by Kevin Hearne
It was near midnight in Sweden after that. We decided to dress in black to pretend to be Celtic ninjas. Comfy black jeans and black long-sleeved shirts, even black gloves. We both had our iron amulets tucked underneath our shirts. Strapped to our thighs on either side were newly poisoned knives; I had also poisoned Fragarach.
“Ready?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Should we take some bottled water or something?”
“I don’t think so. Frigg made no mention of such preparation. It should be a quick operation. We’ll mooch off the dwarfs if we have to.”
“What if they won’t give us any?”
“Then we’ll steal from the dwarfs if we have to.”
“Gods, Atticus. I’m in charge of logistics from now on.”
“That reminds me. We’re going somewhere cold. Let me show you this binding the Morrigan taught me to raise your core temperature. You can hang out in the snow in jeans and a T-shirt and not get all shivery.”
“Sweet!”
We shifted to the northern shore of Vänern Lake, or rather close by it. We were underneath the canopy of an evergreen forest, facing south, where the smell of the lake wafted to us on the night air. A minute’s walk toward the shore revealed a large fire with silhouetted figures nearby. Casting night vision, we saw many more waiting on the beach in the darkness, armed and helmeted figures, all dwarfs. There was an army, all right—but only the one fire, presumably serving as a signal.
I startled as I turned my head. Right next to me, painted so black I hadn’t seen it in the dark, was a strange, massive vehicle bristling with weapons. It wasn’t of human manufacture. I had almost run into it; thankfully, no one was inside to train one of its many weapons on me.
I crouched down at the edge of the trees and cast camouflage. I couldn’t see Granuaile, so she had probably already cast her own camouflage or else her invisibility spell.
“Do you see Freyja?” I whispered. Her voice answered from my left.
“I don’t know what she looks like.”
“She’ll be the tall one in this crowd.”
“Ah. Yes, she’s near the fire but not directly next to it. A few ranks back. Standing in a chariot.”
I scanned near the fire until I found her. “Okay. Let’s sneak up and hail her. If she betrays us, we take her hostage, go back to the trees, and shift away. Stay invisible until we know it’s safe.”
“Got it.”
I wished I could cast Coyote’s spell that he called “clever stalking,” which would muffle our footfalls, but we had to simply move as quietly as possible through the crunchy sand, depending on wind and conversation and the clank of armor to disguise our passage.
The Black Axes were impressively armed—I mean, their arms were bloody huge. Their shoulders and biceps were larger than those of most bodybuilders, with enough hair on them to earn Perun’s respect. Those arms hung out from broad golden breastplates, sans armor, allowing maximum freedom when they took a swing at anything. The Black Axes didn’t have shields but rather skaldic armor; their breastplates and helmets bore runes on them that most likely made them bulletproof. Instead of a shield, they carried a sort of parrying axe in the left hand, with a small hooked blade at the top and a guard to cover their fingers. The axe in the right hand had a large black scything blade, also inlaid with telltale skaldic sigils. My money was on armor piercing. It was an army of Fragarachs.
Aside from the skaldic golden design of their breastplates and helmets, the Black Axes covered the rest of their bodies with black lamellar armor. Here, they said, shoot your guns and arrows at the shiny protected parts. Ignore all the rest of us that you can’t see clearly anyway. It was a heavy mobile infantry designed to run at night.
A few of the Black Axes had beards spilling out from underneath their helmets onto their breastplates, but the majority of them did not. That meant their hair was probably braided as well, and they would be no fans of ours if Fjalar had spread word of my role in sending Loki to Nidavellir.
Granuaile and I were able to sidle up to Freyja only half detected. We made occasional noises that caused a few curious helmets to turn in our direction, but they never saw us and dismissed the noise as made by another dwarf behind us.
The Black Axes were packed pretty tightly around Freyja and her chariot, and we could get no closer than two ranks away. It would make taking her hostage problematic if she wanted us seized. Having no choice, I hailed her. Heads whipped around toward my voice, and grips tightened on axe handles.
