By this time they had reached the upper levels, and Maddy could see increasing signs of goblin activity. Their colors gleamed across her path; their footprints scuffed the red earth floor. When she found she could hear them too, she stopped.
This was the most dangerous part. From here on, there would be no place to hide. The long climb to the upper level would leave her visible on the rock stairway for a dangerous length of time. But she knew no other way out: all other paths led into the warren of storage and treasure rooms that honeycombed the Hill, and below there was the river, a crashing darkness in which lay no hope.
“What have we stopped for?” demanded the Whisperer.
“Quiet,” said Maddy. “I’m thinking.”
“Lost, are you? I should have known.”
“I’m not lost,” said Maddy, annoyed. “It’s just that—”
“Told you you should have killed him,” it said. “If I were him, I’d get back before us, set up an ambush, have posses of goblins at every corner, and—”
“Well, what do you suggest?” she snapped.
“I suggest you should have killed him.”
“That’s a lot of use,” she said. “I thought you were an oracle. Aren’t you supposed to know the future or something?”
The Whisperer glowed in open contempt. “Listen to me, girl. Gods have paid—and dearly—for my prophecy. The General gave me his eye, you know; but that was a long time ago, and he got a bargain. As for you—”
“I’m not giving you an eye,” said Maddy at once.
“Gods alive, girl. What would I want with that?”
“Then what is it you do want?”
The Whisperer glowed brighter still. “Listen,” it said. “I like you, girl. I like you and I want to help. But you’ll have to listen to me now. Listen and take notice. Your old friend One-Eye has systematically lied to you to bring you to this point. Over the past seven years he has fed you a careful diet of half-truths and deceptions, all the more heinous for what you are—”
“What d’you mean, what I am?”
The Whisperer glowed brighter than ever, and now Maddy could see sparks of runelight trapped like fireflies within the volcanic glass. They danced, beguiling, and Maddy’s head began to feel pleasantly befuddled, as if she had drunk warm spiced ale. It was a charm, she told herself, and she shook aside the pleasant feeling and pronged ýr with her fingers at the Whisperer, which continued to glow—in smugness, she thought—as if it had made some rather clever point.
“Stop that,” she said.
“Merely a demonstration,” said the Whisperer. “I speak as I must and cannot be silent. That rune of yours is strong, you know. I predicted such runes before Ragnarók. I imagine that’s why One-Eye sent you. Didn’t want to risk his own skin.”
For a moment Maddy said nothing. She was cautious of the Whisperer, and yet it confirmed some of what Loki had said. Loki, of course, was not to be trusted, but the Oracle…
Could an oracle lie? she wondered.
“He means to start a war,” it said. “A second Tribulation, to wipe out the Order once and for all. Thousands will die at a single word.”
“Is this a prophecy?” Maddy said.
“I speak as I must and cannot be silent.”
“What does that mean?”
“I speak as I must—”
“All right, all right. What else do you see?” Now Maddy’s heart was beating fast; behind the Whisperer’s rocky face, lights and colors danced and spun.
“I see an army poised for battle. I see a general standing alone. I see a traitor at the gate. I see a sacrifice.”
“Couldn’t you be a little less vague?”
“I speak as I must and cannot be silent. The dead will awake from the halls of Hel. And the Nameless shall rise and Nine Worlds be lost, unless the Seven Sleepers wake and the Thunderer be freed from Netherworld…”
“Go on!” said Maddy.
But the Whisperer’s colors had suddenly dimmed, and it almost looked like a rock again. And now Maddy was conscious of something nearby: a furtive movement in the shadows, a tiny crunch of pebbles on the floor. She spoke a sharp cantrip—
Nyd byth nearu
—locked her hands together to form the runeshape Naudr, then reached into the gloom and dragged out a diminutive figure, furry-eared and golden-eyed and covered in mail from head to foot.
“You again!” she said incredulously.
