Runemarks (8 page)

And perhaps it was a trick of the light, but it seemed to Maddy that her friend had grown taller somehow and looked younger, stronger, his colors brighter and more powerful, as if years had been shorn from him—years, she thought, or maybe more. For Maddy knew that the Winter War had come to its end over five centuries ago; demon wolves had swallowed the sun and moon, and the Strond had swollen to the flanks of the mountains, leveling everything in its path.

Nat Parson called it
Tribulation
and preached of how the Ancient of Days had tired of mankind’s evil and sent fire and ice to cleanse the world.

One-Eye called it
Ragnarók.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Does it matter?” said One-Eye.

He must have seen his answer in Maddy’s face, because he nodded and some of the tension went out of him. “Good,” he said. “Now run and find the Whisperer—or let it find you if it can. Stay hidden, and stay alert. Trust no one, whoever they may appear to be, and above all, say nothing—to
anyone
—of me.”

“Wait!” said Maddy as he turned away.

“I’ve waited enough,” said the Outlander, and without a glance or a farewell gesture he began to walk back down Red Horse Hill.

1

The passage was not even, but dipped down at irregular intervals, sometimes crossing water, sometimes narrowing to a cleft through which Maddy had to squeeze to pass through. By inverting the runes, she had closed the mouth of the tunnel behind her, and now the rune
Bjarkán
at her fingertips was her only means of penetrating the darkness.

After some minutes, however, she found that the passageway had broadened a little and that its earth walls had begun to give way to a hard, almost glassy surface. It was rock, Maddy realized as she moved deeper into the hillside; some kind of dark and shiny mineral, its surface occasionally broken by a crystalline outcrop that shone like a cluster of needles.

After half an hour the floor too had mostly changed to the same glassy rock, and sheets of phosphorescence powdered the walls, so that the way was softly illuminated.

And there were color-signatures everywhere, like skeins of spiderweb, too many to count or to identify. Many of these showed the remnants of magic—cantrips and glamours and workings and runes—as easy to see as wagon tracks on a muddy road.

She cast
ýr,
the Protector, to keep herself hidden, but even so she was sure that among so many workings she must have set off a few alarms. Uncomfortably she considered what kind of spider might live in such an intricate web, and her mind returned to One-Eye, and to the person—friend or enemy—he feared, who might be lying in wait at the heart of the Hill.

What was she looking for? she wondered. And what did One-Eye know of any treasure of the Elder Age?

Well, she told herself, there was only one way to find out, and the simple fact of being under the Hill was thrilling enough—for the moment, at least. She wondered how far downward the passage led, but even as she did so, she felt the ground drop abruptly at her feet, and without further warning the narrow walls at either side of her opened to reveal a huge underground canyon, broadening out far beyond Maddy’s field of vision into a labyrinth of tunnels and a vastness of caverns and halls.

For a long time Maddy could do nothing but watch and wonder. The passage had come to a sharp stairway cut into the rock face; this led downward into a vast gallery, occasionally intersecting with other walkways and cavern entrances set at intervals down the canyon walls, with what seemed to be suspended catwalks, illuminated by torches or hanging lanterns, on the distant far side.

Maddy had expected a single cave, maybe even a single passage. Instead there were hundreds—no, thousands—of caves and passages. From the bottom of the canyon came a sound of water, and although it was too dark—in spite of the lanterns—to see the river itself, Maddy guessed it to be broad and fast-moving; its voice was like that of a wolf with a throatful of rocks.

Here too there were spells and signatures, there were green fingers of phosphorescence, nuggets of mica studded the walls, and wherever there was a trickle of water against the rock, musky flowers cast their tendrils: the pale, sad lilies of World Below.

“Gods,” said Maddy. “Where do I start?”

Well, to begin with, more light. Raising her hand, she cast
Sól
—the sun—so that her fingertips blazed and the tiny crystals embedded in the steps and walls flared with sudden brilliance.

It was not nearly enough to light the vastness ahead, but even so, she felt a little better, if only because there was less chance of her falling down the stairway. At the same time, she thought she caught sight of something at her elbow, something that shrank quickly into the shadows as her light shone out, and, almost without thinking, she cast
Naudr
like a net and pulled it in with a flick of her fingers.

“
You
again!” she exclaimed when she saw what she had caught.

The goblin spat but could not escape.

“Stop that!” said Maddy, drawing the rune a little tighter.

The goblin pulled a face but kept still.

