Odin's Ravens (The Blackwell Pages)

by K. L. Armstrong

  “So do we win?” Fen asked.

  The expression on Owen’s face made more sense then as the frown that went with that tension appeared. “I am part of the planning now, Fen. Once I am involved, I can’t see the possible futures. That’s why I stayed away: so I could help more.”

  No one replied to that little tidbit for several seconds, and then Laurie clarified, “So you wanted to be with us, but you could help more by being away?”

  Owen nodded. “And I had to wait because I was afraid I couldn’t keep a secret from you.”

  The rest of the group looked from Laurie to Owen, and she felt her face burn in awkward embarrassment: she didn’t want to tell them about Fen, not now, not after he’d only just heard it himself. It seemed unfair somehow for him to have his change of role revealed already.

  “What Owen is trying to get at and Laurie isn’t saying is that she’s the Champion of Loki, not me.” Fen met her gaze as he said the words, and she hated that he must be feeling so horrible—and was grateful that he cared enough about her and about stopping Ragnarök that he was telling the others.

  Laurie waited to see if anyone would say anything cruel, realizing that her hand was balled into a fist in anticipation. Matt met her gaze, and then she saw his eyes drop to her fist. He gave her and Fen a sympathetic smile.

  “Huh,” Reyna said. “Didn’t see that coming.”

  “You’re staying, right, Fen? I mean, you’re not going to skip the big fight now, are you?” Baldwin asked.

  Fen gave Baldwin a well-duh look. “All the more reason to protect my cousin. She’s the champion, so she’s in even more danger, and it’s even more important nothing happens to her. I’ll still be her bodyguard.” He glanced at Owen and smiled. Then he looked at Matt and redirected the conversation to the current battle. “So we have goats, Berserkers, and… then what, Thorsen?”

  “The Valkyries will take us there—and stay.” Matt looked around at the assembled crowd of descendants and said, “Then we fight, and we win.”

  Baldwin nodded. “Straightforward planning. I like that about you, Matt.”

  The twins exchanged a nervous look, and Laurie told them, “We can do this. We’ve been to Hel and back. River of zombies. Giants. This is just a few draugrs, right?”

  “Forty,” Baldwin interjected. “That’s what Matt said.”

  Before Laurie could try to comfort the twins, Reyna smiled. “Unfair odds for them, but that’s what they get for stealing from Thor’s champion.”

  Laurie looked around at the assembled group. They were finally all together, all of the descendants, and they were about to ride into battle with Valkyries, Berserkers, and… goats. It was pretty epic.

  In a few short moments, the kids all joined various Valkyries and set off to the lair of Glaemir. Those with bags from Helen stowed their things in saddlebags. Matt had his shield in hand, and Laurie had her bow. Reyna had a cloak of feathers, which she fastened around her shoulders just before Hildar pulled her up onto her steed. The sight of the Goth girl with her feathered cloak sitting astride the massive horse made Laurie think of superheroes in the comics she used to read. We are heroes! She smiled as she looked over the rest of their fighting force. They might be kids, but they looked a lot like warriors right now.

  That confidence stayed with her as the Valkyries carried them toward the draugrs. The ride was still exhilarating, but this time it also seemed less unusual. Laurie’s confidence remained steady as they descended into a dark, damp tunnel that seemed to echo loudly. Every strike of hoof on stone seemed to pound like a drumbeat, and her heart wanted to beat in time with it.

  It wasn’t until the tunnel began to glow with a green light that her confidence faded some. The green glow emanated from slick swaths of some sort of fungus that clung to the damp walls. It was as if some oversized creature had sneezed repeatedly on the stone and dirt, and the snot still shivered there. The air grew thicker as the tunnel started to level out again, and Laurie didn’t want to inhale deeply for fear of sucking in the rot.

  As the stench grew more and more stomach-turning, she knew that they were almost there. Somewhere nearby, at least forty-one walking, decaying corpses waited. No one spoke. The only sounds were the steady inhalation and exhalation of the others and the hoofbeats on the ground.

