Runemarks

by Joanne Harris

  “Dreams?” said Dorian. Dreaming was not a pastime respectable folk admitted to in Malbry. He wondered whether Ethel Parson had received a knock on the head and wished he hadn’t called on her. “Perhaps you were dreaming,” he suggested. “There’s funny things—dangerous things—can happen in dreams, and if you don’t happen to be used to it—”

  Ethel made an impatient noise. “I was dead, Mr. Scattergood. Dead and halfway to the Underworld before the Seer-folk brought me back. Do you think I’m afraid of a few bad dreams? Do you think I’d be afraid of anything?”

  By now Dorian’s unease had deepened into anxiety. He’d never had much experience with madwomen and, being unmarried himself, had little idea of how to deal with one now.

  “Er—Mrs. Parson,” he said feebly. “Naturally you’re distraught. Perhaps a rest and some smelling salts?”

  She fixed him with a pitying look. “I was dead,” she repeated gently. “People talk around the dead. They say things they shouldn’t. They pay less attention. I don’t pretend to understand all of what’s happening here. The affairs of the Seer-folk are not our affairs, and I wish none of us had been caught up in them, but it’s too late for wishes, I’m afraid. They healed me. They gave me my life. Did they really think that I would return to it as if nothing had happened? Needlework, cooking, and the kettle on the hob?”

  “What are you saying?” said Dorian Scattergood.

  “I’m saying,” said Ethel, “that somewhere in World Below, my husband and your nephew are still alive. And that if we are to find them again—”

  “Find them?” said Dorian. “We’re not talking about a piece of lost knitting here, Mrs. Parson—”

  Once more she chilled him with a look. “Do you own a dog, Mr. Scattergood?”

  “A dog?”

  “Yes, Mr. Scattergood. A dog.”

  “Well—no,” he said, taken aback. “Is it important?”

  Ethel nodded. “By all accounts there are hundreds of passageways under the Hill. We’ll need a dog to find their trail. A tracking dog with a good nose. Otherwise we may spend the rest of our lives wandering about in the dark, don’t you agree?”

  Dorian stared at her, astonished. “You’re not mad,” he said at last.

  “Far from it,” said Ethel. “Now, we’ll need a dog, and lamps and supplies. Or I will, if you’d rather stay here.”

  Dorian protested less than she’d expected. For a start he welcomed the opportunity to redeem himself for his behavior on the Hill; secondly, whether Ethel was mad or not, she was clearly determined, and he could hardly let her go alone. Borrowing the parson’s horse and trap, he left her to get ready—hardly daring to hope she would change her mind—and returned within the hour with two packs containing food and essentials and with a small black potbellied sow on the seat beside him.

  Ethelberta regarded the black sow with some uncertainty. But Dorian was adamant: pigs were his livelihood and he’d always believed in their superior intelligence. Black Nell, the potbellied sow that had caused the scandal years ago, had been a famous truffler in her day, faithful and clever, guarding the farm as well as any dog.

  This new sow was descended from Nell herself, though Dorian had never mentioned the fact or declared the broken ruinmark that adorned her soft underbelly with a patch of white. Instead he had used pitch to conceal the mark (as once his own mother had used a hot iron and soot to conceal the mark on her new baby’s arm), and he had never regretted it.

  “Lizzy’ll lead us right,” he said. “She’s the best tracker I’ve ever had. She can sniff out a potato at a hundred yards, a truffle in a mile. No dog can match her. Take my word for it.”

  Ethel frowned. “Well, if that’s the best you can do…”

  “Lizzy’s the best. No doubt about it.”

  “Then in that case,” said Ethel, “we mustn’t waste time. Show her the trail, Mr. Scattergood.”

  Ten minutes later, plus several bribes of apple and potato and many sniffs of Nat Parson’s discarded overcoat, and Fat Lizzy was fairly straining at the leash. Her eyes gleamed, her snout twitched, she gave little barking grunts of excitement; it was the closest Dorian had ever seen to a talking pig.

  “She scents the trail,” Dorian said. “Listen, Mrs. Parson. She’s never let me down. I say we follow her, and if I’m wrong—”

  “If you’re wrong, then my husband and your nephew may be wolf meat before long.”

