Runemarks

“Oh.”

“So keep going.”

Now each step was an aeon deep, taking them further and deeper into the pit of Netherworld. Maddy looked back at the thing that followed them and saw a tunnel ringed with lights and lined with concentric rows of knife-edged metal that churned and gulped and circled and gnashed like living machinery.

It took her a second or two to realize that the tunnel was the thing’s mouth.

“It’s catching up,” she said. “And it’s getting bigger.”

Loki swore. They seemed to be moving more slowly now, and Maddy could almost see what he was doing as he leafed through Netherworld like pages in a book. A yellow sky raining sulfur onto creatures that writhed on a bare rock floor. A woman suspended by her hair above a pit of knives. A man drinking from a river of acid that ate away at his lips and chin, stripping his skin and revealing bone-and still he drank; a man whose feet were swollen to the size of oliphants’ small, leggy, many-limbed creatures like articulated trees that crept and chittered along a metal corridor lined with doors in the shape of demon mouths.

“Still there, is it?”

Maddy shivered.

“Slow it down,” Loki said. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

“Slow it down? What with?”

“You’ve got weapons, haven’t you? Use them.”

Weapons? Maddy looked down at her empty hands. Well, she supposed she had mindweapons, of a kind-but surely nothing to halt the moving mountain at their back. Loki had stopped now, the scene a broad square passageway flagged with large flat stones. In each stone was set a tiny grille of black metal. From some of these apertures sounds came-cries, groans, screams-only some of them human.

The thing-or things-that pursued them filled the corridor. Once more the size had changed to accommodate the space, and now Maddy could see that it was indeed made up of thousands of creatures, breaking apart and re-forming in constant movement. Ephemera, Loki had called them. Maddy saw them as thin filaments of animated light, parasites wriggling through the spaces between the Worlds. If even one of them touched her, she knew, they could sever flesh from bone; they would unmake her, burrowing under her fingernails, moving through her bloodstream, eating through her pores, working their way into spine and brain. And there were millions of them.

What could she do?

The ephemera seemed to sense her hesitation. The illusion of a single creature had dissolved and they were everywhere now, in front of them and behind, filling the corridor from floor to ceiling, writhing like deadly maggots toward them.

Glancing at Loki, Maddy could see that he was casting runes, casting them very fast and urgently in his deft and fluttering style-as she watched, she saw the corridor color veer from iron gray to the gray of a thundercloud; the metal grilles of the openings set into the stone changed shape slightly, from square to oblong-

“Got it,” he said. He dropped to his knees above one of the openings, felt with his fingertips for the edge of the grille.

The approaching ephemera seemed to understand; their movement increased and they began to swarm toward him, the filaments breaking into tiny particles, hopping like fleas across the bare stone.

Loki flinched but kept working. “Keep them off me,” he hissed at Maddy, without taking his attention away from the grille.

Maddy opened her mouth to protest, but an image stopped her-she saw those creatures pouring into her mouth, down her throat, filling her like a water skin with their rotten-meat stench-and she shut her mouth again tight.

How? she thought silently. How did you stop a monster that could be anything, take any shape?

This is a place where all things are possible.

All things? thought Maddy.

Once more she looked down at her weaponless hands. Less than a spear’s length away, the air was thick with ephemera. They were even closer to Loki, sensing his purpose, gathering over his head like a wave…

Maddy took a deep breath, focusing all of her glam for the strike. It brightened, veering from reddish brown to brilliant orange, crackling with energy from fingertips and palms. She sought for a rune that might slow down her attackers. yr, the Protector, was closest to hand; holding its image in her mind, she closed her eyes against the wave of ephemera and flung the rune as hard as she could.

There was a crack like a whip and a smell of burning.

Opening her eyes, Maddy saw that a dome of red light some six feet in diameter had appeared around Loki and herself, against which the ephemera crawled and slithered. It was thin, its surface as delicate and as iridescent as a wash-day soap bubble, but for the moment it held, and Maddy could see that wherever the ephemera touched it, their airy bodies crackled and dissolved, leaving a residue of soapy scum over the surface of the shield.

