They reached the hole in the wall at the rear of the citadel without incident, and fifteen minutes later they stood on the first ridge of the foothills leading back up the mountainside and watched the lightning crashing down upon the fortress from the sky, and they waited.
Abe gritted his teeth and listened and tried to see what he could of the melee below. He started back down after a moment, but Pernilla put a hand on his arm and shook her head.
“We need you here.”
He gazed into her eyes, then reached up to touch her face, and he nodded. She was right, of course. If anything happened to Hellboy, it would be up to him to get them all back to safety.
The battle down there in that ghost-fortress was not for him, but for the myths: for gods and monsters.
Gale force winds blew through the courtyard; the storm crashed overhead and lightning tore down the walls of Utgard, one bolt at a time. Hellboy felt larger somehow, like a giant himself in some way, as though he towered high above the creature he had once been. His chest heaved as he breathed in the cold, crisp air of legend, and he knew that the reason Mjollnir no longer felt hot in his hand was not because the hammer had cooled, but because his own body now burned with the same fire of battle.
Though the full weight of this conflict was upon him, the need to conclude it crowding nearly everything else out of his mind, still he found some reserve, some small place in the back of his head where he could retreat and gaze around himself in wonder, in awe, and in dread. For the shadows of Utgard had coalesced now. Abe and Pernilla were not here, so he would never know if they could have seen it, but somehow he doubted it. Atop the battlements and below, lined against the walls in the shadows and arrayed amongst the towers, were all the warriors of Valhalla. These were shades only—not even ghosts, not the spirits of the long dead Aesir—and yet that did not matter.
All the dead of Ragnarok had come to witness this, the last battle of the old world, the true end. Jormungand the serpent reared its head high above the citadel and peered down within. No flesh to it, merely an echo, a whisper on the wind, yet a whisper he could see. Among the Aesir were trolls and light elves and dark elves. The Valkyrie were still there as well, thirteen of them in all, Mist and Host Fetter chief among them. Ratatosk sat attentive upon Mist’s shoulder and gazed down upon the ravaged courtyard and its piles of giant bones.
The ravens flew above in an unchanging circle, never higher or lower, never faster or slower, inevitable and eternal as the passage of time itself.
Hellboy stood still, unshaken by the winds. The echo of ancient battles filled the courtyard, but he turned away from them now, from those ghosts of old. The Nidavellim had felled the last of the giants raised by Thrym, though Hellboy could not be sure there weren’t others. Eitri led his cousins across the frozen, churned earth to stand by him, and together the five warriors crossed the courtyard. The largest and tallest of the citadel’s towers loomed ahead, untouched by the devastation of the lightning.
Before they had closed half the distance, an enormous shadow loomed in the entrance to that tower, a silhouette with horns and long fingers like talons. Things like massive rats scurried at its feet. Thrym stepped out into the courtyard of Utgard. The king of the frost giants was covered with a frozen armor, a jagged crust of ice that was deadly sharp at the end of his horns and had formed upon his hands so that each finger was twice its natural length, a spike of ice. Two of the trees that had been twined in his ribs when he had first dragged himself from the ground had been dislodged at some point upon this long trek north, but the third and largest remained. It protruded from Thrym’s lower abdomen like the truncated vestiges of some half-born conjoined twin.
The frost king’s eyes glowed a bright blue-white and steam leaked from their edges. When he spoke, the Arctic wind seemed to scream his words.
“Thunderer,” Thrym said. “You have come only to die again. It is well. For the first time, it was not my hand that took your life.”
The things that scurried about his feet were Svartalves, and until he saw them, those black, oil-slick beasts he had once thought of as weasels, Hellboy had nearly forgotten them. There were perhaps two dozen, no more, but they capered and sprinted now across the courtyard, eyes glinting with malice, stinging blades whickering across the wind.
“I had wondered where they had gone to,” Eitri muttered at Hellboy’s side. “I thought perhaps he had eaten them all.”
