I took a deep breath (even though in Dream, I didn’t need to). “We’re not in the Architect’s dream,” I said. “I think we’re in the Oracle’s.”
5.
There used to be a saying, back in the day: What is it that the slave dreams? He dreams of being the master. And now, as I urged Sleipnir towards the wall of the bubble-World, I turned my thoughts back to that saying with a whole new sense of perspective.
How scarily apposite it was now. The slave dreams of being the master. And now, after so many centuries in the service of the gods, the Oracle’s dream—a bubble-World of unusual breadth and potency—reflected its powerful longing to build, to inspire, and to rule. I wondered just how far that desire reached. To be a ruler in Dream is one thing; but what I knew of the Oracle suggested that it meant to rule, not just a bubble-World in Dream, but a World filled with dreamers, a World in which, with the right kind of help, one could even be a god.
The Architect—now as tall as the World Tree itself, his head encircled by the dome like a massive glass corona—beamed down at the three of us, his monstrous smile spanning the sky.
“I SPEAK AS I MUST,” it thundered, “AND YOU WOULD BE WISE TO LISTEN TO ME. A NEW AGE APPROACHES. THE AGE OF THE GODS IS FINISHED.” There was a pause, then the Voice spoke again, not without amusement: “WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO RUN?” it said. “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM YET?”
I glanced at the enormous sky. “You know, I thought you’d be taller, somehow? And maybe more impressive?”
Laughter from the Architect, like hail across a field of glass. “You always were quite amusing,” said the Architect in a more normal voice. “I wonder, would it amuse me more to see you suffer, or survive?”
I did not reply, but kept going, urging Sleipnir towards the receding horizon. But Thor was looking mutinous. “Why are we running away,” he said, “if this is what we were sent to find?”
I tried to explain as Sleipnir shifted to his travelling Aspect. His eight legs arched into the air like pieces of a rainbow. The three of us clung to his fiery mane as he started to gain momentum, racing down the gleaming aisles of the great cathedral, as stained glass cascaded around us like rain, and the laughter of the Architect echoed all around us.
But even though we made for the wall of the bubble-World as fast as Sleipnir could carry us, it did not come any closer. The aisles seemed to stretch into coloured mist; the sky, to expand as we advanced. And all the time, it was losing form, like a watercolour in the rain, its substance becoming smoke, cloud, rainbow in the rapturous air . . .
Once more Thor repeated, “What are we running away for?”
“Because this is a trap,” I said. “The Oracle isn’t some human dreamer that we can quietly interrogate. It knows us. Knows our weaknesses. And in this world, it has all the power.”
The Architect laughed again. Looking back, I saw him sitting at the keyboard of the great organ he had referred to as the Machina Brava. The organ now seemed the only thing in the dream that was not losing substance: it gleamed as golden as ever before, and its voice was like that of an erupting volcano.
“I see you understand,” he said. “You always were the clever one. How did you escape Netherworld?”
“Oh, this and that,” I said, clinging fast to the mane of Sleipnir.
“And of course I know the Thunderer, even though his Aspect appears to be linked to that of a fluffy white dog. But who’s that with you?”
“No one,” I said, squinting into the watercolour mist.
“That isn’t quite true, is it?” said the voice of the Oracle. “I can see her quite clearly, you know, even at this distance. Who is she? One of the Folk?”
Jumps was clinging to my back, her Aspect that of a small child, no more than six or seven years old, her colours reflecting the purples and blues that I associated with distress. “No one. Just a friend,” I said.
As soon as I’d said it, I wished I hadn’t. But it was too late. The Oracle laughed. “A friend? Oh dear. Are you sure this is Loki? The Trickster I once knew was too smart to have friends.”
“Loose term,” I muttered. “I should have said—”
“Host, perhaps?”
Dammit, that was no better.
“So, you managed to find yourself a human host,” said the Oracle. “Well done. But it must be draining to have to adjust to your host’s needs. Her feelings. Her incessant demands. The limitations of her flesh.”
