But now Nan faced them in her new Aspect – the Rider whose name was Lunacy – and suddenly she knew what to do, and she laughed like a child at the ease of it.
‘This is madness,’ said Zeb Dean. ‘Are we to listen to fancies and tales from a mad old crone and a couple of birds?’
Nan smiled. ‘Mad?’ she said. ‘Aye, mebbe I am mad. But Madness is one of the islands of Dream, and I ken those waters very well.’
She lifted the pendant that Hughie had given her. From it, the light of the candles now seemed to shine out as bright as the sun. It looked a little larger too; no longer a coin, but a dinner plate.
And at that moment the broken rune Fé began to glow on Nan Fey’s wrinkled forehead. It glowed a clear and luminous white, and as it glowed, it seemed to shift, so that any villager who dared raise his eyes to the old woman’s face saw the ruinmark glowing there, as it changed from a dull, defective rune to a shiny bright glam of the New Script –
Mae gave a cry and shrank back. She knew a ruinmark when she saw one – and she’d seen the one on her sister’s hand glow in just such a fearsome way.
‘Laws save us all!’ said Zeb Dean. ‘This should have been reported!’
But Dan Fletcher was watching Nan, a gleam of appreciation in his eyes. ‘What’s this, Nan?’ he said quietly. ‘What mischief have you been up to now?’
Nan grinned. ‘No mischief, I swear. I’ve sailed through the sky in a washbasket, I’ve floated on the islands of Dream, I’ve ridden a Horse of Air through the clouds and now I’ve come to help my Folk—’
‘Help us?’ wailed Mae. ‘Ye’ve damned us all with your dreaming!’
Nan wondered (and not for the first time) how any sister of Maddy Smith’s could have turned out to be so brainless.
‘Listen to me!’ she commanded. ‘There never was aught to fear from dreams. That was just a story set about by the Order, who rightly feared their power.’
The villagers looked doubtful at this, most of them having believed since childhood that dreaming was terribly dangerous. Some (like Mae) had never dreamed; others had done so in secret. One of these was Dan Fletcher, of course, and now he looked at the Horse of Air, which was standing placidly nearby. Like most of the villagers, he knew every horse in the valley, just as he knew their owners, and this one was unfamiliar to him – besides looking strangely insubstantial, like the pale reflection of a horse on a piece of floodwater.
‘Next you’ll be saying it came here through Dream.’
Nan gave him her mischievous smile. ‘Don’t you underestimate Dream,’ she said. ‘Dream is a river that flows both ways, from Order to Chaos and back again. Dream is the wellspring of creation; even Death is no match for it. Nothing dreamed is ever lost, and nothing lost for ever – that’s the Auld Man telling us that what’s destroyed can be rebuilt – aye, even castles in the clouds!’
‘Castles in the clouds,’ said Dan. ‘I’d settle for a bed and a meal.’
‘Would ye?’ said Nan, still smiling at him. ‘I recall you wanting more.’
Dan looked rueful. ‘What good are dreams now?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Nan, mounting Epona with an agility of which, only hours before, she would never have imagined herself capable. The mirror-glam from Odin’s birds was now almost the size of the collection plate that Nat Parson had passed around the church after every service. Nan had no idea what it was for, but it was a glammy, for sure, she thought; and holding it in both her hands, with both heels kicking the Horse’s flanks, Crazy Nan Fey urged Epona straight towards the dreamcloud.
‘Don’t!’ cried Dan, taking a step.
But Nan just laughed. ‘It flows both ways!’ And at that she entered the dreamcloud at a gallop, her long white hair streaming out behind her, and vanished into the devil-mist without so much as a backward glance.
‘Now what?’ said Matt Law.
‘Now we wait – and pray,’ said Dan.
The dreamcloud was at the entrance now, fingering the doorstep. The Folk had retreated to the church in the hope that it might provide sanctuary; but a candlestick left on the doorstep and a copy of the Good Book had both dissolved into twin piles of ash, and now the doorstep, worn to a shine by centuries of worshipful feet, was starting to turn milky and fade …
And then a figure stepped out of the mist.
‘Demons from Chaos!’ Mae screamed; but Ben Briggs reached out his hand and, bracing himself to lose it, grabbed hold of the ghostly figure and yanked it through the doorway.