Then the stout Nidavellim, proud and grave, barked a command to his cousins and they stepped forward to meet the onslaught of Svartalves. Swords and axes and daggers clashed and rang, and blood was spilled. The stench of it, fresh blood on this field of putrescent decay, set Hellboy’s teeth on edge again. Thrym. It was all down to Thrym.
He started toward the frost king, but the giant only laughed that wintry laugh and waved a hand. The ground began to rumble, nearly throwing him from his feet, but Hellboy rode the tremor, kept his balance. A huge, skeletal arm burst from the ground with volcanic force, its sheer size dwarfing any of the other giants Hellboy had fought thus far. Farther across the courtyard, another skeleton began to tear itself from the earth, and behind him, two more. “No,” Hellboy muttered. “No more screwing around.” Navigating the trembling ground, he ran at Thrym. He passed the Nidavellim, who were slaughtering the Svartalves, but one of Eitri’s cousins let out an agonized cry as Hellboy went by, the dwarf driven to the ground under a twisting mound of Svartalves. He could not stop. Killing Thrym was all that mattered. That would put an end to it.
Thrym laughed as he approached, but it was a grim, throaty sound with the hiss of a blizzard. Then the frost king strode forward, crossing the ground between them in two steps. Mjollnir felt feather-light in his grasp, as if he were one with the hammer at last. He leaped a dozen feet into the air, swinging the hammer around his head, and brought it crashing down toward Thrym’s hip.
The king of the frost giants, this dead thing filled with dark and mystic knowledge, slapped him from the air. His icy claws tore the wool from Hellboy’s chest and back and gashed his flesh. Blood ran freely, spattering the icy ground as he struck the earth and rolled painfully. The serpent pendant was cold against his skin once more, but he barely noticed.
He staggered to his feet, Mjollnir hanging at his side, dangling limply for a moment. Hellboy shook his head, tried not to see the blood that was running across his belly and down his legs. Thrym reached down for him with both hands, and then he jerked back to awareness. Hellboy swung Mjollnir, shattering the frost king’s left hand into massive shards of ice and bone and dead flesh, newly grown. But the other hand grasped him and held him tight.
The cold seeped into him instantly, slowing his mind, dulling his thoughts. His bones ached so deeply that he wanted to tear his own flesh open to somehow relieve them of that lingering pain. His face and hands were numb and slack and his eyes began to frost over. Hellboy hung his head weakly and watched in horror as ice spread over his body, covering him in a thick frozen layer that enveloped him.
“That hurt,” Thrym mused, gazing at his shattered hand almost idly as with the other he cast Hellboy in a block of ice. As he stared at his splintered fingers, they began to grow back once more, claws of ice.
No sarcastic or bitter retort came from Hellboy. His eyes were wide beyond that shroud of ice, and his lungs, though large, burned with the need for air. He stared at Thrym through that blue-white, suffocating sheen, and a sadness deep as the marrow took root inside him, even as he struggled for air. Some unnameable power, perhaps that of the Norns—the Fates themselves—had drawn the spirit of the thunder-bearer back into the world to bring down the final curtain on an era, on a grand age of gods and monsters, and that knowledge filled him with a melancholy unlike any he had ever felt before.
Hellboy could not tell if that melancholy was his own, or that of the spirit within him. Thrym did not belong here. None of these dead things did. Hellboy himself did not truly belong to this world, but he had made himself a
home in it. The difference was, this was his time. This was his life, this age of man. Thrym might have preserved his essence and poured it from the Tankard back into the shell of his body, but it truly was nothing more than a husk.
Blackness edged in at the corners of Hellboy’s eyes. What little breath remained in his lungs had run out. Bright lights flared behind his eyes and in his head. Thrym reached out, scratched a restored talon through the ice, and tore off the serpent pendant. The frost king held it up and gazed at it, grinning.
“This ought to have been cast in my image,” Thrym said.
Hellboy set his teeth against one another, grinding. He stretched, muscles rippling. Mjollnir burned in his grasp again now, and he braced himself against the ice coffin in which he had been encased. In the encroaching blackness inside his mind, he met the thunder-bearer’s essence. Together they reached out to the storm.
