Hammered

  “Are you such a one?”

  He waved my question away. “More about me later. Tell me about you. Your curiosity has piqued mine.”

  There was no point in crafting evasions. Either he could help me or he could not. “I have heard that these creatures possess great strength and long life. I need that to avenge my family. Thor killed them, and so he needs killing in return. But I will never be successful without the time and means to do it.”

  “You want to kill a god?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Not just any god. Thor.”

  “And thus you want to become one of these creatures?”

  “Yes.”

  The scholar studied me and rolled his tongue around in his mouth. Abruptly, he laughed. “That is a new one, I must admit. I give you credit for novelty. So you are not a Christian?”

  “No.”

  “Are you aware that the Christians believe these creatures to be damned—or even demons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you know that you must die to become one of these creatures and then hope you rise from the dead?”

  “I have heard that, yes.”

  “Tell me, Viking, what would you suffer for the cause of vengeance? What atrocities would you commit in the name of revenge?”

  I paused to consider. “If it brought me closer to my goal, I suppose I would suffer anything, commit most any crime.”

  “Most any?”

  “I have … no stomach for harming the young.”

  This brought a wry smile to the scholar’s face. “Because they are innocent?”

  “No, it is not that. I have killed innocent men and women along with the corrupted. Whatever they are when their doom falls, they are what the Norns have made them, and I am merely the instrument of their end. But children … are incomplete. I suppose the Norns do not wish to finish the ones who die, but then, neither do I, if you see what I mean.”

  “Interesting. You dislike leaving things undone.”

  “Precisely. And slaying Thor is something that must be done.”

  He said mockingly, “Do not the Norns have something planned for him? A battle with a serpent, I believe?”

  “I will figure something out. But, first, I need time.”

  “So single-minded! You wish to subvert fate to your own will. That will truly take some figuring. I can see that you have trained your body to dominate others with the sword. Can you train your mind to dominate with the word?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am asking if you would be willing to learn how to read and write.”

  “What purpose would that serve? I am not going to write Thor a letter.”

  “It would serve many purposes, but primary among them would be your survival. Let us suppose that you become one of these blood drinkers. The long life and strength you speak of would have to come at a steep price, or else such creatures would be everywhere, would they not?”

  “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “Excellent. So what price do you think these creatures might have to pay?”

  I frowned. “They never see the sun again.”

  “Correct. What else?”

  This question earned my host a noncommittal shrug. “I suppose there is the damnation to worry about if one is Christian. But I am not worried about this.”

  “No, there is something more you are missing.”

  “What?”

  The scholar sighed and, instead of answering, said, “Let us sit. My manners have escaped me. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

  “I could do with a drink, thank you. Ale or mead or whatever you have.”

  We left the basement library and bookbindery and returned upstairs. The scholar—for I refused to address him as Björn—asked a servant to bring a drink to the sitting room. It contained four chairs and a fireplace but no windows. There was a fire in the hearth, but the smoke was traveling up into an unseen hole rather than filling the room. My host saw my puzzled stare and explained.

  “Ah, the smoke is traveling up a device called a chimney, where it exits above the roof. Wonderful innovation. We can enjoy the fire’s heat without suffering its smoke. Every house will have one eventually, you will see.”

  He offered me a chair and took the one opposite. A handsome young woman brought me a tankard of ale. I thanked her, and my host waited for me to sample it and offer my compliments.

  “Before I answer the question, I hope you will not think me rude for asking—what do you do for a living?”

  I thought he already knew the answer, but I gave it anyway. “I am a guard at the dockside.”

  “I am in need of guards here. You have probably noticed that I have significant assets that need protection. Would you consider working for me? I would pay more and you could live here in the bargain, free of charge.”

  “I will consider it.”

  “Why does it require thought? It is clearly a better offer.”

  “I still do not know who or what you are. You tend not to answer the most basic questions. You always change the subject.”

  The pale man in purple silk smiled. “I believe I like you, Mr. Helgarson. You are no fool. But verbal dexterity is a skill you should cultivate.”

  “You are doing it again.”

  His smile grew wider. “Yes. But we were speaking of prices. The knowledge I have gathered regarding these creatures was bought at a very steep price. Like my name, I do not give it away for free.”

  “What do you require?”

  “Your loyalty. Work for me—under the terms I described, at a higher rate of pay and living here—and never repeat what I share with you.”

  “Done.”

  “Will you swear in blood?”

  It seemed an odd question, especially in relation to the nature of my quest, but I could see no benefit to refusing. “Yes,” I said.

  Before I had time to take another breath, he was latched onto my neck and draining me. I tried to push him off, but his grip was iron, and I could no more move him than I could move the stars. I punched him in the kidney and it was like punching a pillar of stone. However, my continued struggles must have finally irritated him, for he struck me sharply in the gut and deprived me of breath.

