Hammered

Leif efficiently cleared away a hole in the snow and I stepped into it, drawing on the earth’s power and dulling the nerves in my shoulder.

“Okay, do it,” I said. He grabbed my arm and shoved it back into its socket with an audible, crunchy pop. Then he took hold of my splintered collarbone at the first break—there were three—and held the pieces together until I could get a rudimentary binding in place. “Next,” I said, and he moved on to the next break, and then the last. “Good enough,” I said, placing Fragarach down carefully and then lying on my right side so that the maximum surface area of my tattoos could touch the earth.

Leif watched me in silence for a full minute to make sure that lying down wasn’t a prelude to performing something tactically brilliant. Then he said, “You’re just going to lie there until he comes back?”

“Hey, you’re pretty smart for a dead guy. What happened up there? I got you your shot and you blew it.”

Leif grimaced. “No denying that. I shattered his shield, but he knocked me away with a hammer blow before I could take another swing.”

“That must have given you an ouchie.”

“He crushed my ribs,” he replied, grinning. “But that Valkyrie healed me up nicely. Their blood is powerful. First full meal I’ve had in days.”

“Good. You’re going to need it.” I sighed. “Our surprises are all spent now, Leif. Nothing will be easy when Thor returns, and our best chance to get out of here unscathed is gone.” Leif nodded but said nothing.

Gunnar joined us, barked once by way of greeting, and lay down against my back. He was trying to keep me warm, and it made me smile. Though he’d never admit it, Gunnar was treating me like a surrogate pack member. I could tell he missed them. I hoped he’d make it back. He would if we left now; we all would.

“Leif.”

“Hmm?” He kept his eyes on the skies for Thor’s return.

“I need to tell you something. Complete candor.”

He looked down at me, interested. “What is it?”

“I’ve been visited by two different gods. You saw the Morrigan, and the other one was Jesus. They tend to be pretty f**king good at seeing the future.”

“Yes?”

“They both said killing Thor would be an extraordinarily bad idea.”

The vampire’s expression hardened. “So?”

“So let’s get the hell out of here and call it a victory.”

“Victory? We have won nothing!”

“Heimdall is dead, plus twelve Valkyries. That’s the blood price of your family times four. You’ve made your point and we’re all still alive. Let’s quit while we’re ahead.”

“We are not ahead. You do not keep score properly. The only death that counts is Thor’s.”

“What about my death? Or Gunnar’s, or the rest of us? Will those count? Because the odds of us dying are pretty high if we wait for Thor to come back with the rest of the Æsir.”

“Go, then, if you want, but leave me here.”

“You know I won’t do that.” Hal would never speak to me again if I left Leif behind. “We all need to go.”

Leif knelt next to me in the snow and said in low, intense tones, “A thousand years, Atticus. I have been waiting for this, needing it and wanting it, for a thousand years of sunless existence. Against that you put the ten years I have known you. Friend that you are to me, there is no argument you can make that will swerve me from my course. And I doubt seriously that you could sway any of the others with this talk of the future. If they have a fraction of the feeling I have, then the only future they care about is the one where Thor is dead. Nothing else matters.”

Gunnar whuffed a small breath of agreement and nodded his head. I sighed, defeated. Revenge and rational thought never sleep together.

“Surviving matters,” I said, my last salvo in a lost battle.

“Right,” Leif said, happy to agree to anything that did not involve leaving. “So use that head of yours and help us out with that. Ought we to do anything while we wait? What if he does not come back at all?”

“Oh, he’ll come. The frost giants can send ice storms toward Fólkvangr as we planned. And Perun can do his thing too if he wants. Maybe draw straws to see who’s going to take on Týr, because he’ll show up for sure.” The Norse god of single combat might have only one hand (the great wolf Fenris having chewed the other off ages ago), but he could still wreak plenty of ruin with it. “And have Väinämöinen put us under a seeming again. We don’t want Hugin and Munin to scout things out and give Odin a chance to war-game us. Let him deal only with Thor’s verbal report.”

