by C. L. Werner
“I suppose that means you want me to lug this one around?” Bjorn asked as he knelt beside the guard. The flames had flickered away, and the eyes had taken on the quality of fading coals.
“Your armor is better at fending off heat than mine is,” Tyr told him. Once Bjorn had the fire demon slung across his shoulder, Tyr motioned for Lorelei to start moving toward the bridge.
Thirteen
Their veil of smoke rippled over the landscape, dozens of yards in diameter. When they neared the span, it was broad enough to cover much of the bridge. Tyr could see that the moat below seethed with lava, a churning mass of molten rock. Wide as it was, the bridge had no barrier along its sides. Nothing to keep someone from pitching over its edge and into the annihilating inferno.
Banks of smoke like that conjured by the flute must indeed have been commonplace in Muspelheim, for the fire demons paid it as little notice as a frost giant would the fogs of Jotunheim. Even when it started to spill onto the bridge, they suspected nothing untoward.
Tyr and Bjorn moved to the edge of the veil. The advantage was theirs, for they could ready themselves to meet the enemy while the guards remained oblivious right until that final moment when the smoke closed around them and they were within the spell. Swift and brutal play of sword and axe finished six more of the fire demons, three sets of guards poised at intervals along the span, their bodies hidden beneath the expanding shroud of Fafnir’s breath. The easy dispatch of their enemies made Bjorn overconfident. When they reached the fourth pair of guards, Tyr’s opponent fell as quickly as the others. Bjorn’s, however, managed to turn and strive against the huntsman. A slash of the glaive glanced across his armor as the fire demon shouted the alert.
No sound could leave the veil, but Bjorn was desperate to silence his enemy all the same. His axe slammed down into the fire demon. Then the huntsman made a grave mistake. To free his axe, he kicked his boot against the body. The guard went hurtling off the side of the bridge. There were only a few feet of smoke before the fire demon became visible on the long plunge to the lava. The sight was seen by a guard farther along the span.
“Ragnalf’s fallen!” the cry went up. There was an almost jeering emotion to the shout. Cruel in their hearts and bored in their duty, the guards along the bridge rushed ahead, eager to watch their former comrade be consumed by the lava.
“Lorelei! Stay!” Tyr hastily called to her, but it was already too late. The smoke spread forwards and drew some of the gawking fire demons within its veil. The Asgardian warriors threw themselves upon the guards, dropping two more in a blaze of violence. There were more, many more. And when they saw Tyr and Bjorn suddenly appear almost in their midst their caustic wrath was roused.
A dozen fire demons against two foes. Under other conditions, Tyr might have appreciated the thrill of such a fight. This, however, was no mere test of arms. Too much depended upon victory. He made no boisterous shouts or taunting japes as he battled the guards. Each swing of his blade brought another crashing down, but there always seemed to be another to replace the one he’d vanquished. His mind descended into the vicious cadence of the fray, striking and parrying more from instinct than thought.
“Lorelei, they seek to flee!” Bjorn shouted. It was only when the huntsman yelled that Tyr was aware their enemies had been whittled down to four. These had turned and started racing towards the castle. As soon as they emerged from the smoke, they’d be visible and audible to the guards on the other bridges.
Lorelei rushed forward, shifting the reach of the veil. Even this wouldn’t be enough. Then Tyr noted that the smoke was spilling ahead faster than she could run, overtaking the fire demons. He also thought it was more transparent than it had been. Through his mind flashed an answer. She was stretching the smoke to hide the guards but by doing so she was lessening its consistency.
Bjorn settled one of the fire demons by hurling a hatchet into the guard’s back. Tyr sprinted past his friend to close with the remaining enemies. On his side he had the godly power of an Aesir, but the fire demons had the terror of destruction snapping at their heels. It was a perilous race, and one he narrowly won. The guards were only a dozen yards from the gate when he caught up to them. He barreled through them, knocking them down and placing himself between them and the fortress.