I said nothing, but concentrated on reaching the boundary of the dream, which seemed now to have receded beyond the limits of my vision. The three of us hung in the coloured mist, while the Architect, at his organ, seemed suspended in amber, an aeon away.
“I could perhaps help you with that,” suggested the Architect, his voice as close and intimate in my ear as if he were sitting behind me. “But if you want to keep riding, I can wait.”
I cursed.
“What does that mean?” said Thor.
“It means that we’re in trouble.”
I should have known, really. The Oracle was an ancient, powerful glam. Its knowledge of runes was peerless. And its malice was unknowable, its hatred unassailable, its guile as deep as—
Gullveig-Heid?
Of course. It runs in the family. I’d wondered why Odin had told me about the relationship between Mimir and Gullveig-Heid. Now I wondered if he had known that this was a possibility. Had he sent me into Dream in the knowledge that he was delivering me into the hands of his enemy? But if he had, what could he gain?
Beneath me I could feel Sleipnir still straining to escape the pull of Mimir’s world. I laid a hand on the Horse’s flank, signalling it to rest. At our back, the Oracle’s deep and resonant laughter.
“Oh, Loki. I always liked you,” it whispered in a voice only I could hear. “You always were reassuringly selfish and predictable. Whatever else you did, you could always be counted on to look after your own self-interest. What if I did you a favour? Freed you from the demands of your host? Allowed you to walk away from all this, and into a future of your own devising?”
“I’d say that sounded very out of character,” I said.
“Well, obviously, I’d need something from you,” said the Oracle softly. “But, given my trust in your sense of self-preservation, I think we can maybe do business.”
“Really?” I said.
“Oh yes,” said the Oracle.
“So—what do you want me to do?”
“Well, for a start, I suggest we play a little game,” said the Oracle.
“What kind of a game?” My experience of the Oracle’s little games was not, on the whole, I thought, positive.
“This is one I think you’ll like,” said the Oracle gently. “The prize is your freedom, if you do exactly what I ask of you.”
“What about the others?” I said, with a glance at Jumps and Thor.
The Oracle smiled. “We’ll see,” it said. “Besides, since when did you care?”
“Good point.”
Ten seconds later, Sleipnir and I were galloping across the landscape of Dream, alone and unencumbered: a million opportunities stretching out below us like stars; the surface of the bubble-World gleaming faintly, far below, like one of those marbles Jumps had as a child, with a twisted strand of colours inside, played for and lost in a game of chance, long ago and far away.
6.
Freedom. You can’t imagine how that felt for Your Humble Narrator. Even in Asgard, I’d been no more than a slave to the gods; a dog that could be trained to serve, but who never got more than the table scraps. A prisoner in Asgard, a prisoner in Netherworld, and then a prisoner in Jumps, subject to all her little demands, her silly little urges.
And now I was free, and in Aspect—Dream being the medium in which even Death has no purchase—and, with the aid of Sleipnir, could travel to any one of ten thousand Worlds, taking from them what I could—
Which made it all the more incomprehensible that I now found myself back on Castle Hill, inside Jumps??
?s body—now strangely cavernous without her personality inside—and facing my enemies with a not-entirely-unreasonable quiver of fear as I announced, “I have good news and not-so-good news. The good news is, I have located the Oracle. On a slightly less positive note, I may have temporarily mislaid my passengers.”
“You lost Jumps?” Evan said, just as Odin said, “You lost Thor?”
“I didn’t lose them, precisely,” I said. “But I may have had to leave them in Dream.”
I shan’t go into the details of the unfair and unfounded recriminations that followed my announcement. I just waited for Odin to simmer down and for Heidi to stop laughing, then said, “I did find the Oracle, though. And if we give him what he wants, I have his word that they go free.”
“And what does he want?” Odin’s eye was like ice.
I shrugged. “What else? You, of course.”
Heidi gave me a narrow look. “I hope you told him that his only daughter was alive and well, and working to free him.”
