Joanne Harris - Runemarks

And though it was far too late to turn back, Maddy’s heart grew cold with misgiving. For she recognized that hazy thread-she’d seen it so many times before, in Adam Scattergood and his friends, in Nat at his sermon, in poor Jed Smith. It was a most familiar sign, but to see it now, in Loki’s glam, meant that something was already terribly wrong.

The darker thread was a sign of deceit.

Whatever the reason, the Trickster had lied.

Space doesn’t work here as it does elsewhere, Loki had said, and now Maddy could see what he’d meant. She had time only to realize that they were falling before realizing that what she had taken for a giant crater dropping down toward the center of the earth was actually no such thing and that the idea of downward, which she had hitherto taken for granted, was also and at the same time sideward, upward, and even inward, with herself at the hub of a great living wheel of space, a vortex intersected at every spoke with galleries, craters, and crevices leading off in every imaginable direction into the dark.

“How can this be?” she called to Loki as they fell.

“How can what be?”

“This world. It’s just not possible.”

“It is and it isn’t,” said Loki over his shoulder. “In the Middle World, where Order rules, it’s not possible. Where Chaos rules, you haven’t seen the half of it.”

They were not falling, Maddy now saw, although there seemed to be no other word to describe the trajectory that she and Loki were following. Most of the time, travel follows a set path: there are rules regarding space and time and distance; one step leads to another like words in a sentence, telling a tale. But how she and Loki traveled was quite different. Not quite falling, nor running, nor standing, nor swimming, nor even flying, they covered no ground, and yet they moved quickly, as in a dream, scenes flicking past them like pages turned at increasing speed and at random in some book of maps of places no one sane would ever want to visit.

“How are you doing it?” shouted Maddy over the noise.

“Doing what?” said Loki.

“This place-you’re altering it somehow. Moving things around.”

“I told you before. It’s a dream place. Haven’t you ever had a dream in which you knew you were dreaming? Haven’t you ever thought, I’ll do this, I’ll go there, and in your dream you made it happen?”

A thousand maps, every one a thousand deep in caverns, canyons, caves, catacombs, dungeons, torture chambers, cells. Squinting, Maddy could see them, the prisoners, like bees in a hive, their colors like distant smoke, the buzzing of their voices like flakes of ash rising into the apocalyptic sky.

“Hang on,” said Loki. “I think I’ve got something.”

“What?”

“Dreamers.”

Now, with a keenness beyond Bjarkán, Maddy discovered that she could focus in on individual prisoners and their surroundings. She found she could see their faces clearly, regardless of the distances between them, faces glimpsed at random through a spinning sickness, screaming faces, slices of nightmare, machines that crunched bone, carpets woven from human gristle, dreams of fire and dreams of steel, dreams of hot irons and of slow dismemberment, dreams of blood eagles and being eaten alive by rats, dreams of snakes and giant spiders and headless corpses that still somehow lived and of lakes of maggots and plagues of killer ants and of sudden blindness and of terrible diseases and of small sharp objects pushed into the soles of the feet and of familiar objects developing teeth-

“Fifty-three minutes to go,” said Loki. “And for gods’ sakes, stop gawping. Don’t you know how rude it is to look into other people’s dreams?”

Maddy screwed her eyes shut. “All these are dreams?” she said faintly.

“Dreams, ha’nts, ephemera. Just don’t get involved.”

Maddy opened her eyes again. “But, Loki-there must be millions of people here. Millions of prisoners. How are we ever going to find my father?”

“Trust me.”

Easier said than done, she thought. She held more tightly to Loki’s hand, trying not to think of what would happen if he decided simply to abandon her here. His face was set, all merriment gone. His violet signature, always bright, was now so fiercely blinding that Maddy could barely see him for the glare.

The magic-lantern show of Netherworld flickered all around them. Worse visions now-creatures with their guts on the outside of their bodies, dripping poison from bloated sacs; fields of carnivorous plants that crooned and sang in the fiery breeze; machines with oiled and interlocked tentacles, each one tipped with a metal prong that sliced and razored-

“Uh-oh,” said Loki at her side. “Hang on, Maddy, we’re being followed.”

And before Maddy could look around (not that she knew which direction to look in), he put on an extra burst of speed and the scenes around them blurred and flickered.

“Followed by what?”

“Just don’t look.”

Of course, that was exactly what Maddy did; a second later she regretted it.

“Damn it,” said Loki. “What did I say?”

The creature was beyond scale. Huge as a building, Maddy guessed, with a raw eel head and rows of teeth-a dozen rows at least, she thought-circling the cavernous throat. It moved in silence, like a projectile, and in spite of its very real-looking teeth, its body (if that was a body) seemed to be made up of nothing but strands and whips and signatures of light.

“Gods, what is it?” Maddy breathed.

“Not it. They.”

“They?”

“Ephemera. Don’t look.”

“But it’s gaining on us.”

Loki groaned. “Don’t look at it, don’t think of it. Thinking only makes it stronger.”

“But how?”

“Gods, Maddy, didn’t I tell you?” He cast an urgent glance at the thing that was following them. “This is a place where all things are possible. Dreams, fevers, imaginings. We make them so. We give them their strength.”

“But we’re ghosts. Surely. In some kind of dream. Nothing can harm us-not really-”

“Not really ?” Loki gave a crack of laughter. “Listen to me, Maddy. Reality as you know it just doesn’t apply in Netherworld. We’re not ghosts. It’s not a dream. And they can harm us. Really.”

“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.