For a moment there was silence as everyone stared at the apparition.
Then Damson Ploughman gave a cry.
‘Gods! Thank gods!’ exclaimed his wife.
It was Sam, their vanished son, and for several minutes after that the Folk were all too busy vying to touch the new arrival – pulling his hair and checking his teeth and crowing in delight and surprise at the smallest thing he did – to heed the protests of Zebediah Dean, who maintained that young Sam was a demon in disguise, and that all of them would be double-damned, and that when his uncle heard of this, there would be serious consequences—
‘Ah, shut yer pie-hole, Zeb,’ said Mags. ‘Does he look like a demon to you?’
‘Well, he’s ugly enough, for sure,’ said Damson, whose eyes were still brimming.
Sam grinned. Everyone laughed – except, of course, for Zeb Dean and Mae.
‘All you have to do is dream,’ said Dan Fletcher in wonderment. ‘That’s what she meant. That’s what this is!’
Sam nodded. ‘I think so. I remember going into the mist – then nothing else until Nan Fey—’
‘But how did she do it, Sam?’ said Mags.
‘I think – I think she dreamed it, Ma!’
Dan turned on the villagers. ‘Well, what are we waiting for?’ he said. ‘If Nan can do it, so can we!’
‘Us? Dream?’ said Mae Dean.
‘Why not?’ said Matt Law, never the most imaginative of men, but dogged when he came to the point. ‘What more have we to lose now?’
There was a stir among the villagers, but still no one dared approach the mist.
‘What? None of you even want to try?’ Dan Fletcher closed his eyes and plunged into the dreamcloud, to return with a shaggy dog at his heels, a brown shaggy dog, its coat still damp, its long tail wagging furiously.
‘Charlie! Oh, Charlie, you rascal,’ said Dan, grabbing hold of the unruly hound. ‘I thought ye dead and done for, boy!’ Now, turning to the villagers, he said: ‘See? We can do it. We all can. All we have to do is dream, and nothing ever need be lost for ever …’
After that there was rush towards the edge of the dreamcloud. Imagining had never been something that came easily, but that night the harvest exceeded any that had ever been known.
Dogs, cats, horses, birds – all as real as young Sam Ploughman – began to emerge from out of the devil-mist, popping into existence again like a row of bubbles containing little magical pockets of being, released back into the Middle World with just the same ease as they’d left it.
For a time, excitement made all of them a little mad. Even the cynics among them were soon joining in the free-for-all, trying to recall lost ones, prized possessions, fragments of their disrupted lives. Mags Ploughman reached into the mist and brought out her mother’s music box, which she’d thought gone with the rest of her things; Joe Grocer recovered his money-counter; children rescued favourite toys. The people of Malbry soon found out that all they really had to do was concentrate on what had been lost, to remember it in every detail, to call it back from out of the mist, and sure enough it would come to them, like flotsam on the water …
Matt Law’s posse was dispatched to make sure the church remained secure; and before long it was noticed that the mist had receded an inch or so, leaving, instead of the grass and stones that had surrounded the little church, a narrow band of sediment that gleamed in rainbow colours. No one really noticed it. Folk were too busy re-knitting their lives, inch by inch, stone by s
tone. And when Nan Fey and the Horse of Air emerged at last from the dreamcloud, it was to a most unusual sight: a church half filled with exotic paraphernalia, in which part of a cottage (it belonged to Ben Briggs) had begun to appear, like a growth on a tree; where a group of unsupervised children had managed to summon some kittens and a red ball; and where through the roof (which had fallen in), a giant oak was now growing, in the branches of which a flock of birds were singing as if to raise the dead.
Nan Fey gave a little smile and patted the Horse of Air at her side. Soon there would be greater things than birds and lost dogs to summon. The mirror-glammy had shown her as much; it was not for nothing, she knew, that thoughts were known as reflections. Too long had thinking and dreaming been considered the work of idle hands. If the Sky Citadel were to be built, then dreams and reflections would build it. And even if the battle were lost, she knew that the Auld Man would be proud. Nan Fey had achieved what no one else could. Come Hel, flood or Tribulation.
