Master of Umbra (The Valhalla Series)

by Poppet

  Running at full tilt, the tunnel curves in a mild arc, constantly concealing what lies ahead, and it's in this blindspot that I dash past an open cavity, trepidation searing my soul to flee for all I'm worth, when a voice bellows from within, stalling my gait when I'm summoned.

  “Deliah!”

  I'm beyond the entrance to that room and am torn between stopping for it, or daring to take my chances and sprinting like my arse is on fire and it's just singed the short and curlies.

  “I have your pussy on my lap,” croons, echoing down the tunnel, even though I know an impact on the wall makes no sound.

  Arrabella! Shit!

  Fucking crap in a can!

  It's enough to disperse my momentary courage and I slowly swivel to face the imposing hollow which flickers taunting light into the corridor of the disavowed.

  My limbs do their weak accordion impression as I stagger back to the opening. My bowels are hot and roiling, my thighs tender and spastic, so great is my fear. Cold sweat trickles a frosty nail from my armpit to my ribs and my traumatized breathing is verging on hyperventilation.

  Closing my eyes, taking a deep stinging breath, clinging to the wall for support, I take a rigid step onto the threshold to face my gaoler.

  Anticipating the prongs of taser teeth, I flinch, barely catching a glimpse of the foreign environment and the strange hulk when I recoil and freeze.

  My teeth clatter, my dinner burns up my esophagus, and I'm immediately doubled over in cathartic terror, puking my eyeballs out with diabolical enthusiasm.

  I was wrong about the level of hell I'm in.

  Dias has stepped up in the underworld. It's that, or I've just been summoned by the devil. So much for the 'life screw up' chat with a spiritual guide type, this is straight to the flogging and chewing on decomposed intestines.

  I don't feel so good. Hot and cold vie for dominance while the world swarms in a feverish swill.

  A mammoth hand holds my nape, keeping me bent over while his other pulls back my hair, exposing my cheeks to a forge blast of furnace heat.

  Fire pit. My god it's a fire pit!

  Is this where they cremate the bodies?

  Are they going to cast me unto the jaws of the dragon? I would argue if I was given the chance to debate my fate, that I would make a surly and sour sacrifice.

  I wish I could fight but last week's lasagna is still trying to climb out of my gullet to redecorate the matte black floor.

  It needed a woman's touch anyhow. Consider my duty here done.

  Glancing askance I spy a man sprawled out on a vast couch, rolling a coin between his fingers. He's hidden in a smoggy shroud of smoke which billows around him as if he is Buddha and this is his shrine.

  He's got that look about him. Like this is an opium parlor full of thugs counting bullets, smoking spliffs, picking their nose, relaxing while working coins between their fingers which they plan to put on the next sinner's eyes, after they put a cobra in your bed to give you the goodnight kiss of forever bliss.

  It's menacing. He's menacing.

  Which of you degenerates is Satan? I'm counting three. Oh lucky antilove king, he also gets an angel for each side of his throne. I guess down here the people sent to the left are on Santa's nice list.

  Completing my Exorcist impression I try to stand erect, but the hand vices my neck in a choke and his deep voice warns, “Don't move.”

  It's the final churn in the nausea vat and I rabidly puke again, this time feeling as if my soul fell out with the last chunk of trouble.

  Holy fuck, I feel like I've been poisoned.

  Before I have the chance to form the words through queasy spittle, I'm lifted up by my waist and my head dunked in the conveniently placed stoup brimming with nefarious water.

  I'm assuming that, as I doubt he likes to keep holy water in his antechamber.

  Splashed about, effectively drowning, the seizures gripping my body in ruthless spasms desist when a new wave of panic bombs my body and I scrabble for a handhold, pushing back against the grip on my head which is homicidally baptizing me.

  Sucking in water, coughing and flailing, I'm yanked up so fast the world tilts.

  My knees don't work when my assailant releases me and I crumple up, my cheekbone throbbing in the impact of stone meet bone.

