Norse Code Part 7

Fog thickened in the cove, simplifying the world to the fundamental elements of sea and land. Shrieking wind raised whitecaps over the water like floating ice. Minutes pa.s.sed, clouds roiling above. The sky took on a cold, metallic sheen, and Mist lost track of how long they'd been standing there.

A wave came over the debris wall, and suddenly Mist found herself chest-deep in a churn of water that took her legs out and pressed her to the sand. With no time to draw a breath, she clenched her jaw tight and struggled to regain her footing. Magic demands knowledge, she remembered Radgrid telling her once, and knowledge demands sacrifice. Odin gave his eye for knowledge, had hung on the World Tree for knowledge, and some said he'd died there.

Hands lifted her by her armpits, and she opened her eyes to find Hermod holding her up. He was as soaked as she was, as were Grimnir and Winston. She coughed and sputtered.

They weren't alone. An old woman stood in the center of the rune ring, naked and red-eyed, with gray ropes of wet hair plastered to her fat b.r.e.a.s.t.s, like some primeval Venus statue. Mist felt that she knew this woman somehow, as though she were a figure from a recurring dream.

"Sibyl," Mist croaked.

"Oh, d.a.m.n," Hermod said. "You weren't supposed to speak first."

Mist coughed. Salt water dribbled out her nose. "Why not?"

"Now she'll talk only to you."

"You could have warned me."

Hermod had no answer to that beyond a sheepish expression.

Despite the waves, the runes still stood out clearly in the sand, as though carved in cement. The sibyl began rubbing them out with her heel. "You're one of Odin's little lovelies, aren't you? Daughter, lover, or both?"

"Employee would be more accurate," Mist said. "I'm a Valkyrie."

"We're all in his employ. Even me. Who else but Odin could have dared call me from death and kept me in thrall 'til he knew all I knew? Well, you dared, I suppose."

Mist pointed to Hermod. "He dared, actually."

Hermod dug a brown paper bag from his duffel and handed it to Mist. "She won't talk to me. The rune spell's not designed that way. Give her this gift, and maybe she'll tell us what we want to know."

Mist unrolled the soggy paper and peered inside. "This is supposed to be a gift?"

The sibyl frowned at her with a scrunched apple-doll face. "Gifts?"

Mist removed a ziplock freezer bag from the recesses of the sack and withdrew an object the size of a walnut.

The sibyl sniffed. "What's that?"

Hermod told Mist, and Mist repeated it to the sibyl: "This is a prince who died in the body of a mouse."

"Not bad," the sibyl said, reaching out to grab it from Mist's hand. She clutched the mouse to her bare chest. Seawater dripped from her hair and ran in rivulets down her belly and thighs. "You are not entirely without manners, little corpse-chooser. What is it you wish to know from me? If true love lies in your path? If life grows in your womb? If the cows will give milk this year?"

Mist's nose was running. She sniffed and looked expectantly at Hermod.

"Let's see," he said. "Okay, try asking her this-"

The sibyl seemed to take notice of him for the first time. "I don't like him," she said to Mist. "He has the stink of bad news."

Grimnir laughed. "You got that right."

"Ask her about the wolves," Hermod said. "Where can we find them, how do we kill them all? And what about the other Ragnarok portents? What can we do about the Midgard serpent? And ask her about the s.h.i.+p of dead men's nails, and can we find Loki and kill him before he busts loose and pilots the s.h.i.+p of Hel's soldiers? And what about the sons of Muspellheim? And also find out if someone's controlling all this, manipulating events, and so forth."

"Anything else?"

"That's it, for starters."

Mist took a deep breath and repeated Hermod's laundry list of questions.

Crabs scuttled over the sibyl's feet. "I won't answer a thing," she said. "Your runes aren't powerful enough, and your gift isn't pretty enough. You're a rude picker of corpses. You have nothing I need, so nothing will I give you." With that, she turned her back and took several steps into the surf.

"She has to answer the questions," Hermod insisted. "Otherwise we're just thras.h.i.+ng around here instead of knowing what and where to attack. You have to make her answer."

"Do I?" Mist shot back. "You said you'd help me get my people out of Helheim, and as far as I can tell, none of your questions has anything to do with my objectives."

"When the worlds are destroyed, Helheim will be one of them. If you want to rescue your sister and your recruit, then the best thing you can do is to make sure there's still a Helheim to rescue them from, not to mention a living world for them to return to."

