Chapter 19: Survivors IV

It was burning.

Every log of it at once. One roaring blue heart of flame on the sand.

It did not burn the way wood burns. It went up all together, in a breath.

Days of sweat and blood and hope, gone before they had time to understand they were losing it. The fire was so hungry that there was never one instant where saving any part of it was a thought a person could have had.

The black shape passed once, low over the flames, close enough that the wind off its wings flattened the dune grass and bent the fire sideways.

Then it climbed, and was gone, back up into the dark it had come out of.

Nobody on that cliff said what it meant.

Nobody had to.

They stood in the cold and the understanding went through all of them at once, in silence.

That raft had not been logs.

It had been the fjord where a wife had run for the trees. It had been a sister. A life debt paid. A boy meeting his grandfather's people for the first time.

It had been every field and every grave and every face they had been dragged away from, made into something you could push out onto the water.

Now it was blue fire on a black shore.

Then it was embers.

Then it was nothing.

They walked back up to the camp without speaking.

The camp did not feel like safety any more. Every one of them lay down carrying the same silent thing, and slept badly, if they slept at all.

The split came the next morning, and it came out loud.

It was snowing.

The sky was grey and the cold bit harder than on any day before it. There was no watch to stand and no fish to spear that would put it off any longer.

They gathered in the plaza in the grey light with the taste of ash still in the air, and the thing that had been circling the camp for days finally landed in the middle of it.

It was Rum who set it down.

He did not shout. That was worse than shouting.

"It will not let us leave," he said.

No one argued. No one answered either.

"It was not mercy that night on the beach. It was never mercy. It let us build so it could watch us hope, and then it burned the hope."

He looked from face to face.

"That is what it does. It will do it again, and again, however many rafts we lay down, until we are old and mad on this rock cutting logs for a demon to set alight."

He let that sit.

"Or we go up into those ruins while it is still hurt. All of us. Every blade we have. We put it in the ground in its sleep, and we all go home."

The argument had not cooled overnight. The seam that had opened between them tore the rest of the way open now.

Except this time, more of them nodded than did not.

Not all. The goatherd did not. A few others did not.

But they were badly outnumbered, and a man badly outnumbered does not get a choice. Only an opinion.

The blame for the raft had already found its place.

Haaland had been the one who said morning. Haaland had been the one who said first light. So it was his word that had left it lying on the sand for the dark to come and take it, and Rum never once had to say so out loud.

Frightened people need somewhere to put it.

Rum gave them somewhere.

Haaland, Oddr and Emerald watched from the back.

By the time the sun was full up, the camp had come apart in two, and the two parts were nothing like equal.

Nearly all of them went to Rum. The frightened, the furious and the grieving. Some of them had someone waiting at home.

What was left standing with Haaland would not have filled a longhouse.

Haaland did not fight the split.

He had seen enough men grieve to know you cannot argue a crowd that has nothing left to lose. So he did the next best thing. He kept his own few standing together, watched the larger camp arm itself, and said very little.

They went up the next morning, the moment the sun cleared the sea, and they took every blade in the camp with them.

They were gone before anyone had a say in it, and they did not bother hiding what they meant to do.

They were hunting the Night Spawn.

The one thing standing between them and every wife and husband and child and grave and home they had been torn away from.

That made them brave.

It also made them stupid.

On this island the two turned out to be the same thing.

Still, Emerald understood them.

She had nothing waiting for her anywhere, and she understood them anyway. So did Haaland, and so did Oddr, and so did their handful, standing in the snow and watching the others climb.

The small camp quietly picked up the work the large one had dropped.

They fished. They gathered. They kept the fire in. They fed the hunters when the hunters came trailing back down at dusk, worn out and empty-handed and angrier than they had gone up.

The search found nothing at all.

The island was vast. Far larger than a hundred half-starved people could comb if they did nothing else all year but look.

Forest running into cliff running into dead grey stone, further than a person could walk in a day, ridge after ridge of it fading off into the sea haze. The thing they hunted knew every fold and hollow of it. They knew none of it.

So they searched from first light to last light, and came back each dusk emptier than they had set out.

It took six or seven days before they found where it lived.

The ones who came back up out of the deep that evening were pale.

Down beneath the old halls on the heights, they said, there was a round buried room.

Rotted books, wall to wall. And stranger things. A nest of loose paper, burned charcoal sticks, scattered gold, small dredged trinkets off a hundred wrecks.

There was writing on the loose sheets.

Fresh writing. Charcoal that still smudged under a thumb.

Whatever slept down there could read, and could write, and had been doing both very recently.

Oddr had not been there, of course.

The old man never went on the ordinary hunts, never mind a hunt for a thing like that.

But he had good ears. He sat by the fire that night and listened, and when the hunters had gone off to their own side of the plaza and it was only his own few left around him, he turned it over with a low sound that was almost pleasure.

"A demon that keeps a library," he murmured, to the fire more than to anyone.

"Well, now."

He was quiet a moment. Then something in the deep lines of his face eased, and he almost smiled.

"Whatever it is that lives on this rock with us, it is a long way from a devil. I have never heard of a devil that takes notes."

The hunters held the den for days after that.

It made sense. If you know where a thing sleeps, you sit at the door and you wait.

So they waited, in watches, crouched in that low round room among the rotted books with swords across their knees, night after night.

It never came.

And with every empty dusk the camp's temper curdled a little further.

The crack between the two camps widened until the two sides stopped speaking altogether. The orderly sharing out of the day's work fell apart into two camps doing the same jobs twice and both of them badly. Small daily disagreements turned into fights.

Nobody saw the next part coming.

His name was Torvald.

He was nobody in particular, which was rather the point of him.

A quiet man off a farm somewhere, with a plain sort of stubbornness in him, and he had said the same plain thing out loud more than once. That the blades had come off dead men and belonged to all of them. That nobody had put it to a vote who should be handing them out.

He said it the first time and men laughed.

He said it a few more times and nobody laughed.

Four men went to him that night.

Three of Rum's, and Rum.

They went together, and they had plainly settled it between them before they got there.

They found Torvald at the edge of the camp in the morning. Skin gone cold, eyes open and staring up at nothing, his guts out on the stone beside him and the blood long since finished draining out of him.

Rum stood in front of the whole camp before the sun was properly up.

It had been a scuffle over firewood, he explained. Torvald had drawn first. There were men who would swear to it, and some of them did, and it was a terrible thing and nobody's fault and the sort of thing that happens when people are frightened and cold.

Most of them had not known Torvald well enough to argue.

It struck Haaland all the same.

The first death.

Not the first they had buried.

They had buried people, more of them than anyone cared to count, through the long months in the hold and the crossing that came after. To the cold. To the sea. To the slow starving of the rations they were handed. Rum himself had lost a boy of nine.

What they had never once done, in all of it, was lose one to each other.

It knotted something in the gut that nothing on the whole crossing had touched.

The first death on this island had not come by the hand of the demon, nor by the cold of a northern winter, nor by the dragon of legends they shared the rock with.

It had come by a brother's sword.