Runelight

by Joanne Harris

  There was no one to answer these questions, of course. Hughie and Mandy were long gone, lost in the growing maelstrom of birds. Odin’s bridle was also gone. The plan to harness Sleipnir had backfired in a most spectacular way, and as for going to the Universal City – that was surely out of the question, now that this new threat had raised its head.

  No, this attack must be dealt with first, Maddy said to herself as she ran. And yet for the moment, she realized, what had happened on the Hill would have to remain a secret – at least, until she knew the truth about the Whisperer and her mysterious twin. To betray her to the gods at this point would be nothing less than disastrous – and if Maggie, in spite of the assault, had sensed any kind of bond with her, then Maddy owed it to her to find out.

  She made ready her glam for the inevitable, while around her the air turned black with birds and the ground came alive with vermin, swarming from holes and rents in the earth towards the village of Malbry.

  Meanwhile Loki, to whom no movement under the Hill was lost, had sensed the disruption immediately and taken to his bird form, as the network of tripwires and runes he had laid in place these five hundred years was torn apart like a spider’s web, and first the rats, and then a tidal wave of ephemera surged upwards from the Eighth World, driving all things before it.

  His escape came not a moment too soon. As he soared in hawk Aspect above the chaos on the ground, there came a wave of turbulence that almost knocked him out of the sky, though he had time to see Maddy’s signature vanishing into the maelstrom, and to wonder what she was doing there. And what was that other signature, submerged in the general confusion? Had he imagined it? Was he simply seeing stars?

  Then the third wave came out of the Hill, and Loki lost interest in everything but getting as far from the epicentre as possible. A sudden release of water – ice-cold water from the Seventh World – erupted from fissures in the earth, so that the river Strond increased to ten times its normal size in as many minutes, and the flood barriers at Malbry Riverside were broken, and the first great wave of flood water charged like a herd of buffalo down Malbry High Street, past the church, knocking down the wooden houses closest to the river before spilling out across farmlands and pastures all the way to Nether’s Edge.

  This was no ordinary flood, Loki knew. It was the river Dream, unleashed, awash with the flotsam of Chaos. Faced with such a powerful threat, Loki didn’t stand a chance, and, abandoning all loyalties, he fled in bird Aspect as fast as he could towards the Seven Sleepers, where the Hindarfell Pass, just newly cleared, would provide him with the best means of escape from whatever was after him.

  In the village, the Folk were in chaos. Some ran out to see what was happening and were swiftly borne away by the flood. Some fled to the church for safety; some hauled bags of sand and earth to their doorsteps to form a breakwater against the tide. But water was not the end of it: now came fire out of the ground; and boiling mud, which, meeting the flood water, caused great gouts of steam to erupt from the already swollen Strond, rolling like thunder across the land, so that some of the oldsters remembered the tales of demon wolves that swallowed the Sun, bringing darkness even in summertime.

  Maddy saw it coming, and found the nearest tree to climb. A stunted oak, but large enough, she hoped, to withstand the tide of water and mud. Settling into a fork in the trunk, she looked up into the roiling sky, trying in vain to distinguish the forms of Odin’s ravens among the thousands of circling birds.

  ‘Hughie! Mandy! Are you there?’

  From the cloud she thought she heard the faintest of replies.

  Craw. Crawk.

  ‘Stay close!’ she cried.

  Again, that harsh note of reply.

  From her refuge in the tree, Maddy drew her mindsword, for now, after fire and flood, came the rest: Pan-daemonium unleashed.

  After the billows of steam and the plagues of rats and the subterranean waters came creatures that only Dream could have spawned: clawed things and flying things and things with the features of the dead. The deadliest kind of ephemera, fashioned from the raw stuff of Dream and spawned from the wells of Chaos, tearing their way through the rent in the Worlds towards the lair of the Firefolk.

  The Æsir were quick to react to the threat. Assuming as much of their true Aspects as they were able to summon, with mindswords and runeweapons they took their stand against the advancing enemy. No one was at their best, of course – runemarks broken or reversed; muscles weakened; instincts dulled; subject to all the imperfections of their host bodies. Still they stood. Still they fought.

