Runemarks

by Joanne Harris

  “The snake doesn’t seem too pleased about it,” said Maddy.

  “Yes. Well. I…” Loki looked embarrassed. “I believe he’s annoyed because—well—I promised I’d free him when I made my escape.”

  “Free him?” said Maddy. “But I thought you said he was guarding you.”

  “That’s the clever bit,” said Loki. “Remember, all this is a fortress of dreams. Nothing in Netherworld has a definite shape; everything you see comes from the minds that are imprisoned here. That includes our friend…” Loki indicated the World Serpent. “Now, you and I both know that I’m not fond of snakes. And this being Netherworld, and nightmares being more or less coin of the realm, what could be more natural than to appoint a snake—and not just any snake, but the World Serpent—as my guard? And so, in a way, I brought him here—or at least I summoned this Aspect of him. And until I free it—back into the real world—then he’s just another prisoner. Here forever. Just like the rest of them.”

  As he spoke, the snake gave a louder hiss, and droplets of venom clouded the air.

  “Oh, stop it,” said Loki. “I mean, did you really think I was going to let you loose after what happened last time? Last time,” he told Maddy, “not only did he change the tides of the One Sea, flood the Middle World, swallow the Thunderer, hammer and all, but by the time they got him under control, the whole Nine Worlds were full of his wormholes, with the armies of Chaos passing through like mice through a piece of Ridings cheese…” He leveled his devastating smile at the World Serpent. “Still, Jormungand, old son,” he said brightly. “Or can I call you Jorgi for short? I like Jorgi. It sounds cheerful and unthreatening. Friendly, even. What do you say?”

  Across the dizzy space that separated them, the World Serpent spat a stream of venom that missed Loki but took a chunk out of the rock wall.

  Loki gave Maddy a nervous grin. “He’s fine.”

  “Look,” said Maddy. “Fascinating though this tour of your relatives may be, I thought we were here to rescue my father…”

  “And so we are, with Jorgi’s help.”

  Maddy looked at the giant snake as it circled, still chained to its rock. “You thought that would help us?”

  “He helped me. If we can get Thor into Dream—”

  “Dream?” said Maddy in surprise. “But I thought—”

  “Well, he can’t escape through Hel,” he said. “You’d need a body for that, of course, and as far as I know, we don’t have a spare.”

  “Oh.” For a moment Maddy was at a loss. She’d focused so strongly on the idea of rescue that such practicalities had never occurred to her.

  Loki knew it; had counted on it, in fact, in his dealings with the Whisperer. Thor freed into Dream was one thing, but Thor re-embodied and out for revenge—that he could definitely do without. Still, first things first, he told himself. It was a long way out of Netherworld, and even Dream was not without risk.

  He gave Jormungand his cheeriest smile. “Better late than never,” he said.

  The creature gave a silent hiss.

  “But you can’t free it,” protested Maddy. “Quite apart from the damage it could do, ripping holes between the Worlds, won’t it rip you apart the moment you—”

  “Thanks for that,” said Loki dryly. Even in Aspect, his face was pale. “Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind. But with”—he glanced at the deathwatch around his neck—“forty-three minutes left to go, I’m running short of good ideas. As for damage, I’m hoping that can work to our benefit.”

  “How?”

  “Well, for a start, we could use a diversion. Netherworld isn’t going to sit quiet forever, you know, and as soon as it senses the disruption we’ve caused, it’s going to send something—someone—to investigate. I’m hoping that by the time that happens, Jorgi here will have covered our tracks. If I’m right, it should at least buy us a little time.”

  “I see,” said Maddy. “And if you’re not?”

  “If I’m not,” he said, “it shouldn’t trouble either of us for long. Now take my hand.”

  Maddy took it and felt his fingers clamp down on hers. There was a brief sensation of sidestepping—

  “Don’t let go,” Loki warned. “You’re not going to want to be around when Jorgi gets loose.”

  On the circling rock the World Serpent writhed and tore at its chains. The stench of its venom redoubled; the air was mulled with its secretions.