  He withdrew and returned to his chair as my vision began to darken at the edges. I tried to rise from my chair and run but discovered I was too weak. “Now you know what I am,” he said, his fangs clearly visible where none had been before. “I am the thing you would become. Learn to read and write several languages first, and prove your loyalty and discretion. When you are ready, pledge your service to me for three hundred years, starting from when you first rise from the grave, and I will grant you life after death. I will also answer your questions and tell you my name. Then, only then, may you pursue your personal vendetta. Does this sound acceptable to you?”

  “Define several,” I managed.

  He laughed, my blood thickening in his throat. It sounded like caramel. “You still have the strength to spar with me? You are unusually robust.” He sat and faced me, an amused and bloody half grin on his face. “Let us say three.” He ticked off the names on his fingers. “Greek. Latin. German. And as for this Bohemian tongue, you already speak it and that is good enough. I will not have you write anything in it.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “You will never leave here alive. Your survival depends on literacy, as I mentioned before. If you agree but then attempt to betray me, as others have done, you will die. I demand complete loyalty.”

  “These other people here—they all wish to be like you?”

  “Every one.”

  “Will you … turn them all?”

  “An excellent question. The answer is no. Some will betray me. Some will get killed in the normal course of living in Bohemia. And some will never live up to their potential.”

  “So if I do not learn Greek, Latin, and German, you will kill me?”

  “You are quick,” he said. “Come, you are still losin
g blood and soon you will be too weak to recover.”

  “I agree to these terms.”

  As before, he moved too quickly for me to follow—especially with my vision fading. I felt his cold hand on my neck and then nothing; I woke up later on a mattress stuffed with feathers, weak but alive. That was in the last month of 1006. In 1010 he told me his name was Zdenik and turned me into a vampire. He told me all the secrets of our kind, of course, though I may share none of them with you.

  I served him for three hundred years. I killed for him—not mere humans but sometimes witches or ghouls and the odd lone werewolf. I helped him defend his territory from other vampires and learned how to manipulate the wills of men. The Vikings were right to fear us; the things I did were terrible.

  Finally freed from his service in 1310, I returned to the north and searched for ways to get to Asgard. I consulted Norse pagan wise men throughout Scandinavia, and all said I must cross the Bifrost Bridge to get to Asgard or be sent there by the Valkyries to Valhalla. It was another plane of existence, they explained, and the full cruelty of Thor’s crime became clear: Even though I now had the strength to confront him, I could not muster the power to reach him.

  Eventually I refocused my search on planewalkers. There are remarkably few of them, and most of those can travel only to certain planes. The only ones who have complete freedom to go where they wish are the Tuatha Dé Danann—and Druids. But the Tuatha Dé Danann rarely leave Tír na nÓg. Their progeny, the Fae, are limited by their need to use oak, ash, and thorn to shift. I thought all was lost. But I ran across the goddess Flidais in the eighteenth century. She refused to take me to Asgard, but she told me one Druid still walked the earth and, if I could find him, perhaps he would take me.

  “Where do I find this Druid?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” said the goddess of the hunt. “He is in hiding, and he has shielded himself from divination somehow. I think he moves around in tropical zones and deserts, where the Fae cannot find him easily. Probably somewhere in the New World. Do not get frustrated; he’s older than you and has no intention of dying soon.”

  That is when I came to the New World. I picked a desert in the southwest of the continent and waited. It was a long, mind-numbing wait, but it proved to bear fruit, for the Druid finally appeared, did he not? I could not simply charm him and force him to bring me here; he is well defended against such intrusion. I had to charm him the way humans do it: I befriended him and earned his trust. Soon we will shift to Asgard, and my millennium of suffering will end one way or another.

  I have paid with centuries of anguish for one night’s drunken boasting. I have endured much for the sake of revenge. But when I get my chance, friends, I will be swift. I will not gloat over the thunder god or try to make him suffer. The point is not to cause him pain but rather to end mine. No matter how quickly Thor dies, it will be too late for my family.

  Chapter 20

  Well, that was revelatory. When I met Leif shortly after moving to Tempe, I never suspected then, or at any point afterward, that he’d been waiting for me there. For centuries. Or that, for him, all our professional and personal acquaintance was nothing more than a prelude to pursuing his own vendetta.

  I felt hurt for the space of a mouse whisker—“He used me!” a tiny voice said—but then I laughed at myself. He was a vampire, after all. To them, all other creatures are to be used as they see fit. Leif had fooled me into thinking that he was different.

  But I was not the only fool. The expression on Gunnar’s face told me he was thinking similar thoughts. The question was, did this new information change anything?

  Leif had given his word and followed through on it. I had given mine, and that is no small matter for one of my generation. People today make promises, break them blithely, and then excuse themselves by saying “I tried” when in truth they did not. For people of the Iron Age—my age—a man’s word was the foundation of his reputation, the underlying architecture of his honor, the bedrock of his identity. Even though I often lie—a very different thing—I never forswear myself. I couldn’t get around that. Or the fact that Thor could use a good killing.

