by Renée Jaggér
The well of it was deeper than she’d expected. For all their primitive stupidity, the frost trolls were ancient beings with well-developed lore, tremendous endurance, and magical protection from the elements of snow and ice, along with a limited ability to manipulate those same elements. The rush of strength and wisdom was nearly paralyzing.
Imrit fell face-down in the snow and moved no more. Bailey withdrew her sword and stood facing the circle of his fighters.
“Okay,” she ground out, “as per the deal I made with your king, I won, so that means—”
“Kill her!” one of them choked.
The girl’s face fell. “Shit.”
A virtual avalanche of trolls and troll-clubs and troll-axes descended on her. The werewitch launched herself straight up into the sky, evading their blows by a heartbeat, then flying over them to regroup with the soldiers of Asgard.
The troops rushed to meet her as the horde spun and made ready to begin the pitched battle anew.
“Okay,” Bailey told the warriors, “that didn’t work. Looks like we have to kill ‘em all.”
The catapults fired. Bailey turned, instantly conjuring a shield and adding to it part of the new magic she’d absorbed from Imrit. The translucent barrier took on a distinctive blue tint.
The enchanted ice boulders ricocheted cleanly off the shield with extra force, relative to the velocity they’d come in at. The effect was like two magnets of the same charge repelling one another. The projectiles landed amidst the trolls and exploded. They had a natural resistance to cold magic, so they did not flash-freeze or die, but the burst still seemed to cause them pain and slow their movements.
“Hah!” Bailey hefted her sword. “All right, let’s try this again. Charge!”
* * *
Fenris watched as the Asgardian legion, with the werewitch at its head, finished off the last of King Imrit’s mighty horde. Carl stood a pace or two behind him and to the side, peering over his shoulder into the mirror-like disc that disclosed the scene to them.
The scion whistled. “My, my. Quite the slaughter, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Fenris stated, his voice low and monotone. “She has grown stronger, and destroyed most of the trolls who were willing and able to fight. Of course, some of their species still remain: women, children, the elderly, and small splinter tribes beyond Imrit’s authority. But it will be another generation, perhaps two or three before they can attempt anything on this level again. Not that it matters. They have served their purpose.”
He waved his hand, and the crystal disc went dark. It was one of two mounted on wooden stands in the throne room, the Eye of Huginn to the right of Odin’s seat. The Eye of Muninn sat to the left.
The wolf-father turned back to the business in which he and his apprentice had been engrossed before they’d checked on the girl.
The throne room was both grand and austere. Its walls were of smooth gray stone hung with blue and red tapestries depicting knots, ships, warriors, and wolves. The chamber had no furniture nor decoration save the mirrors, the dais of the throne, a pair of golden braziers, and the throne itself. The chair was of oak, tall but spartan, with only a blue cushion to adorn it. There were no windows. The air of the place was somber and contemplative, like Odin the All-Father.
The floor differed from the walls and ceiling in being matte black marble. All across it, Fenris and Carl had drawn a sequence of signs and sigils in the traditional red-ochre ink used for rituals of high ceremonial magic. The last couple of runes still needed to be completed.
Fenris dipped a slant-cut reed into the hollow sheep skull in which he’d stored the dye. As he returned to work, he spoke.
“Bailey should be ready. If not entirely, then so close as to make little difference. We ought to put her through at least one more battle. There are two more armies of monsters massing. That should bring her up to exactly the level of my power. And, of course, it will keep her busy while we enact the final steps.”
He touched the reed-quill to the floor and traced a curious design, linking it to one he’d drawn a short while before. When the sequence was complete, they would be ready to cast the spell at the veritable heart of the Norse divine realm and the Asgardian empire, which would bring about the Beginning of the End and the Twilight of the Gods.
Only the sacrifice would remain to be performed.
“Hmm,” Carl opined. “Yes, probably a good idea, my lord. We don’t want her too powerful though, do we? And she jumped the proverbial gun on the frost trolls. Will we have time to complete our preparations before she takes on the rock giants or the draugar?”