Sugar’s curiosity had finally got the better of him.
6
“Kill it,” said the Whisperer.
Maddy was looking down at the dazed goblin. “Spying, were you?”
“Kill it,” repeated the Whisperer. “Don’t let it get away.”
“I won’t,” said Maddy. “Will you stop asking me to kill people? I know this goblin,” she went on. “He’s the one who guided me.”
The Whisperer made a sound of exasperation. “What does it matter? Do you want it to report us?”
Sugar was squinting cautiously at Maddy. “Report what?” he said. “I don’t know nowt, and I don’t want to know. In fact,” he went on in sudden inspiration, “I think I’ve lost me memory—can’t recall a thing, kennet. So there’s no call for you to be worrit about what I’ve heard—you can be on yer way and I’ll just lie here quietly—”
“Oh, please,” said the Whisperer. “It heard everything.”
Sugar assumed an expression of hurt astonishment.
“I know,” said Maddy.
“Well, then? We have no choice. The minute it gets the chance, it will report to its master. Why don’t you just kill it, there’s a good girl, and—”
“Be quiet,” said Maddy. “I’m not killing anyone.”
“Spoken like a lady, miss,” said Sugar with relief. “You don’t want to listen to that narsty thing. You just get on back nice and safe to the Horse’s Eye. No need to be staying here any longer than you have to, kennet?”
“Shut up, Sugar. You’re going to lead us back to World Above.”
“What?” snapped the Whisperer.
“Well, obviously we can’t leave him here, and we need to find a safe way out of the Hill. So I thought—”
“Were you listening to anything I just said?”
“Well…,” said Maddy.
“I happen to have just made a major prophecy,” said the Whisperer. “Have you any idea how privileged you are? Four hundred years in that blasted fire pit, with Dogstar at me every day, and I never gave him so much as a syllable.”
“But aren’t you supposed to be telling One-Eye all this?”
The Whisperer made a sound very like a snort. “Look what happened last time,” it said. “The idiot got himself killed.”
It was just then that they heard the sound. A distant pounding directly overhead, too regular to be accidental, which sent shock waves through the hollow Hill that made the rock walls tremble.
Boom-boom-boom.
Boom-boom-boom.
“What’s that?” said Maddy.
“Trouble,” said the Whisperer.
To Maddy it sounded like cannon fire; to Sugar, like the Tunnel Folk at work. Some kind of mining or digging, perhaps, and now they could hear the sound of falling grit as it filtered down onto the stairway from the ceiling far above.
“What is it, Sugar?”
Sugar gave one of his whole-body shrugs. “Sounds to me like the Horse’s Eye,” he said. “P’raps it’s your lot at it again. Bin a lot of bloody noise among the Folk recently.”
Maddy wondered how long she had spent underground. A day? Two days? “But we have to get out. Can’t we bypass Red Horse Hill?”
“You can, miss, but it’s a long way round, nearly as far as the Sleepers, and—”
“Good. It’ll be safe, then.”
Safe? thought Sugar. Safe? The idea of safety and Sleepers in the same sentence—even in the same paragraph—made him want to whimper. But there was no denying the hammering sound, and now his sharp ears could make out o
ther sounds too: the sounds of heavy horses, wheels, and the occasional clap of metal against metal…
“Uh-oh,” said Sugar.
“What?”
“I think they’re tryin’ to get inside.” His voice was incredulous; in five hundred years of siege (as he saw it) the Folk had never managed to do so much as crack open the front door to World Below, and here they were actually pounding their way into the rock.
“The Captain’s not goin’ to like this,” he said. “He’s not going to bloody like this at all.”
7
In a corner of Little Bear Wood, Loki’s head was still aching. Wildfire was his name and wildfire his temper, and in World Below he had given it rein, cursing in his many tongues and breaking a number of small, valuable objects that just happened to be lying around.
