I failed to find him after twenty yards. Nor did I find him in the next twenty. But I heard Freyja’s voice call out to my right and behind me shortly afterward and a rumbling reply directly to my right. I turned but saw nothing in the thrice-damned mist. Still I moved toward the husky voice.
“Freyja, is it? I have heard from my sister that you lost your brother some time ago. Such a shame. I forgot to send my condolences, did I not? Please accept them now.”
Freyja told Fenris what he could do with his condolences. The wry chuckle fell from above. I looked up and to my right again, following the noise, and spied two massive legs stretching up into the mist. Poking out beyond them was half a snout—the nose and open maw of Fenris. Clearly he had decided to confront us in the Economy Size. Much larger than Garm, who was a monster at six feet at the shoulders, Fenris was at least twice that, maybe more. With jaws that size, he could handle us like large Milk-Bones, except we would be much more squishy. Quietly and quickly as I could, I minced my steps to the left in search of his rear legs. Freyja kept talking to distract him—that was excellent work. Still, he sensed us.
“Who do you bring with you?” he rumbled. “I smell others.”
“There are dwarfs fighting the draugar behind us,” the goddess replied. “Slaying them all, I imagine.”
“I rather doubt it,” Fenris said after a couple of loud sniffles. “This isn’t the stench of dwarfs. This is something else. Humans. Living ones. Where are they?”
Granuaile had beaten me to the rear legs, for at that moment Fenris yelped and the muzzle disappeared from the ceiling as he whipped around to snap at something painful on his left side. His right rear leg shot forward for balance, planting itself right in front of me. There was a red ribbon tied around it, which I recognized as the fabled Gleipnir, so I swung Fragarach with all my enhanced might just above it, hoping to hobble the beast and turn his attention my way. It worked! Sort of.
Fragarach cut cleanly through his entire leg, amputating it with one strike, but I had now freed him. Instead of turning around to his right, where he could no longer rest any weight, he kept turning left and down, circling around so that his giant tail caught me smack in the chest and sent me flying backward. I dropped Fragarach and the knife and stretched my hands beneath me to make sure my head didn’t hit the rocks first. It didn’t, but it wasn’t a happy landing either. My left hand took the brunt of it and I sprained my wrist. I also banged my elbow hard enough to make me cry out; it was a taste of what Bacchus must have felt under Granuaile’s staff. My left arm would be useless for the near future; sprains don’t mend themselves in seconds, even magically assisted. My tailbone would no doubt give me a bit of pain later on as well. For now it was a dull ache underneath the adrenaline.
My ears pounded with the sound of cannon fire and the howls of a giant wolf, but I longed to hear something from Granuaile, anything that meant she was still alive. I hadn’t heard her since we moved forward.
I clambered to my feet and retrieved Fragarach from where it lay, then looked up to see Freyja charging a much-reduced wolf, as he was still spinning counterclockwise, snapping at something … invisible. Granuaile lived! I charged too, though a bit awkwardly without the free use of my left arm.
Unlike Granuaile, Freyja was fully visible and making noise. She obviously wanted to get the wolf’s attention, and she managed to—but not the way she would have liked, perhaps. As I charged, she leapt at him, spear cocked in her hand. She thrust it at his head as he lunged at her, letting Granuaile go for the moment. He saw the spear and shrank, twisting his head at the same time, so that her thrust overshot her target and grazed along the side of his head. Fenris caught Freyja’s legs between his jaws, she screamed, and he tossed her away into the mist so that he could return his attention to the invisible demon pestering his left side. Granuaile was probably chucking all of her throwing knives into his ribs and driving him crazy. He lunged around to his left, snapping at something he couldn’t see, but thankfully his teeth sank into nothingness. I made my own leap at Fenris—which he didn’t see coming—but he was still shrinking in an effort to spin around faster to catch Granuaile, and he shrank faster than I expected. I’d put quite a bit of force behind my jump, and now I was going to overshoot him entirely. I swiped at his head and just scratched the top of it between his ears, doing no lasting damage beyond whatever the poison could do to him. Thus far, despite having been wounded repeatedly with poisoned blades, he’d shown no ill effects.
