Lee stared at Mikill and his dune buggy and swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “If you drop me in the dunes, I swear to God, I’ll never forgive you.”
I felt bad.
It was easy enough to say everyone had high school damage, but the truth was, hell-spawn or not, I’d gotten off light compared to Lee and his friends. No one had ever held me upside down in the bathroom, dunked my head into the toilet, and given me a swirly. It had happened to Lee, though, probably more than once. And I didn’t doubt that the shadow of that humiliation lingered.
“No one’s dropping anyone in the dunes, Lee,” I said to him, making my voice gentle. “I promise. Just don’t fall out. Because unlike the Tall Man’s ghost, Garm is real.”
“The hellhound?”
“Uh-huh.” I wedged myself into the narrow storage space behind the buggy’s two seats, wishing I’d thought about the logistics earlier. “You’ll find a loaf of bread on the floor at your feet. That’s the offering to Garm. Lee, you’re in charge of throwing it to him. Mikill”—I took a death grip on the roll bar—“drive carefully.”
As soon as Lee climbed gingerly into the front seat and buckled his seat belt, Mikill gunned the engine and headed out of town.
A mile north on the highway, he turned into Pemkowet Dune Rides, passing the stable where the fancy dune schooners were sitting idle for the night and roaring into the path beyond it.
I’d made this trip before, but it didn’t get any less frightening. Quite the opposite, considering I was squished into a cramped space without a seat belt and holding on to the roll bar for dear life.
And once we departed from the graded paths and set course for the massive, looming figure of Yggdrasil II, jouncing over the sand, it got worse. I narrowed my eyes against the stinging mist of ice pellets streaming from Mikill’s hair, searching the darkness in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of Garm before he spotted us.
No such luck. As we entered the sand basin from which Yggdrasil II emerged, somewhere off to the left, an ear-shattering howl split the darkness.
“The hound is nigh,” Mikill announced.
“Lee!” I shouted. “He’s coming! Get the bread ready!”
In the passenger seat, Lee struggled, the folds of his capacious leather duster caught on something. “I’m stuck!”
Directly in front of us, Garm bounded into the headlights, yellow eyes reflecting the beams. He was approximately twice the size of the dune buggy and his slavering maw was big enough to chomp me in half in a single bite.
“Lee!”
“Why the hell is he attacking us?” he said in a high, panicked voice. “Isn’t he on our side?”
“The hound is doing its duty,” Mikill said, swerving violently. The hellhound snapped as we veered around him, jaws closing with a click that sounded like the world’s biggest bear trap. “Throw the offering now, mortal!”
Lee yanked at his trapped coat. “But aren’t we past—”
A fast, heavy tread padded behind us, and then a vast figure darkened the emerging stars overhead as Garm leaped over the dune buggy, landing with a thud and turning to face us, growling low in his throat and wrinkling his muzzle to show his teeth.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Letting go of the roll bar with one hand, I leaned over to snatch the loaf of bread from Lee’s hand. Garm’s ears pricked up. He wagged his tail hopefully, strings of drool dangling from either side of his jaws. “Here you go, boy!” I threw the loaf as hard as I could. “Go get it!”
The hellhound bounded after his treat. In the front seat, Lee turned to give me an incredulous look.
“What?” I said to him. “You want to visit Little Niflheim, you bring a loaf of bread for Garm.”
“Um . . . why bread?” he asked in a faint voice.
“Because that’s the way it is,” I replied firmly. I’d asked the exact same questions on my first visit and gotten the exact same highly unsatisfying response. Somehow it felt better being on the other side of the equation.
Mikill gunned the buggy’s engine again. “Be sure to keep your limbs inside the vehicle during the descent.”
Lee looked around the basin. “Descent? Descend where?”
I pointed at Yggdrasil II. “There.”
The fact that a gap large enough to admit a small vehicle looked like a mere crack in the mammoth trunk gives you an idea of the scale of the tree. Lee let out a terrified sound as we hurtled toward it, then slumped in deflated relief as we passed through the opening and began spiraling down the path carved into the walls of the hollow interior. The temperature dropped as we descended, an icy mist rising from the depths below us. Mikill stopped dripping, his hair and beard freezing.
