The sorcerer frowned and squinted. “I don’t see it.”
“I do!” Perhaps Heimdall was lucky that, conjuring so many phantoms at points all around the city, Skrymir’s magic fell short of the perfection it might otherwise have achieved.
“If Heimdall says it,” Frigga snapped, “it’s so. Relay his instructions.”
The task of telling the many thanes on the towering city ramparts and beyond which Jotuns were real and which were not took a while. By the time Heimdall and the sorcerer finished, the fighting had begun.
Heimdall looked for Sif and the warriors Frigga had placed under her command. Three Jotuns were advancing on them, one real, two illusory. Guided by the information he’d provided, the Asgardians were loosing arrow after arrow at the true frost giant and ignoring the phantasms.
The shafts provoked bellows of rage and pain, but the frost giant kept coming despite the barrage. Sword in hand, Sif darted from behind cover to stand on guard in front of the Jotun. Sneering, the giant quickened his trot to reach her, and his leg plunged into what had been a concealed pit. He screamed as a stake at the bottom stabbed into his foot. He then tried to pull his extremity free but abandoned the effort when it proved unbearably painful.
Sif grinned and ran back to rejoin the other skirmishers. They’d all but exhausted their supply of arrows, and she ordered them to fall back.
Heimdall wrenched his attention back to the battle as a whole. Throughout the outermost defenses, giants had run afoul of the various snares that had been laid for them while the skirmishers who baited them onward made a fighting retreat. Meanwhile, catapults and ballistae discharged their missiles from the city walls, and Valkyries wheeled and shot arrows from on high.
The illusory giants were mostly gone – maybe Skrymir realized they served no purpose and was conserving his power – although a couple fading phantoms remained to flail impotently at Asgardians, who continued to ignore them.
There were still plenty of real attacking giants, though, ones who’d escaped serious injury among the first round of traps and continued their advance on the city walls. To swell their numbers, Skrymir ordered forth a second wave of attackers who trod heedlessly on the bodies of slain or injured comrades in their eagerness to close with their foes.
Heimdall waited until all the skirmishers had fled inside the gates and all the frost giants were well within the ring of outer defenses. Then he said, “Now,” and the sorcerer in the high-collared cloak relayed the message to the warlocks and witches waiting along the city walls, all of whom had been conserving their power in preparation for this moment and all of whom raised their voices to chant a single mighty spell. At the conclusion, the entire town beyond the city wall, all the surviving houses and all the hastily erected fortifications made of wood exploded into flame.
Asgardians had for a while possessed some understanding that frost giants were leery of fire, but until Heimdall’s foray into Jotunheim, he hadn’t realized they liked it so little that regular hot yellow flame was present nowhere. It was the cold blue substitute that lit the Jotuns’ dwellings and cooked their meals. Amora, moreover, had prepared fire to leap forth from the floor of her conjuring chamber. As she’d had no reason to believe anyone but Skrymir would ever enter the space, she had, lest the Jotun king betray her, readied the weapon a frost giant dreaded most.
Or so Heimdall had inferred. Now he felt a surge of elation to see himself proven right.
The frost giants in the ring of fire weren’t burning as Aesir or Vanir flesh would burn. They were, however, shrinking, their substance melting like snow under a hot sun. Panicking, some sought to blunder back the way they’d come. Others rushed on to the city wall, but when they smashed at it, their blows were no longer strong enough to inflict significant damage, and, their height diminished, they could no longer reach the defenders on the battlements. The Asgardian warriors rained spears, arrows, and cauldrons of boiling oil down into their upturned faces, and all the while the fires kept burning at the Jotuns’ backs.
Across the city, warriors began to cheer as frost giants perished or fell back and the Asgardians judged they’d won the day. Perhaps, Heimdall thought, the time for celebration had indeed arrived, but he himself wasn’t ready to join in yet. There were still a goodly number of Jotuns surrounding the city including some who had yet to venture close.. They still posed a significant threat even if they presently seemed little inclined to brave the fires, and he suspected their sorcerer king wasn’t ready to retreat.
