Colemine, the Prince

by Clayton Smith

  Apollo gritted his teeth and set himself to work intensifying the heat of the sun, but even as the temperature climbed by twenty, thirty, even forty degrees, the sweltering heat had no effect on the jotnar. It did affect the gods, however, and they began to wilt as the sun’s rays grew in intensity. “Turn that thing off,” Zeus grumbled. Apollo relaxed, and the sun returned to its normal strength.

  Zeus fired bolt after bolt of lightning at the approaching giants, but the long, jagged lines of energy froze when they struck the jotnar, fell to the ground, and smashed on the desert scrub. One of the giants lifted a huge foot and brought it smashing down toward him. Zeus rolled out of the way and laid a hand on the desert floor. He shot the sand through with a spiderweb of electricity, melting the sand into glass. The creature’s foot came down hard on the smooth surface and slipped off, throwing the beast onto its back. Hestia rushed forward and struck the jotunn with her burning poker. As soon as the hot metal made contact, its heat was extinguished, and the iron of the poker grew cold. Hestia yelped and pried her skin from the poker’s frozen grip. The jotunn grabbed her and threw her back toward New Olympus. She arced through the air and crashed down through the roof of the stables, sending straw and dust billowing out.

  Hephaestus went to work smashing his hammer down on one of the fourth jotunn’s feet. He cracked through the frozen nails on three of the heavy, blue toes before the monster even noticed he was being assaulted. He rained down on Hephaestus with heavy ice shards. The smith god’s leather apron protected his torso and his legs, but a few of the freezing chunks caught him in the head and arms, leaving deep gashes and huge, black welts of dead, frozen skin.

  “Hydra!” Zeus screamed. “Attack!” But in the flurry of battle, none of the Greek gods had noticed that their many-headed monster was having its own problems. Muninn flapped above its heads, swerving and diving around its gnashing teeth and pecking out the creature’s eyes, one by one, until it was completely blind. The Hydra roared and belched fire into the air, waving its mouths around like loose fire hoses, but the raven dodged them gracefully and returned to his perch on Odin’s shoulder.

  The Hydra plunged forward in a panic. It trampled poor, dried up Poseidon, who could only watch helplessly from the shade of the cave, and it roasted Ares alive with an errant jet of flame. It darted into one of the jotnar and bit down blindly on the frost giant’s leg. The jotunn bellowed in pain and battered its huge fists down on the Hydra’s back, beating it down. But the thirteen sets of teeth had done their work, and the jotunn toppled to the ground, ice water spilling out from the holes in his skin.

  Hermes sprang into action, sprinting in circles around the two remaining jotnar, running faster and faster until he was a solid blur spinning around the massive blue and white creatures. The desert sand was whipped into a fury. It rose high into the air and formed a gritty wall between the beasts and the gods. The cyclone rocked the jotnar and threw their balance. One crashed into the other, sending him careening out of the sandstorm and into the broken and battered Greeks. The monster flattened Apollo blindly with one foot and tripped over the prostrate form of the Hydra with the other. He slammed belly-down onto the hard desert floor, and a great, freezing gust of wind exhaled from the monster’s lungs and out of his mouth. The chilling breeze caught Artemis and Hephaestus, and they both crusted over with rime, frozen in place.

  Hermes continued his frantic laps around the trapped jotunn. The creature marked the small god’s movements with his crystal blue eyes. He waited patiently in the center of the sandy cyclone, waiting for the right moment. Then, suddenly, with a speed even Odin wouldn’t have expected, the creature thrust out a hand, and Hermes slammed into it. The jotunn snatched him up, lifted him to his mouth, and swallowed him whole. But little though the messenger god was, he was still a bit more than the creature could handle. Hermes got stuck halfway down the ice monster’s throat. The jotunn clawed at his neck, trying to force the small god down, but to no avail. The jotunn turned a deeper shade of blue as the lump in his throat cut off the supply of oxygen to his lungs. His eyes bulged, and his chest heaved, and, finally, the jotunn fell down dead with a mighty crash.

