped over. Thus it was that Emil found the only treasures in the site, for he had stumbled over a decaying book-bag containing five books. Two had rotted, but the remaining three were protected by shrink-wrapped plastic.
Sigrun scooped up the three books. “Wow, look at these! Nice thick books, too. Mikkel will like them.” She slapped Emil on the back, staggering him. “Good work! Let's go fry a troll and go get supper.”
Emil doubted Mikkel really needed a complete dictionary of the Danish language — the man displayed a formidable vocabulary — but the history of the continental drift controversy (whatever that meant) might interest him. They retreated with relief through the moldy halls and out into the clean air.
Sigrun waved him to a stop at a safe distance from the building with its tentacle troll. “Hmm. No wind, lots of snow, lots of stone. Should be safe to burn.” Emil frowned for a moment. He was a trained Cleanser, and she was telling him his business! He reminded himself that she likely seldom worked with Cleansers, and would have to instruct her own team this way. “Can you hit that hole with an explosive?” she asked.
Emil peered at it. Throwing things wasn't one of his great skills, but the hole wasn't that far. “I think so.” He took out an explosive, pulled the pin, hurled it … and the tentacle shot out of the hole, grabbed the explosive, and disappeared. “Back, back!” They retreated as he counted the seconds before
Boom!
Debris erupted from the ruin and pattered down around the street. An unearthly shriek rose from beneath the ruin before trailing off. Flames flickered near the middle before flaring up.
“Nice!” Sigrun gave him a thumbs-up and led the way, grinning.
“I was thinking,” Emil said several minutes later. “If not for the bird, we might have walked closer to that ruin, and that tentacle might have got one of us.”
“Yeah, we were lucky. Still, even if it had grabbed you, it couldn't have got you through that hole. Anyway, that's why you've got to be ready for anything out here. But you're okay; you're with the most best troll-hunter in Norway.” She grinned at him before returning her attention to scanning their surroundings.
“Lalli ran right by it.”
“The kid's fast. He was probably past before it noticed him. Maybe it never noticed him. Trolls are slow and stupid. I've said that before, I guess. Not saying they aren't dangerous, never saying that, 'cause they are if you get within reach, or if they're in a swarm. But a troll-hunter like you, who pays attention and is ready to fight or run, can handle a troll.”
Emil hugged her words to himself all the way back to the tank. She called me a troll-hunter!
Tuuri walks along a path, a gentle breeze stirring fresh spring leaves in the forest around her. Flowers nod their bright heads, birds sing, and insects buzz. The sunshine is warm but not hot, perfect for her light hiking clothes. She feels she has been here before, yet there are new things to discover all around her.
A rustle in the undergrowth draws her attention. She should be afraid of possible grosslings, but she is not, watching with interest as a hedgehog as big as a cat pushes through the ferns and flowers to join her on the path.
“Oh, I understand now! This is my haven, and you are my luonto.” Her grandmother — oh, so long ago — taught her about the luonto, the guardian spirit, one of the three parts of the soul. Onni spoke often of his luonto, an owl, but she does not remember having seen hers before. She turns in a circle, taking in the forest. “This is what I've always wanted, a wild place with no walls. Let's explore!”
The luonto looks up, opening her mouth in a hedgehog smile, and trots beside Tuuri as she strides down the path.
Tuuri yawned, looking around the tank in the wan predawn moonlight. All the bunks were empty, everyone already outside. Stripping off her pajamas, she left them on her tangled covers while she pulled on her uniform. Not quite ready to face the cold outdoors, she made her way forward and sat in the driver's seat, studying the mirror that Lalli had brought the previous day and she had bolted on.
I wonder if the driver likes this mirror. I guess she didn't talk to me last night; at least, I don't remember her. Some dream about walking in a forest, that's all. Maybe she's upset about the color. I'm sure Lalli would have brought me a gray mirror if he could find one. And the blue is quite pretty, I think. Though she might have wanted it to match the tank.
But no, she's not even real. Lalli would see her if she were real. She'd have asked him; she wouldn't have bothered with me.
Well, maybe. Onni says Lalli's mage-sight is weak. Would he even see a Danish ghost? They might be different from our ghosts. They have different gods, if they have any gods at all. But they must have gods, surely.
Perhaps she's real after all, and he just can't see her.
“Driver? Do you like the mirror? If you want a gray mirror, I can ask Lalli again.” After a long moment of silence, Tuuri sighed and stood to go. She wouldn't resolve the mystery by talking to the air.
Just as Tuuri hopped down from the tank, Lalli picked his way towards them through slush and debris, a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Mikkel, who had been stirring porridge while Sigrun and Emil ate, got to his feet, full bowl and spoon in hand.
Lalli stopped.
The tall, massive Dane and the short, slight Finn regarded each other for a long moment before Lalli's shoulders drooped and he dropped the bag at Mikkel's feet, accepted the bowl and spoon, and settled down to eat well away from the others.
Deferring breakfast for the moment, Tuuri approached her cousin. “What's in the bag?”
“Clothes.” Lalli didn't look up as he spoke.
“For, uh, for Reynir, maybe?”
Lalli gave her the stare he used instead of answering what he considered a stupid question.
“Right, yes, okay. Thank you. That's really helpful.” As Lalli returned to eating without comment, Tuuri shrugged and joined the others for breakfast. Before long, Sigrun chose a salvage spot from Lalli's report, and Tuuri drove them to yet another deteriorating parking lot.
“Wait.”
Fear jolted through Tuuri at Mikkel's quiet voice. Yet the kitten nestled in her hood still purred, the chilly wind still blew, and the Sun still shone bright. She glanced over her shoulder at the tank, no more than twenty meters away, and considered how quickly she could run to it, though Mikkel hadn't told her to run, nor even moved to put himself between her and danger. “What's wrong? Not, not a grossling?” As always on her ventures outside the tank, she kept her voice down.
Mikkel was studying a stream of meltwater beside the frost-heaved street. “That pebble.” He picked it up and held it close to his eyes. “This is flint.” He looked along the stream. “Lots of flint. They must have used it as fill under the street and now it's washing out.”
“Flint used as fill.” She raised her notepad to record the observation.
“This is valuable. With flint, we can make arrowheads for Sigrun so she can hunt without firing her rifle.” Dropping the pebble in a pocket, he checked their surroundings, then knelt to gather more pebbles and add them to the pocket.
Tuuri joined him, gathering a handful of pebbles. “How do we make arrowheads?”
“The traditional way is to knock rocks together, but you can likely do better with a chisel.” He picked up a rounded, gray, fine-grained pebble. “This is granite. You can use it to break the flint if necessary.”
I can use it? The wind whispered in the trees and ruins around them, some loose bit of metal banged irregularly far away, and the city was otherwise silent. “That'll make noise.” She leapt to her feet, startling Mikkel so he fell backwards before jumping up as well.
“Prrr?” said the kitten, poking her nose in Tuuri's ear.
Mikkel looked around, turning in place, hand on dagger. “What —”
“This is a trick!” She flung the pebbles she'd gathered into the stream, raising a cloud of mud. “You just want me to stay in the tank, so you'll say hammering on rocks makes too much noise.”
Mikkel knelt again. “This is not a trick.” His voice was soft, but he bit off the words. He scooped up pebbles and mud, dumped the mess in his pocket, and stood. “You may proceed with your task.”
Tuuri stalked away, straight-backed, trying to focus on spotting and identifying plants. Mikkel followed as her hulking guard. He seldom spoke when guarding her, but now his silence seemed to speak of anger rather than caution.
Maybe this wasn't a trick, but what did he expect? He does play tricks, and he does want me to stay in the tank. Why would he expect me to believe him? She paused to examine another weed and added a tick mark to its name in her list. Her nose itched beneath her mask and she longed to take the thing off.
This is a waste of time. It's the same plants, same ruins, everywhere in the city. Arghh! The team doesn't need me. Reynir can drive now; Mikkel reads Danish better than I do, and I'll bet he can type, not that anyone really needs to, and nobody needs to make these notes. But I want to be part of this! I want to explore! Only I can't ever be like them. I'm like the blue mirror; I won't ever match the rest. With a sigh compounded of anger and frustration, Tuuri put away her notepad and strode back to the tank, Mikkel following.
“Go inside,” Mikkel ordered. “You two keep your masks on. I have some things to do.”
Tuuri pressed the buzzer without looking at him, waiting just a moment for Reynir to open the door. He had been busy while Tuuri and Mikkel were out surveying the local flora. Clothing hung from clotheslines strung across the sleeping compartment, forcing him, but not Tuuri, to duck while walking around. She passed on the word that they should keep their masks on, although she sneaked hers off briefly so she could scratch her nose.
It is a measure of Tuuri's distraction that it took her several seconds to notice that Reynir wore neither his own Icelandic clothes nor Mikkel's ill-fitting gear. Instead, he wore sturdy blue trousers, a gray turtleneck, and over that, a patterned flannel shirt with wide dark green and navy blue vertical and horizontal stripes, and narrow black stripes. She had never seen a tartan pattern before and studied it with interest.
As Reynir noticed her focus on his shirt, he raised his arms and turned in place to reveal that the dark colors showed off his long red braid to its best advantage. “It's nice, isn't it? Lalli was so kind to find it for me. I thought he didn't like me, but he's really a good friend.” Tuuri was sure that Lalli didn't like Reynir, as he invariably referred to the man as “the tall stupid one”, if he had to acknowledge his existence at all, but there was no point explaining that to the Icelander.
The back door of the tank thumped open and soon closed again. The pipes hissed as Mikkel ran the outside tap for a minute; Tuuri looked guiltily at her hands, realizing that he must be washing mud off the flint pebbles. When the buzzer sounded, she didn't make Mikkel wait as she usually did, but opened the door at once.
“Reynir, I'd like you to help me out here. I have some flint —”
“Out there?” Tuuri asked.
“Yes. I expect that knapping flint will produce splinters and dust, which I don't want in the tank. It's not so cold as I'd like right now, but the sunlight will keep nearly all grosslings under cover, and the kitten's not alerted to any threats, so it should be safe to work outside for an hour or two. However, I do want Lalli to help stand guard, much as I'd rather let him rest. Will you please wake him and request his assistance?”
Tuuri shook Lalli awake, dodging his sleepy attempts at fending her off, and explained Mikkel's request. He grumbled his assent, rolled out from under Mikkel's bunk, and pulled on his outside uniform. Reynir was already outside, and Tuuri had all she could do not to urge her cousin to hurry. Nagging him would only slow him down, as she knew from experience, and she wanted to get outside before Mikkel explained knapping to Reynir. Since the project really wasn't a trick, and it might help Sigrun, Tuuri wanted to be a part of it. If only Lalli would hurry up!
Mikkel had set up three folding chairs, a toolbox — Tuuri's toolbox — in front of them. She paused, seeing a seat ready for her when she had not agreed to take part, but shrugged, seated herself, and accepted the protective goggles he offered. Pretending an argument had never happened had often worked with Onni.
Mikkel's knowledge of knapping flint proved to be strictly theoretical. After explaining the proper angle of attack, he struck his pebble at the wrong angle and shattered it. Several smashed pebbles later, he gave up and watched the young people work, offering unneeded suggestions, while Lalli prowled about and the kitten purred from her nest in Tuuri's hood.
By the time Sigrun and Emil came back, disappointed at their meager haul of books, Reynir had managed one lopsided but usable arrowhead and Tuuri had two. Once the project was explained to her, Sigrun attacked it with more enthusiasm than care, but still managed a good arrowhead before Mikkel called a halt, pointing out that the hour was growing late and grosslings would soon wake up and perhaps hear the hammering.
While Mikkel and Reynir prepared supper for the team, Tuuri pried the practice heads off some of Sigrun's fiberglass arrows (breaking two arrows in the process), and attached flint arrowheads, first gluing them in with melted wax and then tying them in place with string.
Sigrun examined the resulting arrows, weighing them in her hands and sighting along them. “Pretty good job, short stuff. These won't fly as well as our arrows at home, but — Hey, buck up, kid! We've got fletchers who've been making arrows their whole lives. You've been at it for, what, two hours? They don't have to chip arrowheads out of rocks, either. Of course your arrowheads aren't that good, but I can use them for rabbits and like that. So I'll take Emil out tomorrow to practice shooting and bring back some rabbits for a change.”
“Sure!” Tuuri did her best to sound cheerful, but, as always, Sigrun and Emil would go out exploring, and she would be stuck transcribing that journal in the tank or cataloging plants in notes that no one would ever care about.
The weather turned bitter during the night, so bitter that Mikkel cooked breakfast inside. When Lalli stumbled into the tank, shivering, he accepted two bowls of hot porridge without complaint and, after he showed Tuuri the route he'd found to a large park, he even allowed Mikkel to give him extra blankets as he rolled under Mikkel's bunk to sleep away the day.
Refrozen meltwater streams and puddles cracked under the tank as Tuuri followed a winding path around rusting vehicles to their next stopping place. “Is there any reason to hunt today?” Mikkel asked from his usual position on the right side of passenger's bench. “The cold will keep natural animals under cover as well as grosslings.”
“Maybe,” Sigrun said, leaning forward to look past Tuuri, “or maybe not. At home, the critters have learned to come out in cold weather when the grosslings can't move around. I don't know if your Danish critters are that smart, though. Still, I'll take those cruddy practice arrows for Emil to try shooting with.” She turned to look at Emil, who stood behind her. “I'll bet those Cleansers didn't teach you archery.”
“No, we just practiced with pistols. Well, pistols and flamethrowers. The hunters were supposed to clean the grosslings out before we went in, and we never stayed in dangerous areas for long anyway.”
Mikkel turned to look at Emil as well. “You practiced with a flamethrower?”
“We had a flamethrower contest last year, and I was the champion. I do best with a flamethrower. But, well, we can't go hunting with it.” Listening to him, Tuuri remembered how much he'd bragged about his education (which wasn't much, really) when she'd met him back in Mora, but now he hardly emphasized his championship.
“Do we have a flamethrower?” Mikkel asked.
“There's one in the back, but —”
“I didn't know about that,” Sigrun said.
“I didn't think you'd want me to bring it along when we were looking for books.”
“Guess not. It's good to know about it, though. We might need it later.”
“We don't have much fuel, though, and there's no way to get more.”
“I'll keep that in mind.”
Tuuri brought the tank to a halt on a slightly tilted chunk of concrete, and Emil, Sigrun, and Mikkel went to the back to prepare.
“What were they saying?” Reynir asked, moving from his position behind the driver's seat to the passenger's bench.
“Just talking about hunting and about a flamethrower that's in the back. Not real interesting.” She made her way to the radio compartment as she did every morning. Reynir leaned on the doorway to watch, though no one else did; for days, she hadn't been able to reach the base through the static and didn't expect to reach it this day either.
“Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base. Silent World Expedition calling —”
“Öresund base here.” The voice overrode the crackle of static, and Tuuri turned down the volume on her headphones. “Do you hear me, Silent World Expedition?”
“Yes! Yes, I hear you!”
“Good. We heard you yesterday and three days ago, but you didn't hear us. What can we do for you?”
“Please patch us through to the expedition headquarters in Mora.”
“Will do. Hold on.” There was a series of clicks and muffled voices.
“What's going on?” Reynir asked.
Tuuri pulled down her headphones. “They're connecting us to the sponsors so we can talk to them directly.”
“They can do that? Can they connect us to my parents? I'm sure they want to know I'm all right. And — and I want to apologize to them.”
“No, they connect to Mora through that wire running alongside the train. Oh, wait, you weren't on the train. Well, anyway, there's a wire all the way from the base to Mora, but nothing like that to Iceland. You'll have to give a message to the radio operator, and he'll pass it on to a ship, and they'll pass it on, and so on.”
Reynir's face fell. “I don't want to send an apology that way.”
“This is Trond. Who is this?”
Tuuri hastily pulled up her headphones. “This is Tuuri.”
“Status?”
“Everyone is well. We've been, um, examining various locations and recording conditions as ordered, but today we're camped in a park so Sigrun and Emil can go hunting.”
“Good. Put Mikkel on.”
“Hey, Mikkel! Trond wants to talk to you.”
Mikkel hurried forward and took over the headphones. After a moment, he said, “Continuing, sir. … Yes, sir.” He passed the headphones to Tuuri. “He's disconnected.”
“Okay. Are we supposed to do anything?”
“No, we'll proceed as planned.”
Behind him, Sigrun was checking the sensors. “Put on your masks, kiddies. Me and my buddy are heading out. Rabbits for supper!”
Mikkel followed the hunters to collect firewood, leaving Tuuri and Reynir with the sleeping Lalli. Tuuri set to work transcribing the journal, while Reynir filled the washtub.
“It's a good thing you're here,” Tuuri said some while later, straightening up and arching her back.
Reynir dried his hands on a shirt and came forward to talk. “You think so?”
“Yeah. Cooking and cleaning are Mikkel's jobs, but you're doing a lot of it.”
“I want to help!”
“Sure, sure. What I mean is, he has to gather firewood too, and he wouldn't have time to do that and all the cooking and cleaning as well. If you weren't here, someone else would have to help gather firewood, so they couldn't spend so much time looking for books or hunting, and I'd have to help cook and clean, so I couldn't make notes or transcribe this thing.”
Reynir's face brightened. “I'm not just baggage?”
“Like I said, it's a good thing you're here. Good for us, at least. Not so good for you.”
“Maybe it's good for me, too.” Reynir blushed and turned back to the washtub. “So, uh, that journal. What's going on in there?” He dropped a shirt in the tub to scrub.
“Right now, it's a long passage about the patients he's assigned to, their conditions, and all the treatments he's administering. Maybe that stuff's interesting to Mikkel. Not to me, though.
“They — the doctors — still don't know what the Rash is really like, but they're hearing that lots of people are dying, and they're getting alarmed. See, they expected patients would get sick and need care for a week or two, but then they'd get better. Most of them, anyway. Old people, or people who were already sick with something, they might die, but most people would recover with proper care. He wrote two whole pages about how mortality is high in epidemics because nobody's well enough to take care of people who might survive.”
“Don't they know about trollification?”
“The writer's heard rumors, but he doesn't believe them. Communications are already failing, so he doesn't know what's going on further south. Mostly, he's just focused on taking care of his patients, and so far none of them are far along in the disease.
“He's got a wife and two little girls, but he sleeps at the clinic because he doesn't want to go home for fear of taking the disease back to them. She — his wife, Inge, that is — is mad about that because she thinks he should come home and take care of them instead. He writes a lot about how he's torn, but he doesn't want to abandon his patients. Inge seems kind of mean to him.”
Reynir moved into the driving compartment to look out the windshield. “Hard to imagine this place full of people, none of them even dreaming they were all about to die. Or worse. And now we come along to disturb them.”
Tuuri joined him in looking out. “Are we disturbing them?” Reynir turned to look at her, puzzled. “Well, you said you're a mage. Can you see spirits? Ghosts?”
“I, I think so. My uncle got married when I was a little boy, and we had a ceremony at a place of power.” He gave her an uncertain look, and she gave him an encouraging nod. “There were lots of people there, family and neighbors, you know, but there was this couple that I didn't recognize. Afterwards, I asked my mother about them, but she didn't know what I was talking about. A few years ago, though, I found a picture of my great-grandparents. I'm sure they were the people I saw, so they must have been ghosts, right?”
“Yes, that makes sense. So, uh, have you seen any here? I mean, in Denmark, or anything?”
He looked around. “No, I haven't. Should there be some? So many dead, and there wouldn't be any psychopomps to guide them, right?”
Tuuri tried not to feel disappointed. There was no ghost in the tank, so why did she keep thinking otherwise? But he had asked a question, and she had to answer. “Onni says people almost always find their way, even if it takes them a few years. After so long, I guess they've all made it.”
“Guess so.” He returned to the wash, and she returned to her typing.
Bzzt!
Reynir propped his broom against the wall, pulled on his mask, looked back to confirm that Tuuri wore her own, glanced at the sensors, and opened the door. Mikkel stood outside, his uniform muddy and stained, holding out a bowl of vegetables. “Please fix soup for lunch. I don't know if Sigrun and Emil will be back in time, but I will. For now, I'm going to gather more fuel.”
The Icelander closed the door and turned to Tuuri with a smile. “You're right, I'm helping.” There was a spring in his step as he carried the bowl into the sleeping compartment. Tuuri was still smiling as she resumed typing.
The warm scent of vegetable soup filled the tank when Mikkel returned an hour later. He joined the non-immunes at the small table, an unaccustomed frown on his face as he ate the soup Reynir served him.
Reynir glanced at Tuuri, then back at Mikkel. “Is — is something wrong with it?”
“The soup is fine. Quite good, in fact. No, I'm concerned about the weather.”
Tuuri looked over his shoulder at the windshield. “It's pretty clear, and it's too cold to snow.”
“It was too cold to snow. It's been warming up all morning, and from here you can't see the clouds building. I think there's a storm on the way, maybe a blizzard.”
“What about Sigrun? Will you go get her?”
“I expect she's weather-wise, and she would not appreciate my tracking her down to warn her. They'll be back before the storm hits.” But the frown remained, and Mikkel left to gather more firewood as soon as he finished eating.
Reynir peered through a side window. “Do you think he's gone looking for them?”
“Maybe we should make bets on it,” Tuuri said with a grin. “I bet he did.”
“I'm not taking that bet!” Reynir gathered their dishes and washed them, while Tuuri dried and stored them. They left the soup simmering while Tuuri went back to typing and Reynir made up the bunks.
Just as the first flakes fell, Sigrun and Emil returned, Emil carrying three rabbits, already skinned and cleaned. “Rabbits for supper!” Sigrun announced when Tuuri opened the door. As she climbed in, she paused, looking around. From that position, she could see the entire main compartment. “Where's the big guy? Hanging out in the back? You guys ran him off?”
“He's out fetching more wood. He thinks this storm may turn into a blizzard.” Just as Tuuri spoke, a thump on the side of the tank proved that Mikkel had returned and was loading fuel. She glanced at Reynir and said in Icelandic, “You should have taken that bet.”
Sigrun ignored the Icelandic comment. “I think so too. This is as good a place as any to ride out a blizzard, I suppose.”
The storm built into the expected blizzard as Mikkel and Reynir prepared rabbit stew, which was consumed with enthusiasm by all parties, even Lalli.
Reynir leans on a rock and plays his pipes for the sheep while his dog roams about, watching for strays.
After several minutes, he lowers the pipes and looks around. Wait, how did I get back home? Oh! This is another dream! He drops the pipes and leaps to his feet. Why am I hanging out with the sheep? I can go tell Mom and Dad how sorry I am for running off.
He cocks his head, searching for that lightening of the fog that had led him to Lalli and Onni. There! He runs across the pasture, already preparing his apologies, but comes to a rocky shore instead of his home. Still, the fog is clearer out over the sea, so he takes a tentative step onto the water. As before, it bears his weight, yielding like soaked moss, and he trots out, watching the fog. The sea goes on and on, and the fog closes in around him, always clearer in one direction.
Reynir stops. In that quiet world, there is now a sound. Far away, it is a growl, a grumble … he is uncertain. He listens, and the sound continues, neither louder nor softer, neither nearer nor farther away. At length, the same curiosity that lured him from his safe home now draws him forward.
I can always turn back. I ran away from the dog-thing; I can run away from this. If I have to.
The sound grows louder and louder as he approaches. Now he recognizes the roar of a waterfall. Though he himself might seem to stand on deep moss, around him are no longer gentle waves, but rushing waters making for the still distant waterfall. He continues, cautious.
The first droplets of spray fall on him, yet still the waterfall is invisible in the fog. The roar is so loud now as to be an almost physical force he must push against. He stops often to look around, for anything might approach under cover of that sound. There is still nothing in the world but the sea, the fog, and that terrible roar.
Spray falls on him like rain, though it runs off without wetting him. He hesitates, no longer certain that he will see the waterfall before toppling over it. Continuing is unsafe, unwise. He looks left and right, sees nothing but the omnipresent fog, shrugs, turns right, and walks on.
Something appears ahead, vast and dark and unmoving. Reynir watches for a few moments before advancing. The fog clears to reveal a granite cliff about ten meters high. The waves have eroded it, bringing down boulders. He climbs those rough wet rocks to reach a flatter area on top, expecting to find a mage, as he had found Onni, though who would want to stay here in this desolate place?
There is no one. Reynir is alone on a barren, rocky island, perhaps thirty meters long and ten wide, tapering towards the waterfall. With solid ground beneath him, he approaches the falls again, his steps slow and careful on wet, slippery stone.
At last the fog clears above the falls, and Reynir stands gaping, one hand blocking the rain from pouring down his face. The sea roars down and down, disappearing into a maelstrom of spray. If the Sun ever shone in this place, he would be surrounded by rainbows.
Even awe wears off after a while. Reynir drags his gaze away from the waterfall and examines the surrounding rocks. There is a ledge about a meter below him to his right and, as he moves to see it more clearly, he realizes that there is another ledge farther down. He lowers himself to the first ledge, planning every move before he makes it, for the rocks are wet and slick. Now he sees yet another ledge, and he realizes that there may be a path here, a way down to the base of the waterfall.
Biting his lip, Reynir stares into the abyss, tracing a path from ledge to ledge to where the fog closes in. As a shepherd in Iceland, he climbed many cliffs, but never one so high and steep, nor one where water flows down every rock.
Mom and Dad are down there, I'm sure of it. I can climb down … maybe? Only it's so steep and so wet, and I could fall. I don't know what would happen if I, well, got killed here, but I'm sure it wouldn't be good for me. They wouldn't want me to risk that just to say I'm sorry. Would they?
Finally, he shakes his head and makes his careful way off the ledge and along the island to the far end. Back on the sea, he trots away from the waterfall, thinking about where to go next. Lalli drove him away; Onni was not exactly friendly, but willing to talk. The fog brightens a little, and he follows it.
Maybe he'll talk to me now. I'll tell him about the kitten, and how I'm learning to drive. I'll tell him Tuuri is happy. I mean, I think she is. Oh, there's lots I can tell him! And maybe then he'll tell me how to fight a troll with magic. That would be so cool!
His hopes are dashed when he finds Onni's place, the cliff and the forest, but not Onni himself. He calls but receives no answer. He climbs partway up the cliff for a better view, seeing only the forest and, beyond it, a pond. The forest looks more barren than the last time he saw it; more leaves have fallen, and a chilly wind makes him shiver as he climbs down.
Having nowhere else to go in this strange world, he returns to his sheep.
Reynir leans on a rock and plays his pipes for the sheep while his dog roams about, watching for strays.
Reynir yawned and rubbed his eyes. The tank was quiet, the wind no longer howling; the blizzard had blown itself out, then. Mikkel's bunk was empty, and likewise Sigrun's, though Tuuri still slept, curled away from the nightlights, the covers pulled up to her ears. He got to his feet, careful not to disturb Emil, still snoring below, changed into his day-clothes, and tossed his pajamas on the bunk. Mikkel and Sigrun would be forward, not outside in the darkness. As he went to join them, he hoped he would not interrupt an intimate moment. That would be like walking in on his parents!
But no, Sigrun sat in the driver's seat, Mikkel on the far side of the passengers' bench. They weren't even speaking as they watched the still-falling snow dimly illuminated by the third-quarter moon. Reynir was both relieved and a little disappointed, for he was a romantic at heart and thought those two would make a good couple.
“Good morning!” he said.
“Good morning,” Mikkel replied, and Sigrun said something similar but unintelligible. Reynir wondered if she had answered in Norwegian or if she had tried to mimic his words.
“Do you think the snow will stop soon?”
Mikkel cocked his head. “I would have thought that the sort of question a mage would answer.”
Reynir looked down, flustered. Onni had said he was a mage, but not what he could do. Or should be able to do, at least. He closed his eyes, trying to feel the storm as he sometimes felt a lost sheep, to no avail. He swallowed and looked back at Mikkel. “I don't know if a mage could feel the storm. It's not something that they taught us about in school. The school in my village isn't very good, I guess.”
Mikkel said something to Sigrun, who answered in a contemptuous tone. “I never went to school,” Mikkel said, “and neither did Sigrun. She says you never learned anything anyway.”
Reynir turned to her, hurt, and found her grinning at him. He blinked. Her grin wasn't cruel, wasn't a bully's grin; it was … why, it was a Bjarni grin! It was the grin that his brother Bjarni gave when he wanted you to join in a joke. Mikkel's translation didn't fit with Sigrun's grin, so … “Oh! She said I never learned anything useful to a troll-hunter!”
Reynir caught Mikkel's slight, sly grin. He'd seen that before, when Mikkel pretended he would cook an infected deer. He grinned back at both of them.
How lucky I am! I made the worst mistake, the most stupid decision, of my whole life, and yet I fell in with these great people! Even though Tuuri says Lalli doesn't like me (or anybody), he's a good friend. He went out into that terrible ruined city to find these great clothes for me. Sigrun and Emil, well, they're gone so much and I can't talk to them anyway, but I can tell they're nice people. Emil is so kind to the kitten and so thoughtful with the rest of us. And see how friendly Sigrun is, grinning at me like that. Mikkel's a good friend, too. He jokes with me, lets me help him, and even sewed belt-loops on his trousers so they'd fit me better. And then there's Tuuri.
Reynir blushed just thinking of Tuuri. They're such great people. I must find something I can do for them, something I can do as a mage. But what? The only thing I can do is walk on water in my dreams, and what use is that? Except I can talk to Onni. Yes, I have to find Onni and ask him what I can do. Tonight. I'll try again tonight.
Mikkel and Sigrun had turned away.
“Uh, Mikkel, can we make a trip to the latrine?”
“There's a chamber pot.”
Reynir shuffled his feet. He'd use a chamber pot if he had to, but, “The snow isn't that bad, and I have a warm coat. Can we please?” He did his best puppy-dog look.
Mikkel shook his head and Reynir thought he might have rolled his eyes. With a brief comment to Sigrun, he slid across the bench and reached past her knees to flip a switch. Lights on the sides of the tank illuminated the snow. After studying the view from the windshield, he got to his feet, pulled on his uniform, and fetched his shotgun and crowbar while Reynir put on his mask and coat. As he opened the door, a blast of cold air raised outraged cries from the sleeping compartment. He ignored these cries, jumped down, and gestured to the Icelander to join him. Reynir hastily hopped down, allowing Mikkel to close the door.
When Mikkel opened the door on their return, Emil, who stood by the door fully clad with arms crossed, glared at Reynir as if he were responsible for the weather. The Icelander climbed in with an apologetic smile, while Mikkel said something to Emil, who answered in a complaining tone but went back to the sleeping compartment and returned with the kitten's litter box. Mikkel, still outside, closed the door as soon as Emil jumped down.
The closed radio compartment door told Reynir where Tuuri was dressing; so as not to be in her way when she came out, he made up the bunks and folded everyone's pajamas, tucking them under the pillows. He could guess the topic when Tuuri came out and spoke to Sigrun.
Mikkel opened the door just long enough to drop off the litter box with its fresh sand, and Reynir moved it to its normal position. Having nothing else to do for the moment, he teased the kitten with his braid. Soon thereafter, Emil returned and Tuuri left with Sigrun. When the Swede made a querulous comment, the Icelander replied with a helpless smile.
Sigrun and Tuuri returned with Mikkel all but treading on their heels. While he set to work preparing the porridge and mint tea he'd brought, Reynir set out bowls, spoons, and mugs. As he placed the last mug, he said, “Mikkel, will you teach me to speak Danish?” The Dane turned to look at him, serving spoon halted halfway to the pot, and gave every appearance of thinking over the question, but that sly smile slipped out.
“I'm sorry. You're busy and I shouldn't have asked,” Reynir said, already regretting the impulsive question. Mikkel was a good friend, but he did like his tricks, and Reynir might well find himself with a Danish vocabulary consisting entirely of insults and swear words.
“Not at all. I'm certainly capable of teaching you. However, I notice there are two Swedish speakers on this team, and only one Dane. You would do better to learn Swedish so the others can understand you. I think —”
Was Mikkel uncomfortable about his speech? “Oh, they all understand you.”
“They understand me when I speak slowly and articulate carefully. They wouldn't if I spoke to them as I would to another Dane. No, I think you'd be better off asking your girlfriend to teach you Swedish.”
Reynir's face heated, and he knew his fair skin would be scarlet. He glanced forward to see that Tuuri and Sigrun were deep in conversation. “That's, um, she's not, that is —”
Mikkel chuckled and turned back to stirring the porridge.
Lalli came out from under Mikkel's bunk for his own run to the latrine and joined the others for breakfast, obeying Mikkel's silent command. He then crawled back under with the stated (to Tuuri) intention of sleeping all day. As there was no question of Sigrun and Emil hunting for books or food, or even of Mikkel going for firewood, that left the five of them to spend the day in the close quarters of the tank.
After a quiet discussion with Sigrun, Mikkel dug around in a cabinet and came out with a deck of cards. Sigrun talked to Emil and Tuuri while Mikkel took Reynir forward to explain the rules of the card game Slap. The rules were simple, and soon Reynir found himself seated at the table with Sigrun, Emil, and Tuuri.
As Sigrun began dealing, Reynir realized Mikkel hadn't joined them, and indeed there was no chair for him. He turned to seek the man, who was still forward, when Sigrun said something and Tuuri translated, “We'll play without him.”
“Yes, but —”
“Sigrun says to quit fussing and play.” Perforce, Reynir did.
Reynir soon lost and left the other three in a fierce competition. He went forward to find Mikkel in his accustomed seat, watching the snow fall. He took the driver's seat, careful not to touch any controls, and said, “I'm sorry if I took your seat in —”
“I didn't intend to play.” Mikkel didn't look at him. “Nor will I play now.”
“Oh, okay.” Reynir searched his memory for what little he knew of Danes. Did they all object to card games? Or was it just Mikkel? Or … well, best to find another topic. “How is it that you know everything when you never went to school?”
Mikkel glanced at him this time before returning his gaze to the snow. “There are many things I don't know. The abilities of Icelandic mages, for instance.”
“I'm sorry. I'll, uh, try to —”
“But to answer your question, my mother taught me to read and write, and I lived for some years in Rønne, which has a library with several hundred books. I read all of them, and later, as I travelled to other countries, I read what books I could find there, and I talked to scholars. Skalds, Tuuri would say.”
“What's Rønne like?”
Mikkel shrugged. “Rønne is a port city, much like many other port cities. It's the largest city on Bornholm. Far smaller than Reykjavík, of course, a mere fraction of the size.”
“Are there palm trees?”
“I don't believe so, or at least, I never saw any. Perhaps there were some once, but many things perished in the Great Dying, including unusual plants.”
“Ha!” Both men leaned over to peer into the back compartment at Sigrun's cry. Tuuri came forward, grinning and showing her empty hands. Reynir made haste to move from the driver's seat to the bench beside Mikkel.
“So I lost too. Emil's still hanging in there, but it won't be long.”
“Do you think — um, maybe you could — that is —” Mikkel elbowed him. “Oof! Could you teach me Swedish?” He rushed through the words before he lost his nerve.
“That's a great idea! Swedish is very similar to Icelandic, so I bet you'll pick it up quickly.”
Thus, Reynir spent the day either losing at Slap or listening to Tuuri's Swedish lessons. Mikkel kept to his seat when not cooking and occasionally offered his own explanation of grammar.
And perhaps both Reynir and Tuuri lost more quickly than they really had to.
Emil woke the next morning to the clatter of dishes. He rolled over to find the table folded down, Mikkel cooking porridge on the small stove, and Reynir setting the table. The Icelander looked up to give Emil a broad, welcoming smile. He did his best to imitate an answering smile; though he had only attended public school for two years, he knew a teacher’s pet when he saw one. He also knew better than to antagonize a teacher’s pet, particularly not when the teacher in question was nearby.
Not that Mikkel could give him a bad mark, but who knew what the Dane might say to Sigrun if he were angered? And what if Sigrun believed the older medic over the younger recruit? It was safest to smile.
Emil edged past Reynir between the table and the bunks that were still folded down as Tuuri was just stirring in her bunk. He retrieved his clothes from his cabinet and retreated to the radio compartment that doubled as Tuuri’s office, where he could dress without bumping into anyone. Instead, he barked his knuckles on the radio as he pulled on his shirt. Muttering a curse under his breath, he carried his nightclothes out, only to find Reynir making up his bunk. He tossed the clothes on the bed, received a big smile in return, and rolled his eyes only after turning away.
Sigrun was sitting on the passenger bench in front, watching the ruins by the dim dawn-light and the light of the third-quarter moon. As she scooted over to give Emil room, he glanced outside. His stomach lurched and his hands came up in an instinctive gesture of defense. But that can’t be a giant’s track. Sigrun wouldn’t just sit here if there were a giant out there. He concealed his fearful gesture by pretending to stumble and catch himself, and Sigrun seemed not to have noticed. After a second look, he recognized what he had seen.
“We have snowshoes?”
“The big guy said we had five pairs back there. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. If we have to leave the tank” — she patted the dashboard as if apologizing for the suggestion — “then we need another pair for the stowaway. We can make a pair, though. No big deal.”
Emil nodded, hoping she wouldn’t ask him to help make a pair of snowshoes. It was already apparent to him that everyone else on the team, and even the Icelander, had more practical knowledge than he did. “What’s the plan for today? I mean, with the snow.” Though the snow had stopped falling, it was piled deep and he could feel the cold radiating from the windows.
“The weather ought to keep the trolls quiet. There’s half a dozen sites around here, so we’ll see what the scout reports. Maybe we can hit a bunch of them!”
“Breakfast,” Mikkel said from behind them.
Lalli returned as the rest of the team was finishing breakfast. As if they’d planned it — and perhaps they had — Mikkel stood between the table and Emil’s bunk, blocking the scout’s path, while Reynir filled a bowl and held it and a spoon out to Lalli. The scout looked at Tuuri, who smiled and made an “Eat up” gesture. He sighed, accepted the food, and retreated to the radio compartment to eat.
Emil watched him go, frowning. It troubled him to see Mikkel and Reynir forcing the man to eat when he didn’t seem to want to. Teachers and their pets had bullied Emil in his brief public school career, and he didn’t like to stand by when the same thing happened to another. And yet he had to concede that Lalli needed to eat, and Tuuri, who knew her cousin best, seemed comfortable with Mikkel’s approach.
After breakfast, Reynir cleared the table and set to work washing dishes. Tuuri spread her map on the table, and Lalli and Sigrun joined her to decide their plans for the day. Mikkel folded up Emil’s bunk and stood against it, watching them, while Emil stood behind Sigrun, waiting for orders.
“Okay,” Sigrun said after several minutes of discussion, “you’ll drive us to here, and we’ll hit these two sites.”
“I’d like to propose a change of protocol,” Mikkel said, and everyone turned to look at him.
Sigrun folded her arms. “What is that?”
“I’d like Lalli to scout by day while —”
“The days are short.”
“And the nights are long, but he doesn’t scout all night. He can do the same scouting by day while you and Emil are scavenging. I don’t want him scouting when there’s so little moonlight.”
“He’s always been a night scout,” Tuuri said, “even at the dark of the moon.”
“Yes, in the Finnish forests that he’s familiar with, where hunters and other scouts keep the grossling numbers down. But he doesn’t know this city, it’s full of trolls, and in the dark —”
“Lalli has eyes like a cat!” Lalli turned to his cousin at the sound of his name, but said nothing.
Arguments made Emil nervous, and he wanted this one to end. Tuuri’s words gave him the opening he’d wanted to interrupt.
“About that. A cat would have seen the trolls in that first site and the tentacle troll the other day. You said Finnish mages can see trolls like a cat.”
“So I was told.” Mikkel turned to look at Tuuri. “And I was told he was a mage.”
“He is! But, um, Onni says his mage sight isn’t very good.”
“I’ve been relying on it to keep you and Reynir safe.”
Tuuri asked something, Lalli replied, and she reported, “He says it’s hard to see trolls when they’re sleeping, but he can see them a lot farther than a cat can when they’re awake.”
“Then —” Emil began but faltered when everyone looked to him.
Sigrun smiled at him. “Yes, then?”
“Then it’ll be even harder for him to see the trolls if he scouts by day. I mean, because they’ll be sleeping.”
Sigrun looked over at Mikkel. “The kid’s got a point.”
After a moment, Mikkel nodded, though he didn’t look happy about it. “Agreed.”
“Right, then, he still scouts by night. Driver, let’s go! Blondy, let’s get our gear ready.”
“Whoa,” Sigrun said. She and Emil had just turned a corner as they followed Lalli’s tracks. Perhaps ten meters ahead, a different track ran from a building on their left to Lalli’s tracks, and merged with his tracks as far as they could see.
“We’ve got a smart troll,” she continued, her voice grim. “I told you trolls are ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and they can’t follow a trail. Well, that’s almost always true. Almost.”
“Have you fought one — a smart troll — before?”
“No, never. I heard about one once, though.” She looked around and Emil did the same, checking for threats. “It tracked a team back to their camp. ‘Course, no hunter’s stupid enough to leave a camp unguarded, so it got killed right away. Still, a smart troll’s a lot more dangerous than the dumb ones, and people got hurt. Killed.” She shook her head, looked around again. “Now. Which way did this troll go?”
Emil gulped and studied the track. Had the troll come from the building and followed Lalli’s tracks to the north? Or had it tracked him to the south and then turned away to go into the building? He didn’t know what the troll’s feet looked like, or even how many it had. Given the deep snow, he doubted he could have detected which way it had gone if it had feet like a man. Yet, Sigrun expected him to see which way the troll had gone, so how …?
“Ah! The door to the building is forced in, not broken outwards. There’s snow drifted up where the door was, and the troll bashed through it. So it broke down the door after the snow stopped. I guess it went in there at dawn, and it’s still in there.”
Sigrun clapped him lightly on the back. “Good man! It should be still in there, but as soon as the Sun goes down, or maybe if those clouds move in, it can go back on the trail. It can follow us or backtrack us all the way to the tank.”
Emil glanced over his shoulder as if he could see the tank with Lalli perhaps asleep and Mikkel as the only guard for two non-immunes. “We’ll have to kill it, then, right?”
“Right you are.” After another check of their surroundings, Sigrun tramped through the snow to a point opposite the broken door. “I don’t like the thought of going in there with just the two of us, not with a smart troll lurking inside.”
Emil studied the troll-infested building. Its roof had collapsed along with part of the front wall, but it was otherwise intact. The buildings on either side set somewhat apart from it, and were taller, and all three were constructed of steel and concrete. The street was wide, and deep snow covered everything. There was no wind.
“I can burn it.”
“Without going in there?”
“Yeah, I can throw an incendiary from here. That debris there looks like it’ll catch easily, and the fire shouldn’t spread from that building.”
“Do it.”
Emil took an incendiary from one of his two bandoliers, pulled the pin, and flung it … directly in the face of the troll lumbering out. He leapt back in shock at the sudden sight of a wide maw surrounded by tentacles. He caught a snowshoe on rubble behind him, fell backwards half on top of the heap, rolled off. Sigrun was shooting, again and again. He scrambled, trying to get to his feet, facing the wrong way, cursing his snowshoes, as the rifle fire continued. Something struck his back, knocking him down again — the smell — the pain — he was on fire!
Emil rolled in the snow, desperate to quench the fire on his back. He ignored the troll. He’d seen death by fire, and death by troll was preferable.
The shooting stopped. Sigrun pulled him to his feet, steadying him as he stumbled, one snowshoe caught under the other.
“Can you stand? Can you guard for a second?”
“Yeah, I think so.” He looked around to show himself alert. The troll lay burning just meters away, and the stinking smoke made him cough.
“Okay, give me an incendiary. Do I pull this, or what?”
“Pull it and throw. Fast!”
Sigrun threw the incendiary. No troll emerged this time; fire bloomed inside. Burn! Burn that building to the ground! The fire roared. Something shrieked inside, but not for long.
“Let’s go,” Sigrun said. “All that noise must’ve woke up every troll for blocks.” She took his arm and pulled him into a run back along their trail.
The adrenaline rush from the attack was fading, and the pain in his back was growing. Pain is good, he reminded himself. The worst burns don’t hurt. Pain is good.
Emil had never been a good runner, but the Cleansers had forced him to build stamina, and hunting with Sigrun had strengthened him further. He was gasping for breath as the tank came into view half a kilometer later, but he was still running and he hadn’t tripped over his snowshoes.
Lalli stood outside the open door of the tank, and Mikkel was just coming around the tank with an armload of sensors. Lalli had his rifle slung on his shoulder as usual, and Mikkel, to Emil’s surprise, had a shotgun slung on his shoulder and a crowbar held awkwardly in one hand.
“Medic!” Sigrun shouted, hardly winded. “Emil’s hurt!”
Mikkel dropped everything and ran to take Emil’s other arm.
“I can … run by … myself.”
“Where are you —? Oh, I see.”
They had reached the tank. Mikkel bent to free himself from his snowshoes and then to free Emil. As he fumbled at the catches, Sigrun snarled something, and Mikkel growled an answer with a far thicker accent than usual. Emil didn’t understand either, but both sounded rude.
At last Emil was freed from the hated snowshoes, and Mikkel helped him into the tank. Behind them, Sigrun said, “Yo, scout! Lalli! Stand guard while I get the sensors. Stand guard. Get that?”
Tuuri and Reynir were hovering near the door, both wearing their masks, but they retreated to the radio compartment at Mikkel’s command. He guided Emil to the sleeping compartment, where the table was folded down and his medical kit sat ready. He left Emil standing for a moment while he folded down his patient’s bunk. Thumps behind Emil told him that Sigrun and Lalli were climbing in, but he didn't turn, fearing the pain of movement. The door clanged shut, and Sigrun said, “Go, go, go!” Emil put a hand to the wall to brace himself as the tank jolted forward. The motion hurt, as he'd expected.
Mikkel staggered, caught himself on the bunk, looked back at Emil. “Didn’t fall? Okay. Come here and sit with your back to me. Good.” He went to his medical kit and brought out a syringe. “I’ll give you a shot to knock you out, so you won’t feel a thing while I deal with this.”
Emil thought back to the cat and Mikkel’s words. “No, don’t waste it on me. Maybe someone else will need it more later.”
“This will hurt. I want to spare you the pain and stress.”
Emil licked his lips. His back hurt already. “I can take it.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Emil.”
“It’s okay. Just … do what you must.”
Mikkel stood for a long moment, gazing at the syringe, before putting it away and taking out shears. “Your uniform is ruined. I’m going to cut it off. Sit still and let me help you with the clothes. The less you move your back, the better.”
Steadying himself against the table as the tank swayed, Mikkel first unbuckled the bandoliers, slipped them off gently, and tossed them on his bunk before sitting behind Emil. The bandoliers were blackened and partially burned through.
“You were lucky it hit you in the back. If it had hit your incendiaries …” The shears clicked several times, and Mikkel eased half the jacket off his right arm, then the other half off his left. The back of the jacket was largely burned away. He tossed the pieces on his bunk as well.
“I tripped. I was trying to get up, but I got tangled up with those snowshoes, and the troll hit me before I could get up.”
“The troll didn’t hit you,” Sigrun said, her voice puzzled. “It threw the fire at you. Somehow. I shot it, and it was down, but it tried to grab you and, hmm, maybe a piece broke off?”
“A bit of burning troll slime?” Mikkel said. He was cutting off the undershirt now, the shears cold against Emil’s back.
“How bad is it?” Emil asked, dreading the answer.
Mikkel eased the undershirt off as he had the jacket.
“It doesn’t look bad,” Sigrun said.
“It’s much better than I’d feared. Most of this is first degree. It should heal up without even a scar in a few days, maybe a week, with proper care. This patch here, though — between your shoulder blades, Emil — is a second-degree burn. You see it’s already blistering. However, small as it is, it should heal without complications. With care. For now, I need to cool and clean your back. Sit still.”
Mikkel stood; people were moving around out of Emil’s view. He wanted to see what was going on, but dared not turn. His back already hurt, and turning would make it worse.
“Brave Viking,” Sigrun said, pushing the remains of his gear out of the way and seating herself on Mikkel’s bunk.
Was she mocking him? “I wasn’t running away.”
“Hey, no, of course not. I was there; I saw. That’s the trouble with cities: junk all over the place. You’re always tripping at just the wrong times. That’s why we stay out of cities, big ones, anyway. Sometimes you have to clear out a village. I remember this one time —”
Mikkel and Reynir were talking, water was running, and now Mikkel was back, taking his seat behind Emil. “This will hurt. I can spare you —”
“Just do it.” Emil tried to focus on Sigrun’s story.
“All right. Think cool thoughts.”
The cold compress stung. It burned. His nose twitched at the sharp smell; there was more in it than water. Water. Think cool thoughts. The lake by the cabin. Mountain streams. Snow. Cool thoughts. He lost track of the story as he concentrated on holding off the pain. His thoughts kept wandering to flames, to burning, and he forced them back to cool water. The ordeal seemed to last forever.
“Done!” Mikkel said, sounding as relieved as Emil felt. “Give it a few more minutes, and the analgesic effect will kick in.” He added something in Icelandic, and Reynir hurried to hand him a flannel pajama top, red with white dots. “You need a loose bandage to cover your whole back, but I don’t have one. This shirt is clean and soft, so we’ll have to use it. You can move your arms — in fact you should — but move slowly and don’t put stress on your back.” He helped Emil into the shirt, then turned to Sigrun. “He’s on light duty for at least a week.”
Sigrun nodded. “Yeah, I kind of figured that.” The tank jolted again.
“Where are we going?” Emil asked, shifting to face into the compartment. Reynir turned from putting away the medical kit, folded up the table, and gave him a smile. He nodded; given his injuries, he didn’t think he had to feign an answering smile.
Sigrun shrugged. “Another parking lot. We just need to get away from the trolls that got woken up.”
“If there was one smart troll,” Mikkel said, “there could be more. Until the snow melts, we’re leaving tracks everywhere we go.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Look, can you turn off the buzzer on the outside sensors?”
“I can, yes.”
“But then, what good are the sensors?” Emil asked.
“There’s still the blinky light. You can leave that on, right? Right. So if a troll comes around, it might hear the buzzer, but it won’t see the blinky light. Nothing to alert it that we’re here. We should have done this before.”
“We’ll have to set watches,” Mikkel said. “Someone has to be awake to see the light.” They’d set watches the night after the dog-beast had followed the team back to the tank, but not since then.
“Yeah. You and me. Not the scout. Emil?”
“It’s light duty,” and “I can watch!” Mikkel and Emil said together, and Sigrun laughed.
“Not just us, though,” Mikkel said. “There’s no reason Tuuri and Reynir can’t stand watches as well.”
Sigrun looked over at the Icelander. “Well, yeah, I guess so. Hadn’t thought of the nons. But how’s he supposed to do that, when he can’t even talk?”
“All he has to do is wake people up if he sees the light. He doesn’t have to say anything. And I can teach him a sentence like, ‘Something’s out there’.”
Reynir’s smile had dimmed. He looked back and forth between the older members of the team, and Emil found himself feeling sympathy for the man. He knew what it was like to know people were talking about him behind his back, and it would be far worse to hear them talking about him without knowing what they said. The encouraging smile he gave Reynir was neither forced nor feigned.
The Icelander’s smile brightened at once. He clasped his hands for a moment, then straightened and turned away to take a mug from a cabinet, fill it, and bring it to Emil.
He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was, and he took it gratefully, downing the cool water in a single draught. Reynir took the mug, refilled and returned it, and stepped back with a pleased smile.
“Thank you.”
“She is welcome.”
“You are welcome,” Mikkel corrected.
“You are welcome,” Reynir said in such perfect mimicry of Mikkel’s accent that Emil had to laugh. Sigrun and Reynir joined him, and even Mikkel was heard to chuckle.
Emil was among friends, and his back hardly hurt at all.
They were all jabbering again. Well, not all of them; the Swede was quiet, for once not whining even though he was hurt. Tuuri said he'd been burned when he threw an incendiary in the face of an attacking troll. That was the sort of stupidity you'd expect from a Swede, though, wasn't it? The proper way to deal with an attacking troll was to sidestep its rush and stab it in the head. That's if you were stupid enough to let it get near you, of course.
Lalli huddled closer to the wall and covered his ears. The shouty woman was sitting on the bunk just over his head, talking and talking endlessly. He understood a few words of her weird foreign language, but he couldn't catch a single word when she yammered on like this. Not that he cared. None of these foreigners had anything useful to say.
Tuuri had had something useful to say: a troll had backtracked him. It hadn't followed him all the way to the tank, but only because the woman had shot it, and then Tuuri had had to move the tank in case more trolls followed him. He hadn't made a mistake by leaving his trail visible; no one had ever told him that any troll could follow a trail. No, he hadn't made a mistake at all.
And anyway, the tank left more of a trail than he did.
Lalli extended his senses, feeling for snow, rain, even a high wind: anything that would hide the tank's trail. Nothing. Nothing in the weather, at least. There was still something odd about the tank itself. The boats and the train he'd suffered inside: they'd felt dead. More than dead, they'd felt cold, repellent. He'd hated the feel of them more than he'd hated the movement. But the tank felt warm and … watchful?
Lalli's mage sight was poor. If Grandma had lived long enough to train him properly — if he'd listened to the mage teachers at Keuruu — if he'd even practiced as Onni urged him — but he hadn't. Though Lalli was an excellent scout, he was only a fair mage, and he hadn't been able to find the cause of the tank's oddity.
He shook his head, dismissing the puzzle, and extended himself into the in-between, that realm not quite material but not quite mage-space. There he took on the form of his luonto, the warm fur of the lynx spirit embracing him. Leaving his body helpless, he padded through the tank. The spirits of the others glimmered in hues of gold and silver, oblivious to his passage. The kitten sat up, staring at him, and he snarled a warning at her before passing through the closed door and out of the tank.
The scattered clouds had blown away over the past hours, and the bright sunlight should deter any trolls. Still, he'd seen trolls scurry from cover to cover in pursuit of prey, and he didn't mean to let a smart troll sneak up on the tank that way.
Lalli circled the tank clockwise, spiraling outwards as he searched for threats. His range was only about a hundred meters, but within his range, he saw everything: the faint spirit-glows of dormant squirrels and mice, and the twisting shadow-spirits of two rat-beasts. After leaping on the rat-beasts and shredding their spirits, he left their bodies and passed on to examine an intact room.
Here were material things, relics of the dead past. A feeling of need drew him to a shelf. Sniffing at a particular box, he smelled the Swede's smoky scent. This was something the Swede needed. Lalli padded out of the room and the ruin, peering around to make careful note of the location. He would visit this spot when he went scouting late in the night.
Finding no lurking trolls within his range, Lalli returned to his body, safe in the tank and surrounded by others.
They were all still jabbering.
Since Lalli hadn't scouted the new area, Sigrun stayed in the tank and told hunting stories to Emil and Tuuri while Mikkel and Reynir cleaned the interior and washed the clothes. Mikkel translated as he worked.
“… and she got that scar when she was seven years old and beat a dog-beast to death with a rock.”
Reynir paused in wringing out a shirt to shoot an admiring look at Sigrun. “All I did when I was seven was help drive the sheep to the high pasture.” Resuming his task, he glanced at Mikkel. “What did you do when you were seven?”
“Nothing. I'll leave you to finish up.” Mikkel opened the UV cabinet and pulled out his uniform.
“Yo! Where are you going?” Sigrun asked.
Mikkel pulled on his outside trousers and jacket. “I'm going to gather fuel. I didn't get a chance before.” As he stepped into his boots and bent to fasten his snowshoes, Sigrun donned her own gear. Ignoring Mikkel's objection that he didn't need an escort, she slung her rifle over her shoulder and patted her dagger. “Ready!”
Mikkel rolled his eyes but picked up his shotgun, accepting the loss. After a quick check of the sensors, he opened the door and stepped back as Sigrun pushed past him and jumped down.
As Mikkel stripped twigs from a branch, Sigrun on guard behind him, he found an acorn still clinging to a twig. He glanced around at the trees, seeing no squirrels. “May I ask a question about hunting?”
“Nope, not gonna happen.”
He turned to her in confusion. “What?”
“Until the kid's back on his feet, I'll take the little scout with me instead. Not you.”
Mikkel stiffened, scooped up an armload of wood, and stalked away to feed branches into the fuel chute. Angry though he was, he pushed the wood in with care; he would not risk damaging the tank. As he passed Sigrun on his way to fetch more branches, he muttered, “That wasn't my question.”
“Oh? What was it?”
“Nothing important. A passing thought.” They finished the task in silence.
As Mikkel stowed his tools in the back, picked up a bowl, and opened the vegetable crate, Sigrun said, “Do we have any meat left for lunch?”
“No.”
“There should be deer around here. Let's go hunting!”
“I'll wake Lalli.” He brushed past her and hopped down from the tank.
“No, we'll go hunting. Us. You and me.”
Mikkel hesitated, holding back the sharp words that came to mind. He doubted she realized quite how much she had humiliated him earlier, but it seemed she was trying to make amends now. “Very well.” Climbing back into the tank, he gathered a couple of large canvas bags and his handsaw. Sigrun grinned at him as he returned, and they set forth.
Less than a kilometer from the tank, they found an overgrown park with clear signs of deer: nibbled twigs, tracks, and scat. With a muttered “Stay!”, Sigrun left Mikkel behind as she followed the tracks towards a roofless ruin. Her slow, gliding steps made hardly more noise than the whisper of snow carried by the light breeze, and Mikkel looked around, uneasy. He'd counted on hearing approaching enemies, but if Sigrun could move silently, so could a troll.
Still, little moved in the park or the surrounding ruins. The shadow of a thin cloud drifted over him, and he shivered despite his warm clothes. Water trickled somewhere, and occasional blobs of snow fell from overloaded branches. Was that a flash of motion behind a shattered window? The shotgun was in his hand, but nothing more appeared.
Bang!
Mikkel turned to his right. Muffled crunches and a diminishing drumbeat of hooves told of a herd of deer fleeing Sigrun's rifle.
Another shadow drifted over him, darker. Motion caught his eye, and he turned back. A long, scaly, multi-legged creature charged from the ruin towards him. The shotgun ready, he waited, casting quick glances left and right in case of other attackers. Just meters from him, the monster reared up and threw itself forward. Mikkel rammed the shotgun into its fanged maw and pulled the trigger. The shotgun boomed. More snow fell from the trees. Momentum carried the troll into him, and he stumbled backward, pinwheeling his arms for balance. Discarding any hope of stealth, he ran after Sigrun, leaving the monster dead behind him.
Sigrun appeared from behind the roofless ruin, rifle readied. Seeing Mikkel unhurt and unpursued, she waved him to follow her to the body of a medium-sized doe. It now became apparent why she'd brought him along: he wasn't a guard; he was the butcher. With his heavy gloves to protect his clumsy hands from cuts, he hurried to field-dress the deer, quarter it, and stow the pieces in the canvas bags. Sigrun prowled nearby, radiating wariness and impatience.
As soon as Mikkel had cleaned his dagger, handsaw, and gloves, and slung the bags over his shoulder, Sigrun led the way at a trot towards the tank. She gave Mikkel a grin and a thumbs-up at the sight of the dead troll but maintained silence for another hundred meters.
“Good job on the troll.” Mikkel shrugged without answering. Thirty or forty kilograms of deer were no great burden for him, but he'd been too sedentary for the last few years, and he needed all his breath for keeping up.
“We outran any trolls we stirred up, so we can walk now,” Sigrun said, suiting actions to words. Mikkel appreciated her accepting part of the blame for stirring up the trolls, but he appreciated slowing down more. “So, anyway, what was your question?”
Mikkel's impulse was to dismiss the question again. Stalling for time as he thought, he stopped to break a couple of small branches off a juniper bush and stow them in his pockets. At length, he said, “I wondered if you've ever heard of an animal warning a hunter about a troll.”
“Well, sure! Birds and bugs, you know. If they shut up, or if they all start screaming —”
“I don't mean that. I mean an animal deliberately warning a hunter.” As she slowed to look at him, her brow furrowed in confusion, he resigned himself to letting her insult him again. “The other day, a squirrel dropped an acorn on my head. It seemed as if the squirrel was alerting me to a troll. I would have seen it anyway, but it seemed the squirrel wanted to make sure.”
Sigrun stared at him for a few more heartbeats, then checked around for threats. “I never heard of anything like that.” She looked back with a grin. “Maybe the Mother of Squirrels likes you!”
“There's a Mother of Squirrels?”
“A Mother of Squirrels and a Father of Squirrels, of course. Where do you think they come from?”
Unable to resist, Mikkel replied deadpan, “When a mommy squirrel and a daddy squirrel love each other very much —”
Sigrun's face turned an alarming shade of red as she tried to suppress her laughter. “That's — that's —” She turned away, her shoulders shaking. Mikkel grinned at her back, but restored his impassive face as she turned to say, “That's squirrels now. But where do you think the first squirrels came from? The Mother of Squirrels and Father of Squirrels, of course.”
Mikkel considered explaining evolution, but refrained. “Is there a Mother of Deer, then? I imagine she doesn't like you very much. Or me, either.”
She shrugged, no longer amused. “The Mother knows we have to eat. I killed the doe quick and painless, and I apologized to her spirit. It would've been worse for her if the wolves got her.”
On that note, they fell silent and hurried back to the tank. The others were waiting for their lunch.
“Where are the trolls?” Sigrun bounced on her toes, glaring at the monitors as if she could summon the foe with her intensity. “It's been dark for ages.”
No one answered. Maybe they doubted the smart trolls were coming.
“If there's one troll of a kind,” she'd explained at supper, “well, then, there's one. But if there's two of a kind, there's a bunch more like them.”
“But why —” Emil had begun.
“They told us that in the army, as well,” Mikkel had said in his deep, slow voice. No one had argued after that as Sigrun set out her simple plan.
Since nothing showed outside, Sigrun turned her sharp gaze on the brightly lit main compartment. With the heavy steel door closed between the main compartment and the driving compartment, no light leaked to the outside. Everyone wore their uniforms, daggers and pistols on their belts, and the non-immunes wore their masks around their necks. The little scout had retreated to his den after supper. Mikkel and Tuuri stood with their heads together over his medical kit, speaking in low tones while Tuuri took notes on a clipboard. Emil sat on his bunk, nervously checking the incendiaries on his bandolier belts. The Icelander sat on the floor, teasing the kitten with his braid.
Sigrun returned to glaring at the monitors, where still nothing showed. The subtle scent of gun oil from the firearms beside the door mingled with the fading odors of roast venison from their supper. Four rifles and a shotgun. She hadn't argued, hadn't even smiled, when Tuuri set her rifle beside the others; such courage was not to be mocked. Sigrun shook her head as she glanced at that fourth rifle. If only that girl were immune. Brave, smart, hard-working — little as she is, I'd make her a recruit without a second thought. But things'll have to be dire before I'll let her join the defense.
Lalli rolled out of his den, shouting something and pointing to the back of the tank. Even as Tuuri translated — “Three trolls from the east!” — Sigrun had her rifle in one hand and the other hand on the door. Snatching up her rifle and settling her mask, Tuuri pushed past the captain to hit a control. “Lights on!” The peripheral lights would attract other trolls, but that couldn't be helped; with neither sunlight nor moonlight, the humans would have no chance without artificial lights.
Sigrun threw open the door, and Lalli leapt through and down into the slushy snow, now brightly lit. Sigrun followed, and a thump behind her said that Mikkel was outside too. Her heart pounded with excitement as she and Lalli raced towards the oncoming trolls, still some thirty meters away. At last, a proper fight worthy of a troll-hunter captain!
Crack!
Lalli fired first, then Sigrun. Another shot, another, another … one troll was down and a second was slowed, still dragging itself forward. The third, though, kept coming, its thick skull resisting the rifle fire. The tentacles around its vast maw stretched a meter or more towards the defenders, flailing about, lashing at the wet snow to hurl blobs in all directions.
“Die! Die!” Every shot hit precisely where Sigrun had aimed, but the monster would not stop. “Okay, then.” She changed her attack, aiming at the creature's joints. The piercing shrieks of the trolls joined the flat cracks of the rifles in a painful symphony.
“Two trolls south! And trolls north!”
Sigrun jumped but didn't turn at Tuuri's voice blaring from the speakers. Lalli turned to fire at the trolls to the south while Sigrun crippled the onrushing troll. It staggered to the left, then fell forward, its rear limbs churning the snow to push it forwards, shrieking. You'll keep for now. Wait your turn, and I'll deal with you later.
Sigrun switched magazines and joined Lalli's attack. The crack of a rifle and the boom of a shotgun behind her proved that Mikkel and Emil were at work. She didn't look back. If they needed help, Tuuri would say so.
“Oh, clever trolls,” Sigrun muttered as she fired at the trolls to the south, which held moldy boards in their tentacles to protect their open maws. “Saw me shoot that first one, did you, and had this bright idea? I can shoot right through your bits of junk.” However, Lalli had followed Sigrun's example by aiming at their joints, and Sigrun joined him. Already, the creatures were struggling to push themselves forward with their remaining limbs.
Whoosh!
Sigrun glanced back to see half a dozen trolls of different types silhouetted against flames. What is going on back there? But Mikkel and Emil were still firing and the trolls were falling.
That moment of inattention was nearly fatal. Sigrun returned her attention to the trolls from the east just as the nearest got its hind limbs and tentacles under it, hurling itself at her body just meters away.
“Yah!” Sigrun leapt aside, dropping her rifle on its sling and drawing her dagger in the same motion. Claw-tipped tentacles lashed the air where she'd been as she darted in towards the grotesque body. The creature's broken forelimbs jerked in a vain effort to strike, and her nose wrinkled at the acrid smell of troll blood and gunpowder.
The dagger flashed in the cold light from the tank as she struck the monster's head. Razor-sharp though it was, her dagger could not penetrate the thick skull. Skipping to her left, dodging the tentacles once more, Sigrun struck again, driving the dagger deep into the troll's spine.
The monster collapsed, though it shrieked and clawed at her with its few working tentacles. She hardly noticed as she placed her rifle firmly against the back of its skull and fired twice. It was still, and she turned away to check on Lalli.
The scout needed no help; he had brought down his two trolls already. As they lay struggling in the wet snow, he maneuvered to get a shot from the rear. Sigrun turned back to finish off the second troll from the east.
Flickering light from the rising flames warred with the tank's lights, and the crackle of fire made itself heard as the gunfire died away. The rearmost trolls were afire, and hungry flames reached for more.
“To the tank!” Sigrun ordered, racing back with the scout on her heels. Or not on her heels; he easily outpaced her and leapt into the tank behind the other two. As soon as Sigrun was inside, Tuuri slapped another control. Only firelight lit the snow as Sigrun yanked shut the door.
Sigrun coughed and waved a hand before her face in a vain effort to dispel the stench of burning trolls. “Whose idea was that?”
Emil ducked his head where he stood in the main compartment. “My —”
Mikkel turned from the table, where he had begun to repack his medical kit. “I threw the incendiary. Throwing things is not light duty.” He gave Emil a stern look before turning back to Sigrun. “I threw it farther than I intended. My error.”
Sigrun opened her mouth and closed it again. Throwing an incendiary in the midst of the trolls was a good idea that she shouldn't criticize. Mikkel had messed it up, but he acknowledged his mistake. Best to let it go.
“Uh, hey,” Tuuri said from her position by the door to the driving compartment. “We should move. I mean, the fire.”
“We stick with the plan,” the captain said. “Look, the fire's dying down already.” She waved at the monitors. “And there's not much to burn but the trolls anyway. The fire won't hurt the tank.”
“But it'll attract more trolls. You said the light —”
“Trolls don't like fire. They know it hurts. Only lights attract them, artificial lights.”
“They remember when artificial lights meant home,” Mikkel said, his accent thicker than usual.
Sigrun gave him a quelling glare. Though every troll-hunter knew trolls had been human, no one knew how much the trolls remembered of their past lives. It was best not to think about that, especially for recruits, lest they hesitate at the wrong moment. “Anyway, we'll stand still and stay silent until dawn. If any trolls wander over after the fire goes out, they won't bother with a big metal box when there's so many nice yummy roast trolls lying around.”
As the flames died away, a single creature crept in, shadowy in the flickering light of the coals. Later, the dim light of the rising moon revealed hulking figures feeding on the dead.
No one slept that night.
“Okay,” Sigrun said as she leaned over Tuuri’s shoulder to study the map more closely. “What about this spot? 54? What's —” She stopped and turned to glare at Mikkel.
With an apologetic nod, he retrieved the pot he'd dropped and returned to scrubbing it, gritting his teeth in frustration at yet another mistake. After embarrassing himself the night before, he'd wanted to show he was good for something by washing the breakfast dishes, but of course his clumsy hands had betrayed him again.
Should I have let Reynir do this while I repaired those clothes? It'd be more painful sticking myself with the needle all the time, but at least it would have been quiet.
“Spot 54 is medium value,” Tuuri said, her words tumbling out in a rush as if to cover for Mikkel's error. “And those two there, one is medium and the other's unknown.”
“Hmm,” Sigrun murmured, tapping her finger on the map. “Short day today. We'll go for 54, and hit those others tomorrow.” Until the dawn drove the grosslings from their cannibal feast, Lalli could not to leave the tank to scout. When Sigrun decided this, she had given Mikkel a glare as if daring him to say “I told you so.” Mikkel had nodded without comment; though he'd proposed that Lalli scout by day, that was not because he anticipated trolls feeding right outside the tank.
As Tuuri gave hasty instructions to Lalli, already in his uniform with his rifle slung, Mikkel dried and put away the pot, considering the map and Sigrun's plan. We're going the right way, at least. We should have been at the target days ago, but that plan's out the window. No reason for me to raise suspicion by pushing Sigrun to head for it, not to mention that she'd probably go somewhere else just because I suggested it. Would the plan ever have worked? Given her resistance to my suggestions, could I have gotten her to go there on time even if the bridge hadn't been destroyed? Maybe the General should have sent someone else. Maybe I can't do it.
Mikkel wiped out the sink, closed the cabinet, and dried his hands on the cloth tucked in his belt. I wish we could get through on the radio. There must be thousands of trolls out there to produce so much static; it's only the cold weather that's been keeping them from roaming around. He suppressed a sigh. Even if we could get through, the General wouldn't tell me much when all the world can hear. Still, he might give some news about the Punished. He might even know when we can expect rescue. With his back to the others, he allowed himself to wrinkle his nose in disgust. Anyway, I need to do laundry and scrub this tank. Too many people crowded in here for too long. I won't wash anything around here, though. Roast troll won't improve the smell.
A thump as the outer door closed told him Lalli had left to scout their path to the next spot, and Sigrun clapped her hands. “Okay! Blondy, big guy, time to burn some trolls. Let's go!”
Emil glanced at Mikkel in confusion, before venturing, “They got burned last night?”
“Not the ones me and the little guy wasted. We need to get them burned.”
Mikkel donned his uniform over his warm black clothes, while Emil, with a sour glance at him, pulled his uniform jacket over his red and white pajama top. The medic gave him a slight smile. Emil's exertions of the previous night had brought no further injury to his wounded back or its fragile blisters, and Mikkel didn't want him to risk the damage a tighter shirt might do.
Outside, Sigrun stood guard as Mikkel dragged half-eaten trolls into a heap. Emil tossed an incendiary onto the corpses, and though Mikkel watched closely, he saw no sign that Emil had used his powers to enhance the fire. As the flames engulfed the corpses, the three retreated into the tank. Tuuri and Reynir had already folded up the table and begun sweeping and dusting. While Sigrun and Emil took their seats in the front compartment to discuss troll-hunting strategies in low tones, Mikkel took out his mop to clean behind the other two.
A couple of hours later, Lalli returned with a full canvas sack, which he dropped in front of Mikkel before taking Tuuri aside to discuss their route. Within the sack, Mikkel found half a dozen gray thermal shirts, all one size, and a down jacket. “The jacket's for Emil, I presume, but he doesn't need all these shirts. May I distribute the shirts to the rest of you?”
When Tuuri agreed, Mikkel placed two shirts and the jacket in Emil's cabinet, and one shirt in every other cabinet except his own. The sleeves would be short on Reynir and Sigrun, and the shirt would hang off of Lalli, but they would fit adequately. Mikkel himself, however, was far too big to squeeze into the shirts. In the deepest recesses of his mind, he wished Lalli might find some new clothes for him as well.
“You’re going the wrong way.” Sigrun leaned past Mikkel to check the mirror on the right, then Tuuri for the mirror on the left. “You should have gone straight at that last intersection.”
Tuuri’s knuckles were white from her grip on the levers and she didn’t look around as Sigrun spoke. “No, Lalli said —”
“I saw the map. You should have gone straight.” Sigrun twisted to look back into the main compartment where Lalli was napping under Mikkel’s bunk.
“Lalli said the streets are flooding from the snowmelt,” Tuuri said, her breath coming in shallow gasps as the tank tilted to the left for a moment before straightening. “He told me to go this way to stay on high ground.”
“Okay, okay, I didn’t know.” Sigrun leaned forward to peer through the windshield, squinting in the bright sunshine, then checked the mirrors again. Slumping in the seat and drumming her fingers on her thighs, she muttered, “I just want to get on with it.”
In his own way, Mikkel was on edge as much as the troll-hunter, scanning the ruins for any threat. Before him, the low winter sun cast the jagged shadows of decaying buildings across the hummocky snow. The fitful wind lifted a thin veil of snow to swirl through gaping doorways and shattered windows. Bare-branched trees struggled to grow atop rubble, clumps of mistletoe leeching what little life they possessed. The mistletoe's yellowish-green leaves lent the only spots of color to the monochrome vista of crumbling gray ruins and slushy snow. Here and there, rusty metal beams or chunks of broken wall protruded from drifts, and everywhere water trickled and dripped from overhangs.
Motion to his right caught Mikkel’s eye, and he twisted to see a sheet of snow break free from the roofline of an angled roof and plummet to the slushy snow below with a thump audible even over the grinding of the tank. Warm weather with the moon rising later every night. The new moon is less than a week away, and we’ll still be in the Silent World. He shuddered. It might get cold again. It doesn’t have to be like it was then.
The tank tilted again, and only Sigrun's seat belt kept her from landing in Mikkel's lap. Tuuri said something in Finnish that sounded like pleading, or perhaps praying, and Emil and Reynir staggered to keep their feet as they stood behind the seats. With a clatter, the tank righted itself and crept on. More snow slid from half-collapsed roofs.
“Mikkel?” Reynir said after a while from where he stood behind Tuuri, clutching the back of her seat with both hands. “Is Spring always this early in Denmark?”
Mikkel appreciated the distraction and the chance to display some knowledge. “No, we’re very far from Spring. The weather here is unstable; it’s an effect of the ocean. It’ll be cold and snowy for a few days or weeks, warm up like this, then get cold again. It’ll vary back and forth for months.”
“Why? It’s not like that at home, and we’re in the ocean, too.”
“Iceland is further north, so it’s colder. And there are currents in the ocean that are different in different places. There’s a warm current that runs up the west side of the continent —” His intended lengthy explanation of North Atlantic circulation was interrupted when Sigrun elbowed him to demand a translation.
As usual, Lalli had found an open area to park the tank within walking distance of the next spot, with a nearby stream and a park full of trees for firewood. As soon as Tuuri eased the tank to a halt and peeled her cramped hands from the levers, Sigrun leapt to her feet.
“Right, then! Scout, let's go get some books!”
Rolling out from under the bunk, Lalli looked less than enthusiastic, but pulled on his uniform and slung his rifle over his shoulder without a word. Almost before the echoes of their arrival had died, Sigrun splashed to a cross street, leapt over fallen debris, and disappeared behind the ruins with Lalli as her silent shadow.
Mikkel surveyed the other three. “I'm going to gather fuel. Emil, you're on guard. Everyone stays inside until I return. If the skies remain clear, we'll go outside to do laundry later.” Shotgun slung over his shoulder, he jumped down and closed the door behind him as Tuuri retreated to the radio compartment and her typewriter.
