Scourged

by Kevin Hearne

  “I see. Is he still here?”

  “No, he’s decided he’s done enough. Did you also hear Loki’s challenge to me?”

  “Everyone heard it.”

  “I know where he is and can lead you to him. Do you want your shot at winning the Girl Scout Cookies?”

  Brighid shrugged. “I want the victory and honor more than the cookies.” At a sudden thought, she frowned at me. “But why help me? You bet on Athena.”

  “Yes, but Athena will get fried almost instantly. You won’t. And I bet you have wards that will deflect those arrows he’s letting loose.”

  The goddess of poetry, fire, and the forge smiled. “Yes. He has already attempted to slay me with one from afar.”

  “Excellent. Shall I usher you, then, to a fight worthy of your skill, which will burnish your reputation and live on in the songs of bards?”

  “Absolutely, Siodhachan. Usher away. Let us form a detail.”

  Her eyes slid away from me for a moment and she smiled over my right shoulder, but when I looked behind me all I saw was a tightly packed throng of Fae, keeping their distance. When I looked back she had turned to shout orders at the yewmen and the Fae lad in livery, whom she called Coriander. They formed a sphere of protection around us, with Coriander at the point, and rather than hold the line, we pushed forward into the throng of draugar and began a slow jog, the yewmen batting aside the undead instead of trying to decapitate them and Coriander plowing through them like a cowcatcher on the front of a train. We were not trying to win by attrition now; we had a destination in mind. I directed them straight ahead until we got to the base of the volcano, which was essentially the edge of the former lake, and then we turned right. I did not see Garm anywhere, and even though he’d tried to eat me on two separate occasions, I hoped he was okay and recovering.

  I cast my eyes back to the front; Coyote and I had basically advanced straight forward from the Álfar position, and we were approaching it now.

  “Should be coming up soon,” I told Brighid, “somewhere slightly uphill from us. Loki will use fire at some point and probably shape-shift, so beware.”

  “Remain in my shadow,” Brighid replied, “and you will be safe from the fire.”

  I wasn’t sure any of us would be safe. After throwing a horde at us, Loki had to be confident of being able to face down Odin and Thor and the rest of them if he wanted to win this thing. He’d been planning for this a long time and wouldn’t have called me to fight him if he wasn’t confident of the outcome. My calculation was twofold: I had it coming, and whatever happened to us, the rest of the assembled gods would see it and know where Loki was. Engaging with us would paint a big target on his back. Or face. Whatever.

  And both Brighid and I had backups. She’d kept Ogma behind in Tír na nÓg somewhere to lead the Fae should she fall, and Flidais was in Japan. Granuaile and Owen would continue Druidry if I fell—especially Owen, who had a fine grove going already. I imagined Granuaile would like to add a couple more headspaces before she took on any apprentices. And I hoped she was safe dealing with whatever threats emerged in Taiwan.

  The first sign we were close came when an arrow struck the kinetic wards surrounding Coriander and its bladed tip shattered to pieces.

  The second, unmistakable sign that we’d found Loki was when he loomed out of the throng, growing to the size of a giant in seconds, and hosed us down with fire that he channeled from his sword—the bow and arrows were nowhere to be seen, nor was Fragarach. Coriander had some rudimentary protection against fire, but as the Arrows of Vayu had been no match for the kinetic ward, his protection was insufficient against the heat Loki was bringing. Likewise for the yewmen, whose only fear was fire. While they all flinched and cried out under the onslaught, Brighid shouted at Coriander to retreat behind her and she charged straight forward, arms spread out, gathering that flame to her and redirecting it to the draugar on either side of Loki. The lord of mischief had to stop soon afterward because Brighid leapt at him, her own sword ready to deliver a killing blow, and he had to deflect that. The metal of their swords screamed as they slid against each other and Loki twisted impossibly to let her pass by, and his push at the end forced her to tumble off balance. But now he had enemies on either side of him, and he couldn’t abide that. He waved at the nearby draugar to either attack us or protect him, and the distinction mattered little. They rushed in from all sides, and that meant I’d have very little ability to attack Loki. He wanted to focus on Brighid, the clearest threat. Once she was out of the picture, he’d be able to fry us without interference.

