Stormbringer

by Alis Franklin

  “Now they’re shooting at us!”

  Of course they are. Two jötnar running through Ásgarðr in the middle of a battle? What else did Sigmund think would happen?

  It occurs to me, as Sleipnir clears a path with a well-placed foot to an einheri’s face, that Sig is very, very susceptible to arrows. And axes. And swords. And maces, and . . .

  Shit.

  “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  Sleipnir darts through the gap between two buildings, leaping over a log pile just as another jötunn rears up with a roar.

  Sleipnir returns it in kind, but I’ve had enough, pulling out my gun and firing it into the air with a “We’re on your side you bloody idiot!”

  The sound startles the jötunn, but it also draws the attention of two einherjar, who appear at the far end of the alley.

  “Shit!”

  I jump off Sleipnir’s back. “Get him out of here,” I say. “Somewhere safe!” I’m not talking to Sigmund when I say it.

  Sleipnir nods, but Sigmund says, “No! What about Wayne and Em? What about Hel?”

  I don’t have time to answer, given I’m busy dodging an ax. I duck low, then lash out with a fist into my attacker’s stomach. It’s not as effective as it could be, given he’s wearing chain mail, and meanwhile his friend is headed Sigmund’s way.

  First guy raises his ax again with a comment along the lines of “Die, jötunn scum!” I ignore him, launching myself at his mate in a spear tackle that would get me red-carded, were anyone here to referee.

  The second einheri goes down hard, grunting as something in his shoulder snaps under my weight. I hear Sigmund swear somewhere up above, and Sleipnir rears, and no sooner have I leaped up off the ground than the other jötunn comes leaping in, fangs bared to rip out his downed enemy’s throat.

  “Oh. Jesus.” Sigmund’s trying not to retch.

  “He’ll be fine tomorrow,” I say. This is true, and it’s the curse of Odin’s chosen. To die over and over and over again, for all eternity. That’s why Helheimr can never win this fight, and Hel would know that. So why start it?

  One guy still standing. I’m halfway through a turn when I feel something heavy and wooden slam into my side. A shield, I think, but it’s hard to tell because I’m too busy being dazed against a wall.

  Vaguely, somewhere else, I hear, “Lain! Look out!” And there’s a crash of steel, quickly replaced by a growl and a gust of wind. By the time I’ve pushed myself off the wall, our jötunn friend is struggling with the einheri on the ground, the haft of an ax between its jaws and a shield between its claws and tender flesh.

  I still have my gun. I’m not a very good shot, but it’s hard to miss with the muzzle pressed right against a skull.

  “That’s enough of that,” I say.

  The einheri’s eyes flick my way.

  “I know you know what this is,” I say, meaning the gun. “I’ve seen guys carrying them.” The dvergar might be unclear on the ways of the modern world, but soldiers who die in battle bring their weapons with them. Doesn’t matter if it’s an ax or an assault rifle.

  “Kill me,” the einheri snarls. “I will rise again. For Ásgarðr!”

  The jötunn snarls and presses closer, but I motion for it to still. It does so, eyes flicking to me and saliva drooling from its bloodied jaws.

  “Listen, you aggro piece of shit,” I tell my new einheri friend. “I lived in this crapheap longer than you’ve been dead, so don’t you fucking ‘for Ásgarðr’ me. Why did you attack Helheimr?”

  “They attacked us! We defend our home.”

  I hear the crunch of sneakers approaching, then Sigmund says, “They wouldn’t do that. They weren’t here for war.”

  “Bah! An army of beasts and monsters, led by that soulless, shriveled ha—”

  He’s cut off by the butt of my gun slamming against his temple. “That’s my fucking daughter, shitbrain.”

  Through his pain and daze, I feel the exact moment when the guy figures out who I am. Mostly because he goes very, very still.

  “Lain,” Sigmund says. “This isn’t right.”

  “No shit.”

  “No, listen. Em and Wayne, they were . . . they were organizing a peaceful protest. Like, with music and banners and whatever.”

  I glance up. “With Hel’s people?”

  Sigmund nods. “For equality. Y’know. Between the dead.”

  And suddenly, I get it. Why Hel would drag her entire kingdom to the gates of Ásgarðr.

