Of course it had. I’d expected no less. Mimir was always resourceful, even in the old days. But as the General’s Horse and I emerged from the misty chaos of Dream, I found myself blinking in disbelief at the change to the World as I’d seen it last—the place between Ida and Ironwood, where we had brought that World to an end. Instead of a dark and smoky sky, I saw a blameless stretch of blue, dotted by little fluffy clouds. And instead of a barren, blasted plain, I saw a large and vibrant settlement, wooden two-storey houses, narrow little cobbled streets leading towards a river, and beyond, a series of towers and spires, built from sooty golden stone and rising above the rooftops.
Ironwood had receded—its trees most probably cut down to build those wooden houses—and the river, once a maelstrom of wild and torrid water, had been dammed and bridged and tamed, with rowboats and ferries and boardwalks and dykes all along the waterfront.
I took a moment to understand that our World had not ended with Asgard’s demise. Of course I knew that already—but all the same I couldn’t help feeling absurdly surprised. How long had it been since Asgard fell? In this World, I guessed it could only be two hundred years or so. But where were the ruins? The monuments? The shrines to our people lost too soon?
From Netherworld, I’d watched through Dream as all trace of our occupancy was removed. But here, on the ground where I’d fallen, it was still a shock to see how completely we had been erased.
I glanced down at Sleipnir, whose Aspect in this World had shrunk to that of an ordinary Horse, vaguely reddish in colour, wearing a runemarked bridle. My own Aspect was so hazy as to be almost invisible, being little more than a fragment of Dream, but if I kept hold of Sleipnir, I knew I could take a more visible Aspect if required. I had no corporeal privileges—eating, sex, and other pleasures were out until I was back in the flesh—but Sleipnir kept me in the World, which was all I really wanted.
The clock was ticking now for Jumps. In Dream, her time was running out. I had to find the Oracle, and all I had now was the memory of that building: the columns, the stone, the glass. Of course, it might not look at all like the building I’d seen in Dream. But if I could find the Architect, the man who’d dreamed it into being . . .
Looking around, I became aware of the sound of hammering on stone. It was some distance away, but rising above my steed for a moment, I could see a building site, beyond the labyrinth of streets. Something was happening back there—something a good deal more ambitious than those wooden houses, or even the stone towers beyond. I urged Sleipnir forward, and in due course we found ourselves watching a work in progress: a half-completed structure of unusual size and scope, around which lay a number of lesser buildings, positioned geometrically to form the points of a six-pointed star.
Rising invisibly above the scene, I could see the grace of the design: the courtyards, gardens, avenues. Asgard itself might not have been as fine as this was shaping up to be, and I guessed that an Architect of extraordinary talent and vision must be behind the project.
No shit, I thought. I wonder who?
Once more disembodied, I rose to explore the scene from the air. Stonemasons, labourers, sculptors, scaffolders, great wagons of timbers and marble and stone. And right in the centre of it all, like a spider in its web, I could see those colours again: the Oracle’s colours, its silver green mingled with those of someone else—
I urged Sleipnir onwards, keeping him to his most mundane Aspect. Following that signature trail, I finally found myself by a thick canvas tent, in which a man of the Folk seemed to be contemplating diagrams, away from the dust of the building work and the noise of the workers.
The man was not asleep, and yet Dream seemed to cling to him like a cloak. Some artists are like that, existing only half in the corporeal World and half in the World of their imaginations. I’d met such people before, but never one whose inner life felt as tangible as this. This was why his signature had been so closely connected to the Oracle’s dream. This was why at first I had failed to see them as two distinct entities. In essence, the vision belonged to both the human and the Oracle. Both of them were the Architect. Both were joined by the same dream.
I took this as a good sign. It meant we could communicate. More than that, it meant that as long as the man remained in this state of enhanced creativity, the Oracle’s dream, too, was secure, and Jumps had an extra lifeline. I banished Sleipnir’s corporeal form and together we passed through the canvas of the tent. The man looked up, as if a draught had disturbed the papers in which he’d been absorbed, but the dream-haze around him remained intact.
