by Dyrk Ashton
Peter takes out as many locusts as he can as they enter the hall, spinning to slice any that come near, blasting the higher-flying ones he can’t reach. He calls a ball of light to the head of Gungnir and wields it as a hammer, then sweeps the swarm with a jagged laser of lightning. He dares not use all the power he and Gungnir are capable of to bring the staircase tunnel down, for fear of collapsing the entire vault.
“Myrddin Wyllt!” Peter shouts without looking back. “Hurry!”
Eyes wide with intensity, weaving his words at greater volume, Myrddin presses the shining end of his wand against the wall. Cracks of light radiate from it, zigzagging across the stone as they search for the edges of the hidden door.
All the while, the staircase booms and quakes from the Nidhoggs’ assault above. More stone tumbles down.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” Fi asks Mrs. Mirskaya.
“My words have no power here,” Mrs. Mirskaya answers, exasperated. “The wards cause interference, and atmosphere is all wrong.”
Fi remembers something and backs away slowly while the others are distracted by the fight at the stairs and Myrddin’s efforts, then runs toward the far end of the vault.
Zeke grabs Mrs. Mirskaya by the arm. She glowers at him. “What do you think you are doing?”
He points and Mrs. Mirskaya glimpses Fi rounding the end of the first row of shelves. She curses in Russian, something about disobedient children, and takes off after her. Zeke trails behind.
Edgar cuts down a locust that made it past Peter and Pratha, then another. Mol barks. Edgar looks down to see him facing the other way, then spies Zeke rounding the row as well. “For pity’s sake.” At the incoming buzz of another locust he spins back, ducking and swinging his sword overhead. It cleaves through the locust’s silver helm, bisecting it from head to tail.
“I must stay with Myrddin Wyllt,” he says to Mol. Mol barks up at him. “Good lad.” Mol barrels off to track down the others.
Baphomet hobbles closer in his chains. “I can fight, Galahad.” The colonel doesn’t look any too happy with that idea.
Edgar eyes him as if considering it, but says, “I know you can. Now, against the wall.” Baphomet gazes back, expressionless, then obeys. Edgar spins and takes out three more locusts with deft strokes of his sword.
* * *
Fi skids around the end of an aisle and sprints to where Peter dropped the Singing Sword on a shelf, across from the ruined Siege Perilous. She hesitates only a moment, then picks it up with one hand. She’s turning to run back when a pair of locusts, having escaped Peter and Pratha, buzz over the top of the shelf up the aisle. They spy her and zoom to attack. She takes the grip in both hands. “Aah AAAAH!” The locusts slow and hover a moment, then rocket toward her.
Fi says, “Oh shit,” and swings the sword like a baseball bat. The first locust takes a gash to the thorax and drops to slide in a slick of blood. The second swerves around her. It reaches the end of the aisle, curves back, and dives as Mrs. Mirskaya comes around the shelves.
Fi flails the sword over her head. The flat of the blade clangs off the locust’s helmet. It crashes into the shelves, but recovers and flies off as Fi swipes at it, missing, but shredding a wooden chest. And still the sword sings its incessant “Aah AAAAH!”
“Fiona Patterson!” Mrs. Mirskaya admonishes her as she runs up. “You are not swatting flies.” A half-dozen locusts enter the aisle at the far end of the room where the stairs are, and fly toward them. “Give it to me.”
Fi says, “Okay, but I can’t let go.”
Mrs. Mirskaya takes the sword in one hand. “Step back. Mokosh will show you how to use one of these.” She lowers the blade, pointing it to the side.
Zeke, who couldn’t keep up with Mrs. Mirskaya, slides around the end of the shelves behind them. He huffs to catch his breath, clutching a stitch in his side as Mrs. Mirskaya strides to meet the locusts. He jogs to Fi.
Mrs. Mirskaya’s style of swordplay is different from Edgar’s, but no less effective. She dips, leaps, spins and thrusts, fluid and nimble in a way her stocky build shouldn’t allow. Three locusts go down, blood misting the air. A fourth catches her arm with a claw, then it, too, smacks to the floor in pieces.
She dodges the next two, who ignore Fi and Zeke and wheel around to renew their attack on her. She jumps to push off a beam with one foot, whirls in the air and cuts them both down—but another has come over the top of the row and swoops from behind. Fi’s about to shout when a sandy-colored blur comes bounding through debris on the shelf with a roar.
