The tree was young by comparison, though still hundreds of years old, and its roots had grown down and twined into the ribcage of the giant. It was not the only one, either. So when Thrym stood, dirt showered down around him but three trees remained, jutting like killing arrows from his skeletal chest, roots wound up in the bones, so bleached and gray that it was almost impossible to know what was bone and what was wood.
Hellboy hung inside the branches of one of those trees and did his best not to fall. Beneath him he saw Abe and Pernilla at the edges of the enormous hole that had been Thrym’s grave. Abe had his pistol out, Pernilla behind him. The Nidavellim and Svartalves who had survived kept up their melee.
And thirty feet from Abe, old, white-haired Edmund Aickman held the Tankard of Thrym up in both hands and giggled like a child.
“Abe!” Hellboy roared. “Get the Tankard!”
Which was when the skeleton began to laugh and reach its bony fingers to the tree upon his chest, trying to pluck Hellboy loose.
“Abe, please!” Pernilla cried. “You have to save my father. Get him out of here!”
The pistol felt heavy in Abes hand. He felt a little ridiculous trying to protect Pernilla with all the nasties around. There were so many of them, and Thrym… they did not even understand yet how the bones had been revived, how to reverse the process. This was all in Hellboy’s hands now. If he couldn’t destroy the skeleton, they were in big trouble.
The Svartalves were vicious, and he had shot two of them already. One of the few things the Bureau insisted upon doing with agents, even unusual ones such as himself, was teaching them how to properly care for and fire a sidearm. He had had many occasions, over the years, to be glad of that. This was one of them.
Get the Tankard! Hellboy had shouted. As if it were that simple. But he had to try.
“Come on,” he told Pernilla.
The wind had grown colder still, and frost seemed to drift like snow down around the clearing. Abe realized it was flaking off the bones, chips of ice whipping on the breeze.
“How can this kind of power be left in his remains?” Pernilla asked, shouting over the hiss of the giant and the screams of battle from the darkling creatures.
“Don’t know,” Abe replied. The gun was in his right hand and with his left he pulled her into a run. They skirted the edges of the enormous grave, working their way in and out of half-uprooted trees, feet driving into loose soil, and circling around toward her father.
Aickman held the Tankard up above his head, staring up at it as if making an offering to his god. Abe realized that in some ways that was exactly what he was doing. The old man didn’t even seem to notice how withered he had become, like some pitiful, weathered scarecrow. It was as though the Tankard was supporting him, as though he dangled from it there in the unnatural wind that swept through the Djurgarden, and without it he would be blown away like some dried husk of a thing.
“The Tankard’s at the center of it,” Abe told Pernilla. “Not to mention that little blood ritual the Svartalves just did.”
“But if drinking from the Tankard allowed Thrym to possess my father… what is the point of resurrecting this empty corpse?” Pernilla asked.
The horror and confusion in her voice galvanized Abe to further action. He was not a fool, not going to do anything stupid, but in that moment he would have given anything to spare the woman all of this. Nothing good could come of it. She was being torn apart inside, and all because her father was a greedy, mischievous old bastard. Whatever terror she faced, whatever impossible evils strode the earth before her eyes, Abe suspected that at the core of her, Pernilla Aickman would be most deeply scarred by this truth about her father. Whether she acknowledged what he was or not, she could not fail to see it.
For it was right in front of her.
When Pernilla screamed his name, Abe glanced back and saw that several of the Svartalves had broken away from their battle with the Nidavellim and given chase. Trying to stop us from reaching Aickman, Abe thought.
He stopped short, boots skidding on the loose dirt, nearly stumbling on an exposed root.
“Get that Tankard,” he told Pernilla. “No matter what happens, that’s the key.” Then he leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger. He shot the first one through the head and the second one twice in the chest, but even as they melted into the air in a sifting black fog, the third was upon him. Abe fired at it, but the bullet went wild, and the Svartalf slashed down with its sword.