It was a suspicion quickly proved correct. Now wearing a steel helm in place of his crown, Skrymir gripped his staff of ice in both blue hands, raised it over his head, and bellowed an incantation with a pause after each line. Though he wasn’t sure anyone else could, Heimdall heard Amora’s dulcet voice filling in the spaces with a contrapuntal spell of her own. His brief elation withered into foreboding.
An arching glimmer appeared. It was like the gateways the Valkyrie steeds opened but broad as a longhouse was long and taller the walls of Asgard. On the other side was a benighted place of glaciers and drifting veils of mist, superficially like Jotunheim but somehow even bleaker.
A creature even bigger than Skrymir strode out of the fog and across the threshold between worlds. Two more followed. Each was a colossus made of glinting ice with jagged protrusions of the substance sticking out of its limbs. Smirking, Amora flew alongside them, and when they’d all come through, she and the frost giant king allowed the luminous doorway to contract out of existence.
Thirty
Heimdall realized the enormous things could only be ice giants of Niffleheim, kindred to the frost giants, recruited to aid in their war, and held in reserve like the storm giants until the final battle. He tried to believe their arrival would change nothing. Frost melted in the presence of flame. Surely, so too would ice.
Yet the ice giants tramped closer to the ring of fire with no signs of wariness or distress. They stared at the burning structures before them, and a mass of ice appeared at their feet. Rising and thickening as it came, it pushed its way into the circle of flame.
At first, fire did indeed melt ice, but that produced water, which began to extinguish the blaze. As the flames died, the ice continued to mass, building a sort of ramp the frost giants might eventually use to charge the ramparts. Meanwhile, possibly in obedience to some arcane principle Heimdall didn’t understand, even the fires elsewhere in the circle burned lower. Encouraged, Jotuns who’d previously fallen back in disarray readied themselves for new runs at the city walls.
The various Asgardian sorceresses and witches pushed back against the ice giants’ power and sometimes succeeded in making a chunk of ice break away from the incursion or causing flames that were dying to leap up anew. But one by one their mystical strength was failing them, and they left off their conjuring, slumped, and gasped for breath, while the might of their opponents seemed without end. Artillerymen on the ramparts turned all the catapults and ballistae that could be brought to bear to hurl stones and bolts at the ice giants, but the shots merely chipped their exteriors and glanced away. The colossal creatures didn’t even react.
Heimdall hoped for a moment that perhaps Thor would intercede and prevail where everyone else had failed, but as the ongoing flashes of lightning and thunderclaps attested, the Prince of Asgard was still busy opposing the efforts of the storm giants. If he stopped, they’d put out the fires, and either way, Skrymir and his forces would overrun the city.
Frigga turned to her new advisor. “If you can see or hear anything else to help us, now would be a good time.”
Heimdall peered at the ice giants. It appeared to him that there might be fault lines, planes of relative weakness, running through the huge creatures’ bodies, but what did it matter? If the faults weren’t vulnerable enough for the stones from catapults and the bolts from ballistae to inflict significant wounds, what mightier weapon could the defenders bring
to bear? Bowing his head and rapping his knuckles on his temples, he strained to think, and finally a notion came to him.
“I think I have the one weapon that might work against the ice giants,” he told Frigga. “I just need to get close enough to try.”
“I can order a company of warriors to accompany you,” said the queen.
He thought about it and then shook his head. “Thank you, Majesty, but no. I don’t need them to wield the weapon, and if it doesn’t work, I would have led them to their deaths to no purpose.” He then turned to the thin, pale warlock. “I need Golden Mane, the black Valkyrie horse with the yellow mane and eyes. The warrior riding him will be in Uschi’s company.”
This time, the wizard didn’t argue. He repeated the message, and it became clear Uschi had heard when Golden Mane and his rider winged their way toward the citadel from the spot where her band of Valkyries was doing battle. The Valkyrie’s lance was bloody and her round metal shield crumpled, proof she’d already done her fair share of fighting, but even so, her glower made it clear she didn’t like being ordered out of the fray to hand off her mount to another. Still, as Golden Mane furled his pinions and set down on the highest ramparts of the central keep, she offered no objection. She simply swung herself out of the saddle and held the bridle while Heimdall climbed up and took her place.
