Runemarks (15 page)

1

Deep in the tunnels of World Below, Maddy was hungry, tired, and at the end of her patience. The passage was featureless, they had been walking for hours, and the steady shuffling lurch of her footsteps in the semi-darkness had begun to make her feel quite seasick.

Sugar had turned sullen as it became clear that he was expected to walk all the way to the Sleepers.

“How far now?” Maddy asked.

“Dunno,” he said dourly. “Never go that far, do I? And you wouldn’t, neither, if you knowed what was there.”

“Why don’t you tell me?” said Maddy, containing an impulse to mindbolt the goblin through the nearest wall.

“How
can
it tell you?” the Whisperer said. “It has nothing but legends and stories to go by. Devices used by the ignorant for the benefit of the foolish and the obfuscation of the credulous.”

Maddy sighed. “I suppose
you’re
not going to tell me, either.”

“What,” it said, “and spoil the surprise?”

And so they shuffled on, through a passageway that smelled sour and unused, for what seemed like leagues (though in fact it was only three or four miles). As they left the Hill, the pounding of the machines receded, although they all heard the peculiar clapping sound that came afterward and felt the cold tremor that shivered all along the granite layer above their heads.

Maddy stopped. “What in Hel was that?”

It was the sound of glam, she thought. That unmistakable aftershock—but so much louder, so much stronger than any mere cantrip she had ever heard.

The Whisperer brightened like an eye.

“You know, don’t you?” Maddy said.

“Oh yes,” said the Whisperer.

“Then what
was
it?”

The Whisperer glowed complacently. “That, my dear,” it said, “was the Word.”

2

Nat Parson could barely contain his excitement. He’d heard of it, of course—everyone had—but he’d never actually seen it in action, and the result was more splendid and more terrible than even he could ever have hoped for.

It had taken more than an hour of prayer for the Examiner to prepare himself. By then the Hill had been trembling with it, a deep resonance that seemed to suck silently at Nat’s eardrums. The villagers felt it; it raised their hackles, made them shiver, made them laugh without knowing why. Even the oxen felt it, lowing and straining at their harnesses as the machines went on grinding, and the Examiner, his pale face now sheened with sweat, his brow furrowed with exertion, his whole body trembling, stretched out his hand at last and spoke.

No one had actually heard what he said. The Word is inaudible, though everyone said afterward that they had
felt
something. Some wept. Some screamed. Some seemed to hear the voices of people long dead. Some felt an ecstasy that seemed to them almost indecent—almost
uncanny.

Loki had felt it from Little Bear Wood but, in his eagerness to seek out Maddy and the Whisperer, had mistaken the vibration—and the crack that followed—for the work of the digging machines on the Hill.

One-Eye had felt it as a sudden rush of memories. Memories of his son Balder, dead from a shaft of mistletoe; of his faithful wife, Frigg; of his son Thor—all folk long lost, whose faces seldom returned to his thoughts.

On the Hill there had come a wakening shudder, making Nat’s hair stand on end. Then a crack like a thunderbolt.

Laws, that power!

“Laws,” he said.

The Examiner was the only one who had seemed unimpressed by the procedure. In fact, Nat thought he had looked almost
bored,
as if this were some everyday routine, somewhat fatiguing, but no more exciting than digging out a nest of weasels.

Then he had stopped thinking and, like the rest of them, had simply stared.

At the Examiner’s feet there was now an irregular gash in the ground, some sixteen inches long and perhaps three inches wide. Its shape seemed vaguely significant—it was
ýr,
the Fundament, reversed—although Nat, who was not familiar with the Elder Script, did not recognize its importance.

“I have broken the first of nine locks,” said the Examiner in his flat voice. “The remaining eight are as yet intact, but this reversal is the most important.”

“Why?” asked Adam, which pleased Nat because it was the question he had wanted to ask but had not for fear of sounding ignorant.

The Examiner gave a small, impatient sigh, as if to deplore the ignorance of these rustic folk. “See this mark—this ruinmark? This marks the entrance to the demon mound. Eight more of these locks remain to be broken before the machines can get inside.”

“How do you know there isn’t another way into the Hill?” said Dorian Scattergood, who was standing close by.

“There are several,” said the Examiner. He seemed to be enjoying himself, though his voice remained dry and contemptuous. “However, the enemy’s first defense is to close the Hill against all intruders. To dig deep, as a rabbit does when it scents the hawk. And so now, as you see, the Hill has been sealed. No escape from within, no way in from without. However, as any hunter knows, it is sometimes useful to
fill in
smaller rabbit holes with earth before setting the snare at the main burrow’s mouth. And when
this
burrow is opened at last”—the Examiner gave a chilly smile—“then, Parson, we shall dig them out.”

“You mean the…Good Folk?” said a voice behind him. It was Crazy Nan from Forge’s Post, perhaps the only person, thought Nat, who would have dared to speak openly of the Faërie—and in front of an Examiner, no less.

