Eventually, though, he and Sif came to a bit of the high path that afforded a clear view down into an open space at the center of the habitation. The biggest piece of luminous crystal he’d seen yet was glowing there, and it revealed scores of wild trolls gathered together.
“They’re deliberating about something,” murmured Sif. “Lucky for us. Come on. Keep moving.” It was no doubt sensible advice, but then Heimdall spotted something that commanded his attention.
“Wait.” He pointed. “Look at the one standing in the center of the circle talking to the others. Does he look like a wild troll?”
On average, trolls were a bit taller than an Asgardian, although some were bigger than that, while others stood no higher than dwarves. All of them, however, were stocky and gnarled, with thick hair, like fur covering their bodies. The bearded warrior addressing them, though, gesticulating with a great axe for emphasis, more nearly resembled a man of Midgard or a god. His bare limbs weren’t hairy, and though the ruddy light made colors uncertain, he didn’t appear to be orange like a troll either.
“Is he blue?” asked Sif, squinting.
“I think so,” Heimdall said. “Making him a frost giant.”
“A small one,” she said.
“They can be born small and take time to grow huge. What’s important is that he’s talking to the trolls. Trying to persuade the tribe to ally with Jotunheim would be my guess.” If the emissary succeeded, Asgard’s military situation would be even more precarious, and Heimdall felt a mix of anger and concern.
Sif frowned. “I never heard of frost giants doing any such thing before.”
“We can probably blame the head of Mimir for this too.”
“At least the envoy doesn’t seem to be getting very far.”
Heimdall realized she was right. When the frost giant finished speaking, a troll stepped forth and replied. Distance kept the Asgardian warrior from making out what anyone was saying, but he could tell when the ring of onlookers exploded into laughter, and the emissary scowled. The knot of anger and worry in Heimdall’s chest loosened to a degree.
Perhaps, he thought, the lack of progress was only to be expected. Frost giants and trolls alike tended to be arrogant and hostile to other races, and neither quality seemed conducive to diplomacy.
Having gleaned what there was to be gleaned, and knowing they invited discovery every moment they lingered, Heimdall and Sif prowled onward. Near the uppermost reaches of the settlement, they happened upon a cave-like dwelling that wasn’t empty. A wild troll slumped on a flattish rock that was evidently deemed comfortable enough to serve as a chair. His expression glum, he seemed too lost in brooding thought to notice the man and woman peeking in the doorway.
Heimdall and Sif exchanged glances, discerned they were of the same mind, and rushed the troll. The creature sprang up and whirled toward the crude war hammer – a flint head lashed to a bone handle – leaning against the wall, but the Asgardians had their blades poised to cut him down before he could pick up his weapon.
“Easy!” said Sif. “You can live through this, but not if you fight us or cry out. Only if you give us what we want.”
“I will,” the wild troll said. Trembling a little, he eased his hand away from the hammer.
“Why didn’t you go to hear the frost giant?” Heimdall asked.
The troll grimaced. “I made fun of Korzar when I thought he couldn’t hear. Korzar is big.”
Heimdall held back a smile. “Understood. My sister and I don’t want to harm you or any of your people, but we need to get back aboveground.”
“I can tell you the way. Please, just don’t kill me.”
“Yes, tell us,” Heimdall said. “You’re also going to map the route and the tunnels that run off from it. Pick up that rock on the floor, slowly, and scratch the lines on the wall.”
The troll did as ordered.
“One more thing,” said Sif. “Tell us about the guards stationed near the cave mouth, and don’t try to tell us there aren’t any.”
The captive sighed. “There are a couple. Maybe. Not more. The tribe hasn’t raided Asgard in a long time, so no one’s expecting trouble.”
“Certainly not coming up from below,” Heimdall said. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand about your map.”
The troll turned back toward the sketch on the wall. Heimdall raised the great sword to clout him in the back of the head and then hesitated to strike the unarmed creature from behind. Memories of trying to knock the warrior standing guard at Odin’s vault unconscious and then learning he’d killed the fellow instead came surging back.
