by Kevin Hearne
“Some of them are already well aware of the deception.”
“That’s the same as all of them.”
“No, it is not. Come. You will be safe.”
This statement, meant to put me at my ease, utterly failed to reassure me. I remembered that the Morrigan’s definition of safe varied widely from mine. Hers included excruciating pain and severe injury just short of death. Mine included beer and a recliner chair. The fact that she felt it necessary to repair my healing capability before we made this trip suggested very strongly that she knew it would be dangerous.
Hand in hand, we used one of the yew trees in her fen to shift from Ireland to Tír na nÓg and from there to an evergreen stretch north of Oslo. We took our bird forms and flew into the city until we banked down a narrow alley, where the Morrigan shifted to her human form as the last rays of sunlight moved off to the west and left us in darkness. I shifted as well and felt doubly naked without a sword over my shoulder in enemy territory. No one witnessed our metamorphosis, nor did anyone spy our public nudity. The Morrigan unbound a locked access door, and we stepped into the back room of what looked like a tailor’s shop.
“Padraig,” she called. “We are here.”
I cast a questioning glance her way. That wasn’t a Norwegian name.
“There are plenty of people outside Ireland who pay me respect, Siodhachan,” she said. “Don’t look so surprised.”
“Of course,” I said.
A short lad with a florid complexion bounded through a black curtain that presumably led to the front of the shop. His eyes grew wide when he saw us and he started to bow to her, but the Morrigan stopped him.
“Never mind that,” she said. “We don’t have time. Just fetch our clothes.”
“Right away!” he blurted, joy writ large on his features, and he fled back through the curtain.
“How cute,” I said. “You have a fanboy.”
“Minion.”
“A matter of nuance. Why not simply cloak yourself in darkness as I’ve seen you do before?”
“We are to arrive without bindings or wards of any kind. No magic is allowed.”
“What? That’s insane! First no sword, and now no magic?”
“They are bound by the same rules. Make sure you follow them.”
“Forgive me, Morrigan, but these Norse gods, whoever they are, might not feel as bound by the rules as you do.”
“This is a formal summit of deities. They would not dare to cross me. Nor will we cross them.”
Padraig returned before I could register any further objections. He held a black evening dress made of silk and lace in his left hand and a tuxedo in his right. He sort of threw the tuxedo at me and then grandly presented the gown to the Morrigan. His eyes drank in her body, and his breathing was already labored. The Morrigan surely noticed this but made no comment.
Since I was certain she wasn’t carrying any cash on her, I didn’t particularly want to see what form of payment Padraig was expecting for these rather expensive clothes. I began to dress as quickly as possible, hoping that I’d be able to exit and wait outside before I had to bear witness to something tragic.
Unfortunately, the dress was a much simpler affair to don than a tuxedo. It slipped over her head, and with a couple of tugs here and a zip there she was ready. The dress was stunning; the black silk was a flat matte in some places but shone with highlights elsewhere. A curling vine pattern of lace interrupted the silk and hugged her curves, allowing her porcelain skin to show through. Starting over her left breast, the lace curved between them and then underneath, tracing its way in a spiral around her torso until it reappeared above her right hip, where it fell in a serpentine wave down the front of her thigh. The dress ended just above the knees.
“You didn’t forget my shoes, did you, Padraig?” the Morrigan said.
A brief flash of panic crossed Padraig’s face as he realized he may have committed an unpardonable sin. “No, no!” he said, hands up in a placating gesture. “I simply couldn’t carry them along with the dress and tux. I’ll go get them and be right back.”
He bolted through the curtain again.
I cocked an eyebrow at the Morrigan. “Do I get shoes too?”
“He might forget,” she replied. “How shall we punish him?”
“Let’s not and pretend we did,” I said. “Let’s leave the poor man alone.”
“That would be unkind, Siodhachan,” she said. “He prayed so fervently for my favor. He’s fully aware that there will be a price for it.”
“What if he’s unable to pay?”
“Oh, they are always able to pay. Was it Shakespeare’s Shylock who was so eager to extract a pound of flesh? I’m like him. I’m happy to carve off a pound. Or two. I never seem to have a scale handy when it’s time to take what’s due.”