Mol slams into the locust’s neck with his teeth and smashes it into a shelf beam across the aisle. Its chitinous armor is too tough for him to penetrate, and it grabs for him with multiple legs. He lets go and leaps back. Mrs. Mirskaya’s sword sings as she takes the grip in both hands and skewers the locust, driving the tip through its thorax to sink into the floor below. The sword sings a muffled, “aah aaaaah.” Stuck as it is in the locust and the floor, she finds she can let go of its haft.
“I hate that thing,” she mutters. “Is no longer funny.” To Mol, she says, “Moy geroy,” which Fi understands to mean, “My hero.” Mol bows.
One might think Fi and Zeke would cease to be amazed. They don’t.
Fi searches the discarded weapons, picks up a poleaxe with a broken handle and chipped blade. “Grab something,” she says to Zeke. Zeke looks over the pile, takes the mace with missing spikes that looks like it’s made of green glass, and a small round shield with a chunk out of it’s edge.
As Mrs. Mirskaya and Mol approach, Fi and Zeke hold the weapons up. Mrs. Mirskaya says, “You look ridiculous. But is good. Just stay away from others when you flail like mad peoples.”
There’s a crash at the far end of the aisle. The green Nidhogg, having been thrown into the shelves, scrambles to its feet. Thick black blood oozes from a gash in its neck and one of its eye-cones is torn nearly off. It sees them and charges up the aisle, careening into support beams, toppling shelves and their contents on top of itself, but keeps coming, crashing through, shrieking its anger and pain.
“Go!” says Mrs. Mirskaya. She snatches up an axe with a bent blade and follows as they sprint away.
The Nidhogg barrels right through the tall rows of shelves to follow them.
* * *
Myrddin has his eyes squeezed shut, forehead and gambanteinn crystal pressed against the wall, his words a forceful murmur. There’s a clunk and the wall shakes. Baphomet and Edgar look up to see the searching lines of light from Myrddin’s wand have found and highlighted the outline of a rectangle, twenty feet wide and thirty feet high. The frame of the door.
Gasping from exertion, Myrddin sees it too.
Then they hear the breaking of shelves and roars of the Nidhogg that chases the others.
Myrddin focuses on the door. Gripping his wand in both hands, he leans on it, shouting ancient words for “stone,” “door” and “open.” Another clunk and the thick slab of stone begins to lower into the floor—very slowly.
Edgar calls to Peter to alert him, but Peter is otherwise engaged.
A crack issues from the staircase and the black Nidhogg, largest of the three, squeezes around the final curve of the stairs. Its claws carve the walls like chisels through chalk and it gouges stone with its teeth as it pushes through to the landing.
Half a dozen locusts have hold of Peter and are trying to drag him into the air. He frees his spear arm, swings it in the direction of the Nidhogg and fires, but the bolt of lightning misses a direct hit, merely knocking off part of the bone shield on the back of the Nidhogg’s neck.
It bounds with a howl and knocks Peter and the locusts holding him out of the way, then spins on Pratha, who’s been swatting down locusts. They face each other, Pratha ignoring the hellish insects that crawl over her, tearing her blue flesh with their Astra-grade claws and mandible jaws.
The Nidhogg leaps at her face, massive mouth open to bite with a force that can crush granite. Sh
e ducks, grabs it by the lower jaw, turning at the same time, and flips it to soar the width of the room, where it slams into the wall, cracking the stone. It drops and shudders on its back.
Fi, Zeke, Mol and Mrs. Mirskaya run along the back wall to the sounds of timbers snapping, upper levels of shelving crashing down, and the sight of the Nidhogg bulldozing its way toward them.
Mrs. Mirskaya says, “Go faster!”
A locust dives down ahead and comes right for them, then another. Fi takes an awkward swing at the first, shearing off a set of wings and a couple of legs. Mol bites it, flings it to Mrs. Mirskaya behind him, and she cuts it in half with her axe.
Fi stumbles from her attack, so it’s up to Zeke and his glass mace to fend off the second locust. He yells in a less than manly way and swings the mace overhand. It strikes the locust’s shining head. There’s a resounding bong and a bright flash of green light.
