Wicked Gods

by D. N. Hoxa

  “Why do you need to find him?”

  “Because I think he knows what the masters are really looking for here.”

  “And why does that even matter?” Millie wasn’t curious, not in the least.

  “Because it does! Of course it does,” I said, with more energy than I’d had in weeks. Maybe I was so bored in those mines, so very helpless, that a rumor had gotten me all riled up, but I didn’t care. I wanted to know more.

  “It doesn’t,” Millie said, but before I could complain, she stopped walking and turned to face me. “But I’ll ask around and see what I can find. In the meantime, please stay out of trouble. I don’t want to die alone.”

  It felt like I was seeing her face for the first time. Her cheeks had hollowed out, her eyes looked too big for her face. Her skin looked paper thin, and her lips were almost completely blue. She’d also lost a lot of weight from the first time I saw her. The sight of her sucked the breath out of me.

  I grabbed her hand and squeezed. “We’re not going to die here.”

  It was probably bullshit, but she must have believed me because she smiled. “Keep your head down.”

  As the day went by, I saw her talking to several people, but only a couple of them actually answered her. I couldn’t blame any of them. Even working was better than the pit, with no food or water, with nothing to do but dwell on your own thoughts and lose your mind quicker than you would here.

  By lunch, Millie had something for me. I could tell by the way her big eyes shone.

  “He’s in the mine to the right of ours,” she whispered when the guards put the stew in our bowls and threw the bread in there, too. I hated when they did that. The bread tasted worse when wet.

  “Thank you!” I said, unable to contain my excitement. So long as I kept my head down, I could switch mines for half a day when we returned to digging. I was sure nobody would notice.

  “But, Morgan, they say he’s crazy. Completely out of his mind. Has been that way since the beginning,” Millie said.

  I swallowed hard. That definitely took half the fun out of it. “I’ll just talk to him, that’s all.”

  “Just don’t get caught,” she whispered, and lowered her head when the guard watching us stepped close to our row. We were sitting on the ground, eating. What the hell did he expect us to do?

  “I won’t.” I had no right to make that promise because I could get caught, and easily, but I needed to speak to that man, even if it got me a week in the pit. At least now I had my friend Germany to talk to.

  Sneaking out of my line and into the one on the right wasn’t hard. Just like I suspected, the guards didn’t notice. We probably all looked the same to them. We were all dirty and dressed in rags, with digging tools in our hands and our heads down. It was hard to tell the difference, even for me.

  Once I got in the cave, it was easy to spot Weston—I just looked for the oldest looking, slowest human among the sixty people in there with me. Shoving dirt to the sides with my shovel, I slowly made my way toward him. As long as I kept moving, the guards wouldn’t suspect anything.

  Weston was as old as Germany had said. He was maybe five feet tall, a shrunken version of his old self, the top of his head completely bald with white hair turned grey around the sides. His hands shook as he dragged the dirt on the ground to the side with a shovel, while two others slammed their pickaxes onto the walls of the cave, searching. His face was wrinkled, but his eyes were clear. Dark brown and wide open.

  “Hello, Weston,” I said, trying to keep my voice as low as I could.

  “Hello, girlie. How do you do?” he sang, his voice high-pitched like a bird’s chirp.

  A shiver washed down the length of me. “Just keep it down. The guards can hear,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, right, right,” he said, in a whisper now. “You’re right, you are.”

  “A friend of yours told me that you tell stories about before,” I said, unsure whether to try to make small talk first. Didn’t see the point, so I went ahead.

  “Yes, I do, girlie.” He turned to look at me with a smile on his face. “I always liked to tell stories.”

  I didn’t know if he looked insane, or it was just because of what Millie told me, but I definitely was surprised.

  “I’d like to hear those stories,” I whispered, continuing to move dirt. “One story in particular, about what the masters are really looking for in this mine.”

