“Please,” said Gift. “We need to be quick. I’m not supposed to be here.”
He was probably right, I thought. The longer we stayed here, the more risk to those I had left behind in Dream.
“Where is it?” I asked, trying not to linger over the spines of the books—books with names like A Historie of the Nine Worldes and Asgard—The Myth of Order.
Jonathan gave a nod in the direction of a cabinet on the far side of the room. It was standing against the wall, in the section marked GEOLOGY. We walked up to the cabinet, which was labelled OBSIDIAN FRAGMENT: PRE-TRIBULATION. And there was the Oracle’s stone Head—a little chipped, but essentially much as I remembered it.
I felt a shiver go through me, even in Jonathan’s body. That damned bauble had never brought good luck to anyone who touched it; and even though I knew it slept, I didn’t want to touch the thing.
Jonathan shared my reluctance. Looking around him, he quickly unlatched the glass door to the cabinet, then, picking up the stone Head using the folds of his long robe, he slipped it into the satchel slung across his shoulder. A red-robed Master, sitting nearby, gave a disapproving grunt, but Jonathan ignored him. Carrying the satchel, we left the Library in haste, and, crossing the cloister, went back outside to find the General’s Horse cropping grass.
“Will I be free of it now, at last?” said Jonathan in a low voice, looking at the satchel.
“Do you want to be free of it?” I said, once more resuming my Aspect as I took my place on Sleipnir’s back.
Jonathan nodded.
“How long has it been?”
“Twenty years,” said Jonathan. “Twenty years of hearing its voice, of having it give me orders. Twenty years of feeling it watching me, questioning me. Twenty years of working for it, of trying to please it, and now—” He stopped abruptly.
“Now what?” I said. “Why now?”
He paused. I could sense his uncertainty, the same cold and hidden thing that I’d sensed when I was inside him. But I was no longer inside his head, and the hidden thing was still out of reach.
“I made a promise, long ago. It was wrong,” said Jonathan. “But the Whisperer offered me something I thought I could not refuse. My dreams, made real. My vision, fulfilled. I was young, ambitious: I would have done anything to satisfy my ambition. But now my cathedral is almost built—”
“You don’t want to pay the price?”
Silently, Jonathan shook his head.
“What did it want?” I was getting increasingly curious. But Jonathan just shook his head again, as if even speaking the words might make him guilty of a crime.
“I just want to be free,” he said.
“Free?” I said.
He nodded. “Free. Free of this life, free of this place, free of the man I have become.”
“Well, I can help you with that,” I said, feeling the germ of a plan begin to formulate at last in my mind.
“What must I do?” he said.
I smiled. “All you have to do is dream.”
Runemarks
By his Mark shall ye know him . . .
(Tribulation, Book of Words)
1.
And so we fled once more into Dream, with Jonathan in corporeal form, clinging onto Sleipnir’s mane with one hand, and holding the satchel containing the Oracle with the other. In Aspect once more, with Sleipnir spanning the sky with his spidery legs, we crossed over what had been Ida’s plain, towards the distant mountains.
“You’ve travelled into Dream before,” I told him, noting his lack of surprise as we left the rooftops of World’s End.
Jonathan nodded. “But not like this.”
“The Oracle’s powers are more to do with vision and communication than travel,” I said. That was true; the bauble was certainly talkative enough when it wanted to be. And that explained why it had chosen a visionary as its human contact—a dreamer, whose inner World was almost as real as the World outside. Just how strong that World might be was something that interested me particularly.
“Tell me,” I said.
He looked away. I sensed that he was uncomfortable even remembering the event. “Twenty years ago,” he said. “Hard to believe I was ever so young. I was out searching for specimens of pre-Tribulation rock fragments.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“The Winter War,” explained Jonathan Gift, “was accompanied by a number of interesting geological events. Volcanic eruptions of cinder and ash, which may explain the stories of wolves devouring the Sun and Moon. Of course, nowadays, no one believes that those stories were ever literally true. But there’s usually a core of truth in stories, whatever the History Department might think. And I had always been curious as to know such primitive warlords as the Aesir could have built something as grandiose as the Sky Citadel of Asgard.”
