I don’t know how long I’m out. Long enough that when the world comes once more into soft-edged focus, it’s Magni and Móði I can feel looming over my shaking form.
“Hnnnrrrhhh.”
Everything hurts. Everywhere. The curse is gone, but the effects linger. In cramped muscles and healing bones, shattered from the ugly contortions my body forced itself into in its desperate and futile attempts to escape a pain coming from within.
“What did you hope to achieve by this folly?” Móði’s voice, much too close. I hiss, pulling away from it. “Did you think to hide from us in this woman’s skin?”
I don’t answer. Somewhere up above, Magni spits. “Will it live?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” A thick, gauntleted hand grabs me by the neck and hauls me upright. The movement sends new lances of agony out through my twisted limbs, and I cry out.
“Brother! Please!”
“Still you feel for it? After all it has done? I told you, Móði, it is a beast. It will take us to Mjölnir and then we will be rid of it, as our father should have been in ages past.”
Mad laughter bubbles up from somewhere inside my blackest heart. Magni hears it, hauling me up by the throat to look me in the eye and shaking me as he says, “Silence. My patience with you is d—”
With the laughter comes blood. Too much poison, left to fester, and it spills out over my tongue and teeth, and I spit it in Magni’s ugly, leering face.
He howls, throwing me aside, and I bounce like a doll, over and over on the grass. I don’t know where we are. Not where I fell. A park, perhaps, the sun higher now in the sky and the sound of cars and mortals roaring somewhere just beyond.
Magni’s boot connects with my gut.
“Magni! No!”
“Poisonous piece of filth! I should sew your lips shut once and for all!”
Móði stands between me and his brother, hands on Magni’s chest, looking back over his shoulder at me.
“Not this. Not now. Do not dishonor yourself for his sake, we are almost done,” he says.
I close my eyes, not bothering to stand up.
All I can hear in my head, over and over, is the sound of Sigmund’s voicemail.
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Móði is right: compared to the distance we’ve come, we don’t have far to go. An hour’s walk, maybe. South, past more flat, ugly houses and dry, open bushland. Into the town of Bowral, population who-the-fuck-cares. In the early ’90s, I left Mjölnir here. As a joke. Because who the fuck would expect Bowral, Australia, as the hiding spot of one of mythology’s most unpronounceable artifacts?
No one gets the jö sound right. Sometimes hanging around with Sigmund in the comic store can get painful.
Nearly as painful as blacking out from magical torture. Hah.
We walk slowly. This is my fault. My bones have knit and my tongue regrown, but every single muscle in my body feels like it’s tried to pull in opposite directions all at once. So a staggering limp is about the best that I can manage.
Magni tried pushing harder at first. Móði stopped him. Then offered me some healing runes and I told him to go jump in the fucking Ginnungagap. See if his overinflated sense of guilt will let him float.
The sun is high and hot and bright as we stumble down Bowral Road. Magni keeps glancing up at it, scowling, as if he can defeat its rays through disapproving thought alone. He’s still in full chain mail and wool, grousing about the heat, and Móði laughs and says, “Soon you will have the hammer, and can bring storms to cool the air.”
It’s a weak comment, Móði’s voice thready and uncertain. I just focus on my shoes. Fucking upstart foreign gods and their screwing with the local fucking weather patterns. Christ. The Rainbow Serpent will take me to fucking court over the fucking territory rights. The native gods don’t have much, but they do still have the weather. And, compared to its mortal equivalents, the Divine Courts are a fucking nightmare.
So are the Lawyers. Literally.
In the heat, we stumble south. Down Bowral Road, veering just past the BP. Take the first left, then over a twee little white picket fence and into Corbett Gardens, a slice of 1950s England, right in the heart of nowhere.
There are people in the park. Jogging, reading. Doing tai chi in the shade. None of them see us, their eyes glossing over the sight of a haggard woman being pushed along by two refugees from an HBO special. A girl with a pram crosses the street to avoid us and doesn’t know why. A car screeches to a halt in the middle of a roundabout while Móði stands there, gawking between two churches. I don’t bother trying to move him onto the sidewalk. Let the mortals reflow their lives around us. I’m too tired for anything else.
