“What’s that?”
“That’s your lifeline. The string that connects you to your physical Aspect. Don’t let anything break it. You’ll need it where we’re going.”
Then I returned to my mission, which was searching Dream for traces of Mimir’s Head in the turbulence: a signature, a vision, a thought, a fragment was all I needed. Mimir’s Head was a powerful glam. Someone must have seen it. Seen it, held it, dreamed of it. If I could find even a glimpse of it, then I could follow the money.
Behind me, Thor, in his natural Aspect, was watching me much as the dog, Twinkle, might have watched a pizza slice casually left on the floor. Massive, red-bearded, and with more muscles than any being really needs: his disapproval was palpable, his silent hostility unnerving.
“Ah, Thor,” I began cheerily.
“Keep looking,” growled Thor. “Or I’ll break your spine.”
Which concluded the pleasantries for a while, and left me to my unquiet thoughts. Why hadn’t Odin told me the truth? Apart from the obvious fact that he was as much of a liar as I was myself, why had he thrown in his lot with Heidi, rather than trust me? Surely, it couldn’t just be because I’d turned my coat and ended the Worlds. He had to have a better motive than that. I mean, you can always rely on me. At least, as long as you bear in mind that I’m naturally unreliable.
“Freyja,” said Jumps, and I was sure she had somehow read my mind, even though that was impossible, given the space we no longer shared. “Is she worth it, do you think?”
I turned to look at her, and saw that she had swapped the penguin pyjamas for a dress of some kind of silvery stuff, split at the knee over high-heeled boots. Her hair was blond, tied up in a bun, and fastened with a diamond clasp. I said, “Don’t tell me this is your idea of what a goddess looks like.”
Jumps looked down at herself in surprise. “I didn’t mean to—” she began. “Why do I keep changing?”
“Everything changes here,” I said. “This is Dream, remember?”
Jumps took a moment to look abashed, and then returned to the subject in hand. “Odin must really care for her, to risk our lives to get her back. You, me, Evan, Meg—”
I cut her short. I couldn’t bear to leave her with the delusion that Odin was a hero. “You’re mistaking Desire for Love,” I said. “Love may be crazy and volatile, but Desire is all-consuming. A man in its clutches would burn the Worlds rather than give up what he wants.”
Jumps gave a wistful little smile. She was back in the penguin pyjamas. “I just wish it hadn’t been Stella,” she said, and even though we no longer shared the same inner space, I could feel her sadness. “Evan doesn’t have a chance. He never did, he should have known. Stella wouldn’t be seen dead with anyone who was—damaged.”
By that I wasn’t sure whether she meant Evan or herself. But she was looking at her arms, still braceleted with the silver scars that mirrored my violet runemark. How odd, I thought, that she should choose to reveal to me now what she had kept behind those secret doors in her mind.
“That isn’t damage,” I said to her. “It’s proof of what you can survive.”
And at that I went back to the task at hand, while my monstrous child span its webs in eight Worlds, and we rode through the many lands of Dream in search of the Head of the Oracle.
3.
Dream is a river in permanent flux, made up of countless islets. Some are no more than bubbles of time, while others may contain whole worlds. The challenge was trying to find what amounted to a grain of sand in a world consisting of nothing but beaches. But Sleipnir had feet in every World, which made our task at least possible, although communication with our steed was still something of a mystery. And gods—even fallen ones—tend to dream more brightly, more fiercely than the Folk. If Mimir was there, I would find him. That is, if nothing found me first.
“So—why didn’t Odin come himself?” said Jumps, still clinging on, her Aspect now that of a child of nine, wide-eyed and in pigtails.
“Maybe it was too risky. Maybe he doesn’t trust Heidi. Or maybe he has some other plan that involves being in human Aspect.” I didn’t say that I hoped he might be playing some kind of double game, partly because I didn’t want to give false hope to Jumps—or to myself—and partly because Thor was there too, and listening to every word.