“Gah!” Zeke cries, blinded as if he looked into the flash of a thousand bulbs, and drops the mace. He can’t see the locust he struck, but its head has been vaporized, the neck steaming where it once connected.
Having recovered her balance, Fi grabs his arm before he trips over the locust, lifting him over it and dragging him along until he gets his feet under him.
What she’s done doesn’t occur to her until she finds herself thinking, Wow, Zeke sure is light, then realizes it isn’t that at all. It’s that she sure is strong. And the flash of the mace didn’t bother her eyes, either. A strange elation, but also apprehension, swells in her chest. No time to dwell on it though. The Nidhogg is getting closer, and the locusts, and the falling shelves. “I’ve got you, Zeke. Just keep running.”
He’s rubbing his eyes, trying to blink away the green and pink bubbles that keep bursting in front of them.
They round the end of the last row and sprint toward the opening door. Mol barks their impending arrival.
Edgar cuts down another locust and turns. The Nidhogg, having lost them in the smoke that’s beginning to fill the room, rampages through the rubble, knocking over more shelves. “Hurry!” Edgar cries. He checks the door’s progress. The top isn’t quite halfway down, still twelve feet above the floor. “Myrddin, can you make it?”
Myrddin looks up. “Yes, of course.”
“Get inside, be ready to close it!”
Myrddin backs up, eyes the top of the door again, then springs to it with ease, catching the edge with his gambanteinn still in one hand, and scrambles over.
Baphomet holds up the chains between his wrists, indicates those at his ankles, showing he can do no such thing. But now Edgar has more locusts to face.
* * *
Inside the room, Myrddin finds a stone lever. He shoves it up. The door stops. When he pulls it down again, the door begins to open more quickly—though not by much.
* * *
Fi, Zeke, Mol and Mrs. Mirskaya come skidding up to Edgar, the colonel and Baphomet. Zeke breathes heavily, still blinking his eyes—but he can see, and witnesses the battle in which Peter and Pratha are engaged.
A tempest of locusts grab and bite Peter. He cuts them down, zaps them with electricity, but more close in. Few get to Pratha, whose twenty scythe-like claws blur through the air, but those that do scratch and gnaw at her skin. Blood trickles down her body, speckles the wall and floor. And still, she’s grinning.
She snatches one off her shoulder and bites off its head, then whirls with her arms out, so quickly that all around her fall shredded, wing-parts twisting in the air like cellophane leaves.
The last of the Nidhoggs and the smallest, the orange one, bounds down the stairs to the landing. Max cackles, perched on its back. More locusts swarm in over his head, mounting a renewed attack on Peter.
The orange Nidhogg lunges at Peter as well, and Max launches himself from its stumpy battering-ram of a horn, catches a pair of locusts by the legs, and lets them carry him high into the room. The orange Nidhogg lands on Peter, knocking him to the floor. Peter kicks it onto its back and rolls away, blasting locusts with his spear as he goes. A wayward bolt hits a row of shelves, which shatter and burst into flame.
Pratha pounces on the belly of the orange Nidhogg, raises one of her four arms to gut it with her claws, but the toothy jaws of the much bigger black wyrm, recovered from its daze after being thrown against the wall, clamp down on her shoulder and it flings her into the shelves, which creak, sway, and fall. Both Nidhoggs bound after her.
A short reprieve from the locust onslaught and the group at the door sees the fire spreading fast and the rows toppling in a domino effect—and they’re falling this way.
Edgar glances up at the door, now ten feet high. He shouts, “Everyone inside!”
Mrs. Mirskaya gives the axe to Fi and makes a step of her hands for the colonel, then lifts her with ease to crawl over the top of the door.
Max drops to the floor beside them, only six feet away.
Edgar spins, brandishing his sword. “Away, you devil!” Mrs. Mirskaya snatches back her axe.
But Max only has eyes for Fi. “Little Miss Muffet, I have missed you.”
So swiftly it’s nearly impossible to follow with the naked eye, faster than Edgar can react with his sword, Max leaps to the wall next to Edgar and pushes off, aiming for Fi.
But he’s plucked from the air, spun away, and slammed to the floor.
