by C. Gockel
Dale puts a hand through his hair. Beside Sleipnir, Star Flower snuffles, “Their young are so charming, but their forelimb tentacles are disturbing.”
Dale’s eyes slide to the mare. “Forelimb tentacles?” He lifts his hand and stares at it. “Oh, yeah, fingers,” he says wiggling the aforementioned appendages.
Sleipnir shakes his head. “You do understand us!”
“He’s magic,” says Star Flower, cautiously approaching.
Sleipnir snuffles closer to Dale, as the human swallows audibly and takes a deep breath as though gathering his strength. The magic is good, but the blood is disturbing, as is a faint smell of chemicals within it. Also, Dale’s appearance has changed. Where before he had the yellow-colored head-mane and pale skin that Sleipnir thinks of as ‘reverse palomino,’ now his hair is silvery-white—and his skin is much paler, as though he has not seen the sun in months.
“Yeah, Sleipnir, I do understand you.” Sleipnir takes a step back, almost rearing in his surprise. Dale’s eyes slide to Star Flower. “And I’m magic, understanding languages is my talent and ... It’s a long story.”
He grasps his stomach, where the stench of blood arises. Sleipnir sees it beginning to stain the faux hide he wears. “Sleipnir,” Dale says, “my buddy Steve, do you remember him?”
Sleipnir snorts. “Of course I remember the leader of your herd and his child filly.” Turning to Star Flower and Pearl Horn, Sleipnir says, “They were part of my first free herd, as was this one.”
“This one is going to die,” says Pearl Horn, head bowed, nostrils wide. She still stands a body’s length away. “It appears an old wound on his stomach is reopening.”
Star Flower snuffles. “I smell a chemical the Black Dwarves use to thin blood. No wonder it can’t clot.”
“Damn it,” Dale mutters, “I knew it was taking too long …”
“You can fix him,” says Sleipnir, raising his head to the mares. Sleipnir doesn’t know such magic, but they do.
Throwing back her head, Pearl Horn stamps a hoof. “He doesn’t meet our prerequisites for associating with two legs.”
“Sleipnir, it doesn’t matter. Listen to me,” Dale says sharply. “You have to get to Steve. He’s in the Iron Wood on Jotunheim, you have to tell him somehow …” He closes his eyes. “Odin stole Laevithin … It’s the strongest weapon, even stronger than the toys Brett and Bryant have been making.” His voice drops to a whisper. “He has to be warned.”
“He’s putting his herd’s life above his own,” whispers Star Flower, cautiously approaching Dale.
“Maybe he does meet our prerequisites,” whispers Pearl Horn, drawing a few steps closer.
Sleipnir snorts loudly and stamps all eight of his hooves for attention. “Is Bohdi with them?” he asks.
Dale’s eyelids move rapidly but he makes no sound, and then Sleipnir realizes that since he can’t make the sound of the human tongue he’s used his own language to say Bohdi’s name. Literally translated, it means two-legged fire-mother.
“Dr. Lewis?” says Dale.
Sleipnir stamps a hoof and tries again. “The two-legged bay-colored colt with fire.”
“Bohdi?”
“Yes,” Sleipnir whinnies.
Dale sputters. His eyes close. “Yeah, he’s with them. Maybe I can write a note and you can take it …”
His voice drifts off. He takes a breath that is almost inaudible to Sleipnir’s sharp ears.
“Unconscious,” says Star Flower.
“Poisoned,” says Pearl Horn.
“You will fix him?” Sleipnir asks, backing away.
Pearl Horn snuffles closer to the human. “He is part of your first herd.”
“And putting the herd above his own life,” says Star Flower. She presses her muzzle to Sleipnir’s. She smells like clover, and long golden grasses, and it makes Sleipnir sad to leave her. “We will take care of him. Go find your mother,” she whispers.
Snorting, Sleipnir backs away and then slips through time. He takes the closest World Gate to Jotunheim, and then slips along the banks of the great sea that borders the Iron Wood. As he passes, the trees at the forest edge raise their branches toward him. He has never been in the Iron Wood, and in winter, with the trees desperate for sunlight and especially ravenous, it could be deadly to do so. He slows his pace until he is at a normal horse trot, his hooves sinking deep into the snow, the chill of the world stinging his muzzle and seeping through his summer coat.
