Norse Code Part 15

Mist shook her head. "I don't like this. It may be the eye of Odin, but it's still just a normal-size eye, right? How are you supposed to find it in the dark mud, with who-knows-what lurking down there?"

Hermod gave her a smile that he hoped was rea.s.suring. "Possessing Odin's eye is too good an advantage to pa.s.s up," he said. "We should at least give it a shot. And it's like Grimnir said: I'm Aesir. I should be fine."

Mist gave him a dubious frown, but she didn't offer further protest. Hermod rather wished she had.

Well, then.

He stripped down to his boxers. "What?" he said, catching a strange look from Mist.

She blinked and looked at her feet. "Nothing. Just be careful."

"Right. Okay." He jumped into the well and treaded the water. It felt like icy pudding. There was no rush of voices in his head. No wisdom. No insanity. Not yet. He glanced back to Mist and detected warnings and cautions and exhortations trapped unspoken behind the strained line of her pressed lips. He gave her a small here-goes-nothing wave, took a deep breath, and dove beneath the surface.

There were worlds down below. Cities and continents and oceans turned beneath him, as though he were observing a planet from high orbit, only it was more than just one world. A mosaic of countless worlds braided and dovetailed. Mountains and rock formations and canyons and plains and fields covered the surface of the World Tree's roots.

Great, Hermod thought, I go looking for an eye, and instead I get grand visions. Did these visions const.i.tute wisdom? Not if he couldn't glean any useful meaning from them, they didn't.

Maybe he wasn't wise enough to receive wisdom.

He kicked his legs and swam to greater depths. He'd hoped that, in this environment, water wouldn't act like water, but he felt stabbing pains in his ears as the pressure increased, and squeezing his nose and clenching his jaw gave no relief. Down he went, toward the worlds at the bottom of the well.

He paddled toward a continent where a sea of lava spilled into a sea of ice, pushing out great gouts of steam. He had a good feeling about this location. It was the sort of place Odin tended to favor: fire and ice, with destruction at the interface.

He tried and failed to ignore his desperate need to breathe. Even at great depths it would take more than a few minutes to drown him, but spots wavered in his vision, and hideous clamps of pain squeezed his head. He wanted to return to the surface, get away from the pressure, breathe. He wanted to quit. He wasn't supposed to be here, down at the bottom of everything. This was no place for living creatures. But going where no one was supposed to go was what he always did. It was his purpose. Wanderer, seam-walker, interloper. n.o.body else could do this. So he put his pain aside and went deeper.

A marvelous model-train world spread out before him, with miniature glaciers cutting tiny chasms, and tiny waves battering the sh.o.r.e. Were there little civilizations at arm's reach, too tiny to see? What would happen if he brought down his foot? Was this how his kin always felt? Huge and powerful, truly like G.o.ds?

Not even Odin sees the world as his toy, said a watery voice.

Hermod spun around, looking for the source of the voice but finding none.

You cannot find me. You cannot know me.

Who are you? thought Hermod.

Your kind credits the All-Father with having created sky and earth from the corpse of his father, but he is just a piece of it, and a small piece at that.

Mimir, is that you?

Look at what is revealed to you.

You mean d.i.n.ky Town down there? I've been looking.

You look, but do you see?

So far, this disembodied voice was irritating Hermod about as much as conversations with the all-knowing usually did. He should have expected that swimming in the well of wisdom would only aggravate him.

What is it I'm supposed to see?

Down here in the thickness of Yggdrasil's deepest waters, one can see everything.

I am Hermod, son of Odin, late of Asgard. I have come here with the permission of this well's keeper, and I am running out of patience and breath. Who are you?

I am what you seek, if what you seek is what you came here for.

I came seeking after the eye of Odin. Are you it?

That may be what you want, but it is not what you need.

Nice dodge. You are Odin's eye, aren't you?

And there was silence, which Hermod took as a sure sign that he was right.

He floated past a range of sharp crags blanketed in snow, similar to ones he'd climbed in Jotunheim or that in Midgard would be spa.r.s.ely dotted with Buddhist monasteries and climbers' camps. Illusion, certainly, covering plain, mucky lake bottom. He came to a stop and reached down to grab a handful of whatever it was below. Mountains crumbled in his grip.

Long ago, when the Aesir had battled their rival tribe, the Vanir, much had been destroyed in the collateral damage. Hermod knew what a falling mountain looked like. It looked just like this.

He opened his palm and watched pebbles, grit, and dust drift away in the currents.

Now you have earned a new name, the voice said. Hermod, Destroyer.

It's not real, Hermod thought. It's just a vision.

The voice sighed, impatient. It is a vision, but it is a vision of what's real, or at least another way of looking at it The world as metaphor, and the metaphor literalized, if that helps you understand it With his lungs crying out for air, his head imploding, and the last specks of a mountain in his hand, Hermod didn't feel like struggling with the mysteries of existence.

Did I just kill a whole lot of people? he asked.

I am not sure. I couldn't see that well from my vantage. Does it matter? Are you not a G.o.d?

Hermod looked down at the wreckage he had created. Stone, earth, and snow lay in clumps around the runnels his fingers had dug. And floating in a lake of molten rock was an eye, the iris storm-cloud gray, glinting with lightning.

Hermod picked it up. Its weight astonished him.

Father? he asked.

His eye, merely. And obviously.

Did I just kill a lot of people down there?

I can't see the mountains if I'm staring at you. Turn me around.