I got almost a full hour of healing in before a cry went up that the Æsir approached. The collarbone was still fragile, but the shoulder joint worked fine and the muscles around it were solid, if a bit bruised and stiff. When I rose to my feet, the stars were gone from the western sky, blotted out by thunderheads that roiled with the barely contained fury of Thor. Gunnar rose too and stretched.

The massive trunk of Yggdrasil still loomed to the north, a gray wall that secured our right flank, though it was a football field away from where I stood. Gunnar and I were on the far right of our company, and the rest of the group was spread out to the south, scanning the western sky.

Even with night vision, there wasn’t much for me to see except for a bright point of light that was probably the boar Gullinbursti. Forced to rely on Leif, I asked him what he saw.

“Odin and Freyr for certain. The lady with the cat chariot must be Freyja.”

Saying that in hearing of the frost Jötnar was a mistake; they became extremely animated and repeated her name like fanboys, some of them even jamming their hands down their furs.

Leif continued, raising his voice to drown out the randy chorus of the giants. “I count three others.”

“Including Thor?”

“No. I do not see Thor.”

“Six of the Æsir but no Thor? Something’s up.”

“I should like to take this opportunity to name you Sherlock and point out that there is no shit.”

“What? Leif, no. You said that completely wrong. You’re supposed to say, ‘No shit, Sher—’ ”

“Incoming!” Leif interrupted me. “Odin’s spear! I cannot tell who has been targeted from this distance.”

“Gods Below,” I breathed. “How can he target any of us? Aren’t we under a seeming right now?”

“Aye, we are,” Väinämöinen confirmed.

“It might be proof against Hugin and Munin but apparently not against Odin himself.” I shape-shifted to a hound, then back again in case it was aimed at me. Taking Fragarach with me, I drifted to the left and watched the phosphorus glow of Gullinbursti grow brighter. He was so bright that he was lighting up the puffed blanket of clouds above.

“Oh, bugger, the clouds!” I said. “Thor’s above the clouds!” I got no response, for that’s when Odin’s plan hit us. The long flight of his spear ended through Väinämöinen’s chest, throwing the Finn backward ten yards and spilling him dead into the snow. His seeming dissipated with his death, and now our exact positions were revealed to the Æsir. How Odin had known to target Väinämöinen was anyone’s guess, but it was clearly the linchpin of his plan.

“One of the Æsir is an archer,” Leif said. “Arrows incoming. That must be Ullr.”

“Take him out, Perun!”

“Da!” The happy hairy thunder god grinned, and lightning lanced down from the sky, but nothing happened except for a frost giant taking an arrow in the throat.

“They’re ready for it this time,” I said. “They learned from their mistakes. They’re protected like we are. You’ll have to make do with your axe. If you see either of Odin’s ravens, take a shot.” I hurried over to the frost Jötnar as another arrow found its mark, albeit not fatally. “Hrym! Suttung! Can you do anything about that archer? Wind or ice or something to throw off his aim? He’ll just pick us off otherwise.”

“Graah,” Hrym said. “Hrrrrgh,” he added, and a long ice club grew from the palm of his right hand, sort of like an extreme beardcicle. The other frost giants followed suit, condensing and freezing their own clubs, then they pointed them in concert in the direction of the Æsir. Shortly thereafter, a curtain of snow was thrown up perhaps a hundred yards in front of us, violent tempests in miniature that were sure to throw off anything flying in our direction—including winged horses and chariots and giant shiny dwarf-made pigs, as well as arrows.

“That’s good,” I said, “but keep an eye on the sky above. Thor is up there above the clouds, and he’ll try to drop in on us soon.” I moved back to the body of Väinämöinen to retrieve Odin’s spear. The cold iron touch of my hand on its shaft did nothing to deactivate the targeting runes on the spearhead, so I had a surefire kill shot here. But using it would mean giving the Æsir a chance to throw it at us again.

