The Bones of Giants

by Christopher Golden

  Even as he spoke, Hellboy knew the words were true. It was something he had known all along, but never thought about. He lay Mjollnir across his shoulder and touched the pendant, the fingers of his left hand aching with the cold in that metal.

  “Great. I’m sure he thought it was very thoughtful. So why can’t I take it off again?”

  Eitri lifted his gaze to stare into Hellboy’s eyes. “I think it is an anchor for the spirit in Mjollnir. If not that, then at least it is a negative to the hammer’s positive. Think of it in that way. They complement each other, creating an energy between them that may be keeping the thunderer here in some way.”

  Hellboy stared at him. He wanted to cuss Eitri out. All this time, it might have been as simple as getting rid of the pendant to shake loose the hold Mjollnir had over him. It made sense in a way, considering that ever since he took the pendant from Abe the echo of the dead myth had resounded stronger in him, altering him more and more. But Hellboy also thought there was more to it than that. He had a feeling until Thrym was destroyed, whatever powers had brought the corpse of the thunder-bearer out where it could be discovered were not about to let their pawn walk away free.

  He gritted his teeth but said nothing. If he raged at Eitri, he’d be no better than the belligerent spirit he wanted so badly to get rid of.

  “All right,” he said. “It stays. But when this is done, you can take it back.” Eitri nodded his head once in agreement.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Hellboy saw Pernilla reach up to grab Abe’s arm. It wasn’t a gesture of warmth or friend­ship, but one of shock. Hellboy turned quickly to find that both she and Abe were staring off to the west toward the front gates of Utgard. “Abe, what—”

  “Get down,” Abe muttered. Hellboy didn’t argue. All of them slipped back down the last hill, hiding themselves from the line of sight of anyone down on the plateau. Hellboy knelt in the snow and looked over the top of the hill, and he saw what it was that had stunned Abe and Pernilla.

  From the frozen ground not far from the gates of Utgard, another giant was rising. Its skeletal, ice-encrusted arms had burst up through the earth, spilling snow and soil around it. The thing was hideous, a kind of spider-webbing of dry skin remaining as a death shroud upon those bones. In its right hand it clutched a huge sword, easily fifteen feet in length and covered in rust and crusted blood and dirt.

  As they watched, astonished, it stood up from that frozen grave and walked toward the gates, which swung open to admit it and closed when it had passed. The moment it was gone Hellboy glanced around and realized that the earth all around the fortress had been cracked and broken, though the fresh snow had hidden most .of the evidence of that.

  Hellboy sighed. “Well, that can’t be good.”

  “There’s no way to know how many there are,” Abe added.

  “Nope. There isn’t.”

  “What do we do now?” Pernilla asked.

  Hellboy smiled to himself and glanced at her. “We could go home?”

  Her withering gaze was as cold as the frozen mountainside. “That isn’t funny.”

  His expression was grave again. Pernilla knew her father had been both part of the cause of this, and its victim. She wasn’t about to turn around, and they both knew it.

  “No. I guess it isn’t. Sorry.” He glanced around at the others. “Let’s go.”

  Abe tried as best he could to shake his exhaustion, but like the cold it seemed to have settled in his bones. Their one small attempt at rest had been interrupted, and they were too far from anything resembling home, and much too far from help. This was it. The odds sucked almost as bad as the weather.

  They worked their way east behind that last foothill for fifty or sixty yards, then slipped over the top and hurried down to the basin floor with only jagged upthrust rocks for cover. Inside Utgard there was only silence. Abe took the lead, then, sprinting across the open ground to press himself against the stone walls. Just as he came within a few feet of Utgard, he marveled at their solidity. This wasn’t just big magic, it was huge magic. Nothing so simple as a ghost. Some haunted city that had turned up in response to Thrym’s arrival, his calling of it, drawing it from out of the ether.

  Then he leaned against it and inadvertently let his hand touch the stone and found that it was warm and moist, and it shot a kind of numbness up his arm that ached deep as the marrow. Abe shuddered and held out his unaffected hand to gesture to the others, to keep them from touching the wall. For he believed, then. Just that touch had convinced him.

  This was a shadow out of time, the specter of a dead city, a phantom fortress. Abe had seen a lot of bizarre stuff since joining the Bureau—hell, some­times he forgot that he was a pretty odd discovery himself—but nothing like this. When he glanced at Pernilla, he could see that she was also profoundly disturbed by their proximity to the place. It was more than surreal… it was unreal. Everything Pernilla Aickman knew about the world had been torn away in recent days, and it was nothing short of miraculous that she had not become completely unhinged.

  Not yet.

  But Abe saw in her eyes, now, that Utgard was haunting her. And he suspected that it would haunt her for a very, very long time.

  “Come on,” he said, reaching for her hand. “We can do this. It’s almost over.”

  “How can you be so calm?” she asked, voice hitching.

  “I’m not. There are times when it’s helpful to be inscrutable. Nobody can tell when you’re terrified out of your mind.”