For the first time in five hundred years, the people of Malbry were dreaming.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Old folk saying
MUCH AS SHE would have liked to believe that this was no more than a bad dream, Maddy was not dreaming. Three hours had now passed since she and Perth had followed Adam to the penthouse near Examiners’ Walk. There, the surprise of her old enemy’s impending marriage had turned out to be nothing compared to Maddy’s dismay on learning the bride’s identity.
Adam Scattergood and Maggie Rede? Adam and Maggie engaged to be wed? Maddy realized at once that this must be part of some devious plan, although how Adam Scattergood was involved remained a mystery to her.
Did Maggie know who Adam was? How had they met? Were they in love? Could Adam really have feelings for the sister of his enemy? And how in the Worlds could Maddy’s twin be in love with Adam Scattergood? Adam, whose heart was as mean and sour as a late-November apple, doomed never to ripen, but to fall as soon as the first frosts came?
Now she watched through the rune Bjarkán, hiding in the shadows, hoping to catch a glimpse of her sister, or some clue as to what she was doing there. But there was nothing unusual to be seen except for the Red Horse in the stables. There had been no violence here – no sign of a struggle, no outbursts of glam – and although she could make out Maggie’s trail, a brighter skein in the tapestry of signatures that lined the road, there was nothing there to indicate that her sister had lost her mind, or to explain what a child of Thor could see in Adam Scattergood.
It had taken all Perth’s powers of persuasion to prevent Maddy from going up to the apartment there and then and simply breaking down the door.
‘What do you think will happen,’ he said, ‘if you just go charging in?’
Maddy looked at him. ‘Yes, but—’
‘Listen. This needs careful thought. You don’t want her calling the Law on us, or starting trouble, do you?’
Reluctantly Maddy agreed that maybe that wasn’t the best plan. ‘So what do we do?’
Perth shrugged. ‘She knows you. If she sees you here, she’ll suspect something. But if I can get in and investigate—’
‘You?’ said Maddy.
‘Why not? There isn’t a penthouse in World’s End that I can’t get into, and out again. Trust me. I can do it.’
Maddy smiled. ‘Trust you? Perth, if you’re trying to pretend that this is about anything other than wanting to steal the silverware, or whatever other valuables might be lying around the place …’
Perth tried for a hurt look. ‘So shoot me,’ he said. ‘But you know I can. And if a couple of candlesticks – or a purse, or a silver snuffbox – happen to accidentally find their way into my possession – well, where’s the harm in that, eh?’ He gave a broad and shameless grin, and not for the first time Maddy was struck by his resemblance to Loki. The similarity was not so much in his colouring or any of his features, but in the way he moved; in his eyes; in his changing expressions. Loki’s older brother, perhaps; not quite as disruptive, but still with that quicksilver spark in him, that tiny hint of wildfire.
It occurred to her that maybe this was how One-Eye must have been in his prime, and a surge of nostalgia came over her. Had her old friend somehow survived? Did her sister know if he had? And what was his connection with the Old Man of the Wilderlands?
‘All right,’ she said, addressing Perth. ‘You go. But be careful. I don’t want you getting hurt. Look, don’t touch, and then come back and tell me what you see. Understood?’
Perth grinned. ‘Understood.’
‘And no candlesticks, or snuffboxes, or anything like that. All right?’
Perth shrugged. ‘Spoilsport.’
And so it was that, at sunset, a nondescript figure in drab brown climbed quickly up onto a stable roof from a back alley off Examiners’ Walk, then up a drainpipe, through a gulley, over a series of ridges, their tiles half eaten up with moss, and finally onto a sloping roof overlooking the penthouse. Without his coloured Outlander’s robes, Perth might have been a roofer, a chimney-sweep, or even a slave; in any case, he was well concealed, wholly invisible from the street, wedged comfortably behind a stack of chimneys.
He cast Bjarkán at the penthouse, and looked at the scene through his fingers. For a moment he saw only light: the curtains were pulled so that only a narrow slice of the room was visible to the naked eye, and even with the truesight, all he could see were the traces of a signature that crisscrossed the room, as if someone were pacing repeatedly behind the half-drawn curtains.