Lightning flickered in white veins across the sky and scorched the air as it reached tendrils down from the sky to touch Mjollnir, as it had done on the river-bank what seemed an age ago. The ice shattered and fell away from him, and the hammer glowed with an unearthly light.
“No!” Thrym roared.
Hellboy swung the hammer and splintered the giant’s knee, snapping the leg nearly in two. Thrym’s cry of rage and pain drowned out the thunder and fought back the wind. The frost king went down on his knees, one ruined and one still sturdy, but Thrym swayed forward, nearly falling. His eyes leaked that blue-white mist, like the frozen breath of a hundred men. The giant’s horns were sharp and deadly, and Hellboy saw a cunning flicker in those eyes. Thrym’s magic was given over to the resurrection of the other giants and to the mastery of the ice, but he might gore Hellboy with those horns.
Every instinct demanded he strike with Mjollnir again, but they were not his instincts, not really. Instead, Hellboy reached up with his left hand, the strength of the Aesir and the storm reverberating through his body, every nerve ending and every tendon rippling with that power, and he grabbed hold of the trunk of tree that jutted from Thrym’s lower ribcage.
With a battle cry learned at the foot of the Allfather, he ripped the tree out of Thrym’s body. Bones broke and flesh tore and ice cracked and when the roots of the tree were pulled free, a hole five feet around gaped and puckered. It sucked at the air greedily, a cold deeper than any Arctic freeze blasting from it between each breath.
Thrym’s mouth dropped open and he reached down to clutch at his belly. All around the courtyard, the bones of giants tumbled to the ground, still once more. The walls of Utgard shimmered and became translucent, the mountains visible through them all around; the ghost of that great fortress lost its solidity, little more than a specter again, an ancient phantom.
The frost king’s eyes were wide, and he stared at Hellboy. “Bring the thunder, then,” he croaked.
Hellboy did. He raised Mjollnir and lightning crashed down from the sky, shearing off Thrym’s left arm at the shoulder. Then he brought the hammer crashing down and caved in the frost king’s skull, snapping off his horns, flushing away that blue-white mist from his eyes in a blast of energy that might have been the giant’s soul essence.
The bones of the king fell in upon themselves and clattered to the frozen ground.
Hellboy stood by those scattered bones, which now lay with the others, a graveyard of giants, and he staggered forward, weak from the loss of blood that no longer flowed, aching with wounds now closed, injuries already healing.
Above, the clouds began to clear and the last of the thunder rolled off across the sky. The ravens were gone.
As were the walls of Utgard, and the phantoms of Ragnarok.
Hellboy saw Eitri, bathed in blood that was not his own, picking his way amongst the bones. Only one other of the Nidavellim survived: his cousin Lit walked with him, arm dangling broken at his side. The blasted remains of the village that had once stood there in that mountain crag were grim testament to the truth of what had happened there, but somehow already the details seemed unclear to him.
“Abe?” Hellboy asked, glancing around as Eitri and Lit came closer. “Where the heck is Abe? Did you guys see him and Pernilla anywhere?”
“I know not where your comrade has gone,” Eitri replied, voice quavering with exhaustion.
Hellboy turned to look at him. “I’ve got to find them.”
“You fought well, thunder-bearer,” Eitri replied, chin raised proudly. “We are all that remain now, but my cousins and my brothers were honored to die at your side. I will remember them, and you.”
“I… look, Eitri, I’m not him. You know that, right?”
The dwarf hung his head, and suddenly he did not look like a warrior anymore. With his long, filthy hair and the iron rings in his beard, he looked only like some strange little homeless man. Lit seemed much the same.
“Yes, Hellboy,” Eitri said. “We know.”
But Lit did not look at him. The ragged Nidavellim was gazing past Hellboy, eyes wide. Hellboy spun, fearing for an instant that Thrym had only feigned death. But it was not the frost king that approached across the ruined earth. The tall, long-legged being who strode swiftly toward them was familiar, however. It was Mist. The soul-gatherer carried her heavy spear in her right hand.
On her shoulder sat Ratatosk the squirrel. Ratatosk chittered and squeaked as though he were some ordinary, earthly rodent.
