The Bones of Giants

by Christopher Golden

  The body was mangled, limbs twisted. The Saami man was dressed in leather and fur, now stained with his blood, but the way he lay, there could be no way to tell which way he had been headed before he had been attacked.

  Hellboy thought he knew, however. The magnetic tug on the hammer drew him northwest, and he believed that this man had been going the opposite direction, fleeing from Thrym, or whatever else awaited them further north. Whatever it was, Hellboy suspected it was close.

  As the afternoon wore on and soon became evening, they continued their trek along the mountain ridge. The storm increased in intensity, and soon the snow was falling thick and heavy, and they were forced to descend once more into a crag that ran between two peaks.

  Though true darkness was still hours away, the storm had blackened the sky so it seemed almost as though night had already fallen. Eitri had taken the lead and slogged through the snow, which ought to have been harder for the Nidavellim, with their short legs, to navigate, but with which he had no trouble at all.

  He tripped over the second corpse and fell nose-first into the snow, grunting as the pommels of his daggers jutted into his belly. When he stood, cursing, there was snow in his beard and on the iron rings in his hair. Eitri seemed ready to snap, desperate to have something to kill. Hellboy figured his grief over Brokk’s death would be raw for a very long time.

  “There are two of them this time,” Abe noted. He glanced over at Hellboy, frowning. “Do you have any sense of what’s going on here?”

  At first Hellboy was not sure what he meant. In the many hours they had spent in the mountains, it had been easy for him to drift away from the weirdness of Mjollnir and its effect on him. Now he got it, though. Hellboy shook his head.

  “It’s gotta be Thrym. Part of what he’s doing up here. But I’ve got no idea where these people are coming from. Maybe he snatched them from some village along the way and has been hoarding them for snacks.”

  Pernilla shuddered and put a hand to her mouth, apparently horrified by the image. But despite that, she knelt by the two corpses again. They were cov­ered with a thick frost and their blood had turned to crimson ice where it had pooled upon their clothing. There was a male and a female, and the woman had an icicle of blood that ran across her face from a gash in her head and con­nected to the snow-covered ground.

  “They’ve been drained,” Pernilla announced, voice sounding more and more detached every time she spoke.

  “Drained?” Eitri asked, moving closer.

  “Thrym is sucking the life out of them,” Abe explained. “He did it back at that village where we met up with you.”

  “And he did it to my father,” Pernilla said softly.

  “Something tells me we’re going to find more,” Hellboy said.

  They all turned to look at him then, strange silhouettes against the twilight curtain of snow. Pernilla stood up and brushed off the knees of her snow gear. Abe gazed at Mjollnir.

  “Are we still headed in the right direction?” he asked.

  Hellboy nodded.

  “Then let’s go,” Abe said.

  After nearly another hour had passed with the sky growing even darker, Hellboy knew they were going to have to stop to camp soon. If they could find a cavern or even an outcropping under which they could take shelter, that would be best. It was obvious that the weather did not impress the Nidavellim at all. They could probably have gone on forever wandering those mountains in the storm. But Hellboy himself was exhausted and cold—frost had begun to form on the stumps on his forehead where he kept his broken horns filed down—and he had no idea how Abe and particularly Pernilla were going on.

  In that short time they had found at least a dozen bodies, enough so that it no longer surprised them. They no longer bothered to even stop to examine the remains. Hellboy thought of Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs, and the macabre twist that put on the presence of the corpses in his mind gave him a chill that had nothing to do with the snowstorm.

  As they crested a rise, Hellboy was determined to stop for the night. But when he had gotten his bearings, his hooves crunching through the crust of snow, he stared down into the basin plateau below, and he knew they had reached their destination.

  “What is that?” Abe asked, eyes narrowed as he tried to make out the sprawl below.

  “I think it’s a village,” Pernilla replied.

  Hellboy shook his head slowly as he studied the dark shapes of buildings below, several dozen small houses and a trio of smaller central buildings. There had to be a road around here somewhere, a path that weaved in and out of the mountains so these people could get to a larger settlement when they really needed to.

