Giantfall

by F. A. Bentley

  I barely ducked underneath a reaping slash of barbed claws, and rolled behind the immense werewolf. Before I could follow up an attack though, he had already jumped back, turned back into a Giant and set the new pool of blood I had rolled onto into a needling mess as well.

  Too fast to use magic against. Too strong to overpower. All I could do was evade until I got tired and made a mistake.

  One look over my shoulder to Brigitte and Hjelti destroyed any hope of aid. The frost they were caged in was magical. Even now I could see the energy sapping from their faces. Soon, they would succumb to hypothermia in their glacial prisons.

  I had to win and I had to win fast. Time for a risk. As the renegade druid leaped at me again, fangs bared, I threw my wand-sword right at his head. If this hit, it would all be over.

  My face fell as the werewolf, even at point blank range, simply craned his head to one side. The wand sword left the merest nick on his lupine cheek. With all due haste, he promptly pinned me to the floor and drew back his claw for the finishing blow.

  That’s when it hit him. Like a cartoon anvil, a great urn fell from above, its chain cut by my well aimed throw. He didn’t doubt for a moment that I’d aimed at him. Unfortunately my real target was what was just above him.

  In the cacophony of shattered pottery and the slippery slick fluid it held, I struggled out from under the dark druid and leaped back.

  By the time he had turned his head to me, I had all that I needed.

  The werewolf looked at me and barked out a laugh. “Poor Human. Did your desperate last gambit fail to slay me?”

  “It already has, you just don’t realize it yet,” I replied through ragged breaths. “Now why don’t you tell me asshole, what melts ice, purges blood, and is feared by all animals?”

  Recognition dawned on the druid’s face. Lupine eyes widened in horror as he looked down at his soaked body. It wasn’t water being carried in the cask that fell on him. It was oil.

  I raised a finger, cocked it like a gun, and shot a tiny dart of fire right at the Jotun warlock. Ignition. I leaned against an immense wooden column as I watched the dark druid writhe and scream in his very own inferno.

  “The correct answer is fire, you son of a bitch.”

  I turned to release the sibling Jotun, only to see the magic that held their icy cages together was already undone.

  “Brigitte,” I called out, rushing to her side. She looked drained. Hjelti too.

  “That was amazing,” she managed, wonder in her eyes. “You crushed him. I’ve… I never thought a sorcerer of Nine Towers could go toe to toe with a monster like that.”

  “You can stroke my ego later.”

  Brigitte flushed inferno red. “R-right. The crone’s boon. Take it. Set it on the center table. We’ve done it. I can’t believe it.”

  I took the dull black and otherwise inconspicuous orb from Brigitte’s slender hands and dashed to the center of the hall. I clambered on top of the gigantic table and set the orb down. I poured a pulse of magic into it just as I had for the Urd disk.

  The orb, looking like a fortune teller’s knick knack, echoed the pulse of magic I’d hit it with. It almost sounded like a heartbeat. Then, the orb opened its eye.

  Lidless, black with a slit of pure white, the orb-eye stared up at me, and then pulsed again, and again, and again.

  This was their secret weapon? I expected some sort of ritual that awakened hidden city guardians or summoned a blizzard so harsh only the hardy Giants could survive it.

  I just couldn’t think of what the pulses were for until I turned around to check on Hjelti and Brigitte. I’d left them fatigued beyond description, every bit of life nearly sucked out of them by their prisons of ice and the battle with the Trolls.

  Now?They looked like they wanted a rematch with the pile of ashes that used to be the Jotun warlock.

  “Oh. Oh!” I said. The eye wasn’t just a magical curiosity. It was a...

  “Yeah,” Brigitte said. “When you rely on Locuses to maintain your strength, it’s a good idea to keep spares. Like that one.”

  Maybe ten minutes later, the Jotun gate breakers joined us in the hall. Bloody, bruised, and some sporting dozens of bullet wounds, they still managed to look like kids that just came home from the candy store.

  Except the candy was dead Goblins.

  As one, they raised their weapons, banged their shields, and roared to the snowy sky their victory.