“Primitive?” I said.
“Well, yes. What else do you call a people who made conflict their way of life, who lived for nothing but conquest, who exacted a barbaric revenge on those who dared to defy them?”
Well, I wasn’t arguing with that one, anyway. I said, “You seem to have made a study of this.”
He smiled. “It was my passion. I had a secret theory that behind those stories of magic and runes, the Aesir must have had knowledge of complex engineering and advanced mathematical formulae. Those pieces of cinder that littered the plain were all that was left of Asgard. I wanted to know what properties those pieces of pulverized rock might have had, what secrets I might learn from them to aid my own research.”
“And so you found the Oracle,” I said, imagining the scene. Ida’s plain, still littered with the fragments of fallen Asgard, still strewn with the splintered bones of those who had fought alongside me. Maybe even my own bones, smashed upon the battlefield—
Damn, that was gruesome, even for me.
But Jonathan Gift was still talking. “At first I thought I’d found a piece of obsidian-bearing igneous rock. But when I put my hands on it, and felt its presence enter my mind—” He stopped. “It was unlike anything I had ever felt before. It was like discovering a new kind of equation. I felt power beyond anything I had ever known; I felt the potential for great deeds, great and important discoveries. The thing in my mind seemed to bloom, to expand, to explore every contour of my brain—and then I felt its terrible rage, its terrible disappointment.”
“Disappointment at what?” I asked, although I had a few ideas.
“I wasn’t who it wanted,” he said. “I didn’t have what it needed. But I was all it had, and it was not about to let me go. It made me bring the rock sample home. It made me tell it everything I knew. And then it took me into Dream, and showed me what it would do for me—and what it expected in return.”
“And what did it expect?” I said.
For a moment Jonathan Gift seemed to hesitate again. Then, finally, with averted gaze, he told me of his deal with the Oracle.
“Of course.” I should have known. It made sense. It was the final piece in the puzzle—the way in which Mimir the Wise could escape his fate and be reborn—not into flesh, but into the Aspect of a god, and wielding the powers that he had always coveted in life.
“I understand,” I said quietly. “I see now why you were ashamed. But you were brave enough to resist. Few men of your World would have done so.”
Jonathan looked at me hopefully. “Do you really think so?” he said. “For twenty years I resisted. But when you found me I was close—too close—to fulfilling my promise.”
I felt a little sting of hope. “Just how close exactly?”
He sighed. “I had what it needed. I could have had it brought to me—to it—in only a matter of days.”
“Brought? You mean, there’s someone else? Someone else who knows about this?”
“Someone. Something,” Jonathan said.
He started to explain, and I began to see what had happened here; and how, with luck, and a certain amount of deception, I might be able to turn it to my own advantage.
/>
“And if something were to happen,” I said. “Is there a way of contacting this—individual?”
“There’s a word,” said Jonathan Gift. And he spoke a word—a name, in fact—in a language I hadn’t heard spoken for many years: the language of the Elder Age, which now survives only in cantrips and fragments of ancient kennings.
I smiled. Names can be powerful things. A named thing is a tamed thing, as the Folk of my World used to say. And this one might just hold the key to my continued survival.
I made a mental note of the name. If I survived the next few hours, I might even get to use it. And then I fled with my passenger back towards the World I had left, in which Jumps’s body, connected to her ethereal Aspect by the thinnest of silver cords, was (I hoped) still waiting for me to bring her back to life, like the Vanir in Asgard!™, or one of those sleeping princesses from her childhood storybooks.
2.
You lost Jumps?” Evan said, showing more animation than he had since I’d first encountered him. “But how can you still be—” His face fell. “Oh. I see.”
