I grinned as I closed the portal on his bellow of rage. “It’s going to take him a thousand years to finish falling on his ass,” I said.
Chapter 26
Abruptly cut off from Bacchus, the maenads stopped caring about Granuaile and began wondering where the hell they were and why they were wearing white nighties.
“Oh, my God, what happened to your teeth?” one said.
“My teeth? What’s up with yours?”
“My teeth are fine! Wait.” She put fingers with torn nails up to her lips and discovered she had a mouthful of fangs. “Oh, Jesus, they’re all pointy and shit!”
The screams, once they began, were contagious. Part of it was the terror of sheer confusion; part of it was terror at their future dental bills. I actually was happy for them: We’d discovered a way to free them from their thrall, and they could be human again.
Granuaile appeared, Scáthmhaide in hand, and looked worried about my dangling left arm.
“Yes, you do get to shove it back in,” I said.
“I was afraid of that,” she said.
“Thanks for the assist. Normally I would chew you out for leaving open a portal that long, but this time I’ll let it slide.”
She grinned and gave me a quick kiss. “Thanks.”
Letting an amateur shove your arm back into its socket is unpleasant, but when you have magic at your disposal, it’s better than getting insurance and waiting five hours for a professional to do it. Jogging north together until we found a tethered tree without an annoyed dryad inside, we shifted to our cabin near Camp Bird Mine to greet our happy hound.
Oberon said as he bounded toward us, fresh from getting a drink in the Uncompahgre River.
“Oberon, did you go into the mine?”
“Oberon?”
“What two ravens?”
Casting my eyes toward the mine foreman’s house, I saw the ravens he was talking about. They weren’t the normal kind. They were a bit bigger than usual, and each had one eye that gleamed white.
“That’s Hugin and Munin,” I said.
Granuaile tensed. “Odin’s ravens?”
“Yep.”
She began to scan the area. “He’s here somewhere?”
“I doubt it. He won’t get within striking distance of me again if he can help it. He probably has backup ravens and everything. I bet this is a call to arms from Frigg. She’ll be wanting me to kill Fenris now that you’re bound to the earth. But stay on your guard in case I’m wrong.”
We began walking toward the foreman’s house, our eyes never resting but searching for threats. None appeared, though Hugin and Munin did their best to serve us up some turbo-grim memento mori action.
As we neared the front porch, Frigg floated from the backyard to meet us. She was wearing another of her Dalek dresses, but this one was blue and green with white swirls reminiscent of marshmallows melting in chocolate. She smiled and greeted us, the very picture of hospitality, her sour expression from months ago now gone. An arm appeared from underneath her hair and waved gracefully at the door to the abandoned house. “Shall we go in?”
I winced. “It’s probably not a good idea,” I said. “It’s been vacant for years, and the last time I was in there it was full of rodent droppings.”
“Oh, I am well aware. But that is no longer true.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “A dwarf owed me a favor, and I permitted him to clean the place for our use. He has been very industrious; I am sure you won’t recognize it. But I should warn you—he is in mourning.”
“I’m sorry to hear,” Granuaile said. “But why does that require warning?”
“Well.” Frigg pulled at imaginary tufts of hair on her chin—or else it was a sign language of some sort. “He’s … you know. In mourning.”
“No, we don’t know,” I said. “We’ve never seen a real Norse dwarf before.”
“Oh. Well, you’re probably expecting the beard, but it won’t be there, you see. They shave them off to express their grief.”
“Instead of crying?”
“Precisely.”
“Would it be rude to ask why he’s in mourning?” Granuaile asked.
Frigg smiled. “You won’t have to ask. He will tell you all about it. That’s part of their process. And in truth, Druids, his story is why I’m here. If this doesn’t convince you to help us against Fenris, nothing will. Oh, one more word of caution,” she said, pausing before the door. “He is a Runeskald, so please forgive his unusual speech. Even in English, he tends to wax poetic.”
She preceded us into the house, understanding that we’d want to have no one at our backs, and waited for us to enter. The interior had been utterly transformed.
Where an old chewed-up beige carpet had rested, riddled with the piss and shit of untold numbers of rats, a gleaming hardwood floor awaited instead. The peeling wallpaper had been replaced with something new and warm.
Well, that was probably a lie. The colors were actually cool, but I had once spent a purgatorial week forced to watch HGTV, and during that time I noticed that the hosts and designers described everything they wanted to do as “warm.” Even if they were working with ice blues, they were warm ice blues. I learned that warm was the best possible all-purpose adjective to use when remodeling; home owners couldn’t hear the word enough. A designer could tell a couple that she was going to place a warm steel sculpture of Beira’s frigid tits on top of a white marble pedestal in a walk-in freezer and the couple would nod enthusiastically, blocking out everything except the warm. Let it be known, therefore, that the entire miraculous remodel of the foreman’s manse was warm. Even the dwarf responsible for it, who was introduced to us as Fjalar, greeted us warmly.