  His head turned away from us even as his left hand pulled out a knife that looked familiar—a cold blue ice knife with a red line along the top of the blade. It was one of the yeti whirling blades—the one he’d stolen from Granuaile in India.

  “Oh, no, you fucking don’t,” a voice said behind me, but when I turned all I saw was yewmen, who cannot speak, and beyond them, draugar. But, then, I wouldn’t have seen anything if that voice belonged to who I thought.

  “Granuaile?” I said. “Are you here?”

  “We’ll talk later,” her disembodied voice replied. “I have a score to settle.”

  “I thought you were in Taiwan.”

  “We’re going to settle that too, believe me.”

  “What?” I got no answer. I got a face full of draugar instead. I fell into a defensive sphere with Coriander and the yewmen and missed Fragarach desperately. Swords that don’t cut through armor can’t compare. That was a fact Loki was finding out in his battle with Brighid. He kept shifting his shape as his blows came in, and Brighid couldn’t react in time to them, so he landed both with his accustomed sword and with the whirling blade. But both were turned back by Brighid’s armor. She disarmed his right hand soon afterward, managing to open up a wound along the inside of his forearm. In need of a new weapon and unable to pick up his old one without exposing himself to attack, he did what any infinitely malleable shape-shifter would do: He reached into his own body and pulled Fragarach out of there, slimed with Loki juices. He met Brighid’s next attack with it and surprised me by being a far better fighter than I thought he’d be. He counterstruck but again slipped past Brighid’s guard with a trick, and that’s when Brighid learned whether the armor she’d forged specifically to withstand Fragarach worked or not.

  It sort of did.

  Normally, Fragarach treats armor like it’s denim. There’s some small resistance, in other words, but not enough to matter if you are striking well. Brighid had forged that armor at a time when she worried that Fragarach could fall into the hands of her enemies and be used against her. She’d never had it tested until now.

  Loki’s blow was a powerful one and it sank into the top of Brighid’s left shoulder plate and the top of her chest, knocking her backward—but she took Fragarach with her, lodged in the armor. Perhaps the blade bit into her and perhaps it didn’t; the armor wasn’t perfect but it did the job, because that would have been a disabling or even killing blow against any other armor. Both Loki and Brighid appeared stunned by the outcome: Loki was once again disarmed, and Brighid had a sword stuck in her kit.

  Before either could resume, however, Loki cried out as a sharp crack announced the shattering of his left ulna at the distal end—right at the wrist, in other words, which caused him to drop the whirling blade. He reared back, cradling his arm, his teeth bared in a hiss as he searched for the cause. Granuaile dismissed the binding on Scáthmhaide that kept her invisible, whirling blade in her left hand.

  “Hi!” she shouted up at him. “Remember how you stole this from me?” She flashed the ice blade at him. “Ambushed me, broke most of my bones? Lured my father into a death trap?”

  “You—”

  “Yep, me. Just wanted you to know who gotcha.”

  “No!”

  Fire bloomed on Loki’s right fist and I hoped Brighid would s
top him, control that fire before it could hit Granuaile, because she had no defense against it. But the fire snuffed out as Granuaile whipped the blade at Loki’s thigh, mere feet from where she stood, and it plunged into the muscle above his knee. The vortex in the tip of the blade sucked the soul right out of him into that glowing reservoir, but his was no ordinary spirit. His was the soul of an old god, and it was too much for the whirling blade to contain. It quivered and then shattered into chunks of ice and mist, and the malignant spirit of Loki dispersed with it. Loki’s body, meanwhile, shrank and ejected a number of weapons from his torso as it fell, including the Arrows of Vayu and the bow he’d been using to shoot them.

  As when Hel had died, the draugar lost interest in fighting folks who fought back and began to drift away toward the human city. The Norse pantheon, which had bided its time until now, sprang into action. The cloud that had been hiding them from view grew and shifted perceptibly to enshroud the human helicopters, and only once they were screened did the Norse deities emerge, joining the armies in routing the draugar. Valkyries swooped down to sever necks with great axes. Mjöllnir plowed through them from above, crunching them into small craters, and returned to Thor’s hand for another throw. Odin rode out with Hugin and Munin circling above him, Frigg and Freyja flanking either side.

