Whatever they had been in life, Odin thought, in death the Order had merged as one: a last Communion, a deadly swarm armed with one Word, which, when uttered, would increase its power by ten thousand.
He could already feel it building: it raised his hackles, shivered the ground, made the clouds shift and circle. If there had been birds in those clouds, they would have dropped from the sky; as it was, even the dead felt it and followed, like dust on a wind of static.
They were waiting, he sensed, for some command, some new word that would galvanize them into movement. All of them silent now, eyes closed; all of them focused with the unbreakable concentration of the dead. The column seemed to stretch out for miles, and yet beyond it the farsighted Watchman seemed to see something—something impossible, he told himself, and yet if he’d not known, he could almost have sworn…
But then came a rumbling across the plain, a silent resonance that nevertheless penetrated the listeners to the marrow and beyond.
Bragi heard it as a lost chord.
Idun heard it as the silent sob of a dying man.
Freyja heard it as a cracked mirror.
Heimdall heard it as a blackbird shadow.
Frey heard it as a death wind.
Skadi heard it as creeping ice.
And Odin heard it as a whisper of the Elder Days, a low sound of ancient spite, and suddenly he understood—not everything, but some at least—and as once more the ten thousand dead opened their eyes and spoke as one, everyone heard the Word that was spoken, a teasing, seductive whisper of a Word that hung over the desert like a distant smoke signal under the putrid clouds.
Odin, it whispered.
“I hear you,” he said.
Then come, it said. Come to Me.
And as the Vanir watched, the ten thousand with their ranks and columns parted silently and in a single fluid movement, leaving a narrow passageway across the sand.
Odin smiled and stepped forward, staff in hand.
Heimdall made as if to guide him.
The dead column seemed to tremble. Ten thousand pairs of eyes opened once more and ten thousand heads turned in his direction. The combined weight of their concentration made the Watchman’s teeth ache.
Alone, said the Whisperer, and every Examiner mouthed the words in perfect synchronicity. The General must stand alone.
There was a long pause. Then Odin spoke. “At least let me take the goblin,” he said. “I’ll need his eyes to lead me through.”
Agreed, said the Whisperer, and its voice moved through the mouths of the dead like the wind through a field of corn.
Odin smiled.
“If you think I’m letting you go alone—” said Heimdall.
“I must,” said Odin. “The prophecy—”
“Damn the prophecy!”
With an effort Odin drew himself up to the full height of his Warrior Aspect. Light and fury blazed from him; the air about him was bright with runes.
“I’m ordering you to stay here,” he said. “You and the other Vanir too.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s the only way. And because if I lose this battle, it may be that the Vanir will be all that stands between Chaos and the Middle Worlds.”
“But you can’t fight. You can’t even see—”
“I don’t need to see. Now let me go.”
“At least let Idun give you some apple—”
“Listen, Heimdall.” Odin turned toward him, and his one eye, though blind, was shining. “If my suspicions are right, then even in my youth, armed, in full Aspect, and with my glam intact, I would have been no match for the powers here. You really think fruit is going to help?”
“Then why are you going?” Freyja said.
Ethel could have told her, with her new clear sight, but Odin had bound her to silence. The image of the death ship was strong in her mind—the fallen General with his dog at his feet—and she wished there was something she could say to make him turn back…
But by then Odin was already gone, with Sugar leading him carefully across the dusty ground, and the ranks of the Order closed as he passed, erasing him like writing in the sand.
10
Nat Parson had watched with apparent indifference as Odin vanished into the ranks. Inside, however, his heart was racing.
That Voice!
He’d heard it as they all had, whispered across the battlefield, and he’d clapped both hands to his face as blood began to drip from his nose. It was the Word—he could sense it as a rabid dog scents water—and for a moment he thought he might go mad from terror and desire.
And now he could almost touch the Word; it trembled all around him like the coming of spring; it called him in a voice like gold—
Laws, that power!