Mikkel seldom studied the outside of the tank. It was intact and it ran; if he needed to do something about it, he expected Tuuri would tell him. But now, thinking about the dark of the moon and the trolls it would enliven, he stopped to survey it. Good solid steel. It won't stand up to a giant, though. A swarm … as long as they don't know we're here … if we're very quiet … He turned away, then turned back, puzzled. Tuuri and Reynir both dented that panel. Didn't they? He ran gloved fingers over bare metal where the paint was scraped off. The contact confirmed his vision: there was not the slightest dent.
Mikkel's lips tightened and he glared at the heavy steel shutters over the side window. Foolish, irresponsible brats! Out here without a guard fixing something that didn't need — But, no, that's not possible. I've never been out of sight and even if they sneaked out, even if they somehow got the panel off before I could spot them, I'd hear — the whole city would hear — when they hammered out those dents. He traced the scraped paint with a finger. The old world had so much that we can't even imagine. Metal that gradually returns to its original form? Evidently so. Now, should I tell Tuuri to put that in her mission report?
Undecided, he trotted into the nearby copse to gather wood. By the time he brought back the last load, he had concluded that he should tell the General about the special metal first, and that would have to wait for rescue.
Several hours passed peacefully, as venison and vegetable soup simmered in the tank, and the four humans and the kitten moved outside to wash clothing and bedding in the bright sunshine. Sigrun and Lalli returned with armloads of paperback books, several of which Mikkel tossed in the slush, fearing their mold would spread to others.
“What are those books?” Tuuri asked over a late lunch, with a longing look towards the back of the tank. As before, Mikkel had stashed the books in the back compartment and would not allow her to examine them until the next day, when any infectious matter would have died. He deemed that protocol unnecessary, but Sigrun had not countermanded it, and he would not risk an argument over it.
“Science fiction.”
“What's that mean?” Sigrun asked, holding up a bit of potato and grimacing before popping it in her mouth.
Tuuri answered before Mikkel could. “That means stories people wrote about the future, what they thought would happen one day.”
“Why would anyone pay for those? I mean, we know what happened and the old people didn't.”
“You'd be surprised,” Mikkel said. “They wrote a lot of stories about something like the Rash. They imagined people all over the world dying or becoming monsters because of a disease. There was even a name for what people would become in those stories: zombies. Some people survived the Rash using ideas they'd got from those books.”
Few books had survived the end of the world. Fleeing survivors abandoned them to rot; freezing survivors burned them as fuel; horrified survivors burned them as representatives of the modernity that had caused the Rash. Useful books were sometimes spared, but in all of Bornholm, fewer than a hundred novels remained, over half of them science fiction. Mikkel had read every novel in the Rønne library.
“Yeah, but we all know how to survive now.” Sigrun tipped up her bowl to spoon out the last drops of soup. “Oh, well. Books are books.”
Mikkel and Tuuri shared a look and a smile. “You'll get to see them tomorrow,” Mikkel promised.
After their long night, they needed sleep. Though the Sun was still up, Sigrun assigned Reynir to keep watch over the sensors, gaining a happy grin from the Icelander, and everyone else crawled into their bunks for a nap.
“Hey,” Reynir said, just as Mikkel was drifting off. “Hey, there's something outside.” The team rolled out of bunks and rushed to his side. Mikkel was last to reach him, but could see the monitors over the heads of Tuuri and Emil.
Mikkel's mouth fell open in undisguised awe. “Those are monkeys. That's a troop of monkeys. I never imagined —”
“They're natural?” Sigrun asked. At Mikkel's nod, “Not much meat on them, but if we all shoot at once, we can get —”
“No! No, we can't eat them.” Mikkel shifted to put himself before the door.
“What, are they poisonous?”
“No, they're our cousins. We can't eat our relatives.”
Sigrun looked from Mikkel to the monitors and back again, then craned her neck to peer at his rump. “Danes have tails?”
“No, that's not —” She'll never wait for an explanation of evolution, and won't believe anyway. How to explain? “Ah, the Mother of Humans and the Mother of Monkeys are cousins, and they wouldn't be happy if we killed those monkeys.”
Sigrun gave the monitors a disappointed glare and strode back to her bunk, Emil following after an uncertain glance at Mikkel.
“I didn't know there were monkeys in Denmark,” Tuuri said in Icelandic, as Reynir had remained with them.
“There aren't. Or weren't, at least. They're not native, but they were kept here in zoos. They must have escaped or been let out and established a population.”
“There might be other animals like them,” Tuuri said. “A whole new ecology because of the Rash. And I'm right here to report it.” Tuuri gave Reynir a joyful grin, and he returned it, blushing.
Mikkel smiled to himself and returned to his bunk.
Emil rides away from the factory, ignoring the shouts of the immune guard, Gustav Eriksson.
“We're immune,” Emil tells his compact chestnut gelding. “We don't need a guard. And I'm a man today.” He urges the horse to a trot, but gently. Angry though he is, he will never harm an innocent animal. “Even if Father can't be bothered to say hello.”
Halfway up the hill on a rough, rutted track, Emil turns to glare down at the factory in its wide clearing surrounded by a dense forest, leafy green in the summer sun. “I hate you,” he says between clenched teeth, unsure in that moment whether he addresses the factory or his father. After a moment, he sighs and urges the horse uphill.
As the alarm bells sound behind him, he casts an indifferent glance over his shoulder. His father values the factory and runs occasional fire drills. Emil rides on.
With the alarm bells getting louder, mingled with shouts and screams, he draws rein and turns to stare. A noise brings him around to see Mikkel galloping towards him on a sturdy black horse.
“It’s not my fault!” Emil says as Mikkel reins in beside him.
“I didn’t say it was.” The light of burning trolls dances on Mikkel’s face.
Emil jerks around to look for trolls, now seeing flames rising from the new wing of the factory. “It’s not my fault,” he says again, but Mikkel is gone.
Emil is a man and the factory owner's son; he feels he should assist at the fire. But he is just turned fourteen, small for his age, and untrained in fire fighting. In the recesses of his mind, he hears the echoes of his father's judgment, the whispers of his opinion, and the weight of his expectations. The fear of disappointing him looms large but, viewing himself as his father would, he has to see himself as useless in this crisis.
Emil calms his restive horse, and together they watch as the blaze consumes the factory and his family's fortune.
Lying on his belly, Emil gazed at the cabinets on the other side of the tank, dimly lit by the faint glow of the monitors. His gaze moved to Mikkel’s empty bunk and the rumpled blanket below. Lalli was out scouting, then. Above Mikkel’s bunk, Tuuri’s silver-blond hair was the only sign of her presence, peeking out from beneath her cozy blankets, while above her, a bit of Sigrun’s blanket hung over the edge of her bunk.
Emil raised his head to peer forward. With the door to the driving compartment closed, he couldn't see the windscreen and the ruins beyond, though the slender crescent moon would have revealed little if he could. Mikkel stood watch, leaning against the door to the radio compartment, his face aglow with the blue light of the monitors, nothing like the yellow and orange glow of burning trolls. Without allowing himself more time to think, Emil rolled out of his bunk and padded forward.
“You're early,” Mikkel said, turning to face Emil but casting occasional glances at the monitors. “Is your back bothering you? Do you need some willow bark?” He spoke softly to avoid waking the others.
“No, I'm okay.” Emil's back did hurt, but Sigrun had called him a Viking. A Viking wouldn't whine about a mild burn. He set his hips against the door next to Mikkel, angling his body slightly to avoid touching it with his back. “May I ask a question?”
“Yes, of course.”
“The Icelanders who told you about people who perceive things that other people can't …” Emil opened and closed his right hand out of Mikkel's sight. “Did they ever say there were people who, um, attract fire?”
Mikkel rubbed his chin. The sound of glove against stubble caught Emil's attention: Mikkel was in full uniform, including boots and gloves, as if he might race to the attack at any moment.
“Yes, I believe they did. Or at least, they believed there are fire spirits that sometimes take a liking to someone.”
Emil twitched his shoulders, feeling flannel shift over healing blisters. “It doesn't seem like much of a liking.”
“Because it burned you? Think of a fire spirit as a large, enthusiastic dog. It leaps on you without realizing it can harm you.”
Danes were said to be skeptics like Swedes, though not quite so much. Surely Mikkel didn't believe this nonsense. But Emil was willing to listen, if only because there might be something useful hidden in the Icelandic superstitions. “Did they say if there's any way to get rid of a fire spirit?”
“I don't think so. Or rather, I didn't ask that question.”
Emil's shoulders slumped a bit. He hadn't had great hopes but … he thought of fire leaping from the smart troll to his back, the fires lunging towards him from one burning troll to another, the factory in flames …
“Though, if you can't get rid of it, perhaps you can train it,” Mikkel said. His teeth glittered blue for a moment as he smiled.
Now he was venturing into absurdity. Emil folded his arms. “How do you train a fire spirit?”
“Oh, I suppose you would stick to campfires, at least at first. Light one, tell it what you want it to do and what not to do. Praise it when it does well, like cooking our food, and scold it when it misbehaves, like trying to escape the fire ring. Drown it if it misbehaves too much.”
Emil rolled his eyes. “I have to drown the campfires anyway, every time we move.”
“Wait until it misbehaves, then scold it and drown it. Surely it will misbehave at some point before we move.”
“That's not fair. That's just waiting for it to make a mistake so I have an excuse to do what I was going to do anyway.”
Mikkel turned back to the monitors without a word. The tank was so quiet that Emil could hear his breathing and the others breathing in the sleeping compartment to his right. Emil bit his lip, looking up at Mikkel's profile and the muscles standing out along his jaw. What was I thinking, to argue with him over this silliness? Now he's angry because I called him unfair, and I don't know what to say, how to smooth it over.
“Yes,” Mikkel said at last without looking around. “That's exactly what it is.” He shook his head before turning back to Emil. “Sigrun apologized to the deer she shot and told it we have to kill animals to eat. Perhaps you should apologize to the fire spirit and explain that you have to drown it, but you'll light another fire later.”
Emil looked into the dimness of the sleeping compartment so Mikkel could not see his mocking expression. “Sure, I'll tell the fire spirit I'll light a better fire for it.”
“You shouldn't do that. Pretty soon you'd have to burn down the whole city to keep your promise.”
“Oh, right. Of course. I won't make promises to the fire spirit that I can't keep.”
“Good. Now, it's time for your watch. Do you want me to fix some tea?”
“No, I'm fine. Maybe some tea with breakfast.”
“You need to say, 'You are relieved.' ”
“You are relieved.”
“I am relieved.” Mikkel stripped off his uniform, strode away, and rolled into his bunk.
It was just a silly conversation in the wee hours of the night. But as he built up the campfire in the morning, after a quick look around, Emil whispered, “Stay in the fire ring and don't jump at me. I have some good dry wood you can have if you behave.”
“You may wear your normal clothes now,” Mikkel said, “but you're still on light duty. The burns are healing very well, and I want them to keep on that way.” Most of Emil's back showed signs of remarkable healing. The majority of the burned area was now a shade of pink, rather more than his normal skin tone. The worst of the damage, a palm-sized patch, remained raised and red, with several ruptured blisters that glistened with clear fluid. Mikkel applied a bandage to that patch as he spoke.
Emil turned his head, straining to see his back, then squinted up at Mikkel with a puzzled expression. “For real? It's only been three days. You said —”
“Mmh, yes, I said a week to heal, and I'm sticking with that. Continue to be careful, and if your back hurts more, let me know.”
“Hey, everybody!” Tuuri waved her arms to get their attention. “I got through!”
There was a concerted rush to the small compartment that served as both Tuuri's office and the radio room. Emil didn't even stop to put on a shirt as he hurried forward, Mikkel almost treading on his heels.
“Trond here,” came the tinny voice from the earphones Tuuri had laid beside the manual typewriter. “What's the status?”
“Continuing, sir,” Mikkel answered. It was a simple code: status would be “continuing” until he had the target in hand, and “ongoing” thereafter.
“We fought some smart trolls,” Sigrun put in. “And there were —”
“You will make a report of that when you return. I can't tie up this line for much longer. Now, I have news of the saboteurs. Their forged papers weren't nearly so good as they supposed. As soon as they were nice and safe in quarantine, the Icelanders put them under arrest. Once they get out, they'll be handed over to the Danes.”
“Give them to Admiral Olsen,” Mikkel said. “He'll take great pleasure in kicking them off his base. Off the top level.”
“I believe that's under discussion. As for the rest of the Punished, the known members have gone missing. Once the bridge collapsed, they would have known from radio traffic that they were suspected. The Icelanders think they've fled to the interior.”
Something about that bothered Mikkel. Before he could formulate a question, Tuuri said, “How many of them are there?”
“Only a couple of hundred. Finally, you'll want to know about rescue. The Icelandic government is concerned about the risks of your expedition and return. Their bureaucrats are arguing about how to retrieve you safely. We're doing what we can, but there will be a delay, certainly several weeks. You will be advised. Trond out.”
There was only static.
“A couple of hundred on the loose?” Tuuri looked over at Reynir, who had joined the audience though he couldn't understand the conversation. “Reynir told me there's only a couple of hundred in his village. And some of them are children.”
“I'm sure the Icelandic government will warn all the villages to be ready to defend themselves,” Mikkel said, ignoring Reynir's whispered request for a translation. “They're very good at sending out warnings. Because of the volcanoes, you know.”
“Why do we have to wait for rescue from the Icelanders?” Sigrun asked. “Why don't your Danes come pick us up?”
As Reynir edged past him to talk to Tuuri, Mikkel answered, “If the Icelandic government is worried about the risk, then the Danish government won't want to upset them by bringing us back against their wishes. The trade with Iceland —”
“But we were going to just drive back across the bridge.”
Tuuri silenced Reynir's whispers with a wave of her hand as she answered Sigrun. “I was supposed to limit radio chatter: just say 'we're okay', or something. Word wouldn't get back to Iceland that we were here until we were already back, and then what could they do about it?”
Sigrun grinned. “Easier to get forgiveness than to get permission.”
“Just so,” Mikkel said.
Emil frowned. “Didn't the Icelanders already know? Wasn't the expedition approved by the Nordic Council?”
“Contrary to popular belief, the Nordic Council is not the Icelandic government. The Council was willing to let Denmark take her chances in this, but the Icelanders as a whole are not so … casual about the risks.”
“Icelanders are stupid,” Sigrun said, and Mikkel shot Tuuri a cautioning glance, silently urging her not to translate that comment. “Welp, guess we may as well get to booking. Scout! Let's go!”
Lalli, who had been leaning against the door with his eyes closed, seemed to have learned some Swedish, as without hesitation, he crossed the tank in a few strides, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and opened the door before Sigrun reached her own rifle. The two jumped down and ran off together even as Mikkel stepped forward to check the monitors. He shook his head and turned away, shrugging. They could take their own chances.
Though Emil was still on light duty, he would guard the tank, freeing Mikkel to explore a little farther than usual in gathering fuel. They were encamped beside a former park, and there was a pond marked on their map. If it remained, he might try fishing.
With a wary glance at the brooding, overcast sky, Mikkel tugged up his hood and fastened his collar. The weather was not cold; rather, it had continued to warm, and streams of meltwater snaked through the ruins. He followed one stream as it meandered through a dense tangle of secondary growth. Birch and maple trees, their bare branches skeletal against the gray clouds, mingled with the dark green of spruce, whose dense needles glistened with droplets from the overnight drizzle. The park was silent save for the occasional drip of water and Mikkel's footsteps squelching through wet leaves and mud.
Reaching the pond, he paused near the bank to study the waters. The fish will be out deep. Where's a good fishing spot, then? He made his way along the bank to search, spruce branches leaving trickles of water on his jacket as he brushed by. This is a good spot. Perhaps around noon the fish —
Mikkel's right foot sank deep into a hole that had been hidden beneath fallen leaves. He stumbled, arms flailing, his gathered wood scattered. A vice-like grip clamped onto his ankle. He yanked his leg upwards with a grunt, expecting resistance, but it came free with an unsettling ease.
There, dangling from his boot, was a grotesque caricature of a rat the size of large cat. With what remained of its fur matted with mud and slime, eyes bulging with a rabid hunger, the creature gnawed viciously at the tough leather. He had to get it off before it reached his ankle and the vital Achilles tendon …
Dropping his axe, Mikkel seized the creature with both hands, ripped it loose, and spun to hurl it, squealing, to splash in the pond. Even as the monster hit the water, Mikkel drew his dagger, just in time to skewer a second rat beast pulling itself from the muddy bank. He glanced back at the pond. The first beast was nowhere to be seen, only a spreading stain of blood.
Squeals sounded all around him. He couldn't stand and fight, not in this forest, not surrounded by beasts. He had to run, but not back to the tank. This nest of rat beasts would follow him, endangering Emil as well. Snatching up his axe, he ran for the ruins, mud splashing with every step, and the squeals followed.
Panting as he approached a standing wall, Mikkel gave a quick look around. He shook his head, dismissing his worry about other grosslings, and set his back against the wall. There might indeed be grosslings in the ruins, but for now, he had to focus on those chasing him.
Sunlight should deter them, even through the overcast. But no! Their filthy, mud-covered fur shielded them from the painful rays, and on they came. Four or five already and more coming, Mikkel thought as he kicked the first back with his steel-toed boots. It hit the ground, already dead, as he chopped another in two with one stroke, sweeping a third away with the side of the axe. Even as he raised his weapon for another strike, a fourth beast leapt, sinking its fangs into his jacket sleeve. He spun to the right, smashing it against the wall. It dropped, twitching, and he kicked it aside.
Tearing pain in the back of his left thigh! Mikkel dropped the axe again, ripped away the beast along with a chunk of his flesh, broke its spine with one twist, and flung it into the midst of the oncoming horde. He grabbed his axe once more, ready for another attack … but none came. The later-arriving rat beasts fell upon the dead and dying, a few glaring up at the human before turning to their grisly meal.
“Stand still, stay silent.” That was the first rule in dealing with grosslings. They were not smart and might forget your presence. But Mikkel couldn't stand still for long; squeals among the trees heralded the approach of more beasts, and the noise might rouse something worse in the ruins.
Mikkel edged to the left, placing each foot with care, avoiding debris likely to shift. Several beasts looked up from their cannibal feast, but only one broke away to pursue him. He kicked it back among the others, which tore into its broken body with enthusiasm.
When he reached more intact pavement, Mikkel ran again, casting glances behind him to confirm no beasts followed and he wasn't leaving a trail of blood. So far, the blood he felt trickling down his leg from the wound was contained within his heavy clothes and boot. The wound hardly hurt. So far.
Mikkel stopped to catch his breath just within sight of the tank, checking around for pursuers, the rat beasts or anything else that might have awakened in the ruins. All was quiet. He brushed at his clothes, spattered with mud and slime, to little effect. When his breathing slowed to something approaching normal, he limped forward, the pain overcoming the adrenaline of his escape.
“Hey, Mikkel.” Emil waved a casual hand in greeting as he patrolled around the tank, but stopped, looking the Dane up and down. “What happened to you?” He dropped his rifle into his hands and stepped aside to look for pursuers.
“Rat beasts in the forest. I think I shook them off, but watch out.” Mikkel pulled out the hose and rinsed off his outer clothes. He hesitated, wanting to send the Swede around the tank, out of sight, then sighed, bowing to the inevitable. Stripping off his clothes, Mikkel quickly cleaned and rinsed the wound, a gash several centimeters wide and deep, which was still leaking blood but was now slowing down. The surrounding skin was red and tender, with bruising starting to form around the edges.
Emil gasped as he took in the sight. “What can I do? What do you need? What —”
Mikkel scooped up his clothes. “Get the door for me. Tell them to put their masks on and get out of the way.”
The door opened before Emil reached it; Tuuri looked out, mask in place, but retreated at Emil's shout. Mikkel climbed in, threw his clothes into the decontamination cabinet, followed up with his boots and socks, closed the door, and hit the controls with his elbow. Turning to the main compartment, he found Reynir had folded down the table, taken out the medical kit, and set out bandages and other gear. The Icelander, too, was wearing his mask.
Mikkel braced himself against the wall for a moment as a wave of weariness swept over him. His head throbbed with each heartbeat, and a cold sweat prickled his skin. “Get back, Reynir. I could still have something infectious on me.”
“But you need help. I —” Reynir backed away as Mikkel limped to the table, picked up the bottle of alcohol and a dressing, and reached for his stowed bunk. “Here, let me. Look, I'll stay out of reach, but I can help.” Reynir pulled down the bunk and stepped away, nervously twisting his braid. After a moment, noticing the trail of blood which Mikkel had left, he pulled out the mop and started cleaning.
Mikkel poured alcohol into the wound, twisting awkwardly to reach it, unable to suppress a hiss of pain as the liquid burned into the torn flesh. He clenched his right fist, his knuckles turning white as he rode out the wave of agony. Next came the dressing, which he pressed against the wound. It needed stitches, but there was no way he could do them himself. He pressed his fist to his forehead, trying to think about next steps despite the pain and exhaustion as the adrenaline that had sustained him through the fight and his trek back to the tank wore off, leaving him feeling drained and shaky.
Reynir turned to look at him again, straightening as if he'd thought of something. Hurrying to the small kitchen cabinet, he pulled out the timer, wound it up, and showed it to Mikkel. “In fifteen minutes, it'll be safe.” He licked his lips. “The sheep get hurt sometimes, you know, and I'm out in the pastures with no one around.” He licked his lips again, and the next words came out in a rush. “So I've stitched up sheep many times, well, half a dozen at least, and I can stitch that up for you.” He looked down at the timer, shook it, looked back at Mikkel. “Unless someone else …?”
Mikkel looked past him at Tuuri and Emil, who had closed the door and both stood staring at him — at his scarred legs. Neither looked ready to help. Tuuri’s usually confident expression had softened, her brows furrowing with concern. Her lips parted slightly, as if she wanted to say something. Emil wore a mask of confusion, his gaze darting between Mikkel’s legs and his face.
“Yes,” Mikkel said at last. “You can help. Set the timer for twenty minutes. I don't want you to take any risks. I'll keep pressure on it.” Another wave of dizziness. This was getting worse. He couldn't do it. Mikkel closed his eyes and switched to Danish. “Emil, please come put pressure on this for me. Reynir will stitch it up. Unless you know how?”
Emil's hands pushed his away and bore down on the wound. “No, no, I couldn't.” He gulped audibly. In a lighter tone, he added, “Now you're on light duty, too.”
“You can't put me on light duty. You're not a medic.”
“Are you?”
Mikkel opened his eyes in the frozen silence that followed, looking first at Emil, who seemed horrified at his own temerity, and then at Tuuri, who stood with her knuckles pressed to her lips.
“Yes.” He closed his eyes again. “I was trained as a medic in the army, and I served as such.” For about three months, total. “But as you have observed, I was a soldier first. I received medic training when I was wounded. So I could still serve, even if I couldn't fight.”
“But if you're really a soldier,” Tuuri said, “why doesn't Sigrun take you instead of Lalli?”
Because I'm too fat and clumsy. “I signed on as medic, and medics do not fight. She won't be happy about this.” Mikkel gave Tuuri a narrow-eyed stare. “It would be best if we didn't tell her.”
“You mean, lie to her?” Emil sounded shocked.
“We'll just clean up and not say anything,” Tuuri said. At Emil's hesitation, she added, “Look, it's blackmail material. That's always useful.”
Emil looked from her to Mikkel and back again. “O-okay. I guess. If she doesn't ask.”
“Thank you.” Mikkel closed his eyes and let his head fall on the bunk. The tank was silent but for the sounds of Tuuri and Reynir cleaning up, lulling him to an exhausted sleep until the buzz of the timer jolted him back to consciousness.
Reynir approached brandishing a large, curved needle with thick, black thread. “I, uh, I'll try to be neat but it never looked very good on the sheep even though it did keep the wounds together —”
“It can't make me look worse. Just do it.”
Mikkel braced himself as the shepherd went to work, the pain flaring with each pass of the needle. Reynir worked quickly and efficiently, pulling the edges of the wound together with wide, sturdy stitches. When he was finished, he tied off the thread and sat back. “There, that should do it.”
Mikkel pushed himself up to a sitting position, wincing at the pull of the stitches. "Thank you," he said sincerely. "I couldn't have done that myself.”
Reynir smiled as if receiving the highest of accolades. “I helped!”
As the actual medic, Mikkel put himself on light duty and consented to Emil's going out for firewood, with strict instructions not to enter the park, not to overstrain his back, not to go too far … Emil escaped, leaving Mikkel to sleep while Tuuri and Reynir cleaned up and kept watch for any threats on the monitors.
After several hours, the two pulled his clothes out of the decontamination cabinet and scrubbed them, removing all evidence of the attack except the tears where the rat beasts had ripped at them. Mikkel cut patches from the remains of Emil's ruined clothing and allowed Tuuri to sew them in. The event was now as well concealed as they could manage.
Having nothing else to do, Mikkel took out his whetstone, his dagger, and all the knives. Sitting on the edge of his bunk so as not to put pressure on the stitches, he began the process of sharpening the blades. As he stroked the dagger across the stone, the familiar rasping sound filled the air, and he let his mind wander, thinking about the day.
It was lucky, in a way, I ran into those rat beasts. I might have tried fishing and found out the hard way what lurks in that pond. He paused to touch the bite, now hidden under his clothes. Of course, I found out about the rat beasts the hard way instead.
He sheathed his dagger and took up the cleaver. And now the kids have blackmail material. He smiled. Such as it is. Not that they'll ever demand that I do anything I wouldn't do anyway. At least, I think not. Emil wouldn't. Tuuri … oh, well, if she ever does, I'll say what the General told me to say to a blackmailer: “Publish and be damned!” She might even know that in the original English. He held up the cleaver, turning it against the light, found it wasn't sharp enough, and set to it again. Not that anyone would ever say that to the General. He knows where the bodies are buried.
The cleaver stopped in mid-stroke. Why does that bother me? It's just a saying. It's not — “The Icelanders think they've fled inland.” But the General knows where the bodies are buried.
Mikkel lifted his gaze to stare unseeing across the compartment. Surely not. The Organization is ruthless but … but they've known about the Punished for years. Decades, maybe. There must be a code word that says “round up the Punished”. And the General was surely furious that they tried to sabotage the mission. He might. He might give that order.
Mikkel shivered and set the cleaver and whetstone aside. He stood. Sigrun and Lalli would be coming back soon, and the team needed lunch. He occupied his mind with deciding what to prepare.
“That was scary,” Reynir said, when everything was cleaned up, Emil was fetching firewood, and Mikkel was sharpening knives. “He walked right into the middle of the nest. If it had been one of us …”
“But we wouldn't. We'd have Lalli, or at least the kitten, to warn us.” Tuuri sat in the driver's seat with the kitten sleeping in her lap, while Reynir sat in the passenger's seat, knees forward so he didn't risk touching her. They spoke in low tones, not wanting to bother Mikkel.
“Oh, right. Lalli would have seen the burrows —”
“He's a mage. He sees the grosslings like a cat. Well, almost like a cat.” She smiled down at the kitten, stroking the little creature's fat belly with one finger. “If they're asleep, he only sees them at close range. But still, he wouldn't walk into the middle of a nest.”
Reynir looked out at the ruins. The clouds were slowly parting, shafts of sunlight glinting off broken glass and metal. Somewhere in the tumbled masses of brick and timber, the trolls were hiding.
“It's so scary here.” Glancing at her and then away, he dared to ask the question that had bothered him since he first met her. “Why did you volunteer to come? If — I mean, if you did volunteer.” Had she been ordered to join the team to translate for Lalli?
“Of course I volunteered! It's been my dream to go on an adventure like this ever since I can remember. This is the one opportunity I've been given.” She looked over at him. “It's different for you Icelanders. You can go anywhere, do anything, in Iceland even though you aren't immune. But in Finland, we live behind walls. Walls everywhere, always, and only immunes can leave freely. Not me. All I could see, all I could ever see, was that little bit of land right outside the walls.”
As a fleeting beam of sunlight swept across the ruins, Tuuri turned to look out at the scene before them, and her lips curved in a small smile. Reynir looked down at his hands. And I ran away because I felt confined at home. I had no idea how free I was.
Tuuri sighed and petted the kitten. “Even way back when I was little, I wanted so much to see the whole world. My grandma was immune and a mage, so she'd leave the island often to handle nearby troll reports. At first she took Onni with her, but he hated to go, so when Lalli got older, she'd take him instead. But never me because I'm not a mage, and I was so jealous!” She shrugged with a wry smile.
Reynir watched her small, strong hands as she brushed aside an errant lock of ash-blond hair that fell into her eyes as she spoke. He knew all about jealousy, with four siblings out having adventures while he watched the sheep.
“Well, anyway, Mom and Dad were always busy, so Onni always took care of me, almost like he was my dad too. I told him once — but only once — how much I wanted to steal a boat and go explore another island with him. He said no, horrible things would happen to us. I said he was a coward.” She made a face. “That was cruel of me. I know now, but I didn't know then, there were things out there that he could hear and I couldn't. Terrible things. That's his mage senses, you know. Onni has never understood why I would want to leave. Wherever we are, he thinks we have everything we would ever want. Everything … except the world. So that's what I've been dealing with my whole life.”
Tuuri smiled again as she looked out at the ruins. “But I knew one day I'd be able to do what I wanted … and so I feel like I was destined to end up on this expedition. I jumped at the chance! It was just too perfect of an opportunity.”
Reynir followed her gaze, trying to feel the same excitement at seeing something no one else in the Known World had seen. But — Emil's burned back, the horrible coppery smell of Mikkel's blood, the way his flesh had quivered as Reynir drove the needle into it — “People get hurt here. Stitching up his leg is the most awful thing I've ever done.” He wasn't fishing for a compliment. Not even a little.
“It's a good thing you were here. I couldn't have done it, and I don't think Emil could have either.”
“But you did such a good job mending his clothes.”
“That's easy. Sticking a needle right into someone's skin — eww!” Tuuri gave a dramatic shudder.
“At least he didn't shriek the whole time, like sheep do, and I didn't have to sit on him to hold him down.”
“You couldn't have held him down by sitting on him. It would have taken all three of us.”
“And the kitten!”
Tuuri laughed, and Reynir laughed with her.
He loved her laugh.
Four grosslings. At least four. Perhaps as many as six.
Perched on a large pile of rubble, Lalli studied the gruesome scene beneath him, his senses on high alert. The bodies, torn and partially devoured, lay scattered across the muddy intersection. Departing to the west, the winners of this fight had left circular muddy tracks. Overlapping prints. A group of grosslings, then, not a giant.
Lalli’s keen ears picked up the soft rustling of small creatures scurrying about in the ruins, but nothing large enough to threaten him. Flared nostrils brought him pungent odors of mud and rot and the light scent of coming rain. After a last glance about, the scout climbed down, placing each hand and foot without hesitation or sound. He couldn’t stay long in this high, exposed location; his eyes glowed blue as he used his inner eyes, a beacon to any grosslings wandering about in the moonless gloom.
Across the intersection stood a collapsed building, two remaining walls framing the night sky. Lalli settled into the corner and closed his inner eyes. His mage vision was vital but tiring; a brief rest would revive him for the rest of the night.
Darkness engulfed him. His open eyes saw nothing of the ruins, only the stars like diamonds sprinkled across the sky and the dim Lights dancing like ghosts against the northern sky. An owl hooted from the west and another answered from the south. Faint and far away, wolves howled, eerie and primal.
A wave of homesickness washed over him. In the darkness, this ruined city might be a forest. The broken beams black against the stars might be leafless trees, the rubble he sat on, a rough, cold rock, its jagged edges pressing against his body. His thoughts drifted to Tuuri, so eager to see the world that she’d dragged him to this terrible place, so full of questions he would struggle to answer. His shoulders slumped; his lips moved for a moment as he composed a prayer for return to his own forests, but stopped himself. Such a prayer might anger the gods, and worse, they might answer it. Tuuri didn’t want to go back, and he could never leave her alone in this weird foreign land.
As Lalli watched the stars, his upper lip lifted in a snarl. Tuuri said the fat Dane wanted him to scout by day, as if he couldn’t do his job in the dark of the moon! The man was a pest, always telling him to eat …
Lalli opened his inner eyes and got to his feet. The surviving grosslings had gone west. Though Tuuri had showed him targets over there, there were others to the northeast. Lalli loped away to the east. He would find a way through the ruins to a target.
Lalli always found a way through.
Sigrun scowled down at the map. “We don't have enough hunters to go after those grosslings.” She shrugged. “Well, then, we'll just have to go where they aren't. What are these spots?”
Tuuri peered at the map and ran her finger down her list of sites. “Number 61: bookstore. 'Possibly technical or scientific. High value if so, but requires further research.' I guess they didn't do the research. Number 72: school. 'Medium value.' That's it.”
“If we go for 61 today,” Mikkel said, “then we're in a position to go for that grouping up north tomorrow. If we can get close with the tank, you could hit all three in a single day.”
Sigrun pursed her lips as she tapped the map. “There's a group to the east, here, that we could reach after 72.”
“But not so close together,” Mikkel said, turning to scan the sensors as if bored with the discussion.
“Yeah. So, go for a sure medium value, or go for a possible high value and maybe get nothing?” She grinned as he turned back towards her. “No choice, is there?”
Rot and insects had rendered the books heaps of ruin. As Sigrun shuffled through decades of dirt and droppings, brushing aside cobwebs and casting aside book after book, her grumbles grew louder. “Even if it was a good bookstore back then, there's nothing here now.” Lalli glanced at her but said nothing before turning away towards the west. Sunlight from the windows they'd wiped clean cast his shadow across the debris. His dagger was sheathed and his rifle slung, so she supposed there was no danger. She yanked open a sagging door to a storeroom, the screech of wood on wood sending insects scurrying to cover.
“More rotting stuff.” Sneezing in the musty air, disgusted at their failure, Sigrun kicked a cardboard box blackened with mold. It came apart and spilled out a dozen large, shrink-wrapped books. “Oho! Not a total loss after all.” The books went into her canvas bag and, after another look around for anything usable, she signalled Lalli to follow her out.
“Hey! Where are you going?” Lalli stopped at her words and gestured to the west. “No, the tank is south.” She pointed down the street, knowing the way though their footprints had vanished in the mud. “What kind of scout are you, to get lost like this?”
Lalli stared at her, pointed west again, and spoke. For all she knew, he was cursing at her, but she caught a single word in his babble: “Mikkel.”
“Mikkel? Mikkel is over there? Oh, lead on, then. I definitely want to find Mikkel.” She stalked after the little Finn, fuming. I thought we'd worked everything out. He didn't argue with my orders, and he was even friendly sometimes. But I agree with his suggestion — one suggestion! — and he thinks he can run around the city whenever he wants. We're going to have a talk, big guy. You just wait.
As Sigrun followed, hand on dagger and every sense alert, Lalli led the way to a shop about a block away. The roof seemed intact, the large windows were cracked and filthy but not shattered, and the door was closed with muddy leaves drifted against it. Sigrun frowned at the sight: no one and nothing had entered that store in years. The scout held up a hand to stop her, pointed into the shop, held up one finger, and used his other hand to indicate fangs. As Sigrun nodded, he drew his dagger and stepped to the side, waving at the door.
Sigrun drew her own dagger, made her stealthy way to the door, and tried the handle. It was locked, but the door jamb had rotted and a probing finger peeled away a chunk of wood. With a quick glance to confirm that Lalli was ready, Sigrun ripped open the door, sending splinters flying.
As the troll charged, the scout twisted aside and struck, driving his dagger into the monster's skull. A heartbeat later, Sigrun's dagger plunged into the creature's spine. The troll collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, its eight shaggy, jointed legs splayed out like an enormous spider. Sigrun grinned up at Lalli's impassive face. “So that's it? Just the one troll?” Without looking at her, Lalli led the way inside.
Dimly lit by the grimy windows, the shop was a jumble of toppled shelves, exploded cans, and split plastic. Glass from shattered jars and bottles crunched beneath their boots as they entered, the sound echoing through the desolate space. No vermin scattered at their entrance, no food rotted on the floor, for the troll had eaten all. Against the back wall was a heap of shredded paper, cloth, and plastic, the mass smeared with grossling slime: the troll's nest.
Beside the nest was a closed steel door, dusty but undamaged, incongruous in this chaotic scene. Debris and dirt in front of the door showed it had remained unopened for years, perhaps decades. Lalli headed for that door without hesitation. When Sigrun stopped to look around, he gave an impatient gesture for her to come on.
Sigrun folded her arms and glared at him. “Mikkel isn't here. He's never been here, and he's not in that room. Forget it. Let's go.”
Lalli gestured again. When she stood unmoving, he shook his head and turned away to push down the handle and heave at the door. After watching for a moment, Sigrun sighed in disgust and joined him in pulling on the door, scraping the rubble aside. Once they had the door open far enough to squeeze through, Lalli went in first, Sigrun following with her flashlight.
Glimpses of the room: metal shelves, burst cans and bottles. An overturned bucket. A tattered sleeping bag.
A pistol.
Sigrun focused on the pistol and the skeletal hand beside it, following the arm back to the body and the shattered skull. She flashed the light around again. “Food, water, sleeping bag. Thought you'd hide out in here.” She shook her head. “You had no idea,” she told the skeleton.
Lalli tugged at a crate. Since she couldn’t stop him, Sigrun joined him in prying up the lid. As soon as they had it open, Lalli sliced through the plastic enclosing the contents and pulled out a sack of rice. Dropping the rice in his canvas scavenging sack, he reached for another. “Mikkel.”
Sigrun wrinkled her nose at the mildewy smell escaping from the crate. “Your cousin needs to teach you a human language. 'Mikkel' means 'rice' in your gabble? That's really stupid. And I don't want that mess.”
Ignoring her, Lalli stuffed about a dozen sacks of rice in his own canvas sack, snatched hers, and loaded a dozen sacks on top of the books. Sigrun watched, shaking her head but not bothering to argue. When he held the top of her sack to her, she slung the sack over her shoulder. “Ready to go, then? Fine. I want to have a talk with your cousin.” She turned and stalked out.
“No, 'Mikkel' doesn't mean 'rice',” Tuuri said. “He was trying to tell you the rice smells like Mikkel.”
“Our bathing facilities are sadly limited,” Mikkel muttered as he examined a sack of rice.
“You smell better than musty old rice,” Sigrun said, sharing a grin with Tuuri. It occurred to her that Mikkel smelled quite good, in fact. Down, girl! That's no thought for you to be having about your second-in-command.
Mikkel grunted as he tossed the rice into Sigrun's sack. “Since you dragged back this trash, I'll store it. But I won't cook it until the processes of starvation are well advanced.” He lifted both canvas bags with one hand, pushed open the outer door, and jumped down.
As he strode to the back of the tank, Sigrun closed the door and looked over at Tuuri. “Are we going to starve? Is the little guy a seer?”
“I don't think so. At least, Onni never said so. Lalli just knows sometimes that you need something, even if you don't know it yet.” She shrugged. “Mikkel needs that rice, I guess. For something.”
Sigrun shook her head. “Mages are weird. Well, I don't mean to starve. Get your map out and let's see where me and Emil can bag some rabbits.”
“That looks a lot better,” Sigrun commented from her position leaning against the cabinets. She was still grinning from their rabbit hunt, which had brought back three large rabbits.
“Just so.” Mikkel shifted to the side to give her a clearer view. “Even the second-degree burns are almost fully healed. I believe you can go back to your regular duties tomorrow, Emil.”
Emil twisted to look at him. “Are you sure? You said a week. I can stay a couple more days and help — uh, help with chores around here.” Without breaking his gaze from Mikkel, he inclined his head subtly towards Sigrun.
Touched by his patient's concern, Mikkel gave him a reassuring smile. “I'm quite sure. You've recovered well, and we can manage without you.” He stood as Emil pulled down his shirt. “Don't lift too much weight, and let me check your back again tomorrow. You've been very lucky; you won't have a scar from this mishap.”
“Pity,” Sigrun said. “No scar to show off in the mead hall from your run-in with a smart troll.”
“You don't have one either,” Emil said with a hesitant smile, and Sigrun laughed.
“I have other scars to show off, kiddo. Now then, we need to clean rifles. I know you haven't used yours, but you need to clean it regularly so it knows you care. There was a hunter I heard about one time — not an Eide, of course — who didn't show his rifle he cared —”
As Sigrun began her story, Mikkel pulled down the table for them, straightened the covers on Emil's bunk, folded it up, and looked around for something else to do. He and Reynir had already swept, mopped, and done the dishes, and it was too early to begin the next meal. After a moment, he shrugged and took out his shotgun. It didn't need cleaning, but he sat across the table from the other two and set to work.
As his fingers maneuvered the cleaning cloth along the shotgun barrel, Mikkel leaned to the left and suffered a stab of pain from his wounded leg. His lips tightened as he suppressed a flinch. He had an excuse ready if Sigrun noticed his discomfort; he would claim it was lingering knee pain from catching Lalli two weeks before. But he didn't want to acknowledge his difficulty unless it became necessary. Sigrun might want to help him or insist that Emil help him, which would interfere with his plans for the morrow.
Engrossed in her tale, Sigrun was animatedly recounting the story of an unloved rifle — a rifle that had failed a hunter because he didn't care enough about it. Her voice rose and fell with the cadence of the narrative. With her attention on Emil, she had missed Mikkel’s reaction.
He set aside the shotgun, rummaged in a cabinet, and came up with his whetstone. There were still knives that he hadn't sharpened. As his hands stroked a knife across the stone, his thoughts turned to Emil and the "fire spirit" training. Is that helping him control his powers, or just a waste of time? I wish I knew how to help him. The General should have given me more information, or sent someone else —
He stopped himself from pursuing that line of thought. The General did not welcome questioning of his decisions, and Mikkel still wasn't sure if the General could read his thoughts. Safer not to think anything that might displease him when next they met.
As his well-trained hands sharpened another knife, his mind turned to the route they'd agreed upon that morning. If all goes according to plan, tomorrow we'll be in position for me to carry out my mission. I should have gotten there a week ago, but that plan collapsed along with the bridge.
Mikkel pushed aside a flicker of unease. The General must understand that. And we have to wait for rescue; I couldn't return the book any sooner, even if I had it in my hands. He reviewed his mental map of Copenhagen, the photo of the building, the floor plan, the drawing of the desk and the book. Just one more night, and I'll recover the most important book in Denmark. If the clan knew — but it doesn't matter. I'm not part of the clan anymore, and it doesn't matter what they think. The Organization will know. The General will know. That's all that matters.
Of course, that wasn't all that mattered. The clan should know what its unwanted child had achieved. They should know what they'd thrown away. They wouldn't know. But he would.
It was not to be. Midway through Sigrun's shift, a blizzard engulfed the tank, its violent gusts shaking the vehicle and jolting everyone from their sleep. Even Lalli agreed it was not safe for him to scout in that weather, and they remained where they were for the day.
After a breakfast cooked on the tank's small stove, Sigrun told stories. Many were of her own triumphs, Mikkel observed, such as she would tell in the mead hall, but many others seemed to be teaching tales showing mistakes that led to death. As she spoke, Emil's unwavering attention made Mikkel think of a dog watching his mistress for commands. Tuuri seemed just as engrossed in Sigrun's tales. This advice can't help her. If she ever comes within striking range of a grossling, it'll be the last thing she ever does. Turning back to stirring rabbit stew, he shook his head with a sigh. Such a brave soul, but trapped by her biology.
“Is it another bad one?” Reynir whispered. He was on watch, leaning against the back wall where he could both see the monitors and listen to Mikkel's summaries of Sigrun's stories.
“I was just thinking of other things.” Mikkel gave the younger man a stern look. “I'm giving you these stories for entertainment. I trust you're not considering becoming a troll-hunter.”
“Oh, no! Never!” A powerful gust shook the tank, and Reynir studied the monitors in silence for a moment before going on. “I'm going to be a mage. I'll help you a lot then.”
“Is that why you've been putting those little drawings in the cabinets and under mattresses?”
The Icelander looked both surprised and hurt. “Well, yes. Those are galdrastafur. Some of them are for good luck and some for good health. We carve them on the doorposts at home, but I thought they might work if I just drew them. Uh — do you mind?”
“The paper is Tuuri's. If she doesn't mind you using it, I can have no objection.” Mikkel raised his spoon to examine the stew. “Lunch is ready. Please fetch the dishes.”
After lunch, Sigrun proposed, grinning, that other people should tell their stories as well. She nudged Emil, who looked at her with an expression close to terror. After another nudge and encouraging smile, he took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and began his first tale.
All of Emil's tales revolved around things unexpectedly blowing up or burning down, and featured a hapless recruit who always suffered the blame. Mikkel thought some of them were Cleanser training stories, but others were likely Emil's own experiences. He found it heartening that the Swede could laugh with the team at his own misadventures, even if he did so from behind a veil of anonymity.
After Emil, Tuuri regaled the group with stories of clueless users and their equipment mishaps. “You would think,” she said, grinning, “that if a part is labelled 'front' and 'back', even the dimmest user would know not to insert it sideways. But our commander—” The others leaned in, eager to hear the punchline.
When Tuuri finished her tales, she turned to Mikkel. “Do you have any medic stories?”
Mikkel shook his head. “My experiences as an army medic are not... something I wish to discuss. However,” he continued, brightening, “I do have some stories from my time working with cattle...”
So the short day passed, and the blizzard raged on.
“Sigrun! Sigrun!”
Reynir jolted awake at Mikkel's urgent whisper. Sigrun leapt from her bunk, darting to the front with Mikkel close behind. Emil and Tuuri stirred in the bunks below, rousing from sleep. Reynir rolled out and followed, reaching the front before Emil.
Peering between their two heads, Reynir saw several blobs on the IR monitor. The visual monitor was black, of course; the night was moonless once more, and they dared not turn on the outside lights. Even as he watched, more blobs appeared, and yet more. Mikkel and Sigrun murmured to each other, speaking too fast for Reynir's limited understanding to pick up more than a few words: “grosslings”, “fight”, and “tank”.
The kitten scaled Reynir's leg, settling on his shoulder and staring forward, her fur so bushed out she seemed twice her true size. Reynir stroked her, whispering, “We know they're out there. We're trying to figure out what to do.” Or rather, they're figuring out what to do. Not me. I'm just useless baggage. He bit his lip, looking at Mikkel, Sigrun, and now Emil and Tuuri straining to see around them. Over his pajamas, Emil wore his bandoliers, which Reynir had repaired with pieces of the Swede's ruined jacket, and he carried both his own rifle and Sigrun's. That gave Reynir an idea.
Edging past the crowd, now whispering among themselves, Reynir gathered up Sigrun's and Emil's uniforms, boots, and gloves, which he pressed into their arms. As they pulled their gear on, Tuuri donned her own uniform. Mikkel already wore his, as always when he was on watch.
Sigrun, Mikkel, and Emil spoke in low, tense tones with frequent glances at the gathering crowd of grosslings down the street. The microphones outside picked up a discordant chorus of gravelly groans. Reynir couldn't tell how many grosslings there were, as they were milling about so much.
Milling about? And those sounds …
Reynir nudged Mikkel's bulk aside to get a better look just as Sigrun said something decisive and turned to the door.
“Sigrun! No! Not go!” At least he knew that much Swedish. Sigrun gave an answer that pulsed with annoyance but conveyed nothing to him. “Not go!” He switched to Icelandic. “Mikkel, tell her not to go.”
Mikkel's voice was unexpectedly kind. “We have no choice. That swarm could overturn the tank, and you and Tuuri — We have to try to stop them.”
“No! They won't attack. Mikkel, they're sheep. Look at them. Listen to them; they're bleating. They're sheep, and they don't have a shepherd. They must be looking for him. All these years …” Reynir remembered his flock at home and felt a hard knot of shame. Were they milling around, bleating, just as lost?
Mikkel said something to Sigrun, who stood with one hand on the door and the other on her rifle, Emil at her elbow. She rolled her eyes but didn't move.
“Sheep beasts?” Mikkel asked. “Are you sure?”
Tuuri had made her way to Reynir's side. “We had sheep when I was little. They do move like that. So sheep beasts might too.”
Mikkel turned back to the monitors. He looked harassed; Reynir thought a man less self-controlled would pull out his hair. “There are more and — those are charging!”
Sigrun shoved the Dane aside for a better look, and Reynir peered around him. Two blobs were indeed charging towards the back of the main mass, splitting, going on to each side …
“They're sheepdogs! Mikkel, tell her they're sheepdogs!” Even as he spoke, one blob — sheepdog — disappeared behind the group, while the other shot along the side closer to the tank. They didn't bark; no, they shrieked, but Reynir heard the timing of the sounds. “Sheepdogs,” he repeated in awe.
Sigrun glared from him to Mikkel to the monitors. Mikkel was still talking to her. Emil craned his neck to see around all the taller people.
“She said I couldn't snipe,” Tuuri said. “They would have left us in here. Helpless.” She sounded near tears.
Reynir didn't know what to say. In this terrible place, they were helpless. All he could do was put an arm around her shoulders. Mikkel didn't answer either, or even turn around. He and the others were still on edge, hands stroking weapons, as they watched the sheepdogs round up the sheep and drive them eastward.
“Now we know what killed those grosslings Lalli found,” Reynir said at last.
“Probably,” Mikkel said, some of the tension leaving his posture, though he didn't turn away from the monitors. “And perhaps now we know why there are so few grosslings in this area.” He said something to Sigrun, who looked over at Reynir.
“Thank you,” Sigrun said, followed by a string of Norwegian.
“She said —” Mikkel and Tuuri began together. Mikkel glanced over his shoulder and gestured for her to proceed.
“She said it would have been a glorious battle, but she's not ready to go to Valhalla quite yet.”
Sigrun grinned and turned away, throwing an arm around Emil and leading him to the back.
Reynir smiled so widely he thought his face might split. I helped keep them safe!
The sheep beasts had come near the end of Mikkel's watch, which marked their official morning, hours before dawn. There being no point in going back to bed, they sat up and discussed the encounter. When Tuuri took over the watch, Mikkel retreated to the back compartment where he cleaned his stitches with alcohol, away from Sigrun's sharp eyes.
As he collected the breakfast porridge, he thought of Lalli out there in the darkness. For a moment, a wave of envy washed over him. A scout can run around outside the walls, free to do what he wants, go where he wants, and report only so much as he feels like. If I could have been a scout — slow, clumsy oaf! You can't even see like normal people! He winced. Though twenty years had passed since he ran away, the old sneers still came back at unexpected times. He pushed away the thought, focused on his mission. Soon. When Lalli's back, we'll finally be on our way. Soon.
Lalli came back while the team was eating. After a silent battle of wills with Mikkel, he took his bowl and ate breakfast as far away from the others as possible. He had found a route for the tank to a park near the three spots of interest and noted tracks of the sheep beasts up north. Watching over Tuuri's shoulder with a look of mild interest, Mikkel noted with hidden relief that the tank would be within two hundred meters of his target. He could slip away long enough to get the book before anyone noticed he was gone. If they would just go!
After a couple of hours of the tank forcing its way through the snow, Tuuri parked with a sigh of relief. Sigrun slapped Emil on the back with a grin. “Books, kiddo!” And they were gone.
Mikkel made another trip to the back, returning with a bowl of vegetables. To Reynir, already mopping the floor, he said, “We're low on fuel and I'll be busy for quite a while gathering more. Here's some food. If I'm not back in time, you fix lunch.”
Reynir agreed with his usual enthusiasm, and Mikkel turned to Tuuri. “It's very cold today, so there won't be a lot of grosslings out. Still, Lalli can protect you in my absence, but if you really need me, yell over the speakers. I should be within earshot.” With matters at the tank arranged, he shrugged his shotgun's strap onto his left shoulder and left. In the back of the tank, he dropped two candles in his pocket, added flint and steel and a pry bar, and took up his axe. With his supplies gathered, Mikkel set out into the snow-covered landscape.
Snow blanketed the park, swept by the north wind into meter-deep drifts in some areas and mere wisps in others. The sky had cleared after the blizzard, and bright sunshine glittered off millions of crystals, forcing him to squint as he surveyed the landscape for possibilities. The icy air burned in his lungs and billowed out like smoke. He soon spotted a likely sapling, chopped it down, and with a few minutes' work, fashioned it into a sturdy hiking stick. Setting the stick aside, he continued to explore the park.
After some minutes of searching, he found a large tree that had fallen, taking down several others. This, then, would supply the tank. Despite his yearning to seek the book, he chopped and hauled for over an hour. Tuuri and Reynir should believe him hard at work.
Mikkel did not wonder why his mission was a secret or from whom; the General had ordered him to keep it secret, and such was the force of the man's personality that Mikkel obeyed without question. Most people did, when the General gave his orders.
With his cover established, Mikkel took up his hiking stick and set out westward through the park. Here, with no one to see, he favored his wounded leg, protecting the stitches from strain. He picked his way with care, probing with his stick for tripping hazards, scanning the snow for tracks, and glancing frequently at the bare branches above. He gave pines a wide berth; no telling what might hide under their snow-covered needles.
Perhaps I should have brought the kitten. She'd keep me from blundering into another nest. But no, she'd be in danger when I was chopping wood, and I can't very well go back and get her now. I'll just have to be careful.
As he approached the far edge of the park, Mikkel's attention was caught by churned-up snow, revealing the passage of many creatures. He hesitated, scanning left and right. All around him, the ruins were still and quiet beneath their white blankets.
Lalli said he saw the track of the sheep beasts. This must be their track. Nothing to worry about; they're far to the south now. Go on.
He went on. The park had helped orient him in these ruins, where streets sometimes vanished entirely in heaps of rubble. Passing two streets and turning north, he skirted debris and watched shattered windows and broken doors for hints of movement. Nothing moved; the icy cold and bright sunshine had likely driven the monsters deep into their lairs. But they were there. Of that, he was certain.
The buildings in this area had well withstood the decades of neglect. No fire had touched them and their structures were largely intact. Their street numbers were long gone, so Mikkel counted doorways as he threaded his way between rusting cars and leafless bushes.
His breath caught as the building came into view; his heart raced with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Despite the ravages of time, there was no mistaking it — this was the very structure from the photo. Though its identifying sign had fallen, its distinctive windows, composed of many small panes set within an iron skeleton, remained unbroken.
Leaning his axe and hiking stick against the wall, Mikkel made short work of the lock with his pry bar and heaved open the door. With a deep, shuddering breath, he entered the building, axe ready. The entrance was open, chairs and couches set about on either side: a reception area. Dust lay heavy on the floor and furniture, marked only by tiny footprints of vermin, and veils of cobwebs hung above him. He inhaled deeply, seeking the stench of rot and slime, but smelling only mice and their droppings. His breathing was loud in the silence.
Ahead was a hallway, closed doors on either side. Relying on dim light slipping through the grimy windows, he left the flashlight in his pocket as he edged forward, his muscles tense and his nerves on high alert. The first pair of doors were restrooms, the next two were irrelevant. He bypassed them with hardly a glance.
The nameplate had fallen off long before and lay somewhere in the undisturbed dust, but Mikkel knew. At long last, he had found the office. His breath came in quick, short puffs as he forced the lock and pushed open the door. The windowless room was dark and foreboding. Flicking on the flashlight, he beheld the desk: massive, wooden, decorated with elaborate carvings, the beauty of which he ignored. They served only to identify it as his goal. He stood for a moment in the doorway, staring, then jerked into motion.
Setting the candles on the desk, he took out his flint and steel to strike a spark. Hands trembling with eagerness conspired with his normal clumsiness to make the effort many times harder, and he swore under his breath with frustration.
Do without the candles. No, I'd have to manage the flashlight while I search, and I'd just drop it. And I'd have darkness behind me …
Imagination bred threats in the darkness. He swept the flashlight around, checking for something creeping up on him, and went back to his struggle with the flint and steel. After a maddening minute, he lit one candle, then the other. Their flames wavered slightly as his movements disturbed the still air. By their light, he saw a simple office. The desk stood at the center, two straight-backed wooden chairs before it, while a more elaborate, mouse-chewed leather chair sat behind it. Four shelves of books hung on the wall behind the desk. The highest shelf was well above his eye level.
Mikkel's lips tightened, but there was no help for it. He pulled off his left glove, reached up to grab a handful of books, set them on the desk, and felt along the icy shelf where they'd stood.
Nothing.
He grabbed more books and felt again. His fingertips grew increasingly numb with each freezing touch. When his fingers became too stiff to continue, he tucked his hand in his armpit under his shirt, pulled off his right glove with his teeth, and kept going. Near the left wall, his questing fingers brushed against something metallic, so cold it felt like searing heat. With a gasp of relief and pain, he snatched the key, gripping it so tightly it bit into his flesh. He dropped the key on the desk for a moment and tucked his stiff, aching fingers in his other armpit to savor the gradual return of warmth before donning his gloves once more.
Mikkel set one candle on the floor and knelt beside it. Second drawer down on the right. He gave the drawer an experimental tug before wiping grime from the keyhole and inserting the key. Gently, gently, you overgrown lout. It's rusty. You'll break the key —
Click.
He let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, waited for the vapor to dissipate before he carefully pulled out the drawer.
It was empty.
Mikkel stared, his brain unable to process what his eyes told him. His hand reached out, felt the drawer as if he could touch what he could not see. After a moment, he rallied, imagining a false bottom to the drawer … but the book was thick. Even the most cursory examination of the drawer proved the book could not be hidden in it. He thrust the flashlight into the opening, scanned every surface, and found nothing.
No. This can't be. No. Think. The informant was sick, dying. He could have been confused, could have misremembered.
(But he remembered the key.)
Okay, it's not in this drawer. Maybe the top drawer, maybe one on the left …
Mikkel pulled out every drawer, dumped their contents in the dust. Office supplies, paperwork, a stash of desiccated candy bars the mice hadn't found. He pressed his fists to his temples for a moment, then stood and ran a finger across every book. Only one was thick enough to be his target, but when he took it down, it was the wrong color. He opened it anyway, leafed through a few brittle pages, moldy at the edges and bored through by silverfish. He dropped it. A book of anthropology was useless.
It's not in this room. The informant misremembered. (But the key?) It's in one of the other rooms. I have only to find the right room.
Mikkel moved from room to room, his desperation growing with each empty drawer and irrelevant book. He yanked out contents, chopped through a stubborn door with his axe, heedless of the noise. Mice skittered in terror behind him, but he paid them no mind. He focused solely on the book, and with each passing moment, the realization that it was nowhere to be found settled like a leaden weight in his chest. At length, empty-handed, he carried his candle back to the first room and sank to the floor in despair.
“This expedition is a cover for your retrieving the book. Nothing else matters, not the expedition, not your teammates, not even you. You must retrieve the book!”
“I won't fail you, sir.”
But I have failed. I'm a failure. I've always been a failure, a disgrace, a shame to the clan …
Mikkel stared hopelessly at the desk, his shoulders slumped and his breath coming in short, foggy bursts. A name drifted through his despairing mind: Jens Hansen. Mikkel hadn't known him, but the story had been told all over Rønne. Hansen had been drinking at an inn and had staggered out the door to go home, as was his wont. No one had given him another thought until someone stumbled over his body beside the path a dozen meters from his home. He had gone from dead drunk to dead without a fight.
Without pain.
At that thought, Mikkel stood, his movements slow and heavy. He pinched out the flames, dropped the candles in his pockets, and took up his axe. The habits of poverty could not be denied; he clung to his meager possessions even in the face of ruin. The hiking stick he ignored as he stepped into the street; broken ankles no longer concerned him.
He had seen the sign as he made his way to his target, noting it without interest. It had fallen, broken in half, shattered the plate-glass window behind it, but he could still read it. Now, he kicked aside the remaining shards and stepped through the window opening. Decades of wind and vermin had knocked the bottles off their shelves to shatter on the floor, but he thought there might be some intact in the back. Leaning the axe against a wall, he moved deeper, crunching through the broken glass, peering about in the incongruously sunny store.
There! A shelf of intact bottles. Their labels were black with mold, unreadable, but he chose one, yanked out the cork, and gave it a sniff. At the biting smell of vinegar, he flung it aside to shatter among the others. Two more suffered the same fate, and he shuffled away, looking for a shelf that might bear vodka.
Heavy footsteps outside.
Mikkel whirled, his hands grasping the shotgun without his conscious decision. He was a soldier, despite everything, and he would take the grossling with him.
The footsteps stopped.
Whuffle.
He blinked. He knew that sound, had heard it more times than he could count, but how —?
Another footstep, and a bull poked its shaggy black head and horns through the shattered window. Their eyes met and the bull stared at him for a long moment. Mikkel felt a flicker of recognition that he couldn't quite place. It flared its nostrils, sniffed deeply, and surveyed the room as if searching for something. It regarded him again as he stood staring, snorted, and turned away to trot down the street.
Mikkel's mind whirled, despair, confusion, and curiosity battling for attention. Curiosity won, as it usually did, but only by a narrow and fragile margin.
Do I know that bull? No, I can't; how could I?
What is he doing here? Where's his herd? He shouldn't be here alone.
He has no herd. He lost a dominance battle and had to flee.
That last thought threatened to drown him in painful memories, and he pushed it away. He squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment, then picked his way forward, took up his axe, and stepped through the window. The bull was out of sight, the clop of its hooves smothered in the deep snow, but its track was clear. It had gone south, its hoofprints beside and sometimes over his own footprints. After checking left and right, Mikkel followed.
Where is he going? What is there for him in this terrible place?
The bull's track turned at the intersection, still alongside his own, and he followed it all the way to the jumbled track of the sheep beast. His footprints continued into the park, but the bull's did not. He stopped, looking up and down the trampled snow.
Does he think this is the track of a new herd? That must be what he's seeking, a new herd to join and protect, but he won't find it this way. His attention was caught by two tracks that broke away from the main mass, curving away and then back again. He studied it, frowning, and nodded as he understood.
A sheep strayed and a sheepdog guided it back. After all the horrors of the Rash and the Catastrophe, after ninety years alone in these ruins, the sheepdog is still carrying out his duty.
With a deep sigh, Mikkel squared his shoulders and strode back through the park, following his own footprints to the tank and the others. The weight of his failure and despair still pressed down on him, the urge to give in, to seek oblivion in the bottom of a bottle, still lurked at the edges of his mind, but for now he would keep on.
Tuuri leaned back to stretch her spine. Without the clatter of her typing, the tank was so quiet she could hear Reynir's breathing and the whisper of wind outside. She frowned. The tank was very quiet. A prickle of unease crept up her spine. Where was Mikkel? He should have been back by now with another load.
“Hey, Reynir, can you see Mikkel?”
The office chair squeaked as Tuuri got to her feet and turned to join Reynir in watching the monitors. He leaned against the doorjamb, the dark tartan pattern of his flannel shirt setting off his fiery red hair, which glowed in the sunlight streaming through the windshield and illuminating the interior. His blue jeans hung loosely on his lanky frame as he leaned forward, stretching a long arm to work the controls and scan around. The images flickered by, monochrome images of snow and tumbled façades in which nothing moved.
“How long since you saw him last?”
Reynir gave her a guilty look. “I don't know. About half an hour? I wasn't paying attention to him, just looking for grosslings, you know.” He bit his lip. “I thought he was working —”
“Okay. It's not like we can do anything for him anyway.” She drummed her fingers against her thigh. “Unless I get Lalli up and send him out there.” The images continued to switch from screen to screen, and still nothing moved. “We'll give him another half hour, and then I'll send Lalli.” She nodded to herself. That was the sort of decisive action Sigrun would take — swift, bold, and proactive. With a curt nod, she sat down and reached for the typewriter.
“There he is,” Reynir said, just minutes later. He touched the controls to stop the scan as Tuuri stood to take a look.
“He's limping again,” she said. “Don't we have anything for the pain?”
“We do, but not much, so he said to keep it for emergencies.” Reynir looked frustrated, as always when he wanted to help but couldn't think of a way. “I wish it were summer. Or anytime but winter. I'll bet then we could find some comfrey. That's what we use at home. You can make a good salve with comfrey —”
Tuuri tuned out his chatter. We made comfrey salve. Her brows knitted as she tried to catch the thought his words had prompted. Yes, so? It probably grows here, but it's died back to the roots and it's buried in snow anyway. It likes the south side of buildings … but that's where the drifts are. Except over there …
She slipped past Reynir and went forward to cup her hands against the window and peer at a jumble of broken stones fallen from a façade. Swirling gusts had left some places deep in snow and others almost clear. Those are limestone. Comfrey likes limestone, doesn't it? Suddenly decisive, Tuuri went to the back and dragged her cousin out from under the bunk.
Lalli opened one eye. “What?”
“We need some comfrey roots for salve. I've spotted a likely place —” Lalli's stare disconcerted her. At least he had opened both eyes. “Mikkel's wounded. It's not bad, but he's in pain,” she added, in case Lalli cared about Mikkel's well-being. Probably not, but …
Lalli closed his eyes and stretched, catlike. “Where?”
“Here, come forward and I'll point it out.”
Mikkel returned with another load of wood to feed into the fuel chute and returned to the park, while Tuuri held her breath, hoping he wouldn't notice Lalli digging around the limestone blocks. Soon after, Lalli returned, dropped a bundle of roots on the table, and turned to strip off his uniform.
“Oh,” Tuuri said, delighted, “You found some!”
Lalli paused to stare at her, and her face heated. “Well, yes. Thank you,” she mumbled. Turning away, he hung up his uniform and stalked into the back to roll under the bunk.
“Is he mad?” Reynir whispered, as if Lalli might hear and understand.
Tuuri sighed. “No, he just thinks I talk too much. Let's wash these. Don't you have some tallow stashed away somewhere?”
While Tuuri chopped the roots, glancing frequently at the monitors, Reynir poured chunks of tallow from a jar into a pot to heat. “Can you do the runes so the salve works better?” Tuuri asked. “Like the way all the remedies work better in their bottles?”
He stirred in silence for a few moments. “I don't think I know the right galdrastafur for pain. I know the ones we carve on the doorposts, and a few that I saw my aunt Helga paint on fences to keep the sheep in. She's a mage … What else did she do?” He fell silent, and Tuuri chopped roots without further questions, letting him think.
Reynir nodded after a moment. “There was this boy back home who got his ears frozen — I mean frozen solid — just from being out without a hat too long. It was scary. I thought they'd break right off.”
He paused, looking past her as if seeing it again. “But Aunt Helga made these galdrastafur on a cloth strip, tied it around his head, and his ears thawed right back out. Good as new.”
He returned his gaze to her with an eager smile. “If anyone gets frostbitten, I could make those same galdrastafur.” But then his shoulders slumped as he seemed to deflate. “I mean, I could draw them. I don't know if any of mine really work. Anyone can draw them, you see. You could, if you wanted to. But it takes a real mage to make one.”
“I guess we won't need that. Don't we have the frostbite remedy?”
As usual, Reynir rallied quickly. “Yes, we have some. We've got a bunch of remedies for cold exposure. It seems like your sponsors worried about you, at least a little.”
Tuuri winced at the reminders both that Reynir wasn't really part of the team and that the sponsors hadn't equipped them very well. She sniffed at the rich, meaty smell from the stove. “Is it ready yet?”
Reynir spooned up some melted fat and dribbled it back. “Looks like it.” Tuuri poured a handful of chopped roots into the pot and stood back to wait.
She had overlooked one small issue. In Keuruu, they prepared the comfrey salve and other herbal remedies in a large, airy kitchen where the smell rapidly dissipated. As roots and tallow simmered in the tight confines of the tank, however, the meaty smell of tallow and the earthy, sweet smell of comfrey built up, unmistakeable.
“Oh, no! When Sigrun smells that, she'll know what we've been cooking, and she'll want to know why. And there goes Mikkel's secret.” And my blackmail material.
Reynir gave her a panicky look. “Can we open the windows? There aren't any grosslings around.”
The windows had been closed so long that Tuuri had forgotten they could be opened. Soon she had folded back the heavy steel shutters and an icy breeze blew through the tank, taking some of the stench with it.
“I have an idea,” Reynir said, shivering. “There was this time Bjarni and I — my brother Bjarni — we, uh, well, we needed to get rid of a stink, and we fried onions. Mom didn't guess. I don't think she did, at least. This stuff is almost done. I'll fry some onions as soon as I can. That'll help.”
Rubbing her chilled arms, Tuuri looked around for a bowl, and they soon poured the salve into it. She hid it in her own cabinet while Reynir cleaned his pot, set out an onion, and heated more tallow.
“Do you think we could close the windows now?” he asked with a hopeful smile, and Tuuri laughed, making the rounds again to close the shutters, before sitting down to slice the onion.
“Wow, what is this stink?” Sigrun demanded, waving a hand before her nose as she and Emil climbed into the tank. She looked from Reynir, who hunched his shoulders and stirred onions, to Tuuri, who knew her guilt must be written on her face. “Did we have a troll attack?”
Tuuri's face heated, but she didn't mean to lose her blackmail material if she could help it. “We were trying to make a traditional Icelandic delicacy. It didn't turn out so well. So we tossed it out for the trolls already. But the smell …” She shrugged.
Sigrun snorted. “I've heard about those traditional Icelandic delicacies.” She eyed them sternly. “If you insist on trying stuff like that, do it outside next time. And toss it when you're through.”
Emil snickered. Tuuri hated the embarrassment, but better that than to give away Mikkel's secret. “I'm going to change out the filters.”
Sigrun nodded, then shook her head. “So we checked every one of those sites, and even a couple of other places that looked promising. Nothing but mold and vermin.” She gave Emil a fond grin. “But we did bag a couple of trolls.” They made themselves comfortable, Emil taking over the watch while Reynir served out fried onions and started a vegetable soup.
Soon Mikkel returned, loaded more wood, and climbed into the tank, his face impassive and his movements fluid. Tuuri watched him closely, searching for any sign that might betray his injury to Sigrun. But he gave no hint of pain, and Tuuri had to admire his determination.
Between them, they'd keep his secret until it could be used to her advantage.
“— so we went on by, and it grabbed at us, but it couldn't reach up, and Sigrun said —”
Sigrun leaned back and patted her belly. This is how a vacation should be! A recruit telling his first mead hall story and a venison feast. All it lacks is mead. Or ale. Beer. Anything but water. She smiled at her thought and returned her attention to Emil's story. His voice was a little too high; he spoke a little too fast. Sounds like he's trying to get through before someone laughs at him. His people have a lot to answer for.
She realized she was frowning and looked away as it wouldn't do for him to see her frowning during her story. Her gaze fell on Mikkel, leaning against the wall and watching the monitors. He'd taken Tuuri's watch as well as his own so that she could enjoy stories from Sigrun and Emil. Hmm. He's been moody since yesterday. Hardly talked this afternoon when we went hunting. She shrugged. Oh, well, medics are all moody. Goes with the job.
At that thought, she glanced over her shoulder at Lalli, who had taken his plate and sat on the floor next to what even Tuuri now called his “den” under Mikkel's bunk. Scouts are all moody too, and besides, they don't like people. But he does his work even if he can't speak a human language. And his cousin's a good translator.
Smiling again, she regarded Tuuri. The little Finn was leaning forward, eyes wide and intent on Emil's face. She wouldn't laugh at him. Sigrun hadn't wanted a non-immune along on this trip, but Tuuri had shown herself to be a valuable member of the team. Not just their translator, not just their driver, she handled the map and identified scavenging spots from her list. When I have to be a general, I think I'll get a little Finnish skald to take care of all that paper stuff. Mom and Dad won't like it — they still think I could read all that paperwork if I put my mind to it — they don't believe I just can't! She gave her head a small, frustrated shake. Anyway, I'll just deal with that stuff my way.
She realized she was frowning again and hastily wiped away the expression, turning her gaze to Reynir. Or rather, Reynir's back as he washed dishes. Who would have thought a shepherd would be useful for a troll-hunting expedition? There's something else I can change when I have to be a general. I'll have non-hunters do some special training, like how sheep and sheepdogs move around. If that stowaway hadn't been here, none of us would have known what those beasts were or how they'd act.
“— and the troll snatched the explosive right out of the air — probably ate it, too — and boom!” Tuuri beamed at Emil as he finished his story, and he gave her a seated bow. “But that's all the stories I have,” he said. “And so, Sigrun —?”
Sigrun grinned. “Let me see. What stories have I not told?”
The books at the next day's site weren't all rotted and torn up for vermin nests, but they weren't all intact, either. Sigrun and Emil had to pull out each book, open it, and toss it aside if it was too damaged to be worth the trouble of carrying out. Every so often, they found a book that had withstood the ravages of time and tossed it into their canvas sacks. After almost an hour of this, both were wiping watering eyes and runny noses, and Sigrun was almost ready to call a halt.
A slither, a bump — she could not have said what sound alerted her, but she whirled, crying “Ware!” as the troll charged through the door they'd opened. Human-sized, it had many multi-jointed limbs and a large drooling mouth with finger-length fangs. As it charged, Sigrun jumped to the right, Emil to the left, daggers in hand.
There was a thud. The light of Emil's flashlight swung wildly about the room before going out. Sigrun twisted away from the troll, her dagger striking hard and true, just behind the monster's skull. She stabbed it a second time as it collapsed.
Scrambling noises told her Emil was alive, and she directed her flashlight towards where his feet should be, moving upwards to look for him without shining the light in his eyes. His own flashlight came on as he got to his feet. “I — I'm sorry, Sigrun. I tripped and —”
Sigrun turned her light on the troll. “Let's see. I hit it there and there. So that slash right there, that's yours. You hit it even though you tripped.”
“That wouldn't have killed it, though.”
“No, but you hit it. That was well done. You kept your wits about you.”
“You had to save me again. I should have watched where I put my big feet. I'm not any use to you —”
Oh, oh. I don't want to crush the poor recruit's spirit. Or let him crush his own spirit.
“Stop. Get your sack and let's get out of here before another one comes. We've spent enough time here and my nose is running.”
The sunlight reflecting off the snow struck their dark-adapted eyes like a blow. Even with the threat of trolls behind them, they had to stop in the remains of the entryway, blinking in pain for several seconds. Afterwards, Sigrun led the way down the street towards the tank, but stopped and turned to face Emil.
“How long have you known me?”
“Eighteen days? No, nineteen?”
“Right, and what were you before that?”
“A Cleanser? For a couple of years, but before —”
“How old are you?”
Emil looked away. “Nineteen.”
“I'm thirty-two. I've been hunting trolls longer than you've been alive. And I was trained, I got lots of training and I've had lots of practice. You weren't trained before.” He opened his mouth and she raised a hand to stop him. “Yeah, you've had some training. You can shoot pretty well. But you're not trained as a troll-hunter. You're a green recruit, just about the greenest.” Oops, don't knock him down too far. “Back home, I wouldn't take you hunting like this, just you and me. We'd have a group of recruits and a group of hunters, and we'd go into areas that are already scouted. But it's just us here, so there you are. Yeah, you didn't check all around you; you didn't check where you could jump if you had to; you dropped your flashlight. All that takes practice, kiddo, and you don't have that practice. But you will. We'll keep at it, and you'll be the most best Swedish troll-hunter ever!”
Emil gave an uncertain nod, not meeting her eyes. Sigrun clapped him on the shoulder. “Let's take these books back and I'll teach you to 'dance' better. How's that?”
He brightened up. “I learned — or, I mean, I had lessons on dancing. Ballroom dancing. It was years ago, but I remember how.”
Sigrun grinned at him. “That's the spirit!” She didn't know what “ballroom dancing” was, but any kind of dancing should help with coordination and flexibility.
“We're going to practice dancing,” Sigrun announced as they approached the tank. All four of the others were outside, enjoying the brilliant sunlight. The two who understood her announcement looked confused; Lalli didn't acknowledge her words at all and Reynir looked lost but enthusiastic.
“So, short stuff,” Sigrun went on, “tell your cousin he's going to play troll. We have these twigs; they're our daggers. He gets to charge at us and try to touch us. We'll try to dodge and stab him with our twigs. They're too little to hurt him. Right?”
