by Kevin Hearne
Hel laughed at our reaction. “Your Fae sword has a name, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Moralltach.”
“This is Famine,” Hel said, pointing it at me. “Perhaps no match for a sword. You are the better warrior, I am sure, in any case. I’m not famous for my dueling skills. But this knife will be the death of you, regardless.” It began to twitch in her hand. “You see? It is drinking in your scent. The next creature it wounds will hunger for your flesh, and no other food will satisfy it.”
Perhaps she expected me to quail in fear or beg her for mercy at this point. She seemed to anticipate some sort of reaction, so I remained still and alert for any attack, saying nothing. The daughter of Loki tilted her head quizzically.
“Do you doubt that I know of a creature to whom your sword means nothing?”
I shrugged.
Hel hissed in frustration. “So be it. Roy.” The knife stopped twitching and she sank the “happy dagger” into its sheath — namely, her abdomen. Showing no ill effects from this, she turned and loped away to the north, in an extremely awkward and unsightly gait but at a surprisingly fast clip the widow never could have managed.
Not really. I’m in trouble.
Right. She’s running to find someone to kill me.
I suppose I should.
“Sensei? What happened?” Granuaile asked. I didn’t have time to explain if I wanted to catch Hel. Gods Below, listen to me — why would I want to catch Hel?
I gave chase anyway, eliciting cries of dismay from those behind me, who had no idea what was going on. I heard them pursue me, even as I pursued a wee Irish widow across the Colorado Plateau. I steeled myself to remember that the sweet little old lady was a malevolent goddess who didn’t belong on this plane of existence. And no matter how I wished it were otherwise, that goddess was skittering around here because of me.
I’d been warned that my actions in Asgard would have dire consequences. The Morrigan told me they would, and so did Jesus — but he’d also said that only I could prevent the worst cataclysms from happening. Those cataclysms, I saw now, had to be the coming of Ragnarok; my actions had made the Norse apocalypse more likely rather than less. The forces that were supposed to stymie the onset of Ragnarok were either dead or crippled, thanks to me — and now there was no one around to deal with Hel on earth save myself.
On top of that, there was that prophecy of the sirens of Odysseus: If I was interpreting events correctly, they had foretold that the world would burn thirteen years from now. Perhaps their prophecy coincided with the advent of Ragnarok? The sons of Muspellheim were supposed to set the world on fire, according to the old tales. Would Hel have her forces marshaled by then? Would it even take her that long? Regardless, I felt I had to stop Hel, if for no other reason than that she’d personally threatened me. I needed that knife — and I wanted the widow’s body back. It hurt to see her used as an avatar of death.
Drawing some power from the earth, I increased my speed and began to gain on her quickly. Hel heard me drawing closer and cast a glance over her shoulder. Seeing me there, she abruptly stopped, and the little-old-lady façade sloughed away like a summer dress around her ankles. I slammed on my brakes hard as a twelve-foot-tall horror erupted from the top of the widow’s head and roared at me. It could be nothing but Hel’s true form, and she was half hot, half rot. Her right side was lithe and supple and built to cause major traffic accidents on the Pacific Coast Highway, with a full half head of lustrous hair, an attractive eye, and other goodies. If I were a giant and looking to date half a woman, I’d ask her out. But her left side — split right down the middle, mind — was like a particularly purulent zombie corpse, with bones and muscle fibers showing and some writhing-maggot action. She was the embodiment of the old saw that beauty is only skin deep. I spied the scabbard for Famine lodged between her lowest ribs, the handle sticking out into the air. If the hot side smelled like coffee and cinnamon rolls, it didn’t get through the stench of putrefying flesh the rot side was throwing down. I took a breath to exclaim something profound like “Whoa, shit!” but the smell triggered my gag reflex and I staggered away from her, retching. Behind me, I heard similar startled cries choked off by heaves and juicy splashes of vomit spilling on the ground. Hel lurched a couple of steps my way and made as if to pull Famine out of its sheath, but when I raised Moralltach defensively, demonstrating that her smell hadn’t completely overwhelmed me, she thought better of it. She blasted me again with an unholy Balrog belch, then she shrank back into the widow’s skin, which resealed itself at the top of the head, and resumed her macabre flight north.
I was tempted to let her go, but then I reminded myself of the stakes.
In order to save the world, I would simply hold my breath next time I got close.
Hel lengthened her stride until she seemed to be executing a never-ending triple jump instead of running. I began to close the distance, with Colorado’s energy providing the assist. When Hel spied me behind her for the second time, she didn’t erupt again from the widow’s head in an attempt to intimidate me. Instead, she stopped, turned, lifted her dead left hand toward me, and said with an unfocused gaze, “Draugar.”
