The Bones of Giants

by Christopher Golden

  Brokk nodded. “There are many darkling races in the nine worlds. We Nidavellim are metalsmiths and armorers, respected for our craft. The Svartalves have no craft and no art. They are carrion creatures who once fed off the leavings of the Aesir and the giants. In the millennia since the age of gods ended in blood and fire, they have lurked in shadow and fed off the refuse left behind by humanity, and sometimes on the dead.”

  The way he said it was so detached, so matter of fact, that Hellboy shuddered. “Can’t wait to meet up with those freaks again. What about you guys? How do you manage to walk around looking like that without drawing attention?”

  Eitri actually smiled.

  Brokk narrowed his gaze, tilted his head to one side, and studied Hellboy for a moment. Then he shrugged. “We hide. Sometimes we hide where the humans are least likely to look… right in their midst.”

  “One of the first things our kind learned about humanity was this: they do not believe what they see. Rather, they see what they believe. And they don’t believe in us anymore.”

  That seemed almost too simple an explanation for Hellboy, but he did not have the time or the inclination to press the matter.

  “Okay. But why did Aickman take off in the middle of the night, and why did your little buddies stop me from catching up to him?”

  The two squat warriors exchanged a dark glance. When they gazed up at Hellboy again, both Nidavellim wore the gravest of expressions.

  “Thrym,” Brokk said grimly.

  Eitri nodded in agreement. “Thrym.”

  Hellboy narrowed his eyes, bared his teeth in a grimace. “Oh, well that explains everything. What the heck is Thrym?”

  But the word resounded in his head, caused a flutter of something buried deep in his mind, the awakening of some awareness that he had not always possessed. Thrym.

  He knew what Thrym was. Or, rather, who.

  In his grip, Mjollnir grew so cold that it burned even that hand that could not be burned. Hellboy twitched as a memory surfaced in him, a memory that was not his own.

  Thrym.

  To the mountain had he come in search of Thrym the Hollow. Through the tallest forest and across battle-scarred plains, along the River Iving and then across it to the foothills of the peaks wherein the citadel of giants had been built. But Thrym was not to be found in Utgard.

  The king of the frost giants was no longer welcome there.

  Across the whole of Jotunheim he was scorned by giant and frost giant alike. Caverns carved of stone and ice housed the once king and his few remaining subjects now, and even they did not trust him. For Thrym had been a tyrant, legendary in his cruelty. And so, though the soulless king still taunted and raged at his enemies, he had no allies save those who were outcasts as well.

  His hatred of the Aesir had given birth to a thousand campaigns, from the most outrageous attacks to the quietest murders. Though he was considered crippled even by his own, the Allfather would not countenance the mischief of Thrym for even another day. He sent his son to dispatch the deposed king, the hollow one.

  The mountainside was crusted with ice and snow and the skeletons of trees, the jagged upthrust stones of the earth’s fury. It was a forbidding place, though not without its beauty. The caverns had been hacked from the earth with barbaric brutality. When the thunderer crested the steep face and reached the plateau just beneath those caverns, wind whipping his cloak of furs behind him, he found the ghoulishly screaming mouth of the main cavern guarded by two sentries.

  Their eyes were white crystals, and icicles hung from their heads as though they were hair. A dusting of snow lay thick atop their shoulders and their fingers were tipped with jagged shards of ice.

  “I have come for Thrym,” he announced, Mjollnir cold to the touch in his grasp.

  And then the sentries stunned him. They moved aside and turned their eyes away from the mouth of the cavern so as not to see what was to come. They were a cruel race, perhaps even evil, though evil was so hard to define. But what their king had become was an abomination even in their frozen eyes.

  He passed the sentries and made his way within, encountering others who ought to have stood and defended their master but did not. At last, in the deepest recesses of the frosted stone, he discovered Thrym. He who had once been king of the Frost Giants lay upon his side, knees tucked up toward his belly, hands crossed on his chest. There had been a time when to look up at Thrym on the field of battle meant to peer into the clouds, but on this day he seemed severely diminished. The ice where he lay must have melted when he first reclined there, for now it had built up around him so that Thrym was all of a piece with the cavern itself. He a part of it, and it a part of him.