Fjalar was very clearly in mourning. His red-rimmed eyes regarded us tragically, and I did my best not to laugh at his sad little chin, a white pocked moonlet gleaming underneath a pouting lower lip and the cantilevered overhang of his epic mustache. The reason dwarfs grow beards became obvious as he spoke: Their chins are too emotionally expressive, capable of quivering and frowning and lending the dwarf an air of vulnerability that they no doubt feel would attract unwelcome advances.
His voice was a lusty, sonorous baritone, bereft of Scottish accent and thick with a Norse one, and he used it to invite us to a place at the table. I noticed that all his dark hair was braided into multiple lengths, not like dreadlocks but not like any fashion I had seen before on males. Each length had something clasped or tied around it, usually gold or silver, but I saw colored strips of ribbon as well. He saw that I was curious about it and pointed to his braids with a thick finger.
“You spy my braids, to be worn for a year and a day. Signs of mourning, brother-memories, friendship flags, and rings of clan and craft.”
“Yes, Frigg told us. I’m very sorry.”
“All will I tell you, speaking fulsome, time in hand,” he said. “For now, bread and mead call us, appetites whetted, to witness what I have been nursing, encased in iron, licked by flame, and tended with relish.”
He waved grandly to a cook pot over a fire. The hearth looked good as new, and in front of it was a long wooden table with benches and candles. Pitchers
of mead waited to be poured into drinking horns, and loaves of crusty bread waited in wooden bowls. Crossed axes and shields hung on the walls. Fjalar had done his best to turn the living room into a mead hall. A warm one.
He ladled out a bowl for each of us, including Oberon once we requested it. Fjalar looked to Frigg first to see if she was okay with it, and she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Druids.” Fjalar shrugged back and filled up a bowl for the hound.
Oberon had nothing but praise for his meal.
Okay, Oberon, I hear you.
“This is fabulous, Fjalar. I wish we could enjoy the hospitality of dwarfs more often,” she said.
Oberon made this last comment as Granuaile was taking a sip of mead, listening to Fjalar’s gracious reply. She managed both to spit mead and choke at the same time.
Fjalar and Frigg looked alarmed, and I looked like an ass because I laughed. Oberon chuffed.
“You’d better get used to it,” I said, pounding her on the back a couple of times, “because that’s the way it’s going to be. He’s like that all the time.”
“Thanks for the timely heads-up,” she wheezed. We then had to spend a few moments apologizing to our hosts for our terrible manners.
After dinner was finished and we had showered Fjalar with another round of compliments and thanks, he cleared away the dishes and brought us cups of Irish coffee.
“Many thanks, Fjalar,” I said. “You’ve researched your guests’ preferences well.”
“Glad I am that I could so satiate you, for I have a tale long in the telling to share, if your leisure serves.”
“No doubt this has something to do with Loki,” I said.
The dwarf nodded. “It does.”
“We know some of it,” I said. “We saved Perun from Loki in Arizona.”
Frigg’s brows rose in surprise, and so did the impressive hedgerows above Fjalar’s eyes.
“Perun lives?” Frigg asked.
“Aye, but his realm is indeed destroyed. He is now a guest of the Tuatha Dé Danann.”
Frigg leaned closer. “Did he say why Loki pursued him?”
“He said Loki had wanted to kill Thor, and since that option had been taken away from him, Perun would have to do.”
Frigg made no comment but shook her head to communicate her disapproval. Fjalar turned to her. “Then why in the nine realms did he come to us, fire-wreathed, rash, and wanton, screaming after someone named Eldhár?”
“Um, that would be my fault,” I said.
“Your fault?” Fjalar said. His eyes widened. “You sent Loki Truthslayer to Nidavellir?”
Granuaile twitched but didn’t follow through. “I’m afraid so,” I said. “Sorry.”
“You are responsible!” Fjalar began to rise from the table and Frigg placed a soothing hand on his shoulder.
“Fjalar, he is our guest,” Frigg said.
“He is our enemy!” the dwarf roared. Despite her attempt to make him sit, he rose, pointing at me. “Thoughtless tongue of a tiny mind! Seven times seven hundred Shield Brothers dead—”
“What?” I said.
“Have patience, you see he is unaware!” Frigg said. “He could not have known what Loki and Hel would do.”
“What did they do?” I asked. “Fjalar, please, I do not know what happened. Tell me what they did.”
The dwarf glared at me, his fingers itching for an axe. Frigg never removed her hand from his shoulder. He took several deep breaths, his chin mottled with blood-lust, until he finally mustered the will to take his seat calmly.
“I suppose it is meet and proper,” he said, “that you should hear first why I mourn, beardless and braided. And then your woman and hound will know I have just cause, am truly honor-bound, to cut you down.”
Oberon growled at his words.
Stop that this instant!
