One of them, drowned, starved and frozen for year after year, met the dead god by the deep pool and was given a rune that sparkled like bright water. The minds of men fell open to her and she began to dream the dreams of children in faraway places, hear jealous whispers flowing through the mountain passes and feel the coursing currents of love and hate that washed over the farmsteads.
Another took a different path to knowledge. She dug her own grave and the sisters sealed her in with a rock. As her sanity collapsed she had felt the god lying next to her in that tiny space, touched the rope at the god’s neck and felt his body cold and lifeless next to her. Her rune seemed to grow and wither in her mind, now obscured by earth and weeds, now exhumed and vibrant. When she was lifted from the ground she was scarcely breathing, but she had won the most valuable rune of all. Now she knew the secrets of inheritance and how magic can be given as a gift.
From that moment on, death could not take the power of the runes from the sisters. Each could build on the knowledge of her teachers. Progress was possible. The witches grew more powerful, generation after generation keeping what they had and building on their knowledge until there were twenty-four sisters of the inner circle, each the guardian, nurturer and expression of a different rune.
Now, though, there was a twentyfifth witch. She was known to Authun as Gullveig, the witch queen, and to some of the local people as Huldra, but the sisters never called her that, or anything. She had been brought to the tunnels as a baby, destined — according to divination — to take on the rune of daylight. But when the witches started to work with the girl it became plain it was already within her, seeming to shine from the darkness from her first meditations, to rustle like the wind in a full-leafed tree in the minds of all the witches who looked at her. This was a puzzle for the sisters because it normally took years of suffering and denial to make the rune manifest — that and the death of the sister within whom it currently dwelled. At two years old the girl was put to further agonies and observed. A rune seemed to spill from her — silver like the sea on a moonlit night — then another, which twinkled like ice in the morning sun, and then a third, which seemed more a feeling than a vision, harsh prickles on the skin with a deep, blustery cold, and a fourth, with the scent of wild fruit, a fifth, like hunger, a sixth with the glint of gold, a seventh that smelled of roses and blood, and an eighth with the sound of the wind in sails. By the end of the girl’s third year all the twenty-four runes that the sisters spent their lives expressing, dreaming and using for their power were in the girl.
She represented a new stage in the witches’ evolution. Previously the queen had only held the daylight rune, that of the first witch. Gullveig had them all. Through her early years her ritual sufferings had propelled her mind on travels with the hanged god through dry tombs in arid lands where the dead seemed to claw at her from their crumbling graves, to mires and peat bogs where she had seen the fresh pink skin of the newly drowned whose faces seemed to implore her for help her as they sank, to battles where she heard the whispered names of lovers and children on the lips of dying men and where she picked the shrieking runes from their fingers. It was said she was mad, but had the farmers and warriors of the valleys known what she had been through, they would have marvelled she stayed so sane.
Reading the portents of rock, wind and water, Gullveig knew something extraordinary was happening. The foreboding that filled the caves, the heavy air, the sense of frustration waiting to break, told her she had no choice. She had to carve a rune, to force the future into the physical realm, to make it something that could be handled, discussed and, ultimately, manipulated.
For this she descended to the lower caves, where the rocks were stained glowing reds and greens and the damp and the cold gave way to a heat that seemed to pour from the earth. She took with her a small piece of cured leather that had once been a chieftain’s belt and a pin that had held his cloak at his neck. Then she stayed on her own for a season. No one brought her food; the water she had was only what she licked from the cave walls; there was no light except the phosphorescence of the rock and no presence but her own. At the end of her ordeal the sisters came and carried her from the cave. She had written nothing and it was clear a greater trial was needed.
The sink hole at the bottom of the ghost caves was not a natural phenomenon, though no one could recall who had dug it. It was about an armspan wide at the top but narrowed as it descended ten or twelve times the height of a man until anyone falling into it would have been stuck fast like a stopper in a bottle. The shaft cut across a powerful underground stream which entered through a fissure as wide as an fist at the top and left through another at the bottom. The result was that, when the witch was lowered by rope into the hole, she was immersed in flowing water up to her neck.
She knew that, for the ritual to succeed, she would need to spend nine days there.
The first three days had been dark and agonising. She was, after all, human. No one who had grown up without her training could have endured it. Since she was a tiny girl she had been subjected to terrible long fasts and meditations, she had consumed strange mushrooms and been confined and buried like the dead, spent nights naked beneath the moon on frozen hillsides when only the power of the mind stands between life and death. So the witch queen did endure it, clawing her way out of her humanity in pain and anguish. On the fourth day the torture had divorced her mind from her physical body and the lights had come on. Dwarfs stood in the darkness, offering her gold and jewels and a ship that seemed built of something like pearl but was, she knew, made of dead men’s nails. It was all hers, if only she would call to the sisters to pull her from the water. On the fifth day the walls around her flamed with green and purple lights and the spirits of the rock tried to lift her from the pool, but she remained. On the sixth day her ancestors were at her side, the ghosts who gave the caves their name, one hundred queens all less powerful than her but all part of her. She was the sum of the whole, she knew. All the dead queens were there, some naked and smeared in muds and vegetable dyes, some finer than she was, calling, jabbering, singing and weeping in the dark. They begged her to give up, spat at her, tried to rip her from the water, but she would not relent. The witch queen was on the way to her answer. On the seventh day there were voices and she knew the gods were near. On the eighth day there was just blackness, an absence of thought, nothing, as she stood on the edge of death. Then, on the ninth day, she was back in the pool, just as she had been the moment she went in.
The flowing water had stopped and she felt warm. None of the other sisters was around her, nor any of the servant boys, but the phosphorescence of the rocks seemed even brighter. In the cave it was like daylight.
A voice came echoing from tunnels that stretched away from her.
‘Do you know what they did to me? Do you know what they did?’ Though the witch queen rarely spoke, she could understand these words that resonated as much in her mind as in her ears.
An odour of burning seeped into her consciousness, not a pleasant smell at all, nothing like wood or straw on fire. It was closer to hair.
‘See what they did to me, see what they did!’
She climbed out of the sink hole and walked down to the lower caves, and then lower still, following the burning smell and the voice.
‘I am blind, I am blind!’ The voice spoke again.
The witch moved on down. The caves became smaller. She had never been in them before and sensed they were not part of the real world, but some place accessible only by magic. She could taste the smoke in her throat, thick and bitter, and the voice became louder. Then in the dim light she could make out a figure. At first she thought he was shrouded in mist, but as she drew nearer she could see something between steam and smoke hissing from his thrashing body.
The man was naked and tied to a rock with bloody and glutinous ropes, while above him snakes of vivid purple, green and yellow writhed, dripping venom onto his face and into his eyes. His features were swollen, bruised and black. His tongue was mottled blue and white and the poison sizzled on his flesh. His pale skin was burned into welts and his red hair singed to patches. He was screaming and howling, tearing at his bonds, but he couldn’t get them off. The witch had practised enough minor magics to recognise the fetters for what they were. They were entrails.
Suddenly, for the first time since before she had joined her sisters underground when she was small, the witch queen felt like the child she was. The presence of this tormented man terrified her. This, she knew, was a creature even the gods feared.
Next to him was a silver bowl. The witch came forward and picked it up, collecting the venom before it fell onto the god’s face. She knew now who it was — Loki, lord of lies, betrayer of the gods, bane of heroes but sometimes, occasionally, friend of man.
‘I send my mind forth in torment. I travel the nine worlds in agony, witch. Do you see what they did to me,