  Suddenly, the man’s eyes turned darker, but it was gone so fast I was afraid I’d imagined the reaction. He turned to work again.

  “That’s an easy story. A boring story. I’ll tell you another story,” he said.

  “No, no, let’s start with that. I really want to hear it. I want to know what we’re looking for,” I said, looking behind us to see if any of the six guards in there were watching us. So far so good.

  “We’re looking for what we’ve always looked for,” Weston said and laughed. “And we’ve always looked for it.”

  “What? What have we always looked for?”

  Again, he turned to look at me, this time not as happy about the look on my face or my question. He turned back to his shovel, and I bit my tongue. I needed to give him his time. If I pushed him too hard, he’d refuse to speak to me altogether.

  “Did you know that Odin took his own eye out as sacrifice to The Wise One, just so he could have more knowledge?” he whispered, and his whisper shook. “Knowledge is everything. It is power. That’s what we’re looking for. Power.”

  “What kind of power?”

  He stopped moving for a second. “The power. The power of all creation.”

  “But it’s not a precious metal, is it?” I couldn’t understand what he meant.

  “No metal, girlie. No metal, just him,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Him? Who’s him?”

  “Did you know that humans were Odin’s favorite creation?” He laughed again. “Yes, we were. His favorite. His weakest. His pride and his demise. His way back.”

  “What? What does that mean? Demise? How are we his way back?”

  Weston put a wrinkled hand over his eyes, and his shoulders shook. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or laughing.

  “Weston?” I whispered, reaching out a hand to touch him, just when he put his down and faced me.

  “Did you know that all worlds are equal, and one can exist inside the other? From the other? Because of the other?” He leaned down on one knee, dropped his shovel, and gathered dirt between his hands, working it into a small ball. Then he showed it to me. “Ah, such wonderful stories, girlie. Do you see them? Do you see the stories?” He looked at the ball of dirt crumbling in his hand with such adoration it was heartbreaking.

  “I do. I just don’t see the one I want to hear. What are the masters looking for here?” I whispered, putting a hand over his.

  “The masters! Yes, the masters,” he said excitingly. “Did you know that I was their favorite of the first? Good people. Such good people.”

  My God. “They were never good people, Weston.” I couldn’t hide the anger from my voice. “They made a slave out of you. Out of all of us.”

  He raised his overgrown white brows. “Slaves? No, they wouldn’t do that. They would not, I’m sure.”

  “Weston, you’re—” Their slave, I was going to say but stopped myself. What was the point? This poor man was already suffering more than I could imagine. There was no need to make it worse for him.

  “Hey! Get back to work!” the guard behind us shouted. That’s when I realized that I’d stopped moving.

  With my head down, I grabbed Weston by the arm and pulled him up to his feet, then gave him his shovel. He smiled like a grandfather would to his baby niece. So full of innocence, it killed me.

  Millie was right. Weston was not well. This place had driven him mad a long time ago.

  “Isn’t it a lovely story, girlie?” he asked, and I nodded, stepping away. If I talked to him more, I would only get him in trouble, and he didn’t loo
k like he could stand a single night in the pit. No, I had to let it go.

  “Lovely story. Thank you, Weston.”

  Thirteen

  Millie looked at me with pleading in her eyes.

  “We can do it,” I repeated for what felt like the hundredth time. “We’ve got forty seconds at our disposal, and we can do plenty with them.”

  “I’m not going, Morgan,” she insisted. “And neither should you. Just…please.”

  We were in the container, lying on our hay mattresses, pretending to be asleep every time guards came to check on us. They would only check for one more time, and then came the shift change. Our chance.

  “This is our shot. The only one we’re going to get. We need to get out of here, Millie,” I whispered.

  “What about the Valkyries? They caught you last time, didn’t they?” Her voice shook.

  “The Valkyries are not going to do shit because they’re not going to recognize us.” She raised her brows in question. “We’re going to kill the guards who keep watch on our containers until dawn.”

