by Dan Abnett
He raised Mjolnir in his right fist. Black water streamed down the mighty hammer’s handle and dripped off Thor’s strapped wrist and bulging forearm. He began to use the mystic hammer as a lodestone, a conduit for the elemental gifts to which he had been born. He was the Thunder God: The storm should have been compelled to respond to his command.
It did not. The rain continued to pelt down, the fog-smoke continued to swirl. Lightning, half-hidden by the fog, flashed like a strobe, and deep thunder boomed like a rock troll’s war-drum.
Another monster lunged out of the darkness. Impatient, Thor lashed out hard with Mjolnir and felled it. He heard the beast whine and mewl as it limped away into the fog.
Thor flexed his grip on the hammer and began to spin it, slowly at first, and then with gathering speed and momentum. If the storm would not obey him, then he would tame it. He would punish it.
Mjolnir turned, humming, creating a local vortex. The wind buckled and wailed. Proximity lightning flared around Thor’s towering figure, and corposant crackled against the hammerhead, dripping like neon froth.
Cyclonic force radiated outward. He brought down the hammer, cratering the rocky ground and creating a shockwave that vaporized the rain.
A sudden calm descended.
Thor straightened up, dripping. Though rain still fell, it had been reduced to a drizzle. The wind had dropped, and the fog had been sucked away like vented fumes, leaving only a low mist behind. The Thunder God had snuffed out the storm, at least temporarily.
He looked around. Uneasy stirrings in the mystical substrate of Midgard had alerted him to trouble, and he had come to the Siberian wastes to investigate on behalf of the Avengers. On arrival, he had landed on an ancient outcrop of dark rock, a tableland thrust up from the Siberian flats in eons past. The storm had swept in on him almost at once, as if it had been expecting him—like a predator waiting to pounce.
The sky above was still as dark as midnight, and lightning strikes stippled the horizon in a hundred-mile radius. The deluge had left rainwater pooled in the cracks and crevices of the granite. The puddles rippled in the drizzle.
But what occupied Thor’s attention was the small mountain ahead of him.
It had not been there when he arrived. It had risen during the ferocious blackout of the storm.
The mountain simmered with unearthly evil. He could feel its malign pull like a magnetic force. It made his skin crawl. It was the same sensation he felt whenever he was obliged to visit Muspelheim, the realm of foul Surtur’s demonkind.
His hammer clenched at his side, Thor began to traverse the jagged rocks toward the skirts of the mountain. He murmured an oath of protection as he went—an oath taught to him by his mother, the fair Frigga.
He kept watch for monsters. The ones that had attacked him during the storm were of a breed unknown to him. They had smelled of stale magic and rotting bones. Purring growls and lingering snarls echoed around the rocks, but nothing appeared.
He strode forward, leaping effortlessly from boulder to boulder where necessary.
There were distant mutterings at the edge of his preternatural hearing, so quiet he could not make out the words. Their tone was sometimes plaintive, sometimes mocking.
He sensed movement.
Thor stopped and looked down. The motion had come from the ground, from one of the many rainwater puddles. The surface of each puddle still rippled from the falling rain, but the movement he had spotted had been more than just a radiating splash.
In his peripheral vision, he saw movement in another puddle. He turned sharply.
Still frowning, he knelt and scooped his left palm into the nearest pool. The water was ice cold. It poured away between his fingers as he raised his hand.
He glanced at another puddle. This time, for the briefest moment, he saw a pale face peering out of the water. It vanished as fast as it had appeared.
The voices murmured.
Puzzled, he glanced from puddle to puddle. Faces like feinting ghosts appeared in their dark surfaces, as if reflected in dirty mirrors. But they faded the moment he looked straight at them.
“Show yourselves,” he snapped. “The Odinson commands it.”
There was no response, no sound except the patter of the rain and the moan of the wind.
Then something showed itself.
It was another monster.
