The Valhalla Prophecy

by Andy McDermott

  “Well, tell us what you’ve managed to find out anyway,” said Nina.

  “Anything you have learned may help us,” Kagan added.

  Tova shrugged again. “I will try.” She gathered together some of her notes, running a fingertip over them. “Okay. The text that I saw on the runestone in Norway was mostly the same as on the other, but one section was different. This is the part that I believe would have told the Vikings which river to follow, but I did not have time to read it properly before Eddie made us move away.” She gave the Englishman a brief sidelong glower.

  It was Eddie’s turn to shrug. “If somebody,” he said, eyeing his wife, “hadn’t gone back for a closer look and made me chuck away the bomb, Hoyt and Berkeley wouldn’t have got away with the stone.”

  “Can we play the blame game some other time, thanks?” Nina complained impatiently. “Tova, what did you manage to get?”

  “I remember that it named Fjarriheim,” said the Swede. She opened a map of Sweden and indicated a point roughly halfway up the country’s length. “That is an old archaeological site, here. From there it said to go north—no, to ‘strike’ north, which to me suggests traveling a long distance—until you reach some mountains.”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down much,” said Eddie. Colored contours on the map marked the rugged spine of Scandinavia, Sweden’s mountain ranges running along the border with Norway.

  “No, but there was something that may help. I am not completely certain, but I think one of the words I saw in the runes would translate as ‘saddle.’ It may be an Old Norse name for a particular mountain.”

  “Is there anywhere in Sweden that fits the bill?” Nina asked.

  Tova shook her head. “Not that I have found.” She gestured toward a laptop. “I have researched as much as I could, and checked the IHA database, but there is nothing that matches.”

  “Perhaps the name is a description,” said Kagan. “It is a mountain that looks like a saddle.”

  Eddie laughed sarcastically. “Should be easy to find. It’ll be right above the mountain that looks like a horse.”

  “I do not think it will be that simple,” said Tova, with a slight smile. “But the Vikings often did use descriptive names for features like mountains and lakes. If only we had just a few more words from the runes!” She turned to Kagan. “You said there was a runestone at the place on Novaya Zemlya. Was it translated?”

  “There were translations and pictures,” said the Russian, “but no more.”

  “Why not?” asked Nina.

  “They were destroyed with the research on the eitr on the orders of Khrushchev. Eisenhov might have been able to remember some of what was written on the stone, but he is dead, and no one else at Unit 201 is old enough to have seen it.”

  “Someone else saw it, though,” said Eddie, with an urgency that immediately caught Nina’s attention. “Volkov. Natalia’s grandfather.”

  “Yes, but he is also dead,” Kagan pointed out with a dismissive tone.

  “Yeah, I know—but before he died, he wrote a letter to his wife, telling her about what he’d found.”

  Surprise filled Kagan’s face. “He wrote a letter? How do you know about this?”

  “Because Natalia told me about it—and she told me what it said on the runestone!”

  That produced an electric response in the room. “You know what the runestone said? Why did you not tell us this earlier?” Kagan demanded.

  “ ’Cause I only just remembered! Tova reminded me, what she said about the Viking names for lakes. Natalia told me that after the Vikings left Valhalla, they went to a lake.”

  “Which lake?” Nina and Kagan said simultaneously.

  “Christ, calm down, I’m trying to think! It was eight years ago, and it wasn’t exactly the main thing I was bothered about at the time. Let’s see, they left Valhalla, and went across a rainbow bridge—”

  “Bifröst,” cut in Tova. “It was also in the runes on the first stone as a landmark on the route to Valhalla.”

  “Must be on the right track, then. But after that, they went through, er …” He frowned, trying to uproot the memories, before snapping his fingers. “Lightning! That was it. The lake of lightning.”

  Nina looked back at Tova. “Does that mean anything to you? The lake of lightning?”

