Primo, learn the ways of the Norns.
Secondo, fulfill the promise she’d made to transport the caskets to the Krak, where somehow they’d be used against those ultimately responsible for her father’s death.
Terzo, deal with Servius Aurelius Santini if and when she ever met him.
She needed to stay strong, focused on each task as it came, succeed in its demands, and then move onto the next challenge to become both a stronger Norn and capable woman charged with the Trevisan fleet and fortune.
So, in cleaving to the “practical” side of things — given the fact that she regularly traveled supernaturally between Midgard and Mimir’s Well! — Clarinda succeeded in committing to memory all the physical paths through Mount Glittertind that led to Mimir’s Well.
One night, when blindfolded, Clarinda led Urd from Svartalfheim to Mimir. The Norn said, “You may take off the cloth, Sister — that was the final test. You’ve earned the right to take a quicker way.”
Unclasping something hidden behind her neck, Urd withdrew a golden necklace embedded with rubies and emeralds. As she placed the precious object around Clarinda’s throat, Urd said, “This is a Brisinga necklace. With it, you’ll be able to imitate the Asgardians and make Runeporten, or Rune Gates. These gates allow us to magically access each of the Nine Worlds.”
“Where did you get it?” Clarinda asked. “The Asgardians?”
“Indirectly,” Urd said, “and not without great anger from Odin. The All-Father wished they’d never been created. The Brisingamen were necklaces made in ancient times by the elven smithy, Volund. While wandering in Nidaveller, the Kingdom of the Dwarves, Volund disguised himself as a dwarf and spent a great deal of time learning magical crafts at the Great Forges in the depths of Mount Glittertind. Eventually, two alert dwarf-sentries captured him.
One of the guards ran off to notify his superiors, but the other dwarf, Brising, freed Volund in exchange for a special bribe. As payment for freeing the elf, Brising demanded that Volund forge four necklaces — one for Brising’s wife, and three more for the wives of Brising’s brothers. Volund did so, but he made not four, but five necklaces — keeping one for himself — and imparted a magic to the jewelry previously known only to the Asgardians.
“Clarinda, this magic was the making of rune-gates. These portals make it possible to travel instantaneously between the worlds. Usually one has to use the Great Gates to pass through Nine Worlds, but Volund’s Brisingamen gave portability to the owner of a necklace. The Asgardians were enraged when they learned that Volund had made these magical talismans, and Odin pursued him. The Dark Elf escaped Odin’s wrath by transporting to Midgard, but as he started to jump through the rune-gate, Odin yanked the necklace off him and stranded Volund on your home world. Soon after, King Níthoth of Swedeland caught Volund and — by means of his wife’s trickery and the severing of sinews in Volund’s legs — the Dark Elf was forced to slavery as a smithy for the king and queen until he recovered and could take his revenge. Meanwhile, in his wrath, Odin destroyed Volund’s broken Brisinga, and then retrieved the other three necklaces from the dwarves’ wives. These prizes he gave to the Norns for safekeeping, and as a means for the Three Sisters of Fate to travel quickly beyond the bounds of Mimir’s Well….”
Back in the present, the memory of Urd’s words faded as Clarinda fingered the jewels at her throat. She wore Urd’s Brisinga necklace, so if the Norn had transported to another world, it must have been by going with Skuld or Verdandi. There was also the possibility that the triquerta brooch also possessed special properties, but the Norns remained silent about it, merely saying she should never take it off.
Whatever the source of their disappearance, the essential fact was that the Norns were gone.
Intuition told Clarinda that she had to go forward alone, confront whatever was waiting for her, and hopefully find her way back to Mimir and the Norns. So, armed with the quarterstaff and protectively touching the Brisinga, Clarinda made her way to the base of the path and began moving toward the waters of what Verdandi had called the River Perilous.
She stopped short at the sight of Servius Aurelius Santini sleeping peacefully under a yew tree.