“Where are you?” the goddess demanded. Firelight flashed off the long blond braid that fell down to her waist. She was beautiful, though a bit mannish in the jaw. She was proud and had reason to be. She had killed more frost giants than any of the Æsir on the day I invaded Asgard.
“First, do I have your word of honor that you mean us no harm?” I asked. “Frigg assured me that you do not, but I would rather hear it from your own lips.”
“On my honor, I mean you no harm,” Freyja said. “Wishing is another matter.”
“Good enough,” I said, and dissolved my camouflage. “I neither mean nor wish you harm.”
Once Freyja had located me, her eyes searched beyond my back. “Were you not to bring another Druid?”
“She is here. She’ll reveal herself when she feels safe.”
“The two of you are to ride along in my chariot. The Black Axes are to follow in their own conveyance. Are you ready?”
“Aye.”
Freyja dropped her eyes to an especially hulkalicious dwarf next to her chariot. “Axemaster, we’ll see you at the Spring of Hvergelmir.”
“Aye, lady.” He bellowed orders, and these were rebellowed up and down the beach. The horde of dwarfs moved toward the trees, where their looming gunships waited. As the space cleared around Freyja, Granuaile revealed herself and nodded.
“Lady Freyja, it is my honor to meet you. I am Granuaile.”
Freyja did not return the honor, but she did nod back. “Join me. We follow the root of Yggdrasil to the Spring of Hvergelmir. There we will see the gates and walls of Hel. Some of the Black Axes will assault one end of the wall, drawing attention, and our party will fly over the other, sparsely defended end to find Fenris.”
We climbed into her chariot, and I experienced a moment’s disorientation before I remembered that it wasn’t pulled by horses or oxen or any other beast of burden but rather by a few gray domestic house cats. Freyja made an odd purring noise and we lurched forward, jerking at first but then smoothing out as we left the ground and ascended, flying briefly over water before banking around and flying back toward the forest. We skimmed above trees that looked like green pipe cleaners, then reached a wee pond and dove straight for it. I knew what was going to happen, but Granuaile didn’t. Her fingers clutched the edge of the chariot and she said, “Um,” but made no other sound.
That water, it turned out, wasn’t very wet. It was a portal to the Norse plane. I recognized it because there was a large fir with roots in the pond, just like the pond in Russia that led to the spring at Jötunheim. We didn’t have to splash through it: The air pressure just changed, our ears popped, and we were following the root of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, down to Niflheim. It was clear for a time, then we plunged into the mists for which the plane is named.
The journey made me miss Ratatosk. Though Oberon might have disagreed—his nature bent to dislike squirrels as a rule—I thought Ratatosk had been a splendid creature and wholly undeserving of the death he found at the hands of the Norns. His death had been my fault, of course. I was beginning to think I’d never balance the scales I’d tipped twelve years ago.
The root of Yggdrasil disappeared into dark, bubbling waters ringed by an epic stone wall with eleven different arches for egress, from whence eleven rivers flowed. One of them, Gjöll, flowed near the gates of Hel and must be crossed. But now that the dwarfs had crafted flying machines, there would be no bargaining with a bridge keeper. Even the massive wall was no obstacle, but
Freyja wished to preserve the fiction that it was. Once the dwarven gunships landed on the banks of Gjöll, half of them split off and went to bombard the walls of Hel, hoping to draw fighters to the walls and distract those inside from our true purpose.
As they flew off with Freyja’s blessing, I took the opportunity to look around at the alien landscape of Niflheim. I sort of wished Freyja had a digital camera on her so Granuaile and I could pose like tourists on top of the stone wall encircling the spring. We’d point east with huge smiles on our faces, and then the caption would read, Nidhogg is over there!
In Niflheim, even under weak starlight filtered through mists, there are blues and hints of soft pinks reflected in the ice. They hint at comfort and reflections of a brighter world; they whisper of the fires raging in their primordial opposite, Muspellheim. In certain light and with a little imagination, great crags of ice could be mistaken for those old red-white-and-blue bomb pops sold from the backs of square white trucks.
