Joanne Harris - Runemarks

“Ah, yes,” said the Whisperer. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t belong to him anymore. You see, Hel and I had a certain arrangement. A life for a life. A bargain, I think.”

Maddy stared at Hel, who stared back, impassive, her living hand folded over her dead one, both resting on the deathwatch around her neck. Thirteen seconds remained on the clock.

“You broke your promise,” said Maddy in astonishment.

“By a few seconds-”

“That’s why he’s still here. You cheated him. You stole his time-”

“Don’t be childish,” said Hel crossly. “A few seconds. He would have died anyway.”

“He trusted you-he spoke of a balance…”

Maddy was almost sure she saw a flush against the dead pallor of Hel’s living profile.

“No matter,” said Hel. “What’s done is done. Thanks to your friend and his pet snake, Chaos has already breached Netherworld, and it cannot be reopened without placing this World-maybe all the Worlds-in jeopardy. Right or wrong, it cannot be changed. And now, Mimir”-she addressed the Whisperer in an altered tone-“your part of the deal.”

The Whisperer nodded. “Balder,” it said.

“Balder?” said Maddy.

So that was what he’d promised Hel. Balder’s return-in a living body…

“And it had to be Loki,” she said aloud. “It couldn’t have been me, for instance, or any other casual visitor, because Balder the Fair, of all the Æsir, would never be party to the death of an innocent…”

“Well reasoned, Maddy,” said the Whisperer in its dry voice. “But as we know, Loki’s no innocent. And so everyone’s happy-well, almost everyone. Surt gets Netherworld and everything in it-including our deserters, for whom I imagine he has interesting times in store. Hel gets her heart’s desire. And I?” Once more, it smiled. “My freedom at last. My freedom-from him.”

At that the old face twisted in rage, and the eyes, which had always been as cold as glass, blazed with a light from which all sanity had been scoured away.

“Here, in the flesh,” the Whisperer said. “Here on the plain, I’ll meet him-and this time I’ll kill him, and I will be free.”

“But why?” said Maddy. “Odin was your friend-”

The Whisperer gave a dry hiss. “Friend?” it said. “He was no friend to Me. He used Me when it suited him, that’s all. I was his instrument, his slave; and tell Me, little girl-what is it a slave dreams of? Do you know? Can you guess?”

“Freedom?” said Maddy.

“No,” said the Whisperer.

“Then what?”

“The slave dreams of being the master.”

“First, Balder,” said Hel, who had been watching the river with her dead eye.

“Ah, yes, of course. How could I delay?” And now the Whisperer raised its staff-red lightning crackled from the tip, and Maddy felt the hairs on her arms and head crackle with static in response.

But the power it raised was not against Maddy. It distressed the air like a storm in a bottle, casting shards of lightning onto the plain; it troubled the sky so that crow-colored clouds gathered overhead, and then the Whisperer opened its mouth to speak the Word.

“Balder,” it said, and the Word it spoke echoed from the mouths of every one of the ten thousand dead. “Balder,” it said. “Come forth.”

Maddy did not hear the Word, but she felt it. Suddenly her nose bled, her teeth ached; a haze seemed to come between herself and the world and she felt a sensation of drawing, of stretching. And now a light surrounded Loki’s body (she still could not bear to think of it as his corpse) and slowly that Aspect of him began to fade, to alter, so that as she watched, his hair changed color, his lips lost their scars, the angles of his face softened and changed shape, and his eyes opened-not fire green as before, but a sunny, gold-flecked, summery blue.

If she tried, she could still see Loki behind the new Aspect, but it was like looking at a picture against which a lantern show had been projected. Nothing was clear; it was impossible to say where Loki ended and Balder began.

Maddy gave a cry of grief.

Hel’s lips parted in a soundless gasp.

The Whisperer bared its teeth in satisfaction.

And Balder the Beautiful, prisoner of Death these five hundred years, stirred, sleepy at first, and then into wide, blue-eyed, astonished life.

“Welcome back, Lord Balder,” said Hel.

But Balder was scarcely paying attention. “Wait a minute,” he said.

His hand went quickly to his face. Through the gleam of his Aspect Maddy could still see Loki’s features, like something glimpsed through thick ice, and as Balder’s fingers moved tentatively against his forehead, his cheek, his chin, his air of puzzlement deepened.

“There’s something funny about this,” he said. He pressed his fingers once more to his lips. At the pressure, Loki’s scars reappeared briefly, then faded again-reappeared-faded-reappeared…

His hand went to the glam on his arm. Kaen, reversed, now glowing white hot.

“Hang on,” said Balder. “I never used to be Loki, did I?”

The parson had listened from afar in a state of dull indifference. His Huntress had been defeated, his enemy reinstated; his wife had turned out to be some kind of Seeress-and what did it matter anyway? What did anything matter, now that he had lost the Word?

He looked across at Ethel, standing among the Seer-folk with Dorian on one side of her and that absurd pig on the other. Even the goblin was with them, he thought, and he felt a sudden wrench of self-pity as he realized that no one was watching him, that he could just stand up and walk away into the desert and no one would miss him or even notice that he had gone. He might be dead, for all they cared; even that damned pig got more respect-

Stop whining, man, for gods’ sakes!

Nat jumped as if he’d been stuck with a pin.

Who’s that? Who spoke? Examiner?

But Nat knew that it was not the voice of an Examiner. It was no more than a whisper in his mind-and yet he knew it, heard it as if through dreams…

Then it struck him with the force of a slap.

Why, that’s my voice , thought Nat, lifting his head. And with the realization came another thought, one that lit up his eyes with sudden eagerness and set his heart a-fluttering.

Perhaps he didn’t need Elias Rede.

Rede was just one man in an army of thousands. And an army of thousands would have its own general-a general whose powers would be unimaginably greater than those of any foot soldier-a general who might be grateful for an insider’s help…

Nat looked at the Good Book in his hands. Stripped of the powers the Examiner had brought him, he saw that it was just so much worthless ballast now, and he dropped it without a second thought. More important to him now was the knife in his pocket: just a simple clasp knife, such as any countryman might carry, but sharpened to a lethal sliver.

He knew where to strike, had used it many a time when he was a boy, hunting deer with his father in Little Bear Wood. No one would suspect him now. No one thought him capable. But when the time came, he would know what to do…

And so Nat stood up and joined the group, and followed, and watched, and awaited his chance as the light of Chaos lit the plain and gods and demons marched to war.

“Gods,” said Heimdall. “There are so many of them…”

They had reached the edge of the battle line. It was vaster than any of them had ever imagined, vast with the false perspective of Hel’s domain, and lined from one horizon to the other with the dead.

Whatever they had been in life, Odin thought, in death the Order had merged as one: a last Communion, a deadly swarm armed with one Word, which, when uttered, would increase its power by ten thousand.