But he and Sif couldn’t afford to dawdle, they couldn’t leave their captive conscious to raise the alarm after they departed, and surely you could depend on a wild troll to have a thick skull. He struck with the flat of the blade, and the troll grunted, jerked, and spilled to the floor.
“Do you think he told us the truth?” Sif asked.
“I hope so,” Heimdall said. “He was plainly afraid for his life, and I think that meant he was too afraid to lie. Anyway, I don’t think we have much choice but to trust him.”
Sif nodded. “There is that. I have an idea about how we can get within sword range of the sentries without taking an arrow or javelin in the guts.”
Brother and sister headed up the trail, in due course passing a couple branching passages that seemed to be where their grudging informant had indicated they would be. Once the last trace of red light disappeared behind them, they woke the glow of their amulets. Doing so gave Heimdall a pang of apprehension, but they had no choice if they were to advance with any speed at all.
Eventually they came to a place with a pile of rocks near either wall. According to the wild troll Heimdall and Sif had questioned, these were blinds, and there were likely sentries behind each, alerted by the approaching light of the medallions and ready to attack the bearers as they passed between the mounds.
They might be ready, but since they didn’t come pouring out and attack instantly, they were perhaps not certain of the need to. Not if the glow was dazzling them a little. Not if they knew about the frost giant envoy visiting their settlement, who surely needed a light source of his own.
“Good news!” called Sif to the hidden sentries, pitching her voice as deep as she could. “Your people and mine have sealed an alliance. Together we’ll grind Asgard into dust for good and all.”
Four wild trolls emerged, two from behind each blind, to make a line across the tunnel. Heimdall and Sif kept advancing as though it didn’t even occur to them that the sentries might try to deny them passage.
A troll carrying a flail-like weapon made of vertebrae strung together with a lizard-like skull at the end raised one hand to shade his eyes. “Hey!” he growled. “You’re not giants!”
Now that the troll recognized Heimdall and Sif for what they were, the time for subterfuge had passed. They charged.
Though their ruse had allowed them to close much of the intervening distance before the fighting started, two of the trolls managed to throw javelins. Sif twisted aside and avoided one of the missiles. Anxiety fell away, displaced by a flash of anger that these creatures were trying to block their path when he and his sister were on the verge of making their escape, Heimdall deflected the other javelin with his great sword.
Another stride brought him into striking distance. The vertebrae clattering, the wild troll with the flail swung his weapon at Heimdall’s head. The Asgardian ducked, and the lizard skull flew harmlessly by above him. He cut to the knee, and, howling, the troll fell with a maimed leg, the splash of blood momentarily filling the air with a coppery scent. Heimdall didn’t bother following up with a killing stroke. Wild trolls weren’t the enemy, not like frost giants were, and there was no need.
Instead, he cast about. Sif had already accounted for the other three sentries and headed farther up the
tunnel, where she was fighting her way through still more trolls that had emerged from somewhere close at hand. The creature the two Asgardians had questioned had apparently underestimated the number of his fellows his captors would encounter here. Maybe the chieftain of the tribe had added more sentries just in case the wild trolls did ally with the frost giants and launch a new war against Asgard.
Fortunately, there were only a few more trolls, and, pivoting to face one foe and then another, Sif was holding her own in a superb display of swordsmanship that made her brother proud, steadily dropping slain or wounded creatures in a ring around her. Heimdall was confident that once he advanced to fight beside her, they’d swiftly win through the final barrier separating them from the world aboveground.
Then, to his dismay, the light of his amulet went out. Sif’s medallion was still shining, but with her farther up the passage, turning constantly, and trolls shifting around between her and him, the fight she was fighting became murky confusion, the tunnel itself dark and indistinct. At certain moments, there was scarcely any light reaching him at all.
