In more ways than one.
The sky was clear above and the air was still, the wind seeming to hesitate as if wondering what he would do next. Hellboy raised the hammer and took a step toward the gates. He brought Mjollnir down in a furious blow.
From the cloudless sky, lightning flashed down and merged with the hammer, striking the gates simultaneously. All of Utgard shook and thunder rolled across the sky, deep and resonant. The gates of the ghost city crashed open, stone splintering and calving like an iceberg. Those huge doors slammed into the two giant, partially decayed sentries inside. One of them was merely staggered, driven several long steps from the walls. The other was thrown to his knees, and an enormous wedge of stone that calved off one of the gates landed upon him, crushing the sword-wielding giant’s spine, sharp edge cutting right through him.
What flesh it had flaked away to nothing, leaving only cold, motionless bones behind.
Above, clouds began to roll in again, and lightning flickered and sparked behind them, as though the heavens themselves were on fire. The rumble of thunder swept across the mountains, and the ground shook.
Hellboy ran through the gates of Utgard, hooves pounding the frozen ground, hammer raised high. The serpent pendant swung against his chest as he bellowed a war cry last uttered by the long dead legions of Valhalla. The wind picked up again, swirling down into the massive courtyard of Utgard, a broad open space larger than the village it had obliterated. Far at the other end of the courtyard, another giant stood in front of one of the citadel’s towers and crashed a fist through a wall. “Abe,” Hellboy muttered. “Damn.”
But it was too late for him to do anything for Abe. The guard who had been staggered by their entrance had snatched up a mace from his belt, a monstrous weapon whose iron head was at least three feet in diameter. It was not skeletal like the one they had seen outside. No, this one had the appearance of a more recent corpse, flesh pitted and dried. Like Thrym, it had its own horns, and its beard and hands seemed forged from jagged ice. The frost giants had some of that ancient ice in them, the frozen heart of Ymir.
“Quickly!” Eitri shouted. “Kill him before the others come!” The Nidavellim did not wait for the giant to attack them. They raced at his legs, attacking with sword and axe. Eitri leaped higher than such a stout creature ought to be able to, and buried both daggers in one of the giant’s legs. The dead flesh stank as it tore, but Eitri started to climb, hand over hand, blade over blade. Mjollnir burned Hellboy’s hand as he faced the giant.
“It cannot be,” the giant muttered, its voice deep as the thunder. “You are dead.”
Hellboy clenched his teeth and glared up at the thirty-five foot monster. “At least I don’t look it.”
The giant grunted in pain as one of the Nidavellim hacked at his leg with an axe as though trying to fell an enormous tree. It stepped back, Eitri still hanging on with his knives, and brought the mace down, trying to crush the offending dwarf. The Nidavellim dove clear, but that was the moment Hellboy had been waiting for.
Again he shouted that battle cry. A barrage of lightning struck the walls of Utgard, blew a hole in one of the towers, and tore up the ground. Hellboy raised Mjollnir and lunged forward, his own leap far more substantial that ought to have been possible for him. He brought the hammer down and shattered the giant’s wrist.
It roared with pain, staggered backward, and the Nidavellim hacked at its legs until it fell with a thump that shook the earth. Hellboy ran at it, hooves sliding across the ice, and leaped up to the giant’s chest. The echo of the thunderer rose up within him; he felt the dead myth’s savagery and bloodlust rushing through his veins, pumping in his heart. He was nearly blinded in that moment by the struggle inside him. Blackness began to swamp his consciousness, and he swayed a moment.
Cut the crap! he thought.
The presence that had festered within him tried to possess him, to control him. His hands shook and the unearthly substance of his right hand burned with the heat of Mjollnir. The serpent pendant was frozen solid to the wool breast of his sweater.
Hellboy screamed a blistering epithet, but this time, he spoke English. With both hands he brought Mjollnir down and caved in the giant’s skull. It shattered, spilling blood and rotting brain tissue onto the frozen earth with a hiss of melting ice. One of its horns snapped off and slid to the ground. The hammer no longer burned his hand. He would do what had to be done and draw on the strength locked inside that weapon, but he was going to do it on his own terms.