Once we circled up into the sky and headed for Hel, above the mists, I saw distant purple crags with black hash marks sparsely distributed about them, lonesome trees howling of their isolation in the chill winds. Still, even with that icy anguish for a backdrop, the swirling mists offered colors and hopes that something inside them might not be so cold. All that ended once we sailed over the wall into Hel.
In Hel, there are no blues or any other suggestions that somewhere there might be a sun or an ice cream man. The color palette is confined to that of a Gustave Doré engraving, grays and blacks and subtle shadings of these rendered in harrowing crosshatches and highlighted with sudden, glaring areas of nothingness, like splotches of vitiligo sent to haunt the dead with memories of what real light did to the eyes. The clear air is redolent of dishwater and mildew, and the mist is formed from the moist, clammy exhalations of snuffed dreams and hopeless sighs, which collect in the lungs like clotted cream.
Freyja drove us into the mists at some predetermined point, but I saw nothing to indicate that this stretch of sickly mist was a waypoint of some kind. It was, to me, an unkind plunge into air that felt like spiderwebs and snot.
Behind us, the black dwarven ships followed, eerily silent, running on compressed rage, I suppose, or some other inventive fuel.
Granuaile started to choke and cough a whole second before I did. The mists crawled up our noses and into our lungs and settled about our brachia like wet snow. We both looked at Freyja, who appeared undisturbed—but also appeared to be holding her breath. I guess she just “forgot” to suggest that we do the same. I turned around, letting my back serve as a breaker through the mist, and was able to take a couple of clear breaths that way, enough to hold for a while. Granuaile followed my example.
I was tempted to “accidentally” jostle Freyja and cause her to expel her breath, but I decided to let her have her petty revenge. I had killed her twin brother, after all; this was a small fraction of the grief I deserved.
Until we landed on the icy rocks of Hel, we didn’t get clear of the mist. It hung over us at a low ceiling of ten feet, depressing the horizon and swirling slowly like dead leaves in a current. Nothing moved nearby. Behind us, the dwarf gunships landed single file, forming a wall in the process. Their guns all swiveled to face behind us.
“It would be no use turning all those guns on Fenris, would it?” Granuaile asked.
“Hel loves her beastly brother,” Freyja practically snarled, yanking a spear out of a slot in her chariot. “She surrounded him with a kinetic ward long ago. Not arrows nor bullets nor Odin’s spear can reach him now. We have to kill him up close.”
Granuaile’s green eyes found mine. She smirked and put up her fist. I bumped it.
“So where is he?” I said.
Freyja pointed with her spear into the mist in front of us. “That way. Not far.”
“Why can’t we see anything?”
“The mist is like that. Though you think you can see the horizon, you can’t. Your functional visibility is less than twenty yards.”
“Great. Can he hear and smell us now?”
“Most likely.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“Yes. Go that way and kill him.”
I waited patiently for more detail.
“Preferably,” she added, “before Hel finds out we’re inside the walls and sends everything she has against the Black Axes. Once they start firing, it’s going to draw a horde. Some of them will get through and over the ships, and then our army of five thousand won’t stand a chance against her hundreds of thousands.”
Freyja’s sentence was punctuated by a shuddering hiss, followed by more all along the wall of gunships.
“What kind of guns are those?” Granuaile asked.
“Circular-saw launchers,” Freyja said, grinning at us for the first time. “Aimed at the neck, but they take off arms and legs too. Don’t you love the dwarfs?”
“They’re charming, yes,” Granuaile said.
“Let us go,” Freyja said. “Time escapes us. I’ll speak to Fenris and front him. You attack from the flanks. Beware: He is very fast and can change his size.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“He is a son of Loki Shape-shifter, giant-born. Like Hel and Jörmungandr, he can grow or shrink as he sees fit.”