  “Because she—because Baldr . . .” Jesus, I can’t finish the sentence.

  Sigmund nods anyway. “Yeah. They have people out there, man. Family of the people in here. They wanna be together, y’know? They don’t want this.”

  “Then they should not attack our homes!” From the einheri.

  And then the jötunn lifts its mouth away from the ax haft and says, “You attacked us first! We were peaceful.”

  The einheri startles to hear the words. “You lie!” I’m pretty sure he’s never heard one of the fíflmegir talk before.

  “Er, no actually,” says Sigmund. “That was true.”

  The jötunn looks at me. “We all saw! Upon the Wall. A man stood and watched while we sang and ate. Then he threw a spear. And there was war.”

  Sigmund says, “One spear?” He sounds incredulous. I wish I could share it. Oh how I do.

  Instead, it feels like I’ve just been kicked in the gut.

  One spear to start a war, one spear to prime them. One spear to bring them all and into bloodshed bind them.

  “Fuck!”

  I’m on my feet, gun vanished and forgotten.

  “Fuck fuck fuck!”

  “What?”

  I turn to Sigmund, pointing with one claw. “I know what this is,” I say. “It isn’t war. It’s a con. Everyone’s been fucking had.”

  “Lain, what—?”

  “We have to stop this.” I have to stop it. Jesus. Fuck. How? “It’s the spear,” I say. “It’s the fucking spear.”

  Sigmund’s mind races, running backward down the threads of Wyrd until he arrives at “Gungnir?”

  “Forseti took it from me,” I say. “Sig, that thing . . . It was Odin’s. It starts wars, that’s what it does.” A game. Or Odin’s idea of one, anyway. Find two groups of people, throw Gungnir over the heads, then step back and watch the carnage.

  And now the dead were pouring into Ásgarðr.

  “Fuck! My friends are out there.”

  “I know,” I say. “Take Sleipnir. Go find them.”

  “We need to tell people what’s happened.” Sigmund gives a sharp intake of breath. “I think . . . There were bands playing. Like, rock bands. There must be some sort of mic set up somewhere.”

  “Perfect,” I say, already halfway down the alley. “Grab the girls and meet me there.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find the fucking evidence!” I call.

  Then I’ve dropped to all fours, running as fast as I can out of Ásgarðr. As I go, I hear Sigmund behind me say, “You two! Um. Behave yourselves. No fighting!”

  And I’m gone.

  Getting through Ásgarðr isn’t easy, especially when no one is sure whose side I’m on.

  It’s mostly the einherjar who give me problems, given how I don’t look like one of theirs. But the fíflmegir know I’m not one of Hel’s jötnar, either, and maybe some of them are so taken by Gungnir’s bloodlust that they just don’t really care.

  I should never have brought that fucking spear back here. Fuck. What was I thinking? Not this, that’s for sure. Not that Forseti Baldrsson would turn out to be just as mad as his father—just as mad as Loki, riding in Baldr’s skin—and in almost exactly the same way.

  That’s the Wyrd in a nutshell, though. The same shit, over and over again.

  Up ahead, the gates of Ásgarðr loom. The very closed gates of Ásgarðr. I have one moment to wonder how the náir are getting in when I hear a roar from overhead, and The Weat
her Girls’ prediction finally comes true.

  The drekar, right. Couple that with the dead’s ability to shrug off long falls, et voilà. Instant airdrop, Viking style. Well, Viking zombie style. Whatever.

  It rains men, and me, I’m busy darting through the downpour, dodging arrows as I go. I need to get out, past the Wall, except the gates are shut and I don’t have time to argue with the group of guys clustered in their defense.

  So. Time for a different tactic.

  I open my wings. Sure, the pinions are still clipped, but that book Wayne gave me? About the evolution of flight in dinosaurs? Yeah, well. It had this theory. That flight evolved not by stupid lizards jumping down, but by even stupider ones running up. Incline running, it’s called, and modern birds do it, too.

  Modern birds, and foolish, wing-clipped jötnar.

  The Wall’s maybe twenty feet and made of stone. Lots of places for claws to go. Especially considering I can get most of the way up by jumping. Dodging the arrows is going to be the awkward bit.

