Battlestorm

by Susan Krinard

  “Her loyalties are divided. She has some affection for you, and for your son. I can easily do without her if she—”

  “But you cannot,” Dainn said. “You will fall without her at your side.”

  Odin strode up to him, seizing his wrist. “The oath you swore with Loki,” he said, Dainn’s blood running over his hand. “Why does it bleed?” He twisted Dainn’s arm. “What do you see?”

  Dainn bared his teeth, and the beast stirred under his skin. Odin jerked back, scraping his bloody hands across his pants. Struggling against his darker half, Dainn calmed his emotions and let the beast fade away.

  “I will ask Danny to release Sleipnir,” he said. “But I warn you. The Eitr can destroy as well as heal, and it will not be compelled. Take great care, Odin All-father.”

  “I suggest you follow your own advice, Faith-breaker.”

  Making a great deal of noise about it, Odin stomped out of the cell. Distantly, Dainn heard the All-father’s hoarse commands. He exhaled slowly.

  The door to the cell was open.

  The Alfar guards ignored him when he walked out, wrapping a scrap of one of his clean shirts around his hand. He made his way to the stable, his senses taking in everything around him, gathering information he might need when he went to warn Mist. The shadow of the Eitr nipped at his heels like a beast still hungry for his blood.

  Sleipnir laid his ears back and pawed the ground when Dainn opened the stall door. Danny was already on his feet. He seemed healthy and alert, bearing no mark of his trauma.

  “Danny,” Dainn said, his voice cracking.

  “Papa,” Danny said. There was wariness in the word, as if he already suspected why Dainn had come.

  And why should he not, when Dainn had tried to do it before?

  “I’m sorry, Danny,” Dainn said, crouching just out of range of Sleipnir’s hooves. “You have to let Sleipnir go.”

  Grabbing a handful of Sleipnir’s long mane, Danny shook his head. “No,” he said.

  Dainn looked up at the horse. “I know you understand me,” he said. “You have permitted Danny to aid you, at some cost to him. If you do not give yourself to Odin, you will only postpone what must be, and surrender the life of the one who protects you.”

  Nostrils flared wide and ears twitched forward and back. Sleipnir understood him well enough.

  “I beg you not to fight it,” Dainn said. “I beg you to save my son.”

  Sleipnir lowered his head, his muzzle nearly touching the ground. It was a gesture of agreement, of sorrow, of defeat.

  “No, Slippy!” Danny said.

  The horse dropped to his knees and rolled onto his side. Danny draped himself over Sleipnir’s barrel. Dainn felt a sense of release, as if a boat had come unmoored from a pier. Fresh blood soaked through his bandage and into his sleeve.

  “Danny,” he said, hiding his hand behind his back.

  With strange, almost jerky movements, Danny straightened. He lifted his head to meet Dainn’s eyes.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” he said. “You’ve given Odin everything, and left yourself with nothing.”

  “Loki,” Dainn said. He scrambled to his feet. “Where is my son?”

  “Here.” Loki reached behind his back and pulled Danny out from behind him. The two were identical in every possible way, but Danny was limp, as if lost in a deep sleep.

  Dainn considered for less than a second. “Can you take him with you, now?”

  Loki’s mocking expression was a travesty on Danny’s face. “You’ll give him back to me?”

  “To save him, yes.”

  “And hand me the victory.” He laughed. “I knew this would come, if I remained patient. You were never anything but transparent, my Dainn.”

  “Loki,” Odin’s voice rumbled from the doorway. “I did not believe you had the courage to come here without Hel’s skirts to shield you.”

  The All-father’s voice sounded strangely uninflected, almost mechanical. But Loki responded before Dainn could get between him and Odin.

  “You have no hope of killing me without Sleipnir,” Loki said, “Danny still protects him.”

  “No,” Dainn said, edging closer to the unnatural twins. “Sleipnir is yours, All-father. Laufeyson, take Danny and go.”

  “I never expected anything but treachery from you, Faith-breaker,” Odin said. He sketched Rune-staves in the air with callused fingers: Merkstaves, Wunjo reversed, joy turned to berserkr rage and frenzy. “Again, I curse you.”