My scratch secured his attention, however. His jaws whooshed closed, with an audible clap of jowls and teeth, where my legs had been a split second before. I landed safely if a bit unsteadily on the other side of him, and he barked in frustration before speaking.
“Who strikes? Who hides like a coward from my eyes? Show yourself!”
Yeah, right. I had made sure Granuaile was of my mind on this matter: When in a fight for your life, you never, ever fight fairly. Honor and sportsmanship are wonderful in games that don’t matter, but it’s the honorable guys who always die in real battles. “When there’s blood involved,” I’d told her, “you always use every advantage you have to make sure it’s theirs that spills and not yours. If you want to feel guilty about taking unfair advantage afterward, you go ahead and feel that shit. But live to feel it.”
In this situation, though, showing myself might make Granuaile safer. It might give her another free shot to finish Fenris for good. Blood was still squirting out of his leg, and I could see now that he had several throwing knives lodged in his bleeding skin, plus a larger one stuck in his left leg. Between that wound and his missing right leg, he wouldn’t be making any astounding leaps my way. It could work out.
I dissolved my camouflage and whistled at him. “Here, boy. Nice doggie.”
His eyes flashed at me and his lips peeled back into a snarl.
“Who are you?” the wolf growled. “Some new god?”
He spoke in Old Norse, so I replied in kind. “Not quite. I’m the guy who kills gods when they piss me off. Freyr, for example.”
Fenris flinched as if I’d slapped him.
“You killed Freyr? And you come here with Freyja?”
“You’re the blood price, see? How’s that leg, by the way?”
“About the same as Freyja’s, I imagine.” He did his best to lunge at me with just his front legs and his jacked-up rear left, but it was an awkward move and bereft of speed. Using her second large knife, Granuaile employed the wolf’s momentum to open up his right side. Fenris yelped and tried to pivot right, but that put weight on his bleeding stump, and he yowled louder as he lost his balance and crashed down onto his leaking guts.
I cast camouflage again and sprinted at him, thinking of little else besides a prayer to the Morrigan that Granuaile wasn’t trapped underneath him. Even though Fenris had shrunk significantly, he was still bigger than Garm. If Granuaile’s head was underneath all that weight, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.
Fenris struggled to get up but flailed messily instead. Without his back leg to lift him, he couldn’t stand again, and his wounds were finally taking their toll. He realized it was over as his eyes searched for me.
“You have my curse upon you, godslayer,” he said between bared teeth. “You and all your—”
I hacked through the back of his neck and cut through his spine. “Shut up,” I said.
Wiping Fragarach hastily against the wolf’s fur, I called for Granuaile. She appeared on the other side of the great wolf’s neck, grinning at me. Her left arm was a sleeve of blood.
“Made you nervous, didn’t I?”
My shoulders slumped in relief. “A bit, yes.”
“Nice kill shot.”
“Thanks. What’s all that?” I chucked my chin at her arm.
“He got a tooth or two into me at one point. It’s all good. No rabies.”
An especially loud explosion from the vicinity of the dwarf ships reminded us that we needed to get out of there.
; “Did you see where Freyja landed?” I asked.
“No. Too busy running for my life.”
“I think she flew off that way,” I said, pointing vaguely behind me.
We jogged together in the direction I thought she’d flown, keeping about ten yards between us. I was giving some panicked thought to how we’d get out of Hel without Freyja’s help if she turned up dead. I was reasonably sure I could use the root of Yggdrasil to shift back to that nice wee pond in Sweden, but getting past the walls and gates of Hel was another matter entirely. I doubted the dwarfs would give us a ride over the wall if we told them one of their favorite goddesses was a chew toy, and I was positive the cats would listen to no one but Freyja.
Granuaile found her first.
“Atticus, she’s here! Bad shape, though.”
Freyja’s spear was lying some distance from her awkward form. Her legs were twisted at odd angles and sheathed in red.
“Okay, you stimulate skin repair, and only that, hear me? No adrenaline. I’ll stop the bleeding.”
We laid on hands and got to work. The wounds Fenris had made would have killed her from blood loss had we arrived much later. She’d already lost consciousness, and soon her brain would be starved entirely for oxygen. She needed a transfusion, but she wouldn’t get it here.