Fenris grunted. “I had planned to set her against Imrit as soon as we were finished with the runes, anyway. It makes no difference that she came to that conclusion on her own, or possibly at the council’s urging.”
“Speaking of which,” Carl interjected, “aren’t there a few more ‘targets’ for us to eliminate? Balder was only the beginning, wasn’t he?”
The hooded man nodded. “We should go after Thoth next. As the god of wisdom, he may be among those smart enough to grasp what is happening and attempt to interfere before we’re done. Leaving him alive too long could create unnecessary hassles.”
“Agreed.” Carl beamed, pleased with himself in advance. Clearly he had something to share. “In fact, because I agree, it shouldn’t shock you to learn that I’ve been tracking the old Egyptian prick on and off, and I just checked up on him recently.”
“Oh?” Fenris inquired without looking up from his rune-work.
The scion went on. “Yes. He’s having a nice leisurely stroll through a nasty desert stretch of the Other, a place that reminds him of the sandy wastes on either side of the Nile, I suppose. It seems he was weary of his duties and wanted to recharge before the shit hit the fan here in Asgard, so he retreated to that godforsaken spot seeking clarity, reflection, peace, and that sort of thing. In isolation, naturally.”
Now Fenris did look up, and he smiled. “How nice of him to be alone and far from help,” he commented. “Help me finish this final sigil, then we will ambush him together.”
“Certainly.” Carl knelt, taking up a spare reed and smoothing the edges of Fenris’ bold lines. The runes were completed in minutes.
They both stood. They had no fear of interruption or discovery since they’d surrounded the throne room with multiple spells: one to discourage the will of any who might peek in, another to create an illusion of the chamber being empty and normal, and a third to physically repel anyone who tried to step in regardless. If that raised suspicions, most Asgardians would assume they were put there by Odin.
None of them had any idea about what was coming.
Fenris concentrated on Thoth’s energy signature as Carl helped him narrow it down by describing the section of the Other in more detail. It lay near the red-rock canyon realm where the witch-specters had recently aggregated, far from the swamps that formed the main central region. Fenris knew of the place but had little experience with it.
“Ah,” the wolf-god murmured, “I’ve found him. Let us pay him a visit.”
He raised his hands, chanted, and opened a purple gateway in the air before Odin’s throne. They stepped through and closed it behind them.
Moving from the mild climate of Asgard to the brief cold of astral travel, the two then emerged under a blazing hot sun. The sky, a flat, nondescript metallic color, was clear of clouds. The landscape around them was featureless save for endless dunes of pale brown sand.
There was no sign of the lord of wisdom. Fenris touched the side of his head and looked toward a line of dunes tall enough to be mistaken for low mountains. “He is beyond those. Come.”
They trudged through the erg, making little effort to conceal themselves. Thoth had not bothered to hide his aura since the region was uninhabited, and he would have had no reason to suppose anyone was hunting him. If anything, he wanted to keep himself easy to find in case he was needed back in Asgard. And he was stationary, probabl
y meditating.
Fenris crested the tall dunes first, with Carl close behind. They looked down into a curiously shaped narrow little valley between two serpentine ridges of sand. Thoth sat at the bottom, cross-legged, his eyes shut. Beside him was a tiny pool of water beside which a single date palm tree and a handful of green fronds grew.
Without opening his eyes or turning his head, Thoth greeted them in his deep voice. “Hello, Fenris the Wolf-Father. Hello, Carl the Scion. I am not surprised you’ve found me.”
“Oh?” said Fenris. “It was not difficult.” He took two slow, heavy steps down the slope, dislodging a small, hissing flow of sand.
The Egyptian deity did open his eyelids then and slowly rose to his feet to look up at his visitors. “I was quite aware you were up to something. The precise nature of it, no, but you would be a fool to assume that your recent irregularities of behavior were lost on me. Perhaps you are a fool at that. You’re certainly not as smart as you like to think.”
