Joanne Harris - Runemarks

“What is this?” said Balder, looking at Hel.

But it was the Whisperer who replied. “A life for a life, O Fairest One. You’re free to go. Your new Aspect will take you anywhere-back to the Middle Worlds, if that’s what you want-”

“To Asgard?” said Balder.

“Sorry, no deal. Asgard fell-well, of course, you wouldn’t be expected to know that, would you?-but you can take your pick of the other Worlds and feel smug at the thought that you’re the first dead person to leave the Underworld by legitimate means since before the Elder Age began…”

But Balder was no longer listening. “Asgard fell?” he repeated numbly.

“Yes, lord,” said Hel. “At Ragnarók.”

“And Odin?”

“Him too.”

“The others?”

“Everyone, lord. Everyone fell,” said Hel with a trace of impatience. She’d been waiting for a sign of gratitude for some time now, and this footling concentration on petty details seemed to her pointless and quite annoyingly masculine.

She gave him a glimpse of her living profile, keeping her dead face turned away, and was irritated to find that he did not notice. It was trying, she thought, after everything she had sacrificed.

“Well, Loki didn’t fall,” Balder went on, oblivious. “Otherwise his body wouldn’t be here. And what exactly am I doing in Loki’s body, and how did you manage to get him out of it in the first place?”

Maddy told him of Loki’s promise, Hel’s betrayal, the release of the Æsir-

“What?” said Balder. “The Æsir escaped?”

“Well, they would have done if Hel hadn’t stopped them-”

“You don’t understand,” said Hel. “Netherworld’s unstable; if I open it now, anything might get through-”

“Including the Æsir,” said Maddy at once.

“The Æsir,” said Hel. “Where would they go? Into Dream or the ranks of the dead…”

“Whereas I-” said Balder.

“You have a body, lord. A glam…” She hesitated, and her living eye shifted modestly downward. “I thought perhaps that you and I-”

He stared at her with an astonishment that Hel found quite unflattering. She flushed a little and turned to the Whisperer. “You promised…,” she began.

But the Whisperer was not paying attention. Instead it stood in its hazy Aspect, glamour twisting around it like smoke, watching the distant, dark figure crossing the gray strand toward it. A silence fell, in which Maddy could hear individual grains of sand dropping onto the dead plain.

“One-Eye,” she said.

The Whisperer smiled.

The ranks of the Order parted like cornstalks as Odin passed through and closed again like spears at his back.

“Odin,” it said.

“Mimir, old friend.”

Odin, in Aspect, mindsword to hand, his hat pulled down to conceal his face, with Sugar trotting at his heels. The Nameless, in Aspect, hooded and cloaked, its runestaff spitting glamours. Maddy on one side, Hel on the other, Balder in the middle.

“Not Mimir,” it said. “Not anymore.”

“You’ll always be Mimir to me,” he said.

And now the General could see them all-their colors, at least. His truesight perceived them as figures of light: he saw Maddy, weakened and depleted by her flight through Netherworld, her colors touched with the gray-violet of grief; he saw Balder revealed in Loki’s glam, saw Hel in her colors, saw what had once been the Whisperer standing in a column of light, the stone Head that it had inhabited for so long lying discarded at its feet.

“Old friend,” it said. “It’s been too long.”

“Five hundred years,” said Odin, moving closer.

“Longer by far,” said the Nameless softly, and though its voice was calm, Odin could see the killing rage in its heightened colors. He supposed it had just cause to hate him; all the same, his heart was heavy. So many friends lost or dead. Such a price to pay for a few years’ peace.

Does it have to be like this?

The answer came as quick as thought. To the death, it said. To the victor, the Worlds.

In silence the enemies faced each other. Behind them the river Dream boiled and seethed. Beyond that lay the darkness.

The shadow that reared over the Ninth World-the blackbird shadow with feathers of fire-was beyond anything seen since Ragnarók.

It was Surt, the Destroyer, in full Aspect, and whatever fell beneath the shadow of his wing vanished as if it had never been, leaving only Chaos in its place, a Chaos full of stars that grew and swelled as the Worlds receded.

Little was left of the Black Fortress as, piece by piece, it reverted to its raw material of glamours, ephemera, and dream. Fragments still floated in the void-here a piece of city wall, there a rock, a ditch, a bend in a river-blown like snowflakes on the dark wind.

It was on one of these fragments that the Æsir had settled to make their final stand, an outcrop of some rocky something overlooking the Underworld, with Thor, in Aspect, mindbolts in hand, and T ýr with his gauntlet raised to strike; Frigg watching the scene unfolding in Hel; Loki crouching in the shelter of the rock; and Sif, who was no warrior, holding a running commentary on when, exactly how, and how soon they were all about to die.

“It’s all your fault,” she said, pointing at Loki, who, ignoring her, was picking off passing demons with a series of small, quick cantrips that sliced through the air like shrapnel.

“Your fault,” repeated Sif, “and now you’re dead, and everything’s going to Pan-daemonium-and what in the Worlds are you grinning at now…?”

But Loki wasn’t listening. Instead he allowed his mind to run-he found that shooting at demons sharpened his concentration-turning over the events of past days until he understood, albeit too late, how cleverly he had been manipulated.

Frigg’s words had brought it home to him: how it had used him from the start, how he had been sent to his death on a fool’s errand while the Whisperer made its bargain with Hel, how it had tricked her into serving its purpose, how Hel’s betrayal had opened the rift in Chaos, and how the Whisperer stood now, at the head of an army, poised, not to do battle, as Odin supposed, but to unleash that Chaos into the Worlds and watch as they fell, one by one…

He realized he’d underestimated the Whisperer’s ambition. He’d thought that it was simply out for revenge, that once its debt was settled with Odin, then perhaps it would be satisfied. Now he knew better. It wanted its turn; it wanted the power of Order and Chaos, to be the One and Only God…

He pegged Kaen at a cloud of ephemera and saw it disperse like a swarm of bees. Desperation had restored his sense of humor, and in the minutes he had left, Whisperer or not, he was determined to go out in flames. Fire runes shot from his fingertips; his eyes gleamed and his face, though bearing the marks of exhaustion, was alight with pleasure. He supposed it was the Chaos in his blood, but to his own surprise Loki found he was having more fun than he had in five hundred years.

Behind him Thor and T ýr stood back to back, each one covering the other as they struck mindbolts at the blackbird shadow. It kept coming. Behind it came silence, the spinning space between the stars, the unimaginable emptiness of World Beyond.

Inch by inch, it glided closer. Clouds of ephemera fizzled and died in its wake. Demons-some as huge as oliphants-were sucked like seeds into its maw, and still it came, unstoppable, oblivious. It was almost upon them now; Netherworld had fallen, and only the shores of the river remained. On came Surt; the shadow clipped the edge of the rock upon which the Æsir had made their stand…