The Finnish wizard looked surprised, his eyes open in an unblinking stare, focused on the spear sprouting from his chest. I closed his eyes and hoped that his soul, wherever it was, felt content with his brief contribution to the battle. I was not content, I would have liked to hear more of his stories, and more of his songs. I would have liked for him to feel he’d done right by the sea serpent he championed. And I would have liked time to mourn him properly, but the demands of battle meant I had to move on quickly if I wanted to live through it.

I hefted the spear in my left hand, deciding to hold it in reserve. Perhaps the ideal moment to use it would present itself. In the meantime, the Æsir wouldn’t be able to pick it up without dealing with me first.

Unfortunately, picking it up proved to be their plan precisely. Leif’s shouted warning saved me. I jumped frantically to my right and barely avoided Thor’s hammer, which fell from the hand of the thunder god, directly above. The earth shook with his blow and toppled our entire party to the ground, and a white splash of snow exploded from the impact, stinging me as I landed nearby. Before I could gather my arms and legs together, Thor was already back on his feet in the small crater he’d made. He had a new shield, I saw, and a new outfit of armor that indicated he was taking us a bit more seriously. The mail shirt was still there underneath, but he had a sleeveless tunic of lamellar armor over it now, made of red-dyed hardened leather. His bracers and greaves were also hardened leather, albeit the normal brown color, and he had nothing of substance over his thighs save for a mail skirt. He wore a cap helmet with a nose guard, but no ridiculous wings or horns sprouted out from the sides of it. His blue eyes blazed from underneath as they locked on mine.

“Vengeance for the slain!” he cried in Old Norse, and then he charged, hammer cocked to pound my brains to tapioca.

“Yeah, that’s what this is all about,” I said, scrambling backward in a graceless crabwalk. All I could hope for was to get out of the way again; there was no question of parrying or striking back when I was so off balance, and parrying a war hammer is damn near impossible in the best of situations. My situation—lying na**d on my back in the snow—was therefore less than optimal.

The fire in Thor’s eyes cooled a smidge as he realized this wasn’t a one-on-one duel: He was now in a free-for-all. He took his eyes off me and raised his shield in time to get bowled over by Leif. They tumbled past me in the snow, the vampire hissing and the thunder god roaring, and that gave me enough time to gain my feet and worry about who else might be on the way. Gunnar was coming hell-bent for Thor, and so was Zhang Guo Lao. So eager were they to pile on that they didn’t see what was coming hell-bent for them. The Æsir had flown through the frost giants’ curtain of snow, and now they had all picked a target. “Behind you!” I shouted, hoping they would realize I was speaking to them both, but only Zhang Guo Lao took heed. He turned and set himself, an iron rod in each hand, and neatly redirected the attack of Týr, who leapt at him from the back of his winged horse. Týr was armored in a similar fashion to Thor, except the leather of his lamellar tunic had been dyed blue. He was fighting left-handed, of course, shield mounted on the stump of his right arm.

Gunnar took a boar tusk in the gut. Gullinbursti gored him from behind, the great tusk sweeping under the werewolf’s hind legs and catching him in the soft underbelly. Gunnar yelped as he was tossed high into the air, blood and maybe intestines trailing beneath him. The sheer wattage output from the dwarf-made boar was blinding with my night vision on, but the silhouetted figure on its back could be none other than the god Freyr. He was raising a sword to cut through Gunnar as he fell back to earth. I’d been hoping to sit out this part of the battle, in the faint hope that nonparticipation would ward off whatever bad karma would accrue here; the words of Jesus and the Morrigan still rang in my ears. But I couldn’t stand by and let Freyr chop Gunnar in two.

I’m not much of a lefty, but the distance was short and either the runes would work or they wouldn’t: I hurled Odin’s spear as quickly as I could toward the god and hoped it would be in time. It caught Freyr under the arm and threw him off the back of Gullinbursti, as his sword cut shallowly into Gunnar’s flesh on the right side of his rib cage. The werewolf plunged snarling into the snow, not done yet but grievously wounded. The huge golden boar—the size of a conversion van—charged past me, and I raked Fragarach along its right side as it hurtled by, eliciting a startled scream from it. It struggled to slow its rush and pivot around to make another pass, and I took the frantic second this afforded me to check the field.