Runemarks (12 page)

3

She followed him back to the fire pit hall, taking care not to let him out of her sight. He had agreed to her demand with apparent good cheer but with a trace of sullenness in his colors that suggested that he was far from pleased. She knew he was tricky—indeed, if he was Loki, he was trickery itself—and if he already suspected what she meant to do, there was no telling how he might react.

They stepped to the lee of the fire pit, sheltering behind a spur of rock until the geyser had spent itself. Then, in the brief lull between two ventings, Loki stepped forward and came to stand on the lip of the well.

“Stand back,” he told Maddy. “This can be dangerous.”

Maddy watched as he stood motionless, his colors flaring with sudden intensity and the first and little fingers of his right hand pronged to form the runeshape
ýr.

His face was streaming with sweat, she saw; his fists were clenched, his eyes screwed shut as if preparing for some painful ordeal. This part at least was no act, she thought. She could feel the effort he was making, see the trembling of his muscles and the strain in every part of his body as he waited, tensed, for the Whisperer.

Even when the geyser began to reawaken, the low rumble rising to become a muted roar, Loki did not stir, but seemed to wait, regardless of his peril, as patiently as a fisherman snaring a trout.

Two minutes had already passed, and now Maddy could hear the eruption building, like a furious howl in a giant’s throat.

Then, almost imperceptibly, he moved.

If Maddy had not been watching very carefully, she would have missed it altogether, for Loki’s style of working was very different from hers. Under One-Eye’s instruction Maddy had learned to value caution and accuracy above all things, to
coax
the runes rather than to fling them, to handle them with care, as if without it they might explode.

But Loki was fast. Balancing like a rope-dancer on the edge of the pit as the column of steam came rushing toward him, he raised his head and made a curious quick fluttering movement of his hand. At the same time, he shifted to his fiery Aspect, his features just discernible in the twisting flames, and skimmed runes at the column like a handful of firecrackers.

Maddy had scarcely time to read them all. She thought she recognized
Isa
and
Naudr
—but what was that shuttling rune that spun like a sycamore key into the boiling flow, or the one that broke into a dozen shining pieces as it skimmed the flame?

She had little time to ask herself the question, though, for it was then that the geyser blew. The column of steam punched into the ceiling, hurling fragments of rock into the scorched air. And in the column, suspended for a moment in that massive splurge of cloud and flame, Maddy saw something that popped up like an apple in water and half heard, half felt its silent call—

(
?
)

(
?
)

—as it dropped once more into the pit.

Loki had fled in fiery Aspect, taking refuge behind a slab of rock. Now he returned to his true form. His face was flushed, his hair lank with sweat, and a reek of burning came from his clothes. Nevertheless, he seemed exhilarated; in the afterglow his eyes were pinned with weird fire. He turned to Maddy. “You saw it, then?”

Uneasily she nodded, recalling the quick way it had bobbed to the surface, and how the light had seemed to shine right through it, and how it had
called
to her…

“That was the Whisperer. Ouch,” he said, blowing into his scorched hands.

“But it’s alive!”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Now Maddy could see just how much this effort had cost him: in spite of his careless words he was shaking, breathless, and his colors were dim. “It really doesn’t like me,” he said. “Though to be fair, I don’t think it likes any of us very much. And as for getting it out of there—you’ve seen what it’s like. If Odin wants to consult the Oracle, then he’ll just have to do it the hard way.”

There was a silence as Maddy stared at the fire pit and Loki’s breathing returned to normal. Then she stood up cautiously. She could feel the next eruption preparing itself; beneath her feet she sensed rather than heard the ripping of fiery seams under enormous pressure.

“What are you doing?” Loki said. “Didn’t you hear what I just told you?”

Maddy stepped up to the fire pit. Beneath her, it gargled molten fire. Loki followed, uneasy now, but hiding it well—except for his colors, which betrayed his anxiety and his fatigue. Whatever he had done to the Whisperer, it had already robbed him of much of his glam—an advantage Maddy intended to use.

Now she was standing at the edge of the pit.

“Watch your step,” said Loki casually, “unless you care for a Netherworld hotfoot.”

“Just a second,” she said, looking down into the fiery throat. The pit was very close to venting. Maddy could smell the burnt-laundry fume; she could feel the fine hairs in her nose begin to crackle. Her eyes stung; her hands were trembling as she too formed the runeshape
ýr.

“Maddy, be careful,” Loki said.

