Stormbringer

by Alis Franklin

  Tóki says nothing, face impassive.

  Actually, given his skin, I suspect he doesn’t have a lot of choice. His voice slurs, lips too stiff to form the sounds the way they should be formed. Another side effect of his profession, and another reason he would never have been the one picked to be Þrúðr’s groom.

  “Here’s the thing,” I say. “Magni and Móði are the sort of thuggish, mouth-breathing neckbeards who belong in the tenth fucking century. Their problem is they’re eleven hundred years out of fashion, but haven’t figured that out yet. All this stuff, slavery and chattel marriage, that’s so fucking passé now. And it’s not gonna work. Þrúðr doesn’t want to be here any more than I do. The first time your cousin puts his damp paws on her she’ll be filing for divorce and heading back to Ásgarðr.”

  “That is her right,” Tóki says. “As it will be ours to demand the return of the bride price.” By which he means Thor’s old belt and gloves.

  “Ásgarðr won’t return them,” I say. “You know those oath-breaking sonsofbitches as well as I do.”

  “Then they will make enemies of the Mountain.”

  I exaggerate a shrug. “So what? They’ll have Mjölnir, and the means to wield it, and if you so much as cough in their direction they’ll send Magni back to slaughter you like his father did to my people.”

  Tóki’s dark eyes narrow, and I see flashes of red appear in the stone-edged fissures of his skin. “That would be dishonor.” But he knows I’m right. “And you?” he continues. “Are we to think Lævísi Loki tells us these things out of his love for Niðavellir’s sons?”

  I bark laugher, as appropriate. “Hardly. I’m here because I’m Þrúðr’s ‘dowry.’ Which isn’t an ideal situation for any of us, I’m sure you’ll agree.” From his (a-har) stony expression, I’m not sure Tóki would agree, but I press on regardless. “Either way, I’ve got a problem and so, by my reckoning, does Niðavellir. Our problem is called Ásgarðr, and exists because, once upon a time, your father made the mistake of forging something powerful for the æsir. Too powerful. And now those bastards want it back, and when they’ve got it, they want to remind the whole Nine Realms just what Asgardian hegemony feels like.”

  A brief ripple of light, this one a rainbow of emotions from the green of revulsion to the pale blue of fear.

  Finally, Tóki says, “You have a solution?”

  “Not me exactly, but . . .” I scratch my chin, contemplating. “I’m guessing you haven’t been out to Miðgarðr recently, yeah?”

  “It has been forbidden for an age.” On Ásgarðr’s decree, he doesn’t say, though I know we both know it.

  “Right. Well, see, me? I’ve lived there since Rangarøkkr. And the mortals? They’ve gotten around a bit in the last few hundred years. Watch.” And I pull out my gun.

  Strictly speaking, it’s David Sussman’s gun. Or at least it was. Back during the stuff with Baldr I kind of appropriated it for myself. David never asked for it back, and nowadays it spends most of its time tucked away inside the nothingspace, the abstracted inventory that exists just behind the world’s façade.

  Nothing ever goes into storage in the universe’s props department and comes out looking quite like it went in. Which is why David’s gun, which was once a subdued, small-caliber thing, now looks like an enormous black rune-carved pistol, and why it shoots “bullets” made from molten magma.

  I have just enough magic on me to grab it, thanks to being down one of Móði’s dampening cuffs. The gun is harder to materialize than it should be, but I manage, and I give Tóki just enough of a glimpse at it to wonder what the fuck I’m up to now before I point it out sideways and prepare to pull the trigger.

  Here’s the thing. There’s a shield, hanging up on the wall, and that’s where I want to hit. Ideally, this game works if I do, in fact, hit said shield, and it really works if I hit it without appearing to be watching what I’m doing. Trick shooting. Playing it cool, y’know how it is.

  Only problem? I’m a lousy fucking shot. Like, major terrible.

  But I do know someone who isn’t.

  (just this once, and I’ll owe you)

  In the end, everyone makes deals with Loki. Even me.

  (“yes, you will”)

  And my arm moves, straightens, and fires.

  A heartbeat later, Tóki picks himself up off the floor.

  “Magic?” he says, eyes fixed on the gun in my hand.