Clarinda knew that she wasn’t having another vision — she’d spent too much time in the Nine Worlds to mistake dreamtime for waking moments ever again — but she nevertheless started to cautiously approach the slumbering young man, in disbelief that she was finally going to meet him in person. She didn’t know what she intended to do when she got close enough to him to touch, but the Norns and Mimir were urgent when they’d spoken of great danger here and she felt that she had to do something.
Kiss him? No, no, not that! Maybe? No! But, he’s really here — I can feel his presence, and it’s not imagination. What’s he doing sleeping, anyway, and where is the Codex Lacrimae everyone keeps talking about?
He stirred.
Clarinda dashed behind the trunk of a broad pine tree.
Peering around its edge, she watched as the young man awakened, brought a hand to his forehead, and rose quickly to his feet. When he turned toward the river, Clarinda withdrew deeper into the wood. From the shadows of the trees, she saw Santini seem to listen to something and look intently in the direction of the river. Clarinda tried to follow his sight lines from her position, but all she saw was a rushing channel with salmon frequently making leaps over a boulder-bridge into some rapids.
Then Santini disappeared.
Clarinda was just watching him, had moved around the trunk of the tree to get a better view, and now found him completely gone!
Why is everyone disappearing this morning?
Throwing caution to the wind, she dashed forward to see where he’d gone to, but couldn’t find him anywhere. She ran onto the path when something twinkled in the corner of her eye, and she saw that he was almost directly behind her, facing the other direction near a copse of hazel trees. He was looking upward at their high boughs with a mattock in his right hand.
She forgot that she’d been holding the Brisinga, and as Santini turned around to the river she tried to find some place to hide.
Thought became action and, in a flaring of emerald and ruby, Clarinda transported onto a wooded hill a few hundred paces behind the youthful knight. She released the necklace back onto her breast, astonished that she’d been able to make the magic work.
Then someone grabbed her roughly from behind and she felt the point of a knife at her throat.
“Are you a Norn?” a high-pitched voice hissed in her ear. “You have their stink on you. Give me the name of that fossegrim yonder and I’ll let you live.”
Clarinda blinked in pain, her eyes watering. There was formidable strength in the slender forearm pinning her throat, but she could still breathe and, therefore, still fight.
“I...don’t know what you’re talking about...,” she gasped. She strove for the kind of control and calmness she’d seen time and again in the demeanor of Urd and her sisters.
“The fossegrim that lives here. His name. Do you know it?”
“No,” she replied.
The attacker pushed Clarinda away and she swung around, bringing the quarterstaff to a guarded position.
A tall, slender being stood only a few paces from her. She knew him immediately for an elf, his kind unmistakable with his pointed ears, fair skin, oval eyes, and angularly shaped features. This elf was clad entirely in black clothing, and Clarinda could tell by the body language of the stranger’s thin frame that he was truly undecided about what to do.
“I’m sorry for attacking you,” he said somberly, depression underlying his every word. He sounded like one condemned. “Leave this place,” he said, flicking a hand at her dismissively. “Go on. Death will be here shortly, and I’m of the mind to finally give Modgud her payment to make the crossing.”
Perplexed at the elf’s words and attitude, Clarinda realized that his seizure of her and the knife attack had been in reaction to her sudden appearance, nothing more.<
br />
The elf put his hands on his hips and lowered his head, apparently thinking. Clarinda could feel the emotional pain radiating off him, and took a closer look. He had short-cropped, black hair, emphasizing his long ears that tapered severely to points set high against his skull. He carried a long spear, its narrow blade decorated with ornately etched runes that Clarinda somehow sensed to be a clan identification for the owner.
She glanced down the hill and saw Santini starting to move toward the river.
No, no, no. Skuld said that he couldn’t touch the water. But this fellow seems to know something about the danger I feel here, and it’s not him.
“What’s a fossegrim ?” She asked, catching the elf’s attention before he took flight.
“You’re a Norn, and know nothing of water elementals?” the elf asked scornfully.
“How do you know that I’m…?”
“What? A Norn in training?” the elf nodded toward Santini. “Who else would spend time talking to me when the Codex Wielder is about to die within minutes after his arrival in the Nine Worlds?”
