“Yes, he does. I don’t know what game he’s playing. I’m hoping it’s the kind where we’re on one side and the Norse are on the other.”
“As opposed to what?”
“Every man for himself.”
“Ah. Well, I can’t speak for him or what side he’s on. But I’m on your side,” I replied, and then tossed my chin at the other members of our party. “And I’m on theirs too.”
The alpha squinted at me. “So you don’t think we need to do anything?”
“Not right now. Let’s see what happens in round two.”
That began almost as soon as Leif rose after sundown. He asked me to talk with him a discreet distance away from the night’s campfire. Gunnar asked a question with his eyes, and I shook my head ever so slightly. He let us go alone.
We walked in silence along the lakeshore for perhaps a hundred yards, hands in pockets and staring at the ground. Leif seemed to be waiting for me to speak first, but he was the one who’d asked if we could talk. Finally he stopped and I stopped too, turning to face him.
“You have had the day to grow angry with me, and yet I still find myself here, head on my shoulders and with a stake-free chest,” he said. “You are a good man, Atticus.”
“And you are a charming vampire.”
He nodded ruefully. “I deserve that. I understand, I do. But I hope you realize that I did not make some kind of Freudian slip last night. I confessed it very purposefully.”
“For what purpose?”
“Complete candor between us.”
“How refreshing. Why tell me now?”
“Because that is what friends do, Atticus. It is true that when we first met I was playing a part. You had something I wanted, and befriending you was the only way to get it. But in that long process—our physical and verbal sparring matches, your attempts to modernize my language, actually fighting side by side—I discovered that I genuinely like you. And for several years now I have not had to act.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I’m having difficulty believing that. Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest explanation is the correct one. And the simplest explanation is that you are a manipulative bastard like every other vampire.”
“Atticus, I had no need to say anything. You were going to fulfill your oath anyway. The simplest explanation for that—the only explanation—is that I wanted to say it, to give you my trust and pay you this compliment, to tell you freely that I value your friendship, I will not betray it, and I will hold nothing back from you again. I am tired of all my secrets.”
I still had my doubts, but that was clearly what he had wanted to say to me, and he expected me to buy it. Maybe I would later; his actions would prove him true or false. My best move was to accept his explanation and be wary. Perhaps he was truly being genuine with me, but there was no way I could fully trust him again, and I’d have to act the friend from now on.
“You wish to share your secrets?” I asked. I tilted my head and smirked. “Vampire secrets?”
Leif raised his hands by way of qualification. “Only with you. No one else can know.”
“So you’re saying I can ask you anything right now about vampires and you’ll answer it truthfully?” I was grinning.
He dropped his hands and sighed in resignation, believing he knew what was coming. “Go ahead,” he said dully.
“Tell me everything you know about the whereabouts of Theophilus.”
I caught a brief flash of genuine surprise. He’d thought I was going to ask him whether vampires poop or something unimportant like that. Why should such things matter? There were far weightier questions on my mind. If this mysterious Theophilus was truly older than me, then he’d probably know who was behind the old Roman pogrom against Druids. He might turn out to be the one behind it himself. Such a creature was worth seeking out.
“And no equivocations,” I added. “I want your best guess at where he is right now and how to make contact with him.”
“Do you intend to end his existence?” Leif asked.
“Not unless he gives me cause. I merely wish to chat.”
“He will wonder how you found him.”
“I’ll tell him I guessed.”
“He will know it is a lie. The quickening of your pulse, the tiny chemicals escaping from your skin, analysis of your expression—he will know someone told you and demand you reveal your source.”
“He can demand all he wants. He cannot take the information from me by force, Leif. You know this.”
“I do not,” Leif said, shaking his head emphatically.
“What do you mean? He’s telepathic?”
“I mean I sincerely do not know. I have never met him. My information on him is vague and extremely suspect.”
“Whatever. Bring it,” I said. “He’ll never know from me that you ever spoke a word.”
