The Bones of Giants

by Christopher Golden

  “I’ll take Eitri and the boys and crash the party. You two check those buildings still standing and get anyone who’s still alive out of there.”

  Even with all his misgivings, Abe had to laugh. That was one thing that Hellboy and the spirit in Mjollnir had in common. They both favored the direct approach.

  “Pretty simple plan.”

  “The best ones usually are,” Hellboy said, eyes blazing red in the firelight.

  Abe recreated the image of Utgard in his mind, but not only that ghost city. He tried to remember the layout of the devastated village that had been supplanted by the resurrected fortress.

  “You’ll have to get us in first, somewhere to the north. We’ll be closer to the remaining buildings and as far as we can get from your attack. Then when you go through the front, you’ll draw Thrym away from us.”

  Hellboy gazed at him. “Works for me.”

  “What if…,” Pernilla let her words trail off and seemed to consider them a moment. At length, she let her gaze move back and forth between them and her eyes settled on Hellboy. “What if none of them are still alive by the time the morning comes?”

  “Then the fight gets easier.”

  Abe had heard the concern, the compassion in her voice. When Hellboy spoke, though, it was as though he had crushed those things. Pernilla shivered, but this time Abe did not think it was from the cold. She reached for her pack and rifled through it until she came out with a box of cigarettes.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Abe said, trying to keep the distaste out of his voice. She didn’t need judgment from him on top of everything else.

  “They’re for emergencies,” Pernilla replied. “This qualifies.”

  He did not argue.

  Hellboy turned over, his back to them now. At the base of his skull was a small black knot he created from what little hair he had, the sort of thing Abe only ever saw in martial-arts films. But it worked on Hellboy. And even if it hadn’t, nobody was going to tell him it looked stupid. Well, except for Liz, who had threatened more than once to pull a Delilah on him and cut it off.

  Abe sighed and reached out to grab the second of their starter bricks. Rather than just toss it on the remains of the existing, dying flames, he lit the corner of the paper and let it flare to life. He hoped it would burn more slowly that way. As he was about to set it down, Pernilla grabbed hold of his wrist.

  “Hold on,” she said. “Do you mind?”

  He obliged, holding up the flaming brick for her as she lit her cigarette off it. She sucked on the filter and the tip of the cigarette glowed, embers burning. Abe put the brick down carefully, relishing the feeling that had returned to his feet.

  “All right. Let’s try to get a couple of hours rest if we can. The snow looks like it might stop soon.”

  “You, my friend, are an optimist,” Pernilla replied, voice a tired rasp.

  Abe smiled thinly. “No one’s ever called me that before.”

  Pernilla took another drag on the cigarette, her knees drawn up to her chest. She let the butt dangle in her hand, there against her knee, and she returned his smile.

  Then she screamed as flames shot from the end of her cigarette. Abe shouted in alarm and scrambled back from her. Pernilla held the butt pinched in her fingers, staring at it. Fire jetted from the tip and joined with the small blaze of the starter brick. It began to grow, to take shape and to roar with a low thunderous growl that was more than the hiss and pop of a fire.

  “Throw it down!” Abe cried.

  As if the thought had never occurred to her—and he realized that it hadn’t—Pernilla dropped the cigarette and backed away further. By then, the roar of the fire-shape in front of them had grown even louder. Abe could feel the heat of it searing his face.

  It had arms and legs and a head; it stood easily nine feet tall.

  And it laughed at them.

  “What the hell is this thing now?” Abe muttered.

  Behind the fire-creature, Hellboy rose from the ground. “Hey!” he shouted. “You’re screwing up my nap. You don’t want me cranky, do you?”

  Hellboy swung Mjollnir at the thing and it began to pass through the flames. For a moment Abe thought Hellboy’s blow would just swing all the way around, harmlessly. But then, abruptly, the hammer struck something solid within that blazing creature’s substance. It staggered back a step, but not far enough. The living flame that comprised it raged and enveloped Mjollnir and Hellboy’s right arm, licking up toward his shoulder and racing across his chest as well, charring skin as it went.

