Runemarks

No one had actually heard what he said. The Word is inaudible, though everyone said afterward that they had felt something. Some wept. Some screamed. Some seemed to hear the voices of people long dead. Some felt an ecstasy that seemed to them almost indecent-almost uncanny.

Loki had felt it from Little Bear Wood but, in his eagerness to seek out Maddy and the Whisperer, had mistaken the vibration-and the crack that followed-for the work of the digging machines on the Hill.

One-Eye had felt it as a sudden rush of memories. Memories of his son Balder, dead from a shaft of mistletoe; of his faithful wife, Frigg; of his son Thor-all folk long lost, whose faces seldom returned to his thoughts.

On the Hill there had come a wakening shudder, making Nat’s hair stand on end. Then a crack like a thunderbolt.

Laws, that power!

“Laws,” he said.

The Examiner was the only one who had seemed unimpressed by the procedure. In fact, Nat thought he had looked almost bored, as if this were some everyday routine, somewhat fatiguing, but no more exciting than digging out a nest of weasels.

Then he had stopped thinking and, like the rest of them, had simply stared.

At the Examiner’s feet there was now an irregular gash in the ground, some sixteen inches long and perhaps three inches wide. Its shape seemed vaguely significant-it was yr, the Fundament, reversed-although Nat, who was not familiar with the Elder Script, did not recognize its importance.

“I have broken the first of nine locks,” said the Examiner in his flat voice. “The remaining eight are as yet intact, but this reversal is the most important.”

“Why?” asked Adam, which pleased Nat because it was the question he had wanted to ask but had not for fear of sounding ignorant.

The Examiner gave a small, impatient sigh, as if to deplore the ignorance of these rustic folk. “See this mark-this ruinmark? This marks the entrance to the demon mound. Eight more of these locks remain to be broken before the machines can get inside.”

“How do you know there isn’t another way into the Hill?” said Dorian Scattergood, who was standing close by.

“There are several,” said the Examiner. He seemed to be enjoying himself, though his voice remained dry and contemptuous. “However, the enemy’s first defense is to close the Hill against all intruders. To dig deep, as a rabbit does when it scents the hawk. And so now, as you see, the Hill has been sealed. No escape from within, no way in from without. However, as any hunter knows, it is sometimes useful to fill in smaller rabbit holes with earth before setting the snare at the main burrow’s mouth. And when this burrow is opened at last”-the Examiner gave a chilly smile-“then, Parson, we shall dig them out.”

“You mean the…Good Folk?” said a voice behind him. It was Crazy Nan from Forge’s Post, perhaps the only person, thought Nat, who would have dared to speak openly of the Faerie-and in front of an Examiner, no less.

“Call them by name, lady,” said the Examiner. “What good can possibly come from this evil place? They are the Fiery, Children of the Fire, and they shall be put to the fire, every one, until the Order rules supreme and the world is Cleansed of them forever.”

A hum of approval went around the gathering-but Nat noticed that Crazy Nan did not join it and that several others looked a little anxious. It was easy to see why, he thought; even in World’s End such powers as the Examiner’s were rare, honors conferred upon the highest and holiest rank of the clergy. Torval Bishop wouldn’t have approved; to an oldster like Torval such things would have seemed dangerously close to magic-which was, of course, an abomination- but to Nat Parson, who had traveled and seen a little of the world, there could be no mistaking one for the other.

“Not children, though,” persisted Nan. “I mean, goblins, Good Folk, that’s all right, but we’re not going to Cleanse any real children, are we?”

The Examiner sighed. “The Children of the Fire are not children.”

“Oh.” Crazy Nan looked relieved. “Because we’ve known Maddy Smith since she were a bairn, and she may be a little wild, but-”

“Lady, that is for the Order to judge.”

“Oh, but surely-”

“Please, Miss Fey,” interrupted Nat. “This isn’t just common business anymore.” His chest swelled a little. “This is a matter of Law and Order.”

3

“The Word?” said Maddy. “You mean it exists?”

“Of course it exists,” said the Whisperer. “How else do you think the ?sir were defeated?”

Maddy had never read the Good Book, though she knew “Tribulation” and “Penitences” well enough from Nat Parson’s Sunday sermons. Only Nat and a handful of prentices (all boys) were allowed to read any part of it, and even then, their reading was restricted to the so-called Open Chapters of “Tribulation,” “Penitences,” “Laws,” “Listings,” “Meditations,” and “Duties.”