  I checked on the yewmen and Coriander: all singed but alive. I left them to see whether Brighid was all right. She’d gotten to her feet and was wrenching Fragarach out of her armor. She won it free as I got there and she offered it to me. There was no fresh blood on the blade. “I think you dropped this,” she deadpanned. I tossed my looted sword aside as I took it from her.

  “Yes, I did. I had a hound on my tail at the time.” My head whipped around to the west. “I wonder what happened to him?” I didn’t see him standing above the sea of draugar.

  “He may yet live, and if he does, we will return him to Niflheim.”

  Grunts and punting noises drew our attention to Granuaile, who was kicking Loki’s still form. “You evil fuck! Ugh! Victory is mine!” She stopped after that and stepped over him, to where the Arrows of Vayu lay on the ground. She scooped them up in her left hand and then glared in our direction, daring us to challenge her right to them. “I deserve to keep these. He tricked my father into going after them, and I suffered quite a bit to find them.”

  I nodded at her. “No argument here.”

  “Of course,” Brighid agreed. She gestured at the body. “Well done. Whether you wanted a cookie for that or not, you’re going to get thousands.”

  “How did things go in Taiwan?” I asked.

  “I’m glad I went,” she replied, “because Sun Wukong is an excellent teacher and Taipei is a wonderful city. I’m going to make Mandarin my next headspace. But I wasn’t truly needed there. The masters of the heavens are more than a match for the lords of hell, and you knew that. You both made a decision for me as if I were a child, and I don’t appreciate it. You might think the difference in our ages makes you wiser somehow, but I don’t need to be thousands of years old to know you shouldn’t treat someone like that.”

  Neither of us was able to respond, because a good chunk of the Norse had arrived. Thor and Freyja landed first, each in their chariot, on either side of Loki’s body. Odin and Frigg appeared soon after, escorted by Valkyries, and they set up a perimeter, making sure the retreating draugar streamed around and didn’t interrupt—or interrupt us, anyway. I felt fairly certain they would be interrupting the citizens of Skoghall soon.

  “Who slew him?” Odin demanded.

  Granuaile raised her hand with the arrows clutched in them. “I did.”

  The Norse all blinked in surprise, clearly expecting Brighid to have done it. “The Druid? We didn’t know you were here.”

  “Late arrival.”

  “Huh. You win all the cookies, then.”

  “Yeah, Brighid mentioned something like that.”

  “There is a more important matter to settle, Odin,” Freyja said, descending from her chariot, sword in hand, “and you know it.”

  “I do, yes. Your pardon, Freyja. Druid,” he said, and pointed to me so that there would be no question to whom he was speaking, “you have committed many crimes against the Æsir, for which you now need to answer.”

  “I’ve already answered,” I said. “We made a deal in Oslo. I returned Gungnir. I helped destroy both Fenris and Jörmungandr, and I was instrumental in slaying both Hel and Loki.”

  “You never made a deal with me, Druid,” Freyja said. “You killed the Norns and unleashed all of this. You killed Sleipnir, and your actions brought about the deaths of Ratatosk, my brother Freyr, Heimdall, Thor, and many Valkyries.”

  “First,” I said, pointing to the thunder god, “looks to me like Thor’s fine.” The others she’d mentioned weren’t fine, though. Or at least they weren’t in attendance. Four figures muscled through the throng of draugar and passed between the Valkyries. It was the Olympians, Athena and Minerva and the two Apollos. Owls swooped down to land on the shoulders of the goddesses of wisdom. “And for the rest I have made recompense. You even helped us fight Fenris.”

  “Yes, at Odin’s request, I agreed to defer my vengeance until a later date to accomplish a strategic goal. But that deferment has now ended. You have not answered for what you did to me personally, and Odin cannot bargain that away. And for that offense I call you out right now.”

  “Wait. What offense?” Granuaile said.

