Runemarks (30 page)

2

As Maddy and Loki were entering Hel, the Vanir aboveground were losing no time. The ambush at the parsonage had alerted them to Skadi’s betrayal, but the murder of Ethel Parson suggested that there was another dimension to the business. Had it been an accident? Was the woman a bystander, caught in the crossfire? Or was she a sacrifice, sent out to make them believe that no treachery was intended on the part of the Folk?

“Of course there was treachery,” Frey had said. “They lured us out there with promises of parley, then tried to use the Word on us. What other reason could there be?”

“But what about Odin?” That was Bragi, looking shaken, combing dust out of his hair. “He wanted to talk. He broke bread with us; he wanted peace with the Vanir—”

“Oh, grow up,” snapped Frey. “He was hardly going to wear a sign saying
This is a trap,
was he? I say we waste no more time. Go after him now. Make him talk.”

Freyja was looking thoughtful. “A poison handkerchief,” she said. “It doesn’t really seem like Odin’s style.”

“And what about Skadi?” Bragi said. “If she’d wanted to do us harm, she could have done it in the Hall of Sleepers, when we were helpless. Why turn against us now?”

“Perhaps she was waiting for something,” said Frey.

“I don’t believe she means us harm.” Njörd was looking stubborn now, his sea blue eyes shining dangerously.

“No, really?” said Heimdall, losing his temper. “You old idiot, what does she have to do to make you believe? She could have her hands round your throat and you’d still think it a sign of affection.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“
You’re
ridiculous. You think that because you were together once—”

“You leave my marriage out of this.”

“Your marriage was over before it began…”

As discussion erupted once more among the Vanir, Idun, who had taken no part in the battle, wandered over to its only casualty. Ethel Parson was lying in the yard, facedown in her nightdress, the wisp of glamours that had been the handkerchief already dissolving in the first rays of dawn. Her hair had come unpinned, there was a smudge of earth on her cheek, and she looked small and discarded, just a footnote to the real business at hand.

Kneeling quietly beside her, Idun considered, with pity and some wonderment, the mysterious resilience of the Folk. Such frail creatures they were, she thought, with such short lives and such a depth of misery to endure. And yet a blow that might have annihilated a goddess had failed to extinguish the life in this woman. Oh, she was dying—but there was some spark in her yet, and when the Healer touched her face, her eyelids moved, just a little.

Some distance away the remaining Vanir were still arguing. The cause of the argument did not interest Idun. Too many people seemed dissatisfied too much of the time and, for the most part, for a trivial cause. Death alone was not trivial. She glimpsed its mystery in Ethel’s blurry eyes and wondered whether she should let it come. The woman was troubled and in pain. Very soon she would be at peace. And yet she fought it—Idun sensed this very strongly—with every particle of her being.

Passive Ethel had always been: obedient to her husband, dutiful to her father, modest and self-effacing throughout her life. Such a woman facing death submits quietly, without a struggle. But there was steel in Owen Goodchild’s daughter. She wanted to live—and so Idun reached into the pouch at her waist and brought out a tiny sliver of dried fruit. It was no larger than her little fingernail, but it was the food of the gods, and she laid it under Ethelberta’s tongue and waited.

A minute passed. Perhaps it was too late, thought Idun; not even the apples of youth could save her if her spirit had already been accepted into Hel’s domain. Very gently she turned Ethelberta onto her side, pushing away the soft brown hair to uncover her face. It was a plain face, to be sure, and yet death had given it a kind of dignity, a stillness that was almost regal.

“I’m sorry,” murmured Idun. “I tried to save you.”

And it was at that very moment that the dead woman opened her eyes, that her colors came to life once more, flaring from autumn brown to pumpkin orange, that she leaped up with her hair wild and the colors flying in her cheeks and announced in a ringing voice to Freyja: “
I’ll be taking my dress back now, my lady!”

3

Odin had fled the moment his meeting with the Vanir had begun to go wrong. Red Horse Hill was the nearest refuge, and, skirting Adam and the sleeping possemen, he made it inside fifteen minutes ahead of the Huntress and the parson, but in his haste he forgot to check his path and ran straight into one of Skadi’s traps.