  The historian’s eyes widened. “Yes, there was a place—let me check!” She turned back to the laptop and began typing. Very soon she had results. “Here, here! There is a lake called Blixtsjö—it means literally ‘lightning lake,’ and it took its name from Old Norse. It is on a river that in Viking myth was sometimes called Leipt.”

  The name sparked Nina’s memory. “That’s one of the primal rivers of the Norse creation mythology, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that is right. There were eleven rivers that flowed from the spring of Hvergelmir, and Leipt was one of them. It got its name because it was supposed to streak like lightning. I always thought it was just a myth, but after what we have seen …”

  “Where’s this lake, then?” Eddie asked.

  “Let me look …” More typing, then, after rapidly reading through the results, Tova returned her attention to the map. “It is … here!”

  She pointed out a thin, sharply winding lake in the highlands of central Sweden. Eddie took a closer look. “It’s pretty much north of Fjarriheim.”

  “In the mountains,” Nina added. “If one of them looks like a saddle …” She commandeered the laptop, accessing the IHA database to bring up a satellite image of the lake and its surroundings. “I can’t really tell from this, though.”

  “All that money the IHA spent on this stuff, and you’d be better off using Google Earth,” he joked.

  “I’ll bring it up at the next budget meeting. But look, the lake’s fed by a river at its north end, and it goes up into the mountains. Tova, what did the Valhalla Runestone say about following the route?”

  Tova didn’t need notes to recite the relevant part of the ancient inscription. “Up the river you must travel, until great Bifröst is reached. Across, follow the stream to the falls. At their summit is Odin’s hall, now of the slain.”

  Nina pursed her lips. “So if this is the right river, then somewhere up it is Bifröst—the rainbow bridge. But a bridge to where?” She scrolled the satellite view, following the river northward, but saw nothing except forests and mountains around it.

  “If Valhalla is there, we must find it,” said Kagan. “Berkeley and Hoyt have the same information that we do. They might be on their way already.”

  “But how do we find it?” asked Tova.

  “The old-fashioned way,” said Nina. “We go there and look. I’ll contact the IHA to make arrangements with the Swedish government, and get us some suitable transport. Kagan, what’s the situation with your bosses at the Kremlin? Are they going to make trouble for us over what happened at the air base?”

  The Russian gave her a grim look. “The president is very angry—at you in particular, Chase,” he went on, turning to Eddie. “You destroyed some expensive military aircraft.”

  Eddie grimaced. “Great, a world leader with nukes is personally pissed off at me …”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Nina reminded him, smiling ruefully.

  “But,” Kagan continued, “he knows the importance of Unit 201 and its work. He is willing to accept your United Nations diplomatic immunity and not punish you for what you have done—as long as you help Unit 201 to find the other source of eitr.”

  “An offer we can’t refuse, eh?” said Eddie.

  “Slavin did say something about gangsters,” Nina remarked, to Kagan’s clear displeasure. “But under the circumstances, I’ll take it. Okay, if you go deal with your bosses, we can get moving. Tova, I’m sure you’ll be wanting to go back to Sweden anyway, but beyond that … it’s up to you if you want to come with us. After everything you’ve been through, I can entirely understand if you’ve had enough.”

  Tova considered this for
a moment. “No, I … I will come with you,” she said. “If Valhalla really exists, if this river really is the way to it, then I want to see it for myself.”

  “Thank you. I really appreciate everything you’ve done to help us.” Nina straightened, gazing down at the map. “Okay. Let’s go and find the hall of the slain.”

  Eddie gave her a look of dark humor. “Just hope we don’t end up as residents.”

  24

  Sweden

  “There’s the lake!” said Tova excitedly, looking over the helicopter pilot’s shoulder.

  Nina, in the front passenger seat, had a better view. Blixtsjö was a zigzagging ribbon running through the tree-covered hills. They were approaching from the south, looking along its length—and she saw at once why the Vikings, and later the Swedes, had given it its name. From the summit of one of the hills below the aircraft, it would indeed resemble the shape of a lightning bolt. One of the nearby mountains also matched the description in the runes, its bowed summit appearing somewhat like a saddle.

