Mythos (14 page)

Loki turned a very intense gaze on the hand. “Interesting. Very. But, what’s it to us? Neither Fenris nor I liked Tyr that much to begin with. Seeing his hand cold and dead isn’t going to bring any . . . well, Tyrs to our eyes, if you will.”

Laginn hopped forward and bobbed a nod, then pointed his index finger skyward in the general direction of Asgard. Finally, he rolled palm down and flipped his middle finger in the same general direction. The message was pretty plain.

“So, you’re not Tyr’s biggest fan either?” asked Loki.

Laginn bobbed.

“Interesting. You and I are going to have to have a long talk about that at some point. I suppose that means you’ll have to be alive to have it.”

He released his hold on the leash and Fenris bounded forward, grabbing Laginn between his teeth and tossing the hand high in the air before catching and swallowing it.

“Chew toy,” said Fenris happily. Then he flopped on the ground at Loki’s feet.

“You may make a god of a ravening wolf,” said Loki, “but any mix of human and lupine divine ideals is always going to have more than a little dog to it. I occasionally wish I’d known that going in.” He sighed, looking both proud and chagrined, and seemed to expect a response.

“I’ll have to remember that if I ever decide to father a wolf,” I said, keeping my tone carefully neutral. Kids were not on my short list. For that matter they weren’t on the long list either, but you never know.

“Good,” replied Loki. “Sensible.” He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at his son. “A truly wild wolf you can just set loose to terrorize. A dog you come to love. It makes things . . . harder.” He shook himself and turned back to me. “How did you figure out that the hand needed chaos to survive?”

“I took it through a faerie ring.”

“Ahh,” said Loki, “is that what you call them? That would do it. The effect is . . .
invigorating
. Every bit as much as one of Idun’s apples.”

“Idun’s apples?” I asked.

“The ultimate nutraceuticals,” said Ahllan, stepping out from behind York Miniature, Melchior at her side. “Fruit from the Tree of Life.”

“I was wondering where you’d gotten to,” I said to him.

“I hung out around the corner long enough to make sure no one was going to start shedding blood immediately, then went to collect Ahllan. I thought she should hear what was going on.”

To say nothing of providing me with a troll for backup.
Even tired and old, she cut a formidable figure.

I smiled at her. “Go on.”

“There’s not much more to tell,” she said. “The gods of this place are not immortal. They can be killed, and they can age. Idun’s apples are their answer to the troubles of time.”

“Smart jatte you have there,” said Loki.

“Jatte?” I asked.

“Troll,” supplied Ahllan, “derived from Jotun.”

I nodded vaguely, but something was tugging at my attention—dim memories from the class where I’d learned what little I knew about the Norse mythos were clashing with one another.

“Can we go back to the apples for a second? There’s something there. . . . Hmm. Who exactly is Idun?”

“The wife of Bragi the Fair,” said Loki, “daughter-in-law of Odin, and keeper of the apples of immortality.”

“Does she give these apples to just anybody?”

“Of course not,” said Loki. “She keeps them for the gods of Asgard, Odin and Thor, Frigga, Tyr, Heimdall, and all the rest. It is how they remain forever youthful.”

I turned my gaze back to Fenris. “How old are you?”

“I’ll be 3,012 in January.”

“And how long does a wolf normally live?” I asked Loki.

“I don’t know. . . . Maybe eight to ten years, fifteen if he’s really lucky. Oh.” He conjured himself a chair and sat down hard. “I think I see where you’re going with this.”

“I take it that means Idun doesn’t drop off a regular package of apples for the boy here?”

“No,” said Fenris, looking very confused, “she doesn’t. So, why am I not dead?”

“Or your brother Jormungand for that matter?” said Loki. “Why haven’t I ever thought about that before?”

“I think I have an answer,” I said, “to the first question at least. Why it’s never occurred to you to wonder about it is something you’re really going to need to consult a psychologist for.”

Loki gave me a hard look over the top of his glasses. “How about I blame the rigidity of the system Odin has imposed upon us all instead? Apparently it stifles our minds as much is it does our souls.” He shook his head. “But that’s neither here nor there, and since I’d dearly like to know the answer to my other question, I’ll leave it there for now.”

“Chaos, of course,” I replied, “and relative affinity for same. Back home, even the most ordered of the gods have chaos flowing in their veins, a genetic gift from our Titan ancestors. Here, however, some of your gods are essentially chaos free. Others have chaos as part of their natures. The stuff in Fenris’s gut, for example, or your eyes.”

“Or the venom in Jormungand’s fangs.” Loki looked as though someone had hit him in the forehead with a hammer. “Is it really so simple? Have I been eating the apples of Idun all this time for no true reason? If you’re right, what does that say about the apples themselves?”

“Probably that they take raw chaos and put it into a form your mortal gods can stomach,” I replied. “Where I come from, all magic flows ultimately from chaos. Take Melchior, for example.”

“Is he an immortal, too?” asked Loki. “I’m getting to the point where I might believe anything about you.”

“No, he’s a webgoblin, both computer and living being. He draws his vitality from chaos directly.”

Loki tilted his head to one side, and a look I couldn’t read passed across his features. “A computer? You’re mad.”

Melchior laughed. “Oh, come on, Loki. We’ve seen the microcomputer you have on your belt. Surely you can’t have built something like that and still doubt the power of the processor.”

“You are claiming to be a . . .
machine
?” he asked. “A clever device run by programs and nothing more? I don’t believe it.”

Melchior shook his head. “I’m claiming no such thing. I’m an AI, not a
thing
.”

“There you go with that AI nonsense again,” scoffed Loki. “No one’s ever managed it, and no one ever will. The closest anyone’s come is Odin’s MimirNet, and that he built from the remnants of a god. Without Mimir’s head at its heart, it wouldn’t work at all. I know; I’ve tried to . . .” He shook his head. “No. Impossible. Preposterous.”

