Runemarks (26 page)

8

The passage they had chosen was low and very tight, half blocked with rock rubble in some parts and with a low stone roof that projected sharply at intervals, threatening to scalp them if they raised their heads. Its entrance was hidden in Little Bear Wood, and the way down was much longer and more tortuous than if they had taken the Horse’s Eye.

But, as Loki said, it was safer this way; the few light-signatures Maddy sensed were very dim and very old, which meant that One-Eye would have difficulty locating their trail, even if the runes they’d left failed to hide it entirely.

Loki, however, was taking no chances. He worked methodically to hide their trail with little glamours and runes of concealment, and Maddy would have been impressed by his attention to detail if she had not known that it was entirely motivated by self-interest. Their journey was a dangerous one, and for the first time in his life the Trickster was concerned for the safety of others—particularly Odin, who, if he managed to follow them, might find himself caught up in the perilous wheels of a prophecy that Loki devoutly (and selfishly) hoped would never be fulfilled.

“He may prove useful after all,” the Whisperer told Maddy as Loki scouted further ahead. “I can take you through World Below. But after that comes the Land of the Dead, where for all my knowledge I cannot guide you.
He,
on the other hand, has a connection.”

“What connection?” Maddy said.

“A family connection,” said the Whisperer.

Maddy stared. “A
family
connection?”

“Why, yes,” said the Whisperer. “Didn’t you know? The prodigal father’s coming home.”

It could have been worse, Loki thought. The going was hard but safe, and before long they would reach the honeycomb galleries of World Below, where he would be able to find them food and clothing (he was getting very tired of Crazy Nan’s skirts) and from which they would be able to pursue their descent unnoticed and undisturbed. Beyond that the risk—at least the risk of being followed—would decrease a little; after all, who would expect them to go willingly into the very throat of Chaos? As for any other risks they might encounter, he could not say, but so far his luck had not failed him, and he was inclined to trust it a little further.

Behind him he could sense, rather than hear, the Whisperer. Not so much
words
as
thoughts
that assaulted his wits and undermined his concentration. He would have to be careful. Even in the fire pit on some occasions, the force of its will had been almost more than he could bear. Now, at close quarters, it made his head ache, and the idea that it could look into his mind whenever it wanted did nothing to allay his discomfort.

What makes you think I’m interested in your mind?
scoffed the Whisperer.
Beats me how you can live in that snake pit anyway.

Loki shook his aching head. There was no point getting into a flyting match with the thing; insults only made it laugh, and as Chaos grew nearer, he would need all his glam for what was to come.

Shut up, Mimir,
he hissed between clenched teeth.

Four hundred years in that pit of yours and you think I’m interested in your comfort? You have a lot to atone for, Dogstar. Just be grateful we have a common interest. And don’t even
think
of double-crossing me.

Loki wasn’t about to try—at least, not until he knew what he was dealing with. Long acquaintance with the Whisperer had made him wary, and its sudden desire to be taken to Hel troubled him immensely. Maddy believed it was helping the gods—but Loki was infinitely less trusting, and he knew that the Whisperer wasn’t in the habit of doing favors.

It wanted something—
What, old friend?

What do you care? We have a deal.

Loki knew he should leave it be. The more he spoke, the more he listened to the Whisperer, the greater its hold over his mind. For the moment he could still tune it out; for all its power it had not managed to penetrate his deepest thoughts. That suited him fine. And yet…

Why help the Æsir? What’s your plan?

In his mind, the Whisperer laughed.
I might well ask the same of you. Since when did you care about saving the Worlds? You’re only interested in saving your skin, and if I had any choice right now, you’d be chained to a rock in Netherworld, having your guts pecked out by crows.

Loki shrugged dismissively.
Sticks and stones may break my bones—

They’ll do worse than that in the Black Fortress.

They’ll have to catch me first,
said Loki.

Oh, they will,
said the Whisperer.

They traveled in silence after that.

9

Meanwhile, in World Below, Odin One-Eye was awake at last. His time in the roundhouse had left him vulnerable, and although he was a quick healer, he needed time to recover his glam. As a result, it was past midday before he awoke to discover that Maddy and Loki had disappeared.

No one seemed to know where they had gone; certainly not the goblins, who in the absence of their captain seemed to have lost any control they might once have had and were deserting Red Horse Hill in droves, taking what loot they could carry with them.

He intercepted and questioned a number of these fugitives but could make little of what they told him. Rumors were flying like wild geese. The Order was marching on the Hill; the Nameless had risen; the World Ash had fallen; Surt the Destroyer had crossed over from Chaos and was even now on his way to devour the world.