I let him figure it out. Corporeal Aspect is better than hanging around as a fine mist, even when that Aspect happens to be someone else’s. I wished, for Jumps’s sake, that I could explain to him what was going on, but with Odin and Heidi watching me, that wasn’t exactly an option.
The silver cord that linked Jumps to her Dream-self remained unbroken, through very faint, almost invisible, even to me—I guessed that Odin and Heidi probably wouldn’t guess what that meant, especially as my passenger was taking up all their attention. Of course the dog, Twinkle, had no such cord, though its behaviour was just as it had been when the Thunderer was in charge, and it capered happily around my legs as I introduced my new friend.
“Folks, meet Jonathan Gift,” I said. “He’s quite appropriately named.”
Fewer than fifteen minutes had passed in this World while I was away. That translated into almost an hour in Jonathan’s World, and in Dream, where Time has no meaning, it might have been hours, even days. I tried not to think too hard about what Jumps might be doing: whether or not she was still sane, or had drifted off into that part of Dream the Folk call Madness. But no, that silver cord was intact, which meant that the link between body and mind was still theoretically viable. But time was running out, and my plan, never a dead cert from the start, needed only for one thing to go wrong before everything came down in pieces.
For a time there was confusion. Odin and Heidi both wanted to ask their questions at the same time, Evan was crazy concerned about Jumps, and I was trying my hardest not to look at Meg at all, not even to see if she was okay, because that might have revealed the plan that was forming in my mind.
Forming, you say? So shoot me. No, I wasn’t yet totally sure of the possible outcome. I’ve always been better making things up as I go along than sticking to a strategy. My ferryman, with his single wolf and goat and cabbage, had it easy. Yours Truly was trying to juggle, not only the thrice-damned cabbage, but a whole infernal menagerie.
And besides, I was dealing with Odin here—never a predictable guy, though in this case I guessed that the thought of facing the Oracle on its home ground was unlikely to appeal to him.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Gift, wide-eyed, descended from the eight-legged Horse—now in a humbler Aspect once more, was starting to crop grass. He looked around at the orange lights of Malbry town below us. He looked at Evan, at Heidi, at Meg. He looked at me in Jumps’s skin, trying to work out what had changed. And then he saw Twinkle, and started to smile—
“Oh,” he said. “A little dog!”
I gave an inward sigh. Of all the marvels of this new World upon which he might have chosen to fix his attention, he had to choose the damn dog. Still, Twinkle seemed to like him, and capered happily around his legs. I tried not to look at the satchel slung across his body—I hoped that its humble appearance, as well as the fact that the whole Hill was already alight with glamours, would serve to hide what it contained.
Instead I addressed Heidi. “Jonathan Gift,” I explained, “is the Oracle’s current toy. He rescued it. He knows where it is.”
Heidi gave me a cold look. “I thought I made it clear,” she said. “You were to bring me my father’s Head, not some random human.”
“He isn’t a random human,” I protested. “I told you, the Oracle has a plan. This man has been putting that plan into action. And much as I long to please you, my discorporate Aspect might have given me some difficulty when it came to, er, collecting it.”
Heidi’s eyes narrowed. “You’re talking too much. It’s a sign you’re up to something.”
“He’s always up to something,” said Odin. “And he always talks too much.” He turned his attention to Jonathan Gift, who by then had dropped to his knees, leaving the pack with the Oracle’s Head lying beside the fire pit, and was asking Twinkle who the good boy was.
“Who are you?” said Odin.
“An architect,” said Jonathan Gift, reluctantly looking up from the dog. “Once a mathematician. Now trained in the art of construction.”
“Really?” said Odin. In Evan’s skin, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but knowing the Old Man as I did, I guessed he was thinking deeply. Thinking about whether I was planning to betray him (I was), about whether I had a ulterior motive (I had), about whether to trust me anyway. He did, of course. He had to. When it came to it, in the end, I was still a safer bet than Gullveig-Heid.