“Of course I did,” I said. “But understand that Mimir isn’t what you’d call the most trusting of personalities. He wanted certain assurances. And I don’t think I can deliver them.”
“So who can?” said Heidi. “And who in Hel’s this?”
I smiled my sweetest smile. “Let me introduce you,” I said. “It’s rather a funny story.”
7.
Scroll back a while with me, if you can. I may not have revealed all the facts. The fact is, the Oracle’s offer had tempted me a little bit—I mean, who wouldn’t jump at the idea of total freedom, physical autonomy without the drag factor of Jumps’s mind in my body, and the bonus of the Wanderer’s Horse at my command, to carry me between the Worlds whenever I felt like a change of scene?
All I had to do was deliver what Mimir wanted. The General, at his mercy. And I could have done it, too, except for one thing—one person. Jumps. Even in Dream, the link we shared was enough for her to guess my plan, and what she had to say wasn’t nice.
“I can’t believe you’re considering this,” she hissed at me as we fled.
“Considering what?” I said.
“Oh, please. It’s written in your colours.” (Don’t ask me how she’d picked that one up, but she had. Hooray for partnership.) “You’re seriously considering leaving me and Thor in here, prisoners in Dream, and gadding off on Sleipnir, never to return. Am I right?”
“Thinking isn’t a crime. Is it?” I was suddenly unsure.
“You weasel. And to think I thought that you might have changed, a little bit. Not miraculously, but enough to make you a little bit human.”
“Human?” I was revolted. I mean, there’s only so much abuse a demon can take.
“Oh, what’s the use?” she said. “I should have known better than to think you could ever be anything more than just a freeloader, user, liar, cheat—”
“Those are my best qualities,” I protested.
“Oh, just go,” said Jumps, sharply. “I’d rather be trapped forever with the Phantom of the bloody Opera over there than spend a single minute more listening to your excuses—”
I shrugged. “Well, of course, I could do that. I could just run away from the problem, which, by the way, would still leave me with three powerful enemies out for my blood. Or you could maybe remember that (a) I’m Loki, and (b) I’ve always got a plan. Are you cool with that, Jumps?”
“You haven’t got a plan,” said Jumps. “You said as much to Odin.”
“I lied. So shoot me. That’s what I do.”
For a moment, Jumps said nothing. I felt the weight of her disbelief slipping from my shoulders. Then I heard a little voice behind me whisper, What plan?
8.
There’s an old riddle among the Folk. It’s about a ferryman. This ferryman needs to transport three cargoes across a lake: a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. Don’t ask me why—that’s his affair. There’s no one at the far side of the lake to look after the goods, and both the goat and the wolf are hungry.
“But his boat is very small; he can only carry one thing at a time. The thing is, if he takes the wolf first, the goat will eat the cabbage. If he takes the cabbage first, then the wolf will eat the goat. And if he takes the goat first, then the next thing he brings to the far side of the lake will either be the cabbage, which the goat will eat as soon as he leaves, or the wolf, which will eat the goat the minute the ferryman is out of sight. So what does he do to keep all of them safe?”
“Er, tie up the goat? Cage the wolf?”
“No. The guy doesn’t have any rope.”
“He has a ferry, but no rope? So how come the wolf and the goat don’t run away as soon as he paddles off?”
I sighed. This was beginning to sound at lot like one of Odin’s tales. Not as bad as the one with the undead cat, and yet the animal motif was irksome. Still, I’d thought it might appeal to Jumps, what with her love of furry things.
“Just take it from me,” I said. “They’ll stay where the ferryman puts them.”
“Well, if they’re that obedient, why doesn’t he just tell the goat not to eat the cabbage, and the wolf not to eat the goat?”
I sighed again. “That’s not the point. The point is solving the riddle, which to a certain extent reflects our current predicament. I’m the ferryman, of course. The river is Dream. You and Evan need to be safely on the waking side. Heidi and Odin need to be taken to the far side—our World. And Mimir’s Head—the cabbage—needs to be kept as far away from either of them as possible.”