“It worked,” she said in disbelief. “Did you see that? Did you…?”

But Loki wasted no time in congratulations. Using T yr to prize open the grille, he had finally managed to lift it aside. Below him a dead blackness yawned. Sliding his feet rapidly into the hole, Loki prepared to let himself drop into the void.

“Is my father down there?” said Maddy.

“No,” said Loki.

“Then what are we-?”

“That shield won’t last,” said Loki grimly. “And unless you want to be here when it fails, I suggest you shut up and follow me.”

And with that he pushed himself into the hole and vanished from sight. There was no sound as he fell. Below him there was nothing but darkness.

“Loki?” she called.

No one replied.

In that moment Maddy was frozen with fear. Had Loki tricked her? Had he fled? She peered down into the empty hole, half expecting to see a wave of ephemera surging out of the pit at her feet.

Instead there was silence. Trust me, he’d said. But he’d lied to her. And now Maddy remembered the Oracle’s words: I see a traitor at the gate.

Was Loki the traitor?

There was one way to tell.

Closing her eyes, Maddy jumped.

There was no sense at all of falling. Maddy passed from the corridor to the cell below in a single step and for long seconds remained in utter darkness, with nothing at her feet and nothing above her and no clue-not even an echo-as to what she might now expect.

“Loki?” she whispered in the dark.

Then she cast Sol, the Bright One, and the space lit up in brilliant light.

Relief filled Maddy as she saw that Loki was still there. They were standing on a narrow ledge, looking across at a slab of rock roughly the size of a barn door, apparently suspended from nothing at all over a gulf that swallowed the light of Sol and gave back nothing but emptiness in return. The rock was revolving slowly in midair some fifty feet away from them, and now Maddy could see that there were chains set into the underside of the stone, from which a set of shackles dangled empty.

But it was the creature that clung to the rock’s surface that really caught Maddy’s attention. A huge snake, its scales gleaming in every imaginable shade of black, its eyes like electricity, its coils chained twice around the circling rock and dropping down into darkness.

It caught sight of Maddy and opened its jaws; even at such a distance the stench of its venom was enough to make her eyes water.

“It’s all right,” said Loki. “He can’t move from the rock.”

Maddy stared. “How do you know that?”

“Trust me. I know. Hang around the locals for a year or two, and you tend to pick up that kind of information.” He narrowed his eyes at the circling snake. “Imagine it, Maddy, if you can. To be chained to that rock, upside down, with that thing…” He shivered. “You can see why I’d be willing to do pretty much anything to free myself, can’t you?”

As if it had heard, the snake gave a hiss.

“I know, I know,” Loki said. “But really, I had no choice. I knew I could escape alone-Netherworld’s a big place and it might have taken them centuries to find out I was missing-but if I’d tried to free you as well-”

“Excuse me,” said Maddy, “but are you talking to the snake?”

“That’s not just any snake,” said Loki. “Maddy, allow me to introduce Jormungand. Otherwise known in polite circles as the World Serpent, Thor’s Bane, or the Dragon at Yggdrasil’s Root. My son.”

9

Far away in World’s End, in a secure chamber of the Universal City, an earnest discussion was under way. The Council of Twelve had been in debate for a number of hours now, following the disquieting news from the distant Uplands.

As a result of this disturbing information, the Council had been convened with a haste that seemed to many unseemly. In normal circumstances there would have been several pre-Council discussion meetings, a week of prayer and fasting, a lengthy meditation on the Elementary, Intermediary, and Advanced States of Bliss, and, finally, a gathering of elders armed with the Word, from whose learned ranks would be chosen the twelve members who would invoke the Nameless.

This present gathering had been assembled in a matter of days, which, in the opinion of its spokesman, Magister Emeritus Number 369 (a tiny octogenarian in scarlet robes, whose giant throne of office dwarfed him to the size of a small monkey), showed a rashness of purpose that was both dangerous and undignified.

However, the others had not agreed, and as a result there had been as little ceremony as possible as the twelve members-all high-ranking officials of the Order- had been chosen by lot for the privilege of Communion.