  “Gunpowder,” I say, only half lying. “Invented by the mortals from the east.” The Vikings didn’t go to China, but we were the western end of the Silk Road. Meaning we knew there were people out there, farther away than the sun, and we knew the little Buddha statues Sigyn liked were the least of the wonders they had to share.

  But we didn’t know they had this. Not back then.

  I hold the gun up, fingers away from the trigger. Cautiously, Tóki inches around to where his decorative shield now sports a large bullet hole, dead on center. When he removes the shield from the bracket on the wall, there’s another hole behind it, drilled into the stone.

  “If there’s one thing you can rely on the mortals for,” I say, “it’s that they’re fucking spectacular at killing each other. Three ingredients, easily found. Mix ’em up, stuff ’em in a tube, light a match, and boom. The rest is just engineering. And this”—I indicate the gun—“is nothing. A pairing knife. The mortals have versions that shoot a hundred of those fucking things a second. Or only one, but one big enough to level half a mountain.” Toki’s head jerks up at that, eyes wide. “You heard me,” I say. “You think you’re fuckin’ safe down here in your hole? The mortals have weapons that can blow this entire place to rubble.”

  This earns me one big, slow blink, sitting atop a frog-gaped mouth.

  “Now do you understand?” I add. “Why it’s not about a fucking hammer anymore?”

  Tóki looks at me, then at the shield, then at the hole in the wall.

  “What do you want?” he finally says.

  “To do business. I can get you the mortal tech. Materials, schematics, know-how.” LB doesn’t do weapons, but Nic’s got side projects in AI and robotics. Military-industrial is all over that shit, and I’m sure I could pull in some tit for tat.

  If I had to.

  “And in return?”

  I grin, bright and sharp and feral.

  “In return, I get to pay back those goat-fucking pieces of shit for daring to do this.” I indicate the shackle and the collar. “And I can finish what I didn’t quite manage at Ragnarøkkr: burning the realms clean of æsir filth.”

  Once again, Tóki looks at the shield. Behind his eyes, I can feel the visions dancing: of blood and war and conquest. Of the realms plunged into eternal night and of the stone-fisted ascendency of the dvergar.

  Angry, young, ambitious.

  Simple.

  “Very well, jötunn,” he says. “What would you have me do?” As if he was ever going to jump any other way.

  I grin, vanishing David’s gun back to whence it came. “What I need,” I say, “is for you to forge for me a set of gloves. And then we’re going to play a tiny little trick.” Out of habit, I pick at the stitching in my lips.

  Tóki can’t meet my eyes as I do.

  Chapter 13

  Em called it Operation Hearts and Minds. She hadn’t given any more detail than that, just grinning a sly and dimpled grin, enthusiasm practically oozing between her teeth.

  Sigmund was in trouble, and he needed their help. No surprises there, which was why they were currently standing outside of Hel’s tent.

  The word didn’t really do it justice. Marquee would probably have been better, or maybe yurt. Wayne had never been clear on what a yurt was, exactly, but Hel’s current office would’ve been Wayne’s first guess: a sort of round, felt-covered building, mostly black, and decorated by a variety of skulls and glossy feathers that looked to have been shed by the Lady herself.

  It also had two enormous Helbeasts curled around the outside, gua
rding.

  The Helbeasts were really, really cool. Wayne had an entire sketchbook full of the ones she’d seen, no two of which were exactly alike. They all had horns, and feathers, and tails, and four limbs and two wings, but inside those constraints was nothing but variation. The smallest Helbeasts being the size of large dogs, the largest being, well.

  The largest were the drekar.

  Em had made that connection. Wayne had asked her, not long before Munin arrived, flicking through her sketchbooks and noting similarities until she’d said, “Hey, dooder. The Helbeasts and the dragons—?”

  “They’re jötunn—jötnar,” Em had said, not looking up from her tablet even as she’d corrected her own noun form.

  “Aaah.” Suddenly, what Sigyn had said—had used Sigmund to say—about Loki’s horse boyfriend made a whole bunch of sense.

  Point being: Helbeasts. Wicked cool.

  The one to the left of Hel’s yurt was ice-themed, with blue-gray skin and copiously fluffy long white feathers. The one on the left was sleeker, with much more of its black skin exposed beneath iridescent green plumage. Both looked up when Wayne and Em approached the Helyurt, and Wayne gave them a smile and a wave.

