Runemarks (18 page)

8

The Examiner’s caution had seemed excessive—even cowardly—to the parson. But Nat had not the other man’s experience and knew next to nothing about the Children of the Fire. The Examiner, however—who, like all members of the Order, had no name, simply a number branded onto his arm—had met with demons before.

It had been some thirty years since his first sighting. At the time, he had been a mere junior prentice, a scholar in the Universal City, and had taken little part in the grim proceedings. But he remembered them well. The Interrogation had taken close on fourteen hours, and by then the creature—a weakened thing, with a broken ruinmark—had been quite insane.

Even so, it had taken two Examiners armed with the Word and three prentices to restrain it, and when at last they had dragged it, howling, to the pyre, it had cursed them with a force that left three of them blind.

The young prentice had studied hard and joined the ranks of the Order, electing to discontinue his studies and work more actively in the field, later spearheading the outreach program into the Ridings and beyond, to root out such evil wherever he found it.

For this sacrifice he was given the Word. It was not usual for a junior to receive it, especially not a junior who had scarcely finished his twelfth year of study, but exceptions could be made in certain cases, and besides, the field operatives of the Order needed all the protection they could get.

On his pioneering journey from World’s End the Examiner had seen maybe two dozen cases worth reporting to the Department of Records. Most of these had turned out to be duds: fraudsters and half-breeds and Outlanders and freaks with no real power worth speaking of. He had come to accept that most of his day-to-day job would consist of digging out goblin infestations, filling in sacred springs, tumbling standing rings, and making sure the old disorderly ways stayed dead and buried.

But in a few cases he had seen things—disquieting things—that altogether justified his sacrifice. The one-eyed man from Malbry was one of these, and the Examiner was torn between the hope of having finally discovered something that would merit the attention of the Chief Examiner and the fear of having to deal with the creature himself.

He would have felt much happier if the man had been bound by the power of the Word. But the Examiner had used up much of his self-control on Red Horse Hill, and it would take long meditation for him to dare to use it again.

For the Word was not an everyday tool. Every instance of its use—save in times of war—had to be fully accounted for and a date written into the heavy ledgers of the Department of Records. It was also unwieldy, sometimes taking hours to prepare, though its effects were immediate and devastating.

And, of course, it was dangerous. The Examiner had used it more than most—one hundred and forty-six times in all his long career—but never without an inward shudder. For the Word was the language of the Nameless. To invoke it was to enter another world, and to speak it was to commune with a power more terrible than demons. Besides, behind the fear lay a deeper and far more dangerous secret, and that was the
ecstasy
of the Word.

For the Word was an addiction, a pleasure beyond any other, and that was why it was given only to those men who had proved themselves able to withstand it. The Examiner dared not use it twice in one day, and never without the proper procedure. For in spite of his abstinence the Examiner was a glutton in matters of the Word, and he worked all the time to keep his appetites secret and under control. Even now, the temptation to use it was almost unbearable. To speak, to see, to
know
…

He looked at his prisoner, a fellow who might be fifty or sixty or even older, dressed in Journeyman’s leathers and a cloak where the patches had long since overwhelmed the original fabric. He
looked
harmless as he looked human, but the Examiner knew that a demon may take on any Aspect, and he was not fooled for an instant by the prisoner’s outward appearance.

By his Mark shall ye know him
, said the Book of Apocalypse.

Even more damning was the Book of Words, where all the known letters of the Elder Script and their variants had been set down, along with their several interpretations. From this list the Examiner had made quick work of recognizing
Raedo
, the Journeyman, and his suspicions had quickly become certainties.

It had not, of course, escaped his attention that the Journeyman rune, though clear and unbroken, was nevertheless reversed. The Examiner did not drop his guard on that account. Even a broken glam can be lethal, and a whole runemark—reversed or not—was a rarity indeed. In fact, in thirty years he had never made such a capture himself, and he guessed that this man, uncouth though he seemed, might prove to be more than a mere foot soldier in the enemy’s camp.

“Your name, fellow,” he said once more. In the absence of the parson he had dared remove the Outlander’s gag, though for safety’s sake he kept the chains in place. By now the man must have been in acute discomfort, but he said nothing and simply watched the Examiner with his one, unnaturally gleaming eye.

“Your
name
!” said the Examiner, and made as if to kick the stranger as he lay there so insolently. He did
not
kick him, however. He was an Examiner, not an Interrogator, and he found violence distressing. Also he remembered the demon with the broken ruinmark that had left three of his Order blind, and decided that this was not the time for rash action.

Odin laughed, as if he had read the Examiner’s mind.
“My name is Untold,”
he quoted maliciously,
“for I have many.”

The Examiner was startled. “You know the Good Book?”

Again Odin laughed, but made no answer.

“If you do,” said the Examiner, “then you must know that you are already finished. Why resist us? Your time is done. Tell me what I need to know, and you may at least save yourself some pain.”