  Finally, they turned a corner and found themselves in a wide-open space. It looked like an underground arena. Stalactites and stalagmites speared down from the ceiling far overhead and up from the floor. Amidst these were what looked like the ruins of an ancient city. Walls and roofs, doorways and windows, they stretched out around the center space. From within those windows, draugrs looked out at them, and from beyond those doorways, still more draugrs walked.

  “You’re earlier than I expected,” Glaemir said.

  They all turned toward his voice. The draugr king had a throne built out of sarcophagi, and to either side, he had a guard that looked as rotten as he did. Their smiles showed missing teeth, and Laurie wondered briefly if those teeth had vanished before or after death. Vikings hadn’t had the best dental care.

  “Return Mjölnir to me,” Matt said. He had to be as unsettled as Laurie was, but his voice sounded steady.

  “No.” Glaemir shook his head slowly. He had the hammer next to him on his throne, and his hand fell onto it as if it were an animal he’d pet. “You gave it away, boy, and coming here with a few children and girls on their ponies won’t convince me to give it to you.”

  All around her, Laurie heard the Valkyries’ responses to the draugr’s jab. Most of them weren’t in English, but they were harsh enough in tone that she suspected they were words she probably shouldn’t repeat.

  “Thorsen, where are the goats and Owen’s clowns?” Fen asked in a low voice.

  “The Berserkers will be here in a few minutes. The ravens went to retrieve them.” Owen finally sounded exasperated, and Laurie felt bad for him. Now that Fen knew he could upset Owen, he’d be even worse.

  “Son of Thor? Out of courtesy, we await your word,” Hildar said.

  “Are you certain you won’t give it back?” Matt asked Glaemir.

  The draugr’s hand tightened around Mjölnir’s handle.

  “Then we’ll take it,” Matt said.

  Immediately, the Valkyries surged toward the draugrs that seemed to pour from the ruins around them. Some stayed on their steeds; others leaped from the animals and charged. The kids dropped from the horses while the Valkyries spread out and attacked. Laurie lifted her bow and began firing. The twins had linked hands and were intoning. Baldwin let out a whoop, and Fen shifted into a wolf. As the fight started in earnest, Glaemir himself stayed on his throne, holding on to the hammer.

  It wasn’t the same as defending themselves against the monsters, which was the way most fights had gone. This was the first time they were going into a full assault on the enemy, and Laurie was energized by it.

  The difficulty, of course, was that Matt had to reach the king, and with the way the battlefield was looking, by the time he did, he’d be exhausted from fighting. Glaemir, however, would be just fine. He sat on his throne and watched them with a smile.

  Fen, in wolf shape, was by her side. He looked up at her and flashed teeth. Then he looked back at the king. She wasn’t sure what words he was thinking, but she knew him well enough to expect that he had the same general thought she’d just had: get Glaemir.

  She didn’t have a clear shot at him, so they needed to get closer. Together, Fen and Laurie started toward Matt.

  The fight had only just begun when Owen’s two ravens swooped into the cavern, and in a blink the rest of the Berserkers came tumbling and leaping into the fray. Behind them was a veritable sea of fur and horns. Some of the draugrs seemed to hesitate when goats charged them, but their pause was brief. In a strange way, the goats seemed to be the perfect weapon against the draugrs: both were essentially deathless. The herd of goats all had the same power of Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr to revive after death, and the
draugrs could reattach their body parts when injured. It was a pretty even match.

  The Berserkers swarmed into the middle of the fur and decaying flesh. They leaped and launched themselves, using even the bodies of the fighters on both sides as springboards. Stalactites were as good as horizontal bars to such gymnasts. It was utter chaos, even more so than the battle between the Berserkers and the Raiders. The Raiders, for all their temper and attitude, simply weren’t as overwhelming as towering, rotting draugrs.

  “Matt! Can you use your Hammer on Glaemir from back here?” Laurie called across the fight as she and Fen worked to get to his side.

  His answer was lost under a roar as a draugr leaped toward them, and then they were separated from him in a growing tide of fighters. Fen stayed by her side, and every so often she saw Baldwin or the twins, but the chaos had divided them into small groups.

  Loki’s champion, she reminded herself. I am Loki’s champion. She wouldn’t fail her ancestor or the other descendants. She couldn’t even consider it. She tried to ignore the growls, yells, bleats, and grunts. She had to do her part.