“Please,” I said to him. “Say on.”
Perhaps if we had warning, horns sounded with alarm, we could have mustered a stronger defense, offered tapestries of wards and fire-tested stone. As it was, our defense faltered, heat-ravaged, and our stone doors melted, slagged to ruin by the sulfur breath of volcanoes, Loki’s fury unchained. Nidavellir opened to him, he gave vent to his spleen, gall and bitterness churning in his eyes, madness made plain, spewing the venom he had choked down for so long in his bondage, deep in the darkness of that sepulchral cave. Our guards he set aflame and then bellowed above their screaming, demanding that we produce the wretched construct, dwarf-crafted, known as Eldhár. He paused for our answer, and we bore him honest tidings that nothing did we know of such a construct, but this he refused to believe, heart hardened against the truth, he who trades in lies like the winds trade in rumors of storms. Awash in fire, orange and yellow, he shot through tunnels and the noble caverns of Nidavellir, ancient dwarf-home, solid sanctuary until that day. Deeper and deeper he delved, past our cities and into rough-hewn mines, and even past these until he burned the raw, untouched rock, the virgin flesh of the earth. We lost him somewhere in the dark, his flames extinguished, his shrill demands for Eldhár fallen silent, grave-still, not even a whisper of misplaced anger in the abyss.
Then we wondered, and we sent out queries to Asgard, Vanaheim, and elsewhere: How had Loki won free? Was Ragnarok begun? Who was Eldhár? There are many dwarfs who hold that name, but none of the king’s smiths had crafted a construct of that calling.
We heard first from Odin Allfather, far-seeing, wise-ruling. He warned us to beware of Hel, cold and cunning, and to look for her spies in our realm; she must not learn that Loki was in Nidavellir. Straightaway we searched, seized, and questioned; her minions, death rattlers, stringy shadows of the eternal forlorn, we found in abundance, and held them captive. But our prudence came too late, availed us not!
Too open had we been about Loki’s arrival, too free with our questions and messages. Hel could not fail to hear that Loki Giantborn had come to Nidavellir, losing flame and voice and pain-racked visage in the black of some pit, far beyond where we feast and work and dwell.
To my shoulders fell the weight of the mountain, for such is the weight of my king’s command. King Aurvang, son of Vestri, golden-maned, mighty-thewed, many-wived, bold in battle, spake unto the king’s smith, who in turn spake unto me, and my task was made plain: The Stonearms, the king’s own hammers, needed armor to withstand Loki, proof against fire, wards against his wrath.
I am a Runeskald, one of seven, seniormost and filled with lore, who emblazons armor with the truth of runes, elemental forms, matched to thought and deed and purpose; weapons too, carved with kennings both old and new that I sing betwixt my workshop walls, always imbuing steel and stone with the poetry of life, the songs of war.
It had never been done before, warding armor so well against fire that a dwarf could withstand the implacable malice of Loki Kinslayer, flame-haired cruelty, molten-tempered mischief. But I was not asked if it could be done; I was told to make it so.
I sang to the steel and struggled with the runes for a sevenday, yet could not find the form and song that would keep steel cool in fire. In perversity, desperation driven, I plied my craft on leather and surprisingly found a measure of success. Pursuing it further, doubly determined, I sang of skin-sealed moisture, sinews hardened with courage, tanned hide of taut resolve that deflects danger, and of surfaces chapped instead of burned. And the runes I crafted were oblong and rounded, hea
t-shedding shapes of domed protection, sigils of steadiness in the face of fury, waves of quenching water to drown licking fingers of fire.
Into the smithy’s flames I tossed two shields of leather, one of my skaldic craft and one bereft of my attention. The standard shield burned, while the skaldic shield only charred and blackened around the edges. Heart-swollen and pride-puffed, I applied my hard-won skills to a set of armor, and it was during this time that Hel’s army came to Nidavellir.
News of her father had reached her pestilent ears, cold with patient malice. Swiftly, she assembled legions of draugar to invade our mountain, defile our homes, stain the beauty of our axe-hewn halls. They came with weapons drawn, modern rifles like our smiths now make, shooting into our tunnels but never spreading out, always marching deeper, past our treasures and warrens of riches. Many thousands were they, yet so were we and determined to stop them, for now we thought Ragnarok had begun.
The hammer horn sounded throughout Nidavellir, and the Stonearms assembled, and with them the Black Axes, the Shield Brothers, the Maidens of Wrath, and the Guardians of Lore. Miners and craftsmen, merchants and millers, all were called to martial arms, all of them answered, abandoning the day’s cares for the defense of the realm, save for myself and the Runeskalds by especial command of King Aurvang. “You must remain in your workshops, ever diligent,” he said, “and continue crafting the armor to slay the father of lies, whensoever we find him.”
And so battle was joined without my hammer, and the king’s skalds will never sing of my valor around the hearths of my people.
Here is what they sing instead: