Okay. Am I supposed to rescue her?
“By the Maids, no! Owraythu would gobble you up like a cherry if you oppose her openly in her own realm as you are now. Even if you had all your wits about you. There are more things in the cosmos than a single man can understand. Even one as cute as you.”
Uh…
“Don’t worry, Hank. I know you love Jane and would never betray her.”
That’s right. Not in a million years.
“More’s the pity.”
I didn’t know big, torpedo-shaped fish could look mischievous, but Kuhntul pulled it off. Tell me what you want—
Something gave me a jerk, pulling me away from Kuhntul, and I flew backward until…
Nine
I opened my eyelids, as Jane shook me a second time. Keri and Fretyi stared down at me, tongues lolling, drool splattering my cheeks. “What’s going on?” I croaked.
“You passed out again,” said Jane. “You and your grimoire.”
“But no harm was done. And it wasn’t the grimoire.” I sat up and shook my head. “I think—”
“Ha!” said Jane.
“Funny. I… I dreamed…the bird-thing again.”
“Where did you go this time?” asked Althyof.
“It’s hard to remember, but I flew overhead, watching you guys.” I glanced skyward. “But I didn’t know who you were.” Keri and Fretyi piled into my lap—which was an awesome experience given their weight and size—and let it be known their ears needed scratching. “I think Kuhntul was in it, but she was a fish or something.”
“And what did the Tisir have to say this time?”
“It’s fuzzy. But it annoyed her that I hadn’t gone into the proo over there, yet. She said…something about the preer being safe as long as they stayed open. That I could send my animus across without fear.”
“Ha!” said Jane. “Sounds more like a wish-fulfillment dream.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. She… I believe she took me somewhere…to a stathur that has different rules. She wanted me to do something…”
“Well, there’s a shock,” muttered Jane.
“Do you recall what?” asked Yowtgayrr.
I shook my head again. “No, but it had something to do with the place she took me.”
“Which one?” asked Althyof, gaze switching back and forth between the waterfall and the proo glinting in the late afternoon sun.
“Which one what?”
“Which proo did she pull you into?”
“Oh. That one,” I said pointing at the proo the cabin had hidden until it exploded into nothingness.
“And it took you to a strange stathur?”
“Yeah, I mean, she was a fish, right? Then she turned me into one, except we weren’t quite fishes.”
Jane rocked back on her heels. “The thing with the giant was a bust. This dream of yours wasn’t much better from the sound of it. How do we decide between these two preer?”
“I’m going to send my animus across and explore.”
Jane rolled her eyes, a scowl settling over her face. “You put a lot of faith in these dreams of yours, Henry Jensen.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But so far, they’ve all been correct.”
She shrugged. “There’s that.”
“We can’t hang around here forever, Hon. I either send my animus, or we risk going across in person. Which is more of a risk?”
She shrugged again and looked away.
“So I’ll try it. It will be fine, though. Kuhntul hasn’t led me wrong so far.”
“Don’t trust her too much,” said Althyof.
“I’ve got you three to make sure I don’t.”
“Do it,” said Jane. “But if you are simple after this, I won’t get to say, ‘I told you so.’ That’s hardly fair.” She grinned as she said it.
“You’ve already gotten to say that particular phrase more than is fair, so it equals out.” That earned me a raspberry. I gave the puppies a pat each and shooed them away. I lay down and winked at my wife. “Now you won’t have to catch me if I pass out.”
“I’d let you fall. It might jar a little sense into you.”
“Nah. Might dent the ground, though.” I muttered the triblinkr to split off an animus, and it appeared floating above me—in the shape of the weird fish-thing from my dream. “Well, that’s weird,” I mumbled. I focused on the shape of a raven, and my animus melted and reformed. The karls made annoying noises, and I shook my head. “Someone send the karls on their way. I’ve done enough religion-building today.”
“Krowkr, can I speak with you?” called Jane.
