Runelight Read online

  ‘Then what are you?’ Maggie said. ‘And why won’t you tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘I will,’ it replied in Adam’s voice. ‘But first I need your obedience.’

  Adam, mouthing his passenger’s words, could feel the intensity of its rage. He sensed that it was on the verge of some colossal eruption:

  How dare she question ME!

  He flinched. Maggie found herself strangely touched. When Adam had first come to her in the labyrinth under the Universal City, she had thought him rather arrogant. After that she had been slightly in awe of this young man who knew so much. But now that she saw his true colours at last, she felt a peculiar tenderness. He was only human, she thought; and the thing that called itself Magister had him in its power.

  ‘I want you to let my friend go,’ she said.

  ‘Maggie, don’t,’ said Adam.

  ‘Let him go,’ she repeated. ‘Then we can talk.’

  Adam was sweating now. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with. It saved my life in the Underworld. Now it tells me what to do. It knows what I’m thinking. Mercy, please …’ He whimpered and fell to his knees.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Maggie said.

  In Adam’s voice, the Magister said: ‘This is your doing, Maggie Rede. I don’t enjoy inflicting pain.’

  Adam began to flail and scream, clawing at the floor with his hands. ‘Please! Maggie! Make it stop!’

  ‘Leave my friend alone,’ she said.

  ‘Not before you agree to My terms.’

  ‘What terms?’

  ‘All of them.’

  Maggie put her hand to her mouth. She realized that she was trembling. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll do what you want. I swear I will.’

  ‘Swear on your true name?’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’

  At once, the presence in Adam’s mind released its hold on him. The young man crawled to his knees and retched. Maggie’s throat was pinprick-tight. She’d never felt such terror before. She never wanted to feel it again.

  What’s happening to me? she thought. What is this treacherous weakness?

  ‘I didn’t want to do that,’ said the Magister in Adam’s voice. ‘But both of you needed a lesson, and our time is growing short.’

  Adam looked at Maggie. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, and took her hand.

  For a moment Maggie held it, not quite knowing what to feel. Alone and loveless for so many years, that simple human contact felt strange and exotic – and thrilling. She wondered what it would be like to kiss Adam, and found herself flushing wildly.

  ‘Has it gone?’ she said at last.

  ‘It never really goes away,’ said Adam. ‘But I think we’re all right to talk.’

  This wasn’t quite a lie – he knew that if he deceived her, she would see it in his colours – but it wasn’t quite the whole truth. In fact, he could still hear his passenger, its small, sly Voice inside his mind, and he knew that if he made a mistake, retribution would follow.

  ‘You wanted answers, Maggie,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you’re ready?’

  She nodded.

  ‘All right. I’ll tell you everything. Then, if you still don’t trust me—’

  ‘I trust you,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s your Magister I don’t trust.’

  Adam looked uncomfortable. ‘I hope I can change your mind about that. I need you, Maggie …’

  Maggie smiled. It felt very strange to wear such a smile, like trying on some unaccustomed item of clothing. She remembered her feeling of disgust when Adam had found the glam on her neck; her reluctance to take off her bergha in front of a man who was not one of her family. Now those feelings seemed childish, absurd. What was there to be afraid of?

  As a child she had seen her parents die and her world dissolve into Chaos. If she’d known then what she knew now, she might have been able to save them – to help them – or at least fight back. But now things would be different. Now she had glam – that mysterious fire that made common people into gods. Better still, she had a friend. Someone who listened. Someone who cared.

  Maggie had dreamed of healing World’s End, of Cleansing a city in anarchy. Now her dream had grown smaller, somehow; smaller, yet more significant. Lost libraries, scally traders, the breakdown of Law and Order – even her desire for vengeance against the agents of Chaos – all had suddenly given way to a deeper, more powerful kind of desire.

  Maggie had no name for it. She barely even knew it was there. All she knew was that something had changed; some lever had been pulled or pushed, setting in motion a mechanism that had never been used before. And as another small piece of an intricate trap tumbled slowly into place, Adam Goodwin grinned to himself, while the Red Horse of the Last Days started to munch on the silk tassels of the bedspread and, for the first time in five hundred years, Mimir the Wise was satisfied.