  One arrow at a time.

  TWENTY-TWO

  MATT

  “VINGTHOR”

  Battle. It’s what Vikings were best known for, as if they spent their lives trolling the coastlines, shaking their swords, waiting for the chance to fight something. Steal something. Kill something.

  Not exactly true. They were also farmers and explorers, and they spent more time in the villages than off raiding, but yes, Matt would admit that Vikings liked to fight. Not just one-on-one battles, either. They liked this.

  He looked out over the battlefield. It was a seething mass of Berserkers and Valkyries and draugrs and battle-goats and the descendants of the North. A grand spectacle to stir the blood of any Viking. If he’d seen it in a movie, he’d have been glued to the screen, heart pounding, adrenaline racing. For a Blackwell kid, this was his version of a battle with pirates, ninjas, and zombies. It shouldn’t get any better than that.

  Except… well, this wasn’t a scene in a movie. A week ago, he’d have admitted that a real fight would be terrifying. Now it wasn’t so much the terror that made him wish it was a movie—it was the chaos.

  It didn’t matter if it was Berserkers and Valkyries and goats versus draugrs. It might have been redheads versus blondes for all it mattered from where he stood. It was chaos, utter chaos, with hooves flying and draugr body parts flying and Berserkers flipping overhead and dirt—lots of dirt, whirling up everywhere, from the horses and the fighters, dirt in his eyes and his mouth. He couldn’t see much of anything after a while, just shapes whizzing past, sometimes overhead, sometimes underfoot, as he stumbled over the fallen. They smacked into him, too, jostling and grunting and knocking him off-balance, and he spun, shield up, Hammer at the ready, but they hadn’t noticed him, just bumped into him and disappeared back into the fray.

  Then there was the smell. Draugr, mostly. The stink of rot was so bad, it was practically a weapon itself. Matt stumbled over one of the younger Berserkers, who was retching from it, and Matt told him to go get some air. The kid’s eyes lowered with shame, but his skin was nearly green with nausea. Yet it was another smell that turned Matt’s stomach. The lighter scent, one he only caught now and again as he moved through the battlefield. Blood. As faint as it was, it was the truest reminder that this wasn’t a movie scene, wasn’t a game. It was real, and he was in the middle of it.

  Yet it wasn’t just him in the middle of it, and that was even scarier. There were the others, too, the ones he was supposed to be protecting—Fen and Laurie, Baldwin and the twins. While he knew he should be heading for Glaemir, he kept looking for them, to make sure they were okay, to see if they needed help. Looking and listening. But listening was nearly as futile as looking. The cacophony was enough to make his ears ring. Now and then he’d catch a distinctive noise—the snort of a horse, the battle cry of a Valkyrie, the clash of swords, the bleat of a goat—but mostly, it was just noise. Deafening noise.

  This was a battlefield. A true battlefield. A true battle. And, frankly, Matt wanted nothing to do with it.

  He suspected other Thorsens wouldn’t feel the same. They’d be right in the thick of it, howling with the other warriors, their spirits soaring with long-dormant battle fever. Battle rage. Battle hunger. To them, it would be like a championship football game, just as chaotic and just as loud, just as smelly, and maybe just as bloody. They thrived on this. His brothers lived for it.

  And Matt? No. He looked around and he remembered why he never wanted to play football. That chaos didn’t energize him like it did his brothers. Yet nor did he want to curl up in a ball, head down, hands over his ears. He was still a Viking.

  He saw the battlefield, and he felt the stirring of his ancestors, but that stirring didn’t make him want to leap into the fray. He wanted his own battle. Like in the boxing ring. One-on-one. Which was perfect, because that was exactly what he had to do. Fight one guy… who just happened to be king of the draugrs and, currently, lost in the middle of this seething battlefield.

  When this all started, he’d known exactly where Glaemir was. He still did, hypothetically. In the middle. But he’d long since lost sight of him and was forced to rely on his necklace to lead him to Mjölnir. Just follow the vibrating amulet. Which would be awesome… if the entire earth weren’t vibrating under his feet. So he had to walk with one hand holding his shield, the other clutching the amulet, gauging its vibrations and following them like a bat using echolocation.

