The Head of Mimir

by Richard Lee Byers - (ebook by Undead)

Heimdall ate the last bite of his remaining cloudberry and then sucked tart juice from his fingers.

  He didn’t know precisely how long he and Sif had been in the Realm Below. There was no way to know when there was no day or night, only endless darkness. But, thus far, thirst hadn’t proved to be a problem. Periodically the two of them happened upon pools and rivulets whose cold water might taste of iron or sulfur but seemed safe enough to drink. Even if they stopped finding those, there should still be places where dampness oozed from the cavern walls or dripped from the ceiling, the plop-plop-plop echoing away down the tunnels.

  Hunger, however, could prove to be another matter – one that preyed increasingly on his mind – if they didn’t find their way back to the surface soon. He doubted they could eat the mosses and lichens they saw. He’d sooner try his luck with the mushrooms they’d once or twice discovered, but that would indeed be a gamble. He’d heard that many of the varieties that grew in the Realm Below were poisonous, and as he had no firsthand knowledge of them, only experiment would reveal whether a particular type would nourish them or kill them.

  Trying not to worry about it, for there was, after all, nothing to be done about it at this moment, he shifted in a vain attempt to become more comfortable. He was stiff and sore from the bruising the trees had given him, and sitting on hard stone in the little natural alcove where he and Sif had stopped to rest wasn’t making things any better.

  The light of his medallion faded to nothing, like a candle flame guttering out. His sister’s light was still shining, but even so, the ambient gloom thickened in a way that made him think of a cat gathering itself to pounce, and with one source of illumination extinguished, new shadows sprang into being.

  Alarmed at the prospect of losing the ability to light his way through the blackness, he touched the amulet and willed it to light up again. Nothing happened. He gripped it, squeezed, and thought the silent command more insistently. This time, much to his relief, a silvery glow leaked between his fingers.

  “Well,” said Sif, “we did buy the medallions cheap from a marketplace conjurer.”

  “True,” Heimdall replied, deciding not to add that if both amulets failed, they were unlikely ever to find their way back aboveground. He was fairly certain the demoralizing thought had already occurred to her, and if not, he saw no reason to make her see their prospects as even bleaker than they might seem already. She deserved a better comrade than that.

  After a few more moments, Sif said, “Do you remember when we were children, and a group of us would go camping in the woods?”

  “I do,” Heimdall said.

  “I loved moving away from the campfire into the trees and the night,” she continued. “It was thrilling. I loved sneaking around playing Seize the Banner or just creeping up behind someone and shouting ‘Boo!’”

  “I remember,” he said, smiling at the recollection. “You caught me a time or two.”

  “Well, just so you know, I think I may be losing my fondness for the dark.”

  He chuckled. Whether it was genuine or a façade, he greatly appreciated her continued display of good humor. It helped him to keep up his own spirits. “I can imagine losing one’s appreciation of trees, too, and the marvels of witchcraft, for that matter.”

  Her tone and expression turned serious. “Do you have any idea where we are?”

  “Not much of one,” he admitted. “Unless they’ve expanded their territory, I don’t think we can be anywhere near the caves of the regular trolls. This is wild troll territory.”

  “Is there really a difference?”

  “As I understand it, the regular trolls have more laws, organization, and knowledge. The wild trolls are more savage and primitive.”

  Sif smiled. “You almost make the regular trolls sound civilized.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s all relative, isn’t it?”

  “Not according to our childhood tutors.”

  “Who were wise, but perhaps didn’t know everything. I don’t think any of them had traveled to all the Nine Worlds and observed firsthand how people live.”

  Sif shrugged. “Maybe not. In any case, it hardly matters at the moment. We need to decide what we’re doing next.”

  He grunted. “You’re right, considering that we’re lost.” He ran his fingers through his hair as he tried to come up with an idea. After several moments, something occurred to him. “You know who does know the way out of here? Trolls. Every cave mouth on the map I studied was indicated because someone spotted trolls venturing out onto the surface or going back in.”

