by Matt Larkin
He knew that name. A sun goddess, worshiped in Lappmarken and Kvenland. “You’re a follower of Magec? Not part of the court?”
She snickered. “Magec is long dead, and I wouldn’t go near to Áine’s court if Quetzalcoatl himself offered to fly me there.”
That was one of the names Keuthos had given for the feathered serpent. “If I wanted to speak with Quetzalcoatl?”
Beiwe shrugged. “So far as I know, he’s crossed into Anlang.”
“The World of Storm?”
“Storms, wind, sky, whatever. Here, Quetzalcoatl claims everything from his Temple of Winds to the western boundaries with Anlang, and beyond. If you go to the temple, you might find him, yes, but I don’t recommend it, unless you’re intent to offer tribute or sacrifice.”
Keuthos had claimed the seal lay within sight of the Temple of Winds, but if the feathered serpent was away, more the better. Maybe Hermod could achieve his ends unimpeded. Better still, if he could cross into Anlang direct, maybe he could avoid passing through the Roil again.
“What kind of tribute?”
Now, however, Beiwe leveled her spear at him, chuckling to herself.
Hermod raised his hands, not quite sure what was happening. A moment ago, he’d thought they were in pleasant conversation. Now …?
The liosalf grinned, her eyes glinting with sunlight. “Come along, then.” A wave of her spear beckoned toward the tower.
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Because I’ve got the spear and I’m telling you to? Because we don’t let just anyone go and disturb the feathered serpent? Or maybe I plan to feast on your pneuma.” She giggled. “Who knows?”
She twirled the spearpoint in a slow spiral. Fucking alfar. Liosalfar seemed to replace svartalf single-minded viciousness with mercurial whims.
His fingers twitched, tempting him to draw Dainsleif. If this liosalf thought to play with him, maybe he’d offer her in sacrifice to the feathered serpent.
Still, given what he’d seen of liosalfar at war, he didn’t much relish the idea of crossing weapons with someone who could appear wherever she wanted and move at such speeds.
Grimacing, he marched ahead of her, back to the spiraling tower as she commanded.
The pathway—drenched in light from arches taller than he was—led up in a slow curve, with outlets on landings every so often. Beiwe led him into one such landing halfway up. The lush flowerbeds and shallow pool carved into the floor gave the impression of a garden. A slight incline on the floor must’ve let rainwater fill that pool during Alfheim’s daily showers. Around the garden, a half dozen glowing liosalfar sat, a mix of males and females, clad in leafy outfits similar to Beiwe’s. Well, many in fact wore decidedly less, with flowery wreaths around their necks, and—in one female’s case—naught else.
The liosalfar ate from platters of strange fruits he had no names for, with the exception of apples and coconuts, such as were found on Asgard.
The naked female tossed an apple to him, and Hermod caught it, shaking his head. “I appreciate the gesture, but I’m not hungry.”
She frowned, as if he’d insulted her. In the North Realms, refusing offered food did constitute a rather grave breach of manners. Still, it was better not to eat the food outside the Mortal Realm. That bit of wisdom he’d heard too oft to ignore.
Hermod set the apple down on a platter and folded his arms. “Why am I here?”
“We heard so much about the mortals who crossed into our world,” one of the males said. “He doesn’t look like much, though. Crude and ugly. Scarred.”
“I’d lie with him,” a female said.
“No surprise,” the same male answer. “His is probably the only cock in all Alfheim you haven’t ridden.”
She giggled. “Don’t want to ruin my record, then.”
While he couldn’t deny he’d hardened just a little at that exchange, the dismissive way they spoke of him as though he were not even there had him equal parts unnerved, and he had to force down the urge to squirm in disquiet. Much as these creatures looked like beautiful women, they were no more human than svartalfar or snow maidens.
One of the others rose, and approached him cautiously, before poking him in the ribs with one finger.
“Bulky,” she said.
He couldn’t quite contain a snort at that. “Gambeson.” She stared blankly at him. “Armor.”
“Armor,” she said, nodding as if he’d revealed some great secret. “Does he plan to fight us?”
