“Okay, Mr. Druid,” Coyote’s new voice rattled. “You can kill it now.”
I shoved Fragarach into the thing’s face and it twitched once and expired. An ambitious elf who saw the new draugr behind the lines came over to take care of him, but I cried a warning, dropped my camouflage, and stepped in front of Coyote. I had to block a strike and shout in Old Norse before the elf got the idea he should stand down.
“This one’s on our side,” I explained, leaving out that Coyote is not a draugr at all. “He’s going to lead us to Hel and help us take her down so she doesn’t keep raising the dead.” I half-turned to Coyote and muttered in English, “Smile and nod so he knows you’re friendly.”
Coyote waved at the elf with a twinkle-fingered flutter and tried to smile with his ruined, half-rotted face.
We wound up employing the elf to get us back through the line. I cast camouflage again and put a left hand on Coyote’s shoulder as the elf led us to the front and made sure we didn’t get cut down by any other elves. We were expelled into the horde and the draugar ignored Coyote as one of their own, flowing around him and showing zero interest in why he was going the wrong way. I followed in his wake and asked him where we were going.
“Hel’s up on the hill, where she can maintain a view. I can see her from here.”
“You can?” To me it was still a wash of magic, nothing distinct.
“Sure.”
“Is Loki nearby?”
“He was earlier, but I don’t see him now. Say, Mr. Druid, I’ve been wondering: If one o’ them purty elves back there eats a burrito and poots, you think it smells like buttercups or something?”
“That would require them to have floral agents in their intestines.”
“You say that like they don’t. I bet they take supplements—poot supplements—to make them smell good. I want some so I can poot on people and have ’em compliment me on how fine it smells.”
“It’s good to have goals, Coyote.”
“Heck yes. Fresh Poot Supplements would be a revelation if you made them available to humans. Folks would just be rippin’ poots in cars and elevators without fear of embarrassment, because it would smell so fine. They’d probably eat more sauerkraut and beans. It would change the world and its standards of etiquette. It might even become polite to poot on someone when you first meet them.”
If that seemed like an odd conversation to have in the middle of a battle, it was because our progress against the tide of undead was less than swift. It gave Coyote time to share his theories about elf poots and gave me plenty of time to look around and see the battle from the enemy’s perspective.
The forces defending humanity looked pitifully small. Odin had ordered the Vanir and Einherjar forward to reinforce the center and support the flanks as well, but it appeared that Thor was summoning mist around them to hide the gods from view. Why would he do that, unless the Norse had some way of seeing through it?
My answer came perhaps a couple of minutes later, after watching Brighid’s army meet the draugar and do somewhat better. They were at least cutting down more draugar than the others: The yewmen had come to the front and were taking plenty of punishment, while other Fae thrust forward with spears in between to slay the draugar. Better tactics. Brighid herself was fighting among them. The Olympians continued to run amok in the midst of the draugar, thinking themselves invincible, until Loki struck back.
Ares was the first to fall, with an impossibly well-placed arrow finding the eye slot in his helmet and piercing into his brain. Mars fell the same way seconds later, and that’s when Zeus and Jupiter realized that this wasn’t a playground. They scanned the slope of the volcano for the source of the arrows and I suppose they found it, after a fashion, since they fell out of the sky with arrows protruding from their skulls too. I wondered if, once they re-spawned back on Olympus, they would look back at their brief participation in this battle and recognize their hubris. They had done very little damage for having such great reputations.
And that’s when I remembered that Loki had stolen the Lost Arrows of Vayu from Granuaile in India, though I supposed now they must now be considered the Found Arrows. Those were long-distance godslayers, each of them enchanted to find its target. Very similar to Odin’s spear, Gungnir, which always hit its target, or Thor’s hammer, Mjöllnir. Hermes and Mercury went down next, having never found where Hel and Loki were hiding in the mob.
At least the mist around the Norse gods made sense now. Loki couldn’t target them if he couldn’t see them. But neither could the Norse gods really let loose with the threat of those arrows out there. Loki had effectively neutralized them.
Though he had really pissed off the remaining Olympians. Athena, Minerva, and the Apollos sped up from their patient, workmanlike pace of battle to reckless abandon. If they were going to be taken down by arrows too, they wanted to leave some mark on the field. But no further shafts appeared in godly skulls. Loki must have a limited supply, and he was almost certainly saving one for Odin.
The ones he’d let fly, however, could be recovered and shot again. In the teeming mass of bodies, I couldn’t see if any draugar were currently bent to the task of recovering arrows, but Loki would be a fool not to at least make the attempt. If one of the Apollos, for example, got hold of one of those arrows, it could be employed against him.
“Did you see where those arrows came from?” I asked Coyote.
“What arrows?” he rasped.
“The ones that killed the Olympians.”
“What? I missed that.”
“How could you miss that? He just removed six gods from the battlefield.”
“Hey, it’s real nice that you can just keep your hand on my shoulder and gawk at the show, Mr. Druid, but I’m tryin’ to find a path forward and keep an eye on Hel, because I thought that’s who we’re after. Are you changin’ the plan on me now?”