  Heaving for air in compulsive coughs, all I can see is a mongrel with her tail up, running for me. That can't be right. They let you take your kitty to hell?

  Don't mind me, I'm just doing my rug impression. Prostrate to a fault, or what eh? Sucking in oxygen while Arrabella tries to smother me with her 'smell my arse because you love me' twirl, another head rests on the floor, two black beady eyes looking into mine.

  The head doesn't look dead. Those eyes are moving. Do the decapitated still look around like that?

  It looks at me again and I get the weirdest impulse to challenge it with a customary, 'what the hell are you looking at' jibe.

  Then it smiles.

  “What the fuck are you smiling at?”

  Oh look, I spoke without my brain giving permission. Holy shitness, they'll be using my head to practice slam dunks because of my runaway mouth.

  “You. Are you quite done fouling up the place?”

  “Fuck off,” I snap at the imbecile, wishing Arrabella would stop poking her tail in my eye and smothering my nose with cat hairs. I'm trying to breathe here!

  “She'll fit right in,” he says, moving out of my line of sight, speaking to the king of the unseelie court.

  “Help her up then, Adam! She's going to think we live up to our reputation at this rate.”

  And what reputation would that be? That you burn odious sigils into unblemished flesh before carving out my liver to make the morning toast paté?

  I'm hauled to my feet and supported this time.

  I am not a dainty girl, what do these guys eat? They must live on powerlifting whey and egg whites to throw me around like a wisp of wishes.

  Lurching against a man with hair the shade of pampas grass, he urges me toward the dude with the coin.

  I remember him now.

  “It's you!” I accuse, recognizing him as the man who caught Arrabella.

  “It's me,” he exclaims, opening his arms in a cheesy 'here I am' gesture.

  “What do you want?” I ask, worry worming its acidic way through my courage again.

  He indicates the bowl next to him. “Holy ash. It's time I made you one of us.”

  I beg your pardon? “What?!”

  Chapter 3

  Odin said, Seest thou thy foster-son Agnar, how he passes his time in dalliance with a giantess in a cave...

  ~ Edda

  Deliah:

  He sits up, standing so swiftly I'm immediately reminded of how towering he is. Bloody hell.

  Taking a shaky step back, I stare up at the lunatic.

  “Deliah, I know this all sounds utterly bonkers, but it's only because we like bonking.” He has a little laugh at his lame wit before losing the smile. “It will only make sense once it comes into contact with your skin.”

  I fucking knew it! I'm in hell!

  Rapidly assessing my chance of escape, I glance at the exit, wondering if it's possible to outrun people with twice the stride I have. This is crap!

  I mean, I'd heard stories of Clootie roaming the highlands but the only thing I thought I needed to run from was Dias. Instead I end up kidnapped by old cloven hoof himself before I've even spent two nights in my hideaway.

  Why doesn't Bella hiss at him? Scratch his eyes out and put up a fuss or something? I thought animals, especially cats, were supposed to be clued into this supernatural shit.

  She's winding her way between his feet, loving his legs, giving allegiance to the powerful stranger so he'll keep her safe. Traitor!

  He slouches down to my eye level, staring his hypnotic gaze into mine. “It will all become clear. Trust me. Now, I'm going to guide you to the chalice, dip my finger in it, and anoint you.”

  There's t
hat magical tone again. The one that peels logic out of my head as easily as a brazilian wax.

  No! No no no no, no!

  But here I go, dutifully guided to the stone scepter full of ash. Is that infidels remains or something?

  The reawakened urge to purge roils its way up my torso, bile burning my chest as it rises in abhorrence.

  I'm holding my breath when he dips his fingers into the drab talc, planting two fingers covered in dead man's bones on the center of my forehead.

  I'm expecting to light up like a phoenix and swiftly turn to ash myself. Closing my eyes, squeezing them shut to be more accurate, I have a gazillion wishes going unfulfilled. I'm not ready to die. I haven't gone base jumping yet. I haven't got a will. No one knows where I am, and Lara will freak the hell out when my trail goes cold.

  This sucks!

