Safe to say, by the time I’m chased out of Þrúðr’s chambers, I’m not the happiest fucking camper in the mountain.

Fucking æsir. Fucking holier-than-thou, hypocritical sacks of—

Was Þrúðr right? About Nic? Because, fuck. Nic. Nic is great. She is LB, literally, but Travis is the face of the company and . . . and maybe it shouldn’t be like that? I mean, this is the twenty-first fuckin’ century right? Nic can do the bread and circuses stuff just as well as I can. She deserves to do it and—

And, fuck. This really isn’t the time to be thinking about succession plans. Not those ones, anyway.

While Þrúðr is cloistered in her room, bawling her eyes out over a bullshit “choice” she shouldn’t ever have had to make, her brothers are in with Brokkr, negotiating her price. Hers and mine, truth be told, because the oath-breaking sonsofbitches (sorry not sorry, Sif) do intend to leave me here as dowry.

Uni, Þrúðr’s husband-to-be, at least seems to not be an awful piece of shit, which is something he’s got that his father doesn’t. Even still, Þrúðr doesn’t deserve to be sold to anyone, let alone a dvergar, and yours truly deserves it even less.

Fortunately, yours truly has a plan. Of course he does, right?

Because Uni is a nice guy, but he’s not the only one sitting at the table. Brokkr is the elder brother, but he’s not the master smith. That honor goes to Eitri. Brokkr is the sales team, and he’s good and he’s smooth, but he’s nothing without his brother. And this is where the family politics gets fun, because Uni, the poor bastard, has a cousin.

And Uni’s set to get the girl and inherit the empire, but his cousin? His cousin is ambitious, not to mention has his father’s talent at the forge.

I’m sure everyone can see where this is going.

Where I’m going is to visit my new BFF, Tóki.

Tóki has been excluded from the negotiations going on in the great hall, for which I’m sure he bristles with resentment. I was watching him at dinner, while Magni and Móði were busy courting Brokkr and Uni was trying to comfort Þrúðr. Tóki is bigger than his cousin, and has the hard and stony skin of a dvergr smith. This is sort of the dvergr equivalent of a tan, and obtained in the same way. Except where humans get melanomas, the dvergar turn to stone. Literal, solid stone. Still breathing and conscious, but unable to move, thanks to their hardened skin. I think it can be reversed, but in the same way fifth-degree burns can be “reversed.” Most dvergar who get into that state don’t make it and end up as particularly unattractive garden ornaments.

And then there are the dvergar smiths, who wrap themselves in light, gauzy cloth and spend one day every month or so baking themselves just hard enough to handle molten-hot iron with bare hands, but, they hope, not hard enough that they can no longer eat, breathe, move, and/or speak.

They hope.

Tóki is a terrifying thing. Or would be, if he weren’t four feet tall. He’s broad, though, with a skin that glistens like sharp-edged obsidian. His “suntan” takes the bioluminescence away, too, and to a dvergr, that’s almost like being mute.

Smiths are important to the dvergar. They make wonders and bring trade with the outside world. But damned if they aren’t as feared as they are necessary.

Tóki lives in chambers adjacent to the family forge. Posh things, for the dvergar, but everything down beneath the mountain is heavy and hard-edged. Geometric and sharp, traced in gold and brass and granite. Glass, too, a rare substance in Ásgarðr; here it’s all over the damn place. Including in one of the walls in Toki’s chambers. The front of a huge aquarium of black and inky water, lit by flashes from the sort of horrific cave fish I don’t want to spend too much time observing.

I observe the room’s other occupant instead.

“You should not have come here, jötunn. You are not welcome.”

Tóki stares at me from across the far side of the chamber. He’s wearing a leather apron and pants and not much else, his regard as dark and heavy as a black hole.

“Tssch.” I find myself a large stone bench and perch atop it, signaling my disinclination to leave. “People say that to me a lot. But they rarely follow through.”

Tóki says nothing, face impassive.

Actually, given his skin, I suspect he doesn’t have a lot of choice. His voice slurs, lips too stiff to form the sounds the way they should be formed. Another side effect of his profession, and another reason he would never have been the one picked to be Þrúðr’s groom.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Here’s the thing,” I say. “Magni and Móði are the sort of thuggish, mouth-breathing neckbeards who belong in the tenth fucking century. Their problem is they’re eleven hundred years out of fashion, but haven’t figured that out yet. All this stuff, slavery and chattel marriage, that’s so fucking passé now. And it’s not gonna work. Þrúðr doesn’t want to be here any more than I do. The first time your cousin puts his damp paws on her she’ll be filing for divorce and heading back to Ásgarðr.”

“That is her right,” Tóki says. “As it will be ours to demand the return of the bride price.” By which he means Thor’s old belt and gloves.

“Ásgarðr won’t return them,” I say. “You know those oath-breaking sonsofbitches as well as I do.”

“Then they will make enemies of the Mountain.”

I exaggerate a shrug. “So what? They’ll have Mjölnir, and the means to wield it, and if you so much as cough in their direction they’ll send Magni back to slaughter you like his father did to my people.”

Tóki’s dark eyes narrow, and I see flashes of red appear in the stone-edged fissures of his skin. “That would be dishonor.” But he knows I’m right. “And you?” he continues. “Are we to think Lævísi Loki tells us these things out of his love for Niðavellir’s sons?”

