by Rick Riordan
More giants laughed and wolf-whistled at us.
Utgard-Loki stood tall, grinning at his subjects as if this was all good fun. “Yes, of course! Ladies and jotunmen, let us begin the entertainment!” He leered down at us. “Honored guests, with what amazing skills will you impress us?”
All the giants turned toward us, obviously anxious to hear what manner of embarrassing failure we would choose. My chief talents were running away and eating falafel, but after a heavy meal of hot dogs and chemically engineered nachos, I doubted I could win a gold medal in either of those categories.
“Don’t be shy!” Utgard-Loki spread his arms. “Who wants to go first? We want to see what you champions of the mortal realms can do! Will you outdrink us? Outrace us? Outwrestle us?”
Samirah stood. I said a silent prayer of thanks for fearless Valkyries. Even when I was a regular mortal student, I hated going first. The teacher always promised to go easier on the first volunteer or give extra credit. No thanks. It wasn’t worth the extra anxiety.
Sam took a deep breath and faced the crowd. “I am handy with the ax,” she said. “Who would challenge me at ax-throwing?”
The giants cheered and catcalled.
“Well, now!” Utgard-Loki looked delighted. “That’s a very small ax you have, Samirah al-Abbas, but I’m sure you throw it with skill. Hmm. Normally I would name Bjorn Cleaveskull as our champion ax-thrower, but I don’t want you to feel too outmatched. How about you compete against Little Billy instead?”
From a knot of giants at the far end of the alley, a curly-haired kid giant stood. He looked about ten years old, his pudgy belly stuffed in a Where’s Waldo striped shirt, yellow suspenders holding up his schoolboy knickers. He was also severely cross-eyed. As he walked toward us he kept running into tables and tripping over bowling bags, much to the amusement of the other giants.
“Billy is just learning to throw,” Utgard-Loki said. “But he should be a good match for you.”
Samirah clenched her jaw. “Fine. What are the targets?”
Utgard-Loki snapped his fingers. At the far end of lanes one and three, slots opened in the floor and flat wooden figures shot up, each painted with the likeness of Thor, with his wild red hair and flowing beard, and his face scrunched up the way he looked mid-fart.
“Three throws each!” Utgard-Loki announced. “Samirah, would you like to begin?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Children first.”
Little Billy waddled toward the foul line. Next to him, another giant set down a leather bundle and opened it to reveal three tomahawks, each one almost as large as Billy.
Billy struggled to lift the first ax. He squinted at the distant target.
I had time to think, Maybe Sam will be okay. Maybe Utgard-Loki is going easy on her after all. Then Billy burst into action. He tossed one ax after another, so fast I could barely follow his movements. When he was done, one hatchet was embedded in Thor’s forehead, another in his chest, and a third in the thunder god’s mighty crotch.
The giants cheered.
“Not bad!” Utgard-Loki said. “Now, let us see if Samirah, pride of the Valkyries, can defeat a cross-eyed ten-year-old!”
Next to me, Alex muttered, “She’s doomed.”
“Do we step in?” Blitz worried. “Sam told us to think outside the box.”
I remembered her advice: Do something unexpected.
I clasped my fingers around my pendant. I wondered if I should jump out of my seat, summon Jack, and cause a distraction by singing a duet of “Love Never Felt So Good.” Hearthstone saved me from that embarrassment by raising his fingers: Wait.
Sam studied her opponent, Little Billy. She stared at the axes he’d planted in his target. Then she seemed to come to a conclusion. She stepped up to the foul line and raised her ax.
The room went respectfully quiet. Or maybe our hosts were just taking a deep breath so they could laugh really hard when Sam failed.
In one fluid movement, Sam turned and threw her ax right at Billy. The giants gasped.
Little Billy’s eyes went even more cross-eyed as he stared at the hatchet now sprouting from his forehead. He fell backward and crashed to the floor.
The giants roared in outrage. Some rose and drew their weapons.
“Hold!” Utgard-Loki bellowed. He glared at Sam. “Explain yourself, Valkyrie! Why should we not kill you for what you just did?”
“Because,” Sam said, “it was the only way to win this contest.”