Tuuri turned to explain to Lalli. And explain. And explain. It was evident that he didn't want to play troll, but in the end, he charged at Sigrun.
She soon realized that Lalli was not a good troll. After he tapped her half a dozen times and Emil more, while neither of them could touch him with their twigs, Sigrun called a halt.
“No troll is that fast. Not one. We need a better troll.” She turned to the other three and opened her mouth to ask Mikkel to play troll. He would be slower and clumsier than a real troll, she thought, but that would give Emil confidence.
Before she could speak, Reynir ran forward, waving both hands. “I am troll! Troll!”
It was apparent that Tuuri or Mikkel had explained the role to him, as the Icelander charged, reaching for Emil with his long arms as the smaller man dodged, striking him in the back and breaking his twig.
“Die!” Sigrun shouted, judging the strike a killing blow. Reynir turned to charge at her, and she leapt aside, striking her own killing blow. “Die! Somebody tell him he's dead.” She dodged again as Reynir charged again and, missing her, went for Emil.
Tuuri shouted, and Reynir stopped, looked over at her, and then, grinning, threw himself into the churned-up snow, rolled over on his back, and lay with his hands and feet in the air. Everyone laughed but Lalli, and Reynir sprang to his feet to bow before retreating to Tuuri's side and charging once more.
He tagged Emil before being “killed” by Sigrun, charged again and was struck by Emil with a new twig, falling to play dead every time Sigrun cried “Die!” The dance went on for more than an hour.
For the first time in ninety years, the bleak, bare, broken ruins of Copenhagen rang with laughter.
Reynir opens his eyes, yawns, and stretches. His pipes are beside him and he raises them to his lips, smiling as he glances around at the sheep grazing in the hollow and the sheepdog sitting watchful on a boulder. All is safe, all is quiet.
“Oh!” Dropping the pipes, he leaps to his feet. “I made it back! Now I can finally talk to Onni again.” The dog stands as well and comes to his side. “No, you stay with the sheep. I'll be back, uh, when I can get here.”
The dog trots ahead of him and looks back. When he takes a few steps, the dog trots forward again, then stops to look back as if impatient.
“You want to show me something? Sure, lead and I'll follow.” He thinks the dog may be leading him to a lost lamb, or perhaps a sheep caught in a bramble, and he worries what might happen to these sheep, all alone without a shepherd. That reminds him of the sheep beasts, and his previous joy at finding his way back fades a little.
The dog leads him to the rocky shore and, without hesitation, sets out across the sea, walking on the surface as easily as Reynir himself.
“Wait, you can walk on water too?” Reynir runs to catch up with the dog on water that feels wet and springy yet solid beneath his feet. He stops to look back over his shoulder at the island. “What about the sheep? I thought they'd be safe on that island, but if they can wander off … You shouldn't be out here. You need to keep them rounded up!”
The dog ignores his scolding, continues at a steady pace across the lapping waves. Reynir looks around for the thinning fog that should show the way to Onni. “Look —” He realizes he doesn't know the dog's name. “Look, Onni is that way. I want to go that way. Please?”
The dog pauses to look back at him, then continues. “I guess I should follow you, then. You know this place better than I do, right? I hope so, anyway,” Reynir mutters to himself as he runs to catch up.
Soon, the fog parts to reveal another island ahead. Gentle waves lap on a clean sandy beach sloping up to an open field, seemingly grazed down by sheep. In the center, a building stands tall, its light color contrasting with the dark clouds along the horizon. The grand, ornate structure is made up of multiple sections, with a tall central tower displaying a simple carved symbol. Red streaks and splatters across the surface of the building catch his eye. A large arched wooden door stands ajar, flanked by two tall arched windows on either side.
“I recognize that symbol. It's a cross — this must be one of those old Christian temples. Please come away. We shouldn't go in there. It feels ... disrespectful, somehow. ”
Ignoring his words, the dog trots towards the door, squeezing through as Reynir rushes to catch up. He hesitates outside but, after following the dog so far, he feels foolish for stopping. He pushes through the door and comes to a halt, blinking as his eyes adjust to the enveloping dimness. The air is cool, with hints of candle wax and flowers, and the silence is so profound that he hears the click of the dog's claws on the tile floor. He shrinks back against the door, peering about in search of shapes or movement.
As his eyes adapt to light filtering through the colored windows behind him, Reynir sees that he stands in an open entryway with hallways leading away left and right. Straight ahead is the vast center hall, an aisle leading between two ranks of high-backed benches and the ceiling lost in the gloom. The dog lies on the floor at the far end in front of a table over which is draped an intricately woven cloth. A tall candlestick stands on either side of the table. The candles are lit, illuminating that end of the hall.
“Dog? Are you all right?”
The dog's tail thumps on the tile, though the animal doesn't otherwise move. Encouraged, Reynir ventures forward just as a woman's voice says, “Hello? Is someone there?”
He freezes, looking around in alarm. Nothing moves but the flickering flames and the dog's tail. “Dog,” he whispers, “Dog, let's go. Please, let's go.”
“Hello? Who's that?”
Reynir starts forward again, meaning to carry the dog out.
“No,” Reynir whispered in the darkness of the tank. He heard the others breathing; looking forward, he saw Emil standing guard beside the monitors. He rolled over into a more comfortable position and closed his eyes, willing himself back to sleep. The dog was still in the temple, the sheep had no sheepdog, and he still hadn't talked to Onni.
Reynir awakens in the tank with sunlight flooding in from the front.
It's late! I've missed my watch, and I didn't help with breakfast. Why didn't anyone wake me?
He rolls out of his bed and looks around. All the bunks are empty, and when he goes forward, meaning to open the outside door, he sees a woman he doesn't know in the driver's seat. She is medium height, mid twenties, slender, with short dark blond hair, and her attire has a disciplined, uniform-like quality, with sharp lines and an air of purposeful simplicity. A holstered pistol at her hip completes her military appearance.
“Oh!” he says, and she turns to look at him. “You're Tuuri's ghost!”
She gives him a dismissive look. “Of course not. Tuuri's spirit is in her body where it belongs.”
“No, no, I mean, you're the ghost she asked me about.” He glances through the windshield and sees a crowd of trolls milling around, fighting. He recoils, backing deeper into the tank in hopes they won't see him. Forcing his gaze back to the woman, he ventures a smile. “I'm Reynir Árnason. I'm really glad to see you at last.”
The woman runs a finger across the controls and holds it up to examine. “I know who you are. You do a good job cleaning.”
“Who are you? If you don't mind telling me your name, that is. I know names give power to some people, but not me. I wouldn't do —”
“I think it's okay to give my name. You gave me yours. I'm Rosli Jensen.” She waves a hand in a vague gesture. “This is my tank.”
“And you've been, ah, here since the Catastrophe?”
“I've been a ghost, yes, ever since.”
Reynir hesitates, thinking of stories of vengeful ghosts. “Is there — I mean, do you have unfinished business? Maybe that I could help with?”
Rosli gives him a puzzled smile. “You mean, like” — she presses the back of her hand to her forehead in a dramatic gesture — “I was betrayed in love and now I walk the night, forever seeking The Other Woman or alternatively The Unfaithful Lover?” Her smile turns wry and she shrugs. “None of that, no. I had a very boring life. Even if any of that had ever happened, everyone I knew is long dead. And I can't leave the tank anyway.”
Her smile fades. “I just died, and I was here. I was alone so long … and then the army came to get me, and then you came, all of you, and it's so hard to reach you.” She shrugs again. “I don't know why. I talked to Tuuri once, but I don't understand why it's not easier … Oh, and remember to tell Tuuri that I don't mind the blue mirror.”
Reynir awoke in the dim light of the tank. Mikkel was moving around, preparing to fix breakfast, Sigrun's bunk was empty, and Tuuri was stirring in hers, while Emil was still on watch. Rumpled blankets in Lalli's den showed he was still out scouting. It was too late to return to the land of dreams. After thumping his head against his bunk in frustration at failing to talk to Onni again, Reynir hurried to dress, splash some water in his face to wake himself up fully, and join Mikkel in his work.
As he helped with the meal, Reynir's mind drifted back to the temple in his dream. Why did the dog lead me there? Who was the woman who called out? It wasn't Rosli, I guess, but then who was it? It must be important somehow, but why? His thoughts ran in unproductive circles until he forced himself to focus on his work.
Later, when Sigrun and Emil had gone book-hunting and Mikkel was gathering fuel, Tuuri took out the journal and began typing while Reynir watched the monitors.
“I saw your ghost last night,” Reynir said after a while. “I talked —”
“Eee!” Tuuri knocked her chair back as she leapt to her feet. “You saw her too? She's really real?”
“Her name is Rosli Jensen and, um, I didn't learn much more. Oh, she said to tell you she doesn't mind the blue mirror.”
Tuuri's smile lit up her face. “She heard me! I asked her if she liked the blue mirror.” Her smile dimmed. “I guess she doesn't like it; she just doesn't mind.” Her smile dimmed yet further. “Why didn't she tell me?”
“It's hard for her to talk to us.” Reynir recounted everything he could remember about the dream, with Tuuri hanging on to his every word.
By the time he finished, Tuuri was smiling again. “She's really real,” she murmured as she went back to her work.
Reynir smiled all day at the thought of Tuuri's smile, but in the back of his mind, a nagging worry persisted. The temple and the mysterious voice — they had to mean something. But what?
“Weird foreign ghost.”
“You see her?”
Lalli turned to regard Tuuri, blue mage-light playing about his eyes, dim in the morning sunlight flooding through the windshield. “No.”
Tuuri sighed. “Reynir can't see her either. She said it was hard for her to reach us.”
“This tank is warm. It's weird.”
“Well, yes, I set the thermostat, but if it's —” After spending almost her entire life with Lalli, Tuuri was familiar with his stares. This one meant I don't know what you're talking about. “You mean it's magic, somehow?” A slight tilt of the head, a twitch of an eyebrow: Isn't that obvious? She sighed again. It wasn't her fault she hadn't been born a mage and didn't understand these things without explanation. “Is it all the same, or is any part, uh, warmer?”
Maybe that wasn't an entirely foolish question, because he turned to survey the interior again. “Your seat is warmer. The place where you drive.”
They were in the main compartment, while Reynir leaned against the doorway to the driving compartment, watching both the monitors and the snowy ruins outside. She couldn't see past him to the driver's seat, but even if Rosli were somehow there, she wouldn't see the ghost.
“Onni didn't tell me about ghosts like her,” Lalli said.
“I wish he were here. I'll bet he could — Can you ask him? Can you talk to him tonight?”
“No.” Perhaps this time her frustration got through to him. “He told me to stay in my haven. He said It's after us again.”
This time it was Tuuri's turn to stare. She knew what “It” was — a kade, a spiritual monster of human malevolence and Rash power. Eleven years before, it had destroyed several villages, including their own, killing their families, their friends, and everyone they had ever known, leaving just the three of them, Onni, Tuuri, and Lalli, alive. It could threaten her only physically, and not even that at the moment since it was in Finland and she in Denmark. But it could track down mages in mage-space, and if it found them … Tuuri shivered.
“Right, okay. Maybe Reynir can talk to him.”
Lalli's eyes narrowed slightly at the mention of Reynir. His gaze flicked towards the doorway where the Icelander stood, then quickly back to Tuuri. He rolled his eyes and the mage-light vanished as he ducked into his den to end the conversation.
“To summarize,” Mikkel said, “you dreamed of a woman driver two weeks ago, and night before last Reynir also dreamed of a woman driver. The two of you agree that she had short dark hair and a uniform and sat in the driver's seat. This doesn't really suggest to me that there is a ghost in this tank. Isn't it poss—”
“But Lalli said the tank is magical and the driver's seat is more magical.”
“Only after you told him you and Reynir dreamed of a ghost in the tank that sat in that seat.” He tilted his head back, gaze remaining on her. There were dark smudges beneath his heavy-lidded eyes, and his magnificent sideburns seemed to droop. “Is it possible that you told Reynir you dreamed about her before his dream?”
“No, I — or I don't think —” Tuuri bit her lip, thinking back over almost two weeks of chatting with Reynir.
“I don't mean that he lied, or that Lalli lied. Our minds are quite suggestible, and Reynir might have dreamt of a driver because his sleeping mind recalled that you had.”
“I guess, maybe.” Tuuri grimaced as her own words tasted of falsity. “I mean, I'll ask him, but I'm pretty sure I didn't.”
To her surprise, Mikkel looked away and his broad shoulders slumped a bit. “Perhaps there really is a ghost, then.”
For a moment, she thought he was mocking her, but his usual quick, sly smile didn't appear. A wave of relief washed over her. She hadn't realized how tense she'd been, waiting for Mikkel's judgment and expecting his usual long explanations and arguments. His acceptance, however reluctant, meant more to her than she'd expected. It wasn't just about the ghost; it was about being taken seriously by someone who was almost a fellow skald.
“Really?” she asked, trying to keep the eagerness out of her voice. “I mean, you believe it's possible?”
He shrugged without looking at her. “I've heard of many strange things in my travels. Can I be sure there isn't a ghost here?” He fumbled at the latch which held the table against the wall. “The others will be back soon, wanting lunch.”
As she watched him let down the table, it occurred to her that he'd already been out for hours in the cold, gathering fuel. “You look like you could use some rest,” she found herself saying. “We'll take care of things for you.”
“You have your own work, and Reynir must keep watch.” He glanced at her and his lips twitched in a brief attempt at a smile. “We don't want Sigrun to find that we've neglected security.”
Tuuri nodded and left him to his lunch preparations as she returned to her typewriter. As she passed him, Reynir answered her nod with a brilliant grin that warmed her to her toes.
“You should have told me before,” Sigrun said after lunch, and Tuuri was both grateful that Sigrun hadn't disputed her news and embarrassed that she hadn't thought to tell the captain before. Of course Sigrun grasped the truth at once!
“I'm a guest and I didn't even know it.” Sigrun looked down to check the monitors and back up at Tuuri, who stood beside her in the doorway of the radio compartment. Tuuri and Reynir took the day watches since they had to stay in the tank all day. “She sits in your seat?” Sigrun took a few steps forward to look at the driver's seat.
Tuuri held her breath, hoping Sigrun might see something. A Norwegian woman was more similar to Rosli than any of the men, or even than Tuuri, who was Finnish, after all. Maybe it would be easier for her to see …
Sigrun gave the seat an elaborate and respectful bow. “My thanks for your hospitality. You've honored us with a place by your hearth.” She glanced back into the main compartment as if uncertain whether the small stove qualified as a hearth. “May the gods smile upon you and your household for your generosity.” She bowed again.
Sigrun's words had the cadence of a ceremony, more formal than the thanks a Finn might give. Impressed by Sigrun's response but unable to contain her curiosity further, Tuuri asked, “Do you see her?”
“No, but it's only right for a guest to thank her host. You said she heard you ask about the mirror, so I guess she'd hear me too. I should have thanked her for meat and mead, but we don't have any mead and I'm not sure it counts if we hunt the meat ourselves.” She turned to the seat and added, “But you have done all that is proper for a host.”
Tuuri leaned forward to look at the empty seat. “I should have thanked you too,” she told the air. “I'm trying to be careful driving. So is Reynir.” She looked back up at Sigrun and gave a helpless shrug, unsure what to say to a ghost that could be neither seen nor heard.
Sigrun clouted her on the shoulder, staggering her. “Good kid. It would be very bad luck to take her hospitality without thanking her.” She grinned. “Now I have a date with a rifle that wants to be cleaned and oiled.”
“A ghost. In the tank. Okay, sure.” Emil rolled his eyes as he turned away, not quite before she saw. “I'll be in the back, checking my supplies. Those Danes did a shoddy job packing them. I find something else wrong every time I look.”
Cheeks burning at his dismissive tone, Tuuri stuck her tongue out at his departing back. Onni had told her that Swedes were natural skeptics, and here was the proof. She told herself she didn't care; everyone else understood that Rosli was there (somewhere), so it didn't matter that Emil didn't.
But it did matter.
The next day passed as usual for this expedition: Lalli scouted in the pre-dawn hours; Sigrun and Emil went out searching for books and trolls; Mikkel gathered fuel while Reynir stood watch within the tank.
And Tuuri transcribed the journal for Mikkel, suffering with the doctor's awful handwriting and the big words he used. Sometimes she had to stop and wait for Mikkel to decipher the big words, and then had to sit through one of his long-winded explanations. Afterwards, she remained mystified as to the differences among “maculopapular eruption”, “erythematous exanthem”, and “pruritic dermatitis”, and wondered why the long-dead doctor hadn't just said “rash”.
Even as her eyes studied the yellowing pages and her fingers pounded the keyboard, Tuuri wondered about Rosli. Why would a ghost remain if she didn't have unfinished business? Had she hung about to protect the tank? Certainly she'd scolded Tuuri about the dents and scrapes, but that didn't seem like enough of a reason to remain a ghost for decades. Besides, from what Onni had said, protective spirits were often hostile, not wanting anyone near what they protected. On the other hand, he said, other ghosts hardly noticed living people. Rosli, though, wasn't hostile and yet certainly noticed the team.
Tuuri shook her head, leaned back, and stretched her spine. Maybe Rosli would talk to her again, and they could discuss the possibilities.
It's the solstice.
It was Emil's first thought when a blast of freezing air snatched him from sleep. It had been on his mind all the previous day, at least until Tuuri surprised him with news of a ghost in the tank. He'd thought better of her, even though she was a Finn.
Not that the solstice means anything. Of course not. Tonight — the longest night of the year — will be only a minute or so longer than last night or tomorrow night. But we were meant to be back by now. We were meant to be wealthy again. I was meant to have solstice presents for the kids. The family had fallen into poverty when the kids — his three young cousins — were toddlers; they'd never had the luxuries Emil had once taken for granted.
Emil sighed at the thought. He had joined this expedition on the expectation that it would enhance his career in the Cleansers. It was only later, when he discussed the secret plans with his uncle Torbjörn, that he realized the expedition could lift the family out of poverty, could lift his cousins out of poverty. Once he learned that, nothing could have dissuaded him from coming, even if he'd known he'd be trapped here for a month or more.
But he still wished he could bring solstice presents to his cousins.
Clatter, clink
Without opening his eyes, Emil knew where everyone was. Sigrun had the last watch and stood watching the monitors. Mikkel had just gone out to fetch food from the back compartment for breakfast. The Icelander was setting the table. Tuuri was wrapped up tight in her blankets, trying for just a few more minutes of sleep, and Lalli was still out scouting.
Another blast of freezing air and a muffled protest from under Tuuri's blankets heralded Mikkel's return and the need for Emil to get up and get dressed out of everyone's way. It was officially morning of the shortest day of the year.
“So, how do you celebrate the solstice?” Sigrun asked as they crunched through the snow, heading for the tank with half a dozen books in a canvas sack.
Emil was limping; he'd twisted his ankle tripping over the clutter when a troll attacked, but he'd caught himself and killed it while Sigrun dealt with the second troll. At her question, he was struck by a wave of homesickness, a longing for a place where nothing tried to kill him and he had nothing to do but drink with friends. Or with acquaintances, at least.
“We have bonfires in the squares, and everyone has a candle or two in the windows. We drink a lot.”
Sigrun grinned. “Same! Well, we have a feast, too.”
“And we give solstice gifts.” He felt a renewed pang, thinking of his cousins. “Things someone might need in the next year. Special things.”
“We give gifts too. Last year Mom gave me an orange from the greenhouses on Iceland.” Sigrun licked her lips as if she could still taste the orange, and Emil looked away.
When he was a boy, Emil had had oranges several times a year, and he'd have been disappointed to get one as a solstice gift. But that was when they were rich, and he hadn't had an orange in more than five years. He hefted the sack of books. His share of the loot from the expedition would buy a lot of oranges.
Emil had truly become an experienced troll-hunter. When they came around the crumbled corner of a ruined shop and saw the tank before them, he had his rifle in his hands a heartbeat later than Sigrun. After blinking at the sight for several seconds, Sigrun laughed and Emil joined her. “So that's … what … the scout … brought back!” Sigrun managed.
Lalli had dropped a sack at Tuuri's feet that morning before glaring at Mikkel and accepting the plate of venison bacon the Dane held out to him. When Tuuri kicked the sack aside and continued her discussion with Reynir, Emil had assumed Lalli had brought back something trivial. But now long red cloth banners tied to the overhead lights danced in the biting wind.
Mikkel opened the door as they approached. To Emil's surprise, Mikkel wore his white uniform with a red sash around his waist. As he moved aside, Emil saw Tuuri and Reynir standing together behind him. Like Mikkel, Tuuri wore her uniform with a red sash. So did Reynir, but the uniform he wore was too big for him and only the sash held his trousers up; this was Mikkel's other uniform. Though both wore their masks, their smiles were unmistakable in the way their eyes sparkled and the skin around them creased.
Sigrun climbed in first, and Emil almost ran into her as she stopped. “Wow,” she said, looking around. The tank was decorated with more red banners on the walls and a collection of lit candles on the table. For a moment, Emil thought Lalli had somehow scrounged up red roses in the middle of winter. But no, the roses beside the candles were folded cloth. The rich scent of venison filled the tank.
“This is great,” Sigrun said after a careful survey. She turned to beam at Tuuri. “This is your work, isn't it?”
“Mine and Reynir's. He put up all the banners because I couldn't reach. Except the ones outside; Mikkel did those.” Tuuri's smile faded a little. “We can't have a proper feast, though, and there aren't any presents.”
“That's okay. The gods can see we're grateful for the return of the Sun. That's what matters.”
Emil made a point of turning to study the nearest banner so the others wouldn't see him roll his eyes. He didn't look forward to spending the solstice with a pack of superstitious foreigners. And he was especially disappointed in Mikkel. He'd asked the Dane what he thought about the so-called ghost, and instead of joining him in a laugh, the older man had simply shrugged. “This ghost doesn't seem to do anything except appear in a couple of dreams. I see no point in disputing her reality.”
Frowning at the chatter behind him, Emil felt the banner's edges. It had been cut from a larger piece, which made sense. Lalli would have found a large red cloth, and the group in the tank would have cut it up.
“Emil.”
Emil jumped at Mikkel's voice just behind his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“Here's your sash. Come and have lunch.” Mikkel looked down at the end of the banner, still in Emil's hand. “Don't worry that these will be wasted. I'll boil them tomorrow and add them to my supply of bandages. They'll hide blood nicely.”
When everyone sat back, replete, Tuuri looked around and cleared her throat. “We — me and Lalli — we have a gift for you all. He can clear the static for a little while, an hour or so at least, so we can send solstice greetings to everyone.”
“Then why hasn't he done that before?” Sigrun asked. “You haven't gotten through the static in days.”
“Because it's hard!” Tuuri folded her arms and her tone changed from eager to defensive. “He can do it, but it'll wipe him out and he won't even be able to scout tonight. He said he'll do it as a gift, just because it's the solstice.”
Emil leaned forward to look at Lalli, who had eaten sitting on the floor, as usual. Like everyone else, he wore his uniform with a red sash. He hadn't even looked up at the argument around the table. “That's a great gift,” Emil put in before Sigrun could answer. “Do you think they can patch me through to Torbjörn's house?”
Tuuri was eager once more. “You want to talk to your family? I'm sure they'll patch us through for a few minutes. Sigrun, you can ask for your greetings to be relayed to your family — your clan, I mean. Mikkel, are you sure —”
“Yes.” Mikkel stood to gather empty plates.
Tuuri called to Lalli, who got to his feet and slouched into the radio compartment behind her, head down. As she closed the door, Emil wondered how much of the gift was Tuuri's idea alone.
Reynir joined Mikkel in collecting plates and utensils, and Sigrun gave Emil a shrug and a grin. She opened her mouth to comment when a resounding bang from the radio compartment made Mikkel jump and drop a plate to shatter on the floor. As he and Reynir dropped to their knees to clean up, they bumped heads. Mikkel swore and Reynir leapt to his feet, babbling in an apologetic tone, and rushed to grab the broom and dustpan from a cabinet.
“What happened?” Sigrun demanded, pushing past Reynir to hurry to the radio compartment. “Did the radio blow up?”
No one answered. Lalli opened the door and edged past her to dash back to his den, rolling under Mikkel's bunk and pulling his blankets up to his ears. Emil watched him, worried, but was distracted by Tuuri's voice calling Öresund base. The usual crackle of static was entirely absent, and Emil looked from Tuuri's back to Lalli's blankets. Is it possible Lalli did … something … to clear the static? That bang … But that isn't possible, is it?
Almost immediately, the operator at the base answered and quickly arranged to signal the sponsors in Mora. General Trond answered, and as Emil crowded into the compartment with Tuuri and Sigrun, the general grumbled but called for Torbjörn.
Torbjörn and Emil exchanged solstice greetings, but were interrupted by shrill voices. Emil found himself smiling more broadly than he had since leaving Sweden as he chatted with his cousins, Torbjörn's children. He loved the triplets: Sune, who was the image of Emil at that age, and insisted on having a haircut just like Emil; Anna, who wanted to be a researcher like her mother; and Håkan, youngest (by two hours) and tallest, who wanted to join the Cleansers even though, unlike the other two, he wasn't immune and wouldn't be allowed.
“Silence,” General Trond said after perhaps five minutes of Emil's cheerful conversation with the children. The triplets fell silent at once, and Emil opened his mouth and closed it again before giving Sigrun an uncertain glance.
“You can't tie up this line,” the general continued. “Is there anything else?”
Sigrun leaned forward. “Give the clan my greetings: 'May the gods bring good luck along with the Sun. Also, I'm having a great vacation! Lots of trolls. Wish you were here.' ”
Tuuri followed up with a stream of Icelandic, including Onni's name. Emil had learned to distinguish Icelandic and Finnish: Icelandic sounded like he could almost understand it, while Finnish sounded like utter gibberish. As soon as Tuuri finished, Reynir edged past Emil with an apologetic smile and added his own Icelandic comments.
“I'll pass all that along,” the general said. “Now, Mikkel!”
Clatter
Emil winced. At least Mikkel had only dropped the plate and hadn't broken it.
“Sir,” Mikkel said, appearing at Emil's shoulder.
“Status.”
Mikkel licked his lips, surprising Emil, who had never seen him so nervous. “Ongoing, sir.”
“Good. I'm continuing to work on your rescue. Trond out — Oh, yes, solstice greetings to all. Trond out.”
Mikkel ducked out the door to the outside, and a few seconds later, Emil heard the thump of the door to the back compartment. He stared at the back wall, puzzled. Didn't Mikkel say he had a sister? Two, even? If I had a sister or brother, I'd send them greetings when I could. And Mikkel doesn't even have to go through Trond. He could just ask the operator at Öresund to take care of it. But then … maybe his sister is dead. I'll keep my big mouth shut for once, and not ask him.
For the rest of the short day, Sigrun, Emil, and Tuuri told tales of solstice celebrations in their homes, with Tuuri translating for Reynir on watch and passing along his stories as well. Emil occasionally glanced at Lalli's still form under Mikkel's bunk, worried their voices might disturb him, but the scout hadn't complained or even moved since retreating there after clearing the static. Time passed quickly with a mixture of laughter and nostalgia, and Emil started when he glanced at the time showing on the monitors and realized it was almost time for Mikkel's watch. And Mikkel was still in the back.
Making an excuse about the latrine, Emil slipped out and, frowning, made his way to the back compartment by the dim light of the crescent moon. As he approached, he heard shuffling and the sound of objects being moved around. Emil hesitated, before pressing the buzzer, not wanting to open the door without warning. As he reached for the handle, thinking Mikkel had not heard, the door swung open. The compartment was dark, Mikkel scarcely visible. “What is it?” Mikkel asked.
“It's almost your watch. I thought you might not realize.”
“Thank you for checking.” Mikkel jumped down and turned to close the door. Emil sniffed: Mikkel smelled of soap and sweat, bleach and cooking odors. The older man froze for a moment as he reached for the lock. With the door locked, he said without turning, “The medicinal alcohol is in the other compartment.”
Mikkel led the way forward and Emil nervously smoothed his hair. He'd already offended the man, but if he was right …
“Oh — I — um.” Emil took a deep breath. “I can hide the alcohol if, if —”
Mikkel didn't turn to look at him. “Thank you, but that's not necessary.” Stopping before the door, still with his back to Emil, he added, “If it becomes necessary, I will tell you.”
Mikkel opened the door, and they climbed inside.
I lied to the General.
Mikkel had distracted himself for hours cleaning and straightening up the back compartment. Sorting the books by topic and author's name had required his full attention, but now, standing watch with his gaze travelling from monitor to monitor, his thoughts refused to be silenced. The warmth of the darkened tank couldn't stop his shivering. He remembered …
The General had hired him right out of Öresund base, rushing him into a dingy little cabin on a cargo ship headed for Norway. Once he was committed, the man had grilled him. Mikkel had truthfully recounted his military service. What was the point of lying? Though he had served in the Danish army and the General was Norwegian, the Known World was too small and too imperiled to stand on ceremony. If the General wanted Mikkel's records, the army would be only too happy to turn them over.
But when the General delved into his personal history, Mikkel had resorted to his usual lie. The General had leaned towards him, glaring into his eyes as if he could see the truth hiding inside his skull. 'You are lying. Don't ever lie to me again.' And Mikkel never had.
Until now.
Even in the safety of Silent Denmark, that cold, reptilian glare seemed to bore into his eyes. But the General was not there and the monitors were, and now something moved on the screens.
Mikkel dropped his left hand to his dagger without noticing as he leaned forward to examine the monitors. Though the waxing crescent moon was well past its zenith and the shadows of small scudding clouds swept across the ruins, there was light enough for the visual screen. For a fleeting moment, he hoped the bull had returned. The creature was too small and had too many legs; it was a troll.
He glanced to his right, squinting into the darkened sleeping compartment. Even if he managed to awaken Sigrun without disturbing the others, the cold air would wake them when she went out after the troll. Not worth it. Releasing his dagger, he turned back to watch the troll hobble through the snow in the intersection twenty yards away and disappear into the ruins.
With nothing moving outside, Mikkel returned to the same thoughts that had circled through his mind for days. I lied to the General. But he left me no choice. I know — I know — he can push the bureaucrats to allow a rescue, but he won't while he thinks I haven't retrieved the book. But there was no code for failure. I had to lie, or he'd leave these people here to die.
He rubbed his forehead, blinked hard, and checked the monitors as if a swarm might have approached in those few seconds. Though he could explain and justify and make excuses, nothing could change the fact that he had failed and that he had lied about it.
Sigrun's watch began at midnight; she rolled out of her bunk, dressed in the dark, and was by Mikkel's side ten minutes before. Murmuring a greeting, she leaned forward to study the screens. Low in the sky, the moon cast long shadows across the snow. Sigrun's eyes were sharp even in that dim and uncertain light.
“Hey! Look up there in the intersection. That trail wasn't there before.”
“I know. It was a small troll. Not worth waking everyone up. It went off to the east.”
“Huh.” She frowned at the monitor, where the focus had moved on, now showing the ruins at the back of the tank. “Should have been put out of its misery.” As Mikkel stiffened at her tone, she glanced at the sleeping compartment, where Emil still snored softly. “But, yeah. Let them sleep. We'll take care of it in the morning.” Mikkel relaxed and nodded without a word, and they returned to watching the monitors.
“I guess the solstice is a bad time for you,” Sigrun said after a few minutes.
Mikkel shrugged. “In some ways.”
She raised her hand, fingers curled as if holding a mug, and saluted him. “To absent friends.” She pretended to drink.
With a slight smile, Mikkel mimicked the toast. “Absent friends.”
Sigrun's teeth glittered in the glow of the monitors as she grinned at him. After a quiet moment, she said, “My watch. You're relieved.”
“I am relieved.”
As Mikkel edged past her, she added, “Get some sleep, man. You look like you rubbed ashes under your eyes.”
“I did.”
Leaving her snickering, Mikkel made his way to the back, stripped, folded and stowed his clothes, and donned his pajamas by touch. Stretched out on his bunk, listening to Emil's snores and the soft buzz of Tuuri's breathing above him, he tried to stop the thoughts spinning through his mind. Instead, they moved to another of his failures.
What am I to do about Emil? He is at least playing at mastering his “fire spirit”, but there surely are better ways of training that power. I wish the General had given me some instructions.
As he finally dropped off to sleep, his last, disloyal thought was, The General should have just sent Emil for training.
As the team awoke on the next day, their twenty-fourth day in Silent Denmark, Mikkel's troubled thoughts faded into the background, replaced by the immediate demands of his daily routine. Lalli slept late, only crawling out of his den as the others were finishing their breakfast. Through Tuuri's translation, he told Mikkel he was hungry, the first time he'd done so, and Mikkel hurried to provide him with a bowl of porridge, even adding a dab of honey.
Afterwards, Lalli pulled on his uniform and darted out the door to scout a route to their next camp. While he was gone, Sigrun took Emil hunting and brought back a goose. To Tuuri's delight, Sigrun had shot the bird with one of the arrows Tuuri had knapped. About the time the goose was cooked, Lalli returned, accepting his share of lunch before huddling with Tuuri over the map. Reynir drove the tank to the next camp, where Mikkel gathered firewood while Sigrun and Emil checked a nearby spot, returning empty-handed. And so that day passed.
The next four days passed as usual; Lalli went back to his usual routine of scouting in the wee hours, and during the day, Mikkel gathered firewood, Reynir cleaned, Tuuri typed, and Sigrun and Emil hunted for books or food. As the days grew imperceptibly longer, the weather remained cloudy and cold with occasional snow until warming on the fifth day.
As they gathered around the crackling fire for lunch, sharing a meal under the open sky, the unexpected warmth seemed to breathe new life into the team. Tuuri strolled around afterwards recording observations in her notebook, with Mikkel as her silent guard. Reynir's steps were lighter as he performed his chores, humming under his breath. Even Lalli appeared less tense. Sigrun and Emil took advantage of the improved conditions to range further in their book-hunting excursion, returning with mud-splattered boots but triumphant grins.
Sigrun arranged another “dance” that afternoon with Reynir playing the role of troll. Emil kept his feet even in the slushy snow and tagged Reynir more often than Reynir tagged him. As the evening shadows drew long, the Icelander slipped his hand under his long braid and whipped it outwards, just missing Emil as he backpedaled. Sigrun laughed in delight as she and Emil jumped forward to stab Reynir with their twigs. “Nice!” she said, grinning at him as he dropped to the icy, churned-up snow and mud. To the Swede, she added, “You dodged that tentacle like an Eide!” Emil ducked his head, his face reddening more from the praise than it had from the unseasonable weather.
The blizzard started that night.
As the door closed behind him, Lalli stopped to study the sky. The waxing gibbous moon was well up, half-hidden behind thin clouds. Though the air was still warm, there was a smell of snow on the fitful breeze, and the first dense clouds were building in the northwest. He was scouting early, not long after supper, so as to get back before the storm broke.
Lalli trotted away to the north. According to the map, there was a park with a pond not far from one of the targets, and if that wasn't reachable, there was a smaller park near another target. He'd find a way to something valuable.
Half an hour later, Lalli kicked absently at the slush as he studied the problem ahead. The façade of the building to the right had collapsed, spilling debris across the street. His gaze traced a path over the obstacle; he could cross it with ease, but the tank? He shook his head and turned away, returning to the previous intersection.
He tried the east first, but the eastern area dipped downwards and was flooded with icy meltwater as far as he could see. Pausing at the edge of the water, he squinted to study the ruins farther down the street. Between the uncertain moonlight and the debris piled here and there, it was difficult to determine how deep the water was, but he was certain it was at least a meter, possibly as much as two. The tank could make it through if the street was intact and unobstructed, but he couldn't check the street in such deep water. With a sigh of annoyance, he started to turn back, and stopped.
A flutter of darkness within a ruin left of the street caught his eye: a troll was waking up. Was the ruin intact enough to keep the troll inside? A splash answered his question. The troll was on the move; it must perceive him, an uninfected mammal, in the same way that he perceived it. He turned and ran for a crumbling building some thirty meters back, climbing up with hands and feet as quick and quiet as a cat. A dozen meters above the street he swept broken glass from a window sill to shatter on the rubble below.
Lalli grimaced as the sound rang in the silent ruins. Still, he saw no trolls around that had been alerted by the noise. The creature from the east, however, was creeping towards him, looking like a giant mole in the moonlit street. He readied his rifle but didn't take aim. The sound of a shot would awaken everything for several kilometers and alarm Tuuri back in the tank. But there was also magic …
The troll stopped, snuffling at the muddy slush, still far from Lalli's perch. It lifted its head and twisted it back and forth as if to look for him, but seemed unable to raise it high enough to spot him. Slowly and ponderously, it turned around, pushing aside the rusted remains of a small car, and crawled back toward the water. Lalli watched, rifle ready, until it disappeared behind a ruin. Even so, he waited several long minutes, checking around him for active grosslings, before climbing down and sprinting to the west.
Heavy clouds already covered half the sky, and the wind was growing cold.
As Lalli fought his way through freezing wind and stinging snow to the tank, the door flew open and the fat Dane grasped his shoulders to lift him bodily inside. Frigid air poured in behind him. Before he could slap the big hands away, they released him as the man turned away and struggled to pull shut the door. At the same time, the Swede hurried to help Lalli out of his icy uniform and Tuuri stood by, wringing her hands. She and the Icelander wore their masks, as if he'd enter the tank with troll slime on him! The shouty woman stood watch, glancing at him but keeping her attention on the monitors.
With the door closed and Lalli's uniform removed, the Dane turned to speak to Tuuri, who translated, “Let him look at your face and ears. I told him you'd show him, so he won't touch you.”
Lalli rolled his eyes at this silliness, but obediently tilted his head back and turned it from side to side. Noting the man's frown, he pushed his unkempt locks away from his ears. The foolish Dane — and even Tuuri! — seemed to think he might have allowed himself to suffer frostbite.
As the Dane raised his hand and wiggled his fingers, Tuuri gave the unnecessary instruction to show the medic his fingers. The man then knelt to peer at his toes, which he flexed while staring into space and wishing these people would leave him alone. With the examination finally over, he turned to escape to his blankets, but still the annoying Dane wouldn't let him go, stepping in front of him and saying something in the tone of an order. The Icelander brought him a mug of soup, which he accepted in hopes they'd let him go if he drank it.
Still, he had to admit the soup with its overcooked vegetables warmed him to his toes, and he accepted a second mug before rolling under the bunk and pulling his blankets up to his definitely not frostbitten ears.
“Hey, Lalli.”
Lalli opened his eyes a fraction to check the light sneaking past his huddled body to light his space. Daylight. Dim though it was, it was certainly daylight. Fighting the blizzard had exhausted him, making him sleep past breakfast. Yawning, he snuggled into his blankets a little more, trying to ignore Tuuri's voice.
“Come on, Lalli, just show me where to go on the map, and then you can go back to sleep.”
“Drive later.”
“No, come on, Sigrun wants to go now. Um … if you'll help me out now, I'll ask Mikkel to give you a cookie. I think he still has a few.”
Lalli hunched his shoulders, not wanting to face all those people again. And yet … well, a cookie. He'd never had a cookie before the Dane gave him one almost a month before, and he considered it the best tasting treat he'd ever had.
He rolled out from under the bunk and followed his cousin to the table, where she'd already laid out the map. The blizzard had blown itself out in the early morning hours, so the snow would not be deep and the streets he'd scouted would still be passable. Several minutes later, they'd agreed on the destination and route, despite the captain's questions. Tuuri smiled and waved a hand to shoo him back to his blankets.
Outraged, Lalli folded his arms. “Cookie.” He wouldn't move without the promised treat.
“Oh, right,” Tuuri said, as if she'd forgotten her words. She jabbered at the Dane, who turned from washing dishes, wiped his hands, and pulled a satchel from his cabinet. Extracting a single cookie, he passed it to Lalli with a comment to Tuuri. She grinned as she translated, “He says don't get into his cookie stash. He's counted all the cookies, so he'll know if you do.”
Lalli said nothing as he nibbled on the edge of the cookie. So, the man had figured out that he'd made off with some extra cookies. He knew he shouldn't steal; Onni had been very clear about that, but the cookies had been irresistible. Still, he'd resist now. He crawled under the bunk, lay with his back to the others, and savored his cookie bit by tiny bit. By the time he licked the last crumbs from his fingers, the floor was shuddering under him, the tracks crushing frozen slush and grinding over cracked and debris-strewn pavement. He closed his outer eyes, opened his inner eyes, and set to work watching their surroundings.
Most ruins were empty, but again and again, they passed troll nests in basements or deep inside collapsed buildings. The trolls roused, detecting the passing uninfected mammals and yearning to strike. The sunlight would keep them under cover for now, however, and he expected that they would forget the passersby before nightfall.
Though he noted a sleeping troll some eighty meters in front of the tank, he was distracted by another, wide awake, which seemed to trail them through a largely intact building. The follower stopped as it ran out of cover, deterred by sunlight despite the partial cloud cover, and he returned his attention to the one ahead. Even as he did so, the tank stopped and the voices of the others rose. Hearing his name and seeing no threat around them, he closed his inner eyes, rolled out from under the bunk and went forward.
“Lalli, this street's blocked and Sigrun's mad and I followed your directions!” Tuuri sounded near tears. “There's a big drift ahead and —”
Lalli's eyes widened as he focused on the massive drift stretching across the street. “Back! Back up!” He wished he knew how to operate the vehicle; Tuuri wasn't reacting fast enough. The foreigners were jabbering to his right, distracting her, and he shook his head in annoyance. “It's not a drift. There's a giant under there.” He'd seen it with his inner eyes earlier, but an overgrown troll's spirit looked like a normal troll's spirit. Giants were so rare that he hadn't thought about the possibility. Now they were too close, and it would feel their presence. “Hurry!”
The word “giant” broke her immobility, and Tuuri pulled on the controls, sending the tank careening backwards. Lalli looked around: no active trolls nearby, and the giant was still mostly asleep. Maybe they'd retreated fast enough.
The Norwegian was demanding something, the Dane was arguing with her, and the Swede was asking questions. Only the Icelander was quiet, for once, clinging to the back of Tuuri's seat with white-knuckled hands. Lalli wished he could shut them up as he had the grosslings on the solstice. Even an hour's silence would be welcome.
Tuuri brought the tank to a halt and turned to him. “She says we can't just go back; we'll get ambushed. And we can't stay here. You have to get us out of here.” She waved at the buildings on either side.
Lalli nodded, hunching his shoulders at the hint of criticism. The nearby buildings contained only a few trolls, but those they'd passed would work their way forward, while the giant might yet awaken. The captain was right, and they had to get out of there. Pulling on his uniform, he fled out the door. Outside, he looked around, picturing the map and the streets as he'd seen them before the storm.
There should be an open area over that way. No targets nearby. Can't be helped. Tuuri says there's not really a hurry to find books anyway.
Lalli ran, watching for movement, for tracks in the snow, for anything threatening. One street was blocked; another had fallen in; and what was happening back at the tank? Was Tuuri okay? Clouds obscuring the Sun might allow the most resistant trolls to venture out for an attack. He ran faster. There had to be a way through. He stopped, stamping a foot in frustration. The open area was there, on the other side of this row of buildings, but they went on and on, and he felt every moment passing put the tank in more danger. Which way should he go?
Wind ruffled his hair as he looked up the street, and he turned to face it, puzzled. It had come from that building straight ahead. An odd building, now that he studied it closely. There was a vast open doorway, easily big enough to admit the tank, and above it, what he had taken for rows of broken windows showed no glitters of glass.
Lalli approached it cautiously, one hand on his dagger, and surveyed that massive opening. There was no door and no sign there'd ever been a door. Within, there were no interior walls, just pillars supporting the floor above. There was another large opening on the far side, admitting the wind that had alerted him. Sunlight reflecting from the snow beyond that opening illuminated the far side of the structure. The tank could make it through if the floor would support it, if the ceiling wouldn't collapse, if there weren't grosslings lying in wait …
He stepped inside, darting glances left and right. Rows of vehicles remained in lines. Those near the entrance had collapsed entirely, reduced to piles of rust and crumbling rubber. Others, deeper in the structure and protected from the elements, remained largely intact. The cold air smelled earthy from dirt and dead leaves swept in by decades of wind and rain, punctuated by the sharp tang of corroded metal, but there was a hint of rot as well. Grosslings, then, but they must be sleeping. How many? He paced forward, every sense alert, casting quick glances into each vehicle as he passed. As the smell of rot was worse to his right, he drew his dagger and advanced that way.
Soon he saw the source of the stench: a group of large cocoons at various levels, some attached to the ceiling, well above his head. He nodded to himself. Although he'd never seen such things, he'd heard of them from scouts who'd ventured in cities and returned. Large trolls took the best nests for themselves, while small trolls, unable to find shelter, sometimes encased themselves in such cocoons.
The trolls didn't react to his presence. After several tense seconds, he approached the cocoon farthest from the others and stabbed it.
Nothing. Dead. Are they all dead? Or are some just sleeping? I can't take the time to stab them all.
Lalli backed away and scanned around again. It was a risk, but time was passing. After another scan, he sat down to open his inner eyes and examine the trolls.
All dead. A sleeping troll in the next building, but the others can deal with it if it wakes. The tank can get through here.
Getting to his feet with some effort, he trotted through the building to check out the other side. He found himself on a wider street than usual, flanked by leafless trees. Those nearest the street were elders among trees, the bark of their sturdy trunks rough and furrowed, and their branches stretching far across the street. Beyond them were younger, smaller trees, with scattered firs dark green among them. Beyond those were more ruins, bigger than most.
He followed the street as the ruins closed in before opening out into an immense eight-sided plaza with a statue in the middle, buildings on four wide sides, and broad avenues leading out through four narrow sides. He approached each building, trying the doors, sniffing, listening, and scanning for trolls. Only one door opened as he tugged on it. Warped by decades of neglect, it stuck partway open, but he slipped through it to check the room within.
He found himself in a large high-ceilinged lobby with several doors opening off of it, and even in the dim light from grimy windows, he could see undisturbed dust in front of those doors. The middle of the room was taken up with multiple gurneys with sheet-covered skeletons. Safe enough, he thought, but something lurked in the shadows, well away from the sunlight. Calling on his mage sight, he stared at the lurkers: ghosts!
But such weird ghosts. He'd seen a ghost in Keuruu, the spirit of a gravely wounded hunter who'd made it back to die in his own cabin. Onni had taken a hand to guide the spirit to Tuonela, never explaining to Lalli why the spirit hadn't found his way alone. That ghost had looked much like the hunter himself, with his luonto, a stag, close beside him.
These ghosts, though, were all but formless, almost shadows themselves, and their luontos had gone away, if indeed they'd ever had any. Weird ghosts, he thought, but no threat, and there were no trolls he could find around the plaza. Reassured, he raced back to the tank, hoping nothing had happened in his absence.
He found that Tuuri had begun to drive after him, but had stopped in confusion at an intersection where he'd had to check several streets. With a few words, he explained the route to her, including the need to go through the strange building. As soon as she understood, he sprinted out again. There was one more thing to check.
A couple of hundred meters back along the tank's track, he saw it. The giant, a multi-legged monstrosity with a cylindrical body, a distorted head, and a long muzzle big enough to swallow Lalli whole, was crawling down the track, pressing close against the ruins on the shady side of the street. The cloudy sunlight allowed it to race across an intersection to reach the next patch of shade.
Lalli glanced back as if he could see the tank, remembering how a giant had ripped into the train as they travelled to Öresund base. The team could kill this giant, but what if it tore up the tank? How could Tuuri survive out here without the tank for shelter?
He turned back to watch the giant as it moved closer. A quick scan around him showed no trolls nearby. Taking a deep breath, he sat down and extended himself into the in-between, taking the shape of his luonto. He saw the twisting shadow-shape of the giant's spirit as it turned towards him. Its near-human face grinned, showing long fangs that dripped foulness.
Lalli-the-lynx charged, his paws silent on the misty ground of the in-between. As the giant pounced, its maw open to engulf him, Lalli darted aside with feline grace, twisting mid-air to leap onto the monster's back. Digging his claws in deep, he held on as the monster tried to shake him off.
The giant's roar echoed strangely, as if coming from everywhere and nowhere. It writhed, twisting its limbs at impossible angles to reach its own back, yanking out tufts of Lalli's spectral fur, raking his side. Snarling at the pain, he bit into its shaggy neck, searching for the pulsing core he knew must be there. The monster threw itself on its side, rolling over in an effort to crush him under its weight. Still he kept ripping at it, spitting out chunks of vile spirit stuff that dissipated like smoke. He gasped for breath, thrashed to push the giant off him, but kept gnawing at it.
Almost smothered, Lalli found the pulsing pseudo-life deep in the giant's neck. He caught it in his powerful jaws and yanked it out. With an agonized shriek, the giant dissolved into a puddle of foulness.
As Lalli pulled himself to his feet, his luonto's form slipped away from him. The lynx stood before him for a moment before turning and walking away in a direction he could not follow. Lalli watched in dismay as it left him. It was part of him, the source of his magic and his life force. Without it, he would grow weaker and weaker. If it did not return, he would die, but he could do nothing to call it back; he could only return from the in-between to his body.
The giant lay dead without physical injury. Tuuri was safe, then. Lalli trudged back along the tank's track, catching up with it in the large, strange building. Someone had been watching for him, for it stopped and the Swede opened the door as he approached. Without a word to Tuuri, he pulled his blankets up to his ears and was asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow.
“Tuuri, did Lalli say you were lost?” Mikkel resettled himself after the tank's jolting stop. Tuuri's driving had grown much smoother over the past weeks, but it seemed Sigrun's criticism had shaken her. As medic, it was his duty to do something to smooth things over if he could.
Tuuri's shoulders hunched forward as she leaned closer to the controls, rubbing them with her sleeve. Her fingers, normally so deft, now moved in short, jerky motions. She kept her head down, but Mikkel caught a glimpse of her rapidly blinking eyes, fixed on the dashboard. “No,” she mumbled without looking up.
Mikkel nodded. “And if you were lost, would he say so?”
“Y-yes. He'd say I was stupid or, or, he'd just look at me the way he does —”
Sigrun rolled her eyes at Mikkel. “Yeah, okay, she didn't get lost.” She turned to Tuuri. “Sorry I said that. It's just — who ever heard of a giant lying in the street under the snow? But you stopped in time. Good kid.”
Tuuri gave Mikkel a grateful smile that lit up her face. He turned away to watch out the windshield. Don't transfer your hero-worship to me. I'm just acting as a medic, and not a very good one at that. Sigrun's the captain; she's the one who'll keep you safe until you're rescued. Motion caught his eye and he straightened. “Lalli's back.”
As Tuuri rushed to the main compartment, a thump behind Mikkel showed that Emil, who'd hurried to stand watch as soon as they stopped, had opened the door for the scout. Sigrun followed Tuuri; to Mikkel's relief, she held her tongue as she watched Lalli trace a route on the map. Reynir, sitting on Emil's bunk feeding the kitten, leaned forward in interest but likewise remained quiet. Mikkel glanced back from the driving compartment, but kept most of his attention focused on the ruins before the tank. Within minutes, Lalli pushed the door open and rushed back out again.
“Hey, where's he going now?” Sigrun asked as Tuuri slipped past her and returned to the driver's seat.
“He has to check on something else.” The tank lunged forward more roughly than usual. “But he found us a really good campsite, and he'll catch up with us along the way.”
Sigrun staggered, caught herself, and dropped into the seat next to Mikkel . “That scout never explains anything,” she muttered. “And why did Uncle Trond stick me with a scout who can't even talk?”
Mikkel wasn't sure if she was addressing him or herself, so kept quiet and worried as the tank crunched forward over frozen slush and fallen debris. What if something happens to our only scout? We're none of us trained scouts, and we have no experience in cities except on this expedition. Our only hope would be to work our way out of the city and into open land where we might hope to survive until the rescue ship comes — if it ever does. If only we could get through on the radio!
“Are you planning to drive right into that building?” Sigrun asked in disbelief some time later.
“Lalli said I can. He said there's a way through.”
Mikkel leaned forward, squinting against sunlight reflected from fresh snow. “I know what this is. It's called a parking garage. The people of the Old World left their vehicles here when they weren't using them. I saw — there was one at the airport. At Kastrup.” He glanced aside at Tuuri. “If Lalli says we can go through, I believe we can.”
Tuuri bit her lip, hunched her shoulders, and pushed the controls forward. They rolled into the parking garage with a muffled crunch as the treads crushed something unseen. When she flipped on the triangular lights mounted on top of the tank, they cast the remains of the vehicles into stark relief.
Mikkel looked around. The vehicles he'd once seen in the beam of his flashlight were just the same and yet entirely different from those revealed by the powerful headlights. Of course, he'd hadn't been in a tank last time. And he hadn't had Sigrun fidgeting in the seat next to him, leaning forward or craning to look past Tuuri or him.
“Stop!” Sigrun ordered, and Tuuri brought the tank to an even more jolting halt, sending Emil stumbling into the back of the passenger bench and raising an alarmed cry from Reynir. Mikkel followed Sigrun's intent gaze out the right side.
“Trolls,” she said. “Those cocoons are full of trolls. Kid, get your rifle. And the kitten.”
As Emil dashed to the main compartment, followed by Sigrun, Mikkel pulled himself to his feet and stationed himself before the monitors. “Those are all dead,” he said, as Sigrun reached for the door. “Look, nothing on the IR anywhere.”
Sigrun paused, studying the screen, before glancing at Mikkel. “I trust a cat more than those things. Let's go, Emil.” And with that, the two rushed out, leaving Mikkel to close the door. That done, he returned to his seat while Tuuri explained the situation to Reynir.
Sigrun and Emil examined the cocoons, Sigrun even holding the kitten high overhead to check cocoons on the ceiling, and then methodically moved through the rows of decaying vehicles. As he watched, Mikkel thought how much simpler it would have been for the soldiers if they'd had enough cats at Kastrup. But then, if we'd had more cats, I'd never have found her …
The scouts came back in high spirits. They had been to the airport and identified possible grossling nests, but best of all, they had found that the parking garage still stood solid despite nine decades of neglect and was full of vehicles. The vehicles on top and around the edges were badly decayed, rusted and rotting from decades in the weather, but those further in were in good shape and could be recycled.
The whole garrison would get a bonus for this find but the scouts, of course, would get a larger share than others. The soldiers were already excitedly discussing what they would do with the bonus when Captain Jurs called them to attention and gave them their orders. Christensen went to work on the radio, informing the base of the find; other soldiers were sent to hook up tanks with flat-bed trailers, as the vehicles were in no condition even to be towed; and Mikkel, among others, was assigned to check in and around each vehicle for grosslings.
Mikkel was deep within the parking garage, flashlight in one hand, crowbar in the other, and his shotgun slung across his back, when he found the skeleton. It was small, just a child, and the delicacy of the skull bones made him think it a girl. She lay curled on her side in the back seat of a four-door car, with a pink blanket drawn up to her shoulders. Her left hand, savagely deformed by the Rash, lay atop the blanket and her legs and feet could be seen under the blanket to be likewise deformed. Her skull, though, was untouched by the ravages of the Rash.
It is a peculiarity of the Rash — and evidence to some that it is utterly unnatural — that victims who die of it do not decay normally. Their flesh seems to melt away into thin air, leaving the skeleton still held together by tendons and ligaments, and it is long and long after that before natural processes dare to attack the remains.
Who were you? Who tucked that blanket so tenderly around your maimed and twisted body? Why did they bring you here and where did they think to flee? Why did they leave you here, alone, to die?
But of course he would never know the answers to his questions. She had been left behind and she had died, and now Mikkel would mark the vehicle as safe and Captain Jurs would have her skeleton dragged out and thrown on the midden with the rest of the trash. Jurs cared nothing for the dead.
“No.” Mikkel was startled when he said that aloud, but he meant it. The girl would not be thrown out as trash.
To his surprise, the car door was unlocked. After a quick glance over his shoulder, he eased it open, mindful that the hinges might have rusted through. As it seemed able to stay open without tearing loose, he left it that way and pulled out a scavenging sack which had been tucked in his belt. Gently tugging the skeleton toward him with apologies that he recognized as foolish even as he repeated them, he forced the bones together so that they could be packed into his sack. The sack was disturbingly light when he finished, not more than five kilos for the last remains of a child that someone had once loved and cherished.
Mikkel eased the door shut again and chalked a circle on the trunk to show the team coming behind him to drag the vehicles onto the flat-beds, that there were no grosslings in the vehicle.
In the excitement, no one noticed that Mikkel had scavenged something in the garage and in his free time after his shift ended, he had no difficult scrounging up enough wood for a small pyre. The pyre was burning well and the bones almost consumed when Captain Jurs — of course — crunched through the snow to demand to know what he was doing.
“I'm celebrating, sir,” Mikkel answered promptly, having already decided how he would deal with his superior. Though Danes were generally skeptics, the captain wouldn't dare interfere with a religious ceremony, even if it were entirely invented. “You see, it's the first new moon after the solstice, which we would celebrate in my family anyway because my great-grandmother always said the festival was something she brought over from the mainland — and we're here on the mainland so it really should be celebrated — and then we had this great find in the garage, which is clearly because of the good luck from the new moon, so I built this fire to celebrate our good luck in hopes that it would continue because —”
Captain Jurs backed away, showing his palms in a gesture of surrender. “Yes, yes, yes, very well, carry on.”
Mikkel had noticed before that Jurs seemed baffled by floods of words. He was careful to scrub any trace of mockery from his voice, face, and manner as he replied, “Yes, sir!” and saluted as the captain turned away.
Mikkel's memories were interrupted as Sigrun and Emil returned, Sigrun passing the kitten to Reynir as she slid into her seat beside Mikkel. “Yeah, you were right,” she said. “No live trolls.” He nodded, avoiding her gaze and not wanting to appear to convey, “I told you so.” He lacked the energy to argue about instrumentation.
The tank moved forward once more, out into the broad, tree-lined avenue. A dozen meters from the parking garage, Tuuri stopped the tank again, more smoothly this time. “Emil,” she said, “Lalli's catching up.” With a glance at Sigrun, she added, “No trolls around.”
Mikkel turned to watch the approaching scout in the mirror beside him, frowning as he noted the man's evident weariness. But then, he'd been running around in knee-deep snow for over an hour after battling the blizzard the previous night. Emil threw open the door and stepped back, allowing Lalli to enter. As Lalli stripped off his uniform, leaving it in a heap on the floor, Tuuri called a question, which he answered with a dismissive wave before retreating to his blankets under Mikkel's bunk.
Mikkel considered what he'd seen: no limping, no difficulty removing the uniform, and, most importantly, no blood. “Is he okay?” he asked.
Tuuri bit her lip and gave an uncomfortable shrug as she started the tank moving. “I think so.” With that, Mikkel had to be content.
Soon the ruins closed in before opening out into the plaza, and Tuuri brought the tank to a halt beside the statue. After Mikkel checked the monitors and declared the area clear, Sigrun climbed out to do her own check with the kitten, wading through knee-deep snow.
After circling the tank at several meters distance, she returned to say, “Okay, you can come out now.”
“Us, too?” Tuuri asked, elbowing Emil away from the doorway.
Sigrun's sigh was visible in the cold air. “Yes, you, too, but Emil comes out first. Careful around the tank, guys; it's broken the crust, and there's slush underneath.” She backed farther away as Emil climbed down, followed by Tuuri and Reynir, both wearing their masks. Mikkel cautiously exited the tank, the crust under the snow creaking under his weight. Testing each step carefully, he edged away from the tank and the others.
After watching him for a moment longer, Sigrun turned, surveyed the site, and concluded, “All right then. This place looks good enough to camp for the night. The little mage guy's got us four escape routes and a clear field of fire. Too bad there aren't any book spots around here, but maybe there's something in one of those buildings that the elderly folks didn't know about. We might as well take a look since we're here.” She passed the kitten to Emil, who passed the little creature to Reynir to snuggle.
To Mikkel's left, Reynir and Tuuri speculated about the riches within the buildings, while Sigrun more practically commented to Emil that likely no one would have stayed in them in the last days of the Old World as it succumbed to the Rash. Mikkel doubted that many would have stayed — even the people of the Old World surely didn't keep working when they were sick — but not many did not mean none, and there was always the possibility of a wandering grossling seeking shelter, or even a patient in a makeshift clinic that didn't quite die.
Even as Sigrun spoke, Reynir seized her shoulder and pointed. “Look! Something moved in there!”
At Tuuri and Mikkel's simultaneous translation, Sigrun turned to study the building. The clouds chose that moment to break, and sunlight glanced off the delicate, undulating forms of low snowdrifts sculpted by the wind. Squinting in pain, she fumbled in an inner pocket of her jacket to find two pairs of googles, one tinted, which she donned, and the other clear, which she put back. With the glare blocked, Sigrun surveyed the plaza and noted the lone set of footprints leading from building to building. Only one showed signs of entry: the one at which Reynir pointed.
“Hey, Tuuri,” she said, still watching the suspect building, “did your cousin say anything about what's in there? Looks like he went in.”
“N-no, just that it wasn't dangerous.” Sigrun's lips tightened at Tuuri's nervousness. The kid was still upset, even though Sigrun had apologized for saying she got lost. “I'll run ask him,” Tuuri added, crunching through the snow to the tank. After a minute or two in which nothing moved in the building, she returned to report, “He said there are just a bunch of skeletons on little tables. Gurneys, I guess he means.”
“Hmm. Then I guess it's not a troll. Probably a bird or something flew in the open door and can't find its way out. Or it's his imagination.” Sigrun glanced at Mikkel for a moment. “Will the monitors show us if something's in there?”
“No, it's too far. We'd have to move the tank closer.”
“Let's not do that, then. I like being in the middle. Okay, we'll have to check it out.” Sigrun tapped her fingers on her rifle as she considered the problem. My buddy doesn't like skeletons. They freaked him out that first time. Leave him here? That might make him feel like I don't respect him. Oh, wait, this is easy! “Skeletons on gurneys means it's one of those clinics. Mikkel, you come with me. Maybe there's some medical thing we can use in there. Emil, you guard the helpless ones.” She was relieved to see the Swede straighten his shoulders, pat the rifle slung on his shoulder, and look around alertly, not offended at being left behind.
Mikkel ducked into the tank to grab his crowbar and shotgun before joining Sigrun in plodding through the snow to the offending building, staying an arm's length to her left. The large picture windows, surprisingly unbroken, were crusted with dirt but still let in enough light for their investigation. They stood before the windows for a long moment, watching for motion, but saw nothing. Goggles pushed up on her head, dagger drawn, Sigrun stepped to the side. When Mikkel shoved the half-open door completely open, she jumped into the lobby, ready for anything.
But there was nothing. She stood still, Mikkel's bulk at her back, and peered about, listening and even sniffing the air. There was no sound but the breeze whispering over the snowfield, no smell but dust. After several seconds, she murmured, “Okay, I see nothing that points to recent activity in here, except the little guy's footprints. You spot anything?” and “I do not,” he murmured in reply.
Sigrun studied the rows of gurneys with sheet-covered skeletons with caution but little emotion. Such sights were familiar to her; like so many public places of the Old World, it had been converted into an makeshift clinic, for even as their civilization collapsed, the people of the Old World had tried to provide proper care to the afflicted. Taking out her flashlight and signaling Mikkel to go right as she went left, Sigrun led a rapid search of the room, checking under each gurney and looking suspiciously up at the ceiling. Again, there was nothing.
They returned to the large front door where Sigrun shrugged elaborately at Reynir, still waiting anxiously by the tank. Rather than being reassured, he pointed so urgently behind her that she and Mikkel both spun around, weapons ready, expecting that something had crept up behind them. Still, there was nothing.
“I like this campsite,” Sigrun said, making no effort to keep her voice down. If there was something hiding in the room, perhaps the sound would draw it out. “It's the best we've had in weeks, and I don't want to move. But we don't need him alarming people. Especially not the girl. She's sweet on him.” She gave Mikkel a grin, but he was studying the room and didn't seem to notice. “I don't see anything in here that would be a risk for him, do you?”
“No, I do not.”
“So, you go fetch him. I'll keep an eye on things here. We'll show him there's no danger, and that'll take care of that.” Mikkel nodded and departed without a word while Sigrun stood just inside the door and flashed her light around, daring anything to charge at her.
With the expression of a condemned man, the Icelander followed Sigrun's track across the plaza with Mikkel beside him. The fitful breeze swept snowflakes up onto his long, dark blue coat as he trudged towards the building, still cuddling the kitten as if he had forgotten that he had her. Mounting the steps and peering inside, he gulped and said something in a quavering voice.
“He says there are ghosts,” Mikkel translated, putting a hand to his head as if in pain.
“Ghosts? Ask him if they look mean.”
Mikkel asked a question and Reynir gave a lengthy answer. “He says no.”
“Yeah? He said more than that. What do they look like? Like the ghost in the tank?”
More unintelligible discussion with Mikkel massaging his temples as he spoke. “They do not look like the ghost in the tank, who looks like a woman of the ancient Danish army. I must remind you that he has only dreamed about her, and she has never appeared in what passes for his reality. These ghosts are, he says, faded to faint shadows. With eyes. They stay back away from the sunlight. They quiver.”
Reynir seemed suddenly to recall the kitten in his hands, gave her a kiss, and whispered to her. Sigrun shrugged and turned away. If the ghosts were no threat, then they were also of little interest. The skeletons caught Sigrun's attention and she narrowed her eyes at them. It was odd that all of these people were dead, but none showed the deformities of the Rash.
Sigrun's interest in the skeletons drew the attention of the two men. Reynir pointed at a skeleton, asked a question in appalled tones, and received one of Mikkel's long-winded answers. Sigrun had, of course, followed none of the Icelandic conversation, but from their gestures she had a pretty clear idea of the topic. “So hey, you,” she asked curiously, “what do you think these guys died from?”
Mikkel opened his mouth and closed it. After a quick glance at Reynir, he replied, “Other causes.”
“And that's scientist speak for …?”
“It means I don't know. And I'm not a scientist.”
“Scientist, skald, same thing, right?”
“Also not a skald.” He picked up some medical supplies but, after a brief examination, sighed and returned them to their boxes.
“Huh.” Given the way he and their Finnish skald got along, she'd come to suppose that he was a skald himself. No reason a skald couldn't also be a farmer, she thought.
Mikkel picked up a box from a cabinet. “Now this here is interesting,” he said, dropping it in a capacious pocket. Nearby was a loose piece of paper, set out as if to draw attention. “And this.” He lifted the paper, tilting it to catch the sunlight streaming through the open door, and began to read. “If any of you wake up, don't be alarmed, we didn't leave you for dead! But the food has run scarce and we've received word that the troops at Kastellet have decided to abandon their cause and move on. We need to venture further out to find supplies, but we're not giving up on you, not now.”
“And then they never came back. Good story.” Sigrun shrugged. His face was as impassive as usual as he looked over at her, but she had the feeling he was … disappointed in her. Surely not, though. The writers were civilians who had gone out into a troll-filled city in the dead of winter. Of course they never came back.
Mikkel looked around. “Apparently the ghosts are harmless and our friend here is no longer concerned. I don't see any useful medical supplies, so there seems little reason to remain.”
Sigrun heartily agreed. Even if the ghosts were harmless, she didn't care to spend more time around them. The three strode out into the cold and sunny plaza.
Hiss
The sound was loud in the near-silent plaza. Before she consciously registered the kitten's hiss, Sigrun's dagger was in her left hand. A quick glance at the kitten in Reynir's arms showed her the threat was to her right, and she scanned the snowfield in that direction even as the three broke into a run for the tank, which was closer than the open door. Ahead, Tuuri fled into the tank while Emil planted himself before the door, rifle ready. Nothing moved among the dazzling snowdrifts; the creature must be under the snow, then. But where?
They had almost reached the tank when the troll burst forth from the snow, shattered ice erupting around it. The troll, a flat monstrosity resembling a multi-legged manta ray, lunged at Reynir. Of course it aimed at Reynir; grosslings always knew who was not immune.
Sigrun jumped to put herself between the civilian and the troll, blocking its head with her left arm. Its weight knocked the breath out of her as its human-sized jaws closed on her upper arm. She was falling … she twisted, grabbed a limb, and dragged it down with her. Half under her, the monster writhed and shrieked, releasing her arm as it struggled to break away. The dagger fell from her hand as she tried to bring her wounded arm around to strike.
The tank door clanged shut; Reynir was inside and safe, then. Mikkel and Emil were shouting as the troll contorted itself, pushing her off and diving into the snow once more. Gasping for air, she fumbled for her dagger as Mikkel raced past her and Emil ran forward. The flat cracks of three rifle shots echoed about the plaza.
“Stop shooting!” Sigrun forced out the words with what little breath she'd gained. Didn't Emil realize the sound might draw more trolls?
Hiss
Just a meter away from Sigrun, the kitten leapt, plunged into the snow, leapt again as she sought to chase the troll. Sigrun caught her up, held her out for the others to see. “That way!”
Mikkel pivoted, stumbled, bumped into Emil, his bulk knocking the smaller man off his feet. “Clumsy oaf!” Sigrun shouted, while Emil shouted a curse. The Dane hesitated, glancing from side to side, before charging forward, striking at the snow with his crowbar. Emil scrambled to his feet and followed, dagger in hand and rifle slung.
“It's making for the door,” Sigrun called, joining the chase with the kitten in her hand. She hadn't found her dagger, but she'd beat the troll to death with her fists if she had to.
The troll was faster than the pursuers and reached the building well ahead of them. It squealed as it emerged from the snow into the sunlight, but kept moving. Surefooted with its many legs, it scurried up the icy steps before disappearing through the door. It had trapped itself for, as Sigrun knew, there was no open exit from the vast lobby. She doubted it could open a door, and if it did, they could follow its trail through the dust. And they could follow its blood trail too, she saw as they approached the stairs. Emil had hit it, then. She doubted Mikkel had, in his flailing at the snow.
They mounted the steps with care. There was no point hurrying and risking a fall, when the troll couldn't escape. Inside, the blood trail led under gurneys towards the back of the lobby. The doors, Sigrun saw, were still closed. Pulling out her flashlight and shining it along the floor, she paced down the middle of the room, not wanting to get too close in case the troll charged again.
“Hey, look at the kitten,” Emil said, and Sigrun did. With the blood trail to guide her, she didn't need the kitten and had dropped the little one in a pocket. Now the kitten was peering out of the pocket, paws on the hem … and not hissing. Not even bushed out.
“She's not alerting.” Sigrun flashed the light across the closed doors. “But how could it have gotten out?”
Mikkel had his own flashlight out, and strode forward, yanking the troll out from under a gurney by one claw-tipped limb. The monster hung limp from his big hand as he dragged it into the sunlight.
Sigrun scanned the blood trail. It didn't seem like enough to kill the thing; trolls died hard. “Did it just die?” Mikkel dropped the troll and stepped on its head with a sickening crunch. If it wasn't dead before, it certainly was now. Sigrun had seen and killed many grosslings; the sight did not move her. “Well, that's handled,” she said. “Let's go.” She led the way out, the kitten in her right hand in case any more trolls lurked nearby. As the adrenaline rush of the fight wore off, her arm was beginning to hurt. And her favorite dagger was still lost in the snow somewhere.
They were greeted at the tank by Tuuri, peeking around the door and still wearing her mask. “Where is Reynir?” Mikkel asked as they climbed into the tank.
“I'm sorry, we didn't know what to do so I quarantined him in the office.”
“That's fine. Keep your mask on and wait over there.” As Mikkel opened the office door and gave orders in Icelandic, Emil closed the outer door and gave Sigrun an enquiring look.
“Your watch, kid,” she told him. “We don't need anything else creeping up on us.” She pulled off her jacket and undershirt, sighing at the sight of the tears and bloodstains, and tossed them in the disinfecting closet. Oh, well, Mikkel can clean this up.
“We didn't put the perimeter sensors out yet.” Emil started towards the cabinet when the sensors were stored, averting his eyes from her exposed torso.
Sigrun smiled at his embarrassment. He'd get over that fast as a troll-hunter; they were always getting hurt and needing to be patched up, with no time for frivolities like proper clothing. “Let that go for now. I don't want anyone out there alone.” She pulled off her boots and uniform and added them to the closet, but left on her long black trousers. That done, she folded down Emil's bunk and took her seat to wait for the medic.
“Oh, yeah, right.” Emil took his place by the monitors, edging around Mikkel as the big man stepped back and closed the office door.
“Reynir'll keep for now,” Mikkel said as he shucked his own uniform. “Let me take care of that bite first. We have anesthetic —”
Sigrun shook her head. Did he think she was afraid of a little pain? “Just sew it up. Keep the anesthetic for when we really need it.”
“I hope you don't mind a couple of scars from this. Stitchwork isn't one of my strong suits.”
“It's fine, I don't care,” she answered, looking around as he set to work cleaning and disinfecting the wounds. Sutures hurt less than the bite, which fortunately had only torn her flesh without ripping out a chunk. She focused on the scout, who didn't appear to have moved when they entered. Heavy sleeper, I guess. Hadn't noticed that before. Odd, for a scout. Tuuri had retreated to sit on the back corner of Mikkel's bunk and wrung her hands as she watched the proceedings.
“Finished.”
Looking down at the rather untidy stitches, Sigrun answered with some disbelief, “So you weren't kidding; you do suck at stitches. I mean, I've had worse, but still!”
“They will serve their purpose regardless. We only have to make sure the wounds stay dry and clean from now on.” Mikkel opened a jar, releasing the distinctive odor of comfrey. “This will help you heal.” He dipped his fingers in the jar to bring out some ointment, which he smeared over the wound.
“Don't waste that stuff either. Who knows when —”
“It's okay,” Tuuri said. “We can make more.” As Mikkel looked over at her, she added, “More than the sponsors gave us, I mean.”
Sigrun regarded her, puzzled. “You can? It's the dead of winter.” She waved her free hand as if inviting a look at the snow.
“I've been making my inventory of plants growing wild here. Lalli told me he found comfrey roots near one of those ruins. Under the snow, you know, where it's not too deep. He can find more if we need it.”
That seemed to settle the question. Mikkel wrapped Sigrun's upper arm in red bandages before standing to stow the medical supplies in their poorly-equipped first aid kit. With that done, he opened her cabinet, pulled out her pajama top, and brought it to her. Once she'd put it on, he asked, “Are you ready to see about Reynir? Or shall I do it alone?”
“I'll help. Nothing wrong with my eyes.”
Mikkel opened the office door and allowed Reynir to join them. The Icelander walked slowly, his gloved hands held out before him as he stared at the floor in a pose of utter dejection. Mikkel took the gloves and passed them to Sigrun before holding Reynir's hands up and scrutinizing them. Sigrun pulled out the inner lining of the gloves — Mikkel's spare pair — and examined them with both eyes and fingers. Reynir stood motionless, though his eyes tracked their every movement.
“Nothing,” Mikkel said, and Sigrun agreed, “Nothing here, either.”
Mikkel slipped Reynir's heavy coat off his shoulders and laid it on the floor before helping the younger man remove his flannel shirt and undershirt, which he passed to Sigrun. As she accepted them, she saw an unexpected problem: freckles were sprinkled across Reynir's torso as well as his face. “Whoa. How are you going to spot a little scratch in that mess?”
“I hope I won't have to. Let's look at the clothes.” As Mikkel joined Sigrun, she saw Emil take a step to the right, reach out, and squeeze Reynir's shoulder reassuringly before returning to his post.
After their painstaking examination of each garment, Mikkel and Sigrun agreed that Reynir's clothes were undamaged: the troll had not touched the Icelander's torso. Mikkel helped him out of boots and trousers, leaving Reynir shivering with cold and fear. Taking pity on him, Sigrun fetched him his pajamas. Her arm was aching and she wanted to lie down by the time they agreed that the troll hadn't touched his legs either.
One last check. Mikkel removed Reynir's mask and passed it to Sigrun while he inspected the man's face and neck.
“No damage,” Sigrun said.
