Sword of Secrets

by S. M. Schmitz

  “What now, Gavyn?” Frey sighed.

  Everyone else in the room groaned.

  “They didn’t make me read any Sumerian mythology on the way over here. Just Norse. I have no clue who you’re talking about.”

  Frey waited for more then narrowed his eyes at me. “Is that it? That’s… actually not a stupid question.”

  I shrugged. I was sure I could have added some extra shit on, but I needed more to work with first.

  Frey pointed to the screen again. “The gods who were on the internationally televised threat were Ninurta, who is a god of war, Nergal, the god of death and pestilence, and Zababa, another war god who was known for being particularly brutal. Inanna was the only goddess with them, and she is also a Sumerian war goddess.”

  “Geez,” I muttered, “kinda violent, aren’t they?”

  Frey lifted a shoulder. “They didn’t used to be any worse than the rest of us. When people stopped believing in our pantheons, some of us were content with the solitude like the Greeks. Some of us found vindication in the popularity our stories enjoyed in different cultures. Can you think of any time anyone’s celebrated a Sumerian god?”

  I couldn’t even remember the four names he’d just told me. But Hunter was deep in thought and he sat up straighter, excited and animated. “Got it!” he exclaimed. His promise of silence for a thousand bucks had lasted less than two minutes. “Ghostbusters!”

  For once, I had no idea what he was talking about and I wasn’t the only one. “Hunter,” I reminded him, “they’re supposed to be gods. Not ghosts.”

  I hadn’t actually seen that movie though.

  “Yeah, and Gozer was supposedly a Sumerian god,” Hunter pointed out.

  “Who?” Frey asked.

  Apparently, he’d never seen that movie either.

  We spent ten minutes listening to Hunter recount the entire first Ghostbusters movie, and in the end, all it made me want to do was go looking through Reykjavik for a bag of marshmallows. Tyr leaned onto his massive elbows to look around Keira and me so he could see Hunter. “Pretty sure that’s not a real god.”

  “Oh, come on,” Hunter complained. “None of them are real gods.”

  Keira looked at Frey beseechingly. “Don’t ask anymore questions. Please.”

  Frey nodded and resumed play on the video we were supposed to be watching. There was no ziggurat in this one, but the same four people were sitting around what looked to be a very modern conference room just like the one we were in. They weren’t speaking English either, but it sounded an awful lot like the language Keira and Tyr seemed to prefer. Tyr scooted his chair closer to me so he could translate.

  “This didn’t exactly come out of the blue, Gavyn. We’ve known they’ve been pissed off about being forgotten for a long time, but we never thought they’d do anything so reckless. Gods going to war with each other is always prophesied to have catastrophic results for everyone—gods and humans alike. And we’ve warned them in the past that if they tried to resurface, if they became violent, we’d retaliate. That’s why they started out by demanding all of the heroes submit to them. We’d be screwed if they somehow got all of their heroes back and ours.”

  I looked away from the television long enough to see just how serious Tyr was. Even though I didn’t believe him, the Sumerians must have been crazier than the guys holding me hostage now. “What the hell made them think I was just going to jump on a plane and head to Iraq? I don’t even want to be here.”

  Tyr shrugged a giant shoulder at me. “They haven’t done anything yet to hurt innocent people. When they do, all of you will feel compelled to do something. Perhaps you wouldn’t have gone to Iraq to offer yourself to them, but if they had a building full of hostages and offered to let them live in exchange for your service, you would do it.”

  I snickered and shook my head. “We have less than twenty-four hours before that original deadline passes, and the only thing I was planning on doing was working a double shift then hoping to convince Heather to come home with me.”

  Tyr looked me over again and sighed. “You heroes. You always get all the women you want.”

  “Tyr,” Keira hissed, “not important.”

  But I couldn’t just let Keira shut me up like that. “Yeah, and we don’t even have to use deception. I read your book. Odin’s still an asshole.”