He ducked away, dove for the ground, gun hand trapped beneath him. Even as he rolled over, trying to pull the gun up again, he knew he was too late. He saw the slick, oily skin of the Svartalf and it occurred to him that Hellboy was wrong. These things weren’t weasels. They reminded Abe more of seals with that glistening sheen about them. Its eyes narrowed, and it grinned cruelly and brought the blade down.
A spear thrust through its chest from behind, shattering bone and tearing flesh. The sword fell as the Svartalf dissipated. Behind it stood a dwarf with iron rings in its hair and beard and a deep scar on its face that had left it blind in one, white, rheumy eye.
“Thanks,” Abe said, leaping to his feet.
The Nidavellim offered a curt half-bow, then raced back toward its fellows with the spear in both hands.
There came a cry of such heartrending despair that Abe at first thought Pernilla had been killed. When he spun around he saw that she was uninjured, for the moment, but whatever attempts she had made to speak to her father had failed, for she was on the forest floor with the old man, grappling with him for the Tankard. Even as Abe watched, the professor used his unnatural strength to break her grip and strike his daughter with a backhand that echoed through the clearing.
“Damn it,” Abe muttered.
Then he ran for them, trying to figure out how he was going to stop Aickman from hurting Pernilla without having to shoot the old man in front of his daughter.
Thrym’s breath was like a blizzard. Horns of ice had formed upon his bare skull and the jaws of the dead thing screeched like carrion birds as they opened wide. The frost king raised Hellboy up in one bony hand and tried to drop him into its gaping maw. A mouthful of swords opened and though there was no gullet, no stomach for him to eat with, this soulless shell of Thrym tried to eat Hellboy.
“Not a freakin’ chance,” Hellboy snarled.
With a thrust of one hoof, he cracked one of the monstrous skeleton’s fingers. It gave him space, and that was all he needed. He clutched his left arm around the giant’s unbroken fingers and swung Mjollnir, dangling above those razor-picket teeth. The hammer shattered several of those teeth and shards of bone and ice flew. A piece of Thrym’s jaw broke off.
It shuddered as if more surprised than hurt, and the foul glow of yellow in the dead orbits of that skull glared down at him. Hellboy felt frozen suddenly, and he glanced around to find that ice had begun to form all over his body. He kicked out, thrust out his arms, and the ice shattered. A few more seconds and it might have enveloped him. Already it was growing across the skull, reconstructing more of a face over the bone.
Again Hellboy lashed out, cracking the ice tendrils that seemed to be growing like vines across his legs and back.
Another finger cracked, and then he was falling from Thrym’s hand. For a moment the world turned upside down and his stomach lurched. Hellboy flailed at the air, the weight of the hammer tipping him downward, and as he tumbled he caught sight of the huge grave yawning open beneath him.
Then he struck the limbs of one of the trees that jutted from Thrym’s ribcage. Not the same one, this was larger. Branches cracked and snapped off, and dead limbs scraped against his arms and chest. Though disoriented, Hellboy lunged, reached out with his left hand, and grabbed a thick branch near the trunk.
It broke.
“Gaaa!” he shouted in surprise and frustration.
But then the broken branch swung him down into the fork of the tree trunk, and, though the wood creaked loudly, and despite its age,
it held. He heard more gunshots below and swore under his breath, gritting his teeth as he slid around in the joint where the trunk was split. His jacket snagged on some outer branches, and they snapped as he tugged it free.
“That’s it,” he muttered. “I’m all outta patience.”
With a grunt of exertion, he pulled himself up on top of the horizontal tree trunk. Thrym stood in place and gazed around at the ravaged clearing, at the Svartalves and Nidavellim in combat. His yellow eyes glowed with menace as he scanned the ground carefully, but slowly, as though he were drunk or just stupid. Hellboy voted for stupid.
Though true dark was still some small way off, the night was coming on, evening crawling across the sky with a bank of clouds thick enough that the day had surrendered early. With the flecks of frost falling like snow in the clearing and the frigid wind that swirled around the resurrected giant, it was as though winter had arrived early.
Hellboy knelt on the trunk and crawled along it to where it met the giant’s ribcage, where the roots disappeared into the skeleton, twined with bones, wooden tendrils wrapped around ribs and wound like vines all the way back to Thrym’s spine.