“No, no, you’re right, sorry.”
“Maybe you can give me a play-by-play,” Coyote said. “We’re going to be at this for a while.”
I reviewed the deity body count for him and then took another look at the field to see how that was going.
“The Álfar are still essentially keeping it a stalemate on the right flank, but every time one falls, Hel raises it up. That doesn’t appear to be the case with the dark elves on the left flank.”
“No?”
“I don’t see the dark elves shifting to smoke like they did at first. They’ve probably realized they don’t have to. They’re naturally faster than the draugar. But I have yet to see a dark elf raised from the dead. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it, if they had a natural defense against necromancy?”
“It sure would. Sounds like the sort of thing you could bottle and sell. You’d make a fortune, and it would be the ultimate in late-stage capitalism. ‘Protect yourself and your family from the apocalypse with Mr. Druid’s Anti-Necromantic Tonic and Salubrious Elixir!’ All o’ them doomsday preppers would buy a bottle and store it in their bunkers, just in case. Huge part of the human economy is based on just in case, you know that? Insurance, condoms, diapers—it’s all just in case.”
I chuckled, because it’s difficult not to like Coyote even when he might mess with you at any moment, and because I understood that he was nervous. Humor often shields the mind against fear. And we had plenty to fear ahead. The slope of the volcano was slowly coming into focus for me, and while I didn’t see Hel yet, I felt sure Coyote was right about her being there, because Garm, her hound, was standing sentinel. She would be somewhere nearby, probably not right next to him but a few quick leaps away.
“That dog’s gonna be a problem,” Coyote said, saying aloud what I was already thinking. “That’s the one that chased us all those years ago, am I right?”
“Yes. Through the planes of the Diné.”
“So he knows our scent. He’s g
onna smell us before we get in range. Or smell you, anyway. I copied the scent of this undead asshole, and lemme tell you, Mr. Druid, I don’t smell like pears and happiness no more.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that.”
“More like prunes and despair,” Coyote said.
“Well, which way is the wind blowing? Maybe he won’t be able to pick me out of the crowd.”
“Maybe. But once we do anything to Hel, he’s gonna come runnin’ regardless. We can deal with him before or after we attack Hel, but one way or another he’s gotta be dealt with.”
We moved in silence for a while, thinking, before I answered.
“I don’t really like the idea of hurting a dog, even if it is a pretty mean one.”
“I don’t either.”
“Is Hel to the left or right of the hound?”
“She’s to the left, in the center of the slope.”
We were on the right side of the field. “How do you feel about circling around that way, coming at her from the left?”
Coyote didn’t reply for so long that I wondered if he’d heard me. But just as I was about to ask him again, he said, “Way I see it, that plan has its good points and its bad ones too. Might keep us from having to confront the dog right away. Might even allow us to get in and get out without confronting the dog at all. That’s good.”
“Agreed.”
“But that’s gonna take a long time. Already taking us a long time as it is going straight ahead. Lots more folk gonna die. Loki’s reloading.”
“What? Where?”
“I don’t know where he is yet, still haven’t spotted him. But off to the left, where you said those gods fell, there are draugar moving toward the mountain like we are now. Six of them. You said there were six gods that fell, right?”
“Yes.”
“So we can follow them to Loki if you want, or keep doing what we’re doing and deal with the dog somehow, or turn left and try to circle around.”
I still thought taking out Hel was more important than taking out Loki. She was the one replenishing their numbers with the fallen and therefore winning by attrition. I wasn’t sure how much control over the draugar Loki would have with her gone; if we were fantastically lucky, they would all return to her realm once she died.
I didn’t really think we’d be that lucky, but removing Hel from the battlefield would mathematically improve our chances the most. Loki might have the Arrows of Vayu, but they were of such limited supply that he required a reload after six shots. Hel, on the other hand, could reanimate the flesh of nearly anyone who fell on the battlefield, as long as they still had a head or, apparently, weren’t one of the Svartálfar.
“Let’s keep heading down the highway to Hel, so to speak.” I got no response to this, not even a groan, so I sighed and mourned the wasted reference to AC/DC.
“What? Was that a pun or something, Mr. Druid? If it was, I’m sure it was terrible.”
It undeniably was, but terrible puns were my specialty.
Surviving was also my specialty—the sort of fact that’s true until it abruptly isn’t. If I wanted to survive this trip behind enemy lines, I should probably start worrying about my exit strategy. Because killing Hel would doubtless evoke a response from Loki.
A telltale chop to the air above drew my eyes to a couple of helicopters coming from the north. Either the military or police forces of Sweden were a mite curious about all this brouhaha. Right now that pilot was trying to process what he was seeing and report it in a way that wouldn’t get him a psych evaluation.
The all-inclusive hostiles, I thought, would be the way to go. Tell ’em you see “multiple hostiles” of “unknown origin” fighting out there, and leave out the bit where there seem to be a whole lot of undead fighting against elves and dwarfs and possibly gods, that it might, in fact, be Ragnarok unfolding. Let them figure out those details for themselves when they send troops to join in. They couldn’t fault the pilot for saying there were multiple hostiles.