  But, thanks to Jesus, I had my doubts that slaying Thor would be an unequivocally good idea, even though all evidence suggested he might be an unmitigated asshole. The function of assholes in the world, just like the asshole we all have, is to spread shit around. They are loathsome and dirty and smell extraordinarily bad, but they are also vitally necessary.

  That thought led me to consider the nature of vampires. Were they vitally necessary? What niche did they fill in the scheme of things?

  Despite the impenetrable curtain Leif had drawn over his undead secrets, I knew something about vampires he’d probably rather I didn’t know. He couldn’t hide it from me, because I could see it.

  Normal people churn with life and their bindings to the earth; the activity of their minds and their relative health is clear from their auras, which suffuse their entire being. Vampires are different in that there are only two clear areas of “being” at all. There is activity in the center of their rib cages, and there is activity directly behind the eyes, a dull red pulsing glow like coals in a fire. The rest of them comes across as nothing more than a sterile yet ambulatory collection of carbon, calcium, and iron, though they do have thin gray auras around their heads and torsos.

  Those red lights, whatever they are—the dark magic of vampirism Leif refused to explain—they are fail-safes of a sort. I think of them as resurrection engines. That’s why you can’t just stake a vampire in the heart and assume you’re done; you have to cut off the head as well to prevent regeneration, because if someone removes that stake, it’ll heal up and the vampire will rise again. Even then, if you cut off the head and remove the stake, the heart will grow a new head eventually. You’ll have a thin and wasted-looking vampire, but it will be tremendously hungry and feed incessantly until it gets back to full strength.

  Theories in Druid lore speculate that vampires are completely alien, or else demonic symbionts brought to this plane long ago. It mattered little to me which was true, because the upshot of it was that I could do whatever I wanted to vampires. As far as the earth is concerned, vampires don’t exist as sentient creatures. They are simply collections of minerals and elements that have yet to be reabsorbed, and as such I could unbind them whenever I wished. Druids have absolutely no tabus against using our magic on the dead—it’s only the living we can’t mess with.

  My private theory about the downfall of the Druids—which I didn’t share with Granuaile when she asked, except in passing—has quite a bit to do with vampires. In my opinion, Caesar was simply a sword wielded by the hands of vampires in Rome. There was (and still is) a well-known nest there, and I think they were working behind the scenes, pushing the Senate to have Druidry wiped out. The young vampires wanted to expand northward and carve out territories of their own, but the continental Druids in Gaul were preventing that expansion by unbinding the vampires on sight, turning them into a mush of protoplasm and then setting the mess on fire to prevent any chance of resurrection.

  I would have done the same to Leif when I first met him, if Hal had not introduced us and taken care to warn me ahead of time that he was very nice for a dead guy. Though I was aloof at first, gradually I realized that Hal was right and I came to enjoy Leif’s company—even considering him a friend. I was not sure anymore if Leif’s regard for me had ever been genuine.

  His tale also made me wonder if he knew what I could do to him if I so chose. He became a vampire after the fall of the Druids, and most likely his maker, Zdenik, had as well—though I was basing that guess entirely on his ethnic name and the conjecture that vampires had not yet penetrated into Bohemia by the sixth century. But Zdenik had probably been made by one of the Romans, and they could have told him what Druids could do, and he in turn could have told Leif. I suspected that asking Leif about it would be wasted breath, so I cleared it from my mind. Something else leaped in to occu
py it, a horrible gestalt that had been bubbling up to the surface all the while.

  Leif knew I’d have doubts after he said those things, and he also knew with full certainty that I’d take him to Asgard anyway. Why?

  The chilling conclusion I reached was that I had given Leif my word, and any creature capable of waiting for centuries to get his revenge would not hesitate to use any leverage he could to ensure I followed through. Any creature capable of suffering what he had suffered would not blanch at inflicting a bit of suffering on others. He knew who my loved ones were. He knew where they lived.

  Almost as soon as I thought this, I rejected it as unworthy. No one could be so Machiavellian. Not even Machiavelli.

  And the simple solution—to unbind him like any other vampire and have done with it—was not so simple, aside from being completely dishonorable. He had drunk gallons of my blood; it was part of him now. If I unbound him, might I do some damage to myself in the process? I had no way of knowing. There was no precedent for this. And now was not the time for figuring it all out, because people were staring at me and I wasn’t sure why. Had I been thinking aloud?

  Zhang Guo Lao cleared up my confusion by politely inquiring if we had bonded sufficiently for a trip to Asgard.

  “Oh. We have made excellent progress,” I replied, extremely relieved that this was all he wanted to know. “But more must be done, I’m afraid.”

  “Tomorrow night, then,” Leif said, standing up and nodding at me, his face inscrutable. “I wish you all a good day.”

  “Rest well,” Gunnar told him, and the others expressed similar sentiments. Leif bowed to us and left the circle of firelight, off to find someplace to hide from the sun.

  Gunnar and I took a walk around the lake after dawn, when Leif was truly asleep.

  “Are you still going through with it after that?” he asked with no preamble, sure that I would take his meaning.

  “Leif seems certain I will.”