Mikkel spoke to Reynir, whose expression turned relieved, then almost giddy, before settling into an anxious frown as the medic spoke. Mikkel turned to Tuuri. “We find no sign that he might be infected, but I understand that you may still feel at risk. I can quarantine him for two weeks if you want. Do you want —?”
Tuuri swallowed hard, but there was no quaver in her voice. “No. I don't believe Reynir is infected.” When she added something in Icelandic, Reynir covered his face with his hands and sank to the floor.
Sigrun glanced at Mikkel in alarm and saw a fleeting, fond smile break his normal reserve. She sat back with a smile of her own that even her wounded arm couldn't dim.
Reynir opens his eyes, leaps to his feet. “Awesome!” Sheep graze in the narrow valley below his hillside, and the dog watches over them from atop a boulder. As the dog turns his head to regard him, Reynir tells him, “I'm sorry I left you in the temple by yourself. I didn't mean to.” Too excited to dwell further on prior events, he runs down the hillside to the rocky shore.
“Now, where's Onni? I have so many questions for him!”
Reynir peers around for the thinning fog that should show the way to Onni. “There! Or … or, wait. There?” He looks from one patch of thinning fog to the other. “That one's bigger, I guess. So maybe that's for Onni, and the other one's for Lalli?” After a few moments, he trots across the sea to the larger patch. When darkness looms behind the fog, he breaks into a run. “Onni!”
He stops as he recognizes his mistake. What he had taken for the cliff of Onni's haven is a long, straight, white wall atop a steep grassy embankment rising from the sea. As the fog above the wall clears, he sees red roofs beyond.
Reynir scans the wall, wondering if he should turn back and try again for Onni, or explore this island. As he ponders, he hears voices from beyond the wall, too faint to understand. The tones are clear, however: a male voice shouting, threatening, and other voices faint and placating. From his schooldays, Reynir knows the sound of a bully with his victims. He frowns. Surely he was led here for this reason.
He strides alongside the island, fog opening before him and closing in behind him. Soon he sees a low bridge leading from a tree-lined street up to a gate now visible in the wall. He runs. Hearing splashes behind him, he halts, turns, fears what might follow in this strange place.
It is the dog.
Darting past him, the dog races up onto the street and stops, looking back at him, and Reynir hurries to follow. Instead of leading him to the gate, the dog runs down the street before stopping at the edge of the fog to wait for him again.
Reynir looks from dog to gate and back again. He clutches his head in frustration. “What does it mean? There's a waterfall out there somewhere, and Lalli's out there but he doesn't like me, and Onni's out there but I can't find him, and you took me to a Christian temple, and now there's this walled place only you're leading me away. What does all this mean?”
The dog waits, and after a moment, Reynir sighs and starts down the street. On either side, the trees fade into sea and fog. The dog leads the way to an intersection, where they turn left. Shadowy buildings close in, then open out into a vast plaza. Reynir knows where he is; he is not surprised to see the gray bulk of the tank with its bold blue mirror. He hesitates, wondering about trolls under the snow. The dog leads on and, with another sigh, Reynir follows.
As they make their way to the other side of the tank, the fog closes in. The air grows heavy and cold, chilling Reynir to the bone. Reynir tries the door. It is locked. He peers around uneasily as he knocks. No answer. Something roils the fog.
Reynir backs into the side of the tank as ghosts drift from the fog. They are deep shadows, denser than the ghosts he'd seen before, and their red eyes glow.
“H-hi,” Reynir says, his heart pounding at their silent approach.
Without a word, the lead ghost reaches for him, too fast to dodge. It seizes his face. Claws dig into his cheeks, sending a searing pain that seems to penetrate his very skull. As blood pours into his eyes, a voice says, “Remember this.”
Reynir jolted awake, shaking, heart still pounding and breath coming sharp and fast. Only a dream, only a dream. He stared into the darkness above his bunk until the panic passed, then twisted to look forward. Sigrun was on watch, her left arm in a red sling. In the dim light of the screens, the sling seemed the same color as her hair.
His heart raced again and his knees felt weak at the sight. If she hadn't been there, if the troll had bitten me instead … I'm not even supposed to be here, but she risked her arm — she risked her life! — to save me. I have to help them somehow! If only I could talk to Onni, I know he could be my teacher.
He rolled over to look down at Lalli, a vague lump on the floor. Maybe he could … Tuuri says he's a great scout but not a very good mage. And he doesn't like me. Reynir rolled over to stare up into darkness again, and was soon asleep.
In the morning, Reynir stepped in to help where he could, listening to conversations and gleaning what he could from tones, gestures, and his limited Swedish. Mikkel and Tuuri worried about Lalli, who'd slept since the previous afternoon; they parted with shrugs. Sigrun and Emil discussed the map while Tuuri called back to base, answered only by static. After several minutes, the static ceased and Tuuri's typewriter clattered.
Frigid air poured into the tank as Sigrun and Emil left together. Mikkel jumped out as well, but soon returned with the washtub. Reynir shivered at the second blast of icy air. He hid a sigh; he wanted to talk to Tuuri about his dream, but not while Mikkel was there.
Though Reynir considered Mikkel a friend, the Dane had not believed his report of ghosts. In the close quarters of the tank, it was nigh impossible to have a private conversation, and a discussion about ghosts and dreams would only further lower Mikkel's opinion of him. Frustration gnawed at him as he realized he'd have to keep his unsettling dream to himself for now.
As Reynir scrubbed a jacket and Mikkel wrung out a shirt, Tuuri emerged from her office with a sheaf of paper, wincing as she twisted her torso and wiggled her shoulders. “I finished your journal,” she announced.
Mikkel hung up the shirt before answering. “Well done. Thank you. That was a lot of work.”
“Did you figure out who killed him?” Reynir asked.
“Well, he doesn't say, 'Here comes So-and-so with a pistol, looking mad.' His last entry is just the usual — what patients died, symptoms, treatments he tried, another rumor of a cure — but I think it was Inge. That's his wife. See, six days before this last entry, he calls his wife — the phones are still working — and she says she and the daughters have the disease. She shouts and swears at him and the children scream, so he tries to go home. Only he can't, because his car's missing and it's too far and too dangerous to walk. Right? He keeps trying to call, but he can't get through. Then two days before the last entry, he calls and she says the girls are dead and it's his fault. Then she ends the call, and he can't reach her again. Doesn't that sound like she'd want to kill him?”
“That's plausible,” Mikkel said. “But what about that rumor? You said 'another' rumor of a cure.”
“He mentioned it on … let's see … the sixth of December, and then again in his last entry, two days later. The 'authorities' were supposed to be preparing a cure or maybe a treatment.”
Mikkel turned to regard her, brows drawn together. “The last entry is on the eighth? But then —” He brushed by Tuuri as he made for the office. She shared a puzzled look with Reynir, and they followed, curious.
Mikkel lifted and scrutinized the box he'd brought from the haunted building. “Look at this. There's a date. The twelfth of December.” He opened it to show them an array of syringes, their contents reduced to tiny, sparkling crystals. “This was distributed four days after that last entry. The city was already so dangerous a week earlier that the writer didn't dare go home without a vehicle. What would anyone be distributing at that time?”
“The cure,” Tuuri said, her voice almost reverent.
“I'd say that's a possibility.” Mikkel turned the box, frowning.
“Didn't seem to work too well,” Reynir muttered. “Those skeletons in there were really, really dead …”
“But they didn't die of the Rash, though their bones showed them to be in a relatively early stage of the illness.”
“Then what did they die of?” Tuuri asked.
Mikkel set the box on Tuuri's desk beside the faded note he'd brought back with it. “Cures are not generally instantaneous. Antibiotics, for example, must be taken for weeks.” He waved at the note. “These medics got this box with the cure, treatment, whichever it was. You can see there must have been more syringes in here originally, so we know they injected the patients. They needed supplies, so they went out searching and never came back. They thought the patients might have recovered enough to awaken, but they didn't — at least those we saw didn't — and they died. Of thirst, of cold, of neglect. But not of the Rash.”
“We've got to find out where this came from!” Tuuri pressed her knuckles to her mouth, staring at the box as if by staring she could compel it to answer her.
“The box is too degraded to tell the origin,” Mikkel said, holding it up again and tilting it back and forth in an attempt to see more details. “But this label does say these were distributed from the Kastellet fort.”
Tuuri seized her map and rushed around the washtub to Mikkel's bunk to spread it out. “This is Kastellet,” she said, pointing out a large, five-pointed star shape. “It's very close by.” She traced a path out of the plaza and up to the shape.
Reynir peered over her shoulder. “That's a building? It's huge!”
“No,” Mikkel said, “that's just the outer wall. These rectangles here are the buildings. It's less than a kilometer away. Even with this snow, I can make it there and back in under an hour.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Tuuri said, “you're not going without me. I transcribed the journal for you; I found the rumors —”
“It's not safe for you. Look what happened yesterday.”
“It's colder today, and look! No clouds!”
As they argued, Reynir stared at the map, his skin crawling at the prospect. He didn't want to leave the tank. He didn't want to face another troll or the bully he'd heard. And yet, there were the streets, the wall, the buildings … This has to mean something.
“Tuuri,” Mikkel said, his voice strained, “you two — and Lalli — will just stay here without me. If anything approaches that can't get into the tank, you'll be safe, while if anything approaches that can get in the tank, I couldn't defend you anyway. So you're just as well off without me. I won't be gone long, and —”
“I've kept your secret all this time; I didn't tell Sigrun you got hurt. Now I'm calling on my blackmail material. You're not going without me.”
Reynir took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “I'm going with you.”
The other two turned to stare at him. “Reynir,” Mikkel began, “after what happened —”
“I must go with you! I don't know why, but I dreamed about that place last night. Something led me to it.” He pointed at the map. “It was through here, up this street, to this walled place. I must go there.”
Mikkel pressed his fingertips to his temples as if in pain but, to Reynir's surprise, didn't argue about the dream.
“I can drive there,” Tuuri said. “We'll only leave the tank long enough to check inside.”
Mikkel shook his head. “You can't drive. We don't know the streets. They could be blocked; they could have collapsed; the tank could get damaged or stuck. It's too risky. We'll have to wait for Sigrun. She can go tomorrow.” He closed his eyes and bowed his head. “Instead of me,” he added as if to himself.
“No!” Reynir surprised himself with his own vehemence. “Sigrun will never let me go in with her. And I have to. Please, Mikkel.”
Mikkel looked from one to the other, his normal impassivity replaced with uncertainty, then turned away to stare down at the map. He opened his mouth but closed it again without a word, his brow furrowed in concentration. Tuuri and Reynir exchanged glances; clearly she had noticed Mikkel's uncharacteristic expression. She raised her hands and crossed her fingers on both hands: the middle over the index, then the ring over the little finger. Finally, she crossed one thumb over the other. Even in his tension, Reynir had to smile at the gesture.
“It's too dangerous for you,” Mikkel muttered, but his tone lacked conviction. He traced the route to Kastellet on the map, his finger lingering on the star-shaped fort. “And yet …” The two remained silent as he seemed to war with himself.
“All right,” Mikkel said at last. “Here are the conditions for you. You will obey my orders without arguing or hesitating. If I say we turn back, you will turn back. Tuuri, you're in charge of the kitten. If she alerts, you two yell and get behind me. If it looks like I'm losing, you run for all you're worth, and you keep running until you're back in the tank. I'd tell you to stay away from our footprints so you don't get ambushed, but if you do that, you'll get lost. So you just follow our footprints back. Do you understand?”
“Yes!”
With that, the three set out with the kitten for Kastellet.
Crossing the plaza with Mikkel and Tuuri was the hardest thing Reynir had ever done. With each step he took, a vivid image of something lurking beneath the snow, waiting to lunge at him, played in his mind. And yet, he kept putting one foot after the other.
Sunlight glittered off pristine snow, almost blinding, bearable only because he wore Lalli’s tinted goggles. The air was so still, the world so silent, that through the crunch of their steps, he heard the kitten purr as she lay along Tuuri’s arm. Not even that could calm him; in the frigid air, his breath came in rapid puffs as he scanned around and even behind. He tucked his gloved hands into the pockets of his long woolen coat, balling his fists to stop their shaking, envying Tuuri’s calm and excitement.
Mikkel too seemed to feel the stress as he led them through the plaza and down the streets, his crowbar in his left hand and his shotgun slung over his shoulder. At every opening in the surrounding buildings, he paused to study it before moving on. Reynir matched Mikkel's stride, while Tuuri half-ran to keep up with her shorter legs.
“Should we slow down?” Reynir whispered, fearing to raise echoes in the silence.
Tuuri stumbled over an obstacle under the blanket of snow, caught herself, resettled her rifle, and shook her head. Though he said nothing, Mikkel eased off on his speed as they picked their way through a field of debris from a collapsed building. Forced to concentrate on his feet, Reynir cast only infrequent glances at the distant wall growing slowly closer.
Though the bridge Reynir had seen in his dream still existed, arching over the frozen moat, it was badly decayed. They crossed with careful steps, staying close to the left edge, with Mikkel going first and testing the stability with each step. The icy air showed Reynir the Dane's deep sigh of relief when they reached the far side. The embankment was overgrown with tall grass — now dead and snow-covered — and volunteer trees.
“Are we going to climb this wall?” Tuuri asked in dismay, looking up the embankment to the wall above, its weathered stone crisscrossed by withered ivy.
“That shouldn't be necessary,” Mikkel said. “According to that note, this fort was abandoned. I doubt anyone wasted time barricading a place they intended to leave for good.”
Prying at the door with his crowbar, Mikkel heaved it open against its rusted hinges, debris, and drifted snow, allowing the three to squeeze through. Inside, he waved Reynir and Tuuri to stay back while he studied the snowy landscape before them. The kitten continued to purr as the two peered past him.
The former lawns of the fort had grown into a young forest of firs and deciduous trees. The blizzard winds had swept the snow into drifts and hummocks, yet even in this frozen terrain, there were signs of life, with the trails of small animals here and there. A flutter drew their attention to the stark, bare branches above, from which a dozen or more birds, brown and white speckled, watched them, seeming almost round with their fluffed-out feathers.
“Birds are smart,” Tuuri said, keeping her voice low in the oppressive silence. “They wouldn't perch there if there were trolls around.”
Mikkel nodded. “Safe enough for now.” With some effort, he forced shut the gate. “I don't want anything creeping in behind us.”
“Do you smell anything?” Reynir asked. He had considered removing his mask, which filtered out all scents, but couldn't bring himself to take that risk.
Mikkel took a deep breath through his nose. “It's too cold to smell much. The firs, that's all. No stench of grosslings.”
Reynir twitched his shoulders uncomfortably. “I guess there's no one in here, then. They'd need fires … smoke …” But if there's no one here, why did I hear those voices? Was it just a memory of the dead past?
Mikkel looked around again, frowning. “I wouldn't expect anyone to be in here. Though if there are any survivors, this would be a good place for them.” He took another deep breath. “No, I don't smell anything suspicious. Let's go. There may be trolls in the buildings, so keep close and stay alert.”
They were methodical. Mikkel entered each building first, carrying the kitten, and the others followed only when he beckoned them in. Most doors stood open, evidence of hasty evacuation; others he forced open against rust and debris. At first they found nothing at all and Reynir began to fear that the dream had misled him and there was no reason for him to have come to this desolate place.
After several buildings, they came across a strange wrecked vehicle that stood deteriorating in the middle of the fort. Reynir stared at it, bewildered. “What is this thing?”
“A helicopter,” Mikkel said, peering into the cockpit. “A flying machine. There are some in the museum at Keflavík airport, though they can't fly any more than this one. You can see them when you get home.”
Tuuri circled the helicopter, studying its workings with a fascinated smile. “What's inside?”
“Not what I'm looking for,” Mikkel said. “I want to know where that box came from. It was sent out from here, but those vials were certainly not manufactured here. They were probably brought here on this helicopter, given how dangerous the streets were. I wonder why they didn't use it to evacuate.” He frowned and struck the side with a fist. The thump was loud in the stillness, and Reynir scanned around, fearful of what might have awakened. “Anyway, there's nothing to show their origin here, but there must be somewhere. There must be! If only we knew where to begin searching.”
“Is that a medical building?” Tuuri suggested, pointing through the trees to a distant building with the faded remains of a crude and slighted tilted red cross painted above the door.
"Well spotted!" Mikkel said, his tone brightening with renewed purpose. "Let's investigate that building. Stay alert as we move."
Tuuri gave the helicopter one last longing look before following. "A flying machine!" she muttered, perhaps only to the kitten.
They set off down the snow-covered street, Mikkel in the lead with his crowbar at the ready. The crunch of their footsteps seemed unnervingly loud in the stillness. Reynir and Tuuri followed closely, their eyes darting from building to building, searching for any sign of movement. And still the kitten purred, pausing only to yawn once.
The door to the medical building stood open, half off its hinges, allowing the winter sunlight to illuminate the inside. Mikkel stepped in and stopped as if staggered by a physical blow. Peering past his shoulder, Reynir saw that the entry room was full of gurneys. And every gurney bore a skeleton.
As Mikkel took a hard breath and shuffled through fallen ceiling tiles and other debris to a cabinet in the center of the room, Reynir lifted his gaze to the shadows at the back of the room. “Mikkel, can we leave? There's those shadow ghosts in here and I don't think we like them a lot.” Ghosts lurked in shadows, their red eyes glowing at the intruders.
Intent on checking drawers, Mikkel didn't even turn around. “There's nothing in here; don't fret. We'll return to base soon.”
The biggest and darkest ghost — the bully, Reynir knew instinctively — moved along the edge of the shadows, stalking Mikkel, stretching out a skeletal hand that withered and vanished in the sunlight. Reynir forced himself to enter the room, keeping to the brightly sunlit center. He didn't know what he could do to protect the man, but he couldn't stand idle.
Tuuri followed him in, another innocent threatened by the ghosts. “Hey, relax,” she said. “You don't have to be afraid. Look at kitty, she's calm.” He did look; the kitten was calm, but her eyes were focused on the menacing ghost. She didn't understand the threat; he did.
“Please, Mikkel,” Reynir said. “Please let's go.”
Mikkel tugged at a lower drawer. “Soon.” This drawer resisted being pulled out, squealing with the friction. “Don't rush me. We have nothing to show for this detour yet.” The drawer came open and Mikkel pulled out a box, stepping back closer to the door to examine it. He opened it to show Reynir it was filled with vials like those used for the presumed cure. Better still, protected as it had been from light and moving air, it had a readable address. “This will do. All right, we can head back. With any luck, we'll return before Sigrun does.”
Reynir rushed out of the building ahead of him, catching Tuuri's wrist and dragging her along as fast as he could. “So, ghosts again,” she said, once he allowed her to slow to a walk. “They're probably harmless, you know. Onni told me most spirits barely even notice humans. Unless they're guarding something, but what would those be guarding? Harmless.”
“They weren't harmless.” So that's what the dream meant? I had to be there to stop Mikkel from going into the shadows? And if I hadn't? He shuddered at the thought, but dropped the subject.
Their return, retracing their own footprints, was uneventful until they emerged into the plaza, only to see Sigrun and Emil returning from their own expedition. Both groups stopped for a moment in surprise before Sigrun stalked towards the truants, scowling. With one accord, Tuuri and Reynir edged together to try to hide behind Mikkel's bulk.
Sigrun snarled a single word, and “No, no,” Mikkel said soothingly, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender and continuing too quickly for Reynir to catch more than a few words like “Kastellet.” Seeing Emil sidling away from Sigrun towards the tank, Reynir gestured to Tuuri with a jerk of his head, and they hurried away, leaving Mikkel and Sigrun arguing.
“She said Mikkel committed mutiny,” Tuuri whispered as they caught up with Emil. “And she threatened to fire him, and he said she can't because he doesn't work for her, so now she's saying she can leave him in a ditch somewhere.”
“Do — do you think she will? Or will she leave, uh, us? Me?” Surely she wouldn't, not when she saved my life yesterday.
Tuuri glanced back. “I don't think so. That would be murder. I think she's just mad.” He wished she sounded entirely confident in her answer.
Emil opened the door, closed it behind the three, and turned to Tuuri, complaining. Tuuri gave a placating answer, but Emil just rolled his eyes and turned away while Tuuri explained to Reynir, "He's worried that Lalli's still asleep and we're not doing anything. But he's just recovering from using his magic and he'll be fine." She didn't quite manage to conceal her own worries. Before Reynir could answer, the door opened again; an annoyed-looking Sigrun climbed in, followed by Mikkel.
Sigrun gave an order, to which Tuuri gave her sloppy salute before running to the radio compartment, Sigrun and Mikkel close behind. Reynir stayed in the sleeping compartment with Emil so as not to crowd their annoyed seniors. Since Tuuri hadn't been able to get through the static since the solstice, Reynir didn't expect much. To his surprise, within a minute or two he heard the General's staticky voice. The man had hardly answered Tuuri's call when a male voice interrupted, and Tuuri answered him in tones of delight. Emil glanced at the Icelander and said, “Finnish,” before sitting down to pull off his boots.
Reynir started towards him. "I help?" He was only a little disappointed when Emil waved him away. The Swede never seemed to want his help.
On the radio, the General interrupted Tuuri's excited conversation with the other man, and Mikkel moved forward to answer. Tuuri slipped between them, all but dancing as she retreated to the main compartment. “That was Onni!” she said, beaming at Reynir, at the world. “He made it all the way to Mora. I didn't think he could, but he was brave enough —” She stopped herself and looked up at him, clasping her hands together for a moment. “I mean, Onni's super brave, he helps protect Keuruu, but he — it's hard for him to go outside the walls. Because of … uh, things that happened.”
Onni's in Mora? Reynir felt like cheering. “That's so great! And we can just talk to him?”
“Yes!” Her enthusiasm returned full force, and she bounced on her toes. “Not whenever we want, of course, because it's expensive, but we can when we check in. He's staying with the Vastey— Vaster— Um, Emil's aunt and uncle, and he's babysitting their children for room and board. And the radio.”
“You'll translate for me? I have so many questions.” And I don't have to keep looking for him in dreams!
“Oh, you won't need me. Onni speaks Icelandic. Not so well as I do, but he does.” She raised a hand and cocked her head, listening to the conversation in the radio compartment. “They found that address on a map. It's a hospital in a city called Odense … about 150 kilometers … we get to go!” She bumped her fists together. “Oh, wait, what? … let someone else come back in a few years?” Her shoulders slumped for a moment before she perked up again. “Oh … Sigrun says we'll go! Yes!” She flung her arms around Reynir, who was too startled to reciprocate. Blushing, Tuuri jumped back and hurried forward to shut down the radio now that the conversation had ended.
They passed a quiet evening. Tuuri could hardly sit still, whispering repeatedly to Reynir how exciting the discovery was. “Imagine if there really is a cure, so we never have to worry about the Rash again!” If Tuuri had had her way, they would have set out immediately, but she had to settle for obsessively going over the map, picking out possible routes for Lalli to scout.
Reynir wanted to echo her enthusiasm, but the thought of the ghosts kept intruding. Another troubling issue was Lalli, still sleeping. No one commented aloud on this, but Reynir caught Tuuri casting a few anxious glances at her cousin, and Emil alternated between worriedly watching the scout sleep and giving Mikkel accusing looks. But what could anyone do?
Late that evening, Tuuri sat back in her comfortable driving seat and speculated about their route as she watched the sunset. Reynir, who had been leaning on the dashboard listening to her, caught a motion outside. He straightened, staring, and realized what he was seeing: ghosts creeping towards the tank in the lengthening shadows.
“Tuuri,” he said urgently, “we need to go.” When she didn't move, he went on, “Remember those spirits? At the place? Well, they're here now and I dreamt that they were going to kill us and you need to drive us away from here! To somewhere else!”
Tuuri's voice was nervous. “Umm … calm down. First of all, the sun is setting; it's not like we can go anywhere. But we might relocate tomorrow, so just —”
“No no no, not tomorrow! They're coming to eat us right now!”
“But we —”
“We've got to go now!”
As she continued to hesitate, he urged her, “Tell Sigrun!”
“Uhh, Sigrun?” She switched to Swedish, sounding increasingly apologetic, while Sigrun sounded increasingly annoyed. Sigrun and Mikkel came forward as the discussion continued. “Sorry,” Tuuri said in Icelandic, turning back to Reynir, “Sigrun says we're not going, no matter what. Try to get them off your mind. They're really probably not dangerous.”
There was a brief silence while Reynir twisted his braid, watching the inexorable advance of the shadows. Desperate, he grabbed Tuuri's hands and forced them onto the controls. “Drive anyway! Who cares what Sigrun says? They're coming!”
“Quit that!” Tuuri yanked her hands away. “I think you should go to bed.”
Reynir stepped back, pressing his fists to his cheeks. There had to be something he could do. But before he could think of another action, Lalli began to make inarticulate, strangled noises. Emil shouted for help, Sigrun and Mikkel started towards them, Lalli began to howl, and Sigrun joined the shouting. Tuuri turned to stare at the uproar while Reynir took a few steps into the back.
In the back compartment, Lalli quieted, and Emil crumpled beside him. Mikkel put his hands to his head, and Sigrun's shout trailed off as she and Mikkel fell first to their knees and then to the floor. Reynir moved to help just as a wave of dizziness struck him and he collapsed as well.
Tuuri stared at her unconscious teammates in horror for a moment. Only for a moment, though. Heart pounding, she shoved the controls full forward, heading for the sunset, and flipped on both interior and exterior lights. The interior lights might do nothing against the ghosts, but they could hardly make matters worse. As the tank jolted across the darkening plaza, an eerie howl rose from behind her.
Tuuri gasped in fear before recognizing it as the wail of a terrified kitten. “Kitty!” she called without looking away from her task. “Kitty, come up here.” The kitten fled to her, scaling her leg and body to perch on her shoulder, trembling against her ear as Tuuri's hands trembled on the controls. “I'm no mage, kitty,” she said. “I can't fight ghosts. But maybe I can drive us to safety.”
As she drove between ruined buildings and along streets of unmarked snow, Mikkel's words echoed in her mind: “We don't know the streets. They could be blocked; they could have collapsed; the tank could get damaged or stuck.” And yet, what else can I do? If we stay in that plaza, worse might happen. I just have to hope someone up there is looking out for us.
Muttering half-remembered prayers, Tuuri drove for all their lives.
Pain jolted through Lalli as he lay on his raft in his haven. He had been husbanding his strength as he waited for his luonto to return to him, but now he leapt to his feet to face this threat. Could It have found him at last? But no, he was safe from It for now. Still, all around, dark shadows pressed upon his barrier, tearing at his protection.
Lalli marshalled his powers to fortify his barrier, but realized to his dismay that he lacked the strength. With a pang, he accepted the need to abandon his haven to the shadows and devote all his energies to preserving himself. But would the barrier hold long enough?
A new shield surrounding only Lalli himself sprang into being just as the barrier crumbled and the shadows rushed forward. Pain lanced through him as the barrier fell and the trees of his haven withered at the ghostly touch.
Lalli pressed his hands against the shield, willing power into it as the shadows bore down upon it, greed in their blood-red eyes as they glared at him.
The shield held … for now.
“Soldiers! On your feet! Incoming!”
Emil scrambled to his feet at the shout, drawing his pistol in the same motion. Dark shadows, their eyes glowing embers, oozed from the walls of the tank. A flat crack to his right: the woman who had shouted was firing at the shadows. Emil winced, expecting a deadly ricochet, but none came as a single shadow fell and crawled away through the wall. He too fired, aiming between those burning eyes and bringing down another shadow. But that, too crawled away.
“Form a square!” Sigrun shouted, and Emil shuffled backwards, still firing. Mikkel formed up to his left, the woman to his right, and he supposed Sigrun was behind him. All four fired as fast as they could.
How many bullets in this pistol? It's not getting any lighter … but does it matter? They're coming in faster than we can shoot them. And I'm not even sure we're killing them.
Emil brought down another shadow.
Baaaa
Reynir stared at the sheep fleeing past him and the sheepdog running after them, barking, nipping at their heels to keep them going. He ran forward to see the threat and stopped, his knees weak.
The ghosts were here.
Reynir retreated. Unable to fight such shadowy foes, he desperately searched his memory for any runes that might help. Hadn't he seen one …?
As Reynir struggled to remember the rune carved into an old and tumble-down cottage, his sheepdog returned, snarling at the advancing shadows. “If they're here,” he told the dog, “then they're in the tank. The others fell … Go to Onni! Go, we need his help!” As the dog dodged around the ghosts and streaked away over the endless sea, he whispered, “If Onni can help us.”
The ghosts closed in and Reynir squeezed his eyes shut, picturing the rune as clearly as he could. After a moment, he opened his eyes to find the rune inscribed in the ground around him. Every line gleamed blue, and a shimmering blue dome rose from the rune to enclose him. Even as Reynir raised his gaze to the ghosts that surrounded him, one slammed a spectral hand against the shield, and he flinched as the shield creaked under the impact.
More ghosts struck the shield. It groaned under the strain.
Onni Hotakainen leaned against the wall, scowling at the children as they did their homework with frequent veiled glances at him. Another hour of that, then supper, then he would allow them to play — quietly! — for a while before bedtime. He could handle this —
A dog barked. Onni looked around, frowning. There was no dog here. The dog barked again, urgent, and he felt in the sound a trace of that Icelandic stowaway mage. Onni extended himself into the in-between, finding the sheepdog running to and fro, searching for him. In the material realm, his body crumpled to the floor, the children raising cries of alarm which he disregarded. As soon as he appeared in the in-between, the dog barked, “Help! Help us!” Message given, the dog vanished.
Tuuri was in danger, then, and Lalli. The shape of his luonto — an eagle-owl — fell over Onni like a warm cloak. Leaping into the air, he flew southwards over hills, over rivers, swift as a passing thought. Few mages could travel so far from their bodies, but Onni was, without false modesty, one of the most powerful mages in Finland. To go so far for so long left his body at risk, but lights and human activity would protect him, for evil things thrive best in darkness and silence.
Sweden passed beneath him, and now the Øresund lay ahead. The sea is the enemy of mages, drawing their magic into its cold heart, but the sound is narrow, and though Onni's wings faltered for a moment, they bore him safely across. Weakened, but with land beneath him once more, Onni sped across the misty ruins of the in-between. Trolls woke as the Sun set, already half below the horizon; he disregarded them as he sought the tank.
At last he saw it. To his relief, Tuuri was alive, awake, driving the tank through the abandoned city, but shadows crawled on the steel sides, and more followed. With a hunting cry, the giant owl that was Onni swooped down on the shadows, tearing them away with his savage talons. Terror he felt from Tuuri, desperation from Lalli, from Reynir, from the four non-mages in the tank. The shadows attacked on every level of reality.
Onni circled above the tank, steeling himself. Talons weren't enough, but this should be. He would pay for it, but that didn't matter if Tuuri and Lalli were safe. He took a deep breath and sang a runo.
Could you be born of Hiisi,
Or from the curses of the corrupted?
Still, you will fall to my words,
Bend to my dire will.
Go, you wicked ones,
Ski away, you evil ones,
Flee, you shadowed ones.
Power flowed to him and he caught it, gathering it before him until he could hold no more, then hurled it against the shadows.
Reynir crouched under the shield, now crushed and contracted under the pressure of the ghosts. He raised his head at a burst of barking. Beyond the ghosts, the sheepdog raced about, snapping at the ghosts and dodging their strikes.
“No, dog,” he called. “Go guard the sheep. They'll get you too!”
The dog dodged the wrong way, suffered a glancing blow, and raced, howling, to Reynir, twisting and squirming to avoid more blows. He passed through the shield with ease, spun around, and pressed back against Reynir, fangs bared and snarling at the ghosts. Reynir hugged him, smelling blood from the dog's wound.
Could you be born of Hiisi,
Or from the curses of the corrupted?
Reynir looked up between the crowding ghosts to see a great owl far above, recognizing Onni's voice. “Look,” he told the dog. “Look! You've brought him to us.”
Flee, you shadowed ones.
A flash of blinding lightning, a clap of unbearable thunder …
Reynir pulled himself to his feet in the tank, catching himself as it lurched. He turned to see Tuuri intent on her driving, muttering Finnish in the cadence of a prayer.
Emil fired again and again, as fast as he could pull the trigger. Around him, the other three did the same, the tank echoing with endless reports. But for every shadow that fell, two more took its place, eyes burning with hatred, pressing in closer and closer. A skeletal hand reached for him; he struck it away but it seared his arm with cold. Mikkel cursed beside him, and over the crash of gunfire, Sigrun shouted defiance. More hands reached for him; he couldn't shoot all the shadows.
This is it.
The world exploded, flash and sound together. Emil fell …
Emil sat up, staring around wildly at a quiet tank. No gunfire, no shadows … He was safe. What happened? Was that all a dream?
Sigrun and Mikkel picked themselves up, Sigrun feeling her nose as she scanned every corner, and Mikkel tugging his sideburns and examining his right arm, frowning as if he expected a wound. The tank jolted, tilted to the left, and Sigrun dashed forward to the driving compartment. Emil and Mikkel looked at each other for a moment, then followed.
Lalli's shield was cracking. He had no more power to pour into it and could only watch, feeling the glee and triumph of the shadows.
Could you be born of Hiisi,
Or from the curses of the corrupted?
Lalli looked up at Onni's owl. How had he known about this threat? But he was here, and Lalli had never been so grateful to the man.
Flee, you shadowed ones.
Flash! Crash! The shadows were flung away, out of the haven, out of mage-space itself. The shield crumbled, the small remaining power flowing back into Lalli.
He watched Onni depart, awed. He'd always known Onni was a powerful mage, but he'd never paid attention to his cousin's reputation. And now Onni had flung away dozens, hundreds, of malevolent shadows.
When the owl disappeared from his sight, Lalli lay down in his ravaged haven and closed his eyes, hoping to recover enough strength to survive until his luonto returned.
If it ever did.
The power swept the shadows before it like dead leaves before the winter wind. Wailing, they scattered as the tank fled and Onni beat his way northwards, already weakening. Almost his wings failed over the Øresund, almost the sea claimed him. Back over Sweden, summoning his last reserves of strength, he winged his way to Mora.
As he landed, his luonto flew up and circled over him. Would it leave him? The question hung in the balance for a long moment before the owl vanished and he felt it settle on a tree in his haven. With a sigh of relief, he turned to his body. In the in-between, the spirits of the people crowding around him shimmered in shades of gold and silver. He slipped between them and fell back to the material realm.
“Onni! What have they done to you?” Siv Västerström demanded as his eyes fluttered open. The children peered around her at him still sprawling on the floor.
“Nothing,” Onni said. “They've done nothing.” And darkness closed in.
Tuuri steered around a pile of rubble, the tank tilting to the left as the right track rode up over something hidden under the snow. The kitten slipped down to her lap, purring once more. Tuuri glanced over her shoulder for a moment as Reynir stumbled forward, quickly pushed aside by Sigrun. Emil and Mikkel were on their feet and coming forward as well, and she blinked away tears of relief as she returned to concentrating on her driving. “Don't be mad!” she begged Sigrun, “I had to! I'm sorry!”
“Stop talking and focus! Find us somewhere to camp before the sun is fully down! And before you make us the target of every single living thing in this city!”
“Th-that's what I'm try—” Tuuri quavered before breaking off at the sight of two giant legs that stood just to the right side of their path. There was no time to stop, no way to dodge, and the tank struck the legs with a crunch.
The creature looked like nothing that had ever walked the Earth before the Rash: two long, multi-jointed legs each ending in a pad-like foot equipped with a wicked-looking spike, and at the other end, a kind of transparent globe enclosing the brain of the thing and two independently mobile eyes, all within an organic gel. As the thing crashed to the ground, the gel splattered across the tank's windshield.
Tuuri's apology caught in her throat as she realized their ordeal was far from over. There were more — many more — like it, closing in on the tank.
“Tell Tuuri to go! Go!”
There was no time for more shouting as a wave of icy, stinking water and floating dead tentacles surged towards Sigrun: the giant water troll was on the hunt. Sigrun dove under the tentacles, swimming along the wall of the canal.
Just moments earlier, she'd been up there on the street, standing guard while Mikkel chopped through the mass of tentacles that stretched from canal to warehouse wall, blocking the tank. By the light of the full moon, they'd seen the giant to which the mass belonged, dead and half-eaten down in the canal. With a crowd of the two-legged trolls that Sigrun dubbed “blob-heads” following the tank, along with who knew what else might have awakened, she'd thought it better to chop through the dead tentacles and continue on the street, rather than turning back and searching for another way through.
After the strange attack in the plaza, they'd struggled to find a safe route through the city, backtracking more than once when they found their street blocked, while the persistent blob-heads had managed to stay always within sight or earshot. Eventually, they had found this street leading out of this gods-forsaken city, and they'd made good time until Tuuri slammed the tank to a halt before the tentacle mass. The three conscious immunes had piled out to consider the problem while Tuuri and Reynir watched from inside. With luck, Sigrun had thought, they could clear the obstruction, recall Emil from checking their back trail, and all be safe in the waiting tank within minutes.
But they had not reckoned on a second giant with its tentacles tangled with the dead ones. When Mikkel chopped into its tentacle, the giant had yanked it back, along with all the rest. And Sigrun.
Sigrun pushed dead tentacles aside to reach air and tried to tread water and breathe as quietly as possible. Something brushed past her leg, and she took a breath and stiffened, allowing herself to sink without moving. When nothing more happened, she swam to the surface just as a rope dropped beside her. She wrapped her fingers, already clumsy with cold, around a knot and hung on as Mikkel hauled her up.
Halfway up, a mere two meters below the edge, something twined around Sigrun's ankle and pulled. Her chilled fingers lost their grip and she fell, taking a breath and drawing her dagger even as she plunged once more into the freezing water. She stabbed the tentacle gripping her ankle and it withdrew into the murky water, the dagger still driven through it.
Give that back! It's my favorite dagger! The Generals gave me that when I made captain!
For an instant, Sigrun wanted to swim after the tentacle, to kill and reclaim, but reason prevailed and she let it go. Keeping close to the wall, she swam underwater as far as she could before surfacing for air. She scanned around for the giant as she broke the surface, saw eyes on stalks scanning around for her, took a quick gasp of air, and dived again even as a pressure wave pushed her ahead of the onrushing giant. Her boots, jacket, and rifle hampered her, but there was no chance to remove them with the giant pursuing her once more.
The dead tentacles floating in the foul water of the canal protected her. Behind and above her were splashes as the giant ripped tentacles out of the way in its search for her. But she had to surface again, and when she did, the eyes focused on her immediately. She dived, swimming with all her strength for a ladder she had spotted in her brief moments at the surface.
Sigrun flung herself at the ladder, scrambling up as fast as she could while corroded bolts snapped and deteriorating concrete crumbled. As she gripped each rung, rough with rust, she expected another tentacle to snatch at her, but the continuing splashes sounded far away. She planned even as her body climbed. Get the kid back here. Run for the tank; it can't be far yet. Good thing I sent it on. That giant could throw it into the canal.
Sigrun pulled herself onto solid ground at last, relief flooding her for a moment before reality crashed back. Down the street, Mikkel heaved a chunk of pavement at the giant in an effort to distract it. But the monster was still pursuing her, its long tentacles twining about the ladder, reaching for her. The ladder ripped away with a metallic scream, but shorter, stronger tentacles slithered onto the street and dug in, pulling the creature up. As the stalked eyes rose to glare at her, Sigrun's mind raced.
I can run after the tank before that thing climbs up. Mikkel can probably get past too. But Emil is somewhere around that curve; he doesn't even know what's happened. I've never left a live teammate, and I'm not starting now.
“Run!” Sigrun shouted, already sprinting towards Mikkel. He dropped another chunk of debris, snatched up his axe, and fell in beside her as they fled along the tank's back trail. Here the snow and ice were crushed and melted, leaving remaining debris visible, though a thin film of ice had already formed on the melt water and shattered under their pounding feet.
Icy water streamed from Sigrun's clothes, water squished inside her boots, her hands and feet were numb, and she shivered violently. Even her Norwegian constitution struggled to cope with a swim in freezing water and now a sprint in soaked clothes. She yearned for a sauna, or just warm, dry clothes.
Sigrun ran, matching Mikkel stride for stride.
Thump
Sigrun risked a glance back. The giant water troll was in the street now, filling it from warehouse wall to canal. Its stalked eyes glared down at her, and two long tentacles groped after the fleeing humans. One tentacle bled, Sigrun was grimly pleased to see, but there was no sign of her dagger, which must now lie deep in the canal. The giant's many shorter limbs heaved its body up and forward to crash down as the limbs swung into position to lift it again, as if rowing it across the land. Though its motions looked clumsy, it progressed as fast as a walking human.
They were opening a long lead on the giant, but they couldn't keep up the pace and were also going the wrong way, away from the tank. Sigrun touched her rifle thoughtfully.
Spin around and shoot those eyes right off! But … shivering as I am, can I even aim that well?
Give the rifle to Mikkel then. But he's only a medic. Can he hit a target as small as those eyes?
The rifle is soaked; will it even fire? Or blow up in our faces? And there's the noise …
No shooting. Just stay ahead of it. It can't keep up forever.
And can I?
A street opened to their left and the frigid north wind swept through the gap, so painfully cold that Sigrun stumbled. Mikkel caught her elbow to steady her, but she shook him off.
We have to turn north, lose this giant, somehow get going west again. We have to turn here. No, no, wait. We still don't have Emil.
Sigrun shook her head at her momentary forgetting of Emil and peered towards the curve ahead. Emil should be up there somewhere, but something strange was happening: a chorus of whistles sounded like a dozen neglected tea-kettles and flickers of red and gold vied with reflected moonlight on the canal. Even as she puzzled over this, Emil sprinted around the curve, flamethrower at the ready, and skidded to a near-halt at the sight of them and their pursuer. Behind him, a blob-head appeared, staggering, whistling, its head on fire. Beyond it, another.
Without hesitation, Mikkel seized Sigrun's hand and pulled her with him as he about-faced and ran for the cross street. As Emil caught up, the giant water troll before them reared up, opened its maw, and extended its long tentacles as if expecting them to run into its clutches. When they fled to the north, it dropped with a thump and roared. Sigrun giggled, thinking it sounded disappointed.
Off the tank's trail, debris hidden under the snow forced them to slow to a walk, and all three cast worried glances over their shoulders at the giant. But the crowd of flaming blob-heads that had pursued Emil collided with the water troll, which turned to slash at them. As the whistles and roars of battling monsters rose to a crescendo, the three humans scurried down the street in the teeth of the north wind.
“Street,” Sigrun mumbled through numb lips, stumbling to a halt and pointing to her left. Behind her, the whistles trailed off, and another thump told her … she looked back. Oh. The giant won.
Mikkel still held her right hand and now gave a gentle tug. “Too much debris there. We can't take the time to climb over that mess with the giant still behind us.”
“Ugh. Right.” She focused on her feet, which felt like blocks and threatened with every step to slip on ice under the snow. “Gotta keep going.” She tried to rub her forehead, which ached, but hit herself with an icy glove instead. She wasn't shivering anymore, despite the bitter wind, and even in her growing confusion, she knew what that meant. “You …” After a moment, she dredged up his name. “You, Mikkel. You're in command.”
“I —” Mikkel glanced from her to Emil and back again. “Yes. I'm in command. Let's go.”
Sigrun followed as confusion closed in.
“You will run for it without us,” Mikkel said.
Emil's reaction did not surprise him. “No!”
Mikkel's tone was firm, seeking to leave no room for argument. “Yes, you will, Emil. You'll run to the tank. I'm putting you in command there. You'll run to the tank and instruct Tuuri to backtrack as far as she safely can. We'll meet you on the track. You won't take any risks, and you'll make sure Tuuri doesn't either. Is that clear?”
Emil leaned forward to look up at Mikkel around Sigrun, whom they supported between them. He shook his head and his voice trembled. “No, no. You need me to help with, uh, with Sigrun.”
Mikkel softened his voice. Emil wasn't really a soldier, and Mikkel wasn't really a commander. He couldn't just give orders and expect instant obedience. “We're not moving fast enough. We can't make it to the edge of town. I can manage Sigrun alone; you can't. So you must bring back the tank.”
The giant chose that moment to roar again. “But if it's still after us —”
“I think it's stuck. Even if it isn't, we're out of sight. 'Out of sight, out of mind', remember? And if it keeps up that bellowing, it's going to have its own troll problems.” He made his voice stern again. “Now, go!”
“Yeah,” Sigrun mumbled. Mikkel glanced at her, wondering what she was agreeing with.
Emil slipped out from under Sigrun's arm, and Mikkel tightened his grip on her waist to keep her steady. The younger man's face contorted with conflicting emotions. Fear, doubt, and determination battled for dominance. He clenched his fists, took a deep breath, his eyes darting between Mikkel and Sigrun. After a moment, he turned and bolted, snow spattering from his feet with each stride. Mikkel tugged Sigrun forward, and they followed, much slower.
The prior half hour had been a nightmare. The cold had its claws in Sigrun and dug them in deeper with every step against the biting wind. Only with her arms over the others' shoulders and their arms around her waist could she stumble along with them. Mikkel well knew the symptoms and treatment of hypothermia, but with the giant thumping along behind them, there had been no hope of doing anything.
They had fled more than half a kilometer northward. The warehouses on the west side of the street were mere heaps of debris, and they had dared not risk climbing over the rubble scattered on the cross streets. At last, they had spotted a collapsed building which had left standing beams, a large hole to its basement, and a narrow, fairly clear path along one side. When they hurried along that path, the giant had soon followed. One last thump and a furious roar proved the giant had fallen in. They had fled onward, west and finally south, and were soon out of sight of even its long-stalked eyes.
With Emil gone and the giant trapped, Mikkel's priorities changed as he pulled Sigrun forward. He scanned the ruined landscape for the right shelter. At length, he spotted it: a fallen building with standing north and west walls, the rubble swept clear of snow by the wind.
Mikkel had planned every move as they walked. He positioned her in the corner so she could lean against the walls. As she blinked at him, frowning in confusion, he stripped off his gloves and glove liners, then hers. He shook water from her gloves, patted her hands dry with the outside of his liners, put them on her hands, and put her gloves back on. After donning his own gloves, he removed her boots and turned them up to drain, as his would never fit her. He traded his socks to her as he had the glove liners before putting his boots on his bare feet.
Next, he needed to trade his long, warm underclothes for hers. In a carefully choreographed sequence, Mikkel swapped their garments, each movement calculated to maximize warmth retention for Sigrun. “Not a good time, Ragnar,” she mumbled as he patted her legs dry, and “I'm your medic,” he answered. He wondered who Ragnar was and whether he was waiting for her in Dalsnes.
Yanking his thoughts away from Sigrun's … friend, Mikkel finished the transfer. His long underclothes were far too big for her, but her uniform trousers would hold them up well enough, since she wouldn't be walking. Dressed again in his own uniform — water- and windproof but not warm — he was already shivering. He scooped up her underclothes and tied them about his waist, for the habits of poverty were not easily broken.
Though Sigrun's boots were still cold and damp inside, they were better than nothing, and he helped her into them. With Sigrun as warm and insulated as he could manage, given their limited resources, Mikkel readied himself for the next phase of their escape. Kneeling before her, he pulled her onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry and picked up his axe.
The uncomfortable position seemed to bring her back to reality. “Hey! Put down!”
“Be still. We don't have much time, and I can move faster carrying you than helping you along.”
“That … not fair.”
Mikkel worked his way carefully through the rubble. “I agree. But I'm in command, these are my orders, and this is how we will proceed.” Another roar from the trapped giant emphasized his words, and Sigrun fell silent.
As Mikkel stepped into the street and turned to follow Emil's trail, the ice under the snow cracked under their combined weight and his foot plunged into the slush below. He sighed. His boots were waterproof, and he could endure the cold long enough. He hoped.
As he plodded south, Mikkel tried to step in Emil's footprints, though the smaller man's stride was shorter than his own. If Emil had not stumbled over debris, then Mikkel would not. With every step, he feared finding Emil with a broken leg or worse.
There shouldn't be any trolls out in this cold. Except the giant … I split the party. Always a mistake. But my reasoning is sound. I'm sure of it. I'm sure.
The north wind pushed him forward, pressing his icy uniform against his back. He shivered. Time blurred, marked only by the rhythmic crunch of snow and ice beneath his feet. He tried to use the axe for support, but it was too short. He remembered the ski poles in the back of the tank, wished he had thought to take one when he grabbed the rope so long ago. Sigrun mumbled now and then, but it was too much effort to understand Norwegian, and he had nothing to say anyway.
And then … Mikkel blinked. Emil's footprints were gone. Instead, there was … oh, the tank's track. Before him was the canal. He had to turn, but which way? His thoughts seemed as sluggish and chilled as his body.
The canal was on our left. Turn right and follow the tank.
He turned and plodded on. His world narrowed to the next step, and the next, until even that became a monumental task. He stopped shivering. His legs trembled. Darkness crept in at the edges of his vision.
“Get up, Mikkel.”
The voice cut through the haze in Mikkel's mind. He blinked, realizing he was on his knees in the snow. How long had he been there? He didn't remember falling, only a nightmarish plod through snow and ice.
Before him stood massive, black-furred legs ending in cloven hooves. A beast! He raised his hand to strike, but his axe was not there. Where was it? When had he dropped it? Mikkel's heart raced as he peered at the snowy street around him.
“Get up, Mikkel,” the voice repeated.
Confused, Mikkel looked up. And up. It wasn't a beast at all, but a bull. An enormous black bull who regarded him with dark, patient eyes.
Mikkel tried to stand, but his legs wouldn't cooperate. His body felt leaden, unresponsive. With a grunt of effort, he reached up, hooked cold, numb fingers over one of the bull's horns, and heaved himself to his feet.
Once upright, Mikkel started walking again, the bull keeping pace beside him. As they moved, the ruins of Copenhagen seemed to melt away. He found himself on a narrow path surrounded by a blasted, leafless forest, ice-shrouded trees stretching endlessly in every direction. Mikkel shook his head, blinking hard. Even as the motion sent a jolt of pain through his head, the forest flickered and faded, revealing the canal, the tank's track, and crumbling warehouses once more.
He trudged on, one foot in front of the other. Thin ice cracked with each step. Sigrun's weight on his shoulders felt impossibly heavy. Lift foot. Step. Repeat. Lift foot …
His leg wouldn't move. Mikkel swayed, then crashed to his knees once more.
“Get up,” the bull urged.
Mikkel tried to reach for the horn again, but his arm refused to obey. He couldn't even curl his fingers. With the last of his strength, he sat, slid Sigrun off his shoulders, cradled her head, and pillowed it on his leg.
“I'm sorry,” he murmured. To Sigrun or the bull? He wasn't sure. “I can't.”
Leaning back against the warm, solid presence of the bull, Mikkel closed his eyes. There was nothing to do now but wait.
“We're freezing to death,” Mikkel said after a while. His mind was a little clearer now. “Aren't we.”
“Yes.”
Mikkel opened his eyes, found himself in the forest again. Far beyond surprise, he merely stared at the ice-shrouded trees glittering in moonlight, thinking them beautiful in their stark way. “I sent Emil ahead. Alone. Did he freeze too?”
“I do not know.”
“I failed him. If he survives, if he goes back … I could have helped him learn to deal with his powers. I should have —”
“Why didn't you?”
“I kept putting it off, forgetting about it, and — and I had my orders.”
“Orders from General Trond. He's a viper.”
“A viper?” Mikkel shook his head, bewildered. “No, no, he helped me when — when — after Kastrup.” But when he tried to remember the General, all he saw was the man's cold eyes.
“That's when he sank his fangs into you. He's poisoned your mind, Mikkel. You must know that. But his venom is wearing off. You won't obey him, not about Emil.”
Mikkel struggled to answer, his mind recoiling at the thought of disobedience to the General. Seeking safer ground, he said, “Sigrun has the Luck. I thought if I just kept going, then the others would reach her in time. But I failed her, too. Again. Always —” A lifetime of voices shouted at him: Disappointment! Disgrace! Failure!
“No.”
Mikkel turned his head to find the bull looking at him. “But —”
“Success and failure are two sides of the same coin. If you have given all that you have to give, and the task still stands incomplete, then the task was too great for you. You could not succeed, therefore you could not fail.”
The bull's words echoed in Mikkel's mind. He felt a strange clarity, as if emerging from a deep sleep, and with it came an awareness of a change in surroundings. With great effort, he pushed himself to his feet, leaning on the bull, and blinked around at the forest. Fog had closed in, hiding all but the closest trees. Yet the tank stood not far away, the side door open, dim light spilling onto the moonlit snow.
“The tank?”
The bull rose. “The others have come. Sigrun is safe. You have done your duty. Now you may go to the Summerland.” The bull paused, eyeing him. “If you wish.”
As Mikkel looked past the tank, he saw a golden light shining through a break in the fog, casting long shadows across the moonlit snow. He took a step forward, still leaning on the bull for support. As a dog's bark broke the stillness of the night, light from the tank cast the shadow of the dog on the snow.
“Are there dogs in the Summerland?”
“All good dogs go to the Summerland.”
Mikkel took another step. The icy wind burned his hands, his feet, his face. He gritted his teeth and pressed on with the bull. As they drew abreast of the open door, Mikkel stopped to look in and the bull stopped with him. A sheepdog stood in the door, its plumed tail wagging, its gaze fixed on his face.
Mikkel turned to stare at the golden light flowing from the Summerland. “Life is pain,” he said.
The bull turned his heavy head towards him. “I know.”
The dog sat down, its gaze still fixed on him, and its tail swept back and forth on the floor.
Mikkel closed his eyes, his thoughts drifting to Sigrun's bravery, Emil's determination, Tuuri's enthusiasm, Lalli's quiet competence, and Reynir's unexpected contributions. Their mission, their struggles, their small victories … After a long moment, he opened his eyes to face the bull, whose eyes held no judgement. He took a deep breath. “Will you wait for me?”
“Until the world ends.”
Mikkel pushed himself away from the bull, and the wind tore at him. He stumbled to the tank and dragged himself in as the dog licked his face, tail wagging ecstatically. There was a body on his bunk. He limped to the body and lay down, falling into darkness and pain.
The most welcome sight of Emil's life: the tank. It stood in a clearing in the forest, glowing in the moonlight. Just seeing it lent him new strength, but even as he broke into a run, the tank rumbled towards him. When it stopped and the door flew open, he didn't even object as the Icelander pulled him inside.
The tank continued forward as Reynir closed the door and Emil stumbled to the passenger seat and collapsed, muscles trembling with relief and the aftershock of adrenaline. His nose twitched at the peculiar stench filling the tank.
“Where are Sigrun and Mikkel?” Tuuri asked without looking at him. The headlights were off and she followed the older track by moonlight, her knuckles white on the controls.
“They're coming as fast as they can. Sigrun's sick —”
“Hypothermia.”
“Yeah, that, and Mikkel's helping her, and he sent me ahead to tell you to go back for them.” Reynir nudged Emil's shoulder, handing him a mug of broth and laying a warm bag in his lap. Warm, but also smelly.
“I knew I should go back,” Tuuri muttered. “Mikkel said to find a safe spot and stay there. But I knew I should go back. Why was I so stupid?”
“No —” Emil hesitated. He too wished she'd gone back, but Mikkel had put him in command. What would Mikkel say? “Uh, we were chased by a giant, and then we had to run around to escape. If you came after us, you could have run into the giant, or you could have missed us. Then we'd all be running around trying to find each other. No, like Mikkel said, you should stay in a safe spot where we could find you. Um, until now.”
“What if we miss them?”
“They're going to the tank's track. We'll find them there. Or … or if not, they'll be following my tracks. We'll just look for mine and turn if we need to.” He finished the broth and handed the mug to Reynir, standing behind him. “What is this st— smell?”
“We heated all that rice. It'll do to warm Sigrun up. That's what you do for hypothermia, you know. ”
“Yeah, I know.” He wrinkled his nose, then glanced at Reynir, returning from rinsing the mug. “Wait, the rice was in the back. How did you —”
Tuuri spared him an angry glance. “We checked the monitors, and we had the kitten, and I'm an excellent sniper. So we went and got the stuff. We're not helpless!”
“No, I didn't think so. No.” Emil stopped himself, because he had thought the non-immunes helpless. It went against all his history and training to imagine them outside in the Silent World without an immune guard, and yet they were right. Sigrun would need warmth, so they'd provided it for her.
They rode in silence, Tuuri intent on her driving, Reynir holding the back of her seat, and Emil rubbing his weary legs.
“There!” the three said together. Though they'd found their team members, Emil's heart sank at the sight. Mikkel sat slumped against a pile of debris, something black around his waist. Sigrun lay half-curled beside him, her head on his thigh. Neither moved as the tank rumbled up.
All tiredness left Emil as he leapt to his feet. Reynir was already pulling down Emil's bunk. Tuuri snatched up her rifle, planted the kitten on her shoulder, and, after a quick check of the monitors, pushed open the door. No commands were needed. While Tuuri stood guard, rifle in hand, Emil and Reynir ran to carry Sigrun inside and lay her on Emil's bunk, before returning for Mikkel. They repeated the process with him, his weight challenging Emil's already tired muscles. As soon as the men had Mikkel inside, Tuuri yanked the door shut and ran to her seat. Pivoting the tank, she drove the tank back along its track yet again while the men laid Mikkel on his bunk and began treatment.
They started with Sigrun, since she'd fallen in the canal. Emil expected her long black underclothes to be soaked through, but as he and Reynir removed them, they found her clothes dry though ill-fitting. The bandage on her arm was soaked, so they replaced it after cleaning the stitches. Only after they'd dressed her in warm, dry pajamas and turned to Mikkel did Emil realize what the man had done.
Swearing under his breath, not sure what he was swearing at, Emil broke the ice on clothes knotted around Mikkel's waist, then worked with Reynir to remove the big man's uniform and dress him warmly. He winced at the sight of Mikkel's blistered feet; the boots were not made to be worn without socks.
Having no language in common, the men worked together in silence. Reynir piled warm rice bags on and around Mikkel's torso, leaving his legs alone, and Emil did the same for Sigrun. Finally, they covered the patients with all the blankets they had. As soon as they finished, Reynir pulled out the first aid kit, pawing through it until he came up with a square glass bottle with an elaborate pattern incised on the front.
A wave of doubt crashed over Emil. What am I doing in command? We all know how to treat hypothermia, no one needs any orders about that, and the Icelander seems to know what he's doing with the remedies. Mikkel made a mistake giving me command …I'll just keep quiet and let him work. It's not like I know any better, and I can't talk to him anyway. He nodded to himself, retreating to watch in silence.
Reynir's usually cheerful expression was replaced by grim determination as he poured a small amount of red liquid into his hand. Dipping a finger in it, he dabbed it on Mikkel's nose, cheeks, and ears, before moving on to his fingertips and feet. Emil's nose wrinkled as the sharp scent of the remedy cut through the sour tang of hot, moldy rice. With the tank safely parked, Tuuri joined him in watching Reynir.
“Does he know what he's doing?” Emil asked, keeping his voice low, as if Reynir might understand.
“We went through the medicines while we were waiting. That's the frostbite remedy. It's supposed to be really good, and Reynir says his family swears by it.” Tuuri shrugged. “Let's hope it works. Though it looks like they just got nipped, except maybe his feet.”
As Reynir dabbed liquid on Sigrun's nose, her eyes fluttered open, unfocused and confused. She gave him a wide, silly smile. “Hey, it's the baggage!” she slurred, looking and sounding quite drunk. “There, I told you so. Or … wait, where'd she go? She was just here. Did you see her?”
Tuuri hurried to Sigrun's side. “I'm here. You have to stay still, now, Sigrun.” Emil followed her.
“Short stuff! Blondy!” Sigrun frowned, as if trying to piece together a puzzle. Her eyes widened. “The mare! She came for me, but I … she didn't have wings …” Her words trailed off as confusion clouded her features again. “Where's the big guy?”
“He's, ah, he's asleep,” Emil said.
“All tuckered out?” Sigrun laughed. “Oh, well, he's just a Dane.” She closed her eyes, and the smile faded as she drifted off.
“What are you giggling about?” Emil demanded of Tuuri. Sigrun had been rather silly, but then she wasn't tracking very well at the moment.
Tuuri giggled a little longer before replying. “It's what she said: ‘He's just a Dane.’ You guys are so much alike — your language, your clothes —” Emil opened his mouth to object, and she overrode him. “Before we got the uniforms, I mean. And the way you … move, walk around … everything. You're so much alike, but you think you're so different. It's just funny.” She shrugged.
Reynir gave them both a puzzled smile and went back to dabbing red liquid on Sigrun's cheeks, ears, fingertips, and toes. At least, Emil thought, he seemed less stressed. As the Icelander finished up, Tuuri asked a question and translated the answer to Emil, “They won't need another treatment, and we have a lot of the remedy left.”
“Good.” Emil watched Reynir store the bottle before turning back to Tuuri. “Look, we can't all stay up until they recover, so we'll have to set up sleep shifts.” That's not really taking command, is it? “And I'm, um, I'm pretty tired, so I'll take the first shift.”
“Sure! Four hours? Then I can wake you up when their cores are warm.”
Emil nodded, pulling down Reynir's bunk while the Icelander went forward to watch the monitors and Tuuri collected some rice bags to reheat. He stripped off his uniform, piled it at the foot of the bunk, and climbed in. Since the patients had all the blankets, he expected a chilly nap, but to his surprise, Tuuri brought him Reynir's long woolen coat and covered him up. He was asleep before she turned away.
Emil felt as if he'd just fallen asleep when Tuuri awakened him. “What's —” he began, before Tuuri raised a finger to silence him.
“Sigrun's asleep,” Tuuri whispered. “She's been awake and talking, but she's asleep now. Mikkel's still … you know, not awake. Their cores are warm, so we'll move some hot pads to their legs for a couple of hours. Reynir will take the sleep shift and you can take the watch. Okay?”
Emil nodded and climbed down, looking over their patients and the kitten snuggling against Sigrun's cheek. Beckoning Tuuri to Mikkel's side, he pointed out several sheets of paper decorated with elaborate abstract drawings, laid along Mikkel's body.
“Those are runes for warmth and health. Reynir made them.” Even in a whisper, Tuuri sounded defensive. “They can't hurt, even if you think they can't help.”
“Yeah, okay. Let's move the hot pads.”
With both of them working, the task was done within minutes and the runes laid on Mikkel again. Emil took over the watch, while Reynir headed for his bunk, drooping as if exhausted. Emil frowned, watching him and wondering what his problem was. He dismissed the thought and focused on the monitors. Tuuri could handle the patients for now.
“Emil.” Mikkel's voice was faint. “Where —”
“Mikkel, stay still! You have to stay still!” Emil abandoned his watch and ran at Tuuri's alarmed voice. Reynir didn't react; he'd been asleep for about ten minutes.
“Hey, Mikkel, here I am. I'm here.”
Tuuri stepped back so Emil could stand beside Mikkel. The Dane looked up at him, squinted, and smiled — the first real smile Emil had seen on his face. “Alive,” Mikkel said. “He didn't know.” He closed his eyes with a sigh, and the smile faded.
Tuuri pushed Emil aside and pressed a finger against Mikkel's neck. After a moment, she said, “Still beating. He should be okay.”
Emil stared at her. “That little movement could — could —”
“Could stop his heart, yes. At Keuruu, they taught us, ‘A chilled heart needs eight hours' rest’, and they meant strict rest. Isn't that what they taught you?”
“Yeah, but I didn't think that little movement would do any harm.” Emil glanced back at the monitors, far forward. “Look, why don't you take the watch? I'll take care of them. When he wakes up again, he might not remember this. So I should be right here.”
“Sure, sure.” With a final glance at the patients, Tuuri went forward.
Emil checked all the rice bags, traded a couple for warm bags on the stove, and settled on a chair, keeping an eye on the two patients.
Mikkel worries about me. Sigrun worries about me. And Tuuri does. I don't think anyone's ever worried about me before. Certainly not Father. Maybe the kids would … but they never knew I was in any danger.
The next time Mikkel awoke, Emil was there to reassure him that everyone was still alive. And also to tell him to stay still for the next seven hours.
First was the warmth. Mikkel drifted from darkness and cold through dreams and into warmth. For some time, he lay quiet, feeling the familiar contours of his bunk, the lump under his right hip and the hollow beside it. His head and shoulders were propped up on something soft. Smells filled his nostrils: the warmth of soup, the sharpness of bleach, a whiff of litter box in need of cleaning. The tank's heating system burbled softly to itself. At last, Mikkel opened his eyes and looked along his body. His feet tented the blankets, which moved reassuringly as he wiggled his toes.
“Mikkel?” Emil asked from his seat beside the bunk. “Are you awake?” When Mikkel turned to regard him, Emil straightened and said, “Everyone's fine. We're parked in the forest outside the city. You and Sigrun got frost-nipped, but Reynir treated you for that. Your feet got a little frostbitten and blistered. We've treated and bandaged them, and Tuuri says they'll be okay. Sigrun and Tuuri are asleep. Lalli's still out, but he grumbled at me when I tried to wake him up. Reynir's on watch. You have to stay still for another hour.”
“How many times have you told me that?”
Emil shrugged, smiling. “This is the fourth time.”
“I'll try to remember.” Mikkel licked his dry lips.
“Are you still thirsty? You want some soup?”
“Please. Thank you.”
With his back to Mikkel as he ladled soup into a mug, Emil said, “When we found you, I thought you were dead. Both of you.”
“We would have been, if you hadn't reached us in time.” Emil brought the mug to him and hesitated. “I think it's safe for me to hold the mug,” Mikkel said, lifting a hand to accept it. He cradled the mug with both hands, still craving its warmth. “I misjudged how far we'd gone,” he continued, “and how slowly we were moving. I should have sent you on earlier, before things were quite so dire. But you got to us in time, despite my error. You saved our lives. Thank you.”
“It was, I just, you know …” Emil trailed off, hunched his shoulders, blushed, and sat down, ducking his head and looking at his hands.
Mikkel sipped at his soup. Emil deserves praise, and not just for this. But if I say any more, he'll think I'm mocking him. As he looked around for some other topic, his gaze fell on the papers laid along his body. Reynir's drawings. Nice of the kid to try to help with his “magic”. Magic?
“Have you talked to Sigrun about what happened last night in the plaza?”
“No, I wanted to talk to you. I mean, you're … um …” He glanced over at Sigrun.
“A fellow skeptic.”
“Yeah. It was so strange, and I —”
“Wait.” At Emil's startled reaction, Mikkel went on, “I don't want you tell me about it. People are suggestible, and I could unconsciously incorporate your story into my own memories.”
“But —”
“We will talk, but not yet. For now, I want you to write down everything you can remember about what happened. As soon as I can safely sit up, I'll do the same. And I'll have Reynir and Tuuri write what they remember.”
Emil gave Sigrun another quick look. “I don't think Sigrun will, um, want to.”
“That's quite all right. The Norwegians have a strong oral tradition, and she wouldn't think the story's complete without tone of voice and gestures. We'll have her tell us, and I'll make notes.”
Emil nodded, pulled down the folding table, and hurried to the radio compartment to fetch paper, pen, and ink. Mikkel closed his eyes. For a moment, he remembered the terror of the previous evening. The racing of his heart, the certainty that death was imminent — it all came flooding back. He clenched his fists, willing the images to subside, clinging to his scientific approach as a defense. As the memory's surge of adrenaline passed, his taut muscles relaxed. He was safe in the tank, and he needed to rest. Soon he drifted off to the sound of pen scratching over paper. His eyes fluttered open now and then, catching sight of Emil hunched over his notes, before he slipped back into a doze.
“Done. Oh! Did I wake you up?” Mikkel opened his eyes to find Emil looking at him, eyes wide in concern.
“No, no, I wasn't really sleeping. So, you're done? Good. Now, please cover your papers so I won't see them by accident. Then take over the watch and send Reynir to talk to me.”
Emil hurried to the front, out of Mikkel's sight but not out of earshot. Mikkel smiled as he listened. After weeks of tutoring from Tuuri and sometimes Mikkel himself, Reynir could understand more Swedish than, “Me, watch. You, Mikkel.”
Reynir looked Mikkel over as he approached. “Are you all right? Emil sent me. Are you hurting? I thought I used enough of —”
“I'm quite all right.” Mikkel hastened to interrupt the other's anxious words and explain the need to record what had happened in the plaza. To his surprise, instead of rushing to do what he could to help, the Icelander clasped his hands together and looked away.
“Will — will Tuuri see it? What I write, I mean? Because I know how and all, but I never wrote very much, and I think my writing is kind of messy, and it's maybe hard to read, and —”
“Wait, Reynir. Think about it. Tuuri never met an Icelander before you, and she's never seen Icelandic handwriting. She only saw printed books. For all she knows, your handwriting is the highest form of Icelandic calligraphy.”
Reynir blinked at him several times before his customary delighted smile returned. “Sure! I'll write everything down right now!” Dropping into Emil's former chair, he took up the pen and went to work while Mikkel closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
This last hour of immobility seemed endless, but at length, Emil peered around the corner to say, “Tuuri, wake up. Sigrun, Mikkel, time's up. Eight hours! Reynir, watch,” he added, and the Icelander hastened to pass him and take over the watch.
Though Sigrun had appeared to be asleep, she reacted instantly, rolling to a sitting position. “Sit up slowly!” Mikkel said too late, as he suited action to words. The kitten, dislodged from Sigrun's side, hopped on his bunk, curled up in blankets warmed by his body, and fell asleep.
Sigrun grinned at him for a moment before closing her eyes and swaying a little. “Ooh, maybe the medic is right. Hey, Tuuri, be a good girl and bring me my boots.”
Tuuri dropped from her bunk above Mikkel, gave a sloppy salute, darted to the UV cabinet, retrieved the captain's boots, and helped her into them. At the same time, Emil donned his own boots and took up his rifle. Mikkel let out a sigh of relief when Sigrun pulled herself to her feet and stood for a long moment, then grinned at him. His training told him she should be safe after eight hours of rest, but he'd never had to test this training before.
Sigrun strode to the door as if she'd never been ill, scooping up her rifle on the way, and turned to glare at Emil as he followed. “Hey, pipsqueak, I don't need a guard.”
“No one goes out without a guard.” He opened the door for her and gestured her out with elaborate courtesy.
“I'm the captain. I give orders around here, and I say —” The argument was cut off as the door closed behind the two of them.
Without asking, Tuuri brought Mikkel's boots and eased them over his socks. He thought he could get used to being waited on hand and foot.
“Do you think we'll still go on to Odense after all this?” Tuuri asked, looking up at him with worried eyes.
“That's up to Sigrun, but I don't see why not. The rescue ship won't come for weeks, and we have to keep moving anyway. Odense is as good a destination as any.” As her expression remained worried, he added, “I'll push for it if necessary.”
She opened her mouth to answer just as Sigrun and Emil returned, so he shook his head to end the conversation. She nodded and stood, offering her hand to help him up. Chuckling at the contrast in their heights — she was more than a quarter meter shorter — he accepted her help and got to his feet. Stepping carefully to avoid further injuring his feet, he made his way to the door. He didn't argue when Emil escorted him out and back again.
On their return, he found the women going over the map, discussing routes to Odense; as expected, the captain wanted to continue with the plan. Leaving them to it, he seated himself and flipped over Reynir's notes so as not to be influenced by them; his handwriting was indeed messy, but Mikkel had seen far worse. As he took up the quill pen, the memory of the ghost attack sent a shiver down his spine. He paused, taking a deep breath to steady himself, before setting to work writing his own experience in the plaza.
“What are you writing?” Sigrun sat across the table from Mikkel and gave his notes a cursory glance. He didn't hide them from her; he doubted she could read upside-down Danish handwriting even if she wanted to, and he didn't expect she'd want to. Behind her, the typewriter in the radio compartment began to clatter.
“I'm making notes of what I experienced in the plaza. It's important to have clear records —”
“Danes!” Sigrun said, rolling her eyes. “Always scribbling stuff down. You want to hear what happened? I was —”
“Wait, please. Let me finish this, and then we'll all settle down and listen.” Sigrun shrugged and returned to Emil's bunk, where she leaned back, eyes closed. Even her iron constitution was worn down by her ordeal.
Mikkel and Tuuri finished their work almost simultaneously. She offered him a single typed page. “Reynir said you wanted this. It's not much, though.” When he accepted it and thanked her, she added, “I should read all these records. I am the official reporter, after all.”
“Of course. But for now, Sigrun is going to tell us what happened to her.” Tuuri nodded and pulled a chair over to where she could see and hear Sigrun but also translate for Reynir. Emil slipped into the seat across from Mikkel, and all waited for Sigrun's story.
“So, you want the story of the ghost attack,” Sigrun began, sitting up straight and looking them over. “First off, the stowaway wanted to drive away because the ghosts were coming. Now, I never heard of a bunch of ghosts attacking people before. Sometimes they make noises and throw things around, but that's all.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I didn't think it was safe to just drive away, and it wasn't. I mean, look what happened. But then the scout started screaming —”
At that moment, Lalli rolled out from under Mikkel's bunk and ran for the door, shedding blankets as he went. Tuuri shouted at him as he flung it open and jumped out, while Emil, the self-appointed guard, leapt up, stepping into his boots and snatching up his rifle.
“Wait, Emil, get his boots!” Tuuri shouted before he reached the door. Emil yanked open the UV cabinet door, pulled out a pair of boots, and was gone. Mikkel winced as he watched the two run out. Lalli had been unconscious for a day and a half; the pain of bare feet in the snow would be nothing compared to the man's desperate need for relief. At least Lalli was on his feet again and seemed none the worse for his magical coma. Magic. Again.
As Tuuri wrung her hands, watching the door, Mikkel and Sigrun looked at each other. “Let's let the children deal with this,” Mikkel said, and Sigrun nodded in tired agreement.
While they waited, Tuuri set out a bowl of soup and mug of water, pulled out a towel and a pair of socks, and stood by the door, arms folded. As soon as Emil returned with Lalli (wearing his boots), she broke into a torrent of Finnish scolding. Lalli hunched his shoulders and looked away, but allowed himself to be pushed to a chair.
As Tuuri removed his boots, dried his feet, and stuffed them into socks, Lalli polished off the soup and water. Emil took his bowl, refilled and returned it to Lalli, who dug in without complaint. Tuuri finished her scolding by draping a blanket around her cousin's shoulders, then returned to her chair and regarded Sigrun expectantly. Emil moved over to sit on Mikkel's bunk and petted the kitten, producing a purring audible throughout the quiet tank.
Sigrun looked around at her now-settled audience and began again as Mikkel made notes. Though the tank, normally chilly, was quite warm, he shivered as he wrote. Her experience matched his in every particular, even the other woman's words: “Soldiers! On your feet! Incoming!”
As Sigrun finished with a dramatic rendition of the explosion that had ended their strange battle, Mikkel turned to look at Emil. The Swede was staring at him, eyes wide and mouth half open, shaking his head ever so slightly left and right. Mikkel understood his reaction without words. Much as he had wanted to believe the ghost attack was a hallucination, deep inside he had known Sigrun and Emil had been with him in that hopeless defense. He rubbed his temples, feeling the beginnings of a headache, longing for a moment of peace, a chance to process everything without the pressure of dealing with the others.
“Mikkel, how —?” Emil seemed unable to finish the question.
Still rubbing his temples, Mikkel opened his mouth to answer, but Tuuri spoke first. “The woman! That was Rosli; it had to be. You saw her. She helped you fight the ghosts.” She sat back with a smile of satisfaction.
“Sure it was! I need to thank my comrade-in-arms.” Sigrun went forward, edging past Tuuri and disappearing from Mikkel's view.
“Reynir.” When Reynir peered around Tuuri, Mikkel continued in Icelandic, “Were you — Did you perceive yourself to be in the tank, fighting the ghosts?”