He rears slightly. How will he get his human herd’s attention? Shaking his head, he looks for signs of habitation. Surely, word of Odin’s former warhorse is bound to travel quickly? He lifts his snout and sniffs. He catches familiar scents in the wind, but they are mingled with death. Alarmed, Sleipnir gallops toward the smells of Thor, Jörmungandr, and Claire.
A voice rises in the wind. “I have to save my dad, and I have to save Bohdi … he’s kind of like my big brother, or my uncle … and I have to get to Asgard to do it, and I just need someone, anyone, to help me.”
It is Claire, she is alive, and she wants to save their parents. He slips through time, approaches more swiftly, and sees Jörmungandr sprawled out on the beach, Claire tiny and as slender as a stalk of wheat, just before him. Sleipnir slips back into time just behind her.
She spins and lightning sparks in her hand; he rears up in surprise. Thor’s corpse is at her feet, and she holds the warrior’s hammer. He shakes his head. He never cared much for Thor; Thor always treated him as just a horse.
As his fore hooves touch the ground, he inhales deeply. He smells tears, but more than that, he smells Claire’s rage. This is not the little filly he knew in the human realm who wept and begged her father to let Sleipnir stay in her herd. She has changed. She is magical like Dale. More than that, he can feel her fury, and it is contagious. Shaking his head, he bugles.
“Sleipnir,” she says, wiping her tiny nose with a forelimb, Thor’s hammer sparking in the other. “Can you help me?”
In response, Sleipnir lowers himself to the ground.
Claire runs forward, her slender hind limbs moving with startling speed and grace through the snow. He expects her to jump onto his back. Instead, she throws her arms around his neck and presses her lips to his forelock. “I missed you,” she says. He smells salty tears again, but she quickly releases him and climbs aboard his back. Picking up on the determination in her movements, he rises to his feet.
“They went through the sea arch to Niflheim and Hel,” she says.
Sleipnir’s ears go back, following her words. He’s been through the main World Gate between Niflheim and Asgard many times.
Claire sounds uncertain. “It’s across the water, I guess you can’t go that way—”
Sleipnir snorts, even though he knows she doesn’t mean to be insulting. He stomps the ground with all his hooves, shifting his body weight and making her grab tight to his mane.
And then with his most ferocious battle scream, he charges toward the waves, slipping through time, across the water on his way to Hel.
x x x x
Amy stares into the teacup in Hoenir’s hand. “No!” she screams as Heimdall’s sword soars in a shimmering arc, neatly severing Bohdi’s head at the neck.
Looking up at her, Hoenir stammers. “I’m sorry—”
Amy’s fists ball at her side. “No! I will not let him die, not a third time!”
“A third time?” whispers Hoenir.
“Lewis,” Rush says. “I liked Ha—Bohdi too, but we need to find the team—”
But Amy’s already dashing through the raptor-door to the pen at the other side. The kitchen is empty and the velociraptors have slipped back outside. Looking around the room, her jaw gets tight. No, it’s not just a kitchen—it’s an examination room. Hoenir was—maybe is—a veterinarian extraordinaire. He’ll have supplies here. Slipping quickly out of the raptor pen, she starts digging beneath the counter and finds what she is looking for. Grabbing the items, she slips them into her apron and goes
back to the gate to the raptor pen, a plan forming in her brain.
Rush and Hoenir are already inside the swinging door. “Rush,” she says. “I’m creating a World Gate, right here. Give me a bullet.”
His jaw gets tight, but he doesn’t protest … maybe he thinks it’s the only way to get to his guys. Taking out a few bullets, he presses them into her palm.
“My goodness,” says Hoenir, staring at her hand. “Those bullets are very powerful. I can feel their magic from here.”
“Hoenir,” Amy says. “You might help us more if you go back to Earth. Let Brett and Bryant know we’re coming. Do you know how to get hold of them?”
Hoenir nods. “I’ve been covertly supplying them with Promethean wire for years now.” Amy shakes her head. The Promethean wire is Vanir in origin—and Hoenir had been held captive for years in Vanaheim as part of a prisoner exchange. It should have been a clue.
Hoenir slips from the raptor pen, carefully locking it up behind him, and then leaves the kitchen. Grasping the bullets in her free hand, Amy says, “Rush, you saw the scene in the teacup. I can fix Bohdi but you’re going to have to clear any guards who stand in the way.”