“That’s better,” said Maddy. “Now, Smá-rakki”—the goblin made a
pff!
sound—“I want you to stay right here with me. No slinking off this time, do you understand?”

“Pff!”
said the goblin again. “All this fuss for a nip of ale.” All the same, he did not move but glared at Maddy with his amber eyes, lips drawn back over his pointed teeth.

“Why were you following me?”

The goblin shrugged. “Curiosity, kennet?”

Maddy laughed. “Plus, I know your name.”

The goblin said nothing, but his eyes gleamed.

“
A named thing is a tamed thing.
That’s it, isn’t it?”

Still the goblin said nothing.

Maddy smiled at the unexpected piece of luck. She was not sure how long her control over him would last, but if she could have an ally—however reluctant—in World Below, then maybe her task would be a simpler one. “Now listen to me, Smá-rakki—”

“They call me Sugar,” said the goblin sullenly.

“What?”

“Sugar. You deaf? Short for Sugar-and-Sack. Well? You don’t think any of us go round tellin’ folk our
real
names, do you?”

“Sugar-and-
Sack
?” repeated Maddy.

Sugar scowled. “Gødfolk names are like that,” he said. “Sugar-and-Sack, Peck-in-the-Crown, Pickle-Nearest-the-Wind. I don’t go round laughin’ at
your
name, do I?”

“Sorry.
Sugar,
” said Maddy, trying to keep a straight face.

“Right. No harm done,” said Sugar with dignity. “Now, what exactly can I do you for?”

Maddy leaned closer. “I need a guide.”

“You need yer bleedin’ head seein’ to,” said the goblin. “The minute the Captain learns you’re here—”

“Then you’ll have to make sure he doesn’t,” she said. “Now, I can’t possibly find my way around this place on my own—”

“Look,” said the goblin, “if it’s the ale you’re after, then I can get it back, no trouble—”

“It isn’t the ale,” said Maddy.

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But you’re going to help me find it.”

It took some minutes to convince Sugar that he had no choice. But goblins are simple creatures, and he was not blind to the fact that the sooner Maddy had what she wanted, the sooner she would be out of his way.

However, he was clearly very much in awe of the individual he called the Captain, and Maddy soon realized that it would be best if she did not confront her new ally with too great a conflict of loyalties.

“So who is he, this captain of yours?”

The goblin sniffed and looked away.

“Oh, come on, Sugar. He must have a name.”

“Course he has.”

“Well?”

The goblin shrugged expressively. It was a shrug that began at the tips of his furry ears and went all the way down to his clawed feet, making every link of his chain mail shiver.

“Call him Sky Trekker, if you like, or Wildfire, or Crookmouth, or Hawk-Eye, or Dogstar. Call him Airy, call him Wary—”

“Not his nicknames, Sugar. His
real
name.”

The goblin made a face. “You think he’d tell
me
?”

For a while Maddy thought hard. One-Eye had warned her that he might not be the only one with interests under the Hill, and the webwork of glamours she had encountered on her way in confirmed his suspicions. But the goblins’ captain—most likely a goblin himself, or maybe a big cave-troll—could
he
be the one of which her friend had spoken? It seemed unlikely—no goblin had woven those spells.

Still, she thought, it was worth finding out more about this captain person and any threat he might represent. But Sugar was annoyingly vague; his attention span was catlike at the best of times, and as soon as the conversation turned to details of where, why, and how, he simply lost interest.

“So, what’s your captain like?” she said.

Sugar frowned and scratched his head. “I think the word is
volatile,
” he said at last. “Yeh, that’s the word I’m lookin’ for. Volatile and
narsty.
Tricky too.”

“I meant, what does he
look
like?” persisted Maddy.

“Just pray you don’t see him,” said Sugar darkly.

“Great,” said Maddy.

In silence, they moved on.

2

According to legend, the world beneath the Middle World is divided into three levels, linked by one great river. World Below is the realm of the Mountain People, the goblins, trolls, and dwarves. Beneath that is Hel’s kingdom, traditionally given over to the dead, then Dream, one of the three great tributaries of the Cauldron of Rivers, and lastly, at the very door of Chaos, Netherworld, known to some as the Black Fortress, where Surt the Destroyer guards the gate and the gods themselves have no dominion.

