Free Runemarks by Joanne Harris Page B

seemed that the Good Folk had anything to do with this. The secret—if it was there at all—lay deeper than the goblins’ lair.
    In the hours that passed, she twice cast
Naudr
on her reluctant companion, with slightly less effect each time. She was very hungry and wished she had taken advantage of the goblins’ food stores, but these were far behind her now and hunger, fatigue, and the strain of controlling the goblin, casting and recasting
Sól,
and passing unseen through the labyrinth of spells were beginning to take their toll. Her glam was weakening like a lamp fast running out of oil. Soon it would be used up.
    Sugar was not unaware of this, and his gold eyes gleamed as he trotted tirelessly down one passage after another, leading Maddy further and further under the Hill, away from the storerooms and into the dark.
    Maddy followed him recklessly. The webwork of signatures that had so baffled her on the earliest levels had mostly thinned out and disappeared, leaving her with one single persistently bright and powerful trail that overwhelmed everything else and filled her with curiosity. It was an unusual color—a pale and luminous violet shade—and it lit the darkness, crossing and re-crossing as if someone had passed there many, many times. Maddy followed—thirsty now and numb with fatigue, but with a growing sense of excitement and hope that blinded her to her own weakening glam as well as to the furtive glint in the goblin’s eye.
    They were passing through a large, high-ceilinged cavern with a chandelier of stalactites that picked up the glow of Maddy’s runelight and threw it back at her in a thousand wands of fire and shadow. Sugar trotted ahead, ducking automatically beneath a protruding ledge of stone that brought Maddy up short and gasping. “Slow down!” she called.
    But Sugar did not seem to have heard. Maddy followed him, lifting up her hand to light his trail, only to see him vanish behind an outcrop of gleaming lime.
    “I said
wait
!”
    As she hurried forward, Maddy realized that she was beginning to see more clearly. There was light coming from somewhere ahead; not runelight, nor a signature, nor the cool phosphorescence of the deep caves, but a warm, red, comforting glow.
    “Sugar?” she called, but either the goblin could not hear or he was maliciously ignoring her, because there was no reply but the echo of her own voice—sounding small and very lost—rebounding glassily between the great stalactites.
    All at once a shudder went through the ground, and Maddy lurched forward, holding out her hands to steady herself. Dust and stone fragments, dislodged by the upheaval, pattered onto her back. She was just straightening up again when a second tremor struck, and she was flung against the wall as a slab of rock the size of a haunch of beef dropped from the ceiling.
    Instinctively Maddy threw herself into a connecting tunnel. Stalactites fell like spears from the roof of the main chamber as the whole mountain seemed to shudder to its roots. But although Maddy was showered with dust and particles of rock, the tunnel roof held, and as the tremor died away—sounding to Maddy like the rumble of a distant avalanche over the Seven Sleepers—she put her head out of the tunnel mouth and looked around.
    Maddy, of course, knew all about earthquakes. It was the World Serpent at Yggdrasil’s Root—or so Crazy Nan had always maintained—grown too large for Netherworld to contain, shaking out his coils into the river Dream. In time, said Nan, he would grow so large that he would circle the world, as he had in the days before Tribulation, and he would gnaw right through the World Tree’s roots, causing the Nine Worlds to collapse one by one, so that Chaos would have dominion over all things forever.
    Nat Parson had a different tale: according to him, the tremors were caused by the struggles of the vanquished in the dungeons of Netherworld, where the wicked (meaning the old gods) lay in chains until the