  Outside the Parsonage Brave-Hearted Tyr, in spite of his inferior size, was making a fair job of dispatching every rat that came his way. They lay in drifts around the square, their bodies creating a barrier against the rising water.

  Ethel’s priority was the Folk. As panic seized the villagers in their struggle to escape, she spun runes into the air to shield the innocents from harm; directed them into the church, which was large enough to take them all; reunited families and promised them that all would be well. And in spite of her Aspect as Frigg the Seeress there was still enough of Ethelberta Parson in her to reassure the village folk – who otherwise might well have assumed that the strangers were to blame for all this, and turned their rage against their protectors.

  Meanwhile the Vanir had not been idle. From under the Sleepers, they too had seen the plague of rats that poured from the Hill, flooding the many passageways that ran from beneath the Horse’s Eye; the noxious tide that followed them – the waves of ephemera from Dream, the verminous geyser from World Below that rushed to fill every hole, every crack, every crevasse in the ice.

  Now, from their ice-cave underground, Njörd worked to hold back the flood while Bragi struck power chords on his guitar. Frey had unsheathed his mindsword and was scything methodically through the enemy’s ranks, while Freyja, in her Carrion Aspect (which she despised most of the time as unglamorous, but whose skeletal features were enough to strike fear even into the heart of Dream), flew around the battle scene, shrieking and striking out with her claws, dislodging clusters of stalactites that fell like spears from the ceiling and onto the heads of the enemy.

  Back in the village, however, Thor was having staffing problems. Faced with a cloud of ephemera, the soul-eating parasites of Netherworld, he quite understandably assumed that his mighty hammer would be at his side during the mêlée. But Jolly seemed less than willing to take part, and the Thunderer spent several minutes wheedling before he could persuade him to put aside his breakfast and to assume his Aspect as Mjølnir.

  ‘Me toast’ll go cold,’ he protested. ‘Can’t you manage on yer own?’

  Thor attempted to explain that this was a bit of a crisis.

  Jolly pulled a face. ‘Well, I don’t think much of yer timin’,’ he said. ‘I can’t bloody stand cold toast. And what about me sausages?’

  Thor took a deep breath, smiled and promised Jolly all the sausages he could eat – but later, when they’d saved the Worlds.

  ‘Say please,’ Jolly said.

  At which time Thor’s patience expired at last, and he erupted into full Aspect in Ethel Parson’s breakfast room – all seven feet of Thunderer, red beard spitting fiery sparks, eyes like torches, fists like anvils, thick blue veins running up his arms – and there was Mjølnir at his side, still looking strangely like Jolly, with its huge misshapen head, its double runemark gleaming, illuminated with glamours and light.

  Thor gave a growl of satisfaction and, seizing the weapon in his fist, strode out into the courtyard again and proceeded to do what he did best, which was to hammer things.

  And there were so many things to hammer. Not quite as many ephemera as the gods had encountered in Netherworld three years ago, but far more than they had seen in World Above since Ragnarók, five centuries ago, when Surt had marched out of Chaos and Asgard had fallen from the sky.

  There were feathered snakes and birds with teeth; fire-cats and mud monkeys; there were spider
s, and swarms of flying eyes, and eagles with human faces, and bats, and things that were nothing but tentacles, like creatures of the One Sea.

  Ephemera can take any shape; and even when smashed into pieces, they can often re-assemble, but Thor and Mjølnir made a powerful team, and with Brave-Hearted Tyr at their side, killing rats, as well as Sif – who had dropped her current Aspect and now faced the enemy as a ferocious battle-sow, with golden tusks and eyes like coals – they laid into the hordes of Netherworld with the vigour of a small army.

  ‘What are they after?’ yelled Brave-Hearted Tyr, hurling a mindbolt at a platoon of marching umbrellas. On contact, the umbrellas broke up into a shower of spinning crescents, each one as sharp as a razor-blade, that sliced screaming through the air before embedding themselves in the frozen ground.