  Three. Two. One.

  Leap.

  Eight feet on the jump, maybe nine. Two strokes of my wings, the airflow feeling weird and wrong. Lacking the lift I’m used to.

  Not enough to get me airborne, but enough to keep me moving. To continue past when gravity takes over, working in tandem with claws that drive between stones and into mortar.

  I haul myself up the length of my arm, trying not to flinch as an arrow hits just next to my biceps, ricocheting and falling to the ground below.

  Another arm length, plus a beat of my wings and the push of my hind legs. One more and I’ll be at the top. Fixing the claws of my left hand into the mortar, I reach out with my right.

  Then pain.

  An arrow, I think. In my left shoulder. The shock of it breaks my grip, and for one awful moment, I hang. Sixteen feet above the ground, more or less, and the fall won’t kill me, but the guys with swords at the bottom will certainly try.

  One beat of the wings. Two. A muttered word and the feel of wind at my back, pushing me against the stone.

  My right hand finds the balustrade. Then one last push with my legs and I’m there. I’m over. Landing on top of the Wall in an awkward skid, injured arm curled against my chest.

  I hit a pair of legs. Their owner shouts, which is all the warning I get before I feel a boot drive against my spine. That hurts, and I roll forward and struggle upright, arrow shaft clattering to the ground as my poison blood eats through wood and metal.

  Kicking guy raises his rifle. He has buttons pinned to his fatigues and words written on his helmet. A yellow smiley face and peace sign for the former, bomb everything on the latter.

  “Vietnam was a crock of shit!” I tell him, then kick him in the face.

  It was. I remember it. Fucking waste of fucking everything. War always is.

  The guy staggers, his gun firing rounds into the air. I don’t wait to see the collateral, instead leap over the Wall and out into the fray.

  Now, flying down? Flying down I can still do.

  Outside of Ásgarðr is just as chaotic as the inside. Here it’s a mad scramble of bodies, pushing up against the Wall, climbing over one another in huge pyramids to reach the top. People throw rocks and axes, or just smash against the stone itself. I have to bank sideways to avoid something burning. It explodes near the top of the Wall, raining hot shrapnel mostly down onto the side of the idiot who tossed it. I hear the roar of a jötunn and the screams of the náir as they suddenly find themselves more on fire than they’d ever really wanted.

  Because that’s the thing. Einherjar come back. The others don’t. Dead for the náir is dead twice over, banished to the mist and shale of Niflhel, to lose themselves to the madness of the mists until their bodies rot into the formless lumps we call the draugar.

  In Hel, even the dead have ghosts.

  Flying down I can still do, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to last. The ground is getting closer by the second and there really isn’t any place to land, every inch covered by yelling, swarming bodies. Some pushing toward the Wall, as if to topple it by mass alone. Others are grabbing at those pushing forward, trying to drag them back.

  Gungnir’s madness, its meme, hasn’t spread to everyone. That’s good. I can work with that.

  First I need to find the fucking spear.

  It’s not quite the needle-in-a-haystack search it could be. Gungnir Bleeds, even here. Its Wyrd oozing out and through the minds of those it drives to war. And where there’s a Wyrd, there’s a weave. A warp and a woof I can follow back to the source, trampled now into the mud by a thousand footsteps. Hidden beneath a fallen banner and a sign painted on wooden boards written in a language I can’t quite read. Danish maybe.

  My claws hit mud not two meters away, and I’ve got just enough time to get to my feet before I’m crushed in the press of the crowd. A woman screams in my ear, brandishing a sword above my head, and a dozen voices answer her.

  “For Helheimr!” she says. “For our husbands!”

  She’s launching a rescue mission, leading a group of women to storm Ásgarðr’s gates, looking for their kidnapped princes. They ignore me. I look enough like one of theirs.

  “Daughter!” I hear, from the leader a group of men, appearing from the fray. Old men, mostly. Dead from age and disease. “Daughter, do not do this.”

  “Do not stop me, Father! You saw what they did to Hræiðarr, those monsters!”

  “Winflæd, be reasonable. This is no place for a woman.”