Heimdall shook off the shock the failure of his talisman had engendered and tried to draw light from it. It still refused to glow. But even so, he told himself, he could catch up to Sif. She was only a few strides away. He started toward her.
A stray troll rushed him with a war club. They traded attacks, neither scoring, and at the end of the first exchange, he took a retreat. His back foot came down on empty air. He’d missed seeing some sort of low place in the floor.
He might have managed to heave his weight forward and escape a fall except that at the same instant the troll swung the war club. He reflexively shifted away from the arc of the blow, the sweep of the weapon fanning his face, and the action ended any hope of regaining his balance. He’d roll when he landed on the floor to avoid further bludgeoning blows until he could scramble back onto his feet.
Except that he didn’t come down on the floor. As he realized he’d blundered into an actual pit or crevasse, he banged his head on the rim, and, stunned, plunged into absolute darkness.
Eleven
When Heimdall woke and opened his eyes, the world was utterly black and utterly silent. If not for the sore spot on the back of his head and the aches elsewhere in his body, he might have imagined himself a ghost condemned to a particularly hellish part of Niffleheim.
Even as it was, the absence of his two primary senses, and the disorientation that came with it, brought a jolt of terror verging on outright panic. Then he remembered falling into the hole, and that limited understanding of what had happened steadied him, at least a little.
Breathing slowly and deeply, striving to control his respiration and so further subdue his fear, he sat up and rubbed the sore spot on the back of his head, registering as he did that his helm was gone. He sought for a better comprehension of his current circumstances and what, if anything, he could do about them.
After some thought, he decided he must have plunged down a sort of chute. A long straight drop might well have killed or crippled him, and though he ached and one impact or another had knocked him unconscious, he didn’t seem to have broken bones or to be otherwise incapacitated.
What else could he glean even though he couldn’t see? The cut in the back of his head had scabbed over, more blood clotting to crust and mat his hair, indicating that he’d lain here for some time. The silence was grounds for hope that at least no trolls were advancing on him to finish him off.
Reassured that he wouldn’t draw an immediate attack, he tried once more to evoke light from his amulet. As he expected, though, the talisman denied him even a glimmer. Disgusted, deciding it truly was useless, he yanked it off and tossed it away.
Having reconstructed what had happened to him and assessed his current condition, perhaps the next step was to search for his missing gear. Rolling onto his hands and knees, he felt around the floor of the space he’d fallen into. He heaved a sigh of relief when he eventually found his great sword. Dire as his situation was, at least he was no longer unarmed.
There was no sign of his helm, though. Either it had hung up somewhere in the hypothetical chute or he was simply missing it.
He supposed he should next learn what he could about his surroundings. With the two-handed sword recovered, he felt confident enough to stand and walk. He could use the weapon to grope his way along as he had on the bridge and so avoid falling down yet another hole. He could feel out other aspects of the lightless space in which he found himself as well.
It took a while, but ultimately he determined he was in a tunnel and not some broader space, but for all his probing of the upper walls and ceiling, he couldn’t find the hole he’d presumably fallen out of. Otherwise he might have tried to climb back up the chute. Parts of the ceiling were high enough to be out of reach, and the chute possibly debouched in one of those.
If he couldn’t climb back up the way he’d fallen, what could he do? He’d memorized the crude partial map the captive troll had sketched, but that knowledge was currently useless. It hadn’t included anything about a chute, let alone where the lower end was, and even if it had, Heimdall wouldn’t have known which tunnel direction was which. Not only was he bereft of sight, he was entirely lost. Finding the sword had momentarily bolstered his spirits, exploring the space around him had briefly made him feel he was accomplishing something, but now he had to struggle against a wave of despair.
When he scowled and pushed the feeling down, it occurred to him that he was equally ignorant of Sif’s fate. Had she defeated the rest of the trolls? Possibly. If so, he hoped she’d escaped the Realm Below and was continuing the quest to recover the head of Mimir without him.