But it did add another note of urgency to our mission. If humans joined in and got raised from the dead with all their modern weaponry, well, it could quickly spiral out of control. Not that we had any sort of real control at the moment.
“There, Mr. Druid. You see her?”
“What? No. Where is she?”
Coyote pointed with his spear a tiny bit west of north. “Near the base of the mountain, just a touch that way.”
I scanned the horde and saw nothing in particular that stood out. It could mean that I was simply missing her. Or it could mean that Loki’s mark was somehow disguising her even in the magical spectrum. Or it could mean that Coyote was messing with me for some reason. Not that he needed a reason, once I thought about it: Messing with me was reason enough for him to get out of bed in the morning.
“I don’t see her.”
“Are you shittin’ me right now?”
“No. Are you shitting me?”
“Damn. Whatever, we’ll keep going.”
Movement off to the right drew my gaze. Garm, the hound of Hel, had just swung his head in our direction. He was staring right at us, it seemed, with those yellow eyes. His lip curled back from his teeth and he growled. His nostrils flared and he huffed a couple of times, then his growl built until a low, booming woof rippled across the field to me.
“You smell too good to him, Mr. Druid. Like coffee and bacon in the morning.”
He had to be right. There was no one else on the field that he’d recognize by scent. His muscles tensed and he began an exploratory stride in our direction, nose twitching, trying to zero in on me.
I tried an old trick that had worked on the Fir Bolgs once: I had the earth soften and then tighten around his paws to keep him immobile. But it failed because the earth was almost completely drained of juice near the portal. The land was going dead and it didn’t have the strength to hold on to Garm—but it did trip him, and he went down with a howl, crushing several draugar underneath him and perhaps getting stabbed with their weapons in the process. He’d be up in a moment, though, and pretty soon I’d be running out of juice to maintain my camouflage. I’d be visible and far away from any help in the middle of a sea of enemies.
“That got her attention,” Coyote reported. “She’s looking at her hound now.”
“She is?”
Coyote pointed once again with his spear. “She’s the ugly one looking toward the hound. All the rest are looking forward at the front lines.”
Coyote’s phrasing left me a bit at sea: If Hel was the ugly member of the undead, which was the beautiful? I still couldn’t pick her out; his attempts to point to her were like waving at a colony of fire ants and saying, “That one!” But his assertion that she was interested in Garm gave me an idea. “Okay, I’m going to keep messing with the hound and you keep leading us to her. If she’s not paying attention to us, you might be able to get a free shot.”
“Okay. You try to keep us from getting eaten. I’ll try not to lose sight of our target.”
On the one hand, I didn’t want to use any more of the earth’s energy, but on the other, it was going to get used anyway and I also didn’t want to die. Garm needed a distraction, so I gave him one. I bound a bunch of draugr armor to his coat—all the leather stuff, which was in many cases connected to metal stuff and to the draugar themselves. They could phase right out of it and probably would, but in a few seconds he had a lot of annoying extra weight on him, draugar being lifted toward his body and vice versa, a tug in both directions every time I completed a binding. Garm must have thought the draugar were attacking him, for he didn’t take kindly to it, turning around and biting at them as if they were saucy jumbo fleas.
“Attaboy,” Coyote said, and I thought he was talking to Garm at first, but then he added, “Keep that up. She’s moving closer to him. We don’t even have to change course.”
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I hoped he was right. I hoped we would be able to pull this off all sneaky, in and out, change the course of the battle, and—
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“She’s looking around. She can smell the shenanigans.”
“Well, she can’t see me,” I said, just as all the earth went dead beneath my feet, its energy drained away, and my camouflage fizzled. I could recast it using stored energy from my bear charm, but I rather thought I’d need that for something else. I was quite visible and quite visibly alive in a sea of undead. And what’s more, Hel spotted me right away and shrieked in recognition. That allowed me to finally locate her: She had taken the trouble to make herself look entirely rotted instead of only half-rotted, but her eyes held burning scleras and if they indicated emotional heat then she was ablaze. She’d once asked me to join her side for Ragnarok and I’d refused. She’d been alone and outnumbered that day and we chased her off. It would be safe to say that the circumstances had changed.
I shoved Coyote forward as I drew Fragarach and said, “You’re not with me now!” hoping he’d get the idea that he should blend in. I kicked the draugr to my right to clear some space and expected to be overwhelmed shortly from all sides, but instead the draugar pulled away from me, and Coyote followed suit—because Hel was coming straight at me, charging down the mountain. Her assumed form of a draugr melted and shifted until she was the deity I had seen and smelled before, half living and half skinless putrid corpse. She grew as she approached, taking longer and longer strides, topping ten feet easily, and I had to rapidly reassess how I was going to fight someone that huge. The reach she now had far exceeded mine, and she had drawn her knife, Famine, out of her rib cage. Unlike Loki’s sword, Famine did not grow in proportion to the rest of Hel—probably because Loki was casting an illusion there—but her knife was a significant piece of cutlery regardless.