  Sif frowned. “When we first came down here, we took care to avoid that wild troll village or outpost or whatever it was.” Shortly after entering the Realm Below, they’d heard some of the creatures speaking to one another farther down the tunnel, and they’d hurried down a branching passage before the trolls noticed them in turn.

  “Because we wanted to pass by without a fight. But we’ve been thinking we should stay well clear of all trolls since, and maybe that isn’t the right course of action. Perhaps it will only take us down tunnels that don’t connect to the surface to wander lost until we starve to death.”

  “Whereas,” said Sif, picking up on his train of thought, “if we find a troll village or guard post, we may also find a way up nearby. Failing that, if we spot a troll on his own, we can capture him and force him to tell us the closest way out.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.” He felt encouraged that she seemed to be embracing the idea.

  “There’s only one problem.” Sif touched her glowing medallion. “How are we going to sneak past or sneak up on trolls when we need these to see?”

  The comment brought Heimdall up short, because his sister clearly had identified a weakness in the plan. But it was still the only plan that came to mind. “You’re right,” he said, “that is a problem, and if one of us comes up with a better idea, obviously, we’ll use that one. But if neither of us does, maybe we can figure something out.”

  Sif nodded. “Agreed. If need be, we’ll think of something. Shall we go looking for trolls immediately, or should we sleep first?”

  Heimdall considered. Once again, the disquieting realization came home to him that he didn’t know if it was day or night in the world above. He was gradually losing any sense of how long he and Sif had been in the caves. There was a mad tiny voice in the depths of his mind whispering that it might have been weeks and weeks already, that perhaps the disaster they were struggling to avert had already overtaken Asgard.

  Maybe the voice was the reason that, though he was tired, he was also too restless to sleep just yet. “Let’s move on,” he said.

  Ten

  Every ten paces, Heimdall stopped moving to listen. The glances Sif gave him conveyed her growing impatience with the frequent pauses even though he knew she understood the reason. With their amulets glowing, they had no hope of seeing wild trolls before the creatures spotted them. They might, however, hear them approaching while remaining unheard themselves.

  Eventually soft sounds did come echoing down the passage from up ahead. The pad of footfalls on rock. The creak of leather. A few growled words and a grunt in a brief exchange of conversation.

  “Back!” Heimdall said, relieved to have finally found trolls and simultaneously keenly aware of the danger the creatures posed. He and Sif mustn’t allow them to round the bend in time to see their lights.

  The two Asgardians turned and hurried back to a space where the way widened out into a cave full of stalagmites, stalactites, and pillars formed by the fusion of the two. He crouched behind a waist-high lump of stalagmite, and she, broadsword in hand, took cover behind one of the thicker columns. They then extinguished the glow of their medallions.

  After that, there was nothing to do but wait in the impenetrable dark, which he did with his nerves taut with anxiety and the pulse ticking quickly in his neck. Gra
dually the sounds of the approaching trolls grew louder, and the stink of unwashed bodies supplanted that of stone, until he could tell the creatures were padding down the path that wound through the center of the cave.

  Unless, of course, they weren’t. They could see in the absence of light, and what if brother and sister hadn’t hidden as well as they’d intended? Heimdall’s anxiety-fueled imagination conjured a grinning war leader commanding his followers with hand signals. What if he was really hearing wild troll warriors creeping up on him and Sif? He wished he’d already drawn his great sword and, aware that it was too late, that at this point any movement might betray him, fought the impulse to do so now.

  It was only when the sounds receded that he was certain the trolls hadn’t spotted him or Sif. He realized he was holding his breath and let it out slowly. He counted to a hundred in his head to give the trolls ample time to round the next curve in the section of tunnel he and Sif had recently negotiated. He then willed his amulet to resume shedding light. As before, it took repetition and forceful squeezing.

  Sif lit her own pendant. “What’s next?” she asked. “Do we go where they’ve been or follow to where the trolls are headed?”