Leif flared his nostrils and exhaled heavily through them, frustrated. “He is said to divide his time between Greece, Vancouver, and a small tropical town in Australia called Gordonvale. He follows the clouds.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He wants overcast skies. He is supposedly so old, so powerful, that he is capable of walking abroad in daytime for brief periods if it is not full daylight.”
My eyebrows crept up my forehead. “Can you do this?”
“No. It takes a tremendous effort for me to remain awake past dawn, even in a sunless basement.”
“Hmm. You mentioned Greece. In what part of Greece?”
“Thessaloniki.”
I frowned. “That is not an especially overcast city.”
Leif shrugged. “My own private theory is that he is from there originally.”
That fit with his Greek name, anyway. I kept firing questions at Leif and watching him carefully for signs of prevarication. If he was lying, he was deucedly good at it. Whether they turned out to be true or not, they were leads, at least, something to pursue in the very coldest of cases. And his seeming candor allowed me to hope that perhaps he truly wished us to be friends.
We spent that night and the next telling stories of our respective pasts—sometimes jokes that didn’t make any sense when translated to English, sometimes adventures in distant lands and in cultures that have long since faded. We tried to top one another in The Weirdest Shit I Ever Ate contest (Väinämöinen won). Zhang Guo Lao pulled out his fish drum and tried to play something along with Väinämöinen’s kantele, but it turned out to be a clash of musical styles that’s best forgotten, sort of like Indonesian Folk Death Polka.
Leif didn’t ask to drink any of my blood, and I didn’t offer. Neither did anyone else. He seemed no worse off for it, so he clearly didn’t need to drink every evening.
After the third night of storytelling, I examined the bonds between us and saw that they had strengthened considerably. I felt I had a good grasp of who these men were now.
“Gentlemen, I believe we are ready,” I told them. “Tomorrow night, we will go to the Norse plane.”
Chapter 21
Getting five men to simultaneously touch me and the root of a tree was vaguely akin to a game of homoerotic Twister, and I almost giggled—especially since their expressions practically broadcast that they were asking themselves, “Is this gay?” That would have lost me major testosterone points, though, so I firmly refocused my mind on the task and pulled us through to the Norse plane.
This time, the Well of Mimir was being watched. An eagle let out one of those “Ee-yaahh!” cries that now remind me of the title music to The Colbert Report, and we all turned our heads to find the source.
“That’s no bird,” Väinämöinen said after a second’s hesitation. “That’s a frost giant.” His magical vision was as good as mine, if not better. When I looked at the eagle’s aura, it didn’t look like a bird of prey. It looked like a huge biped in ice blue. “You’re up, Atticus.”
I’d been elected to do all the talking, if any were to be done. Väinämöinen spoke Old Norse, but Leif spoke
it better, so the vampire would act as translator to the rest of the group.
“Greetings, noble sir. May we speak with you?” I asked the eagle. “We have come to Jötunheim to have words with Hrym, if that is possible.”
The eagle leapt from its perch and turned into a towering giant, shaking the earth and sending sheets of snow into the air as it landed. He was twelve feet tall, with skin a few shades lighter than the blue people in Avatar. His beard had real hair, but it was sheathed in ice, as were his eyebrows. His tangle of dark hair was tipped with highlights of white frost. Despite his obvious cold, he wore nothing but a fur about his loins, which made me wonder: If the frost giants figured out that a fur would keep their privates a bit warmer, why didn’t they figure out that more furs would keep the rest of them warm? Did they never worry about hypothermia? Considering their elemental nature, they were most likely immune to it, and their scant clothing and shivery appearance was calculated to cause hypothermia in all who gazed upon them.
“Who are you?” he demanded. His voice was like barrels rolling down a dock.
“No friends to the Æsir,” I assured him, thinking that was probably more important than our names. I offered those next, and since he had yet to squash us into jelly, I thought relations were proceeding remarkably well.
The frost giant fixed Perun with an icy glare (what other kind of glare could he possibly deliver?). “Graah. I do not like thunder gods. Do not trust them. What words do you have for Hrym?”