There were other, more plausible rumors as well: the Captain was dead (Odin put this down to wishful thinking); World Below was overrun; any treasure, food, and ale was therefore free to all comers—this at least was true enough, as Odin discovered on entering the food cellars, although most of the goblins he found there were too drunk to make any sense.

By contrast, in World Above an ominous quiet reigned. The digging machines were abandoned in the open Eye; in the fields only a few people came and went. It felt like a Sunday, but the church bells were silent and even the farmers, who had good reason to be busy, seemed to have forsaken their business. Watching the world through the rune
Bjarkán,
Odin wondered at the eerie stillness while over the Hill the wild geese flew and storm clouds gathered sullen over the valley of the Strond.

Something was stirring, he could sense it clearly. It shivered through World Below, rattling bones and blowing through doorways. It had a voice—seven voices, in fact—and Odin had no need of truesight or oracle to know from where that wind was blowing.

The Sleepers.

Well, he thought, it was inevitable. Once Skadi had awakened, rousing the others was simply a matter of time. And without the Whisperer he could not know for sure what they knew or what they were planning. Did
they
have the Whisperer? Were they responsible for Maddy’s disappearance? And where was Loki? Was he still alive? And if so, what was his game?

It was crooked, of course—
that
went without saying—but the one thing of which Odin was still sure was that the Vanir would oppose any partnership with the Trickster. If Skadi had convinced them that Loki and Odin were together again, then he would have to approach them with the greatest of care.

And approach them he must, if he was to have the answers to his questions.

Casting his gaze toward the Horse’s Eye, he had found their summons in the form of a white-headed crow bearing a message. It sat on the big stone on top of the Hill, cocked its head, and spoke.

Craw.

One-Eye liked crows and knew their language from all the times he had taken their shape. He drew close to the bird and through the rune
Bjarkán
assured himself that this was indeed a common crow and not one of the Vanir in bird Aspect.

Vanir,
it said.
Parley. No trick.

One-Eye nodded. “Where?” he said.

Parson house.

“When?”

Tonight.

Thoughtfully Odin scattered a handful of scraps for the crow, which flapped down and began to peck at the food.
No trick,
it had said. But the parson’s house seemed a strange place to meet—could they be thinking of an alliance with the Folk?—and in today’s world, he knew, even old friends were not to be trusted.

Damn them, damn them.
He was getting too old for diplomacy. His shoulder was still on fire from Jed Smith’s crossbow bolt; he was worried about Maddy, suspicious of the Vanir, and distressingly weakened by the power of the Word.

The Word. Oh, he’d known of its existence for many years, but he had never encountered its effects firsthand. Now that he had, he feared it more than ever. A single Examiner had bled him helpless. One man—not even a Magister—had come within inches of breaking his mind.

Imagine an army primed with the Word.
The Book of Apocalypse didn’t seem quite so far-fetched now that he’d seen what the Word could do. And the Order was strong—in purpose as well as in numbers—while he and his kind were scattered and in conflict. But what could he—what could any of them do against the Nameless? Alone, he might gain a few years’ reprieve—ten, twenty if he was lucky—before the Order finally tracked him down. Together—if he managed to win back the Vanir at all—what could they hope for but defeat?

Perhaps the Examiner was right,
he thought.
Perhaps my time is over.
And yet the thought did not fill him with the despair he might have expected. Instead he was conscious of a strange sensation, a kind of lightening of the spirit, and in that moment he recognized the feeling. He’d felt it before, in the days before Ragnarók, with Worlds colliding and the forces of Chaos awaiting their time. It was the joy of a gambler throwing down his last coin, the knowledge that everything stands or falls on the turn of a card.

Well, what is it to be?
he asked himself.
A few years’ reprieve or a merciful death? A sliver of hope or a bolt from the blue?

His chances were poor; he knew that already. The Vanir mistrusted him, Skadi had sworn vengeance on him, Loki had fled, Maddy was lost, the Whisperer missing, the Hill wide open, and the Folk on his trail. And without the Oracle the chances of his being able to talk, cajole, negotiate, or outright lie the Vanir into obedience were small indeed.

But Odin was a gambler. He liked those odds. They appealed to his sense of the dramatic. And so once more as the sun tipped westward, he picked up his staff and his battered old pack and made his way down Red Horse Hill.

10

In Skadi’s absence Nat Parson had slept, exhausted after his night’s work. But his sleep had not refreshed him, punctuated as it was with itchy, uncomfortable dreams that left him feeling edgy and dissatisfied.

He woke past noon with an aching head, dizzy with hunger, and yet the thought of eating made him feel sick. Most of all he was terribly afraid that the newly acquired powers he had demonstrated to the Huntress might somehow have seeped away.