At the bottom of the pit, hot air began to roar as the subterranean river gushed out into the flow of boiling rock. In a second steam would obscure the pit; then, a second later, the column of flaming gas and ash would erupt.

Maddy just hoped she had timed it right.

Now she was balanced on the very edge of the fire pit. The stones beneath her feet were slick with sulfur and the glassy residue of many, many ventings. She tried to recall how Loki had done it—balancing on the rim like a dancer on a rope, his hands shuffling runes so fast that Maddy could hardly see them before they sank into the cloud at his feet.

He was right behind her now; her skin prickled at his closeness, but she did not dare turn—he must not see what she was planning. Inside the pit, the furnace glow brightened from orange to yellow, from yellow to almost white, and as the power began to build, Maddy turned the full force of her concentration on the Whisperer.

If you call it, it will come to you.

She felt it, heard it in her mind—

(
?
)

And now she called it, not in words, but in glam—what Loki had called the language of Chaos. It was no language she had ever learned, and yet she could feel it linking her with the Whisperer, joining with it like notes in a long-lost chord.

At last she could see in the depths of the pit something like a cat’s cradle of light, a complicated diagram in which many, many runes and signatures crossed and recrossed in strands of increasing complexity.

A net,
she thought, and for the second time she felt a response—a glimmer, a cry—from the object in the pit. A net just like the one Loki had used to trap his fish—

(
!
)

And it was a net that she meant to use against him. But Loki’s runes did not play fair, straining and twisting between her fingers.
Naudr,
the Binder;
Thuris,
the Thorn;
T
ý
r,
the Warrior;
Kaen,
Wildfire;
Logr,
Water;
Isa,
Ice.

Loki’s runes, Loki’s trap. Even as she drew them, she could feel them moving, turning slyly out of alignment, waiting for her concentration to break.

“Maddy!” said Loki’s voice behind her, and she needed no runes now to sense his fear. His hand brushed her shoulder; Maddy swayed, uncomfortably aware of the pit at her feet.
One push,
she thought…

She called out again to the thing in the fire and, with a cry that echoed across the cavern, wrenched the net with its catch of glamours up and toward her out of the pit.

It was just then that the geyser blew.

The steam, a great hot hammer of air, came punching out of the narrow gauge. For a second everything went white; the laundry smell filled the cave and Maddy was sheathed in a scalding cloak. But for that second Loki flinched back and at the very same time Maddy cast the net, not at the Whisperer in its fiery column, but directly behind her, at Loki’s face.

He had no time to shield himself. The runes of the Elder Script flickered out—
Naudr, Thuris, T
ý
r,
and
Ós
,
Hagall
and
Kaen, Isa
and
Úr.
The net fell, snaring Loki as neatly as any fish, and finally
Aesk,
Maddy’s own rune, hurled the Trickster across the cavern as the fiery column burst free, showering them both with ash, sulfur, and shards of volcanic glass.

The blast was greater than any thus far. It threw Maddy forward twenty feet, and she fell to her knees, half stunned. Behind her the geyser was reaching its climax: ash and cinders filled the air; flaming rocks fell all around her; something heavy crashed to the ground only yards from where she had been standing.

“Loki?” Maddy’s voice resonated flatly against the seeping walls. Half blinded by the scalding steam, she lay behind a flat rock, gasping for breath. The unaccustomed working had all but exhausted her glam. If he were to attack right now, she wouldn’t have much more than a cantrip to throw back at him.

“Loki?” she called.

There was no reply.

A minute later the blast had abated; now sulfurous fumes filled the cavern. Maddy risked a glance around, but in the sickly yellow mist there was nothing to be seen.

Then, as the mist cleared and the extent of the damage became apparent, Maddy realized why. The ceiling above them had partly collapsed. A mound of debris obscured the pit; one huge slab of rock, its near side studded with pieces of stalactite, lay atop the mound like a gauntleted fist.

And Loki?

And the Whisperer?

There was no sign of either in the ruined cavern.

4

It was a few minutes more before Maddy could stand. She did so shakily, brushing cinders out of her hair. Her vision was still cloudy from looking into the fire pit; her face and hands were sore, as if they were sunburned.

The aftershock was over now, and in its wake the cavern was eerily still. Dust trickled from the broken ceiling onto the giant mound of rocks and rubble, completely obliterating the end of the cavern where Loki and his net had been thrown.

Congratulations, Maddy,
said a dry voice inside her head.
Now you’re a murderer.

“No,” whispered Maddy, horrified.

