by E. G. Foley
“I understand. Hmm.” Ragnor stroked his golden beard in thought. “I can get you to the palace and distract Odin’s hunting dogs so you boys can sneak in. The All-Father’s not at home right now, which should make your task a little easier. But his son’s there, so you’ll have to watch your step.”
“His son?” Jake echoed.
“Thor, of course,” Ragnor said grimly. Then he turned away, beckoning them. “Come! To the horses.”
Before long, they were mounted up on three of the great war-horses tied up outside the Vikings’ mead hall. Jake chose a gray and Archie swung up onto a chestnut. Ragnor’s horse was black.
“Follow me!” The Viking squeezed his horse’s sides with his knees and the animal leaped into a canter.
Jake hung on for dear life as his horse followed. Being a city kid and until recently a pauper, he was not the most experienced of riders.
He was nervous about whether he could even stay on the war-horse’s back. But to his delight, the marshmallow effect made the ride as easy as sitting in a rocking chair.
The horses’ galloping strides bounced them lightly over the spongy ground. Still, he held on tightly to the gray’s mane, just to be extra safe. It didn’t occur to him that riding a gryphon was much harder.
Ragnor glanced over his shoulder to make sure the boys were all right. Archie wore a grin from the ear to ear.
Thanks to their fleet-footed mounts, within twenty minutes they were already approaching the castle of Valaskjalf. Odin’s palace radiated the soft light of Valhalla with a lustrous gleam.
The walls and battlements were pure silver, but the front steps and four soaring towers were of white marble. The whole castle glittered in the sunlight.
The All-Father must have been a great dog-lover, Jake thought, for not only did Valhalla offer puppies to play with, but two giant statues of wolf-like hunting dogs carved of smooth gray stone framed the castle doorway.
Slowing his horse, Ragnor held up his fist, signaling the boys to halt in the shadows at the edge of the woods.
Jake’s heart pounded as he got a better sense of the daunting task he and Archie somehow had to accomplish, sneaking into Odin’s fortress.
“Everything looks quiet,” Ragnor remarked, nodding in approval. “I’ll distract the guard dogs. When the way is clear, you boys sneak in. But you won’t have time to dawdle before his hounds return.”
“Good luck, Ragnor,” Jake answered. “We’re grateful for your help. If I don’t get the chance to say it later, I thank you.”
The Viking nobleman saluted them, then signaled his horse forward. The boys stayed in the shadow of the woods, watching him ride toward the castle.
The spectacle they beheld next gave them some inkling of the nearly-insane bravery that Ragnor the Punisher must have possessed in life. He was using himself as bait for the two giant wolf-dog statues, which came alive as the boys watched.
Ragnor urged his horse up the front steps with a wild whoop.
The dog statues opened their eyes. Their pointed ears pricked up, then they bared their fangs at the intruder.
When Ragnor urged his horse off the stairs with a leap back onto the ground, the guard dogs licked their chops, the stone of their carved bodies turning into muscle and fur. It seemed the dogs could not resist the chase. Barking as loud as cannons, they rose, each as tall as buildings.
The Viking chief rode wildly, zigzagging and leading the giant dogs away from the castle in wild figure-eights.
Watching them, Archie was as white as alabaster, and Jake was almost too terrified to move. But somehow he found the nerve to elbow his cousin and whispered, “Let’s go!”
Archie shook off his daze and followed. Then the boys were in motion, sprinting across the field to reach the entrance to the castle before Odin’s dogs came back.
The spongy texture of the ground slowed them down a little, but since Ragnor had led the dogs out of earshot, the boys wasted no time.
The last running step off the green grass up onto the white marble staircase was particularly bouncy, and Jake was surprised when he went flying all the way up to the top of the steps in one stride.
He landed on solid marble before the front door. In a heartbeat, his cousin was right beside him.
Immediately, they teamed up to push the palace door open just a crack. Just wide enough for two skinny boys to sneak through.
But for a second, they almost didn’t dare go in.
Surely it was madness to trespass into the home of the fierce Norse gods. If this didn’t get a person Blood-Eagled, nothing would.
Exchanging a worried but determined glance, the cousins shrugged off their fear and ran inside.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Silver Palace
The boys sneaked into the castle with no idea of what they might find. The first thing Jake noticed was that the vaulted ceiling above them must have been fifty feet high.
“How big are these gods, anyway?” he whispered. “Human sized or giant-like? Even bigger?
“No idea,” Archie breathed as they stole along the corridor. “I think they can change to be as big or as small as they wish. Just depends what they want to accomplish.”
“Loki, too?”
“I should think so.”
“Great,” Jake muttered.
Hurrying to the end of the white entrance corridor, they arrived at the doorway of a vast, rectangular room.
The boys crouched cautiously beside the wall. If anyone came along while they were in that sparse chamber, they’d be seen right away. It offered no place to hide, empty but for a Persian rug in the middle of the room with a round table directly beneath a crystal chandelier. On this table sat a thriving potted plant, lit up by a beam of sunshine slanting in through a high window.
Jake furrowed his brow, studying the scene before him.