  AS MADDY APPROACHED the remains of the Hill, she found that, to her surprise, all was calm. The aftermath of the battle had left little in the way of debris, as most of the casualties had been of the ephemeral kind, and had fled back into World Below, or vanished into nothingness. The few, mostly harmless, remaining creatures that had escaped the World Serpent’s appetite were scattered across the wintry fields: a unicorn; a goblin or two; a cluster of baby dragons borne like dandelion seeds on the air.

  And all around the toppled Hill lay a blanket of pale, bright mist; no ordinary cloudbank, but something that welled up from World Below and flooded the flatlands around the Hill in a way that Maddy recognized …

  The river Dream, she thought; much of its power spent now; the force of its eruption quelled, dispersing its vapours at leisure. All the same, she approached it with care, knowing the potency of Dream, unsure of what might still be hidden away beneath the shroud of white mist.

  ‘Jormungand?’ she called at last.

  The World Serpent, gorged on Dream, seemed reluctant to respond.

  Raising her voice, she tried again, not wanting to enter the bank of mist. But the vapour dampened everything; and the dream-shapes that she’d seen at the start – that menagerie of Outlandish creatures – had dwindled to almost nothing. Only the ghostly mist remained, a residue of the battle, perhaps, and on the ground a kind of ash, interspersed with nuggets of slag, like cinders from a blacksmith’s forge.

  The cloud was right in front of her now. Maddy could see a wavering line, like the tide-line on a beach, which marked the boundary of Dream.

  ‘Jormungand?’ she repeated.

  There came a rumbling from the dreamcloud. Maddy cast the rune Yr and took a step forward into Dream. Nothing happened. She took another step. The mist was cold, and disturbing in a way that Maddy could not quite explain. She – who had witnessed Netherworld in all its bewildering multiplicity, who had looked Half-Born Hel in the eye and had walked the road to the Underworld all hedged around by the souls of the dead – found herself shivering with fear at nothing more than a bank of cloud.

  But as she moved further into Dream, she began to see what was happening. What she had assumed was just cloud was something far more sinister: it seemed to Maddy almost as if the air, the trees, the rocks, the ground – the whole fabric of reality was slowly dissolving around her, unravelling into the dreamcloud like a piece of knitting, reducing to its component parts.

  As she watched, a brown rat crawling over a piece of rock slowed down, grew dim and then popped out of existence before her eyes, leaving just a smear in the air to indicate where it had been. The rock itself soon followed suit, and she realized that the ash at her feet was the residue of this process, a gradual dissolution of everything within the cloud. How long would it take for a human being? And what did this mean for the valley itself?

  Once more she called for Jormungand. This time the Serpent heard her. There came a fearsome rumbling from the blasted remains of the Hill, and the glutinous head of the World Serpent emerged from the broken ground like a mighty earthworm scenting the rain, and levelled his gaze on Mad
dy.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I was wondering if you could help me.’

  Jormungand simply gaped at her in a way that redefined apathy.

  Maddy tried a more forceful approach. ‘I need to get to the Universal City,’ she said. ‘I mean – I need you to take me.’

  The Serpent gave a colossal yawn. His breath was foul enough, Maddy thought, to stop any number of ephemera. For a moment she thought of giving up and actually walking to the Universal City. But if she was to find Maggie Rede before Heimdall and the other gods learned of her existence, she had to get there straight away – which meant travelling through Dream, of course – and, failing Sleipnir, Maddy thought, Jormungand would have to do.

  ‘So – will you take me?’

  A long pause, in which the Serpent looked just as bovine as ever.

  Maddy gave an impatient sigh. ‘I wish I could tell if you understood. Don’t you have a human form?’

  ‘He does,’ said a voice from behind her, ‘but this is by far his most appealing Aspect.’

  ‘Loki,’ said Maddy, without turning round.