  He considered the question. “If we follow,” he said at length, “there’s less chance of losing the trail, and they’re likely to lead us to some sort of village or stronghold eventually.”

  Sif nodded. “That makes sense. Let’s go.”

  Following the trolls was a nerve-wracking business of constantly guessing how much of a lead the creatures had and how much they ought to have. Heimdall and Sif didn’t want to lose the trolls, but they likewise needed to keep at least one bend in the passageway between the underground dwellers and themselves lest the trolls see the light of the amulets.

  At one point the single tunnel branched into three, and the wild trolls had for the moment fallen silent. Denied sound to guide them, the two Asgardians scrutinized their surroundings, and Heimdall felt a pang of dismay when he could see nothing to guide them down the proper path. After a few seconds, though, Sif pointed to a scraped bit of lichen on the wall in a passage entrance that a troll might have rubbed brushing by. She and Heimdall took a chance on that passage, and when the sounds resumed – a troll grumbling about an aching tooth – they knew they’d chosen correctly.

  A cool breeze wafted down the tunnel. The moving air suggested a change in conditions up ahead, a far more open space, conceivably, and Heimdall felt an upwelling of hope. Perhaps he and Sif had finally had a piece of luck, and the wild trolls ahead were leading the two of them back aboveground.

  The tunnel slanted upward. Surely that was a good sign. He glimpsed the faintest hint of reddish light up ahead and told himself that was a good sign too. He didn’t know what was causing it, but any light seemed more likely to originate in the surface world than in the eternally dark maze of passageways that was the Realm Below.

  When he and Sif came to the top of the slope, however, he saw how wrong he was, and, for a moment, his spirits fell.

  The tunnel came out in the side of one of the walls of a huge subterranean vault. The continuation was a trail that switchbacked down to a length of stone spanning a gulf of prodigious depth. On the other side of the bridge were tiers and tangles of chambers that, by the looks of them, made up a sizable wild troll habitation. Scattered lights shined there in various shades of red, some wavering like firelight, others steady.

  Sif extinguished the glow of her amulet and snatched for Heimdall’s to kill that light as well. He realized her caution was well taken. The wild trolls they were following were still negotiating the switchbacks. They could have noticed the white light overhead. For that matter, trolls on the far side of the bridge might have done the same. Tense, he held his breath until the lack of any answering commotion indicated that none of them had.

  With the magic of the medallions quiescent, he could still make out the points of red light, and they sufficed to vaguely delineate or at least imply the lumpy hodgepodge of shapes that was the wild troll habitation. But the trail down to the bridge and the span itself had vanished completely in the dark.

  “Apparently,” Sif whispered, “trolls like light some of the time.”

  As it had before, her matter-of-fact calmness helped to quiet his nerves. He and Sif had wanted the trolls to lead them to one of their habitations, albeit ideally not one this big, and not one where the only past it was right on through. Yet, the creatures had. Now the Asgardians had to determine how to follow through on their plan.

  “If they want their food cooked,” Heimdall said absently, replying to his sister’s remark while starting to turn the real problem of infiltration over in his thoughts, “they need fire, and maybe light reveals details and colors they can’t see otherwise.”

  “My point,” she said, in a tone that suggested he was a dunce for not having grasped it already, “is that there may be enough light over there for us to sneak through without shining our amulets.”

  He smiled. “That’s an excellent thought. But first we have to get down the wall and across the bridge and do that without the use of our talismans as well.”

  Sif made a dismissive spitting sound. “Easy enough for warriors of the Vanir.”

  They gave the trolls they’d been following ample time to cross the span and proceed deeper into the warren of stone. They then groped their way down the switchbacks. Keenly aware of the possibility of a fall into the depths, Heimdall kept one hand on the wall, stayed well away from the outer edge of the trail, and hoped Sif was doing likewise.

