Gods of the Ragnarok Era Omnibus 3: Books 7-9

by Matt Larkin

  When he woke, the torch had dwindled down to a pathetic flicker. Grunting, Hermod snatched it up. Better to make it as far as he could with what light remained to him.

  So he crawled along the tunnel, following it even as the roots disappeared below ground. If this all led nowhere, he would find himself pretty well fucked. But … he could swear he heard water dripping somewhere ahead. Water probably meant a way out.

  He continued forward until at last he came to an opening into a large cavern. Six or seven feet below, the last of his torchlight reflected off water, still, save for the occasional drop falling from recesses far above.

  This was … the underground lake. Odin had bound Fenrir on an island in this lake, and after that, he’d chained Loki there, on the far shore.

  Something lurks … in the water …

  Odin had hinted as much. More serpents, perhaps. But other than swimming, Hermod had no way forward.

  Chancing whatever dwelt in that lake was his only means of getting back to Asgard. Drawing a deep breath, Hermod eased his legs over the ledge, then slipped down into the waters with a slight splash. The lake was cold, but not half so cold as the murk of Naströnd.

  Now, he could see naught, save the flicker of a torch on a pole, standing on the far shore. If aught swam around him, he’d have no way to know it. So he drew his pneuma and swam, as quickly as he could without causing noise or disturbance, toward the shore.

  Hermod swam for the torchlight. Before he’d even reached the shore, a pair of guards were looking at him, and standing beside them was Sigyn.

  “Hermod?”

  Here. His foster sister. Of course. She’d chosen to join her husband in his imprisonment down here, and Loki, too, stood nearby, chained to a stalagmite, standing in a puddle.

  “What in the Tree’s shadow are you doing here?” a guard demanded, as Hermod pulled himself up onto the shore, panting.

  His hair hung down over his face as he stared up at Sigyn. His beloved sister. The girl he’d seen raised from a babe, had always tried to look after.

  Her betrayal stung worse than aught else, save losing Sif. And Sigyn had covered it up for centuries. Compounded the betrayal with lies of love.

  A guard offered him a hand up and, slightly shaky, he took it, gaining his feet, then brushing his hair from his face.

  These men didn’t deserve it.

  He knew that.

  Fuck, but Hermod needed sacrifices. And he would not delay Sif’s release. Not for a moment. Besides, they would try to stop him.

  “Forgive me,” he said. Then he drew his pneuma and jerked free the dagger of Hel. With a swift motion, he rammed the blade into one guard’s chest, slipped it loose, and slashed the throat of the other before the man even seemed to know what was happening.

  “Hermod!” Sigyn fell back several steps, hand up in warding.

  Hermod grabbed her cloak and slammed the dagger’s pommel into her nose, crunching her cartilage beneath it. “You murdered her!”

  “No!” Loki bellowed. “No, stop!”

  Blood dribbling down her face, Sigyn started to crawl away. Hermod lunged at her. She caught his wrist in an iron grip, obviously pneuma-enhanced. Hermod strained, pulling his hand free. Pneuma made her stronger than a man. Not as strong as him when he was flushed with his own pneuma, though.

  “I’m sorry,” Sigyn wailed. She reached to raise the hood of her cloak and Hermod slashed Hel’s dagger across her hand.

  She shrieked, doubling over and clutching her hand to her chest, blood oozing between her fingers. Hermod caught her cloak and kicked her in the stomach, the impact flinging her back and snapping the clasp on her precious swan cloak. It came off in Hermod’s hand and he tossed it away behind himself.

  “You murdered my daughter!”

  “Stop this!” Loki shouted. “I beg you, please, leave her be!”

  “I’m sorry …” Her sobs were muffled by her broken nose and short breath. Maybe he’d cracked her ribs. “I’m sorry …” She raised her good hand in warding.

  Ignoring Loki’s pleas, Hermod stalked closer to his former sister, shaking his head. He grabbed her by her hair and yanked her up until her feet dangled just off the floor. “I loved you as if you were my own true sister. And you betrayed me!”