He could feel the thunder-bearer inside him, furious, but now focused on the external battle rather than the one within.
“Hellboy!” Eitri shouted.
But he did not need the Nidavellim’s warning. He stood on the dead giant’s chest and surveyed the courtyard. Tower doors had banged open and now the giants were coming, first two, then five, then seven, all in various states of decay. Not decay, Hellboy corrected himself. For they weren’t rotting, but reconstituting themselves somehow.
Thrym was not among them.
Hellboy swore under his breath. For a moment the dead giants moved slowly, walking as though in a trance, staring at the Nidavellim and at Mjollnir. All but one of them was armed, several with swords, the others with axes and maces. Two were female, and they were perhaps more hideous than the others, with their twisted, thick-lipped mouths and sagging, withered, pendulous breasts. One of the females wore a thick cloak of fur and carried a morningstar ball and chain larger than any weapon Hellboy had ever seen. She had a scar across the left side of her face in a curling slash that ran beside her eye and then across her lips and jaw.
There was enough flesh on her that he recognized her. Even as she began to swing the morningstar, images flashed through Hellboy’s brain and he put a name to that face. Hyndla. Though a giantess, Odin had been her father.
My sister, Hellboy thought. He shook his head, trying to clear it. Hyndla was not his sister, but that of the thunder-bearer.
By instinct, he raised Mjollnir above his head. The wind whipped against him, powerful enough that it shook him where he stood, there in the midst of the courtyard. He did not need to look to the sky to know that the clouds had begun to churn as though the heavens had become a whirlpool above his head. Thunder boomed and echoed and shook the walls and the ground itself.
“Come, then,” he screamed in that ancient tongue, the words coming unbidden to his lips, spoken not by Hellboy, but by the ghost in him. “Come to me, bones of giants, and we will all return to the grave where we belong, where all the nine worlds were meant to stay buried forevermore!”
There was one final word, one shouted so loud that Hellboy’s throat burned with it, but there was no translation for it in his mind. It was a curse, an insult, a challenge, and at its savage utterance, the giants roared in return. They shouted, all together, a cacophony of war cries and taunts, and they rushed across the courtyard toward him. So large were they, however, that they bumped and jostled one another trying to reach him, trying to be the first to attack. They were not so stupid that they did not realize what they were doing, however. The ground shook with their massive footfalls and they began to spread out, to try to ring him in.
Hellboy raised Mjollnir again and with both hands brought it down. He struck the ground and the frozen earth cracked. Upon the moment of that impact, adrenaline surging through him, every nerve ending in his body crackling with tension, a fusillade of lightning flashed down from the sky far stronger than the first. It tore the ground up into long trenches of turned earth, shattered walls, and set stone afire.
Three of the giants—one of the females and two corpse-like males—shook and jittered as the lightning struck them. Fire exploded from their eye sockets and their hair was set ablaze. Electricity shot in blue-white arcs from their arms and torsos and seemed to tether them to the ground below. The two cadaverous giants glowed from within as the lightning refracted inside their rib cages like fireflies in a jar. None of them managed even to scream before the fir
e engulfed them and they tumbled to the ground, charred flesh and blackened bones.
Hellboy ran at the nearest monstrosity, a sword-wielding giant with two heads, one of them dumb and drooling with hollow eyes and the other cruelly grinning with sharpened fangs and a gaze of pure malice. It was the fastest, probably the strongest of those who served Thrym, and he realized he knew this one too.
“They called you Hraesvelg, before Ragnarok,” Hellboy muttered as he ran toward the two-headed giant, his hooves cracking the icy ground. “Now you have no identity. You are a memory with stolen flesh and rotting bones.”
The world seemed to swim around him, to change, and Utgard took on more solidity. The sky looked different to him now, the air tasted of copper, a bloody mist surrounded him. He spoke of memory, but now he walked in memory as well. It was as though a veil had been torn aside and now he saw the old world, the land where myths had slain one another for sport and spite, until the day when the final battle had come.