Two more blocks, down Boolwey Street. Past foot-high red-brick front-yard walls and the cracked concrete of double-car driveways. Until, up ahead, another low white fence peeks through a stand of trees, a large, flat field of green the only thing beyond.
We take a right just before the oval, into a street already filling with the parked cars of tourists. To our left comes the hard thwack of leather on wood, then a cheer. Magni and Móði turn, watching in fascination as men in seasonally inappropriate white slacks and sweaters jog around the grass.
“Knattleikr?” Móði asks me after a moment of watching and, Jesus. I haven’t thought of fucking Knattleikr in a literal age. It’s a sort of all-day, full-contact Viking hockey. I used to play it a bit with the kids, way back when.
“Cricket,” I say, in correction of Móði’s guess. “The English exported it here when they sent out their prisoners for settlement. Then we got too fucking good at it, and they never got over the fact.”
Móði squints back at the field, then around the street, all unassuming hedges and shiny SUVs. “ ‘Prisoners’?”
“Whole fuckin’ country,” I say. “Founded as a penal colony, writ in the blood of a genocide.”
Behind me, I hear Magni say, “Hah. Then you should feel welcome here.”
I don’t deign this with a response, instead continue down the block. Past the oval and a small parking lot, to where an unassuming sign with too much text informs us of our destination.
Beyond the sign sits a building, red brick and green grass and more white fences than an American sitcom.
Plus one shiny new entrance foyer, all square glass covered in frosted silhouettes of cricketers. Plus a sign reading:
Bradman Museum & the International Cricket Hall of Fame
We’re here.
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It’s $60 for the three of us to get into the museum. I ask Magni and Móði if they have the cash and then, when they look at me like I’ve just proposed they eat the desk clerk, remind them that entering the museum without paying would be stealing.
“Which, yanno,” I add, “I’m fine with, but I was kinda under the impression Forseti wanted to do things whooa—” and Magni shoves me inside with a growl.
Inside is . . . a lot of cricket. A lot of cricket. I never really understood the game. Days and days of guys standing around rubbing red balls on their crotches. I don’t get it. And I mean LB has a corporate box and Travis puts in appearances at Culturally Meaningful Times, but mostly these events involve lounging around, drinking champagne, and seeing how many waitstaff I can bang in the VIP toilets.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Speaking of things I won’t be doing in future: I wonder if Sig likes cricket. Hm. I should find out.
The museum’s been refurbed since the last time I was here. That was before they added the International Cricket Hall of Fame part to the name tag. Things are very . . . glossy now. All big posters and hi-res photos filled with harmonized text describing the history of cricket and blah blah blah, Jesus, Magni and Móði look so fucking out of place.
I find what I’m looking for in a display case in the part of the museum set aside for the glorification of its namesake. Sir Donald “The Don” Bradman, 1908–2001, Australia’s Patron Saint of Cricket, and the only thing of note to ever come out of Bowral, hence this building.
One of his cricket bats—his very first, according to the label—is sitting in a display case three feet in front of me. Except it isn’t his fucking bat at all. I burned the original to (a-har) ashes back in ’92 and replaced it with this. The humans never knew, and never needed to know, and never would know but for the fact it’s about to go missing.
First, I need the key.
“Wait here,” I tell Magni and Móði.
Magni fixes me with a deeply unfriendly glare. “Do not think of—”
“Do you want your fucking hammer or not?” I snap. “Wait. Here.” And I stalk off. Let Magni spit on his runes again, see if I care. I’ll scream loud enough to wake the Don himself if it happens.
It does not happen. Instead, I do two things.
There are people walking around the museum, browsing the exhibits, either deeply interested in the history of cricket or making a decent show of pretending. Coming around the edge of a display, I run straight into one of them. An older guy, maybe fifty or so.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!”
The guy smiles, good-natured despite the near collision. “No worries,” he says, releasing my forearms from where he’d caught me.
As far as he’s concerned, I’m a twentysomething woman with a cascade of copper curls and a five-foot-nothing build. Too busy reading displays to watch where she’s going, and if her expression is a little haggard, the guy doesn’t notice it beneath her bright green eyes and full red lips.