He had blundered; that he knew. He had misjudged Maddy not once, which was forgivable, but twice, which was not; he had been careless and complacent; he had been tricked—and by a girl!—and worst of all, of course, he had let her get away with the Whisperer.
The Whisperer. That thrice-damned bauble. It was his pursuit of the Oracle, and not his fear of the Folk on the Hill, that had brought him out of his stronghold, though now that he was here, watching the Hill from a suitable tree, he was unsettled to see the numbers of people gathered around the Horse’s Eye.
There was the constable; the mayor in his official hat; several hundred men and women, armed with pitchforks and hoes (How rustic, thought Loki); a clutch of assorted brats; some ox-drawn digging machines; and the parson, of course, very smart in his ceremonial robes, with his prentice beside him, riding a white horse and reading aloud from the Book of Tribulation.
All this in itself was not so unusual. Every once in a while there was unrest among the Folk, often after a bad harvest, a cattle plague, or a bout of the cholera. The Faërie tended to get the blame for anything that went wrong, and over the years their legend had built, so that now most of the villagers believed—as Nat Parson did—that the Hill was the abode of demons.
Loki had never discouraged this. On the whole, it was fear that kept people away, and when they did march against him (every twenty years or so), waving flags and relics, swearing to burn out the vermin once and for all, they rarely stayed long. A couple of days—and a gaudy glamour or two—was usually enough to cool their evangelism. And besides, the Eye was securely shut. Sealed by runes, it was surely proof against any attempt at entry by the Folk.
Still, this time he could not help feeling a little uneasy. The digging machines were a new development, and in all his years under the Hill he had never seen such a large and well-organized gathering. Something had happened to excite them thus. A raid, perhaps? Some trick carried out by the goblins in his absence? Too late he told himself that he should have paid more attention to what was going on in World Above. The parson, especially, should have been watched. But, as always, there had been the Whisperer to deal with. The thing seemed to have boundless energies, and over the years most of Loki’s strength had gone into keeping it subdued. Then Maddy had arrived, and all his attention had suddenly turned toward her.
This—this almighty shambles—was the result.
Loki sighed. Of all the times to lose the Whisperer, this was perhaps the worst. He was not unduly afraid of the Folk. His glam might be reversed, but that didn’t make him helpless. Even the machines were not much of a threat; it would take them weeks—maybe months—to reach him.
What he did fear, though, was their fanaticism. Left alone, it would burn itself out, but at the right time, and with the right kind of leader—a leader who awakened it, nurtured it, fanned it, fed it on a diet of prayer and Tribulation…
He had heard the tales, of course. He employed an efficient network of spies from his stronghold in World Below, and over the past few hundred years the word from World’s End had been getting stronger. Word of the Order, followers of the Nameless, of the conflict building between Folk and Fiery, and of the last, the greatest, Cleansing, the holy war that would sweep the Fiery from the faces of all the Worlds.
In World’s End, the rumors said, there were cathedrals tall as mountains, large as cities, where the Examiners held court and their prentices copied out endless invocations on scroll after scroll of illuminated parchment.
In World’s End, Order reigned; bad blood had already been mostly erased, and goblins and other vermin were dealt with efficiently and without mercy. In World’s End, if a sheep or a cow was born with a ruinmark, then the whole herd was swiftly destroyed, and if—Laws have mercy—it was a human child that bore the mark, then that child would be taken away and given into the guardianship of the Examiners, never to be heard of again.
There were other tales too, of hills and barrows once given over to the old gods, now emptied of their original occupants and made holy once again in preparation for the Great Cleansing. And there were other, darker tales of demons caught and bound by the power of the Word; demons who were dragged, screaming, to the scaffold and the pyre; demons who looked like men and women but were in fact the servants of the enemy and therefore had no souls to save.
In World’s End prayer was compulsory; Sundays were fallow; mass was twice daily and anyone refusing to attend—or indeed, exhibiting unnatural behavior of any sort—was likely to face Examination and Cleansing if they failed to renounce their ways.