Padraig returned with a pair of black shoes for me and some sandals for the Morrigan—the type with lots of leather straps on them to wind around the calves. I dragged a chair over from a desk piled high with receipts and invoices. I parked myself on the chair and squeezed my feet into the shoes. I’d rather have remained barefoot, since anything I wore on my feet would cut me off from the earth, but the Morrigan seemed to have arranged matters so that I would be at my greatest disadvantage when I met whomever we were meeting. My bear charm was just below full, since I’d charged up in the forest before we took wing and only used a little bit of it to transform back to human in the city. It felt good to have something available even though the Morrigan kept insisting I wouldn’t need it. That was simply too trusting of her—yet more unusual behavior.
I didn’t understand what was going on with her. On the one hand, she had nearly wept at the idea of going to see a baseball game with me. Now she spoke of carving pounds of flesh from a man who’d been praying to her. It was like she had swerved toward kindness and sanity for a moment, but now she was overcorrecting and trying to be extra-special savage. I feared what she would do to Padraig; I wanted to tell him to run for his life, because this was the Morrigan that gives Irishmen nightmares. Sandal straps twined sinuously around her calves, she addressed Padraig in a silky tone, if the silk was draped over a knife blade.
“Everything appears to be in order, Padraig. You have done well. Are you ready for your payment?”
“Oh, yes, I’m ready, very ready,” he said.
The corners of the Morrigan’s mouth twitched upward in idle amusement. “Take off your shirt, Padraig,” she said in a husky whisper, and suddenly I felt warm as she began to employ her seductive powers on the poor lad. I’ve always thought them more powerful than those of succubi, but she hadn’t needed to use them on me back at her lair-o-bones because the fertility bindings accomplished the same thing. I was partially protected from her wonted powers of seduction by my cold iron amulet, and in this case they weren’t even directed at me, but Padraig was utterly helpless. He was practically panting as he tore at his shirt and wrestled himself out of it.
“Yes, Morrigan!” he cried. “Oh, goddess!” The front of his trousers twitched and strained as if one of Ridley Scott’s alien babies were trying to erupt from it. The Morrigan placed her hand flat on his chest, just underneath his right collarbone, and he shuddered at her touch. Then her fingernails turned long and black, almost into talons, and she dug into his chest with them and began to slowly rake across and down to his left. Padraig cried out, and both his hands clutched at the Morrigan’s wrist—not to pull her hand away but rather to force it deeper. Blood welled underneath her nails and began to run down his ribs and belly; Padraig moaned and wailed and his hips began to buck uncontrollably as she tore at his chest.
I wondered if he had any customers in the front of the store. Tailor shops are not usually so fraught with pain and ecstasy.
Padraig screamed when the Morrigan’s nails sheared off his left nipple. She pulled her hand away then; Padraig let go of her wrist and fell to the floor, jerking and trembling.
“We can go now,” she said, ste
pping over Padraig’s twitching body and through the black curtain, leaving me alone with a man having a bloody epic orgasm on the floor.
I wanted to kneel and heal up his chest but suspected that the Morrigan would object in violent fashion. I didn’t know what to do. “Well, thanks! Um. Have a nice day!” I finally said, and followed after the Morrigan. Once through the curtain, I saw that the shop was empty and the Morrigan was heading for the front door. “Aren’t you going to help him?” I said. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the noise Padraig was making.
She stopped and turned, perplexed by my question. “I just did, Siodhachan.”
“He’s losing a lot of blood and he sounds like he’s in pain.”
“Yes, but he’s also in pleasure. He’ll live. And, besides, he asked for it.”
“He asked to be mutilated and—whatever else that is?”
“He will ejaculate for five more minutes and then pass out.”
I blanched. “Is that even possible?”
“Yes. When he wakes, he will experience the most intense period of creativity he’s ever known. His designs will make him one of the most sought-after tailors in all Europe.”
“Oh. So that’s what he asked for?”
“Yes. I’m not a goddess of craft, like Brighid, but I do what I can.”
“He didn’t ask to lose a nipple and be permanently scarred, did he?”
“People who court my favor know what kind of goddess I am,” she replied. “And there are still plenty of people willing to make Faustian bargains. They tend to focus on the results rather than the costs to achieve them.”
She turned away, signaling an end to the conversation, and I sighed in defeat. I hoped Padraig would think it was worth it in the end.
We exited the shop, closing the door on the tailor’s rapture and ruin, then hailed a cab. The Morrigan told the driver to drop us off at the corner of Kirkegata and Rådhusgata.
