Joanne Harris - Runemarks

He looked at his prisoner, a fellow who might be fifty or sixty or even older, dressed in Journeyman’s leathers and a cloak where the patches had long since overwhelmed the original fabric. He looked harmless as he looked human, but the Examiner knew that a demon may take on any Aspect, and he was not fooled for an instant by the prisoner’s outward appearance.

By his Mark shall ye know him, said the Book of Apocalypse.

Even more damning was the Book of Words, where all the known letters of the Elder Script and their variants had been set down, along with their several interpretations. From this list the Examiner had made quick work of recognizing Raedo , the Journeyman, and his suspicions had quickly become certainties.

It had not, of course, escaped his attention that the Journeyman rune, though clear and unbroken, was nevertheless reversed. The Examiner did not drop his guard on that account. Even a broken glam can be lethal, and a whole runemark-reversed or not-was a rarity indeed. In fact, in thirty years he had never made such a capture himself, and he guessed that this man, uncouth though he seemed, might prove to be more than a mere foot soldier in the enemy’s camp.

“Your name, fellow,” he said once more. In the absence of the parson he had dared remove the Outlander’s gag, though for safety’s sake he kept the chains in place. By now the man must have been in acute discomfort, but he said nothing and simply watched the Examiner with his one, unnaturally gleaming eye.

“Your name !” said the Examiner, and made as if to kick the stranger as he lay there so insolently. He did not kick him, however. He was an Examiner, not an Interrogator, and he found violence distressing. Also he remembered the demon with the broken ruinmark that had left three of his Order blind, and decided that this was not the time for rash action.

Odin laughed, as if he had read the Examiner’s mind. “My name is Untold,” he quoted maliciously, “for I have many.”

The Examiner was startled. “You know the Good Book?”

Again Odin laughed, but made no answer.

“If you do,” said the Examiner, “then you must know that you are already finished. Why resist us? Your time is done. Tell me what I need to know, and you may at least save yourself some pain.”

Odin said nothing, but simply smiled his unnatural smile.

The Examiner’s lips compressed. “Well,” he said, turning to the door. “You leave me no choice. When I return, you’ll be begging to tell me everything you know.”

Odin closed his one eye and pretended to sleep.

“So be it,” said the Examiner dryly. “You have until tomorrow to reflect. You may mock me, fellow, but I can guarantee that you will not mock the power of the Word.”

“Is there no other way?” said Maddy at last.

“Trust me. I’m an oracle.”

Once more Maddy looked into the ice coffin where the pale woman lay, her colors shining softly in the cold light. The blue tones of the ice that encased her threw deathly shadows across her features, and her short hair, so light that it was almost lost in her frosty shroud, was frozen around her face like seaweed.

Casting Bjarkán, Maddy narrowed her eyes, and the workings that bound the ice woman leaped into sight. As she had first seen, they resembled those that had held the Whisperer, but they were more numerous, binding the Sleeper’s ice coffin into a complex knot of interwoven glamours.

“Be careful,” said the Whisperer. “There may be traps set into the work.”

There were. Maddy could see them now, designed to spring out at anyone unwise enough to lay hands on the Sleeper. A protective measure-but for whose protection? She touched the runes gently with her fingertips; at her touch they glowed ice blue, and Maddy could feel them itching, working, struggling to be free.

“Think what they could tell you, Maddy,” said the Whisperer in a silky voice. “Secrets lost since the End of the World. Answers to questions you never dared ask-questions Odin would never have answered…”

It would be easy, Maddy knew. Beneath her fingertips the runes were alive, quickening almost of their own accord. All they needed was a little help. And if in exchange they could give her the answers to questions that had plagued her all her life…

Who was she really?

What was her glam?

And how did she fit into this tale of demons and gods?

Quickly, before she could change her mind, Maddy gathered her strongest runes. She cast them like knucklebones, swift and sure: Kaen, T ýr, Hagall-and finally Úr, the Mighty Ox, beneath which the block shattered with a sudden almighty crunch, and the blue surface of the ice was blasted in a second into a milky crackle-glaze.

The impact threw Maddy backward, one arm raised to shield her eyes from the ice shards that accompanied it. Then, when nothing else happened, she dropped her arm and moved carefully toward the now opaque block.

Nothing moved. The trembling chandelier of ice above her head made small, shivery sounds in the aftershock of the blast, but no icicles fell, and a chilly silence came once more over the great hall.

“Now what?” she said, turning to the Whisperer.

But before it could answer, there came a sound: first a distant crunching sound, followed by a rumbling, a tumbling, a slip-sliding, and finally an avalanche of frozen material that fell from some distant funnel in the ceiling to thud against the glassy floor.

Maddy moved fast, made for the wall of the cavern and flattened herself against it, as now the balancing icicles began to drop from the vaulted ceiling, spike by spike, like the teeth of some giant threshing machine.

A packet of snow the size of a hay wagon exploded against the ground close by, bringing down with it a jangling necklace of small projectiles and lastly a single large object-no, a person -who landed heavily and with a muffled ouch! on the fallen snow.

When Loki collapsed, bleeding and exhausted against the skirts of the glacier, it was with the knowledge that he had made a number of grave-possibly fatal-miscalculations.

What kind of fool puts his head into the wolf’s mouth for the sake of curiosity? What kind of fool leaves his citadel to go aboveground, unarmed and unprotected, chasing rumors, when he should have been preparing for a siege? But curiosity had always been Loki’s besetting sin, and now it looked as if he were going to pay for it.

But he had always had more than his share of luck. As it chanced, the very spot where he fell hid one of the skylights that opened onto the hollow halls of the mountain below. Snow had crusted it, but it was a brittle frosting, and a man’s weight was more than enough to break through.

And so, just as he hit the ground, a fissure opened up beneath him, revealing a ragged hole through which he fell, helpless to prevent himself-through the ceiling of the great cavern with its hanging ice gardens; through filigrees of brittle lace, fashioned by a thousand years of freeze and thaw; and finally through a sickening swatch of empty air-before landing, more mercifully than he would have dared to expect, on a thick wad of powdery snow.

Even so, the impact knocked all the breath out of him. For a time he just lay where he had fallen, half dazed and gasping. And when he looked up, shaking the ice crystals out of his hair, it was to see a familiar face staring down at him, a face as merciless as it was beautiful, around which the pale, cropped hair stood out like a frill of sea foam.

In one hand she carried something that looked like a whip made from runes, a flexible length of barbed blue light, coiled carelessly about her wrist. Now she released it, with a hiss and a crackle, and it slithered to the ground, snapping with glam. The ice woman stared at the fallen Trickster, and her lips, still tinted faintly blue, curved in a smile that made him shiver.