  And then, quite suddenly, the chains weren’t there.

  It was almost comic. For a second Jormungand struggled against thin air, its jaws arcing into nothingness, its leaden coils slipping into the pit…and then its eyes fixed on Loki. It opened its jaws, seemed to stiffen—and then it struck.

  It struck repeatedly, knocking slabs from the rock wall as big as oliphants to drop and circle into the gulf. The air swam with venom, crackled with electricity. In seconds the ledge on which they had been standing was nothing but a nubbin of rock overlooking the void. Nothing else was left alive. Nothing could have survived that strike; nothing remained but the World Serpent in the dark, deserted cell.

  11

  “Of course, you know he’s following us,” gasped Loki, out of breath.

  “Wasn’t that the plan?”

  “What plan?”

  They were running hand in hand down a broad passageway lined with doors, lit now with a lurid phosphorescence that seemed to come from everywhere. Except that running wasn’t quite the word, and the ground beneath them felt insubstantial, as in dreams, and as they ran, the scenery changed, the doors shifting from Gothic oak monstrosities to lead-paneled archways to holes in the wall vaulted with bones.

  “How far now?” said Maddy.

  “We’re almost there. Just making sure…”

  The light too was changing fast, now red, now green, and there was a sound—a sound that pressed like a thumb onto their eardrums—the sound of a million dreamers locked inside a million dreams.

  “How did you do that?” shouted Maddy above the din.

  “Do what?”

  “You know. Get out of the cell.”

  “Shortcut,” he said. “An Aspect-shift I picked up from Jorgi. Now hang on…” He stopped at a door that was red and black and studded all over with glamours and runes. “You might find this a bit…upsetting.”

  Maddy looked at him. “My father?”

  Loki nodded. He looked tired behind his Aspect; much of the brightness had gone from his colors. Around his neck Hel’s deathwatch indicated that they had thirty-eight minutes left.

  He flung a handful of runes at the door; the inscription upon it brightened, but the door stayed shut.

  “Damn.” Loki steadied himself against the closed door and took a couple of deep breaths. “I’m nearly done,” he said. “You’ll have to do it.”

  Maddy studied the locked door. Thuris should move it, she decided, and hit the door as hard as she could. It trembled but did not yield. Once more she hit it—with Ós and T ýr—once more it trembled, and the passageway trembled with it, shaking beneath their feet.

  “It’s coming,” said Loki.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “One more hit, and I think I’ll—”

  “I wasn’t talking about the door.”

  He was looking beyond her, and for a second Maddy didn’t understand. Then she looked up and saw what was coming and in that same instant hurled Hagall at the door as hard as she could while Loki, with what remained of his strength, flung Isa in the path of the World Serpent, which seemed to fill the passage some fifty yards behind them.

  Isa froze in midair, creating a solid barrier against which Jormungand hurled itself in a frenzy. It held, though the first blow cracked the ice; clearly it would not hold the serpent long. But it was enough: in front of Maddy the door did not open, it simply vanished and, with another of those sickening sidesteps, they were inside.

  12

  From the other side of the river Dream, Hel was watching the proceedings with interest. The deathwatch served a
number of purposes—not least to keep her suitably informed—and now, in a room deep in her bone white citadel, she watched the progress of the two trespassers through the darkened mirror of her dead eye.

  How odd, she thought. How very odd. Of course, Loki was never entirely predictable, but this was the last place she would have expected him to return. She felt reluctant curiosity as to what his plan might be. She assumed he had a plan—whatever else he was, he was no fool—though she wasted no anxiety over his probable fate. Hel would weep no tears if Loki fell—in fact, she thought, to witness his destruction might give her the first true fleeting twinge of pleasure she had felt since Balder’s death, centuries before.

  Not that it would last—nothing did. And yet Hel, incurious as she usually was, watched rapt as the seconds ticked by. Her dead eye saw Netherworld, churning with dreams, and her living eye was fixed upon the two figures lying side by side on the shore of the river, their physical bodies linked to their Netherworld counterparts by a skein of runelight finer than silk.

