I pulled a face. It wasn’t so much the existence of a plan that filled me with doubt as the amount of personal discomfort the plan would lead to. Besides, I was happy in the flesh: the thought of forsaking it, even for an hour, to enter the world of Asgard!™ didn’t exactly appeal to me.
“What if I get stuck in there? What if I get killed?” I said.
Odin shrugged. “If we knew that, it wouldn’t be fun, would it?” he said. “Now—are you ready?”
I knew the drill. I put my hands on the console, and let Jumps take over the body again. A blare of martial music. Then, Asgard!™, and the blue of the sky, and the words CHOOSE YOUR CHARACTER. And then, as Asgard unfurled once more like an impossible banner of dreams, came the martial music again, and the ominous words:
YOU HAVE CHOSEN THOR.
Well, that’s a new definition, I thought. Given the choice, I wouldn’t have been facing Thor again on the walls of Asgard. But it had to be done. I’d sworn an oath. And so I took my position, gathered my glam, and waited for the big guy. He didn’t take long. In a rumble of thunder and a wail of guitars, along came my old friend, Meta-Thor, fuming and in Aspect: red-bearded, piggy-eyed, small-brained, and homicidal as ever.
I have to say I don’t see the point of games like Asgard!™. Seems to me there’s enough violence in the corporeal world without going off to seek it elsewhere. And though real in so many ways, this world didn’t follow normal rules. For one thing, the cantrips were all wrong—I could throw mindbolts, I could fly, I could cross great distances in a single leap, but scratching my nose was impossible.
I looked around for the goblin minion I’d seen when I last entered the game. He wasn’t there. Or if he was, he was lying low.
I jumped onto Asgard’s parapet, using one of those giant leaps. I guessed a higher vantage point would give me a better chance to attack. Still, I wasn’t planning to kill Thor. I don’t think that was an option, anyway—as far as I understood, the game allowed this Aspect of Thor to die any number of times, and come back to life with no ill effects. I was less sure of my own survival. As far as I understood the game, my pixellated Aspect could die and be reborn just as he could, but the essential Loki—the part which had lately found refuge in Jumps—was subject to no such assurances. I could just as easily find myself out in the cold if things didn’t go the way Odin had planned. And so it was with no small degree of trepidation that I faced Meta-Thor on the battlements, and wondered exactly how Odin planned to transfer the Thunderer’s Aspect to living flesh.
Then there was no time to wonder much about anything, because Meta-Thor had seen me, and was pounding towards me, hammer raised. The world shook under his mighty tread.
“FLEE, THOU CREATURE OF CHAOS, BEFORE—”
“Ah. Hang on a minute,” I said. “I thought we’d moved past this? Plus whoever wrote this dialogue has no idea of how Thor used to speak. I mean, even when his mouth wasn’t full, it was hardly what you’d call clearly intelligible. So can the verily, forsooth, and let’s have a conversation that doesn’t sound as if it was written by someone in pantaloons—”
Thor gave an inarticulate bellow of rage and took a leap towards me. It was a pretty giant leap, which brought him from the horizon almost to kissing distance.
I flung up a mindshield just in time and addressed the Thunderer once again. “It’s Loki. Remember me?” I said, dodging to avoid his attack. “Remember, we had a moment? When I was here with you yesterday?”
Meta-Thor gave a strangled yowl, like a bull trying to swallow a housecat.
I sidestepped an oncoming hammer-blow. “Give me a break. I kept my word. I said I’d come back to help you.”
He probably doesn’t remember, said Jumps dimly at the back of my mind. He’s played a thousand games since then.
“That many? Wow,” I said.
Well, it’s a very popular game.
And then the hammer came down again some six inches from my head, and I had to cast a mindbolt, or be reduced to a smear on the parapet.
A thousand games. A thousand deaths. No wonder Thor was bewildered. I mean, he’d never been what you’d call a giant intellect, and confusion had always tended to make him more aggressive. I jumped to a higher level, somewhere—as if this had been Asgard—from which I might have found a vantage point. Jumps’s knowledge of the game told me there were weapons there, things I might be able to use. Thor gave a growl and followed me. For a big guy, he could climb.