Odin said nothing, but simply smiled his unnatural smile.

The Examiner’s lips compressed. “Well,” he said, turning to the door. “You leave me no choice. When I return, you’ll be begging to tell me everything you know.”

Odin closed his one eye and pretended to sleep.

“So be it,” said the Examiner dryly. “You have until tomorrow to reflect. You may mock
me,
fellow, but I can guarantee that you will not mock the power of the Word.”

9

“Is there no other way?” said Maddy at last.

“Trust me. I’m an oracle.”

Once more Maddy looked into the ice coffin where the pale woman lay, her colors shining softly in the cold light. The blue tones of the ice that encased her threw deathly shadows across her features, and her short hair, so light that it was almost lost in her frosty shroud, was frozen around her face like seaweed.

Casting
Bjarkán,
Maddy narrowed her eyes, and the workings that bound the ice woman leaped into sight. As she had first seen, they resembled those that had held the Whisperer, but they were more numerous, binding the Sleeper’s ice coffin into a complex knot of interwoven glamours.

“Be careful,” said the Whisperer. “There may be traps set into the work.”

There were. Maddy could see them now, designed to spring out at anyone unwise enough to lay hands on the Sleeper. A protective measure—but for whose protection? She touched the runes gently with her fingertips; at her touch they glowed ice blue, and Maddy could feel them itching, working, struggling to be free.

“Think what they could tell you, Maddy,” said the Whisperer in a silky voice. “Secrets lost since the End of the World. Answers to questions you never dared ask—questions Odin would never have answered…”

It would be easy, Maddy knew. Beneath her fingertips the runes were alive, quickening almost of their own accord. All they needed was a little help. And if in exchange they could give her the answers to questions that had plagued her all her life…

Who was she really?

What was her glam?

And how did she fit into this tale of demons and gods?

Quickly, before she could change her mind, Maddy gathered her strongest runes. She cast them like knucklebones, swift and sure:
Kaen, T
ý
r, Hagall
—and finally
Úr,
the Mighty Ox, beneath which the block shattered with a sudden almighty
crunch,
and the blue surface of the ice was blasted in a second into a milky crackle-glaze.

The impact threw Maddy backward, one arm raised to shield her eyes from the ice shards that accompanied it. Then, when nothing else happened, she dropped her arm and moved carefully toward the now opaque block.

Nothing moved. The trembling chandelier of ice above her head made small, shivery sounds in the aftershock of the blast, but no icicles fell, and a chilly silence came once more over the great hall.

“
Now
what?” she said, turning to the Whisperer.

But before it could answer, there came a sound: first a distant crunching sound, followed by a rumbling, a tumbling, a slip-sliding, and finally an avalanche of frozen material that fell from some distant funnel in the ceiling to thud against the glassy floor.

Maddy moved fast, made for the wall of the cavern and flattened herself against it, as now the balancing icicles began to drop from the vaulted ceiling, spike by spike, like the teeth of some giant threshing machine.

A packet of snow the size of a hay wagon exploded against the ground close by, bringing down with it a jangling necklace of small projectiles and lastly a single large object—no, a
person
—who landed heavily and with a muffled
ouch!
on the fallen snow.

10

When Loki collapsed, bleeding and exhausted against the skirts of the glacier, it was with the knowledge that he had made a number of grave—possibly fatal—miscalculations.

What kind of fool puts his head into the wolf’s mouth for the sake of curiosity? What kind of fool leaves his citadel to go aboveground, unarmed and unprotected, chasing rumors, when he should have been preparing for a siege? But curiosity had always been Loki’s besetting sin, and now it looked as if he were going to pay for it.

But he had always had more than his share of luck. As it chanced, the very spot where he fell hid one of the skylights that opened onto the hollow halls of the mountain below. Snow had crusted it, but it was a brittle frosting, and a man’s weight was more than enough to break through.

And so, just as he hit the ground, a fissure opened up beneath him, revealing a ragged hole through which he fell, helpless to prevent himself—through the ceiling of the great cavern with its hanging ice gardens; through filigrees of brittle lace, fashioned by a thousand years of freeze and thaw; and finally through a sickening swatch of empty air—before landing, more mercifully than he would have dared to expect, on a thick wad of powdery snow.

Even so, the impact knocked all the breath out of him. For a time he just lay where he had fallen, half dazed and gasping. And when he looked up, shaking the ice crystals out of his hair, it was to see a familiar face staring down at him, a face as merciless as it was beautiful, around which the pale, cropped hair stood out like a frill of sea foam.

In one hand she carried something that looked like a whip made from runes, a flexible length of barbed blue light, coiled carelessly about her wrist. Now she released it, with a hiss and a crackle, and it slithered to the ground, snapping with glam. The ice woman stared at the fallen Trickster, and her lips, still tinted faintly blue, curved in a smile that made him shiver.

