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  And as Maggie became accustomed to new ways and to her new life in the Universal City, she understood that the great plague was not the worst thing that had happened there. In the absence of the Order, another plague had come to town – a plague of greed and lawlessness that swept the whole of Inland’s South.

  Odin One-Eye would have understood. Order and Chaos have their tides, and the rise of one leads inevitably to the decline of the other. Not that the Seer-folk had risen far; but the fact remained that ten thousand members of the Order had been eliminated in a single day, and Chaos had rushed in to fill the spaces they had left.

  It was not, however, a victory that would have given Odin any great comfort. The Order was gone, certainly; but in the three short years that followed the war, World’s End had become a wretched place. Without the Order to keep control, it had succumbed, as money often does, to excess, anarchy and greed. Gone were the solemn dark-robed figures; gone the chattering groups of prentices; gone the quiet coffee shops and the oratories and books.

  Now, instead of Cleansings to entertain the masses, the streets were awash with traders from abroad, rushing in to ply their wares. In the days of the Order, the port of World’s End had been kept under very strict control. Foreign traders had been heavily taxed, and illegal wares seized and destroyed. Only respectable merchants had been allowed, selling respectable and necessary goods. Hard drink had been banned, along with whores and dancing girls, and although a black market had existed (for luxury and exotic wares), such undesirables as gypsies, pedlars, rogues and Outlanders were more likely to have been put in the stocks, Examined, expelled or even hanged – than welcomed into Cathedral Square.

  But now the gates had been opened up. Ships were no longer turned away, and once this knowledge had been passed around, a plague of traders from abroad had descended upon the port of World’s End.

  These traders sold anything and everything you could imagine. Silks and leathers and pasties and pies; monkeys and persimmons and purple dyes; sea shells and poisons and barbarian slaves from over the One Sea; gemstones real and fake; hard drink; odd gadgets; love spells; oranges and glassware and the dried organs of wild beasts. And gradually these traders had invaded the city, bringing hordes of buyers and gawkers and gamblers and thieves tumbling in their exotic wake. They also brought crime of every kind, diseases, drugs and violence. They made and lost fortunes in gambling, selling into slavery those who could not pay their debts. They lived like kings or warlords, draped themselves in jewellery, carried swords, kept slave girls, and seduced the young and credulous with promises of easy wealth.

  For Maggie, who scarcely had enough money to survive, and who worked all hours in the grimy tavern, it looked as if the world she knew had turned to Pan-daemonium. Even the University had been taken over by the new arrivals – empty refectories converted to dancing halls and colleges, to brothels and taverns and gaming halls.

  At first there had been some resistance to this – mostly from native World’s Enders, who feared that one day the Order might return. But as time passed, their followers had grown fewer and less fervent. No one had come to take control. The Order had not returned, nor the plague. A few people claimed to have seen ghosts around the deserted buildings, but the eerie corridors of what had once been called the Universal City proved themselves to be a lot less eerie when filled with dancers and musicians; and slowly but steadily the rot spread inwards, claiming chapels, studies and halls; even the Great Quad itself, now converted to a forum where half of World’s End – or so it seemed – came to cavort on Seventh-day nights.

  Here were dancing bears on chains, and sumptuous banquets eaten off the backs of naked whores, and smokers of exotic weeds, and fake magicians and fortune-tellers, and mad prophets preaching the words of vanished demons and conquered gods. Where modesty had always prevailed, wild new fashions now appeared. Some women even went out in the streets with heads uncovered and shoulders bare. In three years, it seemed, the world Maggie knew had come to an end; and no one but Maggie seemed to care.

  She had always kept the faith. She covered her head with the bergha, as the Good Book instructed. She ate no meat on holy days and always washed before saying her prayers. Even though the Order was gone, she kept its fast-days and followed its Laws, for in this new disorderly world, the old rites and rituals made her feel safe.