“I’ve come to help,” I said again, as Thor started to tear down the parapet on which I was standing, stone by stone, casting them onto the plain below. “I swear it. The General sent me.”
Meta-Thor made that noise again, and the parapet started to collapse. Martial music blared from the sky, which I found off-putting.
Come on, said Jumps at the back of my mind. I thought you were meant to be clever.
“I thought you were meant to be keeping him from killing me,” I said.
No, said Jumps. That’s your job. Me, I’m just fine either way.
Wow. That hurt. It really did. After everything I’d done for her, too. I searched the Asgard!™ part of her mind for something that I could use against Thor, and found a cantrip that gave me wings. Not the ones I was used to—these were big and unwieldy—more like a dragon’s than a bird’s—but they carried me out of harm’s way, and onto the game version of Bif-rost, which was heartbreakingly like the real thing and, at the same time, heartbreakingly not.
Spikes of rainbow-coloured light shot up all around me; I sensed my pixellated self gathering momentum. You might think that, being more of a creature of intellect than mere physical action, I wouldn’t enjoy waging war. But I do. I always did. That’s how the Sorceress, Gullveig-Heid, managed to lure me to her side in the war against Asgard. That, and of course, the promise of food, gold, unlimited sex, and a fleet of death-ships under my command.
Now comes a fire-ship from the east,
With Loki standing at the helm.
The dead arise; the damned are unleashed;
Fear and Chaos ride with them.
Good times. For a moment, nostalgia threatened to overwhelm me. Beautiful, ruthless, and corrupt, Heidi was the embodiment of everything I most admired. If only she hadn’t betrayed me, what might we have achieved, she and I? Sadly, it turned out that she, too, was an agent of Chaos, bent on destroying Asgard, the gods, and everyone connected with them. Not the best foundation for a lasting relationship.
For a second or two, I wondered whether a version of Heidi might be lurking somewhere here in the game, perhaps among those sleeping gods hidden under a layer of ice, that apparently belonged to some higher level of the game.
Which gods, I wondered? And would I currently benefit from trying to enlist their help, or would they simply turn on me, as they always had in life?
But I had little time to ponder possible allegiances. In this version of Ragnarók, Meta-Thor was after me. He seemed actually to have grown. I started to back away from him, but Thor gave another mighty leap and landed on the foot of the bridge. That wasn’t very authentic, I thought. In the old days, Thor had been banned from using Bif-rost after a certain incident involving his goat chariot, some beer, and half a roast ox, and besides, even when sober, the big guy was never that nimble.
I said, “Hey, listen. I bring good news.”
Meta-Thor just lunged at me. I spread my wings and dodged the blow, settling a few feet away.
“Seriously, man. Just listen,” I said. “I’ve found a way to get you back into the world of the living. I’ve just come back from there myself, and not without personal risk, may I add. There’s sleep, and food, and music, and games, and girls, and a crazy cat in a box, and all kinds of stuff I bet you’d love to get reacquainted with.”
Meta-Thor lunged again. A section of the Rainbow Bridge slid away into oblivion. Far below on the burning plain, goblin minions squeaked and ran.
“Think about it, man,” I said, flapping awkwardly away. “There?
??s something called pizza, and chocolate, and steak, and chicken wings, and fruitcake, and, like, a hundred different kinds of beer—”
Meta-Thor stopped, his hammer poised halfway between rainbow and sky. I could almost feel sorry for him now, poor slow-witted Thunderer, watching me with the half-pleading look of a rabid dog that is dying of thirst, but daren’t come near the water.
I settled carefully back onto the Bridge. “That’s right,” I said in a gentle voice. “You remember those things, don’t you? Beer, and a nice girl to bring it to you?”
Thor lowered his hammer still farther. He still looked very red in the face, but the rage had gone out of him, somehow.
“That’s my boy,” I said gently. “Now come here, and put down the hammer. Odin’s there too. Waiting for you.”
In my mind I heard Jumps’s voice: Okay. That’s good. Now take his hand.
His hand? I hesitated. Why?