She sounded remarkably calm considering what she’d done, and considering the number of giants now ready to rip her apart. She pointed at the corpse of Little Billy. “This is no giant child!”
She announced it with all the authority of a TV detective, but I could see a bead of sweat trickling down from under the edge of her hijab. I could almost hear her thinking: Please let me be right. Please let me be right.
The crowd of giants stared at the corpse of Little Billy. He continued to look like a dead, badly-dressed giant child. I knew that at any moment the mob would charge Samirah and we’d all have to flee for our lives.
Then, slowly, the boy giant’s form began to change.
His flesh withered until he looked like one of Prince Gellir’s draugr. His leathery lips curled over his teeth. Yellow film covered his eyes. His fingernails lengthened into dirty scythes. Little Zombie Billy struggled to his feet and pulled the ax out of his forehead.
He hissed at Sam. A wave of pure terror swept through the room. Some giants dropped their drinks. Others fell to their knees and wept. My intestines tied themselves into a granny knot.
“Y-yes,” Sam announced, her voice much smaller. “As you can see, this is not Little Billy. This is Fear, which strikes quickly and always hits its mark. The only way to conquer Fear is to attack it head-on. That’s what I did. That’s why I win the contest.”
Fear threw down Sam’s ax in disgust. With one final terrifying hiss, he dissolved into white smoke and was gone.
A collective sigh of relief spread through the room. Several giants hastened to the restrooms, probably to throw up or change their underpants.
I whispered to Blitzen, “How the heck did Sam know? How could that thing be Fear?”
Blitzen’s own eyes looked a bit jaundiced. “I—I suppose she’s met Fear before. I’ve heard rumors that the giants are on good terms with a lot of minor deities—Anger, Hunger, Disease. Supposedly, Old Age used to bowl with the Utgard Ultimates—though not well. But I never thought I’d meet Fear in person….”
Alex shuddered. Hearthstone looked grim but not surprised. I wondered if he and Sam had encountered other minor deities during their twenty-four-hour ordeal.
I was glad Sam had gone first and not me. With my luck, I would’ve been pitted against Happiness and I would’ve had to whack it with my sword until it stopped smiling.
Utgard-Loki turned to Sam with a tiny glint of admiration in his eyes. “I suppose we will not kill you, then, Samirah al-Abbas, since you did what was necessary to win. This round goes to you!”
Sam’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Then we have proven ourselves? The contest is over?”
“Oh, not yet!” The king’s eyes widened. “What about our four other guests? We must see if they are as skilled as you!”
When in Doubt, Turn Into a Biting Insect
I WAS STARTING to hate the Utgard Bowling Ultimate Tournament.
Hearthstone went next. He gestured to the arcade and, with me translating, challenged the giants to bring forth their highest scorer at any game of the contestants’ choosing. Hugo’s Jotun Jammers team nominated a guy named Kyle, who marched over to the skee-ball lane and scored a perfect thousand points. While the giants cheered, Hearthstone walked to the Starsky and Hutch pinball machine and put a red gold coin in the slot.
“Wait!” Hugo protested. “That’s not even the same game!”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I said. “Hearth said ‘any game of the contestants’ choosing,’ plural. Your gu
y chose skee-ball. Hearth chooses pinball.”
The giants grumbled, but in the end they relented.
Blitzen grinned at me. “You’re in for a treat, kid. Hearth is a wizard.”
“I know that.”
“No, I mean a pinball wizard.”
Hearthstone fired up the first ball. I didn’t see him use any magic, but he quickly destroyed Kyle’s score—which, granted, wasn’t fair, since pinball scores go way higher than a thousand points. Even after he’d passed five hundred million, Hearth kept playing. He nudged the machine and hit the flippers with such intensity I wondered if he was thinking of his father and all those coins he’d made Hearth collect for good deeds. On this machine, Hearth quickly became a make-believe billionaire.
“Enough!” Utgard-Loki yelled, pulling the plug on the machine. “You’ve proved your skill! I think we can all agree that this deaf elf sure plays a mean pinball. Who’s next?”
