Hammer of the Gods

by Timothy Zahn

  The Ghoul Brothers had long since lost the capacity for speech. Just the same, Moebius had the distinct impression that both of them were trying their best to swear a blue streak. The second ghoul had his Tommy gun out now and was pointing it at the broken window, clearly trying to decide whether or not it was worth wasting a few rounds firing at an unseen target that was probably already out of his line of fire. The first ghoul, ignoring the wrist stump where his hand had once been, had dropped his knife and was trying to haul out a pistol stuck in his trouser waistband.

  And with Moebius temporarily forgotten, it was the perfect moment to slip around behind them, nick the laptop off the desk, and make his own escape back through the door.

  Basil was crouched beside the Jag when Moebius arrived. “What kept you?” he growled as they both climbed in.

  “This,” Moebius said, tossing the laptop behind Basil’s seat as he revved the engine and pealed away from the curb. “Good job with the journal.”

  “Yeah,” Basil muttered.

  Moebius threw him a quick frown. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Basil said. “We need to find someplace where we can take a look at this.” He tapped the journal.

  “Right-o,” Moebius said. Whatever was bugging his partner, this was again not the time to ask about it. “I’ve got just the place.”

  *

  The all-night café was, Basil decided, exactly the sort of place Moebius would know about. The menu listed eight types of cheese, twelve types of wine, and there wasn’t a decent chops and sauce or beans on toast anywhere to be seen.

  But it was quiet, sparsely occupied, and had a good view of the windows and exits. And the beer was at least decent.

  The journal was thick and over two-thirds filled, and if Crenshaw’s handwriting wasn’t the worst Basil had ever seen it was easily in the top ten. Luckily, long experience had taught him to ignore the stuff at the front and work back from the end.

  Especially when the writer had ended up dead with a bullet to the brain.

  Unfortunately, everyone else knew that trick, too.

  “Bugger,” he muttered.

  “What is it?” Moebius asked, looking up from the laptop.

  “Here,” Basil said, swiveling the journal around and tapping the stubs of the torn-out pages with the tip of his finger. “Four bloody pages missing.”

  “Any hints from the rest about what might have been on them?”

  “Nothing important,” Basil growled. “Only probably the location of the bloody Hammer. He talks about an archeological dig—some cave system with burial chambers and whatnot, looks like. He mentions it’s an hour’s drive to the south. But an hour from where there isn’t a bloody clue.”

  “That wouldn’t take four pages to spell out,” Moebius said. “Unless perhaps the dig is near Berkåk. Then the directions might be that complicated.”

  “Near where?”

  “Berkåk , Norway,” Moebius said. “Which is, as advertised, just about an hour south of Trondheim. Must be other vital information on the rest of the pages. Offhand, I’d guess it includes the Hammer’s exact location in those caves you mentioned.”

  “And you know all this how?” Basil asked.

  “Because it seems your old friend Albert Crenshaw used his uncle’s computer to buy an airline ticket to Trondheim a couple of days ago.” Moebius tapped the side of the laptop. “Luckily for him, he left yesterday afternoon, before the Ghoul Brothers showed up.”

  A shiver ran up Basil’s back. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Lucky.”

  “So you up for a trip to Trondheim?” Moebius asked. “Albert’s got a good head start on us, but given that Mjölnir’s managed to stay hidden all these years there’s a fair chance he hasn’t found it yet.”

  “What the hell’s a Mjölnir?”

  “Oh, come now,” Moebius chided. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Norse god Thor and his famous hammer Mjölnir? You must at least have seen the movies.”

  “Sure—the big ugly thing that spits out lightning.” Basil winced as, purely coincidentally, a particularly loud peal of thunder shook the café. “Just never knew it had a first name, that’s all. You think that’s what this is all about?”

  “Trust me—I’ve had the full classical Oxford education,” Moebius assured him wryly. “And believe me when I say it’s the ideal course of study for a young man about to enter the great and vibrant Britain of the 1870s. If there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that Mjölnir’s about it as far as famous hammers in world culture are concerned.”