“What’s a fossegrim ?” Clarinda asked again, using the voice of command and authority in her voice. As one of the first of Urd’s abilities to manifest, it was the one she felt most comfortable using without over-thinking it.
The spellbinding worked; well, enough to make the elf flinch and raise an eyebrow in curiosity. “Ah...I know that tone. So, you’ll be Urd. Lovely.”
“I’m Clarinda, now.” She staked her quarterstaff into the ground and tried to sound more confident than she felt. “What’s your name, and for the last time, what’s a fossegrim ?”
“I’m Rudyick — you speak the High Speech passingly well, for a mortal, that is.”
“What do you mean, ‘High Speech?’ I’m speaking Italian.”
“You’re a Norn — no language is a barrier to you.”
Startled, she realized that the high-pitched intonation of Rudyick’s speech was in reality the cadence of an unfamiliar language.
The elf smiled dourly, remaining where he stood, and leaning on the spear. “As for a fossegrim, it shortly won’t matter. That Santini fellow down there is just as doomed as my former master. Old Nick’s going to slay both of them, and then I think he’ll take the Codex Lacrimae back to Midgard where he’ll use it to finally reach Heaven.”
“What...is...a... fossegrim ?” she asked, and this time she got the inflection completely right — Urd couldn’t have asked better, or with more Command in her voice.
“Oh, for Odin’s Sake — it’s a water elemental ! THE water elemental! This one is the ruler of the other twenty-six Nøkken around the world, and he’s got about sixty strömkarlen and nixies swimming in this river and under Glittertind’s Lake! Old Nick somehow gained control of this fossegrim, and so at the moment, controls most of the water elementals in the Nine Worlds.” The words came in a rush, and when Rudyick finished he looked with surprise at Clarinda. “Well done. It seems you’ve, ah, found your Voice.” He shrugged, appearing completely defeated. “Ah, that completes my day — commanded by a girl new-come to Mimir’s Well.”
“I’ve got to get going, Rudyick — he’s nearing the river,” Clarinda said impatiently, watching Santini stop and stare at some jumping salmon, “but tell me one last thing.”
Is Santini drunk? Why is he wandering around that glade like he’s lost something? He hasn’t been here long enough to lose anything!
She returned her gaze to the elf: “Why did you want to know the fossegrim’s name?”
He, too, was watching Santini with a confused look on his face. “Did the boy lose something down there?”
“Rudyick!” Clarinda commanded.
The elf turned to her, glaring. “Oh, that — if you know a water elemental’s true name, you can free it.”
“Not command it?”
“No, if that were the case, Old Nick would be unbeatable — that’s not how he plays his games.”
“Farewell, Rudyick, and thanks for the warnings. First things first, though: primo, it seems I’ve got to keep that fool from touching the river.”
“I’ll say you do,” the elf said, before dashing off in a different direction, “that river’s swarming with strömkarlen and nixies. Codex Wielder or not, he won’t stand a chance against the weight of the waters of the world.”
Clarinda groaned, catching the last of Rudyick’s words in the breeze he left behind as he flashed from sight.
Quarterstaff in hand and desperation in her heart, she sprinted down the hill to intercept Santini.
Chapter 3
Fossegrim and Strömkarlen
I should have heeded the girl’s warning.
Aurelius expelled a breath when the waves of the river crashed upon him, so too little air remained in his lungs when an unseen force pulled him in. He panicked, slashing with the mattock still in hand and broke free of the riverbed after he submerged. The tiny hatchet had an immediate effect. Whatever held him released its grip, and he was able to scramble back to the shallows and look about him.
The river waved and roiled with strömkarlen and nixies.
He couldn’t have known then, but never before in the history of the Nine Worlds had so many of the elementals gathered in one place. They emerged vertically from the river’s surface in so vast a multitude that Aurelius couldn’t see the opposite bank. Male and female, the entities’ nude forms were shaped like gigantic human bodies but entirely liquid, with only the merest pools of shadow where eyes, noses, and mouths should be.