I bark laugher, as appropriate. “Hardly. I’m here because I’m Þrúðr’s ‘dowry.’ Which isn’t an ideal situation for any of us, I’m sure you’ll agree.” From his (a-har) stony expression, I’m not sure Tóki would agree, but I press on regardless. “Either way, I’ve got a problem and so, by my reckoning, does Niðavellir. Our problem is called Ásgarðr, and exists because, once upon a time, your father made the mistake of forging something powerful for the æsir. Too powerful. And now those bastards want it back, and when they’ve got it, they want to remind the whole Nine Realms just what Asgardian hegemony feels like.”

A brief ripple of light, this one a Pantone deck of emotions from the green of revulsion to the pale blue of fear.

Finally, Tóki says, “You have a solution?”

“Not me exactly, but . . .” I scratch my chin, contemplating. “I’m guessing you haven’t been out to Miðgarðr recently, yeah?”

“It has been forbidden for an age.” On Ásgarðr’s decree, he doesn’t say, though I know we both know it.

“Right. Well, see, me? I’ve lived there since Rangarøkkr. And the mortals? They’ve gotten around a bit in the last few hundred years. Watch.” And I pull out my gun.

Strictly speaking, it’s David Sussman’s gun. Or at least it was. Back during the stuff with Baldr I kind of appropriated it for myself. David never asked for it back, and nowadays it spends most of its time tucked away inside the nothingspace, the abstracted inventory that exists just behind the world’s façade.

Nothing ever goes into storage in the universe’s props department and comes out looking quite like it went in. Which is why David’s gun, which was once a subdued, small-caliber thing, now looks like an enormous black rune-carved pistol, and why it shoots “bullets” made from molten magma.

I have just enough magic on me to grab it, thanks to being down one of Móði’s dampening cuffs. The gun is harder to materialize than it should be, but I manage, and I give Tóki just enough of a glimpse at it to wonder what the fuck I’m up to now before I point it out sideways and prepare to pull the trigger.

Here’s the thing. There’s a shield, hanging up on the wall, and that’s where I want to hit. Ideally, this game works if I do, in fact, hit said shield, and it really works if I hit it without appearing to be watching what I’m doing. Trick shooting. Playing it cool, y’know how it is.

Only problem? I’m a lousy fucking shot. Like, major terrible.

But I do know someone who isn’t.

(just this once, and I’ll owe you)

In the end, everyone makes deals with Loki. Even me.

(“yes, you will”)

And my arm moves, straightens, and fires.

A heartbeat later, Tóki picks himself up off the floor.

“Magic?” he says, eyes fixed on the gun in my hand.

“Gunpowder,” I say, only half lying. “Invented by the mortals from the east.” The Vikings didn’t go to China, but we were the western end of the Silk Road. Meaning we knew there were people out there, further than the sun, and we knew the little Buddha statues Sigyn liked were the least of the wonders they had to share.

But we didn’t know they had this. Not back then.

I hold the gun up, fingers away from the trigger. Cautiously, Tóki inches around to where his decorative shield now sports a large bullet hole, dead on center. When he removes the shield from the bracket on the wall, there’s another hole behind it, drilled into the stone.

“If there’s one thing you can rely on the mortals for,” I say, “it’s that they’re fucking spectacular at killing each other. Three ingredients, easily found. Mix ’em up, stuff ’em in a tube, light a match, and boom. The rest is just engineering. And this”—I indicate the gun—“is nothing. A pairing knife. The mortals have versions that shoot a hundred of those fucking things a second. Or only one, but one big enough to level half a mountain.” Toki’s head jerks up at that, eyes wide. “You heard me,” I say. “You think you’re fuckin’ safe down here in your hole? The mortals have weapons that can blow this entire place to rubble.”

This earns me one big, slow blink, sitting atop a frog-gaped mouth.

“Now do you understand?” I add. “Why it’s not about a fucking hammer anymore?”

Tóki looks at me, then at the shield, then at the hole in the wall.

“What do you want?” he finally says.

“To do business. I can get you the mortal tech. Materials, schematics, know-how.” LB doesn’t do weapons, but Nic’s got side projects in AI and robotics. Military-industrial is all over that shit, and I’m sure I could pull in some tit for tat.

If I had to.

“And in return?”

I grin, bright and sharp and feral.

“In return, I get to pay back those goat-fucking pieces of shit for daring to do this.” I indicate the shackle and the collar. “And I can finish what I didn’t quite manage at Ragnarøkkr: burning the realms clean of æsir filth.”

Once again, Tóki looks at the shield. Behind his eyes, I can feel the visions dancing: of blood and war and conquest. Of the realms plunged into eternal night and of the stone-fisted ascendency of the dvergar.

Angry, young, ambitious.

Simple.

“Very well, jötunn,” he says. “What would you have me do?” As if he was ever going to jump any other way.

I grin, vanishing David’s gun back to whence it came. “What I need,” I say, “is for you to forge for me a set of gloves. And then we’re going to play a tiny little trick.” Out of habit, I pick at the stitching in my lips.

Tóki can’t meet my eyes as I do.