  I closed my eyes and sighed. I knew Freyja would never forgive me, and I could not blame her.

  “He recruited the frost giants to help him invade Asgard,” Freyja explained. “And their promised payment…was me.”

  “What? Atticus, you never told me this.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  People tend not to volunteer what shames them the most. This was, as I’d feared, my personal judgment day, and I had so much to answer for: A discordant symphony of poor choices that accelerated and crescendoed from the moment I decided to fight Aenghus Óg. Boneheaded moves rooted in codes of honor and loyalty more than logic. Astounding dismissals of the warnings of two deities—one of them omniscient—who stated in plain terms that this wouldn’t end well for me. And I am just honest enough with myself to realize that I would probably make those same decisions again, for that is how deeply flawed I am. My long life has not made me especially wise or some paragon of moral rectitude; it has just given me greater scope to cock everything up. Coyote’s observation that all presidents were narcissists came back to me, for it struck me that I might be one such—not a politician, of course, but a person in power who made decisions in his own self-interest over the obvious interests of a great many other people.

  I stepped away from Brighid on suddenly unsteady knees and faced the Norse goddess of war and beauty. Physically my knees should be fine—I’m still enjoying the ligaments and cartilage of a man in his early twenties—but such is the power of emotion over our bodies. “Freyja, I apologize. I never should have done that.”

  “I didn’t come here for an apology.” The grin on her face contained no scrap or hope of mercy. That same grin bloomed on the faces of the other Norse in attendance, and I remembered they had flashed such smiles before the battle too. This confrontation had been planned all along. They’d been looking forward to it.

  “I know. I wanted to give you one anyway. It’s sincere.”

  Freyja ignored this and bent her knees ever so slightly, raising her sword and her eyebrows. “So you will answer on your own? No pleas to Brighid or summoning the Morrigan to your side?”

  “I will answer.” I glanced at Granuaile and added, “On my own,” to make sure she wouldn’t intervene.

  The land we stood on was dead, drained by the portal to the lower realms of the Norse. I was out of energy, my bear charm drained. I could not boost my strength or speed or perform the simplest binding w
ithout Gaia’s energy. I was a mere human squaring off against a goddess who once held her own against the Morrigan and walked away—a trained fighter, sure, and with an excellent weapon, but still a mere human.

  “Good,” she said, crouching down to spring. I set myself in a defensive stance and felt the adrenaline begin to pump into my system. It didn’t help much.

  When Freyja attacked, she blurred with speed, and the only reason I got Fragarach up in time to block her blow was that she had some distance to cover and I guessed right about where the attack would come from. It came from above, just to the left of my head, and though I placed my blade in the perfect position, her strength was such that it simply knocked my blade down on contact while only slowing her strike somewhat. The edge hit my scavenged Fae armor between my neck and shoulder and it held, but I staggered back and she followed, kicking me in the chest to make sure I went down. That knocked me clean off my feet and I crashed into the flash-cooled volcanic earth, crunching my head onto something and seeing lights pop in my vision.

  I heard some chuckles, maybe someone retching, but saw no incoming attack. She was waiting for me to get up again. Playing with me. And I felt the hot trickle of blood on my neck. I’d gashed my scalp and most likely earned a concussion. But when I got up I didn’t feel like waiting for another beat-down. I charged and delivered the best flurry of attacks I could manage, but her speed and strength allowed her to deflect and parry and repel me. It was abundantly clear that I couldn’t win and that she could end it whenever she wished, but she wasn’t smiling anymore. Her expression was one of intense concentration. She was looking for something—but what was she after? She beckoned me forward, but I planted myself instead. I wasn’t going to give her what she wanted.

  “Fine,” she growled. “I’ll make you hurt first.”

  First before what? I wondered, but then she launched herself at me, and after my initial attempt to block, I was rocked by punishing blows to my body from both fists and feet. I took the pommel of her sword in my right temple, which stunned me until a tremendous impact chunked into the top of my right shoulder just outside the protection of the armor and it dawned on me, far too late, what she’d been after. I toppled over a few pounds lighter, my blood spraying onto the ground, and I let loose a single cry of horror and disbelief.