Wayne made the tea. Some concoction of chili and cinnamon and ginger, because she was an incorrigible beverage hipster who kept an alchemist’s lab of equipment next to the cash register.
Sigmund considered the wisdom of consuming anything found inside a Helbleed, but didn’t want to say as much in front of the lady herself. It seemed rude.
“You know of my death at Father’s hands.” Speaking of, Hel was standing, straight and proud, between a shelf of crumbling Tintin and a display of oozing plastic Daleks.
“Uh, yeah . . . kinda? He mentioned some stuff.” Honestly, between Loki and Baldr and Lain and gods only knew who else, the whole Helbleed/Ragnarøkkr thing had been bloody confusing.
Hel “sipped” her tea, which mostly involved delicately pouring it onto her tongue, what with the lack of lips and all. She was pretty good at it, especially given the huge sleeves that covered her hands like the world’s most ill-fitting pair of gloves.
“We met in battle,” she said. “While he wore the crown of Ásgarðr. It was an honorable death.”
“Are you . . . er . . .”
Another shift that may have been a smile. “Yes,” Hel said. “I am now as my subjects are.”
Dead, in other words. “Oh. Right, um . . . my condolences?”
“But you died a warrior’s death.” Em was sitting up on the counter, eyes fixed on Hel like a fangirl at a photo op. “That means you aren’t like your subjects at all, right?”
“Em!” hissed Wayne, shooting a pointed look. But if the question was rude, Hel didn’t mention it. Instead, she nodded.
“Correct.”
“And that’s why you want our help.” Em was leaning forward, grinning and eager. Hungry, in some way Sigmund had never seen before. “Because we’re valkyries. Were valkyries, whatever. And you need an escort. To Valhalla.”
“Valhöll was destroyed,” Hel said. “Brimir and Gimlé replace it, to the same end. As one slain in battle, as einheri, I have right of place. And I will claim it. For myself, and for my people.”
“What happens to Hel happens to Hel?”
Because Hel was a woman, but it was also a place: both the ruler and the land. And what happened to the Queen . . .
“You want equality for the dead.” It wasn’t a question, and it occurred to Sigmund that Hel really was her father’s daughter. She’d used him, set him up on this longest of cons.
A flash of memory, bubbling to the surface: of Hel and Sigyn, heads close and murmuring in hushed voices. Making conspiracies, rewriting the Ragnarøkkr and everything that came after.
Here, in the now, Hel nodded, the motion punctuated by the chiming of gold baubles hanging from her horns and the fringes of her veil. “Ragnarøkkr is done, and Ásgarðr no longer needs its army. Even the dead deserve their peace, deserve to be reunited with family split from them by circumstance and the hubris of fallen gods.”
Dad goes a-viking, falls to Saxons in a raid. Boom, one-way ticket to Valhöll, to die endlessly in a hellish celestial Blackwater. Mum, meanwhile, spends the next fifteen years looking after the kids, coughs herself into an early grave, and wakes up in Hel’s cold lands. No kids, no spouse. It was cruel, when Sigmund thought of it like that.
He wondered why no one else ever seemed to. No one except for Hel, that was.
“So, like. What do you need from us?” Wayne was leaning over the counter, tea forgotten and eyes as bright as Em’s. Whatever Hel’s plan, they’d already signed on. The only things left were the details.
“An escort, as you say,” Hel replied. “To the gates of Ásgarðr.” She turned to Sigmund. “And an escort inside.”
He blinked. “Me?”
“Odin is dead.” Hel, Sigmund thought, did not sound mournful for this fact. “And it is possible his successors may not honor his oaths to the valkyrjur. But you are ásynja. By right, they cannot deny you entry to the realm.”
“Sigyn was the goddess,” Sigmund pointed out. “Not me.”
“Dude!” Em snapped. Even Wayne looked disappointed. It wasn’t like Sigmund wanted to be the wet blanket on the cool plan to bring social justice to the dead, but . . . Well. He also didn’t want to be the reason it failed, if some Asgardian gate guard took one look at his claim to divinity and laughed him off the Bifröst.