  Of course, she had never known the plague, nor had she actually witnessed the Bliss. Coming home from the Ridings to find herself an orphan, penniless and alone in a city she barely recognized, she had found her romantic young soul turning inwards for comfort, and she had convinced herself (at least in part) that she was the hero of some tale of the Elder Days, a lone survivor of Tribulation.

  The youngest child – and the only daughter – of a family of four, Maggie had always been the brightest. Though she had never been to school, she had secretly taught herself to read, and over the years, in tantalizing fragments between Jim Parson’s Sunday sermons and passages snatched from her brothers’ books, she had collected more knowledge than anyone could have suspected. Tales of the demon Seer-folk of old; of the Æsir and the Vanir, their wars, and finally how they had stolen the runes of the Elder Script and built themselves a citadel from which to rule the Nine Worlds. She knew how they had gloried; made weapons and magical artefacts; had gone on quests and adventures; waged war against the Ice Folk; and, finally, had been betrayed by one of their own, the Trickster, and defeated at last in their arrogance by the Nameless.

  That had been Tribulation – or Ragnarók, as they called it then. But Tribulation had not finished the Seer-folk. Instead it had driven them into hiding, weakened but still dangerous, like wildfire creeping underground. And the Good Book had promised that one day soon, the final Cleansing would arrive, and Perfect Order would triumph for ever over Chaos …

  In the days of the Order, of course, all tales had been seen as potentially dangerous – even the ones in the Good Book – and only the Order’s initiates had been permitted to enter the great libraries of the Universal City. But now Maggie was free to do as she pleased. Though most of the Order’s gold had been plundered – including the strange key-shaped tokens that Examiners wore around their necks – many of their books remained, and these she sought out with a growing hunger, knowing that it was dangerous, but filled with a mounting nostalgia for the half-forgotten worlds inside.

  Some were books of science and alchemy, naming the various properties of metals and salts. Some were books of geography from before the New Age. Many were in languages she could not read, or in words she did not understand. Some were illustrated with tiny pen-and-ink drawings of animals and birds. Some were indecent, containing love poetry or pictures of naked women. Some were long lists of ancient kings. As the desecration of the University by the traders progressed, Maggie knew that it was only a matter of time before some enterprising person dismantled the libraries and sold the books to burn in their hearths, and so she removed as many as she could and took them to a place of safety, a newly discovered passageway that lay below the Communion Chapel.

  At that time this tiny chapel at the heart of the University still remained almost intact. Some of its glass had been plundered, but at the great oak pulpit a lectern still stood, and on it was the largest Book Maggie had ever seen. Too big to have been looted as yet, it was almost the size of a child’s cradle, tooled in leather and bound in gold and heavy with the mysterious weight of words. Maggie longed to see inside – but it was securely fastened with a golden hasp, and none of her efforts to force it prevailed.

  But it was what she found under the lectern that day that made catch her breath in excitement; for behind a panel in the huge carved pulpit Maggie discovered a secret door, left half open during the Bliss – the first of many hidden entrances into the catacombs of the Universal City.

  From that day forth Maggie spent most of her nights in the catacombs. The ransacking of the University was already underway, and she knew that before long, the once-aband
oned buildings would no longer be so, and her solitary occupancy would be no more.

  But the catacombs were a different matter. The passageways beneath the University stretched out for miles in every direction: cold stone lanes, labyrinthine tunnels, draughty caves, abandoned stores, depositories of bone and dust. Above her head the looters grew bold; but no one ventured underground, and no one came to disturb her forays as she moved ever deeper under the city.

  It became more than a game to her. Over three years Maggie made several hundred maps showing the location of more than a thousand rooms, caverns, crypts, passages, wells, stairways, hidden doors, loose panels, avenues, entrances, exits, crawl-spaces and cul-de-sacs.