  His eyes were open too wide and his head tilted downward so that streaks of tears and snot and drool had frozen in diagonal ribs of clotted, discolored ice that ran like scars across the side of his face, becoming icicles themselves, some pillars that went from floor to flesh, others incomplete stalagmites and stalactites of his hollow madness.

  But Thrym was not silent. Low and resonant, like the deep cracking of polar ice, he cursed the Allfather and the alves and the Nidavellim and even all his brothers and sisters in Utgard. In savage detail he outlined his plans for the evisceration of his enemies, as well as their children and brides. And when blind, mad Thrym began to speak of draping himself in Sif’s organs, the thunderer struck.

  With a single blow of Mjollnir, he cracked the frozen skull of the hollow king. What spilled from within was brown and red, thick with a stench of rotten meat, and it melted the frost on the stone floor. An icy wind washed through that cavern, and

  Thrym was dead. When stories were told of that day, they would attribute an element of compassion to the thunderer’s actions.

  They would lie.

  Thrym was a horrid thing, truly a monster. Killing him was an act of vengeance and honor, not of mercy.

  Hellboy blinked, looked around the streets of Gamla Stan in alarm, Mjollnir raised as if to defend himself. Eitri and Brokk were beside him but they backed away, startled by his sudden movement. He could see their breath misting on the night air, ice particles glistening in it, and then he realized he could see his own as well.

  “I remember,” Hellboy said. Then he glanced down at Mjollnir and saw that the front of the war hammer had a dusting of frost upon it.

  “Thrym?” Eitri asked.

  Hellboy nodded. “Thrym. But how can it be Thrym?”

  The Nidavellim explained.

  With Pernilla’s help, Abe had located a hammer and some nails. They had brought a broken table up from the basement and Abe had used it to board up the broken window. Then the woman had made cocoa for them with steamed milk and melted chocolate and they sat together in the book-strewn parlor and sipped at their cups, their eyes straying to the hallway from time to time as they talked quietly. The front door was locked up tight, but Abe’s anxiety came not from concern that more of those creatures would return. Rather, he wondered how long Hellboy would be gone.

  “He is your friend,” Pernilla said, a trace of wonder in her voice.

  Abe nodded as he sipped the delicious chocolate, a swirl of moist steam tickling his nose. “You find that strange?”

  She lowered her gaze. “Forgive me. For my whole life the only thing I have known of Hellboy was that he was a monster who wished to take my father’s life.”

  “Well, obviously he doesn’t want to kill your father,” Abe replied, scoffing at the preposterousness of it. “Though he might have the urge to slap him around a little. It ticks him off when someone else’s greed almost costs him his life. He’s funny that way.”

  “Of course I know that now,” she said, shifting uncomfortably on the sofa. “I am grateful that he is willing to try to save my father in spite of that. Do… do you think they will be all right?”

  Abe shrugged, glancing out into the hall again. “Hellboy’s been through a lot of scrapes. He’ll come back as soon as he can.”

  “And my fa
ther?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Abe felt guilty suddenly, as though he had wronged this woman somehow. Despite the lights in the corners of the room, her features were cast into shadow, framed by her hair, but it made her look vulnerable rather than mysterious.

  “Tell me about your work,” he said, a smile on his thin lips.

  And so the conversation began, and slowly the world disappeared around them. Pernilla discussed her own research into comparative mythology and her desire to teach at the University of Stockholm, an ambition her father decried. He was growing old and claimed to need her to aid him in his own studies, but those efforts only frustrated her, for her father never included her fully. She was a research assistant and little more. Abe pointed out that they would be meeting with Professor Aronsson the next day, and that he might be willing to speak with her about opportunities at the university.

  Pernilla smiled brightly and placed a hand across her chest in a gesture so disarmingly unself-conscious that Abe could not help but laugh. He was pleased when she did not take offense. The clock seemed to fall silent, the minutes slipping rather than ticking by. His cocoa grew cold in the cup and the parlor seemed a world unto itself. When she had tired of talking about herself and her work, Pernilla studied him closely.