“Nowhere to run to now,” Tyr told them. It was a credit to their martial pride that the fire demons didn’t try to flee back across the bridge. Aware that their only chance was to fight past Tyr, the guards didn’t hesitate but came at him together. Or at least so it seemed. When two of them fanned out, he guessed their strategy. It only needed one of them to get into the fortress and raise the alarm.
Tyr lunged at the enemy directly before him, running the guard through with his sword. Leaving the blade in his dying foe, he ripped the glaive from the fire demon’s grasp. Hefting the heavy weapon as though it weighed nothing, he spun and threw it at the guard trying to slip past on his left. His enemy dropped in a heap right at the end of the bridge.
Wasting no time, Tyr tore Tyrsfang free and sprang at the last of the fire demons. The guard was nearly at the gate when he caught him. A slash of his blade threw his adversary against the basalt wall. The fire demon struggled for a moment, then the blazing eyes darkened into dull coals and he fell still.
“Lorelei! Above you!” The shout was Bjorn’s. Tyr turned from the gate to see his friend dive at the woman, knocking her flat. As he sprawled, he cried out. An obsidian javelin crunched down into his leg.
Tyr cast his gaze upwards. Her spell weakened and the opacity of the smoke stretched thin, Lorelei had been spotted from above by a lone sentry walking the walls. Tyr snatched up the glaive from the last fire demon he’d vanquished. He made ready to cast it, but he knew it would be a desperate throw even for an Aesir. The javelin the guard threw down that struck Bjorn was designed for such work. The glaive simply wasn’t.
The matter was resolved before Tyr could act. The fire demon was reaching for a second javelin, his mouth open to shout an alert, when suddenly the flames flickering around him were snuffed out. Tyr knew what that sudden extinguishing meant. A moment later the guard pitched outward and fell down onto the bridge. He could see Lorelei continue to make arcane gestures with her hands until she was certain the fire demon was dead.
Tyr rushed to her side. He gave Bjorn a worried look, but what he had to say to Lorelei was too important to brook even the slightest delay. “The spell’s faltering! They can see into the smoke!”
Lorelei nodded wearily, looking more exhausted than Tyr had seen her before. He wondered just what toll that last spell had taken upon her. Even so, he had to demand even more from her magic. “Is there any way to condense the dragon’s breath again?”
“That would serve no purpose,” Lorelei said. “To draw it back would reveal the absence of guards and the presence of bodies to the others.” She drew out the bone flute. “What I must do is strengthen the veil.”
Tyr left her to the macabre process of drawing out the essence from the fallen fire demons. He turned to Bjorn. The huntsman was sitting with his legs stretched out, blood seeping from where the javelin was stuck in his calf. “Did you see?” Bjorn asked with exuberance. “I saved her.”
His friend’s fawning admiration for Lorelei concerned Tyr. Whatever Tyr’s own feelings might be, Bjorn’s attitude was making him put himself at risk. One glance at the wolfhunter told him it would do no good to broach the subject. Not with that reckless devotion shining in his eyes.
“This is going to hurt,” Tyr warned Bjorn as he took hold of the javelin. He glanced around at the smoke. It appeared much thicker than it had been before. “Cry out all you like. We’re the only ones who will hear.”
Bjorn took the largest of the fangs he wore and bit down on it. He wasn’t going to show weakness when Lorelei was around. He nodded for Tyr to proceed. Such was his determination that not even a moan rose from him. Tyr st
udied the wound. “You’ll be able to walk on it, but not very well,” he concluded.
Lorelei came over to them at that moment, having decided she’d foraged enough essence from the fire demons. “We will need to move fast when we’re inside the stronghold,” she said, overhearing Tyr’s statement.
“He won’t,” Tyr told her.
Bjorn managed a smile and shook his head. “I’ll manage,” he said.
“You’ll do better than manage.” Lorelei set the flute on the ground and reached into her satchel. She removed a small jar. “Milk from Audumla, the Great Ice Cow,” she pronounced. Crouching beside Bjorn, she peeled back his bloodied leggings and started to knead the pasty material into his wound. “This won’t heal your hurt,” she warned him. “But it will strengthen your leg and make you forget your pain.”
“Strength is all I need,” Bjorn declared. “Pain is only the absence of strength.”
