Mythos (30 page)

I nodded reluctantly. She was right, but I’ve got an overdeveloped curiosity bump, especially when it comes to anything that relates to the Fates. I took the possibly dead spinnerette and very gently slid her into an outside pocket on my leather jacket. I couldn’t just leave her there, but I didn’t want her inside the Kevlar if she woke up angry.

I helped Tisiphone get the bed bearing the still-sleeping Ahllan back onto her shoulder, and we were off. The old troll slept all the way to the bay where we’d left Jormungand. When we set her down in the dune grass just beyond the high-tide line, she raised herself on one elbow and looked around.

“Where are we?” she asked. “And what are we doing here?”

“Hitchhiking,” I replied.

“You’re joking, right?”

“No, he’s not.” Melchior sighed.

“You’ll see,” I said.

Drawing the hilt shard of Occam, I put a shallow cut in my left hand. The moon had left the sky, and late night was losing its eternal battle with early morning, but the stars and my eyes provided plenty of light as I walked down to the edge of the rocky beach. I willed the chaos to start dripping from my fresh cut and held my hand out over the water in the classic thumbing-a-ride position.

“I don’t understand,” said Ahllan. “What are you all—oh my!”

Jormungand had arrived, visible more as an absence than a presence. The great black wedge of his head occluded the northern stars like a serpentine eclipse.

“Is that . . . ?”

“The Midgard Serpent?” asked Jormungand, finishing her question, his voice gentle. “Yes, I am. And you must be Ahllan. You may call me Jormungand, and I’m quite pleased to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you in the past few hours that I already feel I know you well. I only wish we could be meeting at a less strained time. Unfortunately, my wishes do little to move the world, and we should not linger now that you’ve arrived.” The huge shadow twisted quickly left, then right. “Hugin and Munin could show up at any moment, or even Odin himself, and we have many miles yet to travel.”

He lowered his head so that his nose touched the pier. Tisiphone and I caught up Ahllan’s bed between us and hurried out onto the wooden planks and from there up onto Jormungand’s head, settling the bed as best we could. Moments later the serpent turned and moved out to sea once more. Melchior remained with Ahllan while I resumed my story and my seat just beside Jormungand’s eye.

This time Tisiphone joined me, laying her head in my lap. I rested my hand on her neck with my thumb in the curve of her jawline. She smiled and closed her eyes as I talked, though I don’t think she slept.

 

 

A long, slow October sunrise off Iceland seen from the top of a moving skyscraper. Beautiful and surreal. Jormungand took us to the brilliant wall of blue ice, where a glacier flowed southward into the sea, and raised his head level with the top. We disembarked there just as the sun finished sliding clear of the ocean behind him. The waves sparkled like a line of rubies and topazes in the dawnlight.

“This is as close as I can take you. There’s an unnamed little island off that way”—he pointed southwest along the coast with his tongue—“where the others and I meet for family conferences. When you get to Rune, tell my father and brother that I want to be included in the coming discussions.”

“I will,” I said.

“Good. I’ll wait for all of you there.” He pointed with his tongue again, then sank out of sight.

Tisiphone hefted Ahllan’s bed. “I’m kind of missing Thor’s chariot at the moment,” she said, eyeing the unbroken snow and ice that lay between us and the mountains that hid our destination.

“I miss the mweb and sensible travel,” said Melchior.

“Failing that, a snowmobile suit wouldn’t go amiss,” I replied. “It’s freezing!”

Tisiphone, despite the fact she didn’t have a stitch on, just smiled and winked. Furies are never cold.

“I can’t manage a flying chariot,” said Ahllan, who had woken up again and was looking a good bit less tired, “but I can probably conjure that snowsuit and some skis.”

She whistled several long strings of pseudobinary, producing a couple of cross-country ski rigs, a snowsuit for me, and two big runners for the bottom of her bed. Since I’d gone to college in scenic—and frozen—Minnesota, I had more than a passing familiarity with the skis and their accoutrements. Pretty soon we were off to look for the nearest road and better transport.

Some hours after that we found ourselves waiting in the lobby of Rune. Somehow the whole post-logo thing made me feel the need to roll my eyes every time I said the name of Loki’s computer enterprise.