I turned my attention to my animus and moved it to the proo shining in the afternoon light. I reached out, not with my talons or my wings, but with my mind, and touched the proo. Unlike when I moved across a proo physically, the change wasn’t instantaneous. There was a sensation of being pulled, of movement. I could see nothing, hear nothing, but I could sense things slithering nearby, maintaining a discreet distance, but coming very close to touching me. The sense that these things had a kind of terrible intelligence, godlike and expansive, the sensation you expected to feel confronting Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, settled on me like a nightmare. I imagined great slithering things living in the void between the ends of the proo—vast, titanic beasts of unimaginable power.
I hoped they wouldn’t notice me and kept my mental gaze averted.
And then it was over, and I drifted in a semi-fluidic space. I had no sense of gravity, no sense of up or down, no sense of relative motion. I no longer sensed the Great Old Ones from the proo, but I had the sense of large things surrounding me. They didn’t seem like living things, however, just large masses of something.
When I tried to look at the things, it was as if I looked into a kaleidoscope of worlds, each overlapping the next. It hurt my head to look for too long, so I looked outward from them—toward whatever else was there.
I could perceive light, but not the way I could at home, not really. It wasn’t that I could see the light with my little raven eyes—I couldn’t—it was more like a sensation on my skin, like wind or waves at the beach. I had the sense that whatever existed in the opposite direction from the overlapping masses, it was akin to space at home, but it looked nothing like it.
My mind wandered in the nothingness I floated in. I found I could make ripples in the fabric of the semi-fluidic gunk around me, like a child slamming his hand into the water to splash waves around the bathtub. It fascinated me—I couldn’t see these ripples, but I knew they were there, the way you know where your bedroom furniture is in the middle of a moonless night.
I stretched my senses for any sign of Luka—listening, feeling, looking, tasting, smelling—but if he’d been here, I was simply not equipped to sense his passage. I couldn’t even detect my own boundaries, outside of the body my brain insisted I had. If he came this way, he’d succeeded in losing us.
Turning back toward the way I believed I’d come, I sensed something approaching me. It had a form, but I can’t describe how my senses insisted on defining the thing. Whatever it looked like, it was immense, and it gave off a strong sensation of hunger.
Panic gripped me as the thing seemed to blot out what served as the sky. Was it flying? I had no idea. I searched for the terminus of the proo I’d traveled through, but there was no shimmering silver portal anywhere near me. The only thing close was that kaleidoscopic mass of twisting, slithering worlds.
I glanced over my shoulder and would have shouted in fear if I had a mouth or a voice. The vast, hungry entity had closed the distance while I looked behind me. It loomed over me, blocking the wave-like sensation of light radiating on my skin.
The entity—no, that’s wrong, it wasn’t a single entity, it was many, many entities, working together as one. Whatever it was, it lurched down at me, and I jetted away in fear, as a squid might, and I wished for all the world that I had a cloud of ink to release in my wake. The hungry…colony…of denizens from the stath
ur twisted away, as though surprised by my movement.
I drifted toward the kaleidoscope, not by any conscious intent, just the luck of the draw as it turned out. I gained speed, moving faster the closer I got to the thing. The twirling images of world upon world upon world blurred faster and faster as I drew close, the colors merging into the familiar shimmery silver of the proo.
I glanced over my shoulder as I approached the proo. The hungry colony-thing lurched toward me, reminding me of a striking snake. Before the thing struck me, the proo took hold, and I zipped away, back into that in-between space filled with the Great Old Ones.
Eyes closed, I rode the current of the proo back toward that chilly mountaintop somewhere in Scandinavia, trying not to think too loudly, trying not to wonder what the behemoths in the darkness were and whether they, also, were hungry.
I emerged into Mithgarthr and sighed with relief.
“That good, huh?” asked Jane.
“I don’t recommend that proo,” I said through my physical mouth while I moved my animus to the grotto behind the waterfall. “It would mess up your hair. It leads to one of the stathur Meuhlnir warned us about. One with different physical laws. I’m not sure we would survive going there physically.”