From the far side of the cavern, Maddy was watching. She had seen Loki fall and had recognized him at once by his signature and the color of his hair. She had seen the ice woman rise, striding confidently across the great hall, apparently oblivious to the fragments and shards that rained from the ceiling.

Now she watched the confrontation, cautiously, through
Bjarkán,
keeping low to the ground behind a table-sized block of unpolished ice.

“Loki,” purred the woman. “You look terrible.” The glam between her fingers began to uncoil, slowly, like a sleepy snake.

Loki raised his head, not without difficulty. “I try to oblige.” He pushed himself up onto his knees, keeping a watchful eye on the runewhip.

“Please don’t get up on my account.”

“It’s no trouble,” Loki said.

“I wouldn’t
quite
say that,” said the woman, pushing him down with a booted foot. “In fact, I think I can safely say that you’re in rather a lot of it.”

“That’s Skadi,” said the Whisperer.

“The Huntress?” said Maddy, who knew the tale. A part of it, anyway: how Loki had tricked Skadi out of her vengeance against the Æsir and how, at last, she had made him pay.

“The same Skadi who hung the snake—?”

“The very same,” said the Whisperer.

That, thought Maddy, complicated things. She had been counting on the fact that the reawakened Sleeper would be both friendly and eager to help. But this was Skadi, the Snowshoe Huntress, one of the Vanir by marriage to Njörd. Her hatred of Loki was legendary, and from the look of things, five hundred years had done nothing to abate it.

“What about Loki?” Maddy said.

“Don’t worry,” said the Whisperer indifferently. “She’ll kill him, I expect, and then we can get on with business again.”

“
Kill
him?”

“I would think so. Why do you care? He wouldn’t lift a finger to help you, you know, if your positions were reversed.”

Maddy glared. “You knew this would happen.”

“Well, of course I did,” said the Whisperer. “Have you ever known Loki to keep his nose out of anything that might be interesting? And Skadi always had a special grudge against him above all, you know, ever since the Æsir killed her father, Thiassi of the Ice People, warlord of the Elder Age. The Æsir killed him, but Loki arranged it. I’d keep out of her way if I were you.”

But Maddy was already moving. Using the ice block as cover, she edged closer to the two opponents,
Bjarkán
crooked between her fingers. Across the hall Skadi looked down at Loki and gave her chilly smile.

“Come on, Skadi,” said Loki, working to recover a little of his glam. “I thought we were past all this by now. It’s been how long—five hundred years? Don’t you think it’s time we—?”

“
That
long?” she said. “It seems only yesterday that you were in chains with a snake over your head. Those were the days, eh, Loki?”

“Well,
you
haven’t changed much, either,” said Loki, bringing one hand slowly behind his back. “Still as
perilously
attractive as ever,” he went on, “and still with the same delightful sense of humor—”

And at this he moved, with the same uncanny speed that Maddy had seen before, and as he threw himself out of range of Skadi’s glam, he flung a rune into her face.

Maddy had time to recognize
ýr
just as Skadi countered it with a blow of her runewhip. The coil struck once, like blue lightning, casually pulverizing
ýr,
then slammed home, the barbed runes that made up its length biting into the frozen ground.

Loki dodged—but only just. The runewhip opened up a crevice in the ground where he had been and swept a dozen icicles off a hanging buttress twenty feet above as it snapped back into the light-crazed air.

Loki tried for another rune, but before the fingering was even complete,
T
ý
r,
the Warrior, was blasted from his hand with a force that left his fingers numb. And now he was cornered, his back to the wall, one arm thrown up to cover his face as Skadi stood over him, runewhip raised. Maddy could see him forking runes at the Huntress, but his glam was burned out; not a glimmer remained.

“Now, Skadi,” he said, “before you do anything hasty—”

“Hasty?”
she said. “Not a chance. I’ve been looking forward to this for five hundred years.”

“Well, yes. Nice to see you’ve kept your strength up,” said Loki. “But
before
you cut me into little pieces—”

“Oh, Loki, I wouldn’t do
that.
” She gave a laugh that rattled the icicles all the way to the frozen vault. “That would be over far too quickly. I want to see you suffer.”

Now Loki played his final card, his crooked smile beginning to show. It was a desperate move, to be sure, but he had always been at his most inventive in times of crisis.

“I don’t think you do,” he said.

“And why’s that?” said Skadi.

Loki grinned. He’d never felt less sure of himself, but as it was his last card, he played it with style. “I’ve got the Whisperer,” he said.

There was a very long pause.

Slowly the runewhip was lowered to the ground.

“You’ve got it? Where?”

Loki smiled and shook his head.

“Where?”
In Skadi’s hand, the runewhip stirred threateningly, its tip reaching for him like the fangs of a snake. He waved it away with an impatient gesture.

“Oh, please. The minute I tell you that, I’m dead.”

“Good point,” said Skadi. “So. What do you want?”