  Abe smiled at her and Pernilla took a long breath. Then she nodded and they moved on, Hellboy and the Nidavellim pausing only a moment at the wall before hurrying to keep up. They made their way along the southern wall and then around to the east, as far away from the gates as they could manage. At a spot about a third of the way along the length of that massive structure, Abe stopped and waited for Hellboy.

  “Here?” Hellboy asked.

  “It’ll do.”

  “You know this only works if nobody hears us breaking in. And now that we know Thrym’s not alone in there, the odds of that are poor.”

  “I was just thinking about the odds a few minutes ago,” Abe replied. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. If they hear us, then the plan changes.” He shrugged.

  Hellboy only nodded before taking a step toward the wall and narrowing his eyes, as though merely by studying it he could find the weakest point in its construction. After a moment he glanced at the Nidavellim and pointed to a spot on the wall where two massive granite slabs were fitted together.

  “Here?”

  Eitri stepped forward and studied the spot. “Yes. That is your best chance.”

  A change came over Hellboy then. His thin lips pressed together so that they seemed even thinner, and the still-scorched flesh on his arms cracked as he stretched himself out. Muscles popped as he raised Mjollnir, eyes flaring with a kind of primal strength.

  He swung the hammer in a single massive stroke that rang loudly upon impact. The stones moved, cracked, shifted, and then several of the huge blocks crashed backward into the courtyard of the citadel of the giants.

  With the echo lingering in the air they waited several long minutes to see if there would come any response from within, but there was none. At length, Hellboy looked over at Abe and gave him a thumbs up. Abe returned the gesture and then watched as Hellboy signaled the Nidavellim, and the warriors began the long trek around the ghost city to the front gates.

  Pernilla slipped her hand into his, and when Abe glanced at her, she inclined her head toward the hole in the wall. He squeezed her hand and then, together, they entered Utgard.

  The section of wall through which they had come had been well chosen. Utgard wasn’t truly a city at all, of course, but its sheer size made it seem as though it was. Rather, it was a fortress, a citadel comprised of numerous huge structures—the living quarters for the giants—arranged in a rough rectangular shape. The outer walls had been built around these towers and battlement
s constructed atop them. In the midst of the citadel, however, was an enormous courtyard. Once upon a time, before Ragnarok and the collapse of the nine worlds, the implosion that destroyed all of Jotunheim, Utgard’s courtyard might have been a marketplace or a field of combat for warriors who wished to test their mettle in rare times of peace. It would have been the place where feasts were held, weddings celebrated, and funeral ceremonies conducted.

  Now it was a wasteland.

  Abe and Pernilla slipped alongside a massive tower, perhaps the grandest of all. He suspected it would be the king’s palace and feared that Thrym would emerge any moment. They stayed near the wall, in the furthest recesses of the fortress, but as they passed in the shadows and through the arches of the various towers, they glimpsed that courtyard, a frozen field of snow and ice, and the giants that lumbered across it. These were not ice and bones, but somehow had become enfleshed, incarnate. Only partially, though, and some more than others. One was sleeping out in the open, little more than a skeleton, but two others standing by the distant gates as sentries had the look of corpses who had been dead a month or less.

  Abe spotted two more walking from one tower to another, a male and female who rumbled something to one another in a language Abe did not know. They were nearly whole, their flesh withered and sagging, but not desiccated in any way. They were edged with a gilding of ice and wore whatever strips of ragged cloth had not rotted off them in the ground, and the male had a horned helmet and a club.

  Each of them carried a human corpse. The male lifted the dead villager to his mouth and crunched its upper half between his jagged teeth, then seemed to suck on the cadaver for a few seconds. He spat bones onto the ground and then used his teeth to peel the remaining flesh from the dead man.

  Pernilla whimpered in horror and pressed herself against Abe, unwilling to look. But Abe could not turn away, revolted though he was. So he was watching when the giant changed. The resurrected monster’s skin no longer sagged, and instead of looking withered, it now looked only weathered, leathery.

  Quickly Abe glanced around at the other giants, in various states of decay, and he realized with profound horror how deep Thrym’s magic reached. Not only had he resurrected all of these frost giants, but with each human life they took, each bit of human flesh they consumed, they became more complete, more whole. More alive.

  No, not alive. They’re undead. Giant walking dead things. It was bad enough with Thrym as a skeleton. Now he understood what Thrym had been doing all along, this entire trek northward. And he feared for Hellboy. But at the moment, he had a job to do.

  “Nobody else is going to end up like that,” he whispered to Pernilla.

  Together they moved swiftly and silently along behind another of the towers. The giants varied in size, but the enormity of each tower was extraordinary. For long minutes they moved through the forgotten places of that fortress, and several times they had to circumvent the remains of some house or other, a dwelling that had been occupied scant days before and was now nothing but rubble. After a time they came around the edge of a tower to find a wood and stone building—a human structure—growing right out of the side of the thing. There was no seam, and both seemed very real and solid. The resurrected citadel of the giants had fused with the human building, which might have been the town hall or a church.

  That three-story structure gave them greater perspective on the size of Utgard, which dwarfed the human building. From the mountainside they had seen three such buildings, though this had been the tallest. Now this fraction was all that remained. Abe wondered if the others had been supplanted by the citadel, the way a portion of this building was.