  Zeus picked himself up and hobbled over to the last living jotunn, the one lying on the sand. The monster struggled to stand, but Zeus shot a powerful bolt of lightning into the open wound at the jotunn’s side, and the frost giant was down for good.

  Zeus turned and surveyed the damage. All of the other gods were either dead or badly injured. The jotnar were down, but so was the Hydra. Zeus was the only Olympian left standing.

  He turned to Odin and set his fingers crackling with electricity. “That all you got?” he asked, spitting into the sand.

  Odin smirked. “Not exactly.” He tilted his head, and the raven on his shoulder let loose a mighty cry. Almost instantly, four more pairs of giant, blue hands appeared over the frozen brick wall on the other side of the gate.

  The new batch of jotnar lumbered forward into the desert.

  Chapter 11:

  In Which Distractions Are or Would Be Welcome

  Cole sighed. “Stop that, please,” he said, for what felt like the hundredth time.

  “You sound like my mom,” Willy replied, swinging the broomstick. He had found it lying on the floor in back of the barn, and he’d been using it to batter the weathered wood wall ever since.

  “Your lack of respect for the world around you is extraordinary,” Etherie decided.

  Prince Colemine observed them all from high up in the barn’s loft. He had climbed up there because he claimed that being higher made it easier for him to think. “It appears to be a finely-made broom handle,” he said, studying it from his perch. “What magical properties does it have?”

  “I don’t think it’s magical,” said Cole. “It’s just a piece of wood.”

  Prince Colemine frowned. “Why would anyone bother making something that isn’t magical?”

  “Most stuff in our world isn’t magical,” Emma pointed out.

  Prince Colemine frowned harder. “How do you stand it?” He stood up and crossed over to the ladder that led back down to the barn floor. He climbed down carefully, then approached the boy with the flailing broomstick. “May I see it?” he asked.

  “No way! You’ll break it!”

  “I will not,” the prince insisted. “I’m going to make it better.”

  Willy eyed him suspiciously, but he held out the stick. “Okay, but you can’t touch it,” he warned. The prince agreed, and he cleared his throat and held out his hands. He placed one above the broomstick, and the other below it. He narrowed his eyes and concentrated hard on the wooden staff. He poked his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. He furrowed his brow and tilted his head. His hands began to shake, and his breathing became heavy and labored. He forced all of his will into his hands and transferred their energy into the wood. His face grew red. His cheeks became puffy. Tears leaked out of the corners of his eyes. His hands shook harder and harder, faster and faster, and the broomstick seemed to thrum with the energy he forced through it.

  The air was still as the children all held their breath. Finally, just when it looked like the prince might pass out, he gave a mighty exhale and relaxed his hands down to his sides.

  “Nope,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Can’t make it magical.”

  Cole sighed. As Willy went back to battering the walls, he let his thoughts wander across the desert and up the hill. He wondered if the Stranger was having any luck. He hoped the cowboy would return with Polly soon so they could leave.

  Reaper’s Gulch was boring.

  The Stranger was used to close calls, but this—this went beyond close.

  The Hydra’s teeth had snapped so near his arm that one set shredded the fibers of his shirtsleeve. Another set gnashed in close enough to his nose that he could smell the creature’s rancid breath and see his own reflection in its gle
aming fangs. A third head, down by his feet, had actually shorn away the toes of one of his boots. Only by instinctively curling in his toes did he save them from being eaten off.

  But then the raven had cawed, and the Hydra had stopped. Half a second more, and the Stranger would have been food for the monster.

  Timing is everything, the cowboy thought.

  The raven’s cry caused the Hydra to snap all thirteen heads to attention. When the Norse god opened the gateway between the Pinch Rim and Reaper’s Gulch, the monster forgot all about its prey and stalked back toward the cavern, instinctively protecting its masters and their prisoner. The Stranger was left unguarded.