  Shyly, she glanced away. “I fear you’ll find me rude again, but I have to ask. What you said when you arrived, it seemed as though you don’t know where you come from.”

  “Washington, D.C.,” Abe replied, the quip an automatic defense mechanism. He regretted it immediately. She had been so open with him that she deserved more than that.

  Pernilla blinked, regret in her eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I know what you mean.” And he told her what little he knew about the day decades before when plumbers had broken through a sealed door in the basement of St. Trinian’s Hospital in D.C. and discovered the secret lab within, and the fluid-filled glass cylinder inside of which floated a seemingly lifeless figure. The label upon the cylinder had identified him as an Icthyo Sapien and had borne the date April 14, 1865.

  Her eyes widened at that. “1865?”

  Abe nodded. “That was the day President Lincoln was assassinated. That’s where… that’s where I got my name.” He didn’t like to think about that part, about the fact that a couple of whiskey-breathed, chain-smoking plumbers in a dank hospital basement had given him his name, as if they were his parents.

  “It’s a proud name,” Pernilla said.

  He smiled at that.

  From down the corridor came the resounding echo of someone knocking at the door. Abe’s gaze darted to the clock and he saw that it was a quarter past three in the morning. He and Pernilla rose at the same time and went cautiously to the front door.

  “Who is it?” Pernilla called.

  “The Big Bad Wolf,” Hellboy replied crankily. “Open the door.”

  Abe sighed. “Sorry. He gets like that when he hasn’t had enough sleep.” He unlocked the door and swung it open.

  Hellboy stood on the steps. Behind him, gazing up expectantly, were a pair of armed dwarves with dark, mottled flesh and iron rings tied in their hair. They were both armed and they looked almost startled as their eyes focused on Abe. The two little men bared their chipped and jagged teeth and their hands moved swiftly to the weapons at their hips.

  “Good God,” Pernilla gasped, and she put a hand up to cover her mouth. “Are… are they Nidavellim?”

  The stumpy warriors looked very proud suddenly and straightened up. Hellboy frowned and glanced back at them.

  “What? Them? Yeah. Brokk. Eitri. Meet Abe Sapien and Pernilla Aickman,” he said. Then he focused again on the dwarves. “Guard the house. When the sun comes up, try to do it without drawing too much attention to yourselves.”

  They bowed their heads and withdrew down the stairs. Hellboy came into the house and shut the door behind him. As Abe locked up once more, Pernilla stared at Hellboy, gnawing on her lower lip.

  “My father? You couldn’t save him?” she asked.

  “Save him?” Hellboy replied. Then he softened slightly and rubbed at the back of his neck. “Aw, I’m sorry. You thought? No. I woke up… well, the squirrel woke me up, but when I came downstairs I saw him taking off down the street. The Svartalves weren’t taking him away. They were making sure I didn’t stop him.”

  Abe was stunned by this news, but not nearly so much as Pernilla was. Though she was exhausted, she had still had some color in her cheeks. Now, sud­denly, in the dim light of the foyer, she looked like a walking corpse, her flesh devoid of any flush or even emotion.

  “Svartalves?” Abe asked, mainly to change the subject.

  “Yep.”

  The amphibian hooked a thumb toward the door. “And those two guys? There a reason they’re suddenly your bodyguards?”

  Hellboy halfheartedly raised Mjollnir. “I’m the thunder-bearer.”

  “Ah, well, yeah, that explains it,” Abe replied, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in his voice.

  Pernilla still looked stricken, and though Hellboy had never been good with that sort of thing, he went to her and laid his left hand upon her shoulder very gently. His voice was tired and low and a bit like smashing granite with a sledge, but somehow, Abe thought it sounded soothing. He hoped Pernilla did too.

  “I tried to catch him,” Hellboy said. “There’s a lot going on here, with the Nidavellim and the Svartalves and the hammer. Trust me when I say I don’t want to hurt him, I just want to find him and see if he can help explain it all. But there’s no way we’re going to do that tonight. We all need sleep. Why don’t we get some, and in the morning I’ll tell you both all the crazy stuff that’s in my head right now, and we’ll go see Professor Aronsson, and then maybe together we can figure out where to start looking for your father.”