Maddy already knew this, of course. One-Eye’s teachings had been thorough on all matters concerning the geography of the Nine Worlds. But what she had not suspected was the monstrous
scale
of World Below: the countless passageways, tunnels, alcoves, and lairs that made up the underside of the Hill. There were rifts and fissures and crannies and nooks; and dugouts and dens; and side passages, storerooms, walkways, and potholes, burrows and warrens and larders and pits. And after what seemed like hours of searching through these, Maddy’s excitement at actually being in the fabled halls was starting to fade visibly as she began to understand that, even with Sugar’s reluctant help, she was unlikely to be able to cover even the hundredth part of them.

They found goblins only on the top level of the great gallery. Cat-faced, golden-eyed, squirrel-tailed, all dressed in mail and rags and leather, they paid little attention to Maddy or to her companion.

They were not the only inhabitants of that level. As she hurried along the crowded passageways, Maddy passed dozens of other creatures, all as busy and incurious as the goblins themselves: Tunnel People, colored like the clay of their native earth, with great jaws and tiny, lashless eyes; Mountain People; Sky People; Wood People; even a couple of men of the Folk, hooded and furtive, with traders’ packs on their shoulders and staves in their hands.

“Aye, miss, there’s always some that’ll trade with the Gødfolk,” said Sugar when Maddy commented on this. “You don’t think you’re the only one what’s found their way down here, do yer? Or that the Eye’s the only gateway under the Hill?”

Below that there was less traffic, fewer spells. Here were storerooms, vaults, sleeping quarters, food stores. Maddy, who was growing hungry, was tempted to raid these, but goblins are not especially particular about what they eat, and she had heard too many tales to take the risk. Instead, searching her pockets, she found an apple core and a handful of nuts and made a small, unsatisfying meal of these, a decision she was to regret later.

They moved down toward the river, and here at last were stone lanes packed with spoils and takings. Remembering what One-Eye had told her, Maddy cast
Bjarkán
and searched, but among the webwork of little spells and signatures that crisscrossed the tunnels, among the bundles of feathers, chests of rags, pots and pans, and broken daggers and battered shields, she could find no sign of anything resembling a treasure of the Elder Age.

Goblins, of course, are terrible hoarders and, unlike dwarves, will steal anything that comes to hand, regardless of its value. But Maddy was not discouraged. Somewhere in all this, she was sure she would find the Whisperer. Rather an odd name for a treasure, she thought, but then she remembered the Dropper, Odin’s ring; his spear, Fear-Striker; and Mjølnir, the Pounder, the hammer of Thor; and told herself that the treasures of the Elder Age had often borne such mysterious names.

And so she searched on: through old mattresses, dry bones, and broken crockery; through sticks and stones and dolls’ heads and partnerless shoes and loaded dice and fake toenails and scraps of paper and tasteless china ornaments and dirty handkerchiefs and forgotten love poems and balding oriental rugs and lost schoolbooks and headless mice.

But still, as One-Eye had warned her, she found nothing of value—no gold, no silver, not even a nickel penny.

“There’s nowt here.” The goblin had grown increasingly restive as they proceeded deeper into the belly of the Hill. “There’s nowt down here and it’s not bloody safe.”

Maddy shrugged and kept on going.

“Now if I knew what you were looking
for
…,” said Sugar.

“I’ll tell you when I’ve found it.”

“You don’t even know what it looks like, do yer?” he said.

“Shut up and watch where you’re going.”

“You don’t bloody
know
!”

As Maddy followed Sugar deeper and deeper into the Hill, she began to fear that the goblin was right. The Hill was a ragman’s paradise, stuffed from seam to seam with worthless trash. There was nothing resembling treasure here; nothing magical, nothing precious, nothing approaching One-Eye’s description.

Also it was clear to Maddy that Sugar was as baffled by their search as she was herself. He had repeatedly denied that there was any kind of treasure beneath the Hill, and after consideration she was inclined to believe him. Goblins don’t really understand wealth and are just as likely to steal a broken teapot as half a crown or a diamond ring. Besides, she just couldn’t imagine how a treasure of the Elder Age—a thing of such importance that One-Eye could spend years trying to locate it—would remain for long in the hands of Sugar and his friends.

No, the more Maddy thought about it, the less likely it seemed that the Good Folk had anything to do with this. The secret—if it was there at all—lay deeper than the goblins’ lair.

In the hours that passed, she twice cast
Naudr
on her reluctant companion, with slightly less effect each time. She was very hungry and wished she had taken advantage of the goblins’ food stores, but these were far behind her now and hunger, fatigue, and the strain of controlling the goblin, casting and recasting
Sól,
and passing unseen through the labyrinth of spells were beginning to take their toll. Her glam was weakening like a lamp fast running out of oil. Soon it would be used up.