There’s a seventeenth-century building at that location that currently houses one of the finest gourmet restaurants anywhere. It’s the sort of place where you have to dress up to walk through the door and even the toothpicks are posh. Dinners are served in four to six courses, and there’s not only a professional waiter but a professional sommelier at your elbow.
At some point the building had been painted a belligerent shade of mauve—it was mauve, damn it, and proud. It was a generous two stories tall, with frequent narrow white-framed windows blessedly interrupting the Great Mauve Wall. Above a gray cornice loomed a black-shingled roof, which had architecture of its own, allowing for an attic room or three and their concomitant windows. Movement up there drew my eyes, and I spied two enormous ravens perched on the eaves, seeming to look straight at me with equal parts gravitas and gloom. Each one of them had an eye that gleamed white.
“That’s an overdose of Poe, isn’t it?” I said.
The Morrigan, seeing the ravens, gave a short bark of laughter. “There’s no Poe involved at all. Use your head, Siodhachan.”
I remembered we were supposedly meeting members of the Norse pantheon and said, “You don’t mean he is here—”
The Morrigan slapped me. “I said use your head, not your mouth.”
“But how can he—”
I got slapped again.
“Right. Sorry.”
The Morrigan took a deep breath and closed her eyes, clenching her fists at her sides. It was the first sign I’d seen that she felt the least bit nervous about this encounter.
“How do I look?” she asked, and I wondered again at how she could be simultaneously so ruthless and insecure.
“Fearsome. Deadly. A bit delicious.”
She smiled. “You always know what to say. Let’s go. And, remember, no magic.”
Once inside, we were greeted with a large smile by the maître d’, an impeccably scrubbed and barbered man dressed in black-tie livery. He ushered us to a window table in the Cleopatra Room, where waited none other than the goddess who gave her name to Friday. She rose to receive us.
Frigg glowed the way stained glass does; she had that sort of beauty, very colorful and beatific yet flat and gauzy with the suggestion that you’re missing quite a bit of depth. The question was whether the depth was carefully hidden or if it was simply missing.
She appeared cordial yet tense, like a little boy who’s being forced by his mother to be nice to his aunt Ethel or else, except that Aunt Ethel is the one with the hairy mustache and it’s all he can do to keep from screaming when she arrives and wants a kiss. The pleasant expression on Frigg’s face, with a ghost of a smile, didn’t reach her eyes; they were cold and unfriendly. She wore a royal-blue sheath gown circled with a wide black sash just beneath her ribs. Circling her neck was an extremely shiny something, set with enough diamonds to feed several families and a stable full of ponies for a year. I was about to check her out in the magical spectrum when the Morrigan grabbed my jaw and yanked it right to face her. She spoke in Old Irish so Frigg wouldn’t know what she said.
“Remember what I said about magic?”
“Not supposed to use any,” I managed to say while she had an iron grip on my chin.
“That’s right. None. But you were about to cast magical sight, weren’t you? See my eyes? They’re brown instead of red because I can’t use magic right now. Pretend they’re red, Siodhachan. I’m watching you.”
“Got it.”
She let me go and then I felt like the little boy, except I’d failed to greet Aunt Ethel properly and received a royal chewing out as a result. I blushed and muttered a quick apology in Old Norse to Frigg for my manners. “Call me Atticus, please.”
“Thank you for coming,” she said, then waved a hand at the chairs across from her. “Please, sit.”
I pulled out the Morrigan’s chair for her, and after she was seated I took the spot nearest the window. The sommelier showed up to welcome us to Statholdergaarden and discuss wine before we could say anything. Frigg ordered a bottle of Australian Shiraz, surprising me somewhat. It must have shown on my face, because she explained the order afterward.
“One gets so tired of mead from the teats of a magic goat every night. Not that I’m complaining about the quality—I dare anyone to find a better brew flowing from the udders of a she-goat—but one does need a bit of variety now and then. The food and drink here will be a welcome change.”
I was completely unprepared to answer her. Not only had I not drunk the same thing every night for centuries, I had never made small talk about goat teats before. I realized that my mouth had dropped open after the Morrigan reached over and pushed up on my chin. My teeth clacked together audibly, and then Frigg’s face turned crimson, realizing she’d introduced an awkward topic of conversation. The Morrigan seemed determined to embarrass everyone tonight.