To his relief, however, the power of the Word remained undimmed. If anything, he thought it had actually
increased
as he slept, like some fast-growing creeper feeling its way through his brain. He lit the altar candles on his first try, almost without thinking, and the colors that had so overwhelmed him before now seemed familiar, almost commonplace.

How this had happened he did not know, but somehow, as he’d stepped forward at the very instant the Examiner summoned the Word against One-Eye, their minds had meshed. By accident or design? Had he been
chosen
to receive this power? With the Order, of course, anything was possible. Perhaps it
was
simply chance, the aftermath of Communion combined with some more random element—chance or choice, who knows?—but whatever it was, Nat Parson meant to keep it.

He hardly spoke to his wife at all, except to demand the loan of her second-best dress. Her best was already lying discarded somewhere out on Red Horse Hill, and Skadi would need another when she returned from the Sleepers in bird form.

Ethelberta was quite naturally reluctant to part with the cream of her wardrobe in this way, and there was a small unpleasantness, from which Nat escaped to the sanctuary of his study before his desire to use the Word on Ethelberta became too strong to resist.

Meanwhile, the Huntress had returned. It had taken some hours to bring the Vanir around to her way of thinking, and it was early afternoon by the time she reached the village. By then her quarry was already gone: Maddy and Loki into World Below and Odin into World Above, to observe the parsonage and to check the area for a possible ambush.

He did not observe Skadi as, in the guise of a white she-wolf, she explored the intricacies of Red Horse Hill, sniffing out its passageways, calculating its defenses, searching for a fresh trail. Briefly she caught Loki’s scent, but it was faint and soon ran cold, and she could find no trace of Maddy Smith.

Well, that could wait, she told herself.

Today she hunted bigger game.

She turned her attention once more to the Hill. A natural fortress, in normal circumstances it could have withstood a siege of a hundred years or more. But now, with its gates in ruins and its troops deserting, the fortress might yet become a baited trap.
Naudr,
the Binder, angled just so against the catch of a door, might be set like a snare for an unsuspecting rabbit, to snap shut on whoever passed that way, while the rune
Hagall
could be left like a powder charge, to explode in the face of the unsuspecting victim.

She entered through the ruins of the Horse’s Eye and spent the best part of the afternoon setting as many of these snares as she could. She dropped them at crossroads and corner stones, at tunnel mouths and around dark bends. She worked the rune
Naudr
into a net and stretched it across a darkened doorway, and she fashioned the rune
T
ý
r
into a cruel barb that would hook the victim like a fish.

It might work, the Huntress thought. A man on the run—or even a girl—might well be taken unawares. An unguarded moment, a careless step—and the quarry would be caught or wounded, weakened, helpless; easy prey.

It was nearly four on the town clock when Skadi returned to the parsonage in her wolf Aspect. Ethelberta, who had vowed that this time she would not submit so easily to the woman’s demands, found herself quite at a loss when the Huntress arrived, and soon Skadi was clad in sumptuous white velvet (which would
never
brush clean, thought Ethel) while Ethel herself was giving orders to prepare the house for six more guests and hoping that they, at least, would arrive decently clothed.

Skadi, however, had other concerns. She had sown some suspicion among the Vanir—and Loki’s involvement had done the rest—but Heimdall and Frey, at least, remained loyal to the General. If Odin had the Whisperer and if Maddy was really Thor’s child, then he might yet be able to talk them round. Of course, if there were to be a
casualty
…

Coolly Skadi considered the Vanir. Not Heimdall, not yet—he was too powerful to lose. Not Frey, for the same reason. Not Idun—she was not as helpless as she first appeared, and besides, they might need a healer in times to come. Bragi? Njörd? She owed him nothing, she told herself. They were no longer married—and yet she was loath to sacrifice the Man of the Sea. He might be useful after all. Freyja, on the other hand…

Skadi considered the goddess of desire.

Oh, she had some powers. She wasn’t
useless.
She was annoying, however, and Skadi admitted to herself that of all the surviving Vanir, Freyja was the one she would miss the least. Not because of her beauty—everyone knew Skadi despised such things—or even because of their conflicting natures, but because of the discord she spread in her wake. With Freyja around, arguments broke out; friends quarreled; the most peaceable folk turned green-eyed and crotchety. Besides, she and Odin—

But Skadi bit off that thought before it could take proper shape. This was no personal grudge, she told herself. This was a tactical choice, taken for the greater good. The fact that Freyja and Odin had always enjoyed more than a passing intimacy did not enter into her calculations at all. Freyja’s death might grieve him, of course. It might even
wound
him in a place even the Word could not reach. Should she let that affect her decision? She thought not. Loki might have
caused
her father’s death, but it had been Odin who
ordered
it, Odin who afterward had bought her silence with a few compliments and a strategic marriage. And over the years, she had begun to realize how he’d manipulated her, how he’d used her to make a much-needed peace with the Ice People, how long and how cleverly he had misdirected her anger, making her believe that Loki, and Loki alone, was to blame…

And now the brothers were together again.