That word brought me up short. It was the plural form of draugr, and those weren’t the sort of creatures you wanted two or more of. Even the singular would ruin most anyone’s day. I waited a moment for something heinous to appear. Nothing did. The unholy grin split the widow’s face one last time, and as Hel cackled at me I heard an alarmed squeal from the rear. It was Granuaile.
I stole a glance back and saw three corpses with dark blue skin between me and my friends, advancing toward them with a fair bit of menace — the corpses’outstretched arms weren’t pleading for hugs. Apparently Hel could summon draugar at will. Already large and overmuscled for corpses, they were growing, their arms swelling like Peeps in the microwave. I didn’t want to turn my back on Hel, but I didn’t see what choice I had. My dog and my apprentice — not to mention Frank and maybe Coyote — were in danger.
But Hel didn’t want to jump on my back. She just wanted me off hers. She turned and ran again to the north, leaving me to fend off three insanely strong zombies — not the George Romero kind that hungered for braaaains, but juiced-up Norse ones capable of magic in some tales. Oberon was barking, his hackles raised as the draugar approached them.
Don’t bother barking. They can’t feel fear. Harry them from behind or the flanks. See if you can knock them down, but don’t let them grab you, I told Oberon as I sprinted to help.
Why don’t high school math teachers ever come up with cool problems like this? If a 150-pound Irish wolfhound launches himself at seventeen miles per hour at a 250-pound draugr, will that dead motherfucker go down? The answer is Hel yes. Oberon actually scored a twofer, because the draugr he rode down to the ground clipped the knee of a second blue boogeyman. My hound nimbly leapt away from the clumsy attempt to grab him and circled back around to place himself between the draugar and Granuaile.
“Run!” I shouted at her, now that I was in range. “Just go!” Without any weapons or training, Granuaile wouldn’t stand a chance against these lads, and thankfully she obeyed. The advice should have held true for Frank Chischilly. He wasn’t a young man, and he was breathing hard already from trying to keep up with us this far. Coyote was urging him to bail. But he had pulled out a wee jish from his back pocket, and he was untying the rawhide knots as he backpedaled away from the third draugr. Coyote looked like he was trying to convince Frank to stop, but I couldn’t tell what was being said, because they spoke in Na
vajo. The last thing I saw was that Frank had worked the knots loose and dumped the contents of the jish on his head. Said contents appeared to be nothing more than various colors of herbs and pollen and sand.
Then I had to concentrate my attention on the first two draugar that Oberon had knocked down. After a few moments of disorientation, they did not lumber to their feet so much as dissolve into mist and re-form again — except that when they re-formed, they were standing up instead of lying prone. I was still behind them and gaining fast.
Let’s see if they can go all misty on a sword blade, I said. Iron hurt them but wasn’t always fatal, from what I’d heard. This was the first time I’d ever run into draugar. Though I’m sure Hel had other forces at her command, draugar would be the bulk of her army. They wore heavy helmets with chain ventails to protect their necks; it was low-cost stuff but enough to prevent easy decapitation. Otherwise they wore nothing but the ragged remnants of tunics and breeches that they had died in long ago. White bone shone through here and there where the blue necrotized flesh had torn or rotted away.
I came in from behind and hacked at the arm of the draugr on the right, expecting the blade to shear through fairly easily, but it sank into flesh and bone and got stuck as if it was lodged in soft wood. Caught by surprise, the draugr jerked away, and suddenly I was disarmed, Moralltach dangling impotently from the arm of this corpse. The Fae magic began to work, the blue flesh turning black, but it only made the creature shudder. Its flesh was already necrotic, the creature already dead, so the enchantment was unable to kill it again.
“I miss Fragarach,” I said, as both draugar turned to face me. Empty eye sockets and gaping skeletal smiles grimaced at me as they lurched forward. The one I’d hacked at made no effort to wrench the sword out of its arm. The arm was swelling, sealing the blade in if anything.
Can you knock down the blue one and buy me some time? I asked Oberon. I need to take care of this black one first.