  Thor shrugged. ‘How in Hel would I know?’ He levelled his hammer at an oncoming ice bear and sent it howling back to Netherworld. ‘I’m not the one who opened the rift …’

  ‘No, that was Loki,’ said Brave-Hearted Tyr. ‘It must have given way at last!’

  ‘Well, if that’s who they’re after,’ said Thor with a growl, ‘they’re welcome to him. Anytime.’ And, lifting his hammer, the Thunderer returned once more to the business in hand.

  LOKI HAD NEVER doubted for a moment that he was the one they were after. He’d automatically assumed from the start that his deal with Angrboda and her folk must have come to the attention of Chaos, and that this offensive was the result.

  Certainly, it made sense. An alliance between demons and gods might threaten even Surt’s domain, especially if the Sky Citadel were indeed to be rebuilt, and the First World reinstated as theirs. Of course, that didn’t explain what he had seen in the sky before the eruption. Maddy’s signature was hard to miss, and he was more than familiar with the colours of the General’s Horse, which he had glimpsed in the moments before the Hill had started to erupt, emitting so many signatures that all trace of Sleipnir and Maddy had quickly been obliterated.

  Loki, of course, had known all about the creature sleeping under the Hill. Technically, in Horse Aspect, he was Sleipnir’s parent – a relationship he would rather forget – and as such he could have awoken the Horse quite easily; but he had no interest at all in doing so. Quite apart from the fact that Odin would have torn him limb from limb if he’d tried anything of that sort, the Trickster didn’t much like horses, preferring his bird Aspect to anything four- or eight-legged. Maddy, it seemed, had no such qualms. The presence of her signature so close to the source of the eruption suggested that she had taken the Horse. Perhaps she’d assumed that the aftermath would provide her with adequate camouflage to make her escape before anyone made the connection. Perhaps, now that Odin was dead, he thought, its power had been too much for her to resist.

  All the more reason, Loki thought, for him to take his flight while he still could. Maddy couldn’t help him now, even if she’d wanted to. If he could reach the Hindarfell, he might have a chance of finding shelter outside the valley, and thereafter make his way southwards into the Universal City and beyond, where, he thought, he could probably find better, safer, more comfortable – and certainly more lucrative – opportunities to develop his skills.

  But Hawk-eyed Heimdall, at his post in the Sleepers, had been waiting years for just such a move, and his sharp eyes were quick to notice the small brown bird flying towards the Hindarfell. Ignoring the chaos below him, he took to his own winged Aspect – that of a white sea-eagle – and set off in pursuit of the bird, whose gaudy violet signature-trail marked it conclusively as the fugitive Trickster.

  For a time it seemed that the smaller bird might almost evade its pursuer. But Loki was tired, Heimdall was stronger, and the many eruptions from World Below had conspired to create a turbulence in the thin mountain air that battered and shook the Trickster until, at last, he was forced to the ground just as he reached the Sleepers.

  With the white sea-eagle still on his tail, Loki headed for a space between two peaks, where, halfway down the mountainside, a pool of white mist spilled out from beneath a glacier, partially obscuring the scene below. If only he could reach it, he thought, then maybe he could find somewhere to hide …

  The mist was thick and creamy, like the head on a glass of ale. He plunged into it, feeling the drop in temperature as soon as he passed through the cloud layer. As he came to land on an outcrop of rock, Loki had a moment to appreciate the unusual thickness of the fog – its ghastly pallor; its sickening cold; the stench that enveloped everything within its reach – before something happened that made him forget his pursuer, his flight; that startled him right out of his bird form and back into his human Aspect, sprawling him clumsily into the snow in his hurry to escape.

  The white sea-eagle swooped into view, but Loki barely even glanced his way. He simply lay shivering where he had fallen, his eyes widening in disbelief as something came slithering out of the mist in the glacier’s shadow. Something large. Something dark. Something monstrously familiar …

  Loki swallowed painfully. ‘Jorgi? Is that you?’ he said.

  LOKI’S DREAD WAS not misplaced. The last time he had encountered the World Serpent – otherwise known as Jormungand – the circumstances had been less than amicable. But at least he’d been in full Aspect then, with Maddy by his side, and with the (somewhat reluctant) support of Hel, the Guardian of the Underworld.

