The storm clouds overhead boiled away like kettle steam, leaving a bright cerulean blue punctuated only by the dazzling gleam of a clean white sun. At the touch of the sun’s light, the land around us burst into sudden and irrepressible life. Flowers bloomed one after another like strings of tiny explosions; fresh green shoots curled out from the remains of the brittle, dry bracken; and small birds wheeled overhead in an ecstatic aerial display.

Fenrir released me and stepped back, staring wildly about. “What are you doing?”

Freed from her choking grip, I fell to my knees, half curled around the agony in my chest. “Me?” I sucked in a painful breath. “I’m not doing anything.”

Her lip curled and she shook her sword at me. “Then what is this? What’s happening?”

Overhead, the sun revolved on its vertical axis, to reveal on its other side a face carved out of light.

My face.

I looked Fenrir in the eye and raised a shaking arm to the sky. “Why don’t you ask her?”

Fifty-Four: Ona Sudak

FIFTY-FOUR

ONA SUDAK

I followed the corridor as it curved around to the left, and came upon my third corpse in as many minutes. Only this one wasn’t human; it wasn’t even close. In fact, I had to look twice to ascertain it was a single creature and not, as my first glance had suggested, a random assortment of body parts.

The creature had obviously been dead a long, long time. It had four multi-jointed legs covered in a kind of tough carapace, and at least a dozen dry and shrivelled tentacles emerging from the place where I would have expected its neck to be. I could see no head, but a cluster of dark slits between the tentacles’ roots seemed to house the desiccated remains of spherical, fleshy organs that might once have been its eyes. I could find no mouth, so assumed it must be underneath, on the creature’s belly. One of its tentacles gripped a twisted, multi-barrelled device that had to be a weapon of some kind. Another held a carved stone model of a creature much like itself. Whether this represented a deity or a loved one, I had no way of knowing. Yet I was tempted to reach down and pick it up, just to feel the heft of it in my palm.

Had this creature been seeking the centre of the maze or simply a means of escape?

I edged past, pressed up against the corridor’s wall, and my nose wrinkled at the faint, barely traceable residue of a leathery, fish-like odour, somewhat reminiscent of the pickled herring rollmops I remembered from childhood visits to the Oslo home of my Norwegian grandparents. How strange to feel such an unexpected and visceral connection to home in a place so austere and far removed as this!