“I’m afraid Mr. Ulfr isn’t available right now,” said the giant receptionist, touching the earpiece of her headset. “He’s in a conference, but I’ve left a message that he should see as soon as he gets done.”

“What about Loki?” I asked. I’d prefer to start with Fenris, but I’d take what I could get.

“I’m afraid he’s also in a meeting. I can leave a message for him as well if you’d like.” She smiled at us with her big predator’s teeth.

“Don’t bother,” I replied. “If we have to wait anyway, we’ll wait for Fenris.”

She nodded and turned back to her desk. After a few minutes she started talking into her headset. “Of course I ate him. Stupid geologist. They know they’re not supposed to enter the tunnels off the main crater. Loki wrote that into their official policy document when he cracked the system.” She canted her head to one side and laughed. “No, not raw, silly. I’m not a complete barbarian. I did him up in a nice curry with lentils.”

I tuned her out at that and settled down to chat quietly with Melchior and Tisiphone. Having heard the Greek version of monsters swapping hero recipes in the past, I knew that they were both disturbing and quite frequently fictitious. Sure, they say that they eat people all the time, but that’s gotten much harder to get away with in the modern era. I think it’s mostly the monster equivalent of maintaining street cred at this point.

Some minutes later Laginn got up from where he’d been sitting beside Ahllan and raised a finger to attract our attention. The hand pointed at himself, then into the depths of Rune, before miming a wolf’s head and making a leading gesture. Then he quickly signed yes/no?

“Seems like a good idea to me,” I replied. “If you can find him and bring him here, I’m all for it.”

The hand hopped down and scurried off. He hadn’t been gone more than five minutes when the muffled sounds of an argument came through the glass wall that separated the lobby from the main part of the complex. Over the next few moments it rapidly got closer and louder until rather suddenly Loki and Fenris appeared on the far side of the glass. Loki was pounding his fist repeatedly into his hand while Fenris—in wolf shape—had his tail down and his hackles up.

“Because you should have told me before you did it; that’s why!” yelled Loki. “This is just like when you let them come and take that little AI back without a fight.”

“And I was right then, just like I’m right now,” growled Fenris in a voice that should have sent every small animal within a thousand miles scurrying for the nearest hole. “You’re blinded by your hatred for Odin.”

The giantess at the desk looked up at us and smiled rather sickly.

“And you can’t see past your hunger for companionship,” said Loki. “Try not to forget that the reason you’re trapped here on Midgard with only the friends I bring you is because of Odin’s twisted need to control everything. You should hate him at least as much as I do!”

“Who says I don’t? If anything, I hate him more. But I’m not going to let that stop me from thinking. If I’d come to you before I sent Laginn and Hati off, we’d still be arguing about it, and Odin would have them again.”

The giantess pulled off her headset and put it down beside her in an overtly casual manner. Then she slipped a hand under her desk, activating the mechanism that turned a portion of the wall into something like red Jell-O. Finally, and without ever breaking eye contact with us, she got up and very quickly sidestepped to the portal before backing into the other area. As the red glow went away, she waved stiffly at us.

“What is it now, Grýla?” demanded Loki, his voice still pitched for a fight.

She didn’t say anything, just jerked her chin in our direction. The whole pantomime-theater nature of the thing was starting to really tickle my fancy, and I couldn’t help chuckling.

“I don’t . . .” he began, then trailed off as he turned and spotted us. “Oh.” In an instant, Loki’s expression switched from hot fury to icy calm.

He turned to Fenris then and said something very low and very fast. Then he waved at us and smiled an unfriendly smile before heading back into the depths. Fenris, on the other hand, seemed genuinely glad to see us, his ruff dropping back to normal and his tail coming up as he gave us a wink and headed straight toward the wall. In the instant before he would have hit it, a beam of red light shot down from the ceiling behind him and did the glass-to-Jell-O trick.

“I take it you’ve decided to agree to my offer,” he said as he stepped through the gate.

“Say that we’ve come to discuss it, and you’re closer to the truth,” I replied. “Hati was called away rather abruptly before he could finish laying things out for us.”

“That rather optimistically assumes he would have eventually gotten to the point,” Fenris said with a grin, “no?”