“No, I was in my haven, with my sheep. I wrote it all down for you. I sent my dog for Onni, and the ghosts attacked me, and Onni flew in and drove them away. He said something; I tried to write —”
“ ‘Onni flew in.’ ” Mikkel took a deep breath. “I'm going to have to read your notes, and then we'll talk.” He switched to Danish. “Emil, Sigrun's recollection of the events agrees with mine. With yours as well?”
“Y-yes. But that's not — we couldn't have —”
“I understand. Believe me, I do. But we have the proof right here in writing. We all three saw and felt the same things. Even down to our positions. You were to my right, Sigrun to my left, the woman behind me. Right?” Emil nodded, eyes still wide. “We must accept that something attacked us, something invisible to us but not to Reynir. It … somehow drew us into some kind of shadow realm where we fought it off. What else can we conclude?”
Emil shook his head again, scooped up the kitten, and held her close. Mikkel felt sorry for the younger man. As a medic, he himself had had some strange experiences. Icelandic healers sometimes produced results that he would never have expected. And then there were the remedies, which seemed to work only if stored in their rune-incised bottles … But the Swede had had no such background.
Still holding the kitten, Emil leaned forward to pick up all the notes, held them in his lap, and bowed his head as he spoke. “Tuuri said the, the woman was a ghost. Reynir said there were ghosts attacking us. But they weren't the same.” He looked up with an air of desperation. “That doesn't make sense. None of this makes any sense!”
As Mikkel sought an answer, Sigrun returned to the main compartment and asked the most practical question Mikkel had ever heard from her, sending a chill through him that had nothing to do with hypothermia.
“The ghosts came yesterday at sunset. What do we do if they come back?”
“What do we do if they come back?”
The air handler hummed in the silence. After several seconds, Tuuri said, “Maybe they won't. Maybe Onni killed them all.”
Sigrun frowned. “Onni?”
“Onni's my brother. Reynir called for him, and he came to us. He's a really strong mage, and he sang a runo … A, uh, a magic spell, I think you'd say.” Tuuri smiled, a mixture of pride and awe. “That was the explosion you saw. But I don't know if it killed the ghosts. Maybe Lalli knows. I'll ask him.” The scout looked up from his soup, watched in silence as she muttered something to Reynir before seating herself and taking up a sheet of paper and a pen. Rosli wished Lalli and Reynir would hurry up and learn Swedish, though at least Reynir was trying.
Sigrun closed her eyes, drumming her fingers on her thighs as she waited. The kitten's purr joined the hum of the air handler and the quiet Finnish discussion, for Emil had set down his papers and cuddled the little creature with both hands. Mikkel still sat silent, rubbing his temples.
Rosli liked all of the team, but especially her fellow Dane. Not that Mikkel was really a Dane, any more than this monster-haunted wasteland was really Denmark. Mikkel and the others were the products of a desperate, generations-long battle for survival in a world turned into a nightmare. But he spoke her tongue, and she favored him.
“Okay,” Tuuri said, switching back to Swedish. “The ghosts are still out there. Onni can't have killed — or, you know, destroyed — them; no one can. He drove them off and probably hurt them, but Lalli can't do that.” She gave her cousin a quick glance. “He's not — well, he's a different kind of mage. He doesn't think Onni can do it again either, or at least not anytime soon.”
Sigrun scowled. “We're on our own.”
Not on your own. Those ghosts aren't getting into my tank again if I have anything to say about it!
Tuuri looked down at her notes and shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “But Onni told me ghosts are harmless unless they're guarding something. So maybe now that they've driven us off, they'll just go back to standing guard.”
Mikkel spoke without lifting his head. “We slept in the plaza two nights ago. If they were guarding the plaza, why didn't they attack then?”
“I don't —” Tuuri stopped, staring at him. “They attacked after we went to Kastellet. You took that box; maybe that's what they were guarding, so they came after us.”
That was enough to make him look at her. “It's just a box. It was stuck down in a drawer and —”
“Yeah, well,” Sigrun said, “even they want their box back, we're not going into that gods-forsaken city again.”
“I don't need it anymore. We can just throw it out. The one from the plaza, too, and the note. The ‘ghosts’ can have it all.”
Tuuri shook her head. “We shouldn't just leave it in the snow. I'll ask Lalli to find a place that's not too ruined, and we can leave it there.” Reynir nudged her, and they muttered back and forth.
As they spoke, Sigrun looked from her to Mikkel, frowning. “Good idea, but what if they keep coming?”
“Reynir says the dead can't cross running water,” Tuuri answered.
Sigrun leaned forward, cocking her head and narrowing her eyes. “Yeah?”
“I heard that, too,” Emil said, surprising everyone. “ My nanny used to tell me ghost stories, so …” He shifted uncomfortably.
Mikkel squeezed his eyes shut, breathed deeply, shrugged, before asking, “Can they cross using bridges?”
Emil lifted his chin and glared at him. “How should I know?”
“I'm not mocking you. That's a serious question.”
“I don't know. She didn't say.” Emil ducked his head and returned to petting the kitten. Soon Tuuri reported Reynir didn't know either.
I heard that too, long ago. If only I could tell them! But is it true? I've crossed running water. But then, I'm inside my tank. Those others — they aren't really like me at all. They're just shadows.
“We could cross at a ford,” Tuuri suggested.
Emil set the kitten aside. “We could cross over a bridge and blow it up behind us!” Mikkel and Sigrun rolled their eyes at his sudden enthusiasm, and Rosli would have laughed if she could.
Sigrun drummed her fingers on her thighs again while the others fell silent and watched her tensely. After several seconds, she gave a curt nod. “Any other ideas? Okay, then, I guess we'll go with these. Short stuff, send the scout out to look for someplace to leave that box-thing and a stream we can cross somehow.”
“We need fuel,” Tuuri said. “We burned up a lot, driving around last night and then heating the tank.” Reminded of the issue, Rosli turned down the thermostat; Mikkel and Sigrun were warm enough now.
Emil got to his feet. “I'll go.” As he donned his boots and took up his rifle, Sigrun did the same. “Wait, Sigrun, I don't need a guard.”
“Everybody gets a guard. That's my orders.” They were still arguing when the door closed behind them. After a quick command from Tuuri, Lalli followed. Left alone, Tuuri, Mikkel, and Reynir talked among themselves.
Rosli shifted to the Other Realm, leaving them to their unintelligible Icelandic discussion. Standing up from her driver's seat and stretching, she strolled to the back compartment without a glance at the monsters rampaging outside. The passing decades had shown that they couldn't get in and she couldn't get out, and watching them was as pointless as watching a screensaver.
The interior of the tank in this realm had the same bunks and cabinets as the tank in the material realm, but no mattresses on the bunks, no clothes in the cabinets. Rosli seated herself on Mikkel's bunk, patted the rifle that lay beside her, and regarded the floor, remembering.
“Uhh, Sigrun?” Tuuri said after Reynir's urgent words. “Reynir has a question … he says there are ghosts coming, so he really insists that we drive somewhere else. Tonight, not tomorrow.”
“I … don't understand the question. There wasn't even a question in there. Is the question ‘is he a moron?’ ”
“The question is: can we go somewhere now?”
“No! Are you a moron? Have you noticed that it's evening? Tell him to tell the ghosts to go away if he's so bothered by them!”
As Tuuri turned to argue with Reynir, Rosli surveyed the tank's surroundings. Nothing moved but the shadows creeping across the plaza with the sunset. Nothing alarming, she thought, until Lalli howled and Sigrun ordered Emil to shut him up. Rosli felt something slam into her, and everyone collapsed but Tuuri.
Without warning or intention, Rosli found herself in the Other Realm with a shadow hovering above her, its icy hand touching her face, sending searing pain through her. In one motion, she quick-drew her pistol and fired between the shadow’s burning eyes. As it withdrew, shrieking thinly, she leapt to her feet and found Mikkel, Sigrun, and Emil lying on the floor beside her. More shadows pawed at them, and she fired even as she manifested weapons for the three and shouted at them to get up.
On their feet, shoulder to shoulder in a square, the four fought against the shadows, but she could see they were losing. More and even more oozed through the walls, their passage sending bolts of pain through her.
And then the world exploded, and she was back in the material realm with the others getting to their feet. Rosli shifted back to the Other Realm, fearing the shadows had taken over in her absence. The comforting steel walls of the tank remained, but the shadows were gone. Still, she focused her energy, manifesting a solid rifle in her hands. She flipped the selector to full auto, smiling at the satisfying click.
Her trainers had drummed into her head that full auto was a waste of ammunition, but in this realm, her rifle would never run out. She wished she'd thought to do this in the first fight, but she hadn't had time to think, and she didn't have the strength to manifest rifles for all of them, anyway. Now, though, any shadows that sought to invade her tank would face a hail of lead.
For the next several hours, as the tank worked its way through the ruins in the material realm, Rosli stood guard with her rifle. One shadow pushed through the walls, but fled as she fired, the deafening thunder of her gunfire reverberating off the walls. If it was a scout, she thought grimly, her show of force must have discouraged further attacks.
I wonder how the shadows brought the others here. Maybe I could do that too …
No! What if I brought someone here and then couldn't send him back? Much too dangerous.
Tuuri and Reynir both got here; maybe they'll come back, or one of the others will come.
Rosli gathered her strength and manifested an overstuffed armchair and hassock. Today, she made them crimson with gold dragons, incongruous in the sterile gray of the tank. Leaning back and propping up her feet, she reveled in the feel of her human body against the cushions. How many years — how many decades — had she sat in chairs like this to remember every detail of her short life, consider the past, and speculate about the future? But she had always sat alone and lonely.
In the material realm, Rosli now had her team, but not her human body. She could watch and listen, though she couldn't communicate with them. Thinking of the team, she looked around her tank again. She doubted the shadows could come back during the day, and she would feel them if they did. With the rifle already lying on the bunk, she could fight back without hesitation. Did she have to stay and wait for them all day?
Rosli stood, dissolving the chair and hassock, straightening as the strength flowed back into her. With a final glance around the tank, she shifted back to the material realm.
“Mikkel, sit! Stay!”
Tuuri folded her arms and stood her ground as Mikkel loomed before her. Behind her, the sound of Reynir's sweeping stopped. After a moment, the big Dane gave a slight headshake, sank back on his chair beside the monitors, and rested his feet on the pile of blankets on another chair.
“Good,” Tuuri said, resisting the temptation to say “Good boy.” She was taking much too much pleasure in ordering him about, now that he too had to stay in the tank. “Now, what do you need?”
“The latrine,” Mikkel said drily.
“Oh …” She hadn't thought of that, especially since he had been out not long before. But he was an old man, after all, and she'd heard old men had such problems.
“We have a chamber pot,” Reynir said over her head. She could hear the grin as he spoke. Like her, he was still riding the high from proving themselves valuable team members the night before.
Mikkel gave the quick, sly smile she'd come to recognize. There was a joke somewhere that she was missing. “In that case,” he said, “I suppose I'll settle for some willow bark tea.”
“Are your feet hurting?” Tuuri asked, her solicitousness not entirely feigned. “Or your knees? I'll get the comfrey salve —”
“No, they're fine. It's just this situation giving me a headache.” When she turned to take out the jar of dried bark, he added, “You know, I inventoried the medical kit before we set out, and there was no comfrey salve. I've wondered where that salve came from.”
With a little help from Reynir, Tuuri explained the comfrey caper while the water heated, and Mikkel was even heard to chuckle as they described their efforts to hide the odor. As she brought him a mug of tea, she asked, “What about the situation troubles you? I thought you understood.” She had difficulty imagining the mindset of a skeptic, or what might trouble him.
“I accept that we were attacked by entities visible only to Reynir —”
“Lalli saw them, too.”
“— visible only to Reynir and Lalli. Ghosts, for lack of a better term. I accept that there's another realm, so to speak, where Sigrun and Emil and I, and the entity called Rosli, fought the ghosts. The ghosts were driven off by an explosion, and both Reynir and Lalli say that your brother caused that. So, again, I accept that.”
“Right, so what's the problem?”
Mikkel closed his eyes and took a long drink of tea before answering. “You said the Finnish soul has three parts. The henki is the breath of life.”
“Yes, exactly. It's what keeps us alive.”
“Okay, and we have that. The itse is the personality.”
“Close enough.”
“And we have that, too. But then there's the luonto, which you say provides strength of body, mind, will, and magic.” He stopped for another drink.
“That's right.”
“But we non-Finns don't have luontos, yet we still have strength of body and so on. Also, Onni has a luonto that's an owl, and Reynir has that sheepdog, yet the sheepdog isn't a luonto; it's a fylgja, a companion spirit that's not part of him.”
“Right again. So …?”
“So, why? Why do you Finns have three-part souls and luontos, and we don't? Why does Reynir have a fylgja? Where do these things come from? Why is … any of this?” He waved his free hand helplessly before rubbing his temples.
Tuuri looked back at Reynir, who leaned on his broom and shrugged. He'd told her about fylgjas, which all Icelanders and Norwegians — maybe even all Danes and Swedes — had. “I don't know,” she said at last. “I guess our gods provide for us our way, and your gods provide for you your way.”
“I have no gods.” Mikkel finished the tea and held out the mug. “More, please.” As Tuuri blinked, struggling to grasp this extraordinary statement — how could someone have no gods? — he waved at the monitors and added, “Lalli's back.”
Reynir hurried to open the door before Lalli reached it. Once inside, Lalli slipped past Mikkel to grab the map from the small office compartment and laid it on the table. He leaned on the table, shoulders slumped and face tired, but no trace of weariness entered his voice.
“You go this way. Washed out there. You can get past —”
“Running water?” Tuuri asked hopefully.
Lalli didn't look at her, but his voice held annoyance. “Shallow. Frozen.” His finger traced a road. “Don't turn here; there's a thing down that road. I marked a tree for you past there so you know where to turn. The marks take you to this road. There's a bridge here over running water. You can get across. Here's a camping place.” He tapped the map and looked up at her. “Give me the things for the ghosts. I found a place.”
“We're going without you?” Even as Tuuri spoke, there was a thump against the tank. Since Mikkel hadn't cried a warning, it had to be Sigrun and Emil with firewood.
“I'll catch up. You have to go. Fast.” Lalli stared at her, one of his impatient stares, so without more questions, she hurried to find the two boxes and the note. As he accepted them and opened the door, Sigrun and Emil jumped back in surprise. Lalli hopped down and sprinted away without a word.
“What was that all about?” Sigrun asked as she climbed in, followed by Emil, still brushing twigs and bits of bark off his jacket.
Tuuri tossed off a quick instruction to Reynir to get the tank ready to move before reporting Lalli's plans to the others.
“You mean you're just leaving Lalli behind?” Emil sounded disbelieving and even accusing.
“He's got to dump those boxes somewhere over that way.” Tuuri waved towards the north. “But you know how fast he is; he'll catch up.”
Emil shook his head, but offered no further argument. Mikkel moved to his usual seat in the front, Sigrun and Emil did the same, and after folding up the table and stowing the chairs, Reynir took his position behind Tuuri's seat. With a final quick look around, Tuuri set the tank in motion.
Lalli's instructions, brief though they were, were clear. While passing the forbidden turn, she glanced down the road, longing for a glimpse of the “thing” that blocked it. An immobile giant, perhaps? She sighed and kept driving. If the past weeks hadn't tempered her curiosity, at least they had given her an understanding of risks.
White marks showed on the trees where Lalli had cut away a bit of bark, and Tuuri made the turn indicated. Lalli seemed to understand precisely the dimensions and capabilities of their tank, for he had blazed a trail that wound between trees, sometimes with mere centimeters to spare. Leafless twigs scraped along the tank's flanks and roof, and Tuuri hoped they weren't leaving scratches. Surely, though, Rosli would understand the necessity. Tuuri whispered an apology, drawing a brief glance from Sigrun, but no questions.
After a slow and jolting ride through the forest, they came to a relatively clear road and Tuuri turned to follow it. Reynir leaned forward and offered to take over driving, but she declined. For now, the route was too rough for his lesser skills. She regretted the need to refuse him, for her hands cramped on the controls as the afternoon passed and still they crept down the battered road, crushing bushes and detouring around volunteer trees.
“Finally,” Sigrun muttered as the bridge appeared ahead, its span silhouetted against the late afternoon sky, already reddening with the approaching sunset. “Okay, my man, get ready to blow up a bridge!”
“Let me get us across first!”
“Sigrun,” Mikkel said. “You'll need a dagger, and I won't be using mine for a while.” He drew his dagger and held it out to her, hilt first. Sigrun didn't answer for several seconds before thanking him and accepting it, and Tuuri briefly wondered what the problem was, but the driving drew her full attention.
The bridge was rickety with several gaps, but Lalli had judged it well, and they got across without it collapsing beneath them. As soon as Tuuri brought the tank to a halt a safe distance away, Emil leapt out to gather his explosives, Sigrun behind him as guard. A biting wind whipped through the open door, carrying the muffled rush of the unfrozen stream and the crunch of their footsteps on the snow and ice.
“Don't blow it up until Lalli gets here,” Tuuri called as Reynir and Mikkel crowded behind her to peer through the door. “Do you see any ghosts?” she asked the Icelander.
“No, not yet. I don't think the shadows are dark enough.” Reynir shivered. “I hope this works. Old aunty Helga said that about ghosts not crossing running water, but she was old, and maybe she was just repeating something she'd heard.”
“We don't plan to come back this way,” Mikkel said, “so if it doesn't work, we’ve lost nothing but a few explosives. And this gives Emil a little innocent destructive pleasure.”
“If it doesn't work,” Tuuri said, “I don't know what we can do. If Onni doesn't come back …”
No one answered, and the Sun began to set. Emil hovered around the plunger detonator, set firmly on the frozen ground. His gloved hands stretched occasionally towards the T-shaped handle, ready to send the fatal surge of electricity down the wire to the charges beneath the bridge, but still he waited for Lalli to return.
At last, as long shadows stretched across the stream, Lalli sprinted down the road and over the bridge. As soon as he reached Emil's position, Emil slammed down the detonator's handle. The bridge erupted in a thunderous roar, the sound rolling across the landscape.
Emil had judged his explosives well; only the smallest shards of shattered rock and wood pattered harmlessly on the tank's roof. From the safety of the tank, Tuuri watched as Lalli, Emil, and Sigrun raced for cover, ducking and shielding their heads with their arms, Lalli jumping in first with the others close behind. As soon as the door closed, Tuuri gunned the engine, sending the tank down the road at its best speed.
“Wasn't that the awesomest? Boom!” Sigrun shouted as she and Emil came forward with broad, crazed grins to take their accustomed seats. Tuuri spared them only a glance; the road was in terrible shape and she needed to get them away from the site of the explosion. Ghosts weren't the only threats, and that noise would have woken up everything for kilometers.
It was full dark when Tuuri brought the tank to a halt in the clearing Lalli had chosen. Since they'd lost the perimeter sensors in fleeing from the ghosts, there was nothing to do but set watches, have supper, and go to bed.
That night was quiet, and nothing disturbed their rest.
“I'm getting creeped out by that soulless horizon over there,” Sigrun said, leaning to look past Tuuri at the treeless marsh stretching away to their left. Dead trees stood like skeletal fingers reaching from the water. “I heard there'd be no mountains, but I didn't expect the view to be this disturbing. I don't understand why any ancient folks chose to live in places like these.”
“Believe it or not,” Mikkel answered in the annoying, didactic tone he sometimes assumed, “flat fertile land was highly valued by many. No doubt this was valuable farmland back then. I suppose there were flood controls that have failed. The ancient farmers —”
“Humph, yeah. Apparently they didn't care about how hard that is to defend.” She held up the map. “Short stuff, how long is this trip going to take?”
“Angle left,” Lalli said from his position standing behind Tuuri. “Now straight. Watch for sunken walls.” She didn't ask what she was avoiding on the road; he wouldn't explain anyway.
Gripping the controls tightly as the tank ground over frozen mud and leafless bushes, Tuuri guided them past a collapsed farmhouse, its roof still visible above the marsh. Far off, a flock of sheep grazed on the tough marsh grasses. She risked several glances at them, telling herself they couldn't be sheep beasts wandering about in the cold bright day. “Well, if we're lucky,” she answered Sigrun, “we can travel on the big roads most of the way, once we get to them. There's only a couple of cities that we need to drive around. And the big bridge should still be there, according to some naval sightings.”
“Sooo … you're saying it'll be a quick ride? A couple of days? Yes? No? Yes?”
“Ah … maybe? I'll do my best.”
“Go back to the road,” Lalli said, and Tuuri breathed a sigh of relief as she guided the tank to the right. Ahead, the ground rose, and the cracked and overgrown road disappeared into a forest. Lalli yawned in her ear before adding, “Follow the route I gave you.” The sound of Lalli's second yawn faded toward the back of the tank, and he was soon replaced by Reynir, a warm presence at her back.
As the tank ground through the forest, low branches scraped over the roof and sides, and Tuuri winced at the thought of Rosli's reaction. Sigrun grumbled, “This is too slow. At this rate, it'll be dark by the time we reach this camping place.”
“I can't go any faster.” Tuuri bit her lip, forced the whine out of her voice, tried to sound official. Like Mikkel, in fact. “I can't risk damaging the tank in this dense growth.”
Sigrun gave an annoyed-sounding snort but answered, “Yeah, okay.”
The day had not started well. As usual, Tuuri had called to Öresund base, and as usual, only the crackle of static answered. To Reynir's worried questions, she had explained that, although there weren't many grosslings around them here in the wilderness, all of Copenhagen, with all its trolls and all their static, lay between them and the base. “Still,” she had added, “ships pass through the Øresund all the time; we can contact one once we're farther away from the city.”
Then, Lalli had returned to say the road ran through a marsh for several kilometers, so he would have to direct her around ditches and pits in the mud. And as they set out for the next campsite, she had realized that it was the 2nd of January. In all the worry and confusion of the day before, they'd done nothing to welcome the new year. She could only hope the gods would understand and forgive their failure, and not visit them with a year of bad luck. At least Reynir had muttered a prayer when Mikkel was distracted by Sigrun.
As Tuuri thought about the morning, a branch snapped, sliding down the windshield. Sigrun leaned forward to watch as it fell off. Another branch cracked overhead, and she unbuckled her seat belt with sudden energy. “Blondy! Grab your stuff; we've got work to do.” Emil's quick footsteps followed Sigrun's to the back.
“What's wrong?” Reynir asked, his tone anxious. “Where are they going?” The sound of rifles being checked floated forward.
“Nothing's wrong,” Mikkel said. “Here, have a seat. I assume they're just taking advantage of all these broken branches. Free fuel, and we won't have to gather wood tonight.”
Reynir waited until the door clanged open and closed before taking Sigrun's vacated seat, fastening his belt as tentatively as if he expected to be shouted at. When Tuuri glanced over, she saw determination in his expression. He leaned forward to give her a tentative smile, and she had to focus on avoiding the larger trees to keep from smiling back.
Some while later, several thumps told her the others had opened and closed the back door. Before Tuuri could reassure Reynir, who was already asking what happened, Mikkel said, “They're throwing fuel in the back compartment. They can't use the chute with the tank bouncing around like this. We'll put it in the chute tonight.”
“They'll put it in the chute,” Tuuri corrected. “You'll stay off your feet, or they'll never heal.”
“I can't just sit and be useless, or Sigrun will leave me in a ditch somewhere.”
“Would — would she really do that?”
Tuuri shook her head, not looking at Reynir as she squinted on the road ahead. “No, she wouldn't. Don't listen to him.”
“She left a gaggle of recruits to be eaten by trolls because they didn't clean their rifles,” Mikkel said.
“She did not! It was one recruit, and she left him safe in camp —”
“Perhaps you misunderstood the story. Swedish is your third language, after all.”
“I think Norwegian is your third language. Anyway, recruits come in flocks, not gaggles.”
Mikkel chuckled, Reynir laughed, and suddenly the day didn't seem so bad after all.
“Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base.” Only static answered. Tuuri shut off the radio and joined the others for breakfast.
“Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base.” The static seemed louder today, mocking her efforts. Maybe a different call? “Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base or any ship at sea.” But even the expanded call brought nothing but static, and Tuuri gave up for the day.
“Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base or any ship at sea.” Tuuri drummed her fingers on the desk, expecting another disappointing morning. “Silent World Expedition calling —”
“Bára Björn calling Silent World Expedition. Radio technician Þorsteinn Gunnarsson here. Is that Tuuri?”
Even through the crackle of static, Tuuri heard excitement in Þorsteinn's Icelandic voice. “Yes, Tuuri here, sending update. All is well. We're outside Copenhagen, heading for Odense. Any news for us?” When no answer came, she repeated her news twice more.
“All well, outside Copenhagen, going to Odense. Correct?” The static was growing more intense; the ship must be passing an inhabited area.
“Correct, yes. You're breaking up. Any news for us?”
“No news, sorry. Good luck, Tuuri. Bára Björn, out.”
“Silent World Expedition, out.”
The others were less excited than Tuuri expected when she reported the contact. But then, perhaps they, like her, preferred to avoid unneeded advice and orders from the sponsors safe in Sweden.
“Maybe tomorrow we'll hear some news about Onni,” Reynir suggested as they set off once more. “But that sailor knew your name. If anything had happened to your brother, he'd probably know, right?” Tuuri nodded with little confidence. “I'll keep trying to reach him, though,” Reynir added, the same assurance he'd given on previous days. Something in his tone made Tuuri glance back at him, but he was staring thoughtfully at nothing.
At least there'd be plenty to eat. Gathering fallen wood behind the tank worked so well that Sigrun and Emil had taken time each day to hunt, trotting into camp with rabbits one day and deer the next.
Tuuri took great pleasure in making Mikkel stay off his feet, joined by the others, even Reynir, who scolded him that evening for standing to stir their stew. Rolling his eyes at Tuuri, Mikkel seated himself on his bunk and took up a book: “Field Guide to Medicinal Plants & Herbs of Denmark”.
“How useful is that?” Tuuri asked in Swedish, since Sigrun and Emil were cleaning their rifles nearby. “I mean, all those leaves and flowers and things won't come out 'til Spring, and we'll be rescued before then.”
“There are some things available now.” Mikkel gave her a sly smile. “Comfrey roots and such.”
Sigrun looked over at them and humphed, “Rabbit food!”
Before they could answer, Reynir tapped his ladle on the pot with newfound authority and announced, “Supper!” in Swedish. Even Lalli rolled out from his den to enjoy his stew of venison, rabbit, and rabbit food.
Reynir had first watch that night, and Tuuri had second. As they edged past each other, Tuuri to the monitors and Reynir to the sleeping compartment, he looked down at her to say, “I'm going to talk to Onni.” This time it sounded like a promise rather than reassurance.
Reynir leans on a rock and plays his pipes for the sheep grazing in a grassy hollow. Realizing where he is, he drops the pipes and leaps to his feet. The dog regards him for a moment from a high, rough rock before turning back to watching the sheep.
“I made it! I did it!” He climbs up to check the dog. A streak of white hair runs down the shaggy flank, but the ghost wound is healed. “I need to find Onni. Will you go with me?” As the dog glances at him and then away, “Oh, okay, I'll go alone.”
Concentrating on Onni, picturing the man's face in his mind, Reynir strides out onto the quiet sea. The mist clears to his right, and he trots that way. When something dark looms through the mist, he stops, looking around, hoping the dog has followed to guide him.
What if it's Kastellet again? Or something worse?
The waves roll onward in the silence, raising and lowering him as they pass. After several seconds, Reynir clenches his fists and strides forward once more, every sense alert.
His knees weaken for a moment as he recognizes the craggy granite cliff of Onni's haven, the rocky shore, and, at last, the man himself sitting on a boulder, arms around his knees as he stares into the autumnal forest.
Reynir stops just offshore to call, “Onni?”
Onni jumps to his feet, raising his hands as if, Reynir thinks, he means to cast a spell.
“It's just me! Just Reynir! Can I talk to you?”
Onni lowers his arms, hops down from his boulder, and gestures for Reynir to join him on the shore. “How is Tuuri? And Lalli?”
“Oh, Tuuri's great!” Onni's scowl reminds Reynir he's talking to Tuuri's protective older brother. “I mean, she's fine. So's Lalli. Everyone's fine.” Onni's scowl remains, and Reynir searches for another topic. “And, and, thank you for the other night; that was awesome!”
“Yes, yes.” Onni shrugs as if indifferent to the praise, but his scowl is gone.
“Tuuri said you might have lost your, uh, luonto —”
Onni glances up at an owl perched on a branch with its eyes closed and its head resting on its breast. “No. But we're tired. We can't do that again.” He shakes his head. “I've never met spirits like those before.”
Reynir follows his gaze to the sleeping owl, and his hand rises to his throat as he thinks of the spirits. “Those spirits, uh, I think they're people. Dead people, I mean. Ghosts. They came from these creepy old sick rooms full of skeletons.” He shudders.
“They're not like … But then, they're not Finnish ghosts. What do you know of your people's ghosts?”
Reynir shifts his weight, looking down at broken rocks and fallen leaves. “Oh, I – I don't know about ghosts. I don't know anything, really.”
Onni's scowl is back. “Is the training in Iceland that bad?”
“Oh, no, I don't have any training. I'm just a shepherd.”
“I … see.”
Reynir shuffles his feet, feeling as if he's home, facing his father's disappointment after yet another mistake. There must be something he can say to Tuuri's brother … “Can you do something with them? Tuuri said you were a psychopomp.”
Onni's scowl fades as he narrows his eyes and stares off into the mist. “I might not be able to. Even if they are like Finnish ghosts … Human souls are tricky. They become scared and frustrated if they can't find their way to the afterlife, which makes them grow wrong. And angry. To guide them forward, I'd need to know about their former selves, but as decayed as they were, I doubt they have enough human left in them to even remember who they used to be. Honestly, I've never heard of a soul that's been lost for more than a few years. Even without help, they usually find their path eventually. I can't imagine what 90 years of despair must have done to them.”
“We crossed running water and blew up the bridge behind us. Will that help?”
“Probably.” Onni returns his gaze to Reynir. “They might lose track of you, or forget about you, when they have to find a way across running water. Otherwise, you need to keep your distance. If you see more, don't approach. If they follow you, keep moving. When we're stronger, or if I can get through on the radio, I'll teach Lalli something that might drive them away.”
Reynir leans forward eagerly. “What about me? I'm here. I want to help, if there's anything I can do. Maybe … you could teach me something too?”
“Oh. No.” As Reynir takes a step back, wondering how he offended the man, Onni pinches the bridge of his nose and adds, “I can't teach you the language to reach my gods. You'll need training from your own people.”
“But I don't know any mages other than you! Well, you and Lalli, but I don't think —”
“I can't help you. I don't know any Icelandic mages. You can go now.”
Reynir lay with his eyes closed, the tank's lights glowing through his eyelids. Shuffling noises and a whiff of disinfectant told him Mikkel was awake and treating his feet. Sigrun would be on watch, he knew, and more shuffling — and an absence of snores — told him Emil was awake in the bunk below. It was morning, and he had to get up.
Rolling over, Reynir opened his eyes to see Tuuri in her bunk — or rather, to see a bundle of blankets with ash-blonde hair at the far end. As always, he thought with a smile, she was trying to get just a few more minutes of sleep.
After dressing and helping Mikkel ease his uniform boots over his blistered feet, Reynir joined Mikkel and Emil in going outside in the icy darkness for their morning routine. When they returned, Sigrun and Tuuri took their turn outside while Reynir started breakfast and Emil set the table. Then, as Reynir stirred porridge, Mikkel inspected, disinfected, and redressed Sigrun's arm.
While the others chatted as they ate, Reynir kept quiet. He wanted to tell Tuuri about his visit with Onni, but he couldn't do it now, not with Sigrun and Emil present to interrupt for translations. Once the tank was moving, though, and the other two were out gathering wood …
As Reynir washed their dishes, Lalli returned from scouting, handed Mikkel a grimy, spider-webbed box, and accepted a bowl of porridge with a scowl strikingly similar to Onni's. Reynir hastily directed his attention to Mikkel so as not to laugh at the Finn's expression.
Sitting on his bunk, the Dane opened the box to reveal a pair of large faux-leather ankle boots with thick fake-fleece padding. Sigrun took one to examine with Emil, while Mikkel and Tuuri discussed the other. Sigrun laughed, and though Reynir didn't understand all her words, he caught “big feet”. Emil joined the laughter, and after a moment, so did Tuuri. Mikkel glanced up at Reynir, and the two tall men shared a wordless look of understanding before Mikkel slipped on the first boot and laced it up.
After Lalli finished his breakfast and he and Tuuri went forward for a Finnish discussion of the day's journey, Sigrun and Mikkel had a long conversation with frequent gestures at his new boots. Reynir cleaned up and put away the cooking gear, wishing his Swedish were more advanced. After Sigrun clapped Mikkel on the back and went forward with Emil, Mikkel got to his feet, took a few steps back and forth, and said to Reynir, “These boots are well padded, much better than my uniform boots. I'm putting myself on light duty in and around the tank, so you two won't be doing all the cleaning from now on.”
“So Sigrun won't leave you in a ditch somewhere?”
Mikkel chuckled and went forward; Reynir followed, stepping aside as Lalli fled the crowd back to his den. Once they all took their accustomed places, Tuuri eased the tank into motion, and they were on the way again.
Reynir stood behind Tuuri, waiting for Sigrun and Emil to leave, and found himself thinking about Mikkel's new boots. He'll be outside helping with the wood after we park, and we can talk alone, just me and Tuuri. Not that I'd say anything that he'd object to, no, no, but when he's around, they talk so much to each other, skald to skald. It would be so nice to just talk to her without him. Wait, am I jealous?
Reynir had never been jealous before. Envious, yes, when his siblings could travel freely and he was left behind watching the sheep. The thought that he was jealous of Mikkel was so unsettling that Reynir forced it aside and focused on watching the landscape. The tank crunched along the shoulder of a wide highway full of cars, rust-ridden and weathered, but still too sturdy for the tank to drive over or through them. Though nature was taking over the shoulder along with everything else, the undergrowth here was less dense than farther away from the road. Still, there was no shortage of trees stretching their long branches towards the road, and many low-hanging branches broke off and fell behind the tank.
When the outer door clanged shut behind Sigrun and Emil, and Mikkel beckoned Reynir to sit beside him, Reynir had to push away the unworthy thought that he had gotten between Tuuri and Mikkel. But now it was time to describe his visit with Onni. Mikkel couldn't do that!
Tuuri's hands tightened on the steering wheel as Reynir described Onni's tired owl. “But was he hurt?” she broke in.
“He didn't look hurt, just tired,” Reynir reassured her before continuing his tale.
“Ninety years of despair,” Tuuri repeated softly when Reynir repeated Onni's comments about the ghosts. “No wonder they're so angry.”
“But we're not to blame,” Mikkel put in.
Reynir shrugged. “Onni said there wasn't much human left in them, so maybe they don't even know we're not from their time.” At Mikkel's nod, he continued his recitation to the end.
“So he said he can't teach you anything,” Tuuri said, as she steered around the wreckage of a vehicle that had run off the road. “I wonder why not.”
“Maybe Finnish magic requires a luonto, and Reynir doesn't have one,” Mikkel said.
“Yeah, that's probably it,” Tuuri answered from Reynir's other side. “But I'm sure there are mentors in Iceland. You can get training as soon as we get rescued.”
“Oh, yeah, that's right,” Reynir agreed, and the conversation died. But his thoughts went on.
As soon as we get rescued. That's great, right? I want to be rescued; who'd want to stay in this nightmarish realm? But I'll be sent home in disgrace. Mom will be furious, Dad will guilt-trip me for upsetting her, and they'll keep me home forever. I'll have to go back to being a shepherd. Tuuri — brave, curious Tuuri — she'll enjoy visiting Iceland and seeing the sights with me, but she'll never stay. She'll go out into the wide world again. Without me.
These gloomy thoughts kept returning as he rode along, trying to keep up an image of cheer. But when Tuuri parked and Mikkel went out to help with the fuel, Reynir didn't sit down to chat with Tuuri. Instead, while she typed notes on what they'd observed that day, he swept and mopped the main compartment before tidying up his cabinet and Mikkel's medicine cabinet.
In the medicine cabinet, Reynir found a thin sheaf of papers: the galdrastafur he'd drawn for Mikkel and Sigrun. Warmth and health, they promised, but really he should give them to Tuuri. She could use the backs for scratch paper. With a sigh, he picked them up to take to the radio compartment.
He stopped.
The papers didn't feel right. He set them down, picked them up one by one, turned them over to examine the backs. There seemed nothing wrong with them, but …
Can it be? Are these really galdrastafur? Am I feeling their magic? Maybe, but how to be sure?
The others clambered into the tank at that moment, tracking in muddy snow, and he stuffed the papers back in the cabinet before hurrying to mop up the mess. It was only after they'd all gotten settled, Sigrun was chatting with Tuuri, and Emil was playing with the kitten, that Reynir had a chance to signal Mikkel to talk to him.
“I know you don't believe in magic and all —”
“More than I used to, I assure you.”
“— but I need you to help me test something.” Reynir pulled the papers from the medicine cabinet and led the way to the radio compartment. There he took up a few sheets of paper, some with Tuuri's notes and some blank.
“Okay, I think these here are true galdrastafur. I mean, I think they're magical. So I'm going to close my eyes, and you give me a sheet of paper, and I'll say if it's a galdrastafur. Right? If I can tell with my eyes closed, then it has to be real, right?”
Mikkel smiled, a genuine smile, not the sly, mocking smile Reynir had seen so often. “A good plan, worthy of a skald.” He arranged the papers on the desk before adding, “One slight change. Close your eyes and turn your back. Hold your hand behind you, and I’ll put the paper in your hand.”
“Super idea!” Reynir faced the wall, eyes closed, open hand behind him. His face felt warm, and he knew he was blushing. A plan worthy of a skald!
“What is this?” Mikkel asked as he folded Reynir's fingers over a piece of paper.
“Just paper, I think.”
“And this?”
There it was again, that strange feeling. “A galdrastafur,” Reynir said, sure he was right.
A dozen more tries, and Mikkel told him to turn around. “These are the ones you identified as galdrastafur. These are the others.” Mikkel gazed down at the two stacks of paper rather than at Reynir. His hands were steady as he gestured, but his voice was uncertain. “You identified all the drawings except these two, and none of the other papers.” He raised his gaze to meet Reynir's eyes. “As a skeptic, I have to accept the evidence of my own eyes. These are, are” — he closed his eyes as if the words physically pained him — “magical.”
Reynir's heart pounding, he darted past Mikkel to the main compartment. His excited gabble of Icelandic made Tuuri spin in her seat, but his words tumbled out too fast and jumbled for her to follow. Mikkel stepped in with calm, precise Danish to explain the experiment, while Sigrun and Emil pressed closer to listen, looking back and forth between Mikkel and Reynir.
“Again!” Sigrun said, her hunter's eyes bright with interest, and even Reynir understood that demand. “Show us!”
They had to repeat the experiment twice, first with Mikkel handling the papers, his methodical approach unchanged by his newfound belief, then with Sigrun herself acting as test-giver. Emil's skeptical expression gradually gave way to confusion, and he pulled Mikkel aside for a whispered conversation. Sigrun's congratulatory backslap nearly knocked Reynir off his feet as she shouted what had to be encouragement.
But Reynir barely noticed the Norwegian and the two skeptics, for his gaze found Tuuri watching him with the most radiant smile he'd ever seen.
“You favor the shotgun, I think?” Without waiting for an answer, the woman holds out her hand. The air shimmers for a moment, and she holds a shotgun.
“Impressive,” Mikkel says as he accepts and examines the firearm.
“I have lots of practice.”
Mikkel is surprisingly comfortable with this woman who died decades before his birth. Just minutes ago, he looked up from his book to find himself sitting on the bare metal of his bunk. No mattress, no blankets, no pillow, and, when he set down the book and stood, no book either. Their living space was stripped to the tank's steel skeleton. He wore his fine new boots with his old army uniform, which fit because he also wore his old army body. Accepting the situation, he went forward to meet Rosli Jensen. Tuuri and Reynir had prepared him for her appearance — a woman about Tuuri's age in an army uniform — but not for the rifle slung on her shoulder nor the swarm of grosslings outside. The threat distracted him despite his efforts to look at the woman as he introduced himself, and he gratefully agreed when she suggested moving to the back compartment.
Mikkel seats himself on his bunk with the shotgun beside him as Rosli takes her seat on Emil's bunk. “Is this for the grosslings out there?”
“No, they're no problem. We may have to fight the ghosts again. I chased one off last night, a scout, maybe. They've made it past the running water.”
“I'm a poor marksman,” he says. “You might have done better to summon one of the others. Sigrun or —”
“I didn't summon you. You just wandered in like Tuuri and Reynir.” As he opens his mouth with another question, “And that before, all of you, I didn't do that either. I think the ghosts pulled us here to attack us. Anyway, until you turned up, I was trying to figure out how to fight them. Normally I'd put my back against the wall and hose them down, but, well, ghosts. So I'm glad you're here to guard my six. I'll watch this way, you watch that way, and blast anything that moves. ”
Mikkel sets the shotgun across his knees. “Perhaps we should get in position.”
“I'll know when they come. I feel them, like being in a dark room and feeling something move near you. They surprised me that first time because I was busy trying to figure out Reynir's problem when they attacked. They won't surprise me again.”
A thousand questions dance through Mikkel's mind, but the one that makes it to his voice is, “What is your connection to the tank?”
She shrugs. “I'm part of it, I guess, is the best way to put it. I don't really know why; it's not like I had any special link to it. I was just assigned to it when I was called up —”
“Your people called up women to fight?”
“I had the disease. I was doomed anyway, so why not go out fighting? Anyway, I was just the driver. This isn't really a tank, you know. They meant it to be a base for drone operators — you know what drones are? — but it was unfinished and experimental.” Mikkel nods at that; he has long wondered about the tank's peculiarities.
“By the time they pulled it out of the shop, all the drones had been expended. But it had the electronics; it was good for commanding the battle. Our part of the battle. The commander had the disease too, had it bad. He was getting crazy, violent, you know, but he had enough of himself left that he ran outside rather than hurt me.” She stares across the tank in silence as Mikkel tries to think of something to say.
“So I was alone in here, trying to coordinate anyone still fighting, but the static was already bad and getting worse. Then the last convoy came through. They made it to the planes and one took off. I don't know who they were or where they thought they could go, but anyway, not all of them made it onto the plane. This medic must have been left behind, because he ran out into the middle of this battle — crazy, really — and knocked on the door. I let him in, and he said there was a cure. A treatment, at least. Maybe the one you guys are looking for now. He gave it to me and ran out to go look for other people to treat.” Rosli sighs as her hand strays to her arm where an injection might have been given.
“I don't know what happened to him. Probably the monsters got him. I guess the disease was too far advanced in me for the treatment. If he'd got to me sooner … Anyway, the shot made me feel kind of woozy, so I lay down for a nap and died in my sleep.” She delivers this with the same practical tone she'd used to discuss fighting positions, but her fingers drum once on her knee before going still. “Then I woke up and I was in the tank. Part of it. I feel it as my body now. I can see through the lights on top or the sensors, if I want. And I can see and hear everything inside unless I'm here.” She waves a hand at this ghost of the tank.
Before Mikkel can choose another from his myriad of questions, Rosli leaps to her feet, unslinging her rifle. “They're here.” Mikkel snatches up his shotgun and places his back to hers as the shadows ooze through the walls.
Booms of the shotgun, rapid cracks of the rifle, and shrieks of shades combine in a mind-numbing cacophony. As he fires over and over, hardly bothering to aim, two thoughts run through his mind: if this were real life I'd be deaf beyond salvaging, and did she heal those dents in her “body”?
At last the shadows retreat and the echoes die. “Are they gone?” Mikkel asks in the silence. “No, still out there,” Rosli says, and they remain alert, watching the walls.
“What can you do with the tank?” Mikkel asks after a while, unable to contain his curiosity. “Can you repair it? Can you drive it?”
“I can repair some things. I kept it intact all those years sitting in the battlefield. No, I can't drive it. I don't know why not; you'd think I could just push the controls forward, if nothing else. And I can't manipulate the electronics to do something like speak to you all. The best I can do is change the thermostat settings — Tuuri grumbles to herself in Finnish, did you know that? — or flash some of the error lights. But I don't think Tuuri knows Morse code, because when I flashed her name, she went looking for an electrical fault.”
“I know Morse code. What light —?”
“There's a light that signals the air filters need changing. If it's steady, then, yeah, change the air filters. But I can flash it to talk to you.”
Mikkel nods, meaning to ask more questions, but the ghosts return, and the battle begins anew.
Waking, Mikkel rolled onto his back to stare up at the underside of Tuuri's bunk and listen to the sounds of life: Emil's snores, the hum of the air handler, the creak of Reynir's bunk as the Icelander turned over. Was that a dream? What is a dream anyway, when ghosts attack us and a Finnish mage flies from Sweden to our rescue?
He rubbed his eyes, wondering about Rosli. The last thing I remember is her saying, “They're gone.” But were they really gone? Is she facing them alone? He glanced at the clock over the stove. Almost eight. About half an hour 'til sunrise, already light enough to get around. The Moon's still up, too. The ghosts should be — where do they go during the day, anyway?
Shaking his head at the unanswerable questions, Mikkel rose, treated his feet, and dressed with a regretful glance at his middle-aged body, so far from his youthful army body. Though the limited meals and extra activity of this journey had flattened his belly somewhat, he had still far to go. With a nod to Sigrun as she stood watch, he slipped through the heavy door to the tiny driving compartment.
Inside, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath before looking down at the status lights on the panel. One light blinked in an oddly regular pattern. Four quick flashes, a pause, then two quick flashes. He watched as the pattern repeated, then sat heavily in the passenger seat as he recognized the Morse code.
.... .. .... .. .... ..
Hi hi hi
All his native skepticism sprang up again, fighting back against his bizarre circumstances. This can't be real. I can't really be trapped in a haunted tank pursued by ghosts. That blinking light — it could be a mechanical fault causing a regular pattern that just happens to —
The light still blinked. Hi hi hi
Perhaps none of this is real. Perhaps I'm still lying in the snow with my mind creating elaborate fantasies as hypothermia takes me. That would explain everything. A dying brain can create quite convincing illusions. But if this is a hypothermia dream, it's a very consistent one.
Mikkel ran his fingers over the rough stitches on his uniform sleeve where he had repaired it a week before. His feet ached within his padded boots. The familiar smells of the tank — oil, disinfectant, six people crowded into a small vehicle — seemed too real, too detailed for a dying fantasy. He rubbed his temples and said softly, “I'm worried about you, about the ghosts coming back,” squeezing his eyes closed for a moment before looking again at the blinking light.
– – – –.–
“OK”, he translated aloud before turning away to stare out the windshield. The horizon glowed with the coming dawn, snow and ice glittered in the moonlight, and an owl swept across his view and away.
I'm a practical man. I deal in facts, in evidence, in what can be proven. And the facts are: We were attacked by ghosts. Reynir identified magical drawings behind his back. I spoke with a ghost in a dream. And now that ghost is signaling me through the tank's warning light. If this is a dream as I'm freezing to death, then it doesn't matter what I do. But if it isn't a dream, I need to deal with the facts on the ground.
Mikkel took a deep breath, told the air, “We'll talk later”, and went to the main compartment to begin the day.
“So our ghost talks by flashing lights,” Sigrun said.
Mikkel watched the error light blink for a moment before translating, “Yes.”
Tuuri raised her hand as if in school. “I want to learn Morse code.” To Mikkel's surprise, before he could answer, Emil mumbled, “Me too.”
But that made some sense, Mikkel thought. If Emil could talk to Rosli and get answers with no one else's input, that might help him deal with a situation which Mikkel himself regarded as surreal. “Very well, I'll make up a sheet of the codes for each of you.”
Sigrun rolled her eyes. “That's great. You do that. But also, now we know running water doesn't work against ghosts.”
Mikkel shook his head. “I wouldn't say that. It did slow them down, since it took them four days to catch up to us.”
“When Lalli gets back, we'll look for a route with another bridge to blow up, then, or a ford,” Tuuri put in, and Emil brightened up at her words. The kitten in his lap purred loudly in the momentary silence.
Sigrun turned to her. “What about your cousin? Can he do anything about the ghosts?”
“No, he told me he can't. Maybe Onni can teach him something when he's recovered, but …” Tuuri finished with a shrug.
“Right, then,” Sigrun said, brushing her hands together as if wiping away dirt. “We'll move as soon as the scout gets back. Move fast” — she pointedly looked away from Tuuri — “and maybe we'll get to Odense before the rescue ship shows up.”
Tuuri winced and went forward to pull out the map, not looking at the captain. Mikkel felt sorry for the young woman, for it wasn't her fault they were moving so slowly. They should have been in Odense already; indeed, before the Rash, a regular passenger vehicle could have made the trip in a few hours. But the roads were clogged with the world's last traffic jam and nature was taking over the landscape. Though the tank could roll over bushes and small trees and force its way through knee-deep mud, Tuuri still had to maneuver around larger trees and pits, sometimes backtracking or detouring for kilometers at a time.
“Do you think the ghosts can cross the sea?” Reynir asked once Sigrun and Emil had left. Mikkel would have joined them, but his feet are still too tender for him to follow the tank, though he'd like to leave Tuuri and Reynir alone together.
“I don't know,” Tuuri said. “Don't your stories mention that?”
Reynir shook his head and turned to Mikkel, who shook his head as well. “I don't know either,” Mikkel said, trying to keep frustration out of his voice. “Does the sea count as running water? There are currents in it, after all. And why can't they cross running water, anyway, when they can cross standing water? Nothing about this situation makes any logical sense!”
“I think things make sense if you know all the details,” Tuuri said as she navigated around the wreckage of a truck beside the road. “Like, for instance, Reynir, when you were identifying your galdrastafurs, you were consistent that some weren't magical. What was different about those?”
“Oh, I —” Reynir glanced at Mikkel, then looked down at his hands. “Those were the ones I made first, just wanting to help. The magical ones, those were the ones I made when I thought that, that Mikkel would die without them.”
The last words came out in a rush. Mikkel turned to look out the side window, not wanting to embarrass the younger man. “Thank you,” he said, for want of a better answer, and the three fell silent.
Reynir stared at the snowy trees, trying to hide his disappointment. After The Experiment, as he thought of it, he'd tried to make new galdrastafurs for healing, in case someone broke a leg or got bitten, and more for warming, as cold was a constant threat. He'd even modified a warming galdrastafur to make it cooling instead, in case someone got burned again. But they hadn't had that special feeling that meant they were true magic, and he hadn't understood why not.
Now he knew. He was just drawing them, not making them, because he didn't feel that urgency, that need to succeed right now in order to save a life. Next time he needed a galdrastafur, he'd have to make it on the spot. But what if next time he wasn't quick enough?
Reynir rubbed his fingers together, imagining the feel of magic. After his failure the day before, he'd taken out the bottles of Icelandic remedies and stroked the incised designs, feeling the magic, trying to teach himself to recreate them. No matter how many times he felt the magic, he couldn't make his own.
He sighed and looked down to caress the kitten in his lap, feeling useless. Everyone else was working, or had been. Lalli was sleeping, but he had been out for hours in the dark, and when he came back, he learned they needed to cross running water. Without complaint, he went back out again to mark the trail to the bridge. Sigrun and Emil were running after the tank gathering wood (and having snowball fights), Tuuri was driving, and Mikkel had taken over cooking and cleaning as his feet healed. Those were his jobs, of course, but that left Reynir with nothing but odd jobs to help out. At least Mikkel planned to be back to normal work in a couple of days.
I so hoped to be useful as a mage. If only I could get training from someone. Oh, wait! Is a ghost a mage?
“Rosli,” Reynir said hesitantly, “do you understand me?”
Several flashes. As Reynir turned to Mikkel for translation, the Dane asked his own question. Reynir caught his own name and the word “Icelandic”. More brief flashes, and Mikkel said, “She doesn't know any Icelandic. What do you want to say?”
Reynir looked down at his hands. Another teammate I need an interpreter for. I've got to work harder on learning Swedish! And Morse code, too, now. “Oh, I just wanted to know if she's a mage. Because she's a ghost, you know, so maybe she could teach me a little. Maybe?”
Tuuri spoke up, asking questions with Mikkel translating the brief answers into Danish. “No, she's not a mage,” Tuuri concluded. “She never was, never knew any, and didn't believe in magic until she became a ghost. She can't help you learn magic.”
“No,” Reynir said, shoulders slumping. “No one can.” After a moment, his normal optimism came back. “Maybe my dog — my fylgja — can. He can talk, after all.”
“He can?” Mikkel and Tuuri asked together.
“Didn't I tell you? In that dream, the one when I saw Kastellet, after that, the ghosts attacked me, and he said ‘Remember this.’ Well, I mean, I didn't see him, but I heard that, and who else was there to say it?”
“I see,” Mikkel said thoughtfully. “Do non-mages have fylgjas?”
“Y–yes? I mean, I think so. That's what everyone says, at least.”
Tuuri had fallen silent as she maneuvered between trees on one side and the remains of an overturned truck on the other. Now she asked, “Would a non-mage ever see their fylgja?”
“No, not normally. I think just when the fylgja comes to lead their … spirit … uh …”
Mikkel turned to stare out the side window.
“You heard what — oh, but you didn't understand,” Tuuri said, drawing Reynir's gaze to her. “When Sigrun first woke up, she was pretty loopy, and she was looking for a mare. She said the mare was just there a minute ago. So wouldn't that be her fylgja?” She grinned without looking around, and Mikkel's shoulders twitched. “I'll bet she doesn't even know!” Tuuri finished.
A shepherd learns to “read” his flock, to see their emotions. An anxious flock might mean one was hurt or in danger. A man, even a man like Mikkel, is not so different from a sheep, and Reynir could see that Mikkel was on edge. He wondered what might have happened in the man's own near-death experience. Squelching his curiosity by main force, as Mikkel clearly didn't want to talk, he reached out to tap Tuuri's arm. But he didn't quite dare touch her, and she didn't notice and spoke anyway.
“You won't tell her, will you, Mikkel? You'll let me?”
“Well —” Mikkel began, still facing the window, tension in his voice. Before he could finish, movement caught Reynir's eye, and he straightened up to peer to the left. His shoulder bumped Mikkel, who turned to follow his gaze. “Just a deer,” the older man said with a hint of relief. “Good. There will be more around here for Sigrun to hunt. We're almost out of rabbit.”
Reynir watched the deer flee the tank as it rumbled over the rough terrain. “There are so many animals. I thought there would be nothing but grosslings. That's what my parents said.” At least he'd found a new topic, though the thought of his parents lowered his spirits again.
“There are grosslings out here,” Mikkel said, in his most didactic voice, “but far fewer than there are in cities. Wild animals were much more likely to die of the Rash than humans, and of course the domestic animals were generally killed once people realized they could be infected. Most grosslings are slow and not very smart, and they stink like rot and death, so animals avoid them or can flee from them. But most humans aren't fast enough to escape if they encounter a beast.”
Mikkel's hand drifted down to touch the scar from the rat beasts, hidden under his trousers. “So though this looks peaceful and there's an abundance of wildlife, it's not safe. I would not want to spend a night out there without the protection of the tank.” He patted the dashboard, and the three fell silent.
The afternoon passed quietly as they traveled through the forest. Reynir studied the snowy forest, observing animal tracks, the tiny faces of squirrels and birds peeking down from branches, and even a flash of red as a fox crossed the ruined road, pausing for a heartbeat to regard the tank. After several hours, as Tuuri wove between obstacles in the slush, a single shot rang out behind them. “What do you think?” Reynir whispered, as if his voice might summon a grossling.
“I expect that was Sigrun shooting a deer,” Mikkel said, his quiet voice unworried. “It's likely too sunny for grosslings to be out and about. We'll know soon.”
Minutes later, Tuuri stopped the tank as Sigrun and Emil came back carrying a field-dressed deer between them. Mikkel promptly volunteered to butcher the carcass in the back compartment. He jumped out along with Sigrun and Emil, who returned to their wood-gathering.
Left alone with Tuuri, Reynir searched for a topic that wouldn't lead back to his continuing failure as a mage. “So, uh, you've read about Iceland, I guess, but I don't really know anything about Finland. What's Finland like?”
“We've lived for so long — eleven years — in Keuruu,” she said, intent on her driving. “That's a military base; it's really big, almost a thousand people. Almost everybody is immune, and us non-immunes had to stay on the main island. It has a wall, but they're building an outer wall to reclaim some resources out there that they want.”
Reynir noticed how she spoke of the base with pride but also frustration when mentioning non-immune restrictions. They were much alike in that way. He loved Iceland, but even that vast island had felt like a prison to him.
“I joined the military when I was thirteen, same as Lalli did when he was, but I couldn't fight. Well, except for sniping when a swarm got close to the wall. So I became a mechanic, studied a lot to be a skald and an engineer. I got to maintain the tractor — we had only one — and even drove it a couple of times.”
She fell silent, biting her lower lip as the tank slipped on slushy mud into a shallow ditch. Rocking it back and forth several times freed it, and once they were moving on stable ground, she released the controls long enough to flex her hands. Reynir wished he could spell her on the driving, but this terrain was far beyond his abilities.
“That was Keuruu. But before we went there, we lived on an island in the great lake, Saimaa. It had a wall, too, and I wasn't allowed to go out — well, I told you about that. There were only a few dozen people in the village, and they were all really nice.”
Her shoulders moved as if to shrug off the weight of memory. “There were trees on the island, oh, everywhere. Ancient pines that have been there forever. I used to climb up … There was one that I really liked, because I could see out over the lake. In the mornings, in the autumn, when the mist rose from the lake, I'd climb up there and watch while the mist burned off. There was this other island, all rocky cliffs and trees, and it would appear out of the mist like the gods were making it fresh, just for me.”
“Sound so beautiful,” Reynir murmured. But even as he spoke, he wondered if either of them would ever see Finland or Iceland again.
Emil checked over his explosives once more. At least this time he didn't have to worry about blowing up the bridge with Lalli on the wrong side. He glanced over his shoulder at Sigrun, her distant figure silhouetted against the sunset. Clouds had moved in as the evening wore on, and the western sky beneath the overcast was a sullen red-orange, like banked coals. Everyone else was safe in the tank, well back from the bridge.
Though he shivered with cold and excitement, his hands were steady as he set the charges; he'd done this hundreds of times — well, dozens, at least. After a last critical scan over the half-ruined bridge, soon to be entirely ruined, he jogged up the bank and along the wire to the detonator. Jogging came easy to him now; a month with Sigrun had toughened him up more than two years with the Cleansers.
After a few moments’ work to connect the wires, Emil was ready. He slammed down the detonator and reveled in the thunderous crack of the explosion, the deep groan as the structure failed, and the massive splashes and thuds as large debris plunged into the water and ground. The sound died away, leaving a disconcerting silence.
No echoes. I'll never get used to not having any hills.
Emil shook off the thought. Shattered bits fell on him as he disconnected the detonator, scooped it up, and ran for the tank, joined by a grinning Sigrun. She enjoyed explosions nearly as much as he did.
Sigrun waited by the tank as Emil stowed the detonator in the back. He'd already lost a detonator at the previous bridge and didn't mean to lose this one too. In the Cleansers, standard procedure had been to set the explosives, detonate them from a safe distance, and then retrieve the detonator afterward. But last time had been different; the tank had sped away the moment he reached it. At least this time Tuuri had let him grab his gear. As he jumped down and ran to the main door, he made a mental note to ask Lalli about getting more wire in the next town, just a kilometer or two upstream.
Emil allowed himself a moment of pride as he climbed back into the tank. Following Sigrun to the front and taking his position behind her and Mikkel as Tuuri drove away, he smiled at the wrecked bridge in the side mirror.
The tank ground forward, crunching bushes and small trees under its treads. As usual, Sigrun fidgeted, leaning forward to peer past Tuuri and Mikkel. “How far to the campsite?” she asked after several minutes, as the tank edged around rusting cars tangled together in an ancient collision. “It'll be full dark soon.” When Tuuri didn't answer, Emil turned to her, seeing her knuckles white on the controls as she steered. Sigrun must have seen the same, for she muttered “Sorry” and fell silent.
Something caught on the corner of the tank, scraped down the side with a squeal of tortured metal. Even from his position, Emil saw Tuuri's grimace. He didn't recognize her Finnish words, but he knew cursing when he heard it.
Perhaps the noise distracted Tuuri, or perhaps it was just bad luck, but as she passed the tangle and steered back towards the marked trail, the tank slid to the left. She cursed again, pushing the left tread faster, slushy mud spraying out behind the tank, while the tank continued to slide slowly but inexorably downhill into a marshy hollow. Emil held his breath, imagining the tank overturning and leaving them unprotected in the beast-haunted forest.
In the hollow, Sigrun's curses joined Tuuri's as the driver rocked the tank back and forth, the engine whining with the strain. Mikkel said nothing, but his shoulders were tense as he leaned forward to check the mirrors and scan the darkening forest.
“We're not stuck,” Tuuri said between gritted teeth, as if hearing the unspoken accusation. “I can get us out of here. It'll just take a few minutes.”
Emil silently willed Tuuri to succeed. If the tank gets stuck … but it won't. She's a good driver. The tank jerked backwards and forwards again, forcing him to grab the back of the seat. Anyway, if it did, we wouldn't leave it here. Sigrun would find a way to pull it out. Lalli can find chains … But we'd be stuck here for the night, too close to that explosion …
At last, the tank lunged forward, crushing bushes for more traction, and Tuuri angled it up the low slope toward their marked route. Even as Emil gave a sigh of relief, Lalli called something from the back. Emil looked back in alarm as the scout rolled out of his den and ran forward. Tuuri swore again before adding in Swedish, “There's a swarm coming. Got to keep going. Can't just stop here or we'll slide again.”
Hiss!
Everyone jumped as the kitten, who had been sleeping in a nest of blankets in the radio compartment, ran out to contribute to the alarm. She looked nearly spherical, every hair standing on end, the whites showing in her wide eyes. Reynir scooped her up, hugging her close and murmuring soothingly.
“Weapons and uniforms!” Sigrun ordered, on her feet and running for the back even as she spoke. Emil and Mikkel followed, all three stumbling as the tank tilted left before righting itself. As Emil fastened his boots, Tuuri's stifled shriek, the kitten's hiss, and Reynir's curse brought them all running to see a troll perched on the hood, clawing at the windshield.
Like many trolls, it had an insectoid appearance, with six multi-jointed legs supporting an oval torso. The front of the troll was a massive toothless maw that drooled on the hood, and the legs ended in humanoid hands. As Emil stared in horror, Mikkel announced from beside the monitors, “There are dozens of them. A hundred or more. We're surrounded.” He paused to listen to scrabbling noises. “They're underneath as well.”
“We can't outrun them,” Tuuri said, her voice thin but firm. “And Lalli says the next bit is worse. If we get stuck …” Lalli leaned in close for a low-voiced discussion.
“We can wait them out,” Sigrun suggested.
“They may find the warm underside of the tank a congenial environment,” Mikkel answered.
She looked at him in annoyance. “Does that mean they'll camp out under there? Okay, so we have to get them out.” She turned to Emil. “What have you got in here?”
“Just one incendiary.” He avoided looking at Mikkel. After that little accident last week, the Dane had told him to keep his toys in the back. He hadn't quite obeyed, but he'd been extra careful about hiding it. The incendiary lay in his pocket now, ready for a fight.
“Not enough,” Mikkel said. “We'll have to shoot them. Though it will take considerable ammunition.”
Sigrun rubbed her chin. “We should have enough ammo in here —”
Tuuri cried out something sharp in Finnish. Emil turned as Lalli, face set with determination, pushed past Mikkel and yanked open the side window. Trolls hissed and squalled below, the sound now horribly close. Evading Mikkel's hands, Lalli dived through the window with a fluid motion Emil could hardly follow.
Heart in his throat, Emil lunged for the window. Below, Lalli rolled to his feet with catlike grace and took off running. His voice rose in a strange, taunting song that cut through the trolls' cries. The swarm of insectoid trolls hesitated, then surged after him as the bizarre Pied Piper led them away into the forest.
“What — what —” Staring into the twilight, Emil couldn't believe what he'd seen. “We have to do something!”
Tuuri joined him at the window as the others crowded in behind him. “He's —” Her voice quavered and she wiped her eyes as she spoke. “He'll be okay.”
“They'll catch him!”
“No, he's letting them stay close so they won't turn back.” Tuuri took a deep breath and finished in a stronger voice. “You've never seen Lalli run.”
Hiss!
The sound drew their attention from the window. Still bushed out, the kitten struggled in Reynir's arms until Sigrun ordered, “Put her down.” Released, she darted under Mikkel's bunk. Everyone crouched to see her paw at a back corner.
“Can't be many there,” Sigrun said. She got to her feet and the others rose as well. “Fuzzy-head, can the tank stand a fire underneath?”
“I don't —” The overhead light blinked, and Tuuri started forward. “Now what?”
Mikkel raised a large hand to stop her as he stared up at the light, his lips twitching as he read the code. “Not for long,” he said when the flashing stopped. “And ‘troll may harm’. You mean the trolls may damage the tank under there?”
“Yes,” he and Tuuri translated together.
“Can she — I mean, can you see them under there?” Sigrun asked.
Tuuri translated the flashes this time. “No.”
“Right, then. Let's get those things out of there. Blondy, you're with me. Blades before bullets! Big guy, you're on watch and backup. Short stuff, be ready to drive.”
Sigrun jumped out first, Emil close behind. Daggers in hand, they sprinted to the tank's rear. As Sigrun passed the back corner, a troll charged at her. Alert as always, she danced aside, slashing its grabbing limb. With a quick glance at the tank for other threats, Emil darted forward to drive his dagger into the monster's back with all his strength.
The troll whirled, ripping the dagger from Emil's grip. Its carrion breath hit him as it lunged. Gagging, he leapt back, reaching for his rifle. He would fire if he had to …
With a muted war cry, Sigrun plunged her dagger into the troll's back. Her aim was true: its limbs jerked outward, rigid, as it dropped to the ground, dead.
“More underneath,” Mikkel warned through the speakers.
Emil took out the incendiary. At Sigrun's nod, he hurled it at a movement beneath the tank. The tank rumbled forward and two trolls lunged out, flames already licking across their bodies. As the humans splashed back along the tank's trail, the monsters followed, shrieking in pain and fury.
“Burn! Burn!” Emil muttered, panting. One by one, the trolls collapsed, their blazing limbs clawing weakly at the mud.
“Back!” Sigrun ordered with a reckless grin. As they leapt over reaching limbs, Emil whispered to the flames: “Burn the trolls, not the forest.” At the site of the first fight, Sigrun yanked Emil's dagger from the dead troll and handed it over. Her own dagger was long gone, leaving her to use Mikkel's borrowed blade. The tank waited nearby, and they scrambled inside to safety.
But Lalli was still out in the forest with the trolls.
“How can you think about supper when Lalli is out there running for his life?”
Mikkel dropped another potato into his basket with infuriating calm. “We can't help him.”
Emil clenched his teeth in frustration. All the while he and Mikkel fueled the tank, Sigrun, sorry but unyielding, had stressed that they couldn't risk the tank by driving into the unscouted forest, and couldn't risk the non-immunes by leaving them behind and following Lalli on foot. Mikkel, likewise sorry but unyielding, now collected food while Emil selected a handful of explosives and incendiaries to take to the main compartment.
“We may be attacked again tonight or later. We must maintain our strength, which means eating, drinking, and sleeping on schedule, however much we worry about him.”
Emil pocketed a sixth incendiary. “Yeah, okay.”
Mikkel brushed past him, strode to the door, and turned to face him. Emil’s eyes widened in alarm, and he instinctively took a step back. Over weeks of travel with Mikkel, he had come to see the Dane as just another team member, forgetting quite how large and powerful the man really was. And now Mikkel blocked his escape from the compartment.
“Have you been working on taming the fire spirit?”
The question left Emil speechless for a moment, completely taken aback. “You — it was your idea!”
“It was. But are you working on it?”
Emil shrugged, feeling ridiculous. “It's just a few words now and then. It doesn't interfere with anything.”
“Good.” Mikkel leaned forward, eyes fixed on Emil with unwavering intensity. “You must work harder. You must get control of it before you're rescued. That’s vital.”
“But — but — you can't possibly believe —”
“Can't I? Look, we're living in a haunted tank, dodging ghosts by blowing up bridges. Is it really so much of a stretch to believe that you have a familiar fire spirit?”
Sigrun banged on the door, making them both jump. “Hey, what're you guys doing? Get a move on!”
Mikkel straightened, squaring his broad shoulders. “Work on it. Work hard.” He turned, opened the door, and hopped down to follow Sigrun forward.
Emil trailed behind the older two, distracted by the sight of the trolls burning fifty meters away, crackling like a bonfire, the acrid smell of smoke lingering in the air. The ground is wet and muddy; that's why the fire hasn't spread. I just said that because … because … No, I can't believe Mikkel believes there's really a fire spirit!
Supper was a silent affair. Emil stirred his stew, brooding, until Sigrun elbowed him and ordered him to eat. He would have liked to say that he ate under protest, choking down a meal like sawdust, but in truth, Mikkel and Reynir had done a good job, and he was hungry as always in this cold climate. After the first bite, he attacked his meal with a will.
Once the dishes were washed, Sigrun, Mikkel, and Tuuri bent over the map while Reynir stood watch. At loose ends, Emil considered a nap before his next watch, but found himself too wound up to sleep. Lalli was still out there somewhere. Emil tried to distract himself by considering Mikkel's strange orders.
Get control of the fire spirit? As if there really are fire spirits! And we aren't living in a haunted tank … are we?
With a quick glance at the three by the map, Emil ducked into the radio compartment to collect clipboard, quill pen and ink, and the all-important Morse code list. So equipped, he edged past Reynir and slipped into the driving compartment, closing the heavy door behind him with a solid thunk that seemed too loud in the quiet night. The darkness pressed in around him, his eyes struggling to adapt, as he fumbled his way into the passenger seat. The only illumination came from a handful of tiny status lights, their dim glow reflecting off the curved windshield. Even the troll-fires had burned out, leaving the world outside pitch black.
For a moment, sitting there in the dark and the silence, he wanted to go back to his bunk, curl up under the covers, and pretend that Mikkel had never mentioned any nonsense about fire spirits. He'd signed up for a simple expedition to explore some ruins and gather some books, not to deal with ghosts and spirits and fylgjas and whatever Onni's owl was.
But so much had happened, too much even for a confirmed skeptic. He meant to learn the truth for himself, not rely on what everyone else told him.
Setting the Morse code list in the driver's seat and tilting the clipboard into the weak glow of the status lights, Emil took a deep breath and cleared his throat. “Fru Jensen,” he said, unsure how one addressed a ghost. “I am Emil Västerström.”
A telltale flashed red.
.–.
Emil shivered. This is actually happening. His hands trembled as he glanced at the code, finding the letter R. “Slowly, please,” he muttered, “I'm not good at this.” With several retries, he got the message: Rosli.
“Thank you, ah, Rosli. And I am Emil, of course.”
OK
Emil's mind went blank, half-formed thoughts stumbling over each other. His answer had been automatic: when the other person gives you the use of their given name, you do the same. But now …
The tank is really haunted. I'm really talking to a ghost. Unless I've lost my mind. Maybe I have. But everyone else has been talking to the ghost, too.
“Mikkel says there's a, um, fire spirit around me. Do you see it?”
No.
But did that prove there was no fire spirit? Emil bit his lip, thinking it over. “Do you see Reynir's dog? The fylgja, Tuuri calls it?”
No.
He clutched his hair with both hands. Maybe the fylgja doesn't exist either. If the ghost can't see it … wait!
“You're a ghost. Nothing out there can hurt you. You can go check on Lalli — what?”
The light flickered until he fell silent, then switched to Morse code.
No stuck in tank can't
Emil stared out at the darkness. I've confirmed the tank is haunted, but it's haunted by the world's most useless ghost.
“Okay, thank you for talking to me. Good night,” he said as he gathered up his things and slipped out through the door, because it wouldn't do to be rude, even to the world's most useless ghost.
Less than an hour later, as Emil lay on his bunk pretending to sleep, Reynir sang out “Lalli!” Rolling off the bunk, Emil was nearly knocked over by Mikkel rushing to the door, closely followed by Sigrun and Tuuri, who elbowed her way to the front.
When the door swung open and the scout saw the team crowded together to greet him, he glanced over his shoulder as if considering running away again. Before he could do so, Tuuri seized his wrist and dragged him in, scolding as she guided him to the table. Emil hovered nearby, feeling useless, as Reynir served Lalli a bowl of stew and Mikkel pulled off his light indoor boots and examined his feet. The medic looked disappointed at finding no injury or frostbite to treat.
When Lalli had wolfed down his supper and disappeared to his usual spot under Mikkel's bunk, Emil finally got the chance to ask, “But what did he do out there?”
“He outran them,” Tuuri said with a smug smile. “I told you so.”
The sheep graze and the dog stands guard. Reynir watches for a moment, smiling, before striding down to the black sand beach of his haven. The eternal fog over the sea seems the same as far as he can see. Believing now that his dreams mean to guide him, he turns right and strolls along the beach, admiring the rough rock of his haven and scanning the fog as he goes, holding himself ready for what might happen. Before long, he sees a thinning of the fog and trots out on the gentle waves of the sea.
He stops as he recognizes the Christian temple he saw before. After a quick glance over his shoulder, hoping for the reassurance of his dog's presence, he ventures closer to the half-open door. The gloom beyond makes him step back.
I shouldn't investigate alone.
Reynir gazes out at the fog-shrouded sea and focuses his thoughts on Lalli. When the fog thins, he trots towards it, soon finding Lalli's haven, the grove of birch trees now burned and broken. Gazing around, shocked at the devastation, he lays a gentle hand on a shattered tree trunk, wishing he could repair the damage. But he cannot, and Lalli is absent, so he turns away and focuses on Onni. The fog thins, and he strides over the gentle waves, shortly spotting the familiar cliff of Onni's haven.
The Finn sits on his usual boulder, arms folded beneath his heavy white fur cloak, hood shadowing his face. At Reynir's call, he leaps to his feet, alarmed, the hood falling back. His cloak flares out like wings as he jumps down to join the Icelander on the rocky beach. “Why are you here? Is something wrong?”
“No, no, nothing. I mean, everybody's fine; don't worry. But, uh, I found a weird place out there, a Christian temple.”
“Church, not temple.”
“Oh, okay. But, anyway, I don't want to go in there alone. Will you come with me?”
Onni scowls. “Whatever it is, leave it be. There are dangers in this world you know nothing of.” He turns away.
Reynir hesitates, finds his courage. “I'm not leaving it alone. I've seen it in a vision before. There must be some meaning to it, some reason it's shown to me. I have to go in there. Please help me, Onni.”
Onni sighs heavily, gesturing at his owl sleeping in a nearby tree. “I can't. We're too tired to fly.”
“You don't have to,” Reynir says, puzzled by the man's reluctance. “We'll just walk on the water.”
“Icelandic mages do that, not Finns.”
“But — no, Lalli did, that first time I talked to you.”
“He followed in your footsteps.” Onni's scowl deepens, but he turns back. “All right, I suppose I can do the same. Very well. I'll go with you.”
“Great! Follow me!” Reynir takes several steps on the water and pauses, watching the ripples circle outward from his footstep. Onni steps cautiously on the center of the ripples. One slow step, two …
As the ripples of Reynir's first step dissipate, Onni's back foot plunges into the water. He staggers, Reynir seizes his arm to steady him … and Onni stands on the water as if on the ground. The men stare at his feet in astonishment.
“Oh!” Reynir says after a moment. “It's like a magnet. Do you know what a magnet is? Yes? It's like a magnet passing its power through a chain of pins. When I touched you, you became part of the magic. So I wonder …”
Onni responds with grunts and monosyllables as they run together, Reynir speculating on how far his water-walking magic could spread, and whether other Icelandic mages are also “magnetic” so they will be drawn together. At length, they reach the church and stop on the neat grass lawn outside the door.