  There was a long moment when she just looked at the closed door as though she could see right through the wood to the street beyond. Then she nodded and touched the hand on her shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Pernilla slipped away from Hellboy and came to Abe. “And thank you,” she said again.

  “We’re going to figure this out,” Abe told her, though he had no such confidence himself. “You’ll see. Professor Aronsson will help.”

  Silence.

  All was perfectly, almost unnaturally silent within the home Karl Aronsson lived in upon the grounds of the University of Stockholm. It was close to the halls where he lectured and the offices where he met with students and the library the university was so proud of. But Karl never worked in any of those places. His research was always done in the study inside his own home.

  A pop and hiss broke the silence. In the fireplace, the embers of the night’s blaze still glowed and announced themselves from time to time. Karl had fallen asleep at his desk, face upon an open book, body splayed in the thick-legged chair that was comfortable beneath his bulk but terrible for his back. His breathing was light, no trace of a snore, and yet he was deeply, profoundly asleep, his arms crooked at the elbow and arrayed around his head like walls built to protect him. Photographs had spilled from the top of the desk to the floor. A notebook filled with his scrawl lay open, awaiting more ink. The last words that had been written there were underlined three times. One of the words was “Thrym.” There was a map there as well and circled upon it in green ink was the place upon the river Dalbard where the corpse had been found. The dead god and the hammer. The discovery of a lifetime for Karl Aronsson, and one that would change the way the world regarded history and mythology forever.

  But that was not the only spot circled on the map. Another ring of green ink signified the place north of the river where Hellboy had led them to that cave, whose carvings Karl believed he had translated. If he was correct in his translation, the result was equally stunning.

  A third location was marked on the map. This one within Stockholm itself. After rereading legends he had sifted through a thousand times, Karl had calc
u­lated distance and angle and pinpointed that one spot. It seemed impossible and yet eminently reasonable all at the same time. And after what they had discovered in the frozen north, what did it really mean any more to say something was not possible?

  He had contemplated these things, these questions, for hours and eventually laid his head down upon the desk. Just to rest his eyes, just for a moment. Now he slept with a tiny smile at the corners of his mouth as the room grew cold in the absence of fire.

  Another pop and hiss broke the silence as the glow of embers dimmed further. Karl started in his chair, snorting a bit. He shifted uncomfortably, his sleeping mind aware of the ache in his back from too many hours slouched across the desk.

  But the hiss did not go away this time. In his dreams, Karl frowned deeply, troubled by the continuation of this sound. Then it was not a hiss, but a slow, deliberate scratching. The ache in his back and the foreign nature of this sound intruded at last upon his sleep, and Karl opened his eyes. He shivered a bit and sat up slowly, his mouth dry and his face a bit numb from lying on the hard surface for so long.

  There came another hiss, but it was not from the cinders.

  Karl turned and then froze, so astonished by the creatures who emerged from the darkness around him that he was unable to utter even a word. Here was yet another miracle, another myth come true. But these were not dry bones or a tomb devoid of artifacts. They were real, their powder blue eyes bright in the darkness of his study.

  He stared at them until they tore out his eyes.

  The last of the embers in the fireplace died with him.

  Chapter Seven

  The morning came too soon and Hellboy fought it for as long as he could. For some time after he had first groaned and slitted his eyes open to find invasive sunlight in the room, he shifted and turned and slept fitfully. Each time he woke he curled away from the windows and hoped that he could sleep a bit longer, that the next time he opened his eyes he would not feel quite so tired.

  At last, late in the morning if he gauged by the angle of the sun through the glass, he found he could not force himself to sleep any longer. His eyes were dry and his head felt as though it were stuffed with cotton, but he rose from the guest bed with Mjollnir still clutched in his hand. Already it had begun to feel as though he had always held that hammer, and the familiarity bothered him. This was not something he planned to get used to.