At any other time he would have seen it: a thin band stretched across the tunnel mouth, ready to snap shut on any trying to pass through. This time he didn’t, and the trap—a primitive thing, but primed with
Hagall
—caught him straight in the face, and he went out like a light.

Coming to his senses a few seconds later, Odin found himself in darkness. He cast
Sól
to light his way, but no light shone from his fingertips, and not even the faintest gleam of phosphorescence came from the tunnel’s rocky walls. It was not an absence of glam, he thought; there was plenty of power in him still, and it was only when he tried the rune
Bjarkán
that, reluctantly, Odin conceded the truth. There must have been more to Skadi’s trap than a simple device to wound or kill.

He was blind.

In haste Odin considered his options. Certainly he could not stay where he was. He had not seen the outcome of the fight at the parsonage, but he guessed that the Huntress would be on his trail. He had to assume that Loki had fled. Maddy, who might have helped him, was gone. The Whisperer was lost. And it went without saying that any further contact with the Vanir was out of the question—at least until his sight returned.

If
it returned.

For now he needed to get away. Skadi could track him in wolf form, and his first concern was to throw her off the scent.

His shirt was still bloody from Jed Smith’s crossbow bolt; carefully he took it off and felt his way down the tunnel until he came to a narrow crossroads, trailing the shirt behind him. He took it some distance down the left-hand passageway and abandoned it there, wedged under a rock. Then, retracing his steps, he took the right fork, walked thirty paces, flung the rune
Hagall
at the roof hard enough to collapse it in part, and ran down the passage as fast as he could.

Blind as he was, he tripped and fell, though luckily out of range of the falling roof. He hoped the rockfall had blocked the tunnel: acrid dust fretted the air, and if his ruse worked, then at least it would slow the Huntress down, or at best send her off on a false trail while he found refuge under the Hill. Even so, she would have caught up with him if the instinct to stop and feed had not been so strong, but as it was, she lost precious minutes, and by the time she entered the Hill, the trail was blurred and the true quarry had fled.

Now, Odin was nothing if not resourceful. He was blind but not helpless, and as he fled toward the Strond, he began to rediscover skills he had not used for centuries. The passageway was obstacle-free, the few loose rocks that littered the ground easy to kick aside, and he had his staff to help him along, tapping first one side of the wall and then the other, probing ahead to warn him of anything on the ground that might trip him or stand in his way.

He found that he could tell when the passage forked, could tell from the movement of the air—its temperature, its dampness or otherwise, its sweetness or foulness—which direction he ought to take, which passage led up, which led down, which passed over water, and which was a dead end.

Exploration of the rock at his fingertips proved equally fruitful. Damp, porous rock indicated a good air supply; smooth, well-polished rock suggested a well-traveled route; the patterns of dust on the ground, the distribution of rock litter, the sound made by his staff as he rapped it against a hollow wall—all these showed him things that might not have been apparent to a man accustomed to relying upon the evidence of his eyes. In these passages, at least, he was not so much at a disadvantage.

Then there was the truesight. The injury to his good eye had not affected his inner vision; with
Bjarkán
he could still see the colors, the footprints of magic, and the muted glow that indicated the presence of life.

In this way, and quite by accident, Odin discovered the Whisperer’s trail. He had reached the heart of Red Horse Hill at about the same time as Loki and Maddy crossed the Strond and found no recent sign of them there. But as he approached the central chasm from one of the tunnels leading down, his truesight showed him a fugitive gleam and he caught his first scent of the Whisperer.

Someone had tried to erase it, he saw, but its signature was very strong, and in places it overwhelmed the workings, spilling out at intervals along the passage. Once it was joined by a faint signature of a familiar violet, another time by a bright fragment that was unmistakably Maddy’s. They were moving fast, Odin could tell. And they were heading straight for the Underworld.

But why would they risk the Underworld? Hel had no reason to welcome Loki—in fact, she was more likely to kill him on sight or, better yet, hand him over to Netherworld, where Surt the Destroyer still kept the Æsir captive and would be more than interested to learn how one of his prisoners had managed to escape.