“Can you awaken if you need to?” Onni asks.
“N–no? I don't think so. I never —”
“Then I'll awaken you if there's danger. Come on. Let's get this over with.”
The great hall is lighter than on Reynir's previous visit, colored light from the high windows playing across the high-backed benches. Their footsteps are loud in the profound silence, and the still air bears hints of incense and wax.
Onni scans the hall and the hallways to either side. “This place holds no meaning for me. It's not a vision. I see no benefit in lingering. We should leave.”
“Why was I led here, then?”
“I don't know.” As Onni turns to go, the men freeze at the clack of footsteps to their left. A door opens at the far end of the hall. A woman steps through the door and turns to them.
The woman wears a long, dark gown or robe that drapes gracefully to the floor, simple and stately; a high, stiff white collar frames her neck, giving Reynir the disconcerting impression that her head sits on a serving platter. Above the collar, her middle-aged face is rounded, she wears glasses with thin frames, and her graying black hair is neatly styled in soft curls close to her head. She regards her visitors with a serious, no-nonsense air.
“Hello,” Reynir says with a smile.
“Be still!” Onni orders, pulling his hood forward over his eyes with his left hand while smacking Reynir in the face with the back of his right hand. “Don't look it in the eyes. You're not strong enough to shield yourself. I'll handle this.”
Feeling no evil from the woman, Reynir gives the older mage an uncertain look. Onni's shoulders are rigid, his mouth set in a grim line. But the woman's presence feels nothing like the malevolent ghosts that attacked them. Those spirits radiated cold hatred; this woman emanates only gentle warmth. Still, remembering Onni's warning about dangers he knows nothing of, Reynir obeys, lowering his eyes.
“Please calm yourselves,” the woman says in a mild, kindly voice. “Who are you?”
Reynir cannot be rude in the face of such courtesy. “I'm Reynir. We're just —”
“Be still! ” Onni steps in front of Reynir, his right hand trembling slightly as he offers it to the woman. “All right, madam. Tell me who you are, and I will guide you towards your destination. It'll be quick and painless. You can be at rest.”
“I need no guidance,” she says, her voice a little sharp. “I know where I am. And I have no intention of leaving just yet.”
Onni's shoulders tighten beneath his cloak. “You're dead. It isn't good for your soul to stick around like this.”
The woman gives him a gentle smile. “Thank you for your concern. Despite my condition, I still have a purpose in this world, and through my faith, I will be protected. I'll leave once I'm no longer of use here.” She sighs, the smile fading. “I do wish I knew when that might be.”
Onni turns to Reynir, his face shadowed by his hood. “Come. We have no reason to linger.”
“But —” Reynir hesitates. He's been led here twice, and still hasn't learned why. Is this woman the reason? He dares not walk away.
“Wait!” the woman says, taking several steps towards them. “Please stay for a moment. I haven't spoken with anyone for such a long time.”
Reynir smiles at her, and Onni lets his hood fall back to glare at him. With a small pang of guilt, Reynir steps around him to approach the woman. But only a small pang; although Onni can't fly away or walk on water without him, the mage is not trapped; he can awaken if he wishes to leave.
With a wordless grumble, Onni follows them to a smaller room down the hall. Sunlight streams through large windows, illuminating a round table with half a dozen chairs, a pitcher, several delicate cups and plates, and a simple two-layer cake with yellow icing. As their hostess serves out cake and pours a steaming drink, Onni hums and glowing mist falls over the table, then fades away.
“Safe to eat,” he mutters. “The old lady isn't very powerful.”
She gives him a benign smile. “I'm glad one of you isn't afraid of me.” As they seat themselves, she adds, “I'm also so very happy to see living souls. The world was such a dark place when I passed, I was afraid that perhaps there was nothing to be salvaged.”
“So … ah … you died from the illness?” Reynir asks, setting down his cup and trying not to grimace at the unfamiliar taste of coffee. Beside him, Onni sniffs his own cup and sets it down untasted.
“Yes, I think I did. I can't quite recall. The memories of my life have grown fuzzy and elusive. I feel as if I've been here for several years now.”
“Y–yeah. It's been a few years.” He takes a bite of the cake and licks his lips, savoring the tart lemon flavor. “And now you're stuck here?”
“My offer still stands,” Onni says around a mouthful of cake.
“Oh, child, I'm not ‘stuck’. My path home is clear to me. I stay because I sense there are still souls out there who need help finding their way.”
Reynir looks up sharply. “Wait. Are you good at helping souls find the afterlife?”
“One might even say that is my job. Is that why you're here? You're lost and wish for me to guide you into the embrace of our heavenly father?”
“O–oh … thank you, but no. No. A super kind offer, but I'm very happy with my own gods. And I don't think they'd like me a lot if I started fraternizing with others.”
“I belong to the forest,” Onni says, helping himself to more cake without looking at either of them.
“Perhaps it's for the best,” she says with a sigh. “I can't remember what I was supposed to say in this situation either way.”
“Don't feel bad, though,” Reynir says, moving his cake out of Onni's reach. “There are some dead souls following us right now, and we don't know what to do about them. Could you help with them?”
“Of course! At the very least, I'd try if you were to bring them to my church.”
Reynir nudges Onni, who edges away with a glare. “Hear that? Now you won't have to figure out how to handle the ghosts. So, where is your church?”
“I … can't really remember.” As she stirs sugar into her coffee, the sunlight dims and the air is filled with whimpers and moans and the unmistakable stench of illness. “I'm sorry. ”
Reynir shivers even as the cheerful sunlight returns. “Don't worry. We'll find you.” Onni rolls his eyes. “I'll find you. Um, so, what's your name?”
“I believe it began with an ‘A’.”
Onni shakes his head. “It's time to leave.”
Although Reynir would have preferred to stay and talk to the woman (and finish his cake), in describing the dream to Mikkel and Tuuri that morning, he had to admit that, if she didn't remember her own name, she likely didn't remember anything else helpful about her church.
“Denmark was a Christian country,” Mikkel said when Reynir finished his story. “There were churches everywhere. Every village we've passed had one, and there were dozens in Copenhagen alone. Without more information, we can't possibly find hers.”
Reynir looked down at the map before them, sighing. “I feel like we have to, though. Like I have to.”
Later, as they rumbled past the wreckage of the world's last traffic jam, Reynir stood behind Tuuri, his eyes searching each ruined road they passed, hoping for some sign, some feeling that this was the right road.
“What's up?” Sigrun asked, raising her voice just enough to be heard over the howling gale and the ice spattering against the tank. The blizzard had blown up around midnight, and showed no signs of stopping.
Standing watch in the wee hours, Mikkel had slouched against the wall, but he now leaned forward and gestured at the radar. “There's something out there to the west. It's at extreme range in this storm — more than a couple hundred meters — and I only see it occasionally. All the snow and the branches whipping around are interfering with the radar. Look, there it is again.”
Sigrun leaned close, but even as she did so, the object was lost in the echo of thrashing branches. “How big is it?”
“I can't tell. Bigger than man-sized, I think, or there may be more than one out there. It's moving south, more or less, but slowly.”
She gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “And you didn't tell anyone?”
Mikkel suppressed annoyance from his voice and shrugged. “It's not moving towards us. I can't be sure what it is, but it may even be a natural animal. It doesn't seem worth interrupting anyone's sleep.”
“Natural. Could be.” Sigrun turned to regard the radar again. “Our critters know they can run around in the cold when the grosslings are under cover. Don't know if your Danish critters are that smart.” She smirked at him.
Mikkel declined to rise to the bait. “Probably.”
Sigrun shook her head with a disappointed pout before returning her attention to the radar. “There it is again. Moving south.” She tapped her chin in thought. “No, that's a giant. I'm sure of it.”
“Your plans?”
She glanced towards the sleeping compartment. “Not going after a giant with this crew, not if I can help it. If it comes this way … Did my pal bring any explosives and stuff in?”
“Yes, half a dozen each of explosives and incendiaries. He may have sneaked a few more in while I wasn't looking.”
“Good kid. If the giant comes this way, we'll fight, but for now we stand still, stay silent.” She gave a decisive nod. “And you're relieved.”
“I'm relieved.” They switched places, but instead of heading to the sleeping compartment and his bunk, Mikkel stayed close, watching the flickering radar signal.
After several minutes of silence, Sigrun elbowed him. “When'll you take these stitches out? They itch.”
“Five days.”
“What? No! You said two weeks and it's been a month!”
“It's been nine days. Five more days makes two weeks.”
“No way I'm waiting five days. Two days, then you take them out.”
“This is not a negotiation. The tissues need time to knit together and —”
“Nope, not waiting five days. My arm'll heal up fast.” She turned her head to address her arm. “If you don't heal up in two days, I'll tell him to hack you off.” Back to him: “I know you have that saw in your cabinet.”
Mikkel opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. “If I hack off your arm, it will take even longer to heal.”
“Right, that's why it'll heal up fast.”
“Wait — that's — all right, three days. If it looks good in three days.”
“Three days. And if you don't do it, I'll pull them out myself.”
Mikkel retreated to the sleeping compartment before she could make some other absurd demand. Still, he told himself as he rolled into his bunk for a few hours' sleep, her arm was healing well, with or without threats of amputation, and had avoided infection even with her dip in the foul canal and near death from freezing. And if it didn't look good in three days … well, he wouldn't take those stitches out no matter what she threatened.
Even in the lee of the tank, the raging wind hurled stinging ice pellets into his face. Mikkel pulled up his scarf, adjusted his hood, pressed his shoulder against the tank, and headed for the back. Around him, the dim light of the third-quarter moon glowed and glittered off swirling snow. As he set out to fetch food for breakfast, Tuuri had offered to turn on the perimeter lights for him, but he had declined; he could see well enough to find his way to the back, and lights might attract … anything.
Mikkel scanned about, uneasy, though he could see little more than the bulky shapes of trees. Radar, IR, and even the kitten had assured him that there was nothing threatening nearby, and Sigrun and Tuuri were on watch within. When Sigrun tried to accompany him as guard, he had pointed out the advantages of the monitors in watching for enemies and planning a defense. She had laughed at him. “You just want some time alone, don't you?” And he had had to agree.
As Mikkel reached the back corner, the force of the north wind hit him like a physical blow. He gritted his teeth and pressed into it, fumbling for the door handle with his gloved hand. The metal was bitter cold even through his heavy gloves, and he had to muscle the door open against the tearing wind. Though the back compartment was warmed only by heat leaking through the wall from the front, it gave relief from the blizzard as he jumped in. Released, the door slammed shut with a boom that seemed to rock the tank.
Mikkel winced, wondering how far that sound had carried and what might have heard it. But there was nothing to be done about it, and he turned to his work, gathering up potatoes and onions and slicing off a slab of venison. Since his supply of porridge was sadly depleted, the team would have potatoes for breakfast instead. The rest of the venison would remain in the chilly back compartment, to be retrieved on another trip for lunch, and yet another for supper. Much as he would have preferred to take it with him, it would not be safe to keep the meat in the warm front compartment for hours.
With the food in canvas bags and a couple of candles in his pockets, Mikkel gave one last look around the compartment for anything useful. He paused as his gaze fell on the books, neatly tied into bundles and stacked against the wall. So many books — but the most important book was missing. At the thought, he closed his eyes against a wave of shame and despair.
“Rosli.” He needed to talk to her alone; his plans would affect her as well.
The overhead light shone down, unwavering.
“Rosli?”
Still nothing. Wasn't she watching? After another minute, frowning, he made his way to the door, forced it open, and began his difficult return to the front.
The trip back had been even harder than going out, fighting the churning gusts that tried to tear the bags from his clenched fist, but he’d made it without losing anything. He found Tuuri on watch, but Sigrun stood beside her, alert and ready to lead a rescue if danger had loomed out of blinding snow. Reynir rushed to take the bags from him; the Icelander had already set up the cutting board, knives, and pots, ready to cook breakfast. Left of the door, Emil sat cross-legged on his bunk, mending a rip in his jacket. As Mikkel brushed snow off his jacket, Sigrun clouted him on the shoulder as she went to join Emil, taking her rifle along to clean.
Mikkel glanced at Tuuri as he hung up his uniform, considering the young woman who cast quick glances and smiles at him and the others even as she watched the monitors. Like Mikkel himself, she had lost weight, fine bone structure showing in her face as it thinned. Mikkel had thought her a cute kid when he first saw her; now, with lost weight and greater maturity, she was becoming a beautiful woman. Reynir would have competition when they returned to civilization. If Mikkel were a decade younger — but no, he dismissed that thought at once, turning away to face the rest of the team.
The teakettle shrilled, and Sigrun glared at it. Reynir laid down the potatoes he was washing, lifted the kettle, and poured the water into a pot, his movements calm, competent, and unhurried. As he turned back to his work, the sharp scent of mint tea wafted across the tank. Sigrun shrugged and glanced over at Emil with a smile that was downright maternal before returning to cleaning her rifle.
Mikkel joined Reynir at the table, taking the washed potatoes and dicing them. Fried in tallow, they would supply sustained energy for the team in this frigid weather, while venison bacon would provide protein. He frowned as he sliced a potato in half. They were running low even on potatoes and onions, not to mention carrots. How long until the rescue ship came? He wanted it to come, but rescue would mean the end of the team. How selfish was he to worry about that?
That, of course, reminded him that he hadn't spoken to Rosli. He looked forward, as if he could see through the walls to the driving compartment, then gave his head a small shake. No one would stop him from going for a private talk with Rosli, but they would wonder. And gossip.
As if she'd followed his thoughts, “Rosli?” Sigrun asked the air, but the air gave no answer. “Hey, Rosli, haven't heard — well, you know. Haven't heard from you.” The lights shone without a flicker. She set down her rifle, frowning. “Kiddo? You think she's sleeping?”
Emil started in alarm, pricking his finger as the two older team members turned enquiring looks on him. Gaze fixed on the wounded finger, he mumbled, “Nanny never said if ghosts sleep.”
Mikkel looked from the steady lights to the clock and back to the others. “Sunrise isn't for another half hour. Maybe she's just busy right now watching for ghosts.” Or maybe she's fighting them, his thoughts ran on, or maybe she fought them and lost. That's the problem with an invisible teammate. You can't be sure if she's … what passes for all right with her.
“Huh. You think sunrise'll stop the ghosts in this?” Sigrun waved vaguely at the still-howling storm.
“I have no idea. If you'd asked me that question before this expedition — or even a week ago — I'd've said ghosts could do whatever you imagine, since they are themselves imaginary. Now …” He shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.” Emil mirrored his shrug, and Sigrun sat back with another glance at the lights before returning to cleaning her rifle.
At that moment, Reynir poured mugs of mint tea and passed them out with a broad, happy smile, as if providing for others was all he'd ever asked for in life. Perhaps it was, Mikkel thought, as the tea warmed him to his toes. The Icelander placed a mug on the floor, temptingly close to the bundle of blankets under Mikkel's bunk, and sat with a satisfied sigh, sipping his tea as he watched the venison bacon sizzle.
A motion caught Mikkel's eye; he looked around to find Lalli now leaning against the bunk, sipping his tea without looking at anyone. Mikkel hastily looked away, not wanting to make the younger man self-conscious. Soon Reynir served out venison bacon, setting a plate at Lalli's side without comment, while the others moved to sit at the table. Still on watch, Tuuri accepted a plate and ate standing up.
Sigrun was unwontedly silent. When the bacon was gone and Reynir was frying potatoes, she tapped her chin and said, “We've really got a problem with those ghosts.”
“There's probably another bridge,” Emil offered, and she grinned at him before sobering again.
“We don't even know if running water stops them, and with the weather turning cold again — can they cross on the ice?” The question wasn't addressed to anyone in particular, and no one answered.
Reynir stirred the potatoes, nudged Mikkel, and whispered, “Is she talking about ghosts?”
The plan came together instantly, as the best pranks always did. “Yes. We're in grave danger. Rosli's not talking, so the ghosts might have gotten her. They may figure all of us together are too much for them, so they're picking us off one by one, starting with her.” Reynir's eyes went wide and he turned away from Mikkel, staring at the wall as if he could see through it to Tuuri. “I wonder if you can fight them.”
Reynir turned back. “Me? How? I'm just a shepherd.”
Mikkel couldn't stop himself from chuckling. “Not just a shepherd, not anymore.” He gave the young man his most intent stare. “You held off the ghosts. Yes, yes, I know, you needed Onni to drive them away. But you were surprised, you didn't have time to prepare, and you still held them off. Now, if you hurry, if they can't reach us today, I think you can hold them off for good. You remember the galdrastafur you used, don't you?”
“Y–yes?”
Sigrun had fallen silent, eyes narrowed as she watched the conversation she couldn't understand.
“This is very important, Reynir. We may be attacked tonight. Maybe even today, if the ghosts can handle sunlight in the storm. Now think. How can you use that galdrastafur to protect us?”
“It was — I saw it carved into the door of an old cottage.” Reynir looked around helplessly. “I don't think I can carve it into the tank. Rosli wouldn't like that. I mean, if —”
“Can you paint it? We can make a kind of paint. But you're going to have to get this right. We're in danger.” Mikkel gestured towards Tuuri, unseen beyond the wall.
“Yes!” Even as Reynir spoke, he turned away in alarm: the potatoes were burning.
“Hey!” Sigrun exclaimed. “Don't upset the cook or we won't have anything to eat.”
“I'll eat the burned food.” When Mikkel told Reynir the same, the Icelander shoveled half the burned potatoes and onions onto Mikkel's plate and the other half onto his own. Hands visibly trembling, he turned back to fix more.
“What'd you say to scare him?” Sigrun asked, leaning back and regarding Mikkel with suspicion.
“Only the truth. Rosli's not talking and we don't know why, we don't know how close the ghosts are, and we have no way to fight them.” He'd meant to scare Reynir, but if he had to admit it, the situation made him nervous as well. What if Rosli fell — or had already fallen?
“We can fight!” Sigrun said. “We'll fight with teeth and claws if we have to!” Mikkel didn't doubt it. Somehow, the ferocious troll-hunter would find a way to fight even ghosts.
“We could blow up another bridge,” Emil offered, his fork stopping half-way to his mouth. The bacon fell off the tines as he spoke. “They haven't caught up with us, so maybe the running water does work.” His face reddened as he fished the morsel out of his lap.
“We'll do that, for sure.” Sigrun gave him a quick grin before turning back to Mikkel. “Then why upset the baggage?”
“Because we do have a defense. Remember what he did in the attack.”
She screwed up her face in concentration. “He sent his dog to Onni and then … ah! He made a galdy-thing!”
“Galdrastafur.”
“Yeah, that thing. But you said he can't unless — ohhh.” Was that admiration in her eyes? “So, is he going to make some for us? Maybe draw them on our backs?” As Mikkel blinked at that image, she laughed and added, “On our uniforms, silly Dane!”
“An interesting thought,” he said with dignity, and turned to Reynir to make the suggestion.
“I c–could? Maybe? Wouldn't it wear off? And, and we don't have any paint or anything. I've been trying to think of how —”
“Hearth paint.” Mikkel gestured at the smoking skillet of potatoes. As Reynir hastily took it from the stove and served Sigrun and Emil, Mikkel added, “Didn't you ever — ah, perhaps not.” Reynir was a good kid. He would never have secretly made paint and scrawled obscenities on his tormentors' houses. “Grease and ashes make an adequate paint. It's sticky and fairly waterproof, so it'll work on the doors. On our jackets too, I suppose.”
The Icelander looked encouraged as he dropped a bit of tallow into his skillet and poured the rest of the potatoes and onions on top. “Oh, yes! That would work. Uh, I'll fix this for Tuuri and Lalli, and then melt some tallow for paint. Yes!”
Reminded of Lalli, Mikkel turned and pointed to him. “Lalli. Come with me. Talk to Tuuri. Talk to Tuuri.”
Lalli scowled but got to his feet and followed Mikkel to Tuuri, still on watch. Sigrun and Emil joined them, curious.
To Tuuri, Mikkel said, “Lalli can detect Rosli's presence, right? Is she still here?”
After a quick Finnish instruction, Lalli looked around the tank. For a moment, Mikkel could have sworn there was a blue light playing about his face, but surely that was his imagination. Instead of the expected simple yes or no answer, the scout said something rather longer to Tuuri. After some questions and answers, she turned to the others.
“He says yes, she's here, but there's something else here too. He's not sure what.”
Sigrun's hand dropped to her dagger as if she would rush to the defense of her teammate. “Ghosts. How many?”
“He doesn't know. Not many, maybe just one.”
Mikkel edged past the others to look at the clock over the stove. “Rosli can hold off one. She has before. Just minutes to sunrise.”
Lips tight, Sigrun tapped her dagger for several seconds before shrugging. “Okay, we can't do anything right now. Come on, kiddo, let's finish breakfast.”
As they headed back to the table, Reynir brought a bowl of potatoes and passed it to Tuuri. Lalli retreated to his usual position against Mikkel's bunk, and the Icelander gave him a bowl as well. Or, at least, he set the bowl beside Lalli's hand.
“Big guy, how's he going to draw his galdy-things?” Sigrun asked with her mouth full. “Is there paint out there that's not dried up?”
“No, we'll have to make it. Melted tallow plus ashes will make an adequate paint.”
Emil looked up from his plate. “Oh! Fire smears! We used to make that. But we need ashes …”
Mikkel nodded. “There should be plenty in the ash box.” The tank burned fuel efficiently, but there was always remaining ash. This accumulated in the ash box under the tank until Tuuri parked and pressed a button to empty the box.
“Great idea,” Sigrun said, scraping up the last scraps of onion. “But there's got to be all kinds of snow packed under there.”
“Right, so Tuuri can dump the ashes and move the tank, and we'll dig the ashes out of the snow.”
“No,” Emil said, surprising them both. “They'd be wet, and wet ashes don't make good fire smears.” The tips of his ears reddened. “We made some, you know, in the Cleansers. I can —”
Lalli sat up to call something to Tuuri, who came around the corner to translate. “The other feeling is gone and Rosli's still here.”
Mikkel checked the clock. “Sunrise. It did drive them off.”
“Rosli?” Sigrun asked. Everyone gazed at the overhead light, which shone bright and steady. “Okay, then,” she went on, “Emil, what were you going to say?”
“I can crawl under the tank and catch the ashes in a bag as they fall out. They'll stay dry that way.”
“We'll have to dig some of the snow out from under,” Mikkel said, frowning as he considered the best approach.
?
“Rosli!” five voices exclaimed in their various accents. Four added, “Are you okay?” in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, along with, “How are you?” in heavily accented Swedish.
OK
Mikkel, Tuuri, and Emil translated her answer in a chorus of reassurance.
“We were worried about you,” Tuuri scolded, and “What happened?” Sigrun asked, glancing up and then at Mikkel for translation.
3 ghosts fled now
Even Sigrun looked impressed. “You held off three by yourself? Nice job! But that means they've caught up with us again.”
Mikkel didn't answer, but Sigrun seemed to have learned his body language, no matter how carefully he hid it. “What is it, big guy? You're thinking about something.”
“I'm always thinking about something. It's nothing to worry about.” She stared at him, narrow-eyed, until he shrugged and answered. “I'm not sure they have caught up. We found ghosts in two buildings. What are the odds those were the only ghosts in all of Copenhagen, all of Denmark? I think it's possible this group came from somewhere else. Maybe one of the towns we've passed, a ruined farmhouse, or even one of those hulks on the road.”
“But we didn't do anything to anger other ghosts!” Emil objected.
“We don't really know what angered the first batch, or what might anger another batch.” As Mikkel spoke, Reynir gave him a quick, anxious look, left the dishes piled on the table, and hurried to Tuuri for translation.
“Yeah, whatever,” Sigrun said. “We've got a ghost problem, and we need to do something about it.”
“Oh, right,” Emil said. “So, I'll dig under the tank and put a sack under the ash box. Tuuri dumps the ashes, I drag them out, and we can make fire smears.”
Mikkel looked up at the light. “Rosli, you can't see under the tank, right?”
Right
He rubbed his chin, wishing they had a better and quicker method of communication. “Then can you feel it if something — if Emil taps on the underside?”
Yes
Emil nodded, shivered as if anticipating the cold, and got to his feet. “Okay, I need something to dig with.” Armed with a frying pan, he donned his uniform and left the tank with Sigrun as his guard and Mikkel following to collect candles.
By the time Mikkel hopped down from the back compartment with a sack of candles, Emil's head and shoulders were already under the tank as he scooped out snow. As the relentless wind slammed shut the heavy door, Sigrun turned towards Mikkel from watching their surroundings. Even with her face almost hidden behind a scarf and tinted goggles, he could see her excited grin, and he couldn't help grinning back. But, of course, his face was hidden too.
Back in the main compartment, Mikkel found Tuuri and Reynir deep in conversation next to the monitors, while Lalli had disappeared into his den once more.
“We need a stick,” Tuuri informed him. “About this long, about as thick as your finger — well, maybe my finger; yours are kind of thick. Oh, and where's the string?”
“I suppose you're making a brush? What will you use for bristles?”
Reynir gave him a tragic look. “We're going to cut off part of my braid.”
Tuuri patted the Icelander's shoulder. “Only a couple of centimeters. Just a little. You have lots to spare.”
“It'll grow back,” Mikkel added. He passed the two and headed for the cabinets, dropping the sack onto the table as he went. Plenty of string … he left it on the table, took up his crowbar, and braved the storm once more. Finding a stick in this mess is going to be fun.
With snow and ice particles spattering on his back, Mikkel moved downwind, figuring the tank would block the worst of the storm. Behind him, his footprints vanished almost as fast as he left them. He studied the trees he passed, not just looking for a stick, but memorizing their appearances so he could find his way back. How humiliating would it be to get lost in the storm and have to be found by Lalli? Or worse, by Sigrun? Freezing to death would be better. After all, he had experience with that.
The storm had broken many branches, and more creaked threateningly overhead. Surely there would be a good stick around here somewhere …
Growl
Mikkel stopped in his tracks at the sound, slowly turning his head to see the threat, an animal about five meters away. Not a grossling, certainly, as that would have attacked without hesitation. A dog? A wolf? A hybrid of both, he thought. Smaller than a wolf but more dangerous, as it would lack a wolf's instinctive fear of humans.
He turned to face it, raising his crowbar with one hand and pulling down his scarf with the other. Drawing back his lips, he showed his teeth, which immediately hurt from the cold. The animal showed its teeth in return, but didn't attack as he scanned around for its pack. Were they surrounding him? Or was this animal out by itself?
Then too, why had it growled instead of attacking? He squinted against the wind sweeping past his eyes. Was there something beyond the wolf-dog? Yes, something brown, something other than a branch or a rock …
“Ah,” he said loudly between clenched, aching teeth. “I don't want your kill. You go your way and I'll go mine.”
Growl
“I'm bigger than you and I have a weapon.” He backed away, feeling with his feet for obstacles under the snow and risking a quick look behind him. If he tripped and fell, the animal or its pack might be on him before he could rise.
Three steps back, four … and his foot landed on a hidden branch, which cracked, the sound muffled by the snow. As he pinwheeled his arms in a desperate effort to keep his balance, the wolf-dog backed several steps, perhaps perceiving his actions as another threat. The broken branch pivoted, bringing part up from under the snow. Steady on his feet once more, Mikkel glanced down to find a small branch of the width and length he needed. Did the Mother of Wolves send this animal to guide me? No. I'll accept ghosts and protective drawings and all that, but the Mother of Wolves is a step too far.
With his gaze fixed once more on the animal, he snapped off the branch, the sound like a shot. The wolf-dog backed another step as if, in some recess of its mind, it held an ancestral memory of firearms.
“Okay, I'm leaving. Don't even think about attacking.” Still facing the animal, but alert for others, he retreated towards the tank. Once the wolf-dog was hidden by blowing snow, he pulled up his scarf with a sigh of relief, his teeth still aching with the cold. Facing forwards, he hurried away, checking over his shoulders periodically for threats. None materialized from the blinding snow, and he soon reached the tank, unharmed.
Within, Reynir was heating candles while Tuuri watched the monitors. Both wore their masks, Mikkel saw with approval. “Do you see anything out there? Particularly to the east?” Mikkel asked, brushing snow off his uniform.
“Just Sigrun back there. I can't see Emil. I saw you coming back. Why?”
“I encountered a wolf-dog. Not a grossling,” he hastened to add, “just a normal animal. It had a kill — a deer, I think — so it shouldn't follow me. But there might be more out there.”
“Sigrun would probably like that.”
“Probably. I should —”
The overhead light flashed: dump
Tuuri darted into the driving compartment to hit the necessary button, while Mikkel took over watching the monitors. Mere moments later, Emil appeared next to Sigrun behind the tank, and the two ran for the front. Mikkel swung open the door as they approached.
Tuuri laughed aloud, Reynir turned to look, and even Mikkel chuckled. Emil glared around before ducking his head, hiding the soot splashed across his face and ashes caught in the locks that had escaped from under his hood. He strode to Reynir, thrust the bag of ashes at him, pulled off his jacket, and threw it on the floor. Snatching a washcloth from a cabinet, he turned his back to the others, hunched his shoulders, and scrubbed his face and hair.
Sigrun looked at Mikkel with a grin. “Hey, he got the ashes. That's what counts. Now, let's make fire smears and get to work so our mage can finish before dark.”
Tuuri slipped past the others to pick up Mikkel's medical scissors and talk to Reynir. With the air of a condemned man, he lifted his long braid and offered it for sacrifice. Mikkel suppressed his grin as she snipped off a couple of centimeters, so little as to be unnoticeable. Reynir clutched his maimed braid to himself as she sat down with stick, hair, and string to put together a paintbrush.
Sigrun watched all this with intent interest. “He's using his own hair for the brush? That's a good idea, using part of himself. In fact, I think runes like this work way better when drawn in blood; the gods love blood.” At Mikkel's dubious look, she added, “Hey, I'm not an expert or anything, but we need all the help we can get.” She drew her dagger and started for the pot of melted tallow.
“Wait, wait!” Mikkel stepped in the way. “She's not after you,” he said in Icelandic to Reynir, who had retreated to a corner, braid held before him like a shield. Switching back to Danish, he addressed Sigrun again. “Unless you're planning to knife someone — which I'd prefer you didn't, speaking as the team's medic — there's no need to wave your dagger around. My dagger, now that I think of it.”
Sigrun sheathed the disputed weapon. “We should add some blood, though.”
Mikkel squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. Arguing with Sigrun when she was convinced about something was generally pointless. At least he could ensure it was done hygienically with proper medical equipment. “Very well, then. I can draw a little blood with a lancet. Will that be enough?”
At the captain's grudging “Guess so”, he took out his first aid kit, giving instructions to Reynir over his shoulder. With many nervous glances at Sigrun, Reynir put a pot of water on to boil while Sigrun explained to Tuuri and Emil that they too would donate some blood to the defenses.
The process went slowly as Mikkel insisted on boiling the lancet for ten minutes after pricking each person's finger and squeezing a couple of drops into the tallow. Even Lalli came out to offer his finger after a monologue from Tuuri. When Mikkel finished the others, Sigrun stood glaring at him, arms folded, until he surrendered and pricked his own finger.
“Do we have to do this again every time he makes another pot of tallow?” Emil asked, sucking his wounded finger.
“Nah, nah,” Sigrun said with a grin. “He can just put a bit of this batch in the next batch; that should be enough.”
When Tuuri translated this for Reynir, he scooped out a spoonful of tallow and set it aside before adding ashes to the pot. Within minutes, he had a pot of usable paint and moved outside with the team, other than Tuuri and Lalli.
Pressing his body against the tank to avoid the swirling wind, Reynir dipped his crude paintbrush into the pot of tallow in Emil's hands and drew a wide circle. Within, he drew a series of geometric designs from the rim inward to the center. By the time he finished, the tallow had all but solidified, and they returned to the tank to warm up.
“So that does it?” Sigrun asked, shaking snow onto the floor.
“No, there are two more doors, you know,” Tuuri answered, setting the pot back on the stove. “The back compartment and the driver's door.”
“Yeah, but there's no way he's painting on them in this mess!”
“We've figured that out,” Tuuri said with a smug smile. “He'll paint on the back wall of the back compartment, so if they get in there, they still can't reach us. And then he'll paint on the interior door to the driving compartment. If they get in there, they can't get in here, and they'll have to get out at sunrise.”
Sigrun stared at the small woman. “You're a smart kid, short stuff. I wish I could have you on my team.”
Tuuri blushed and Mikkel winced inwardly at the reminder that Tuuri couldn't be on Sigrun's team.
“Let's get to work,” Sigrun said hastily. “Mage, do the door now. We'll do the back when the paint's warmed up. Then we can have lunch, right, big guy?”
Within half an hour, the work was done and the team sat down to eat. Mikkel listened to the storm still howling outside and hoped the galdrastafur would hold up to the wind. And that Reynir had been anxious enough to work the magic, and that it was the right magic, and that the ghosts didn't have some other attack up their incorporeal sleeves.
Creak of snow-laden trees, rustle of small creatures in snow-blanketed leaf litter, distant crack of overburdened branch. Hiss of skis across untouched snow, whispers of wind, low calls of owls far away. Sharp smells of pine sap, musty whiffs of fungus, and the pure scent of snow; clouds from each exhalation joining the ice crystals that swirl in the wind. Stars twinkling overhead and brilliant green Lights dancing in the north.
Lalli was in his element, every sense alert as he skied through the darkling woods. This Danish forest was subtly different from his own Finnish forests, every sound, every smell slightly off from his expectations. But it was a forest, he was scouting, and he was content.
Lalli slowed to a halt, studying the problem. This back road, frost-fractured but free of rusting vehicles, was mostly passable for the tank. But here, on either side of the road, trees were smashed aside in a broad path, and a single shallow-rooted tree had fallen across the road, heavy branches sprawling around it. Deep drifts against the fallen tree showed it had fallen early in the blizzard, which had ended a few hours before.
This was the track of a giant, and giants were rare. Lalli thought it clear that this was the track of the giant that had passed the tank at the height of the blizzard, so it was long gone. Still, he scanned his surroundings with his preternatural night vision. Seeing no danger, he leaned on his poles and opened his inner eyes.
He saw only a couple of trolls in a ruined house far up an overgrown driveway. There was no sign of the giant. Reassured, Lalli closed his inner eyes and returned to his study of the road. The others could chop through the fallen tree, could use the tank to push or pull the larger pieces out of the way. But it would take time, days perhaps, and Lalli felt they couldn't waste time. He sensed danger approaching, like the faint stench of trolls on the wind. It was far away, but it was coming. Of that, he was certain.
Lalli turned around, following his backtrail for several hundred meters to an intersection. To his right, the road was badly overgrown with close-spaced volunteer trees; perhaps the tank could force its way through, but the road to the left looked better. He skied along that road, noting hollows and mounds where the pavement had collapsed or tilted up, frost-shattered edges gleaming in the starlight. It would be rough, but the tank could get through. At length, he saw another road to his left and followed that back towards the giant's track. This road was clear enough for the tank to cross the track, and he continued to follow it.
A few kilometers later, he stopped again, examining the remains of a bridge over a broad stream. The banks here were steep, too steep for the tank to negotiate or to mount on the other side. Wind sighed through the broken pilings as he looked up and down the stream. He thought it widened to his right, so should be shallower there. He backtracked again to find a thin spot in the undergrowth where the tank could force its way through, scouted a route to the wide spot, which proved to be a good ford. On the other side, he worked his way back to the road and went on.
Crunch of footsteps, moving fast from downwind, still too far away for him to see the attacker. Lalli flicked the quick-releases on his skis, stepped away, and drew his dagger, patting his rifle as he did so. He would shoot if he had to, but there was no telling what the sound would awaken. The dagger was better, if it sufficed.
The creature charged into view: a deer beast, its horns transformed into short tentacles and its elegant muzzle drawn out into a maw bristling with fangs. Behind its head, its body kept its original form, but for a long, lashing serpent tail.
As the grossling lunged, Lalli leapt aside, twisting to avoid grasping tentacles, and plunged his dagger precisely into the monster's spine. Transformed though it was, its spine was still vital, and it dropped paralyzed, plowing for a meter through the snow before it halted. Its serpent tail twitched once and fell limp, while its horn-tentacles stretched towards the man and its long jaws snapped.
Lalli pondered the still-living head. Though he cared nothing for grosslings, he was no sadist and reluctant to leave the thing in this condition. He couldn't reach the skull with his dagger; even his quick reflexes would not protect him if he reached into that nest of tentacles. After a moment, he searched around and found a sturdy branch. A dozen solid blows, and the head lay crushed and finally dead. Tossing the branch aside, he took up the serpent tail and dragged the monster well away from the road. Returning, he donned his skis and went on.
An hour later, the Great Belt Bridge loomed before him. Lalli squinted at the bridge, considering its condition and the chances that the tank could cross. It had not collapsed in the decades since the world ended, but it was packed with the remains of vehicles as far as he could see. After a moment, he shrugged and turned away. His orders were to scout a path to the bridge and he had done so. Getting across was someone else's problem.
A hundred meters down the wide road leading to the bridge, he found a parking lot, slabs of concrete tilted up in places, but few and small volunteer trees. The buildings beside it had collapsed into ruin, and he saw no threats. This would do for a camp. Setting a couple of snares nearby, he gave the place one more searching examination before setting out on his return. No one had asked him to set snares, and he might only snag a grossling, but if he caught a rabbit … Lalli didn't resent Tuuri's inattention to him, or that of the others, but he would appreciate some recognition of his efforts.
With no threats, returning was faster than scouting, though he stopped frequently to slice bark from prominent trees, blazing a trail for Tuuri. The Moon, a waning crescent, hung well above the eastern horizon, which glowed dimly with the approaching sunrise, but the tank outshone them both in his eyes. A shield of swirling green and blue — life's colors — surrounded the tank, and on the door, the rune, ruby red and gold, pulsed with power. Would it really defend against ghosts? That he did not know, but there could be no doubt that the “tall stupid one”, as he thought of Reynir, was a true mage.
Lalli stowed his skis in the back compartment, where a second rune glowed and pulsed, before padding forward to the main compartment to make his report. He said nothing of the glories of the magic, for he didn't want to upset Tuuri by describing a sight that she could never see.
“Ha! You'll have to be quicker than that, little Viking!”
Emil's snowball skimmed Sigrun's hood as she ducked, scooping up a snowball of her own. Even as she stood, another snowball hit her squarely in the back. She whirled, assessing threats: the Icelander wouldn't dare; the little scout was standing guard; so the big Dane … she hurled her snowball at his broad chest.
To Sigrun's astonishment, Lalli leapt to his left, slapped away the snowball, and leapt back to his original position. Mikkel seemed equally astonished; he turned to stare at the scout and was still staring when Emil's snowball hit him in the face. He turned back, snatched up snowballs in each large hand, and flung them at Emil and Sigrun, missing both. Reynir splattered snow across Emil's shoulder, and the battle was on again. After several more rounds, they raced after the tank trundling through the deep snow.
It had been a good day. The blizzard had died away in the early hours, so Lalli had gone scouting and had returned to report they could reach the big bridge by nightfall. The day had dawned clear and icy, the cloudless sky so pure a blue it was almost painful. To everyone's relief, Rosli had reported no ghosts during the night.
As the tank ground its slow way through the drifts, Sigrun and Emil had gone hunting while Mikkel gathered fuel. When Sigrun asked Emil which way deer had gone on the game trail they found, he had correctly pointed out the direction. Granted, there were only two possibilities and he might have guessed, but Sigrun preferred to think he was learning to track. She shot their doe since Emil had had little chance to practice with bow and arrows.
After a hearty lunch, all the immunes had jumped out to stretch their legs, and at Mikkel's request, even Reynir was allowed to join them, leaving Tuuri alone in the tank. But not alone; as always, Rosli was there, now watching the monitors and ready to alert Tuuri, and though her the others, of danger.
Before long, the five were engaged in a running snowball fight as they followed the tank. At a particularly easy stretch of their route, Tuuri stopped, Reynir took over driving, and Tuuri joined the fun for almost an hour.
Everyone was back in the tank by the time red and gold streaked the western sky. Sigrun leaned forward to look past Tuuri as the great bridge hove into sight, stretching far into the distance. “Man,” she said, “you said the bridge was big, but I had no idea!”
“This is the east bridge,” Mikkel said, also leaning forward. “It's about seven kilometers long. Then there's a little island, then the west bridge, about the same length. One of our ships got a good look at it last year and said it was still standing all the way.”
Focused on Lalli's trail, Tuuri didn't turn her head. “It had better be. We can't get the tank across if it isn't.”
Sigrun folded her arms. “We won't give up. We'll get across.” But she was already thinking about what to do if they had to leave the tank behind.
Tuuri stopped to let Sigrun and Emil out at the start of the bridge before turning towards the camping spot Lalli had found. “Wow,” Emil said, waving at the vehicles filling every lane as far as they could see. Two lanes were crowded with eastbound vehicles, two with westbound vehicles. “Where were they all going?”
“Away,” Sigrun said. “Just … away. Don't worry about it. We've got our own problems. We've got to get the tank through this mess.” She turned to study the lines of vehicles. Part of troll-hunter training was learning not to think about the desperation of the people who perished with the coming of the Rash.
A near-century of exposure to high winds and salty sea air had corroded the vehicles far more than those in the more sheltered forest and city. Many had collapsed into heaps of rust and broken glass with rough steel beams poking out, while others remained as heavily rusted shells. But in even the most decayed hulks lurked the engine blocks: heavy, unwieldy chunks of steel.
“At least there won't be any trolls on the bridge.” At Emil's surprised glance, Sigrun added, “They've frozen to death, or else they've broken out by now.” With a grin at her recruit, she strode onto the bridge and kicked a body panel, which disintegrated into thick scales of rust. Jumping out of the way, she moved forward and pushed at one of the engine blocks with both hands.
Tank can't fit between these things. Whoa, heavy, at least a hundred kilos. Still, the big Dane can move it, if he can get a grip on it … She considered the rough edges and awkward shape. Maybe him and Emil together, then. But a stream of rusty shapes stretched off into the sunset. “We can't move all these things,” she told Emil. “We'll have to push through with the tank. If we can.”
“Maybe a plow?” Emil put his fingertips together and spread his elbows to form a triangle. “Like on the front of the train? Oh, but you weren't on the train …”
Sigrun looked from his triangle to the bridge, then thumped him on the shoulder. “Perfect! Come on, kiddo, let's tell the others.” They trotted together along the tank's track to the campsite. As she ran, Sigrun rubbed the palms of her gloves on her uniform jacket, leaving rusty smears.
As they scrambled into the tank, they met with the mouthwatering odor of stew, and the less appealing smells of hot tallow and ashes. Mikkel, Tuuri, and Reynir, standing together by the stove, turned as Sigrun and Emil entered.
“I paint —” Reynir began, breaking off as Tuuri murmured something. “I will paint doors,” the Icelander continued. “You will guard?” He glanced at Tuuri and smiled at her nod before turning back to Sigrun with a hopeful expression.
“Sure, we'll guard you.” Sigrun grinned at him and headed back to the door, Emil close behind. Reynir soon joined them, paintbrush and pot of paint in his hands and the kitten draped over his shoulders. As the three made for the back of the tank, something caught Sigrun's attention. She peered over her shoulder at the pattern painted on the main door. For a moment, the lines reflected the sunset, gleaming red and gold. Stumbling, she looked down at her feet, then back at the pattern, which was now just greasy black smears on the gray paint.
Reynir looked around anxiously, petted the kitten, and painted on the door to the back compartment as Sigrun and Emil separated to guard his flanks. The shadows were long and growing longer as he worked. Finishing the back, he moved on to the driver's door, which Sigrun had never seen used. He painted quickly here, with frequent fearful glances over his shoulder. As soon as he finished, the three raced for the main door.
The table was set, and Lalli sat in his usual place on the floor, already eating his stew. It seemed that Mikkel had won the war of wills, for Lalli now ate every meal without protest. Reynir ladled out stew, and everyone fell to at once. After a day of snowball fights and running after the tank, they were all hungry and tired. Sigrun had finished one bowl of stew and was halfway through the next when she stopped and held up a piece of meat. “What is this? How did you make venison taste like” — she paused to sniff at the meat — “like rabbit?”
Mikkel stood to refill Emil's bowl before answering. “It is rabbit. Lalli set snares here and got a couple.”
Since Tuuri said Lalli didn't like to be touched, Sigrun settled for giving him a thumbs-up. “Good man!” She knew he didn't understand the words, but perhaps he got the tone, as he looked at her hand, then past her towards Tuuri, before raising his own thumb. Grinning, Sigrun turned back to the table. The little scout was acting like a real teammate. That reminded her … “Hey, Mikkel, you got a fair-weather friend there?”
“How so?” Mikkel seated himself and took up his spoon.
“He knocked away that one snowball, but not the rest.”
“Oh, that. I would hope he views me as a friend, but I don't believe that's why he did it. He hit you in the back with a snowball, and you retaliated towards me. So he knocked the snowball away.”
“He hit me with a snowball?” Sigrun looked down at the scout, wishing she could pound him on the back in delight. “Good man!” she said again, inadequate though it felt. This time she gave him two thumbs-up, which drew only a look of mild confusion. She shook her head and returned to her supper.
As they scraped the last drops from their bowls, the light overhead flashed. Everyone sat up and stared at the light until Mikkel and Tuuri translated the flashes as “Dark”. Reynir jumped to his feet and hurried to the monitors to take over the watch as Rosli switched to watching for ghosts. Sigrun smiled as he passed. For his own sake, she wished he were at home in Iceland, but she couldn't deny she was glad to have an Icelandic mage on the team. And he was helpful.
Sigrun turned back to the others. “So, big guy, this bridge is definitely the only way across?”
“This is it.”
“Okay, we're going to get the tank over that bridge.” Sigrun leaned back, pretending to be completely confident. “The bridge is full of cars, so close together the tank can't squeeze between them.”
“No surprise,” Mikkel said, gesturing towards the traffic-jammed road outside as if they could see it.
Sigrun nodded. “Yes, but on the bridge, the cars are all rotted. No trolls in them, and we can clear most of the stuff by hand. The only problem is every car has a big chunk of steel in the front. We can't move all those. So we'll push them out of the way with the tank. With a plow.” She nudged Emil, who made his “plow” gesture. Tuuri squinted at him, nodded, and looked off into space, brows knitted. After a moment, she stood, muttered “Need to draw up a design”, and made her way past Sigrun to the radio/office compartment.
Mikkel stood as well. “I'll help you after I wash up.”
“No,” Emil said. “I'll wash up. You help Tuuri.”
Mikkel turned to Emil in surprise, and Sigrun beamed at her recruit. Was it only six weeks ago that he whined about having to dig a latrine? And here he is volunteering to wash dishes! “We’ll do this. Get to work, big guy.” As Mikkel gave them a doubtful look, Sigrun readied herself to snap at the Dane if he dared tell them not to break anything, but he nodded without comment and followed Tuuri. Sigrun gathered bowls, clattering them together to make unnecessary noise, and the two set to work scrubbing.
The design was simple: two large rectangular metal frames with diagonal braces, bolted together at an angle to form the prow. Across the back was a third such frame, the width of the tank itself, to which the first two were bolted at their back edges. The whole structure was held together by bolts, with heavy planks bolted on the front to form the deflecting surfaces. Tuuri had insisted on bolted construction rather than welding the frames together. Not only would it be stronger, but they could dismantle the whole thing and store it in the back compartment once they were across. “We might need it again,” she pointed out, “and I don't want to have to build another one from scratch.”
The plow would be chained to the front of the tank; this would require Tuuri to weld on mount-points, which they hoped Rosli wouldn't mind. The welding gear and other tools were part of Tuuri's repair kit, while Lalli would have to find the planks and components of the frame. “Oh, Lalli can find whatever we need, if it's out there,” she answered breezily when Sigrun questioned whether her cousin could find them.
With their plans ready for the morrow, the team went to bed early. As she drifted off, Sigrun thought she'd missed something. Whatever it was, she supposed she'd remember in the morning.
The morning dawned clear, cold, and windy. When, once again, Rosli reported no ghosts, Sigrun grew more convinced that Reynir's galdy-things were truly keeping the spirits at bay. Rosli agreed that Tuuri could weld mount-points on her tank, and Lalli had discovered a promising hardware store nearby with all the necessary parts. So, after a hearty breakfast of venison bacon, Tuuri moved the tank to a parking lot nearby. As Sigrun pulled on her uniform to head out, she realized what she'd forgotten.
“Hey, short stuff. Look at this.” She brushed at the rusty smears on her jacket. “This stuff's going to get all over us. And there's a lot of sharp edges up there too, that'll tear up our clothes. I don't want us to be rescued in filthy rags! Ask your cousin to find us some clothes we won't care about.”
After a quick Finnish explanation, Lalli nodded, gave Sigrun a brief, unreadable look, and raced off, threading his way through the decaying traffic jam. Shaking her head at the vagaries of scouts, Sigrun joined Mikkel and Emil in searching through the vast hardware store, carrying out planks, nuts and bolts, and parts of several heavy-duty shelving units. Outside, Tuuri hummed happily to herself in between ordering the others to arrange, lift, and hold parts for her.
By lunchtime, they had assembled the plow. Tuuri sent the others back in to find chains and locks while she welded reinforcement plates followed by heavy metal loops on the tank. The plow was so heavy and unwieldy that Reynir had to join the others in lifting it into position so that Tuuri, clambering about on the hood, could fasten it in place with chains and locks. With the plow firmly attached, the team stepped away to regard their handiwork.
“It’s too high,” Emil said. “Look, it’s a good twenty centimeters off the ground.”
“Sure!” Tuuri smiled at the plow. “We don’t want it scraping along the ground, tearing up the bottom. This gives us some clearance if we have to go over something and —” She broke off as Lalli returned with a large, grimy box and dropped it at Sigrun’s feet. He didn’t answer her questions, dodging around the others to duck into the tank. Sigrun opened the box while the others crowded around.
Besides a good collection of heavy leather work gloves, Lalli had scavenged pristine polyester tracksuits. He had gathered a couple of dozen in sizes for the whole team, including Tuuri and Reynir. Sigrun pulled out one in her size: hot pink with lime green stripes, clashing gloriously with her red hair. Mikkel recoiled at the sight. Smirking, she set it aside to inflict on him as often as possible. The rest were sensible dark blues and greens, except for a single sky-blue suit with silver stripes that went beautifully with Tuuri’s ash-blonde hair. Watching Tuuri blink back tears as she clutched her special outfit, Sigrun smiled. The little scout might seem indifferent, but he knew his cousin's favorite color.
After lunch, Tuuri moved the tank up to the start of the bridge, nudging aside several cars with the new plow. With only a few hours left in the short winter day, they didn’t begin the crossing. Instead, Sigrun, Emil, and Mikkel gathered wood, storing it in the back compartment once the tank was fully fueled. There would be no fuel on the bridge.
“Watch your step here,” Emil said.
“Sure.” Mikkel was already watching every step as they shuffled across the cracked and spalling concrete, carrying a car door between them. A meter later, he saw the danger, a hole in the bridge deck, chunks of broken concrete, rusty rebar at the bottom like bloody bones, and blood splattered around the body, while the giant screeched behind him. His breath came in quick gasps and his back itched, expecting the killing blow, as he stepped over streams of blood — rust flowing from ruined vehicles. Another meter took them past the wreckage.
“Here’s good,” Emil said.
Mikkel dropped the door and spun to face the threat, fumbling for the dagger that wasn’t on his hip. Where’s the giant? Hiding! No, no ... it’s just the tank. Metal shrieked as the tank shoved it to the side.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Mikkel was grateful his scarf and tinted goggles hid his shamefaced flush. “Yes, quite all right.”
“Good.” The younger man hesitated before continuing. “But I’m cold and tired and hungry. Can we take a break now?”
Mikkel looked around. In their dark blue tracksuits, the team might have been in uniform. Sigrun and Reynir hauled smaller pieces aside, while Lalli followed with a snow shovel, clearing the worst of the remaining debris. The tank could, in theory, push everything aside, but its armor was thinner than anyone would like, and it might be damaged by beams falling against it. The five of them had been working since daybreak to clear the way, and it was now near noon.
“I suppose we should take a break for lunch. Sigrun!”
They had worked out their plans in the long pre-dawn hours. At Sigrun’s signal, they hurried to the back compartment, where they stripped off their rust-covered tracksuits and left them by the door. Reynir carried the stew pot as they rushed through the bitter cold to the main compartment to join Tuuri. Inside, the team washed their faces and hands while Tuuri took the pot and put it on the stove to reheat the stew Reynir and Mikkel had made that morning.
As Sigrun, Emil, and Reynir dropped into the chairs and Lalli sat in his usual position on the floor, Mikkel adopted his medic persona and examined everyone’s fingers, toes, and ears. Sigrun watched him, narrow-eyed, as even Lalli cooperated, rolling his eyes as he did so. Mikkel found no signs of frostbite and no blood, though everyone had acquired new bruises.
“I think my arms are going to fall off,” Emil said, twisting his shoulders. “How far have we come?”
“About a kilometer,” Sigrun said. “Too slow. At this rate we'll be on this bridge three days.”
“Better that than getting someone hurt,” Mikkel said, but Tuuri interrupted as she served the stew.
“Actually, you're moving faster now. I hardly have to wait at all.”
“We still can’t hurry too much,” Mikkel muttered, accepting his mug and spoon. Conversation died as everyone dug in hungrily. There was enough stew for everyone to have two helpings.
“Big guy, let’s talk,” Sigrun said as she finished her second mug of stew and got to her feet. Curious, Mikkel followed her to the driving compartment, where she closed the door and turned to face him. “Look, the stowaway is nearly as strong as Emil, and he’s closer to your height.”
“Yours, too.” Mikkel saw where this was going and wouldn’t make it easy.
“Yeah, okay, but you talk his language —”
“Why, you’re right!”
Sigrun ignored his feigned astonishment. “And I want you to deal with him before I strangle him with his own silly braid.”
Mikkel cocked his head. “Has he been a problem?”
“He jabbers. I don’t know if he’s saying, ‘look at the pretty birdy’ or ‘ooh, look at the cool tentacle climbing over the railing’. I keep looking over my shoulder, and he’s driving me nuts. So you deal with him.”
She raised her eyebrows, watching him expectantly. After a moment, as her brows drew together in puzzlement, Mikkel realized she expected him to demand a favor in return. But there was nothing she could do for him, so he merely nodded and opened the door.
“Okay, kiddo!” Sigrun announced as they returned. “Me and you are working together this afternoon, and the big guy will deal with the baggage.” Emil sat up, grinning at the news.
Mikkel explained more politely to Reynir that they would work together; the Icelander was as happy and enthusiastic as ever. The five of them trooped back out to don their tracksuits and return to work.
They worked in silence. Or rather, they were silent, but there was noise all around them: seagulls screeching overhead, waves splashing below, and in between, the team shifting debris, the tank plowing through wreckage, and the wind sighing through the bones of the old world.
“Reynir,” Mikkel said at last, “do you think your galdrastafur works to keep the ghosts away?”
“I guess so. I mean, I haven’t seen them, but then I wouldn’t from inside, would I? They haven’t bothered Rosli at all, and I can feel the magic, so … maybe? I hope so. You can’t feel the magic, can you?”
“No.” Mikkel searched for another topic. Why didn’t Reynir jabber to him? “Tell me about your village.”
“Oh, but it’s just a boring village. Anyway, Tuuri said you’d been to Iceland.”
“I have, but I was just in Reykjavík, not in any of the villages. Tell me.”
“Okay, well, Brúardalur is very small, so small we don’t even have a school …” Reynir went into great detail about his village, growing more enthusiastic as he spoke. His tales were quite mundane, but Mikkel didn’t mind. The Icelandic chatter drowned out the shrieks of trolls and moans of wounded soldiers.
At sunset, they stopped work. As the others pulled off their filthy tracksuits and ran forward, Mikkel gathered an armload of wood. Sigrun turned back to join him as he fed it into the fueling chute.
“I don’t need a guard.”
Sigrun ignored his objection. “If I’d known it was going to be this hard, I might not have agreed to go to Odense.”
“I should have known. I knew we had to cross this bridge, and it should have been obvious —”
“We’re here now. Do we keep going? Look, what I’m asking is, do you think there really is a cure in Odense?”
Mikkel pushed a last stick into the chute and went back for more as he answered. “I think there’s something there. Not a really good cure; it can’t have worked very well, since Rosli got it and died anyway. Still, they distributed it, so it had to work sometimes.”
“There were those dead people in that clinic, too. And I’ve never heard of anybody being cured. Shouldn’t some of the cured people have shown up somewhere?”
Mikkel had given this much thought on their travels. Now, he gestured at the kilometers of wreckage on the bridge. “How many of these people were cured? And where did they go? We know some people fled to smaller uninhabited islands; Bornholm sent out naval search teams after about a decade and found a few survivors on those islands, but a lot more dead. The survivors they found were immune, but were those others immune? Or maybe cured?”
“Survived the Rash and then starved to death on those islands?”
“Perhaps. Also, there’s a whole continent south of us.” Even in the twilight, he could see her puzzlement. “That’s like a huge island, many times as big as Iceland. And warmer. Survivors could have gone that way on small boats or on foot across bridges. So just because we don’t know of anyone who was cured, that doesn’t mean there weren’t any.”
Mikkel tossed a final branch into the chute and returned to the back compartment to strip off his tracksuit. “I’m not saying there’s a perfect cure in Odense. I think there’s an early, imperfect cure, and their scientists ran out of time making it. Our scientists have nothing but time. They can refine and improve an imperfect cure into something better.”
As they trotted together to the main compartment, Sigrun clouted him on the shoulder. “Yeah, guess we need to keep going.” They climbed into warmth and the welcome smell of stew.
When Mikkel did his frostbite check, Emil rolled his eyes. “I don’t think it’s cold enough for frostbite, man.”
“Perhaps not, but it’s cold enough to numb your fingers. You could cut yourself and not know it.”
“Hey, kiddo, let the medic do his job,” Sigrun said, pulling off her socks and wiggling healthy toes. “He knows what he’s doing.” Mikkel had a feeling she was humoring him, but he didn’t care as long as he knew no one was hurt. She did, however, demand that he take out her stitches, and he could hardly refuse, given that the wound seemed well healed.
Supper was a quiet affair as the team stoked their exhausted bodies. Sigrun estimated they’d made three kilometers over the day and hoped they’d make four the next. “But we’ll camp tomorrow night on the bridge again. I don’t want to tangle with those trolls in the dark when we’re all tired.”
Lalli had scouted ahead, reporting a nest of six to eight trolls on the island, no fresh water supply, and a scrubby forest. But the trolls seemed a distant problem when they had another day of hard labor ahead.
Since there wasn’t enough water to wash more than their faces and hands, they slept in their sweaty underclothes. It was too cold to sleep naked, and changing into their pajamas would soon make the pajamas equally foul. Sigrun had set watches, but nothing disturbed them or Rosli during the night.
The work went on the next day. Mikkel took the heavy end of every piece of junk, encouraged Reynir to talk to him, and avoided looking at anyone. Though part of his mind understood their tracksuits were rust-covered and grimy, a much louder part insisted they’d suffered mortal wounds. He called a break mid-morning, when he estimated they’d progressed a kilometer. The team rested on sturdy remains in the lee of the tank until Sigrun chided them for wasting daylight.
Sigrun called the break for lunch and another mid-afternoon. They stopped for the night as the sun neared the horizon and the island sprawled like a pit of darkness a quarter kilometer ahead. Only when Mikkel checked for frostbite did he learn that Emil had dropped something heavy on his left foot. His steel-toed boot had taken the worst of the impact, but his instep was swollen and already purplish-red.
Mikkel knelt to examine the wounded foot. “What were you thinking? If it’s broken and you walked —”
“It’s not broken, and we need to get across this bridge. Hey, that hurts! Why are you doing that?”
“Because he’s the medic, and that’s his job,” Sigrun said from where she leaned against the wall. Her tone was light, but her eyes were worried. “Told you he’d find out.”
Mikkel shook his head, ignoring them both, as he felt the bones and flexed the foot. “Reynir, get some compresses and put them outside with something heavy on top so they don’t blow away. And pass me the comfrey salve.” To Emil he added, “It’s not broken, but it’s badly bruised. Get on your bunk and let me apply some salve. This will help with the swelling, and we’ll have a cold compress soon.”
Over Emil’s muttered complaints, Mikkel gently massaged the salve into his foot. The strong smell of comfrey competed with that of stew and the stronger odor of people who’d worked hard, slept in their clothes, and worked hard again. And would sleep in their clothes again. Mikkel sighed. The situation wouldn’t get any better until they crossed the west bridge.
“Short stuff, tell your cousin he’s going hunting with me. Bullets, this time.” Sigrun patted the pistol on her hip and the rifle slung on her shoulder before adding, “You guys stay here.”
Mikkel and Emil glanced at each other, but neither objected. Emil’s foot rested on a pile of pillows with a cold compress wrapped around it; as medic, Mikkel had recommended rest for the day. With only a few trolls on the island, and none on the bridges, Sigrun felt safe shooting instead of stabbing. As Mikkel had admitted to Sigrun that he was a terrible shot, that left only Lalli to join the troll-hunt.
The four left behind crowded into the driving compartment to watch Sigrun and Lalli trot down the bridge at daybreak, nimbly avoiding debris and icy pavement. Minutes later, the two vanished amid the ruins of a service plaza.
“Back to your bunk.”
With a sniff at Mikkel’s order, Emil folded his arms and leaned back in his usual place behind the passengers’ seat. “I can stand. It hardly hurts.”
“It’ll hurt a lot if you don’t take proper —” Mikkel turned at the sound of gunfire from the island. “Did you see anything move?”
“No,” Emil and Tuuri said together. Mikkel gave up on his unappreciated medic’s duties and joined the others in watching the island.
More shots rang out, then silence. Minutes crawled by. Mikkel glanced back at his shotgun, leaning against the wall by the door.
The crack of a single shot, then silence again. The four strained to see movement in the ruins. Was that final shot Sigrun finishing off a troll, or …? Ghastly images sprang unbidden to Mikkel's mind. He forced them away, focusing on the present. Beside him, Emil shifted his weight with a hiss of pain.
“There, you see? Go lie down.”
Emil gave him a brief glare, then turned back to watch. Mikkel glanced at the shotgun again, gave Tuuri a speculative look. If they had to defend the tank …
And all his worries were for naught, as Sigrun and Lalli emerged from the ruins to wave at the team. Or rather, Sigrun waved at the team while Lalli appeared to look at the ground. The nest was cleared, then; on the island, they’d have no more trouble from trolls unless something crossed the bridges or climbed up from the sea. Mikkel tried to dismiss that thought.
“That’s our cue, Reynir. Let's go.” As Mikkel and Reynir headed for the door, Mikkel ordered again, “Back to your bunk.” This time, Emil obeyed.
The last stretch proved easier than expected. With the trolls eliminated and a clear path ahead, they made steady progress despite their exhaustion. By mid-morning, the tank's treads finally gripped solid earth instead of battered concrete.
An hour later, while most of the team rested, Tuuri ventured out to wander around with the kitten on her shoulder and Lalli trailing along behind her.
“It’ll hold long enough,” Tuuri said, “if I drive fast.”
Mikkel scanned from left to right. A fire some time after the bridge was abandoned had caused part of the bridge deck to crumble and fall away. The break formed a triangle, two car-lengths wide on the outer edge of the eastbound lanes, narrowing to two meters wide on the inner edge of the westbound lanes, and down to a mere half-meter on the outer edge. Any of them, even Tuuri, could step across it at its narrowest. But how much more of the deck was weakened and ready to collapse under the weight of the tank?
“How sure are you?” Sigrun asked.
“Pretty sure. I’ve examined the break and the deck around it, and I’m pretty sure. Really sure.”
Mikkel shuddered at the memory of Tuuri lying on the crumbling concrete, half her body hanging over the hideous drop, while he held her ankles. He was far less sure of the situation than she was. “We can turn back,” he said quietly. “The way is clear all the way back to Zealand. We can go back and wait there for rescue.”
“No!” Tuuri turned to him, betrayed. “We’re so close!”
The other end of the bridge was just a kilometer away, so close Mikkel could see it, even smell it, the clean sharp scent of pines over the salty odor of the strait and the reek of his unwashed body. Over those smells, though, was a whiff of coming rain, and above the trees rose masses of clouds.
After a day’s rest on the little island, they’d made good time on the west bridge the day before. The weather had been warm, the sun bright, and no one had been hurt. Lalli had reported a “bad place” on the bridge ahead, but said it was passable. And here they were mid-morning, a kilometer from the shore with the bridge ready to collapse.
Emil leaned against an engine block nearby, resting his wounded foot. He’d flatly refused to take it easy; he wanted off the bridge yesterday, if not sooner. “We’re out of water.”
“We can survive a day without water. Also, it’s going to rain.” Mikkel didn’t want to turn back, but continuing risked the safety — the survival — of the whole team.
Reynir tugged his sleeve. “What’s going on?”
“We’re discussing if the bridge will stand long enough to get the tank across.”
“Ohhh …” The Icelander stepped back, looking between Tuuri and the break, his expression anxious.
Sigrun drummed her fingers on her thigh as she looked over the rest of the team. “I won’t order you to cross this bridge. This isn’t part of what you signed up for. So for once we’re going to have a vote. Who wants to try to go forward?”
Tuuri beckoned Reynir and Lalli to her side and whispered to each of them. The men raised their hands; Tuuri raised both hands. Emil raised his hand, and Sigrun turned to Mikkel. He knew her vote; Sigrun would never back down from a challenge.
These people are adults. Is it really my duty to protect them from taking risks that they choose? Mikkel raised his hand.
With a broad grin, Sigrun turned to the others. “Okay, we’re going. Now —”
“Hey, wait,” Tuuri said. “We have to ask Rosli too. It’s her tank.”
Sigrun thumped herself on the head. “I’m dumb. Let’s go ask.”
The team rushed to the tank, where Sigrun stood in the middle of the main compartment and set out the problem. “So,” she finished, “do you want to turn back, or risk going forward?”
“If we go forward,” Mikkel hastened to add, “I don’t believe we can go back. You can’t go back. That part of the bridge will collapse, and there’s no other way across.”
Sigrun gave him a puzzled look and asked again, “Go forward?”
yes yes yes
Muted cheers greeted her response. They understood it; everyone except perhaps Lalli had learned to recognize “yes” and “no”.
“Okay, we’re agreed. Outside!” Sigrun led them out. “Now, here’s the thing. The tank has to go fast. That means it can’t be shoving this stuff out of the way.” She waved at the line of rusty hulks before them. “So we can’t do this at all unless we can move it ourselves. That means you, big guy. Can you do it?”
A challenge. Mikkel straightened his shoulders, gave her a glare, and turned to study the vehicles. The tank had plowed those chunks of metal aside with ease, but to move them by hand would be a struggle. He strode down the bridge to one beside the tank and circled it, looking for any protruding part solid enough to grip. Finding a sturdy bracket, he gripped it with both hands, planted his feet, and heaved upwards. The bracket dug into his heavy leather gloves as he lowered it again. About two hundred, maybe a little more. I can carry that weight, but it’s too unwieldy to lift by myself. I’ll need Reynir to help, or else I’ll have to drag them.
He looked around for Reynir, but the Icelander had disappeared. Tuuri came to his side and pointed ahead. “If you can move those four there, I can steer through the cleared area and get up to speed. Then on the other side … move five more, and I can stop on solid decking.” She gave him an apologetic smile. “You only have to move them maybe five meters. Just far enough that I can get past them.”
“So, can you do it?” Sigrun asked, joining them. At his nod, she added, “Okay, the big guy works on the big things.” She grinned at her own joke. “Emil, you’re with me again. Tuuri, you and your cousin get all the little stuff you can. The baggage — where’d he go?”
“He’s in the tank,” Tuuri said.
“He’ll help me,” Mikkel added.
Sigrun rolled her eyes. “Well, he’s your problem.” She looked around. “Let’s get to work and clear the junk out of the way.”
They split up to take up their tasks. Since Reynir was still missing, Mikkel turned his hand to breaking off doors and dragging them out of the way. Several minutes later, the Icelander appeared with a paper in his hand, picked up a long straight piece of metal, and approached the break. Everyone looked around as he scraped the metal across the concrete. Emil rolled his eyes at Mikkel as they tugged pieces off the same wreck.
“What were you doing over there?” Mikkel asked several minutes later, as Reynir hurried to take one end of a hood.
“There’s a galdrastafur I’ve seen carved in roof-beams sometimes. It’s supposed to make the beam stronger, you know, because of the snow. So I thought maybe it would work to strengthen the bridge. I made one on each side.” They dumped the hood out of way and went back for more pieces. “I’m not sure I remember it, but still, it won’t make things worse, right?”
“I don’t suppose those scratches will do any harm.” Even after seeing Reynir’s demonstration that his galdrastafur were detectably different from drawings, Mikkel had difficulty believing a pattern could produce powerful effects. “We need to move this beam, and then we’ll tackle that big piece.”
It took them some time to find grips for both of them, but once they did, they lifted the first engine block and carried it across the lanes and set it down slowly; they couldn't drop it and risk damaging other parts of the bridge.
“I wish I could drive the tank,” Reynir murmured as they made for the next engine block. “I want Tuuri to be safe. But I’m just not good enough.” Mikkel nodded. He had some experience driving a tank — not this one, of course — but that had been more than ten years before, and he hadn’t been very good even then. They would have to stand by and watch Tuuri make the attempt.
The sun climbed higher and the first clouds moved in as the team worked. Piece by piece, they cleared a path. The work went more slowly than when they could use the plow, but by noon, they had the path cleared on both sides. Sigrun called a halt for lunch before they tried the crossing. As Reynir fried potatoes and onions, Lalli took a bucket without comment to anyone, raced down the bridge, and soon returned with fresh water. They each had a glass of water, to their great relief, and there was a little more to wash their grimy hands before eating.
Mikkel expected to be unable to eat for stress, but days of hard work had worn him and the others down. They finished the potatoes and onions without hesitation.
“Everybody out,” Tuuri said as Reynir gathered their plates. Her voice was higher and faster than usual, and her hands trembled a little as she waved them out. One by one, Sigrun, Emil, and Mikkel embraced her and stepped out, striding towards the break. They didn’t wait for Reynir and Lalli, who caught up after they’d stepped over the narrow end of the crack.
“Keep going,” Sigrun ordered when Emil stopped to look back. “We need to get out of the way of … stuff.” They kept going until they were some thirty meters from the break. There they stopped and looked back. As they waited, Sigrun bounced on her toes, Reynir wrapped his braid around his arm, coil after coil, and Emil smoothed and finger-combed his hair. Mikkel clenched his fists in his pockets, schooling his face to impassivity. Lalli stood apart from the others, staring fixedly at the tank. Even the kitten stood on Reynir’s shoulder with her paws on his head, watching the tank.
The tank's electric motor whined to life, a high-pitched sound building steadily. Metal creaked as torque built up in the drive system. The whole frame of the tank groaned as if protesting the stress it was about to endure.
And the tank lunged forward, following the path they’d so laboriously carved for it. Stressed concrete shattered and shot out from under the treads, clattering into other debris like hail. As the tank reached the damaged area, the bridge deck creaked and cracked, and the tank tilted to the left. Reynir gasped, yanking at his braid as if he could pull the tank towards him.
And then the tank was across the break, pieces falling away behind it, splashing far below. The motor's whine changed to a scream as Tuuri reversed the tracks. Metal shrieked in protest as the tank fought its own momentum, tracks grinding against concrete, dust and gravel flung before it. With a final groan of stressed metal, the tank shuddered to a stop just short of the uncleared vehicles.
The team ran for the tank. Reynir reached it first, yanking open the door and throwing his arms around Tuuri. Sigrun thumped her on the back, and Emil punched her gently on the shoulder. Lalli entered long enough to look around, then retreated. Mikkel edged around the crowd to find a spot where Tuuri could see him past the celebrating group, offering support through his steady presence.
“Hey, guys,” Emil said after a moment. “Can we get back to work now? I want off this bridge. I’m thirsty and I’m filthy.”
Sigrun laughed and gave him a hug. “Sure, kid. Come on, big guy. Tuuri, your boyfriend there gets to stay in here with you. We’re too close to shore and it’s getting cloudy.” Tuuri untangled herself from Reynir, blushing, and gave an edited translation of Sigrun’s words as the others climbed out of the tank.
Mikkel stopped for a moment to look back at the break. Chunks of concrete had fallen away and yet … the damage wasn’t so bad as he had expected. Had Reynir’s magic worked? The tank couldn’t make it across, no, but a man could on foot. Even a big man. He nodded and turned away to join Sigrun and Emil in clearing debris. A drizzle had already started.
“Wait, are you going to shave that off?”
Mikkel turned to Sigrun in disbelief, his face half-soaped. “Yes I’m going to shave!”
“But you look good! I mean, nicely scruffy. And that ginger color’s great. Are you really a natural blond? ’Cause —”
Four days of itching as his beard grew in. Four days of wishing he could shave, going so far as to consider shaving with brackish water from the strait, or no water at all. Four days of hair in contact with his food.
“Yes, I’m a natural blond! And I don’t want to look scruffy! I couldn’t waste water shaving before, but now I’ve got a whole streamful and yes, I’m going to shave!” He spun away, smearing more soap on his face with hands that shook with anger. Footsteps behind him proved that Sigrun had prudently retreated. After several deep breaths to calm himself, Mikkel raised his razor and shaved off his hated facial hair.
The long, nightmarish journey across the bridge was over.
“So, which one?”
Mikkel didn’t answer as he surveyed the complex of buildings. Sigrun looked past him at the Icelander, who held the kitten in his arms, stroking her and murmuring soothingly. The little cat’s eyes were wide and her fur ruffled: trolls in the area, then, but not close. Past him was Emil, watchful, turning now to look behind the tank.
“I don’t know,” Mikkel answered at last.
And it was all going so well.
After they’d gotten off the bridge the day before and spent an hour or so cleaning up and restocking the tank with fuel and water, they’d all felt an urgency to move on. With Lalli running ahead and everyone else resting in the tank, they’d made it almost halfway to Odense by sunset. This morning, they’d set out at daybreak and soon found themselves on an empty road. Frost-heaved and overgrown, it was still better than the forest, and they’d made excellent time all the way into Odense. Now they stood before their target, not the single hospital building Sigrun had expected, but a bewildering complex of close to a dozen buildings large and small.
Mikkel turned abruptly to look past Sigrun at Tuuri. “Please ask Lalli if he can find the records for us.”
Sigrun hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. She should have thought of the Finnish mage’s weird gift of finding things.
After a brief conversation, Tuuri shook her head. “He says if you need paper, he can find paper. But you want paper with the right words on it. He can’t find that.”
Mikkel’s lips tightened and his broad shoulders slumped as he stared at the buildings. Equally disappointed, Sigrun glanced up at the sun. Almost midday. To search even one building would take hours, and she wanted to get out of this troll-filled city before dark.
Mikkel turned back to her. “Which building should we try?”
“How should I know?”
“Guess!” Another flash of temper. In the weeks they’d travelled together, he’d been almost disturbingly peaceful, and now he’d snapped at her twice in two days. Something was up with the man. “You might be lucky,” he added, his tone shifting to something oddly intent. “The records about the cure have to be here, and we have to start somewhere.”
Sigrun rolled her eyes, but looked over the complex. One building drew her gaze, hulking over the others, its dark brick and sparse windows contrasting with its neighbors’ light brick and neat rows of windows. Tall and closed-off, she thought, just like Mikkel. “That one.”
The scout took off like a shot, but stopped when Mikkel called his name. “Tell him we need to find rooms with a lot of papers. Can he do that?” Mikkel asked, and after another brief conversation, Tuuri confirmed that he could. As the scout took off again, Sigrun turned to Emil.