It was three times his height and built like a giant simian creature whose hide had been wrought from the black, hairy dermis of a hunting spider. It had a canine snout filled with massive yellow teeth. Fibrous black hairs grew sparse around its snout and lips, where the skin was a diseased pink. The monster’s eyes were radiant amber slits.
Its most alarming characteristic, however, was the manner of its manifestation. Despite the fact that it had the stature of a fair-sized frost giant and the mass of several bull elephants, it was rising up out of a puddle.
The monster sprouted from the ground like a jack-in-a-box, flinging blood-black water in all directions. It uttered a roar that resounded at an infrasonic level, vibrating through Thor’s diaphragm. The Thunder God recoiled in surprise, but he did not balk.
It sprang at him.
Its jaws opened wide, a bite radius like an industrial man-trap. Noxious breath gusted from its pink, yawning throat.
Thor raised his left arm to block the thing’s attack. It bit down.
Thor exclaimed in pain.
The teeth had drawn blood. He felt himself being driven backwards across the wet rocks by the monster’s attacking force.
Thor let out an oath in the All-Father’s name.
The creature was strong, as strong as any being in the Nine Realms. It had broken the almost invulnerable skin of an Asgardian.
“What manner of creature are you?” he demanded.
The monster did not reply. Its jaws were locked around his arm, like a hound biting a branch or a bone. It began to shake its snout, worrying at him, trying to tear off the limb. Thor felt his muscles wrench painfully and the gashes in his flesh broaden. This creature was actually going to knock him off his feet.
With a war-curse, he swung Mjolnir and brought the hammer’s head up into the monster’s midriff. The blow lifted the beast’s hind legs off the ground. It let go and tumbled aside—half falling, half rolling—and issued a roar of pain and rage.
Thor looked down at his arm. Blood was streaming from the puncture wounds. It looked as if he’d taken multiple stabs from blades forged in Nidavellir.
The monster resumed its attack. He met it with Mjolnir.
Thor delivered an over-arm swing this time, a full battle-strike. The power of a god’s arm drove the hammer down onto the beast’s skull. The blow knocked the monster flat. Still, it tried to rise. Teeth gritted, angry, Thor struck it two more hammerblows before it ceased its struggles.
No sooner was it quiet than other monsters emerged around the Asgardian, springing from rainwater puddles as the first had done. They were twisted things—some humanoid, some more bestial, one slabby and hefty like a monstrous boar. They roared and wailed as they came for him, attacking from all quarters, snapping with fanged jaws and slicing with dirty talons.
Thor fought back, swinging Mjolnir with his right fist and punching with his left. He threw in the occasional kick and elbow jab as the monsters pressed in.
Their strength and stamina was humbling. Blows that normally would have felled a considerable opponent had to be repeated three or four times to bring just one of the creatures down.
Thor was one of the strongest beings on the mortal plane, and these monsters were withstanding the fury of his warcraft.
They were magical things, demon-spawn bound in conjured flesh. Only magic of the darkest kind possessed such levels of resistance.
The rain fell with renewed vigor. As he fought, Thor became aware that the smoke-like fog was again roiling in, staining the air and reducing visibility. The monsters swirled and howled in the vapor around him, looming to strike, before slip
ping back into the cloak of the foul air.
One monster locked its arms around him. Thor smashed away its grip and wrestled it onto its back before finishing it off.
But the effort exposed him.
He grimaced as talons raked into his back. Teeth sank into his shoulder, ripping through his hauberk and mail.
He rolled, knocking the creatures off him, and broke free.
He circled, calling out taunts and jibes to the monsters in the smoke and rain, swinging Mjolnir at any that dared to try their luck. The sweeping hammerhead broke ribs, tusks, horns, and limbs, and turned aside biting snouts.
Then they rushed him together.
The Thunder God’s prowess at combat was based squarely on his physical strength and dauntless courage, but he was not without wit or cunning. He whirled Mjolnir as they came in, gripping it by the strap, and let its potent upswing pull him into the air. The monsters clashed together, cheated of a target.