They were speaking and singing to him, their collective frustration at his escape sounding like the thunderous roar of a hundred waterfalls laced with an entrancing chorus of feminine pleas.
The air thrummed with magical energy, and as he backed away, he saw that his mattock had cleaved through the arms of two of the four beings who’d grabbed him. As he watched, the slashes disappeared when water flowed around their cuts and reformed itself. The clamor of the male creatures intensified while the songs of the females became more plaintive and alluring. Each time a being arose, the river receded to allow more substance for creating it.
Liquid hands clutched his ankles and began to drag him toward the watery horde.
He again hacked downward with the mattock, severing the wrists of all those gripping him. More screams erupted from the nearing strömkarlen as he stumbled onto shore.
The girl was next to him, her quarterstaff raised and warm hand lightly touching the underside of his arm.
“We’ve to get out of here,” she urged as they retreated from the bellowing creatures.
“D’accordo,” Aurelius agreed. “By the way, you were correct about the water.”
“You think ?” The girl replied sarcastically. “Let’s back away a bit further, and then I’ll get us over to that tree where the prisoner is.”
“How?” Aurelius asked. “I was going to use those boulders, but we can’t get near them.”
The strömkarlen and nixies were seemingly everywhere in the river, but none left the boundary of the bank to pursue the young people. Both Aurelius and Clarinda halted at the entrance to the glade, where they could observe the frustrated water creatures without risking even a splash from them.
Then the nixies moved to the front, singing in harmonies that soothed and completely overwhelmed the storm-watered crashing of their male brethren. The music was that of the sirens, ancient and melodic, and immediately affecting Aurelius in its promise of returning him to times and lands long thought lost. Hypnotized, he began moving forward, taking a tentative step toward the group of nixies beckoning to him — he watched, amazed, as the face of one of the elementals took the face of his younger sister, Constanzia, who he’d last seen five summers ago when he set sail for the Levant.
She’s...what? Thirteen now? Is this what little Constanzia looks like these days?
The girl beside him slapped him hard in the face.
Stung, Aurelius turned from the nixies, partly angry t
hat his view of the present-day Constanzia melted away as the sprite dove back into the crowded river, but mostly relieved that his newfound companion had saved him from stepping forward any farther.
“They’re water elementals,” Clarinda shouted, “like sirens of the deep! If you listen to them too long, you’ll walk into the water and drown!”
There was still music in the air, but it changed dramatically.
They heard the strains of a fiddle whose chords pierced all the singing and roaring of the water elementals.
At the new sound, some of the strömkarlen collapsed into the river, enabling Aurelius to see the opposite bank. An obese, redheaded man stood there, vigorously playing a fiddle. The instrument’s discordant and sinister music drifted across the river in a hauntingly beautiful melody, compelling the young Hospitaller and Norn to approach.
“Evremar of Choques?” the girl exclaimed, her voice hoarse with rage. “What are you doing here?”
The fiddler completed a measure and then grinned at Aurelius’s companion.
“Ah, Clarinda Trevisan! So good to see you again, my dear.” He pursed his lips together, obviously enjoying the moment. “In these lands, though, I’m afraid it’s not ‘Evermar,’ but ‘Old Nick.’”
Aurelius glanced at her, surprised. “Clarinda? I’ve heard that name before — we’ve met somewhere!”
“Only in dreams,” she replied cryptically, and then reached beneath her tunic to clasp a necklace. “Hold on, we’re getting out of here right now!”
“D’accordo,” Aurelius agreed, sensing a great malevolence in the fiddler. He seemed purely evil.
She tightened her grip on his sleeve, but nothing happened.
“Again,” Aurelius repeated, “I said, ‘ d’accordo,’ but how are we going, and what about that prisoner?”
Clarinda glanced at her chest, confirming that she was indeed holding the ruby and emerald gold necklace. She clenched it in her free hand and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Why won’t it work now?” she muttered desperately.
The Codex Lacrimae Page 28