But some chapters of the Book were locked, with silver clips that pinned the pages shut, the key kept on a fine chain around Nat Parson’s neck. No sermons were ever preached from these Closed Chapters, as they were called, although Maddy knew some of their names from One-Eye.

There was the Book of Apothecaries, which dealt with medicine; the Book of Fabrications, in which were histories of the Elder Age; the Book of Apocalypse, which predicted the final Cleansing; and, most importantly, the Book of Words, which listed all the permissible cantrips (or canticles, as the Order preferred to call them) to be used by the special elite when the time of Cleansing came.

But unlike the rest of the Closed Chapters, the Book of Words was sealed with a golden clip, and it was the only chapter of the Book that was closed even to the parson. He had no key to the golden lock, and although he had tried several times to open it, he had always failed.

In fact, on the last occasion, when he had taken a leatherworker’s awl to the golden lock, it had begun to glow alarmingly and to get uncomfortably hot, after which Nat had been careful not to interfere with it again. He knew a charmed lock when he saw one (it was not so very different, in fact, from the runecharm the Smith girl had placed on the church door), and though he was disappointed that his superiors had shown so little trust in him, he knew better than to challenge their decision.

Maddy knew all this because when she was ten years old, Nat had asked her to remove the lock, saying that he had lost the key and needed to consult the Book for parish purposes.

Maddy had taken malicious pleasure in refusing. “I thought girls weren’t allowed to touch the Good Book,” she’d said modestly, watching him from beneath her lowered lashes.

This was true; Nat had said so only the week before, in a sermon in which he had denounced the bad blood, disorderly habits, and weak intellect of females in general. After that, of course, he could not insist any further, and so the Book of Words had remained closed.

That had done nothing to endear Maddy to Nat; in fact, it was at that moment that the parson’s dislike of Maddy had turned to hate, and he had begun to watch for any sign that might justify an official Examination of Jed Smith’s pert, clever daughter.

“But the parson doesn’t have the Word,” Maddy said. “Only an Examiner could have-” She stopped and stared at the Whisperer. “Examiners?” she murmured in disbelief. “He’s called in the Examiners?”

Not kings, but historians rule the world. It was a proverb that One-Eye had often quoted, but even Maddy didn’t quite realize how true it was.

The Order of Examiners had begun five hundred years ago, in the Department of Records in the great University of World ’s End. It had to have happened there, of course. World’s End was always the center of things. It was the financial capital and the home of the king, the Parleyment was there and the great cathedral of St. Sepulchre, and rumor had it that in the vaults of the Department of Records, there was a library of more than ten thousand books-poetry and science and histories and grimoires-to which only the serious scholars-Professors, Magisters, and other senior staff-had access.

In those days the Examiners were simply officials of the University. They were entirely secular, and their Examination procedures consisted merely of written tests. But after Tribulation and the dark time that followed, the University had remained a symbol of Order. Gradually its influence had grown. Histories were written, conclusions drawn, dangerous books hidden away. And quietly, studiously, power had passed. Not to kings or warriors, but to the Department of Records and the little clique of historians, academics, and theologians who had appointed themselves the sole chroniclers of Tribulation.

The Good Book had been the culmination of their work: the story of the world and of its near destruction by the forces of Chaos; a catalog of world knowledge, science, wisdom, and medicine; and a list of commandments to ensure that in the future, whatever else happened, Order would always triumph.

And so the Order was begun. Not quite priests, not quite scholars, though they shared elements of both, over the years they had become increasingly powerful, and by the end of the first century following Tribulation they had extended their authority far beyond the University. They controlled education and ensured that literacy was restricted to the priesthood, its prentices, and members of the Order. The word University was expanded to make Universal City, so that as years passed, folk forgot that once there had been free access to books and to learning and came to believe that things had always been as they were.

Since then the Order had grown and grown. The king was on the coins, but the Order told him how many to strike; they governed the Parleyment; the army and the police were under their jurisdiction. They were immensely wealthy, they had the power to seize land and possessions from anyone who broke the Law, and they were always recruiting new members. From the priesthood, for the most part, although the Order also took students from the age of thirteen, and these prentices-who gave up their names and renounced their families-often turned out to be the most zealous of all, working tirelessly up the ranks in the hope that one day they might be found worthy to receive the key to the Book of Words.

Everyone had heard tales: of how some prentice had denounced his father to the Order for failing to attend prayers or how some old woman had been Cleansed for decking a wishing well or keeping a cat.

World’s End, of course, was used to it, but if anyone had suggested to Maddy Smith that a villager of Malbry-even one as vain and stupid as Nat Parson-would deliberately court the attention of the Examiners, she would never have believed them.

***