Hel tilted her head, the exposed sinew around her back teeth flexing in that maybe-smile. “You, bearer of Father’s burden, who bought victory with the blood of Ásgarðr’s king? Forgive me, but all will know you. If they make pretense not to it is that alone: pretense. Do not allow them such disrespect.”
“Oh,” said Sigmund, feeling small and foolish. Hel meant it kindly (probably), but as far as Sigmund could tell, she was still describing Sigyn, not him.
“Well, we’re in,” came Em’s voice, while Sigmund was still busy studying the rips in his jeans. “C’mon, bro. We need you, too.”
Stolen story; please report.
“I’m in,” Sigmund told his knees. “Of course I’m in. Always.” He looked up and gave Em his best smile, trying not to feel the worms crawling in his gut or the creeping decay flaking in the corners of his vision.
“Awesome,” Em said, offering a brofist.
Sigmund returned it, earning a cheer of, “Woot! Adventure time!” from Wayne as he did.
His friends believed in him. So, apparently, did the goddess of death. When he turned back to look at her, Hel was regarding him, head tilted slightly to the side. Gravity shifting the fabric of her veil, leaving one thin sliver of smooth, soft, pale-skinned cheek exposed.
Sigmund looked away, trying not to feel like a creep or a perv.
“So,” he said instead. “Um . . . when do we leave?”
----------------------------------------
Hel gave them the afternoon, vanishing from the shop in a cloud of dust and black feathers, leaving the three of them blinking and standing in among a group of guys discussing who would win a fight between Batwoman and Power Girl.
“—such a waste, dude. Why make them fight it out when they could be making out instead?”
“Uh, because Maggie, you doofus,” said Wayne, as if she hadn’t just shifted dimensions care of a towering monstrous avatar of death. She and Em had shared glances and rolled eyes, the arguing boys slinking away in outnerded shame.
They’d spent the rest of the afternoon apart, arranging leave and packing and doing the sort of things they’d do if they were just driving to Melbourne for the weekend for a con, not helping lead an undead army in the overthrow of centuries of tradition.
Sigmund spent a long time, staring at his half-packed duffel bag, marveling at the speed with which his life had descended into Urban Fantasy: The Roleplaying Game.
Just before Hel had left, Sigmund had suggested the possibility of walking into Ásgarðr and finding Lain sitting on the (potentially allegorical) throne. Things with Baldr had been confusing, but Sigmund was reasonably sure Lain still had at least some claim to the realm.
Except Hel had actually laughed so much at the suggestion, she’d had to steady herself against a display case.
“I love Father, truly,” she’d said. “But he is no king. Nor, I think, would he desire to be such.”
Sigmund hadn’t mentioned LB. Or Gungnir.
Instead, he’d headed home, grabbed his duffel, and thrown together a bunch of jocks and socks and spare T-shirts. Plus an extra pair of jeans and a toothbrush and . . . Jesus. What was someone supposed to bring on this sort of thing, anyway? Fifty feet of hemp rope and an eleven-foot pole? Caltrops? An impossibly infinite supply of zero-weight, zero-size slingshots?
Sigmund had a hoodie and a cell phone. Both of which, he had to admit, had turned out pretty useful the last he’d done this sort of thing. So what the hey.
The plan was to meet Hel on the LB rooftop, just after sunset. Em and Wayne were waiting for Sigmund in the foyer when he arrived back at the building, Em dressed in full-tilt black and spikes, Wayne wearing her most combat-appropriate bustier. They both looked incredibly badass. Sigmund made a vow that if he was going to be doing more of this sort of thing in future, he needed his own [Adventuring Threads of the Hero] to bring along. Preferably featuring a long leather coat of some kind. Lain knew about stuff like that, about looking cool and fashionable and badass. Sigmund would find some way to ask about it later.
Right now, he asked, “Ready?”