  Now she really thought I’d lost my mind. “How the hell do you think we’ll do that?”

  Finally, I showed her my most prized possession. I pulled the corner of my mattress up just a bit so she could see the pickaxe I’d hidden in there. I’d grabbed it from the ground while we were leaving the cave. The guards took our tools every time we left the caves and returned them to us in the morning, so I could only hope that nobody noticed it missing or that we’d be long gone by the time they did. Its metal head was old and worn, the edges far from sharp, and the wooden handle had all but fallen off after who knows how many years of use, but it didn’t matter. I could bash a guard’s skull in with it any time of the day, and that was exactly what I intended to do.

  I didn’t want to kill anyone, but there was no other way to get past the Valkyries. I’d need luck on my side, too. They never went near the containers of the slaves or the guards. They only came close if someone —like me—was stupid enough to try to run out the front gates. And they never even looked at the guards. Not once in the time I’d been watching them. It was our safest bet. If we were dressed in guard uniforms, nobody was going to suspect anything. I’d given it a lot of thought. The main gate was no longer an option. It was smack in the middle of the mining site. We were going to have to go to the other side gates, the ones I’d come through when I was stupid enough to think I could barge in here and rescue Millie in a heartbeat. What a difference a week made.

  “My God, Morgan,” Millie breathed, completely shocked. I let the mattress down again.

  “Only two guards keep watch of the slave containers from midnight until dawn. That’s we why need to do it after midnight, so we’ll have plenty of time to get away before the bodies are found. We kill the guards, take their uniforms, and go out the side gates. We can do this.” Only a part of me believed in the words coming out of my mouth. The other part, the bigger part, thought I was a fool who was going to die tonight, just like Millie.

  “But how are we going to kill them? They’ll see us coming from a mile away!”

  I’d thought about that, too. “When the guards leave to change shifts, we get out and wait behind the last container. That’s the way they always use. As soon as they step behind the containers, we jump them from behind so that nobody sees us from the other side. Get it?” It all made perfect sense in my head.

  “No, I don’t. We’ll be caught and then thrown in the pit. I don’t want to die in the pit.” It was almost an accusation.

  “And that’s why you need to come with me, Millie. If we don’t get out of here soon, we’re going to die, here or in the pit. Believe you me, there’s no difference.” I’d been to the pit and Millie hadn’t. The container was just as much a burning hell as that little hole in the ground.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, more to herself than to me.

  I sighed. I’d never been good at talking. “Look, I know how you feel right now. I’ve felt like that every single day for the past three years. Stuck, with nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.” It was the truth. In Alfheimr, the monsters didn’t hide under the bed—they were out in plain sight. “But then you passed through the screen. I remember praying like I never had before while I was coming to see you. I prayed that you’d be my salvation, my way back home.” I’d prayed with all my heart that night that felt like years ago, a completely different lifetime. “And you practically forced me into this journey and made me realize that giving up is never an option. You did that for me. You’ve got to let me repay the favor.” It was as honest as I knew how to get.

  Millie smiled, but it didn’t last.

  “Say we do cross the gates. What happens then? Do you think they won’t come after us? Because they will,” she said, but it finally looked like she was at least considering it.

  “We cross the gates and we run. The Valkyries never leave the site, so we run into the woods,” I said, getting more excited by the second. Just imagining my freedom felt like I was flying. I was never going to take that for granted, ever again. “Sim will be on the other side. He’ll help us get away.”

  “Sim is gone,” Millie said, a bit disappointed. “He’d have reached the mountain by now.”

  She was right. It had been more than a week, and Sim hadn’t come to our rescue like I’d naively thought a few times the first days. But something told me that he was there. Who else could have killed the three guards I’d seen brought into the mining site, three nights in a row?

  “Then we’ll run on our own, into the woods and as far away as we can from this place. We can hide for days if necessary, until they stop searching. Then, we can find that damned mountain, and we can get the hell out of here. We can go home and forget this ever happened.”

