He hadn’t spilled anything, but it’d been close.
“Sigyn?” The thing’s voice was raspy and thin, a cold wind punctuated by a crackling bonfire.
“Um…”
The thing had gone still at the sound of Sigmund’s voice, blind eyes blinking up at the roof, withered claw desperately trying to grasp him again. But Sigmund had moved, and the chains strung across the thing’s chest and hips didn’t give much in the way of mobility.
“Hvar ert þú? Hverr ert þú?”
“Um, man, I’m sorry I don’t speak, like, Viking.” Sigmund wondered about the sense of trying to talk to a hallucination. Because that’s what this was, right? It had to be, didn’t it? Because this wasn’t Lain. Sigmund didn’t know where Lain was, but this thing didn’t look like him, didn’t feel like him. Plus, Lain, like, spoke English with a pretty strong Australian accent.
Except…
Except if it was a hallucination, why was it speaking Viking? Sigmund didn’t know Viking, didn’t even really know what language Viking would have been. Ancient Icelandic, maybe?
The next words the maybe-hallucination spoke were different again. That strange tongue that Lain had used once or twice that felt like a broken speaker and left an itch at the back of Sigmund’s throat.
“Uh, I don’t…I can’t do that one either. Um. Sorry.”
Sigmund thought the thing looked thoughtful at that, though it was a little hard to tell, and, besides, Sigmund was trying really, really hard not to look at it too much.
That hadn’t stopped it talking, though, and it’d been going nonstop ever since. A crackling, sibilant hiss, and Sigmund didn’t have to be a linguist to know the words weren’t nice.
He’d pushed the words and, worse, the occasional bouts of unhinged giggling to the back of his awareness. Behind the ache in his limbs and the maths in his brain and the stench and despair and the niggling feeling that he was forgetting something.
How had he gotten here, exactly?
More important: Why was he staying?
Drip. Drip.
Loki stayed because he had to. Sigyn had stayed…
(out of guilt)
…to be with her husband. Sigmund was staying because…?
And actually, maybe that was the entire point. Lok—the thing was chained up, and suffering, and Sigmund couldn’t just leave it. That wasn’t how it worked, wasn’t how the story progressed. He’d picked up the bowl and now he was stuck here, watching it slowly fill up, trying to figure out the right combination of items to solve the puzzle so they could make it to the next cutscene.
So. Step one: take stock of his inventory.
Sigmund figured he had one set of house keys, one key to Lain’s car, one wallet, one phone-cum-flashlight-cum-calculator-cum-whatever-other-apps-he-had-loaded, his clothes, a pair of glasses, and one stone bowl of poison.
The puzzle involved freeing Loki from three sets of iron chains, preferably while not causing him any more undue facial burning.
“Oh,” Sigmund said. “Oh!”
“Hvat?” Loki was looking at him speculatively, or at least looking at the place where he thought Sigmund was. He was off by about two feet.
This was going to be tricky. It was obvious, really, but tricky. Was going to require some mad twitch and an über micro. Fortunately, Sigmund had both.
Loki’s jaw felt fragile under Sigmund’s fingers. Sharp beneath skin like damp cellophane.
“Hvat ert þú—?”
“Turn your head and don’t move.” Loki tried to move back, maybe just to be contrary, but Sigmund turned his face away again. “Face the wall or…the darkness or whatever.” Loki looked like he was going to argue again, so, “Just trust me, okay? Please?”
The jaw underneath his fingers was tense for one eternal moment, before relaxing. “Eins og þú vilt.”
That sounded affirmative, so Sigmund pulled his hand back—his fingers were slightly…damp, but he tried not to notice—and said, “Awesome.” He put the bowl down on Loki’s sunken cheek.
“Hvat?”
“Sorry, man, just gimmie a sec…” The bowl wobbled a little when Sigmund took his hands away, but it didn’t tip and it didn’t spill. He didn’t dare take his eyes off it, even as he unzipped his hoodie and pulled it off. It was an old favorite and had seen the inside of a few too many washing machines. Sigmund folded it over a few times, ending up with a somewhat flat lump roughly half a foot thick. It’d have to do.