He also doesn’t notice my hand slipping in to grab his wallet.
Five minutes in the ladies’ room later, I’ve got $200 in cash—old people always carry so much money—and the sanitary bin has a bunch of credit cards. The money I take to find my next victim, skin shifting around me, male and familiar. Boy-band eye candy designed by committee to be inoffensive and attractive to absolutely everyone, teenage girls especially.
I find one sitting in a theaterette, paying more attention to her Flame than to the endless loop of Ashes footage.
“Hey, psst,” I say, slipping into a seat behind her and leaning forward.
The girl turns, eyeing me uncertainly. “ . . . What?”
“This is gonna sound so-oo-oo weird, but . . . can I borrow your phone?”
Her eyes narrow. “Why?”
I wince, and laugh, and spin her a story about my two dull out-of-state cousins, and it being their anniversary, and they’ve come all this way to see the museum—I know, right, who would?—but they did and now they’re here and I want to play them the song they were listening to when they first met except, gaargh! Guess who left his phone on the kitchen counter this morning? I just need it for half an hour, I swear, maybe less. Find one song, play it for my cousins, then bring it right back. Here, look. Here’s $200. If I don’t bring the phone back, you can keep it, all right?
And I talk fast, and I’m handsome, and my grin is wide and bright and easy, and the girl—Maya—is bored out of her skull and $200 is $200, certainly more than her shitbox third-gen out-of-date prepaid is worth . . . so why the hell not?
By the time I walk back to Magni and Móði, I’m down the cash and up one phone.
Magni scowls at the device in my hand, flexing his gauntlets in threat as I thumb through menus, finding a clip of the song I need on YouTube.
I hit play, give it a few seconds for the preload—the 3G isn’t great, out here in the Town Technology Forgot—then, when tiny speakers begin to roar, press the phone against the display case’s glass.
“Ready to rock and roll, boys?” I ask. From somewhere beneath my fingers, I hear the start of lyrics.
“What are you doing?” Magni scowls. Lately, I wonder if he has any other expression.
It’s Móði who figures it out first. Móði the would-be sorcerer, who can feel the eddies and currents of the Wyrd begin to shift beneath our feet.
“Opening a Wound,” he says. “That’s where you hid Mjölnir?”
The “cricket bat” is the door, the song is the key. Stupid jokes, both of them, and I remember thinking myself oh-so-clever when I set this all up.
That’s the problem with pop-culture references, though. They need an audience with the context. Not out of time sticks-in-the-mud like the Thunder Boys. I need Sigmund. He’d appreciate the joke. Would’ve been laughing at the first “nah na-na naah nah.” Singing along maybe, or trying to. I’m not sure anyone really knows the lyrics to “Thunderstruck,” belted out in Brian Johnson’s bizarre growl. One of the greatest songs from the greatest bands of all time, and practically no one realizes it’s about a whorehouse.
All around us, the world begins to Bleed.
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This is the part that’s done in post. Three actors in the obnoxious green field of a sound stage, feigning horror to the slapdash descriptions of the director. Animators take the raw, strip the green and chroma-key it in on top of a reconstruction of the museum, rendered in silk-smooth polys.
Then, in time to the dizzying rotation of the camera, they pull it apart. Washed away by the rain that comes in through the ceiling. A trickle, first. Gentle teardrops falling on chain mail and leather. Then a shower, soaking displays and plastering feathers against skin.
The lights flicker. Somewhere, thunder rumbles. In time to the music, of course. That’s still playing, too. Swollen out from tinny diegetic speakers into blaring hi-def surround. Another peal of thunder and, this time, the flash of light feels more like lightning than faulty wiring.
The ceiling is the first to go. Bulging and swirling, opening into a still, dark eye surrounded by a maelstrom of steel-heavy cloud. The rain comes harder, faster. Falling in sheets, sluicing down walls hard enough to peel paint and dissolve print, to tear through jerseys and topple statues.
In the end, the storm washes everything clean. Even the entire world.
One final swell of guitars, a last verse, a crash of thunder . . .
Then an old model Pyre Flash hits the floor in front of a display case in an empty room in the Bradman Gallery, and all is silent.