Unsure of what to say, I kept silent and waited. I couldn’t think of a safe topic of conversation—not even the weather, because that might be interpreted as a reference to Thor. I didn’t want to embarrass myself or anyone else, and I didn’t want to earn another rebuke from the Morrigan for saying the wrong thing—like, for example, inquiring after the missing occupant of the chair next to Frigg’s. There was a place setting there, and Frigg had asked the sommelier for four glasses, but there was no other sign of the last member of our party. Unless you counted the two ravens on the roof.
I suppose there was a statistical non-zero probability that this could be a coincidence—two normal ravens just happened to be perching on the roof of a restaurant in Oslo where I was about to meet unnamed Norse gods—but I felt it was fairly improbable. It was far more probable that I was about to have an extremely uncomfortable formal dinner with two deities who had a long list of reasons to kill me.
Granuaile asked me once how it could be possible for all the world’s gods to be walking around without anybody noticing. The answer was (and is) simple: cosplay. Most gods cosplay as humans when they visit earth and do their best to stay in character. If they perform miracles here a
nd there, they’re always small things that no one outside the local area will notice. But, more than anything else, they don’t show themselves because humanity doesn’t truly believe they ever will. We imagine them chilling out in their heavens or nirvanas or planes of punishment, and they’re generally expected to stay there. And if they’re going to work their divine magic on earth or pull a deus ex machina, then they act through surrogates or from afar. In a sense, deities are incapable of showing themselves because most people don’t believe they’ll meet their gods before they die. I am a notable exception to the rule. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed they could run into the Olympians, though, so that allowed Zeus and company to start all kinds of shit in the old days.
The silence lengthened. I couldn’t believe Frigg’s entire repertoire had been exhausted on goat teats and mead, but for the nonce, at least, her speech was on hiatus. Taking a deep breath, I employed the architectural-history gambit: “Why is this called the Cleopatra Room?” I asked.
The Morrigan pointed up. “The ceiling,” she said. Craning my head back, I saw an elaborate stucco on the ceiling. Back in Arizona, they just sprayed stucco on the outside of houses and called it an exterior. But long ago, back when this building was originally constructed, artists used it as a medium to create permanent bas-relief sculptures. This one—undoubtedly one of the finest I’d ever seen—depicted the suicide of Cleopatra, who’d famously decided to leave this world by snakebite. Seeing it made me immediately miss Oberon, because I knew he would find the opportunity for parody irresistible, and I knew what he would say if he could see it now, complete with the voice of Samuel L. Jackson:
“Beautiful,” I said, and hoped my smile would be interpreted as art appreciation rather than amusement at my hound’s fondness for movies.
“Yes,” the Morrigan agreed.
Our scintillating conversation was blessedly interrupted by the sommelier, who returned with the bottle of Shiraz. He poured a little out for our suspiciously missing homie, then left us to fill the silence once again. We had nothing, so we drank a bit and speculated about all the different flavors we could taste in the fermented grapes. The Morrigan opined that it had a layered flavor, stony but finishing with a lush réglisse. Frigg tasted spice, whatever that meant; I doubt it was an allusion to the planet Arrakis. I am not proficient in the language of wine, so I was just about to suggest there was a faint top note of mango chutney when Frigg’s eyes shifted over my shoulder and her expression softened. She rose from her chair, and the Morrigan and I followed suit. Turning to follow Frigg’s gaze, I saw a tall man in a tuxedo approaching our table. Gray hair flowed about his head and down to his shoulders, but it wasn’t thin and receding; it was somehow virile and imbued with badassery. The simple black eye patch over his left eye didn’t make him look like a pirate but instead communicated wisdom—precisely the prize for which he gave up his eye. It spoke of his suffering and his willingness to sacrifice—to stop at nothing—to remain the wisest of the wise. His epic beard was a bit surprising and somewhat intimidating: I’d expected an unruly carpet flowing down his chest, but it was a densely packed and trimmed affair, almost like topiary, which gave his features the weight of a carefully constructed edifice that few men could pull off. Most guys grow beards that do nothing for them other than communicate to the world that “this is what happens when you don’t shave.” The beard of Odin told you that he wasn’t a hippie or a barbarian or a fantasy author but a god who could bring order to chaos.