  “You can open your eyes now,” drawls at me, littered with mocking.

  I pry my left eye open, then the right, looking at the ghastly bowl of crematorium juice. Holy ash my arse. If that's holy then I'm Mary Magdalene.

  “And?” I ask, wondering what all the fuss was about. I'm still standing here without so much as a roman candle for a finger. I'm still not glowing, or burning.

  What kind of hell is this? Does the management know the resident devil is slacking on the pain scale? Does he expect me to kiss his ring? Do you suppose he prefers it with a bit of rimming first?

  The thought makes me smile, and for the record to the soul scribe recording this, I would hate to be the one to have to rim his prostate. Don't laugh! Oh god, if I laugh I might puke. I'm on the skids, never mind shaky ground. But it bubbles out regardless and swiftly morphs into hysterics. It wrings me so hard I'm crying and laughing and ripe to chuck another chunky.

  Jeez!

  “Deliah, come sit with me,” he says, not giving me much choice as I'm forced to the big devil chair he was lounging on.

  My legs fold without any resistance when he applies pressure and I flop obediently onto the puffy mustard sofa.

  “This is known as Odin's ash.”

  I nod.

  This is ludicrous. Maybe this is a loony bin and someone locked me in here to test my boundaries? Maybe I lost it back in the cage and they gave up, sending me here for rehabilitation? Maybe that's why the corridor curves, so we can run around in circles and feel like bona-fide members of society.

  “Ygg is a name assigned to Odin. Like any god he went under many guises, and Yggdrasil was torched to prevent the gods from reaching mankind. Sabotage of the highest order, but a lame maneuver at that. As if burning one channel could truly sever ties with ones so mighty.”

  He just drones on and on. But it's giving me the room I need to turn the screws on the nausea, forcing myself to take long slow breaths to calm the quease.

  “The tree in question is wrongly believed to be an ash tree. Now it is clearly ash, of that there's no doubt, but it was a yew tree in its previous incarnation.” This time he holds my hand, as if trying to force me to give him my undivided attention.

  I give a slight nod, desperate not to move too much and send the world plunging back into the puke abyss.

  “I'm going to cut to the chase because you have the attention span of a termite. The short of it is we lived in this tree. It was our home until a wanker found a way to burn an eternally evergreen tree. It was an immortal tree but it was weakened when Odin gave his sight to Ymir, and then that foresight went to the fucking Ravens. So we were left high and dry and royally fucked by the turn of events. We gathered the ash and have kept it safe ever since.”

  I look at the stranger next to me. Why are you telling me this? Who gives a damn?

  “So?” I manage to mutter.

  Oh shit! His congenial expression just vanished into savage.

  “So!” he bellows at me.

  Good lord, that was like standing in the bell tower while someone sounded the alarm.

  Pouncing out of his seat, releasing my hand, he turns on me to point a finger the size of a dildo at my nose, “Deliah, this is paramount! This was a travesty! Do you have any clue how big yew trees grow? You can easily seat forty people comfortably in a fairly young yew. They hollow out beautifully and their trunks span a humble thirteen meters in diameter; they were used to make our longbows; we used it for everything from poisoning our enemies to shooting the fuckers down. It is god's tree! It cures heart conditions and cancer in the right conditions, and it was our church! For lack of a better explanation that's exactly what it was. And those midget wankers burned down our churches all over this land and built their monstrosities on top of them! Plugging into the sacrosanct connections we'd established!”

  Leaning in so I get a good whiff of his spring rain aftershave, he hisses, “How would you feel if every church in the union was smashed to the ground and a mosque built on top of it? Everyone praises the Christians now, but I can tell you on good authority that they were a savage and ruthless bunch of assholes! They obliterated everything holy that preceded them, and forced through a vicious dictatorship that their wrath and hatred be adopted. They desecrated Alba and the surrounding counties by threat of death.”

  Cringing away from the baleful glower aimed at me, I nod again.

  Go along with the crazies and they'll let me go home. Right?