“Lovely. So if we run across a wolf puppy, don’t believe it.”
“Precisely.”
I cast camouflage on myself and drew Fragarach, plus the knife hanging out on my right thigh. I carried that in my left hand, and once I used it I would have another waiting on my left thigh. Granuaile held her staff in her left hand and spoke the words for invisibility as she drew a large knife in her right. She disappeared from view.
“I’ll take the left and Granuaile will flank right,” I said.
“Forward, then,” Freyja said.
I padded into the mist on bare rock and checked my connection to the earth. As in Asgard, the magic was still there but strained and weak, like getting only a single bar of wireless signal. If I needed a surge of power, I’d have to draw it from my bear charm. I quietly boosted my strength and speed as I walked, knowing I’d need both against a monster like Fenris.
Behind us, the sounds of the gunships swelled as they brought heavier firepower online. There must be a whole lot of draugar coming our way. Hel was not a master strategist, but she didn’t need to be with the type and number of soldiers she had at her disposal. When your army is truly disposable, there are no letters to write home to loved ones, no veterans’ benefits to pay, no logistics to worry about, then there’s no need to be clever in battle. Just drown your opponent in bodies. Freyja was right: We had no time to be cute. We had to finish quickly if we wanted to get out of there.
I failed to find him after twenty yards. Nor did I find him in the next twenty. But I heard Freyja’s voice call out to my right and behind me shortly afterward and a rumbling reply directly to my right. I turned but saw nothing in the thrice-damned mist. Still I moved toward the husky voice.
“Freyja, is it? I have heard from my sister that you lost your brother some time ago. Such a shame. I forgot to send my condolences, did I not? Please accept them now.”
Freyja told Fenris what he could do with his condolences. The wry chuckle fell from above. I looked up and to my right again, following the noise, and spied two massive legs stretching up into the mist. Poking out beyond them was half a snout—the nose and open maw of Fenris. Clearly he had decided to confront us in the Economy Size. Much larger than Garm, who was a monster at six feet at the shoulders, Fenris was at least twice that, maybe more. With jaws that size, he could handle us like large Milk-Bones, except we would be much more squishy. Quietly and quickly as I could, I minced my steps to the left in search of his rear legs. Freyja kept talking to distract him—that was excellent work. Still, he sensed us.
“Who do you bring with you?” he rumbled. “I smell others.”
“There are dwarfs fighting the draugar behind us,” the godd
ess replied. “Slaying them all, I imagine.”
“I rather doubt it,” Fenris said after a couple of loud sniffles. “This isn’t the stench of dwarfs. This is something else. Humans. Living ones. Where are they?”
Granuaile had beaten me to the rear legs, for at that moment Fenris yelped and the muzzle disappeared from the ceiling as he whipped around to snap at something painful on his left side. His right rear leg shot forward for balance, planting itself right in front of me. There was a red ribbon tied around it, which I recognized as the fabled Gleipnir, so I swung Fragarach with all my enhanced might just above it, hoping to hobble the beast and turn his attention my way. It worked! Sort of.
Fragarach cut cleanly through his entire leg, amputating it with one strike, but I had now freed him. Instead of turning around to his right, where he could no longer rest any weight, he kept turning left and down, circling around so that his giant tail caught me smack in the chest and sent me flying backward. I dropped Fragarach and the knife and stretched my hands beneath me to make sure my head didn’t hit the rocks first. It didn’t, but it wasn’t a happy landing either. My left hand took the brunt of it and I sprained my wrist. I also banged my elbow hard enough to make me cry out; it was a taste of what Bacchus must have felt under Granuaile’s staff. My left arm would be useless for the near future; sprains don’t mend themselves in seconds, even magically assisted. My tailbone would no doubt give me a bit of pain later on as well. For now it was a dull ache underneath the adrenaline.
My ears pounded with the sound of cannon fire and the howls of a giant wolf, but I longed to hear something from Granuaile, anything that meant she was still alive. I hadn’t heard her since we moved forward.