Chapter 18

Reynir was sleeping on the room's couch, Lalli under it. Sigrun and Mikkel were talking. Emil looked at all the books in the room in which they were staying for the night, and deeply regretted the fact that they could neither be looked at to pass time, nor taken to the pick-up spot without risking irrevocable damage. He then remembered that Reynir had been drawing some sketches and taking notes in his sole non-packed notebook before going to sleep. Just looking at the sketches couldn't hurt, right? And since he didn't know Icelandic, he would be able to read anything that Reynir didn't want others to read. Most drawings were quite small, but the first relatively big one almost made Emil's eyes pop out of their sockets. He didn't need to know Icelandic to read the date, so he could tell that the drawing that was eerily similar to what he had seen of the back of the church in which they were currently spending the night was more than three weeks old. He showed it to Mikkel, who promptly pointed out that there were plenty of old churches in Iceland, and that Reynir must have visited at least one of them for the purposes of his education. Emil found another drawing that reminded him of something, this one closer to being a week old. In that one, that depicted a room with at least a couple tables, things looked much less run-down than in the first one. The nice tea set on one of the tables in particular caught his eye, as it reminded him of one his family used to own. After staring at the drawing for a while, Emil realized he was getting no better idea of where the feeling of familiarity was coming from, closed the notebook and looked at the contents of the crowded table next to him instead. He noticed the chipped and faded tea set that shared the small space with boxes now known to have been used to deliver the unfinished medicine. Emil didn't know whether to find this impressive or creepy.

The ghosts that had been following them for weeks were being led to the afterlife through a beam of light, but Lalli could tell it was neither the doing of a Finnish mage nor that of Reynir. It was somehow a third kind of magic, that came from the large troll living in the strange building that was their shelter for the evening. He was quite sure Onni had once told him there were only two types of magic. From where he was sitting, Lalli could see Reynir watching it all happen from its just outside his own dream realm. The ghosts, now resembling sheep for some reason, were all apologizing as they floated up the beam. As the flow of ascending strange spirits was reducing, indicating that the last ones were coming in, Lalli heard Reynir speak:
-Thank you for your help, nice lady. I wish I could have known your name.
To Lalli's surprise, the very last spirit to pass through the beam of light answered Reynir:
-It's Anne.
As Reynir was correcting his goodbye to something including the name, a strange conversation from when Tuuri had been bitten, but still alive, suddenly started making sense to Lalli. During that time, Reynir had suddenly started yelling at Lalli for no apparent reason, and all Tuuri had been able to tell him was that that Reynir was expecting him to help find a random woman in a place that was clearly devoid of non-infected humans. Seeing what that woman had done, Lalli thought that he would have really wanted to find her also, if he had known that she actually existed and what she could do before tonight.

It was only after they had left the church, and he had been done answering Emil's various questions about the now-dead huge troll they had left behind, that Reynir realized how little time there was left until they arrived to safety. As long as the ghosts had been following them, he had had the option of letting them take him so they didn't follow the others back Iceland, all while giving his father what he wanted. But he had found a way of getting rid of them, without needing to die, that had sent them all to a peaceful afterlife instead. Now, he would be condemning them all the others to be locked up as soon as he set foot on the boat, where they would all be locked up twenty-four hours a day for a couple of weeks and him dying would put people who hadn't been involved in the expedition in trouble as well. If something was going to happen, it was going to have to be at the outpost, when everyone being alive would no longer be as essential to the group's survival. It would also need to be something nobody would take any risks trying to save him from. He briefly considered just telling the others about the "deal", but he knew they wouldn't want him to die if they had any say in it, and just put themselves into more trouble by trying to help find a viable alternative that probably didn't exist. As he was thinking, the voice wondering if his father's friends were going to keep their word if Reynir "had an accident" came back for the first time in a long time, and was now considering an even more sinister scenario: what if the eventual "accident" got used as part of the excuse to lock the others up anyway if the promise wasn't kept? He hoped he'd figure out a good solution soon.

By the time they arrived at the outpost, they were out of food. Fortunately, there were still some canned goods, the vast majority of which were still edible. Mikkel threw all the obviously spoiled ones away and told the others to pay attention to the smell of the cans they did eat, as some could still be spoiled and could make them very sick if eaten. The fish Reynir ate for dinner that evening tasted a little strange, but was still better than Mikkel's meals.