  Dainn endured a moment of terror, and then the beast took him. His body expanded as if it would fill the entire room, heavy black pelt covering taut muscle, claws and teeth like daggers.

  The sacrifice. The fading, rational part of Dainn understood, then. The beast considered Danny a threat to his existence. Danny could stop him, control him, prevent him from becoming what he believed he was destined to be. He was the darkness seeking to smother the light.

  There was no room for both boy and beast in Dainn’s soul. Losing the last of his rationality, he sprang at Danny. At the last moment he turned and bore Loki to the ground, seizing the false child’s neck in his jaws and shaking until it snapped. Sleipnir screamed, rolling to his feet, and lashed out at the beast, kicking him hard in the side. The beast caught Loki’s foot and dragged the godling with him to the corner, half-whimpering, half-snarling as he stared up into the eyes of the All-father.

  But Odin made no move toward the beast and his slaughtered prey. His pale eye stared into the stall, where the horse whinnied over and over again like a weeping mother.

  Dainn’s consciousness flared inside the beast’s skin. He felt the Eitr eating its way through his misshapen body, the taint of poison that fed the evil within it.

  But the space between the beast’s paws was empty. No blood, no broken body. Loki was gone. A boy lay on the mat a dozen feet away, his small form sprawled and his lifeless arm stretched as if he were reaching for something he would never touch.

  Acting without thought, the beast leaped up and flung himself at Odin. He struck the wall hard where the All-father had stood an instant before and slid to the floor, the air knocked out of his lungs.

  When he opened his eyes, the beast had left him, and Danny …

  Crawling on hands and knees, Dainn found his way across the floor, unable to make a sound. He reached Danny and touched the still-warm body with a bloody hand.

  There was no other sign of injury on the boy, no broken bones, no torn flesh. Yet he was as dead as if the beast had torn him apart.

  I killed him.

  Dainn pressed his face to the mat, listening to the horse kicking at the wall until it began to crack. He clung to Danny’s ankle, struggling to find his voice. One blow from those iron hooves …

  He lifted his head. The little body didn’t move, but something remained within it, something very small. A mote of life Dainn could almost feel passing from Danny into himself.

  And then it was no more.

  Dainn pulled Danny into his arms, cradling his son and crooning words he didn’t understand. Sleipnir slumped against the wall, his legs buckling, and stretched his neck toward Danny.

  “He’s gone,” Dainn said, stroking Danny’s hair away from his forehead. “He’s gone.”

  Sleipnir wept.

  27

  Mist knew that Hel could outrun her. She knew that the goddess of death could simply disappear if she wished. Mist had already seen it happen.

  It was not so easy for the dead.

  At least a hundred loped ahead of her toward North Beach, abandoned by their mistress, given physical form and the prospect of a permanent extinction. Mist might have pitied them, knowing that many had probably been forced to obey, and that others, like Geir, were rebelling.

  But there was no way for her to separate the good from the evil, and she could only hope that Geir and his resistance had been able to do it for her.

  And hope that she could save the living who got in the way of her enemies.

&n
bsp; Running as swiftly and lightly as an elf, Mist had almost caught up with the stragglers when clawed fingers seized her heart, stopping its beat and robbing her of breath. She fell to her knees, overwhelming grief and denial drowning out the horror that lay just ahead of her.

  Someone had died. Someone close to her, close to her heart and yet beyond her reach.

  No. Light and smoke seemed to fill her skull, and she felt the burning elation of the Eitr, life-giving and lethal, stretching across the city from the allies’ camp. Dainn’s mind was crying out in that ancient tongue, and Danny …

  Neither dead nor alive, but poised somewhere in the middle, caught in the Eitr like a fly in amber. But Dainn grieved as if he believed that Danny was gone, his emotion carried to her along invisible currents that linked her mind and his.

  Go to him, her heart insisted. The Eitr insisted. But Mist pushed against the pavement with the palms of her hands, fighting the pressure to return to camp, filling her mind with images of the dying only she might save.