Ten thousand times stronger than anything he’d felt before, the pull of the Word was not to be denied, and who could know, when at last it was unleashed, what gifts it might bestow on a faithful servant?
Worlds, Nathaniel. What else is there?
He stared at the obedient dead, pegged out across the colorless horizon. Ten thousand dead, yet strangely alive—his strained senses could feel their vigilance, their stillness a blind over that horrible alertness. He could feel their unity: the ripples that ran through them like wind through grass, a single flicker of an eye echoed in ten thousand pairs of eyes as they stood in terrible Communion.
That could have been me, he told himself.
Somewhere in those ranks stood his Examiner, the one he had known as Elias Rede. Somewhere, he was certain, Rede was aware of him. Surely that made him a part of this Communion, gave him the right to some of that power…
He took a step toward the line.
Ten thousand pairs of eyes looked his way.
He whispered: “It’s me. Nat Parson.”
Nothing happened. No one moved.
Nat took another step.
Behind him the Vanir were lost in debate; their raised voices reached him as if from a distance, but the sounds of the dead were deafening, an artillery of furtive creaking and rustling, as of insects crawling on shifting sand.
He moved closer.
“Prentice?” he said quietly.
Adam, who had been pretending to sleep behind a nearby piece of rock, lifted his head.
Nat smiled—to Adam he looked as mad as ale, and Adam began to feel that it might be safer to be as far from his old master as possible.
He backed away—
“Oh no, you don’t.” Nat reached out to grab the boy’s arm. “I may need you yet, Adam Scattergood.” He did not mention why he might need him, though Adam cringed at the look in his eyes. Nothing was left, Adam thought, of his master. Instead Nat looked like one of the dead; his dull but horribly knowing eyes were fixed on a point Adam could not see, and his grin was like that of a rabid wolf.
“I don’t want to go,” said Adam faintly.
“Good lad,” said the parson, and crossed the line to join the army of the dead.
None of the Vanir saw him go. Nat had made no friends among the Faërie, and now that he was no longer a threat, their contempt for him was plain to see. But Ethel had not forgotten him. Her husband still had a part to play, and even she did not know how the game would end.
So she watched as Nat approached the line, dragging Adam in his wake, and she followed quietly, a few paces back. Dorian knew better than to protest. In the short time they had traveled together, his respect for Ethel had grown beyond measure, and although he was terribly afraid of the dead men standing on the plain, he would rather have died than let her go alone. And so he followed, his pig at his heels (for Lizzy too knew loyalty), and though the dead pressed in on either side, distressing the air with their stench and their chanting, Ethel Parson stayed calm, her gray eyes kind and compassionate and unafraid.
Someone, she knew, was about to die. And the fate of the Worlds depended on whom.
11
Balder the Fair, behind whose shining Aspect fragments of Lok
i were still apparent, looked down at himself with a puzzled expression. He examined his hands, his chest, his arms and legs. He pulled a hank of hair over his eyes and squinted at it. Even through his colors it still showed faintly red.
“What is this?” said Balder, looking at Hel.
But it was the Whisperer who replied. “A life for a life, O Fairest One. You’re free to go. Your new Aspect will take you anywhere—back to the Middle Worlds, if that’s what you want—”
“To Asgard?” said Balder.
“Sorry, no deal. Asgard fell—well, of course, you wouldn’t be expected to know that, would you?—but you can take your pick of the other Worlds and feel smug at the thought that you’re the first dead person to leave the Underworld by legitimate means since before the Elder Age began…”
But Balder was no longer listening. “Asgard fell?” he repeated numbly.
“Yes, lord,” said Hel. “At Ragnarók.”
“And Odin?”
“Him too.”
“The others?”
“Everyone, lord. Everyone fell,” said Hel with a trace of impatience. She’d been waiting for a sign of gratitude for some time now, and this footling concentration on petty details seemed to her pointless and quite annoyingly masculine.
