Joanne Harris - Runemarks

Their talk lasted less than five minutes or so, though her eyes were wet at the end of it. “You’re sure of this?” she said at last.

“Quite sure,” said the General. He turned to the Vanir. “You all heard it, didn’t you? That sound. The sound of Chaos coming through. The lines are drawn, the enemy named. And our only hope is beyond that plain. I have to reach it, or everything will fall-not just the gods, not even the Worlds, but everything.”

Heimdall frowned. “The parson’s wife told you all this?”

Odin nodded.

“And you believe her?”

“With good cause.”

Skadi gave him a scornful look. “Even assuming she’s telling the truth, there’s a whole army between us and the river. You’ve seen what the Word can do…”

“I’ve seen it, yes.”

“And you think you can win?”

“No,” he said. “But I think we can fight.”

There was a long and thoughtful silence.

“There are eight of us,” said Heimdall at last.

“Seven,” said Skadi, “and a blind general.”

Odin grinned. “Eight of us against ten thousand. My favorite kind of odds.”

Heimdall showed his golden teeth. “My money’s on the General,” he said.

Njörd shrugged. “Well, if you put it that way-”

“Gods,” said Freyja. “You’re worse than he is.”

Frey said: “I’d like another poke at that bloody blackbird…”

Bragi began a victory song.

Idun opened her casket of apples, and their scent was enough to wake the dead…

And Skadi ground her teeth and said, “All right-General-you win. But that doesn’t mean the slate’s clean. If we survive, then you and your brother owe me some blood. And this time don’t think you can fob me off with promises…”

Odin smiled. “I’ll promise you this. There’ll be more blood by the end of today than even you could ever want. But if perhaps you want to fight,” he said, pointing, “then I have reason to believe the battle’s that way.”

They didn’t look like heroes, thought Ethel, and yet with her altered vision she could definitely see something in the air around them; not a signature (she’d been seeing those for days now and knew the difference) but a kind of glow, like the sky before dawn; a promise, if you like, of transformation. She didn’t need to be an oracle to know that it might lead to the death of them all; still, she went cheerfully in the wake of the gods, humming a little tune under her breath and watching Dorian’s broad back as he led the way with Lizzy running at his heels.

All Hel was about to break loose, she thought, and finally, and for the first time, Owen Goodchild’s daughter, Ethel, knew precisely where she wanted to be.

In Netherworld-what was left of it-Loki definitely wasn’t where he wanted to be. He’d felt the severing of his Aspect from his physical self, and his quick mind had come to the following conclusions:

First and most importantly, he was dead.

That hadn’t come entirely as a surprise. In fact, as far as Loki was concerned, the real surprise was how far he had managed to get before it finally happened. But the face of Hel’s deathwatch told its own tale-thirteen seconds remained on the clock, which meant that for the first time in the history of the Worlds, Half-Born Hel had broken her word.

All right, he thought. Let’s look on the bright side of this. The bright side is that though my body may be dead, my Aspect remains here, in Netherworld.

Not much of a bright side. Still, he thought, the really stupid thing at this stage would have been to seek refuge in the Underworld. He’d tried to explain this to Maddy as she dragged him, protesting, toward Hel’s borders, but either she hadn’t heard him or she simply hadn’t understood, because if she’d managed to drag him through, then he would have been Hel’s plaything by now, helpless and forever in her power, like the countless other souls that sighed and keened on the dusty plains of the Land of the Dead.

However (and now we come to the second point), to be trapped against an immovable barrier on one side with Surt on the rampage in his full Aspect on the other-for so he interpreted the sounds coming through from World Beyond-was hardly an enviable position either.

And thirdly, there were the Æsir. He’d managed to evade their attention till now, but as he looked up from the foot of the gate, Loki was uncomfortably conscious of the four familiar Aspects that now flanked him.

Let’s face it, he thought. There is no bright side-

– and bolted.

Predictably he didn’t get far. He shifted to his fiery Aspect only to find himself pinned in on all four sides.

“Not so fast,” said Thor. “You owe us an explanation.”

“He owes us more than that,” said T ýyr.

Of course, Loki knew that the one-handed god had more than one reason to distrust him, given that it had been his fault that T ýr lost the hand in the first place. Now he loomed over the Trickster, his signature blazing a fierce orange, his right hand (renewed in Aspect) a miracle of mindweaponry, a gauntlet of glamours that doubled his strength.

“Hit him,” said Sif-whose long hair Loki had once cut off as a joke and who had never allowed anyone to forget it. “Go on, Thor, give him one from me.”

“Oh, give me a break,” said Loki. “I just gave my life for you people-”

“How?” said T ýr.

Loki told him.

“So, what you’re saying is,” said T ýr, “that it’s actually your fault that all this has happened. If you hadn’t been so damn careless-”

“Careless!”

“Well, unless anyone thinks that destroying half of Netherworld doesn’t count as careless, to say nothing of awakening the Destroyer, opening a rift into Chaos, releasing Jormungand back into the Worlds, and basically bringing about the second Ragnarók-”

“Leave him alone.”

That was Frigg, the Mother of the gods, and even the Thunderer hesitated to defy her. A tall, quiet woman with soft brown hair, she might have been unremarkable but for the intelligence in her gray eyes; as it was, her patience and dignity had often overcome trials that even the most powerful weapons had failed to defeat. As one of the few who had visited the Land of the Dead and returned, she had the occasional gift of second sight, and now all eyes were on her as she said, “There may yet be an escape for all of us.”

Thor made a scornful noise. “In this shambles? I say fight…”

Frigg looked out across the swollen river. The armies of the Order could be seen quite clearly now, eerily still on the dead plain.

“This is not a shambles,” she said. “All this was planned very carefully. Our escape from the fortress, the closing of the gate, the destruction of Netherworld, even Hel’s treachery-none of this was random. It suggests that we were brought here for a specific purpose and that the enemy-whoever he is-has a plan in which the destruction of the Æsir is only one part.”

Thor grunted again, but T ýr was looking interested. “Why?” he said.

“No,” said Frigg. “The question is who?”

Everyone thought about that for a moment.

“Well, Surt, I suppose,” said T ýr at last.

Thor nodded. “Who else is there?”

“Surt was in his kennel, sleeping off Ragnarók. The battle was won. His enemies were dead or imprisoned in Netherworld. What business would he have in the Middle Worlds? And more to the point”-Frigg turned to Loki, indicating with one hand the silent ranks on the far side of the river-“what business would he have with such as these?”

“You’re right,” said Loki. “It isn’t Surt. Chaos is his business, not Order. He wouldn’t know how to raise an army like this. He may be powerful, but behind it all he’s just another guard dog, trained to bite on command. Surt doesn’t do subtleties.”