Frank Chischilly was suddenly unbelievably strong, because he held what must have been a two-ton boulder above his head with one hand. As I watched, he jumped high into the air with it, one of those super anime leaps that are wholly unnecessary but completely awesome, and then came down with that boulder in his hand like he was dunking a basketball — a two-ton sandstone basketball that he slammed onto the head of the third draugr. The creature just disappeared under that rock, and Frank crouched down to land on top. If he’d been in the movies, he would have stayed there and risen slowly, heroically, as the dust cleared, but he leapt right down off that boulder and charged the last draugr, who was coming for me. Frank’s shirt strained at the buttons as muscles he didn’t have before threatened to burst out. His eyes were completely white and glowed a bit. I switched my vision to the magical spectrum, and Frank didn’t have that cute little white line in his aura anymore; he was almost entirely made of white magic now, at godlike levels. He whipped around his right arm in a backhand swing at the draugr’s head, and when his fist connected, it was like he had teed off on the fourth hole. The head sailed away into the north sky, in the direction that Hel had run, and the dead blue corpse sank to the ground. Frank roared at it, and the veins on his trunk-size neck stood out; the turquoise stone of his bolo tie snapped off the cord and went zinging away, and his massive quivering pecs reminded me of Lou Ferrigno’s. His opinion of the draugr established, he turned in a circle, searching for more foes. He looked faintly disappointed not to find any more — Hel was gone — and those glowing eyes examined us again for an uncomfortable few seconds, to make sure we weren’t legal targets. And then he began to deflate, the light winked out of his eyes, and he coughed once, violently, before slumping into a faint. Coyote darted in quickly to catch him; he was a frail old man again.
Chapter 6
“Okay, Coy — Mr. Benally, I mean — what the fuck just happened?”
“I should ask you the same thing, Mr. Collins!” Coyote snarled. “Who was that lady and what were those things?”
“Tell me about Frank first. Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah, he’ll be all right,” Coyote said, the anger in his voice modulating to regret. Frank’s chest was still moving up and down. “Wished he hadn’t of done that, though. He ain’t gonna get another shot, and I was kinda countin’ on him to use it on somethin’ else.”
“What’d he do?”
“He called Changing Woman and told her we had monsters here. Let himself be a vessel, see? So she sent her son, Monster Slayer, to help us out, a onetime limited engagement.” So that had been a god inside him. An aptly named one.
Granuaile’s footsteps approached from the south. “I’m assuming it’s safe now? Ugh,” she said, looking at the headless corpses. “What are those things?”
“They’re sort of like zombies on Red Bull with a little bit of ghost mixed in,” I said.
Frank moaned and his eyes snapped open. Then he closed them again and raised a hand to his head, saying something in Navajo that made Coyote laugh. He must have a killer headache. Coyote helped him up to a sitting position and patted him companionably on the back.
“All right, Mr. Collins,” Coyote said. “It’s your turn. Who was that lady?”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “I nearly crapped my pants.”
“That was Hel,” I said, “the Norse goddess of death.”
Frank turned to Coyote to see if he was buying it. “He’s not bullshitting?”
“Naw, this guy don’t usually tell stretchers about gods,” he answered. Then he asked me, “What did she want with you?”
“She, um, wanted my help, I guess.”
“Help with what?” Granuaile said, her lip curled. “Personal hygiene?”
“Um … destroying the world.” I tossed Moralltach aside and sat down heavily in the red dust next to Frank, executing a double face-palm. Saying that out loud took quite a bit out of me. What had I done when figures like Hel approached me as a potential ally? My primary reason for going through with the Asgard trip had been to preserve my honor by keeping my word. But I saw no honor in an unstained name now. If Ragnarok began because of me, no one would remember or care that I followed through on my promises. There would be no kind historians to write apologetics for me.
Usually I try to suppress any emotions that savor of regret, because they are invariably aperitifs to a main course of depression, and for the long-lived, that’s a recipe for suicide. But that doesn’t mean they
can’t sneak up on me sometimes.
And, like, gang-tackle me.
I felt a slight spell of vertigo as the enormity of what I’d done hit me. I wept silently behind my hands for Mrs. MacDonagh, for Leif, for Gunnar, for Väinämöinen, for the Norse, and for the untold suffering to come because of my bad decisions. Druids were supposed to be forces of preservation, not destruction, and I could not dance around the fact that my stupid pride had turned me into a misbegotten cockwaffle.
Granuaile squatted down next to me and put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Well, clearly she didn’t like what you had to say about that,” she said.
“Just checkin’ here,” Frank said, his voice thick. “Geologists don’t normally get invited to help destroy the world, do they?”
Behind my hands, I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No, they don’t.” I pressed my tears away with my palms and then dropped them to my lap. “But don’t ask me who or what I really am right now. I’m supposed to be dead.”
“Well, it seems to be a day for dead people to be walkin’ around,” Frank said. “And disintegratin’.” He pointed over to the draugr bodies, which were turning into ash and mixing with the dust of the plateau.
“What was the deal with that freaky knife she had?” Coyote wondered aloud.
“It’s called Famine. She said the next thing she cut with it wouldn’t rest until it had eaten me.”
“Ew,” Granuaile said.
Oberon tried to cheer me up.