“You should have stayed dead, old king!” Hellboy roared in the ancient tongue.
He stood up on the trunk of the tree just as Thrym began to move. The giant lifted his huge, skeletal feet and stepped carefully in the ruined earth. Hellboy grabbed hold of one of Thrym’s ribs to keep his balance. Those empty sockets with their sickly flames flickering gazed down at him, and Thrym paused. Again he reached up to try to pluck Hellboy from his chest, as if the giant had almost forgotten he was there.
“Uh-uh, Spanky,” he snarled, in his own language this time, and with all the pique he could summon. “You’re sleepwalking out here, and you’re not gonna get me twice. Time for you to go back to that little eternity dirt nap.”
Clinging to the giant’s rib, he raised Mjollnir. “Or didn’t you see the freakin’ hammer?”
Hellboy swung it down and the war hammer struck the precise spot where the roots of the tree met the frost king’s ribcage. There came a series of cracks, one upon the other, like cannon fire, as tree trunk and roots and two of Thrym’s ribs snapped.
The long dead king of the Frost Giants opened its mouth of swords and uttered a shriek of pain that was like a ghost itself, not a wail so much as the crashing of surf against the shore. Thrym reared back, the ice cracking where it had formed upon its skeletal arms, trying to connect the bones the way tendons and muscle should have.
Hellboy fell with the shattered tree and two long shards of the giant’s ribs. Much as he tried he could not right himself in the fall, and so he struck the ground on his back at such an angle that if it were not that the earth had been so churned up by the disturbance of Thrym’s grave, he would probably have broken his neck.
Groaning, Hellboy rolled onto his stomach and tried to push himself up to his knees. His vision was slightly blurred, and he knew he had struck his head. He shook it and blinked, and waited for his eyes to focus. When they did he frowned. The object in front of him was familiar, but he had been so jarred that, as though waking from a particularly fantastical dream, it took him a few seconds to recognize it.
His gun. “Look at that. Sometimes luck does run my way.”
He stood up, hurried toward the gun—not that it would do any good against Thrym, but he was glad he had not lost it—and picked it up. As he slid it into its holster, he turned, thinking to try to get Abe and the Aickmans to safety and then come back at Thrym when they were safely out of harm’s way. He’d come back and just shatter the giants kneecaps, use Mjollnir to cut him down to size. Remind him he was supposed to be dead. Unfortunately, Hellboy had always found that reasoning with dead guys was pretty much a fool’s game.
He spotted Abe across the clearing, saw a skirmish on the ground and realized it was Pernilla Aickman wrestling with her father. Hellboy shuddered at the macabre sight. Then he heard a grunt and a shout of pain off to his left, and he turned just in time to see one of the Nidavellim fall dead at his feet, torso sliced open from groin to gullet.
Then the Svartalves were upon him again. The dark things moved like shadows now as the clearing became darker, and they chittered like vermin as they came at him. Fewer, this time, and some of the Nidavellim still lived to oppose them. But even three or four of the weasels were enough to distract Hellboy in that moment, and he could not afford the interruption.
“You… try… my patience, Thunderer,” Thrym rumbled, words like cracks in ice.
The enormous skeleton bent down then, bony fingers lunging toward the ground where Pernilla Aickman grappled with her father. Abe swore loudly and fired several rounds at the giants face, but the bullets scraped bone and either lodged there or ricocheted.
“Abe! Grab her!” Hellboy roared, knocking aside one of the Svartalves and starting to run across the clearing toward them.
But he need not have worried. Abe grabbed hold of Pernilla and hauled her to her feet, then the two of them dove between two tall, lush oaks just as the skeletal fingers of the giant closed around Edmund Aickman. The old man cackled madly, shouting in Dutch, as he raised the Tankard up toward the giant’s deadly, jagged maw. Thrym laughed, lifted the shriveled little man higher, and shook him with hideous glee.
The Tankard fell to the ground and all of the combatants there in the ravaged wood froze and stared at it a moment. Abe shouted at Hellboy to get it, but before he could even move Thrym stepped on the Tankard, driving it into the soil.