Thor banked in the air above them and let his hammer carry him down again to a spot halfway up the black scree slopes of the new mountain. He landed with a crunch.
In the fog below, the monsters bayed and roared. They began to scramble up the slopes to reacquire their target.
Thor continued his ascent. The prickle of magic was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, but he wanted to get a look at the summit. A mountain’s peak was its most sacred space. It was there that rituals took place, and this mountain had been raised for a purpose.
One look—to assess the nature and degree of the threat—and he would report back to his comrades, the Avengers. He had the distinct feeling he would need them to assemble and assist him. A terrible darkness was rising to blight the world.
The air grew colder. Gales howled at him, and sleet mixed with the furious black rain. Laughter and half-heard words hissed and echoed in the wind.
He reached a crag and paused for a moment. Lightning forked around him. Thunder crashed.
“You took your time getting here,” a voice said.
Thor turned, then lowered his hammer.
“Wanda?”
Her red cloak pulled around her against the deluge, the Scarlet Witch smiled at him.
“I thought I was on my own against this for a moment, Thor,” she said.
“How came you here?” he asked.
“Cap sent me to provide backup,” she said.
“And I think it might be needed,” he replied. “Are others coming?”
She shrugged.
“I have no idea. I lost contact shortly after I arrived. I can’t raise the Avengers by any means, magical or technical. I imagine this place is causing interference.”
“It is thick with sorcery,” Thor agreed, “and the nature of that sorcery is strong indeed. Demonspawn and worse lurk below.”
“You’re hurt,” she said, seeing the gashes on his arm.
“They are out for blood,” he said. “We must be careful.”
“Have you any idea what this is?” Wanda asked. “Have you…have you seen anything like it before? Something from Asgard or another realm?”
Thor shook his head.
“I do not know enough,” he replied. “I have not seen enough, except to know that demonic magic is at work—and on a scale that would blanch the souls of men.”
“Then there is something you should see,” the Scarlet Witch said. “Ahead, over the next crag. I spotted it just now. I need you to tell me what it is.”
He nodded.
“Gladly, if I know it,” he said. “Show me.”
“This way,” she replied, and began to move along the crag with speed and grace. Her red cloak billowed out behind her. Rain streaked her form-fitting scarlet costume and glittered like diamonds in her long auburn hair.
Wanda Maximoff was an adept of magic. But her application of that craft was unusual and personal to her, a strange art of probability and chance. Though she was a spell caster, and her primary powers were best deployed over range and distance, she was also physically capable. Like all long-serving Avengers, she had augmented her skills with combat training and hand-to-hand skills for times when magic might fail her. Captain America had trained her personally.
Even without her hex power, Thor would have been glad to have Wanda at his side in a brawl. He had seen her take down foes twice her size.
The physical training had also given her great balance and sureness of foot. She clambered and leapt up the slippery rock ahead of him without hesitation.
“There,” she said. “Look. Thor, what is that?”
He reached her side and moved past her, peering into the darkness.
“I see nothing,” he said, puzzled.
“There!” she repeated. “Look there, ahead of us.”
He stared again, but saw nothing except rain, lightning-lit crags, and the enfolding night.
“Wanda,” he began, “I—”
Something struck him from behind. Pain seared up his spine, and he fell forward in agony. He rolled, trying to rise. Another blast hit him, a bolt of blue fire that smashed him to the edge of the rock wall. He scrambled to hold on, to avoid plunging down the mountainside.
A third blast hit him. He howled in pain. It felt as though his bones were melting.
He looked up, clinging to the lip of the ragged cliff.
“Wanda...?”
She stood over him, her gloved hands extended, the fingertips aimed in his direction. Blue fire played and crackled around her hands.
The smile on her lips was utterly without compassion or warmth.
“You should not have turned your back on me, Odinson,” she said. “You let your guard down, and now you are lost.”