  Frey gave up and sat across from me at the conference table and the quiet murmuring conversations in the room all stopped. Everyone stared at me again, and this time, I squirmed a little as all of those eyes bored into me. I looked at the supposed hero sitting next to Hunter. “Did they make you read their myths? I’m right, you know.”

  He shook his head at me and muttered something that didn’t sound Norwegian. German, maybe? Finnish? Hell, I didn’t even care.

  Frey took a deep breath and folded his hands in front of him, his green-blue eyes studying me. “Okay, Gavyn. Everybody here has a story except for you. I guess your… reticence is understandable. Maybe Tyr and Gunnr should just take you back to the hotel and we can meet separately later.”

  Finally, an idea I could get behind. On one condition. “Still an open bar for Hunter and me?”

  Frey sighed and shook his head again. “Not tonight. You need to be sober. We’ve been trying to explain why, but maybe Tyr will have better luck on his own.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I mumbled. That had been the best part of this whole abduction, although even Hunter would agree this was going to make one hell of a story one day. Assuming we ever got back home. “Fine,” I hissed. “But I’m taking some of these sandwiches.”

  Frey pushed the entire tray over to me and Tyr covered his mouth again so no one would see him laughing at me. And I actually felt kinda bad about laying the guy out earlier, but for some weird reason, that had only seemed to impress him, so I didn’t feel too bad. Keira grabbed the tray and was the first to get up from the table. We followed her to the elevators where Tyr finally let out the laugh he’d been holding in for the entire meeting. It was one of those deep laughs that seemed to come from his entire body and it was so infectious, I found myself smiling, too. Only Keira kept scowling.

  “That was so humiliating,” she muttered. She punched the down button on the elevator again and I felt the need to inform her that wouldn’t make the elevator arrive any faster. She pushed the tray of sandwiches at me so she could flip me off.

  Tyr patted my back and kept laughing. “I like you, Gavyn. We’re going to have to make sure you know how to fight so you don’t get killed in your first battle though. That would be a damn shame.”

  And the elevator chose that moment to ding and as its doors opened, Keira pushed me inside so we could be hauled back to a hotel and lectured about my mysterious role in stopping some lunatics from destroying the world.

  That night, Tyr sat alone with me in our hotel room, correctly assuming I’d be a little less of a pain in the ass without an audience or Keira around. He somehow managed to sneak in a six-pack of beer without our guardian, the Valkyrie, noticing, and as we sat at the table with my tray of sandwiches and the beer in front of us, he went through Frey’s presentation that I’d repeatedly interrupted. Not that I felt bad about it. I mean, I’d been kidnapped and all.

  Tyr chose another suspicious looking sandwich from the tray, and I swear, he finished half of it in one bite. He used his prosthetic hand to point to the papers in front of me. “The Sumerians have been warning us for years that they weren’t content to fade into oblivion. What else could we do except threaten to fight back if they did something like this?”

  I decided to humor the guy and play along since it was getting late and I was tired. “Like what? What exactly are they threatening?”

  Tyr finished the sandwich with another bite and shrugged a shoulder at me. “They’re gods of war. What do you think they’re threatening?”

  I rifled through the papers in front of me—copies of emails and letters and transcripts of conversations—and it all seemed pretty
vague to me. “But where? How? Come on, Tyr, half the world is always at war with someone. Why would you be so concerned about them starting one more conflict?”

  Tyr shook that giant head of his at me. “I guess wars have gotten a lot more dangerous and lethal over the years, but it’s still nothing compared to what could happen if war gods stop caring about the consequences. Ragnarok is a prophecy, much like the Christian concept of Armageddon, and in all of these apocalyptic prophecies, we’re talking about the end of the world. In our prophecy, some survive. Not many, but a few do and eventually rebuild the world.”

  “And what about the Sumerians? What happens in their version of the apocalypse?” I finished off my second beer and eyed the remaining bottles in the ice bucket in front of me. But for once, I decided to act like the mature adult I was supposed to be and left the beer alone.

