Joanne Harris - Runemarks

“Stand back,” he told Maddy. “This can be dangerous.”

Maddy watched as he stood motionless, his colors flaring with sudden intensity and the first and little fingers of his right hand pronged to form the runeshape ýr.

His face was streaming with sweat, she saw; his fists were clenched, his eyes screwed shut as if preparing for some painful ordeal. This part at least was no act, she thought. She could feel the effort he was making, see the trembling of his muscles and the strain in every part of his body as he waited, tensed, for the Whisperer.

Even when the geyser began to reawaken, the low rumble rising to become a muted roar, Loki did not stir, but seemed to wait, regardless of his peril, as patiently as a fisherman snaring a trout.

Two minutes had already passed, and now Maddy could hear the eruption building, like a furious howl in a giant’s throat.

Then, almost imperceptibly, he moved.

If Maddy had not been watching very carefully, she would have missed it altogether, for Loki’s style of working was very different from hers. Under One-Eye’s instruction Maddy had learned to value caution and accuracy above all things, to coax the runes rather than to fling them, to handle them with care, as if without it they might explode.

But Loki was fast. Balancing like a rope-dancer on the edge of the pit as the column of steam came rushing toward him, he raised his head and made a curious quick fluttering movement of his hand. At the same time, he shifted to his fiery Aspect, his features just discernible in the twisting flames, and skimmed runes at the column like a handful of firecrackers.

Maddy had scarcely time to read them all. She thought she recognized Isa and Naudr -but what was that shuttling rune that spun like a sycamore key into the boiling flow, or the one that broke into a dozen shining pieces as it skimmed the flame?

She had little time to ask herself the question, though, for it was then that the geyser blew. The column of steam punched into the ceiling, hurling fragments of rock into the scorched air. And in the column, suspended for a moment in that massive splurge of cloud and flame, Maddy saw something that popped up like an apple in water and half heard, half felt its silent call-

(?)

(?)

– as it dropped once more into the pit.

Loki had fled in fiery Aspect, taking refuge behind a slab of rock. Now he returned to his true form. His face was flushed, his hair lank with sweat, and a reek of burning came from his clothes. Nevertheless, he seemed exhilarated; in the afterglow his eyes were pinned with weird fire. He turned to Maddy. “You saw it, then?”

Uneasily she nodded, recalling the quick way it had bobbed to the surface, and how the light had seemed to shine right through it, and how it had called to her…

“That was the Whisperer. Ouch,” he said, blowing into his scorched hands.

“But it’s alive!”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Now Maddy could see just how much this effort had cost him: in spite of his careless words he was shaking, breathless, and his colors were dim. “It really doesn’t like me,” he said. “Though to be fair, I don’t think it likes any of us very much. And as for getting it out of there-you’ve seen what it’s like. If Odin wants to consult the Oracle, then he’ll just have to do it the hard way.”

There was a silence as Maddy stared at the fire pit and Loki’s breathing returned to normal. Then she stood up cautiously. She could feel the next eruption preparing itself; beneath her feet she sensed rather than heard the ripping of fiery seams under enormous pressure.

“What are you doing?” Loki said. “Didn’t you hear what I just told you?”

Maddy stepped up to the fire pit. Beneath her, it gargled molten fire. Loki followed, uneasy now, but hiding it well-except for his colors, which betrayed his anxiety and his fatigue. Whatever he had done to the Whisperer, it had already robbed him of much of his glam-an advantage Maddy intended to use.

Now she was standing at the edge of the pit.

“Watch your step,” said Loki casually, “unless you care for a Netherworld hotfoot.”

“Just a second,” she said, looking down into the fiery throat. The pit was very close to venting. Maddy could smell the burnt-laundry fume; she could feel the fine hairs in her nose begin to crackle. Her eyes stung; her hands were trembling as she too formed the runeshape ýr.

“Maddy, be careful,” Loki said.

At the bottom of the pit, hot air began to roar as the subterranean river gushed out into the flow of boiling rock. In a second steam would obscure the pit; then, a second later, the column of flaming gas and ash would erupt.

Maddy just hoped she had timed it right.

Now she was balanced on the very edge of the fire pit. The stones beneath her feet were slick with sulfur and the glassy residue of many, many ventings. She tried to recall how Loki had done it-balancing on the rim like a dancer on a rope, his hands shuffling runes so fast that Maddy could hardly see them before they sank into the cloud at his feet.

He was right behind her now; her skin prickled at his closeness, but she did not dare turn-he must not see what she was planning. Inside the pit, the furnace glow brightened from orange to yellow, from yellow to almost white, and as the power began to build, Maddy turned the full force of her concentration on the Whisperer.

If you call it, it will come to you.

She felt it, heard it in her mind-

(?)

And now she called it, not in words, but in glam-what Loki had called the language of Chaos. It was no language she had ever learned, and yet she could feel it linking her with the Whisperer, joining with it like notes in a long-lost chord.

At last she could see in the depths of the pit something like a cat’s cradle of light, a complicated diagram in which many, many runes and signatures crossed and recrossed in strands of increasing complexity.

A net, she thought, and for the second time she felt a response-a glimmer, a cry-from the object in the pit. A net just like the one Loki had used to trap his fish-

(!)

And it was a net that she meant to use against him. But Loki’s runes did not play fair, straining and twisting between her fingers. Naudr, the Binder; Thuris, the Thorn; T ý r, the Warrior; Kaen, Wildfire; Logr, Water; Isa, Ice.

Loki’s runes, Loki’s trap. Even as she drew them, she could feel them moving, turning slyly out of alignment, waiting for her concentration to break.

“Maddy!” said Loki’s voice behind her, and she needed no runes now to sense his fear. His hand brushed her shoulder; Maddy swayed, uncomfortably aware of the pit at her feet. One push, she thought…

She called out again to the thing in the fire and, with a cry that echoed across the cavern, wrenched the net with its catch of glamours up and toward her out of the pit.

It was just then that the geyser blew.

The steam, a great hot hammer of air, came punching out of the narrow gauge. For a second everything went white; the laundry smell filled the cave and Maddy was sheathed in a scalding cloak. But for that second Loki flinched back and at the very same time Maddy cast the net, not at the Whisperer in its fiery column, but directly behind her, at Loki’s face.

He had no time to shield himself. The runes of the Elder Script flickered out-Naudr, Thuris, T ý r, and Ós, Hagall and Kaen, Isa and Úr. The net fell, snaring Loki as neatly as any fish, and finally Aesk, Maddy’s own rune, hurled the Trickster across the cavern as the fiery column burst free, showering them both with ash, sulfur, and shards of volcanic glass.