Runemarks

prisoners, and pieces of ephemera thrashed and tumbled in the hectic flow. And now the space between the Worlds looked just like a waterspout, sucking obscenely and at random, sending chunks of flotsam-some as large as skerries-lurching into the filthy air.

“It has to be stopped,” said Balder to Hel. “Any more of this and Chaos will find its way into the other Worlds.”

Hel shot him a glance from her living eye. “It’s safe enough in here,” she said. “Even Surt knows better than to mess with Death.”

“And the others?”

She shrugged. “They knew the risks when they came here. Anything happens to them, I’m not responsible.”

How tiresome he was, thought Hel. For the first time in centuries she had Balder to herself, and all he could think about was the possible disruption to the other Worlds. To be sure, she had made a stupid mistake-

You broke your word. You cheated Loki out of thirteen seconds…

And now the time had come for Hel to pay.

Balder the Beautiful looked down from his turret, and though his eyes were blue as summer skies, they were far from dreamy. He saw Odin far below, struggling with some dream of drowning.

He saw Ethel and Dorian holding hands and Fat Lizzy perched on a spur of rock. He saw Adam Scattergood, lost in a dream of giant spiders, and Loki, surrounded by poisonous snakes.

He saw Nat Parson and knew he was dying.

He saw the thing that had been the Nameless, its face twisted with rage and chagrin, as it stood hip-deep in the river and screamed at the rising tide, like the Fool King in the old tale: STOP, I SAY! I COMMAND YOU, STOP!

But words-even Words-have no power in the realm of Dream. Dream has no rulers, no servants, no kings. Dream cannot be summoned, commanded, or banished. And as the Nameless ranted and raved, Nat Parson-Nathaniel Potter, as was-fell into a dream of his own, a dream in which he was a young boy again in his father’s house, watching his father at work in the shop.

Look at the clay, his father said.

I see it, said Nathaniel. The clay was blue and smelled of the riverbed from which it had been gathered. Nat’s father cupped it between his hands like a bird that might otherwise fly away. The potter’s wheel turned as he pumped the treadle, and the lump of clay began to take shape.

A fat-bottomed pot, with a neck that grew slim as the wheel went around. Nat thought he had never seen anything as delicate as his father’s big hands cupping the clay: teasing it round, making it smooth.

You try, said Fred Potter.

Nat cupped his fingers around the pot.

But he was only a boy, not even a prentice, and the beautiful pot with its swan’s neck and gracious curves wobbled, leaned, and collapsed on the wheel.

Nathaniel began to cry.

Don’t cry, said Fred, and put his arm around the sobbing boy’s shoulders. We can always make another one.

He began to pump the treadle again, and the pot began to rise anew, to become, if anything, more beautiful than before.

Fred Potter turned and smiled at his son. See, son? he said. Our lives are like these things I make. Turn ’em, build ’em, bake ’em in fire. That’s what you’ve been, son. Baked and fired. But a pot don’t have the right to choose whether he be for water, wine, or just left empty. You have, son. You have.

This was where Nat realized-to his sorrow-that this was all a dream. Fred Potter could never have voiced such thoughts. And yet Nat, who hadn’t thought about his father more than twice since the old man’s death, now found himself wanting to believe.

It’s too late, Dad. It’s all gone wrong.

It’s never too late. Come on, take my hand…

And as Nat Potter took his father’s hand, he found himself at peace for the first time in many years and slipped quietly away to a place where even the Nameless could not find him.

The Nameless gave a roar of frustration as it plunged, bodiless, into Dream. At the same time there came a kind of rushing sigh-like the sound of the sea coming in on the sand. Ten thousand souls gave a single gasp as Dream struck them with a giant wave and they were lost in a moment, like grains of sand, rolling, roiling, sifting, seething, drifting, drowning, marveling-for so few of them had ever dreamed, and here they were, at Dream’s very source…

Some wept.

Some ran splashing into it, like children at the seaside.

Some went insane.

The dead of Hel, which had gathered like dust and ash and smoke and sand on the deserts of Hel for centuries, were drawn to the movement and flocked like birds to the edge of Dream…

And Elias Rede, the Examiner once known as 4421974, had time to think, No more numbers for me, as he plunged with joy into the wave.

“That rift,” said Balder, “in Netherworld. You know what caused it, don’t you, Hel?”