“I’m not here for a fight at all,” he blurted. The last thing he needed was to have these creatures decide he was a threat. “I just want to see the Temple of Winds.”
The male who’d spoken before glared at him. “What if we tied his left stone and right stone to two different dinosaurs and sent them running?”
What the fuck? Hermod stumbled backward several steps, hand going to Dainsleif. “Are you completely mad?”
They all looked at each other and shrugged as if he was speaking a completely foreign tongue.
“What if we made him sing instead?” Beiwe asked. “Sing for us, Hermod of Asgard.”
“I don’t really sing.”
The male threw up his hands. “All right, I’m getting a triceratops.”
Hermod’s hands shot up in warding. He was taking no chances if a tri-whatever was some kind of dinosaur. “My mother sang, all right? I …” Shit. He hadn’t thought of such things in ages. “Just … give me a moment.”
He drew a few deep breaths, trying to remember songs he’d heard as a child. Centuries ago, Mother had sung for him and father, and later for … Sigyn. Mother’s songs had always had a sense of sadness, deep and unrelenting, though he’d not even understood all the words. Songs about passing through mist and into light, but always having to return to darkness.
About … Oh. Well, fuck. She’d been talking about Alfheim in some of those songs, hadn’t she?
Seeing this place, its eternal light, it had some of those words flooding back to him. They spilled from his lips without conscious thought. It caught him, seized his heart, his mind, and he hardly knew whether it was himself, or Mother singing once more.
“… Beyond Magec’s memorial, I lie and weep, for beauty I cannot hold …”
The liosalfar were all staring at him, as his voice drifted away. He’d win no contests for singing, that was for sure. He couldn’t quite get the rasp out of his voice, nor keep it steady enough. But the liosalfar kept looking at him, as if enthralled.
“A valkyrie’s song,” the naked female said.
“Who is this mortal?” the other female asked. “Who are you?”
“Hermod Agilazson,” he said. A lightheadedness had settled upon him, one he could not explain. Was the song itself responsible, or this feeling, this connection, however fleeting, to a mother he’d lost so very long ago?
Who now might well rot in Naströnd …
Shit. Mother …
The naked female rose and came to look deep into Hermod’s eyes, craning her head from one side to the other. “You’re her son, aren’t you? The one who sang as though one of us. We taught her …”
“You knew my mother? Who are you?”
“Olwen.”
The name meant naught to him, but still, he now could not tear his gaze from hers. “You knew my mother?”
“I knew her, after a fashion, some days back.”
Hardly aware of himself, he caught her hand—incredibly warm. “Tell me.”
The liosalf grinned. “Sate me.”
Hermod dropped her hand, shaking his head. These creatures flitted from one thing to the next like moths. “I am a married man and I have never betrayed my wife.”
Olwen snickered. “How charmingly mortal of you. Still, I can pass you my impressions of Olrun—it was her, yes?—but only if you draw out some of my pneuma. And I’ll be quite pleased to have a fair taste of yours.”
She traced a warm, almost hot finger along his jaw, up to the scar where the better
part of his ear should have been. “Unless you find my dripping trench so very repulsive.” Her other hand reached down and cupped his stones. “You’d like this more than the dinosaur plan, I imagine.”
It was impossible to keep himself down while she worked her palm over his cock.
“I … have … a wife.”
The male chortled. “By the blistering Sun, mortals are fools, are they not, Beiwe?”
Beiwe, snickering herself, reached around from behind Hermod and began unlacing his trousers, while Olwen pulled at his gambeson.
Stop. His mouth wanted to say it. Yet he could neither form the words, nor make his body resist. Syn … But he had not seen his parents since the crossing to Vanaheim, ages ago. And these people had known his mother.
Hermod had lost almost everyone he’d ever cared for. His parents. His only child. His … fucking foster sister.
He shuddered, caught off guard as Olwen’s mouth brushed over the tip of his cock. Before he realized what he was doing, he was atop her. Slipping inside. Dimly aware that the rest of the liosalfar were watching, not abashed in the least. It ought to have shamed him, yet he couldn’t stop the grinding of his hips.
