I fucking hate the ocean. Hate it. Hate hate hate. Almost as much as I fucking hate caves. I’m a thing of fire and of air, of movement and chaos and light. All this dark dank plodding bullshit makes me twitchier than a roo on a highway.
Being stuck in a cave on a boat in the ocean? Surrounded by a bunch of dvergar and the bratty sons of Thor? Not my idea of a great holiday.
I spend most of my time smoking. The cigarettes aren’t real, but with one hand free I’ve got enough narrative trickery in me to conjure up the memory of ash and nicotine, if only for a little while.
The dvergar boat is made of metal. Magni and Móði treat this as if it’s the most arcane sorcery they’ve ever encountered, stamping across the deck and tapping against the walls just to hear the clang. At one point, Móði teases me for my lack of interest. I’m about to sneer something sarcastic in response when it occurs to me I don’t even know where to start on a couple of guys whose frame of reference is wooden boats designed to be hauled cross-country on log rollers by a few dozen burly guys. How the hell do I explain a fifteen-hundred-foot-long supertanker compared to that? Hell, forget the supertanker; how do I explain a moderately sized commercial cruise ship?
I tell it to a dvergr instead. One of Tóki’s boys. The boat is stacked with them. He’s understandably interested, and asks a bunch of questions about ballast and displacement and corrosion I have no answers for. Then he asks whether the mortals mount weapons on their giant floating metal whales, so I explain about ballistic missiles, and wonder—not for the first time—why the Wall-Banging Wonder Boys are bothering with something as pathetic as a hammer.
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It’s a long and awful journey, down there in the dark and damp and cold. Sitting on the deck with my back against a wall, I learn I do, in fact, get somewhat seasick. A great character trait in a god born from a land of seafaring traders, I assure you. But between the magic cloaks and not-quite-horses, we just didn’t go on that many boat journeys. Even when Odin got it into his head to go wandering on Miðgarðr. Where our people were, there we could be. And there are ways and means for gods to travel through the Tree. We’re on one now, in fact. Just not one I would’ve picked of my own volition.
Somewhere, out in the dark, the dim glow of a second ship bobs quietly in our wake.
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Eventually, the bottom of the boat scrapes gravel. We’ve washed up on a bleak and rocky shore, the only illumination coming from the lapping waters of the Skærasær and the few lanterns our dvergar crew hand over as they dump us on the beach.
From here, we make our own way.
The rock is slippery and the mud clings between my toes and coats my feathers. Magni and Móði make me walk ahead, where I clip my horns painfully on stalactites hanging from the too-low ceiling. In the end, I wind up crawling over rock and though crevasses on all fours, which makes Magni sneer, but fuck him. His boots have smooth leather soles and I have built-in pitons, so whatever.
We scramble in near silence for maybe an hour before we see the light. A dim yellow glow coming from up ahead. As we get closer, I feel the realms around us shift and shimmer, and when I next stumble, I’m able to catch my fall on an iron railing, bolted to the wall.
Up ahead, I hear voices.
Everything is connected, sea to sea, earth to earth. Know the right places to fold and space itself becomes little more than complex origami, threaded on the Wyrd.
The lights get brighter. Electric lights, erected by the people who run tours in this cave. Because that’s what the voices are ahead: children shrieking about bats and monsters while their parents call for hush and snap dim and blurry photos.
Welcome to the Wombeyan Caves, a charming and quaint tourist locale in southeastern Australia. Not quite where we want to go, but close.
Not quite home, either. And even farther still.
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The tourists don’t see us, because we don’t want them to. The caves are caves. The light helps, but the smell of earth and the way the walls close in on every side does not. Nor does the weight of the shackles, the cold press of the iron, and I will my hearts to stop shuddering, because no. Not now. Not in front of Móði and motherfucking Magni. Breathe in, and out, and in, and think of Sigmund. So close, safe and happy, sitting on the couch, Inferno controller in his hand and face slack in concentration as he murders his way through the enemies du jour.
One phone call. That’s all it would take. To Sigmund, to Nic. Just one, and this is all over. I’m back in my tower, Travis is back with his empire. Because how dare they, these half-dead memories of a forgotten age? Beasts born from blood and death, who know nothing of the world beyond their ill-gotten Wall. I broke their chains and burned myself clean and that would’ve been the end if only they could let it go. Could see their own futility, written on the warp and weft of fate. Dead gods for dead people, lost like blinking children before the bright laughter of mortals they no longer understa—
Oh Jesus, we’re outside. Thank fuck.