She gave him a glimpse of her living profile, keeping her dead face turned away, and was irritated to find that he did not notice. It was trying, she thought, after everything she had sacrificed.
“Well, Loki didn’t fall,” Balder went on, oblivious. “Otherwise his body wouldn’t be here. And what exactly am I doing in Loki’s body, and how did you manage to get him out of it in the first place?”
Maddy told him of Loki’s promise, Hel’s betrayal, the release of the Æsir—
“What?” said Balder. “The Æsir escaped?”
“Well, they would have done if Hel hadn’t stopped them—”
“You don’t understand,” said Hel. “Netherworld’s unstable; if I open it now, anything might get through—”
“Including the Æsir,” said Maddy at once.
“The Æsir,” said Hel. “Where would they go? Into Dream or the ranks of the dead…”
“Whereas I—” said Balder.
“You have a body, lord. A glam…” She hesitated, and her living eye shifted modestly downward. “I thought perhaps that you and I—”
He stared at her with an astonishment that Hel found quite unflattering. She flushed a little and turned to the Whisperer. “You promised…,” she began.
But the Whisperer was not paying attention. Instead it stood in its hazy Aspect, glamour twisting around it like smoke, watching the distant, dark figure crossing the gray strand toward it. A silence fell, in which Maddy could hear individual grains of sand dropping onto the dead plain.
“One-Eye,” she said.
The Whisperer smiled.
The ranks of the Order parted like cornstalks as Odin passed through and closed again like spears at his back.
“Odin,” it said.
“Mimir, old friend.”
Odin, in Aspect, mindsword to hand, his hat pulled down to conceal his face, with Sugar trotting at his heels. The Nameless, in Aspect, hooded and cloaked, its runestaff spitting glamours. Maddy on one side, Hel on the other, Balder in the middle.
“Not Mimir,” it said. “Not anymore.”
“You’ll always be Mimir to me,” he said.
And now the General could see them all—their colors, at least. His truesight perceived them as figures of light: he saw Maddy, weakened and depleted by her flight through Netherworld, her colors touched with the gray-violet of grief; he saw Balder revealed in Loki’s glam, saw Hel in her colors, saw what had once been the Whisperer standing in a column of light, the stone Head that it had inhabited for so long lying discarded at its feet.
“Old friend,” it said. “It’s been too long.”
“Five hundred years,” said Odin, moving closer.
“Longer by far,” said the Nameless softly, and though its voice was calm, Odin could see the killing rage in its heightened colors. He supposed it had just cause to hate him; all the same, his heart was heavy. So many friends lost or dead. Such a price to pay for a few years’ peace.
Does it have to be like this?
The answer came as quick as thought. To the death, it said. To the victor, the Worlds.
In silence the enemies faced each other. Behind them the river Dream boiled and seethed. Beyond that lay the darkness.
1
The shadow that reared over the Ninth World—the blackbird shadow with feathers of fire—was beyond anything seen since Ragnarók.
It was Surt, the Destroyer, in full Aspect, and whatever fell beneath the shadow of his wing vanished as if it had never been, leaving only Chaos in its place, a Chaos full of stars that grew and swelled as the Worlds receded.
Little was left of the Black Fortress as, piece by piece, it reverted to its raw material of glamours, ephemera, and dream. Fragments still floated in the void—here a piece of city wall, there a rock, a ditch, a bend in a river—blown like snowflakes on the dark wind.
It was on one of these fragments that the Æsir had settled to make their final stand, an outcrop of some rocky something overlooking the Underworld, with Thor, in Aspect, mindbolts in hand, and T ýr with his gauntlet raised to strike; Frigg watching the scene unfolding in Hel; Loki crouching in the shelter of the rock; and Sif, who was no warrior, holding a running commentary on when, exactly how, and how soon they were all about to die.
“It’s all your fault,” she said, pointing at Loki, who, ignoring her, was picking off passing demons with a series of small, quick cantrips that sliced through the air like shrapnel.