  “I know that.” He looked at the potbellied sow, who was practically dancing with excitement. “But I know my Lizzy. She’s no ordinary pig. She’s one of Black Nell’s line, and I never had a pig from that brood that wasn’t twice as smart as any other. I say we give her a chance—it’s more chance than we have without her, anyway.”

  And so it was that Ethel Parson and Dorian Scattergood followed Fat Lizzy down the road and across the fields to Red Horse Hill and that before noon they had already entered World Below and, lighting a lamp to show their way, had set off along the sloping path into the unknown.

  7

  On the threshold of another world, Loki and Maddy were facing the shortest hour of their lives. All around them lay the river Dream, a vastness so broad that neither side could be clearly seen but dotted with islets and skerries and rocks, some drifting, some static, the largest of which housed the Black Fortress of Netherworld.

  Above them, purple clouds were gathering like wool on a spindle.

  And at their feet lay the Black Fortress, which, Maddy now saw, was no fortress at all, but a huge crater, lipped with steel, from which a thousand thousand galleries dropped and yawped, each gallery lined with barred doors, cells, oubliettes, chambers, dungeons, stairwells, forgotten walkways, dank grottoes, flooded passageways, cavernous spaces, and colossal engines of excavation, for Netherworld is the sink of every evil thought, every submerged terror and neurosis, every war crime, every outrage against what is hopeful and good—and it is always expanding its territory, going deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the World toward an inexhaustible mother lode of sickness.

  From the crater, the sound of those engines was like an army of giants cracking boulders with their teeth; above it the voices of the countless dead made a sound like Jed Smith’s forge, but infinitely greater.

  “Gods,” Maddy said. “It’s so much more than I ever imagined…”

  “Yes, and you don’t even have all that much imagination,” said Loki, putting his hands in his pockets. “Try to picture how I saw it, in the days after Ragnarók; if you think it looks bad from up here, you should try going in deeper—let’s say, twelve hundred levels or so. Believe me, down there, things begin to get seriously imaginative—”

  “I don’t understand,” said Maddy.

  But Loki appeared to be searching for something, and with what looked like increasing anxiety. He searched in the unfamiliar pockets, in his belt, around his wrists, and cursed as he failed to find what he sought.

  “What is it?” said Maddy. “What have you lost?”

  But Loki was grinning now with relief. He reached into his shirt and drew out what looked like a watch on a chain around his neck.

  “This,” he said. “It’s a timepiece from Hel. Time here doesn’t follow the normal rules—minutes here could mean hours or even days outside—and we’ll need to be sure how long we’ve got.”

  Maddy looked at it curiously. It was a little like a fob watch, though it was no timepiece that she’d ever seen. There were no hours marked on the black dial, and the hands, which were red, showed only the minutes and the seconds. Complex machineries turned and spun behind the glass-and-silver casing.

  “What kind of a watch is it?” said Maddy.

  Loki grinned. “A deathwatch,” he said.

  The deathwatch was already counting down. Maddy found herself unable to look away as the red hands ticked away the hour. She said, “Do you really think Hel will keep her word? What’s to stop her from leaving us here?”

  “Hel’s word is what keeps Hel in balanc
e. To break it would mean abandoning her neutral position, and here, at the brink of Chaos, that’s the last thing she can afford to do. Believe me, if she tells us we’ve got an hour…” Loki glanced at the face of the deathwatch again. The countdown now read fifty-nine minutes.

  Maddy was looking at him curiously. “You look different,” she said.

  “Never mind that,” said Loki.

  “But your face—your clothes…”

  Maddy struggled to express what she saw. It was like watching a reflection on water as it clears. As she watched, he seemed to come into focus; still recognizably Loki, with his fiery hair and scarred lips, but Loki as drawn by some otherworldly artist in colors unknown to Nature’s palette. “And your glam,” she said, with sudden realization. “It isn’t reversed anymore.”

  “That’s right,” said Loki. “That’s because I’m here in my true Aspect, not in the form I was obliged to take when I re-entered World Above.”

  “Your true Aspect?” said Maddy.