That would be Maddy’s sister, he thought. Only a Fiery left such a trail. He narrowed the focus of Bjarkán and moved a little closer. Even from this vantage point he could see little but her signature and her movements, which both revealed agitation, and her shadow at the window, moving quickly to and fro.
Then came a sound of wings, and a bird landed on the chimney-stack just above his head. A raven of peculiar size, which looked at Perth intently.
‘Shoo,’ said Perth.
Crawk. Crawk.
Now another bird joined the first; a second raven, this one with a white feather on its head. It gave a harsh cry – Ack-ack-ack! – and pecked the larger bird on the wing.
Perth forked a runeshape. The larger bird hopped from its perch. But instead of flying away, it dropped right onto the rooftop next to him and, in a second, had taken on the Aspect of a young man in black, with disreputable hair and a broad grin.
‘That’s no verra polite,’ he said, sitting down cross-legged on the roof.
Perth considered casting Hagall, then decided against it. Even if the bird-man could be deterred by such methods, the use of such a powerful glam would alert the girl in the penthouse.
‘Who are you, and what do you want?’
‘Call me Hughie,’ said the bird. ‘And that’s my sister Mandy. Aides to the Rider of Carnage, and all we want is to see that Rider all set for the End o’ the Worlds – unless ye’ve got such a thing as a sugar lump tae spare, or mebbe even a piece of cake—’
Kaik! Kaik! said the smaller bird, pecking at the chimney-pot.
Perth gave it a suspicious look. ‘The Rider of Carnage?’
Hughie grinned. To Perth, that grin looked about as real as a purse full of glammy gold, but this was his chance to find out more about his new friend Maddy and her mysterious sister. Perth didn’t know much about prophecies or tales of the Elder Age, but he knew the Song of Three Horses from the Book of Apocalypse, and it hadn’t taken him long to understand that the Black Horse that Maddy called Jorgi, with its peculiar appetites and tendency to change Aspects, was no horse at all, but some creature from Dream masquerading as a horse. And here was Hughie talking about a Rider whose name was Carnage …
‘Who is the Rider of Carnage?’ he said. ‘Is it that girl in the penthouse?’
Hughie gave his gleaming grin. ‘Aye. She may be, if she rides …’
‘And what has that to do with me?’
‘I th
ink it may have everything.’
Perth took a moment, thinking hard. Did Maddy know about all this? From his point of view, his new friend had been most annoyingly secretive. Since arriving in World’s End she had told him almost nothing of her family, her origins, the source of her mysterious glam. Who was the girl that she had come to find? What was the Old Man of the Wilderlands? How did a girl from the Northlands come to know so much about runes? What did Perth really know about Maddy? That she was new to the city; that she had a glam and knew how to use it; that she had powerful enemies.
Could she be one of the Riders? Could Jorgi be the Black Horse? It seemed to Perth that maybe he was. And the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that some kind of gain could be had from all this: treasure from World Below, perhaps, or knowledge for which the right person might pay.
‘Tell me,’ Hughie said at last. ‘Have ye ever heard of a thing called the Auld Man o’ the Wilderlands?’
Perth nodded. It was a phrase that he’d heard Maddy use a number of times, but he still had no idea what it was. A person? An object? A little of both?
‘What is it?’
‘A treasure,’ Hughie said. ‘A treasure out of World Below, more precious than gold and rubies.’
‘Is that so?’ Perth said. ‘And do you know where it is?’
‘Aye. It’s right there, in that penthouse.’
‘Really?’ said Perth.
Mandy crawk-ed.
‘And what do you want from me?’ he said.
‘We want ye to steal it,’ Hughie replied.
‘Steal it? But you said you were—’
‘Aides to the Rider o’ Carnage. Which means we serve the interests of the Rider. Even when the Rider herself disn’ae know where her interests lie.’
‘And you’re telling me the Rider needs—’
‘A thief,’ finished Hughie. ‘A verra good thief.’ His grin widened more than ever. ‘One who could climb to the balcony in the middle of the night. One who could get in without a sound, and take the Auld Man from where it’s hid. One who could undo the ties of glam that bind it without alerting anyone. And finally, one who could carry it back to safety, where no one could find it, and start collecting the rewards—’