  Huffing, standing while running his hand over the military stubble on his head, he exhales exasperation.

  I take the opportunity to check out his sidekicks. They look as outraged and ready for blood as he does. Holy monkeys these guys are a bunch of cult creeps.

  The man without a name swivels to eyeball me again, saying in a much softer baritone, “It burned for years, so vast was Odin's tree. Yew wood is the slowest burning wood on earth. Many died. We lost our mascot and protector in the blaze. Very few knew he was safely ensconced underneath the 'church'. Without Níðhöggr we were lost for a time, but when we came back to take our vengeance, this land was already conquered. All those almighty fuckers and their fake god couldn't protect Alba because they had no power. The Romans were raping and pillaging and burning everything in sight. They robbed us of our vengeance, so we destroyed them instead. Us with our boats with the proud figurehead of our patron wyrm, Níðhöggr.”

  “What's a wyrm naddregd?”

  “Dragon. Our dragon to be precise. The mother of all dragons. They aren't myths, they were real. Just like we aren't myths, we're real too. The druids called it by our term. Their rosary beads were made of naddred eggs. They continued where we left off and were persecuted until they gave their wisdom to the monasteries. A heinous plague of crude culture befell this land in the pathetic guise of religion. And it has not served one man that walks this soil, not one. So we came back, put our DNA in the common folk again, and left a mark they'd never forget. And don't believe the shit story about a serpent living at the base of Odin's tree, it was a dragon. I bloody hate translations because they always fuck it up.”

  “Hang on,” I say to the head psycho running the show. “First off, who the fuck are you? And second, what are you? You are spewing vendettas at me without giving me a reference point. You don't look like a myth, just a whackjob who's taken too many steroids.”

  If he tells me he's Satan I will piss my pants right here.

  He laughs so hard that he ends up punching the 'headless' bad guy who baptized me, who responds with a skew smirk and punches him back. Their mirth is obvious and is celebrated with a quick thumping session. Holy fuck, these guys are hardcore lunatics.

  “Deliah, my manners are rusty. Forgive me darling!” And he flourishes into a kneel, still being taller than me even if he looks like he's about to propose, and says, “I am Ewan, chief of the Eagle clan. And you are a stray seed of our tribe. You can surely see it for yourself lass? How many eight foot eight men have you met?”

  Frowning at 'Ewan', I look between them, trying to catch the joke.

  “Are you related?” I ask, because that would account for them all being tall. I've heard of tall p
eople before, heck I'm one of them. So this isn't strange in my opinion.

  “We are giants,” he whispers, as if sharing a big bad secret with me.

  “Very funny. Get off. I'm having a really bad day and I'm not in the mood to have you take the piss when you've enforced so much duress on me that I puked out every meal I've consumed since I was conceived, right there in your doorway.”

  “I really like her,” says the strong silent one of the group.

  Ewan glances at him, standing again, jabbing his thumb at the man with the crisp green eyes and beeswax hair. “Deliah, this is Alweada.” He's the one who really likes me. I've yet to assess if this is a compliment or not.

  Ewan points at headless guy with pampas hair, “That is Adam.”

  Adam bows so low his hair sweeps the floor, “At your service m'lady.”

  “Not likely Adam. You're at mine, and don't you forget it,” says Ewan.

  Really there is only one question that needs answering right now.

  “Why am I here?” I ask, just as Bella decides to stop flirting with every man in the room and finally comes to my lap.

  Ewan smiles, ruffling her fur when he scratches behind her ears, leaning intimately over me and whispering in my ear, “You are here because every stray pussy deserves a home.”

  Chapter 4

  Every day when he goes to doom

  At Ash Yggdrasill;

  For the Æsir's Bridge burns all with flame,

  And the holy waters howl.

  ~ Völuspá

  Deliah:

  Is he flirting with me? For real?

  Arching my confrontation eyebrow, I interrogate the leery hulk, “So what was supposed to happen with the ash? I've had no epiphanies or visitations from the Holy Ghost since the grande gesture. All you did was make me dirty.”