Because, when I say so, Jumps explained, we’re going to pull him out of there.
Pull him where? I said. But Jumps wasn’t saying anything more. Instead I sensed amusement, and, for the first time since I’d moved into her body, a kind of satisfaction. I wasn’t sure I liked it. It made me feel small and uncertain, as if some balance of power had shifted.
Pull him where? I said again, feeling fairly certain I knew. I’d been so sure that the General needed me in his world that I’d failed to consider the circumstances of our last meeting. Ragnarók, and the fall of the gods—a fall largely engineered by Yours Truly, working together with Gullveig-Heid, and carried out by their army of monsters and ephemera—
Okay, so that was a lifetime ago. Both of us had mellowed since then. Or so I’d assumed—now, out of the flesh and back in the precarious archipelago of Dream, I started to wonder what Odin had planned. I found myself going back to my first experience with Asgard!™—the lights, the fanfare, the words in the sky:
YOU HAVE CHOSEN THOR.
And now I started to wonder—rather late in the day, I know. Just what had Odin planned for me? From everything he’d said to Jumps, I guessed that he’d been as surprised as she was at my sudden appearance. Could it be that I had arrived in Jumps’s mind by accident, and that Thor had been their choice all along? Once more, I thought of those words in the sky. How much clearer could it have been?
YOU HAVE CHOSEN THOR.
Which suggested that Odin’s current plan was nothing but a bait and switch, a trick to send me back into the dark, while Thor took my place in Jumps’s skin, which had always been the plan. That would have been disappointing, if not entirely a surprise. Good thing I had a plan of my own. How could Odin have doubted it?
The martial music was at it again. Thor took a step towards me. Red sparks danced behind his eyes. He was close enough to touch—
Now! Take hold of him now! said Jumps.
This was the moment. Now was the time. Now I could see the General’s plan to get rid of me and bring the Thunderer into the world. But instead of taking his hand, I summoned every ounce of my will and flung him as far as I possibly could, away from me and into the only available creature nearby not currently occupied by a god.
I heard Jumps’s wailing protest, and the echo of Evan’s voice in my ears, and then I was back in the flesh once more, and the little white dog was barking like mad and nipping at my ankles.
“What did you do?” Odin said.
“What, sorry?” I was all innocence. “Wasn’t that your plan?”
Odin gave me the kind of look that would once have shrivelled hearts. As it was, it made me smile. I wasn’t about to play Asgard!™ ever again, and I guess the Old Man knew that. I’d fulfilled my oath to Thor (if not in quite the way he’d expected me to). And now there was nothing the bastard could do but grit his teeth and take it.
As for the little white dog, I could see it was trying to process things. I’d like to say I sympathized. But it’s a god-eat-god world out there, and if our positions had been reversed, I doubt they’d have spared any pity for me. So instead I made for the fridge (turns out playing games is hungry work), and turned to my erstwhile General with a great big smile and said, “Well, that all turned out splendidly. Anyone for pizza?”
3.
After that, I assumed the Old Man would probably be on the warpath. But Odin was always subtle, and though I had foiled his treacherous plan, he showed no sign of resentment. Instead, he gave his inscrutable smile, fed a biscuit to the dog, and said, “You see, I was right about you. It’s good we’re on the same side.”
Well, that was rich, coming from the man who’d sworn blood brotherhood to me, then betrayed me to his friends when things got too tough to handle. “Whatever,” I said. “My work here is done. Now to enjoy the good life.”
Slowly, Odin shook his head. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “You and I can’t stay in this world. For a start, that isn’t your body. You can’t just occupy it indefinitely. And besides”—his living eye darkened—“our place here is precarious. Remember the box with the cat inside?”
“Oh, not the bloody cat again,” I said.