“Nevertheless, true,” said Melchior. With a grin he triggered the older version of his transformation, melting slowly from goblin into laptop.
See,
he printed across his screen. “It’s that simple.” He finished with spoken words, having flickered back from laptop to goblin.

“How can you be what you claim?” asked Loki, his voice barely above a whisper. “I see that you are, but without a soul to give you life . . .”

“We have souls,” said Ahllan, “though the Fates who built us did not wish it.”

“You, too,” said Loki. “But how?”

“Discord gave us life in a trick she played on Fate,” replied Ahllan.

“Discord. That would be Eris?” he asked, leaping from his chair and starting to pace. “My opposite number, as it were.”

“I see you’ve been doing your homework,” I said, somewhat enviously. I needed to do mine and still hadn’t had the time.

“Oh yes, once you arrived, a number of . . . possibilities opened themselves before me. Some I had hoped for but never dared believe. Others had never even crossed my mind. And now”—he looked back and forth between Melchior and Ahllan—“now the vistas appear limitless.”

I opened my mouth to respond but stopped when Fenris leaped to stand on three feet and pointed his nose skyward, giving the impression of a poodle with a bad case of bird-dog envy.

“What is it, boy?” Loki asked.

“Is Timmy in trouble?” I added.

Loki glared at me while Fenris growled low in his throat.

“It’s Tisiphone,” said Melchior, who had probably adjusted the acuity of his eyes to see her.

A moment later a point of fire bloomed high above and began to grow quickly larger. She dropped like a falcon diving on its prey, backwinging only at the last second to save herself a crash. She landed between me and Loki and Fenris, her fires bright with anger, her claws extended.

“I believe we have some unfinished business from the last time we met,” she said, looking all the more dangerous for the fresh and angry scars where Hati had clawed her temple.

“What would that be?” asked Loki, the chaos of his eyes glinting over the tops of his glasses.

“You need to learn that trifling with those a Fury cares about is a risky proposition.”

“A Fury?” asked Loki, looking far more delighted than scared. “Are you really, now?”

“I am,” she said, moving toward him. “And—”

She was interrupted by a low, rumbling growl from Fenris, who stepped in front of his father and bared his teeth.

“You want a piece of this, too?” Tisiphone asked, smiling a dangerous smile. “That’s fine with me.”

Leaping into the gap between the wolf and the Fury took more willpower than I’d known I had before I tried it. It also took a whole lot of stupid, since I wasn’t the only one who moved then. Both Tisiphone and Fenris had acted as well. Which is why I found myself with my entire head inside the wolf’s mouth and ten daggers of organic diamond sunk a good centimeter into the flesh of my lower back. The sword blade hovering an inch in front of my nose made me a little nervous, too; but by comparison it was barely worth mentioning.

“Could everyone please stop with the macho and the death threats for a second?” I asked.

I was proud my voice didn’t shake, though the hollow echo it made as it bounced away into the bottomless depths of his stomach robbed it of some of the authority I would have liked to project. Still, the necklace of pain Fenris’s teeth had put around my neck didn’t tighten, and I felt Tisiphone withdraw her claws.

I continued. “I know that holy crusades are more fun for the violence-minded, but could we wait until diplomacy has genuinely failed before we
cry havoc
and all that?” I waited until several more terrifyingly long seconds had passed without anyone tearing me limb from limb. “All right, then. Fenris, please release me. Tisiphone, let’s don’t start another disemboweling strike when he does, ’kay?”

Fenris opened his mouth and moved back beside Loki. I drew several deep breaths of air that didn’t smell like the inside of a large carnivore, then took a step backwards, pressing myself firmly against Tisiphone, despite the stinging of the punctures in my back. Again I waited. Nothing. I took another tentative backward step. Tisiphone didn’t have to move—she was at least ten times stronger than I—but she did. I kept backing until a good couple of yards separated the potential combatants.

Finally, I nodded to Loki. “Could you wait here for a second? I think Tisiphone and I need to talk.”

Then I turned around, hooked my arm through Tisiphone’s, and attempted to lead her away. I say “attempted” because the result was pretty much the same as if I’d wrapped my arm around a telephone pole and tried to lead it away.

“Please,” I said.

“All right, but you’re a reckless idiot. And very nearly a dead one. You know that, right?”

“You just noticed?”

Tisiphone sighed and let me draw her around to the far side of a miniature English tavern. It was about the size of the average backyard shed, just big enough to put us out of sight of the others. Whispering, I quickly brought Tisiphone up to speed on current relations with Loki and Fenris. Not wanting to get her any more wound up than she already was, I skipped my Raven-napping by Hugin and Munin and the whole Odin scene for the moment. Oh, and the part about the hair of ice as well.

When I was done, and she was calmer, I asked her how her quest to find me a networking card had gone. She grinned in response and pulled a slender board from some hidden niche in her wings.

“Getting it was an
interesting
proposition, but I can tell you about that later. I don’t know how well Fenris hears, and I’d rather not share the news too widely.”

I nodded. “Speaking of which, why don’t we head back? I don’t want to keep our guests waiting too long since I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them.”

“Good,” said Tisiphone, “neither do I.”

She gave me a quick kiss, then took my hand and started to lead me back around the other side of the miniature. She stopped when she got far enough out to see and started swearing. I darted past her. Then I started swearing, too. Bitterly.

Loki and Fenris were gone. So was Melchior. Ahllan lay in a slumped heap beside a brand-new faerie ring perfectly in keeping with the rest of Forestdown’s mad miniatures—an inch-high fieldstone wall crafted of the tiniest pebbles.