  “Hermod, I—”

  He rammed Hel’s dagger in between her ribs. Her hot blood shot over his hand. It dribbled from her mouth as she looked at him, eyes wide in pain and fear and … betrayal. She knew how he felt, now. He jerked the dagger free then drove it up under her chin. Now, blood exploded out over his face in a hot geyser. “You’ll help me get her back.” Her eyes went dead almost instantly.

  “No!” Loki bellowed. “No! No! I’ll kill you!” The man flung himself against his chains, straining as if he might break orichalcum, slurring his words in apoplexy. “I’ll destroy you!”

  Hermod dropped Sigyn’s limp form and she collapsed in a heap at his feet.

  “Fitting,” he said, now turning back to Loki. “Fitting, that you too should pay for her crimes, and be sacrificed to your daughter.”

  “You cannot kill me.” Shuddering breaths and sobs muffled the man’s words. “But I … will end you for this …”

  A shuffling behind him drew Hermod’s gaze. Sigyn moved, pushing herself up.

  What the …? Hermod fell back several steps as she shambled to her feet.

  Fool …

  She moved wrong. Her head lolling side to side, neck cracking loudly.

  Hermod brandished the dagger between himself and … whatever Sigyn had become. No draug had ever risen on Asgard, so far as he knew. But … maybe it was the torchlight … Still, he could have sworn that a red gleam lurked behind her eyes.

  Sigyn’s left eye seemed to freeze in its socket. It cracked and split, shards of it showering down over her cheek, even as she stretched, a macabre spectacle that had Hermod’s empty stomach lurching. “Oh … I could not have asked for a better sacrifice.”

  He knew that voice: Hel.

  Slowly, his gaze drifted down to the dagger in his hand. Her dagger. Repulsed, he let it clatter to the cavern floor. It was impossible …

  “What have you done?” Hermod asked, half stumbling over his own feet as he retreated from the Queen of Mist.

  The skin on the left side of her face had begun to slough off, seeping down like tar. It turned her bloody smile all the more grotesque. “Why … taken the offered sacrifice … one so grand I’ll hold your bargain fulfilled even though you’ve offered but three sacrifices instead of nine.”

  Behind them, Loki roared, straining against his chains, but Hermod could not tear his gaze from Hel.

  What had he done?

  No …

  She was … here.

  What the fuck … had he done?

  He was in the Mortal Realm. And he had done that. Odin’s worst fear, the thing he had struggled against for so very long—Hermod had caused it.

  “If … you hold my oath fulfilled, then restore Sif and Baldr.”

  “Restore them?” She snorted, a wheezy sound that sent the side of her left nostril flapping. “I promised you I’d release them. Even as we speak, they are now free of their cells … free … even to leave my palace should they so wish.”

  “What?”

  Betrayal … forewarned … and still it surprises you …

  “I wanted them to live!”

  Hel drifted toward him, her malevolent smirk never faltering. “Then perhaps you ought to have been more specific in your bargain.” She reached out and snatched his chin in her hand. Her touch was so cold it froze his breath in his chest. Her strength so immense he couldn’t move. “Still, you’ve done well. So I give you your life, or what remains of it. Let none question my generosity.”

  Icy mist wafted from her, thicker even than Melinöe’s, and the chill of it left Hermod frozen in place. When Hel released him, he slumped to his knee. The Queen of Mist drifted through the cavern, and out, up toward Asgard. Her cloud trailed behi
nd her like a swirling sea of toxic vapors. The power of Niflheim made manifest.

  More than ought else, Hermod wanted to weep. To curse Hel and curse urd and curse the entire world.

  Sif.

  Sif.

  Fuck! What had he done?

  “You’ll die for this.” Loki’s voice sounded so raw. So broken. Like Odin, the man had some gift of prescience, leaving Hermod to wonder just how much Loki had foreseen of this moment. Had he known it was coming all along?

  The workings of fate lie beyond your ken … You took your vengeance on the sister that betrayed you …

  Keuthos. Keuthonymos … The servant who betrayed Achlys for Hel, and now regretted it.

  Oceans of regret … they shape the cosmos … All of existence is grief compounded upon damnation … And the darkness seeks to draw us back into its embrace …

  Hermod struggled to his feet, finding it hard to even breathe. He’d kill Hel for this betrayal.