  The thing laughed again as Hellboy tried to tug his arm free, and the fire began to engulf his entire body. Abe ran to Pernilla, shielding her with his body even as he moved them both back against the wall of the crevasse, as far away from this thing as possible. He could see now that it had eyes of yellow mist and a gash for a mouth.

  “Foolish god-shell,” it roared, its voice the snap of burning wood. “You are as dense as the true thunderer himself. Logi will consume you.”

  Hellboy snarled. “I remember you, Logi. You trumped my brother by deceit only. I have been burned before, Wildfire, and dragon’s breath cannot last forever.”

  “But I am not dragons breath. I am only myself. Eternal flame.”

  The fire crawled all over Hellboy and his jacket was ablaze now, a sheet of flame licking up toward the sky, snow melting as it neared him. Logi seemed to have enveloped him so that now Hellboy was almost inside him. He roared with agony.

  Abe felt his skin prickle with the heat of it, but he had to help Hellboy. “There’s something in there!” he barked. “You hit something before. Do it again!”

  Pernilla’s breath was warm on his neck and she panted in fear as Abe pressed her against the wall. He could hear her muttering to herself, nonsense words that he took, at first, for terrified ramblings. Abe watched as Hellboy attacked the thing, shouting in agony and fury as he burned. He raised the hammer and struck Logi, and the fire-creature staggered backward. The flames on Hellboy subsided somewhat, black smoke rising in places where the blaze receded. Hellboy struck him again, aiming for the head but hitting the monstrous thing instead in the chest. Something cracked loudly and yellow flames roared out of its chest cavity.

  Logi cried out, enraged, and redoubled his efforts, using both hands to grab at his enemy once more. The fire blazed up around Hellboy again. Abe was frantic. He knew he had to protect Pernilla, and he knew that Hellboy could endure almost anything, that he could take care of himself… but this was too much.

  “Start up toward the ridge,” Abe told Pernilla.

  “I can’t. Not without my gear. I’ll freeze up there.”

  Abe swore. “What the hell is this guy?” he muttered.

  “Logi,” Pernilla said, as though tasting the name. “Logi, wait, I’ve heard it. There’s a story, one of the myths. Logi wasn’t a giant, but he was a servant to the king of the Frost Giants—”

  “To Thrym?” Abe asked.

  “No. One of the others. He’s fire incarnate. But the giants had to call him up from a source. He had to have a source, Abe.”

  “Your cigarette?”

  They both glanced over at the spot where the cigarette had dropped. There was no sign of the burning ember of its tip. Near the edge of the plateau, above a drop that seemed to fall away into nowhere, Hellboy struck Logi with the hammer again and again, and though the creature seemed pained by them, the blows were not stopping it.

  “It started there,” Pernilla said quickly. “But look!”

  Abe saw what she was referring to. Logi was far from the place where they had made their small camp, but skeins of fire stretched away from his blazing form, reaching back toward the single small starter brick, this chunk of chemicals and pulped wood.

  “The source,” Abe muttered. It would burn out in five minutes, maybe less, given the way the flames were fluttering now, burning faster as though Logi was feeding off them.

  But Hellboy didn’t have five minutes.


  “Don’t move,” he told Pernilla.

  A glance upward revealed that the Nidavellim were on their way down, but they would not arrive in time to be of any help. So much for bodyguarding Hellboy, Abe thought. It fell to him, then.

  Silently, he pushed away from the stone face of the crevasse wall and ran out across the plateau. His boots slid a little in the snow, and he nearly lost his footing as he rushed toward the place where his bedroll lay sprawled too close to the fire. He noticed that the edges of the non-flammable synthetic were singed, but the fact barely registered as he reached the little fire-starter, the small log that was sputtering with flame. As he hauled back his foot, Logi seemed to sense him, and the fire-creature hissed and popped and began to wash toward him across the darkness.

  Abe kicked the blazing starter brick as hard as he could. It sailed across the platform, bounced once, and then skipped out over the chasm below before dropping down, down into the seemingly endless darkness of that scar in the face of the earth.

