“Fifty-three minutes to go,” said Loki. “And for gods’ sakes, stop gawping. Don’t you know how rude it is to look into other people’s dreams?”

Maddy screwed her eyes shut. “All these are dreams?” she said faintly.

“Dreams, ha’nts, ephemera. Just don’t get involved.”

Maddy opened her eyes again. “But, Loki-there must be millions of people here. Millions of prisoners. How are we ever going to find my father?”

“Trust me.”

Easier said than done, she thought. She held more tightly to Loki’s hand, trying not to think of what would happen if he decided simply to abandon her here. His face was set, all merriment gone. His violet signature, always bright, was now so fiercely blinding that Maddy could barely see him for the glare.

The magic-lantern show of Netherworld flickered all around them. Worse visions now-creatures with their guts on the outside of their bodies, dripping poison from bloated sacs; fields of carnivorous plants that crooned and sang in the fiery breeze; machines with oiled and interlocked tentacles, each one tipped with a metal prong that sliced and razored-

“Uh-oh,” said Loki at her side. “Hang on, Maddy, we’re being followed.”

And before Maddy could look around (not that she knew which direction to look in), he put on an extra burst of speed and the scenes around them blurred and flickered.

“Followed by what?”

“Just don’t look.”

Of course, that was exactly what Maddy did; a second later she regretted it.

“Damn it,” said Loki. “What did I say?”

The creature was beyond scale. Huge as a building, Maddy guessed, with a raw eel head and rows of teeth-a dozen rows at least, she thought-circling the cavernous throat. It moved in silence, like a projectile, and in spite of its very real-looking teeth, its body (if that was a body) seemed to be made up of nothing but strands and whips and signatures of light.

“Gods, what is it?” Maddy breathed.

“Not it. They.”

“They?”

“Ephemera. Don’t look.”

“But it’s gaining on us.”

Loki groaned. “Don’t look at it, don’t think of it. Thinking only makes it stronger.”

“But how?”

“Gods, Maddy, didn’t I tell you?” He cast an urgent glance at the thing that was following them. “This is a place where all things are possible. Dreams, fevers, imaginings. We make them so. We give them their strength.”

“But we’re ghosts. Surely. In some kind of dream. Nothing can harm us-not really-”

“Not really?” Loki gave a crack of laughter. “Listen to me, Maddy. Reality as you know it just doesn’t apply in Netherworld. We’re not ghosts. It’s not a dream. And they can harm us. Really.”

“Oh.”

“So keep going.”

Now each step was an aeon deep, taking them further and deeper into the pit of Netherworld. Maddy looked back at the thing that followed them and saw a tunnel ringed with lights and lined with concentric rows of knife-edged metal that churned and gulped and circled and gnashed like living machinery.

It took her a second or two to realize that the tunnel was the thing’s mouth.

“It’s catching up,” she said. “And it’s getting bigger.”

Loki swore. They seemed to be moving more slowly now, and Maddy could almost see what he was doing as he leafed through Netherworld like pages in a book. A yellow sky raining sulfur onto creatures that writhed on a bare rock floor. A woman suspended by her hair above a pit of knives. A man drinking from a river of acid that ate away at his lips and chin, stripping his skin and revealing bone-and still he drank; a man whose feet were swollen to the size of oliphants’ small, leggy, many-limbed creatures like articulated trees that crept and chittered along a metal corridor lined with doors in the shape of demon mouths.

“Still there, is it?”

Maddy shivered.

“Slow it down,” Loki said. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

“Slow it down? What with?”

“You’ve got weapons, haven’t you? Use them.”

Weapons? Maddy looked down at her empty hands. Well, she supposed she had mindweapons, of a kind-but surely nothing to halt the moving mountain at their back. Loki had stopped now, the scene a broad square passageway flagged with large flat stones. In each stone was set a tiny grille of black metal. From some of these apertures sounds came-cries, groans, screams-only some of them human.

The thing-or things-that pursued them filled the corridor. Once more the size had changed to accommodate the space, and now Maddy could see that it was indeed made up of thousands of creatures, breaking apart and re-forming in constant movement. Ephemera, Loki had called them. Maddy saw them as thin filaments of animated light, parasites wriggling through the spaces between the Worlds. If even one of them touched her, she knew, they could sever flesh from bone; they would unmake her, burrowing under her fingernails, moving through her bloodstream, eating through her pores, working their way into spine and brain. And there were millions of them.

What could she do?

The ephemera seemed to sense her hesitation. The illusion of a single creature had dissolved and they were everywhere now, in front of them and behind, filling the corridor from floor to ceiling, writhing like deadly maggots toward them.

Glancing at Loki, Maddy could see that he was casting runes, casting them very fast and urgently in his deft and fluttering style-as she watched, she saw the corridor color veer from iron gray to the gray of a thundercloud; the metal grilles of the openings set into the stone changed shape slightly, from square to oblong-

“Got it,” he said. He dropped to his knees above one of the openings, felt with his fingertips for the edge of the grille.

The approaching ephemera seemed to understand; their movement increased and they began to swarm toward him, the filaments breaking into tiny particles, hopping like fleas across the bare stone.

Loki flinched but kept working. “Keep them off me,” he hissed at Maddy, without taking his attention away from the grille.

Maddy opened her mouth to protest, but an image stopped her-she saw those creatures pouring into her mouth, down her throat, filling her like a water skin with their rotten-meat stench-and she shut her mouth again tight.

How? she thought silently. How did you stop a monster that could be anything, take any shape?

This is a place where all things are possible.

All things? thought Maddy.

Once more she looked down at her weaponless hands. Less than a spear’s length away, the air was thick with ephemera. They were even closer to Loki, sensing his purpose, gathering over his head like a wave…

Maddy took a deep breath, focusing all of her glam for the strike. It brightened, veering from reddish brown to brilliant orange, crackling with energy from fingertips and palms. She sought for a rune that might slow down her attackers. ýr, the Protector, was closest to hand; holding its image in her mind, she closed her eyes against the wave of ephemera and flung the rune as hard as she could.

There was a crack like a whip and a smell of burning.

Opening her eyes, Maddy saw that a dome of red light some six feet in diameter had appeared around Loki and herself, against which the ephemera crawled and slithered. It was thin, its surface as delicate and as iridescent as a wash-day soap bubble, but for the moment it held, and Maddy could see that wherever the ephemera touched it, their airy bodies crackled and dissolved, leaving a residue of soapy scum over the surface of the shield.

“It worked,” she said in disbelief. “Did you see that? Did you…?”

But Loki wasted no time in congratulations. Using T ýr to prize open the grille, he had finally managed to lift it aside. Below him a dead blackness yawned. Sliding his feet rapidly into the hole, Loki prepared to let himself drop into the void.