  He grabbed his hat and jammed it back down on his head. While the gods were distracted, he slunk around the hill and shored himself up flat against the outside of the cave. He turned onto his belly and pulled himself up the sloping side until he could just peek over the top.

  It wasn’t every day that the Stranger saw something that took his breath away. But the frost giants lumbering through the gateway did the trick.

  He backed down and scouted around the far side of the cave, looking for another way in, some ancillary hole in the rock that he, or at least Polly, could squeeze through. But there was nothing but solid stone disappearing into the sandy earth.

  He cursed and spat into the sand. A battle was raging in front of the cave–the gods and the frost giants were dismantling each other, giving him all the distraction he needed to sneak into the cave, but the Hydra was still blocking the entrance.

  But then, movement caught his eye, and he saw the raven advance on the thirteen-headed beast. It swooped down and started attacking the creature, and the Hydra howled in pain.

  The Stranger waited with his legs tensed as the raven went about its work. The Hydra’s heads were flailing wildly. Odin’s raven dove in for a final assault, and the Hydra pitched forward, trampling some of the Olympians in its path. The Stranger sprang forward, scrambling nimbly along the rock and slipping into the mouth of the cave while the melee raged on. He sank into the darkness of the shadows, out of sight.

  He breathed a strong exhale. Now all he had to do was find the girl.

  “Polly,” he hissed into the black maw of the earth. Then, louder, “Polly!” His voice bounced off the dripping stone walls, but aside from his own echoing call, there was no response. She must be too deep in to hear, he thought.

  At least, he hoped that’s why she wasn’t answering.

  As he pushed deeper into the cave, he noted with no small amount of displeasure that his skin had become clammy from the cool, damp air. He wiped his hands on his jeans and used the hem of his shirt to dry the handle of his gun. The fastest hands in the world wouldn’t help a cowboy who couldn’t hold onto his pistol.

  “Polly?” he called, louder this time, now that he had made his way deeper into the cave. The noise of the scuffle outside had faded, and as he stepped over tangled vines and loose rock, all he could hear was the steady drip, drip, drip of the cavern walls. “Polly!”

  A pair of deep blue lights flickered in the darkness ahead. The cowboy instinctively crouched and felt his way over to the nearest wall. He trained his eyes on the darkness before him. The eerie blue glow dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened, as if the light itself were breathing. And as he looked on, more blue lights rose from the cave floor, and soon there was an entire wall of blue lights, winking and blinking silently in the darkness like oddly-burning stars.

  And then, they began to move.

  They came at him all at once, a stampeding swarm of cool blue dots in the darkness. The cowboy pressed his back flat against the stone and drew his pistol. The silence was broken by a gentle hissing sound that grew steadily louder as the lights drew closer. They were almost on him now, and their hisses buzzed in his ears and ricocheted off the uneven walls. More and more blue lights were still appearing in the darkness beyond the horde, and they rushed forward as one frenzied mass. The hissing filled the Stranger’s head, and his heart began to pound as he realized that the temperature was dropping steadily, and quickly. Even in the darkness, he could see his breath pluming out in cloudy steam that caught the reflection of the approaching blue orbs.

  Then the lights rushed past him, and he realized what he was seeing.

  The lights were cold, glowing eyes, set into the heads of short, thin, reedy creatures that sprinted nimbly and quietly toward the mouth of the cave. He raised his gun, and it wasn’t until he did so that one of the creatures broke off from the horde and snapped its head to the side, piercing the Stranger with its gaze. The creature opened its mouth, and another blue light glowed from the recesses of its throat. The creature hissed at the cowboy.

  The Stranger froze. Then, slowly, he lowered his gun and slipped it back into his holster. He raised his hands to show that they were empty. The creature, satisfied, returned to the herd and flowed along with the other creatures, heading toward the mouth of the cave.