Fenris stopped, frowned, and then advanced again. “And you,” he stated, “are, as the humans say, too smart for your own good. Your supercilious and pretentious attitude has always made a fine counterpoint to the ignorance and naïveté of Balder. The late Balder.”
Carl had begun to circle toward Thoth’s flank. “Since you’re so wise, O Great God of Wisdom,” quipped the scion, “you were aware that Balder was dead, right?”
Thoth didn’t answer. His dark, aged face only grimaced. His eyes were clear and open, not bothered by the bright sun.
Fenris stopped at the base of the tall dune. “It will be good to be rid of you. Balder was wounded and weak, so he did not give me as much sport as I would have liked. But you, old one, are at full strength, or as close to full as can be expected at your age.”
“At my age,” Thoth retorted, “I have seen the rise and fall of greater beings than—”
Fenris struck him full in the chest with a sudden bolt of lightning, while Carl sprang in and kicked the wisdom-god’s legs out from under him. But before he struck the ground, he was gone. In his place, a hissing swarm of poisonous asps moved through the dust.
Carl sprang back, searing the sand beneath him with a gout of blue-white flame that turned it to glass. Two of the snakes were destroyed, but the rest had separated and made toward Fenris.
The wolf-god leaped into the air, hurling bolts of concentrated percussive force into the base of the great dune, collapsing it in an avalanche of sand that buried the serpents. By the time he landed on the earth next to the small oasis, Thoth had sprung free of the particulate mass, back in human form, his eyes glowing white with wrath.
At a motion of his hand, the water in the tiny pool surged upward in a gout far larger and more powerful than anything the oasis could have mustered under natural conditions and formed into an ibis-like construct of foaming liquid. The bird dive-bombed Fenris, its body separating into a storm of icy knives.
The wolf-god was in motion, springing past the impact point of the icicles and shifting into his huge wolf-form. He tackled Thoth in a flurry of sand, and the two figures wrestled while Carl moved in to harry the Egyptian with plasma lances, tripwires of condensed atmospheric metals, and psionic waves of confusion.
Thoth faltered, but he summoned all his strength and threw Fenris off of him, causing the massive wolf to roll to the bottom of the valley.
Before the lord of wisdom could counterattack, Fenris struck him from three sides simultaneously with lightning, briefly paralyzing him. Carl moved in from the fourth side and punched him in the jaw after surrounding his fist with an arcane shield. Thoth’s head snapped back, and he collapsed in the dust.
He regained his feet quickly enough, but the interplay of the two combatants—a god who was his equal and a demigod only marginally weaker than himself—wore him down. Soon Thoth could barely defend himself.
Fenris roared in vicious triumph and seized the aged dark-skinned deity in his jaws, whipping him back and forth, then hurling him to the ground and stomping on him with his clawed forelegs, while Carl continuously blasted him with arcane and elemental attacks.
Thoth tried to get back up, only to stumble to his knees. “Uhh,” he gasped. “So be it. You have won, Fenris, but do not celebrate your victory too soon.” He coughed, spitting up ambrosiac ether, and his hands trembled as he clutched his wounds.
Fenris slashed his throat with the claws of his left paw. Then he shifted back into his humanoid form to watch Thoth die.
The Egyptian god faded like a desert mirage, and a snaky mixture of spiraling strands in amber, white, and deep turquoise erupted from his form. What little remained of him dissolved into dust and was lost amidst the desert sand.
Carl let out a gasping sigh. “Woah! Finally. That was harder than dealing with Balder, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Fenris acknowledged, “but not by much. And now another of the oh-so-mighty council has fallen.”
* * *
Loki watched, slowly shaking his head, though his hands were clenched in the necessary gestures to maintain the illusion, keeping it as convincing as possible right up until the bitter end. At the same time, he was recording the proceedings, as he had during the Balder incident. It put a certain amount of strain on him, but he managed.
“Fenris, Fenris.” He sighed. “Where and when, exactly, did you go so wrong?”
The were-god and his apprentice departed through a portal without bothering to absorb the dissipated energy. Again.