Holding it in his right hand, he picked the bowl back up with his left. It was heavy, hard to get a grip on one handed, and Sigmund ended up lifting it by the rim, one finger pinched dangerously close to the liquid inside. Loki had just enough time to turn his head before Sigmund covered it with the folded hoodie.
“Sorry, sorry!” he said in answer to Loki’s muffled protest.
There was no really good way to time the next part. The drips were coming too fast. Sigmund counted them anyway, getting a feel for the rhythm. Then two deep breaths, then go.
Drip.
One hand braced against Loki’s arm in case he got any ideas about moving.
Drip.
Empty the contents of the bowl onto the chains. They were iron, and for one heart-stopping moment they did nothing, then—
Drip.
—that horrible sizzling sound, cut with the metallic tang of rust and the acrid smoke of burning cotton as the still-dripping poison soaked into the fabric.
Drip.
It wasn’t going to be enough. The poison was caustic but the iron was thick and it wasn’t enough. A roar of frustration and a harsh clang as Sigmund brought the stone bowl down against the chains, once—
Drip.
—twice—
Drip.
—three times and there! One final ringing snap and Sigmund was jerking Loki toward him, even as the god was scrabbling twisted fingers against his eyes, burnt by the first fumes of poison-soaked fabric.
Sigmund dropped the bowl and helped pull the ruined hoodie from Loki’s face, tossing it aside into the dark. For a moment after, nothing moved. Then Loki threw back his head and began to howl. Laughing. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, but perhaps if any time was a time for mania, this was. Sigmund took a stumbling step back as the god stood, steady and lithe despite his withered form, the remaining chains sliding from his hips and ankles. When they hit the ground, they were no longer iron, and the pile of gore glistened in the gloom.
It was about now that it occurred to Sigmund he hadn’t planned for this part. He’d figured solving the bowl puzzle would be enough, but real life—even this current weird, warped version of it—wasn’t much like a game. Here, even the FMVs required his player input.
“Dude, we should like, go or something. Before…” He trailed off with an abortive gesture, unsure.
Then not-Loki looked at him, and Sigmund’s stomach turned to ice.
Loki—real Loki, not this parody of a thing—was huge and monstrous and weird but, despite all that, Sigmund had never actually found him frightening. All glowing dead eyes and stitch-swollen lips and jagged fangs and still he had nothing, nothing, on the monstrosity standing in front of Sigmund in this moment.
The one that said, “You got this far, boy. What will you do now?”
“What the fuck?” Sigmund stumbled backward as the definitely-not-Loki advanced toward him, steps sure and precise on the slippery roots of the World Tree.
“What will you do when cunning is not enough? When loyalty becomes a vice? When they come for you as well as him? And come they will. They always come.”
The thing wasn’t speaking English, not exactly. Actually, Sigmund wasn’t convinced it was speaking at all.
“Who the hell are you?” Another step backward. Into air this time, and Sigmund was falling, tumbling to the cave floor, roots slimy and warm against the skin of his arms.
The fall was short, but it hurt. Curled in terror on the ground and, oh Christ, those footsteps were still coming, were stopping
in front of his head.
“Get up, boy, and stop sniveling.” Fingers like iron clamped around his wrist and Sigmund found himself jerked to his knees. He looked up.
“Oh, no. No. No. No.”
The thing was changing, its shriveled skin filling. Like water into a balloon, revealing a proud, handsome face; broad, strong shoulders; round, full breasts—
“Oh fuck no, not you!”
—and hips, and thighs, and a cascade of hair like rotting straw, and eyes as ancient and cold as glaciers.
Sigyn, the Victorious.
“Get up, boy.” She shook his arm, not gently, from where she still held his wrist. He tried to pull back but her grip was as inescapable as time, and his skin burned where she touched.
“You’re hurting me!” he cried, ashamed by his own weakness. Ashamed that Sigyn could see it.
“Of course,” she said, raising one dark eyebrow. “And you will hurt a thousand times worse before this is over.”
“Before what is over? What do you want?”