“Doesn’t look very Viking-like to me.”
Archie nodded. “Strange.”
But Jake shrugged off the modern décor. In dealing with immortals, who could say? Maybe Odin and his royal family liked keeping up with the times.
More important to stick to the business at hand.
“Let’s go find this pool from Loki’s riddle, then.”
“Where do you want to start? We’ve got three choices.” Archie pointed to the three hallways that opened off the vast chamber, each leading, presumably, to a different wing of the palace.
The three elaborate doorways were each as tall as Snorri. Carved symbols above each one gave tantalizing hints of what might lay beyond. The doorway to the left was adorned with graceful, painted flowers, while the one to the right was marked with the symbol of a mighty hammer.
The largest doorway, straight ahead from where the boys crouched, had the ominous symbol of two ravens displayed above the arch.
Glancing around at each of the doorways, Jake knew that the hammer was the symbol of Thor. The flashes of lightning and low rumbles of thunder coming from his wing of the castle confirmed that the god of sea and sky was indeed at home.
But the flowers? Then he recalled Kaia saying something about a goddess queen named Freya, Odin’s wife. He could just make out the sound of babies crying, toddlers laughing, and lullabies coming from that direction.
Archie heard it, too, and gave him a wry glance. “I think Freya’s the goddess of marriage and motherhood.”
“Ah. The one straight ahead must be for Odin, then,” Jake whispered. “Why ravens?”
“God of death?” Archie breathed.
“Great. And we’re about to go invade his private rooms,” Jake muttered. “Let’s go.”
The boys darted away from the shelter of the wall, racing down the few stone steps into the large sunken chamber to sprint across the room. Passing the table with the plant, Jake caught a glimpse of the brass nameplate on the flowerpot and nearly skidded to a halt for a closer look.
Yggdrasil?!
A baby one! he thought. Immediately, he wondered if there were newborn worlds
already budding in the twig’s little branches. But there was no time to stop and study it or even to ponder this mystery.
Odin’s hunting dogs might return at any moment—or worse, Thor might come out and take a break from doing…whatever it was he did, exactly. Making the weather or ruling the ocean or some such. Passing the table, the boys raced across the other half of the room and managed to dash up the few steps into Odin’s personal hallway, still thankfully unseen.
Having made it that far, they paused briefly to catch their breath, exchanging a dire glance.
“Now what?” Archie panted.
Jake’s heart pounded as he gazed down the corridor ahead. There were several closed doors along the hallway. The pool they were looking for could be behind any one of them.
“Now we start our search,” he whispered.
The boys began checking each of the rooms they came to along the hallway. This was no easy task, since Archie had to stand on Jake’s shoulders just so they could reach the various doorknobs.
The rooms themselves offered more, strange types of jeopardy, considering who they were dealing with. The first door they opened revealed a dimly-lit library so huge they could not even see to the ends of it. It must have held millions of books. Of course, Odin was the god of wisdom.
Archie stared greedily at the library’s countless shelves, but Jake was more intrigued by another, highly unusual feature. It was said that Odin the Wise had invented the Viking alphabet of runes. Therefore, in his library, each of the runes was proudly displayed.
The mysterious letter-symbols stood several feet tall and glowed with golden light as they revolved slowly, levitating over their pedestals.
“All that knowledge,” Archie whispered. “Can’t we just go in and take a peek—”
“No!” A flicker of motion near the dark, shadowed corner caught Jake’s eye. “Hurry up,” he urged his cousin. “There’s something moving around in there.”
“What? Where?”
“Somethin’ big, creeping along the floor. Hurry up! It’s coming closer! Archie, quick, get the door!”
“What is it? I don’t see any—”
“Ahhhh!”
All of a sudden, a giant snake reared up in front of the boys, its white fangs gleaming.
The boys bit back shrieks as it hissed at them, having slithered out from where it had lain coiled in the corner of the library.
“Get the door!”
Briefly paralyzed with terror, Archie snapped out of his trance and lurched forward to grab the doorknob. He pulled the library door shut with a bang just in time to escape the giant serpent’s lightning-fast strike.
The boys ran up the corridor, clearing the area, only to pause at a safe distance, panting and in shock.
“What the deuce was that?” Archie cried.
Jake shook his head in belated dread. “No idea. Come on, we need to keep going.”
“Cheese it,” Archie muttered, but he followed.
As Jake jogged ahead to check in the next room, he did recall Dani reading something to him from her Norway book about an old Viking legend concerning a very nasty giant serpent. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been listening very well and couldn’t remember the details.
In any case, at the next door, Archie climbed once more onto Jake’s shoulders to reach the doorknob, as if they were a pair of circus acrobats. Jake stepped closer to the door so his cousin could get a better grip on the handle.
“That’s weird. The doorknob’s cold,” Archie remarked.
“Hurry up!” Jake whispered in annoyance, supporting his cousin’s legs. But when Archie succeeded in pushing the door open, it swung inward upon a black, windy void, and Jake beheld the strangest room he’d ever seen.
If you could call it a room.
It looked to him like the mythical realm of Limbo, the space between life and death.