Wind. Wind and sun and light, the warm, crisp air of inland Australia, dirt and gums and the faint whiff of diesel from a dozen SUVs running up and down the dirt tracks of the mountains.
“Where are we?”
Fucking Magni.
I open my eyes. It doesn’t do much. Beneath my claws I feel half-dead grass and sun-dried dust.
“Miðgarðr,” I say. “A place called New South Wales.”
Magni frowns, looking around. “The Saxon lands?”
I laugh, a loud bark that startles a nearby tourist. He blinks, gaze ghosting across my skin and sliding off as his mind tells him not to see the pattern light makes inside his eyes.
Magni and Móði know about Wales. The one up north. The Vikings did a bit of a stint as rulers in England for a century or so, so the boys would’ve done some wandering around as kids, back when that sort of thing was allowed. I doubt the land they remember bears much resemblance to the bright, dry place we are now, with its dull-dead grass and pale, too-thin eucalypts.
Plus Móði has noticed the kangaroos, watching us from the treeline.
“Brother,” he says, “I don’t think—”
Never have truer words been spoken. “New South Wales,” I emphasize. “As far east as China, as far south from Constantinople as Iceland is north.” I pause. “And possibly more again.” Like I ever took geography in school. I start walking, following the track, well trodden by generations of newly bought hiking boots.
After a moment, Magni and Móði begin to follow. “I did not know the mortal lands extended thus,” Móði says.
This is, of course, Móði’s problem. He has all the approximate knowledge of a tenth-century Viking trader. He knows about Wales and China and the Ottoman Empire and the eastern tip of Canada. That’s his world. His entire world.
“We have heard tales,” he continues. “From some of the newer einherjar, but I’d thought them legends. The drunken boasts of sailors.”
A little girl stops and stares at us, mouth agape beneath dark eyes. I smirk at her, and she gives a tentative wave before being pulled along in the next moment by a bustling mother, hurrying to catch up to her tour group.
“Yeah,” I say. “Well. Welcome to the New World, kids.”
There’s a reason I chose to hide here after Rangarøkkr. Gods are notoriously terrible at grasping new concepts. “An entire continent of people thousands of miles beyond any place we’ve ever heard of” counts as a pretty new fucking concept.
Up ahead, a tour bus engine roars.
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There isn’t much here. Dirt tracks, cars, tourists. A few low-slung cabins painted that dull and ugly green that’s supposed to “harmonize” with the environment. We need to head east, along the road. The directions aren’t difficult, but it’s nearly a hundred-K hike. Maybe a day’s walk, all the way down shitty, precarious mountain roads.
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Magni and Móði boggle the first time they see a moving SUV. “I did not know the mortals possessed such things,” Móði says, running his fingers along the hood of a parked example of the same.
The dead bring grave goods with them all the time. I spend a few moments wondering why no cars ever ended up in Ásgarðr, until it occurs to me most people suffering death-by-vehicle wouldn’t be finding themselves in the hallowed halls of the einherjar.
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This is the part where we walk. All through the day, all into the night. Following one single road—the aptly named Wombeyan Caves Road—down the mountains and out into farmland, trees giving way to endless paddocks and bleary-eyed livestock.
We see plenty of cars, roaring to and from the caves.
They don’t see us in turn.
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Night falls. Somewhere just out on the horizon, the bright glow of a city blots out the stars.
“We should stop,” I say. “It’s not far. We’ll get there tomorrow.”
“Then we should get there tonight instead,” Magni says, fingers of his new gloves hooked into his purloined belt.
“No point. We can only call the hammer during the day.” The place it’s hidden has operating hours. I don’t know how to explain this to Magni, so I don’t even bother. Let him think it’s magic or something equally banal.
Magni grumbles but settles, coaxed down beneath the trees a short distance from the road. Móði starts to go foraging for deadwood to build a fire, before I tell him to stop.
