Page 59 of Demon of the Dead


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It was called Nágrindr. The gate of the dead. The underground pool into which Náli had been baptized as an infant, and to which he was forced to return at regular intervals, was what the priests had described to him as a “thin place” in the veil. A point where the fabric between the mortal plane and the plane of those who’d crossed over was so porous that it was possible to commune with them. A place where a man with Náli’s magic might slip right into the afterlife, or where a man without magic might be driven mad.

Náli wasn’t sure he wasn’t mad. Nor had he ever known anything like communion. It was always like being thrown headfirst into a maelstrom, and this time was no different. Was in fact worse, because he’d put it off for so long.

Water made things buoyant, usually, but not so with precious stones. Especially not with enchanted precious stones. The moment he was fully submerged, the diamond pulled taut at the end of its chain and towed him forward and down, forward and down.

He’d gone swimming, once, in the height of summer; in a slow-moving bend in the river, with Danski and Darri, before a scowling Mattias had fished him out by his ankle and hauled him, laughing and dripping, up onto the bank. Then, when he’d been down low among the slippery river stones in the shallows, light had penetrated the surface and dappled the bottom in shifting, refracted tides. Despite the burn of water in his eyes, he’d been able to see the waving tendrils of underwater plants, and the flashing dart of minnow and trout.

The waters of the Nágrindr were nothing like that. With no sun overhead, and the waters opaque as pearl, there were no refracted glitters to light his way; no dart of fish or gleam of moss-slick stones. He could see, though, even though he was underground.

He wished he couldn’t.

He slipped through the bright, pale water suffused in a glow he’d never been able to explain. It was if a light filtered through from underneath, an impossible glow that was more terrifying than comforting. It lit the scabrous hand that darted toward him in stark relief.

Dark, open sores weeping, tattered strips of peeling skin dangling, it grabbed at Náli’s face, and he tucked, and rolled and shot past it.

But it was replaced by another, and another. They flailed, as quick and twisty as the minnows he’d tried to catch that time in the river, darting forward, rather than away. Reaching for him. Until he was surrounded on all sides.

A face pushed through, eyeless, jaws spread wide, jagged stumps of rotten teeth bared.

Another, on his opposite side, its lower jaw stripped away completely, bits of ligament dangling like open shirt laces.

It was here that the diamond stopped dragging him, content and light against his chest once more. This was where it – where his magic, where the dead – wanted him.

He tried to dodge, at first, like always. An ingrained fear that had dogged him since infancy, that couldn’t be fully suppressed by the waters of the well. But then a hand caught his ankle. Another curled around his wrist. And then there were ten, fifty, a hundred of them, pinning him fast. He stopped fighting and floated within that dead hold, refusing to look at any of the rotting limbs that held him. He stared straight ahead, waiting, trembling, and the thing that would come next, the thing that always, horribly came for him, he wouldn’t flinch away from. Pride alone held him steady, helped him keep his eyes open against the soft, weightless press of the water.

Bubbles formed. Ripples. The water skimmed backward off a face, parted like two sheets of curdled cream across a tall brow and narrow, hawkish nose. Its skin was the gray of old stone, pocked and streaked as the curtain walls of a palace. Its hair hung in long gray streamers, and on its brow sat a circlet of silver set with diamonds.

Its eyes were closed, but when it hovered nose-to-nose with Náli, dead, gray neck stretched long, the lids flipped open, and they were the blue of sapphires in the sun. The blue of the cold-drakes’ fire. They pulsed, strobed like lightning, the blue of magic.

The face surged forward, pressed its frigid lips to Náli’s, forced his mouth open, and breathed death into his lungs.

~*~

Mattias was eight-years-old when his mother dressed him in a stiff set of new leathers, a miniature version of his father’s, and shooed him out the door in his father’s wake. “Good luck,” she’d told him, but her eyes had been sad. He hadn’t understood why, then; hadn’t understood until much later, years after he’d bested all the other eight-year-olds at the Guard trials. Father had looked on, pride shining naked on his face, as Mattias proved the strongest, quickest, canniest with staff, wooden sword, and shield.

Mattias had viewed it as a game, grinning and trading insults with his friends, offering hands to help them up once he’d knocked them, complaining, on their backsides. At the end, he’d been declared the victor, and he’d caught his father’s eye and smiled as they pinned the brooch to his tunic.

But that victory changed everything. The next morning, a man with an odd hairstyle – shaved on all sides save a thin strip down the center of his head, braided into a single, slender tail that hung down his back – appeared at their door, dressed as a warrior, boots dusty, face grave. Mother brought Mattias’s belongings in a satchel, and then fled back inside the cottage, muffling sobs into her hands.

“Mother?” he inquired, but Father kept him from following her; got down on one knee so they were of a height, and gripped him firmly by both shoulders.

“Mattias,” he said, and his voice was oddly tight. “This is Master Sigismund. I want you to listen to him. Do everything he says.”

“But why?”

“He’s your teacher now. You’re to be a member of the Dead Guard.” And though Father’s smile was proud, his eyes glittered in the slanted morning sunlight, tears that he refused to shed.

Mattias went with Master Sigismund to live in a crude timber longhouse on the back side of the fire mountain. The sky was gray, hazy with a constant layer of smoke, and the ground beneath their feet in the training yard was dried magma covered with sand. When you slipped and went down while sparring, you left wide slashes in the white sand, black of the old magma showing through in jagged, cut-off shapes like runes. There were no girls or women. Their beds were low and hard, their meals nutritious, but not rich. They were woken before dawn each morning, and made to run a long, narrow trail that carved its way through the lowlands. Afternoons were for study: military history, tactics, rudimentary first aid; reading, writing, and sums. Then, later, there came the sparring.

That was Mattias’s favorite part. He was the tallest, and the strongest, and graduated quickly from a wooden practice sword to a steel one – even if it did have blunted edges. In the hours before dinner, he put the other boys on their backs in the sand, again and again.

He didn’t tell anyone, though, that sometimes he missed his mother’s lullabies as he tried to fall asleep. That sometimes he pressed his face into the blankets and let the wool drink his silent tears.

His homesickness eased with time, and his prowess in the ring grew. He licked his bowl clean every night and heeded all of Master Sigismund’s instructions.

“You’ll make a fine captain, one day,” he was told, and struggled to keep the smile from his face. Not just a Guard, but a captain. His young mind could think of no higher honor.

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