  God, I sounded like that old man Weston, only much worse.

  Millie’s eyes glistened with tears. “Home,” she whispered. Such a simple word, such a powerful meaning. “We can go home.” It was all the confirmation I needed.

  “Now rest. We’ve got about an hour before we make our move,” I said and lay back on the mattress. It was decided. For better or for worse, we were doing this. I’d rather die trying to free myself, than like a slave, wasting my life away for the masters. At least if I died fighting, I’d know that Charles would be proud of me. He’d think that I was brave or at least not a coward. And right now, that was the only thing I had to keep me going.

  As I lay in the mattress, I found my thoughts drifting to Weston again. Weston and his stories. It felt like someone sucker punched me in the gut every time I remembered his face, the look in his clear eyes, the way he was so isolated in his own mind that he refused to see what he was doing, where he was. What he had become. Maybe it was a self-defense mechanism. Maybe that’s what had kept him going for all this time.

  Or maybe it was his stories.

  I was aware that I couldn’t take any of his words seriously, but he said that the masters were looking for power. Unsurprising. The power of creation. What the hell was the power of creation? Odin was the creator of everything according to the people of Alfheimr. Odin The Terrible.Odin the Allfather, The Ancient One, and all that crap.

  And what did Weston say, no metal, just him? Maybe he meant Odin, too. No wonder he was obsessed with the dead god. Everybody else in this place seemed to be. Poor old man. I could only imagine what he’d endured all this time in this world, still run by the ideas of wicked gods who are long gone. I didn’t even want to know what it was like here when they were alive.

  When the guards came for the last check before the shift change, an invisible energy covered me from head to toe. The door of the container closed with a thud, and I slowly reached for the pickaxe under the mattress. Just to have it in my hand made me feel a thousand times more powerful than I actually was, but I needed the confidence, so I didn’t question it. The people sleeping—or pretending to sleep—around me wouldn’t even turn their heads our way when we left our beds, just like t
hey hadn’t the other times I’d sneaked out of the containers to spy on the guards or try to escape.

  Our time finally came. I heard the footsteps of the retreating guards and sat up. We had to act quickly, and I was as ready as I was going to get. Millie looked up at me like she was seeing death instead of my face. She was terrified. I gave her a smile, but it made no difference. When I offered her my hand, she took it. I didn’t let go as we walked around the mattresses on the ground and the people on them. My hand shook when I pushed the container door open, but I couldn’t afford to hesitate. Hesitation was going to get the both of us killed.

  The cold night air made the hair on the back of my neck rise like a physical assault. My senses were sharp and my breathing was even. Just like before a fight in Sennan’s cage. I went in, kicked someone’s ass, came out and got my money. Now, I was going to go in—or out, rather—kill someone, get the hell out of that place, and get my freedom back. Piece of cake.

  The containers of the guards were about thirty feet from ours. We hid in between the last slave containers of the second line. The first separated us from the side gates—and our freedom. The space was tight, but we were small enough. The guards would come from the other side of it, and as soon as they did, I’d jump them from behind. I was up for a fight. In fact, I was craving it like I’d been craving pizza every day for three agonizing years. The Valkyries weren’t going to see us. The containers were going to hide us pretty well.

  It was dark outside, and that worked to our advantage. The moon hid behind thick, dark clouds, offering us a much better chance of going unnoticed.

  I counted my breaths until we began to hear the footsteps of the two guards coming for their shift. Millie was about to start crying.

  “If I can’t kill them, you don’t make a sound. You simply go back to the container and sleep, okay?” I said, just in case. If I didn’t make it, she needed to live to fight another day.

  “Morgan, I—” But I put my finger in front of her lips. Sshh. It would all be over soon. I no longer felt afraid. I didn’t need to—I’d walked into a fight a thousand times before. This time didn’t need to be any different, except, you know, I had to actually kill someone now. Details.