I couldn’t help but grin back. “There is that. So you know . . . ?”

“That my son is a babbling cretin?” Fenris nodded. “Of course I do. That’s half of why I sent him. He’s quite a nice lad if you don’t happen to be a large silvery orb, by far the most personable envoy I could lay my paws on at short notice. After Laginn, that is. Speaking of which, where is he?”

“Looking for you,” said Tisiphone, inserting herself into the conversation for the first time. “That was quite an argument you were having with Loki, and not guaranteed to raise a lot of confidence in the listener, particularly this listener.”

Fenris laughed. “He’s just unhappy because I sent someone to get you without being told ‘fetch’ first. Well, that and he really didn’t much like when I released your friend.”

“I noticed that bit,” said Melchior. “I can’t say it made me want to cast my vote for Team Loki either.”

“Understandable and understood,” said Fenris. “But it’s not like Team Odin is all sweetness and light, as you might have noticed while sitting in Asgard’s charming jail. Nor is Team Odin offering you any kind of deal at all. Odin doesn’t bargain. He commands. But that’s a discussion I’d rather not have out here in the lobby. Why don’t you come up to my office? Also, I can’t help but notice that your troll friend isn’t looking in the best of health. Can I arrange a quiet room for her?”

“Her condition’s another one that belongs on Loki’s doorstep,” said Tisiphone. “Since I’d rather not give him another chance at her, the answer is no. She goes where we go.”

Fenris nodded. “Fair enough. Grýla, would you bring the troll along to my office?”

The giantess lifted the bed neatly under one arm. Laginn was waiting in the office when we got there, having entered through a little pet door set into the bottom of the main door.

The large rectangular office had walls of polished obsidian offset by sleek stainless steel and glass furniture and a cool blue deep-pile rug. On the far wall, behind the desk, was a triple-paned window overlooking a fiery lake of lava with a tiny island at its center—presumably the place of Fenris’s binding.

Fenris settled onto a thick mat behind his desk. It should have looked silly—the giant wolf sitting behind an ultramodern executive fashion statement, its glass surface bare except for one of Loki’s microcomputers. It didn’t. It looked perfect, a surrealist’s portrait of the ultimate predatory CEO. The hellish view over the lake of fire behind him only added to the effect.

“My, what big teeth you have,” I said.

“All the better to charm you with, my dear,” replied Fenris. “Come, sit down. Let’s talk. Oh, and if you really want to play fairy tale . . .”

He snapped those teeth together hard. Once. Twice. Three times. After each snap there came a sharp echo that blended into the next—self-echoing binary castanets. When he finished, three chairs had sprung up in the space before the desk. One had only a slender post for a back. One was very high and narrow, with two short steps leading up to the little seat. One would have looked at home in any dotcom start-up.

I tapped the seat obviously designed for Melchior. “This chair is too tall”—Tisiphone’s—“this chair is too narrow”—the last.

“And this chair is just right,” finished Fenris. “I’ve always preferred Goldilocks to Little Red Riding Hood. Wolf as villain is
so
overdone.”

“What about Ahllan?” I asked.

“Look behind you.”

A large wedge-shaped cushion had appeared, perfect for propping someone up in bed.

“Where were we?” asked Fenris when we had all settled down. “Oh, right. Bargaining. Look, let’s make this simple. I’m not a big fan of verbal fencing. You’re not from around here, and what that means to us is that maybe it’s possible to stop the end times from happening. Whether we need your help to do that is an open question, but the fact that Odin can’t
see
you suggests you have big potential. You know what we want. Allies against Odin to help prevent Ragnarok. What do
you
want?”

I leaned forward to answer, then stopped. What did we want? I looked at my friends and really thought about it in terms beyond immediate survival. Part of me wanted to say, “I just want to go home,” but was that truly all that I wanted? To go back to face whatever mess had happened while we were gone?

Odin had said I might be free of Hades if I stayed within this MythOS. That still sounded awfully nice. What about the others? We’d been in this world for less than five days, most of which had been spent trying to get out of one mess after another without ever a moment to think past the next crisis. Actually, put that way it sounded like the main difference between here and home was which afterlife I got stuck with when I made the inevitable final mistake. When in doubt . . . bluff.