FIVE
MADRIPOOR
22.01 LOCAL, JUNE 12TH
SOME said that the Straits Royal Hotel represented the peak of Lowtown luxury; others deemed it the low-budget end of Hightown hospitality. Whichever was true, the hotel possessed a faded, colonial charm: an architectural grandeur and quality of service that spoke of older, more elegant, more glamorous days.
Dr. Bruce Banner, traveling on U.S. papers that declared his occupation as “research physicist,” sat at a table on the terrace bar, watching the street below. An immaculately liveried waiter brought him his order on a silver tray, and Banner signed it to his room account.
Night had fallen, and it was warm. His light linen suit was cool, but the flexible plastic cuff around his left forearm was making his skin sweaty and uncomfortable. He exhaled gently, took a sip of tea, and set the aggravation aside.
The air was richly scented: smoke, traffic fumes, the spice of foodstuffs cooking; heavier notes of garbage, sweat, hot concrete, and the lemon-stink of the insect-repellant candles set on every table. It was noisy, too: cars, scooters, voices, firecrackers, street hawkers yelling their wares, and the dulcet, cycling, digital instructions of the crosswalk signals.
The Straits Royal occupied a corner block and had done so since 1870, according to a plaque in the lobby. The street, therefore, was in actuality two streets, merging directly in front of the triangular plot of the terrace bar, as if the bar were the prow of a luxury liner cruising into an ocean of traffic. Chantow Street, twisting like a serpent from the unplanned thoroughfares of Lowtown, came in from Banner’s left to mix with Orchard Highway, a broad modern avenue that ran like an arrow from the heart of Hightown to his right. Handcarts, rusting mopeds and sedans—even the occasional water buffalo and wagon—spilled up from the Lowtown end, along with scores of working-class and street people. These conveyances merged and mingled with buses, gleaming western automobiles, and white tuxedo stretch limousines from Hightown. It had been ever thus.
The Straits Royal’s dual reputation rested principally on its location at the junction between the impoverished, lawless Lowtown and the dazzlingly upscale Hightown. It was of both and of neither: the very best of one and the worst of the other. It was, to Bruce Banner’s mind, the quintessence of the island city. Few places in the world were as fundame
ntally split as Madripoor. It was a binary nation, home to the unimaginably rich and the impossibly poor. Two diametrically different lives coexisting in one body.
He knew how that felt.
Outside the Straits Royal, the flowing lifebloods of Low and High mingled. Hightown tourists were guided past to glimpse the more palatable nightlife of Lowtown. Wealthy and overprivileged dilettantes began furtive trips into the Low-side shadows in search of illicit recreation and reckless diversion. Lowtown criminals edged into High-side realms to stalk their prey. Hundreds, if not thousands, of shift workers trooped into Hightown to fill humiliating and poorly paid positions in the service industry. Others wandered home again, bone-tired and drawn.
Banner noticed that the most dignified and orderly members of the milling foot traffic were the Lowtown workers in their smocks and uniforms. He noticed, too, that Lowtown jalopies tended to brake for Hightown limos where the chaotic traffic merged.
Above the high- and low-rise skylines of the city, the night was a dark amber haze.
He heard a chattering, urgent voice and turned to see a bright, cheerful smile. The boy was no more than thirteen years old, a street kid from the Low. He was moving from table to table on the terrace, selling postcards of the Prince’s Palace, the Sovereign Hotel, and other noted sights, presenting them with a flourish in a battered, clear-plastic pocket-folder.
“A very good price for you,” he declared.
Banner smiled and shook his head.
“Very good price, agreeable terms,” the boy insisted, undeterred.
There was an angry shout. The boy collapsed the plastic concertina of his wares and ran. The hotel steward followed him across the terrace, clapping his hands and shooing him away like a stray dog.
“So sorry, sir,” the steward said to Banner as he passed by on his way back to the bar.
“So am I,” replied Banner.
Banner checked his smartphone. No new messages. He registered a tic of annoyance, then worry. He took a breath and felt the plastic cuff on his arm tense slightly.
Another breath. A sip of tea.
Dale McHale sat down at the table beside him. He looked at Banner’s drink.