Thor as a small fluffy dog had been cute—if you liked that sort of thing. But Thor, in full Aspect, was fearsome. The Meta-Thor of the Asgard!™ game had come close to conveying his strength and size, but for bristle, and rage, and sheer muscle, there was nothing like the real thing. And currently, the real thing was looming over my shoulder with a look of tremendous suspicion.
“Boundaries,” I told him, trying to nudge his bulk aside. “What do you think I’m going to do? Swallow the Oracle whole, then vanish into thin air?”
Thor growled, although his expression remained that of a small dog guarding a very large bone. “I wouldn’t trust you to find a cat that wasn’t even lost,” he said. “But if you do find the Oracle, I’m here to make sure that it goes to the General, and no one else.”
“The General, who’s working with Gullveig-Heid?”
“Odin knows what he’s doing.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.” But as I’d suspected, the Thunderer was only following orders. His perspective—such as it was—was limited to an unshakeable belief that the General knew best, and that I was not to be trusted. Which, frankly, made the business of speeding through Dream on one of my monstrous children even less fun than it would have been otherwise.
Time works differently in Dream. Years in Dream can often amount to the passing of mere seconds in the corporeal World. Great for Odin and Gullveig-Heid waiting for us on Castle Hill, but not so fine for those of us clinging to that silver cord. Every moment we spent in there was a risk to our sanity—well, maybe not Thor, whose imagination wasn’t of the highest calibre, but Jumps had never encountered Dream outside of her own little bubble, and I knew how easy the Folk were to break.
Still, chances were that any contact with the Oracle might be disturbing to anyone who happened to discover it. And so I searched that part of Dream that the Folk call Madness, hoping for a fugitive gleam of the thing that had once been Mimir the Wise.
Thus we encountered the worst of Dream: the cesspit of the subconscious. Here there were lakes of lethargy, bottomless pits of depression. Here was the fear of never being well, the certainty of never being loved. Here there were dreams of small blades driven beneath the fingernails, and of committing terrible acts, and of being drowned beneath black ice. Here, there were murdered loved ones, and dreams of being stifled by clouds of gas, and colourless pockets of terrible despair where even dreams could not enter.
Behind me, Thor was growling, and I could hear Jumps’s steady sobbing. Even I had begun to feel a little nauseous. But finally, after a timeless interval, I caught it—not more than a glimmer in the slipstream of the General’s Horse—but those colours were unmistakable.
“There. Right there!” I urged Sleipnir after the Oracle’s reflection. Quicksilver green, it winked at me from one of the floating islands of Dream—a World that owed its existence to the fleeting mental processes of an unknown dreamer.
“Are you sure that’s a sign of the Oracle?” That was Thor, scowling over my shoulder.
I gritted my teeth. “Oh, I’m sure.” I’d know those colours anywhere. That bauble had brought me nothing but woe from the very first moment I’d seen it. Spreading discord wherever it went, it had lured us with its prophecies, severed my bond with Odin, brought about the End of the Worlds, and was even now conspiring to mess with my mind, even after I’d thrown it from Asgard’s highest parapet. The Oracle had a habit of leaving its mark on people. And that mark was reflected in the dreams of those its presence had touched—in this case, clearly a strong one, from the substance of the world contained within the dreamer’s thoughts.
“Hang on, Jumps. We’re close,” I said.
; The sobbing behind me seemed to subside.
“We’re going into a bubble of Dream,” I told her. “No one can hurt you physically there. Just remember you’re spirit, not flesh. And try to stay close to Sleipnir. We may have to leave in a hurry. Can you do that?”
Jumps nodded. Her hands tightened on the lifeline. I saw that she looked older now, closer to her physical age, although she still had the pigtails. Quickly, I urged Sleipnir towards that thread of bottled lightning. I could already see where it led: into one of the bubble-Worlds that shimmered along the banks of Dream. How long that world would last, I could not tell. Some dreams of the Folk last minutes, others only seconds, and if I lost the Oracle’s trace, we would be back to square one. There was no time to check the terrain, no time to identify the dreamer, or even to check if they were sane. Instead I guided Sleipnir towards the Oracle’s colours. For a moment I saw the reflective curve of the dream-bubble surging towards me. Then, we crashed through the bubble’s side and into the World of the dreamer.
