Chapter Eight

a colored lithograph of a field.

There are no other pictures on Ward D.

From Barley Field – Olav H. Hauge

Translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly

“Tell me again why we’re voluntarily going to the PIT?” The concern that filled Jade’s voice was telling. No one went to the PIT for anything, short of certain death. The PIT—it’s what the Others called the Silent Court’s dungeons; the lower rungs of never ending doom and oppression. The PITs were the holding cells for all of the Other World’s dysfunctional, criminal and terminally insane. PIT or Pain in Transition; the transition towards death. It’s the last stop on the way to the Shadow Lands for the wicked—no matter their preference of power. Light or Darkness, it’s the place you ended up right before the Court took away your life, your afterlife and possession of your soul.

I always wondered what they did with all those souls. Were they in a black box somewhere? Rattling around? Scraping the dark edges for escape?

I seemed to be one of the few who voluntarily visited the PIT. On more occasions than I cared to think about, actually. In fact, a big chunk of Ward B, Block C and most of the nasty inhabitants of Ward D were put there by me, personally. Ah, the price of being a Hunter. I knew that if most of them could get their grubby little hands on me, I’d be slop burger for sure.

To my delight, we were headed down into the deepest, darkest hole of the labyrinth. Each step leading straight on through to the end of the line. Past Ward D there isn’t even a sign telling you the name of the area you’re entering, only the grim conclusion that beyond this point an illuminated death awaits in all its diabolical, illustrious glory.

Most of the Court’s jailers liked to call the place HELL, as in Here, Everafter Lacks Light. The tenants just view it as another shade of Darkness. I guess when you walk the edge too often, the colors tend to smear. Light and Darkness bleeding in an all-consuming smudgy haze. Something for the wise to remember.

Each step brought us further into the recesses of the Court’s nether-realm. A place too few had traveled and less had returned from. I’d been here twice. Neither time brought back memories of comfort or mirth.

At first I thought that Drae, my own personal Judge Dread, would have given me all kinds of shimmering shit on toast for needing to speak to her. But surprisingly, his supreme Judge Trollness seemed to be in a magnanimous mood. The thought of Xavier Drae, Troll Overlord, in any mood other than bleak made me nervous. It made me wonder what sort of parallel universe I’d woken up in and what this trip to the PIT was going to cost me. Here’s hoping it wasn’t flesh, blood or my soul.

I just wasn’t in a giving mood today.

I felt like a Dwarf petering my way down into the mountain in search of gems as my merry band of fellows followed behind me. Gimlit was hard on my heels, the girth of his chest shield-like and hovering every step we took. Jade followed close behind him, small currents of power coiling around him like a small, nervous force field. Each jolt vibrated through to me with his every exhaled breath. His wolf’s hackles were up, tension running high the further down into the darkness we went.

I couldn’t blame him, if not for the fact that I’d walked these dark and hallowed halls before and knew the way out, my she-wolf would be clamoring for escape as well. Oh, I knew she wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of death’s proximities, for I felt her pacing; a tight coil brushing repeatedly against my insides. Caged and anxious; the heavy scent of despair and desperation thick in the air with each inhaled breath and every step we took.

Against my better judgment, Xavier’s ginormous, pocked and pitted face filled the small enclosure at the end of the line. His flame-red head was stark against the austere accoutrements of his black over-coat, where it blended with the shadows. His radiant, glowing eyes an odd apparition in the macabre dance of light thrown from the spire of sconces that had been embedded into the very walls that limned the cavernous stairwell.

The halls and corridors we traversed seemed to take us to some sort of different level of time; a moment where the granules of sand sift slowly, the parallels shift and each fleeting second becomes destiny in the mist. At first you don’t quite notice you’ve wandered deeper into this strange vortex until the light shimmers and shifts. It becomes a glimmer of shadows dancing on the dew-slick walls that catches in the corner of your eye, fleeting and iridescent. A sort of dèjá vu of your heartstrings that suddenly pulls you past memories and moments, hopes and hopelessness.