  “Um, hey,” she said. “Can we talk with Hel for a moment?”

  The white Helbeast huffed, gesturing with its head.

  Like the drekar, the Helbeasts didn’t seem to speak human-comprehensible languages. But they understood them well enough.

  “Thanks!” Wayne gave both Hel’s guards a little wave before stepping forward to poke her head inside the yurt’s flap. “Um. Hello?”

  The inside of the yurt was dark, Ásgarðr’s sun blotted out by furs and black wool. The only illumination came from little lamps hanging from the ceiling, burning with some kind of eerie, blue-green magelight.

  “Honored sisters, enter.”

  Hel herself was sitting on a mat in the center of a pile of cushions. She’d been kneeling when Wayne looked in, head bowed and hands folded into a purposeful position, like in prayer or meditation. If Wayne had to guess, she would’ve said it was something magic, given the charge in the air and the taste of copper behind her tongue.

  Both sensations faded as Hel’s attention shifted outward. Wayne entered the yurt, Em trailing along behind, and Hel gestured to the cushions at her side.

  “Come, sit. I trust things outside are to your liking?”

  Hel was wicked cool, and awesome, and kind. But she also had a bit of a stiffness about her, something overly cautious and formal. Wayne was used to it, because Em gave off the same vibe sometimes. It was the aura, Wayne thought, of someone who hadn’t grown up with very many friends. The shield of someone who knew they weren’t always an easy person to like.

  It was work, having friends like that. Wayne knew that one firsthand, particularly if Em was having one of her off weeks.

  It was work, but it was worth it. Because Wayne had been popular, back in school, and had had a lot of easy friends because of it. All of whom she would’ve traded, in hindsight, for one single Em, and none of whom she could imagine taking to have a sit-down chat with a goddess of death in the middle of an undead horde.

  Wayne’s childhood friends were good people, and she still chatted to most of them on Facebook, on and off. But none of them were Em, and none of them were Sigmund.

  “Everything is so-oo-oo-oo cool!” Wayne said, with appropriate squee and shaking. She threw herself down onto the cushions next to Hel, like they were old besties. Hel . . . well, it wasn’t like Wayne could tell under the veil, but Hel looked like she might have blinked, hand half rising to her mouth and cute little wings unfolding like a started bird. She covered the reaction quickly, but Wayne saw it.

  Then immediately pretended she hadn’t, instead launching into an entirely honest babble about the things she’d seen outside, her sketchbook full of awesome, the cool people she’d met, and, like, basically everything, because holy shit. She was in the middle of an undead army, with, like, real zombies and dragons and everything, and for a girl whose original AIM handle had been xXSoGothBornBlackXx, back in the day, that was like the coolest thing ever.

  Em had settled down on Hel’s other side, half listening to Wayne’s chatter, half lost in whatever plot had brought them to Hel’s tent in the first place.

  Wayne had a brief flash of guilt at that, the idea they’d come only because they wanted something. Before, outside, they’d maybe kind of supposed Hel would be busy. Doing, like, whatever it was Queens of the Dead did. Inside, though, Hel looked . . .

  Well. She looked sort of lonely.

  Maybe Em sensed that, too, which is why she was letting Wayne talk. Because Em was awkward and she was abrasive, but she could be perceptive, too. Empathic. She didn’t always give a shit what people were feeling, but she almost always knew.

  Em liked Hel. Wayne could tell that, as well.

  Eventually, when Hel had settled—reclining back against the cushions rather than sitting up, ramrod straight—Em said:

  “I admit we came here to ask a favor, not just rant enthusiastically at you until the Tree withers into dust.”

  Hel’s face twitched in the way Wayne—with her background in muscles and anatomy, thanks to art school—knew meant she was smiling. “This is about the raven,” she said.

  “Yeah. How—?”

  Hel tilted her head, apologetic. “What my people see, I see.”

  “Oh,” said Em. “Right. That makes sense. Anyway, so point being we need a distraction. For Sigmund. And . . . look, don’t take this the wrong way or anything”—never a good start to a conversation, and Wayne winced—“but did you know Sigmund wouldn’t be allowed out of Asgard once he got in?”