“Gods, what a mess,” Granuaile said. “Wish we could put some of it back in.”
“You and every field surgeon who ever lived.”
Freyja’s right leg and right arm both had breaks, probably from the way she landed. She most likely had a concussion as well, though I thankfully saw no blood pooling underneath her head. I couldn’t set her bones here.
“We’ll have to carry her to the chariot,” I said. “Think we can do it invisibly?”
Granuaile nodded. “Once the spell is cast, skin contact with the staff is all you need. We could support her under either shoulder, hold the staff across the back of our necks with our outside hands, and sort of drag her that way.”
“Make it so.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
I took a few more seconds to stabilize Freyja’s circulation, then we hefted her up between us as planned. Before we had taken three steps, we heard an anguished cry erupt near the body of Fenris. We recognized the gravelly source of it and hurried: That was Hel’s voice. If she’d burst through the Black Axes, there was no telling what kind of reception awaited us.
Hel’s unseen wailing continued as we dragged Freyja closer to the sounds of fighting, and it was difficult not to cringe at the noises Hel made. Half her throat was dead and rotting, after all, so normal cries were impossible for her. The addition of tears, mucus, and genuine emotion on her part made it unbearably animal.
Thinking of the stages of grief, I wondered if Odin had counted on what would happen when Hel reached rage. Could this be the trigger for Ragnarok, right here? Or would she stay her hand until Loki wakened from his sleep?
Knowing I was caught between Hel herself and Hel’s army, every step seemed unnecessarily long. I wanted to be in the chariot and flying already—but who knew if Freyja’s flying kitties were still alive at this point?
The mist brought us nothing but the sounds of battle, dwarfs dying and draugar falling for the final time. When the combatants finally hove into view, I knew I never wanted to face off against one of the Black Axes.
Hel must have pushed through the lines on an unstoppable wave of draugar, but most of these now littered the rocks ahead, and the remaining few were falling in hand-to-hand combat with the dwarfs. The axemen were closing the breach one swing at a time, toppling heads and sometimes even torsos with their blades, such was the force generated by their muscles. My earlier supposition that their blades were armor-piercing was borne out before my eyes; I saw a dwarf’s axe cut through the steel-plate helmet of one undead soldier with no more resistance than that of wet cardboard.
A cluster of them facing outward drew my attention: They were guarding Freyja’s chariot.
“There’s our ride home,” I said to Granuaile. “You see it?”
“Yep.” The ground between the chariot and us was clear of draugar, except for the remaining pieces of them.
“If we suddenly appear amongst them, they’ll cut us down without thinking. Drop the enchantment now and I’ll hail them.”
“Done.”
I shouted in Old Norse and hoped that Hel wouldn’t hear it over the sounds of war and her own sorrow. “Black Axes! To me! To Freyja! Defend the goddess!” A dozen wee warriors swarmed around us and escorted us to the chariot.
“Is she alive?” a gruff voice asked.
“Aye, but barely. The wolf is dead.”
“We figured Hel wouldn’t make that noise if he lived.”
“Right you are. It’s time to run.”
“I’ll tell the axemaster,” the dwarf said, seeing us safely into the chariot. “Don’t wait for us. Go!”
He made it sound so simple. But when I looked over the front of the chariot, the cats’ eyes staring back at me did not seem anxious to leave.
“Hey, cats,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s boogie. Come on.” I pointed up at the ceiling of mist. “Back over the wall. Let’s do this.” They stared at me. One began to lick his nether region. “Giddy-up!” I cried. “Heaahh! Move ’em out! Shoo!” This earned me more stares and more licking but no movement. “Go, damn it!”
“Atticus, that’s not going to work,” Granuaile said.
“Yeah? Well, you try it.”
Granuaile faced Freyja forward so the cats could see her face. “Listen,” she said. “Freyja is hurt.” The cats took sudden interest. Their eyes, indifferent before, were now clearly focused on Granuaile and Freyja. “Your mistress needs help. We need to leave now. Over the wall, back the way we came. Take us to Frigg. Take us to Frigg, and I’ll buy you some tuna.”
