by Matt Larkin
An enormous bellow resounded somewhere out over the black waters, a chorus of them, in fact, all in unison. An instant later, one of Volund’s ships flopped sideways and split in half as a massive serpent head burst through the hull. More serpentine heads rose up all around, everywhere about the ship.
“Loose on the hydra!” Elga bellowed.
A hail of arrows rained down over the beast, as archers from this ship and several others loosed on it, heedless of hitting their own allies if it meant driving off that abomination. The hydra—a multi-headed monstrosity—crunched its heads together and flung them outward, turning the ship into kindling before disappearing beneath the black waters once more.
“Oh,” Hermod said. “Well, trollshit.”
A moment later, the creature burst through the surface once more, capsizing the nearest ship to their own. The surge of waves hefted up his ship and sent it toppling over, almost ready to flip. Hermod slammed against the gunwale, lost his grip on Dainsleif, and then caught it just before it would have slid overboard. The ship lurched back the other way, sending him skidding along the deck, before it pitched back right-side up.
“Oars!” Elga shouted. “Oars, close us in! Keep rowing you useless bitches!”
A half dozen of the archers had gone overboard with the wave, and the two manning those ballistas were shouting in their own language.
Freyja stumbled to his side, slipped in water, and hit her knee on the deck. “This is going to cost me.”
Hermod turned to her. “What are you—”
Her eyes lit up like miniature suns, flaring so bright they dwarfed the torchlight. Freyja thrust her hands into the air.
All at once, the hydra ceased its assault. It wavered for a moment, then it dove back beneath the waves.
“How in the gates of Hel did you do that?” Hermod demanded.
The liosalf didn’t answer, her teeth grit, her face almost a snarl.
Another chorus of roars sounded out, this time back toward Amsvartnir, and an enemy ship floundered as the hydra tore into it.
“Fuck me,” Hermod mumbled. That was different.
“Get us up there!” Elga commanded. A moment later, the women at the oars sent them surging forward, while archers launched volley after volley at the enemy ships.
Freyja groaned. “I … can’t … hold …” Her skin had lost a great deal of its luster.
“Line those ballistas up with the hydra!” Hermod shouted.
Elga glanced first at him, then at Freyja. “Do it! Loose when ready!”
Twang!
The contraption snapped and a giant missile hurtled overhead like a spear flung by a jotunn. The bolt punched through a hydra throat. That head went limp and crashed back down into the waters, while several others roared in obvious anger.
Freyja slipped to her knees, blinking, her skin now barely brighter than a candle. “I don’t dare use any more.”
With a hand under her shoulder, Hermod helped her up again. “I’d say you did enough. We’re drawing up on the city.”
“Meaning the real fight is just beginning.”
The port of Amsvartnir extended beyond the honeycomb city itself. Bodies floated in the water. Face down, face up, or in various states of dismemberment. Svartalf blood slicked the docks and viscera lay in steaming piles. Everywhere Hermod looked, the dead lay reeking. He could scarcely keep from slipping in the gore.
He came to a svartalf female with her hands pressed over her gut, moaning. He couldn’t guess which side she’d been on, but she looked up to him with pleading eyes, as if he could have done aught to salve her pain. A long, painful death lay ahead of her.
With a grimace, Hermod swiped Dainsleif across her throat, spraying a fresh splatter of blood over his face. It took half her head off, and she died almost instantly.
Not even the runeblade could eliminate the fatigue that tugged at his limbs. Breathing had grown painful, and he wanted more than aught else to collapse in a heap, panting and insensate. Exhaustion slowed his movements, and that could get him killed, especially against foes such as these.
The svartalfar had spent ages training with their blades, and any one of them could have ended him.
Still, he had to push on. Elga’s troops had entered the city ahead of him, and he needed to follow, to find Odin, and to get the fuck out of this awful world. The svartalfar could maim and kill one another until the end of time for all he cared.
Volund’s warriors had cleared a path into the city proper. Beyond the docks lay a hexagonal entryway thirty feet high, with spiked grates that should have slid into place. Now, though, everyone around those grates lay dead, bodies strewn haphazardly along the gatehouse, a few impaled on the spikes.
Hermod panted as he gazed up the sloping path beyond. Additional spikes lined the walls here, and many punched through the throats, shoulders, or arms of svartalfar who had been driven onto them. Some of these victims were still alive. A hamstrung male crawled along the ground, whimpering.
“Fuck me.” He’d seen a lot of war in his long life. But this rampant cruelty … he’d rarely seen its like. Not that this sort of bloody work was ever pretty. He rubbed grit off his face with the back of his arm as he continued upward.
Atop the slope, the path split off in three directions. The whole city was a maze of interconnected buildings and he didn’t have the first clue where to begin his search. Well … no, he had one clue. Volund surmised Fjalar would have Odin in his palace in Amsvartnir’s heart. The problem was finding a route to the center without aught to orient himself.
All paths ahead lay strewn with bodies.
A svartalf female from the path in front came trudging toward him with a snarl, a two-handed sword in hand.
Hermod raised Dainsleif and set his feet. As the svartalf drew nigh, she broke into a mad charge, leading with great swipes of that massive sword. Relying on reach and power usually got a warrior pretty far.
He had to hold steady …
The svartalf swung and Hermod jerked Dainsleif up to parry. The impact left his arms numb, even with his pneuma drawn, fouling his intended counter. He stepped into it, though, and caught the svartalf in the gut with a fist. His foe fumbled, unable to get such a large weapon to bear in tight quarters.
Damn svartalfar had strength to match even an Ás relying on pneuma, and his blow stunned his opponent for only a breath. Just enough time to catch her in the nose with a jab. Cartilage crunched under his fist. The svartalf staggered backward, but Hermod couldn’t afford to let her put distance between them.
He yanked a knife free from his belt and thrust. The svartalf dropped her weapon in order to catch Hermod’s wrist. He strained against her power, closing the blade closer and closer to her ribs. Couldn’t get it …
Desperate, he slammed Dainsleif’s pommel into her forehead, crunching bone. She pitched over backward. Roaring, Hermod leapt atop her and rammed his runeblade into her chest. She twitched, spewing blood at him. Her hand closed around his ankle and sent him toppling over backward.
Hermod landed hard and rolled away just before she snatched up the two-handed sword and swiped at him once more.
The svartalf had managed her knees.
He’d stabbed her through the chest and she was still fucking fighting. Bastards were too damn hard to kill.
A light trudged up behind him. Freyja’s sword knocked aside the svartalf’s next blow, giving Hermod the chance to lunge in. This time, he planted Dainsleif’s point between her eyes. Now, the svartalf twitched once. Her own weight had the blade slicing through the top of her skull, and she collapsed to the ground, falling still.
“Fuck me,” he mumbled.
Freyja eased him up by an elbow. “Doubt you could handle it at the moment.”
“What?” Oh. Well … “How do we find Odin?”
“Keep pushing toward the heart of the city, I guess.”
“Don’t you have some Art that can aid us?”
Freyja frowned. “I lost my grip on the v
aettir I’d bound as I became a liosalf. The powers I have now … they require stored sunlight and I have very little left, as you can tell.”
Hermod stared down the dim paths ahead. “All right, then. Stay close, and we’ll watch each other’s backs.”
It seemed a great deal more blood lay ahead of them.
28
The chaos outside had everyone within Fjalar’s palace scrambling to fortify the defenses. Hands loose at his side—it took an effort to keep from clenching them—Odin stood by a window overlooking a wild melee on a street directly below him. Svartalfar cruelty and savagery extended to their dealings with one another as well.
It would be easy to dismiss their hatred as inhuman. Maybe it was. But the creatures themselves had mostly begun as mortals. Died … become ghosts … and been spun out through the Wheel of Life or otherwise transformed into this. So the root of their nature was a soul, the same sort of soul that lay within the breasts of every man and woman in Midgard.