“We can end the tyranny of the Æsir tonight, or the next, or whensoever the frost Jötnar choose. Odin is vulnerable, and he knows it not. Thor is crippled, yet he knows not how. Freyja is there for the taking. The Norns are dead. All of Asgard is a fruit waiting to be plucked if Hrym feels hungry.”
The giant laughed like someone with severe respiratory symptoms. “Mrr-hhr-hwauugh! What nonsense is this? You think scrawny snacks like you can defeat the Æsir?”
There is no use in bandying words with the muscle-bound and oafish. They communicate physically, and that is the only way they can be reached. I turned to the immortal Zhang Guo Lao and spoke to him in Mandarin. “Master Zhang, I believe he needs a brief lesson in manners. Perhaps you could show him how to speak on our level.”
A flicker of a smirk played under the wispy mustache of the ancient alchemist, and he afforded me a brief bow. He shrugged off his pack and set his fish drum aside, drawing out one of its iron rods.
“Allow my comrade to show you a glimpse of our power,” I said to the giant, switching back to Old Norse. “Perhaps you will be willing to hear more when you have seen what we can do.”
“Hrrgh!” the Jötunn snorted. “What can this old man do? Fart on me?”
I hope I never get taken down by a fart the way Zhang Guo Lao took down that frost giant. He swung a high kick to the giant’s kneecap to begin with, just to let him know he was serious. The giant bellowed and kicked spastically at Zhang with the same leg. Zhang grabbed on and then leapt up at the giant’s face, somersaulting until his spread legs approached the giant’s throat. These he locked around the giant’s neck, then hung upside down, and the giant’s eyes widened in surprise: How’d he get saddled so quickly with an old-guy necklace? His massive hands moved toward his chest, obviously intending to grab Zhang and yank him off, but Zhang wasn’t merely hanging out. While performing a sort of extended crunch, he used his iron rod to administer surgical blows to various pressure points on the giant’s chest and neck—thup-thunk-thak-thunk-thup. After the last one, the giant’s hands stopped moving. He was paralyzed from the waist up. Zhang, still hanging upside down, relaxed and spread his arms wide in a sort of “ta-da!” gesture. I led our group in a round of appreciative golf claps. The giant slowly processed what was happening and staggered about, trying to get his upper body to move. When he lurched back a step, Zhang bent at the waist until he could grab on to a couple of beardcicles. Then he allowed his feet to slide from around the giant’s neck, planted them against the giant’s collarbones, and sprang backward as if he were participating in a high dive competition. After a bunch of twists and flippy thingies—I’m not a gymnastics expert—he landed gracefully on his feet, if somewhat deeply in the snow. The frost giant fell backward in a markedly graceless fashion, propelled by Zhang’s kickoff. Unable to windmill his arms for balance, the giant roared his frustration all the way down and crunched loudly (and wetly) into the snow.
I looked at Leif. “If we hadn’t been here, would he have made a sound?” Leif snorted once in amusement but made no reply.
Back to Mandarin. “Master Zhang, I am assuming, since he can obviously make noise, that he still has the ability to speak?”
Zhang Guo Lao nodded once. Together we walked through the snow to the frost giant’s head.
“Please forgive us for this small demonstration of our power,” I told the Jötunn. “I assure you that no permanent damage has been done and we will release you shortly. May I have your name, old one?”
“I am Suttung,” the giant growled. “Release me from this foul magic now!”
“Not before we have your pledge to offer us no violence and take us to Hrym.”
“You tricked me!” He thrashed about in the snow, trying to get up but finding it impossible to do with only his legs. I let him give it a good try, then spoke again when he subsided in angry frustration.
“I disagree. We told you we know how to bring down the Æsir, and you refused to believe. It was quicker to show you rather than simply tell you. May I have your assurance of safe conduct?”
“Graah. I suppose I must give it, or else I will lie here like dead wood.”
“And you will take us to Hrym?”