“Of course, if I’d had a corporeal form,” I said, “I could have brought you Mimir’s Head. But that was not to be, and so instead I brought you this man, this man who will lead us to where the Oracle is hidden.”
Odin’s gaze speared me. “I see,” he said thoughtfully, and, still looking at me, took the Architect by the hand.
Gullveig-Heid had not noticed the look that passed between us. Instead, she spoke to Jonathan, without trying to conceal her eagerness.
“Tell me about the Oracle. Where you found it. What it said. Did it make a prophecy?”
The Architect gave a little shrug. “It was so long ago,” he said. “It spoke in some kind of poetry. I don’t remember the exact words, but—”
“It prophesied?” said Heidi. “It prophesied, and this idiot doesn’t remember!”
“It mentioned runes,” said Jonathan, looking aggrieved. “New runes for the gods—which doesn’t make sense, as the Aesir all fell at Ragnarók. I can only suppose that it must have been some form of metaphor—”
“What runes?” said Gullveig-Heid, her expression growing dangerous.
Odin saw it and intervened. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We need to find it.”
“And by ‘we,’ you mean yourself and . . . ?” I said.
“Oh, don’t think you’re getting out of this,” said Odin in his grimmest voice. “You’re coming too. And so is he.” He gestured towards Jonathan. “That way at least we’ll have someone with a physical presence.”
Heidi broke in. “No, not Odin. He can stay here, in his human host. If the Oracle makes a prediction, I want to hear it firsthand.”
“So do I,” said Odin.
Heidi laughed. “You don’t say? You’re staying here until my father’s Head is in my grasp. And after that”—she looked at me—“I will fulfil my part of the agreement.”
I raised an eyebrow. My part of the agreement. That sounded interesting. The whereabouts of the Vanir, perhaps? I should have known Odin wouldn’t throw in his lot with Heidi unless she had something he wanted. And I knew Odin well enough by now to understand that what he wanted wasn’t always what he needed.
“You don’t need me, either,” I said. “Leave me here. I’ll be fine.”
She laughed. “Not a chance, Trickster. You’re not going anywhere until I have my father’s Head, and the new runes. After that, you’ll be free to go.”
I feigned chagrin. “Is this necessary?”
“Oh yes. I think it is.”
I gave an exa
ggerated sigh. Then I grasped the Horse’s mane. Looking at Evan, I said, “All right. See you on the other side.”
Preparing to leave, I took one last look at Meg there on the hillside. If my plan worked, I would probably never see her again. In fact, if my plan worked, I would probably never see any of them again, which, to be fair, was fine by me. Being human might have its perks, I thought, but in the long run, what with the feelings, the angst, and the existential confusion, I much preferred to be myself: disloyal, uncaring, selfish, pure, and unconflicted.
Evan was standing beside Meg, looking into the bright air, his face upturned in livid stripes that radiated from the Horse as it prepared to cross over once more into the maelstrom of Dream.
For a second, our eyes met. No question of speaking my thoughts aloud, and without the special intimacy that had linked me with Jumps in our shared space, all I could conjure was the very simplest of messages. So, across the glamorous air, I sent him a distant memory of himself and Jumps, age seven, on their first day of elementary school. Jumps was wearing yellow shorts and a blue sweater with a picture of a penguin on it. Evan was wearing jeans and a Spider-Man T-shirt. And Evan took out his glass eye and put it into Jumps’s hand, where it gleamed like a marble—
Here. You can hold it.
Can it see?
No. But it once scored twenty points in a game of ringer.
There. I thought I saw him flinch. I hoped I’d managed to get it across. A small and unrelated thing, which hopefully would fail to attract the attention of my companions. His gaze flicked to Stella, who, freed from her passenger, was blinking prettily (if somewhat vacantly) at the scene. Then he looked at me again, and I thought—I hoped—he’d understood.
Here. You can hold it. Keep it safe.
“Good luck, Captain,” Evan said.