  But they weren’t going anywhere. Not ever again. His eyesight was better than the others’. The dead they had found in the snow had come from this village, trying to get over the mountains to safety. There were probably more dead along other routes. But the rest were still here, in the rubble of this village, which had been all but destroyed save for two of the large buildings at the center.

  “It was,” he said. “Look again.”

  Pernilla squinted, and Abe actually took several steps down the cliff face. But Hellboy saw it clearly enough. The ruin of the village was obscured by what at first appeared to be a mirage. Transparent walls and battlements many stories high rose into the air, towers jutting up from behind massive gates. This fortress was no mirage, however.

  “What is that?” Abe asked, mystified.

  It took Pernilla another moment, but then she actually took a startled step back­ward. “How… how did I not see that at first? It is as though there’s a whole city there. But then how can I still see the village too? It’s as if the place has been swallowed by this other. Is it an optical illusion?”

  Despite the fear in her voice, Hellboy was no longer paying attention to her. His gaze had been drawn to the surviving Nidavellim, who had gathered close together, their weapons at the ready as they studied the sprawling mirage of towering walls and gates that loomed in the snowstorm below them.

  “Hellboy, what’s going on?” Abe asked.

  The Nidavellim glanced up at the sound of his voice. Eitri nodded once at Hellboy.

  “It is Utgard,” the dwarf told him. Hellboy nod­ded. “I know.”

  “No… wait,” Pernilla interrupted. “You can’t possibly mean that this is the Utgard. The citadel of the giants.”

  Hellboy only looked at her, then slowly turned to regard Abe, whose moist, dark skin was flecked with snowflakes that melted almost as soon as they touched him.

  “This? This right here?” Abe asked, an edge to his voice. “How can the city of the giants be here? Just plopped right down on some village that was here already. Never mind that, wasn’t it destroyed during Ragnarok along with everything else?”

  Once more Hellboy turned to gaze out at the sprawling silhouette, the image of Utgard that wavered in and out of reality with each rush of wind, each blast of driven snow.

  “It isn’t Utgard,” Hellboy said, his deep voice carrying along the mountain ridge. “It’s the ghost of Utgard.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Once, not long after he had joined the Bureau, Abe Sapien had spent six days trudging across the Australian outback with only an aborigine shapeshifter for a guide. They had been investigating an outbreak of nightmares that were driving people to madness and outright slaughter, and Hellboy had been dragged into the Dreamtime by a pack of dingoes. Abe didn’t remember much of the story of what had happened to Hellboy there, because, by the time they were reunited and Hellboy gave him the details, he was so completely exhausted that all he heard was blah blah blah. As far as he was con­cerned, the only thing that mattered was that it was over and they could go home. It was a close call, but he thought that he might be even more exhausted now than he had been in the outback all those years ago.

  His feet were so cold they were numb, and he tried to pretend all those little niggling thoughts about frostbite and amputation we
re just silly jokes he was making to himself. Nothing funny about them, but otherwise he was going to start freaking out, and that would not do any of them any good.

  Abe wrapped his arms around himself and shuddered as he forged his way through the storm. The snow had thinned and slowed, but it was still there, like a heavy curtain draped over them. Not a shroud, don’t think shroud. He pushed the image out of his mind. His boots were weatherproof, so his feet were dry, but that didn’t keep the cold out. He kept his eyes slitted against the snowfall and did his best to follow in Hellboy’s enormous footprints.

  They picked their way carefully along the ridge that overlooked the snug basin where the ghostly fortress stood. It seemed to have grown more solid as the minutes went by, but there were still times when he glanced down at it from a certain angle and the citadel of the giants disappeared completely in the screen of snow.

  But Utgard was for later. Right now shelter was their top priority. His eyelids felt frozen and when he blinked they were sticky as if they wanted to freeze closed completely. Abe glanced back to make sure Eitri and the other three Nidavellim were still following. They waded through the deepening snow in grim silence.