  To sever the skein was to cut short their lives—but she had promised them an hour inside, and such an oath, even to Loki, must not be broken. Still, she was intrigued—not least by the glam he had left behind. A powerful glam, some relic of the Elder Days, that gleamed and shone like a forgotten sun. She couldn’t imagine why Loki had brought it—or why he had pretended to hide it away, knowing that she would spot it at once.

  And now it was calling to her from its place in the desert, in a soft and coaxing voice that seemed—almost, but not quite—familiar.

  It’s a trap, thought Hel. Whatever it is, he wants me to take it.

  Through her living eye she observed the Trickster. He looked asleep; occasionally he twitched and frowned, as if in the throes of some nightmare. She could see the thread that joined him to his dreaming self, a transparent wisp of violet light. She fingered it delicately and smiled to think that in another world she was sending a shiver down Loki’s spine.

  Could it be a trap? she wondered. It wasn’t like Loki to be so obvious. And yet—if he didn’t want her to take the thing, then why had he left it so obviously?

  Loki wasn’t obvious. Loki was subtle. And so, whatever he was planning, the obvious answer must be false. Unless he’d known she would think this way. In which case the obvious answer was the right one. Unless—

  Unless, she thought, he had no plan.

  Unless the carelessness was a bluff designed to make her think he had something clever up his sleeve. Some kind of protection, some backup in case of a hostile reception. But what if he hadn’t? What if, as she’d first suspected, he was running on nothing but wits and bravado?

  If so, then he was at her mercy. And the glam he carried—that tantalizing bauble—was hers for the taking.

  With a word she summoned it. The glam was hiding in his pack, so bright now that she could almost see it through the worn leather. She opened it, and the Whisperer’s light blazed out, almost blinding Hel with its intensity.

  Hel had never seen the Whisperer. Mimir’s time was before her birth, and the Æsir had never been generous with their secrets. But she knew a glam when she saw one, and now she held it in her hands, feeling its energy run through her, its voice now deafening in her mind.

  Kill them, said the Whisperer. Kill them both.

  13

  A problem shared is a problem solved, or so the saying goes. Fortunately for Sugar-and-Sack, he was quite unaware that he now shared the problem of his journey to Hel with Odin, the six Vanir, the Huntress, Nat Parson and a dead Examiner, Adam Scattergood, the parson’s wife, a farmer from the valley, and a potbellied pig, and even if he had known, it is doubtful whether the knowledge would have cheered him.

  He’d been checking the runestone every five minutes or so, and either his imagination was working overtime or in that short time it had darkened still further. Sugar didn’t think it was his imagination. And he knew what he was supposed to do.

  “The Underworld,” he muttered feverishly. “He must be madder than I thought. Wants me to go to the Underworld, eh? Wants me to find a Whisperer? What’s a Whisperer? I sez. And all he sez is—”

  Don’t let me down.

  The goblin shuddered. It looked bad—but the Captain, he knew, had a knack for getting himself out of tight corners. And if he did and Sugar betrayed him…

  He stared half hypnotized at the runestone, noting the way its color deepened from vermilion to crimson to ruby.

  The stone would show him the way, the Captain had assured him. Sugar had seen such stones before, although he’d never used them. Rune magic was for Seer-folk, not goblins, and Sugar felt uncomfortable just touching the stone, let alone using it.

  But it had shown him the trail so far: every broken cantrip, every signature. And now at last the trail had run out, and it would open up the way to Hel, a road that no one living should take—not if they wanted to stay that way.

  If it turns red, then you’ll know I’m in mortal peril.

  He cast the stone against the ground, just as the Captain had told him to. And a passageway that had not been there a moment before forked out like lightning at his feet. It was dark in the passage, steps that seemed to be made of black glass staggered down into the gap, and below it, he knew, lay the final stretch—to the Underworld and the Whisperer.

  He looked down at the Captain’s charm, which had darkened once more from ruby to oxblood and now to the midnight gleam of a very good claret.