  “Look, this is Netherworld,” said Loki with impatience. “It’s not a place you can visit in person. In fact, as we speak, our bodies are in Hel, tethered to life by the thinnest of threads, awaiting our return. And may I suggest that if we want to rejoin them—”

  “You mean this—this isn’t me?” Maddy looked down at herself and was startled to see that she too was different. Her hair was loose instead of being sensibly braided, and in place of her usual clothes she now wore a belted chain-mail tunic of what she judged to be immodest length. Of her other clothes, her jacket, and her pack there was no sign.

  “Our packs!” she exclaimed in sudden dismay. “The Whisperer!”

  In Hel’s domain she had forgotten it; now the thought filled her with alarm. She realized that she had not felt its call since Hel had joined them in the desert. Loki had been carrying it then, but she could not recall having seen him with it at any time since they entered Hel’s halls.

  She turned on him with a sudden suspicion. “Loki,” she said, “what did you do?”

  Loki looked hurt. “I hid it, of course. Why? You think it would have been safer here?”

  He did have a point, Maddy thought. Still, it continued to trouble her. If Odin had followed them there somehow—

  “Come on,” said Loki impatiently. “Just being here causes massive disruption, and the longer we stay, the greater the chances of attracting the wrong sort of attention. Now please”—once more he checked the deathwatch around his neck—“you really don’t want to be here when our time—now fifty-seven minutes—runs out.”

  He was right, Maddy thought. Why should she mistrust him? He’d risked his life to bring her this far. And yet there was something in his colors, colors so bright that she no longer needed the truesight to show her his thoughts. Maybe it was a part of being in Aspect, but everything seemed brighter here, brighter and clearer than anywhere else. Squinting at Loki, she could see his fear, that silvery streak in his signature, and, running alongside it, something else: a thread of something dark and indistinct, like a thought that even he seemed reluctant to face.

  And though it was far too late to turn back, Maddy’s heart grew cold with misgiving. For she recognized that hazy thread—she’d seen it so many times before, in Adam Scattergood and his friends, in Nat at his sermon, in poor Jed Smith. It was a most familiar sign, but to see it now, in Loki’s glam, meant that something was already terribly wrong.

  The darker thread was a sign of deceit.

  Whatever the reason, the Trickster had lied.

  8

  Space doesn’t work here as it does elsewhere, Loki had said, and now Maddy could see what he’d meant. She had time only to realize that they were falling before realizing that what she had taken for a giant crater dropping down toward the center of the earth was actually no such thing and that the idea of downward, which she had hitherto taken for granted, was also and at the same time sideward, upward, and even inward, with herself at the hub of a great living wheel of space, a vortex intersected at every spoke with galleries, craters, and crevices leading off in every imaginable direction into the dark.

  “How can this be?” she called to Loki as they fell.

  “How can what be?”

  “This world. It’s just not possible.”

  “It is and it isn’t,” said Loki over his shoulder. “In the Middle World, where Order rules, it’s not possible. Where Chaos rules, you haven’t seen the half of it.”

  They were not falling, Maddy now saw, although there seemed to be no other word to describe the trajectory that she and Loki were following. Most of the time, travel follows a set path: there are rules regarding space and time and distance; one step leads to another like words in a sentence, telling a tale. But how she and Loki traveled was quite different. Not quite falling, nor running, nor standing, nor swimming, nor even flying, they covered no ground, and yet they moved quickly, as in a dream, scenes flicking past them like pages turned at increasing speed and at random in some book of maps of places no one sane would ever want to visit.

  “How are you doing it?” shouted Maddy over the noise.

  “Doing what?” said Loki.

  “This place—you’re altering it somehow. Moving things around.”

  “I told you before. It’s a dream place. Haven’t you ever had a dream in which you knew you were dreaming? Haven’t you ever thought, I’ll do this, I’ll go there, and in your dream you made it happen?”

  A thousand maps, every one a thousand deep in caverns, canyons, caves, catacombs, dungeons, torture chambers, cells. Squinting, Maddy could see them, the prisoners, like bees in a hive, their colors like distant smoke, the buzzing of their voices like flakes of ash rising into the apocalyptic sky.

  “Hang on,” said Loki. “I think I’ve got something.”

  “What?”