  “The Assyrians talked about the last days of the Earth, but the Mesopotamians don’t have a similar tale like Ragnarok.”

  I grunted my disapproval about throwing more names out I didn’t recognize. “I thought we were talking about the Sumerians,” I complained, and I immediately regretted complaining about it because I got a history lecture thrown in, too.

  “All of the ancient Mesopotamian cultures borrowed heavily from each other. Kind of like Woden is the same god as Odin. Just depends on where a person lived, but they’re all similar legends. Assyria developed north of Sumer, but their religions were closely linked.”

  “So, they’re pissed off because they’ve been forgotten and they want the world to pay attention to them by starting a war that could end the world? What the hell kind of logic is that?” As soon as Tyr was done with this informational session, I was finishing off those beers.

  I noticed Tyr was eyeing the bottles in the ice bucket, too, and I wondered if I had it in me to lay him out again if he tried to beat me to them. “Easiest way to get people to worship them again is to get people to fear them. That’s what they’re planning. I doubt they’ll start the war in Iraq though. I’m kinda surprised they were willing to blow up one of their own ziggurats.”

  I was still surprised I even knew what a ziggurat was. “Do they have a god of architecture that can just rebuild it?” I was back to being the village idiot, a role I was much more comfortable in.

  Tyr chuckled and grabbed another sandwich from the tray. I wrinkled my nose at whatever was dripping off the sides. “What is that?”

  Tyr studied the sandwich. “Lamb. I think.”

  It didn’t stop him from eating the whole thing in two bites.

  “Thing is,” Tyr continued, “we gods aren’t nearly as good at fighting in battles as you’d think. Ever notice how often in these stories gods just hang around and help out their favorite heroes? Like in The Iliad.”

  I groaned because he was back to expecting me to remember shit I should have learned in college. Didn’t he understand I hardly even remembered my first two years of college? “I’m not reading The Iliad, Tyr.”

  He’d finished his sandwich so he wiped the crumbs from his hand and waved me off. “Don’t need to. The Greeks aren’t our problem. But the story is about three goddesses who start a war that ends up being fought between humans and then the gods and goddesses take sides, but they can’t really determine the outcome of the war.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him because I had a vague memory of watching some movie about this. “Hercules in that one?”

  Tyr sighed and sat back in his chair. “Achilles.”

  “Ah, the guy who could only be killed by shooting him in his heel. And you think I’m stupid. I at least would have had the sense to turn the damn baby around and dunk him in the river again to make sure all of him was invincible.”

  Tyr yawned and nodded. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a magic river to make any part of you invincible, so get some sleep, Gavyn. We’re going to start training tomorrow.”

  Tyr lifted his large frame from the chair at the table and lumbered off to the bathroom and I reached for the beer in the ice bucket, already trying to figure out how to thwart their efforts to train me to do anything except figure out how to get my best friend and me home.

  Havard Buys Two Maids with a Ring

  (Because that’s apparently legal in Asgard.)

  We had to ride through most of the following day to return to Asgard so it was night once again by the time we reached my palace. I dismounted in front of the stables and a stable boy ran out to take the reins from me while I helped Arnbjorg down. One of my servants greeted me at my palace door and tried to hide his surprise that I hadn’t returned alone.

  “Send a messenger to Freyja and ask her if she can spare a couple of lady’s maids for Arnbjorg,” I told him.

  He nodded and went to find somebody to send my message. “I’m sorry there’s no one here to help you right now,” I told her.

  Her dark blue eyes betrayed her confusion. “With what?”

  “You’ll want to clean up before we eat,” I told her.

  Arnbjorg raised an eyebrow at me and unfastened her cloak. “I’m nineteen years old. I can clean myself.”

  I took her cloak from her, but I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t know how peasants lived. Instead, I led her silently through the halls until we reached a washroom and glanced at her apologetically again. But Arnbjorg looked inside the room and gasped. “Our entire house could fit in here.”