  Imbecile … She will crush you like an ant …

  He didn’t fucking care. Hermod started off after her, breaking into a trot as he drew Dainsleif. Hel had broken her deal—the essence of it, at least. He’d not go to Odin and tell the king that his apprentice had released his bitterest enemy from her prison. No, he’d cut her down.

  Even if you succeed … she would hop to another … If you wish to repay her treachery in kind … I have already shown you the way …

  His steps faltered at the edge of the tunnel.

  Keuthos wanted him to release Achlys. To break the seals. To let one horrid abomination go to war with another. And why not? Could the one truly be worse than the other? It was Hel who had so crossed him, not Achlys.

  Yes …

  Did it mean he ought to trust the first Elder Goddess? No. But at the very least, her freedom would give Hel something to concern herself with outside the conquest of Midgard.

  It was a start.

  28

  It was a long trek up the Norns’ mountain, especially without Sleipnir, and twice Odin paused to rest. He could have burned his pneuma to enhance his stamina—indeed, he had to use a little to make it at all—but he thought it best to conserve his strength for what lay ahead. He had no way of knowing if aught like the dís would guard the Norns.

  Perhaps they would have hid themselves away, refusing to show themselves, as they had done when he went to confront them beneath the roots of Yggdrasil. Perhaps … save, if he spent the rest of time hunting them from one corner of Midgard to the next, had not their schemes still failed?

  No, with a bitter certainty, he knew they would await him this time. A prescient knowledge, yes, but one he refused to look directly at for fear of what it might mean. That stubborn denial left him feeling a bit like a petulant child, willfully ignoring the adults and pretending they did not exist. But still, he could not deny that, on some level he had to wonder if aught he did not see, in a sense, truly did not exist yet within the tapestry of time.

  Crouching atop the mountain, with lashing snowstorms all around, his mind kept circling back to a desire he hated himself for. The desire to discuss the implications of self-fulfilling prescience and whether, by choosing to turn away from prescience, he might thwart the workings of these non-temporal entities. The desire to circle round and round the topic, coming ever closer to the elusive center, with the one person whom Odin could discuss such things.

  With Loki.

  The very servant of the Norns Odin now went to destroy. The man who, on their behalf, had wrought all the chaos now descending upon Midgard. Maybe Odin ought to have killed his blood brother for such a complete and utter betrayal of Asgard.

  Nornslave.

  Because Loki, too, was trapped by urd. Perhaps, even, a victim, as much as Odin.

  Trembling, Odin finally bestirred himself to press on.

  Sitting alone in the cold would not avail him. If answers existed, they dwelt deep inside the hollow beneath this peak.

  Torch in hand, Odin trod into the tunnels leading down to the Norns’ sanctum. The mighty iron doors had already stood open, awaiting him. Just as well. He and the fatespinners had business together, and none of them could deny it any longer.

  The braziers were unlit, this time. No crackling flames to hold back the darkness or the chill or the niggling sense of dread in his gut that he so wished to pretend did not lurk there.

  The only sound was the soft padding of his boots over the stone floor, and the clank of Gungnir’s butt upon it, as Odin descended ever deeper. So very long ago he had first come here. Back then, he’d been so young, so very naïve. The world had been a place of mystery, where the unknown and the mists held horrors. Where the supernatural was best left alone. Sometimes, Odin missed those days.

  Now, he himself had passed on into the realm of the supernatural. Now, he contended with forces he once had no idea existed, and for a prize beyond imagining. The very fate of history.

  For all the allies he’d made along the way … Odin did not recall ever feeling quite so alone.

  Loki’s betrayal had left him bereft.

  Then, at long last, the path leveled out and led him to the chamber of the Sisters of Fate. His first visit here, he had not looked so carefully about himself. The Norns stood there, before the well once more, illuminated by a single brazier. Peering through the darkness, now Odin could make out the hints of a root of Yggdrasil above.

  It was the same chamber as the one below Asgard. The same, or very similar. Odin knew better than to assume limitations of time or space existed in this hold. They were everywhere and nowhere, and he had, perhaps, even stepped outside time now.