“Call them by name, lady,” said the Examiner. “What good can possibly come from this evil place? They are the Fiery, Children of the Fire, and they shall be put to the fire, every one, until the Order rules supreme and the world is Cleansed of them forever.”

A hum of approval went around the gathering—but Nat noticed that Crazy Nan did not join it and that several others looked a little anxious. It was easy to see why, he thought; even in World’s End such powers as the Examiner’s were rare, honors conferred upon the highest and holiest rank of the clergy. Torval Bishop wouldn’t have approved; to an oldster like Torval such things would have seemed dangerously close to
magic
—which was, of course, an abomination—but to Nat Parson, who had traveled and seen a little of the world, there could be no mistaking one for the other.

“Not
children,
though,” persisted Nan. “I mean, goblins, Good Folk, that’s all right, but we’re not going to Cleanse any
real
children, are we?”

The Examiner sighed. “The Children of the Fire are
not
children.”

“Oh.” Crazy Nan looked relieved. “Because we’ve known Maddy Smith since she were a bairn, and she may be a little
wild,
but—”

“Lady, that is for the Order to judge.”

“Oh, but
surely
—”

“Please, Miss Fey,” interrupted Nat. “This isn’t just common business anymore.” His chest swelled a little. “This is a matter of Law and Order.”

3

“The Word?” said Maddy. “You mean it exists?”

“Of course it
exists,
” said the Whisperer. “How else do you think the Æsir were defeated?”

Maddy had never read the Good Book, though she knew “Tribulation” and “Penitences” well enough from Nat Parson’s Sunday sermons. Only Nat and a handful of prentices (all boys) were allowed to read any part of it, and even then, their reading was restricted to the so-called Open Chapters of “Tribulation,” “Penitences,” “Laws,” “Listings,” “Meditations,” and “Duties.”

But some chapters of the Book were locked, with silver clips that pinned the pages shut, the key kept on a fine chain around Nat Parson’s neck. No sermons were ever preached from these Closed Chapters, as they were called, although Maddy knew some of their names from One-Eye.

There was the Book of Apothecaries, which dealt with medicine; the Book of Fabrications, in which were histories of the Elder Age; the Book of Apocalypse, which predicted the final Cleansing; and, most importantly, the Book of Words, which listed all the permissible cantrips (or
canticles,
as the Order preferred to call them) to be used by the special elite when the time of Cleansing came.

But unlike the rest of the Closed Chapters, the Book of Words was sealed with a golden clip, and it was the only chapter of the Book that was closed even to the parson. He had no key to the golden lock, and although he had tried several times to open it, he had always failed.

In fact, on the last occasion, when he had taken a leatherworker’s awl to the golden lock, it had begun to
glow
alarmingly and to get uncomfortably hot, after which Nat had been careful not to interfere with it again. He knew a charmed lock when he saw one (it was not so very different, in fact, from the runecharm the Smith girl had placed on the church door), and though he was disappointed that his superiors had shown so little trust in him, he knew better than to challenge their decision.

Maddy knew all this because when she was ten years old, Nat had asked her to remove the lock, saying that he had lost the key and needed to consult the Book for parish purposes.

Maddy had taken malicious pleasure in refusing. “I thought
girls
weren’t allowed to touch the Good Book,” she’d said modestly, watching him from beneath her lowered lashes.

This was true; Nat had said so only the week before, in a sermon in which he had denounced the bad blood, disorderly habits, and weak intellect of females in general. After that, of course, he could not insist any further, and so the Book of Words had remained closed.

That had done nothing to endear Maddy to Nat; in fact, it was at that moment that the parson’s dislike of Maddy had turned to hate, and he had begun to watch for any sign that might justify an official Examination of Jed Smith’s pert, clever daughter.

“But the parson doesn’t have the Word,” Maddy said. “Only an Examiner could have—” She stopped and stared at the Whisperer. “Examiners?” she murmured in disbelief. “He’s called in the
Examiners
?”

Not kings, but historians rule the world.
It was a proverb that One-Eye had often quoted, but even Maddy didn’t quite realize how true it was.

The Order of Examiners had begun five hundred years ago, in the Department of Records in the great University of World’s End. It had to have happened there, of course. World’s End was always the center of things. It was the financial capital and the home of the king, the Parleyment was there and the great cathedral of St. Sepulchre, and rumor had it that in the vaults of the Department of Records, there was a library of more than
ten thousand
books—poetry and science and histories and grimoires—to which only the
serious
scholars—Professors, Magisters, and other senior staff—had access.

In those days the Examiners were simply officials of the University. They were entirely secular, and their Examination procedures consisted merely of written tests. But after Tribulation and the dark time that followed, the University had remained a symbol of Order. Gradually its influence had grown. Histories were written, conclusions drawn, dangerous books hidden away. And quietly, studiously, power had passed. Not to kings or warriors, but to the Department of Records and the little clique of historians, academics, and theologians who had appointed themselves the sole chroniclers of Tribulation.