“Who’s there?” he said. “Is anyone there?”
I took what hazy form I could, and saw his eyes widen in sudden alarm—though rather less astonishment than I’d been expecting.
“No!” he said. “I’m not ready! You promised you’d leave me alone until my work was finished!”
I said, “We seem to have a case of mistaken identity. I’ve never met you before, and I mean you no harm. Quite the opposite.”
The man seemed to relax a bit. He extended a hand to touch the mane of the General’s Horse, and seemed relieved to find that it was corporeal. “Who are you? An angel, a demon, a ghost?”
Actually, a bit of all three. But I didn’t want to waste time in formalities. That timepiece was still ticking in Dream.
“A traveller, from the future,” I said, which had the dual advantage of being both absolutely correct, and sounding nicely mysterious.
The man’s eyes widened again. I had the chance to see him a little more closely, and I realized that he was a version of the man I had seen in the Oracle’s dream. Red-lined robe, tasselled cap, blue and slightly sleepy eyes—he seemed a gentler, kinder version of the Architect I’d seen through the grandiose lens of the Oracle’s vision. Best of all, his colours revealed no guile, no malice. It looked to me as if the Oracle’s tool was an innocent: a man whose sole love of his art was enough to sustain him.
His eyes had lit up at my words. “Is it there?” he said. “Is my great cathedral there? Did I finish it? Is it as great as my visions foretold?”
I thought back to the Oracle’s dream. “I saw a dome of crystal glass,” I said, “with pillars that seemed to reach into the very firmament. I saw a great organ, the voice of which seemed to fill the Nine Worlds.”
His eyes were like stars. Keep it coming, I thought.
“I saw great alleys of golden stone. I saw gracious archways of breathtaking height. I saw statues, and panels of multicoloured glass.” I took a breath (even though, disembodied, I didn’t need to). “And I saw a disembodied Head, hidden away in the darkness, a thing that spoke and lived and dreamed, and showed me things from years ago—”
His colours shifted uncomfortably. “How do you know about that?” he said.
“Never mind. I know,” I said, giving the performance all I had.
The man looked still more uneasy.
“Tell me,” I said, “how it came to you.”
The man seemed to hesitate for a time, then nodded, his colours clearing. “I was a mathematician,” he said, “a Master at the University. I had no ambitions beyond my work. I liked to study number squares. They were so neat, so elegant. I was even writing a book—on the architectural properties of multiplicative squares of complex numbers. And then, on one of my walks, I found the stone, half-buried in a pile of ash.”
“And then the dreams began,” I said.
“How did you know?”
I shrugged. “Go on.”
“At first I thought I had become too absorbed in my work,” he said. “I dreamed of numbers and number squares more complex than any I had previously created. Sequences that seemed to explain everything in the known Worlds, from the smallest to the greatest. I abandoned my book on number squares and began to work on my great Theory of the Known Worlds, in which I ventured to speculate that there might be more than the Nine we know—perhaps a great many more, existing alongside our own, in which many possibilities might
be played out and tested, like complex equations waiting to be solved.” The man gave me a wan smile. “I know it sounds insane,” he said. “But I began to imagine a sequence of Worlds, interlocking like honeycomb, built from the magic of numbers, complex equations expressed as symbols—the symbols we still think of as runes—”
“This theory of yours,” I said. “It didn’t happen to feature a cat in a box, did it?”
The mathematician looked confused. “Er, no.”
“Thank gods for that,” I said. I’d heard enough. I could guess the rest. The Oracle had found itself a foothold in the Architect’s mind, though what it hoped to achieve there was a mystery to me. The cathedral was clearly important to it, as it was to the Architect, but I couldn’t for the life of me see why a building, however fine, could serve the Oracle’s purpose.
My mind went back to the words it had spoken to me in Dream. I’d had time to consider them carefully as I tried to find my way back, and the more I thought about them, the more they sounded like a prophecy.