“For you to be ready, boy. Nothing more. You walk a road between a sun and an inferno. You must be ready for it. If you are not, they will destroy you.”
And that was the thing, really. Sigyn’s grip was iron, the bones in Sigmund’s wrist grinding together from the pressure of her fingers. The skin on his arm burned like he’d plunged it into liquid nitrogen, and the agony forced him to his knees.
Sigyn stood above him, cold and merciless. She was a goddess, he was just some mouth-breather from the IT department. Not even one of the cool ones, the ones that did the R & D. The biggest, hippest technology company in the world and all Sigmund had ever managed was to ask people with multiple PhDs in computer science whether they’d tried turning it off and on.
He was nothing. A Joe Nobody, one of the faceless white-collar masses, gristle in the mill of the corporate world. He wasn’t brave, he wasn’t strong, and he was so unfit zombies could’ve outrun him. Not to mention that he applied video games and comic books to real life as if they meant something, then got surprised when they didn’t.
He wasn’t a hero and he wasn’t a goddess and most important—
“I. Am not. You!”
“Really?” said Sigyn. “Then prove it.”
So Sigmund did.
He stood up.
TWENTY-ONE
Wayne tried not to stare. She really, really did. Not in the rearview mirror and not directly, either. And it totally wasn’t her fault if she had to take a lot of left turns, and that meant a head check via the passenger side. Just because they were stuck in some grotesque, depopulated hellscape didn’t mean she was free to forego all the rules of the road. And if, during said head checks, she just happened to linger over the…being in the passenger seat, just a little. Well. Who could blame her?
Holy crap, she was driving in a car with a god.
Like, an actualfax, (dis)honest-to-himself, blood and fire god.
As a little girl, Wayne’s father had told her the stories of the land, of the Dreaming and the spirits and the ancestors. Of mighty Wollumbin and wise Dirawong. Her mother, meanwhile, taught her yoga and meditation, chakras and karma, yin and yang and the Horned God and Triple Goddess.
Growing up in Nimbin, New Age neopagan religious syncretism was in Wayne’s blood, and she believed it. All of it. But there was a difference, she was learning, between believing in the abstract and having a seven-foot-tall personified force of nature sitting within arm’s reach.
Wayne wasn’t too down with the Norse mythology—that was more Em’s area of expertise—but she did know enough to know that Loki was kind of an asshole. And dangerous. Flame and earthquakes all the way down, and he felt it, in some indescribable way. The faint scent of smoke and earth, and the way his feathers (feathers!) seemed to flicker in the gloom.
Also, he was dating Sigmund. What was up with that? Not that Wayne was ragging on Sig or anything. He was a nice guy, and cuter than he gave himself credit for in a chubby, adorkable sort of way. But still. A god? Really?
The next time Wayne didn’t quite look at Loki, he was grinning, leather stitches pulled tight against dark lips, sharp white canines peeking through the gaps.
“Next left,” he said, his voice somewhere between the rumble of a cave-in and the roar of a bushfire.
Wayne obliged, watching the car’s headlights slice through darkness that seemed almost like a living thing. The streets were hard to recognize, some mad artist’s dream of bleeding signs and dead trees carved from obsidian, hung with bones and feathers. When Wayne caught sight of houses, they were squat and ugly things, too close and too identical, a copy-paste nightmare of windows like black sockets and doorways shattered open in silent screaming.
Wayne had given up asking where Loki was taking them. There were only so many times she could deal with his smug grin and cryptic bullshit answers.
The thought that this may have been a terrible idea had occurred to her, multiple times.
Following Loki’s directions, Wayne took two more left turns, then a right. Out onto a two-way four-lane highway that she almost recognized, bar the garlands of rotting viscera hanging from the streetlights.
From the backseat, Wayne heard, “Why Sigmund?”
Em, who did not believe in gods or monsters or spirits or magic, and had been looking sick and pale and hollow for a while. This was the first thing she’d said since getting in the car.
Loki replied: “He’s my wife.”
“Bullshit. Sigyn’s your wife.”
Which earned Em something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “She died. Sigmund has her soul.”