“Now,” he told the sorcerer, “tell the warriors on the wall to stop the catapult stones. I don’t want them to hit me.” The warlock relayed the order, and Heimdall urged Golden Mane into motion.
Golden Mane galloped down the wall-walk, reached a corner, and leaped over the merlons into space. The winged stallion plunged down toward the tiled roofs of lesser buildings and the cobbled courtyards of the citadel for a moment. Then his spread wings caught the air, and he leveled out and climbed.
Heimdall rubbed the horse’s neck. “Good. Now let’s make the ice giants sorry they came.”
Their fighting concluded for the moment, the sweaty, weary warriors and mages on the city wall gazed up at him as he soared overhead. No doubt they were torn between hope he could do something against the new threat and doubt that one lone rider who wasn’t Odin on eight-legged Sleipnir, Thor, or even Frigga could succeed when their own concerted efforts had already failed.
One frost giant threw a spear, then another, and Golden Mane dodged each huge missile in turn. Most of the Jotuns, however, made no effort to stop the stallion and his rider. Maybe they didn’t even notice the approach of a single warrior on a black steed galloping across the stormy sky, or perhaps they too assumed there was nothing Heimdall could do to harm the ice giants.
Heimdall knew they might be right about the latter. But on childhood hunting trips into the snowy mountains of Vanaheim, his father had warned him to be quiet lest he bring an avalanche rumbling down on their heads. Similarly, scholars had told him that sustained powerful sounds could rattle and ultimately shatter certain substances. He was gambling that the faults he’d discerned in the ice giants’ bodies bespoke a comparable kind of brittleness.
Golden Mane bore him close to the nearest colossus. He brought the Gjallarhorn to his lips and blew with all his strength. The note that blared from the enchanted instrument was prodigiously loud. It had no effect on the ice giant, however, and the creature didn’t even appear to notice the rider circling its body like a gnat. Like its fellows, it just kept staring and adding its strength to the effort to quench the ring of fire and build the ramp of ice.
Heimdall told himself not to be discouraged. During the journey across Jotunheim to Skrymir’s royal city, he’d experimented with the Gjallarhorn enough to discover that if he varied his embouchure, it was capable of producing several different tones. He sucked in a deep breath and sounded another one.
This time, his sharpened sight detected a shivering as the trumpet’s call assailed the ice giant’s body. No matter how loudly he blew, however, and no matter how closely he dared to approach, the enormous creature suffered no real damage.
This time, though, he’d captured its attention. It turned its head to regard him and Golden Mane, and a crudely shaped war hammer made of ice grew upward out of its fist. Once armed, it pivoted and struck.
The black steed lashed his wings, dodging, and the giant’s weapon swept on by with a whoosh. Heimdall had to depend on Golden Mane to keep evading as his foe continued striking. He needed to concentrate on finding the right tone.
He blew a different note, and it wasn’t right. He sounded yet another, the final tone of which the Gjallarhorn was capable.
A piece of the ice giant’s head broke off and fell bumping down its torso, and as Heimdall continued blowing, more pieces cracked away from the whole until finally the ice giant’s entire body sheared and slipped apart along the fault lines like the edge of a glacier giving way and falling into the sea.
Heimdall rubbed Golden Mane’s neck. “You see, friend? We can kill them!” His surge of fierce satisfaction gave way to renewed determination as the two remaining ice giants turned in his direction, and they too grew weapons, one a battle-axe and one a sword, from their hands.
Golden Mane wheeled around the ice giants, evading the sword and axe strokes by swooping, climbing, and dodging. Meanwhile, Heimdall sounded the Gjallarhorn again and again.
Chunks of the ice giants’ forms crunched, cracked, and fell away, but the sort of catastrophic harm the horn had inflicted before was slow in coming. Maybe, Heimdall thought, gasping in more air, it was because he was dividing his attacks between two targets.