At least, I think she said tuna. Her words were drowned out by a roar from Hel, who appeared in her half-hot, half-rot form to demand an explanation, her hair touching the ceiling of snotlike mist. Though she was twenty yards away, we could already smell her. “Who killed him?” she wanted to know, the great knife Famine clutched in her skeletal left hand. “Was it Freyja?”
The chariot jerked and we lifted off the ground; Freyja’s cats were suddenly anxious to escape.
“Nope. That was me!” I shouted.
Hel’s eyes focused and then narrowed in recognition. “You! You’re supposed to be dead!”
“You should have learned from the mistakes of the Æsir,” I said. “Never fuck with a Druid!”
I shouldn’t have said that.
As we rose into the clouds of mist, all sounds of battle and rage below muffled by its close stickiness, Hel’s giant right hand followed us in and closed on the open back of the chariot, halting our progress in midair. Granuaile and I yelped, and the cats protested with a noise primarily composed of vowels.
Freyja’s kitties were powerful, and thanks to them Hel couldn’t drag us back down, but neither could we escape. Hel’s right hand was on the “hot” side, and thus it looked lovely and cultured and gave no hint that it belonged to something hideous. Granuaile slapped at her thighs, searching for a knife, but she had thrown them all at Fenris and slammed her bowie knife into his leg. I handed her mine.
She snatched it, cocked it over her shoulder, and threw it directly into the back of that giant lovely hand—not hard enough to pin it to the chariot floor, but hard enough to stick in there. A bellow from below and we shot skyward as the hand disappeared. I think the cats were in a hurry, because we didn’t seem to spend so long in the snot this time. More likely Freyja had taken us through it a bit slower than necessary.
“You poisoned that blade, right?” Granuaile asked.
“Yep. We can always hope. I doubt it will take her out, though.”
I held much more hope that the Black Axes would make it out okay; I’d had no time to assess the state of their forces. I rather feared that the dwarfs in Nidavellir would have
to bear a counterattack now. It would be better if Hel were somewhat cowed by this affair and rediscovered caution.
“Hey, Granuaile,” I said once we got clear of the mist and were sailing back to the wall. “Will you ask the cats to keep the portal to Midgard open for the dwarfs?”
“Sure. I don’t know if that’s something they can do, but I’ll try.”
“Thanks. I’d hate to think we were stranding all the dwarfs in Niflheim.”
Red hair streaming behind her in the cold wind, Granuaile asked our transportation to keep the door open for the dwarfs. I distinctly heard a meow in reply.
“Oberon was right about you,” I said. “You really are a cat person.”
Chapter 28
Sound and light returned to normal once we crossed over the wall. Colors came back, and the thundering of artillery coming from the other side of the wall echoed in our ears. Once we got an angle, I could see that it was significantly damaged and Hel had made absolutely no return fire. She’d never upgraded her own defenses, assuming that she would be the one to make an attack. Perhaps that would keep her busy also.
Someone must have been watching for us, or else the dwarfs used radio or something, for the attack broke off and the ships began to rise to follow our chariot. Looking behind us, I saw more dwarf ships sailing silently over the wall, following us back. I had no way of knowing how many returned, but I knew that honor was important to them and that the dwarfs would feel better for dealing Hel this defeat.
We swerved up the root at a ninety-degree angle but thankfully did not fall out the back of the chariot. There was, instead, just a slight sense of vertigo as we completely ignored gravity.
“I could get used to cat chariots like this,” I said.
We splashed up through the pond and the night sky was full of different stars—earth’s stars—then we banked around until we found a rainbow in the dark. It was on this occasion that I discovered that Granuaile had never heard of Ronnie James Dio. My shock at this news was such that I almost completely missed the fact that we were traveling on Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Asgard. Only when we reached Asgard and got a serious frowning from an unknown keeper of the bridge—Heimdall being dead—did I notice that we weren’t on earth anymore. The cats meowed at the frowning man and the rainbow pointed elsewhere; Freyja’s cats promptly followed it back down to Midgard, where it led to the foreman’s manse in the mountains near Ouray.