“It felt like that. I think. I don’t know.” He shook his head again. “My time in She’ol was such a strange, painful blur.”
“Do you know what those marks mean?” I pointed to the drying wounds on his chest.
He looked down at them. “No. Abaddon made them when we were alone together. He gave me something to drink first, said it was to help me get my strength. And then he used a dagger to carve into my chest, and he laughed as he finished and said, ‘Now no one else can have you.’”
“He was branding you as his property?” I asked thickly.
“Probably.” Asher looked over at me again and took my hand, gently squeezing it. “But I’m not his property anymore. I’m here, with you, and that’s what matters.”
A knock at the door interrupted us before I could reply. Valeska leapt off the chair, sending it clattering to the floor, and she flew up toward the ceiling, while Oona sat up with a start. A moment later, an exousia entered the room.
“Ready yourself,” the exousia commanded. “Sedna and her court are ready to see you.”
TWENTY-NINE
On the marble platform, in front of the open balcony, a dozen chairs had been set out. All of them were the same elegant gold design as the throne, only smaller versions with lower backs. Six of them were on either side of the throne to create a semicircle facing us.
Seated in each one of the chairs were what appeared to be a dozen divine immortals of great stature. A few of them I recognized—like Bastet, a humanoid goddess with the head of a cat, and Tsukiyomi, a stoic god with silvery lavender hair—but many of them I could only guess based on their imposing presence and particular features, like a goddess with navy-blue skin or a god with brightly colored feathers and the feet of an emu.
Standing at the side, wearing a fitted white tunic with loose trousers, was a tall but slender man, and his cranium was totally smooth. He was plain but not unattractive, with a broad nose and full lips, but his dark eyes were anxious as he looked down at us.
We knelt before them, as we had before, as the exousia directed. They stood behind us, armed with golden spears, should we decide to charge the gods. Not that we would.
“Thank you for your patience as I consulted with my court,” Sedna announced in her cool, clear voice. “I trust you have been comfortable.”
“Yes, thank you,” I replied, keeping my voice as cool and strong as hers. “We truly appreciate all your hospitality.”
“Yes, yes, we’re all giant bowls of gratitude,” Bastet said with an exaggerated roll of her bright green eyes. “Let’s move on with it, shall we?”
Sedna cast her a look, then continued. “Our main concern is what you plan to do with the spear once you have it.”
“I plan to give it to Odin,” I answered honestly, which was met with a few scoffs, eye rolls, and irritated muttering.
“That’s exactly what he wants!” one of the other gods shouted in protest.
“We’re playing into his hands,” another agreed with a scowl. Her expression now matched the rest of the court’s—save for Sedna, who continued to look impassive.
Tsukiyomi folded his arms over his chest and shook his head. “The spear shouldn’t even exist. It goes against everything this world was built upon.”
“Yes, but so does immortals kidnapping the child of a Valkyrie,” Sedna countered. “The impious have drawn the first blood, and we cannot let them rise up to the earth.”
“We all want to stop an uprising before it’s too late, but I don’t trust that spear in the hands of a Vanir god,” Tsukiyomi said. “Especially not Odin.”
“Agreed,” Bastet added. “Baldur took the spear from him for a reason.” She looked over at the man in the tunic standing off to the side. “Didn’t you?”
“Of course,” he replied, sounding uneasy. Baldur stood tall, with his hands clasped behind his back. “The ability to snuff any living thing entirely out of existence, with no consequence or resistance, is unparalleled. It’s too much power for any one god to wield.”
Sedna finally said, “I’m not sure how we can resolve this.”
“You haven’t let them speak,” Bastet argued, motioning toward us. “There has to be an agreement that can be reached. Baldur, tell her directly what you want, and let the girl tell you what she needs.”
Baldur cleared his throat and looked down at me. “I cannot let the spear go back into the hands of my father. I took it to protect all the beings on earth, and below, so I can’t let that all be destroyed.”