  This time he was alone, freezing cold and, worse still – one of the disadvantages of shifting to bird Aspect being that he’d had to leave his clothes behind – clad in nothing but his skin. Not the way he had envisaged their reunion – in fact, Loki thought, the only way he would have willingly submitted to such an encounter was with a large army standing between himself and the Serpent (which would be safely bound with runes – Loki saw no virtue at all in settling scores in person).

  He looked at the open jaws of the beast, bared his teeth in a feeble smile and said: ‘Jorgi – uh. Long time no see.’

  Heimdall, meanwhile, recognizing his prey’s attempt to escape, had taken a fast, steep dive into the pool of white mist. The first thing he saw on arrival was Loki, stark naked, backed up as far as he could go against an outcrop of white rock, and such was the Watchman’s eagerness to dispatch his enemy at last that it took him several seconds to notice the massive, dark, undeniable head of the World Serpent leering from under the skirt of the glacier, his interminable coils lost in mist, his jaws half open and drizzling venom onto the snow.

  ‘Heimdall!’ said Loki gratefully.

  The Watchman resumed his Aspect.

  Jormungand gave a beastly yawn and slithered forward another twelve feet. Heimdall shot Loki an evil look and summoned a handful of fire-runes – though whether these were intended as weapons or merely to combat the bitter cold could not easily be determined.

  ‘Running out on us, Loki?’ he said. ‘I always knew you would, some day. And now I find you here – with that, and all Hel following after you …’

  ‘Give me a break,’ said the Trickster. ‘Do I look like I have a death wish? If you recall, Jorgi and I didn’t part on what you’d call friendly terms.’

  ‘Really?’ said Heimdall with sarcasm. ‘And after you freed him from Netherworld too. You’d think he might show some gratitude.’ He levelled the full force of his ice-blue gaze at the cowering Trickster. ‘So – am I to take it you’re telling me you didn’t have anything to do with what’s happening right now under the Hill? That you didn’t open a gateway to unleash the hordes of Netherworld, and that you’re not now planning to make your escape with the help of your monstrous son, the World Serpent?’

  ‘Well, actually—’ began Loki.

  But what he’d been about to say was lost in a sudden flurry of wings as another bird – an outlandish bird, with purple and scarlet plumage – fluttered through the veil of mist and alighted on the outcrop of rock. Loki had barely a moment to react before the bird became Angrboda – fully clothed in a long hooded coat of scarlet fur an
d purple snow-boots with outrageous heels – sitting on the high rock and watching him disapprovingly.

  ‘I’m very disappointed,’ she said.

  ‘Angie, please. I can explain—’

  ‘You’re telling me you weren’t running away?’

  ‘Damn right I wasn’t,’ Loki said. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a bit of a crisis going on. I was covering the rear – making sure the pass was secure – while Goldie and the gang held the Sleepers, and Thor and the others dealt with the Hill. Thanks for the Hammer, by the way. Great little guy. I miss him already.’

  Angie grinned. ‘I thought you would.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Heimdall bared his teeth. ‘Can I ask what in Hel is going on?’

  ‘Cool it, Goldie. She’s on our side. We had an arrangement, remember?’

  ‘Not with that, we didn’t,’ Heimdall said, with a sideways glance at the World Serpent.

  ‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ Angie said, hopping down from her icy perch. ‘Jormungand’s going to help us. You gods think you’re so clever, with your glamours and your mindbolts, but Jormungand here can snap up ephemera the way an ice bear snaps up fish. You’ll need him – and the rest of us – if you’re to have any chance against what’s coming.’

  ‘And what is coming, according to you?’ Heimdall’s eyes were very bright.

  ‘War, of course,’ said Angrboda. ‘The battle for the Sky Citadel.’

  ‘We lost that battle long ago. How can we hope to win it now? This is a trick …’ He turned once more on Loki, the rune Hagall trembling in his palm.

  Loki forked Yr, the Protector, with fingers that were numb with cold.