  “Especially if you only count the ones that might have gotten lost in Norway?”

  “Especially then,” Moebius said, nodding. “And it makes sense—the Collector does seem partial to things that go boom in the night.” Another thunderclap rolled by overhead. “Sorry,” Moebius added, looking up toward the ceiling. “Figure of speech.”

  Basil lowered his gaze to the journal. “What about the Ghoul Brothers?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Moebius assured him. “They’re not exactly equipped to wend an inconspicuous path through modern airport security. They’ll have to go the ferry boat and grand theft auto route.” He busied himself with the computer a moment. “Best estimates put Berkåk a minimum of twenty-five hours from here via that approach. Whereas we can be there by one o’clock tomorrow afternoon if we grab an early flight.”

  “Don’t suppose we’ve got much choice, do we?” Basil growled.

  “Not unless you’ve got a really good excuse we can give the Collector,” Moebius said, frowning across the table. “And I don’t think a note from your mum will do it. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” Basil said. This wasn’t the time to tell Moebius the circumstances of his falling-out with Albert Crenshaw. Or why he’d sworn to never speak to the man again. “What’s the weather like in Trondheim, anyway?”

  Moebius pursed his lips. “Forecast says there’s snow on the way.” He lifted his hands helplessly. “Sorry. But we did only ask for someplace with no rain.”

  *

  It wasn’t actually snowing when they landed in Trondheim. There was plenty of snow on the ground, though, and the air was bloody cold.

  Next time the Collector got one of these burrs up his butt, Basil groused as he turned their rental car south, it had bloody well better be for some artifact lost in the sands of Bermuda.

  He was maneuvering along a narrow, slightly slippery road and daydreaming about cream of Bermuda onion soup when Moebius announced that they had arrived.

  Basil frowned as he pulled the car onto the shoulder. All he could see were steep hills dotted with cabins and small houses, with more distant mountains rising behind them.

  And snow, of course. Lots and lots of snow. “Where is here?” he demanded.

  “The dig,” Moebius said, pointing out the windscreen. “It’s about half a mile away, just around that next bend.”

  “So why have we stopped?”

  “Because no one has passed us, the dig is operating full hammer and tongs, and there hasn’t been a turn-off for at least the past two miles. Ergo, if Crenshaw the Younger hasn’t yet snatched the Hammer, it follows that he’s lurking around here somewhere waiting for his chance.”

  “Okay,” Basil said. The lack of opposite traffic and other roads he had spotted. The rest of it— “What makes you think the dig is operating?”

  “Because they’re running a streaming website, which I checked out while you were picking up the rental,” Moebius said. “There’s a big snowstorm supposedly moving in tomorrow night, but the professors running the show say they’re planning to work the caves until they have to pull back to Trondheim.” He considered. “More realistically, they’ll be working their graduate students until then. Professors the world over are all alike.”

  “So you think he’s up there somewhere?” Basil asked, nodding toward the cabins scattered across the hillsides above them.

  “That’s where I’d be,” Moebius sa
id, digging through the bags on the seat behind them and pulling out his binoculars. “Question is, which one?”

  There was a minute of silence as he carefully and methodically swept the hillsides. “Well?” Basil asked, trying to be patient. Moebius might have all the fancy schooling, but there were some things you needed to leave to a proper SAS man.

  “No idea,” Moebius admitted. “So…”

  “You looking for smoke?” The least he could do was give the bloke a hint.

  “That was the idea, yes,” Moebius said. “I figure a lot of them are holiday homes or something—only about a quarter of the chimneys are showing anything. But these things aren’t powerful enough to see through the windows at this distance.”

  “Give ‘em here,” Basil said, holding out his hand. He’d offered Moebius a sporting chance. Time to show how this was done. “Come on, come on—I’m freezing.”

  Silently, Moebius handed over the binoculars. Fifteen seconds later, Basil had it. “There,” he said, pointing to a cabin about three-quarters of the way up a particularly steep hill. “That’s the one.”