  Odin trod up, until he stood a dozen feet from the sisters, then flung the torch at their feet. It squelched down into the loam around the Well of Urd. “You betrayed me.”

  “Conceptions,” one said.

  “Of betrayal,” the second said.

  “Presuppose loyalty,” the third offered.

  Odin sneered at them, shaking his head. “So you never had our interests in mind. Fine. Nevertheless, you have brought ruin unto the world. You have wrought the deaths of those I loved.” He pointed Gungnir at the closest of them. “You forced others to turn on each other. I don’t know why. And I don’t fucking care. It stops now.”

  “Ignorance.”

  “Impudence.”

  “Impotence.”

  Well, maybe not that last one. Snarling, Odin lunged with Gungnir, intent to skewer the Norn closest at hand. Her form broke apart like the dís’s had, and he missed, for her images appeared all around. All three Norns had become a blurring mass of overlapping images, seeming to fill the entire chamber.

  Odin grasped for his own prescient visions to counteract their temporal manipulations, but found the Sight hard to catch hold of. Were they blocking him?

  As one, the Norns flitted away, into the darkness beyond the edge of the brazier’s light, to the far back of the cavern.

  Pausing only to snatch up the torch, Odin raced after them. “You’ll not escape me! Today I free Midgard from the chains of your …” But he faltered, as the torch’s light adumbrated a stalagmite that seemed to stretch from floor to ceiling at a crooked angle.

  Stalagmites didn’t form like that. They were vertical …

  The shaft moved, chittering slightly. As he took another step closer, he realized coarse hairs covered the stalagmite. And it was a leg. A spider leg, big enough to fill the whole fucking cavern.

  A hollow pit opened in Odin’s gut, and—almost dreading what he would see—he flung the torch out into the darkness. It bounced off a bloated body the size of a king’s hall. Spider-like, yes, save instead of eight legs jutting from its sides, dozens and dozens of legs erupted from the body at all angles imaginable. Those legs grasped the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the roots of Yggdrasil, in a skittering manifestation of nightmare.

  Within the body itself glinted a hundred faceted eyes, spread out all over, such that the creature could no doubt see in any direction
. It was an abomination beyond description, and from it exuded a timeless horror, eldritch and unknowable. Gossamer strands of reality wafted in and out of existence around the entity, visible manifestations of time and space warping around it.

  A sudden, almost irresistible urge seized Odin. The need to fall to his knees and worship this being beyond the scope of even gods. To beg its—or their—forgiveness for his hubris in even thinking to come here.

  His mind recoiled at the sight before him, refusing to even grasp the ultimate shape of this thing. Indeed—as it crushed all hope within him by even moving forward—its legs seemed to vanish and reappear all at once, shifting its location without the need for pathetic mortal movements.

  It simply was.

  It was everywhere. Anywhere. Any time or place it chose to exist, it was there.

  The Norns, the Sisters, were but a guise of an entity that the mortal mind simply could not comprehend.

  Bow down. Beg forgiveness from the lords of time. Give in. To the inevitability of history.

  For history is merciless.

  All he had to do was drop the weapon. Yet … his hand would not open.

  Give in.

  Give in …

  You were a fool.

  Fear laced even the voices of Audr and Valravn. Even vaettir knew they looked upon something so far beyond their ken.

  Except …

  Odin refused to accept defeat. Refused to back down.

  Roaring, lunging forward before wisdom could dissuade him, Odin slashed with Gungnir at the chitinous leg before him. The undulating blade smacked hard into the surface, but gouged deep, tearing out a chunk of exoskeleton and a spray of black-green ichor that must have passed for blood.

  The Norn-thing chittered, the sound a thousand times more potent than that uttered by the dís, and sending the whole cavern reverberating with a sound that seemed to unmake reality. Those gossamer strands flitted in and out of existence.

  Before Odin’s very eyes, the ichor reversed its momentum. It sucked back up from the ground, from midair, and flew back into the leg, followed by the skeleton he had cut away, locking itself back into place as if his attack had never happened.