  I hadn’t thought her house was that small at the time, but looking around my palace now, she probably wasn’t exaggerating by much. I stared at my boots because I was too embarrassed to meet her eyes again. I had no idea why this girl made me feel this way. Was I ashamed that I hadn’t grown up in poverty while she had?

  “Do you know your way back to the dining hall?” I asked her, keeping my eyes on my boots.

  “I can find it,” she assured me.

  I returned to the dining hall and made sure the fire was stoked so it would be warm enough for her and asked for two cups of ale to be brought to the table. The same servant who had opened my door for me returned with two glass goblets and set them on the table near the fire. I had known Geirr my whole life. He wanted to ask about her but was waiting to see if I would volunteer the information first. I told him to get our supper instead.

  Arnbjorg entered the dining hall and I backed away from the fire so she could sit closer to it. She thanked me as she sat down and Geirr returned with two bowls of soup. Unlike the soup her mother had been making, there was meat in this broth, not just barley.

  We hadn’t eaten since midday and I was starving but now that she was here, now that Arnbjorg was in Asgard with me, I had to know the truth about her father. And part of me suspected I would regret asking her, but I asked anyway.

  She put the piece of bread down she’d been about to drag through her soup and fixed those deep blue eyes on me. I had to look away again. I pretended to study my own bowl. “Your horse was loose. It got into Father’s field and was trampling the barley, so he tried to run it off, but it became aggressive. My brothers hurried over to help him, but all three of them couldn’t get your horse out of our field, and the more agitated it became, the more of our crops were trampled and destroyed. And then your horse got angry and knocked my younger brother over and was going to trample him, so my father had to defend his son. He hit your stallion with the only thing he had on him. He didn’t mean to kill it, and he certainly didn’t know it was your horse, but what could he have done?”

  “But he shouldn’t have been loose,” I protested, because that was obviously the most important part of her story to respond to. But it was the only part I knew anything about: I had loaned him, reluctantly, to my half-brother and he was the one who told me this peasant had tried to steal him and mount him then killed him with his scythe when Magni had refused to be ridden.

  Arnbjorg shrugged. “I don’t know how it happened. We never saw any rider. No one ever came for it.”

  I exhaled slowly and finished the ale in front of me and a
sked Geirr to bring me more. The only brother I had that I fully trusted was my real brother, my mother’s son, and I would get him to help me deal with the lies of our half-brother tomorrow.

  But if Arnbjorg was telling me the truth, and I had no reason not to believe her, then I had taken her as a ransom that should have never been paid. But I couldn’t imagine bringing her back to her father’s house now. I was already quite sure I was falling in love with her.

  Perhaps Arnbjorg sensed my unease because she smiled at me and was about to speak to me when Geirr announced the messenger had returned, and he hadn’t come alone. I hardly thought our supper needed to be interrupted for that news: after all, I’d sent him to get lady’s maids to take care of Arnbjorg. But Geirr shook his head. “No, my lord, I mean they’ve come with their goddess.”

  I groaned and stood up from the table. After the excruciatingly long three days I’d just had, the last thing I wanted to deal with was Freyja. But I didn’t even have a chance to ask Geirr to convince her to come back in the morning. I heard the metallic clinking of her bracelets as she bounded into the dining hall and I turned to face her, trying to force myself to smile at her and greet her warmly since I had just asked a favor of her, but if she was here, then she wanted something in return.

  She smiled at me then her smile immediately vanished as Arnbjorg stood up from the table and bowed for her.

  “What is that?” Freyja asked.

  I looked over my shoulder, half expecting to see some dwarf or something that had magically materialized in my dining hall.

  “What is what?”

  “This is why you wanted to borrow my lady’s maids?” Freyja’s nose wrinkled in disgust, and I wanted to throw her out of my palace. But she was the nearest goddess and I didn’t want to send the messenger back out looking for someone more reasonable and less offensive. This was Asgard, after all. That could take him all night.

  “She is my guest, Freyja, and you’re insulting her.” I hoped the tone in my voice made it clear I wouldn’t let her do it again.