“This isn’t Ásgarðr,” I say. “It’s hot here, and dry, and if you build a fire the mortals will come and yell at you to put it out. Half this goddamn country burns down every year. They’re a bit sensitive about it.” I have half of one second after I say this to ponder the usefulness of a bushfire to my current situation. We’re surrounded by dry grass and gum trees, the latter of which have a tendency to explode when exposed to too much heat. Watching Magni and Móði burn to death might be satisfying, but not necessarily the endgame I’m playing, so I settle for listening to them grumble in irritation and content myself with imagining their death by snakebite.
The dvergar sent us off with food: dried mushrooms and a sort of meaty, breadlike substance I’m trying not to think about the origins of. We eat; I enjoy both the silence and the half-formed fantasies of revenge inside my eyelids.
Then Móði says, “You’ve been quiet today, jötunn.”
I open one eye. “Thinking about Þrúðr,” I lie. “Wondering what her honeymoon is like, being pawed at by the slimy, filthy maggot you sol—”
“Shut up.” Magni, glowering. He spits. “Is there anything you touch that does not turn to poison?”
I grin and think of Sigmund.
And Þrúðr, too, now that I’ve mentioned it. The dvergar are notoriously secretive about where their tadpoles come from. There’s a story about that. It involves me, the goddess Freyja, and a necklace. It’s mostly bullshit, which I know, because I made the bullshit up. But if there’s one great thing about the æsir that’s remained constant throughout the ages, it’s their paranoid belief that every single man and beast in the whole Nine Realms wants to fuck their women.
Still. Maybe I feel a little guilty about Þrúðr. Just a little. And maybe I’d expected a little more protest from her re her future, and maybe—
And maybe there isn’t much I can do about it now. Later, perhaps. Not now.
Now, it’s time for something else.
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Magni and Móði still insist on keeping watch, despite my assurance Ivan Milat’s been in jail for a while now. Watching them keep watch is interminable, as it ever is. So I close my eyes, lean back against my tree, and try to reach out. Past flesh and bone and feather, into the wind, across the treetops, into the copper wires of the telephone lines, tracking back to—
Shit. I can barely get out of visual range. Móði’s fucking rune cuffs. They cut me off from the Wyrd, from the heartbeat of the Realms. Keep me small and limited, my sight dimmed and shuttered. It wasn’t so noticeable in Ásgarðr; things work differently there. But on Miðgarðr, I’m a god. I should feel like one. Nothing here should be a challenge, that’s the point of it, whether it be running a company or finding a parking space at the mall. The world of mortals bends to my will because that’s the way they made me, made all of us. Living, breathing stories.
Except, right now, not.
It’s going to be a long fucking night.
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I get my chance just before dawn.
Magni and Móði are being extra-vigilant, probably because of the horse thing back in Myrkviðr. Even still, just before the dawn, just for one moment, it’s two sets of snores that shake the earth.
This is my chance, and I take it. Claws driving into the flesh of my biceps, carving gory runes across the ones already laid in ink. Then rubbing dirt into the gashes.
It hurts. But not as much as it would if I didn’t.
Blood begins to seep and ooze, and I pull open more flesh to loose it. Thick and purple-green, I collect as much of it as I can, rubbing it onto the remaining cuff and then against the metal of the collar. The iron hisses, bubbling and corroding, and I thrust my claws into the gap between metal and flesh and tear. Once, twice.
And I’m free.
The world, the Wyrd, rushes back. Heady and brilliant, the spark in a wire and a wind full of cinders, like putting on a pair of glasses or taking off a pair of earmuffs, and I don’t savor it. There’s no time.
Instead, I’m already running. On all fours, because I’m fast. So much faster than on two legs, for all I hate it, hate feeling like an animal. But that’s what I’ve been made into, leashed and collared, dragged around and punished, and it’s time to use that. To unlock that ball of spite and rage, to let it fill my limbs and send my head reeling in the euphoria of freedom.
In the distance, I see the city lights. Still too far, and I cut across paddocks and through scrubland, over dried-up dams and the heads of anxious roos and cattle, my wings beating in time to the thunder of my claws.
They might be clipped, and I can’t use them to get airborne. But I can leap and I can glide, and each beat of their mangled feathers still pushes me forward, flames flickering along their edges and sparks disappearing into the night.
I am what I have always been: wind and flame made flesh. And, tonight, I fly.