From the corner of his eye, he realized the others had begun pleasuring one another while looking on him and Olwen.
The liosalf beneath him had her legs wrapped around his back, thrusting her hips in time with his own. Furiously grinding, even as she pulled his head down to her breast.
This was wrong.
He was not the kind of man who … he couldn’t stop himself from …
Olwen shuddered beneath him. Her energy flooded into him like a bolt of lightning, coursing through him and immediately driving him to climax. Flickering thoughts—visions maybe, though not in any sense he could process—they bombarded his mind. A sense of Olrun—of his mother—as a dying mortal, wounded in battle. A Vall? Perhaps even in line for the throne. Until a spear thrust took all that.
And left her with a choice. To forestall her death and gain unfathomable powers, if she swore obedience to Dellingr and lay with the Sun God. Hardly a choice at all … until she forsook her oath because of Hermod and his father.
And lost herself … lost her very soul to the corpse sea …
Weeping, Hermod slumped off Olwen and lay on his back.
“Huh,” one of the males said. “Never saw a man react like that to her trench. Did you grow some teeth down there, Olwen?”
The liosalf didn’t answer, just lay there beside him, pensive, leaving him to wonder what she had taken from him. He felt drained, as if some vital part of himself had been sucked out.
“I’ll take you to the Temple of Winds,” Olwen said, approaching from behind Hermod.
He sat with his legs dangling out over the side of Magec’s tower, staring from the arch at the wetlands to the south, still woozy and uncertain of himself. Certainly, Olwen had not only shared his pneuma—lying with any woman meant some was shared, and more from those flush with pneuma from Yggdrasil—but stolen a portion of it. Vaettir feasted on pneuma and on souls, and Hermod was lucky she’d only been after the former.
He rubbed his hands over his beard, stifling a yawn. Fatigue warred within him, yes, and guilt at having betrayed Syn. Shit … he didn’t even know for certain if she yet lived, given the devastation around Yggdrasil.
Urd made wretches of all men, Odin had once told him. Perhaps it was true, though Odin admitted that, acknowledging his misdeeds as part of the web of urd did not abrogate one’s responsibility for them. Back then, Hermod had found Odin’s philosophizing tedious. Now … now he had to wonder if such thoughts were manifestations of his mentor’s guilt, rather than any attempt to assuage that guilt.
“I can use my power,” Olwen said, “to guide an animal there, in case the serpent has returned and requires a sacrifice.”
Hermod nodded slowly. Whatever Olwen had seen of him, in the pneuma she’d stolen, now she wanted to help. Because of her connection to his mother, long ago? Or did she know what he planned, and why? He dared not raise any such question for fear she’d change her mind, or that he might reveal more than she already knew.
No, he had to accept her gift and be glad of it. There would be time enough to brood over his mistakes here later. First … First he had to avenge himself and Sif both upon Hel, for how the Mist goddess had deceived them.
When Olwen had said she would use her power on an animal, she meant her eyes would glow and she’d somehow take command of one of the lizards, as Freyja had done to the hydra in the Onyx Lagoon. The animal was a quadrupedal behemoth with a massive, feathered crest, and three giant horns jutting from its head. At Olwen’s behest, Hermod reluctantly mounted the overmastered beast, and they rode it together, through the wetlands.
The creature stood tall enough to walk through shallows that would have impeded Hermod’s passage, seeming hardly to take note of any of the animals they encountered. Including giant water snakes, and a large-mouthed lizard creature. Perhaps this triceratops—as Olwen called it—lacked the ability to fear predators while under Olwen’s thrall.
Either way, she sat behind Hermod, arms around his waist, occasionally tickling his cock, and drawing up memories of their moment together. Intense beyond words, and somehow, though he knew it would mean losing more of himself and his health, he felt drawn to take her once more. This, he would not allow, so he pretended not to even notice her attentions.