There was a rather long silence. “I don’t think that’s a riddle,” said Jumps. “More of a lateral thinking problem.”
“Never mind what it is,” I said. “You know I have a plan, right?”
I looked at her. She smiled and said, “Loki always has a plan.”
“And I promise I’ll be back, right? On my name, I promise you.”
Again, that nod. I don’t know why it made me feel anxious, as if something—a roll of wire, perhaps—had suddenly tightened around my heart. It was a troubling feeling—especially as this time I couldn’t attribute it to anyone else—and it made me wonder just how much Jumps had managed to corrupt me during the short time we had shared together. That tightening sensation. That tremor of something deep inside. It felt too much like caring to me. It felt too much like weakness.
“Jumps,” I said, fearing the worst. “Do you trust me?”
Jumps nodded.
I put my head in my hands. “Did you learn nothing from me at all? Trust no one. Understand?”
Jumps looked puzzled. “But you said—”
“Oh, just forget it,” I told her. And at that I urged Sleipnir back into Dream, leaving the Architect’s bubble-World behind me in the darkness.
9.
After that, I made a small detour, following the colours that had led me to the Oracle. But this time I followed it not into Dream, but into the corporeal World in which its counterpart remained.
Linked to its dream-Aspect by the finest of cords, Mimir’s Head slept—though for how long I could not hope to speculate. Jumps had one of those cords too, at least until the bubble-World failed and the Oracle returned to its conscious self.
Time in Dream works differently, allowing the dreamer to travel and drift for hours, even sometimes days or weeks, while in the waking world, only a matter of seconds might pass. But this time, I was travelling into the physical World again, which meant that every second would count, every breath make a difference. Jumps’s survival depended on how long the Oracle stayed asleep, how fast I could retrieve the Head, and whether or not I could persuade Odin to come with me.
I know. Put that way, it sounds as if I didn’t really have a plan. But while I might have led Jumps to believe that my plan was fully formed, I hadn’t lied to her, except perhaps in allowing her to believe my riddle had a solution. The ferryman’s problem—and mine, of course—lay in never allowing the wolf to be alone with the goat, or the goat left alone with the cabbage. But my v
ersion of the riddle was further complicated by the fact that I had multiple goats and wolves, all who needed to end up on their respective sides of Dream, not to mention—ahem!—the ferryman, whose survival in all of this was still of some small importance. But what did I hope to achieve, you ask, alone and without a physical form? Well, one thing I’ve learnt in my time is that you can tell a lot about someone by the way they dream. And Mimir’s dream had given me much to reflect upon, especially its depiction of that vast cathedral, the cross-shaped symbol carved into the stone, the organ with the odd-sounding name, the figure of the Architect. These things, added to the fact that, within the millions of crisscrossing signatures that ran through Dream, the Oracle’s colours seemed closely linked to another set of colours, suggested a human connection. Had one of the Folk unearthed the Oracle from its burial place? Had he, too, fallen under the spell of the thing that had cost the gods so dear?
On Sleipnir, I followed the signature. The Oracle’s trail was very bright, cutting through the tangle of lesser, muted colours. But that second trail continued, sometimes crossing the Oracle’s, sometimes winding around it, until, as I’d expected, it led me into a World I could almost recognize. Green and gold and ice blue, a place of valleys and mountains, a frozen North, a fruitful South, with the One Sea all around them . . .
It had been a long, long time since I fell from Asgard’s parapet. At that time, the World of the Folk was dark, and cold, and fiery. The Sun and Moon had been engulfed, the glaciers had marched down from the hills, and the armies of the living dead had poured from the tributaries of Dream to gather in frozen Ironwood. All right, I’ll admit I wasn’t in any position to pay much attention to climate change. But the Winter War had ravaged the land and decimated the people, making them into little more than scavengers on the decaying corpse of the world. Into this cesspit of darkness and ice, I had thrown Mimir’s Head, hoping that it would be lost forever—and yet, I told myself, it would seem that the Head had not only survived in this World, but had managed to find itself a human host to work on.