“The trap, then?” asked Althyof.
“I’d say so. Althyof, Yowtgayrr, what do the two of you know about the preer?”
“Not much, to be honest,” said the Tverkr. “We never discovered how to create them and don’t understand how the Isir manipulate them. We just use what’s there.”
“Yowtgayrr? How about the Alfar?”
“We understand them better than the Tverkar, at least on a conceptual level, but we can’t create them either.”
“Have either of you heard of things living in the preer?”
“No,” said the Alfar. “The preer don’t exist in the manner you are imagining. There is no physical bridge between the two endpoints and moving from one endpoint to the other is instantaneous. Only the ends are real. Think of them as a folded scrap of leather with a hole punched through both sides.”
“I always believed so, too,” I said. “But after traveling through one with my animus, I can categorically say that is not factual. There is a pathway, and things do live in the in-between.”
“I do not doubt your word, Hank,” said Yowtgayrr. “But perhaps traveling as an animus creates the illusion of this path.”
“It seemed quite real.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t do it again,” said Jane.
“You don’t need to,” said Althyof. “We know which proo to take by the process of elimination.”
I let my animus go with a smile. “I hadn’t considered that.” I got to my feet. “The only thing is, that proo sitting out there in the open is dangerous. I’m sure that if you traveled it in physical form, you’d arrive dead.”
“Too bad the cabin exploded,” said Jane.
“We can’t leave it like that. A curious Viking will try to use it, believing it’s the Reknpokaprooin and get himself killed.”
“If only someone knew a kaltrar to, I don’t know, make a suppressive field around the thing,” said Althyof.
“Yeah?”
“Got a better idea?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. I walked toward the proo, my step uncertain. “How big does it need to be?”
“Big enough no one can reach the surface of the proo,” said Yowtgayrr.
“This one seems livelier than the others, as though it can reach out and grab a guy.” I shrugged. “Here goes. Be ready to catch me if I pass out again.”
Althyof shrugged. “The ground looks soft enough.”
“Hey, this is your idea, Tverkr.”
“Yes, but it’s your triblinkr, Isir.”
I sighed. “How do I give it a specific size? Do I need rune markers similar to the ones you used down in the village?”
“If you want it to remain after you leave, you do. I make them, you set them out.”
He held out his hand, and I focused on the chisel Kuhntul had given me. When it appeared in my hand, I passed it to him, and he got to work chiseling runes into stones from the stream’s bed. He made six of them each with three runes carved expertly into their tops, and I placed them in a rough circle, about four feet from the proo.
“How do I link the stones to the suppression field?”
“Add a stanza immediately before the last stanza. Use the runes I carved into each stone.”
“Sounds easy enough.”
Althyof scoffed and shook his head.
I chanted the triblinkr, focusing on slowing the air molecules as close to a zero-energy state as I could get them. One line before the conclusion, I added three lines using the runes he’d carved into the river stones and finished the kaltrar.
I picked up a stick and threw it at the dome that appeared around the proo, and Keri and Fretyi attacked my ankles. The stick bounced off the dome with a sound like a bell striking.
“Neat trick. Sig will hate it the next time he gets in trouble and loses his electronics.”
“You better believe it,” I said.
The karls stood at the edge of the clearing, at the head of the path that led down the mountain. Of course, they’d stayed to see the whole thing. When they saw me looking, they averted their eyes and shuffled down the trail.
Krowkr stood a few paces away but within earshot. He, too, kept his eyes averted. He stroked the amulet he wore around his neck with his thumb.
“Krowkr, stay with your people. Your part in this is finished.”
“Lord, if…that is, I’d rather stay with you and Lady Fr—er, I’d prefer to stay with the four of you. I’m an able hand with both axe and sword. I’d very much like to meet Veethar, as I have met you.” He swallowed hard. “Besides, I’ve no one left here.”
“There is danger in what we do, lad,” said Yowtgayrr. “It would be wise to stay.”