  Blinded by tears, Mist burst into a run. Hel’s minions were rushing past the corner of Kearny and Columbus Avenues, flowing like smoke over the pedestrians wandering amongst lounges, restaurants, and clubs that beckoned with colorful signs, fancy drinks, and late hours.

  Mist felt the fear before she heard the cries of shock and horror. Several people had already died by the time she reached Columbus, and there were dozens of unsuspecting mortals just ahead of the deadly wave. Hel floated behind her servants, observing without participating.

  There was no sign of law enforcement of any kind, but Mist knew that emergency personnel would have been slaughtered just as easily as the people they tried to protect. Well aware that she couldn’t get ahead of the dead in time to stop them, she envisioned the choppy waters of the bay half a mile to the west and found a song as unfamiliar as Dainn’s ancient language. She magically sought, gathered, and transported wood and metal from nearby piers, and constructed giant water tanks. She directed the tanks to fill themselves, and used the forge-magic to heat the water to a temperature above the boiling point. She pulled the tanks through the air and over the buildings to hover just above the section of the street the dead were about to reach.

  With careful precision, Mist opened the tanks and let the scalding water fall on the dead without touching the onlookers frozen on the sidewalk. Moans and muffled cries announced the annihilation of Hel’s minions, who disintegrated to ash before the mortals’ disbelieving eyes.

  The carnage sent most of the mortals running into the nearest open buildings they could find, but a few, curiosity outweighing sense, remained to record the scene with their cell phones. Without warning or explanation, the mobile devices turned black and disintegrated in their users’ hands. Some of the dead rushed onto the sidewalk to snatch up the would-be photographers, while others invaded the clubs, dragging the patrons nearest the door out into the street.

  Mist unsheathed Kettlingr. Six of the dead charged, and she cut them down, enhancing her sword-work with all the magic she had at her disposal: Galdr, Jotunn, and Eitr, Rune-staves forged into missiles flung by the invisible winds of the Void amid hails of ice and snow. Another nine or ten dead came at her from two sides, and she managed to take them down as well.

  But she quickly realized that the magic she had used to destroy the first wave had enervated her to the point that it was becoming more and more difficult to wield Kettlingr, especially when she was so keenly aware of the mortals who were very likely to die if she didn’t think of a more permanent solution.

  And still no police showed up, no ambulances. The hundreds of mortals cowering in the clubs and lounges must have called 911 by now, even if the people on the sidewalk hadn’t succeeded. For the first time, Mist wondered if Hel had created a kind of “dead zone” to keep anyone from entering or leaving the neighborhood. If she could do something like that, she was even more powerful than Mist had realized.

  Luckily for her, the dead seemed to have lost their momentum. Hel screeched at them, a sound so hideous that Mist almost dropped the sword to cover her ears. A dozen more of Hel’s hosts started forward, while those who had taken mortals from clubs and restaurants lined them up along the sidewalks like grotesque mannequins.

  The dead made no further attempts to kill, and after a time some of the unaffected mortals began to creep out of their hiding places to stare and take more photos. Their devices disintegrated as well. None of them dared to help the hostages, who seemed to be in a kind of trance, unable or unwilling to escape.

  Mist glanced at her watch. It would be dawn in less than an hour. The dead must lose some of their power during the day, and once Mist could call for reinforcements …

  “You have stood in my way too long,” Hel croaked, rising out of the asphalt near Mist’s boots. “Stand aside.”

  “Fat chance,” Mist said, meeting Hel’s penetrating stare.

  “You are alone, with no one to help you,” Hel said. “Though your trick with the water tanks was impressive, I can feel that you have weakened. Soon you will no longer be able to destroy even a few of my hosts without suffering injuries yourself.”

  “Let me worry about my own health, Fenrir’s Sister,” Mist said through her teeth. “The one thing I don’t get is why Loki sent you here. If it was a trap for my allies, it didn’t work. And these mortals aren’t fighters or anyone who can hurt him. If Loki wants to terrorize average citizens, why aren’t you letting people and calls go through so that this gets out to the whole city?”

  “I am not subject to Loki’s every whim.”

  “You mean he didn’t order this strike, and you just wanted to come out and play?”

  “Perhaps I merely wish to swell my ranks.”