  Some of these passageways were clean; others were almost knee-deep in dust. Most of them were bare and unused, but once she found a high vault constructed entirely of human bones, the skulls arranged in a decorative pattern along the architrave, the columns made of long dry bundles of femurs and ulnas mortared together with hair and gristle and dirt and fat. Another time she found a room filled with canned meats and vegetables; then some cases of wine. She also found rats in great number; but mostly she found only lifeless rock, echoing chambers, frozen arteries – the dead heart of the Universal City.

  And then, on one of her nightly forays, Maggie tripped over a loose stone, under which was wedged a long golden key. She took it and kept it around her neck. It was a pretty thing, though surely too ornate to be of any practical use. Then, one day, it occurred to her to try it on the gold lock that sealed the colossal leather-tooled Book she had found on the lectern in the Communion Chapel …

  And that’s how a Ridings wool merchant’s daughter found and read the Book of Words.

  The pages were unwieldy and large, and the paper was both stiff and curiously brittle, so that Maggie had to take great pains to avoid breaking it. But the hand-lettered script was exquisitely beautiful, and the pictures – tiny enamelled scenes from the Closed Books; portraits of heroes, rampant snakes, dragons, demons and long-vanished Seer-folk – were often stories in themselves, mysterious and terrible and luminous with promise.

  Fearing vandals or thieves, she had hauled her treasure (not without difficulty) into the space under the pulpit, and from thence to her secret library. Here she kept all her stolen books, and here she set up the Good Book respectfully against the wall. And although the text was very old and its meaning was often hard to make out, Maggie sensed the power in the ancient script, and she would creep back to the library at night and, by the light of a candle, run her fingers over the illuminated text, and whisper the strange and lovely words to herself, and dream.

  As a child she had been taught to be wary of dreams. But as Maggie grew older, scraping a living down in the bilges of the Universal City, she found increasing pleasure in dreams. Her parents and relatives were gone. Such friends as she’d had were scattered. Dreams were all she had now and, primed with images from the Book, she dreamed of battles and of demons, Seer-folk and gods; of the Sky Citadel and the Black Fortress and the Chaos beyond; but most of all she dreamed of the Last Days, of Tribulation, of the ultimate Cleansing of all the Worlds, when plague and crime and famine and death would be outlawed for ever, and three great Riders with swords of flame would charge across the Middle Worlds, striking down the wicked and raising the faithful from the dust.

  And there shall come a Horse of Fire –

  And the name of his Rider is Carnage.

  And there shall come a Horse of the Sea –

  And the name of his Rider is Treachery.

  And there shall come a Horse of Air –

  And the name of his Rider is Lunacy …

  It was Maggie’s favourite dream by far. She knew what a dangerous game she played – for demons could enter the world through dreams – but still she could not let it go. And so in the darkness of the Universal City, surrounded by forgotten books, lulled by the murmur of wind in the tunnels and by the distant sounds of music from above, she dreamed of the Word, and of the Bliss, and of the Tribulation to come. Most of all she dreamed of the Riders of the Last Days, coming closer as time went by; and she found that if she closed her eyes, she could almost see them – one of them especially, his young face weathered by the sun, light hair pulled back with a hank of hide, and the blue of his eyes, so different to the blue of the Sea; a misty blue, like mountains seen from afar, and as cold as the peaks of the distant North.

  It was a strange and beautiful dream. Strange, because somehow she knew he was real, and that this – this dead and all-but-forgotten place – was the place to which he was destined to come. Stranger, because she sometimes felt that the dreams themselves were calling him in a language of their own; a secret language like that of those books in which she had found a new purpose.

  And so, where most people did all they could to stop themselves from dreaming, Maggie became a hunter of dreams. And the more she dreamed, the more real they became to her, and the more she grew to understand that it was here, among the ruins of the Universal City, that the End of the World was destined to start, and that she would have a part to play.

  It was this thought – and not the books or the rats – that brought Maggie Rede here every night, walking down deserted passageways, reading strange and forgotten texts, turning keys half gobbled with rust, and dreaming of that glorious day when everything she had longed for all her life would suddenly come true.

  One day it would happen. One day her moment would come.