It was a grim, bitter thing to hope for, but he’d fallen in an instant, and, intent on the trolls she was battling, Sif likely hadn’t seen what became of him. She wouldn’t have any idea where to begin a search, and he hated the idea of her wandering the maze of caverns at random until she succumbed to one or another of its perils. It would be better if she gave him up for dead and finished their mission.
Hopeless as his situation seemed, however, he refused to give himself up for dead. Maybe, somehow, he could find his way to the surface even if, at this moment, it was difficult to imagine how. If not, he could at least die trying as befitted an Asgardian warrior. He’d know he’d perished with honor even if no one else ever would. He chose a direction at random and headed down the passage.
From time to time he caught faint sounds, or maybe he only thought he did. Often, when he stopped to listen, the sounds stopped too, and he suspected he’d only reacted to the echo of his own footfalls or breathing, the beat of his heart thumping in his chest, or else simply imagined the tiny unidentifiable noises. Sometimes, though, the sounds continued, and then, nerves taut with apprehension, he insisted to himself that, faint as they were, they had to come from something too distant or tiny to do him any harm. They didn’t come from some subterranean predator stealing up behind him.
After what seemed a long while, red light tinged the blackness ahead. At first, he wasn’t certain he was really perceiving that either, but as he skulked forward it became clear he hadn’t simply succumbed to some version of wishful thinking. Several more wary paces brought him to a spot where the passage widened out and exposed veins of dully glowing crystal running through the walls. There were some stone-headed pickaxes littering the floor near sledges made of sheets of hardened fungus with loose chunks of crystal sitting on top of them. The miners presumably employed the sledges to drag the material they dug to the troll habitation.
Fortunately, the miners weren’t here at the moment. Maybe they’d taken time away from their labors to hear the frost giant envoy speak. At any rate, their absence meant Heimdall was free to avail himself of a source of light. He could almost have wept with gratitude.
He entered the mining site and picked up one of the loose crystals. He polished the lu
minous rock with the scarf he’d hoped would conceal his identity from the poor sentry back in the citadel of Asgard, rubbed away dust and dirt, and got the crystal shining a little brighter.
It was still a dim light but infinitely better than nothing. He started to leave, and then, on impulse, decided to search the area more thoroughly. Toward the back was a place where water trickled from the wall to fill a natural bowl in the rock. Beside that was a ledge with a heap of picked raw mushrooms sitting on top of it.
The sight of the water made Heimdall feel parched, and after he scooped up handfuls and slurped his fill, the sight of the mushrooms made him equally hungry. His stomach rumbled.
He hadn’t forgotten that the Realm Below reportedly abounded in poison mushrooms, but he was hungry enough to gamble that if a troll could eat something, he could too. He took one bite of a single mushroom. It tasted much the same as raw mushrooms he’d eaten in Vanaheim and Asgard, pleasant enough in a bland sort of way, and it didn’t make him fall over dead or experience any sort of distress. He wolfed down more until he’d eaten his fill.
Refreshed, he pondered what to do next. Reason suggested that if the trolls traveled back and forth between the mine and their habitation, maybe he could identify and follow their trail to the settlement. Now that the creatures knew of the Asgardian intrusion, a second visit was likely to prove even more dangerous than before, but, as he needed to find his bearings, it was still the best course of action he could think of.
How, then, to track the creatures? Could the sledges provide an answer? It seemed to him that such a crude conveyance dragging along the tunnel floor might have left marks of its passage.
He took the opportunity for another drink of water from the bowl where it collected, then departed the mine. Stooping and peering by the light of the crystal in his hand, he found the telltale scratches he’d hoped to find, and in due course they led him to a similar glow. He crept forward and found the source was the vault, when its jumble of natural and artificial caves and its mottling of dots of crimson light came into view. He was simultaneously profoundly relieved to have found it and wary of the danger it represented.
The Head of Mimir Page 8