seen, not meant to be touched and used. The ability to do that was the key to magic and to madness.
‘We have tired of the tale the god has to tell.’
The god had intended to set his runes inside her, to drag her to his death. Did he think he could cheat her, blind her and control her? The water flowed around her and she fell in on herself. She was not sitting in a pool of water. She sat in a pool of thoughts, of visions and memories, a stream of words, fears, hopes and disappointments running out of it over her fingers into blackness. She could manipulate it, change its course.
She saw the remaining symbols in the water, keening for their sisters. Her death, her self-sacrifice, had trapped the runes in the pool but not all of them. Some had gone away, fearing their fate, each one a fragment of a god.
Where had they gone? Did it matter? She would call to them and they would come back, to be released by death, back to be trapped in the pool. Then the eternal dumbshow would stop.
The god had not reckoned with her magic. He had asked for her mother’s death and for that of her brother but he hadn’t understood who she was. He knew only she was a magical creature, not who she truly was — a Norn, one of the three sisters who spin the fates of all humanity. She laughed as she realised what had happened. The god had mistaken her for an incarnation of himself, an empty vessel into which he could pour his runes. She was to die for him after the runes had assembled within her. But she had pre-empted him and gone to death before he could fill her with his magic. It had not occurred to him she could manifest herself in the realm of men too. As Odin began to claim her for his own, to put the runes within her, to inhabit her flesh and offer that flesh to the wolf so he might live, suffer and die, she had done what he had not thought possible. She reached out into the stream, twisted the current through her fingers, felt it as a multitude of threads and drawn out those she recognised as belonging to her brother.
The threads trembled with the deep currents of his ambition, the hot flow of his jealousies, and she had weaved them together into a skein of murder. He had killed her and thwarted the dead god’s will.
‘Odin,’ she said, ‘you could not live in me. I am stronger than you and my magic cannot be gainsayed. Here by these dark waters that feed the tree on which all worlds grow, I will have what I am owed.’
How many had he tried to set inside her? Twenty-four in their orbits of eight — twenty-four, a magic number, a god’s number. When twenty-four runes came to life inside any human, then the old god was present and ready to face his little fate on earth so he might avoid his bigger one in eternal time.
He had tried to make her his sacrifice, as he had done to her sisters in times past. Sisters? Did she mean Styliane? No. Others — sisters bound to her eternally.
Where were they? Uthr. Verthani. The strangeness of those words struck her. Have they taken flesh as I have? Where were these thoughts coming from? From the water. She saw the god’s wake, a trail of blood dripping throughout human history. He should pay the price for that.
The raven’s wing is black
Scarlet stains the snow’s white field.
The dirge-voice was in her head. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like him, the one who was speaking. Are you here for your sacrifice? She’d known him a long time, longer than she remembered. The dead god. Odin, Hecate, Mercury — that many-formed fellow. He was near. She saw a hill, grey in a raw dawn, and on it a tree where men dangled and choked from hanging ropes, their legs doing the dead god’s dance. She saw the gold of kings thrown into waters rich with loam, holy slaves bound and drowned, around their necks the dead god’s symbol — the sticky, tricky triple knot.
Then she saw him, near her in the water in the blood glow of the rocks — his bloated corpse face, the black rope at his neck, his good eye staring at her, the other torn and ragged. He chanted a dissonant song:
‘Under the gallows tree they worship me;
By the moon they call me;
Triple-knotted, triple-faced, triple-looking.
Three times I suffered to sacrifice
Myself unto myself. In the branches
Of that terrible tree.’
She heard mad bursts of poetry:
‘It is said, you went with dainty steps in the city, and knocked at houses as a vala.
In the likeness of a fortune teller
You went among people.
Now that, I think, betokens a base nature.’
The words seemed to have a great power. They fell as earth to bury her, and she stretched out her hands to shovel them away. She heard a drum, its beat toiling and slow above her. The god’s will was bound by cold irons to eternal death, and she knew what he offered. Death, again and again, spreading like a stain across the light of the world.
‘Lady,’ said the god, ‘it seems to me I know your name. I mistook you for someone.’
‘For who?’
‘For myself.’
His mind roamed over hers, a sensation of cold fingers on her face, a desperate pulling and upending of things within her, as if her soul was a house and he a miser searching for a coin within it.
‘You know me, old one. As I know you. Maddener. Frenzied One. All Father. All Hater.’
‘I know you.’
‘What is my name?’
‘I dare not say it.’
‘My name is Skuld.’
‘Have you fallen to the world of breath?’
‘Did you think I would let you travel here unwatched?’
‘I have a bargain with you.’
‘Only for as long as you can honour it.’
‘I will honour it. By the runes that I am, I will honour it.’
A great white tree stretched out to the stars above her. In the pool the symbols sparkled like shipwrecked treasure in the tales of children.
‘You play the fates falsely, Odin, made us share in your deaths, weave strange magics and sacrifice ourselves to ourselves. Now see what I weave for you.’
She held up her hand. Crimson threads flowed from it, streaming out towards the god, entangling his pale body, pulling her towards him.
He stretched out his hands, snapping the threads, and images appeared: a starved girl-child lying broken in a cave, a blonde-haired woman covered in blood and screaming, a wolf guzzling on her entrails.
The god’s voice spoke:
‘These are the gifts I have given you:
Death for life, life for death.
I have bowed to your will.
For you I have suffered agonies deep and long.’
Elai heard herself speak: ‘Can you not hear how he howls for your blood? The wolf strains against the bonds with which you tied him.’
Each sinew, each curve of the muscles of the corpse god’s pale and wounded torso seemed no more than the twist of a rune; the tattoos that stained the flesh of his body, his arms and his face were runes too. The god was the runes. He had promised to die for her — that was the destiny in the stream that played through her fingers — but he had killed her, in her many and various forms. She saw herself as she had been — a sorcerer in an animal mask looking out over a cold sea, a wolfman in his skins, many other things, male and female over many lives, trying to bring the god to his destiny of death. He had torn her, tricked her and broken her heart, left her as a dead girl in the water — Odin, that ancient killer.
‘You have played me basely, lord. For this you will pay what you owe.’
The god spoke:
‘I took a fetter and the fetter was called Thin,
And I bound the wolf to a rock called Scream,