  “That one?” Moebius asked. “It’s not even running a fire. He’ll freeze to death in there.”

  “’Course it’s running a fire,” Basil said. “It’s just not showing any smoke.”

  “All riiight,” Moebius said slowly. “Smokeless trees are a staple of Norwegian flora, then?”

  “It’s a trick we came up with in Nepal,” Basil said, grimacing. The origin of the stunt was lost in the mists of his memory, but it was entirely possible that it had been Crenshaw himself who came up with it. “You’re set up somewhere cold and you don’t want a bloody big plume of smoke pointing straight at you. So you light a small fire, but you make sure the flue is closed and instead you open the tops of a couple of windows. Preferably ones that aren’t facing the blokes who want to shoot at you.”

  “And instead of the smoke blowing out the chimney, it just sort of dribbles out in a couple of diffuse streams,” Moebius said, nodding understanding. “Leaves a bit of smoke damage behind, though, doesn’t it?”

  Basil shrugged. “Usually the previous owner wasn’t going to be using the place again.”

  “Ah,” Moebius said. “May I?”

  He held out his hand, and Basil gave him back the binoculars. Moebius put them to his eyes and peered out the wind screen another moment before lowering them again. “Looks like our best approach will be from above,” he said, pointing. “There’s a road of some sort at the top of the hill—I can see a couple of the edge marker posts. We find our way up there, park the car, and head straight down to the back door.”

  “If there is a back door,” Basil warned, squinting up at the slope. “Looks pretty steep. You have enough line in that fancy belt-buckle grappling hook of yours? Or are we going to have to find a mountaineering shop around here somewhere and buy some rope?”

  “No, I’ve got enough,” Moebius assured him. “Not much cover up there, though, if he sees us coming.”

  “Nope,” Basil agreed. “If you’re worried, you can stay up top and belay the line for me.”

  “Thanks, but I’d worry about you getting lost on the way,” Moebius said dryly. “Besides, if you figure out how to get Mjölnir to throw lightning, I definitely want to be there to see it.”

  *

  The road up to the back side of the hill wasn’t easy to find. But after a couple of false starts, and some under-the-breath muttering from Basil that sounded like a not-entirely-unwarranted criticism of the Norwegian government’s map-making skills, they were there.

  The slope down to the cabin was every bit as steep as it had looked from below, if not more so. It was also a foot deep in snow, and Moebius winced every time some of the crystalized water found its way over the top of the ill-fitting hiking boots he’d borrowed from Basil and trickled a chill down his socks. Next time, he promised himself sourly, he would skip the no-rain wish and go straight for zero precipitation.

  Still, annoying though the snow might be, it did an admirable job of muffling the sounds of climbing. As long as Crenshaw kept to the far side of the cabin where he could watch the distant archeologists, they should be all right.

  Especially since the cabin did indeed have a back door, nestled in between a pair of racks filled with firewood. On the far sides of both racks, Moebius noted, were windows that had been lowered about two inches with wispy trails of smoke coming from them. Basil had called it perfectly.

  He reached the door and crouched down, waiting for Basil to take up a similar position on the opposite side. Then, carefully, he tried the knob.

  Most people living in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t bother locking a door that led to nothing except their fuel supply. But Crenshaw was apparently not most people. The middle-of-nowhere door was indeed locked.

  Which postponed the inevitable only by as many seconds as it took to pick the lock. Which, in Moebius’s case, turned out to be precisely thirty-three of them. Putting his picks away, he drew his Sig and lifted it toward Basil in silent question. The other nodded, straightened up, and eased the door open.

  And froze. Moebius, in the process of starting to straighten up and follow him, also froze.

  Because, really, that was the only proper and socially accepted response when one was suddenly facing a pair of big Browning Hi-Power 9mm handguns three paces away.

  “Easy,” Moebius soothed, lifting his hands and the Sig to point at the sky. “We’re not here to make trouble. We’re—”

  He broke off, belatedly realizing that the thin-faced man standing behind the guns wasn’t looking at him or his gun. The bloodshot eyes were instead focused like twin laser sights on Basil.