Then, a sudden intake of breath and you taste time’s hesitancy. Its horribly bitter sweetness against the thickness of your tongue. It becomes a sort of residue that clings like broken promises and miserable regrets where it lingers on your dry, parted lips. And just like that, you’ve reached the end and you hadn’t even seen it coming.

I stopped, my heart racing as a plethora of fearful thoughts invaded me. Ice and sadness seemed to coalesce from further down the corridor and I didn’t want to take that final step. Weariness and heartache enveloped me while I clung to the landing—a flashing sign in my subconscious glaring, ‘Doom and Destruction Straight Ahead!

Then there was the strange metallic glow from the cell beyond that kept me frozen in my tracks. A solid knot of fear, angst and excitement rippled through my gut like a lance.

My sudden stop caused Gimlit and the others to slam into me.

“The shield keeps her in place. Her magic cannot harm you.” Xavier Drae’s voice floated to me like a distant storm cloud. In my mind his words rang true, but I couldn’t seem to tell my hammering heart that it was so. I mean, the last I’d seen her I was seven. And even then she had been amazing. Full of life and drunk with power.

So much power. Wasted, on the taint of Darkness. It had latched on to her so tightly you could no longer see the color of her eyes. They’d become nothing more than black cavernous pools of impending destruction.

And me, a mere child, had been chosen as her deceiver. Oh, yes. The Court had used me well. Recruited me and fed lies more glorious than any child could ever have hoped to see come to fruition.

Acceptance is all. And love is a beautiful lie when the truth is twisted. Hope becomes nothing more than fantasy filled with rotting wishes and childhood dreams that turn to dust in the hands of liars, swindlers and fools. It’s just too bad I had been too young to know for certain who the deceivers really were. At least time grants us growth and the winds of healing. For one learns much with the passage of time.

I stood on the last step of those stairs and wondered if it was enough. For me and for her.

“Only one way to know,” Gimlit whispered. His hand was firm on my shoulder, strength of friendship and love pouring from him with the briefest of touches. I let out a sigh of resolution. I knew the next few moments would be difficult. I truly had no other choices. Time, that precious stealer of all, had wrought my path for she had the answers I sought.

“So be The Way,” I stated with a calm I did not feel and took that next step.

Beyond, at the end of the last corridor, was a black door and nothing else. The walls of the lengthy corridor were tinted a smudgy, brackish color, mixed somewhere between a void of black, the color of sludge rotted slime and blood that has dripped so long in the cold darkness it no longer knows what color it should hold.

“Whatever you do, do not touch the walls,” Xavier stated as we all hesitantly skirted the ancient tomb-like corridor.

“What the hell is that smell?” Jade questioned, his face inches from the wall, nostrils flaring. His icy, iridescent eyes glared at their slime in disgust.

The smell was just as repulsive as the glistening dark stain that seemed to come from within. You could smell the cold of earth, the rank of decaying bones, and the festering of wounds. The stench was definitely permeating from walls.

If guilt had a scent, it was soiled like the rot of sewage six weeks in a hard sun and lingering like a green haze. If pain had a perfume, it was decrepit death, mass world destruction and the loss of hope and humanity, all sealed in the bowels of sufferings’ last breath, wafting on the currents of time’s stagnant breeze.

“It is the essence of the damned,” Xavier replied gruffly, the hint of shame lingering in his voice as if each glimmering drip were a mark on his soul. The oblique haze seemed a reminder of all he’d condemned to the lower rungs.

It was not like he himself had created this deathly realm. I am certain, however, that he’d cast his share of creatures to the depths of its bowels, so I’m not sure how sorry I felt for him. He too, was a part of the machine that was the Silent Court. He held their secrets close to his chest, did their bidding. I knew that I answered to him, but it made me wonder to whom he answered to. Lately, it seemed I was always coming up with more questions and never enough answers.

The stench and Xavier’s words gave this trip a whole new meaning. I had never known, in all of my visits, that the condemned pretty much just rotted into the very core of the PIT. But where else did I expect them to go? Unless you were immediately condemned to death, to the Shadow Lands or to endless servitude to the Court, you pretty much got to rot in the PIT. And rot you obviously did.

Welcome to the Silent Court’s version of Purgatory.

