Norse Code Part 18

"Frightened," he said.

"Of what?"

"Of you."

She shook her head as though he'd uttered some charming bit of childish nonsense.

"Eat this."

A spoonful of soup came toward his mouth. He slurped it and felt a spreading warmth. He would gladly starve for a thousand years if he knew at the end of it there'd be his mother's soup.

"More, please?"

"Sit up." Frigg fluffed his pillows and fed him another spoonful. "You came to me badly hurt, Hermod. What happened to you?"

"Did I come here alone?"

"You were with a Valkyrie. And a very loyal dog. He would not leave your side."

Winston rose up and put his paws on the bed, panting and s...o...b..ring on the furs.

"Good dog. Where's the Valkyrie?"

"My servants are seeing to her needs, as I will see to yours. What happened to you?" she asked again.

Could he lie to his mother? Not quite. Perhaps, though, he could try evasion. "Things have gotten absolutely mad in Midgard," he said. "It's an age of wolves over there. And my need to poke my nose where it doesn't belong is still stronger than my sword arm."

"You've always been one to keep your own counsel," Frigg said, her smile sad. "I suppose there's even less chance you'll tell me what you have been doing since your brother's funeral."

She meant Baldr's funeral; it was the last time he'd seen his mother. Since then, glaciers had advanced and receded over Midgard more than once.

"Are we going to be coy, Mother? Everyone else seems to know what I'm doing and where I'm doing it. Surely you do as well."

"I didn't say I didn't know," Frigg said with reproach. "I said that you wouldn't tell me. The difference between the two is as vast as Ginnungagap. Why will you not trust me, Hermod? Am I not your mother?"

There was such genuine sorrow in Frigg's face. How could one not love her, not want to make her happy? She was not just Hermod's mother; she was motherhood itself. She was life budding from fertile soil after the long winter. She was life in the womb.

Hermod understood that if he didn't take an oath to help her bring about the destruction of worlds-and mean it-he would not leave here alive. Maybe it was the dip in Mimir's Well that had given him this insight. Maybe it was his brief possession of Odin's eye. More likely, it was the thousands of years he'd had to think about things, culminating in a point at which he could no longer deny obvious conclusions.

"At least tell me why you had Baldr murdered."

"It was necessary," she said, offering him another spoonful of soup. Hermod declined it. "Fate stretches before us and after us as a chain of linked events. For there to be Ragnarok, Baldr must die. For Baldr to die, there must be Ragnarok."

"That's the part that makes no sense to me. Why must there be Ragnarok? Why did you have to tell Loki about Baldr's weakness to mistletoe?"

"How long has it been winter, Hermod?"

"Three winters. No summer between."

"It has been winter much longer than that. It has been winter since the first shoots of gra.s.s pushed up from the earth. From its very first moment, the world has been dying, just as an infant's first breath makes certain its last. I am life in renewal, and I crave the new green world to come after Ragnarok. To rail against the end is merely preserving a corpse."

"So, Ragnarok is an act of euthanasia. And once it's over, you and Vidar and whomever else you've drawn to your side can preside over the reanimated corpse."

"We see things differently, Hermod."

He leaned back against the pillows and closed his eyes. He was so tired. "Why did you send me to Hel to ransom Baldr? Was that just cover, so Odin wouldn't suspect?"

"No. It was my genuine hope that you would win Baldr's life back. Baldr had to die, but that didn't mean I wanted him to spend his death with Hel. Do you not think I love my children?"

"Did you love Hod less?"

Frigg didn't answer, but Hermod felt a change in the air pressure, like a storm building. He shrugged and instantly regretted having done so. His arm had started to ache and burn.

"I a.s.sume you love everyone and everything," he said, "but you'll eat your own young if it serves your purpose. What are your plans for me now?"

"No harm will come to you as long as you remain with me."

No harm, as long as he stayed in bed and ate soup. As long as he sat back and let the world die.

"I'm sorry," Hermod said. He sprang from the bed and punched his mother in the throat. She sank to her knees and emitted a choked whistle. Frigg's power didn't rely on muscle, nor was she some special-effects magician who could shoot purple lightning from her fingers. She could speak to life and convince it to do her bidding, but in the short term, Hermod had her number. Frigg clutched her throat and gawped like a fish.

Winston, demonstrating discretion, kept his distance from Frigg and Hermod both. He didn't even bark.

With only one fully usable arm, Hermod went about the slow business of dragging Frigg's hands behind her back and tying them to the bedpost with the linens.

He wept as he did so. Frigg was intent on the greatest ma.s.s murder of all time, but it was impossible to watch his mother struggle for breath and not despair.

He wiped tears from his eyes and gagged her.