Beyond the threshold of the doorway, the room had no floor, nor walls nor ceiling, for that matter. The threshold stood as a high ledge looming over dark empty space as black and vast as a moonless night sky; one step forward and you might fall forever.
The boys backed away instinctively—but the room was not entirely empty.
As the rushing winds sighed through the void, everywhere there floated ticking clocks. Ghostly spirits, faceless in their hooded black cloaks, flew among the clocks, haunting the inky room.
“What is this place?” Archie whispered in wonder.
“God of death?” Jake quietly reminded him.
They stared at the clocks and spirits drifting by for a long moment.
“I think those clocks are people’s lives,” Jake said at length. “How much time we’ve all got left.”
“Well, that’s depressing,” Archie muttered, hauling the door shut. “No pool in there.”
Glad to be gone from the grim place, they kept searching.
Jake’s shoulders were starting to hurt from his cousin climbing up and down on them, but he clenched his jaw without complaint, waiting for Archie to get the third door open.
When his cousin succeeded, however, neither of them were prepared for what they saw: a large room full of ominous equipment, gadgets, and machines.
Archie drew in his breath in excitement.
“What is all this stuff?” The boy genius couldn’t seem to help himself.
He jumped off Jake’s shoulders and took a few paces into the chamber, looking all around him in amazement.
“What are you doing? Get back here!” Jake whispered loudly from the doorway. Had the glock-wit already forgotten the giant serpent guarding the god’s library? No telling what nasty booby-traps might await an intruder in here.
His cousin walked farther into the room like a person in a trance, gawking at everything.
Jake wanted to wring his neck. “Do you see a pool?” he whispered impatiently.
“No. This must be Odin’s most important room.” He turned and stared at Jake, wide-eyed. “God of war.”
“It’s war stuff in there?”
Archie nodded, marveling over the ancient set of horse armor near him. There were wall arrangements of hatchets and swords, gun cases filled with neat rows of innumerable long guns, from ancient blunderbusses to Brown Bess muskets with bayonets and much stranger, futuristic weapons, silver and black.
High up on another wall, the sharp-tipped prow of a mighty eighteenth century warship protruded, mounted there like a deer’s head.
Against his better judgment, Jake followed Archie into the room, passing some huge armored vehicle the likes of which he had never seen.
But most astonishing of all was the back wall of Odin’s war room. It was covered in dozens of flat, rectangular screens with moving pictures on them.
Jake had no idea what sort of magic this might be, but unlike the newly-invented moving pictures he had seen back in the Exhibit Hall, these were not flickering black and white images without sound. On the contrary, the sleek screens before him were as true-to-life as looking out a window, sharp pictures in full color, with all the sounds you’d hear if you were there.
The scenes they showed, however, were terrible, windows onto every war taking place around the world—not just at the present time, but past and future, too…
Roman legions on the march. Knights whacking each other with maces. Tribal warriors in Africa burning each other’s villages to the ground. Muddied young Englishmen entangled in barbed wire.
In the upper corner, another screen or window showed some horrific cloud in the shape of a mushroom blooming over a vast modern city before flattening it. The shapes of people bursting into flames…
Beside that, a brightly uniformed cavalry charged across the fields of Waterloo and horses fell, screaming. Below that was a jungle lit up with flashes of gunfire, and to the left of that, a nightmare scene showed a pile of skeletal bodies being dumped into some sort of mass grave.
Sickened, Jake turned to Archie, eager to be gone from this shocking place, but he found his cousin mesmerized
by a particular moving picture that showed unimaginable flying machines screaming through the clouds.
Rocketing through the air so fast they left white trails across blue skies, Jake saw they must have had some sort of cannons attached beneath their silver wings.
The boys watched in half-horrified wonder as the pilot, his face hidden by a black, inhuman-looking mask, released his missiles over his target and cheered as something on the ground exploded.
“This can’t be right,” Archie whispered hoarsely, his gaze still glued to the screen.
“What is it?”
“The future. But they can’t…they wouldn’t…” He turned to Jake with a stricken look, his eyes wide behind his spectacles. “Mankind finally learns how to fly and this is what they use it for?”
Jake didn’t know what to say.
Archie had always seemed to view the human race as basically good, but he knew better. You learned that living on the streets.
Good took effort. Something human beings had to work for. But bad, mean, selfish? Those came naturally.
“C’mon,” he murmured, grasping his younger cousin’s arm. “We need to keep moving before those dogs come back.”
“The dogs of war?” Archie echoed bitterly.
“Probably so,” Jake answered in a low tone. He felt sorry for his cousin, who still seemed to be in shock, but they had already wasted enough time.
As he pulled Archie out of there, he couldn’t help remembering Isabelle’s words back at the Exhibit Hall after seeing Dr. Galton.
One day, she had said, Archie would have to choose what sort of scientist he’d become. No doubt this glimpse into Odin’s war room would stay with the boy genius and factor into his decision when the time came to choose his future path.
Jake used his telekinesis to draw the giant door of the war-room shut. Archie was unusually quiet as they turned their attention to the final chamber at the end of the hallway.