  “Better women than old and cowardly men!” Winflæd shoots back, just as quickly.

  They’re speaking Old English, I think. It’s all very Beowulf. At least three of the women in Winflæd’s war band are wearing jeans, and another one is carrying what I swear looks like a jackhammer.

  I don’t know how a jackhammer got into Helheimr and, honestly, I don’t want to. Mostly, I need to shoulder aside the old men with a “Hey, ’scuse me. Coming through!” They shout and mutter, and their daughters take the opportunity to escape, running to the Wall, jackhammer held high above their heads.

  Somewhere, beneath mud that Bleeds the black corruption of Hel, my claws find wood.

  “Got you!”

  Fucking Gungnir, filthy but no worse for wear.

  “They did this to us, did they not?”

  I turn. Behind me, standing in an eye of calm amid the riot, is my daughter. Loki’s daughter.

  The woman we killed.

  “Hel . . .”

  She’s looking pretty good for a dead woman. Not much different from what I remember, bar the mud that splashes up her legs and robe.

  “Hel, I—”

  She inclines her head, eyes hidden by her veil. “Another time,” she says. “First, tell me: Who did this to us?”

  I look at Gungnir, then at Hel. Somewhere deep inside, my black heart breaks. “I don’t know,” I say, which is honest.

  “But you suspect.”

  I nod.

  Hel says a name: “Forseti.”

  I nod again, and she hisses, face turning to look at the chaos all around.

  “We came here to bargain,” she says. “To make peace. I earned my people’s place within the Wall, bought it with my death.”

  “Hela—” Loki starts.

  Hel’s head whips back around, fast enough to flash the pale white of her cheeks beneath the veil. “No! They have no honor! You know this more than any. We did not want war, only what was ours by right. And they have taken even that from us. From me. So be it. If they would have us be monsters, then monsters we will be. And may Ásgarðr’s fields run red with blood and may the bodies of their dead reach into the darkened sky!”

  “Wait!”

  Hel’s wings are mantled up and I can feel her rage twist the ground into sharp obsidian. But she stops, and she’s listening.

  She doesn’t want to be the bad guy, not really. No one ever does.

  “You can blame all of Ásgarðr for the actions of one bloodt
hirsty áss,” I say. I hold out Gungnir. “Here. This is proof Helheimr didn’t start this war. People saw someone throw it. Stop the fighting long enough to talk with the other æsir. If they knew about this, if it was deliberate, then yeah. Wipe them off the Tree, fine. But if they didn’t . . .”

  If they didn’t, if Forseti acted alone—even if the other æsir are prepared to pretend he did—then Hel isn’t the villain in this story. Because that’s all life is to things like us: story. The same plots and tropes and tales, told over and over again. And sometimes—just sometimes—we get a bit jack of it all and start looking for a change.

  Hel takes the spear, her rictus grin contorting into something like a sneer as she does. “Vile thing,” she says. “It should never have been made.”

  What use is a spear that incites people into war? Well. A fair bit of use, really. If you happen to be someone looking to build up an army made from guys who died in battle.

  Hel looks up. “Your words are clever, Father. As always. But Gungnir’s own Wyrd does not heed them. The æsir will not speak to us while we assault their Wall.”

  I nod. “Right,” I say. “About that. Where’s your stage?”

  I’ve got a meme to spoil.

  It’s easier to wade through the riot, trailing in Hel’s wake. Even gripped by Gungnir’s madness, her people don’t obstruct her passage.

  There is, indeed, a stage, and one that’s only slightly trampled in the chaos. It’s fitted out with an odd assortment of instruments, both modern and old, plus microphones and stacks of looming black amplifiers. Some things are smashed, some things aren’t, but, more important—

  “Lain!”

  Sigmund, true to his word, is here, Em and Wayne and Sleipnir standing close behind. I don’t ask how they got here first. Sleipnir is Sleipnir, after all.

  “I found them!” Sigmund says, crushing his arms around my waist and his face against my chest. “They’re all right.”

  That might be an overstatement. Wayne is holding half her dreadlocks in one hand like some fuzzy, candy-striped octopus, and Em sniffs like she’s been crying. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she says, when she notices me looking.