"Dammit," Mist growled. She called to the sibyl, but the old woman just pushed deeper into the waves. Mist jogged into the cold foam and called out again. "Forget the spell, forget the stupid mouse. Please, tell me what you want that I can give you."

The sibyl stopped, waves breaking over her shoulders as though she were a rock. She turned and put her hands on her ample hips. "You could offer an old, dead lady a cup of tea."

GRIMNIR WAS typically resourceful in finding something for the sibyl to wear, though Mist was afraid to ask him exactly how and where he'd obtained the purple sweats.h.i.+rt, yellow pants from a rain slicker, orange sparkly boots, and Minnesota Vikings ball cap with one sagging gold lame horn.

Sibyl, Valkyrie, warrior-thug, G.o.d, and Alaskan malamute made for an odd party when they arrived at the Novel Cafe, which occupied part of the bottom floor of the old Masonic lodge on Pier Avenue in Santa Monica. Hermod gave Winston instructions to remain outside on the sidewalk, and the group installed themselves around a corner table, flanked by chipped-wood bookcases stuffed with paperback best sellers from the 1970s. Mist left to get tea for the sibyl and black coffee for the rest of them, as well as a poppy-seed m.u.f.fin for Hermod, who'd reminded her that she'd promised him breakfast. The total cost of the drinks and m.u.f.fin shouldn't have astonished her as much as it did, considering how the prices of fuel and food had been climbing in inverse proportion to the average temperatures. When she returned to the table, drawing on past waitressing experience to balance everything, the sibyl was immersed in a copy of the Weekly World News.

She looked up at Mist and snorted. "Just who is this Nostradamus character?"

The front page displayed a scowling, bearded visage in grainy black and white. Two-inch type had him predicting a Miami buried in snow and mammoths charging through the streets of Santa Fe.

"He was a prognosticator, like you." Outside, hail clattered on the sidewalk.

"A prognosticator?" the sibyl barked. "He was a spouter of non sequiturs. Listen to this: The young lion will overcome the old one on the field of battle in single combat and put out his eyes in a cage of gold." The sibyl threw the paper down on the table. "What in Niflheim is that supposed to mean? What a phony."

"Not like you, though. Your p.r.o.nouncements always come true."

The sibyl's smile was tight and smug. She squeezed honey into her tea from a plastic bear. "I'm more than reliable. I prophesied that a son of Odin would kill another, and wasn't Baldr slain by Hod? I predicted all of this: three winters, each longer than the last, with no summer between."

Mist took a sip of watery coffee. At least it was hot. "There've been ice ages before."

"Three winters," the sibyl boomed, "each longer than the last. Man forgets the bonds of kins.h.i.+p. Battle-ax and sword rule, and an age of wolves 'til the world goes down. The rust-red c.o.c.k will raise the dead in Helheim, and the golden c.o.c.k Gullinkambi will crow to the G.o.ds. The wolves of Fenrir's kin swallow the sun and the moon. Earth breaks and mountains crumble, and the Midgard serpent, venom-spitting, rises from the sea. Naglfar, the s.h.i.+p of dead men's nails, breaks its moorings and sets sail. The Aesir's enemies meet them on the battlefield of Vigrid, and the nine worlds fall to fire and ice."

The sibyl caught her breath. "Forgive an old woman for admiring her work. It's so nice to chat like this." She slurped her tea.

Mist gazed out the window and tried to imagine the sky on fire. She tried to imagine monsters striding over the horizon, leaving gravel and dust in their wake. But she couldn't, really. It was all too big, too abstract. Easy enough, however, to picture the Irish pub across the street engulfed in flame. She'd spent a first date there during her soph.o.m.ore year at UCLA with a cla.s.sics major named Jared. After dinner, he'd taken her back to his car, parked on this very street, and they'd made out for three hours. She remembered his hazel eyes and the way he seemed genuinely interested in learning everything about her, about how her grandmother Catalina had raised Lilly and her, how she'd been a band geek with a tenor saxophone at Venice High, about how Lilly dropped out of high school to travel the world and protest the World Trade Organization and whaling and half a dozen other things, and how alone she'd felt when her grandmother died. Now she imagined Jared's hazel eyes shriveling in the heat of conflagration and Catalina's little house burning to cinders-all just collateral damage in the fight between G.o.ds and monsters who wouldn't even notice.

"I don't believe it," Mist said. "I will not believe that the world can go on for four and a half billion years, and we can go from living in caves to building the Taj Mahal and sending probes out to Jupiter and making music and law and antibiotics ... and it's all for nothing."