  Logi roared with fury as he was dragged over the edge. Impossibly long fingers of fire stretched into tentacles as he tried to hold on, but then the weight of the source became too much and he lost his grip, shrieking as he tumbled into the murk, as though someone had thrown a torch down a well. Abe stood at the edge and watched him fall until there was only the tiniest wink of light below.

  “Abe,” Pernilla said, and there was panic in her voice.

  He spun and saw Hellboy on his knees in the snow perhaps a dozen feet away. Though it was dark now without the flames, Abe could see that his jacket was all but destroyed and the red flesh of his arms was puckered and seared, charred black in some places.

  “Aw, damn it!” Abe rushed to Hellboy’s side, but slowed as he got near his friend.

  Hellboy seemed frozen, Mjollnir in his hand, his chest rising and falling as he took long, deep breaths. The stench of his seared skin was repulsive and Abe’s stomach churned with nausea.

  “Hey,” he said, his own voice thick with concern.

  Abe reached out to touch Hellboy’s shoulder, but Hellboy abruptly turned and glared at him, slapped his hand away. Then he rose, far faster than Abe had ever seen him move, and Hellboy swung the hammer at him.

  “Back, darkling beast!” Hellboy snarled. “I’ve had my fill of monsters today!”

  If Abe had been a fraction of a second slower, Mjollnir would have shattered his chest, probably torn a hole right through flesh and bone. He shouted in alarm as he leaped away. Hellboy staggered slightly, shook his head as if to clear his mind, then sneered and started forward again. Abe rushed back toward Pernilla, wondering if they were going to have to run for the top of the chasm, and to hell with their gear.

  Hellboy fell on his face, arms out at his sides. His flesh was still so hot after being burned by Logi’s flames that the icy ground hissed loudly as heat met frozen earth. For several seconds, Hellboy did not move.

  “Oh, no,” Abe said quietly. Something began to feel broken inside him. Again he moved toward Hellboy, more carefully this time.

  With a pained moaning, Hellboy shifted. Abe stared at him in astonishment, noticing that his skin seemed to already be healing. That wasn’t natural. Hellboy healed fast, but never this fast.

  “Abe?” he croaked weakly.

  “I’m here. You planning to take another swing at me?”

  Hellboy rolled over on his back, too weak to do any more than that. His eyes were wide and childlike, and he looked not at all dangerous, but rather pitiful.

  “Aw, Jeez, Abe. I’m sorry.”

  The sorrow in his voice was dreadful to hear.

  Hellboy glanced down at Mjollnir, then lay his head back again and stared up at the sky. “All this time I’ve had this damned hand and I know it isn’t really me, and sometimes that spooks me. But I’ve made it mine. You know? But this freakin’ hammer? I’m going down there and killing that giant zombie with the stupid trees growing out of his chest and then if the hammer is still stuck to my hand, I’m cutting the whole arm off, I swear.”

  Again, Hellboy had returned to himself. This time, though, much as he wanted to be glad, Abe could not summon any relief. Hellboy was falling apart right in front of him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  On the ground, Hellboy lay and gazed at the sky, face illuminated by the light of the stars.

  The stars.

  Only then did Abe realize that the snow had stopped. The storm was over.

  It was time to put an end to this.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mjollnir was no longer luring Hellboy in one direction or another, but in some ways it haunted him more than ever. There was a presence inside him, lurking at the back of his mind; it felt like he was waiting in line for something with this rude, extremely impatient entity staring over his shoulder, urging him on. He felt like throttling the big barbaric bastard, but there was no way he could get his hands around the throat of some spiritual echo, especially when the only body it had at the moment was his own.

  He led the way down the mountainside mostly to avoid having to look Abe or Pernilla in the eye. Guilt and embarrassment went hand in hand, and that had never been more true than tonight. It wasn’t him; Abe knew that. But Hellboy still figured he owed his friend a bottle of tequila and a trip to the antiquarian book shop back in Fairfield.

  If they ever got back to Fairfield.