  “You’ve presumably got millions already at your command. I wonder if you’re really just showing Loki that you have a mind and will of your own?”

  Sweeping her robes around her legs, Hel hovered in a tight circle like an angry wasp. “Do not presume to know me, Valkyrie,” she hissed. “But perhaps we can reach an agreement. I take a few dozen mortals to join my host, and then I will leave the survivors in peace.”

  “Until tomorrow, you mean?” Mist tipped Kettlingr toward Hel’s semitransparent neck. “I don’t think so.”

  “But I can never be destroyed, and I cannot return to my realm, since it no longer exists.” She spread her hands. “A place must be made for me in Midgard, or I will go on wreaking havoc on your innocent mortals.”

  “So this is about you. Loki won’t be happy if you go on rampages without his permission.”

  “Must my father be happy?” She smiled. “Must yours?” She glanced to the east. “Night wanes. But I was never confined to darkness, whatever Midgardian legends may claim.” She lifted her arms with a terrible ululation and opened her robes. More dead rose around her, emerging from beneath her gown, tumbling over each other in their haste to reach the watching mortals. A miasma of rot and putrefaction came with them. Mist found her own arms almost too heavy to lift, her strength rapidly waning as if she were soon to be among the dead herself.

  She closed her eyes, remembering her own darkness—not only Freya’s legacy, the desire to rule at any cost, but the power to destroy that had always lain within her since she had first used the ancient magic.

  All she had to do was accept it, and she might still save the mortals facing a most horrible death. I can destroy Hel, she thought. Suddenly the answer was clear, and red mist swirled behind her eyes, the blood of the Eitr pulsing hot and hungry. I can only kill evil with evil.

  But her body resisted her mind’s commands. It began to tremble, and her hand went numb on Kettlingr’s hilt. Hel’s dark cloak flared wide like a cobra’s hood. A great moaning rose up over the neighborhood, and the sky overhead turned black.

  But as dawn broke over the hills across the bay, forging a narrow path through the clouds, it brought with it a powerful man on a white, eight-legged steed, wielding a spear that sang as he raised i
t to strike. Behind him ran six Valkyrie—Rota and Hild, Hrist, Regin, Olrun, and Skuld, the latter four carrying Treasures: Bragi’s Harp, Freyr’s Sword, the Chain Gleipnir, and the two halves of Thor’s Staff, Gridarvoll.

  And behind them came tall men, warriors in dark leather, bearing axes and swords only the strongest of mortals could wield. The true Einherjar, Odin’s resurrected warriors … his hidden army, set loose at last.

  Odin swept past Mist, unseeing, and cast his spear at Hel. It struck her in the chest, and she shrieked, her body seeming to collapse in on itself like the Wicked Witch of the West beneath her black robes. Clouds boiled and simmered overhead, smothering the weak rays of the rising sun.

  The other Valkyrie caught Mist up among them, and she raised her sword, fresh energy pouring into her arms and legs, the reckless, mindless heat of war filling her veins with fire. She cut down the dead in their dozens, cleaving and hacking and chopping at half-living flesh until there was nothing left of her opponents to stand and fight. There were screams amid the shouts of battle, but to Mist they were music, like the sounding of trumpets, like the Gjallarhorn itself.

  And now, now the darkness came. The shadow-side of the Eitr rolled before her like a hard wind before a storm. She called up Rune-staves of the forge and twisted them, reversed them, cast Merkstaves that reduced the dead to ash. She dropped Kettlingr and pushed her way through bodies of the once-living, laughing as they crumbled in her wake. Only as she reached the last line of Hel’s warriors did she feel the joyful fury begin to subside. There was no hope for them; the Einherjar were already among them. Though many had fallen to “permanent” death at the hands of the dead, they continued to fight with reckless courage, their blows severing gaunt heads from half-wasted bodies.

  Mist paused to catch her breath and grinned at Rota and Hild, who had stopped to stand beside her. Rota’s red hair was loose around her face, and Hild was smudged with ash and blood.

  A single, pitiful beam of sunlight brushed Mist’s eyelids. She blinked to clear her eyes, and the darkness was gone.