  And so Maggie waited amongst her stolen books, and kept the faith, and studied, and dreamed; little knowing that six hundred miles away, in the far frozen North, in a village half hidden between mountains and snow, a pair of ever-watchful eyes had turned at last to the sound of her voice; and that, after three years of waiting, her dreams were finally marching home.

  THOR WAS SPOILING for a fight. That in itself wasn’t unusual. The Thunderer wasn’t best known for his patience, especially not before breakfast, and you had to admit he’d had a lot to deal with over the past three years.

  First had been the arrival of his son, Modi – one of a pair of twins whom the Oracle had predicted long ago but who, due to the unreliability of oracles in general, had actually turned out to be a daughter, Maddy. Then there had been her rescue of the surviving Æsir – with the help of Loki, the Trickster, of all people – from the Black Fortress of Chaos; which operation had led, if not to the actual End of the Worlds, then at least to something very like it, something that had wiped out the enemy, taken the life of the General, and culminated in the cataclysmic event between Order and Chaos that had caused Dream to burst its banks and to release its contents into the Middle Worlds.

  She hadn’t meant to do it, of course. In Thor’s experience, women never meant to do anything, which was why – in the Elder Days, at least – they hadn’t been involved in the dealings of the gods. Let a woman in your life, thought the Thunderer bitterly, and before you know it, you’re sitting in an ice cave somewhere with your beard in knots and your glam reversed, and your wife nagging at you for a new body every ten minutes, as if you didn’t have enough to do keeping the Worlds safe for mankind.

  Bloody women, grumbled Thor. A son would have done things properly …

  Of course, it had ended in victory for the gods. Four of them had escaped the Black Fortress. Loki had gone even further, escaping the realm of Death itself. But though it was true that the Order had been defeated, never had victory tasted less sweet.

  The Oracle, who had promised them new worlds, had turned out to be the enemy. Odin was dead, the Æsir divided, the Vanir resentful and hostile; all of them weakened and irresolute. Without the General they were once more at odds – the Vanir, under Heimdall’s command, keeping mainly to their stronghold under the Sleepers (except for Skadi, who hadn’t been seen since the End of the World and was generally assumed to have gone back home to the Ice People).

  The Æsir too were divided. Elevation to godhood is not always an easy matter to come t
o terms with, even such beggarly godhood as theirs, with their broken runemarks and unfinished Aspects. On the shores of the river Dream, with magic flying around like snow and the disembodied Æsir fighting desperately for their lives, there had been no chance for discussions or explanations. Four largely unsuspecting hosts had found themselves suddenly embodying various Aspects of the divine with greater or lesser degrees of comfort.

  Ethel and Dorian had accepted the change wholeheartedly, and had therefore come to terms with the situation rather better than Sugar, whose role as Brave-Hearted Tyr was still something of a trial to him; or Sif, whose complaints at her reincarnation into the body of a pot-bellied pig had been a trial to everyone.

  As a result, the Æsir were split between Malbry Parsonage, which still belonged to Ethel; the pig farm at Farnley Tyas, which was the home of Thor and Sif; the smithy, which Tyr had claimed as his own (possibly because it was closest to the inn); and the smith’s cottage, which had fallen to Maddy after her father’s death.

  Maddy’s elder sister Mae, who might in other circumstances have been expected to take an interest, had married out of Malbry to a relative of Torval Bishop’s, and now lived across the river in the little village of Farnley Tyas, which was about as far from Maddy as could be managed, and where Mae could sometimes pretend to herself that they were not related.

  The folk of Malbry had been reluctant at first to accept the strangers into their midst. But Maddy was still one of their own; and Dorian Scattergood, though something of a black sheep, was the son of a most respectable family. A pity his new wife was so muffin-faced, said the village gossips. Dor – or Thor, as he called himself now – was a fine-looking fellow, and some had expected him to pair up with the parson’s wealthy widow – though, to be sure, even Ethel Parson had grown quite peculiar following her escapade under Red Horse Hill.