  The truth was, Hellboy had thought more than once about telling Abe and Pernilla to head back. Send the Nidavellim to protect them and just make them go home. And that was another reason he felt guilty; the only reason he hadn’t done that was because he thought right about now Abe might take him up on the offer, and he did not feel like being up here at the top of the world by himself.

  Not that he was afraid. No way. After the crap he’d gone up against and lived to tell the tale? Nah.

  Well, maybe a little.

  But there was more to it than that. He wasn’t himself now. There was no way to know what he was going to do next. He had heard the expression “taken leave of his senses” a hundred times, but only now did he really understand what it meant. Of course, he doubted anyone he’d heard use the phrase had ever been talking about someone possessed by a myth. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t appropriate.

  The presence that lingered inside his skull—and in that damned hammer—wanted to merge with him. Or, at least, that was the sense that he got, on the surface of things. Below the surface, though, he could feel that it wasn’t really a merger the echo was looking for, but a hostile takeover.

  So it was that they moved carefully down the mountainside into the basin where once a village had stood, and now there was only rubble and ghosts. The snow had stopped, and the night sky had cleared with remarkable speed. The air was cold and crisp, as though each breath that Hellboy drew into his massive lungs was comprised of tiny ice crystals. The stars made the newfallen snow glow a strange blue and provided more than enough light to see by.

  Hellboy picked his way down the steep face of the mountain. His jacket had been all but destroyed. In with his gear he had an enormous sweater that had been knitted just for him by Anastasia Bransfield, the only woman he had ever referred to as his girlfriend. It had been years since he had spoken to her, and many more than that since he had seen her last, and still it pained him to have destroyed the sweater. In order to get it over the godforsaken hammer and his massive right hand, he had to cut the right arm of the garment along its length.

  Hard-packed snow crunched under his hooves and the fresh layer of powder sifted in around his legs. His pack had not been a burden throughout their long journey, but now, though lightened, he was weary of carrying it. From time to time he heard Abe or Pernilla grunt with exertion behind him, but the Nidavellim made not a sound. They were coming nearer to the ghost walls of Utgard and knew better than to give themselves away.

  As they descended, the wind whistling around them, the way became easier to navigate, and near the floor of that cr
ag, they found themselves striding over foothills that put them briefly out of sight of Utgard. As they crested one such hill, Hellboy caught sight again of the narrow path that must have been the road to a larger settlement further along the mountain ridge.

  At the peak of the final hill, they looked up. Hellboy was filled with both a cold familiarity and a terrible dread. The walls of Utgard were growing more solid as they drew closer, and they could gauge the size of the place now. The battle­ments of Utgard towered more than one hundred feet above them. Once upon a time they had been built of dark stone, and now they took on that aspect again, though from this distance the texture of those walls seemed to waver between solid rock and insubstantial mist.

  “All right,” Hellboy whispered as the others gathered around him. “Just like we talked about.” He gazed grimly at Abe. “You and Pernilla stay clear of Thrym. Just do what you have to do and get the hell out of here. If you end up on your own, take whoever you can find and follow that track that heads west. I’m betting there’s a Saami village that way. Might even be Norway this far north, I don’t know. But if they’ve got any kind of road it’s gotta be shorter than the jaunt we took to get up here.”

  Abe nodded, did not comment about the implications of Hellboy’s instructions—that he might not be alive to leave with them.

  Mjollnir began to grow warm again in his hand, and the serpent pendant became so cold against his chest, even beneath that sweater, that it was nearly stuck to his flesh. Hellboy hissed at the sudden icy pain and reached up to touch it. He pulled it out by the chain and let it hang outside the sweater. “I should’ve left this thing back at the university.”

  “No,” Eitri said sharply.

  Hellboy, Abe, and Pernilla all turned to stare at him. Eitri and his cousins had been silent for so long that though he spoke quietly, that single word resonated in the air around them.

  “What?” Hellboy asked. Eitri gestured toward the pendant. “My brother Brokk forged Mjollnir, a gift of life to the thunder-bearer. I crafted that pendant, a representation of Jormungand, the world snake, the Midgard Serpent. The hammer was a gift of life. The pendant was a gift of death. He wore it at the end.”