Unless he had something to bargain with,
thought Odin.
A weapon, perhaps? A glam?

In the darkness he smiled grimly. Of course. He was not the only one to covet the Whisperer. Surely Hel could have little use for such a glam, but beyond Hel’s world, where the balance was set, in Netherworld, or even beyond—

For a moment he stopped. Could
that
be Loki’s aim? he thought. To use the Whisperer as a bargaining tool—not with the Æsir, or the Vanir, or even with the Order, but with the very Lords of Chaos?

Odin’s mind reeled at the thought.

That power combined with the power of Chaos, destabilizing the Worlds, rewriting reality…

It could mean, quite simply, the Worlds’ unmaking. Not another Ragnarók, but a final dissolution of all things, a breakdown in the laws of Order and Chaos, a terminal upsetting of the balance.

Surely even Loki would not dare to set in motion such a chain of events. But if not, then what exactly did he expect to gain? And even if he was innocent of malice, then did he
really
understand the risk he was taking—not only with his own life, but with the whole of existence?

4

Above One-Eye, at last, the hunt was on. Three hunters, to be exact: a woman who was a Fury, a goddess, and also a wolf; a man who was two men in a single body; and Adam Scattergood, who was beginning to think that even death at the wolf woman’s hands might be more merciful than the terror of these endless passages with their sounds and their smells.

Skadi had wanted to kill him at once. Reverting to her natural form, she had leveled her ice blue gaze at Adam and given a wolfish—and still bloodstained—smile.

But Nat had other plans for Adam. And here he was now, miles below the demon mound, carrying the parson’s Book and pack. Fear had made him surprisingly docile, and although the pack was heavy, he made no complaint. In fact, thought Nat, it was easy to forget him altogether, and he did, for long periods, as they followed the white she-wolf deeper into World Below.

They stopped for supplies some way down, and while Nat rested, Adam packed as much food and drink as he could carry. Bread, cheese, dried meat—lots of this, in the silent hope that the wolf woman might prefer it to fresh boy. Adam himself was not at all hungry. Nat ate sparingly, and studied the Good Book, and seemed to
argue
with himself in a way that Adam found very disturbing. Then they walked—Skadi in her natural shape, wearing Jed Smith’s cast-off clothes and cursing at the elusive trail—and then they slept for an hour or two, and when Adam awoke from a terrifying dream, he was not really surprised to find that his present reality was far, far worse.

There must have been a thousand paths leading out from under the Hill. Even with Skadi’s wolf senses, finding the trail was a difficult task. She did find it, however: it ran alongside their own path, in a small lateral tunnel to which they had not, as yet, gained access. But they were close: once they had even
heard
their quarry tapping its way quietly along the tunnel at their side, and the white wolf had howled with frustration at finding herself so near, with only a span of rock between themselves and their prey.

But the wolf form tired Skadi if she kept to it for too long, and often she was obliged to shift to her human Aspect, eating ravenously every time she did so. Adam found her human Aspect even more intimidating than her wolf form. At least with a wolf he knew more or less what he was dealing with. And when she was a wolf, there could be no spells or glamours, no sudden explosions, mindblasts, or conjurings. Adam had always hated magic; only now was he beginning to realize quite how much.

Better to deny it all, he thought. Better to tell himself that it was all a dream from which he would soon awake. It made sense. Adam had never been a dreamer, and so it was natural that this—this exceptionally long and troubling dream—should have unnerved him. But a dream was all it was, he thought, and the more he told himself that it was just a dream, the less he thought of his aching back, or the wolf woman at his side, or the impossible things that came to him out of the dark.

By the time they reached the river, Adam Scattergood had come to a decision. It didn’t seem to matter anymore that he’d seen two men die, that he was far from home in the company of wolves, that he had blisters on his feet and rock dust in his lungs, or even that the parson had gone insane.

He was dreaming, that was all.

All he had to do was wake up.

Meanwhile, on the trail of the hunters, the Vanir had made less headway than they would have liked. Not that the trail was difficult to follow—Skadi was making no attempt to shield her colors—but by now the six of them were so little in sympathy with each other that they could hardly agree on anything.