MIST AWOKE in the bath when a grating screech struck her in the head like a rusty spear, the sound of a million diamonds sc.r.a.ping against a million windows. She pressed her hands to her ears, tighter and tighter. Chunks of ceiling fell about her, and she looked up to see lightning draw cracks in the sky. If the bolts were accompanied by thunder, she couldn't hear it. There was just the continually rising scream that, despite its colossal power, sounded like a giant chicken.

The rust-red c.o.c.k will raise the dead in Helheim, the sibyl had said, and the golden c.o.c.k Gullinkambi will crow to the G.o.ds.

Her head still buzzing, Mist shot from the steaming bathwater and put on her clothes, which were now soft, mended, and smelled like spring flowers. d.a.m.n Frigg and her hot bath and nouris.h.i.+ng food and Stepford matrons. While Mist had been lounging in the tub, Hermod had been left alone and vulnerable. Had Mist been so fatigued that she'd fallen for it, or had Frigg's house cast an enchantment of fog over her?

She crossed the narrow bridge that connected her room to a network of stone walkways and found the household in chaos. The rooster's cry had shattered calm and physical structure alike. Crushed stone and splintered timber lay everywhere. With the house in shambles, she couldn't retrace her steps back to Hermod.

She heard a group of attendants coming her way and ducked into a small alcove. Casks and baskets of grain lined one wall, and set into the other was a wooden door. Over the sound of rain coming in through the gaps in the ceiling, Mist eavesdropped on the ladies in the hall.

"He attacked Mother?" one of them was saying, incredulous. "Is she harmed?"

"Not as badly as he'll be when we find him. The Valkyrie has left her room too."

"Find her and kill her."

My, but these Stepford matrons were mean. Mist moved farther into the alcove as more ladies approached. She barely had time to hide behind a stack of barrels before three of the matrons poked their heads in and shone torchlight into the corners. Mist held her breath until they withdrew.

There was still too much activity in the outer corridor for her to dare venturing into it, so she went for the little door on the other side of the alcove. Cautiously, she cracked it open. On the other side, two ladies lay dead beneath a fallen beam. They weren't dressed like the others, instead outfitted in chain-mail vests over their gowns and armed with swords.

Guards.

And what, Mist wondered, were they guarding?

Before her ran two rows of pens at least the length of a football field, with a corridor between them. She stepped deeper into the vast room. In one pen, a gorgeous chestnut foal lay motionless on a bed of straw. In another, three leopard cubs cuddled in a heap, absolutely still. They didn't look dead. They looked switched off.

All the pens housed inert babies. It was a veritable zoo of them. In one of the pens, the babies were human.

A noise at her back, and Mist spun around.

"Oh, hey, it's you," Hermod said. His right arm hung in a sling, and his face was clean, the bruises from the drubbing Vidar had given him faded. Winston wagged his tail at Hermod's side. "We have to get out of here. This is my mother's house."

"I know," Mist said. "I met her."

His eyes widened. "Did she do anything to you?"

"She gave me a bath and did my laundry."

"That's just like her."

Mist handed him his duffel. "Careful with this. Vidar's sword is inside."

Hermod grimaced as he took the bag from her.

They hurried between the pens, looking for a way out of the stable that didn't involve going back into the heavily trafficked corridor. Winston ran ahead and sniffed the door on the far end of the stable. He barked impatiently.

Hermod pushed the door open a crack and issued a low whistle.

"What is it?"

He opened the door wider and stepped through. Mist followed him into a cavernous room of maps and drawings and saw what had impressed him. In green ink, drawn directly on the walls and on the floor and on the ceiling, was a depiction of a world gone mad with life: a naked man and a woman provided scale, dwarfed by forty-foot blades of gra.s.s and daisies the size of roller-coaster loops. Jumbo-jet dragonflies buzzed through the air between flies and moths and bees the size of Volkswagens. Trees soared above, vanis.h.i.+ng in foreshortened perspective. Behemoth melons sprung from the ground. There were seas too, packed with a dizzying array of fish and whales and squid and snails and forests of kelp.

Written over the whole of it in a precise hand were runes that Mist didn't know and geometric patterns that suggested a crossbreeding of abstract art and an attempt to ill.u.s.trate s.p.a.ce-time.

"I think this is Frigg's blueprint," Hermod said. "This is what she wants built in the aftermath. And those animals in the pens are like a DNA repository to populate her new world."

"Too bad the current world has to meet the wrecking ball first."

Hermod shrugged. "I guess there are worse reasons to destroy everybody and everything."

"But if she and Vidar are acting to artificially encourage Ragnarok, then there should be something we can do to halt it."

"It stands to reason. Except we're so far out of our league. Frigg's ability to manipulate the very substance of the universe is unequaled. She proved that a long time ago, with her spell to protect Baldr."

"But she's not invincible," Mist insisted. "After all, Baldr did die."

"Only because Frigg wanted him to. She intentionally left a loophole by neglecting to get an oath from mistletoe. Then she had Loki exploit that loophole to trick Hod into killing Baldr."