The Good Book had been the culmination of their work: the story of the world and of its near destruction by the forces of Chaos; a catalog of world knowledge, science, wisdom, and medicine; and a list of commandments to ensure that in the future, whatever else happened, Order would always triumph.

And so the Order was begun. Not quite priests, not quite scholars, though they shared elements of both, over the years they had become increasingly powerful, and by the end of the first century following Tribulation they had extended their authority far beyond the University. They controlled education and ensured that literacy was restricted to the priesthood, its prentices, and members of the Order. The word
University
was expanded to make
Universal City,
so that as years passed, folk forgot that once there had been free access to books and to learning and came to believe that things had always been as they were.

Since then the Order had grown and grown. The king was on the coins, but the Order told him how many to strike; they governed the Parleyment; the army and the police were under their jurisdiction. They were immensely wealthy, they had the power to seize land and possessions from anyone who broke the Law, and they were always recruiting new members. From the priesthood, for the most part, although the Order also took students from the age of thirteen, and these prentices—who gave up their names and renounced their families—often turned out to be the most zealous of all, working tirelessly up the ranks in the hope that one day they might be found worthy to receive the key to the Book of Words.

Everyone had heard tales: of how some prentice had denounced his father to the Order for failing to attend prayers or how some old woman had been Cleansed for decking a wishing well or keeping a cat.

World’s End, of course, was used to it, but if anyone had suggested to Maddy Smith that a villager of Malbry—even one as vain and stupid as Nat Parson—would deliberately court the attention of the Examiners, she would never have believed them.

Two hours later, and at last the passageway had broadened out, a faint gleam reflecting dully against mica-spackled walls. The sour cellar smell that suffused the Hill no longer troubled Maddy at all. In fact, now that she thought about it, the air seemed sweeter than before, although it was growing perceptibly colder.

“We’re getting close to the Sleepers,” she said.

“Aye, miss,” said Sugar, who had been getting more and more nervous as they approached their goal. “Not long now. Well, that’s my job done, then, and if I could just be on me way…”

But Maddy’s eye had lit upon something, a point of luminescence too pale to be firelight, too bright to be a reflection on the stone. “That’s daylight,” she said, her face brightening.

Sugar considered putting her straight, then he shrugged and thought better of it.

“That’s the Sleepers, miss,” he said in a low voice, and that was when his courage, already tried to its breaking point, finally gave way. He could withstand many things, but enough was enough, and there comes a time for every goblin to take the better part of valor and run.

Sugar-and-Sack turned and ran.

Maddy ran toward the light, too excited to think either about Sugar’s desertion or about the fact that it didn’t really look like daylight at all. It was a cool and silvery light, like the pale edge of a summer pre-dawn. It was faint but penetrating. Maddy could see that it touched the sides of the passageway with a milky gleam, picking out the fragments of mica in the rock and lighting the plumes of steam that came from Maddy’s mouth in the cold air.

It was a cavern. She could see that now. The passage broadened, became funnel-shaped, and then opened out, and Maddy, who had considered herself accustomed to marvels after her time under the Hill, gave a long sigh of amazement.

The cavern was beyond size. Maddy had heard tales of the great cathedrals of World’s End, cathedrals as big as cities with spires of glass, and in her imagination they might have been something like this. Even so, the sheer hugeness of the space almost defeated her. It was a bristling vastness of luminous blue ice, its ceiling vaulted in a thousand bewildering swirls and fantails, its height lifted unimaginably by glassy pillars as broad as barn doors.

It stretched out forever—or so it first seemed—and the light seemed trapped within the ancient ice, a light that shone like a distillation of stars.

For a long time Maddy stared, breathless. The ceiling was open in part to the sky; a fragment of moon stood outlined against a patch of darkness. From the gaps in the vaulting, icicles fell, tumbling and plunging hundreds of feet to hang, crystalline, above her head.
If I threw a stone,
thought Maddy with a sudden chill,
or if I were to even raise my voice…

But the icicles were the least of a thousand wonders that filled the cavernous hall. There were strands of filigree no thicker than a spider’s web; there were flowers of glass with leaves of frozen gauze; there were sapphires and emeralds growing out of the walls; there were acres of floor smoother than marble, fit for a million dancing princesses.

And the
light:
it shone out from everywhere, clean and cold and pitiless. As her eyes adjusted, Maddy saw that it was made from
signatures;
thousands of them, it seemed, crisscrossing the rapturous air. Maddy had never, never in her life seen so many signatures.

Their brightness left her speechless.
Gods alive,
she thought,
One-Eye’s is bright and Loki’s is brighter, but this makes them look like candles in the sun.

She had been moving, wide-eyed, bewildered, further into the cavern. Every step showed her new marvels. She could hardly breathe—hardly
think
—for wonderment. Then in front of her she saw something that momentarily eclipsed everything else: a raw-edged block of blue ice with thin columns at its four corners. Maddy peered closer—and gave a cry as she saw, embedded deep beneath the ice, something that could only be…

A face.