“Your fault,” repeated Sif, “and now you’re dead, and everything’s going to Pan-daemonium—and what in the Worlds are you grinning at now…?”
But Loki wasn’t listening. Instead he allowed his mind to run—he found that shooting at demons sharpened his concentration—turning over the events of past days until he understood, albeit too late, how cleverly he had been manipulated.
Frigg’s words had brought it home to him: how it had used him from the start, how he had been sent to his death on a fool’s errand while the Whisperer made its bargain with Hel, how it had tricked her into serving its purpose, how Hel’s betrayal had opened the rift in Chaos, and how the Whisperer stood now, at the head of an army, poised, not to do battle, as Odin supposed, but to unleash that Chaos into the Worlds and watch as they fell, one by one…
He realized he’d underestimated the Whisperer’s ambition. He’d thought that it was simply out for revenge, that once its debt was settled with Odin, then perhaps it would be satisfied. Now he knew better. It wanted its turn; it wanted the power of Order and Chaos, to be the One and Only God…
He pegged Kaen at a cloud of ephemera and saw it disperse like a swarm of bees. Desperation had restored his sense of humor, and in the minutes he had left, Whisperer or not, he was determined to go out in flames. Fire runes shot from his fingertips; his eyes gleamed and his face, though bearing the marks of exhaustion, was alight with pleasure. He supposed it was the Chaos in his blood, but to his own surprise Loki found he was having more fun than he had in five hundred years.
Behind him Thor and T ýr stood back to back, each one covering the other as they struck mindbolts at the blackbird shadow. It kept coming. Behind it came silence, the spinning space between the stars, the unimaginable emptiness of World Beyond.
Inch by inch, it glided closer. Clouds of ephemera fizzled and died in its wake. Demons—some as huge as oliphants—were sucked like seeds into its maw, and still it came, unstoppable, oblivious. It was almost upon them now; Netherworld had fallen, and only the shores of the river remained. On came Surt; the shadow clipped the edge of the rock upon which the Æsir had made their stand…
Then, suddenly, even as the rock began to disintegrate beneath them—
Everything stopped. A silence fell. Netherworld froze
at the moment of its unmaking, and Odin and the Nameless began to move closer, barely at first, circling each other almost imperceptibly, like dancers in some long, slow ceremony.
Maddy, whose heart had leaped at the sight of her old friend, took a step forward, but Balder put a hand on her arm.
“Leave him,” he said in a quiet voice. “Interfere, and you risk both your lives.”
She knew he was right—this was Odin’s battle, not hers—but she could not help but feel a little hurt that her old friend had not even acknowledged her. Was he angry? Didn’t he care? Or had she simply served her purpose, to be put aside like so many before?
The two warriors were closing now, Odin looking tired and drab next to the dazzling form of the Nameless. The staff in its hands crackled with runes; Odin’s mindsword gleamed kingfisher blue.
Behind them, ten thousand voices of the Order began to recite from the Book of Invocations.
I name you Odin, son of Bór…
“You’ve lost,” said the Nameless. “Your time is done. Out with the old gods. In with the new.”
Odin smiled. “The new?” he said. “There’s nothing new about this, old friend. This is the way the Worlds turn. Even betrayal serves one side or another. And even Chaos has its rules.”
“Not this time,” said the Nameless. “This time I will set the rules.”
“The rules are already set. You serve them, whether you like it or not.”
The Whisperer hissed. “I’ll serve no one. Not Order. Not Chaos. And if everything else has to fall, then so be it. I’ll rule alone. Nothing but Me throughout the worlds: all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful Me.”
“I can see Wise Mimir has lost none of his wisdom,” mocked Odin.
In fact, he had rarely felt less like laughing. The strength of the Nameless was even greater than he had anticipated; its glam was like the heart of a star, and although its Aspect was still only half formed, he knew that it was already lethal.