4.
I’d always thought that if the Folk could somehow harness the power of dreams, then there would be no need for gods, for they could shape the Worlds as they pleased. Their imagination is boundless, the breadth of their vision as vast as the sea. And yet they choose to live as they do, constrained by petty little laws—
I’ll never understand them.
The dream was ambitious, even for such grandiose dreams as the Folk can sometimes build. It was a hall of tremendous size, perhaps even large enough to rival Asgard in its heyday. There were columns of marble and ebony, elaborate mosaics on the floor, sculptures and gilding and coloured glass, and at one end a giant organ, all swagged with velvet and gilt—its largest pipes as thick as the most ancient of oak trees. Ten thousand wooden benches were lined to face a massive altar. The aisles stretched as far as the eye could see, and the whole thing was topped with a massive dome of cut crystal and glass, bright with the light of a thousand suns.
“Nice,” I said.
In this world, the Horse was just a horse, vaguely roan in colour. Holding the lifeline in one hand, Jumps got down to look around.
“What is it?” she said.
“A grand design,” said a voice that seemed to come from everywhere. “My great Cathedral, built to bring Order out of Chaos.”
That must be the dreamer, I told myself. In this dream, he or she might take any shape—a useful way of determining what kind of person they might be. I looked around, and saw a tall man of middle age, dressed in a workman’s tunic, a belt of tools wrapped round his waist, a tasselled cap upon his head.
Of course, this might not be the dreamer as he was in his physical Aspect. In life, he might be a different man, or even a woman, or a child. But this was how he saw himself—at least in this particular dream—a master craftsman, secure in his work; humble, yet authoritative.
“Your design?” I inquired.
“Aye, the good gods willing.”
That sounded promising, I thought. In this man’s world, the gods were still, if not an active force, at least alive in memory. I looked around for the trace of the colours I had glimpsed in the slipstream. They should have been easily visible, but in that dazzling bowl of light, no signatures were visible.
I turned to the dreamer. “What’s your name?”
He looked at me, but did not reply. Dreamers rarely give their true names, although you can often tell more about them by what they call themselves in dreams than by the names their parents chose.
“I am—the Architect,” he said at last.
“And this?” I indicated the great glass dome. “A palace? A cathedral? A pleasure dome?” I had learnt this last term from Jumps’s interior lexicon, in one of the subsections marked ENGLISH LITERATURE, and I thought it sounded pretty cool.
The Architect gave a little smile. “It was the Cradle of the gods,” he said, “in the time of the Golden Age. Now it is the Cradle of the Folk. Its completion will mark the beginning of a new Golden Age of learning, wisdom, and Order.”
That was the second time he’d mentioned Order. Worthy, I thought, but rather dull. Order is overrated: Odin spent centuries trying to establish it in the Middle Worlds, and look how fast we lost it all. From Asgard to mudguard in one fell swoop. It hardly seems worth the energy. And yet I was sure there was something I’d missed.
Once again, I looked around. The place was divided into five halls: the central dome, plus four smaller chambers, one for each point of the compass. At the far end of each chamber, a window of colourful and glorious design, detailing scenes from Ragnarók: the World Serpent rising out of the sea, the fall of Bif-rost, the General falling to the Fenris Wolf. In a distant corner of the northern window, I could even see Yours Truly, tumbling from the parapet, with Heimdall hanging on to my arms—a tragic scene that in my view deserved a larger canvas. Still, there was no time to spend on mourning my demise. And now I saw along the great aisles that linked the chambers to the dome a shimmer of something more than just the gilding on the mosaic tiles: a pattern that ran along the ground to form a design I’d seen before.
It was same sign I’d seen in the sky, the thing Jumps had said was a vapour trail. I’d been so certain at the time that it was some kind of a rune; now the certainty returned. I moved to the point where the two lines crossed—in Dream, distances are meaningless—and there beneath the gleaming dome, I saw, fixed into the ground, a black stone, carved with runes down one side, and with that crossroads shape engraved on top—
“What is it?” I asked the Architect. “What does this symbol here mean?”