Mist shook her head as she walked down the length of the wall, awestruck not so much by Frigg's power as by her thoroughness. She'd suborned Vidar and Loki. She'd arranged the murder of Baldr and set Hod up as the fall guy. She'd taken steps to see to it that her influence would be perpetuated in the new world to follow Ragnarok. And what sickened Mist most of all was that Frigg was no doubt comfortable in the thought that all this was being done for a greater good.

Not all the drawings were gargantuan versions of familiar life forms. There were also terrestrial creatures that looked like jellyfish with fur, and glowing globes with corkscrew tails, and things that looked like mounds of baby bunnies, only with more eyes. Frigg's Earth 2.0 would be fecund and strange.

Mist was gaping at a many-torsoed centaurlike animal and almost missed noticing the door it was drawn upon. What manner of creatures would she find on the other side, she wondered? With her hand on the pommel of her saber, she cracked open the door.

Vast darkness lay beyond the threshold, like an endlessly deep hole in all directions. Though Mist braced herself against the doorjamb, the emptiness pulled her in. Her grip slipped and she flew forward, nothing below her feet, air rus.h.i.+ng out of her lungs, like an astronaut blown through an airlock into s.p.a.ce. She felt the atomic bonds of her body break apart into disconnected particles as her thoughts lost clarity and shattered like a mirror. With her last shred of unraveling awareness, she perceived a kind of revelation, an understanding of the true absence that had existed before the creation of the universe. This was the wisdom of G.o.ds.

And then Hermod was beside her, falling into the vortex, and she decided, no, they would not lose to Frigg this way. They would not be disappeared. She threw herself back and, with a silent cry of effort, slammed the door shut. She sank to her knees and clutched Hermod.

"Hey, careful," Hermod whispered. "We almost fell there."

It was moments before Mist could speak again. "There's nothing on the other side," she said, s.h.i.+vering.

"I know. That's why you need to be careful."

"I mean there's nothing. Not like there's not anything, but like ... Oh, holy s.h.i.+t. There's nothing on the other side." She clutched him tight, desperate to feel his comforting solidity.

"I know," he said, rubbing warmth into her shoulders. "We've almost fallen inside monster wolves. There's some of that nothing inside them. Or they're like a portal to nothing. It's upsetting, I know."

She and Hermod held on to each other.

"There's nothing in Vidar's sword too," squawked a voice. Mist turned to see a pair of ravens hopping on the floor.

"That was a close shave," one of them said. "If you hadn't caught yourselves before you fell in, you'd have been so completely erased that no one would have even remembered you'd ever existed. Because, well, you'd have never existed."

"I would have remembered," said the other raven. "I've got a mind like a steel trap. And I'm talking about dwarf steel. A lot of people think elf steel is the best steel there is, but in terms of hardness, elasticity, ductility, tensile strength, and uncanniness, you really can't beat dwarf steel."

"Also, Munin and I have the advantage of being partly made of nothing ourselves," said the first. "We're a bit like Vidar's sword in that sense. It's made of seven impossible things, the seventh being nothing. Nothing is great stuff. Nothing cuts through anything."

"Talking birds?" Mist asked Hermod.

"Hugin and Munin. Thought and Memory. Another source of Odin's wisdom," Hermod said. He made quotation-mark gestures with his fingers when he said "wisdom."

Mist's head felt empty, her body bloodless. "Terrific. Maybe they can tell us this: Why does Frigg have a room full of nothing?"

Hugin c.o.c.ked his head sideways. "All the something she's planning to build has to go somewhere. And you don't think she'll be content to make a single new world, do you? Or even nine? She'll be making hundreds of worlds, thousands, all teeming with life. It's selfish, in a way, you trying to stop her, putting the needs of you and your sad little dying worlds ahead of the endless possibility of the new."

"It wouldn't bother me so much if there weren't already people living on the old ones," Mist shot back.

"Don't let the bird bait you," Hermod said. "The ravens don't want Ragnarok to happen any more than we do. They may be hyperniscient pests, but they want to live, and ours is the universe they live in. If it gets flushed away, they go with it, just like the rest of us."

Munin pecked at a drawing of a fat worm on the wall, but Hugin grew still, fixing Hermod with his black mirror eyes.

"Losing possession of the Sword of Seven was not a good move on Vidar's part," the raven said. "Because the sword cuts through anything, it can be used to make new seams in the World Tree. Vidar needs the sword to make sure that the destruction of one world will spill over into the others. It's like a domino effect, but for one domino to topple the others, the barriers between the dominoes have to be removed. Odin's eye is what shows Vidar where to make the cuts, to slice those barriers out of the way."

"So Vidar's got the eye," Mist said, "but we've got the sword. As long as Vidar doesn't have both, we're okay?"

"Vidar's not that stupid," Hugin said. "The nothing in the Sword of Seven is a tricky substance to work with, but there's no shortage of nothing."