I speak of One who is Nameless
And yet his name is Legion.
He will bring Order to the Worlds,
And bring about a Cleansing.
From the Cradle to the grave,
He lives in rage and malice.
And his parting gift to you
Will be a poisoned chalice.
Nothing I’d encountered so far had been designed to make me change my mind on the subject of Oracles and prophecies. Never trust an Oracle, so the saying goes, and the plan as far as I was concerned was to get as far away as I could from anything that prophesied or spoke in verse (even unaccompanied by a lute). But the words of the Architect of the dream still continued to trouble me, especially the last line:
And his parting gift to you will be a poisoned chalice.
What gift was this? It sounded like a warning. Could this be a trap? Could the Oracle have foreseen my arrival, somehow? Could it even have lured me here? I pushed aside the troubling thought.
“Where is it?”
The architect seemed to hesitate. “Safe,” he said at last. “Held safe in the Great Library of the University.”
I didn’t know this University, but I guessed it must be linked to those towers and spires I’d noticed. “Why not keep it with you?” I said. “Isn’t that how you dreamed this place? Isn’t that what inspires you?”
His eyes grew dark. “It whispers.”
“It does?”
“At first it was only good things,” he said. “It told me how to solve problems, and how to bring mathematics into a more practical context. It showed me how an arch could stand much stronger than a doorway: how to plan the crossing where the axes of the nave and transepts meet. It told me how to use the runes to build things I’d never conceived of. But then, it started to want things.”
“What kind of things?” I said.
The man shook his head. “I fought it at first. But it had grown so much stronger. I promised I’d do what it wanted as soon as my great work was finished. And so I threw myself into the building of my cathedral. The work that would ensure my fame, rivalling even Asgard itself.” He paused. “Is that what it is?” he said. “The Head of one of the Aesir?”
“Not quite, but pretty close,” I said.
“Have you come to take it back?” His voice was almost pleading.
“Would you like that?”
He nodded.
“Then it’s your lucky day. But I’ll need you to come with me. I can’t manage it on my own.”
That nod again, as if he feared to speak aloud. “But what if it awakes?” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “What if it awakes and knows that I mean to send it away?”
I summoned a reassuring smile. “Just do as I tell you,” I told him, “and I promise everything will be all right. By the way, what’s your name? I want to make sure that the Future remembers you as clearly as your great work deserves.”
The architect looked at me and nodded. His eyes were the cold bright blue of the sky on a winter’s morning. “My name is Gift,” he said. “Jonathan Gift, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of World’s End.”
“Then take my hand, Jonathan Gift,” I said, with a gesture of welcome. “Take my hand and come with me. We’re going to be very close, you and I.”
10.
The University of World’s End was a fine building of yellow stone, accessible through an archway that led into a green courtyard, then a set of stairs that took us through a wood-panelled hall, and a series of sunlit cloisters towards the Great Library.
It not being the most natural place for a horse, we had left Sleipnir out in the yard. If only Jumps had been with us, we might have dispensed with Jonathan Gift, but we needed someone corporeal to give us access to the Head. And so I entered Jonathan Gift—easy to do, with Sleipnir channelling Dream as he did—and investigated my new surroundings.
I’ll admit, I’d been half expecting Jonathan Gift to freak out at that, as Jumps had done when I entered her. But I sensed no alarm at my presence. In fact, I sensed very little reaction. I guessed that Jonathan Gift was used to feeling an alien presence in his mind.
I cast a cursory glance around. Jonathan was more learned than Jumps: His inner space was filled with maps and graphs and equations, and formulae and charts of the sky. There were whole rooms filled with number squares, directories filled with symbols and runes, chambers filled with theories and dissertations and papers and graphs. And while Jumps’s mind was filled with people and relationships, Jonathan Gift seemed to have no friends, or family. A section marked COLLEAGUES catalogued the Masters in his department at the University, a section marked craftsmen listed the woodcarvers, builders, stonemasons, glassworkers, journeymen, enamellers, tilers, and labourers that made up his daily interactions. There were no closed doors in his inner space—except for one restricted zone, cold as Hel, dark as Death. There was no sign of what it might contain, but I sensed that there might be trouble if I tried to explore it.