  The Stranger exhaled. He pushed himself flat against the stone wall, which felt fire-warmed now, in comparison to the freezing wind that bore the blue-light creatures forward. They streamed past him, silent but for their hissing, running with such agility that they seemed to float. There were dozens of the creatures, hundreds of them. And when the last of the herd finally flitted past, the cold air went with them, and the cowboy was left breathing in the damp, clammy cavern air once again.

  The Stranger looked after the fleeing cave dwellers, astonished. He hadn’t known what to expect under the earth. But it certainly hadn’t been that.

  He was so caught up in the surprise of the blue-eyed creatures that he didn’t notice the soft pink light approaching until it was just a few dozen yards away. It came from the same direction as the cave dwellers, but this light didn’t fade in and out. This one glowed steadily, and it bobbed and weaved from side to side.

  It also threw a rosy glow on the beaming face of the girl who carried the plastic light-up wand.

  “Polly,” the cowboy exhaled. He was so overwhelmed with relief that tears stung his eyes.

  “Hello, loyal subject,” Polly said, smiling in the dim light. “How do you like my army?”

  Chapter 12:

  In Which Some Reap What Others Have Sown

  Zeus was having a bad day. It had started out well, and full of promise. He had captured a girl, a real human girl, and that had put the Royal’s throne within reach. But now, as the sun began its descent toward the western horizon, he had no choice but to admit that the day had taken a turn.

  The fact that most of his gods were dead didn’t bother him all that much. They’d find their ways back to themselves eventually. As long as the ancient gods of Olympus were studied in schools and exhibited in popular culture out in the real world, they couldn’t truly die here.

  Even so. The whole thing was a real pain.

  Zeus stared wearily up at the four new jotnar. “You’re a traitor to your history, Odin,” he sighed.

  The Norse god scoffed. “I’m not betraying it. I’m rewriting it.” He held up a hand, and the four jotnar stopped advancing. “Any last words before we clean things up here?”

  Zeus snorted. He pulled off his hat, ran his fingers through his white hair, and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Yeah,” he said, tugging the hat firmly back down on his head and snapping the brim, “you can–”

  But the rest of the words never made it out of his throat. A sudden rustling hissed out of the mouth of the cave behind him. It was a sound that triggered instant and heart-sinking recognition.

  Someone had released the reapers.

  The girl, he thought. But that was impossible. She was just a child. She couldn’t possibly have set them loose.

  Could she have?

  The reapers blinked their fiery blue eyes against the glaring sun. They’d been trapped in the dark depths of the desert cave for more ce
nturies than Zeus cared to count. The light was a shock to them, but it wouldn’t take them long to recover their wits.

  When they did, they would be angry.

  And they would be hungry.

  “You’re going to wish you’d run,” he said to Odin. Though of course it was already too late for that.

  The Norse god smiled. “From them?” he asked, nodding at the scrawny, ash-colored reapers. “I doubt it.” He signaled to the jotnar, and the frost monsters lumbered forward. The one nearest the cave reached down with his massive paw, a thick line of spittle dripping from his huge lips. The horde of reapers was still pouring out of the cave, and the creatures in front blinked up at the gigantic frost monster. Without even the slightest change in expression, they opened their mouths in unison and drew in a long, collective inhale. As they did, tiny bits of the jotunn turned to dust and flaked off, caught in the reapers’ inhale. These flakes of ash flew through the air and into the creatures’ open mouths. The reapers monsters continued to draw in their breath, and more and more of the jotunn turned to ash and broke off. New reapers emerged from the cave, joining their inhales to those of their brethren, and soon there were hundreds of small, gray monsters clustered around the cave, drawing in breath and sucking down the ashen flakes of the monstrous jotunn.

  Watching them devour the beast was like watching a ripe dandelion being blown to pieces on the wind.

  The entire consumption of the frost giant took only seconds.

  The reapers grew slightly larger as they fed on the jotunn’s ash. The long-ignored hunger in their bellies was now stirred, and they turned on the other three jotnar with a terrifying ferocity. They rushed forward and sucked down the other three beasts, and Odin gaped in horror as his army flaked away into nothingness, inhaled by the reapers.