Runemarks (33 page)

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 balance. 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.

“Still there, is it?”

Maddy shivered.

“Slow it down,” Loki said. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

“Slow it down? What with?”

“You’ve got weapons, haven’t you? Use them.”

Weapons?
Maddy looked down at her empty hands. Well, she supposed she had mindweapons, of a kind—but surely nothing to halt the moving mountain at their back. Loki had stopped now, the scene a broad square passageway flagged with large flat stones. In each stone was set a tiny grille of black metal. From some of these apertures sounds came—cries, groans, screams—only some of them human.

The thing—or things—that pursued them filled the corridor. Once more the size had changed to accommodate the space, and now Maddy could see that it was indeed made up of thousands of creatures, breaking apart and re-forming in constant movement.
Ephemera,
Loki had called them. Maddy saw them as thin filaments of animated light, parasites wriggling through the spaces between the Worlds. If even one of them touched her, she knew, they could sever flesh from bone; they would unmake her, burrowing under her fingernails, moving through her bloodstream, eating through her pores, working their way into spine and brain. And there were millions of them.

What could she do?

The ephemera seemed to sense her hesitation. The illusion of a single creature had dissolved and they were everywhere now, in front of them and behind, filling the corridor from floor to ceiling, writhing like deadly maggots toward them.

Glancing at Loki, Maddy could see that he was casting runes, casting them very fast and urgently in his deft and fluttering style—as she watched, she saw the corridor color veer from iron gray to the gray of a thundercloud; the metal grilles of the openings set into the stone changed shape slightly, from square to oblong—

“Got it,” he said. He dropped to his knees above one of the openings, felt with his fingertips for the edge of the grille.

The approaching ephemera seemed to understand; their movement increased and they began to swarm toward him, the filaments breaking into tiny particles, hopping like fleas across the bare stone.

Loki flinched but kept working. “Keep them off me,” he hissed at Maddy, without taking his attention away from the grille.

Maddy opened her mouth to protest, but an image stopped her—she saw those creatures pouring into her mouth, down her throat, filling her like a water skin with their rotten-meat stench—and she shut her mouth again tight.

How?
she thought silently. How did you stop a monster that could be anything, take any shape?

This is a place where all things are possible
.

All things?
thought Maddy.

Once more she looked down at her weaponless hands. Less than a spear’s length away, the air was thick with ephemera. They were even closer to Loki, sensing his purpose, gathering over his head like a wave…

Maddy took a deep breath, focusing all of her glam for the strike. It brightened, veering from reddish brown to brilliant orange, crackling with energy from fingertips and palms. She sought for a rune that might slow down her attackers.
ýr,
the Protector, was closest to hand; holding its image in her mind, she closed her eyes against the wave of ephemera and flung the rune as hard as she could.

There was a crack like a whip and a smell of burning.

Opening her eyes, Maddy saw that a dome of red light some six feet in diameter had appeared around Loki and herself, against which the ephemera crawled and slithered. It was thin, its surface as delicate and as iridescent as a wash-day soap bubble, but for the moment it held, and Maddy could see that wherever the ephemera touched it, their airy bodies crackled and dissolved, leaving a residue of soapy scum over the surface of the shield.

“It worked,” she said in disbelief. “Did you see that? Did you…?”

But Loki wasted no time in congratulations. Using
T
ý
r
to prize open the grille, he had finally managed to lift it aside. Below him a dead blackness yawned. Sliding his feet rapidly into the hole, Loki prepared to let himself drop into the void.

“Is my father down there?” said Maddy.

“No,” said Loki.

“Then what are we—?”

“That shield won’t last,” said Loki grimly. “And unless you want to be here when it fails, I suggest you shut up and follow me.”

And with that he pushed himself into the hole and vanished from sight. There was no sound as he fell. Below him there was nothing but darkness.

“Loki?” she called.

No one replied.

In that moment Maddy was frozen with fear. Had Loki tricked her? Had he fled? She peered down into the empty hole, half expecting to see a wave of ephemera surging out of the pit at her feet.

Instead there was silence.
Trust me,
he’d said. But he’d lied to her. And now Maddy remembered the Oracle’s words:
I see a traitor at the gate.

Was Loki the traitor?

There was one way to tell.

Closing her eyes, Maddy jumped.

There was no sense at all of falling. Maddy passed from the corridor to the cell below in a single step and for long seconds remained in utter darkness, with nothing at her feet and nothing above her and no clue—not even an echo—as to what she might now expect.

“Loki?” she whispered in the dark.

Then she cast
Sól,
the Bright One, and the space lit up in brilliant light.

Relief filled Maddy as she saw that Loki was still there. They were standing on a narrow ledge, looking across at a slab of rock roughly the size of a barn door, apparently suspended from nothing at all over a gulf that swallowed the light of
Sól
and gave back nothing but emptiness in return. The rock was revolving slowly in midair some fifty feet away from them, and now Maddy could see that there were chains set into the underside of the stone, from which a set of shackles dangled empty.

But it was the creature that clung to the rock’s surface that really caught Maddy’s attention. A huge snake, its scales gleaming in every imaginable shade of black, its eyes like electricity, its coils chained twice around the circling rock and dropping down into darkness.

It caught sight of Maddy and opened its jaws; even at such a distance the stench of its venom was enough to make her eyes water.

“It’s all right,” said Loki. “He can’t move from the rock.”

Maddy stared. “How do you know that?”

“Trust me. I know. Hang around the locals for a year or two, and you tend to pick up that kind of information.” He narrowed his eyes at the circling snake. “Imagine it, Maddy, if you can. To be chained to that rock, upside down, with that thing…” He shivered. “You can see why I’d be willing to do pretty much anything to free myself, can’t you?”

As if it had heard, the snake gave a hiss.

“I know, I know,” Loki said. “But really, I had no choice. I knew I could escape alone—Netherworld’s a big place and it might have taken them centuries to find out I was missing—but if I’d tried to free
you
as well—”

“Excuse me,” said Maddy, “but are you talking to the snake?”