The sibyl tore open a sugar packet. "Take heart, carrion-lover. There will be a new world, all fresh and green, run by the Aesir who survive: Vidar and Vali, and Thor's sons, and Baldr and Hod. It just won't be this world, and you and those you love won't be around to enjoy it."

"Ask her what happens to me," Hermod said around a bite of m.u.f.fin. "No, wait, changed my mind, I still don't want to know. Ask her about all those things I told you on the beach."

The sibyl dumped sugar in her tea. "You don't have to speak through the girl, Aesir black sheep. Your spell may have called me from the fringes of life, but it's not enough to bind me. I remain here out of choice, and I'll speak to whomever I wish."

Hermod gaped at her. "Well. Fine, then. First question: Can we stop the wolves from eating the sun and moon?"

The sibyl swatted Hermod's coffee cup to the floor, where it burst apart in ceramic fragments. Coffee splattered his legs.

"Can you make it so that your cup never shattered?"

"No, but I could cut your arms off." Hermod made the threat so matter-of-factly that it gave Mist chills.

"But that wouldn't unbreak your cup," the sibyl said with a calm that equaled Hermod's.

"I could have cut them off back on the beach when I first summoned you, before you spilled my coffee."

"Perhaps, but you would still be without your coffee now. The chain of events through time is made of stronger links than your sword can cut through. Baldr fell, and therefore the wolf must eat the sun and moon, and since the wolf eats the sun and moon, the nine worlds must die. Each event falls irrevocably from the previous and triggers the next."

"It's like a domino effect, then?" Mist asked.

"We had something like dominoes in the early days," the sibyl said. "We carved them from the bones of our enemies and burned the markings in. We called them something else, though. I had a nice set when I was a girl."

"The domino effect," Mist pressed on, trying to keep the sibyl on topic. "If you tip one over, the others all fall. Unless you remove some down the line before they topple."

"That's not how we played the game."

"I'm not talking about a game. I'm asking you how things work. I'm asking if we can change it."

The sibyl ripped open five more sugar packets and let the contents fall into her teacup. She drank without stirring. "You need a better metaphor. Think of it as a ball of string. It can be a big, knotty ball, all convoluted, but it's still one single strand. Tug here, tug there, just one string."

"But ... what if you cut the string and break the connection?"

"Oh, girl. You don't have shears sharp enough." Her gaze crossed everyone at the table. "None of you does. Accept it, as I do. Where you hear a pink new-born crying out its first breath, I hear the death rattle of the brittle-boned man it will become." She drained the sludge from her cup and rose to her feet. "Thank you for the tea."

"We're not done here yet," Hermod said. "I still have questions."

"You keep asking the wrong ones."

"What should I ask you, then?"

"First of all, how about, 'Can I offer you the rest of my m.u.f.fin?'"

Hermod sighed and pushed his plate toward her. "Dig in. What else?"

The sibyl returned to her seat. Hermod watched mournfully as she plucked away at his m.u.f.fin. She seemed very satisfied. "Because I was given honey and pastry," she said, smacking her lips, "I will say one last thing to you: Go to Hel. In her realm, where even Odin won't tread, you will find the links in the chain at their weakest. There, if you will, you might still grasp a few dominoes."

Mist carefully watched Hermod's reaction. He looked resigned, and Mist realized she'd won. With Hermod, she could make it to Helheim. Only now, having achieved her small but important victory, the ramifications of what they were going to do hit home. Making an incursion into death's realm was no small thing.

"Thank you for breakfast and for these lovely clothes," the sibyl said, pus.h.i.+ng her chair back from the table. "But I'll be leaving now. I'm missing my shows." Straightening the horn sagging off her hat, she walked out of the cafe, into a curtain of rain.

After a time, hail struck the windows as hard as machine-gun fire.

LILLY CASTILLO REMEMBERED dying. She'd been walking home from grocery shopping, arguing with her sister, Kathy, as usual. Lilly had been back in California for only a month, but she was already thinking about leaving again. She knew some people in Oregon who were smuggling vegetable crops from government-funded hydroponic farms and distributing them to those without money or connections, the sort of thing that was right up her alley.

Naturally, Kathy hadn't been shy about telling Lilly what she thought about contraband networks, and they'd been on the edge of a major fight when Lilly felt a pinching pain in her ribs, accompanied by a heavy blow that knocked the air out of her.