The icy horns on the giant were mere silhouettes now against the bruise-dark clouds in the evening sky. Thrym raised Aickman up, opened his jaws, and simply inhaled with the scream of a driving snow. The old folklorist had been looking around madly, scrambling, trying to figure out how he had dropped the Tankard. Now he stared up at the skull of the frost king and screamed.
And as he screamed, his eye exploded, sucked into the waiting maw of the dead giant. Then a stream of snow and sleet poured out of Aickman’s mouth and his vacant eye sockets and his nostrils. It was as though the old man were vomiting ice into the giant’s mouth.
Thrym laughed, and suddenly the voice was deeper. It shook the ground and reverberated in Hellboy’s chest. The blaze in the empty sockets of the giant’s eyes had turned from tainted yellow to blinding blue-white.
“Now,” Thrym boomed. “We shall see what my kingdom has become.”
He dropped Professor Aickman to the ground and something snapped in the brittle old man as he landed. Pernilla wailed and wept and Abe held her back.
“No!” Hellboy shouted.
Slowly, with a creak of bones and ice—ice that even now began to cover more of the giant’s body, filling in the gaps between his bones—Thrym turned to glance down at him again.
“Not now, Thunderer. But when I am ready for you, then we will have the battle so long denied us. And I will freeze your blood and strip your bones.”
“Yeah? Where do you think you’re going?” Hellboy called. He raised Mjollnir. “You woke up for this fight? Come on and get it, then!”
Thrym laughed again. “I did not rise for you. But you stand in the way. So you shall die. Soon. When my kingdom is whole again and my brothers bow down before me.”
With that, Thrym turned and lurched through the trees. Where before he had been moving with almost painful slowness, now he was swift. Hellboy screamed and ran after him, hooves punching the loose soil. He lost his footing once but did not fall. By the time he had reached the opposite side of the clearing, there was only the distant pounding of the giant’s footsteps to reveal his location. And even those sounds were receding.
Thrym was gone.
Hellboy turned and stared across the clearing again. Some of the Nidavellim still lived, but he could not see if Brokk and Eitri were among them. The Svartalves were gone, having scattered into the forest in pursuit of their master. On the other side of that massive grave, amidst a scattering of fallen ice shavings that lay ac
ross the ground like snow, Abe stood with one hand on Pernilla Aickman’s shoulder, where she knelt by the broken form of her father and cried.
Mjollnir felt heavy in Hellboy’s grip, as though it longed to destroy something, to shatter bone and crush skull.
“All right,” Hellboy growled. “Now I’m really ticked.”
Chapter Ten
The breeze had turned warm. Above the clearing, now devoid of trees, the sky had seemed low and gray only moments before. Now it was crystal clear, a deep blue velvet night scattered with pinprick stars. At the edges of that ravaged land where a dead myth had risen as a monster, had been born and torn from the earth, snow still lingered on the leaves of oak trees.
Melting snow. It dripped and slid down leaves and fell in wet slaps from limbs to the ground. In minutes, it would be gone. And as the thin shroud of snow withered to nothing, the life began to go out of Edmund Aickman.
Pernilla knelt on the ground, dampness soaking through her pants, and held her father’s head propped upon her lap. He hardly seemed himself now, and she had to fight back a feeling of revulsion that swept through her. Part of her did not want to touch him, did not want to allow that this man might be her father. The skin of his face was slack and jowled like an old dog, folded and newly smooth, save for where the white stubble had grown on his chin.
In her arms his body felt like paper and bones, and something broke when she settled him down there on her lap with a sound not unlike a piece of chalk being snapped in two. The breeze rustled what little remained of his hair, not much more than spiderwebs now. His eyes were shot through with red from broken blood vessels and dark circles sagged beneath them.
He stared up at her, but she did not think he could see her. At first she called to him in Swedish, and then in Danish, and finally she only whispered the kind of hushed nothings that one utters to calm a child, or to comfort the dying.
The Bones of Giants Page 12