He blinked, and Evan resurfaced. The change was so subtle that anyone else might not have seen the difference. But Evan’s voice was more hesitant, like that of a boy who once stammered; and he sounded almost apologetic as he said, “I know I’m a massive geek, okay? But I’ve been ill since I was a kid. I’ve had a lot of time to read. Science and magic can sometimes sound very close to each other. In fact, all through the Renaissance, science and magic overlapped. In those days scientists believed in alchemy, and the Philosopher’s Stone that could turn base metals into gold and give you secret to eternal life—”
“Just tell me about the cat,” I said with a touch of impatience. It seemed Odin’s host was as talkative as he himself had turned out to be. I shot a glance at the little white dog who used to be the Thunderer. Like so many very small dogs, it seemed to believe that it was a wolf, and was trying to eat my shoe.
Evan went on patiently. “This cat,” he said, “is like the gods. Neither in this world, nor out of it. And much as the box may seem the safest place to be right now, no cat—or god—can live in a box and expect to survive for long.”
Well, put like that, it made sense, I thought. Whatever else he might be, Odin’s host wasn’t entirely without insight.
I said, “What’s the alternative? Without the power of the runes, how can we hope to get back to our World and do all those things you were talking about?”
The General smiled. It was odd to see that smile on the face of a boy of the Folk, but it was the General’s smile, all right, and I didn’t trust it one bit.
“We have one more friend to meet,” he said, “before I tell you that. Another has taken Aspect from the game of Asgard!™. Another has been born into flesh. I’m afraid that your host may not approve.”
“Why not?” Jumps and I both spoke simultaneously.
“Because of the individual of whose current Aspect they have recently declared occupancy.”
I felt Jumps rebel. Oh, no, she said.
“I’m sorry,” said Odin. “I had no choice. She was by far the closest match.”
“Not Stella,” said Jumps aloud. “Please tell me you didn’t ask Stella.”
Odin shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But trust me, Stella can help us. I chose her for a reason, as I chose you for a reason. And with her help, we’ll have enough glam between us to do what needs to be done—that is, finding a way out of this World and back into the one we left.”
I pointed out that dying wasn’t exactly my idea of a plan.
“No, not Death,” said Odin. “There are many other Worlds. Worlds in which the old gods may still have a chance of survival. Worlds in which runes are still powerful; Worlds in which we can find our place, and maybe reshape our destiny. My plan is to find a way into one of those other Worlds, and start again with whatever glam we can salvage between us.”
I have to say I was doubtful.
Easy to talk about crossing between Worlds, but even in the old days, these things weren’t that straightforward. It had taken an army of gods at the peak of the Golden Age, plus a million cantrips and runes, to build the Rainbow Bridge that had linked Asgard to the Middle Worlds. What could the pair of us do now, with not even a runemark between us?
“Trust me,” said the Old Man. “I’ve been here somewhat longer than you.”
“How long exactly?”
“Long enough.”
Well, that was intriguing. I have to say I’d assumed that I had been the first one to escape. But now, I started to wonder. How long had Odin been in this World, quietly weaving his plans for the gods? A week? A year? A lifetime? He certainly seemed on better terms with his host than I was. Were he and Evan a better match? Or had he entered the mind of the boy at such an impressionable age that he and Evan were brothers in blood, united in thought and action?
If so, I thought, gods help the boy. Odin’s record of loyalty wasn’t exactly flawless. He and I were blood brothers too, and look how he rewarded me.
In the inner space we shared, my host’s agitation was growing. “Why Stella?” she said again. “Of all the people you could have chosen, why did it have to be Stella?”
I let her ask the question. In fact, I was curious myself. I accessed the Book of Faces. Stella. Age: 17. Favourite colour: pink. Favourite film: Scream. Favourite food: Haribo. Likes: sleepovers, netball, talking about boys. There was much more everyday stuff in this vein, but from what I could read of Jumps’s mind, Stella was nothing but trouble: an erstwhile friend, turned enemy; as confident as Jumps was not; empty-headed; volatile; venal; selfish; and vain. And there was something else, as well. Jealousy? Anger? Something more?
Odin shrugged. “You might as well ask the same question of all of us. Why was it easier for Odin to enter this mind, and not another? Why was Jumps’s mind more receptive to the Trickster, rather than Thor, whom she preferred? Each of us has some quality that makes us inherently suitable. As for Stella—” Odin smiled. “Who knows what qualities she may reveal?”