Of course, thought Loki, that was all a very long way from the valley of the sleepy Strond. But his many informants spoke ever more loudly of the coming of the Examiners, and it was whispered on the Roads and reported in World Below that even the Ridings had become infected by rumor and tales.
Tales of the Word, that power given only to the highest rank of priests (though Loki could recognize a cantrip sure enough, and as far as he was concerned, their incantations were just cantrips under a new coat of paint). Tales of the Nameless, which, according to the Book of Tribulation, rose from the dead at the End of the World and will come again at the hour of need to save the righteous and strike down the blasphemers.
Loki was in no doubt that he counted as one of the blasphemers. Reviled by the new gods as a demon, loathed by the old gods as a traitor—his position had never been good. But now he had lost the Whisperer—the single ace in an indifferent hand—without which he would have nothing to bargain with when the time of reckoning came.
He had to get it back, he thought, before it reached the General. The Oracle would have guessed that, of course, and Maddy would be on her guard. Still, he thought, he was not beaten yet. He knew all the exits to Red Horse Hill, and from his hiding place in the wood he could watch for the fugitives unobserved. In World Below, without knowing their destination, he might lose them among the thousands of tunnels that lined the Hill, but here, in World Above, Maddy’s colors and those of the Whisperer would shine out like beacons for miles around. True, so did his own colors, but still, it was worth the risk, he thought. Besides, at the first sign of danger he could open the doorway under the Hill and be safe underground in a matter of seconds.
Loki’s sharp eyes traveled all around the valley, from Red Horse Hill to Farnley Tyas, to Forge’s Post and Fettlefields and even as far as the Hindarfell, where distant smoke from a hayrick or a cook-fire smudged the horizon into a haze. There was as yet no trace of a signature, but he felt sure Maddy would show herself soon. He watched and waited, taking his time—it had been decades since he’d last ventured into World Above, and in spite of the urgency of his task he could not help but take pleasure in the feel of the sun and the blue of the sky.
It had been a good falltime, but the season was almost done, and soon would come the long, bleak winter. He could smell it: the wild geese had flown; the fields were bare after that busy Harvestmonth and the stubble burned in time for the next seeding. Wherever Maddy and Odin were planning to meet, they would surely not venture out of the valley at such a time. So far, it was still warm in the afternoon sun, but there was a sharp edge to the air that would soon turn to ice
and a long, slow five-month before spring’s awakening.
Awakening! The thought came to Loki with sudden certainty, and he froze, his eyes fixing on the hazy sky, the distant pass, and the seven peaks that guarded the valley. There were tales about those peaks, he knew. He had spread many of them himself in the hope of discouraging attention from the glacial halls under those mountains and from the seven deadly inhabitants that slumbered beneath the ancient stone.
The Sleepers.
“No. They wouldn’t dare.”
In his alarm he spoke aloud, and birds flew cackling out of the scrub at the sound of his voice. Loki scarcely heard them. Already he was sliding down the tree trunk, sending leaves and fragments of bark showering onto the forest floor. Surely, he thought, they wouldn’t dare! The General himself had never dared—after Ragnarók, Odin could no longer assume the Sleepers were his to command.
Unless he knew something that Loki did not. Some new rumor, some warning sign, some omen that Loki’s spies had failed to read. Perhaps, at last, Odin had dared.
Loki’s mind raced furiously. If the Sleepers were awake, he thought, then surely he would have known by now. Their presence would have launched echoes and alarms throughout World Below. No reason to panic just yet, then. The General was above all a tactician, and he would not risk unleashing the Sleepers without first ensuring his absolute authority.
But with the Whisperer in his hands…
A distant shudder ran through the ground. It must have been the digging machines—though for a second Loki had been almost sure that he sensed something else: a convulsion that passed over the skin of the valley like a tremor on the skin of an old dog.