  “We have to get in,” Pernilla whispered. “If there are people still alive, they would have tried to take refuge inside there.”

  Abe agreed. The way the two buildings, one real and one somehow mani­fested there, were juxtaposed together, they could move quickly without being seen by the giants. The walls of Utgard were to their left and the last standing human structure to their right. There were windows, and, though he peered inside, it was dark within and he could not make out anything in particular. Through one, he thought he saw something move.

  Then they had reached the corner. He peered around it and saw that there was only open courtyard beyond. One giant still slumbered on the frozen ground perhaps fifty yards away. The sentries seemed alert, but not particularly concerned about what might happen within the gates so much as what might come from outside them. There was no sign of Hellboy and the others, but Abe was not worried—it was a long walk around the circumference of Utgard.

  He glanced along the front of that truncated building and saw that the door faced the courtyard. The sentries might see them, but they could not very well break a window. Shattering glass could bring them running, might even rouse the sleeper nearby.

  Wordlessly, he took Pernilla’s hand and they raced across the front of the building, exposed and vulnerable in the starlight. He could not erase from his mind the image of that giant stripping flesh from human bones the way a man would a piece of chicken. He hoped to avoid that fate for himself, and for Pernilla.

  At the door, he tried the knob and it turned. It was a public building in a village at the top of the world, in the middle of nowhere. Of course it was not locked. It probably did not even have a lock.

  Abe pushed inside, ushered Pernilla in, and then silently closed the door. When he turned, he flinched, horrified by what he saw. The inside of the building had been gutted. Where on the outside it was conjoined with the wall of the citadel, on the inside it was all torn away so that the giants could get at the people who had hidden themselves inside.

  There were three still alive, a woman, a very old man, and a young girl who could not have been more than eight years old. They were huddled together under blankets, but there was frost on their hair and the blankets, and their breath fogged the air. They stared at Abe and Pernilla with wide eyes, astonished more, Abe thought, by their arrival than by his appearance.

  The woman began to whisper to them, a fearful expression on her face. Abe didn’t understand a word but it was obvious Pernilla did. He had no idea what she said to the woman, but immediately all three of them began to rise. Tears sprang to the old man’s pale cheeks and the little girl hugged herself to the woman’s side.

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “That we’re all leaving together.”

  “Is there anyone else?”

  Pernilla frowned and repeated the question in that other language—Lappish, Abe thought it was. The old man wrapped a blanket around himself and walked through the rubble, the shambles that had been made of the interior, the upper floors having collapsed down upon the lower. Near the place where this structure met the citadel tower, he pointed to something beyond a barricade that might have been put there on purpose or might merely have been the way the floor above had crashed down.

  Reluctantly, Abe followed him.

  Behind that barricade was a pile of corpses, dozens of dead men, women, and children haphazardly thrown together and covered in frost. Icicles had formed upon them, and their eyes were wide and frozen as well. Between each corpse was a crust of ice that connected them all, and though he would have said had he been asked that he could not possibly imagine it, in his mind Abe could hear the sound they would have made when one of the giants came to break one off the pile to eat.

  He staggered backward, his stomach convulsing, and nearly threw up. Pernilla moved toward him but he waved her back. “Let’s just go,” he whispered. “And when we get out of here, the Bureau is going to pay for a very long, very tropical vacation.”

  Several minutes passed as they gathered up what they could salvage from the debris to keep the survivors warm. Clothing and blankets and what little food they had set aside to try to keep themselves alive in circumstances that might have driven many to take their own lives.

  Abe gestured to them to hurry, then, and he and Pernilla helped shoulder their bu
rdens, placing some of their belongings in their own packs. At the door, Abe held up a finger and shushed them. His hand was on the knob when he thought better of it. With a frown, he worked his way across the room to a window that was relatively clear. It opened wide enough for them to fit through so he slid his pack out first and then climbed out after it.

  He looked back in and beckoned for the Saami woman to follow. Pernilla would help them get through, and then come along herself. The woman lowered her belongings out the window.

  The ground shook.

  Abe spun toward the sound… toward the courtyard.

  The sleeping giant had awoken and was staring down at him, bleary-eyed and curious.

  The wind died as Hellboy stepped up to the front gates of Utgard with Eitri and his cousins in tow. The Nidavellim brandished their weapons in grim silence. They looked almost ridiculous, so small in front of that massive gate, and so few. But they were fierce and loyal and Hellboy would not discount them.

  “Do not split up,” he told them, staring at Eitri. “Stay together and kill one at a time. Bring them down to your level. Be swift and stay out of their reach.”

  Eitri gazed at him boldly. “We have killed giants before, thunder-bearer.”

  Hellboy nodded. “All right.”

  He turned and faced the gates, drew in a long breath, and focused on some­thing inside of him, that indefinable thing he knew as himself. Whatever it was that had made him who he was now, not his birth or parentage, but his youth and his relationship with Trevor Bruttenholm and his friends at the Bureau. There was a lot more out in the world, he realized; a shame that these were the only things that defined him. But those were thoughts to be pursued another time. This night, he only needed to concentrate on who he was, on keeping his head.