He paused and licked his lips before continuing. “Many centuries ago, my own mother Frigg came to the Gates of Kurnugia. We could not and would not open the doors for her then, and had she asked, I would never have given the spear to her. That is how strongly I feel.”
“The problem seems to be that you don’t want the spear left in the hands of a Vanir god,” Oona interjected.
Baldur nodded. “Precisely.”
“Then we won’t do that,” I said, with far more confidence than I actually felt. “I will return the spear to you when this is all over.”
I had no clue how I could possibly get the spear back from Odin if I brought it to him as he asked, but if Odin believed it was important, I would do whatever it took to get the spear back on earth. Returning the spear afterwards would be a problem for another day.
“You’ll return to Kurnugia?” Sedna asked, raising her eyebrow.
“There isn’t an open door here,” Tsukiyomi contended. “You can’t just come and go as you please.”
“I got in here once,” I persisted. “I can do it again.”
“It’s actually much easier for a mortal than you immortals might imagine,” Valeska added.
“Frankly, that does little to address Baldur’s concerns, and mine, for that matter,” Sedna said. “Yes, the Vanir gods are particularly dangerous with a weapon like that, but you are a mere mortal. What’s to stop Odin from simply keeping it once you give it to him? Or another immortal might take it, or even another human.”
Suddenly there was a loud sound—like an avalanche and a lion roar—and the whole palace began to tremble. The floor rumbled beneath us, like an earthquake.
“Stay calm!” Sedna commanded, even as the room swayed and the immortals let out gasps and yelps of surprise.
The shaking began to lessen, but the deafening sound of a hundred salpinx erupted. It was a brassy, sad note that reverberated through me.
Sedna stood up and looked behind her at the world outside, beyond the balcony. “They’ve broken through the first wall.”
“How is that possible?” a goddess wailed.
“We should’ve killed them all,” another god said, almost to himself. He was the only one still sitting, and his eyes were downcast and his shoulders slumped. “That was our only chance. We should’ve killed all the mortals that came into a realm where they don’t belong.”
“It was already too late,” Sedna insisted. “As soon as they had a Valkyrie bloodline, they had what they needed to unseal—”
The word died on her lips as another wall came crashing down, echoing through the palace as it shook.
“Go!” Sedna ordered. “All of you! Arm yourselves if you can fight, and get to safety if you can’t. Gugalanna is leading an army on Zianna, and they will be here soon.”
As everyone began to scramble, doing as their ruler had ordered, I got to my feet and raced up the stairs toward Baldur. I grabbed his arm, stopping him before he escaped the room.
“Please,” I begged him.
All around me, I could hear things crashing as statues fell over and paintings clattered to the floor. The cries of the immortals throughout the citadel came in through the balcony, interrupted by the bleat of the salpinx horns.
Baldur put his hand on the marble rail that ran around the veranda, bracing himself as the floor shook beneath us. He met my gaze with an intense uncertainty—his dark eyes flitting around the chaos that had enveloped the room, before landing back on me—and
then he reached under his tunic and pulled out a spear.
It was only about a foot long, with the shaft ending in a jagged break. The head appeared to be made of a near-translucent red glass with a razor-sharp tip, while the rod was twisty metallic dark blue.
“Here.” He held out the spear toward me. “Take this.”
I took it quickly, afraid he might change his mind if given more time, and I was surprised by the weight of it. Not only was it heavy, but there was a strangeness in the density, with an underlying heat. It reminded me of a thermos filled with hot liquid sloshing around inside and warming through the outside.
“Tell my father that I warned him about this,” Baldur said as the palace quaked around us. “He cannot keep everything trapped down here forever. Eventually it will all come to the surface.”
THIRTY
I hid the spear way down deep in my bag, beneath the Valhallan cloak. The throne room had been deserted—Baldur was the last one to go, while Valeska, Oona, and Asher waited behind with me as I got the spear safely tucked away.