She'd found herself on the ground, her cheek against the pavement beside her sister. Kathy said she'd been shot, and that's when Lilly understood what was happening.

She and Kathy were being killed.

She'd tried to s.h.i.+eld her sister with her body against further shots, while Kathy had tried to do the same for her. Then a second shot slammed into Lilly's belly. A moment of blood-red pain drained to a milky haze, and the road of walking corpses appeared.

Lilly hadn't wanted to join the other dead, but she'd known she had to. Death was just f.u.c.ked up like that.

Kathy had called to her, reached for her, tried to join her, but there'd been someone holding Kathy back, a tall redheaded woman outfitted in white furs and silver chain mail. She'd said things to Kathy, things that Lilly had caught only part of before the murmuring of the dead drowned out all other noise. Something about being a Valkyrie, about claiming Kathy for Odin's service. She'd called Kathy "Mist." It sounded to Lilly like a p.o.r.n-star name.

Carried along in the current of the dead, Lilly waved back to Kathy, blew her kisses, tried to tell her she was sorry for every slight, every wound, for every time she'd run away. But it was too late for that. Being dead meant never getting to say sorry.

Since arriving in Helheim, Lilly hadn't stopped moving. She walked across endless plains of gray dust until her body dragged with hunger. But there was no food. Her head ached and thirst made her tongue feel like an old sock, but there was no water. Her side and belly hurt from the bullet wounds, but she was getting used to the pain.

She missed green. She missed the sun's warmth on her cheeks and eyelids. She missed orange juice.

She thought she was doing a little better than many of the other dead. Most everyone else stood around like herds of sheep, quietly moaning or weeping or staring into the featureless distance in a state of catatonia.

It wouldn't do. Prisoners had obligations: survive, escape, sabotage. She understood that survival was out of her hands; she was dead, after all. And if there was some kind of deeper, more permanent death after this one, she didn't know how it worked or how to avoid it. Despite her ache for it, food and water didn't appear to be necessary, and if it was, she'd seen no evidence of sustenance in Helheim. So she focused her attention on escape. That meant she needed to get a sense of her prison's landscape. From what she'd been able to gather from the more experienced dead around her, she now dwelled in the world of Helheim, ruled by Queen Hel. Here, there was the queen's palace, the corpse gate, some perpetually frozen rivers, cold plains, and some rock formations, like the eroded bones of mountains. The corpse gate apparently went all the way around Helheim's border, posing a formidable obstacle. And there were also fearful mutterings about Hel's dog, a terrible hound named Garm who served to keep the dead inside bounds.

Actually, the existence of Garm comforted Lilly. If there was a need for a guard dog, then escape must be possible.

What Lilly needed, then, was a plan.

Cresting a ridge, she came to a wary halt. There was some commotion down below, angry shouting coming from the center of a knot in the crowd. What could possibly ignite people's pa.s.sions in Helheim? She jogged down the path from her ridge to investigate.

Pus.h.i.+ng through the mob, she found a towering, gaunt figure surrounded by people wielding sticks and stones. The man at the center of the crowd wore loose trousers tucked into boots of an archaic style, and his hip-length s.h.i.+rt opened at the collar to reveal a ring of deep purple bruises around his throat. Narrow cheekbones curved down to a pale-lipped mouth set in a sardonic smile. His shriveled eyes were nearly lost in dark hollows.

He was leaning on a tall, skinny tree branch, and Lilly realized he was blind.

"I tell you it's him," said a man. "He's the reason we're all here."

"That's Judas?" said someone else, wearing modern jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt.

"Not Judas," said the first man. "It's Hod, the one who killed Baldr, on account of being a jealous dog-thanks to him, we're all cursed to rot in Helheim."

The blind man shook his head and released a bored-sounding sigh.

Lilly had heard murmurings about Baldr-some kind of G.o.d or something-and that his murder many thousands of years ago had been some kind of watershed moment of cosmological something-or-other. All of it was so far removed from her that she didn't much care whether this Hod person was guilty or not of doing what the mob accused him of. But Lilly thought she knew scapegoating when she saw it, and when a baseball-size stone flew from the crowd and struck Hod in the temple, she couldn't stand by and do nothing.

As a man beside her moved to throw a rock of his own, Lilly grabbed his wrist and elbow and made him drop it. She swung him around to use as a s.h.i.+eld as she moved closer to Hod.

"Rather gotten yourself in the thick of things, eh?" Hod said.