Did that not mean that, under the right circumstances, faced with cruelty themselves, anyone would be capable of the atrocities he witnessed in Amsvartnir? He winced as a female warrior stomped on the skull of another. Across from her, another rammed her spear up the arse of one trying to crawl away for no reason save the torment of it. Beside her, another used an axe to hack off the feet of a victim who’d tripped.
“Come away from that window,” Weth snapped.
Odin ignored her, forcing his mind into the vision trance, letting the waves wash over his consciousness. In such madness inevitably lay opportunity. War had ever been a tool Odin could make use of. If you could accurately predict the outcome, you became a general no enemy could defeat.
The svartalf’s hand fell on his shoulder and yanked him away.
Odin allowed her to do so. He’d already seen this part anyway, so he scarcely even watched her as she scowled at him.
“Get back in your chambers, now!”
Idunn’s radiance had dimmed to the point that even in the pathetic torchlight of this palace, Weth didn’t seem to notice her coming up from behind, a shard of glass in her hand.
“There lies an inherent danger in attempting to overmaster any oracle. A peril, in assuming that the Sight of another might be turned to your own ends, when oracles themselves are just as caught in urd’s merciless web as any other.”
“Shut up,” Weth snapped.
Idunn jammed the glass shard into the svartalf’s neck, shrieking as she did so. The liosalf yanked it free, then rammed it in again, in her jugular. Weth stumbled, but Idunn caught her with an arm around her throat and repeatedly jammed the glass shard into Weth’s gut, shrieking all the while.
Savagery is a fire that feeds itself. It becomes an inferno that can burn out only when no one remains to stoke it. Subjected to such pinnacles of malice, a soul becomes inured to it, clinging to rage as the only means of survival.
Oh yessss … And you knew … But allowed her such vengeance …
Of course he had. He’d seen it, which meant he’d not stop it. Could not dare to stop it, even were he so inclined.
As if it had naught to do with those pieces of your precious humanity … you flitted them away for power …
Oh, Odin was under no illusions. He did not begin to imagine himself immune to the transformative effects of antipathy, or the apathy of fate. It did leave him with a question, however—whether taking actions he knew would inherently strip away his humanity made him culpable for a kind of suicide, despite his having no choice.
You deny your free will …?
Perhaps. Perhaps no one had choices.
Idunn continued shrieking, plunging her shard into Weth even after the svartalf had fallen still.
Half aware of her actions, Odin focused on the battle below as it would soon unfold. Rarely had he ever attempted to use his prescience in such a way as he now intended. The flood of future memories, the surge of time that must bombard him, it had always precluded following such intricate plans on an immediate scale. The play of prescience had long allowed him to mold reality into complex machinations, true, but to attempt this appeared both inevitable and audacious to the point anyone must think him mad.
The space between madness and transcendence is a fragile one …
Ignoring Audr, and knowing well that Idunn would follow regardless of his instructions, Odin climbed up to the window. Had he seen it all? Every moment, playing out in recursive detail, each instant predicated not only upon the preceding ones, but the following ones?
Seizing his pneuma and flooding it to his limbs, Odin jumped from the window and fell forty feet to the street below, landing in a crouch but rising immediately.
Svartalfar surged for him, warriors loyal to Fjalar, intent to prevent him from escaping. They would fail.
If an oracle were to be given even a moment of perfect prescience, how then would those without such hope to stand against him?
A warrior thrust at him with a spear, but Odin stepped around it before her action had even begun, placing one of her allies between himself and the spear. It skewered her fellow. Not pausing, Odin ducked a sword swipe without looking at it, and used his momentum to sweep the legs from beneath the spearwoman as she tried to close in.