  She looked beyond the lake. The landscape rose higher, snowcapped peaks and ridges standing out between forest-filled valleys as far as she could see. It was a beautiful sight, but her appreciation was now far more archaeological than aesthetic. Hidden somewhere among the endless trees was Valhalla.

  If they were right. They were following a route that had been pieced together from the deliberately incomplete writings on one ancient runestone, a few barely remembered scraps of information from another, secondhand recollections of Viking inscriptions that had been melted to glass more than half a century earlier—and her husband’s recollections of what Natalia Pöltl had told him, also secondhand, eight years before. The pieces did seem to make up a coherent picture, but there were no guarantees that it was the correct picture …

  She put her doubts aside. It was all they had, whereas Berkeley and Hoyt possessed both runestones, and in theory everything they needed to lead them to Valhalla. The disgraced archaeologist had already proven that he could follow the clues left by the Vikings; she had to take the gamble that Tova was as good as or better than her former IHA colleague. It was the only chance they had of finding Valhalla first—and with it, the location of the second source of eitr.

  The helicopter descended. On the lake’s western bank was the little village of Blixtholm, and Nina saw a reception committee waiting on the frozen shoreline. “There are the snowmobiles,” she said. “Remind me to thank Melinda for arranging everything so quickly.”

  The pilot landed the chopper on the lake. The ice creaked loudly enough to be heard even over the noise of the rotors as it took the aircraft’s weight, but to the relief of all aboard it showed no sign of cracking. All the same, the four passengers collected their belongings and made their way to land with a degree of haste. The helicopter departed in a whirlwind of sparkling ice crystals.

  While Nina, Tova translating, spoke to the man who had delivered the snowmobiles, Eddie went straight to a box among the gear waiting for them. “Remind me to thank Melinda,” he said with a grin.

  “What is it?” Kagan asked.

  Eddie opened the box, which was covered with stickers denoting it a United Nations diplomatic package. Inside was a rectangular metal case about eighteen inches long. He lifted the lid to reveal a gleaming steel handgun, the long, thick barrel reinforced by a hefty rib along its top. “Oh yeah,” he said with a Christmas-morning grin. “It’s been a while.”

  Nina let out a disapproving sigh when she saw the weapon. “Jeez. When did you get another one of those?”

  “Picked it up two months ago,” Eddie replied, taking out the Wildey automatic and checking it admiringly in the morning sunlight.

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “No, ’cause I knew you’d throw a fit. I mean, I lost the last couple before I even had a chance to fire them.”

  “That’s not why I threw a fit, and anyway I didn’t throw a fit,” she complained. “I don’t like you having them because first, they cost two thousand dollars and you keep losing them—”

  “See? Fit-throwing.”

  “—and second, it’s illegal to have them in New York City!”

  Eddie pulled back the slide. “That’s why I kept it at work.”

  She spluttered. “You—you kept a gun at the United Nations?”

  “It’s not technically part of the city, is it?”

  Nina held a hand to her ear. “You hear that distant popping sound? That was Seretse’s head exploding. And for God’s sake, put it away before someone calls the cops.” The helicopter’s arrival had inevitably attracted curious onlookers from the village. “If you lose that one, you’re never, ever having another, not at two grand a go. Seriously.”

  Eddie grinned again, then slid one of the two magazines in the case into the pistol. The slide snapped back into place, chambering the first .45 Winchester Magnum cartridge. “I just got fed up with being caught out without a gun. If I’d put a couple of bullets through Hoyt when I had the chance, we’d all be a lot better off.” He took a leather shoulder holster from the box and put the second magazine into a clip on one of its straps, then took off his winter coat to don it.

  Kagan opened his own coat to reveal his SR-1. The Russian gun was considerably smaller than the Wildey. “You seem to like overkill, Chase.”

  “Overkill’s my middle name,” the Yorkshireman replied.

  “No it isn’t,” said Nina. “It’s Jeremy.”

  He made a disgruntled sound. “Thanks for reminding me, Persephone.”