Rush opens his mouth and before any sound comes out, Amy hears the kitchen door swing again. “Stop right there!” Beatrice says.
Rush freezes in place. Amy feels like gravity has increased, or like she’s moving in jello, but she turns around.
She finds Beatrice pointing her umbrella, made from the shaft of Gungnir, at her. For hundreds of years Gungnir had belonged to Odin. It must have picked up Odin’s essence and ability to stop time. She looks down at the bullet; it’s keeping Gungnir from working on her—but she’s not consciously focusing her magic, she blinks—because her nature, her essence, is change. Her eyes widen. Odin had tried to stop her when she was in the other universe, but she’d been holding Laevithin, and it had augmented her own nature, and she’d slipped away. She gulps. The only other person who could resist Odin’s magic was Loki … at the end of his life he was so strong he could resist Odin alone.
Another thought occurs to her ... Bohdi had swept away Beatrice’s umbrella without a bullet when Amy held his hand. Her eyes widen. Together she and Bohdi have broken the magic of Order, they are Creation and Destruction, they are both Chaos, and they can stop Odin even if he has Laevithin ... if they are together. She squeezes the bullet. At least she hopes they can.
She hears the raptor-door behind her swing, and a hiss and a clang, as the animal smells Beatrice and leaps onto the bars of the pen.
She meets Beatrice’s eyes. Her grandmother doesn’t look angry, but she’s shaking. “Amy, don’t do it …”
Amy gulps. “Grandma, I have to face Odin someday. I’m going to Asgard now, are you with me or against me?”
x x x x
The side of Bohdi’s head hits the stones, and the feeling is strangely muted. He tries to get up. At first nothing happens, but then he stands, feeling oddly weightless. He looks around. Einherjar are running to the platform. He sees their lips moving. He raises his hands to fire his Glock, but his hands are empty. The Einherjar stream up the stairs to the platform, and Bohdi expects them to order him to raise his hands above his head, so he does that, proactively. But the Einherjar ignore him. Instead, they run to Heimdall’s body.
And that’s weird. Someone comes over to him and stops just inches from his nose. The man looks down and curses. Bohdi looks down, too—and sees his body spilled out on the stones, his head, lying on its side, a few feet away.
Bringing his hands down, Bohdi looks down at them in horror—and they’re not there, all he sees is his headless body … a headless corpse. He feels a wave of panic and can do nothing about it. He can’t fight; he can’t scream. He’s helpless and amorphous. Shouldn’t he be incarnating as someone else right about now?
No, wait, consciousness remains tied to a body immediately after death. Amy told him that after Ruger died. He thought she’d just been trying to make him feel better.
Amy … he wants so badly to see her now … he won’t remember her much longer, will he? He’s going to have to find her all over again. He wishes she were here, so he could say goodbye, even if she couldn’t hear him. If only he could find her … staring down at his body, he wishes … and wishes … and realizes his body is getting farther away. From a bird’s eye view he watches as the Einherjar crowd along Heimdall, some falling to their knees to weep. No one pays attention to his body. He floats higher, and his attention is caught by a fire raging in the orchards beyond Odin’s palace. He sees Odin, Laevithin glowing blue in his grip, locked in combat with Sutr, the Fire Giant with the sun-bright sword. As they battle, Einherjar and Frost Giants stand frozen in place immediately around them … but beyond their melee Fire Giants are running through the orchards toward the city proper, leaving flames in their wake.
Bohdi’s consciousness jumps ahead to the city. There is a tower that catches his eye. Outside of it he sees a crowd of Asgardians, with Valli at their head, shouting … his amorphous form feels their rage as though it were a tangible thing. In a realm of the spirit, could the intangible be all that is real?
His consciousness floats through the walls, and he sees the SEAL team, surrounded by bodies—it looks like a grenade has been detonated. And then he’s floating up through the ceiling and floors and he sees a hallway packed with Fire Giants that look like concentration camp victims. At the end of the hallway Sigyn materializes behind an Einherjar, firing a Glock as she does. The bullets bounce from his armor. The man turns around, crossbow raised ... and is attacked from behind but not before the bolt is loosed. Sigyn falls, and Bohdi sees Steve on top of the Einherjar, a chain in his hands wrapped around the man’s neck. He feels rather than hears Steve cry Sigyn’s name.