  ‘Oh, so you do remember me,’ said Loki in a casual voice. ‘Call me paranoid if you like, but after your spectacularly loyal defence of me back there, I wondered if I’d done something wrong.’

  ‘Have you?’ said Maddy.

  ‘No. Have you?’

  Maddy turned to look at him. He’d assumed his original Aspect – easy to do in Dream, of course – and was watching her from a cautious distance, his green eyes bright with malice. In Dream, she saw, as in Netherworld, his runemark was no longer reversed, and his colours shone more violently than they ever had in World Above.

  ‘Listen – I’m sorry about that,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all right, then.’ Loki’s scarred lips twisted in a dangerous smile. ‘Because here I was thinking, for some reason, that you were the one who’d opened the Hill, taken Odin’s Red Horse and let half the Underworld escape in the process, and were even now preparing to take off in secret with Jorgi, leaving Yours Truly to take the rap – and we’re not talking a rap on the knuckles here, but something much more permanent – without so much as an explanation.’

  Maddy cast the rune Bjarkán and shot a quick glance at Loki. That casual approach, she knew, was simply a ploy to take her off-guard, and as soon as he saw a chance to attack, he would try to tackle her. She could see it in his colours now – an acid-green thread of malevolence combined with the red of his anger – in this case, perfectly justified.

  ‘If that’s what you thought,’ she said, ‘then why didn’t you tell the others?’

  He shrugged. ‘You think they would have believed me? I’m hardly the most popular guy in the Middle Worlds right now.’ He narrowed his eyes at Maddy and smiled. ‘Anyway, I was curious. Whatever reason you might have had for freeing the Red Horse from under the Hill, it must have been something important.’

  Maddy gave him a sharp look. ‘You think I knew the Horse was there?’

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Loki impatiently. ‘Don’t play the innocent with me. Remember, I know Red Horse Hill. I know every crack and crevice. You think I never suspected that something big was buried here?’

  ‘The Whisperer …’ Maddy began.

  ‘That’s what I assumed at first,’ said Loki, with his disarming smile. ‘But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Mimir was never the main prize. Odin was planning to use him to get the gods back on his side before revealing his master plan.’

  ‘What plan?’ said Maddy.

  ‘War with Chaos,’ Loki said. ‘The End of the World. Asgard reclaimed. It’s all there, in the Good Book; with the Horse whose Rider is Carnage. Carnage. Grim, in the language of the Elder Age. And did you know – by some freak coincidence – that happens to be one of Odin’s names?’

  Silently Maddy shook her head.

  ‘But the Whisperer betrayed him,’ Loki went on implacably. ‘You went off to Netherworld; he was blinded; the gods turned against him. He had to reassess his plan. Even so, it nearly worked; but without the Horse it was futile. He fell. We all thought he was gone. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. Strange things began to happen. Like Angie cutting a deal with the gods, and giving Thor back his hammer. And then this business with the Hill. And if those weren’t Odin’s ravens back there, then I may just have to resign my position as Asgard’s most brilliant exile …’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ Maddy said.

  ‘The General survived, didn’t he?’ Loki’s eyes blazed fire-green. ‘He managed to escape somehow, and he doesn’t want the others to know. That’s fine. I’m cool with that. I mean, he must have his reasons. And if he’s working with Chaos now – well, I totally understand. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  ‘Odin would never do that!’ Maddy said.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Loki. ‘My mistake.’

  ‘I mean it,’ said Maddy angrily. ‘Odin would never do that. I can’t explain his plan right now, but betraying the gods isn’t part of it.’

  ‘OK. I’m sorry. Forget I spoke. So – he does have a plan, then?’

  Maddy eyed him suspiciously. ‘What do you want, Loki?’ she said.

  Loki shrugged. ‘Same as always. Let me go with you to World’s End. That’s where it’s going to begin, right? The war between Order and Chaos? I don’t know why you’re keeping so dark, or what you think you can do alone, but if the General did survive, then I know he’d want me to help you.’