Tyr shook his head. “Any moment and more guards will be on us. We need to get moving.”
“We’ve time,” Lorelei corrected him. “I dispatched the fire demon on the wall before he could alert anyone. The rest who’ve seen us…” She nodded at the guards strewn along the bridge.
“Then the two of you must stay here,” Tyr decided. “If the smoke leaves the bridge then the stronghold will know what has happened. You’ll have to maintain the veil.” He looked down at Bjorn. “I know I can trust you to protect Lorelei.”
“No need to be so dramatic,” Lorelei said. She drew her hands away from Bjorn and replaced the jar of milk in her satchel. Her fingers brushed against the bone flute. “This is what conjures Fafnir’s breath. It is to this that the spell is tied.” She scowled at the instrument. “I can leave it here and the smoke will remain. The dead guards won’t be discovered until whenever their relief arrives. With the stamina of fire demons, that might not be for days.”
“Or their relief might be on the way here now,” Bjorn warned.
“If so they would find us anyway,” Lorelei said. “But if we leave the bodies shrouded by the dragon’s breath, they may remain undiscovered long enough to suit our needs.”
“That means abandoning another weapon in our arsenal,” Tyr said. One look at Lorelei made it clear to him that nobody appreciated the fact more than her. First the loss of the Niffleheim ice to the lava kraken, now the surrender of Fafnir’s breath.
“I can see no other way,” Lorelei told him. “But we must think on what we stand to gain, not what we lose to gain it.”
Her smile as she spoke those words made Tyr think that Bjorn wasn’t the only one who would risk everything to keep Lorelei from harm.
Fourteen
The postern gate they chose for their entry to Surtur’s fortress opened into a narrow passageway. Walls and ceiling were heavily ornamented with whorls of colored rock that suggested crackling flames against the dark basalt. Tyr gave them wary scrutiny, soon spotting the tiny holes hidden in the decoration. They were too numerous to merely be vantage points for spies. He expected a far more violent purpose.
“Beware here,” Tyr whispered to his companions. He went back to the bridge and recovered three of the red shields from the fire demons. Each of them took one. Tyr indicated the tiny murder ports he’d spotted. “If the alarm has been given, we can expect a fierce reception.”
Bjorn shook his head. “No archer can send an arrow through a hole that small.”
“Those opening aren’t meant for arrows,” Lorelei said. She glanced up at the ceiling where the ports were even more numerous, then turned to Tyr. “Do you think molten metal is intended to pour through those?”
“Or magma. Or poison gas.” Tyr grunted at the irony of still another suggestion. “Perhaps smoke to smother us.” He focused on the passageway, straining for the least clue that might betray a watcher hidden behind the walls or peering down at them from the ceiling. “We go,” he decided finally. “I’ll lead the way.”
Tyr still could not find the least hint of a hidden watcher. Each step he took into the passage he expected something to rain down on him from the ceiling or jet out from the walls. If they’d been able to draw the dragon’s smoke into the fortress with them, at least a spy would’ve been blinded.
The sensation under his left foot told Tyr that the presence of Fafnir’s breath wouldn’t have lessened their danger. He looked down to see the stone under his foot had receded an inch into the floor. If he hadn’t been moving with such caution, he’d have removed the pressure from the plate before he was even aware it was there. “Back!” Tyr called to his companions. “The corridor is trapped.” He nodded at his foot. “And I’ve stepped on the trigger.”
“Don’t move,” Bjorn cautioned him. “Nothing happened when you stepped on it, so it must be waiting for you to lift your foot again.”
“I should have been suspicious when all the guards were outside,” Tyr growled. He glanced at Lorelei. “You even warned that Surtur had kidnapped dwarves to labor at his forge. Our mistake was not thinking he might’ve set them to other tasks as well.”
Bjorn came over and studied the stone under Tyr’s foot. He scratched at his beard as he pondered its mechanism.
“The two of you cross ahead,” Tyr told them. “I’ll try to outrun whatever comes.”
Bjorn pointed out the length of the corridor. “I don’t think you’d make it.”