Down, down, down we went, emerging beneath the immense canopy of roots that the three Norns tended with tireless care, drawing water from the wellspring and pouring it over Yggdrasil II’s roots. One of them smiled at me, her eyes as colorless as mist in her grandmotherly face. I smiled back at her. She’d given me a piece of soothsaying earlier this summer that had saved a lot of lives.
“Are those . . . ?” Lee asked in a hushed whisper.
“The Norns,” I said.
Turning his head, he looked at Mikill hunched over the steering wheel. “And he’s . . . blue.”
“I told you,” I said. “He’s a frost giant.”
Little Niflheim really is little. There’s nothing left of the buried city of Singapore but a single road and a handful of buildings, including the abandoned sawmill where Hel holds court. Or at least that’s what it looks like, insofar as it’s possible to see in the darkness and mist. I suspected that here, as elsewhere in the eldritch community, the laws of physics didn’t necessarily apply.
Duegars, the ancient Norse dwarves whose magic had excavated Little Niflheim and kept the whole thing from collapsing, came out to observe our passage, silent and watchful, looking as knotty and hardened as though they’d been carved from Yggdrasil II’s roots.
“What do they want?” Lee whispered to me.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard one speak. Maybe if you learn Old Norse, you can ask them.”
In the driver’s seat, Mikill made a muffled sound that might actually have been a chuckle before halting in front of the sawmill. “Come, Daisy Johanssen,” he said to me. “You are expected.”
“Hey, wait!” Lee clambered out of the dune buggy. “What about me?”
Mikill fixed him with an implacable slush-colored stare. “You are not expected.”
“Daisy—”
I spread my hands. “Look, I told you I couldn’t promise you anything. I’ll ask, but don’t hold your breath. She’s a goddess, Lee. She’s not some imaginary character made of bits and bytes and pixels.”
“Okay.” He swallowed hard, then glanced around at the misty darkness, the watching eyes of the silent duegars. “Right. Of course. Do what you can, and I’ll . . . I’ll just wait here with the car.”
“Fine.”
With that settled, Mikill escorted me into the sawmill.
Being in the presence of a living deity is another experience that’s hard to describe. There’s just so much . . . well, presence. It’s awesome in the oldest sense of the word. It makes the very air feel different, charged and intense. It makes your skin prickle and raises the hair on the back of your neck. Whether you’re a worshipper or not, you will tremble. And you will kneel and bow your head, whether you intended to or not.
Don’t get me wrong—as Hel’s liaison I was more than prepared to offer her honor and respect. I’m just saying it would have happened regardless.
“Rise, Daisy Johanssen,” the goddess bade me, her voice tolling like a bell.
I rose.
Seated on a throne wrought from the immense saw blades that the duegars had salvaged and brilliantly repurposed, Hel regarded me. “So, my young liaison. What compels you to seek an audience?”
With an effort, I made myself return her gaze evenly, which wasn’t an easy feat. On her right side, Hel resembled some Renaissance painter’s idea of a goddess, fair-skinned, beautiful, and luminous, with boundless depths of compassion and wisdom shining forth in her gaze. That part was easy. The left side . . . the left side was another matter, burned and blackened and withered, her sunken left eye glowing like a baleful red ember in its hollow socket. It was hard to meet that eye.
“There’s something I’d like to do, my lady,” I said to her. “But I felt I should ask your permission.”
Her right eye closed, the right half of her face lovely and gracious in repose. Her left eye continued to blaze at me. “Tell me.”
I outlined my idea for a database, floundering as I tried to couch it in terms that would be comprehensible to someone whose idea of modern innovation was the Gutenberg printing press. Aboveground, there were plenty of members of the eldritch community who have embraced technology. It was different in the underworld. Well, except for Mikill’s dune buggy.
“Enough.” Hel opened her right eye and raised her graceful, elegant right hand to stop me. “Although the means may be unfamiliar, the notion is not. Humankind has catalogued the world since first they began scratching marks in the soil. Even so, we have never abetted them in this task.” She closed both eyes and fell silent a moment before opening them again. “Although I have misgivings, your idea has merit. I grant you permission to execute it.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “Thank you, my lady.”
Her right eye closed again. Oops, not out of the woods yet. “And this mortal you have brought into my demesne?”
“I would need his help to accomplish the task,” I said. “You might say he’s the only scribe in town.”
Hel said nothing, which I took to be her equivalent of raising her eyebrows and saying, “And . . . ?”