She’d never intended to hurt him, of course. She’d only meant to keep him at bay, to hold him while she claimed the Whisperer. But everything had happened so
fast.
She’d had no time to measure her strength. And if now, by her fault, he was under there—smashed beneath that fist of rock…

And now it was not just the fumes from the pit that were making it hard for Maddy to breathe. The mound of stones, so like a barrow from the Elder Age, almost seemed to fill the cavern. Slowly, reluctantly, she moved toward it. A small part of her protested against all hope that Loki might be trapped but unhurt, and fitfully she began to turn over the smaller rocks, searching in vain for a scrap of sleeve, a boot, a shadow—

A signature.

That was it! Maddy could have kicked herself with frustration. Casting
Bjarkán
with a trembling hand, she found his at once, that unmistakable wildfire trail. No two light-signatures are ever the same, and Loki’s, like One-Eye’s, was unusually complex and alive.

Alive!

A good tracker may tell the age of the wolf he hunts, whether it limps, how fast it was running, and when it made its last kill. Maddy was not so skilled a tracker, but she spotted the fragments of the net and traces of the mindrune she had cast.

There had been tremendous power in that final rune, power enough to collapse the ceiling as Maddy dragged the Whisperer out of the pit. Pieces of
Aesk
still littered the floor, like shards from an exploded bottle, and here was where the rune had thrown him, pinning Loki like a moth as the ceiling collapsed on top of him.

But then…

There it was, against all hope, leading away from the mound of stone: not a back-trail, not a fragment, but a signature, scrawled fleetingly in that characteristic lurid violet against the rock.

She guessed from its faintness that he had tried to hide, but either he was too weak to shield his color-trail or the falling rocks had taken up too much of his concentration, because there it was, unmistakably, leading toward the cavern mouth.

It was there at last that Maddy found him. He had fallen behind a block of stone; one arm was up to cover his face, his motionless fingers still pronged into the runeshape of
ýr,
the Protector. He was very still, and there was blood—an alarming amount of it—on the rock behind him.

Maddy’s heart did a slow roll. She knelt down, shaking, and held out a hand to touch his face. The blood, she saw, came from a narrow slash just above his eyebrow. A rock must have caught him as he ran, unless it was the fall that had knocked him unconscious. In any case, though, he was alive.

Relief made Maddy laugh aloud; then, hearing her voice rattle eerily across the ruined cavern, she thought better of it.

He was alive, she reminded herself—but as soon as he awoke, doubly dangerous. This was
his
place. Gods knew what resources he might have at his command. She needed to get out, and quickly.

She looked around. The cavern was still acrid with the stench of the fire pit, but at least the air was cooler now that the shower of debris had stopped. It had been a close shave, she saw now: a chunk of volcanic glass the size of a hog’s head had flown through the air, missing her by inches, and now lay, still glowing, by her feet.

Thinking fast, Maddy assessed the situation. It looked bad: she had failed—she had lost the Whisperer—her strength was exhausted, and she was buried in the tunnels of World Below with miles and miles of passages and galleries between herself and the surface.

Still, she thought, it had been a good plan. It should have worked. For a second there had been a
contact
between them. The Whisperer should have answered her call. It almost had—but, as Crazy Nan used to say, “
Almost” never wins the race.

Maddy looked around in desperation. What was she to do now?

“Kill him,” said a voice behind her.

Startled, Maddy turned around.

“Go on. He deserves it.” It was a man’s voice, dry and rather fussily disapproving, like Nat Parson in mid-sermon. But there was no one in sight; around her the shadows swelled, red-tinged, as the fire pit drew breath.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

“Just kill him,” said the voice again. “Do the Worlds a favor. You’ll never get a better chance.”

Maddy looked left and right but saw no one.

Had she imagined it? Was she so addled by smoke and fumes? Somewhere at the back of her mind she was conscious of a small, persistent voice telling her to run, that the geyser was about to vent again, that she was already half poisoned from the fire pit fumes, and that unless she got out into breathable air, she would collapse, but none of that seemed very important now. So much easier to ignore it, to close her eyes, to think of nothing.

“Stop that,” said the voice sharply. “What are you, an imbecile? Look down, girl, look
down
!”

Maddy dropped her gaze.

“Lower.”

“But there’s nothing—” began Maddy, then stopped short, her eyes widening as she finally saw—
really
saw—the thing that had crash-landed almost at her feet, still glowing from the heat of its fiery cradle.

“Ah, at last,” said the Whisperer in a weary tone. “Now, if you can possibly bear a
little
more exertion, you might at least give that bastard a kick from me.”