Without a word or any means he could see, she guided the animal through the wetlands, until they came at last to a step pyramid of enormous size, situated on a rocky plateau just above the wetlands. Within it, he could hear swirling gales, though he could not understand how a storm might rage inside.
The pyramid itself was cut from yellow stone, with gems encrusted in its steps.
“You’re in luck,” Olwen said. “Quetzalcoatl is not here and, if you finish your business before his return, you’ll need no sacrifice.”
“How can you be certain he’s not inside?”
“Oh.” She giggled. “How quaint, mortal. No. The feathered serpent wouldn’t fit inside the pyramid. He encircles it, or flies above it.”
Hermod suddenly found it difficult to swallow. So the dragon … god … thing was too big to fit inside that. An unsettling thought.
He slid a leg over the dinosaur’s side and slipped down.
“Would you like more sex, before you go?” Olwen asked, and Hermod flinched.
“No.”
“Liar.”
Well. Whatever he wanted, he knew better.
“It is not given to us to grieve the way mortals do,” she said. “But, I would have preferred things turned out different for Olrun.”
Having no words—and neither the desire to discuss it—Hermod only favored her with a final nod. And with that, she turned the animal back and rode off into the wetlands.
Hard to say whether he ought to rejoice at the absence of the discomfiting female, or miss her company. Here, in the wetlands, he had only the buzzing of insects and the swirling storm within the pyramid to keep his attention.
No.
He had something else. A mission. He’d come here for vengeance and, with any luck, a means of defeating Hel. He aimed to be about it.
Before they came to Alfheim, Keuthos had described a pile of stones on the wetland’s edge, not far from the feathered serpent’s pyramid. The wraith had even supposed that the dragon may have known of the seal’s existence.
Now, Hermod set about pushing stones as big as his torso aside. Thanks to Olwen, he no longer had pneuma in abundance. Maybe it would have rejuvenated, given many days of rest and proper food, but Hermod had no time for that.
So he’d stripped to the waist and still managed to become drenched in sweat and swarmed by buzzing, biting insects that seemed intent to suck every last drop of his blood out. He drew what pneuma he still could—there’d be no moving those stones otherwise—and pushed one after another of the huge things out of the way.
&nb
sp; Until a hint of blue light escaped from beneath the rocks.
This was it.
Drawing more pneuma, he grabbed one of the rocks and heaved it aside, revealing part of a glowing sigil not so very unlike the marks he’d seen upon the Mountains of Fimbulvinter in Niflheim. He grabbed and tossed aside the last rock, exposing the rest of the seal. It was a circular design, inset with other circles, inside which lay glyphs of extraordinary complexity. Maybe more complex than even Odin or Freyja could have interpreted.
The circle’s diameter was half again his height, and he had to slide down into the exposed pit to reach it.
As far as destroying the seal … Keuthos had never really gone into much detail on that. Perhaps the wraith had assumed he’d figure it out on his own.
Simply covering the circle had not broken its power. Not here, and not in Niflheim where ages of snow and sliding rock had obscured the massive sigils.
What if he were to more directly disrupt the lines?
Drawing Dainsleif, he paced around the circle’s perimeter. As disconcerting as Keuthos’s sibilant voice in his mind was, he almost missed having the wraith’s advice on such matters. Or Odin’s or anyone’s. Shit, maybe Olwen could have told him how to do this, if she had remained. Not that the liosalfar were like to help him release an enemy of their god.
With a sigh, he dug the blade into the hard-packed earth around the sigil, then slowly pulled it across the circle, breaking it from one side to the other. As he did so, the blue luminance dimmed and finally winked out. His ears popped and his skin tingled, but he saw no visible sign of workings of the Art. Was that it, really?
He grimaced. Sorcery was for madmen and fools. Half the time, other people couldn’t even tell if it was real, though clearly something had bound Achlys in that cavern. To be certain, Hermod drew another line across the circle, then a third, slicing it every which way in the hopes that would break the seal. Because he had no intention whatsoever of returning to Alfheim.
Finally, he climbed out of the pit.
One down. Now, onto the World of Storms.