“You’re in charge here.”
“No! My foot’s fine. I don’t have to stay —”
Sigrun smiled at her eager recruit. “Somebody’s got to be here to stand guard.” She ignored a protesting noise from Tuuri behind her. “And I need the medic to read the medical stuff, so you have to stay. Nothing to do with your foot.” By the time Emil nodded agreement, Mikkel was more than a dozen meters away, and Sigrun had to run to catch up. He didn’t look around as she fell in beside him, matching him stride for stride.
She glanced back as a clank behind her showed that the other three had retreated into the tank. The greasy gray smears of Reynir’s galdrastafur still showed on the door. The marks had survived the rain of the previous day and night, but had the magic? Sigrun dismissed the question and returned her attention to the slush and dead grass before her feet.
Crash!
The sound of breaking glass spurred them into a sprint, muddy slush flying from their boots. Already evaluating risks, Sigrun rested her hand on her pistol as she ran. She’d left her rifle behind — it wouldn’t be much use inside — but she bore her pistol and dagger on her belt, while Mikkel had a pistol and his long crowbar. Lalli had his pistol, dagger, and, as always, his rifle.
Mikkel stumbled but caught himself, falling behind Sigrun as they turned to pass the last building before their target. She slid to a halt as Lalli smashed another jagged shard from a window with a grimy board. Seeing them, he nodded, swept the board across the windowsill to send fragments tinkling to the ground, and vaulted through the window.
A quick glance showed her his reasons. The heavy steel outside door was askew, its lintel tilted forward and the brick above cracked. Even if Mikkel could force it open, the whole thing would likely come down on his head. She followed Lalli through the window, waiting inside as Mikkel clambered through.
They stood in a lobby perhaps fifteen meters wide and eight deep, with a row of large windows along the outer wall. All the windows were broken; Lalli had simply cleared away the remains of one. Sunlight poured in, casting dim shadows through shards of grimy glass. Mold had found its way inside, flowing down the wall and creeping across the ceiling. Dried leaves and dirt had blown in to pile below the windows and across the floor. The leaf litter rustled as mice and insects scuttled away from the intruders.
A large horseshoe-shaped desk faced the outside door, with a wheeled wooden chair in the inside curve. The wooden laminate of the desk had peeled away, the sides falling off and the top curling upwards. Dead leaves had drifted against the desk. In the spaces on either side of the desk were half a dozen or more plastic chairs with metal frames, now deeply rusted. Most of the chairs were toppled over. The room had had a false ceiling, which lay in broken, crumbling heaps on the floor, revealing the vents, pipes, and wires above.
Left and right, each side wall bore a single closed door with a lever handle. Remains of picture frames lay collapsed before the walls, and fingers of black mold reached across the side walls and onto the back. Everywhere the mold had not touched, white paint had fallen away in flakes and chunks, leaving gray concrete exposed. The back wall had a double steel door behind the desk and a single door several meters away on either side. These doors were closed, and none had handles or push bars, nor any evidence that they’d ever had them.
Sigrun listened to the wind and the vermin, breathing deeply through her nose. The room smelled of dirt, mold, and rodents, but under all of it was the deadly reek of grosslings. She turned to Lalli, who leaned against the back wall, his eyes closed. Even as she watched him, puzzled, he opened his eyes and pointed to his left with two fingers, then to his right with three. Sigrun pointed to the doors along the back and cocked her head in an exaggerated question. The scout shook his head and pointed up before turning to tug at one of the double doors.
Mikkel hurried forward with his crowbar. With his efforts, the doors inched apart, rusted metal grinding and scraping and shrieking, and Lalli recoiled, shaking his head as if in pain. Sigrun listened; had something large stirred beyond the side doors? After perhaps a quarter meter, the door moved more freely. Mikkel looked in and jumped away with a gasp, throwing out his arm to knock Sigrun back as well. His crowbar fell to the floor with a clatter. “Stay back!”
Sigrun pushed his arm aside and stepped forward, flicking on her flashlight to peer through the gap into darkness. Mikkel’s big hand closed on her arm as she stared, trying to make sense of what she saw. Rough concrete walls … she angled the flashlight down to see the floor … and down … and down. Her knees went weak at the sight of the empty shaft plunging downward, and she was grateful for Mikkel’s support. Far below, barely visible in the wavering light, lay the crumpled remains of the elevator car. The shaft walls were lined with thick metal rails and hanging cables, some still taut, others dangling in loose coils. A whiff of stale air drifted up from the depths, carrying the scent of old oil and rusted metal.
Sigrun stepped back, swallowed hard, and looked up at the big man. “Let’s not go that way.”
He nodded, his face pale, and they both looked at Lalli, who took a few steps forward, peeked into the shaft, and moved on to examine one of the other doors. Mikkel knelt, staying as far from the elevator shaft as he could and still reach his crowbar. When he stood and followed Lalli, Sigrun considered making a joke about the big tough Dane who was afraid of heights. But in truth, she’d been afraid of that shaft as well, and anyway, she didn’t want him to snap at her again.
The next door opened outwards with a little encouragement from Mikkel’s crowbar. Lalli entered without hesitation, and Sigrun followed with more hesitation than she wanted to admit. But beyond the door was only a stairwell, steps leading down and up into darkness. Lalli trotted up the stairs, Sigrun following and Mikkel behind her. The scout apparently needed no flashlight, but the other two did. Their small pools of light made the darkness more oppressive.
Sigrun looked back at the daylight shining through the open door as she climbed. If trolls broke through the side doors, if they followed the humans up the stairs … but there was no sense counting trolls before they attacked. She turned back and kept her gaze on the scout’s heels.
They had passed three landings, Mikkel was panting, and even Sigrun was breathing hard, when Lalli stopped and tapped the door before him. Fifth floor, Sigrun thought, and far above the trolls Lalli had detected in the lobby. But something about the scout's tension suggested there were more trolls nearby.
Since the door opened outwards, Mikkel threw his considerable weight against it, forcing it open with a grinding crash. As before, small creatures scuttled away through the crumbling remains of the false ceiling. The hallway they entered was well lit, as to one side was a row of offices with wide windows both to the outside and the hallway. The office doors had been painted wood, but the paint had fallen off in strips and chips, adding color to the debris on the floor. Lalli drew his dagger and led the way down the hall. Every crunching footstep raised a small cloud of dust, and all three pulled their scarves close to avoid breathing it in.
Dagger still drawn, Lalli stopped before a warped wooden door on the other side of the hall from the offices, raised one finger, then pointed at Mikkel. With a nod, the big man stepped forward to try the door. The lever handle broke off in his hand, clattering as he tossed it away. Sigrun winced at the noise in the quiet building, but it was quickly overtaken by the sound of the doorjamb splintering as he slammed his shoulder against the door, driving it open.
Mikkel backed out of the way as something long, many-legged, and toothy charged through the door. Sigrun and Lalli struck together, nearly decapitating it. Mikkel dragged it across the hallway, and the three stepped into what even Sigrun recognized as a records room.
The room was long and narrow, made narrower by the steel shelves along both sides, loaded with cardboard boxes. A grimy window at the far end admitted dim light, joining that from the open door. As Mikkel made his way along the shelves, studying the box labels, Sigrun and Lalli stood guard, watching the door and the open spaces above the walls.
“Hurry up,” Sigrun whispered after fifteen minutes, as Mikkel knelt beside half a dozen boxes he’d placed on the floor, pulling out binders and checking them. Some troll-hunter sense told her their presence was known, and the enemy was closing in.
“Don’t rush me. I’ve got to get the final test records, the details of preparation. This is my only chance to get this right.”
“Not going to get it right if we get swarmed in here. Grab what looks good and let’s get out of here.”
Mikkel shook his head, pulled out another binder, checked it, put it back. Several minutes later, he stacked two boxes and stood with them in his arms. “Finally!” Sigrun said, heading for the door as Lalli stepped out.
All three froze at the distinctive sound of a door being pushed open. Lalli looked around, pointed at the stairwell door, and ran the other way towards the massive troll crawling out of a storeroom. “Go!” Sigrun shouted as she raced after the scout.
As Sigrun and Lalli danced around the troll, trying to get a good angle to stab it despite its carapace, a trollish shriek behind her, followed by a thud, clatters, and fast, heavy footsteps, revealed her error. She whirled at the sounds, then jerked back to jump away from the troll’s sudden lunge. The motion gave Lalli his opportunity; he drove his dagger to the hilt in the monster’s skull. Yanking it out, he raced to the stairwell, Sigrun on his heels.
One box of binder lay spilled on the landing, loose papers and several more binders were strewn on the stairs going up, smeared with blood and troll slime. Pounding footsteps above proved Mikkel was on the move. The two sprinted up the stairs. Sigrun caught up with Mikkel as Lalli raced past them. “What —?”
“It tried to bite — got the box — stop it —” Mikkel gasped.
“You grab these papers! We’ll get it.” Sigrun ran up the stairs after Lalli.
Two flights later, Sigrun braced herself, raised her dagger, and slashed as an insectoid troll lunged down the stairs at her. Gutted, the creature fell, rolled down the stairs, and lay sprawled on the landing below. The box fell from its mouth, almost empty. As she ran up the stairs, snatching up papers and binders, Lalli raced down, grabbing the rusty railing to catch himself as he reached her. Under his arm, he had his own bundle of records.
“G–gha–ghost!”
Sigrun cursed, scooped up what she could reach, and fled with the scout. After their last encounter with ghosts, she didn't need to be told twice. She wasted a little breath cursing again; with everything else going on, she hadn't gotten around to having Reynir draw protective runes on their jackets. “Ghosts! Run!” she shouted as she spotted Mikkel below, the box by his feet, heaped with loose papers and binders, and his crowbar ready. He was running by the time they reached him, the precious records under his arm, and the three ran for their lives together.
On the ground floor, as they raced across to the window, something snarled and slammed against the door to their right. Lalli skidded to a halt, shoved his bundle into Sigrun’s hands, vaulted over the windowsill, and took his and her burdens, freeing her to climb over and accept Mikkel’s while he scrambled over. After hastily trading around the records, the three sprinted for the tank.
Emil had the door open for them. He, Reynir, and Tuuri accepted the records as Sigrun and Mikkel climbed in. Lalli shouted something from behind them, and Tuuri dropped everything and ran for the front. “Close up!” she shouted, and Emil obeyed, leaving Lalli outside. The tank lurched as Tuuri started it forward.
As Mikkel fell to his knees, sweeping together the loose papers, Reynir reached for them. Mikkel shook his head, saying something quiet. The Icelander stepped back, looking disappointed, then went forward to stand in his usual position behind Tuuri.
“Can I help?” Emil asked.
“No, it’ll be easier with just me working. I need to sort these by date and topic.”
Emil glanced at Sigrun, who shrugged. Leaving Mikkel with the records, they went together to sit and watch as Lalli ran ahead of the tank, guiding them to safety.
“What happened? Were those the records? Why are they all messed up?” Tuuri risked a glance at Sigrun in the passenger seat with Emil beside her in Mikkel’s usual seat.
“We ran into some trolls. And then a ghost. Wait, I’d better start at the beginning.” Sigrun told the story of the search for the cure, emphasizing the fights with trolls, and not neglecting Lalli’s invaluable finding ability. By the time she finished, they were out of the most built-up area of Odense. “But there’s something I remembered. Tell your boyfriend he needs to draw his galdy — galdar — those things on our jackets to keep the ghosts away.”
Tuuri’s face warmed, and she knew she was blushing, the curse of pale skin. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said before passing on the request in Icelandic. Fortunately, she hadn’t taught Reynir the word “boyfriend”, so she was spared embarrassment in front of him.
“I should have done that already! I can make some more hearth paint — oh, but we’re still bouncing around so I’ll spill it. Maybe when —”
“Ink stains don’t ever come out. You can use my ink when we stop; that’ll be neater. My pen is too thin, but we’ve got those goose feathers in the back, if Mikkel hasn’t tossed them, so we can make a wider pen.”
Silence fell for several minutes as the tank followed Lalli. He pointed down a side road, and Tuuri turned as directed. He ran ahead, sure-footed, stopped, looked around, and chose another turning. Tuuri followed unquestioningly; if there was a safe path, Lalli would find it. Sigrun mused, “Your cousin’s a great scout, and then he’s a mage too. Never heard of anyone who could find stuff like that. I think I’ll steal him for my team.”
“Can you have a Finn on your team? I mean, would they let you?”
“Why not? He’d have to learn to talk, but he knows some words already.” After a few moments, she went on, “Mom and Dad are the Eide generals, so someday I’ll have to take their place and be the general.”
“That’s cool.” Tuuri wondered why Sigrun was telling her this.
“Not really cool. See, the clan can’t make everything we need. Sometimes we have to buy things, so we need money. The generals make deals for our teams to go clean out areas for other people. Norwegians and Swedes, mostly.” She took an audible deep breath. “Since I’ll have to be a general, Mom wants me to make deals like that. For practice, you know. And I hate it. I just want to be a captain, lead my team, and hunt trolls.”
Tuuri was at something of a loss. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve always known I’ll have to. Anyway, I’m thinking it would be handy to have a skald to handle those deals for me. Especially one who can talk to Icelanders and Finns.”
“Me?” The word came out in an astonished squeak, and Tuuri forced her voice into her normal range. “Even though I’m, you know —”
“Skalds don’t go out hunting, no more than medics. It’d be crazy to take them along.”
For a moment, Tuuri was thrilled beyond words. Sigrun wanted her on her team! But then … she wouldn’t be allowed to explore. She’d be behind walls again. New walls, but walls, all the same. “I–I’ll think about it. I have to talk to Onni before anything like that.”
“Oh, sure. We’ll be rich and famous when we come home with the cure, so you’ll have all kinds of things you can do. How about you, kiddo? Want to join my team?”
“Can I? I’m just a recruit and not a very good —”
“Ha! Don’t even think that! You’re a good trooper and you’re catching up every day.”
“Then, yes? If they let me.”
Sigrun laughed, and Tuuri glanced over to see her pulling Emil into a one-armed hug. It would be great to be part of that team, if only … But she was and always would be the prisoner of her biology. Unless they brought back the cure. She hugged that thought to herself.
As the sun set in glorious banners of red and gold, Tuuri brought the tank to a welcome halt when Lalli pointed out a spot to park, with plenty of trees and a stream nearby. Flexing her hands, cramped from hours of tension, she followed Reynir to the main compartment. She stopped at the sight of Mikkel sitting on his bunk, binders piled beside him, reading one.
Even as she watched him, trying to read the news from his rigid posture, he set aside the binder, and his hands fell limp into his lap. Tuuri licked her lips, wanting an answer but fearing it now. When at last he looked up at her, there was a glassiness of his eyes, a pinching at the corners, that she knew only too well.
“There’s no cure,” she whispered.
“But they distributed it!” Sigrun objected.
Mikkel dropped his gaze to his hands. “They did. But it didn't work.” He sighed. “Tuuri, please try the radio. Maybe we can reach the sponsors. I–I’d rather only tell this once.”
Tuuri’s eyes stung as the tears tried to come, but she blinked them back as she ducked into the radio compartment and flipped switches. “Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base,” she said dully, and static answered, crackling like the laughter of grosslings. “Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base.” The others crowded in behind her as she spoke, and the clunk of the outer door told her Lalli had entered the tank. She wished for her cousin’s support, but knew he’d never approach such a crowd. “Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base.”
“Öresund base here.” Tuuri twitched in surprise as the voice broke through the static. “Do you hear me, Silent World Expedition?”
“Yes, uh, please connect us to our headquarters.”
“Will do.” As the static continued uninterrupted, the bodies behind her shifted around; she felt the solidity of Mikkel move close. She wished Reynir were there instead; of all these people, only he truly understood how she felt. But Reynir couldn’t report their failure.
“Torbjörn here! Is that you, Tuuri? What’s the news? Did you find it?”
“Mikkel here. So as not to raise any hopes, I must report that there is no working cure.” There was a sigh, a shifting by those in the tank, and a crackle of static. “We found a lot that may be useful. Case studies, reports on their research, reports on research in other countries … but the most important for us is what I found in the minutes of the final meeting of the Rash Research Group. They were coordinating all Danish research on the Rash. The main researchers reported that they did have a working cure.”
“But then —” Torbjörn began.
“But their cure had an inevitable side effect: complete and irreversible brain death. The researchers said they needed two months to identify the problem. They were given two weeks and dismissed. And then the Director ordered that in two weeks the cure would be distributed even if — even though — it would kill every patient. Calling it a cure spared the medics from the moral burden of euthanasia. Killing every infected person was their last, desperate hope to stop the plague. But, as we all know, nothing could stop the plague.”
“Okay,” Torbjörn answered with a sigh, “we all knew finding a cure was a long shot. You have salvaged a marvelous collection of books, so as a whole we can easily say this mission has been a success. Trond has arranged for a ship with proper quarantine facilities. They’ll pick you up in three weeks at Outpost Four. Do you know Outpost Four?”
“Yes, I know.” There was another shuffling as others left the room. Reynir’s hands fell on Tuuri’s shoulders and squeezed.
“That’s all our news, I guess,” Tuuri said through a tight throat. “Silent World Expedition out.”
Behind her, still squeezing her shoulders, Reynir said, “Hey, Mikkel, are you getting food? Can you get me some long goose feathers?”
As the outer door clunked shut, Tuuri stood. There were still practical matters to deal with. “Here’s the ink. I have another bottle, too. Do Lalli’s jacket first; he’s out there at night, and the ghosts … he says he can run away, but I don’t … anyway, Sigrun and Emil next, then Mikkel.” The tears threatened to break through again. “I guess, if there’s enough ink, maybe you and me, even though —”
Reynir hugged her tight, his cheek against her head. “Nothing’s really changed.” Tuuri forced out the words. “We didn’t have a cure before and we don’t have one now. It’s only that I hoped so much. But there never was a cure.” And then the tears came.
All clear on the monitors. That left Tuuri free to watch as Lalli approached Reynir, sitting at the table drawing in ink on Lalli’s jacket. Sigrun and Emil, sitting on Emil’s bunk cleaning their rifles, were watching the activity. No doubt Mikkel, out of Tuuri’s sight as he fried potatoes and onions, was watching too.
Tuuri loved Lalli like a brother, but there was no denying that he didn’t know how to behave around strangers. She nibbled her lower lip, wondering what he was going to do. After all that had happened, she didn’t need him upsetting the team.
Before she could come up with something to make Lalli back off without making a fuss, Reynir stood, holding up the jacket for Lalli to examine. Familiar though she was with Lalli’s expressions, Tuuri struggled to recognize his reaction. Eyes wide, lips parted — amazement!
To her, the jacket bore a complex black drawing, but it must be far more to Lalli with his mage sight. Tuuri studied the monitors as she fought down a surge of envy. When she looked back, Reynir was holding up the jacket, and Lalli, to her surprise, slid his arms into the sleeves without arguing. He didn’t even recoil when Reynir patted him on the shoulder.
When Lalli drew his dagger and laid it on the table, the two men spoke together. “Oh, no, that’s a gift; I don’t need a dagger,” and “Tell him to do this too.”
Tuuri translated, “He says thank you, and can you please do the dagger too?” As Reynir sat down to examine the weapon, she ducked into the little office to grab her fine-pointed pen for him, since the thick pen he used for the jackets would never do for this. Lalli’s dagger had a broad steel blade, a warm brown reindeer antler hilt, and a rounded steel pommel. After looking it over, Reynir turned the dagger up and drew his first circle on the shiny base of the pommel.
Lalli fidgeted as he watched the Icelandic mage at work, but Reynir was quick, finishing the delicate work in minutes. The ink seemed to dry faster than ever before, perhaps because of the addition of a drop of blood from each person, so he had only to blow on it once before handing it over. Lalli sheathed the dagger, muttered, “I need to check something,” and darted out the door.
Tuuri stroked the hilt of her own dagger. Her dagger, with its hilt of light brown deer antler, had a similar steel pommel. No reason Reynir couldn’t do the same for her. What if she had a ghost-killing dagger of her very own?
Setting her rifle aside, Sigrun stood and placed her own dagger on the table beside Reynir, saying “You, too,” to Emil. Without shifting his rifle, he drew his dagger and held it out to her, hilt first. She stepped back, almost stumbling over Reynir’s chair. “No, no, you don’t just hand someone your dagger! There’s rules. And ceremonies. You have to put your dagger on the table like I did.”
“Reynir handed Lalli his dagger,” Emil grumbled as he moved his gear out of the way and stood.
“That doesn’t count. It was the little guy’s own dagger he gave back.”
Skald curiosity pierced Tuuri’s discouragement for a moment. The finest Finnish skalds were at Keuruu, and they’d said nothing about Norwegian dagger etiquette. Maybe she would write a treatise on it … when she had to go back and live behind Keuruu’s walls again. Her shoulders slumped, and she turned to watch the monitors while Reynir worked on jackets and daggers.
As they ate a meager supper of cold tuna and fried potatoes and onions, Sigrun speculated excitedly on the possibility of ghost-killing firearms. She desisted only when Tuuri pointed out that if the galdrastafur were on the rifle, it would only be effective if she smacked a ghost over the head with it. To be effective at range, the galdrastafur would have to be on the bullets themselves. Sigrun considered it, Tuuri thought; she gave Reynir a narrow-eyed, speculative look before giving up the idea.
After supper, Reynir finished his and Tuuri’s jackets and daggers, apologizing for his own dagger as he did so. His dagger, intended for a shepherd’s work, was a smaller version of Sigrun’s. Both had broad steel blades (though his had only one sharp edge), bleached bone hilts, and steel pommels with flat bottoms, perfect for galdrastafur. Emil’s dagger likewise had a steel blade and flat-bottomed steel pommel, but his hilt was wrapped with age-darkened, gray-blue plastic. Tuuri wanted to examine it, but refrained, not wanting to violate any Norwegian dagger rules.
Tuuri leaned against the wall, watching the monitors and trying to convince herself that, with the money from the books, she could afford to travel. Even travelling in safe places, like Iceland, would be better than living behind Keuruu’s walls. And maybe there would be another expedition …
As she daydreamed, motion caught her eye: Lalli, sprinting all-out for the tank. She rushed to the door, opening it in time for him to jump in, saying, “We’re about to be overrun! There’s a swarm coming, and ghosts among them. I tried to draw them off, but they kept coming.”
Tuuri translated for Sigrun, who hesitated for only a moment, glancing around at the team, before ordering her, “Drive. We can’t make a stand in these trees. We need an open area. Could use better intel, though,” she muttered.
“It’s dark. I’ll have to use the headlights, and the trolls will see.”
“Yeah, but from what he says, they know we’re here anyway. Drive!”
Lalli stood behind Tuuri, while Sigrun and Mikkel took their usual seats, and Emil and Reynir crowded in behind her. As Lalli directed her to avoid dangers she couldn’t see even with the headlights, she heard several gasps and Sigrun muttering what sounded like a prayer. Tuuri risked a single glance at Lalli to see the reason. Such was the urgency of the situation that Lalli was using his mage sight in full view of others, the mage-light playing around his eyes.
“There,” Sigrun said after a long half-hour of Tuuri driving and Sigrun planning. She pointed into a field which had suffered a recent wildfire. “We’ll make our stand there.”
As soon as the tank slammed to a halt, the others dashed out. Tuuri turned on the perimeter lights since the waxing crescent moon, low in the sky, didn’t cast enough light for their preparations. Emil set explosives around the perimeter with Mikkel’s assistance, while Reynir took the broom out and used the broomstick to draw galdrastafur in the sloppy, ashy mud. She wondered how effective that would be as the mud filled in the lines, but it might be better than nothing. Sigrun and Lalli patrolled, their rifles ready.
Tuuri drummed her fingers on the controls, frustrated, before standing, filling her pockets with magazines, and taking up her rifle. “Rosli, do you hear me?”
Yes
“Right, then. When we’re ready, cut all the lights. Watch for the swarm. When they get within, hmm, thirty meters, blink a few lights, not very bright. That’ll tell us to close our eyes. You turn all the lights on as bright as they’ll go. With luck, it’ll let us shoot the trolls while they’re still dazzled.”
OK
Reynir returned with his muddy broom as Tuuri strode out of the tank. “What? Where —?”
“You stay inside. Close all the doors. I’m going to snipe trolls.”
There was no time to argue. She brushed by him and hurried to the back, climbing up to join the other four already there. Mikkel had his shotgun and crowbar, while the others had rifles and daggers, with Emil additionally burdened by his flamethrower.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sigrun said as the lights went out. “What are you doing? Get back inside!”
Tuuri gazed to the southeast, watching for any hint of movement. “No. You’ve got four immunes to fight an entire swarm. I’m afraid you won’t win, and if you don’t, we’re dead anyway.” She turned to glare at Sigrun in the moonlight. “One more rifle may make the difference.”
“She’s an excellent sniper,” Mikkel added. “And four, or even five, against a swarm is a losing battle anyway. Let her fight.”
“Real helpful, big guy.” Sigrun folded her arms, but finally nodded. “Okay, Tuuri, you deserve an honor guard in Valhalla. Let’s get ready.”
Tuuri swallowed, fighting down a surge of fear. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t go to Valhalla, but if this was their last stand, she meant to go down fighting. She passed on the plan about the lights, and then there was nothing to do but strain her eyes in the dim moonlight.
And wait.
The moon had moved a hand’s breadth across the sky when its faint light showed the first movement among the leafless trees at the edge of the field. Tuuri flexed her hands, whispered a prayer for protection to any gods that might be listening, and aimed her rifle.
A moment later, the lights flickered, she closed her eyes, and light flared before her eyelids. Since the tank’s lights aimed downwards, they were bright for her but blinding for the grosslings. As they reeled and squealed and covered their eyes, the team opened fire, mowing down the first rank. But more and ever more grosslings flowed in, climbing over the bodies of the fallen, mindlessly bent on killing.
Flash — flames — shrieking trolls. Crack of rifles, boom of shotgun. Eject an empty magazine, grab another from her pocket, slap it in and keep firing. And still the grosslings crawled forward; too many to shoot, too many for the incendiaries and explosives, they kept coming.
“Get down!” Sigrun shouted over the noise, leaving her rifle and dropping over the side, dagger in hand. The other immunes followed, while Tuuri remained above, firing over and over. Every shot brought down a grossling. More came.
Lalli sprinted through the grosslings, dodging their claws and tentacles, and squared off with … something. Tuuri could spare him only occasional glances, seeing him slash and stab, light flashing with every blow. Is that magic? Am I seeing Lalli fight a ghost? But she had to focus on her sniping.
Sigrun, Emil, and Mikkel had spread out between the tank and the swarm, Emil firing short bursts from the flamethrower while Sigrun stabbed and Mikkel pounded. It was only grosslings’ lack of coordinated attacks that allowed the team to survive. The creatures got in one another's ways, pushed one another aside, spoiled one another's attacks, and all the time the humans were killing, and killing, and killing.
The monsters lacked the wit to flank the team, choosing to charge forward into the defenders, but Tuuri checked over her shoulder at intervals, just in case. So it was that she saw the beasts — a herd of mutated deer — charging from the trees behind them. She whirled, firing, bringing down the first few, before the bolt locked back on an empty magazine and she lost a few seconds.
As she slapped the new magazine into the rifle, a beast slammed into the tank, pulled itself up, reached for her. Its clawed paw latched onto her ankle, pulling her towards it. Behind her, Mikkel shouted over the din, “Call the fire! Emil, call the fire!” Tuuri fired, again and again, into the beast’s befanged, slavering face.
Firelight, red and golden, warred with the wan moonlight and the blue-white perimeter lights. The last beasts fell back, shrieking, and Tuuri cut them down before turning to see …
A giant dog of living flame, ten meters or more tall, bounded across the field, each massive paw leaving burning footprints in the muddy slush. Its fur rippled, sending sparks whirling into the night sky. Its great paws batted away grosslings, setting them ablaze. As it raced around the tank, waves of heat washed over her. It darted across the burned field, chased down the last monsters, and turned back. Lalli fled aside.
Below Tuuri’s position, Emil lay collapsed in the muddy slush, unmoving as the dog charged towards the tank, its lips drawn back in a doggy smile. Tuuri stared in awe and fear: what did it intend for them? With an inarticulate shout, Sigrun ran to Emil and threw herself on him as the dog reached them. For a second, there was nothing but flames.
The fire was gone, and Tuuri blinked to clear her dazzled eyes. Sigrun was rolling around in the muddy, ashy slush, pulling Emil with her, both of them coated head to toe in mud. Mikkel ran to her side, and Tuuri at last took a moment to look at herself.
Her trouser leg was torn. She bent, touched her ankle where the beast had grabbed her. Her fingers came away wet. She wiped them on her trousers, red smears on white.
Emil dreamed of fire. The golden glow, the cheerful crackle, the leaping flames devouring a tumbledown house that would never shelter another troll. The smell of burning wood, pungent yet comforting, and — and the harsh smell of burning hair. Some newbie had gotten too close to the show, and in the mess hall tonight, they would all laugh at his missing eyebrows and singed bangs.
The smell of burned hair followed him as he drifted from dreams to the wakefulness. For a long moment, he lay still, a hot tight feeling across his scalp and the back of his neck, as he tried to understand. The familiar scent of his bunk surrounded him — wool blankets and clean hair oil — but there was that other smell and the sharp odor of comfrey salve. Only the burble of the heating system and the soft sound of breathing broke the silence of the tank. He lay on his belly, and his pillow felt rough against his face.
Opening his eyes in the dim light, he saw Lalli's tangled blankets and Mikkel's empty bunk. Tuuri's ash-blond hair just showed above her covers, while Sigrun's blanket hung off her bunk in a way Mikkel would never have allowed if she weren't in it. As he processed this sight, still struggling with the smell of burned hair, Mikkel padded over to crouch by his bunk.
“How are you?” he asked in a whisper.
Emil raised himself on an elbow and reached a trembling finger to touch the back of his head, already knowing in a horrible way what he would find: bare, sensitive skin and no hair at all.
Mikkel nodded. “It will grow back. You have only first-degree burns on your scalp, so the hair follicles are not damaged. You were very lucky Sigrun rolled around in the mud with you to protect you from the flames.”
What had happened? Emil remembered the fight, the weight of the flamethrower, flames seeking out troll after troll. And then another swarm, still more trolls, the flames dying … and Mikkel's voice, rising over the din of battle, “Call the fire! Emil, call the fire!” He had wanted the fire more than ever before, and the fire had come, flaring up before him as the world spun and went black.
Emil stared at Mikkel, hearing the man's words from long before: “You must be very careful with fire." Almost too shocked to breathe, he whispered, "You knew. You knew all along.”
Mikkel rocked back on his heels, glanced sharply at the women’s bunks, and stood. “Talk outside,” he said, striding away.
The soft thump of the outer door closing behind him brought Sigrun peering over the side of her bunk as Emil got to his feet. “What’s up? Something wrong?”
“No,” Emil managed to force past the tightness in his throat. “We’re just going to talk outside.”
“Wear your boots.” With a yawn, Sigrun rolled over and pulled her covers up. Numbly, he obeyed, barely registering the blackened condition of the boots.
Cold air struck Emil's face as he opened the door, making his burned scalp sting, and the noonday sun made him squint. His boots crunched on frosted grasses as he hopped down. Mikkel had retreated five or six meters from the tank, standing amid leafless bushes. This was not the site of the battle, and some part of Emil’s mind noted that the tank had moved while he was unconscious. But only a small part.
“The others don’t know,” Mikkel said as soon as Emil closed the door. “They’re innocent.”
Words burst out with all Emil’s hurt behind them. “I thought you were my friend!”
“I wish I had been.”
Until that moment, Emil had had some shred of hope that Mikkel could explain, could make it right. “Then why weren’t you?” The words came out in a wail.
“I’m — This will take some explaining.”
Emil glared at him, fuming. “Then explain.”
“This will upset you more. Please — please just let me finish. You need to know this.” When Emil didn’t answer, he ran a hand through his hair and continued. “I am not a volunteer. I was sent on this mission with specific information and orders. One of my orders pertains to you.”
Not a volunteer? Orders? Briefly, puzzlement broke through Emil’s hurt and anger. But only briefly. He still waited for an explanation for Mikkel’s betrayal.
“You’re a pyrokinetic, a person who can control fire. That's what I was told. You use your powers in a small way without realizing it; I’ve seen you do it, lighting fires. Back in Sweden, someone saw, someone understood, and word got back to … to the organization I work for. So because you were on the mission, I was ordered to observe your abilities and report back. I was warned that you can lose control of your powers. Things may catch fire when you’re frightened or angry. People may catch fire.”
Emil's stomach lurched as he remembered the fire at the factory. But he’d been up the hill when it happened; it couldn’t be his fault.
Mikkel took a deep breath. “And if you did lose control of your powers, my orders were to kill you.”
Emil understood the words, despite Mikkel’s thickening accent, but for a moment, they made no sense. As the meaning sank in, his legs felt weak. He backed up to the tank, trying to process this further betrayal, this threat, and the memory of the times Mikkel had seemed so menacing. The very air around him felt hot and close. “You — is that why — outside —”
“No! No, Emil, I’ll never hurt you. I’m not a killer. He thought I was, but the venom is wearing off. I can think straight now.”
Confusion joined hurt, anger, and fear at Mikkel’s strange words. Emil gave the door a sidelong glance, wondering if he’d be safer inside.
“But, please, understand this. In your very first outing, you panicked, lost control, and blew up that building. I had my orders, but I hesitated. I thought you could learn to master your powers. But I’m no pyrokinetic; I didn’t know how to train you, and it was against my orders to tell you anything about what I knew. So I made up a fire spirit, thinking that by trying to tame this imaginary spirit, you would gain control of your powers.”
Mikkel smiled, a genuine smile. Had Emil ever seen him smile before?
“But reality must have its own jest. There really was a fire spirit, and you really did tame it, at least a little. It burned up all the trolls before coming back and jumping on you. Even then, it vanished before it did great harm.”
Emil touched his tender, hairless scalp. Easy for Mikkel to say losing his hair was no great harm!
The smile faltered; Mikkel shook his head. “But you did lose control that once, and they’ll hear about it from the others. I meant to vouch for you when we were rescued, to say you’d gained control, but then I failed at another order, and lied about it. So even if I were rescued, my word would be useless. Then I thought, if we had the cure, even a partial cure, you’d be too famous to be harmed. But that fell through too.”
Mikkel’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe it wouldn’t matter anyway. I’ve thought about it for so long, and my orders don’t make sense. Why send you out untrained? Why send me with those orders? They could have recruited you, taught you properly.” Mikkel's voice grew harsh. “Unless the point was for you to die. For me to eliminate an unexpected variable, even if I destroy myself in the process.”
Bewilderment almost overcame hurt and anger. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“I’m saying you’ll be in danger when you’re rescued. You’ll have to be alert. You’ll have to stand up for yourself, be cautious, and watch your back.” Mikkel closed his eyes and lowered his head, waiting.
What’s he waiting for? Is he waiting for me to … to … No!
Emil shivered, the tank cold against his back. Silence stretched between them, and tears pricked his eyes as he stared at the frosted trees blurring before him. He had been so wrong, thinking Mikkel was his friend, when the man was a spy, a liar, maybe even an assassin, whatever he said.
And yet … and yet, Emil remembered that he had seen Mikkel smile before. When Mikkel was near death from hypothermia, when he was too confused to pretend, he’d smiled when he realized Emil was alive. That memory struck like cold water, quenching his anger, all but a tiny ember that burned on.
“I don’t really understand, but, but I guess I …” He couldn’t quite express his feelings even to himself. “It’s cold out here. Let’s go inside.”
Reynir lay on his mattress on the hard metal floor between the disassembled plow and stacked crates, his back against the partition between the compartments. His bed was less than comfortable, but he was an Icelandic shepherd; he’d had worse. Heat leaking through the partition, along with several blankets, kept him warm enough in the cold compartment. He even felt a slight warmth from the galdrastafur above, at the level of Tuuri’s bunk. Though he wanted to protect the whole team from ghosts, he had to admit to himself that he’d wanted to shield her above all.
At least Mikkel had banished him to the back rather than Tuuri. It had all happened so fast that he hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye. He pressed his face into his thin pillow as he remembered the horrors of the night before.
Sigrun had ordered Reynir to stay in the main compartment with all doors closed, but he’d heard Tuuri say “ghosts”. Ghosts surely wouldn’t show on the monitors, so when everyone had gone, he slipped out to the driving compartment to watch, wearing his mask as always when trolls were near. Standing behind the passenger seat, twining his braid around his arm, he watched as the trolls approached.
He could still see his anti-ghost galdrastafur drawn in the mud, and even the anti-troll galdrastafur that he thought he remembered, though Icelandic trolls were cuddly lambs compared to these monsters of the Rash. Volleys of shots cracked overhead, trolls fell, but more came, undeterred by his anti-troll galdrastafur. While Tuuri fired from above, the others jumped down to slaughter trolls with dagger, crowbar, and flamethrower. Reynir held his breath every time the gunfire paused, but always it resumed. And still the trolls came.
The slim figure of Lalli darted through the trolls, leaving one after another fallen in his wake. The sigil on his jacket gleamed red and gold, brighter and brighter, as he approached a crowd of ghosts lurking in the trees behind the mass of trolls. Reynir twisted his braid so hard that it tugged his head to the side as he watched the Finnish mage’s dagger flash gold with each slash as he struck at one ghost far bigger and more solid than the rest.
Lalli’s foe was a horror, with a head like a horse’s skull and a long body with many legs, like the ghost of Sleipnir. But it can’t be Sleipnir! Reynir thought frantically. Odin would never allow him to die! A troll lunged at Emil and fell, flaming. When Reynir looked back, the horror had shifted, like a disturbed reflection in water. Now Lalli fought a man on a rearing horse, with people chained to the stirrups. Reynir blinked, and the man had become the horse-headed horror again.
Lalli was driving the ghostly creature back, but the mob of trolls was closing in on the team. Reynir backed away. He should hide in the safety of the main compartment. But what use was that, if the others fell …
Flame burst from Emil’s flamethrower, erupting into the form of a giant dog of fire. Reynir’s mouth fell open; this was a magic such as he had never imagined! The fire dog swept across the battleground and back again, engulfing Emil and Sigrun as Reynir cried out in horror.
The flames were gone in a heartbeat; the ghosts had fled. Mikkel ran to the two on the ground; Tuuri’s footsteps pattered across the roof; Lalli sprinted back. Reynir raced to open the door for Tuuri.
“Stay back! I’m — I’ve got troll gunk on me.”
He retreated, strangling his braid as she climbed in and darted to the medical cabinet. Stripping off her uniform trousers and black underclothes, she poured alcohol on a cloth, spilling some with shaking hands. As she cleaned her ankle, he saw them: three scratches, less than ten centimeters long, not even deep enough to need stitches. But they’d drawn blood, and that was all that was needed. Reynir sank to the floor, devastated, as she bandaged her ankle.
Lalli charged in, ignoring Reynir as he rushed to Tuuri’s side. The cousins said nothing, as Tuuri pulled on her pajama bottoms and sat on Mikkel’s bunk, staring down at her hands with Lalli sitting close beside her. A few minutes later, Mikkel carried in an unconscious Emil, who was stripped to his underclothes and soaking wet with his hair burned off. Sigrun followed, likewise soaked and nearly hairless, with their blackened and dripping uniforms, which she tossed into the UV cabinet.
After one glance at Tuuri, Mikkel laid Emil on his bunk, said something to Sigrun, hurried to kneel before Tuuri, and questioned her softly. As Sigrun opened a jar of salve and smeared it first on Emil’s head, cheeks, and neck, then her own, the sharp smell of comfrey filled the tank.
Mikkel stood. “Reynir, you’re going to have to move to the back compartment. It’s just a precaution.” He unfolded Reynir’s bunk, stripped off the bedding, pushed it into his arms, rolled up the mattress, and led him out and around to the back. And just like that, Reynir was settled in the back, safe from Tuuri’s breath, which would soon become deadly to him.
The tank had been quiet since Tuuri moved it a kilometer or so after the battle, but for the faintest sound of the door closing around daybreak, probably Lalli going out. Reynir supposed everyone was sleeping, exhausted after their exertions, their injuries, and the trauma of knowing Tuuri was wounded. He’d dozed, strangely exhausted himself, but waking frequently as his mind cast up memories of the battle. Now Reynir thought he heard the door clunk once or twice, more felt than heard. Reynir sat up, hoping that Mikkel, or even Emil or Lalli, would come to see him.
Time passed, and it seemed no one was coming to see him. He lay down again, staring up at the ceiling in the faint glow of the emergency lights. I didn’t even say goodbye, and now I never will. I’ll never see her in person again. Yeah, Mikkel said it isn’t certain she’s infected, but I think Mom and Dad told me the truth about that, if nothing else. If you get scratched by a troll, you get infected.
Reynir squeezed his eyes tight to hold back the tears. It isn’t fair. I would trade places with her if I could … I should have been on the roof with her. I should have asked her to teach me to shoot weeks ago. But even so, I could have guarded her, stabbed the troll, just gotten between her and the troll. Anything.
Memories of Tuuri came back to him: her delightful laugh, the elegant precision of her small strong hands. The quick intelligence in her eyes. The determined set of her jaw, more visible now as the hardships of their journey reshaped her face. The way her eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled.
Reynir wiped his eyes, tried to turn his thoughts to something else. Anything else. Images from the battle replaced images of Tuuri. He sat up, frowning, as he tried to remember exactly what he’d seen. Lalli fighting the horse-headed thing that was also a man on a horse. He squinted, trying to picture the man. I feel as if I know him. Or know of him. But how could I? I’ve never met a Dane besides Mikkel. Well, and Rosli, but … Wait! Rosli was alive when that man was alive. Maybe she knows him!
“Rosli, you see ghosts last night?”
yes
How to phrase this with his limited Swedish? Tuuri hadn’t taught him the word for horse. “You know the ghosts? You know the big man?”
no
“Right, thanks.” Reynir fell back on his mattress. Of course she didn’t know the man. There were lots of people in Denmark when it happened, more even than in Iceland. But there was still something about him … and about the people chained to the horse. Why was he dragging them along like that? Reynir searched his mind for answers.
Because he’s a bully. He didn't know where the thought had come from, but he felt its truth. Because he’s the bully from Kastellet. I heard him, I saw him, I know this is him! He tried to kill us back in the plaza, but we got away. So he followed us, and he brought others along who maybe don’t want to do this. And then more ghosts joined along the way. Reynir pressed his fists against his temples as the realization hit him. This is all my fault!
There was a clunk: the main door closing. Within seconds, his door opened, harsh sunlight and cold air pouring in around Mikkel’s bulk. Mikkel stopped in the doorway to ask, “Do you want to take a break?”
“This is all my fault!”
“I don’t think so.” Mikkel sounded tired.
“It is! I pointed out the ghosts in the plaza. That’s why you went in there; that’s why you found the box and the note. That’s why we went to Kastellet. And the ghosts from Kastellet followed us. They drove those trolls against us. And now Tuuri’s going to die, and it’s all my fault!”
“You don’t know they were from Kastellet.”
“They were! I’m sure of it!”
Mikkel ran a hand through his hair. “Look, even if you’re right, every one of us makes decisions every day. We don’t know — we can’t know — what will happen in the end because of that decision. We can only decide what’s right based on what we know at the time, and we just can’t foresee the outcomes.”
Reynir opened his mouth to object, but Mikkel overrode him. “You pointed out the ghosts because they might be a threat. That was the right thing to do. And afterwards, we might not have realized there was a possible cure. We might not have gone to Kastellet. We all made decisions along the way. Don’t beat yourself up over that remote connection. Your guilt is far less than mine.”
“What?”
Mikkel sighed. “Sigrun wanted to send her back to the tank to stay with you. I argued she should be allowed to fight. If I’d supported Sigrun, she would never have been scratched.”
Reynir stared at the man, wanting to hate him. Somehow he couldn’t. “She — she never wanted to sit behind walls forever.”
“Yeah.” Mikkel hadn’t looked at Reynir even once. Now he climbed into the tank, pulled a small sheaf of paper and a bottle of ink from his pocket, and passed them over. “That’s your special ink. I thought with the way you’ve come up with useful galdrastafur, maybe you could, could make something that would help.”
Reynir didn’t answer, looking down at the paper and ink, blinking back tears. He knew what Mikkel wanted, but if trained and experienced mages hadn’t come up with a galdrastafur against the Rash, he certainly couldn’t.
Mikkel turned away, making for the stacked crates. “Everyone’s waking up. I need to fix lunch.”
“We’re out of veggies.”
“And down to a couple of dozen cans of tuna. I know.” He pulled out half a dozen cans and dropped them in his pockets. “But Lalli’s set some snares; at least I think he understood the request, and when Sigrun and Emil get over the fight, they can hunt. And there might be waters safe to fish in. In any case, we’ll be at the outpost in a week or two. There’ll be food there.” With that, he left, latching the door behind him.
Reynir remained staring at the door. Mikkel hadn’t locked him in; he couldn’t, in fact, because the latch worked from either side. Whenever he wished, Reynir could go through that door and return to the main compartment and Tuuri. And she’d tell him to go to the back compartment and safety.
The long day dragged on. A supper of rabbit fried in tallow was at least better than the lunch of tuna fried in tallow. He tried and failed to draw effective galdrastafur on paper after paper, and ended by wadding up the papers and throwing them at the latch. When that paled, he went through the salvaged books, found one that looked simple, and tried puzzling out Danish based on the Swedish Tuuri had taught him.
Eventually, it was late enough that Reynir lay down, closed his eyes, and attempted to sleep, thinking sleep would make the time pass faster. Images of Tuuri came to his mind, but more than that, images of all his plans for after the expedition. He’d thought Tuuri might come to Iceland with him. They could have watched a lava flow and visited the dormant volcanic crater, Þríhnúkagígur. In Spring, they could have helped plant the family birch seedling, already two years old, in the village reforestation plot. He knew she wouldn’t have stayed in Iceland; the walls were invisible and far away, but they were there.
Maybe I wouldn’t have stayed either. Reynir sat up at that thought. I left my family, my dog, my sheep, just because I wanted to see the world. If Tuuri wanted me to go with her … but it’s too late for that. He lay down, still restless.
A plaintive voice crept into his half-dozing mind. “I want to leave. I want to go home.”
For a moment, he thought it was his own thought, but a cruel, angry voice broke in, “We will follow you forever. We will take everyone around you.”
Reynir sat up, eyes wide.
“There is nowhere to go. We will never tire. It will never stop,” the cruel voice went on.
“I don't know where to go,” a third voice cried.
“It's so dark, so cold, so empty, so scary, so lonely,” wept another.
Fingers trembling, Reynir traced his anti-ghost galdrastafur on the grimy floor.
“I'll be waiting,” the cruel voice said, fading away.
Shaking, Reynir lay back down. He had to sleep; he needed help against these ghosts. Pulling his blanket tighter around himself, he forced his breathing to slow and sought to clear his mind. Sleep finally overtook him and …
Reynir leaps to his feet, runs down to the sea. Concentrating on the thought of the church, he steps out on the water, scanning the fog. He runs towards a break in the fog, hoping and praying.
The church appears before him, and he sprints through the door, turning left and hurrying into the little room where they’d had cake. “Pastor lady? Pastor lady? I really need help!” The air is still and cold. He waits, listening, but no kind voice breaks the deep silence of the church.
After a long moment, he leaves the church and stares off into the fog. What can I do? Who can help me? Ah! Onni!
He focuses his thoughts on Tuuri’s brother. Almost immediately, he sees a new lightening of the fog, and he races towards it, soon seeing the cliff and the forest, with Onni himself sitting on his usual boulder. The mage turns at his approach and jumps down to the beach to meet him.
“What do you want now? How are Tuuri and Lalli?”
Reynir hesitates. Is it really his place to tell Tuuri’s brother about her situation? “Fine. Everyone’s fine,” he answers at last, slipping one hand behind his back and crossing his fingers.
Onni narrows his eyes. “You hesitated. What are you hiding?”
“The ghosts,” Reynir says hastily. It is even true. “They followed us. They threatened me. I don't know what to do. I hoped the nice old lady would help, but I can't find her. Maybe you can help …”
“I can't. I don't have the strength yet to go all the way to Denmark again.”
Reynir leans against the cliff and slides down to sit and stare into the autumnal forest. “I guess I knew that. I don't know why I came here. I guess I'm just scared. And there's nobody I can talk to about it.”
Onni turns to the forest and back to Reynir. “Look,” he says wearily, “you Icelanders are supposed to be seers. If you really think that woman has the ability to help you, then she will, one way or another. If she doesn't, she probably wasn't powerful enough to help in the first place.” He turns back to his forest. Without looking at Reynir he adds, “And sometimes ... there simply is nothing anyone can do about a bad situation. The world is a terrible place.”
“I don't think I can agree with that.”
“And that is why you're in your situation.” He waves a hand, and the world fades away.
“Do you think Tuuri has a chance?”
Sigrun was silent for so long that Emil thought she might not have heard. At last, with a heavy sigh, she replied, “No, kiddo, she doesn’t. That grossling drew blood. When that happens — not a chance.” She shook her head. “She shouldn’t be here at all.”
“But she volunteered.”
“Yeah, well, they should’ve told her ‘no’. I should’ve said ‘no’ the first time I laid eyes on her. But we had the tank, and it was only for three weeks. I was sure we could keep her safe that long. And we did! We kept her safe a lot longer than three weeks. But not long enough.” She sighed and shook her head again. “Hush now, we’re getting close. Those droppings are fresh.”
Emil glanced at the deer droppings, wondering how Sigrun could tell. He certainly couldn’t, though he'd learned so much from her over these weeks. Still, he focused on following in her footsteps, placing each foot on a hummock just visible above the mud, careful to avoid the snap of twigs or the rustle of dead leaves. He walked less quietly than she did, but still far more quietly than he had when they first met. With his second uniform jacket burned beyond repair, he wore the down jacket Lalli had found for him weeks earlier. He held his arms away from his body so as not to produce any rustling noises.
This hunt was the first time they’d been alone together since the battle. He could speak freely to Sigrun, but did he want to? As he followed her path across the hummocks, his thoughts turned back once again to Mikkel's confession.
Who can I trust? Can I trust Sigrun? Mikkel said she didn’t know, but he’s a liar, and General Trond brought her along with him. And she called me a “hapless, ham-fisted Swede” in that first building. But if she were part of Mikkel’s plot against me, she’d have had a hundred chances to finish me. She could just step aside and let a troll get me, then go back and say I wandered off against orders. No one would even blame her. No, I can trust her; I’m sure of it.
Sigrun raised a hand and they stopped. Leaning close, she murmured in his ear, “They’re just over that little rise. We’re downwind from them. I’m going to sneak forward and shoot one. You watch my back.”
Without the sound of their movement, Emil now heard the wet squelching of hooves in half-frozen mud and the soft gnawing of bark. At his nod, Sigrun stole away, pausing every few steps to listen. Emil peered around; few monsters would be out and about in daylight, but the day was cloudy and threatening rain. Or worse.
Sigrun disappeared among the trees at the top of the little rise, and soon Emil heard the sharp “thwip” of her bow. All stealth forgotten, Emil ran after Sigrun to help track the deer, mud splashing about his boots.
The deer, a medium-sized doe, ran perhaps twenty meters before collapsing, while the rest of the herd fled. As Emil knelt beside the deer, knife in hand, a flood of memories washed over him. He recalled his first fumbling attempts at field dressing, Sigrun's patient instructions guiding him. Now, he drew his dagger and cut out the arrow to return to Sigrun. Laying out the two canvas sacks he carried, he worked with practiced speed while Sigrun kept watch. The choicest cuts came first: the backstraps, the tenderloins. After that came whatever would fit in their sacks, as Emil worked until his hands were numb from the cold and his gloves stained red despite the icy mud he'd used to scour them clean.
With several meals secured, they trotted towards the next camping spot, where the tank would meet them. Too breathless to talk, Emil returned to his thoughts.
Surely I can trust Tuuri and Lalli. He can’t even talk to me, and poor Tuuri’s got her own problems now. Reynir, too. He really is just an idiot who ended up here by accident. If he’d been part of the plot, they would have just sent him along. No need for a pretense of stowing away. No, it’s only Mikkel in the plot.
But then, who sent him? Who is involved among the sponsors? That General Trond for sure, but what about … what about Aunt Siv? She doesn’t like me; she doesn’t like anyone, not even her own children. The thought of his little cousins pained him.
She wouldn’t have a problem sending me along to get killed. And Uncle Torbjörn hates being poor as much as Father does, although I don’t think he drinks like Father. If he thought I had something to do with the factory burning down — but I didn’t! — then he’d probably want to send me off to die. Emil shuddered and sought to focus his thoughts on the task at hand, keeping up with Sigrun’s long legs as she strode through the mud.
Sigrun held up a hand to stop him, and they stood together, listening. A twig cracked off to their right, out of sight behind the trees. Emil dropped his rifle into his hands, and Sigrun nocked an arrow, leaving her own rifle slung. If the threat was too dangerous for the bow, she could drop it and have her rifle in hand in a heartbeat.
“It’s downwind,” she whispered. “If it wants meat, it’ll smell what we’ve got. Be ready.”
They stood silent as something moved southwards, snapping twigs as it went. The sounds grew more and more distant until they could hear no more.
Sigrun replaced the arrow in her quiver. “Okay, move out.”
“But what was it?”
“Who knows? Maybe a cow or a herd of cattle. Maybe a large grossling, even. Probably not, though; a grossling would’ve smelled the blood and come after us. We’ll hear it if it comes back. Let’s go.”
Emil’s worries returned as they ran on, icy mud spattering their trouser legs. Should I talk to her about Mikkel? His story sounds insane. Maybe it is insane. And if I tell her — if she believes me — what then? Will she throw him out of the tank for the trolls? Do I want that? Arghh! With one hand holding a canvas sack and the other steadying his rifle, he couldn’t smooth his hair in his distress. And most of his hair was burned off anyway.
Maybe I should just keep quiet about him. But he warned me to guard my back when I’m rescued. He can’t convince them I can control my powers, because no one will believe him. I don’t get why not; he said he lied about something? Still, maybe they’ll believe Sigrun.
He darted a look at Sigrun before returning his attention to the treacherous ground ahead. “I didn’t panic in the fight,” he said, his voice more uncertain that he’d intended.
“No, you didn’t.” Unlike Emil, Sigrun was hardly panting. “You did really well.”
“Maybe I should have called the fire sooner. Then maybe Tuuri wouldn’t —”
Sigrun slowed to a walk. “Look, kid, we’re going to be refighting that battle forever, and we’ll find a hundred things we did wrong. But if you’d called the fire sooner, well, some of the swarm would’ve still been back in the trees. If your fire dog missed them, you’d be out cold and we’d be fighting the rest with a man down. And poor little Tuuri would still be up there guarding our backs. So it could’ve gone even worse.” She sighed. “We just didn’t have enough people for that fight.”
“I was so intent on the trolls in front of me; I didn’t see how many more were coming until Mikkel yelled.”
“You have to learn to watch the whole battle, not just your part. That takes time and experience, and you don’t have it yet.” She punched his shoulder, not quite hard enough to bruise. “You did well for a young troll-hunter.”
Emil hesitated, but continued. “Mikkel scared me once; I told you about that. And I didn’t panic and call the fire then either.”
Sigrun laughed, covering her mouth to smother the sound. “Yeah, I scared him back. Made him jump so much he fell right on his backside in the mud.” She sobered and gave him a narrow look. “That fire dog was huge. Can you call it but make it smaller? And maybe keep it from burning you? 'Cause it’d be great to have it in a fight, but not if it’s going to fry everything.”
“I–I don’t know. I didn’t know I could call it at all. Maybe if I practice.” Reminded of his injury, he pulled off a glove and touched his bare, itchy scalp. “Do you think it’ll grow back?”
“Yeah, the medic says so.” At Emil’s disbelieving snort, she added, “Don’t you believe him?”
“Not really. How bad does it look?” he asked hesitantly, hating to draw attention to his ugly baldness but wanting to know the truth. “Any blisters?”
Sigrun stopped and leaned close to examine his scalp. “Not a one.” She clouted him on the shoulder. “We match now. We’re the no-hair team!”
Emil gave a hollow laugh as they started forwards again. “The Cleansers will make fun of me for this. Only a real newbie gets his hair burned off.”
“The Cleansers? What, you want to go back to them? They don’t have any idea how to train you. Look how well you’ve learned in just a couple of months! No, kid, stick with me. Even if you can only call big huge fire dogs, you’ll still be a great troll-hunter.”
Emil felt a surge of relief at her words. Staying with Sigrun would mean not having to face his aunt and uncle, not having to wonder if they'd been part of the plot against him. And Father … well, Father probably wouldn't notice and certainly wouldn’t care if he didn't come home.
“Maybe I will,” he murmured, smiling but still uncertain. He pulled up his hood as the first cold drops of rain fell on his tender scalp.
By the time the tank reached them, they were sheltering from the sleet in the remains of a small building, wondering if the tank had broken down or gotten stuck. The squelching grinding noise of the treads brought them out, running to the door which Mikkel threw open for them. They had far more meat than needed for the evening meal, so Sigrun shoved both sacks into Mikkel’s arms and told him to store them while she and Emil warmed up. The Dane obeyed without a word, returning some fifteen minutes later with enough venison for a good meal.
Supper was a quiet affair as no one felt much like talking. Afterwards, Emil took Reynir’s supper to him, waiting outside in the sleet for fifteen minutes according to the wind-up timer in his pocket before stepping into the back compartment. Dark circles under Reynir’s eyes suggested he wasn't sleeping well, and his usual welcoming smile seemed forced. The man looked so lonely and so pathetically grateful for company that despite his annoyance at having had to stand outside, Emil sat and recounted his day while the other ate. He wasn’t sure how much the Icelander understood, but the man smiled and thanked him in Swedish when he took back the mug and bowl he’d brought.
Emil had the early morning watch, so he went to bed early and was sound asleep when Tuuri called, “Guys, guys, everybody, wake up! You’ve got to see this!” She sounded excited rather than frightened, still seeming entirely herself — no rash creeping up her cheeks, no weakness in her movements as she gestured them forward. But then, it might be as long as two weeks before any symptoms appeared. If they appeared at all. Maybe Sigrun was wrong. Emil pushed that hopeful thought away as the team rolled out of their bunks and rushed to her side.
Tuuri had opened the driving compartment door, which was supposed to remain closed. As the team crowded in, she retreated into the space beside the driver’s seat and pointed out the window. “Look at them, up on that hill.”
Emil’s breath caught at the sight. Far off, just visible through the leafless young forest to their east, were pale blue lights, appearing and disappearing as branches and tree trunks blocked their view. Three lights moved north to south, meeting a single light coming up from the south. The four met, then two went south and two north.
“There were more of them earlier,” Tuuri said. “Half a dozen or so; I’m not sure. But look at them!”
“Can’t be foxfire,” Mikkel murmured, his accent thicker than usual. “Foxfire doesn’t move.”
“Will-o’-the-wisps?” Sigrun suggested. “They move.”
“No,” Tuuri answered, “can’t be. They’re above us; they must be on a hill, not in a swamp.”
No one spoke for a moment as, one by one, the four lights vanished, perhaps over the crest of the hill. Three more lights appeared in the south and moved north before vanishing as well.
Tuuri looked back at the others, her face a pale smear in dim moonlight. “I think they’re people. People with flashlights. I think we’ve found a lost community of survivors.”
Emil looked past her at the distant hill, where another light appeared in the north, hesitated, then disappeared again. He so much wanted her to be right.
“Did the scout go over there?” Sigrun asked. “Did he see any signs of people?”
Tuuri asked something in Finnish. Lalli answered, then eeled his way through the crowd, darted out the door, and dashed away, soon disappearing into the forest. “He hasn’t been there, but he’ll check them out now.” Tuuri turned back to watch for more lights, clasping her hands together. “This makes it all worthwhile,” she whispered.
Almost an hour later, Lalli returned. One look at his face told Emil the truth; he didn’t even need a translation.
“They’re trolls,” Tuuri said, her voice choked with unshed tears. “They’re trolls with a glowing tentacle growing out of their heads. Just stupid glowing trolls.” She pushed past everyone and threw herself facedown on her bunk.
“My watch,” Sigrun said after a long, silent moment. “Everybody go to bed. Tomorrow will be another hard day.”
“Why didn’t Sigrun know about the ghosts?”
Mikkel looked up at Rosli for the first time, opened his mouth, closed it, and looked past her, brows drawn together as he considered her question. Rosli folded her arms and waited. She sat on Emil’s bunk, her rifle leaning against her leg, while Mikkel sat slumped forward on his own bunk, elbows on knees.
A few minutes earlier, Mikkel had shimmered into existence beside his bunk like someone being transported in the old Star Trek shows that no one but Rosli had seen. Though here he appeared as a young soldier, he looked utterly weary. He had greeted her politely and accepted the shotgun she materialized for him, but was as depressed and silent here as he had been in the material tank. Perhaps the puzzle would draw him out. In any event, she wanted his answer as a check on her own reasoning.
At length, Mikkel straightened and turned his gaze to Rosli. “You’re right, she should have.”
“Your reasoning?”
“We found ghosts in two clinics and the only hospital we entered. Troll-hunters in Norway and Sweden — and scouts like Lalli in Finland, for that matter — must have entered hundreds of clinics and dozens of hospitals over the years, over the decades. Even if they couldn't see the ghosts, the ghosts could have, would have, attacked. Troll-hunters should have any number of stories about how dangerous clinics and hospitals are, and rules about not going in.”
“And so?”
“If ghosts occurred in other countries as they do in Denmark, Sigrun would have known the danger. But she didn’t. Therefore, ghosts like this only occur here.”
“Q E D,” Rosli agreed. Mikkel looked blank, and Rosli waved the words away. Of course his post-apocalypse education wouldn’t have included Latin abbreviations. “I mean, that’s the same thing I thought. Denmark is different.”
“Only Denmark has these ghosts. Only Denmark had the so-called cure. And we found ghosts everywhere we found the cure.”
“The link seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? I’ve had some time to think about this. I wish I could have helped with the battle instead of sitting around thinking —” Mikkel shook his head and looked at the floor. Better to drop that topic before he stops talking again. “Anyway. Look, you’re here, but your body is back in the material world. What would happen if you never went back to your body?”
Mikkel looked thoughtful. “I would die.”
“Yes, but mightn’t you appear to be completely and irreversibly brain dead until your body died?”
Mikkel looked away from her, towards the front of the tank. She thought she could see the wheels turning in his head. “You think the cure pushed their spirits out of their bodies and left them as ghosts.”
“Well, the cure, or the cure and disease together, who knows? You won’t get a lot of healthy volunteers to take the cure and see if it makes them ghosts after it kills them.” She waited for a chuckle that didn’t come, before hastily adding, “But yes, my guess is that’s what happened.”
Mikkel stood, slung his shotgun over his shoulder, and strode forward to look out at the grosslings in the trampled clearing before the tank and the surrounding spring forest. When Rosli joined him, he glanced down at her and asked, “How does that explain you? You also received the cure.”
Rosli couldn't help smiling. “I’m not like the other ghosts.”
“Exactly.”
Rosli suppressed a sigh; Mikkel’s post-apocalypse education also hadn’t covered TV tropes. “My guess is it’s because I wasn’t that sick, not like the patients in those clinics. That note you found implied those patients were already comatose. I was still up and about, just a little rash on my shoulders and neck. And I was by myself in this tank that I’d been living in for the past ten days. They were crowded together in some unfamiliar place.” She shrugged. “So maybe that made me, my spirit, strong enough to grab onto the tank as sort of a new body instead of drifting into the aether like the others.”
Mikkel nodded slowly before turning back to watch the grosslings. “This is your haven, I think. Like Reynir’s.”
“Reynir gets sheep and a dog. Lucky me, I get grosslings.”
“Have you ever tried to thin the herd? Shoot a few and run back inside?”
“I can’t. I can’t open the doors or shoot out the windows.” She’d tried. Oh, she’d tried so many times over the decades.
Mikkel stroked a sideburn as the grosslings attacked each other. “I wonder if I could open the doors.” He looked down at her again, his expression oddly intent. “Please give me a crowbar, and I’ll try.” For a moment, it seemed he might say more, but the moment passed and he looked away.
She hesitated. Now that she had her team, did she want to throw herself into battle against the grosslings? On the other hand, even if he could get the door open, the grosslings probably couldn’t kill her any more than she could kill the ghosts. Probably.
Rosli materialized a crowbar and passed it to Mikkel, who hefted it, testing its weight. He gave her a thoughtful look and a nod before striding to the side door that the team normally used. She expected him to pry at the door, but instead he tried the latch. Having tried it herself to no avail more times than she could remember, she was as surprised as he was when it clicked, the sound loud in the quiet tank. A flash of surprise crossed his face before, for a split second, Rosli saw his smile. He flung open the door and jumped out.
“Mikkel, no!” Rosli cried, momentarily dazzled by the unfiltered daylight flowing into the tank for the first time. Gathering her wits as his shotgun boomed, she manifested a flamethrower, leapt down, and ran out to face the grosslings now turning towards them. “What are you doing? You’re still alive! Get back in the tank!”
He ignored her, focused on shooting grossling after charging grossling. As each fell, it melted into black goo that seeped into the crushed grass and vanished. She joined the battle, sweeping the flame across the oncoming enemy. A fitful breeze brought her now the heat of the flamethrower, now the cool air of early spring.
Mikkel glanced over, gave Rosli a strangely peaceful smile, and turned back to fire on the enemy. His crowbar lay at his feet, ready for when the creatures reached them. Grosslings burned and fell and melted, but ever more slithered or shambled towards them, and each attacker fell a little closer than the last. Bowing to the situation, Rosli stood beside him, flaming grosslings, as their implacable foes closed in.
It was all very loud, with the boom of the shotgun, the roar of the flamethrower, and the shrieks, wails, and snarls of monstrosities. The stench of grosslings, alive or burning, swept across them. In the midst of the chaos, a sound cut through everything else, a single, piercing cry:
CAW!
A shadow passed over them, swift and immense. To Rosli’s amazement, a gigantic gray and black bird — a grey crow but with a wingspan easily three meters — plunged from above. The crow’s great talons ripped at a monster’s eyes as the bird dodged a grasping tentacle, before its wings carried it out of reach above the crowd. Sweeping back and forth, it teased the grosslings, slashed at them, distracted them, and drew many away from their attack on the humans.
Almost before Rosli had fully grasped that this giant grey crow was an ally, a thunder of hooves heralded the arrival of another. Out of the forest charged a massive black bull. Each lethal horn gleamed like polished obsidian and muscles rippled beneath its midnight hide. Goring and tossing grosslings with its sharp horns, stomping and kicking more with its broad hooves, the bull wreaked havoc among their foes.
The crow worked in perfect coordination with the humans, diving to distract the monsters just as Rosli's flamethrower or Mikkel's shotgun found their targets. Meanwhile, the bull's charges kept the creatures from reforming their mass. More and more died until, quite suddenly, there were none.
Rosli lowered her flamethrower as she surveyed the field of battle, where the trampled grass now sprang up along with red and yellow wildflowers. The grey crow strutted across the clearing to her, its wingspan now shrunken to a more normal one meter. She stared at it, turned to Mikkel to ask what was happening … but Mikkel was gone. So was the bull.
Rosli looked back at the crow, wondering what exactly it was and how she should deal with it. “Thank you,” she said finally.
The crow raised its wings and bobbed its head before flying up to perch on a leafy branch. In the silence, birds sang and insects buzzed and trilled. The air was fresh, scented with green leaves, wildflowers, clean earth, and a faint whiff of the ocean. Rosli turned in a slow circle, drinking in the sounds and smells she’d been deprived of for so long.
At length, with the crow circling above, Rosli set out to explore her haven.
“And so,” Mikkel concluded, “it’s not even a good euthanasia drug.” He shrugged. “I gathered only the latest documents from the hospital, so they’re all useless, all focused on this ‘cure’. Still, there’s a roomful of research there, not to mention any other records lying around. A larger expedition, better equipped, can return and collect the rest. Somewhere in there may be an approach that our researchers can use.”
Sigrun leaned back and looked around. From her seat at the end of the table, she could see everyone. Emil was on watch, his face hidden because he had his hood up, even in the warmth of the tank. The little scout sat on the floor, gnawing on a last strip of venison bacon. He hadn’t reacted to the news since he had understood none of Mikkel’s report. Tuuri had hardly eaten; now she stared down at the table without a word, while Mikkel turned away to stir more bacon.
Every time she went hunting, Sigrun knew she might die, but it was only a chance. If it happened, she would go down fighting, taking an honor guard with her to Valhalla. She couldn’t imagine knowing that she would die within the next couple of weeks, and that there was nothing she could do but choose the way she died. If she were in Tuuri’s position, she’d run out and find the nearest swarm.
But maybe the girl still has hopes that she isn’t infected. No chance, though. I hope the big guy isn’t encouraging false hopes. Well, maybe she just wants to make at least a little mark on the world first, as best she can. She can still drive us, and she can finish her report on all this stuff. I wonder, should I do more to comfort her, or is it better to keep my distance? I'm not exactly the nurturing type.
Sigrun sighed and got to her feet just as Emil turned to her. “If you’ll take the watch, I’ll take Reynir his breakfast,” he said. As they switched places, Mikkel edged past them and called something to the back wall. Even Sigrun understood the answer: “Yes, okay.”
Mikkel returned to the stove and prepared a plate of bacon, setting a bowl upside down over it. “He’ll put on his mask, so you can take his breakfast straight to him and he’ll time it himself. That way, you don’t have to stand around in the cold.” Emil accepted the plate and the wind-up timer without a word, stepped into his boots, and left the tank.
Although she hadn’t wanted him from the beginning, Sigrun had to admit that Reynir had made himself a part of the team. He’d been so helpful — invaluable against the ghosts, in fact — that she meant to argue that he should get a share of the loot. That would’ve been a good wedding present … but whatever relationship was forming between Reynir and Tuuri was now doomed.
So Sigrun was pleased to see Emil treating Reynir like a teammate. They still couldn’t really talk to each other, though Reynir was getting better in Swedish, but Emil had started taking Reynir his meals and escorting him for necessary breaks. On the other hand, she felt a strain between Emil and Mikkel. There were no harsh words exchanged; they were both polite — too polite, maybe. She wondered if she should intervene.
How much does it matter, though? When we get back, I’ll take the kid with me to my team, and the big guy will go back to his farm or something. They’re both doing their jobs as they should, and we’ll be rescued before it’s a real problem.
The thought of rescue didn’t cheer her as she expected it to. I’ll miss all these people, the poor little girl, the big guy, the little mage scout, the baggage, even our ghost. They don’t expect me to be a general; most of them don’t know I’ll have to be a general one day. When we go back, I’ll have my team, for a while, anyway, but I’ll have to negotiate with towns for hunting contracts and with ships’ captains for supplies.
Out of sight of the others, Sigrun slammed her fist against her thigh. The generals — Mom and Dad — they’ll be disappointed in me again — always! — because I can’t read their stupid contracts.
Small dots of warmth moved about, visible in the IR monitor despite the light snow. Birds flitted from tree to tree, a squirrel ran along a branch, small creatures foraged in the thin layer of snow. None looked threatening. Emil was still in the back compartment. All was quiet.
All remained quiet for the next five days as the tank carried its grieving crew through deepening snow. The snowfall never quite stopped, muffling sounds, hiding obstacles, and often limiting visibility to a dozen meters, slowing their pace. As before, Lalli scouted ahead by night, returning with little prizes: another jacket for Emil, a sealed canister of oats, a large jar of honey.
Sigrun and Emil followed the tank, gathering fuel, which they passed to Reynir in the back. Since Mikkel had moved the kitten in with the Icelander and Rosli was on watch, Sigrun supposed it was safe enough to allow him to open the back door and look out rather than staring at the walls. It seemed the least she could do, given that the young man looked more haggard with each passing day.
When weather permitted, Sigrun and Emil went hunting, bringing back a goose and later a pair of rabbits. Emil built a small fire in the lee of the tank each evening and whispered to it, though he confessed to Sigrun that he was afraid to summon the fire spirit just yet. His hands trembled a little as he took out the flint and steel.
Tuuri wore her blue and silver tracksuit as she drove the tank by day and worked on her notes in the long evenings, grilling everyone over details. She even sat on Mikkel’s bunk, back against the partition, to call questions to Reynir. Sometimes she made no notes as they talked.
And Mikkel cleaned. He cleaned everything, scrubbing the interior of the tank until it gleamed, washing their clothes and hanging them to dry inside so that everyone had to duck and push their way through damp laundry in the evenings. The sharp scent of soap mixed with cooking odors in the humid air, making the confined space feel even smaller. No one commented; it was tacitly understood that everyone had their own way of dealing with grief.
Every morning, the pristine snow stretched out around them, unmarked except for their own tracks, waiting for new footprints to break its surface.
Tuuri had taken to calling on the radio both morning and evening, to no response but the snarl and crackle of static. On the evening of the fifth day, as she sent her voice uselessly into the ether, Lalli rolled out from his den, edged past Sigrun as she cleaned her rifle and Mikkel as he polished the outer door, and joined Tuuri beside the radio. A resounding bang from the radio compartment made everyone jump and turn to listen.
“Silent World Expedition calling Öresund base or any ship at sea.”
“Öresund base here.” The static was not quite silenced, a murmur below the answering voice. “Do you hear me, Silent World Expedition?”
“I hear you. Please connect us to our headquarters.”
“Will do.”
As the team crowded forward to listen, Lalli retreated to the back of the tiny compartment, leaning wearily against the wall with the little desk with its radio and typewriter between him and the others. He gave Tuuri a sharp look as a Finnish voice answered, questioning. From her position, Sigrun saw Tuuri blinking away tears as she smiled and replied. Something in her artificially light tone made Emil shift uncomfortably beside Sigrun. After several questions and answers, Uncle Trond took over the radio.
“Trond here. The rescue ship is on its way from Iceland now. I’ll meet it, so I’ll be with it at the rescue. Mikkel, we’ll meet to —”
“No.” Sigrun turned to stare. No one told Uncle Trond ‘no’. “No, we will not meet.” Static hissed as Mikkel took a deep breath while the others seemed to hold their breaths. “I failed at my mission, and I lied to you. I will not be rescued.”
“What?” Sigrun, Emil, and Tuuri asked together as the radio continued to hiss.
“You — Corporal Madsen, you” — Mikkel turned on his heel and strode away — “will meet with me. You will explain yourself. You will —”
Freezing wind swept through the tank before the outside door slammed behind Mikkel. Sigrun gave a throat-cutting signal to Tuuri, who sat wide-eyed at the radio. Emil stepped forward as if to follow Mikkel, then hesitated, looking between the door and Tuuri. The static roared back, drowning out Trond's coldly furious voice, and Lalli slid down the wall to the floor. Sigrun blinked at him, then turned and ran out the door herself.
Mikkel hadn’t gone far. She found him leaning slump-shouldered against a rusty signpost a dozen meters from the tank, light snow dusting his black underclothes and each breath a cloud in the frigid air.
“Tell me what’s going on!” she demanded.
He shrugged. “I won’t be rescued.”
Sigrun hesitated. This was the sort of problem she would pass to the generals, but they weren’t here and she was. “Do you feel guilty about Tuuri? Is that why?” When he didn’t answer, she continued, “Of course you do. So do I. But, Mikkel, you were right. She was right. We needed her up there guarding our backs. More of us could have been killed without her. Maybe all of us.”
“Emil’s fire spirit —”
“So those beasts hit us from behind, and the fire dog attacks them right on top of us. We get torn apart and burned up at the same time! No, we needed her. I know how you feel, but you’re wrong. Don’t do something stupid because of that.”
Mikkel opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. “It’s not just that.”