“Yes. He will spit you and roast you with rosemary, and we will all sample your flesh tonight. Tomorrow you will be shat out in the snow.”
“Your diplomacy is bold and edgy, sir. I would not call that safe conduct. Still, I suppose you cannot speak for Hrym. Master Zhang, he has given his word. Please release him.” I said that in Old Norse for Suttung’s benefit, then repeated the last sentence in Mandarin. Zhang nimbly flipped himself onto the Jötunn’s chest and poked him again in various places. After the last one, Suttung’s arms spasmed and he slammed them forcefully into the snow, levering himself to a sitting position. Zhang performed some acrobatics to get out of the way and nailed another perfect dismount.
Suttung stood and spent a few moments reassuring himself that everything worked the way it had before. When he was satisfied, he examined Zhang more closely, trying to spot what he’d missed earlier—that this seemingly frail old man was truly quite dangerous. He likewise favored us all with suspicious glares—frosty, of course—wondering what powers we might possess that could destroy the Æsir.
“Graah. Follow,” he finally said, and turned east, dragging his massive feet to plow a trail through the snow for us.
The village of the frost Jötnar was two hours’ march through the biting cold. My jeans and leather jacket were not up to handling it, to say nothing of my sandals, so I was forced to beg a blanket and snowshoes from Väinämöinen, who gave them to me with an expression that clearly said he thought I was a dumbass. Chilblains I could heal; it was frostbite I worried about. The other members of the party seemed acquainted with such cold—or at least better prepared for it.
Perun walked beside me and thumped his chest, which was covered in matted curls. He wore a fur cloak, but his thin shirt was open in front and his personal fur was on prominent display. “You see? Hair is good for place like this. Is stupid to shave.”
“Would you give the same advice to a woman?” I asked.
“Of course! Hairy woman is good. Give me beefy, hairy women.”
“I’m fresh out. But, hey, you know, that sounds like a spectacular band name. Beefy Hairy Women. Think of the logo and merchandising possibilities. Could be trendsetting.”
Perun looked distressed. “We should speak Russian. I not know what you mean.” We switched to Russian and chatted a
miably in Suttung’s wake. Perun was excited about the possibility of seeing the giantesses, who might indeed be both beefy and hairy. I deduced from this that he had not enjoyed an amorous encounter for some good while.
The frost Jötnar did not live in caves or primitive huts but rather in solid blocks of carved ice insulated with snow. In some cases, the snow was hardpacked and carved into attractive patterns around the windows and along the bases. They had steep roofs and chimneys and very tall doors.
There were no heaps of human bones in the street or evidence that the giants regularly shat in the snow. The village was remarkably clean, in fact, almost artistically so, without any of the squalor or refuse that one might expect from people fond of saying graah. There was a large communal fire pit in the center of the village, but it looked like it had not been used in some time. Perhaps, I reflected, all the human bones were buried in the snow, along with the missing squalor and refuse.
Everyone seemed to be enjoying a quiet night at home. The snow-lined main promenade was deserted, but orange glows from inside the houses and chimney smoke spoke of warm fires inside. For all of its idyllic appearance, however, the giants’ village did nothing to put our party at ease. We were half expecting an ambush.
“Where is everybody?” I asked Suttung.
“Graah. Hiding from Odin’s spies. Hugin and Munin have been visiting too often the last few days.”
How very interesting. Had they perhaps been looking for me there? “We should probably get indoors soon. It would not do to have them see us now.”
“We are here.” Suttung stopped in front of a house no larger than the others, marked by nothing spectacular to set it off from any other house. Granted, all of the houses were huge, but there were no special ice carvings around this one’s door; no skulls on a spearhead; no helpful sign saying that the chief was in. My ambush alarm went off and I checked our surroundings. Leif and Gunnar and Zhang Guo Lao also set themselves facing outward, watching for incoming attacks. Perun and Väinämöinen looked unconcerned. But no cadre of camouflaged giants appeared with spears in hand; no frozen Nordic zombies leapt out to snack on our brains.