  “Dreamers.”

  Now, with a keenness beyond Bjarkán, Maddy discovered that she could focus in on individual prisoners and their surroundings. She found she could see their faces clearly, regardless of the distances between them, faces glimpsed at random through a spinning sickness, screaming faces, slices of nightmare, machines that crunched bone, carpets woven from human gristle, dreams of fire and dreams of steel, dreams of hot irons and of slow dismemberment, dreams of blood eagles and being eaten alive by rats, dreams of snakes and giant spiders and headless corpses that still somehow lived and of lakes of maggots and plagues of killer ants and of sudden blindness and of terrible diseases and of small sharp objects pushed into the soles of the feet and of familiar objects developing teeth—

  “Fifty-three minutes to go,” said Loki. “And for gods’ sakes, stop gawping. Don’t you know how rude it is to look into other people’s dreams?”

  Maddy screwed her eyes shut. “All these are dreams?” she said faintly.

  “Dreams, ha’nts, ephemera. Just don’t get involved.”

  Maddy opened her eyes again. “But, Loki—there must be millions of people here. Millions of prisoners. How are we ever going to find my father?”

  “Trust me.”

  Easier said than done, she thought. She held more tightly to Loki’s hand, trying not to think of what would happen if he decided simply to abandon her here. His face was set, all merriment gone. His violet signature, always bright, was now so fiercely blinding that Maddy could barely see him for the glare.

  The magic-lantern show of Netherworld flickered all around them. Worse visions now—creatures with their guts on the outside of their bodies, dripping poison from bloated sacs; fields of carnivorous plants that crooned and sang in the fiery breeze; machines with oiled and interlocked tentacles, each one tipped with a metal prong that sliced and razored—

  “Uh-oh,” said Loki at her side. “Hang on, Maddy, we’re being followed.”

  And before Maddy could look around (not that she knew which direction to look in), he put on an extra burst of speed and the scenes around them blurred and flickered.

  “Followed by what?”
/>
  “Just don’t look.”

  Of course, that was exactly what Maddy did; a second later she regretted it.

  “Damn it,” said Loki. “What did I say?”

  The creature was beyond scale. Huge as a building, Maddy guessed, with a raw eel head and rows of teeth—a dozen rows at least, she thought—circling the cavernous throat. It moved in silence, like a projectile, and in spite of its very real-looking teeth, its body (if that was a body) seemed to be made up of nothing but strands and whips and signatures of light.

  “Gods, what is it?” Maddy breathed.

  “Not it. They.”

  “They?”

  “Ephemera. Don’t look.”

  “But it’s gaining on us.”

  Loki groaned. “Don’t look at it, don’t think of it. Thinking only makes it stronger.”

  “But how?”

  “Gods, Maddy, didn’t I tell you?” He cast an urgent glance at the thing that was following them. “This is a place where all things are possible. Dreams, fevers, imaginings. We make them so. We give them their strength.”

  “But we’re ghosts. Surely. In some kind of dream. Nothing can harm us—not really—”

  “Not really?” Loki gave a crack of laughter. “Listen to me, Maddy. Reality as you know it just doesn’t apply in Netherworld. We’re not ghosts. It’s not a dream. And they can harm us. Really.”

  “Oh.”

  “So keep going.”

  Now each step was an aeon deep, taking them further and deeper into the pit of Netherworld. Maddy looked back at the thing that followed them and saw a tunnel ringed with lights and lined with concentric rows of knife-edged metal that churned and gulped and circled and gnashed like living machinery.

  It took her a second or two to realize that the tunnel was the thing’s mouth.

  “It’s catching up,” she said. “And it’s getting bigger.”

  Loki swore. They seemed to be moving more slowly now, and Maddy could almost see what he was doing as he leafed through Netherworld like pages in a book. A yellow sky raining sulfur onto creatures that writhed on a bare rock floor. A woman suspended by her hair above a pit of knives. A man drinking from a river of acid that ate away at his lips and chin, stripping his skin and revealing bone—and still he drank; a man whose feet were swollen to the size of oliphants’ small, leggy, many-limbed creatures like articulated trees that crept and chittered along a metal corridor lined with doors in the shape of demon mouths.