And his parting gift to you will be a poisoned chalice.
The name couldn’t be a coincidence, I thought as I considered that cold space. Gift, the poisoned chalice—but what kind of poison, and how could it be? There was no guile in Jonathan, no sign that he knew the answer. It made me deeply uncomfortable to think that the Oracle might know a part of what I’d been planning. I wondered what would happen if it awoke to find me in Jonathan’s mind. Not that I thought Mimir would deign to stay in the head of a mortal with no runemark and no power. Perhaps that was why the Oracle preferred to spend its time in Dream, conducting grandiose plans instead of experiencing the joys of the flesh. I wouldn’t have chosen that option myself, but I guess there’s no accounting for taste.
Instead I turned my attention to our surroundings as Jonathan passed through the cloisters. Students in their robes and caps bowed to the Architect as he passed. A couple of elderly Masters, recognizable by the red trim on their robes, nodded affably in greeting. Jonathan greeted them in return—his version of the Book of Faces gave me their names and departments, but nothing more elaborate. Did this man have no friends at all? Was there no one important to him?
But then we entered the Library, and I had eyes only for the books. Books had never been part of my life when I was in Asgard, and in Jumps’s world they were commonplace, even sometimes disposable. But, watching the Worlds from my cell, through Dream, I had learnt to respect the written Word, as well as those who valued it. And I wondered how this orderly World, this place of books and scholarship, could have sprung from the chaos of Ragnarók. How long had it been since then? Time works differently across the Worlds, but I sensed that this climb out of Chaos had been unusually fast, and shaped at least in part by books, and by the people who wrote them.
Looking around at the Great Library of World’s End, I could tell that the people of this World valued books. There must have been more than ten thousand of them, lined up on bookshelves twenty f
eet high—leather-bound books as big as house doors, vellum books as small as your hand, some illustrated in coloured inks, some bound in precious metals. The Library was divided into several sections, each headed in ornate script: HISTORY, ALCHEMY, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY, ASTRONOMY, GEOMETRY, ARS MATHEMATICA. I noticed the section marked HISTORY was cordoned off from the rest of the room, and that the books were contained within a glass-fronted cabinet, fastened with a large golden padlock.
Why the padlock?
Jonathan shrugged. “The History Department is notoriously secretive about its work. I’ve heard they’re working on a definitive Chronicle of Tribulation, and they don’t want the other departments interfering in their research.”
Tribulation? I searched Jonathan’s mind for more details, and discovered, to my surprise, that it had been no more than two hundred years since Ragnarók, which the Folk now preferred to call the Tribulation.
“We thought the Worlds had ended,” said Jonathan in a low voice. “But out of adversity comes progress, and out of Tribulation comes strength. The Worlds did not end, and out of the long winter, there came a new beginning. Books and learning carried us through. The University of World’s End was created to study the lessons of the past, and to make sure that never again would we suffer that descent into barbarism.”
Two hundred years seemed a very short time for such a rapid ascent, I thought. I wondered what had inspired it. Someone hunting for treasures in the ruins of Asgard, perhaps? A drily whispering voice from Dream?
It whispers, had said Jonathan Gift.
Just how long had the Oracle been secured in the Library? How many people had heard its voice? What had it whispered in the dark, as it formed its dark dreams of freedom? More importantly, how long ago had the Oracle made the connection with Jonathan Gift?
He gave an inward sigh. Too long. I felt a coldness from that restricted area, a place I sensed held memories—or maybe just one memory. What memory, what act could be so terrible that he would want to hide it away, even from himself? What crime had this dreamer committed? What secret had the man suppressed in his years of serving the Oracle?