Hraesvelg laughed, and the deep, sonorous boom of it was akin to the thunder. “I am a memory? Then what, might I ask, are you?”
“Just another dead thing.”
Hellboy ran at Hraesvelg as the giant slashed down at him with that enormous blade. The sword cut a long gash in the ground, but Hellboy avoided its deadly descent. Despite his mindless, soft-skulled head, the giant’s second head was cunning. When Hellboy dodged the blade, Hraesvelg reached down and grabbed him, snatched him up in one enormous hand.
Teeth bared in a growl, Hellboy shattered the giant’s wrist with one blow from Mjollnir. The crack of bone echoed across the courtyard and the lightning tore the ground nearby. Hraesvelg roared in fury and raised his sword. Hellboy clung to exposed bone and rotting flesh with his free hand and hung on to the giant’s arm. He got his hooves under him and then sprang with all the momentum he could muster. Mjollnir raised above his head, he leaped at the two-headed giant’s chest and shattered it with Mjollnir, breaking bone and tearing muscle and ripping a hole where the monster’s heart ought to have been.
Hraesvelg froze and tumbled forward, landed with both faces striking the ground. Hellboy was thrust up inside the darkling beast’s gaping wound. The stench of dead meat was powerful and nauseating and his stomach heaved as he was enveloped in sickening fluids. It was pitch black there, trapped inside the giant’s body. He raised Mjollnir and struck upward, tearing a hole in the giant’s back; then he climbed up and out of it, using splintered bone as a hand-hold.
As he withdrew himself from that massive corpse, he saw that the Nidavellim were all still alive. Eitri and his cousins, with their heavy fur and mail armor covered in blood, had managed to kill one of the giants, severing its head entirely, and were now attacking another like wolves bringing down a deer.
The world around him remained a kind of fugue state, where the wind itself tasted of ancient worlds, carried the songs of Valhalla and the smoke from distant fires in the camps of the Aesir. Above, the two large ravens circled once more. Huginn and Muninn, the servants of his father. He knew them now. As he glanced around he saw still figures standing atop the walls of Utgard, beautiful women draped in long furs and carrying spears and swords and shields. Mist was among them, watching solemnly, awaiting the outcome.
The Valkyrie had been watching all along.
Chapter Sixteen
He stood atop the corpse of the two-headed giant and surveyed the courtyard. The Nidavellim were screaming in their own tongue, a kind of chant that they sometimes uttered in the heat of battle. There was no sign of the giant he had seen when they had first broken in, the one who had been tearing into the side of a building. And no sign of Abe.
Thrym had still not shown himself.
Only Hyndla remained, his sister, the crescent scar on her face gleaming wetly with each crack of lightning that illuminated the sky. She stared at him, still gently swinging her morningstar, the ball and chain clanking as they spun.
“Why are you here?” she asked, her gravelly voice almost soft.
“Because all of you are.”
She swung the morningstar down and he leaped out of its path. It crashed to the earth, one of its spikes tearing through his sweater, slashing his back, and driving him down. He cried out in pain and snarled in fury. With a grunt of effort he shot to his feet again and turned to find Hyndla trying to pull the morningstar from the ground. The spikes on the mace ball were lodged in the frozen earth, but they were loosening.
Hellboy grabbed the chain and pulled with all the strength of the blood of Odin, which ran through him. Hyndla was tugged off her feet and landed on her chest on the ground. She tried to roll away, began to rise, but he was there, upon her, Mjollnir raised high. He shattered her shoulder first, then cracked her ribs, and finally he stood upon her heaving bosom and prepared to crush her skull.
Her gaze was distant and lost, her eyes as wet as her scar.
“Is this real, Thor?” she asked.
His heart was cold, his stomach tight, but his eyes were stung by the wind. Or perhaps only by the winds of fate.
“As real as it ever was, my sister,” he replied.
Then he killed her.
Abe stood just outside the building, staring wide-eyed up at the giant towering over him. Never in his life had he felt a more profound desire to go home. A sudden image of Dorothy’s ruby slippers appeared in his head, but he would have taken a wicked witch and flying monkeys over a bunch of zombie giants any day of the week. Had, in fact, now that he thought of it, managed just fine against a wicked witch and flying monkeys that time in Dusseldorf.
