Joanne Harris - Runemarks

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.

Two hours later, and at last the passageway had broadened out, a faint gleam reflecting dully against mica-spackled walls. The sour cellar smell that suffused the Hill no longer troubled Maddy at all. In fact, now that she thought about it, the air seemed sweeter than before, although it was growing perceptibly colder.

“We’re getting close to the Sleepers,” she said.

“Aye, miss,” said Sugar, who had been getting more and more nervous as they approached their goal. “Not long now. Well, that’s my job done, then, and if I could just be on me way…”

But Maddy’s eye had lit upon something, a point of luminescence too pale to be firelight, too bright to be a reflection on the stone. “That’s daylight,” she said, her face brightening.

Sugar considered putting her straight, then he shrugged and thought better of it.

“That’s the Sleepers, miss,” he said in a low voice, and that was when his courage, already tried to its breaking point, finally gave way. He could withstand many things, but enough was enough, and there comes a time for every goblin to take the better part of valor and run.

Sugar-and-Sack turned and ran.

Maddy ran toward the light, too excited to think either about Sugar’s desertion or about the fact that it didn’t really look like daylight at all. It was a cool and silvery light, like the pale edge of a summer pre-dawn. It was faint but penetrating. Maddy could see that it touched the sides of the passageway with a milky gleam, picking out the fragments of mica in the rock and lighting the plumes of steam that came from Maddy’s mouth in the cold air.

It was a cavern. She could see that now. The passage broadened, became funnel-shaped, and then opened out, and Maddy, who had considered herself accustomed to marvels after her time under the Hill, gave a long sigh of amazement.

The cavern was beyond size. Maddy had heard tales of the great cathedrals of World’s End, cathedrals as big as cities with spires of glass, and in her imagination they might have been something like this. Even so, the sheer hugeness of the space almost defeated her. It was a bristling vastness of luminous blue ice, its ceiling vaulted in a thousand bewildering swirls and fantails, its height lifted unimaginably by glassy pillars as broad as barn doors.

It stretched out forever-or so it first seemed-and the light seemed trapped within the ancient ice, a light that shone like a distillation of stars.

For a long time Maddy stared, breathless. The ceiling was open in part to the sky; a fragment of moon stood outlined against a patch of darkness. From the gaps in the vaulting, icicles fell, tumbling and plunging hundreds of feet to hang, crystalline, above her head. If I threw a stone, thought Maddy with a sudden chill, or if I were to even raise my voice…

But the icicles were the least of a thousand wonders that filled the cavernous hall. There were strands of filigree no thicker than a spider’s web; there were flowers of glass with leaves of frozen gauze; there were sapphires and emeralds growing out of the walls; there were acres of floor smoother than marble, fit for a million dancing princesses.

And the light: it shone out from everywhere, clean and cold and pitiless. As her eyes adjusted, Maddy saw that it was made from signatures; thousands of them, it seemed, crisscrossing the rapturous air. Maddy had never, never in her life seen so many signatures.

Their brightness left her speechless. Gods alive, she thought, One-Eye’s is bright and Loki’s is brighter, but this makes them look like candles in the sun.

She had been moving, wide-eyed, bewildered, further into the cavern. Every step showed her new marvels. She could hardly breathe-hardly think -for wonderment. Then in front of her she saw something that momentarily eclipsed everything else: a raw-edged block of blue ice with thin columns at its four corners. Maddy peered closer-and gave a cry as she saw, embedded deep beneath the ice, something that could only be…

A face.

In the fields to the west of Little Bear Wood, Odin One-Eye was watching birds. One bird in particular, a small brown hawk, flying fast and low across the fields. Not in a hunting pattern, he thought-although there was surely plenty of prey. No, this hawk flew as if it sensed a predator, though there were surely no eagles this far from the mountains, and only an eagle would bring down a hawk.

A hawk, but what kind?

That was no bird.

He had sensed rather than seen it almost at once. Its movement, perhaps, or the speed of its course, or its colors scrawled across the sky-half obscured by the setting sun but as familiar to One-Eye as his own.

Loki.

So the traitor had survived. It came as no great surprise to him-Loki had a habit of beating the odds, and that hawk had always been a favorite Aspect of his. But what in Hel’s name was he doing here now? Loki, of all people, should have been fully aware of the recklessness of flaunting his colors in World Above. But here he was, in broad daylight-and in too much of a hurry even to cover his tracks.

In the old days, of course, Odin could have brought down the bird with a single mindrune. Today, and at such a distance, he knew better than to try. Runes that had once been child’s play to him now cost him an effort he could ill afford. But Loki was a child of Chaos; its harmonies were in his blood.

What could have forced him to leave the Hill? The Examiner and his invocations? Surely not. No single Examiner could have flushed out the Trickster from his stronghold, and Loki wasn’t the type to panic. Besides, why would he leave his base? And why, of all places, make for the Sleepers?