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The M31 comes first, two wide scars of bitumen, cut into a gully, separated by a swath of grass. It’s early, road trains and utes sharing the strip, the early morning trade of those whose professions never sleep.
I leap from one half of the cutting, just enough wing left to glide into the middle, then a second leap and I’m over, veering east, following pine-green signs with big white letters that proclaim the presence of rural towns.
It’s here, running through scrub again, that my tattoos begin to itch.
Magni and Móði are awake.
The runes carved into my arms are healing, or trying to, but the mud is caked and bloody. Enough to scar, I hope. Enough to hold the jerry-built magic: alu for protection, sól as a shield. Too difficult to carve a complex incantation into your own biceps. I hope it’s enough. Enough that I can keep running, even as I feel the agony build behind.
I vault over a high fence painted that awful green. Behind it, highway and scrub give way to wide streets and low-slung houses, still sleepy in the predawn haze.
I need a phone. It’s five a.m. in a country town; where the fuck would a phone fucking be? Twenty-first fucking century and everyone has a cell phone, thanks to me, except for fucking me. Fuck.
I keep running. Past the suburbs, a town emerges, front yards giving way to parking lots and the squat, ugly barns of stores selling furniture and tires. Nothing is open. Not the Woolworths, not the Subway. I’m on the main drag—the old highway, long since bypassed—and my tattoos are burning and my wards are healing and I need to find a fucking phone. One call. One call is all I’ll need, then fuck Magni and fuck Móði because I’m an Australian fucking citizen under the law and they can’t do this to me. Kidnapping and torture. Fuck that shit. Fuck them and their hammer and fuck Forseti, too. Fuck every last oxygen-thieving one of them, they should’ve burned up in the fucking fires of Ragnarøkkr to save the rest of us from their self-righteous fucking presence.
Fuck.
And then, up ahead, I see a jogger.
A woman in black Lycra, keeping an awkward pace behind a dog, telltale red cord from a Pyre Flame’s headphones dangling from her ears.
Fuck, I hope it’s a Flame. Not one of our music players. Fuck.
I take a human skin. Another woman, slight and red-haired. Skin shifted, the jogger notices me, gets halfway through a smile and a nod, mutual recognition for a fellow traveler on the hard and heavy road of daily fitness.
Then her eyes go wide.
I can’t hide the tattoos. That’s part of their charm. I can’t hide the tattoos, and I can’t hide the blood, either.
The woman slows. Her dog begins to growl.
There are a lot of ways this could go. The way it does involves me slamming into the woman, sending us both crashing to the grass. She yelps, startled, drops the dog’s leash even as it turns and lunges, teeth bared, ready to protect its master.
It’ll die if it bites me. So I don’t let it, fingers closing around the slick glass of the poor woman’s Flame. There’s a moment of resistance as the headphones tear free from her ears, and for a second all I hear is a single snatch of song,
(slow down and try to tell the truth)
and then I’m gone, dog’s jaws snapping onto air.
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One phone call, that’s all I need. One call and I can bring down every fucking cop Travis can buy onto Magni and Móði’s fucking heads. They might be gods, but this is my world, and I can be back in Panda before they’ve even figured out how to find me.
Then just try to let them come.
I run down a side street, past an RSL, and back into the suburbs, my fingers fumbling with the touchscreen.
No passcode, thank fucking me.
There are, I think, two people I could call and one person I will. Ten numbers, and I fumble on the typing, unfamiliar fingers shaking with the agony that’s slicing through my new-formed skin.
Shifting bodies was a stupid move. Too much power, pulled from one place to another. Out of the hastily scrawled wards and into a “disguise” my pursuers will see through as easily as sunlight scatters clouds.
On the sixth digit, something changes. The low hum of agony from Móði’s curse becomes a torrent, a fresh branding as vicious as the first time I felt it.
And old words, echoing in my head:
“Spit will be pain. Blood, agony.”
And agony it is, shattering the remains of my own pitiful runes, sending my knees to the grass and blood pouring from my mouth as I bite my tongue against the scream.
Ten digits. On the ground, muscles locked and limbs twitching, I hit Call.
The last thing I hear, before the world fades mercifully to blank, is:
“Um. Hi. This is Sigmund’s phone. I . . . guess I’m not here to answer it right now. But if you leave your name and number after the beep, I’ll get back to you!”
And then nothing.