  If it turns black…

  Gods, he thought.

  And whimpering with fright, Sugar pocketed the stone and set off once again at a brisk trot down the narrow steps and along the path to the Land of the Dead.

  It had been almost three days since Odin had entered World Below on the trail of the fugitives. In that time he had moved gradually and carefully downward, favoring the smaller passageways and always keeping the river between himself and his pursuers. In this way he had crossed the Strond twice, approaching the Underworld by an oblique route that he hoped would put Skadi and her parson off his scent.

  In that time he had barely eaten, barely slept. He still traveled in darkness but found that his sense of direction had improved beyond measure and that his reading of colors had become honed to a degree of accuracy he had not known since before the war.

  He had sensed the presence of the Vanir in World Below, as he had sensed the presence of the Huntress. It was tempting to try to contact them, but in his present condition he dared not approach. Later he would, in full Aspect, once the Whisperer was his again—that is, if the Whisperer was ever his again.

  Till then he concentrated on reading the signs—and there were many, stretching across World Below like the strings of a harp, tuned to exquisite pitch. It took concentration, it took glam, but at every new sign his foreboding grew.

  Finally he cast the runes. He cast them blind, but it didn’t matter; their message was clear enough. First he drew Raedo, reversed—his own rune—crossed with Naudr, the rune of Death—

  Then Ós, the Æsir; Kaen, reversed; Hagall, the Destroyer; and finally Thuris, rune of Victory—

  —But for whom? Odin wondered. For Order or Chaos? And on whose side do the Æsir stand?

  So it begins, Odin thought. Not aboveground, as he’d imagined, but deep in the belly of Chaos itself. Not the war—surely not yet—but war would follow as winter follows fall. Loki was part of it—Maddy too. What had started the chain of events? The waking of the Sleepers? The discovery of the Whisperer? Something else? He could not tell. But he knew this: he had to be there.

  Someone else who had to be there was Ethelberta Parson. Why this was so she could not say, but as she and Dorian approached their goal, she sensed it with growing urgency. They had endured cold and discomfort, their feet were blistered, their food was gone but for a few raw potatoes they kept aside for the pig, they were out of lamp oil, and still Ethelberta was undaunted, following the squat snuffling form of Fat Lizzy through the labyrinth of Worl
d Below.

  Dorian Scattergood had long since given up hope of finding anyone in that endless maze. Even the idea of finding his way home seemed impossible now, though that was not the reason he continued to move on. Ahead of him Ethel was a dim shape against the phosphorescent walls. Patient, tireless, as unafraid of the rats and goblins they had encountered on the upper levels of World Below as she was now of the passing dead.

  “We do not need to fear them,” she had told Dorian as the first whispering wave of spirits brushed by them—he had been flattened against the wall, shaking with terror, but she had simply parted the flow and moved on, ignoring the mournful voices all around them—ignoring even the familiar voices of Jed Smith and Audun Briggs as they followed them to the Land of the Dead.

  The road into Hel had been bad enough for Maddy. But for Odin it was much worse: he could not close his blind eyes to the presence of the dead nor his ears to their pleas and curses. They sensed it, and for what seemed like miles he was carried along, feet hardly touching the floor of the passage, on wave after wave of the marching dead.

  It was not the first time he had risked that journey. Each time had been unpleasant, but this time he felt that something had changed. There was a sense almost of expectancy among the crowd, a knowing quality that made him uneasy. And for the first time they spoke to him—they called him by name.

  Blind man on the road to Hel—

  (I prayed to you, you let me die)

  Odin No-Eyes, still alive? Not.

  For.

  Long.

  When at last he heard a living voice, sensed the colors of a living being, he almost missed them both among the clamor and commotion. The voice rose and fell plaintively, seeming to argue with itself at length before falling silent for a moment, then resuming its one-sided argument.

  “I tell you, I can’t—

  “I can’t an’ I won’t, d’ye kennet, it’s unnatural, you can’t make me, all right, p’raps you can but—