  On the ledge at the bottom, he drew his two-handed sword and used it to find the edge without stepping over it. He then felt along and found the protrusion that was presumably the start of the bridge. “It’s here,” he said.

  “Good.” It was both reassuring and vaguely unsettling to have Sif speaking right beside him when he couldn’t see her at all. “Let’s cross.”

  They went single file. He wanted to be in the absolute center of the bridge, and perhaps Sif felt the same. The span wasn’t all that narrow, and he had only to walk a straight line to traverse it safely, but he nonetheless used the great sword to probe for solid footing as he headed across. He touched as lightly as possible to avoid a tapping some troll might hear.

  Above his head, something fluttered. “Listen!” he whispered.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Sif replied.

  Neither did he, now.

  “We should keep moving,” his sister said.

  Maybe, but Heimdall was still tense with the suspicion that something was about to happen. Maybe it was because he’d watched animals in flight, and they didn’t beat their wings constantly.

  He stood still, listened, and caught a second soft flap on his flank. It was lower, as if the creature – assuming there was only one – had circled and was now swooping at them in the middle of the bridge. His imagination suggested a bat-like horror with talons poised and fangs bared to catch and rend its prey.

  He swung his sword at the instant when instinct prompted him, and the blade caught some part of his attacker’s flesh and tore loose. Something thumped down behind him, and he caught a musky animal smell.

  Leather creaked and mail clinked. The sounds suggested Sif had somehow found where the wounded creature had dropped and was likely slashing at it with her broadsword.

  Then came a scrabbling, fumbling noise that might be the beast tumbling off the edge of the bridge. A split second later, Sif said, “Falling!” Even now, she kept her voice low, but the urgency was unmistakable.

  Desperate with the need to help her, Heimdall dropped the great sword, stretched out his arms and touched her back. He found her shoulders and hauled her backward.

  “Thanks,” she whispered. “I chased the bat a step too far. I was tottering right on the brink.”

  “‘Easy enough for two warriors of the Vanir?’” he asked
.

  “We killed it, didn’t we?” she replied. “The question is, did the trolls notice us doing so?”

  He listened. If trolls were coming, he couldn’t hear any sign of it.

  “I think we’re all right,” he said. “The fight was pretty quiet.”

  “In that case,” she said, “keep moving. We’re exposed out here on the bridge.”

  “Just a moment.” He squatted, groped, and found the two-handed sword. “Now I’m ready.”

  At the far end of the bridge there was enough red light that he could at least make out his sister as a shadow in the gloom and discern the start of several pathways leading into the chaotic pile of habitations that was the wild troll settlement. Sif pointed to a trail that climbed up and around to the right. It might, if they were lucky, skirt the perimeter of the village and minimize the chances of detection. He nodded his agreement, and they stalked up the incline. Recognizing the absolute need to go unnoticed, he was intent on moving stealthily, but even so, the curiosity that was so much a part of him made him take in incidental aspects of his surroundings.

  He soon decided wild trolls must not care about privacy. Some of the dwellings he and Sif were creeping past appeared to be natural chambers in the rock. Others bore the marks of the tools used to hollow them out. In no case, however, had anyone attempted to cover the openings and shield the spaces and their meager contents from the view of passersby.

  Heimdall supposed that was fortunate as it allowed the red light to escape. As he’d surmised, some of the illumination came from fires burning fungus and oils that tinged the air with malodorous eye-stinging smoke. The steadier glow came from chunks of luminous scarlet crystal, a very few of which also had also been set along the twisting, rising and falling paths to serve as streetlamps.

  He noticed these details in passing, the bulk of his attention focused on finding the quickest way through the settlement and a path back to the surface and on spotting any wild trolls before they spotted Sif or him. Despite the size of the enclave, for a while he didn’t see a single inhabitant. He was glad, but at the same time it seemed strange enough to worry him. If he hadn’t known for a fact that a patrol had just marched into the place, he might have thought the trolls had abandoned it, possibly fleeing to escape a curse or plague.