  Tova gave her a look of surprise. “Your middle name is Persephone?”

  Nina blushed faintly. “My parents were … well, obsessed with mythology. I’m lucky they didn’t call me Melpomene or Eris or something.” The Swede laughed.

  “I suppose if I knew anything about Greek gods that’d be hilarious,” said Eddie. He slipped the Wildey into the holster and put his coat back on over it. “Okay, I’m set. Everyone else ready to go?”

  Kagan refastened his own coat. “Yes. But I would feel more confident if I knew exactly what we are looking for.”

  “I wish I could say,” Tova told him. “All I know is that if my reading of the runes is correct, somewhere up the river from here, we will see Bifröst—the rainbow bridge to Asgard. But what that means, I do not know.”

  “I just hope we’ll know it when we see it,” said Nina.

  It did not take long to fix their gear to the back of the snowmobiles. Eddie switched on a GPS unit attached to the handlebars of his machine, then started the engine. “All right! Let’s give it some James Brown.”

  “What?” said a puzzled Nina.

  He put on a strained, rasping voice. “Yow! Take me to the bridge!”

  Both Tova and Kagan remained mystified, while Nina rolled her eyes. “That was your best James Brown? I don’t feel good.”

  “Tchah! So, the plan—we just head north up the river until we see something that looks like it might be a rainbow bridge? And then we wander about until we find Valhalla?”

  “That’s pretty much it, yeah,” Nina told him, feeling faintly absurd at hearing the vagueness of their mission put into words.

  He shrugged. “It’s not exactly the D-Day landings, but … we’ve found stuff in the past with less to go on.” He revved the engine, sending the snowmobile out onto the frozen lake in a spitting spray of ice. “See you somewhere over the rainbow!”

  Eddie turned north, speeding toward the gap in the trees marking the mouth of the river. Nina, Tova, and Kagan started their own machines and followed his trail.

  The journey upriver was scenic … at first. Before long, though, the monotony of unbroken mile after mile of conifers became wearing. The chain-saw buzz of the snowmobiles’ two-stroke engines and the constant vibrations from the ice—which was far from smooth, the pressure ridges that had formed as the flowing water froze leaving it in places as striated as a washboard—also did nothing to ease the journey.

  Nor did the
group see anything that could possibly have been described as a rainbow bridge. They passed rocks and boulders of ever-increasing size the higher they rode into the hills, but none were large enough to span the river. Eddie gave one formation a hopeful look as he passed, but there was nothing of note about it. “Bollocks to this,” he muttered, bringing his snowmobile to a stop and checking the GPS.

  “What is it?” Nina asked, pulling up alongside him. Kagan and Tova followed suit.

  “Just seeing how far we’ve gone. Christ! Only thirty kays? Feels more like a hundred and thirty.”

  “It cannot be much farther, though,” said Tova. “The runes said it was two days’ travel from the lake on foot. Even the Vikings could not travel very fast over land like this.”

  Eddie took out a map and used the GPS coordinates to find their position. The river was now heading roughly northwest, toward the mountains forming the spine of Scandinavia. “Okay, in about ten kays the river forks, and the runes didn’t say anything about that, did they?” Tova shook her head. “So if it’s here, we can’t be too far from it.”

  “Is there anything on the map?” asked Kagan.

  “Just a big load of bugger-all. Nearest town I can see marked must be at least twelve kilometers from here. Looks like the terrain gets steeper, but there’s not that much detail.” He folded the map again. “Worse comes to the worst, we can ride up until we hit the fork, then come back and see if we missed something.”

  Tova looked downhearted. “I was so sure this was the right river, though.”

  “We’re not done yet,” Nina reminded her. “Ten kilometers is a long way.”

  Eddie rolled his buttocks from side to side on the saddle. “Yeah, especially on these bloody bumps. It’s like riding over the world’s longest cattle grid.”

  “If the Vikings could handle it, I’m sure you can too,” Nina said with a grin as she set off again.