“Born for it, dooder,” said Wayne, grinning and giving a brofist to Em. The pair turned their heads away as they mimed the resulting brosplosion.
Sigmund was convinced the elevator took them to the penthouse powered by Wayne’s excitement alone. Em, meanwhile, was more subdued.
“Nervous?” Sigmund asked her, getting a thin-lipped smirk in response.
“Yeah, man,” she said. “Of course. It’s an awesome opportunity, I can’t not help.” But it’s scary, she didn’t add.
Sigmund nodded anyway. “Yeah,” he said. They were just mortals, after all. Kids, really. Old souls could get them only so far.
“Maybe I’ll get to fight an einherwhatsit,” Wayne said. “That’d be so cool.”
Em and Sigmund shared a grin.
They stepped out of the elevator inside the penthouse, a sort of hotel-suite-in-waiting, situated above the executive offices for when one of the VPs had to do an all-nighter. Sigmund had spent the night sleeping in the bathtub once, which wasn’t one of his proudest memories.
Hel was waiting for them when they arrived, as evidenced by the peeling paint and strange, fleshy stalagmites that were growing from the carpet. She was standing out on the balcony, looking over the city, her silhouette tall and thin and obscured by a layer of frost that had, for whatever reason, built up on the balcony doors.
When Sigmund opened them, he was glad he’d packed a hoodie. The air outside felt like midwinter, not early autumn.
The reason became obvious fairly quickly.
“Holy shit, is that a dragon?”
It was huge. Enormous, even. Perched behind Hel on the edge of the LB building, claws cracking through the concrete, the feathers of its wings leaving behind glittering trails of frost whenever it moved.
“This is the dreki, Hrímgrímnir,” Hel said. “He will take us to where we are heading.”
The dragon—dreki—was curled around something that looked a little like a Viking boat and a little more like a basket. When Hel walked toward it, Sigmund realized it was their transport, a sort of cable-car gondola designed to be held in giant claws.
“Dooder,” Wayne was saying to Em. “We picked the team with dragons.”
“Eee!” was all Em said in reply. The girls were gripping on to each other, grins huge in the evening light.
“Hi there!” Wayne called, waving upward. “I’m Wayne; this is Em and Sig. Thank you for flying us! This is so cool.” Wayne paused, looking around at the rime sloughing off Hrímgrímnir’s ice-green skin. “Literally!” Wayne added. “Are you, like . . . an ice dragon?”
Hrímgrímnir’s eyes were the size of bicycle wheels, glacially blue, and definitely rolled in Wayne’s direction. Then the creature moved, the muscles in its throat working as it made a sound partway between a growl and a purr and a chirp. It wasn’t an aggressive sound, exactly, bar the fact that it was being made from a thing as big as an airplane. Not to mention the accompanying blast of frozen air.
There was something under the sound, too. Sigmund had a sudden flash of . . . black feathers? Of the clash of swords and the cry of battle and—
“He says it is an honor to escort such noble allies as yourselves.” Hel’s voice broke into Sigmund’s . . . whatever that had been. “And he thanks you for your service to the dead.”
Wayne gave a jaunty salute. “Just doin’ our job, sir!” she said, grinning.
The gondola had a door, and the three of them climbed inside, Em and Wayne sitting next to each other on one side, leaving Sigmund to share the bench with Hel on the other. She was big in the same way Lain was big, but, unlike Lain, she knew how to sit keeping her arms and legs to herself. When she’d settled, she closed the door, then cried out what Sigmund assumed to be the Viking version of “Onward!”
All around them, through the glass-free windows, Sigmund felt Hrímgrímnir begin to move.
When the dreki’s claws closed around the gondola’s handle, the whole thing lurched from side to side.
Then came the sound of giant wings unfurling against the sky, and Sigmund had just enough time to wonder if this was how mice felt beneath owls, when Em suddenly said:
“Is now a good time to mention I’m, uh. I’m kinda terrified of heights?”
Then the gondola lurched again and lifted from the ground.
Em kept her eyes shut the entire way.