Blitzen challenged the giants to a complete makeover. He promised he could turn any giant into someone more dashing and fashionable. The giants unanimously elected a jotun named Grum, who had apparently been sleeping under the bar—and collecting grime and lint there—for the past forty years. I was pretty sure he was the minor deity Bad Hygiene.
Blitzen was not deterred. He whipped out his sewing implements and got to work. It took him a few hours to slap together new clothes from odds and ends in the bowling alley’s gift shop. Then he took Grum into the bathroom for a proper spa treatment. When they emerged, Grum’s eyebrows had been waxed. His beard and hair were trimmed neater than the most metrosexual hipster’s. He wore a shimmery gold bowling shirt with GRUM stitched across the front, along with silvery pants and matching bowling shoes. The giant ladies swooned. The giant dudes edged away from him, intimidated by his star power. Grum crawled back under the bar and started to snore.
“I can’t fix bad habits!” Blitz said. “But you saw him. Did I beat the challenge or what?”
There was a lot of muttering, but no one dared to argue. Even magically enhanced ugliness was no match for a dwarven degree in fashion design.
Utgard-Loki leaned toward me and murmured, “You’re doing very well! I’ll have to make this last challenge really hard so you have a high chance of dying. That should solidify my liege men’s respect.”
“Wait, what?”
The helpful king raised his hands to the crowd. “Ladies and jotunmen! Truly we have some interesting guests, but never fear! We will have our revenge! Two guests remain. As fate would have it, that’s the perfect number for a doubles bowling challenge. Since bowling is the reason we are here today, let’s have our last two visitors face off against our defending champions from Tiny’s Turkey Bowlers!”
The giants hollered and whooped. Tiny looked over at me and made the finger-across-the-throat sign—which I was getting really tired of seeing.
“The winners will take the usual prize,” Utgard-Loki announced, “which is, of course, the losers’ heads!”
I glanced at Alex Fierro and realized we were now a team.
“I suppose this is a bad time to tell you,” Alex said, “I’ve never bowled.”
Our opponents from Tiny’s Turkey Bowlers were brothers with the delightful names of Herg and Blerg. It was difficult to tell them apart. In addition to being identical twins, they wore matching gray shirts and football helmets—the latter probably to keep us from throwing axes at their faces. The only differences I could see were their bowling balls. Herg’s was airbrushed with the face of Prince. (Maybe he had provided the bar’s playlist.) His brother Blerg had a red ball with Kurt Cobain’s face on it. Blerg kept looking back and forth between me and the ball like he was trying to imagine me without the choppy haircut.
“All right, my friends!” Utgard-Loki announced. “We’ll be playing an abbreviated game of three frames!”
Alex leaned toward me. “What’s a frame?”
“Shh,” I told her. In fact, I was trying to remember the rules of bowling. It had been years since I’d played. There was an alley in Hotel Valhalla, but since the einherjar did most everything to the death, I hadn’t been anxious to check it out.
“A very simple contest!” Utgard-Loki continued. “Highest score wins. First team up: the Insignificant Mortals!”
Nobody cheered as Alex and I walked to our ball return.
“What do you think?” Alex whispered.
“Basically,” I said, “you’re supposed to roll the ball down the lane and knock over the pins.”
She glared at me, her pale eye twice as bright and angry as her dark one. “I know that much. But we’re supposed to break the rules, right? What’s the illusion here? You think Herg and Blerg are minor gods?”
I glanced back at Sam, Blitz, and Hearth, who’d been forced to watch from behind the railing. Their expressions told me nothing I didn’t already know: we were in serious trouble.
I wrapped my fingers around my pendant and thought: Hey, Jack, any advice?
Jack hummed sleepily, as he tends to do in pendant form. No.
Thanks, I thought. Huge assist from the magic sword.
“Insignificant Mortals!” Utgard-Loki called. “Is there a problem? Do you wish to forfeit?”
“No!” I said. “No, we’re good.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay, Alex, we’ve got three frames. Uh, three rounds of play. Let’s just see how the first frame goes. Maybe it’ll give us some ideas. Watch how I bowl.”