He watches Steve jump over the Einherjar’s body and lift Sigyn from the ground. One of Steve’s eyes is swollen shut. The other is glowing purple. Bohdi feels Steve talking to Sigyn, urging her to hang on, and he feels her being brave, making a joke about always getting shot in the tower. He wants so much to be there and help …
Time seems to speed up … maybe when you aren’t attached to your body time doesn’t hold you? Steve and the team are moving in fast forward. He watches as they let the Fire Giants go. Many of the Fire Giants run from the tower, but many remain. One by one, the remaining Fire Giants fall to one knee; they pledge their loyalty to the son of Roger who delivered them from Odin and the wrath of Sutr who would have them drawn and quartered for letting themselves fall prisoner.
Bohdi would laugh if he could. It figures; Bohdi let loose a chaotic mob of trolls in Chicago but Steve is organizing an army. Steve isn’t comforted by their promises of service; Sigyn is fading in his arms, and a new friend behind him is likely dead, and he’s terrified for Claire and worried for Bohdi. Bohdi tries to reach out, to tell Steve he’s fine, at least Odin can’t catch him anymore … but he can’t. He feels himself drifting up and away from the scene. But he feels Steve ask Larson, “What is the backup plan for getting out of here?”
“Gerðr says we should go to the Center, to the World Gates—they’ll be heavily fortified, but we may make it through.”
The Center—is that where Bohdi is? It sounds like the right place. Maybe Steve will find his body—at least he would know Bohdi is safe, then.
Bohdi feels himself drifting away from the scene, and he wishes he could call out, just once … and then he’s floating above Asgard again. In the center of the orchard, the Fire Giants and Einherjar around Odin and Sutr are still frozen in place while the two men remain locked in combat. Bohdi watches as Odin shatters Sutr’s sword, but the Fire Giant doesn’t relent. He attacks the Allfather with the stump of the blade.
Bohdi feels the panic of the people in the city, even as he feels a sensation like the universe is trying to pull him up and away. And he wants to leave. The fires from the orchard have reached the city, and the panic of the men and women who live there is rising up all around him, and
it fills him with despair.
And then strangely close he hears Amy’s voice, “No, no, no! Bohdi, no!”
And like he’s caught in a whirlpool, his consciousness is condensing, coalescing, and being sucked back to his body.
Chapter 36
Amy creeps through the tunnel that leads through the three-meter thick wall that separates the rest of Asgard from the area referred to as the Center. The tunnel has two enormous metal portcullises. One is in front of her, just before the opening to the Center. The other is behind her, a nose away from the entrance to the city. The one before her is open; the one behind that leads to the city is closed.
The tunnel is strangely empty—as are the two custom houses set into the wall on either side of the tunnel. She reaches the end of the tunnel and stops short before stepping into the sunlight. She’s seen the Center in Loki’s memories, but the real thing makes her almost gasp aloud.
Wider than a football field, the Center is a circular area within which the major World Gates to all eight of the other realms are located. Each World Gate is a circle of flat stones. Unlike the tiny, secret World Gates she is accustomed to sneaking through, these are the conduits of commerce and troops, and each is as wide as a highway. There is no commerce today and no civilians in sight. Between the World Gates rises a dais. It is the place where Heimdall prefers to stand guard. Above it is the entrance to the Void, not activated, thankfully. The whole plain is empty—because of the recent unrest in the realms? From where she stands she can see Einherjar, a few mages, and men wearing customs officer uniforms collecting the body of a fallen warrior. She blinks. The fallen warrior is Heimdall. As they begin to carry his body down the steps of the dais, Amy sees Bohdi’s body headless and abandoned on the stones.
“No, no, no! Bohdi, no!” she whispers, and then covers her mouth with her hands.
Above her, she hears someone say, “Did you hear something?”
Amy ducks back into the shadow of the tunnel. Squeezing her magic bullet, she runs to the closed portcullis, sees a flash of rainbow light, crashes through the tiny World Gate she has just created, and finds herself just outside of the raptor pen. Beatrice is loading her M4 with a clip of magic bullets. Rush is standing beside her grandmother. His hazel eyes meet Amy’s.