  Chapter 27

  “He’s gone. Wherever he went, he didn’t Cross Over, or use magic to get there either. How peculiar,” the crone said, retrieving the eye Locus from where I’d placed it and returning it to the folds of the cloth that enveloped it.

  I was afraid of that. We only succeeded because Rurik wasn’t here. And if he wasn't here, then that meant that taking Jotunheim was not his goal. Could it be that Lodri was right all along? That the old bastard was working for some supernatural nasty hiding in the shadows?

  “Why should it be easy when it can be hard,” I muttered.

  “Come on Charles, we should be celebrating,” Brigitte piped up, sitting next to my seat of honor and plopping a too big tankard of mead in front of me.

  “Too many questions unanswered,” I replied.

  What can I say. With a past as dark as mine, sometimes I just can’t help but piss on someone’s parade.

  “What we beat here were minions led by a couple of enforcers and a lieutenant,” I added. “That’s a garrison force, not the enemy elite. But if Rurik did not use magic or Cross Over, then where could he possibly be?”

  “Well, we sent scouts out a while ago of course. This isn’t Jotunheim’s first war, you know,” Brigitte replied.

  Something bothered me about all this. If you’ve ever had a word on the tip of your tongue but just couldn’t remember it, then that’s exactly what I was going through here. I felt like Rurik was hiding just under my nose, that I’d overlooked something that I just couldn’t put my finger on.

  I stared into the placid tankard of mead until I felt a pair of eyes boring into me.

  Turning my head, I caught sight of jagged brows and abyssal hair.

  “Please don’t stare at me like that. It's unnerving,” I grumbled, taking a swig of the immense tankard.

  “What’s the matter, something on your mind? Forget the stove on back home? Not sure if you locked the car or not?”

  I leveled a glare at the she-devil. “Lis, if you have something to tell me, tell me. If not let me concentrate."

  “What, you expect me to just give you a hint? You already got your freebie from me.” She made a motion with a hand as though zipping her lips. “So no, Charlie. Dead men tell no tales.”

  I blinked in surprise as the cogs in my head unkinked themselves and went into overdrive.

  “That’s exactly it. Goddammit, why didn’t I see it before?” I said.

  I turned to Brigitte in a whirlwind of motion. “Brigitte. Have all the scouts reported back?”

  Brigitte looked surprised. “Almost all of them. Just a couple we had probing some of the old tunnels beneath--”

  Her eyes lit up with recognition as well.

  Rurik was clever. He’d have contingencies to not just stop us but slow us down if we couldn’t be stopped. He’d have things like a rear guard waiting in ambush should scouts come along.

  No news for us was good news for Rurik.

  “Dead men tell no tales,” I murmured, turning to the crone. “Where do the tunnels lead to? Basement? Sub-basement? What do you have hidden beneath this fort?”

  The crone looked bewildered for a moment before giving me a ‘now hold your horses sonny’ look. She took a moment to think and then answered. “Helheim. The roots of the great tree Yggdrasil are honeycombed. Though one great branch leads to the lands of death, there are many other twigs and sprouts that take you there too.”

  I swore underneath my breath, rose up, and began packing. Fresh ammunition from my pack, double checked my wand and mundane weapon
ry, everything. The battle was over, but the war was going on just out of sight.

  “Helheim. Why would Rurik go to the land of the dead? There’s easier ways for him to commit suicide,” I asked.

  “That’s obvious,” Brigitte replied, double checking her armor next to me. “There are many great and terrible things hidden in Helheim. It’s as much a prison of godlike beasts and villains as it is a place to go to when dead.”

  A chill crawled up my spine. That would mean Lodri was right all along. My instincts had been totally off. Rurik was himself a lieutenant and his true master was about to be released right now.

  “Describe ‘godlike beasts and villains’,” I said.

  Hjelti answered me this time. “Hah. Lots of the best, scariest things. Grandpappy Fenrir. Nidhoggr. The Hanged Kings. Hey, even the great Deceiver himself.”

  “Deceiver?”

  Hjelti and Brigitte replied in unison, “Loki.”

