“Look,” Mercy said. “If you’re talking about Loki, I don’t want him. You can have him.”
“Begin!”
Mercy drew the sword.
“Not that. I meant magic.”
“I’m not-” Oh, what the hell. She thought of her dreams and sighed.
It would have to be wolf-magic; nothing else was old enough. She remembered her dream of the homunculus, wriggling in the snare under the ice. She thought of the curse. She remembered the shift, herself changing not into wolf, but wolf-woman.
This was the nevergone. It was between-that was important, it was not the final product. No such thing as a finished story. She took a breath and changed.
The world about her shifted. Maybe that was it: you yourself don’t alter, but you step into a different narrative, rewriting yourself. Mercy stood on the plateau she had seen in her dream, with the standing stone above the long valley. It was winter, twilight, a thin moon high overhead, but the air still smelled of the pines. And blood: something had been freshly killed.
The disir shaman stepped out of the stone. At first, she, too, was different. She was no more than a girl, her hair white fire against the darkness of the rock. Her eyes were huge and luminous, and she was smiling. There was a touch of Mareritt, but her face was more elemental. Then it changed and the disir was back. She opened her jaws to display long teeth and gave a grating shriek of challenge.
Mercy was hit with a blast of power. Not a conjuration or a spell, but the knowledge of what the disir was. Overwhelming cold, the long Ice Age winter, thousands of years long, when a thin rind of northerly humanity had clung to the chill planet and survived. The disir were their nightmares; they were the sharp-toothed dark and the killing cold. They were the stories and tales of the hunters, and when the ice had gone and the world grew warm, they too survived their long winter in the deep minds of men. And they were female, which men so often fear.
Mercy could see, in that moment of understanding, why Mareritt was their enemy. Later she became a rival. She came from a part of history in which city-dwellers feared the forest, overlain onto something much older. But she wasn’t wild. She was an urban idea of the wilderness, and she was far closer to human than the disir would ever be. She wanted the disir gone so she could take their place.
“This is my reply,” Mercy said. She thought of the wolf-clan, the hearth. She thought of people in the long night, the arctic cold, banding together against the rigours of the world. Animal and human, finding connection, reaching out. The long winter hadn’t killed them: they’d won. Greya and the lampmender Salt, who had helped one another. She raised the Irish sword and it began to sing in her mind a song of its own, a thread of telling about battles fought and won, the green summer hillside and the sparkling sea. It sang of honour and glory, but also of loss and the knowledge that it had been the agent of that loss. It was human-born, human-made and Mercy hung onto its song and pulled herself to her feet. She cut through the wintersong of the disir, the stories of iron ground and iron cold, of the delight in bloodshed, and she ran the shaman through so hard that the blade rang out against the standing stone.
The stone and the valley were gone. Mercy was herself again, with the sword hilt reassuringly solid in her hand. Her arm was still numb with the shock of the blow, ringing up the bones of her arm. The body of the shaman lay at her feet, convulsed in death. The disir army cried out with rage and dismay.
But Shadow, off to her left, was looking behind Mercy, not towards the vociferous disir.
“This is not good,” Shadow said. Mercy turned. The clouds of the Pass were opening up. The sky was splitting in a ragged vertical to let more stormlight through. She saw bolts of azure flame rip the clouds, a blaze of golden light, with thousands of black specks whirling against it. Storm demons, coming through. They coiled in a spiral above the black line of the horizon, like bats or birds, but Mercy knew that from the distance, they must be vast.
The horned beasts ridden by the disir were beginning to panic and stampede. Their riders wheeled them back, shrieking: an earsplitting sound which made Mercy clap her hands to her head. But she could still hear the riders’ cries and feel the thud of the hooves travelling up through the ground, a dull drumbeat. Something tugged her sleeve and she leaped, her heart pounding and the sword jumping in turn in her hand. The demon’s eyes were gleaming.
“Can I make a suggestion?” Gremory said. She gestured with a long-taloned hand towards the oncoming storm. “If that lot sees you, they’ll tear you apart.”
“I’d worked that out.” Mercy nodded towards the forest. “Only way out’s through there.”
“Best get a move on, then.”
With Shadow, they ran for the line of trees. Perra ran ahead, bounding between the tussocks of grass. If the disir noticed, it meant little: their attention was now fully occupied by the oncoming storm. The trees would not protect them-but the rocks might. Mercy was remembering the bridge, and that crack in the mountain behind the mistfall.
The only problem was that once off the open tundra, the trees slowed them down. The pines, their branches weighted with snow, grew closely together and the slope between them was slippery, with ice filming the glassy rocks beneath the thin covering of earth. Mercy could see Shadow was shivering, despite her heavy coat. She held out a hand and pulled her friend up the slope.
“I’ll be all right,” Shadow said. The demon seemed to have no such difficulties: her boots made no footprints in the snow and Mercy was reminded of a raven, black above the red of a kill. They could hear the onrushing storm through the trees now, a battering wall of sound. Shrieks from the disir army suggested that the meeting was imminent.
Mercy struggled across a short plateau of rock and found herself above the tree line. She looked back. Over the pines, the stormclouds boiled and writhed: she could see the tornado funnel of the winged demons, a black whiplash cracking against the sky. They had a clear few hundred yards of snowfield, before the rocks began.
“Ready?” Mercy said to Shadow, and they ran.
Forty-Nine
Deed stood in the cockpit of the Court’s airship, binoculars clamped to his eyes. Disir sight was not always so keen and he had enhanced his own over the years with a variety of judicious preparations: sight stolen from the youths of the Western Quarter, vision sipped from the eyes of cats and nightbirds. But the tundra was too wide, and he needed the binoculars to check the magic levels. The readings slid in a sequence of silver sigils down the sights of the binoculars, ticking away the fluctuating degrees of different magics.
As the airship slipped over the estuary, the first great curves of the World’s River came into sight. This river had been, in the true past, the first to reappear across Siberia once the ice had begun to retreat. Tales of the disir had first come from its banks, and so here it was in the nevergone. Loki’s land. Deed’s binoculars registered ancient sigils as they passed overhead, runes which were given by the land, not by man. He could taste them in blood and fire on his tongue; they spoke to him of the blast of the winter wind, of ice and the little flick of flame raised by a human hand, of the hunt and the long chase. Deed smiled, and then he saw the army of the disir.
Thousands of his kindred stretched out across the plain, milling far below the airship. Ahead, he could see the mountain walclass="underline" features so ancient their true names had been lost. The pines spilled down the mountainside like ink, black against the snow. In that forest, Loki was waiting for his freedom. Deed’s mouth was suddenly dry.