The man who called himself the Architect shook his head. “I do not question the patterns,” he said. “The Whisperer desired it there.”
“The Whisperer?”
“He speaks to me.” The Architect’s voice was hushed with awe. “He watches. He operates the Machine. He tells me I’m going to build for him.”
That sounded promising, I thought. This Whisperer—or was it an Oracle?—seemed to be a big influence. Had the man seen it? Glimpsed it in Dream? Could he even have found it somewhere in the real World?
“What Machine?”
The dreamer smiled. “The Machina Brava. Over there.” He indicated the organ. It looked—if that were possible—even bigger than it had before—its golden pipes like columns of fire, thick as Yggdrasil itself. I noticed that the dome, too, was bigger than it had been a moment before, impossibly high, its crystal vault refracting the whole of the blameless sky.
“I think the dream is beginning to change,” I said. “Jumps, Thor—get ready to ride.”
Jumps took hold of Sleipnir’s mane. Thor just looked suspicious.
“It’s okay,” I said irritably. “What, did you think I might try to escape? Where to, for gods’ sakes?”
“Wouldn’t put it past you,” growled Thor.
“Bite me,” I said. But my heart wasn’t in it. The danger of staying in a dream that might be ready to collapse was outweighed by the fact that I needed to know more about this Whisperer. The whole of the sinister setup sounded all too familiar to be a simple coincidence; and if the Whisperer was the Oracle, then maybe here I could find a clue as to its physical whereabouts.
I turned to the Architect, whose Aspect had shifted slightly. Now he was a younger man, maybe thirty years old or less, wearing a kind of dark robe and a three-cornered cap with a tassel. I wondered how long after Ragnarók this was, and what the dreamer’s World was like in the wake of the gods’ demise.
“Tell me about the Whisperer,” I said, addressing the Architect. “Is he here? Can you see him? What’s his name?”
“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.”
That was odd. It sounded almost as if the dreamer were reciting something. A verse, perhaps a poem. Maybe even—
<
br /> A prophecy?
I looked at the dreamer. “What was that?”
“I speak as I must, and cannot be silent.” The Architect gave a dry little laugh. “Oh, Loki,” he said. “I’m disappointed in you. I thought that you, at least, would appreciate what I’m trying to do here.”
“Oh no.” I turned to Jumps. “Get on the Horse.”
“What is it?” said Thor.
“Get on the bloody Horse.”
The dream was changing faster now, expanding to fill every horizon. The cathedral, the windows, the glass dome, even the organ were starting to shift, the colours, already dazzling, to intensify even further. The Architect was smiling; his Aspect, now grown to monstrous size, loomed over us like a giant.
No wonder I hadn’t been able to see the Oracle’s signature, I told myself. The Oracle was the World itself, shining out from every piece of glass, and gilt, and marble. A World that, if the Oracle chose, might at any time collapse, with all of us still inside it—
“I SPEAK AS I MUST,” said the Architect, his voice as loud as an avalanche. “I SPEAK, AND THE NINE WORLDS WILL LISTEN TO ME, FEAR ME, AND OBEY ME.”
Thor was still standing by Sleipnir, his massive brow furrowed, his red beard bristling. As I started to mount the Horse, he put his hand on my shoulder.
“Not so fast,” he said. “I want to know. Did the dreamer prophesy?”
I glanced at the Architect. “Kinda.”
“How?”
I cursed inwardly. Thor’s mental processes were never fast at the best of times. Here, they were even more sluggish than in a game of Asgard!™.
“I don’t have time to explain,” I said, trying to shake off Thor’s grasp. “Just trust me. We need to get out of here, and fast. Before all Hel breaks loose.”
Thor looked around suspiciously. “Why would it do that?” he said.
I tried to keep calm in the chaos. It felt like being the only immovable object in a world of projectiles. I began, very dimly, to understand what it might have been like for the General, back in the Elder Age, trying to bring Order to Asgard.