  I wiped sweat from my brow. “Then it all makes sense. This wasn’t a rebellion or an invasion. It was all a feint; a really elaborate distraction so that Rurik could get away with what might just end up being the greatest jail break the supernatural world has ever seen.”

  I paused and then looked from side to side. Brigitte and Hjelti were fully armed and armored once again looking grim and stoic enough that the poetic eddas wouldn’t do them justice.

  “What the hell are you two doing?”

  “We’re going with you. Obviously,” Brigitte said.

  “Your home has been saved. You were just in the middle of your celebration. This is not your fight anymore dammit.”

  The brother and sister traded an unimpressed look.

  “Charles of Midgard, Rurik has done enough to merit more than a little bit of vengeance, don’t you think?” Hjelti said. He pronounced it ‘leeetle’.

  “You saved me. And Jotunheim. I don’t know if we would have done it without you. I want to do this, Charles. Don’t you dare try to stop me.”

  I sighed, shrugging my shoulders. “Giant pain in my ass.”

  Hjelti laughed long and hard. Brigitte shook her head and smiled.

  After a short talk with the crone, Brigitte led us down below the hill fort, past winding tunnels. The deeper we went, the harder it was for me to tell whether the tunnel was made by digging through bedrock or hollowing out an impossibly huge tree root.

  The air was musty and laced with the vague stench of rot. Breathing with all this stink was hard, but seeing five feet in front of you was even harder. What light there was was dim. It felt like I was seeing the world through a funerary veil.

  Which is my excuse for why I nearly tripped over the bodies when we found them. Four dead Jotun scouts. Riddled with equal parts hot lead and frost magic. That wasn’t the worst of it either.

  A little exploring found that they’d been killed in the center of a crossroads. Hollow tunnels, dark and ominous, spread out in every direction. Of course, there was no way of telling which way Rurik went either.

  Dead men tell no tales.

  I cursed underneath my breath, but not so loud that I couldn’t make out a harsh wet cough. The three of us crept towards the source of the coughing, and in a shadowy nook born out of an odd shift in the wall, we found two human-sized shapes.

  One lay perfectly still, limp black leather sopping wet with blood. The other wore Kevlar and gray camo pants. My eyes lit up with recognition when I saw the immense guitar case on his back. Or perhaps I should say her back.

  “Smith. Cazador. What the hell is going on here?” I asked.

  Chapter 28

  “Assassinate the target,” Smith began. “As soon as Lodri’s wards in Helheim went off we were dispatched with those instructions.”

  Brigitte managed a wry smile. “It didn’t work out very well, I take it?”

  Smith shook her head as the two Jotun dragged her and Cazador into the center of the abyssal crossroads and began dressing wounds. They’d both lost a lot of blood. Cazador enough to render him unconscious.

  Small miracles.

  Their wounds were unusual though. It looked more like shrapnel shards rather than bullet wounds.

  “You didn’t get caught in the crossfire with the Giant scouts, did you? How did this happen?” I asked.

  Smith hesitated for a moment before shaking her head.

  A sharp pang of fury suddenly arched through me. We didn’t have time for politics. “Smith, if you cannot trust me with the info then I hope you are ready to take responsibility for our dear friend Rurik releasing every goddamn boogeyman the Norse supernaturals have imprisoned here since the goddamn Middle Ages!”

  Smith grit her teeth and nearly barked a reply. However, something very strange and unexpected happened that cut her off and made my heart skip a beat.

  My phone rang.

  Who could possibly get a call to reach me while I was in Helheim? I couldn’t keep a signal when soliciting a basement pub let alone however many thousands of feet below tree and stone and supernatural interference I was now.

  I turned to Smith. “Spill. There are two pairs of very big ears eager to hear. I gotta take this.”

  Smith turned towards Hjelti and Brigitte before sighing, “We arrived at the location as the insurgent Vetti were mopping up. Instead of engaging, we reconnoitered to our own ambush point and set up to take out the HVT.”

  “High Value Target,” I called out, before turning back to the call.

  “So,” began Hjelti. “You tried to kill Rurik with your gun and then leave?”