“Oh, right, you failed some mission. Even so, you get a share of the loot; you can go home to your farm and —”
He gazed off into the forest. “I have no home. No farm. No family. And no pay, no — no job since I failed. I have nothing to go back to, Sigrun.”
She stared at his profile. “I, uh, I didn’t know that. But, look, my clan can always use a medic; I’ll tell the generals to —”
He turned to her, shook his head. “General Trond will — he won’t permit that.”
“It’s not up to him!” She waited for Mikkel to agree, to say anything. His silence spoke volumes. She felt a strange chill that didn’t come from the snow. “Is it?”
“Yes, it is. If I went back …” Mikkel turned away again. “I have unfinished business in Kastrup.”
Sigrun felt lost. What he’d said, what he’d implied, about Uncle Trond … she didn’t want to believe, but something in her said that it was true, that she’d always known it was true.
“You — you can’t go now. We need you. Things are bad enough already, with Tuuri. We can’t lose you too.”
He sighed and lowered his head. “Of course. I’ll stay until you reach the outpost.”
She strode back to the tank, and after a moment, she heard him follow.
Tuuri sits up and peers around in confusion. The tank is empty, no one is inside, and the side door stands wide open with sunlight streaming in. She reaches for her blankets, expecting a freezing blast, but there are no blankets and the air is warm and scented with growing things.
As she jumps down from her bunk, a figure appears in the doorway. A flash of terror passes through Tuuri before she recognizes the woman. “Rosli!”
“Tuuri, I’m so glad you made it. Please, come outside. You have to see this!”
Tuuri hurries to the door and hops down, her smile the widest she’s felt in weeks. The forest around the tank is in its full spring glory, fresh green leaves rustling in the warm sunlight. Birds sing, insects hum, and somewhere nearby a stream chuckles. She turns to Rosli to share her joy, only to see the woman’s face grow dismayed.
“What —” But she knows. She pulls aside her warm black undershirt and looks down at her shoulder. At the terrible rash that covers it. With trembling fingers, she traces the rash, feels the knotted, twisting tendrils running up her neck, just touching her jawline.
Tuuri falls back against the tank, her legs too almost weak to hold her up. “It can’t be. I looked — I look every morning and evening. There’s no rash. There can’t be!”
Rosli hurries to her side, pulls her into her arms. “Oh, Tuuri, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Tuuri can’t help sobbing. “I didn’t believe it. I thought someone was looking out for me. I just wanted to — just to see the world. Just to be outside the walls. That was all.” Something touches Tuuri’s leg, and she gasps, pulls away from Rosli to look down. Standing with paws on her leg is a hedgehog as big as a cat. She kneels to gather her luonto in her arms and stands. “You came for me. If only — if only —”
At last, without looking at Rosli, Tuuri says, “I’m, um, I’m really glad I got to see you again. I’m sorry about all the scratches. It was so hard to get through the forest. Reynir will finish the — he’ll —” She can’t get out the last words.
Rosli squeezes her shoulder for a long moment before speaking. “Tuuri, don’t give up yet.”
“You know there’s no cure. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing anyone can do.”
“Maybe.” Rosli’s voice is slow and thoughtful. “But we’ve found out something no one else knows.”
Tuuri looks up, curiosity warring with despair.
“We found out the Rash is magical. I mean, look, it’s affecting your spirit right now. But ever since the plague started, everybody’s been trying to fight it like it’s physical. Maybe the key is to fight it magically.” She steps in front of Tuuri, grips both her shoulders, and looks her in the eye. “You’ve got two mages to work on this for you. Two mages of different types. That has to count for something.”
Tuuri and the luonto stare at her. “Two mages? Oh, you mean Reynir and Lalli.” Could there really be some hope? “But, no. I have three mages. Onni’s a mage too.”
Rosli steps back. “You’re smart, Tuuri. There’s too much I don’t know about your world, especially about magic, but you’re a scholar; you know. You’ve got some time, and you’ve got those mages. Don’t give up. Don’t waste time. I mean, maybe you’re right and it’s hopeless, but Tuuri, consider that maybe you’re wrong.”
Tuuri snapped awake, shaking. Without even sitting up, she pulled at her pajama top to examine her shoulder. Her skin was clear and smooth as she stroked it with a shaking finger. Was that just a bad dream? No, it was too clear, too vivid. I’m … I’m infected.
She choked back a sob. Only Rosli’s right. I’ll fight this to the end. Just like we all fought the swarm. That was hopeless too, but we won anyway, because of magic. I can’t fight this physically, but I’ll fight it mentally. I’ll find the cure!
The outer door opened, admitting a blast of cold air as Mikkel left to fetch supplies for breakfast. She considered telling him, as he was the other educated team member. However, remembering what had happened the previous evening, she shook her head.
Lalli had volunteered to clear the static, hoping she would feel better if she talked to Onni. And she had talked to Onni, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him what had happened. He didn’t cope well with uncertainty. Then that General Trond had come on, and Mikkel had made that astonishing announcement that he refused to be rescued. After that, everyone was even more unhappy than they’d been before.
Tuuri thumped her head on her thin pillow. He’s too stressed out for me to deal with right now. And no one else can help. Even Reynir … I wish I could talk to him. Just sit and talk to him without Mikkel hearing every word.
Another blast of air as Mikkel returned, and it was time to get up and get ready for the day. Lalli would be back soon, with instructions on the course to follow.
That evening, setting aside the expedition report she’d been editing and bringing to date, Tuuri turned to the hospital papers that Mikkel had retrieved. She hadn’t yet come up with even a rough plan for the mages, so maybe learning more about the Rash would give her an idea. Or maybe reading would distract her while the back of her mind kept working on the problem.
Mikkel had organized the papers by topic and date, which helped. Shuddering, she set aside the patient status reports after examining the first few pictures. Was that her future? No, no matter what, she wouldn’t go out that way.
The research reports were the most interesting. Continuing on beyond the final meeting of the Rash Research Group, they detailed the results of further testing of test subjects — both humans and animals that had received the cure. She didn’t know what “PCR tests” or “Rapid antigen tests” were, but the researchers had trusted them to show if the test subjects had the Rash virus. The last result was recorded ten days after the cure was distributed to whatever clinics and hospitals still existed. At that time, none of the test subjects had revived, but the tests still showed that none had the virus.
Tuuri sat back, thinking about the two researchers who had continued to record the results for so long. Who were they? Were they immune? Did they escape to safety, or were they killed by trolls as they fled? If they did escape, I can see why they never told anyone about the cure. Who would want to admit that they were a party to tricking doctors and nurses and medics into killing their patients?
She tidied up the papers and put them away. Her watch began at midnight, and she needed to get some sleep. It had been nine days since she was scratched.
The next morning, Tuuri’s skin was still clear, the Rash still hidden somewhere inside. As she drove through the day, Tuuri mulled over what she’d learned.
I think Rosli is wrong. Well, maybe not wrong but not totally right. The Rash is magical, but it has to be physical too. Those researchers detected a Rash virus in all the patients and in all the test subjects. And then once they used the cure, that virus was gone. I think you need the cure as well as magic.
In the evening, Tuuri moved on to the report on the manufacture of the cure. The process was intricate and used equipment she’d never heard of. Worse, it required ingredients that had come from America, that vast land across the Atlantic that she’d read of. Before the coming of the Rash, ships had brought these ingredients across the ocean from its massive factories. Now, who knew if America even existed anymore, let alone still made these specialized chemicals?
No one in the Known World can possibly manufacture the cure even with the full instructions. This is hopeless!
Tuuri wiped her eyes, stood, and began to tidy up the papers. As she did so, her gaze fell on the instructions for distribution. “The compound does not require refrigeration. It tends to crystallize, but may be reconstituted for use with sterile water.”
She sat down and stared at the paper, thinking about honey. Scouts sometimes brought back jars of honey; Lalli had found one just days before. As always, the honey was crystallized solid, but when they warmed it up, it had returned to liquid form, perfectly preserved after all these years.
Her finger trembled a little as she ran it across the words.
Crystals.
“Lalli! Hey, Lalli, wake up!” She wanted to shout at him, but held herself to an urgent whisper.
Lalli opened his eyes and glared at her from his den. “Why?”
She welcomed his glare; it was more natural than the concern he’d been showing. “I’ve got an idea. I need syringes that were used for that cure. The cure dries up and turns into crystals. I need those crystals.”
“It didn’t work.”
“I know, but I think it can work. I think we can make it work. Please, Lalli, please find me those crystals. Can you do it? Please?”
Lalli crawled out from under his bunk and looked around, nostrils flared. “I’ll find them.” He pulled on his uniform and slipped out the door.
Tuuri breathed a prayer as she watched him leave. It had been ten days since she was scratched.
Lalli darted to the back compartment for his skis. As he climbed into the back, Reynir sat up to greet him in a sleep-thickened voice. Lalli nodded to him. He didn’t like the man; he didn’t much like anyone other than his cousins, but he didn’t dislike him either. Lalli respected the Icelander for his magic, and also he knew what the glowing red and gold sign on the back wall meant. The whole tank was protected from ghosts by Reynir’s magic, but that sign, that one, was for Tuuri. Anyone who protected Tuuri was a good man in Lalli’s eyes.
Lalli stuffed a canvas bag into his belt and, after a pause for thought, another. How many syringes did Tuuri need? He would bring back as many as he could find. With his skis and ski poles in hand, he nodded again to Reynir and climbed down. The Icelander followed him to the door, babbling. Lalli ignored him.
The ghosts lurked nearby, held away from the tank by the surrounding shield of blue and green. Protected by the sign on his jacket and armed with his dagger, he didn’t fear them. Rather, they feared him and retreated as he donned his skis. His mind raced as he considered his direction. His “finding” ability was close-range; he needed to be within thirty or forty meters to sniff out what was needed. That was how it felt, that he smelled the need. So he had to go to a place where the syringes were likely to be.
There were crystals in Odense. He was certain of that. As he pursued the troll up the stairs, he’d smelled that scent of motor oil and dusty books that marked something Tuuri needed, and he’d left the troll behind as he ran to find it. And then he’d run right into the ghosts and had to flee. He’d wanted to go back, but so much had happened since …
I can’t go back to Odense. There and back would take days, and Tuuri doesn’t have days. But every city had clinics and hospitals. They should have that cure. There’s a small city to the southwest. And if that fails, there’s another just west of it.
Lalli skied southwest, ghosts scattering out of his way. Why the gods had gifted him with his ability had always been a mystery, but maybe it had always been for this one day, this day that would save Tuuri’s life.
The snowfall had stopped; the clouds were clearing. The Moon hung near full in the eastern sky, lighting the pristine snow before Lalli’s skis. His arms and legs worked together with practiced skill, driving him ever onward across the snow. Puffs of breath streamed out behind him in the frigid air.
When he scouted, Lalli’s every sense was heightened, reaching out around him. On this night, the sounds of the forest seemed normal, dead leaves rustling while small creatures foraged and owls hunted. Off to his left was an empty space, a silent space, where nothing moved. A grossling lurked there, avoided by every normal creature. He avoided it too; he couldn’t spare time for a fight.
An owl swooped silently across the game trail he followed, landing on a branch and watching him. He thought of Onni as he passed. Has he recovered from driving off the ghosts? Even if he has, there are more of them every day. I don’t think he can drive them off again. They can’t get to us and I’ve hurt some of them. Maybe they’ll give up and go away.
He detoured around the remains of a cabin. When will she tell him? Should I tell him? But the risks … he’ll be angry if I go to him. Still, he has to be a part of whatever plan she has. She’ll tell me when it’s time. We won’t use the radio, that’s for sure. He’d cleared the static for Tuuri once, then that old man’s menacing voice had driven Mikkel off — no, never again.
The Moon had begun its long slide down to the western horizon as Lalli entered the city. For some time, he’d passed tumbledown houses, some with trolls inside, but nothing that looked large enough for a hospital or even a clinic. Now, he leaned on his ski-poles and peered about at institutional buildings with their shattered glass frontages and crumbling brick façades.
Dead paper, dead ink — they didn’t speak to Lalli as they spoke to Tuuri, as the forest spoke to him. Nevertheless, he could read, and he knew some important Swedish words: “clinic”, “hospital”, “school”. He saw none of those words on the few remaining signs, and there was no hint of the scent he sought, that smell of motor oil and dusty books that marked Tuuri’s need. After a careful look at the condition of the traffic-clogged street, Lalli removed his skis, bundled them up, and stashed them behind some debris. Trolls wouldn’t bother them; trolls only attacked living beings.
A twist of darkness: a grossling in a nearby building, now stirring as its own strange senses told it of his presence. Ignoring it, Lalli ran down the street, clambering over the remains of a fallen façade. This wide street might lead somewhere important.
As he searched street after street, on two occasions, trolls lunged out of ruins to chase him. He outran each, scrambling up and over collapsed ruins so as to disappear from their eyes and their special senses.
The eastern sky was lightening as he gave up on this city and returned to his skis. Tracks showed a grossling had followed him but lost him, turned aside, and never returned. Dismissing the creature, Lalli retrieved his skis, backtracked into the forest, and skied around this city to the next, a few kilometers west along the remains of a major road.
As before, he stowed his skis and searched the ruins on foot, his desperation growing. It was now the eleventh day since Tuuri was scratched. The syringes had to be here. Just after noon, as he raced along one more broad avenue, he stopped in his tracks and turned to his right. The building a block down a side street looked like another shop, but from it came the odor he sought. He sprinted towards it, snow spattering to the sides, before jerking to a sudden stop. Yes, the odor came from that building, but so did the stench of trolls.
Lalli squinted at the two-story building, examining the broken door, smashed in rather than out. The damage looked old. Two large windows flanked the door, both shattered, with large shards still projecting from the bases. Much of the brick façade had collapsed, but the roof appeared intact.
A twisting wrongness showed Lalli trolls deep within, now edging forward as they detected him. He looked around the street, spotting the sturdiest ruins, planning a possible retreat. There were no more active trolls on this street, but there might be some nearby. He turned back to examine the approaching trolls.
Four trolls crept towards him, moving faster now as they sensed him more clearly. He needed to deal with them quickly, for time pressed. He felt forces in motion, like a storm just over the horizon, when the air goes strange and distant thunder is felt rather than heard, and he needed to get back. Even at his best pace, it would be past midnight before he could get back to where he’d left the tank, and he’d have to track it down. They wouldn’t have stayed there.
Lalli stood in front of the door, perhaps five meters back, looked around once more for active trolls, and readied his rifle. The four trolls were close.
The first troll, a crab-like creature two meters long and a meter wide, appeared and shoved broken bricks and rotting beams out of the doorway. Lalli watched, rifle aimed, but held his fire. As soon as he fired, every grossling for kilometers around would awaken. The monster raised stalked eyes to stare at him as the second and third trolls, of similar form, crowded behind it, their own stalked eyes peering over it. He couldn’t see the fourth troll with his outer eyes, though it was close behind the other three.
“Come out,” he said, his voice rough with long silence. The trolls hissed and snarled, the lead troll reaching out a multijointed leg, but snatching it back as sunlight fell on it. “Come out.” They shifted but remained inside, out of the light. This wasn’t working. He couldn’t shoot them all as they crowded against the door.
Trolls were remarkably unintelligent. Usually, this was an advantage, since it made them easy to ambush or trap. Now … well, if they weren’t clever enough to see that there were more exits, he would just have to show them. Lalli darted to one of the windows, smashed a shard of glass with the butt of his rifle, and leapt out of reach as a clawed leg snatched at him.
The fourth troll hove into view, much larger than the others, also crab-like with its broad flattened body and many multijointed legs. It sported two distorted human heads on stalks, their elongated jaws drooling and shrieking at him. Two head-shots, and the creature fell. A smaller troll clambered over it and was struck down in turn. The lead troll now lunged out the door, shrieking as its warty skin smoked in the sunlight, but still determined to grab him. Lalli retreated to a sturdy pile of rubble before he got a clear shot at its head. The monster fell, and he ran past its still-twitching limbs to shoot the remaining troll through the door.
Seething darkness under his feet told him he’d awakened something else in this building. Where are the syringes? That haunting odor led him through a half-collapsed doorway to an overturned cabinet. As clawing sounded from below, he climbed atop the cabinet and pulled up drawer after drawer.
There! The scent of motor oil and dusty books overwhelmed the stenches of trolls and mold and decay. He snatched up two boxes, stuffed them in his canvas bag, and fled. Behind him, floorboards splintered as something ripped its way up.
Lalli sprinted all out for his skis. Stirrings in the ruins around him: monsters roused by the sounds of gunshots. An eye-tipped tentacle reached for him from a manhole; he hurdled it and kept running. With the precious syringes in his hands, nothing mattered but getting back to Tuuri.
Sunset blazed across the sky as he skied back along his own trail. The full moon rose while the western sky still glowed. Lalli skied, desperate to get back. Things were changing; he could feel them.
Just past midnight, Lalli skidded to a halt, recklessly closing his outer eyes and opening his inner eyes to search around him. Nothing. All quiet. He shivered and pushed off once more.
Something momentous had happened.
“Is Tuuri okay? Why are we going so slowly?” If something had happened to Tuuri — no, he wouldn’t think that! But this was the eleventh day since she'd been scratched …
Mikkel handed Reynir his lunch without looking at him. “She’s well enough. Sigrun’s doing the scouting. Lalli went out last night and never came back.”
Reynir set down the plate, staring at Mikkel in dismay. He'd said goodbye to Lalli the previous evening, not imagining that would be the last time he spoke to the man. “You think he’s — he’s —”
“Tuuri says he’s okay. How she would know that …” Mikkel shrugged. “Eat your lunch. I’ll be back later, or Emil will.” He hopped down and ran forward, leaving Reynir to close the door.
As Reynir wound up the timer, the kitten trotted over to investigate his plate of venison. He made no effort to stop her; she wouldn’t eat much and he wasn’t hungry. He hadn’t been hungry for days, worrying about Tuuri. And now Lalli was lost.
Fifteen minutes later, the timer buzzed, making the kitten jump, and Reynir took off his mask and gloves to eat. “Do you think I should visit Onni?” The kitten expressed no opinion. “If I did, how could I tell him Tuuri’s infected and Lalli’s missing? Poor guy. They’re his whole family, you know.” The kitten watched his knife and fork cutting the meat. “Oh, right. I guess you lost your whole family too. Here, have some more.”
They ate together in silence until the plate was empty. “I had a dream last night,” he said, cuddling the kitten. “I was with my dog again. Except not on my island this time. We were in the forest, in the snow. He ran ahead of me, and I ran after him. And then he turned left — do you know left and right? I bet you do; you’re a clever kitty.” The kitten purred.
“Anyway, he turned left, and he ran towards this break in the trees. It was like the Sun shone right through that break, right on him. And he looked at me and said ‘I helped!’ And then I woke up. Weird dream, wasn’t it?” The kitten snuggled a little closer, and he sighed. “I wish I could talk to Tuuri. I mean, really talk, without Mikkel listening in. Not that he’s spying on us!” he assured the kitten. “It’s just the tank is so small; there’s no way he can avoid hearing. I had so many chances to talk to her, and I didn’t.” He hugged the kitten to him, and perhaps she tolerated a few teardrops.
After a while, Reynir opened the back door again to watch the passing scenery as the short winter day crept by. With the kitten on his shoulder and Rosli watching out, he felt quite safe. Since the weather remained clear but still frigid, he wore his mask, warm clothes, boots, and gloves.
The scenery was, he had to admit, quite dull, though better than the walls of the back compartment. The tank ground its way through a leafless forest with occasional stands of snow-covered pines. About the tank, deep, level, unmarked snow stretched far away, bare-branched bushes poking through in places.
As the shadows grew long and his thoughts grew darker, counting up the days since Tuuri was scratched, his gaze fell on something strange. Beside the tank’s track ran another, the track of an animal. The paw-prints began from a break in the trees off to his right, came almost to the tank’s track, then ran away from him until they simply stopped.
No. Reynir’s lips parted as he recognized what he was looking at. No, the track starts back there and comes towards me, then turns left. He seized his braid and twisted it with both hands. Could … could it be? This has to be it! This has to be my chance to set things right!
Holding the kitten on his shoulder with one gloved hand, he dropped out of the tank and sprinted along the paw-prints into the break in the trees. The sunset glowed along the wide clear path he followed. Shouts sounded behind him, but he ran on. The path curved to the right, and as he rounded the curve, he stopped at the sight before him.
The central tower with its carved symbol still stood tall and the complex mass of the church still lay on either side, though vines had grown up over the structure. The lawn was deep in snow, and rusting vehicles hulked off to the left. “It’s really here,” Reynir told the kitten as he strode forward. “An answer to my prayers. Isn’t it?” He hesitated a dozen meters from the church, uneasy, no longer so sure. “I’m glad you’re here too. I have to go in there. I need to know if it’s safe.” He held the kitten out towards the building. When she yawned and licked a paw, his fear faded away. “Okay. I think that means everything is clear. Here we go!”
Reynir ran to the door, half-open as he remembered, and rushed inside. “Wow,” he whispered, stopping just inside. The chilly air of the church seemed to swallow his voice. “It looks a bit less tidy than last time.” Bits of the high ceiling and the walls had fallen off, piling on the grimy floor and leaving gray splotches, as if the church itself had the Rash. The stained glass windows were still intact, and the last light of day shone through them, laying colors across the rubble.
The kitten made an inquisitive sound, stretching to look off to his left. “Oh, right. We’ll go find her.” With the kitten in his arms, he hurried to the room where the pastor lady had served him and Onni cake. Like the rest of the church, it was cold and quiet. The kitten stretched forward towards one of two doors in the back.
The uneasy feeling came back as he studied the right-hand door. Something black had oozed from under the door. Yet the kitten wasn’t alarmed. Reynir touched his mask, confirmed that it was properly settled, and tiptoed across to open the door.
A mass of claw-tipped, sucker-lined tentacles twitched slightly towards him. Reynir recoiled, clutching the kitten to him, too terrified to turn his back and flee. Yet the tentacles remained within the closet behind the door, and after a frozen moment, Reynir managed to look away from them. His gaze wavered across the blotched, scaly body of the monster to the face.
To the alert brown eyes. To the clouded oval glasses with their thin, rusty frames. To the collar, no longer stiff and white, but wilted and soiled.
“Reynir,” the troll rasped.
He couldn’t speak. The words couldn’t come. Numb with horror, Reynir reached out one hand and pushed the door closed. He felt sick to his stomach at her transformation. He wanted to run away, yet he felt he had to stay. As the door clicked closed, the kitten began to purr.
Even as Reynir retreated to the great hall, the door banged open and Mikkel charged in. Before Reynir could speak, the Dane, red-faced and gasping for air, gripped his shoulders, making him drop the kitten. The big man lifted him off his feet and shouted at him. Unfortunately, he shouted in Danish, and Reynir understood little of his tirade, other than that he had taken an insane risk and Mikkel was furious.
“Mikkel, Mikkel, listen to me. This is —”
Before Reynir could get out any explanation, the tank rumbled to a stop outside, and Sigrun and Emil raced in, rifles in hand. Mikkel dropped Reynir and stepped back as Sigrun took over shouting at him. Emil started toward the room where the troll lay hidden, while the kitten leapt onto a dusty chair by the door, safe from all the feet.
“Stop! Stop!” Reynir shouted in Swedish. Tuuri had taught him that useful word, and it worked its magic as the others fell silent and glared angrily at him. “Mikkel, listen to me!” he continued in Icelandic. “I’m sorry I ran off, but I’ve seen this place. I’ve dreamed of it, twice, no, three times. Onni said I’m a seer, so these visions must be important. There’s a, a — The pastor lady here holds the key to banishing the ghosts. She has to, or they’ll follow us home and kill everybody. They told me so. Tell Sigrun. Please, Mikkel.”
As the older team members spoke, Reynir moved to block Emil from leaving the great hall. “I smell a troll,” the Swede said, gesturing him to step aside. “This place is bad for you.”
“No, the troll is good,” he answered in his bad Swedish. “Look! See the kitty. The kitty says the troll is good.” He wished he had a larger vocabulary. Talking like a small child wasn’t helping his argument.
Mikkel came over to talk to Emil while Sigrun wandered down the aisle of the great hall. At her exclamation, the other three hurried over, seeing what had alarmed her: old, crumbling human remains lay on every pew. As Reynir stood staring around — this differed greatly from his visions — Mikkel picked up an empty syringe from the debris on the floor.
“This is familiar,” he said, and even Reynir understood his words. “This contained the ‘cure’.” He looked around. “Are there ghosts?” he asked Reynir, his voice tense. Even with the galdrastafurs on their jackets, none of them would feel safe among ghosts.
“No, there are none. Everyone is gone. Except the pastor lady. She —”
Footsteps brought everyone around, and Reynir fell silent. Though her mask hid her face, he drank in the sight of Tuuri just meters away. He hadn’t seen her in eleven days and had thought he’d never see her again.
As Mikkel stepped into the aisle between them, Reynir shifted to peer over his shoulder. “You two need to stay apart,” Mikkel said apologetically.
“There’s a troll in here,” Emil added. “Reynir said it’s good.” Reynir could almost hear him roll his eyes.
“A troll?” Sigrun said, drawing her dagger.
“No, no, Mikkel, tell her the troll is the pastor lady! I don’t understand it either, but she mustn’t hurt her. She’s not a danger to us.”
While Mikkel explained the situation, Reynir watched Tuuri stare around at the church. He knew her fine mind was recording each detail for her report, and wished he could help her as he had before. Before she was scratched. His heart broke as she looked at him and smiled, perhaps for the last time.
“Okay, you know what’s going on here, so what’s the plan?” Mikkel asked.
“I think I need to stay the night.” Reynir thought about that. It felt right. “But you all should stay in the tank, where you’re safe from the ghosts.”
“You’re going to stay in here alone with a troll? That’s not happening,” Mikkel said. Sigrun tugged at his sleeve, annoyance written on her face at the Icelandic conversation. He spoke, she answered, they argued, and at last Mikkel turned back to Reynir.
“All right. Sigrun and Emil and Tuuri,” he said with a sharp look at her, “will sleep in the tank for the night. I’ll stay with you. Sigrun would rather stay, but if things go wrong, the team needs the captain more than the medic. So I get the job.”
Reynir wished Tuuri would get the job instead. “Okay, but the troll — the pastor lady — is no threat to me.”
After the others returned to the tank, Reynir and Mikkel explored the church for a place to sleep, finding an interior room that had been closed up long before. Protected from weather and vermin, it was as it had been left but for the dust. It featured a fireplace, a long couch, several high-backed wooden chairs, a heavy wooden table, and a shorter couch, which they did not know had once been called a love seat.
Reynir stretched out on the couch, leaving the love seat for Mikkel, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep. His thoughts whirled in tight circles: how was Tuuri, where was Lalli? He told himself to let that go. Slowly, the sounds of Mikkel’s lighting the fire and then settling himself on the love seat faded, and he drifted away.
Reynir opens his eyes and sits up. The little room is different — no dust, no Mikkel. He gets to his feet, goes out to the room where they’d had cake.
“You found your way,” the pastor says, delighted. “I never doubted you would.”
"So, uh, you've turned into a troll," Reynir says, taking a seat and accepting a slice of cake she offers.
“If that’s your preferred term for a ghastly abomination, then yes.”
“That’s so strange. The cure you had, it should have prevented that. We think it should have just cast your soul into some sort of limbo.”
“Oh, is that what prevented my poor wards from finding the path onwards without my help? I’ve wondered about that for so long. But I didn’t take the cure.” She sips her steaming coffee.
“Why not? If you thought it could save you …”
“We had barely enough for a fraction of the population hereabouts. We treated those who were most capable of helping others first. Doctors, nurses, anyone with a crucial skill. How could I, a mere elderly servant of God, put myself before them?”
“Maybe your kindness is the reason why your mind is still this clear, even after all this time in your … state.” That didn’t come out well. He takes a bite of cake to cover his embarrassment.
“I take no credit for that. Our heavenly Father does not forget his children. Even in the bleakest of times, I knew I was never abandoned or alone.”
Reynir says nothing, unsure of the correct response.
The woman takes another sip. “Where is your sullen friend? He didn’t want to say hello this time?”
“Onni? He would have liked to come, but he’s got a lot on his plate right now.”
“That’s a pity. I would have liked to give both of you my final thanks. I have a feeling we won’t be meeting in this world again after tonight.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
She smiles. “Yes, a very good thing.”
They sit in silence. He finishes his slice of cake and she gives him another, then stands. “I must get the church ready.”
As he starts to rise, she waves him back. “No, finish the cake. And …” she hesitates. “And stay out of sight. You’ve set things in motion. Strange things. Wondrous things. But dangerous things as well. Stay out of sight.”
She leaves the room, and he takes up his fork again. It’s only dream cake, but it’s the best he’s ever tasted.
Reynir finishes the cake and risks a peek into the great hall. All the windows shine with their brilliant colors, and the flames of candles on and beside the altar glow warm. The pews are clean and gleaming; no skeletons on them now. As he admires the beauty, a rumble of hooves sounds outside. He shrinks against the wall, trying to be invisible while still watching.
The horse-headed horror comes first, its hooves striking sparks from the polished stone floor. Behind it comes a throng of shadows, their red eyes glittering with hatred.
“You’ve finally arrived!” the pastor says from her position by the altar. “Come in, come in, you’re all welcome here. I’ve been waiting for you.”
The horse monster rears, and it is a man on a horse, a dozen people chained to the stirrups. “Do not speak to us, woman!”
“Oh, my, there’s no need for that. I’ll show you the path. The path to the light. The path to salv—”
“We are not here for your salvation!” he bellows. “We are the abandoned! The unjustly suffering! And the world will be made to suffer with us! That is justice! That is our path!”
“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, her voice mild despite the creature rearing and plunging before her. “I’m tired. So very tired.”
The chained people murmur among themselves, and the man kicks at them while the horse quiets, ears forward as it listens to the pastor.
“I’ve been trapped here for so long, waiting for you,” she says. “You see, you were never abandoned, only lost. But now you’ve been found, and we can all go home at last. If you wish to.”
A motion catches Reynir’s eye. He turns to see Rosli slip through the door behind the ghosts. She sees him, smiles, and hurries over to join him.
“Come on now,” the pastor says to the man on the horse, “be truthful.” She waits, and Reynir holds his breath.
The man dismounts and stands before her, head bowed. A gray-green scaly monster clings to his shoulders. Behind him, the chains fall away from the people he’d dragged so far. “We’re tired,” he says softly. “I’m tired.”
The pastor holds out her hand, and a great light flows from it, forming a gateway into sunlight before the altar. The man straightens and strides forward. As he approaches the light, the monster falls away and dissolves into a brief twist of blackness. He steps into the gateway and is gone. A sigh passes through the crowd. The ghostly horse grows more solid, now a tall chestnut mare with a flowing flaxen mane and tail. A monster clings to her as well, but it falls away and dissolves as she trots forward. There are hands within the gateway reaching for her, a loving voice welcoming her.
The other ghosts, the shadows, grow more solid as well. They stream toward the light before the altar, hundreds, thousands, more than Reynir can count, each clear and individual — a soldier still in uniform, a woman in her doctor's coat, a child skipping — somehow occupying the same space without collision or confusion. Each bears a monster that falls away as they approach the light.
Reynir turns to Rosli, still beside him, still watching. She looks up at him and smiles. “Maybe I'll stay for a while. See how your adventure turns out.” He smiles too as they watch the ghosts of Denmark pass through to their long home.
When all the ghosts are gone, the pastor starts towards the great gateway, then turns back to Reynir. “My name is Anne,” she says, and steps into the light. It dwindles to a point and is gone.
Mikkel jerked awake at a distant crash. When had he fallen asleep? He looked wildly around the small room, warm now and dimly lit by the candle on the table. But the fire …
Moments ago, it seemed, he’d risked lighting the fire. Some long-dead hand had laid the logs ready, leaving them to dry out over the decades. He’d feared the chimney might not draw, but when he held the candle near the fireplace, the flame had stretched towards it, assuring him that the chimney was clear. Or mostly clear, at least. He’d left the door ajar so air could enter and smoke could escape, and settled on the narrow sofa to watch the fire in case it smoked.
Now, the cheerful fire had burned down to a bed of coals. Hours had passed while he slumbered without fear, without dreams, wrapped in the deep peace of the church. In sudden alarm, Mikkel turned to Reynir, stretched out on the long sofa to his left. Had the troll gotten the man while he slept? Reynir's hands twitched a little as Mikkel watched him. Asleep then, not dead, despite his inexcusable neglect of duty.
Thumps, crashes, squeals of tearing wood — those were the sounds that had awakened him. What was happening outside this room? Dust sifted down from the ceiling like snow in the candlelight, and he looked up, drawing his shotgun to him and getting to his feet as quietly as he could. A thin beam of moonlight shone through the slightly open door; a chill ran down his spine as he remembered there were no windows in the short hallway outside. Was the troll tearing the church apart as it searched for them?
“Mikkel! Mikkel! Reynir!” Sigrun’s voice, urgent, somewhere outside. Mikkel cursed under his breath. She would attract the troll to herself. Reynir sat up, yawning, and Mikkel gestured him to silence.
“In here! We’re okay!” At least that would stop her from shouting. He glanced up at the ceiling again and beckoned Reynir to him. As the Icelander joined him, mask in place and candle in hand, he pulled open the door.
Or rather, he tried to pull open the door. The lintel above had tilted, blocking it. Were they trapped? Mikkel slung his shotgun to use both hands to pry at the door, forcing it inwards with an earsplitting shriek of wood on stone. As soon as he could, he squeezed through, readying his shotgun as he scanned the incredible sight before him.
The Moon, high in the sky, lit the crumbled rubble of the roof strewn across the hallway, broken beams and shattered tiles still settling with creaks and thumps. The Moon’s position told him it was just past midnight. Off to his left, Sigrun stood on a larger piece amidst the wreckage, the kitten on her shoulder peering around with interest but no alarm. Reynir nudged him to move out of the way.
“Stay close,” Mikkel murmured. “We don’t know where the troll is.”
“Yes, we do,” Reynir said. “She has gone on.” His voice was so strange that Mikkel glanced at him in puzzlement. Though the Icelander smiled behind his mask, his eyes glittered in the moonlight with unshed tears.
Sigrun gestured for them to join her. The kitten wasn’t reacting, so … Reynir’s troll had been peaceful before, and even it could not have done this much damage without waking them. Shaking his head at the mystery, Mikkel made his way over the shifting mass of debris. Sigrun watched them approach before turning to lead them out of the wrecked church.
As they picked their way past the troll’s closet, Reynir stopped to look in with a long sigh. A vast roof-beam had fallen on the troll, smashing its head and body. Tentacles sprawled about the beam, their clawed ends now almost like human hands turned up and relaxed in sleep. “Farewell, Anne,” Reynir murmured, then turned away to follow the others out.
With the three in the back compartment, the door closed, Sigrun called through the partition to Emil and Tuuri that they were safe before turning to Mikkel for an explanation.
“I don’t know what happened.” Mikkel straightened, stared straight ahead. “Captain Eide, I failed in my duty. I fell asleep on watch.”
“Did you.” Sigrun rubbed her forehead before looking him over with a kind expression that sat oddly on her face. “When was the last time you actually slept?”
“That’s no excuse.”
“No, but it's a reason. And ... look, that place is seriously weird. We had a peaceful troll that the Icelander said could deal with the ghosts, and then the roof falls in without hurting you. I know you don’t sleep on duty, so if you fell asleep in there, I'm pretty sure it's because that place did something to you.” She clapped him on the back. “You look better than you have in a long time, too.” She smiled. “I'm putting you on kitchen duty as punishment. Just don't let it happen again. Now,” she turned to study Reynir. “Find out what he has to say about all this.”
Still upset over his own dereliction of duty, Mikkel translated Reynir’s story without snarky additions. When he got to the part where Rosli said she’d stay a while, the overhead light flickered, and Sigrun and Reynir looked up with smiles. Mikkel didn’t smile. After spending ninety years alone, Rosli had been stuck with this team, which she seemed to have grown to like. But now, Tuuri would die, he himself would die, and the others would return to their homes. There would be another team; Rosli’s tank was too useful to be left to rust. But what would the next team be like?
“Go on,” he told Reynir.
“Well, that’s all. The ghosts went into the light, and then Anne went in and the light went away. I mean, she told me her name was Anne, and then she went into the light.”
Sigrun narrowed her eyes at the translation. “Is he saying all the ghosts are gone? We’re safe from them now?”
Mikkel passed on the question. “Yes … I mean, that bully, the one from Kastellet, he’s the one who threatened to follow us forever. He went in first; I know we’re safe from him. But I’ll watch for ghosts until we’re rescued …” Reynir’s enthusiasm faded, and Mikkel knew why. He’d remembered that only four of them would be rescued. Tuuri and Mikkel would not.
Sigrun looked away as Mikkel translated, as if she could see the ruined church through the tank’s side. “Okay,” she said when he finished, “that takes care of that. Emil’s on watch. Tuuri takes over at four. Let’s get some sleep. Show’s over for the night.”
She was almost right. An hour into Tuuri’s watch, in the early morning hours of the twelfth day since Tuuri was scratched, a blast of cold air woke Mikkel from dreamless sleep. He rolled over to see Lalli climb into the tank, hand Tuuri a canvas sack with something inside, speak briefly with her, and jump back out. Tuuri looked around and, seeing Mikkel awake, stashed the sack in her little office and came over to whisper to him.
“He’s going to scout our route.” She swallowed, licked her lips, looked away. “He thinks another two days to the outpost.”
Mikkel nodded. Unable to speak of her situation, he whispered back, “Is he all right? He’s been out more than twenty-four hours.”
“He’s okay. He was just looking for something. Something for me. He was just trying to help me.” With that, she returned to her position by the monitors, leaving Mikkel to stare at the ceiling. He wondered distantly what Lalli had brought her. Some trinket, some token of her cousin’s love, he supposed, like the beautiful track suit that she wore this night, that she’d worn every day for a week. Mikkel wished he too could find a gift for her before the end. But there was only one last, terrible gift he could give.
The quarantine period was two weeks because, in all the thousands of records of Rash victims, none had ever survived thirteen days after infection without showing the diagnostic rash. It appeared first on the shoulders before creeping down the body, twisting and mutilating the form, and creeping up the neck and head. Creeping up into the brain itself.
By the next midnight, the rash would appear. Unless Tuuri was uninfected … he dismissed the thought. That vain hope would only make the tragedy worse. After the rash appeared, it would affect her mind within a day. She would become paranoid, violent, dangerous to everyone around her. A day or so after that, she would fall into a coma as her body transformed into a monster over perhaps two days. If she was lucky, she would die in the transformation. If she was not lucky — and that was a coin flip — they would have to kill the mindless horror she became.
It was his duty, the duty of every doctor or medic, to prevent that. He had sworn to carry out this duty when he took up the role of medic. The drug was in his medical kit, was in every medical kit. If she’d been bitten, if the scratches had been deeper, he should have given her the final injection days before. But light scratches … there was a small, an infinitesimal, chance that she was not infected. They all clung to that tiny chance.
Mikkel rolled over, stared at the wall, and wished he’d frozen to death a month before.
After breakfast, Tuuri showed Mikkel her shoulders without comment. They seemed clear, but was there the slightest roughness? He couldn’t tell. She gave him a nod and went forward to drive the tank one day closer to the outpost and their rescue.
The day was very quiet. They all knew what would happen, and no one wanted to speak of it. Lalli had slept all day, waking only for meals. He ate sitting on the floor beside his cousin, his shoulder against her knee.
Mikkel joined Sigrun and Emil in following the tank and collecting broken branches. Emil moved mechanically, his face unnaturally blank. When Sigrun asked him a question about the best type of kindling, Emil merely shrugged, avoiding eye contact. After a few minutes of silence, Emil muttered, “I thought we were all going to make it,” before walking ahead, shoulders hunched against more than just the cold.
Although Sigrun tried to lighten the mood with a snowball fight, even inviting Reynir to join them in the bright sunlight, the effort died quickly. Emil didn't react when a snowball grazed his shoulder, continuing to gather branches as if he hadn't noticed, while Reynir kept running forward, trying to catch a glimpse of Tuuri through the side window.
After lunch, Sigrun took Emil hunting, staying out almost until dark and coming back empty-handed. Even the forest seemed to conspire against them. As the unsuccessful hunters passed Mikkel, who was feeding branches into the fuel chute, she commented to the two men, “Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but keep moving forward.”
“Waiting won’t make it any easier,” Sigrun said, nudging Mikkel over so she could sit beside him on the passenger seat. She had closed the heavy steel door behind her, leaving Emil on watch. The roughness on Tuuri’s skin had been unmistakable by evening, and Mikkel had retreated to the driving compartment early to steel himself for his duty. He couldn’t bear to watch Lalli carry notes back and forth between her and Reynir. Maybe without his presence, they could say private goodbyes through the partition.
Mikkel turned his back on Sigrun as best he could while sitting next to her. “She’ll be okay overnight. I’ll give her one more sunrise.”
“This isn’t good for you.” At Mikkel’s disbelieving snort, she added, “I have a duty to you, Mikkel, to … to care for you.”
“No.”
“I know you mean to leave. Believe me, I know. And I won’t, I can’t, stop you, not from that. You … have a right to choose your own path. But you don’t have to do this to Tuuri. For Tuuri.”
He glanced at her in the moonlight. “Of course I do. I can’t leave her to —”
“I can do it. Give me the needle and the drug. You don’t have to do it.”
Mikkel turned to stare at her. To offer such a thing … but whoever did it would bear the burden for the rest of his life. Or hers. And Sigrun’s life might be long.
“No. I’ll do it.” He looked away. “But thank you.”
She cursed under her breath, drew her dagger, stared at it, and sheathed it. He wondered if she’d considered cutting Tuuri’s throat to spare him. Or his throat.
Sigrun left him in the driving compartment. Alone.
As the eastern sky lightened with approaching sunrise on the thirteenth day after Tuuri’s wounding, Mikkel levered his stiff, cramped body from the passenger seat, took a deep breath, and opened the door to the main compartment. One look at Sigrun’s face brought him to her side in a rush.
“She left you a note,” Sigrun whispered, gesturing at the folded note pinned to Tuuri’s pillow. She backed away, giving him space.
His name was written on the note in neat skald’s handwriting. He unpinned it with trembling hands, but stood looking down at Tuuri, unable to move on. The Rash had crept up from her collar, faint markings on her cheek. So faint, yet so fatal.
Mikkel touched her cheek, a last farewell — and leapt back. “She’s still warm!”
Sigrun cursed, long and inventively, as Mikkel backed away as far as the tank allowed.
She tried to spare me, but she failed. She wound up her courage to do this instead of me, and now I have to finish the job. Finish her.
He looked at the note crumpled in his hand, unfolded it. It was in Icelandic, a private message for him.
“What’s happening?” Emil's voice cracked, his tone a near-wail, as he sat up on his bunk, newly awakened.
Sigrun tallied up the physical and emotional state of her team. Tuuri had attempted suicide and failed. Mikkel had read her suicide note and collapsed; he now sat on the floor, back against the wall, staring at Tuuri’s — at Tuuri. The scout had run out hours earlier, as usual, but would he come back? She knew his loyalty was to Tuuri, not the team. The Icelander was in the back compartment and would probably be as overwhelmed as Mikkel once he knew. Sigrun was well aware of the attachment he’d formed to Tuuri.
Emil was the only functional team member she had left. “We have some problems. Take over the watch while I deal with this,” she ordered. Bewildered, he looked from Tuuri to Mikkel and back to Sigrun, but obeyed. Once Emil was in position before the monitors, she searched Mikkel’s cabinet, pulled out his medical kit, and knelt beside him where he sat with the note crumpled in his hand. How much did she wish she’d torn up the note before he saw it!
“Mikkel, she wasn’t thinking straight. Whatever she wrote about you, you can’t take it to heart. You’re a good man and a good friend to her.” She set the kit beside his hand. “Show me which one to use, and I’ll —”
“No,” he said, still staring at Tuuri. “No, you can’t. She —” He took a deep breath. “She used the cure. Lalli found it for her. I saw him bring it to her. I thought it was a goodbye gift —”
“Wait, wait, wait. She used the cure? How? Why?” A thought struck her, and she looked up at the lights. “Rosli, is she, uh, is her ghost here? With you?”
no
“She thinks she can make the cure work,” Mikkel said. He closed his eyes and translated the note aloud.
Dear Mikkel,
I am infected. It doesn't really show yet, but I know.
Lalli found the cure for me. It’s crystallized, but I rehydrated some. Don't blame him if my plan doesn't work!
The cure didn't work before, but those people didn't have magic and we do. You said it drives the spirit out of the body, so Reynir will bring Onni to me, and then Onni will guide my spirit back into my body, where it belongs. That's what he does. Well, he guides spirits, at least.
Don’t wake Reynir up! He has to stay asleep. He’ll wake up when it’s all over. One way or the other.
We think this will work, but — Mikkel — if it doesn't, tell Sigrun and Emil goodbye for me. I can't face you or them to say it myself.
With all my love forever,
Tuuri Hotakainen
Sigrun sat back on her heels. “Use magic along with the cure. That makes sense.” She thought about it for a long moment. “But the baggage — I mean Reynir — he’s just feeling his way. He doesn’t really know anything about magic. The rescue ship’s coming, though. How long can she, um, live like that?”
“I suppose — before the Rash, doctors had the equipment to feed and hydrate her; they could keep her alive for years. I can't do that; I don't have the equipment. If I try to pour food or water in her mouth, she'll likely strangle on it. Better to just keep her clean and comfortable, and leave her in peace.” He looked away. “I don't have experience with this and it wasn't in my training. Since she's not moving, she'll survive longer without water, so … a week, or maybe a little longer, I suppose.”
“The rescue ship will get here in a week. Or, not here, but the outpost …” The problem dawned on her as she spoke. “We don’t have a driver. We have to wake him up, or we’ll be sitting here like troll snacks while —”
“I can drive,” Mikkel interrupted. She stared at him, astonished at his answer. The man had unsuspected depths. If only … “I’m not very good,” he clarified, “not even as good as Reynir, but I can drive.”
“Well, that’ll do. Okay, here’s the plan. You’ll drive. If the little guy doesn’t come back, I’ll scout. Emil will gather fuel. For now, though, we need to eat. Get up and make breakfast. The porridge and honey are in the cabinet. Get up now.”
Mikkel got up.
Somewhat to Sigrun’s surprise, Lalli came back shortly before daybreak. Disregarding the other three, he went straight to his cousin’s bunk. His face betrayed nothing as he studied her face, but he reached out to touch her forehead softly, and he murmured something in Finnish. Sigrun wondered what he was thinking. Had he expected to find her already recovered? Or dead? Or as she was, caught somewhere in between? Sigrun sighed. There was no way to know, no way to communicate to him her sympathy and hopes for Tuuri’s survival.
Mikkel ducked into the radio/office compartment, came out with the map, and laid it out on the table. The scout looked from the map to the man to his cousin and shrugged, bending over the map beside Mikkel. He knew a few words of Swedish, pointing to certain points on the map to say “Danger” and others to say “Safe”. After a brief review of the map, Mikkel went forward, beckoning Lall to follow. Sigrun and Emil joined them, Sigrun taking the passenger seat while Emil stood behind her as usual, and Lalli stood behind Mikkel.
It soon became apparent that Mikkel was not falsely modest about his driving ability. He drove slowly on straightaways and crept around curves, his knuckles white as he gripped the controls. The muscles stood out along his unshaven jaw as he clenched his teeth in concentration.
“Sigrun,” Emil said, leaning close to her ear, “let’s gather fuel. Please?”
“Sure.” Sigrun got to her feet and announced their decision. Neither of the others responded, and she shook her head as she and Emil left to gear up. As they climbed out, she added, “We’ll throw the wood in here. If we throw it in the back, we’ll wake the baggage.” Perhaps the others didn’t hear.
“Times are hard when the most reliable person in the tank is the scout,” she said several minutes later as they walked behind the tank, taking frequent breaks as it crawled along.
“You don’t think Mikkel’s reliable?” Emil broke a branch across his knee and gathered up the pieces.
“Not right now, not really. Hel’s breath, I thought he'd faint when he found she was alive. He’s following orders, but I think that’s about all he can do.”
“Following orders … he told me …”
Sigrun stopped to look at him in puzzlement. All the confidence he’d gained over the weeks as her recruit seemed to have leaked out of him. “What’s the problem?”
Emil dropped the wood, stroked the hood that hid his missing hair, and looked away as he answered. “Someone told him about me and fire. Before we left, I mean. And they … they ordered him … he said … he had orders to watch me so if I lost control of my powers …” He took a deep breath, ducked his head, and gripped the edge of his hood with both hands as the words came out in a rush. “He said they ordered him to kill me if I lost control.”
Sigrun stared in disbelief. “No, he couldn’t do that. I’m not sure he could even euthanize Tuuri —”
“I, I know. He said he wouldn’t do it. I believe him … I’m pretty sure. But somebody ordered him to, and he said they won’t believe him when he says I can control my powers. You know I can, though. You know I didn’t panic and call the fire, right?”
“What in Odin's name is going on here? Who would give such an —” But, of course, she did know who would give such an order.
“Can you —”
“Hush a moment. I’ve got to think.” She gathered up some branches, shook off the snow, and carried them to the side door. Emil followed, and once they’d thrown their fuel in, they stopped and let the tank pull away from them.
As long as she could remember, people had joked that you just didn’t cross General Trond Andersen. There were rumors of people who’d crossed him and disappeared, although she knew of no one who ever had. And then there was something she’d overheard from a hunter of another clan. He’d said the true commander of the Eide clan was an Andersen, not an Eide. She’d been offended — what did he know about her clan? But he might have known more about her clan than she did.
I thought Mikkel just couldn’t face Uncle — no, General Trond after he failed a mission and lied about it. I thought he meant Trond would exclude him from the clan. But what if he didn’t mean that at all?
Sigrun stopped, staring into the snowy forest. If Trond could order Emil killed, then he could order Mikkel killed too. And he would. Oh, he would. And Mikkel knows that.
She turned, numb, and walked after the tank. Emil gathered wood with frequent glances at her, but said nothing.
How deep does this conspiracy go? Do others in my clan know about these secret orders? My parents? Emil’s parents? What does Trond intend now? Can I keep Emil safe on my team? I feel like I'm fumbling in the dark!
As Sigrun pulled the door open for Emil to throw a load of wood in, a final question came to her. Do I want to be rescued?
Reynir stands on a rough rock, looking out at the sea and the fog. As he realizes where he is, he pumps both fists at the sky. “Yes! I made it!” Tuuri’s plan hinges on so many things, but most of all, that he can reach mage-space this night.
The sheep look up from their grazing; the sheepdog gives him a stern look. Ignoring them, climbing down, he runs to the beach, saying aloud, “Onni. I need Onni. Show me Onni, nothing else.” Perhaps the fog hears him, for a patch of fog clears to the right. Reynir races for that tunnel through the fog, every footfall spraying water.
Soon, the familiar cliff rises before him, the autumnal forest with its bare-branched trees … and a lone figure sitting on a boulder, arms around his knees.
“Onni! Thank all the gods, you’re here! We need you!” Reynir shouts before even reaching the shore. The plan also hinges on Onni’s being asleep. If he hadn’t been, Reynir would have waited for him. Forever if need be.
Tuuri’s brother leaps to his feet, jumps down from his boulder, his cloak spreading out like wings. “What’s happened?”
“Onni, I’m so sorry. Tuuri is infected with the Rash. She has a —”
Onni gives an inarticulate cry and collapses to the rocky beach.
Reynir kneels beside him, grips his shoulders. “No, no, Onni, you have to be strong. You have to help me. Tuuri has a plan.”
Onni remains huddled in misery, hands pressed against his face. “I talked to her,” he says. “I asked how she was. She didn’t tell me!” The last words are a heartrending wail.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But, please, we don’t have much time. You have to listen.” Onni doesn’t answer. “Tuuri took the cure.” At Onni’s groan, “We think it will cure the, um, the physical part of the disease, but it will push her spirit out of her body. We think that’s what happened to the ghosts. But you can lead her spirit back into her body, because that’s where it belongs. That’s what you do, right?” He holds his breath, waiting for Onni’s answer.
“No, I can’t.” Onni's voice breaks. “Her spirit isn’t here.”
Reynir can hardly hear Onni’s voice, hardly believes what he hears. “But my spirit is here, and you said you could lead —”
“You’re a mage,” Onni cuts him off, momentary irritation breaking through his grief. “Mages’ spirits are in mage-space. Non-mages like T–t–my sister have their havens in another realm. I can’t reach her until —” He buries his face in his hands.
Reynir yanks his braid around, twists it as if to wring answers from it. This can’t be! The gods can’t be so cruel! He stands, looks out at the sea and the fog, searching for an answer … and remembers.
“Onni! Onni, listen to me. When I first started coming here to mage-space, I thought I could tell my parents how sorry I was.” Onni shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter, I know. But that’s what I wanted, and the fog opened for me, like it does, and I followed it. I found a waterfall, and I was sure my parents were down there, down at the base of the waterfall. It looked really dangerous, so I didn’t climb down, not then.”
He wants to shake Onni, to make him understand. “Are you listening, Onni? The waterfall leads to that other realm. We can go there and can find her spirit, and you can lead her back. Don’t you see that?”
Onni lifts his head. Hope and grief war across his tear-streaked face. “Can you find it again?” When Reynir holds out his hand, Onni stands and takes it.
Reynir turns to the sea once more. “Show me,” he orders fiercely. “Show me the way to Tuuri.”
The fog parts before him.
Reynir is a head taller than Onni, his stride longer. Still, Onni outpaces him as they run across the sea hand in hand, tugging him faster in desperate hope. The eagle-owl that Reynir had seen before rides on Onni’s shoulder, wings fluttering at times as if to speed him on his way.
They slow as they hear a distant growl. “That’s the waterfall,” Reynir whispers, uneasy at breaking the silence of sea and fog. “Now we need to find the island.” He glares at the fog. “Show me the island.”
Does the tunnel through the fog bend to the right? He isn’t sure, but there’s no choice. They run again, the growl growing to a roar as the sea grows rough, waters rushing past them faster than they run. Spray from the distant waterfall falls on them like rain without wetting them.
“There!” The granite cliff of an island rises before them, a dozen meters high. The same island? Another? It doesn’t matter. As they reach the tumbled, broken rocks below the cliff, he urges Onni to climb first, to find safety on the wet rocks before releasing his hand. As soon as their hands part, the spray soaks into Onni’s hair, runs down his face like tears. Disregarding the water, the Finn climbs, and Reynir climbs behind him.
They find themselves on a flattened, barren island, about thirty meters long and ten wide, its edges sharply defined as they narrow towards the waterfall. With solid ground beneath them, they need not hold hands as they pick their way across the rough, wet rocks to the falls, the roar of the water an almost physical force slowing their steps.
At last, the fog clears, and they look out over the water pouring past to their left and right and the cliff-face below. “Onni,” Reynir shouts over the roar, “can you become an owl like you did before?”
The older mage looks out into the fog, and Reynir can feel him yearning to take wing and fly to his sister. Instead, he shakes his head, spraying water about, and shouts back, “I need you to find her. We have to stay together. Climb!”
And they climb. Down the wet, slippery rocks to a narrow ledge, across and down to another ledge, pressing their bodies against the cliff while hands and feet seek for holds. Again and again and again.
Once, Reynir misses a hold, the cold, damp rock giving way beneath his grasp, and he slides down the cliff in a terrifying rush, scrabbling for purchase. Meter after meter he slides until his groping fingers catch in a crack, a fingernail tearing off — a brief, sharp pain, all but unnoticed. His other hand flails, finds a projecting rock, clings. He doesn’t want to look down; he fears the drop below may terrify him into immobility. But the fog is kind as he peers down for a foothold. He sees only the cliff, the fog, and the waterfall a dozen meters to his left.
Reynir creeps across the cliff-face, placing each hand and foot with slow care, until he’s close enough to a ledge for Onni to grab his arm and pull him up. Onni worked his way down from ledge to ledge while Reynir struggled. Reynir crouches, shaking, while Onni kneels beside him, still gripping his arm.
At length, they stand and look around for the next ledge. There is nothing else to do.
“Reynir!” Onni shouts, drawing him out of his haze of concentration: the next handhold, the next foothold, the next blessed ledge for respite. He lifts his head, looks back at the other, who points down.
Reynir forces himself to look down. Perhaps twenty meters below is the sea, swirling against the cliff while the waters of the falls plunge into it. Just twenty meters, but still enough to kill them if they fall. He nods, turns back to the rocks, reaches for another hold.
After an endless climb, they stand once more on the fog-shrouded sea. The waters rush and whirl about them, and they sway from foot to foot as if on a rocking ship. Reynir stares at the fog, willing it to show him the way.
The fog parts once more, and they race into the gap.
Onni slows as the island appears from the fog, sandy beach and green forest, seagulls calling overhead. “Wait, this isn’t right. This isn’t Tuuri’s haven.” He looks around, looks up at Reynir. “This is wrong. Tuuri’s not in this place.”
Reynir hesitates. The fog has led them to this place; there must be a reason. Even as Onni pulls at him, he sees a woman run out of the forest and onto the beach, a grey crow circling above her. She wears a rifle over her shoulder and a pistol belted at her waist. As she waves, the crow lands on her shoulder and stares at them. “Reynir, welcome!” she calls happily.
“It’s Rosli! Come on!” He runs to her, dragging Onni along with him.
“Who’s Rosli? We don’t have time for this!”
“She’s the ghost of our tank. She knows a lot.” As they reach the shore, he tells Rosli, “He’s Onni, Tuuri’s brother.”
“Every second we delay could mean losing Tuuri forever. We have to go. Reynir, please.”
Onni has never begged him before, and Reynir feels terrible for dragging out his suffering. Still … “You told me I’m a seer, and if I think someone can help us, she can. The fog led me here, and I think she can help us.”
“If I may,” Rosli puts in, “as I understand it, Tuuri took the cure, her spirit was torn out of her body, and we need to do something about it. So what do you intend? How can I help?”
“Onni’s a psychopomp and —”
“And we have to find her spirit, her haven. I can’t do it alone. Reynir, you have to take me to her. This woman can’t help us.”
Rosli stares hard at him. “I’m not a psychopomp and I can’t help find Tuuri’s haven, but I’m a soldier and I know how to fight. And if Tuuri’s spirit is trapped like I was, you’re going to find monsters in her haven.” She holds out her hands, and a rifle and a gun-belt with a pistol materialize from the air.
When she offers the weapons to Reynir, he shakes his head. “I don’t know how to shoot.”
She holds out the gun-belt alone. “You know which end the bullet comes out of. Point it at the enemy and pull the trigger.” As Reynir dons the belt, she turns to Onni. “What about you?”
“I know how to shoot. Rifle or pistol,” he says sullenly. When another gun-belt appears in her hand, he accepts it and the rifle. “Now can we go find Tuuri?”
Facing the fog, Reynir takes the hands of his companions, and says, “Tuuri. Show me where Tuuri is.”
Once more, the fog parts for him, and they sprint across the water. Time presses on them all.
As the fog opens out ahead thirty meters ahead, a desolate and menacing landscape comes into view. A thin strip of pale sand lies hemmed in by jagged, moss-encrusted cliffs that loom before them. The sea crashes against these stony outcrops with a sinister hiss. Beyond this barren strip, a bleak hill rises, a forest of twisted, skeletal trees, an icy wind whistling through their leafless branches.
“This is Tuuri's haven?” Reynir asks in disbelief.
Onni stops, and the others stop with him. “It is. She is … near death.” He draws his pistol. “Be ready.” Rosli too readies her weapon as they advance.
A grossling slithers out of the blasted forest, its body long and segmented, and its head an elongated horror with long, dirty, ash-blonde hair blowing about its distorted human face. Onni and Rosli raise their pistols, and Reynir cries out. “No, that’s Tuuri, you can’t —”
“It isn’t,” Onni says grimly. “I know my sister. Even now, she’s no monster.” He and Rosli fire together, the cracks echoing from the cliffs before them.
The creature shrieks, a sound like tearing fabric, as it falls, dissolves into oily blackness, and is gone. The cry is answered by others, and suddenly the shoreline swarms with half a dozen deformed figures. Every one has some hideous link to Tuuri: ash-blonde hair, pale blue eyes, delicate human hands.
Reynir can’t even try to shoot, since he holds his companions’ hands, and he can’t bear to look at the horrors they are shooting down on the shore. As he looks around, wondering what may be called out of the fog by the shrieks and gunfire, he sees the bow wave cresting behind them. Something colossal is stirring beneath the water, bearing down on them with terrifying speed. “Behind us!” he shouts over the uproar.
“Run!” Onni commands, and they sprint for the shore. The monsters ahead extend clawed arms or tentacles as their prey rush towards them. The birds, crow and owl, take to the air, their wingspans widening as they fly. By the time they reach the grosslings, their wingspans are some three meters. They rip chunks of flesh from the creatures, swooping and diving, drawing their attention from the humans.
The moment their feet touch land, Onni and Rosli release Reynir’s hands, aiming their pistols and firing into the mass of grosslings as they make their way up the shore. Glancing back at the sea, Reynir sees a massive gray-green head rising from the water, saucer-sized red eyes fixed on him. Tentacles as thick as his leg writhe toward him and the others. He yanks his pistol free and fires, the shots echoing from the cliffs. The creature vanishes beneath the surface — a mystery of this strange world.
He turns back, pointing his pistol at the grosslings, but not firing as he fears he may hit the birds. The others don’t need his help; they take down the grosslings, which dissolve and vanish, and Onni leads the way into the devastated forest. With a last glance at the now-peaceful sea and shore, Reynir follows the other two.
The birds circle overhead as grosslings emerge from both sides of the narrow path. Onni takes point with his rifle while Rosli guards their rear. Reynir stays between them, firing his pistol at creatures that get too close. His sheepdog races ahead, clearing threats before returning to his side, then dashing off again. There is no time to wonder at the dog’s presence.
Perhaps a hundred meters from the shore, the trail they follow opens out into a clearing full of grosslings. This, Reynir somehow knows, is the heart of Tuuri’s haven. But where is Tuuri herself?
Monsters swarm towards them, gobbling, shrieking, snarling. The birds attack from above; the dog rips at the monsters’ legs; Onni and Rosli fire continuously. Even Reynir fires, though his lack of skill makes him slower than the others. Still, the grosslings draw inexorably nearer. Fallen grosslings dissolve and are gone, no obstacle to those that follow.
And then … from the center of the clearing, something leaps through the grossling ranks — a hedgehog the size of a large dog, ripping and tearing, hissing and squealing. Through the gap it creates, Reynir spots Tuuri at the far side of the clearing, dirty and bedraggled, backed against a fallen tree, desperately swinging a broken branch at approaching monsters.
“Tuuri, catch,” he shouts, and as she turns to him, he tosses the pistol. But she is too far — the pistol will fall among the grosslings — but no! The crow snatches it out of the air, drops it in Tuuri’s upraised hand. Her rapid gunfire joins that of Onni and Rosli. Reynir takes up a broken branch of his own, smashing any arm or tentacle that reaches for him or his companions.
Beset from above, below, before, and behind, the grosslings are driven together. And this is itself an attack, for they claw and tear at each other, wounding and trampling the weakest. The humans and their allies press the attack without hesitation.
And it is over. The last grossling falls to a well-aimed shot from Tuuri. The four humans scan around, expecting more foes, but there are none. In the center of the trampled clearing, Reynir sees the hedgehog’s burrow, large enough for a small woman to hide in. He wants to run to Tuuri, hold her, assure himself that she’s all right, but Onni is quicker.
Onni pulls his little sister into a bear hug. He smiles over her shoulder at Reynir … and they are gone.
“So now what?” Rosli asks, looking about, rifle still in hand. “Did it work?” The grey crow shrinks back to normal size and lands on her shoulder.
“I think so. I’ve never seen Onni smile before. He’s usually really annoyed with me.” He offers his hand to her. “Let’s run back to your haven. If we keep moving, maybe that thing under the water won’t notice us.”
Rosli looks thoughtful. “No need. I think I can just … return.” She vanishes along with her crow.
Reynir finds he's alone with his dog; even the hedgehog is gone. All around him, the dead, trampled grass is springing up green, leaves are coming out on the trees, and a bird sings somewhere in the distance. The dog smiles up at him, and Reynir says, “I think it's time for us to go too.”
Reynir awoke with a gasp, sitting up to stare about in the dimness of the back compartment. For a moment, he remained perfectly still, heart pounding against his ribs.
Had it worked? Had they reached Tuuri in time?
He held his breath, straining to hear any sound from the front compartment. A voice, movement, anything.
But there was only silence.
Mikkel gazed down at Tuuri’s face. He reached out, brushed an errant lock off her face, turned her face to the left. The rash on her cheek was gone, her skin clear and smooth. The collar of her beautiful track suit was open, pulled away to show her shoulders. By chance? Arranged so as her last act? No way to know. But her shoulders were clear and smooth; the cure had worked to cleanse the rash from her skin.
He pulled the covers up and tucked them in, as if that would keep her safe, and turned away, feeling very old. As he made his way forward, twigs, dead leaves, and bits of bark crunched under his feet. He dropped into the passengers’ seat, not the driver’s seat. That was Tuuri’s seat; he would take it when he had to, but it would never be his.
He stared out at the snowy forest in the late afternoon sunlight. Sigrun had called an early halt, since they couldn’t reach the campsite Lalli had chosen before dark, and this spot was good enough. It had a clear field of fire and a stream to refill the tank’s water supply. He had helped fuel and water the tank before retreating inside while Sigrun and Emil went hunting. With Lalli in natural sleep and Tuuri comatose, he heard only his own breathing in the silent tank.
His thoughts spun in the same tight circle they had since they discovered Tuuri’s condition and understood what she’d done. He doubted Tuuri’s plan would work. Of course he didn’t doubt the existence of magic; how could he when he’d fought ghosts himself? But her plan depended on Reynir, a powerful but untrained and inexperienced mage, and Onni, a mage of unknown abilities in Sweden.
The rescue ship should have quarantine facilities and they should be prepared for injuries. She can survive until the rescue, if it comes when they expect it, and then the crew can probably keep her alive. Keep her body alive. But then her body becomes a research project for as long as it lasts. I’d rather euthanize her myself than allow that. And yet … what if the cure eventually works? What if it just takes time, time the original researchers didn’t have? What if she would wake up in a month or two? How can I take that from her? But if the cure does work, or if her plan does —
The outer door banged. “Hey, big guy,” Sigrun said, standing between the seats and looking down at him. “We got a couple of rabbits, and the kid’s out there building a fire.”
“That’s good.”
“Are you okay?”
“Well enough.”
A brief silence fell between them. “Yeah, okay,” Sigrun said at length, turning away. “So we’ll cook supper. We’ll fix a plate for you.”
“No need.”
“Yes, there is. You’re our driver, and you need to eat. We’ll fix a plate and you’ll eat. That’s an order.” The outer door banged shut before he could answer. He returned to staring at the lengthening shadows on the snow outside and worrying about Tuuri.
When Sigrun brought him a plate of roast rabbit, he bowed to necessity and ate it, though the taste was ashes in his mouth.
Sunset had painted the sky in crimson and gold when something changed. Mikkel lowered his gaze to a red light flickering on the dashboard. It was much too fast to be Morse code, and he frowned at it, wondering why Rosli was trying to attract his attention.
“Mikkel.” He thought it was his memory summoning up the Finnish twist Tuuri gave to his name.
“Mikkel.”
He recoiled, twisting to stare, wide-eyed, at Tuuri, standing smiling beside him. Scrambling to his feet, he banged knees, elbows, and head without noticing.
“Hey, didn’t you believe me? It worked!”
“I — yes, it —”
Lalli appeared behind Tuuri’s shoulder, saying something to her as he regarded Mikkel, narrow-eyed. She answered him, nodding, and turned back to Mikkel. “Lalli says you drove the tank?”
“I did. We couldn’t stay where we were for another night. Driving was rather more difficult than I expected.”
She smiled. “It was more difficult than I expected, too.”
Mikkel pulled her into a hug, grateful for her life even through his worries, but let go when she made theatrical strangling noises. “Reynir’s awake too,” Tuuri said as he stepped back. “I’m going to see Sigrun and Emil. Will you let him out?”
“Yes, I’ll do that.” He followed her and Lalli out of the tank, stopping to watch as Sigrun and Emil leapt to their feet at her appearance. They were so happy, and he would have to ruin it. He wished he hadn’t had all day to consider the possibilities.
Sigrun reached her first, lifting the smaller woman off her feet in a tight hug and spinning around, grinning widely. Lalli backed against the tank, clearly worried someone might want to hug him, too.
“Sigrun, put her down!” Emil said. “Maybe the rest of us want to hug her!”
After setting Tuuri back on her feet and watching Emil pull her into a bear-hug, Sigrun turned to Mikkel. Her grin wavered as she saw Mikkel’s grim expression. “Hey, Mikkel, smile! Look, she’s cured! It worked!”
“We’ll talk.” Mikkel made his way to the back of the tank. “Reynir, put on your mask.”
The Icelander opened the door, mask in place. “Is she okay?”
“Tuuri is with Sigrun and Emil.”
“What’s wrong? You should be happy. Did something bad happen?”
“Come. I need to talk to everyone.” They returned to the fire together, finding the other three still rejoicing. “Sigrun, Tuuri, Emil. I must talk to everyone.” Mikkel had everyone sit down, Lalli by Tuuri’s side and Reynir a couple of meters away despite his objection that he wanted Tuuri to translate for him. With everyone settled, Mikkel took a deep breath and began.
“I can’t say how happy I am that Tuuri is awake, that the cure didn’t … didn’t cause brain death. However. There are problems that none of us thought about until Tuuri tried it.”
“She’s alive,” Sigrun said. “What’s the problem? Do you think the cure didn’t work?” She glanced at Tuuri before looking back at Mikkel. “Do you think she’s not cured after all?”
“Do you know what a carrier is?”
Sigrun wrinkled her nose in confusion. “Someone who isn’t immune, but her children might be.”
“No. Or, yes. That’s a carrier of the immunity trait. But there also are, or can be, carriers of disease. That’s someone who doesn’t have the symptoms of the disease but can still give it to others.”
“And you think —” Emil began.
“I don’t know what to think. I just know that this is possible.”
“Quarantine wouldn’t work, then,” Emil said, frowning, seeing the problem. “She’d get through okay.”
“No,” Tuuri said. “The cure gets rid of the disease. The researchers did PR–PC–some kind of tests on their subjects. It’s in the notes —”
“They had a fresh solution. They weren’t using ninety-year-old crystals. And we don’t have whatever tests the ancient researchers had, so we can’t tell if you still have the disease or not.”
“You could put some non-immune rabbits in with me,” Tuuri said. “And they wouldn’t catch it, so you’d know — What? Why not?”
“That would only tell us you're not actively contagious now.” Mikkel spread his hands. “Look, decades before the Rash, there was a disease called chickenpox. No, I don’t know why that name. It was endemic, which means practically everyone got it. But it wasn’t a dangerous disease, so they mostly just got over it. They weren’t contagious, they had no symptoms, and they could go through a quarantine just fine.”
“So what?” Sigrun asked.
“So they hadn’t gotten over it. The virus never truly left their bodies. Years or even decades later, the virus that had been hiding inside them all that time would come back out as a disease called shingles. And then they would be contagious.”
“But the Rash doesn’t work like that,” Sigrun said.
“It hasn’t worked like that. Everyone who’s ever gotten it has either died or changed. Except for Tuuri. The Rash is unlike any disease humanity faced before the apocalypse. We don't fully understand how it works, and we certainly don’t know what it will do in someone who got it but recovered.” He swallowed hard, looking directly at Tuuri. “And the world can’t risk finding out the hard way. You will be quarantined forever.”
“What!” Sigrun jumped to her feet. “No!”
“No.” Tuuri shook her head, ignoring her outburst. “No, Mikkel, that can’t be right.”
“It isn’t right, but it’s the way it is.” He looked into Sigrun’s outraged face. “It’s not my choice, Sigrun. This is what the authorities will say, what they will have to say.”
“Well, they don’t know.” Sigrun folded her arms. “We never told them. So if we all just keep quiet —”
“We can’t do that, Sigrun. The danger is real. She can’t risk exposing non-immunes. She must be quarantined.”
Tuuri stared at him, betrayed. “Don’t talk about me when I’m right here. You mean I have to be behind walls forever.” She jumped to her feet. “No! I won’t do it! I’ll — I’ll stay here.”
Emil was on his feet as well. “But you can’t stay here alone.”
“I expect Lalli will stay with her,” Mikkel said quietly. “And I will.”
“What?” Tuuri stood, her fists on her hips. “Don’t I get a say in this?”
“Of course you do,” Mikkel said. “I don’t mean that. If you don’t want me to stay with you, I won’t. But you alone or with just Lalli …”
By now, they were all on their feet. As Tuuri turned to speak to Lalli, Sigrun beckoned Mikkel to her side along with Emil.
“Okay, big guy, I want answers. I want the truth, right now. Who ordered you to kill Emil?”
Mikkel hadn’t expected to have to talk about this now. He closed his eyes. “Some knowledge is dangerous, Sigrun.”
“Shut up about that and answer! Who ordered it?”
“General Trond.” He looked at her with regret, knowing he’d just destroyed her relationship with her “Uncle Trond”.
Sigrun put an arm around Emil’s shoulders. “Who else was in on this? My clan? His family?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know about anyone else.”
“What happens to him if he goes back?” As Mikkel hesitated, she went on, “You think Trond will have him killed. Don’t you.” Emil made a protesting noise, and she pulled him close to her side.
Mikkel looked away from the two of them, from the whole team. “Yes.”
“But why?” Emil demanded.
He’d already revealed so much; there was little reason to hold back. “Because you’re a sport. That’s what the General called you. You’re unexpected; you’re in their way. I think they want you gone, so they sent you here as an experiment, to see what happens with an untrained pyrokinetic under stress. And I was supposed to end the experiment before it got out of hand. But now you’re going back, and I think you’re still in their way.”
Sigrun looked down at Emil. “I want to put you on my team, but I’m pretty sure Trond pulls the strings in my clan.” She looked up at Mikkel and back at Emil. “I don’t think I can protect you.”
Emil tugged at his hood. “My cousins aren’t in on this. They’re just kids. But Torbjörn and Siv … they might be. And even if they’re not, I don’t think they’ll mind if — if something happens to me.” He turned to look at Tuuri, now talking to Reynir, who stood two meters away from her. “Tuuri won’t be alone. I’ll stay.”
Sigrun looked from him to Mikkel with a fierce, reckless grin. “I never wanted to be a general anyway. And I'm an Eide. I’m not going to be a pawn of Trond Andersen. No! I’m staying with Tuuri and my right-hand man! And you, big guy.”
Tuuri had come near enough to listen in, Lalli close behind as if guarding her. “Don’t I get a say in this?” she asked again.
Sigrun turned to her with that reckless grin. “Nope, sorry, short stuff. We’re all staying with you!”
“Except Reynir,” Mikkel said. “We need to take him to the outpost so he can go back to Iceland.”
Reynir heard his name. He now looked around, bewildered. “Tuuri, what are they saying?”
“I — Mikkel says I have to stay in the Silent World because he thinks I might be contagious still, but they’ll take you to the outpost to go —”
With a few steps, the Icelander was beside her, his arm around her. “What? No! I won’t go back without you.”
“Stay away from her!” Mikkel started forward, but stopped as Reynir yanked off his mask and pulled Tuuri into a kiss. “Oh, no. Oh, no.” Mikkel buried his face in his hands. Sigrun and Emil stepped away.
“She’s cured,” Reynir said defiantly. “I won’t get infected, and anyway, we have a cure.”
Tuuri embraced him, looking around at the others. After a moment, she gave them a broad smile.
“Okay, then! Let’s all go explore the Silent World!”