Peter stomps a foot against Max’s body, one hand firmly gripping one of Max’s legs. His eyes burn red, the uniform he borrowed from the Templars blackened with locust blood, and torn. The expression on his gore-spattered face is terrible to behold—made only more frightening when he grins. “What did I tell you, Max?”
Max shrieks, “No!” and Peter rips his leg from the socket with one violent jerk.
Max howls and rolls away. Pratha had taken the second leg back on one side. Now Peter has removed the third back from the other. Max gets to his remaining legs and screams, black blood oozing from the fresh wound, a crimson glow in the cores of his eight yellow eyes.
“That’s two,” Peter says, his voice laced with menace. “Six to go.”
It looks as if Max might be considering another attack, but even he knows better, and with a glance he sees the shelves will soon crash down on them all. He scrabbles back toward the stairs, nearly as quickly as he could with all eight legs. Locusts dive in, and the last row of shelves falls.
Peter steps to the front of the group, fists clenched, muscles tensed, and golden light spreads from him to envelop the group.
Burning timbers and castaway treasures crash and splinter around them, but none penetrate Peter’s shield of light. Locusts bounce off it, scratching and biting without effect.
Peter says through gritted teeth, “In.”
Mrs. Mirskaya hops to land on her feet atop the door, now eight feet high and still lowering. Fi jumps and Mrs. Mirskaya grabs her with the hand not still holding the axe. Fi gives Mrs. Mirskaya her poleaxe, drops to her belly on the door, and reaches. “Zeke!”
He jumps. She catches both hands and hauls him over.
* * *
They fall into the room, Fi on her back, Zeke on top of her. He pushes up, his face inches from hers. “Shit, you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says, looking into his eyes. Even now they have the same effect on her. For a moment, sound fades, and she lets herself get lost in them.
Baphomet drops to his manacled feet beside them, ruining the moment. Mol comes hurdling over the door, and Edgar climbs in after. Zeke gets up, taking Fi’s hand to help her.
The door is still opening, revealing Peter in his glowing shield. He relaxes, exhaling sharply, and the light is gone. Burning beams and detritus crash down on his head and shoulders, sending up clouds of red cinders, but he remains unharmed.
Cries of Nidhoggs, breaking of wood, crashing of battle, the roar of fire and buzzing of locusts resound through the vault. Peter aims Gungnir to the ceiling like a lightning rod, his arm and wrist throbbing with electricity. Zeke and Fi see the
others turn away or cover their eyes. They do both.
The spearhead of Gungnir pulses with a boom. Fried locusts rain down by the dozens—and a crack opens in the lintel above the door with a foreboding crunch.
Peter eyes it, shouts back into the vault, “Prathamaja Nandana!” The top of the door is finally flush with the floor, and he slides their belongings, which have been stacked at the doorway but protected by his godly force field, into the room. He enters and says to Myrddin Wyllt, “Close it.”
Myrddin jams the lever up and the door grinds upward.
Fi says, “But Pratha...”
“She’ll be along,” Peter replies.
Mrs. Mirskaya turns the axe over in her hand. “Is good, but not Mokosh’s style.” She throws it out the closing door. Flipping end over end, it cuts a locust in half before disappearing into the rubble.
“What was that mace I had?” Zeke asks. “After I used it, I didn’t think I’d ever see again.”
“It was made for Hodur of Asgard,” Mrs. Mirskaya answers. “He was blind, but much better fighter than anyone knows today.” She slides the round shield off Zeke’s arm. “This is crappy Mortal shield.” She tosses it to clatter in the corner. “And this,” she checks Fi’s poleaxe. “I don’t know what this is.” Edgar spares it a glance and shakes his head. Mrs. Mirskaya tosses it after the shield.
“Hey,” Fi protests. “I should have something to defend myself.”
“Is still not good idea for you to have sharp things. Besides, you have these.” She holds up her hands. “I saw what you did.” Mol barks in support.
Zeke asks Fi, “What did you do?”
She searches for an answer, but Mrs. Mirskaya interjects, “Fiona picked you up with one arm, carried you like little baby.”
“No I didn’t,” Fi says. Mol cocks his head at her, ears lifted. “Okay I did, but not very far.” Mol’s tongue flops out as he doggy-laughs. “You’re starting to freak me out, dog,” Fi says, then rubs his head and pushes him away. He barks again.