(wait, what)
“No,” Em replied. Her voice was still thready, but Wayne could hear the strength creeping back into it. “No, that’s not how this works. Sigmund is Sigmund. Don’t try to tell me this is all some predestined star-crossed-lovers crap. What’s the real reason?”
Loki was silent for a moment, claws drumming on the car door. Wayne could see the end of his tail, flicking where it was curled awkwardly over the dash. Finally, he said, “He makes me honest.”
(did he just say that Sig is a)
Wayne heard Em shift in her seat. “If you hurt him,” Em said, “it won’t be just a goat you’ll find your balls tied to this time.”
“Duly noted.” Loki gestured for Wayne to turn right.
“And all of this?” The sharp staccato of Em’s rings, tapping against the window, echoed the sound of the car’s indicator.
“Bad timing,” Loki said. “Ásgarðr wants me dead, and their king is prepared to break reality to do it.”
“Odin?”
“No. The next one.”
The conversation seemed to make sense to Em, and she said, “You fucked the Ragnarok?”
“Sigyn did.”
“Go her.”
From the corner of her eye, Wayne saw Loki smile.
Then Em asked, “Who is she? Sigyn, I mean. None of her stories survived.”
Loki closed his eyes, their faint glow vanishing behind dark lids. “No, they didn’t. She was a girl, a mortal. That’s all,” he said, in a voice that meant anything but. “The motherless daughter of a shipbuilder, who grew up doing the chores of ten men and dreaming of the lands along the trade routes. Places she knew she’d never get to travel as wife and mother. One day she found a falcon in the forest, broken and fallen from the sky. She nursed him back to health, and in turn he made her a goddess.”
“Did he take her traveling, too?”
“At first,” Loki said. Wayne heard him shift in his seat. “Not as much as he should have.”
“And this time?”
When Wayne flicked her eyes to the mirror, she saw Em’s face lit from below by the pale light of her phone. Taking notes, and maybe Sigyn’s story wouldn’t stay so lost, after all.
Assuming they survived this. Whatever it was.
“This time,” Loki started. “This time…we’ll see. Turn left, pull up beside the fence.”
/>
The latter to Wayne, and she obeyed. “We here?”
“We’re here,” Loki said. As soon as the car stopped, he opened the door and spilled himself out onto the street, groaning and stumbling as he unwound, cursing in a language that wasn’t English.
Wayne shared one last look with Em before following, stepping out onto asphalt that felt like taffy under her boots.
Loki was standing a short distance away, lacing his claws through a rusted, chain-link fence. It ran parallel to the road, indecipherable signs decorating it at regular intervals.
Wayne knew what those signs said. The roads had been hard to follow, but, now they’d arrived, the destination was unmistakable.
Golgotha Hill: the huge barren heap of gray shale, rising from the city, its only feature a lone dead tree.
It was a slag heap, or so the story went. Back from the town’s old mining days and stubbornly resistant to any form of rehabilitation. The city tried every decade or so; the last push in the late 1990s, spurred on by paranoia over toxic metals in the soil.
But the land wasn’t toxic. It was just…dead.
And creepy. Major creepy. Wayne had come up here in first year, jumping the fence and getting reference photos for a project. She’d felt the vibe in the air then, a hum beyond hearing and the taste of tin on her tongue. It’d been bad enough back in the real world, here it was—
“You…you feel that too, right?”
—bad enough to affect Em, even.
“Yeah,” Wayne said. “I feel it.”
They walked over to where Loki was threading his claws through the mesh. Wayne could feel the heat radiating from him, see the way the metal was glowing, white-hot in the darkness.
Wayne felt Em’s hand close around her elbow. “Look!” she hissed.
Wayne saw. And heard, a moment later when Loki pulled, wrenching a huge chunk of the fence free. He looked from the piece in his hands to the hole and back again, then grinned.
“Cool.” The still-glowing section clattered as he threw it aside. Then he turned and said, “Ladies. After you.”
The edges of the hole were also glowing, and Wayne could feel the heat as she dashed through, hoping nothing molten dripped on her skin.
Liesmith Page 22