He came up a hairsbreadth from having his ear lopped off by another swing from that sword. A hairsbreadth, or a mile, perhaps. He didn’t bother looking at his attacker. Others came in at him. He dodged another blow, stuck his foot out, and ducked once more. A svartalf tripped over his extended leg and fell face-first into an ill-timed thrust from a spearwoman. Odin caught her falling sword, jerked it up into a parry and then let it go as the blade of another swordswoman lost its momentum.
He thrust his palm up into her throat, staggering her, then yanked her around, using her body to shield him against a slash from a swordsman. Odin twisted around, two paces to the right, no more, and thrust his elbow into the face of another attacker. The swordsman slipped on spilled viscera and went down to one knee.
Odin’s heel caught him in the ear with enough force to spin him around. Using his momentum, Odin dropped to one knee, and a spear thrust went above him, impaling another foe as she tried to rise. He caught the spear’s haft and yanked, stripping it from the female’s hands and whipping it around so the blade tore out her throat even as the haft cracked another warrior on the temple.
A sidestep took him out of the path of a knife flung from the shadows. A twirl of the spear deflected another projectile and sent it careening into an unsuspecting foe. A thrust killed. A dodge. A block. Twist. Turn. Sidestep. Kill.
Breathe in.
Kill.
Twist.
Kill.
Behold the torrent of blood …
At last the Destroyer begins to wake, Valravn said.
Breathe out.
Kill.
He caught the wrist of another attacker and flipped him over his shoulder.
Breathe.
Spear thrust to the face.
And then there were no more. Just him and Idunn, her gaping at him over more than a score of corpses.
An ocean of blood …
Yes. Odin inclined his head at Idunn and—still not quite managing to close her mouth—she plodded down to where he stood.
Amsvartnir was a maze, but it didn’t matter. He knew the way he would take, which invariably must have led him out, for otherwise why would he have taken it? Part of the paradox of prescience was the need—or the potential damnation—of trusting the visions implicitly. Of assuming that whatever you will do is already predicated upon the success of that action, for if you would not have done it, you would not have seen yourself doing it. A flawless circle, up until he trusted such things so completely as to allow himself to foresee a mistake while not realizing he was making one.
Prescient memories of failure. Such had always worried him.
“How did you do that?” Idunn finally managed, as they trod down the path, taking one turn after another.
/> Odin dispatched another foe, scarcely aware of doing so. “I’m not sure you’d understand if I told you.”
Lying to her … or to yourself? You claim she would not understand … in truth … you rather fear she would …
“My grandmother told that …” Idunn seemed to have trouble swallowing. “That my grandfather fought like that … in the end. Like a god of war that no man, no army could stand against.”
Odin could not bring himself to look at her. “I know.”
So many of those memories of past lives were cloudy, but some things remained eternally clear, ever cast in stark relief. Because he was the Destroyer. The antithesis of life, in a sense, and he bathed a world in blood if that was what it took to stop the decay. He was the one who would cut the rot from the dying world, in an attempt, however late it came, to save some small portion of the victim.
The strongest prophet must invariably create his own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Audr was right. Oceans of blood. Odin remembered such things.
They had drowned the world. And those days were returning.
“Odin!” Hermod’s voice came when he knew it would, as they descended into the lower levels of the city.
Odin’s former apprentice had changed a little in the intervening years. Not graying, exactly, and yet—despite immortality—time seemed to have weighed upon Hermod. Perhaps, in choosing his protégé, Odin had damned him to the same weathering of the ages he himself had suffered.
You are the architect of his damnation … And your own …
It was all too true.
Hermod threw his arms around Odin, and Odin returned the embrace. “I’m glad to see you.”
“And Idunn …” Hermod said, glancing past Odin’s shoulder. “You’ve …”
“Changed?” she asked.
Odin did not need to look at her to feel her sad smile. Yes, maybe he had created her damnation as well. All of theirs.
And beyond Hermod, glowing faintly, Freyja came treading up the path, looking torn between too many emotions to give name to, if names for them even existed. So much time had torn them apart, and now—though the specifics remained elusive—he feared terribly that so little time was left to them.