Sugar was not unaware of this, and his gold eyes gleamed as he trotted tirelessly down one passage after another, leading Maddy further and further under the Hill, away from the storerooms and into the dark.

Maddy followed him recklessly. The webwork of signatures that had so baffled her on the earliest levels had mostly thinned out and disappeared, leaving her with one single persistently bright and powerful trail that overwhelmed everything else and filled her with curiosity. It was an unusual color—a pale and luminous violet shade—and it lit the darkness, crossing and re-crossing as if someone had passed there many, many times. Maddy followed—thirsty now and numb with fatigue, but with a growing sense of excitement and hope that blinded her to her own weakening glam as well as to the furtive glint in the goblin’s eye.

They were passing through a large, high-ceilinged cavern with a chandelier of stalactites that picked up the glow of Maddy’s runelight and threw it back at her in a thousand wands of fire and shadow. Sugar trotted ahead, ducking automatically beneath a protruding ledge of stone that brought Maddy up short and gasping. “Slow down!” she called.

But Sugar did not seem to have heard. Maddy followed him, lifting up her hand to light his trail, only to see him vanish behind an outcrop of gleaming lime.

“I said
wait
!”

As she hurried forward, Maddy realized that she was beginning to see more clearly. There was light coming from somewhere ahead; not runelight, nor a signature, nor the cool phosphorescence of the deep caves, but a warm, red, comforting glow.

“Sugar?” she called, but either the goblin could not hear or he was maliciously ignoring her, because there was no reply but the echo of her own voice—sounding small and very lost—rebounding glassily between the great stalactites.

All at once a shudder went through the ground, and Maddy lurched forward, holding out her hands to steady herself. Dust and stone fragments, dislodged by the upheaval, pattered onto her back. She was just straightening up again when a second tremor struck, and she was flung against the wall as a slab of rock the size of a haunch of beef dropped from the ceiling.

Instinctively Maddy threw herself into a connecting tunnel. Stalactites fell like spears from the roof of the main chamber as the whole mountain seemed to shudder to its roots. But although Maddy was showered with dust and particles of rock, the tunnel roof held, and as the tremor died away—sounding to Maddy like the rumble of a distant avalanche over the Seven Sleepers—she put her head out of the tunnel mouth and looked around.

Maddy, of course, knew all about earthquakes. It was the World Serpent at Yggdrasil’s Root—or so Crazy Nan had always maintained—grown too large for Netherworld to contain, shaking out his coils into the river Dream. In time, said Nan, he would grow so large that he would circle the world, as he had in the days before Tribulation, and he would gnaw right through the World Tree’s roots, causing the Nine Worlds to collapse one by one, so that Chaos would have dominion over all things forever.

Nat Parson had a different tale: according to him, the tremors were caused by the struggles of the vanquished in the dungeons of Netherworld, where the wicked (meaning the old gods) lay in chains until the End of All Days.

One-Eye denied this and spoke of rivers of fire under the earth and avalanches of hot mud and mountains boiling over like kettles, but this seemed to Maddy to be the least likely explanation of all, and she was inclined to believe that he had exaggerated the tale, as he did so many things.

Nevertheless, she was sure that an earthquake had caused the tremors, and it was very cautiously that she left the safety of the tunnel mouth. The stalactite chandelier had partly collapsed, leaving a treacherous rubble of shattered pieces in the center of the chamber. Beyond it was nothing but stillness and silence, apart from the distant after-echo and the dust that filtered from the trembling walls.

“Sugar?” called Maddy.

There was no reply, but she thought she heard a scuffling sound, far away to her right.

“Sugar?”

Once more there was no reply. Stepping out into the hall, Maddy thought she saw him, just for a moment, about a hundred steps ahead; then he dodged beneath a broken archway and was gone.

Quickly she cast
Naudr
again, but her concentration had been broken by the earthquake, the light was failing, her feet suddenly felt too far away, and she realized, too late, as the shadows rushed in, that she had fallen victim to the goblins’ oldest trick.

Sugar had never meant to guide her toward anything. Instead, without ever quite disobeying her, he had allowed her to move deeper and deeper into the perilous passages under the Hill, sapping her strength and waiting until her endurance gave way and her power over him failed and he was able to seize an opportunity to make his escape, leaving her alone, exhausted, and lost in the tumbled passageways of World Below.