  Help me? Help yourself, more like. Maddy thought she understood. Loki, as always, was hedging his bets. Out of favour with the gods, he thought to gain Odin’s protection, or at least to put some distance between himself and the carnage at Red Horse Hill. She might even have succumbed to his charm – alone and uncertain as she was – but for the thought of Maggie Rede. Loki, she knew, had no scruples at all, and if he found out about Maggie, he would not hesitate to use the information to restore his status amongst the gods – or, worse, to bargain with Chaos.

  Maddy hated to leave him this way, but she simply couldn’t take the risk of exposing her sister to further threat. And so she turned to Loki and smiled, and hoped that he would understand. ‘Look, I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘I promise I’ll tell you everything. But first I have to do this—’

  And with these words she summoned all her considerable glam and flung it as hard as she could. Just to slow him down as she fled – Loki in Aspect was no pushover, even for her – but the glam she chose instinctively from all those at her command happened to be the new rune she’d snagged that morning from her ghostly visitor.

  For a second the rune Ác burned silvery white at her fingertips, then, without any further encouragement, swiftly merged with her own rune, Aesk. She felt rather than heard the click as the two runes locked together, then a mindbolt shot from her open hand, knocking Loki off his feet; then slammed him hard against the ground some fifty yards away from her.

  At first she was afraid he was dead. But, narrowing her eyes, Maddy saw that his signature was there, although its potency was dimmed.

  She considered the glam she had flung at him. It looked like an ordinary combination rune – Ác, the Thunder Oak –

  – crossed with Aesk, the Lightning Ash –

  – but in this case, clearly, Ác and Aesk had come together to make up something far more powerful –

  – a glam that had knocked the Trickster out cold (and in his most powerful Aspect, no less) as effortlessly as swatting a fly.

  Once Maddy had determined that Loki wasn’t faking it – that he really was unconscious – she found herself faced with the awkward choice between leaving him there at the mercy of Dream, or dragging him into the open, where his signature would instantly betray his location to Heimdall and his people.

  She opted for the second choice, hoping that Loki would understand. The gods would be furious at his escapade, and would probably give him a hard time, but he’d talked his way out of worse things before, and Maddy was certain that he would c
ope.

  As for his suggestion that Odin might have turned his coat and struck a deal with the enemy, she dismissed it with a shake of her head. Odin might be devious – sometimes even dishonest – but he would never betray the gods. She had no choice but to follow her heart and go off in search of her sister, and hope that her search for Maggie would lead her to the Old Man.

  She left the unconscious Trickster just outside the dreamcloud and ran back to the Horse’s Eye, where Jormungand, stirred by his father’s defeat, was showing signs of excitement – shaking his mane and hissing and generally giving the impression of a Serpent ready for anything.

  Maddy gave him a wary look. ‘We’re on the same side, right?’ she said.

  Jormungand made a horribly puppyish sound.

  ‘And you know where I have to go? Right?’

  Jormungand almost frolicked.

  ‘And when we get there, you’ll behave yourself? You promise you won’t eat anyone? I mean it. That would be bad,’ she said.

  Jormungand gave a half-shrug and slowly began to uncoil himself. Maddy took a double handful of the World Serpent’s mane and hauled herself into position. I hope you know what you’re doing, she thought.

  And they lurched off into the heart of Dream.

  LOKI WOKE UP with a headache. Not so much a headache, in fact, as a pain that began at the top of his head and extended as far as his body could reach. Even his hair hurt – which, on second thoughts, he decided wasn’t all that surprising, given that someone was using it to yank him briskly to his feet.

  Thor seemed the likeliest guess – though to be fair, the Trickster thought, it might just as easily be Heimdall. Or Frey. Or Njörd. Or even Angie. If she had been anywhere nearby, his best guess would have been Skadi of the Ice Folk, otherwise known as the Snowshoe Queen, the Huntress, and the Snow Wolf.

  Fortunately, he told himself, Skadi was out of the picture for good. In the weeks preceding Ragnarók it had been she who’d had him chained to a rock with a snake spitting poison into his face, and the last time they’d met she’d come very close to bringing him down with her runewhip.