Meanwhile, no doubt responding to the will of his adversaries, huge spikes of ice, like the stalagmites on the floor of a cavern, shot upward from the ground. At first the thrusts seemed simply efforts to spear Golden Mane in the belly or, failing that, to provide vertical obstacles to his dodging. Then, however, horizontal lengths of ice grew from one spike to the next and made it even harder for the winged horse to maneuver. Heimdall felt like a fly with a pair of spiders spinning a web around it.
He blew the Gjallarhorn, and finally, finally, the face of the creature before him broke away from its head, leaving it eyeless and presumably blind. He sounded the trumpet a second time, and its sword arm and much of its torso fell in several pieces, a third time, and the rest of its body crumbled into fragments. He grinned, started to suck in a fresh breath, and then Golden Mane screamed as he slammed into an obstacle.
Additional lengths of ice sprang into being to close around the horse and his rider too. The remaining giant had willed still more horizontal bars to shoot from one vertical spike to another and surround Golden Mane so thoroughly that finally not even a Valkyrie steed could escape the trap.
The lengths of ice thickened, steadily exerting more pressure on the prisoners caught inside. Half crushed, Heimdall couldn’t draw in enough air to sound the Gjallarhorn to any effect, nor could he even point the trumpet in the direction of the third giant. Golden Mane heaved and shuddered as he fought to break free, but the ice held fast.
In what he took to be his final moment of life, Heimdall realized he wasn’t afraid. He simply hoped he’d accomplished enough for the other defenders of Asgard to somehow do the rest. He hoped Sif would survive the battle and regretted Golden Mane was dying with him.
Then other horns sounded as a company of Valkyries wheeled around the ice giant’s head. Half the riders were blowing them, the other half loosing arrows and hurling spears. Heimdall realized they must have been watching from above the city and flown to his aid when his colossal adversary caught him.
The ice giant turned away from him and flailed at the Valkyries. Heimdall doubted the creature feared their archery and spear casts, but maybe, thinking them possessed of the same magic as the Gjallarhorn, it feared the bugles.
Someone cried, “Hold on!” From the corner of his eye, Heimdall saw Uschi swooping down to his level. The flaming sword burned brighter and brighter as she made her approach and the
n, leaning far out of the saddle, cut thrice.
Ice shattered and fell in pieces, and Golden Mane heaved at the remaining bonds that held him. They snapped as well, whereupon the horse fell right along with the fragments. It was as if the press and chill of the ice had so injured him that he’d lost the ability to fly.
“Come on!” Heimdall called. “You can do it!”
Golden Mane tossed his head. The ice had frozen fast to strips of his wings, and he’d left feathers and scraps of the hide under them behind. But despite the bloody welts, he unfurled his pinions. The plummet became a swoop, and then he was racing along just above the ground but parallel to it, no longer in danger of smashing down to his death.
Heimdall bade the winged horse land on the ground and swung himself out of the saddle. “You’re hurt and you’ve done your part,” he said. “Now get yourself to safety.”
Golden Mane hesitated, but only for a moment. He then turned, galloped, unfurled his wings, and flew back toward the city walls.
Heimdall pivoted to find the third ice giant turning toward him as well. Apparently, despite the Valkyrie’s attack, it had decided he was the one true threat.
A single stride brought the ice giant into striking distance. It was like seeing a mountain leap across the face of the land. The enormous axe chopped down. Heimdall dodged out from under the blow, but the impact of the weapon striking the ground threw him off his feet. He scrambled back up, and another axe chop missed him but jolted him to the floor once more.
Heimdall rolled to his knees, pulled the Gjallarhorn to his lips, and blew. The ice giant’s leg trembled and then shattered underneath it, and the creature fell. Chunks of ice dropped all around Heimdall, and he threw his arms over his head. Fortunately, none of the bigger fragments smashed down on top of him.
Ice grated against the ground as the crippled giant pulled itself around to threaten him anew. Falling back, Heimdall sounded the enchanted trumpet repeatedly. Sections of the creature’s body cracked and crumbled away until a final blaring note blasted it into shapeless, motionless rubble.
The Head of Mimir Page 26