“Besides,” Lorelei added, “dwarves are clever enough to make any trap they design serve two functions. To stop an intruder and to sound the alarm. Even now guards might be rushing here.”
“Another good reason for the two of you to get going,” Tyr said.
“A reason why we can’t,” Lorelei countered. “Without the God of War, how long do you think we’d last against the fire giant’s forces?”
Bjorn stood and wiped the sweat from his palms on his knees. “I think I’ve some idea how it works.” He picked up the shield he’d taken and rapped it with his knuckles. “We might need these yet, but just now we need one of those glaives.” He turned and rushed back to the bridge. A moment later he returned with one of the axe-headed polearms.
“What do you mean to do with that?” Lorelei asked. “It is a certainty that it doesn’t weigh as much as Tyr. You’d have been better dragging one of the fire demons in here.”
“It isn’t a question of weight, but of pressure,” Bjorn said. He shook the glaive. “By wedging this between the wall and the stone, it can exert the same pressure as Tyr’s foot.”
Tyr sheathed his sword and reached for the glaive. “Make your way across with Lorelei. I’ll put your idea to the test.” He gave Bjorn a reassuring look. “I’m confident it’ll work.” When the wolfhunter still hesitated, he added to his argument. “You need to lead the way across and make sure there aren’t any more triggers. After examining this one, you know what to look for.”
Reluctantly, Bjorn accepted Tyr’s logic. Guiding Lorelei along the passageway, he paused frequently to score the floor with his axe. “Just ahead of the marks,” he called back. Tyr nodded his understanding.
Only when the pair were at the end of the corridor did Tyr start work. Swinging the glaive about, balancing it with his left arm, he brought its end up against the wall. Carefully, inch by inch, he eased it downwards, shifting it until he could bring the obsidian blade against the floor. He eased his foot aside and let the glaive press down on the plate. He looked up at Bjorn and Lorelei. With a grim smile he drew his foot away.
The pressure of the glaive kept the trigger depressed. Tyr exhaled in relief and started down the corridor. He grimaced at the many marks Bjorn had made and the worry flashed through him that perhaps the huntsman had missed one. That concern, however, was overwhelmed when his friend shouted.
“The glaive is moving!”
Tyr turned his head and saw that indeed the weapon was slowly sliding along the wall. A matter of heartbeats and the
angle would be compromised and the pressure against the plate lost! He didn’t hesitate, but broke into a run, lunging down the corridor.
He just reached the end of the passage when a seething hiss bellowed behind him. Tyr felt the intense heat of the discharged trap. As he twisted around, he saw that glowing magma was pouring into the trap-filled corridor from the ports on the ceiling and in the walls.
“I’m minded of an expression they use in Midgard,” Tyr told his companions as they watched the searing flood. “They say ‘out of the frying pan…’” He turned his head and looked at the bleak hallway ahead of them, its dark walls lit by smoldering blobs of lava imprisoned in crystal orbs. There was an inescapable feeling of malevolence in the hall, not least because it was built to the scale of giants. It wasn’t hard to imagine the colossal figure of Surtur himself striding through these cavernous vaults. “‘… and into the fire,’” he completed the saying.
Lorelei opened the box with the sliver of Twilight. It spun around for an instant, then pointed away to their right. “We need to find steps leading down,” she stated.
Tyr gestured at the sword fragment. “I thought that talisman only showed direction, nothing more. How do you know we need to descend?”
“It stands to reason that a forge would need heat,” Lorelei said. “Surely it would be located lower where the fire of the volcano is nearest.” There was an edge to her voice that Tyr didn’t like. He was certain she knew more than she was saying and told her so.
“Lorelei’s explained why she thinks we’ll find the forge lower in the fortress,” Bjorn snarled, anger in his eyes. “It seems to me that her reasoning is sound.”
“Perhaps too much so,” Tyr pressed. He pointed to the left. “If we need to descend, the stairs are as likely to be in this direction as they would in another.” He fixed Lorelei with a stern look. He didn’t like her keeping secrets from him. As much as he still harbored suspicions of her, it had become important to him to earn her trust.