Krowkr ducked his head. “That may be, Lord Alf, but I could help you. I’m a fair cook, and I have knowledge of hunting and trapping.”
I arched an eyebrow at Yowtgayrr. “This isn’t an audition, Krowkr. You don’t have to prove your worth. It’s just that there is every possibility you will die if you come with us.”
Krowkr shrugged. “Lord, I was dying when you found me—when Lady Freya saved me. My life is already yours.”
I glanced at Jane. Her expression matched how I felt. Neither one of us wanted worshippers. Neither one of us wanted to pretend to be gods from the Norse pantheon.
“Krowkr, you don’t owe me anything,” Jane said. “I could help, and so I did. There’s nothing more to it.”
“Yes, Lady Skyowlf,” he said with perfect subservience. “I apologize for the slip of the tongue a moment ago.”
Jane shook her head and glanced at me with a smile playing at her lips. “I don’t think we can dissuade him, Hanki.”
I sighed and shook my head. “No, Skyowlf, it appears we can’t.” I scratched my beard and turned my gaze to Krowkr. “Here’s the thing, Krowkr. I don’t want your death on my conscience. There’s enough there already.”
He shrugged in a way that made me want to groan—that very stubborn Norwegian shrug that said “I will agree with you even though you are wrong.” He nodded at Jane and said, “Your lady wife is correct, Lord. The two of you will not put me off. It is my duty to remain at your sides. I feel…called…to the task.”
“Krowkr, we are not who you believe we are. Yes, we have capabilities that might seem magical to you, but they are—”
“Hank,” said Yowtgayrr with a small shake of his head.
“If we tell you not to follow us, will you go home?” Jane asked.
“No, Lady. I will run the Reknpokaprooin after you’ve left. I will follow behind your party if you don’t wish me to travel with you.” He hung his head.
Jane looked at me and shrugged.
“That would be even more foolhardy and dangerous, Krowkr,” I said with a sigh. “What can I s
ay to convince you to go home?”
“With respect, Lord, there is nothing you can say.” Krowkr stood still fingering the amulet around his neck.
“Oh, all right. But stop calling me ‘lord.’ My name is Hank.” I hooked my thumb at Jane. “Her name is Jane.”
“Yes, Lo—er…Hank.”
“Marginally better. Keep working on it.”
Krowkr nodded, still not meeting my gaze. “And since you won’t defer to us, don’t be deferential.” I stood up and shouldered my pack. “Come on, puppies.” I turned and walked toward the waterfall, escorted by the two silliest creatures in the world, trying to walk as they tried to attack my feet.
Ten
I emerged from the proo, and the water left on my clothes from the waterfall on Mithgarthr flash-froze in the searing cold. As far as I could see, a blanket of peculiar bluish-white ice and snow coated the ground, and a pale mist hung in the air like a bride’s veil. No trees were visible, no animals, no life of any kind. Lumpy shapes stood in the distance, but whether they were natural rock formations or buildings was anyone’s guess. A set of tracks still snaked toward one of the mounds, although almost obscured by snow and wind.
I stepped away from the proo and set my wriggling puppies down on the gelid ground. I put on my modern winter coat and my gloves, hoping they could withstand the temperatures.
Jane appeared next to the shimmering silver oval, and her face wrinkled at the cold. “Great. Cold. I so love the cold.”
“You’ve got the cold weather gear Yowrnsaxa bought you?”
“Never leave home without it,” she said in a cheesy voice.
The others came through, each dropping his pack at once and digging out extreme-weather gear. “Niflhaymr,” said Althyof with a shudder. “I hate this place.”
“Because of the frost giants?”
“No, because of the cold!” He glanced upward, and his eyes twitched away. “That sky.”
I glanced up at the grim sky. From horizon to horizon, charcoal gray clouds tinged with bitter celestial blue gloomed down at us. A meager, blue-tinged light squeezed through the cloud-cover, but it was insubstantial, ineffective against the pale fog and the perpetual gloaming. “Where are they?”
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