Uncertainty began to consume me. Maybe it was because of our surroundings or the magnitude of the next few minutes, but by the time we’d made it to the door I finally noticed the strange, hollow keening that seemed to flow from beyond it. Every nerve ending, every hair on the back of my neck and all of my senses of danger flared at once. When my body slammed against the far side of the wall, all realization was brought home that this had been a really, really bad idea. By then however, it was far too late to change my mind.

The slick, gooey muck Drae had just warned us not to touch felt cold and unforgiving as my back cracked against it. A burning shock singed through my spine and immediately the howls of the dead and the dying ripped through me. With a startled gasp of lost breath, I began to channel the dead.

My head knocked repeatedly against the wall. Bursts of color, brilliant and amazing exploded before my eyes. Sparking flashes of green, yellow and orange hues like a kaleidoscope began to swirl, swimming in and out of my vision. Then it filled like an ink pot, pouring in from the top down until nothing remained but the Darkness. The screams of suffering; vile, angry screams of death in all its varied, unforgiving forms encompassed me.

I felt a spirit brush through my flesh, corporeal tendrils wafting as though tethered to my bones, my soul and remembered the cries of the suffering from earlier this summer. Their pain and agony was a familiar memory. It was a journey of death I’d not likely ever forget.

Their Darkness called to me. Reached for me like a distant whisper, or a remembered prayer. Only this time, I accepted it. I welcomed it. Opened myself to its vast, dark scorn and embraced the misery, the hate and all of the agony that the suffering had to offer. I held my arms wide like a mother seeking to comfort its young and let the wraiths know the ease of my embrace.

The suffering settled.

It was then that the wind came; icy, frigid in its wintry blast. It shot the door from its hinges, sent it barreling straight towards me. It blew the hair from my face. So sudden was the rush, so cold the torrent I felt like my flesh would freeze, crack and fall from my bones. Gimlit was there in seconds, but the cold felt like forever before his massive frame was able to block the door, shove it away as if it were made from cork. Then the wind reversed, my ears popped and the gale sucked back into the cell, the cold and ice wrenching itself from the depths of my soul.

Gasping, I clung to the floor where I had fallen; my eyes wet with tears of pain I could not shed. My heart raced with fear I would not show. And the wind was gone as though it had never been.

Jade and Drae stood in the corridor slack-jawed, hands cleaving to their chests. Pain and amazement shone in their eyes. “What the hell was that?” Jade asked when he could finally draw breath. Slowly I scurried up the wall. Gimlit helped gather me to my feet.

“That,” Drae began gruffly, his voice hoarse from lack of oxygen, “was the Lady Arwin, Rihker’s maternal, full-blood Pixie Grandmother.”

“What the hell did you do to piss her off?” Jade questioned. The stunned look in his iridescent eyes held wonder, his voice steady. I knew that he was totally serious. But I also knew that no matter what had been done, or was about to transpire, he would still be beside me at the end of this night. It was there in his stance, the quirk of his smile and the wild gleam of his eyes.

“I am afraid that Rihker just so happened to help the Court to condemn her to the Vortex of Suppression,” Drae replied, his voice cold of emotion.

“When the hell was that? Yesterday?”

“When she was still but a child...A mere child of seven, and purely human.” I could hear a glimmer of delight seeping in around the edges of Drae’s voice that somewhat pissed me off. That whole night was another stain on my memory that I didn’t like to think about, but sometimes did. The Court had used me well that night. They had lied, connived, scammed and tricked me, but good. But, as Drae had said, I was a child. Seven in age. What the hell did I know? At that time I didn’t even have any powers. Not one Tell in sight. One would think that it would have turned me against the Silent Court.

What’s that old saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer? After that, I swore to myself that if I was ever going to be used by the Court in the future, I at least would have a better, closer understanding of how they worked.

“I take it by the welcome she’s still just a wee bit pissed off at you?”

“You have no idea,” I replied, wiping the sludge off my backside. To say that this was going to be a very bad familial visit didn’t even begin to sum it up. Some nights, illusion is all. Others, I should just mind my own business and stay the hell out of Hell.