Sometime later, a girl comes looking. Maya finds her phone, three raindrops beading on the screen but otherwise no worse for wear. She never sees the boy who took it again.
A day later, every newspaper in Australia is talking about the mysterious theft of Donald Bradman’s first bat. Maya reads the article, thinks of the boy, and spends his money.
The bat is never found. Well. Not as something fit for cricket, at any rate.
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The Thorbleed is a desolate, lightning-cracked wasteland, though, thankfully, it isn’t raining.
Unthankfully, I’m still fucking soaked from when it was. I take comfort in the fact that Magni and Móði share this fate, and that wet armor is a lot more miserable than damp feathers.
Then I remember I’m a fucking fire god and—one self-immolation later—I’m substantially drier and on the receiving end of a truly baleful look from Magni.
All around us, lightning cracks and arcs. Other than that, there really isn’t much here. A stormy, low-hanging sky and an endless landscape of dark pentagonal pavers, erupting from the ground into weird, alien staircases.
Columnar basalt, it’s called. A natural formation, found in such popular tourist locales as Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway, and Iceland’s Svartifoss.
Not one foot from yours truly, sitting atop one such a formation, is the thing we’ve come all this fucking way to find.
Mjölnir.
“Voilà,” I say.
It really is a very unremarkable hammer. Not to mention looks nothing like people imagine: much smaller in the head, for one thing. Short handle, too, but that one’s in the myths.
Because, well. Here’s the thing: War hammers? Those big, two-handed things? Yeah, they didn’t come onto the scene until a good five, six hundred years after we did. And Thor’s hammer isn’t one of those. Actually, it isn’t even really a weapon. Because that’s the point, that’s the whole fucking point of Thor, tenth-century Joe Everyman, who fights giants with a fucking peasant’s farm implement.
Funny, isn’t it? What parts of the story people forget.
Magni looks between me and the hammer, then back again. Like he can’t quite believe he’s really done it. Made it to this point. I know he recognizes Mjölnir, even from the distance. And I know he wants it. I can see the greed and the bloodlust, rising in his coal-dark eyes. Bloodshot dreams of gore and carnage, legacy writ large on a purple tide of the blood of a thousand jötnar.
I’ve made this mistake once before. Loki made it. Sold out his own people, and for what, exactly? A bad death and a broken legacy. Fuckup after fuckup after fuckup.
No more.
Because I’m not Loki, I’m me. And the luxury of being me?
Is getting to make my own damn mistakes.
Magni’s eyes narrow. “No tricks, jötunn,” he says. And in that moment I know—I know—my blood will be the first that Mjölnir spills.
I say nothing, just gesture toward the hammer, grin pulling the stitches tight across my lips.
With one final glare, Magni ascends the “steps.” Reaches out . . .
“Oh. One last thing.”
He turns, growling. “I said no tricks, beast!”
“Not a trick, exactly,” I say, waving a hand and leaving sparks of flame in the ion-charged air. “And it’s not mine. It’s just, well. The mortals . . . you have to understand, it’s been a long time since your father walked among them.”
“Get to the point.”
I roll my eyes. “They have some . . . quaint beliefs, nowadays. About Mjölnir.”
Magni looks at the hammer, then at me. “No,” he says, flatly. “I will not listen to your lies. Never again.”
I shrug. “Well. Don’t say I didn’t try warning you.”
Móði looks at me, then at Magni, hesitation oozing out of him like blue-green bile. “Brother, perhaps we should—”
“Silence.” Magni’s done with this, done with me. “Mjölnir is mine.”
I tilt my head toward Móði. “I’m sure he meant to say ‘ours.’ The prophecy does specify it goes to both of you, after all.”
Móði closes his eyes, expression pained. “Do not do this, please,” he says, voice hushed beneath the storm. “Have we not suffered enough of your schemes?”
For a moment, all I can do is stare, lip curled in incredulity. Móði returns the expression with an open, guileless innocence. Behind us, atop a basalt pillar, Magni’s gauntleted fist closes around Mjölnir’s haft.
Lightning flashes, thunder roars.
And, all around us, an army descends into the Bleed.