  When he looked ahead once more, Pernilla had stopped. She stood with both legs planted in one of Hellboy’s massive footprints and she shivered, her teeth chattering. Abe went to her and put his arms around her for warmth, though he knew he wouldn’t provide very much of that. His eyes ticked toward Hellboy, who was perhaps twenty feet ahead of them. He wanted to shout to him, tell him to wait, but he had no idea how far his voice would carry, and it would not do to draw Thrym’s attention until they were ready for that.

  But he needn’t have worried.

  Hellboy walked on a few more feet and then stopped. The wind drove the snow at him, it swept around him, and to Abe he looked like little more than a monstrous black silhouette against the night and the storm. His duster flapped around his legs, snapping like a flag in the breeze. Hellboy dropped into a crouch and stared at something ahead, then turned and waved to Abe and Pernilla to hurry.

  “He’s found something,” Abe told her. “Just a little further.”

  Her eyes had a dull sheen to them, and he recognized it as both exhaustion and apathy. She was so tired now that she almost did not care if they died out there. But Abe knew that was only frustration and despair taking root, and it would go away the moment she had some respite from the cold.

  “Come on,” he said, and he slipped his arm around her and together they walked toward Hellboy.

  He stood at the edge of a crevasse with walls of ice and stone. It was as though the largest of all giants had cleaved the earth asunder with a hatchet. The snow fell down into the black depths of that gash in the mountainside, and the wind pushed at Abe’s back. He drew Pernilla a step away from the edge, for the pull of that chasm was too great, and a flutter went through him as he imagined them tumbling down into it.

  “Dead end,” Abe said.

  Hellboy glanced at him. “Yep. But maybe also exactly what we need.” He pointed along the crevasse to a place where the edge tapered downward, creating a natural ledge formation that led to a kind of plateau about a dozen feet down. “If it doesn’t fall out from under us, and nothing explodes, we should be all right until the worst of the wind dies. If we’re going to try to get the people who are still alive out of Utgard, I’d rather do it before dawn. I’m hoping the snow stops by then. If we can get a few hours’ rest, all the better.”

  Abe smiled. Though he was obviously stressed, Hellboy sounded like himself. Lately it was impossible to predict if they were going to get the regular guy who rolled with the punches or the other guy. Hellboy had always liked to beat the crap out of things. If something got in his way, or gave him trouble, his usual solution was to whomp it with something heavy until it wasn’t an issue anymore. He was hell on electronics that didn’t behave themselves. Abe had lost two TVs that way in the time they had known one another.

  But the other guy, the essence of this thing that had hitched a ride in Hellboy’s head thanks to Mjollnir… that guy lived for the battle. He was brutal and a little crazy. Abe had heard stories about Viking berserkers, ruthless and bloodthirsty warriors who wore berserks, or bearskin shirts. There was the implication that they thought they took on the spirit of the bear to help them be savage in battle. But bears didn’t have anything on these guys when it came to nastiness. From what Abe knew, they might not have been men at all, but some kind of thing somewhere between man and animal. In any case, if this entity that had hijacked Hellboy was any indication, it was no surprise that the Vikings had such a fierce rep.

  “You seem… better,” Abe told him.

  Hellboy shrugged. “Got a mythological monkey on my back. But it’s subsided for the moment. Can’t even feel anything in the hammer anymore. Or in the snake,” he added, gesturing toward the pendant around his neck.

  “Now that we’re here, maybe it’s leaving you alone for a bit.”

  “Maybe,” Hellboy allowed, but his jaw was set and there was a gravity about him. “To tell the truth, though, I’ve been thinking maybe I’m just getting used to it.” He turned toward the ledge. “Come on.”

  For a moment Abe just watched him go. Pernilla slipped her arm through his and shivered.

  “I don’t think I like the sound of that,” she said.

  “Me either,” Abe replied.

  As they spoke, Eitri and the other Nidavellim gathered around them. Abe turned to the creatures, all of whom had been painfully silent since Brokk’s death. They had lost others of their kind during the horrors of the past days, but Brokk had clearly meant a great deal to all of them, not merely to Eitri, who was his brother.