Skadi clenched her fists against the white velvet of Ethelberta Parson’s second-best gown. No amount of ironing would remove those creases, but Skadi’s thoughts were far away. In her mind clouds gathered, blood spilled, and Revenge, long deferred but all the sweeter for that, opened its sleepy eyes and smiled.

Isa
is the only rune of the Elder Script to have no reverse position. As a result, Skadi had lost none of her powers in the wake of Ragnarók. She considered herself a match for almost any of the Vanir, even Frey or Heimdall—but against the six of them together she knew she could not prevail. Unless, of course…

It had been a long time since she’d had the leisure or inclination to create a new weapon, and this one, she knew, must be foolproof. Not large, no, but every thread picked over with runes of concealment, a weapon of elegance—a weapon of stealth.

If she’d had time, she might have fashioned a shirt—even a cloak, barbed in every stitch with runes of ice and poison—but time was short, and instead she made a tiny handkerchief, edged with ribbon lace so fine that you could hardly even see it, so intricate that the glamours that warped and wefted it were hidden between the love knots and the embroidered flowers, so deadly that a single cantrip would be enough to unleash its working. And on it, in plain, bright script, she placed the rune
Fé—

Freyja.

Skadi was pleased. Normally she disdained the homely art of needlework, but as a daughter of the Ice People she was skilled in it nevertheless. Carefully she folded the tiny handkerchief and put it into a drawer of the elegant escritoire. The Vanir would be here before nightfall. Smiling, the Huntress awaited their arrival.

Odin saw them coming from his vantage point beneath a stand of trees, half a mile from Malbry village. It was six o’clock in the evening, and against the last of the sunset he could just make out their signatures moving across the fields, arching into the smoky sky. Skadi’s colors were not among them—but it was possible that she was hiding in ambush nearby, using the others as bait to draw him in. Of Maddy and Loki there was no sign, and only now did he admit to himself how much he had been hoping to see them there.

He cast
ýr
and ducked behind a hedge. There they were: the Reaper, the Watchman, the Poet, the Healer, the Man of the Sea, and finally the goddess of desire, trailing far behind. Why had they chosen to come on foot? What was their business at the parsonage? And exactly how much did they know?

Through
Bjarkán
he tried to detect the Whisperer. There was no sign of it, nor could he hear its voice as yet. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. He moved in closer along the hedge, circling behind the little group so that he stood the least chance of being spotted. It felt so wrong, to be hiding thus from his friends, but the world had changed, and not even old friendships could be taken entirely on trust.

Njörd was speaking. “I know she’s reckless—maybe even a little wild—”

“A
little
wild!” That was Freyja, her long hair shining like frost, the links of her necklace catching the light. “She’s an
animal,
Njörd—all that prowling around as a wolf and an eagle…”

“She was always loyal. At Ragnarók—”

Frey said, “We were at war then.”

“If Skadi’s right, we’re at war
now.
”

“With the Folk. With the Order, perhaps,” said Heimdall. “But not with our people.”

“The Æsir are
not
our people,” said Njörd. “We might all do well to remember it.”

Behind the hedge Odin frowned. So
that
was where the land lay. Of course, Njörd was the oldest of the Vanir, father to the twins, and it was understandable that his allegiance should belong to the Vanir first and the Æsir second. Besides, he’d long suspected that Njörd still felt tender toward his estranged wife, and as Odin knew, there could be no reasoning with a lover. He himself was not immune: there had been times—quite a few of them—when even Odin the Far-Sighted had shown himself as blind as the next man…

He glanced at Freyja, still dragging behind, her blue dress black to the knees with mud. “How far now?” she wailed. “I’ve been walking for hours, I’ve got a blister, and just
look
at my gown—”

“If I hear any more about your gown, or your shoes, or your feather dress…,” muttered Heimdall.

“We’re nearly there,” said Idun gently. “But I can give you some apple if your foot hurts—”

“I don’t want an
apple.
I want some dry
shoes,
and a clean
dress,
and a
bath—
”

“Oh, shut up and use a cantrip,” said Heimdall.

Freyja looked at him and sniffed. “You don’t have a clue, do you, Goldie?”

From his hiding place, Odin smiled.