  No one left a path open for him. No one tried to stop him, either. They seemed too caught up in their own fights to notice—or care about—this red-haired kid who they’d smacked into.

  Matt was so intent on his goal that he barely registered a draugr in his path. Just another zombie thrown out from the fray. Except it didn’t leap back in. It just stood there. Blocking his route.

  Matt looked up. He had to. The guy was six feet tall—huge for a Viking. From the nose down, he was little more than a skeleton draped in ragged leather, which made the top half of his head seem like a weird skin-and-flesh cap rather than part of his head, the illusion even stronger because he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Tangled dark hair fell from that “skull cap” to his shoulders. Dark eyes peered at Matt, one filmed over, as if blind. Under his nose, his head was a grinning skull with a surprising number of teeth intact. Those teeth clacked as he opened his mouth, and Matt was sure that clacking was all he’d hear—how could you talk without a tongue… or a throat?

  But somehow, this draugr could, though the words were guttural and hoarse, even harder to understand than Glaemir’s speech.

  “So you are the one who thinks he is the great god Thor?” the draugr said.

  “Not exactly,” Matt said, keeping his voice calm as he surveyed the situation, trying to see an easy way out. He needed to save his energy for Glaemir. “ ‘Living embodiment’ is the phrase, which means I’m kinda Thor and I’m kinda not. It’s confusing.”

  “Do you mock me, boy?”

  “No, I’m just correcting you. But if you’re asking if I am the living embodiment, the answer is yes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get my hammer.”

  “Your hammer?” The draugr seemed to spit, which was really hard to pull off without saliva. Or lips. “You are not this Champion of Thor.”

  “Yes, I am. I can prove it, too.”

  The draugr snorted in derision.

  “I can. Just help me clear a path to Glaemir and take Mjölnir. I’ll show you that I can wield it. That should settle the matter.”

  The draugr let out a grating laugh. Then he charged.

  Trolls were so much easier to trick.

  Matt slammed his shield up into the draugr’s face, which made him stagger back, one eye bulging like it might have lost its moorings. It also might have ticked him off. The draugr roared and inflated to double his size. He charged again. Matt tried to throw his Hammer, but it fizzled. He did manage to
get the shield up in time, but that had worked better when the draugr wasn’t twelve feet tall. The shield only hit the zombie’s thigh. The draugr swung one massive arm. It connected with Matt’s shoulder and knocked him onto his butt, making him skid backward across the ground.

  As Matt scrambled up, he could see the draugr bearing down, his hand reaching out to grab Matt, and he knew he wouldn’t make it onto his feet in time. Then an arrow hit the draugr’s leather chest-plate. It didn’t do any damage, of course, but the zombie stopped and looked down at it. That’s when a wolf lunged from the crowded battlefield and clamped down on the draugr’s leg. As Matt sprang up, Laurie stepped from the fray. Still biting the draugr’s leg, Fen gave her a look, as if to say About time.

  “Hey, my arrow beat you,” she said. “Technically, I was here first.”

  The draugr turned on her and roared and when it did, it seemed to get even bigger. Then it charged. Matt saw this thing—a fifteen-foot-tall zombie warrior, not even caring that a wolf was still gnawing its femur, barreling after Laurie, who was armed only with a bow—and he found the rage he needed to launch the Hammer. Launch it with a crash and a bang and an explosion of force clear into the battlefield. It also knocked down Laurie and sent wolf-Fen flying. They were ready for it, though, and bounced back while the draugr was still lying there, shaking its head as if to say What just happened?

  “You still doubt I’m Thor’s champion?” Matt said, advancing on the draugr, which had deflated when it hit the ground. “I—”

  The draugr leaped up, surprisingly agile for a leather-bound skeleton. “The true champion would never have let Mjölnir slip from his grasp. You are an impostor, and I will put you in the earth, where you belong.”

  It was a great speech. The draugr even followed it up with a roar, ready to reinflate. Except… well, the problem with battlefield speeches? If you’re talking, you aren’t fighting.