  “We’re going to take shelter down there for a while,” Abe explained, pointing to the plateau in the crevasse.

  Eitri grunted and frowned as he gazed down into the chasm. “There is very little room. We will remain here and alternate on sentry duty.”

  Pernilla frowned and reached out to place a hand on the Nidavellim’s shoulder. “We’ll make room. You really should get out of the wind for a while.”

  A kind smile appeared on Eitri’s face, as if her gesture had warmed him for the first time since his brother’s demise. “Thank you, Miss Aickman. But my cousins and I have weathered far worse than this. We will be all right.”

  Abe felt as though he ought to make a greater effort to urge Eitri to join them, but after a moment he decided against it. The Nidavellim could follow them down at any time if they wanted to. Right now it was imperative that he get Pernilla to as much shelter as he could find. Down in the crevasse they could light a fire without worrying that it would be seen. All they had was a trio of those flame-starter logs—which were stashed in Hellboy’s pack—but it would give them a small bit of warmth and light for an hour or so if they spaced them out. That would be enough to discover if his feet were going to fall off from frostbite.

  With Pernilla now behind him, Abe made his way along the gorge to where the natural ledge formation began. It was four or five feet wide—though much narrower in spots—and Hellboy was already nearly to the plateau below.

  “Lay your hands against the stone face,” Abe told Pernilla. “Like this.”

  He spread himself out against the rock wall and moved slowly along the ledge, and she followed suit. The moment they dropped below the edge of the crevasse, the wind was cut off. Abe could hear it whistling overhead, but the relief that flooded through him was almost euphoric. It was as though some great weight had been lifted from him. Thanks to the lack of wind, the temperature within that jagged slice in the earth was easily twenty or thirty degrees warmer than it was above.

  Still cold. Still, in fact, ridiculously frigid—and Abe never wanted to feel that cold again. But liveable. His eyelids no longer felt like they might ice over at any moment.

  “You all right?” he asked Pernilla.

  She grunted with concentration as she traversed the ledge and did n
ot look up, but a dry chuckle came from her lips. “Never better. All in all, I’d rather be on a Greek island basking in the sun, but right now this will do.”

  Several minutes later they had reached the broad plateau, which Abe now judged to be at least fifteen feet below the edge of the chasm. Hellboy had pulled out the starter bricks, and in moments the first of them was blazing brightly. It was too insignificant to pass for a campfire, but it would do. Within minutes they had gathered around the small flame and laid out their gear to try to sleep. Abe sat atop his waterproof bedroll and Pernilla lay snugly within hers, her face almost too close to the fire. Hellboy had also climbed inside his oversized sleeping bag—when it was all put together his pack was enormous and had to be absurdly heavy, but he never seemed to notice. He lay watching the fire, and its light made orange and black shadows flickers across his crimson skin.

  Despite what Abe had been thinking earlier, Hellboy was too quiet now. It was disturbing. He had a sudden flash of the hotel room they’d shared in Washington D.C. right before leaving for this debacle in Sweden. Cable TV, macadamia nuts, and just hanging around. Both of them could be pretty stoic at times, but Abe thought that was part of why they were friends.

  We have got to get home soon, he thought, staring across the tiny flickering fire. And without that hammer.

  “Have you put any thought into how we’re going to do this?” he asked.

  Pernilla turned to study Hellboy across the flames as well. Abe had regretted allowing her to come along at least once every five or ten minutes since they had left Stockholm. But each time he thought about it, his mind would go back to that moment where she announced her intention to come along, and he could not think of anything they could have said or done differently to dissuade her without her hating them. And Abe did not want Pernilla Aickman to hate him.

  Hellboy cleared his throat and scratched at the little patch of goatee on his chin with his left hand. In his right, Mjollnir lay heavy upon the ground. The hammer seemed to absorb the light of the fire rather than reflect it, and so it looked almost black there in the illumination cast by that small blaze.