  Hel stiffened, just a little, and her sleeves twitched in a way that almost looked like she was drumming her fingers beneath the fabric. Finally, she said, “The æsir have too much pretense at honor to harm one of their own. Besides, stepmother was always . . . adept at feigning innocence to her foes.”

  It wasn’t quite an answer, but Em nodded. “Well,” she said, “I admire your faith, but Sigmund isn’t Sigyn.” It wasn’t quite an admonishment.

  Nor was Hel’s dipped head and, “I understand,” quite an apology.

  “Good. ’Cause, like, that’s the reason I’m gonna need to borrow some of your people. Sigmund needs a distraction, a big one—”

  “I will not go to war against the Wall. Not yet.”

  “I know.” Hel’s voice had been as sharp and brittle as obsidian, but Em didn’t even seem to register the tone. She wasn’t even looking at Hel, her eyes ignored as her mind watched something unfold inside. “War is passé, anyhow,” Em continued. “We’re gonna do something better. Something big. And it’ll help Sigmund, but it’ll help you, too. I just need to borrow some of your guys to make it happen.”

  Hel’s dark tongue flicked out to run across her teeth. After a moment, she said, “What is it you require?”

  So Em told her, grin a slash of bone the entire time. When she was done speaking, Wayne’s brows were even higher than the pencil line, and she had to admit Em was kinda, well. She was kinda devious.

  Hel agreed, teeth sharp and white beneath her veil.

  “Make it so, sisters of the dead,” she said. “And let us show Ásgarðr the true power of what they stand beneath.”

  The thing about the enormous, monstrous, undead army was that it couldn’t win. Not in a straight-up fight. They might’ve outnumbered Ásgarðr’s people a hundred to one, but Wayne had seen this story before—in movies and book and video games—and she knew, categorically knew, that no matter how many people Hel brought to the front, she’d never win an all-out war.

  Because they weren’t on Miðgarðr anymore, Toto, and here the mathematics didn’t matter. Here, it was about the story. And the story was that all it took was one single guy—and it was always, always a guy—and a white guy to boot, Wayne hadn’t failed to notice—one single guy with one single magical MacGuffin, doing one single br
ave, stupid thing, to bring the entire horde to its knees.

  The Horde never won. They were the overwhelming odds, the monsters, the dark Other who had to be defeated by the superior honor and friendship and bleeding bloody hearts of the Forces of Good.

  And the Horde might’ve had the coolest costumes and the coolest dragons on their side, but that was only so they looked much more impressive when they fell.

  And fall they would, to some blond-haired, dick-swinging asshole holding a shining sword.

  Em explained all this to Hel, in her usual acerbic tone, and maybe Wayne saw Hel’s shoulders fall, just a little. She’d tried so hard. Setting up Baldr, plotting a way into Ásgarðr that wouldn’t end in bloodshed, wouldn’t end in the destruction of her people. But she still couldn’t be The Good Guy, because she was still Wyrdborn, still trapped in her own story.

  This was something Sigmund had whispered, one night over voice chat when it’d just been the three of them on the line.

  “It’s why Sigyn had to be mortal again,” he’d said. “Gods can’t change the Wyrd, not really. But we can.”

  That had been a while ago, but Em, it seemed, hadn’t forgotten the lesson.

  “We need to change the narrative,” she’d told Hel, inside the cozy darkness of the maybe-yurt. “And the new narrative is that this isn’t an army. It’s a deconstruction.”

  Hel had tilted her head. “And this . . . you believe this will succeed?”

  Wayne, who’d caught on already, grinned. “Hearts and minds,” she’d said, sharing a brofist with Em.

  Ten minutes later, they’d walked out of the yurt wearing shiny new pendants made from Hel’s own feathers. Symbols that they were doing her will and were to be obeyed by anyone loyal to Helheimr.

  Once outside, Em had explained what she needed to the nearest nár, who’d been confused by the request, but had nonetheless gone out to spread the word.

  And the game was on.

  Even without cell phones, word traveled fast in a crowd full of large things that could fly. Wayne’s anxiety had set in along with nighttime; she was all-too-conscious of Sigmund and of Hel and, well, everything. All of it riding on them and their crazy, modern-day plan.