The giant roared, its lips peeling back from its teeth, the stench of its breath so powerful Abe could smell it all the way on the ground.
Then it began to shout, and he was glad he could not understand its words. Any second now other giants would arrive, but Abe wasn’t all that concerned about the others. Just keeping this one from peeling the flesh from his bones with its teeth would be an accomplishment. After all those humans, he figured they’d all be fighting over some seafood.
“Abe!” Pernilla screamed behind him.
“Coming!” he replied.
He left the Saami woman’s gear where it was, but they could not afford to leave his pack behind. Abe grabbed his unwieldy pack and tossed it through the window, just as the giant struck the wall above him with its fist. The stone wall shook and part of it caved in. The window shattered and the glass showered the ground.
Pernilla screamed his name again, and he saw her face through the broken window, those dark eyes wide with terror. He ran at the window, any sense of caution forgotten, and just as the giant reached down to try to grab him, Abe dove through. A shard of broken glass that jutted down from the frame gouged his arm, but then he was inside. He grunted and the breath went out of him as he landed on the floor, colliding with his pack.
“Go, go, go!” he shouted.
He hefted the pack and slipped it on his back, but even as he rose, Pernilla had gotten the three survivors moving. The woman and the young girl carried whatever they could manage, and they had blankets draped about their shoulders, but the biggest surprise was the old man. He was faster than he looked, and kept pace with the others. Abe realized he should not have been surprised. The man had survived this long.
With the weight of his gear a heavy burden upon him, Abe ran through the debris, praying he did not get his ankle broken. As he reached the other side of the room, where the frozen mountain of the dead lay in a grotesque diorama, he heard the voice of the giant rumbling above, and he paused to glance back.
The hole it had punched, high up on the wall, was blacked out by its face. It pressed an eye to the hole to stare in at them, shouting something in its old language.
With more speed than he would ever have credited himself with having, Abe drew his gun and shot the giant right through the eye. The bullet punched the huge orb and fluid spilled down through the hole. The giant screamed and reared back, then instantly began pummellin
g the wall, tearing it away, stones spilling down with a crash and a cloud of rising dust. The giant was enraged, screeching in a high, agonized voice.
From deeper within the tower of Utgard that lay ahead, Abe heard Pernilla calling back to him. With a grim satisfaction, he gave the giant the finger, then raced after Pernilla and the others, leaving the monster behind. It was insane with pain and fury or it might have stopped trying to burrow its way into that smaller structure and instead run around to the tower entrance. Abe hoped it kept trying to dig its own door.
The arched halls of Utgard were so high he felt like a church mouse racing along the stone-slab floor of the main corridor in that tower. As silent as possible, he caught up with Pernilla, the old man, the little girl, and the Saami woman, thinking again how tragic it was that these three were the only survivors, and hoping that he could get them safely away.
As he reached them, Pernilla put a finger to his lips. She glanced around the corner and he knew there must be giants there.
Then from outside the tower there came a crash like a mountain crumbling and shouts of alarm and rage. Then thunder boomed through the fortress and the high windows revealed the zoetrope flash of lightning across the sky.
Abe smiled. Hellboy had arrived.
“They’re going,” Pernilla whispered, peering again around the corner. After a moment, she turned and nodded to him.
“Quickly and quietly,” he told her, and she repeated it to the others in their own language.
Abe glanced back the way they had come. From down the massive hallway he could hear the shouts and the crashing as the now half-blind giant tore his way into the building. A shudder went through him as he remembered the frozen dead and the way the giants had eaten them. Then he followed after Pernilla and the three villagers. They moved in absolute silence, though there was chaos outside. It was not long before they came to an open passageway at the back of the tower that led them outside. In the shadows of the walls of Utgard, Pernilla and Abe hurried back the way they had come with a new burden and a new responsibility. It was slower going with the villagers along, but these three people were what they had come for.
The Bones of Giants Page 21