In the time it took me to put it away, another wall had come down. Oona and Valeska stood on the veranda, watching it fall.
“There’s only four walls left,” Oona announced morosely as she surveyed Zianna. “They’re almost halfway through.”
“Let’s try to make it out before they make it all the way,” I said as I secured my bag on my shoulders.
Asher glanced around the massive, empty throne room. “Do you know how to leave? Because I haven’t a clue.”
“Not off the top of my head,” I admitted. “But the sólarsteinn got us here, so hopefully it can get us out.”
“Or—” Valeska said loudly, and I looked back to see her smiling slyly as she stood on the railing that ran around the veranda. “If we wanted to go faster, I could give you a ride.”
Without looking, she jumped backward off the railing, only to come flying back up a second later. She hovered above us, her large black wings flapping languidly behind her.
“Can you carry all of us?” I asked cautiously as I walked over to her.
“I don’t think I could carry all three of you at once,” she admitted. “And I couldn’t take two of you higher, but if I had you and Oona, I’d be able to glide you down to the ground.”
The loud wooshing noise of another wall falling rumbled through the palace, and I looked out at the chaos below for the first time. Many of the divine immortals inside Zianna had run toward the next remaining wall, attempting to support it with their strength and boulders, while others were armed, waiting for a battle if the impious broke through.
Gugalanna was leading the charge—kicking at the wall with his massive bull legs. But he wasn’t the only one, nor was he the largest. He had an army of giants and monsters beside him, attacking the wall with everything they had.
The exousia and other flying immortals were diving at the impious, but they appeared to have little effect on them. Gugalanna punched an exousia out of the sky, then threw his head back and laughed.
Beyond the fighting and destruction, back far enough so as not to risk any injury, a woman in black sat on a throne of bones. The throne was part of a sedan chair, with a dozen ghoulish carriers holding the poles on their shoulders. Even when they weren’t moving, her servants still held her up, so she could see her work unfolding from a slightly higher vantage.
The distance was so great that I couldn’t really make out her features—I couldn’t see her toying with the gold rings on her fingers, or the impish smile on her lips, or the glimmer in her black eyes—but I knew it just the same. What seemed possible or impossible was irrelevant to her.
Ereshkigal looked up at me—her eyes piercing through me—and her smile deepened.
“All right, let’s do this,” I said and turned back to Valeska.
Valeska instructed me to give Asher my bag, since she didn’t want the extra weight. She’d paired me and Oona together because we were the two lightest ones, and we didn’t have time to waste for her to make three trips.
I hated leaving Asher again, even for a second, and I kissed him brusquely before whispering, “Hurry down to me.”
Then I ran over to where Valeska waited, standing on the railing of the veranda. Oona was already at Valeska’s left side, with her arms wrapped tightly around Valeska’s waist as she clung to her.
“What happens if we get too heavy?” Oona asked as I climbed onto the rail to take my place.
“You won’t,” Valeska assured her.
I looked down at the ground below, and I felt a dizzying nausea roll over me. I gripped tightly on to both Oona and Valeska—I had no intention of letting either of them go.
“But what if we do?” Oona persisted.
“Then we fall,” Valeska replied matter-of-factly. “Hang on.”
“Wait—” Oona began, but it was too late. Valeska had already jumped off.
I squeezed my eyes shut so I wouldn’t see how quickly the ground was rising up to meet us, and the wind blew through my hair. Her wings beat above my head, and I tried to focus on the sound of that and not the feeling of my stomach rising into my throat.
It wasn’t until she finally set us down, with the ground firmly beneath my feet, that I realized I’d been holding my breath.
“Told you I could do it.” Valeska grinned as she stretched her wings, then she stared up at the towering palace. “Be right back. I’m gonna go rescue your boyfriend.”
I thought about correcting her, that Asher wasn’t my boyfriend—I mean, at least not officially, yet—but she was already flying off again. And honestly, did it really matter? I cared about Asher, he cared about me, and with the world literally falling down around us, labels no longer really seemed to matter.