Loki finished creating the hologram, processing it as a memory, and once more sending it to the other deities for immediate mental viewing. He stored the visual version within himself for display to Bailey and the mortals later.
“Showing them this might be redundant,” the mischief-lord mused, “but it eliminates every last iota of doubt. My son is beyond all hope of salvage or redemption, it would seem.”
He did not feel much emotion about that since the sentiments that mortals treasured registered with him only in a vague, intellectual way. Such was his nature. Still, he noticed a deep regret within himself and, more pressingly, a concern—even a fear—for what happened next if Fenris was not stopped.
“Soon,” he mumbled to no one, making ready to leave. “I’ve been saying that too often lately, but it’s true. Soon.”
Chapter Eleven
Bailey sat in the snow, heedless of the sub-freezing temperatures. The Asgardian troops had made three or four bonfires out of wood debris recovered from the battle, but the werewitch sat apart from them.
She’d needed time to “digest” her new powers, as usual. The strength of the frost trolls’ king was different from any arcane source she’d drained before, but it was oddly familiar. There was a primal, animal-like quality to it that reminded her of nothing so much as her own heritage as a lycanthrope. The frost trolls were creatures of snow and icy winds, just as werewolves were creatures of moonlight, fern, and tree-shadow.
The lieutenant she’d spoken to before came over. His name was Sigfred, she recalled.
“Lady Bailey, will we be staying here? The battle is won, and the men would do well to return home.” The light was fading; the frost trolls’ domain did not have a true day-night cycle, but it seemed to grow dimmer and then brighter in equal turns.
She stood up, wrinkling her brow in thought. “Someone should remain to keep watch, in case more of them try to attack.” Five or six hundred had fled toward the end of the battle. “And I’m having trouble adjusting to all the new powers I got. Is there a problem on you guys’ end?”
“The cold,” Sigfred gasped. “We are hardy, and the exertion of battle warms us, but the frigidity of this realm...we will not be able to fight here indefinitely.”
Bailey recalled that in the city and palace of Asgard, the temperature has seemed exceedingly mild despite the sky-high location. She wasn’t sure exactly what these men were—probably demigods or magical beings similar to the dark elves—but they lacked the arcane ability to completely protect
themselves from harsh elements.
“Okay,” she said, “well, I think I can do something about that. Hold onto your helmets.”
Expanding her consciousness, she created a protective shield-dome around their encampment. It was thinner than a combat shield; a man could push through it with effort, and an arrow or fireball would be slowed rather than stopped, but it would hold in air, allowing the fires to warm it more easily. She poked holes in the barrier near the base and top to allow breathable air to filter in and wood smoke to filter out.
Then she tried another technique. Using part of the newly-absorbed cold-resistance magic, she spread it across the mass of soldiers the way she’d cast a mild healing spell. Blue light played about them as they stared in surprise, then it was gone.
“Better?” she asked. “I’m hoping that will give you more resilience to this place.”
Heads nodded, and the men all seemed more comfortable.
The werewitch smiled. “Nice! Admittedly I didn’t know if it’d work. Anyway, I need to leave, but I’ll be back. What I’m going to suggest is that maybe a quarter or a third of you stay here, and the rest can go back to Asgard. But stay in touch in case you need reinforcements, and be prepared to relieve each other in shifts. That way, everyone can get some rest within the next day or two, but we’ll still have a cursory force here to deter any more attacks. Oh, and send word to me if anything major happens.”
Sigfred agreed and spoke to the men to divide them into shift groups.
Satisfied, Bailey bade them farewell and opened a doorway leading back to her home.
She stepped out of the portal and into the bronzed light of late afternoon. Her adventure first in Asgard and then in the troll realm had felt like at least a day, but back on Earth, it seemingly had been only half of one, unless she’d been gone for over thirty hours.
Within the house, only Kurt was present in front of the TV. “Hi,” he greeted his sister. “Once more, I’ve been given the illustrious duty of guarding the fucking living room while everyone else goes out and does ‘interesting’ stuff. Did you have a nice, uh, job interview with the gods?”