  “Are you alive?” he demanded.

  Moebius frowned. What kind of question was that? “My name is Moebius—”

  “Are you alive?” the man repeated, his tone harsher this time. “Answer me, damn it.”

  “Yeah, I’m alive, Crenshaw,” Basil said, his own voice under careful control but about as dark as Moebius had ever heard it. “You thinking about changing that?”

  For a long moment, Crenshaw just stood there. Then, the hands holding the Brownings sagged, as if the weight of the guns had suddenly become too much for him, and he lowered his arms to his sides.

  And with the distraction of imminent death gone, Moebius was able to get his first clear look at the man.

  He wasn’t the sort Moebius would ever have pegged as former SAS. Far from it. The gauntness he’d already noted in Albert Crenshaw’s face extended downward, apparently infecting his entire body with wasted-thinness disease. His clothing seemed to hang limply across his shoulders and arms, as if it had been poured onto someone a couple sizes too small for it. His face wasn’t just thin, either, but thin with a pinched, haunted look about it.

  “I wouldn’t have shot you,” Crenshaw said. He looked down at the Brownings, then turned and laid them gently on a small table near the door. “I’ll never shoot anyone again. So you’re real. You’re really real.”

  “Yeah, we’re real,” Basil said. He strode forward, giving Crenshaw barely enough time to get out of the way as he stalked into the cabin. “You seeing ghosts now, are you?”

  Crenshaw let out a shuddering sigh. “Yes.”

  Basil paused in mid stride, turning to frown at him. “What?”

  “You thought you were joking, didn’t you?” Crenshaw said tiredly. “Well, you weren’t. You looking for the Hammer?”

  Basil regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Yeah. What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing, really,” Crenshaw said. “Just a word of advice: don’t. If you value your life and your sanity, just don’t.”

  “Afraid that’s not an option,” Moebius said, deciding not to wait any longer for a formal invitation and stepping through the doorway. The air inside the cabin was eye-wateringly smoky; and while it wasn’t exactly hot, it was a far and welcome cry from the walk-in butcher’s freezer compartment that this part of ou
tdoors Norway had become. “I hope you’re not thinking you can scare off the competition that easily.”

  Crenshaw barked a laugh. “Is that what you think? That I’m here to steal the Hammer?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly high tourist season out there,” Moebius pointed out. “Unless you rented this place with an eye toward smoking whole sides of elk—”

  “You’re an idiot,” Crenshaw bit out. “You’re both idiots,” he added turning back to Basil. “Anyway, the Hammer’s not in the dig. Uncle Robert found it three months ago.”

  Moebius looked at Basil. The other was looking back at him, a chagrinned look on his face. If they’d come all the bloody way from London when the Hammer had been in the Professor’s study the whole time…

  “Then what are you doing here?” Basil demanded.

  “What do you think?” The brief flicker of fire was gone, leaving nothing but a broken voice coming out of the broken face and body. “I’m here to put it back.”

  Moebius’s first reflexive thought was relief. If Crenshaw was here to return the Hammer to the dig, then it was indeed here, and he and Basil hadn’t wasted a trip.

  Only then did the actual meaning of Crenshaw’s words penetrate. “You want to put it back?”

  “I have its location,” Crenshaw said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of rough-edged pages, the same size and color as the ones that had been torn out of the Professor’s journal. “And the route he took, and everything. I can put it back exactly where he found it. I just need the snowstorm to send everyone home so I can get in without anyone seeing me and asking questions.” He gazed a moment at the pages, then slipped them away again. “And I pray that’ll be the end.”

  Again, Moebius and Basil exchanged looks. Basil was still glowering at Crenshaw, but the simmering anger in his face had taken on a tinge of puzzlement. “The end of what?” Moebius asked. “The end of the Hammer?”

  “The end of the curse.” Crenshaw waved a hand vaguely through the air in front of him. “The end of them.”

  “Them who?” Basil asked.