  Smith shook her head. “The Cazador attempted a slaying ritual. It should have worked.”

  Brigitte perked an eyebrow. “Slaying ritual?”

  Smith paused another breath before replying. “Specialized. With the right specs, it’s capable of making someone spontaneously combust. All it needs is LOS and nomenclature.”

  I turned back from my phone call. “Less jargon, G.I.”

  Smith shot me what I assumed was a sour look. Most of her face was obscured by a black ski mask.

  “The slaying ritual needs sight to the target as well as the target's name. Instead of dispatching the high value, it--”

  “It backfired,” Brigitte said. “Your medium was shattered explosively. That’s where the shrapnel came from.”

  Smith turned her head towards Cazador as I finished my call, tucking my phone away.

  “I don’t understand why it didn’t work. We had all we needed. Slaying rituals are foolproof.”

  “It didn’t work because Rurik isn’t his name,” I replied, rejoining the group.

  Brigitte and Hjelti turned to stare at me. Smith’s face betrayed surprise.

  I smiled and shook my head. “When I started getting a feel for the movers and shakers in this incident, I decided to go out on a limb and have an old friend of mine do a check on Rurik. Honestly, I thought that he’d forgotten all about me until just now. As it turns out, Herr Starr found the answers I was looking for in the very strangest of places. The KGB archives.”

  “Bullshit. What the hell does the Soviet Union have to with any of this?” Smith replied.

  My grin’s size must have rivaled Lis’. I hit the play record button on my phone as Starr’s thick German accent echoed out of the device.

  “Radimir Rurikovich. The dragon of St. Petersburg. Logic requires me to assume this is a near miss on my information, but my instincts say it all adds up. He is-- was a top shelf Soviet spook in charge of a hefty piece of the red cake. Rose to prominence during the Second World War and held his position for almost fifty years. Seven confirmed caches of Nazi occult paraphernalia ‘disappeared’ after falling into his hands during the sack of East Germany. After the Soviet collapse, he fell out of the history books. That’s all I have, Charles. You’re not dealing with Norse malcontents. You’re dealing with rogue Soviet brass.”

  I cut the recording as silence fell. To be fair, I was just as surprised as they were when I’d heard it.

  Smith broke th
e silence first. She was so shaken she let her Texan accent slip. “Jesus Christ. It’s the Reds.”

  “Dasvidaniya indeed,” I muttered.

  Herr Starr might not have been convinced, but between the computer message and the tiny red medal I found in the bunker, there was no longer any doubt in my mind.

  “Now we just need to figure out why he came here.”

  Smith shook her head. “It doesn’t change a damn thing. He’s here to free his boss and wreak havoc. Lodri was right. What you just told us confirms it.”

  “Maybe. But I think you’re letting your inner mage control your opinions.”

  “The hell is that supposed to mean, Locke?” Smith demanded.

  “It means you need to tell me which way he went or else we’re all going to have a one way ticket to Valhalla to discuss our should-have-beens.”

  Smith slammed her gloved hand onto the stone floor. “I don’t know where he went. Neither of us saw because we were too busy getting sprayed in arcane shrapnel. We’re already screwed!”

  “Anything could help. You don’t become a gun mage without sharp instincts and good intuition,” I replied.

  Smith sighed. “He was... He was looking to the right side after his Goblins finished off the scouts and our spell backfired. But that doesn’t narrow things down that much. Now we get to roll the dice like it’s Vegas and pick between six different tunnels. And that’s a best case scenario.”

  “You’d think some of Cazador’s confidence would rub off on you with how much you have to put up with him,” I muttered, turning to Brigitte.

  “Those six tunnels on the right. Where do they lead?” I asked.

  Brigitte nodded, rose up and went to inspect them. Glum runes hung above each one of them. After a moment of scanning, Brigitte said, “Nidhoggr and Loki lead this way. This one here leads to Jormugand’s little elvers.

  “Baby Midgard Serpents. Charming.”

  “Yeah,” Brigitte agreed. “And the two on the end lead to other ways backtracking to the upper levels.”