That’s a statement I never thought I would utter. Bowling was not one of my superpowers. Nevertheless, I stepped into the approach with my pink fuzzy-dice-themed bowling ball. (Hey, it was the only one that fit my fingers.) I tried to remember the pointers my shop teacher, Mr. Gent, had given us when we had our middle school orientation party at the Lucky Strike Lanes. I reached the line, aimed, and threw with all my einherji might.
The ball rolled slowly, sluggishly, and stopped halfway down the lane.
The giants howled with laughter.
I retrieved the ball and walked back, my face burning. As I passed Alex, she grumbled, “Thanks, that was very instructive.”
I returned to my seat. Behind the railing, Sam looked grim. Hearthstone signed his most helpful advice: Do better. Blitzen grinned and gave me two thumbs up, which made me wonder if he understood the rules of bowling.
Alex came to the line. She did a granny roll, hefting the ball between her legs and chucking it down the lane. The dark blue sphere bounced once, twice, then rolled a little farther than mine had before toppling into the gutter.
More laughter from the jotun crowd. A few high-fived each other. Gold coins exchanged hands.
“Time for the Turkey Bowlers!” Utgard-Loki shouted.
A roar of applause as Herg stepped to the next lane over.
“Hold up,” I said. “Aren’t they supposed to use the same lane as us?”
Tiny pushed through the crowd, his eyes wide with mock innocence. “Oh, but the king didn’t say anything about that! He just said ‘highest score wins.’ Go ahead, boys!”
Herg threw Prince’s head. It rolled straight down the middle at lightning speed and crashed into the pins with a sound like an exploding marimba.
Giants cheered and pumped their fists. Herg turned, grinning behind the face mask of his helmet. He patted Blerg on the shoulder and they exchanged a few words.
“I need to figure out what they’re saying,” Alex said. “I’ll be back.”
“But—”
“I NEED TO PEE!” Alex yelled.
Some of the giants frowned at this interruption, but generally when someone yells I need to pee in a crowd, people let them go pee. The other options are not great.
Alex disappeared into the little giant girls’ room. Meanwhile, Blerg came to the approach. He hefted his Kurt Cobain ball and rolled it down the lane, Cobain’s face flashing in and out of sight, saying hello, hello, hello, until it crashed into the pins and sent them flying with lots of rocker spirit.
“Anot
her strike!” Tiny yelled.
Cheering and mead-drinking all around—except among me and my friends.
Blerg and Herg rendezvoused at the ball return, snickering and glancing in my direction. While the crowd was still celebrating and making new bets, Alex returned from the restroom.
“I HAVE FINISHED PEEING!” she announced.
She hurried over and grabbed my arm. “I just heard Herg and Blerg talking,” she whispered.
“How?”
“I eavesdropped. I do this thing where I turn into a horsefly.”
“Oh.” I glanced at Sam, who was frowning severely. “I’m familiar with the horsefly thing.”
“Their lane is a normal bowling lane,” Alex reported. “But ours…I dunno. I heard Herg say, ‘Good luck to them, hitting the White Mountains.’”
“The White Mountains,” I repeated. “In New Hampshire?”
Alex shrugged. “Unless they have White Mountains in Jotunheim, too. Either way, those aren’t bowling pins.”
I squinted at the end of our lane, but the pins still looked like pins, not mountains. Then again, Little Billy hadn’t looked like Fear…until he did.
I shook my head. “How is it possible…?”
“No clue,” Alex said. “But if our bowling balls are rolling toward a mountain range on a different world—”
“We’ll never reach the end of the lane. We definitely won’t be able to knock down any pins. How do we undo the hex?”
“Come on, Insignificant Mortals!” Tiny yelled. “Stop stalling!”
It was hard to think with a crowd of giants yelling at me. “I—I’m not sure,” I told Alex. “I need more time. Right now, the best thing I can think of is to sabotage their lane.”
It was impulsive, I’ll admit. But I charged the foul line and threw my pink dice bowling ball overhand with all my strength, straight into Herg and Blerg’s lane. The ball landed with such force it cracked the hardwood floor, ricocheted backward into the crowd, and felled one of the spectators, who squawked like a startled chicken.
“OHHHH!” the onlookers yelled.
“What was that?” Tiny bellowed. “You brained Eustis!”