As I looked out at the walls trembling beyond the valley, the sound of crashing rocks mixed with battle cries. A lot of things I’d worried about up on earth didn’t seem to matter anymore. Time really did move differently—an entire lifetime had gone by in a matter of hours. So much was changing, so quickly.
Oona stared at the incoming carnage with wide, fearful eyes and her mouth agape. It was still far away, at the very edges of Zianna, but it was only a matter of time before Gugalanna and his crew broke through.
“How are they doing this?” she asked. “Haven’t these walls been up for centuries?”
“I think so, but they used Asher’s blood to unseal the protective spells,” I said, explaining as best as I understood it. “They’d never been able to get their hands on the child of a Valkyrie before.”
When she looked back at me, her eyebrows were drawn together, and her skin had paled. “Did we do this? Is this our fault?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted around the growing lump in my throat. “But we’re going to do everything we can to make it right.”
Valeska returned a moment later with Asher, along with my bag of gear and Oona’s. Oona blinked back her sadness and took a deep breath, easing her anxiety by focusing on the task at hand.
The familiar anxious electricity churned through me, warming my muscles, and I felt the buzzing growing around my heart. The urge to fight, to kill, was growing inside me, but this wasn’t my usual Valkyrie mode: the angry ache in my stomach was because I wanted to protect Asher, to avenge him and my mother.
“Let’s go while we still have a chance,” I said. “We’ll deal with everything else later.”
THIRTY-ONE
The only entrance—and exit—of Zianna was right by the melee, so that would be no good for escape. Gugalanna and his army couldn’t walk under the arches—they had to tear down the walls to fully break the spell that kept them out. But they were blocking the pathway of anyone else who might want to get out.
The final wall—the starry black opal one—was still standing, but it had begun to weaken. So our only way out that we could see was to find a crack in that wall. We started as far as we could get from the fighting, but the wall held too strong. We had to get closer to the ba
ttle.
I ran alongside the wall, my legs humming with delighted electricity at finally getting a chance to move. I was racing toward the fighting, and my vision shifted subtly to hyperfocus.
My wounded leg should’ve been throbbing. It still wasn’t completely healed from when I tangled with a spider woman I had been sent to kill. But running like this helped my instincts kick in enough, as my body prepared for its job. The edge of my vision darkened, tunnel vision that allowed me to focus on a single immortal at a time, so I forced myself to slow my breathing.
The others trailed behind me, since they couldn’t run as fast. Walking now, I ran my hand along the smooth cool stone, until I finally spotted a break. It was much closer to the fighting than I would’ve liked—only a few yards separated the crack from where Gugalanna kicked at the wall—but it was the first gap I had seen that was large enough for us to fit through.
I motioned for them to hurry, my eyes darting between them and the trouble at the wall. Valeska went first, deftly sliding through the growing crack in the trembling wall, and Oona and Asher hastily followed.
Valeska was still leading the way, climbing over the red crystal rubble of the sixth wall, by the time I squeezed through the crack after them. Oona stumbled on a stone, and Asher grabbed her arm, helping her across, and I hurried after them.
We all moved as swiftly and as quietly as we could to avoid detection, and fortunately everyone else seemed to have their hands full, so they didn’t notice us climbing over the remains of the wall.
I made it to the fifth wall when I realized that Valeska wasn’t leading the way anymore. I stopped and looked past Oona and Asher, who stayed a step or two behind me, and I saw Valeska standing on a tall chunk of blue garnet, staring intently at where the impious pounded at the final wall.
“Valeska?” I called her in a hushed voice, but she didn’t move.
I followed her gaze and instantly realized what she was looking at—a swarthy woman standing at the edge of the fighting. Her large black wings were outstretched behind her, and with her dusky skin and wild hair, her similarities to Valeska were striking. She even had the same wide, prominent eyes.
From the Earth to the Shadows Page 13