Heimdall and Frey had wanted to shapeshift at once and follow the Huntress in animal guise. But Njörd refused to be left behind, and his favorite Aspect—that of a sea eagle—was hardly practical underground. Freyja refused to shift at all, protesting that there would be no one to carry her clothes for when she returned to her true Aspect, and all of them found it impossible to make Idun understand the urgency of their pursuit, as she stopped repeatedly to marvel over pretty stones or veins of metal in the ground or the black lilies that grew wherever water seeped through the walls.

Frey suggested shapeshifting Idun, the way Loki had once turned her into a hazelnut to flee the clutches of the Ice People. But Bragi wouldn’t hear of it, and finally they proceeded on foot, rather more slowly than they would have wished.

All in all, it had been a long, quarrelsome descent for the six of them, Heimdall maintaining stubbornly that Odin could not have betrayed them, Freyja complaining about the dust, Bragi singing cheery songs that got on everyone’s nerves, Njörd impatient, Frey suspicious, and Idun so lost to any sense of peril that she had to be closely watched at all times to keep her from wandering away. Nevertheless, they crossed the Strond barely an hour after the Huntress, for Skadi had her own problems, in the shape of Nat Parson and Adam Scattergood, both of whom had slowed her down considerably.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the Strond, someone else had been following a trail. It was an easy trail to follow, if you knew where to look; the Captain had shielded his colors, of course, but had left small cantrips at every turn he took, embedded in the tunnel walls or hidden beneath the stones of the path, to show where he was heading.

Not that Sugar had any doubt where he was heading—and only the Captain could be mad or bad enough to believe that any such as he could ever return from such a destination.

But he
was
the Captain, and Sugar had long since learned not to question his orders.

He’d caught up with Sugar in the food stores, where the goblin was about to settle down with a suckling pig and a yard of ale. At first Sugar hadn’t recognized him, dressed as he was in Crazy Nan’s dress, looking filthy and hunted and close to exhaustion—but Loki had soon got his attention, binding him to obedience with threats and runes and giving instructions in a low, hurried tone, as if afraid of being overheard.

“Why me?” Sugar had asked desperately.

“Because you’re here,” Loki had said. “And because I really don’t have a choice.”

Sugar wished he
hadn’t
been there. But Loki’s instructions had been quite clear, and so the goblin followed his trail, picking up the spent cantrips as he went and occasionally checking the pouch around his neck—the pouch the Captain had given him, with orders on how to use it if it became necessary.

The Captain was in trouble—that was for sure. Sugar didn’t need any glam to tell him
that.
In trouble deep—and heading deeper—but still alive, though for how long, Sugar could not say.

Every half hour he checked the pouch. What was inside looked like a common pebble, but Sugar could see the runes on it—
Ós,
for the Æsir,
Bjarkán,
and
Kaen,
the Captain’s own sign—all cleverly put together to make a sigil that was unmistakably Loki’s.

This runestone will show you what to do,
he had said, cramming clothes and supplies into a pack.
Follow me close—and don’t be seen.

Follow him where? Sugar hadn’t dared to ask. In fact, he hadn’t needed to—the Captain’s expression had already told him more than he wanted to know. Loki was going to Hel, of course—a place Sugar didn’t even like to hear about in
stories
—and he was taking Maddy with him.

If the stone turns red,
the Captain had said,
then you’ll know I’m in mortal peril. If it turns black
—his scarred lips tightened—
then you’ll know I’m beyond reprieve.

Sugar almost wished the stone
would
turn black. He’d been following the trail for what seemed like days; he was hungry, thirsty, tired, and getting more and more worried at every step. There were rats deep down in the lower tunnels, rats and roaches as big as he was. There were freezing waters and hidden pits; there were geysers and sulfur pits and limestone sinks. But Sugar continued to follow the trail, though even he wasn’t sure anymore whether it was fear, loyalty, or simply that fatal curiosity of his that kept him going, step by step.

The stone had been red for nearly an hour. And it was getting darker.