Mist said nothing. She paused only inches away from Hellboy, her eyes in shadow, a slight smile at the corners of her mouth. She raised her left hand and with it reached out to tap Hellboy once between the stumps of his horns.
Mjollnir fell from his hand and thumped dully to the frozen ground. Astonished, Hellboy stared at the hammer for a long moment, relishing the emptiness in his head. He was alone again in his mind, the echo of that ancient age now gone.
When he looked up, Mist was gone. “Eitri?”
The dwarf stared up at him, attentive and respectful.
“You’ll keep the hammer?”
The two Nidavellim glanced at one another, and then Eitri nodded. “We shall. We will keep it in our care for all time. There are others of our kind in Stockholm and in Copenhagen and throughout the northlands. Mjollnir will be kept out of the hands of the unworthy and never will be wielded again unless the spirit of the thunder-bearer returns.”
Hellboy nodded thoughtfully and glanced up at the sky to find only the night and bright, gleaming stars. “That’s good. I don’t think he’s coming back, but I guess you never know. Wouldn’t have exactly predicted all this stuff if you’d asked me beforehand.” Again he looked to Eitri and Lit. “You guys’ll make it back all right?”
Eitri bent and lifted Mjollnir. Hellboy was surprised at how effortless it seemed, but then he recalled that Eitri and his brother had forged the hammer to begin with.
“We will be just fine. And you?”
“I’ll be all right,” Hellboy replied. “Little fresh air’ll clear my head.”
There was an awkward moment where he felt he ought to have something more to say. Then he nodded once and turned away, toward the foothills on the other side of the crag, where he had last seen Abe.
The ground was broken and churned in many places. Homes had been reduced to rubble and frozen human corpses, some of them mutilated, their bones gnawed upon, were strewn amongst the debris. The giant bones were plentiful but easily navigated. Hellboy stepped around a small pile of stones that might once have been a chimney, and his hoof slipped. As he struggled to maintain his balance, a glimmer of starlight off metal caught his eye and he realized he was looking at the serpent pendant that Thrym had torn off him.
For a long moment he stared at it, tempted to leave it there.
“Hellboy!”
He looked up and saw Abe and Pernilla picking their way across the battlefield toward him. Hellboy let out a long breath he had no idea he’d been holding and started walking in their direction. Then he paused and bent down to retrieve the pendant. When he reached them, he h
anded it to Pernilla.
“This is pretty much all that’s left. Except the bones. Figured you should have it. If you want to put it in a museum or something, or you want to keep it for yourself, either way is fine with me. Just… well, it might be a bad idea to wear it.”
Pernilla took it from him gingerly and nodded. Then she slipped it into her pocket. She looked pretty bedraggled, but there was a kind of sheen to her skin and a brightness to her eyes that Hellboy figured came from having come so close to something so horrible and living through it.
“What happened to the hammer?” Abe asked.
Hellboy shrugged. “The dwarves took it. What was I gonna do with it? You didn’t find any survivors, huh?”
“Three, actually,” Abe said. He pointed back toward the foothills. “I’ve got them camped in a crevasse back there, out of the wind. We should all try to get some sleep at least until sunrise. Even if the walk to the nearest village isn’t as long as the walk up here, I’d still rather do it under the sun.”
Hellboy nodded tiredly, and the three of them fell into step side by side, walking back to where Abe and Pernilla had left the survivors. Abe had his arm slipped gently around her waist, but that might have been just to help her make her way through the rubble in the dark. Hellboy could not be sure, and he wasn’t about to get nosy about it.
“All right,” Hellboy said. “But just a few hours’ sleep. At dawn, we hit the trail out of here. My stomach’s already rumbling.”
“There’s still some food in our packs,” Pernilla offered.
“Nah, none of that crap,” Hellboy replied, chuckling softly. “I want to go home and get really bad Chinese takeout, maybe Kung Pao Shrimp and some Peking Ravioli. That’s the ticket.”
Abe turned to look at him. He paused a long moment and then grinned that weird, fishy grin of his.
The Bones of Giants Page 22