Hel’s face was impassive, but he thought her living profile flushed a little.

“You have to mend it now,” he said. “Your dead are escaping. Your realm is at risk.”

“There are always plenty of dead,” said Hel. “I can bear a few losses.”

“But the rift is widening. If Chaos gets through-”

“It won’t,” she said. “Dream will contain it.”

“It may not, Hel. You broke your word.”

Hel’s word is unbreakable. Balder knew this, as everyone did; it was one of the axioms of the Middle Worlds.

But it seemed the unbreakable had been broken-and now there was turmoil in her realm. He knew what that meant-that the forces of Chaos were very close and that if nothing was done to halt it now, then the rift between the Worlds would widen and tear, opening up similar rifts between the Eighth World and the Seventh, and then unraveling through the fabric of the Worlds like a ladder in some fine lady’s silk stocking until, at last, the Chaos was everywhere, and Ragnarok would come again.

Hel the Half-Born knew it too. The promise of Balder had blinded her to danger as well as to consequences, but the face of the deathwatch was beyond argument. Slowly but nonetheless relentlessly as Dream flooded the land, the hands of the deathwatch were moving together, and when they met…

She spoke aloud, in a voice still rusty from underuse. “I can buttress this tower if Chaos breaks through. Seal it off from the rest of the Worlds. We can be beyond Order, beyond Chaos. You and I-my love-alone.”

Balder’s expression, though habitually sunny, was bleak. “I can’t,” he said. “To stand by and watch the Worlds swallowed up, one by one, for my sake-”

“You don’t have a choice,” said Hel grimly. The six seconds on the deathwatch had dwindled to three. “There’s nothing either of us can do…”

So many times she’d dreamed of this moment-Hel, who never dreamed-and now the dream was within her grasp…

“There is,” said Balder. “Pay Loki his debt.”

For a moment she stared at him. “Do you know what you’re saying? No one can stop what’s happening now. Even if I were to take your life…Besides, this is Loki we’re talking about-Loki, whose mischief caused your death-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Balder said. “You broke your word to bring me to life. What kind of a basis is that for a meaningful relationship?”

“But here you can be safe,” protested Hel. “You can have anything, do anything you ever wanted. My face offends you? There are glamours I could use to make myself beautiful. I could look like anyone-Sif, Freyja even-”

Balder’s eyes went cold as midwinter. “Tricks,” he said.

Now Hel’s living eye twitched in growing annoyance. Tricks? she thought. What does he think the others use? Does he really think Freyja’s hair was ever naturally that shade? Or that Sif’s waist doesn’t benefit from a little tight lacing?

For the first time she began to wonder whether she hadn’t made a big mistake bringing Balder to this place. She should have drugged him first, she thought; a single draught of the river Dream would have ensured his cooperation, at least until the danger was done.

Still, it was too late for that now. Balder was looking out of the window again, searching, his eyes narrowed in concentration. For a second he thought he saw Loki suspended over a pit of snakes and Odin desperately holding on to his hand-

With a flick of her dead fingers, Hel made the window disappear. A fine silk tapestry, cleverly and lasciviously embroidered with scenes of lovers, now hung in its place.

Balder saw it and turned away. “Send me back,” he said in a flat voice.

Hel ignored him and with another gesture made a banqueting hall appear around them, the tables set with fine crystal and pomegranates (a traditional favorite in Hel) and honey cakes and oysters and sweetmeats and wines of every color, from spring green and deepest amber to rose gold and tulip black.

But Balder looked at them in disgust. “Do you really want to please me?” he said. “Then let me go!” And once more he turned away, and Hel, gnashing her teeth, made one last gesture in the air-

“My love,” she said, and stood before him as Nanna, his wife, who had died upon Balder’s funeral pyre rather than live for a day without him, and nothing could have been sweeter and more joyful than her smile, and nothing as soft as her gleaming hair; but Balder closed his eyes in loathing, and tightened his lips and said nothing at all.

Hel gave a cry of rage and disappointment. She looked at the deathwatch, its hands now separated by nothing but the smallest whisker of time.

“Then go!” she screamed, and in an instant her citadel was gone, and Balder was standing once more in the desert with the river gleaming and churning all around him and Dream, in all its gorgeous disarray, laid out at his feet.

Loki, he thought. And plunged headlong into the rapids.