Hermod did as he was told.

After an unbearably long time, the eye said, This part of the world was uninhabited. You owe no compensation.

Hermod nearly sobbed with relief. He closed his fingers around the eye and kicked toward the surface.

When we get back to land, Hermod thought at the eye, you're going to cooperate with me and dispense all the wisdom you have. You're going to be a regular wisdom vending machine, understand?

The eye did not respond. It sat cold and dense in his fist.

After dragging himself ash.o.r.e, Hermod sat on the beach, filling his lungs with air. Mist hovered over him, catching her own breath after a tirade about how long he'd been underwater (much longer than it had seemed to him, apparently) and how only Grimnir's muscle power had prevented her from diving in to retrieve his corpse. The eyeball felt like a partially frozen brussels sprout in his hand, slimy and cold and slowly thawing.

"Got it," he wheezed, loosening his grip to show his prize. In the open air, its color was a sad yellow, with a cataract film over the iris. He had to hold it away from Winston, who tried to sniff it.

Are you awake? Hermod thought at the eye.

The eye silently glistened.

He asked the question again, this time aloud. The lack of response didn't surprise him.

"So," Grimnir said. "The eye of Odin. There it is."

"Yeah."

"Do you feel wiser?"

"I feel like c.r.a.p. And not any smarter."

"Maybe it's not enough just to have the eye," Grimnir suggested. "Maybe you have to yank out your own eye and shove Odin's eye in the socket."

"Great idea. You first."

Grimnir demurred.

Hermod stepped to the edge of the lake, where Mimir's brow, nose, and chin stood out in the black water like the raw white of a cut tree root.

"Now what?" Hermod called to the head. "What do I do with it?"

Mimir let out a long, hollow sigh. "Much the same question Odin asked after taking his draft. He had gained knowledge of the worlds' end, but what ought he to do with that knowledge?"

"What did you tell him?"

"The same thing I shall tell you, walker of in-between places: Seeing isn't everything."

"That's what pa.s.ses for wisdom these days?"

With great weariness, Mimir closed his eyes and sank into the waters. A few bubbles broke the surface, and then the well was quiet.

"Guess that settles it," Grimnir said. "You'll have to pull out your own eye."

Hermod wrapped the eye in his handkerchief and tucked it in his jacket, against his belly. The chill leached into his skin.

MUNIN AND I circle three thousand feet over calm Pacific waters, above the delicate ring of the Enewetak Islands. Munin has been quite generous in sharing the history of the atoll and its people with me, and I reward him by pecking his neck in midflight to make him shut up, but not before I've learned about Operation Hardtack, in which the United States conducted thirty-five nuclear detonations in the South Pacific before calling a halt to the tests in 1958. The island was rendered uninhabitable, the soil and lagoon irradiated. Later, at great cost, the islands were cleaned up and the people returned-only to be evacuated again last year for the resumption of nuclear tests. As Ragnarok approaches, the bonds of kinship among men break, including those codified in nuclear nonproliferation treaties.

Down below, a small flotilla of Navy vessels is sprinkled one hundred miles off the atoll's western edge. "USS John S. McCain, Arleigh Burke-cla.s.s destroyer," Munin says. "USS Gary, Oliver Hazard Perry-cla.s.s frigate. USS Ronald Reagan, Nimitz-cla.s.s supercarrier."

While Munin goes about naming every single ship in the group-a feat that he will no doubt follow up by reciting the name of every single crew member-I'm more interested in the reason the ships are here: a barge about the size of a family restaurant, to which is moored, at a depth of two thousand feet, a thirty-megaton bomb.

The ships have charts and calculations that help them keep a safe distance from their monster, but there are other monsters in the deep. The greatest of all is a son of Loki: Jormungandr, the Midgard serpent. It lies on the seafloor, its hide camouflaged with crags and volcanoes. Whenever it twitches in its sleep, tidal waves kill hundreds of thousands. It opened its great red eye once, and fish took to land and evolved lungs and legs, just to get away from it.

When the men of Midgard detonate their bomb, there is very little drama at first. No fireball, hardly any noise. But a moment later, a dome of spray rises a third of a kilometer in the air, and a gas bubble of indigestion bursts through the dome, sending a surge of salt.w.a.ter jets almost four thousand feet up, chasing Munin and me skyward.

Below, the Midgard serpent remains sleeping in the poison currents. It takes a lot to rouse such a serpent from its slumber. But then there is a voice in the gurgle and rush of water. A soft voice, motherly and soothing, but also insistent. It is the same voice that long ago extracted the oath that failed to protect Baldr.

"Time to wake up," the voice coos. "You have work to do. Wake up, Jormungandr, and fulfill your destiny."

The oceans fill with the groans of whales, and the Midgard serpent stirs, slowly rising from its ancient sleep.

HERMOD NAVIGATED SLEIPnir through a long, twisting network of seams that finally led back to Venice, California, Midgard. The streets were flooded up to six blocks inland. Offsh.o.r.e, chunks of ice bobbed in the swells, a sight novel enough to draw people out with their cameras, risking the waves in dinghies and Zodiacs. Ragnarok was gawk-worthy. When Mist spotted news vans broadcasting from the highest ground with their telescoping antennae raised into the soggy sky, she gave Hermod a nudge. They'd have to be particularly careful to avoid being seen. Mist didn't even want to think about the chaos that would ensue if Channel 5 caught a glimpse of an eight-legged horse crab-walking through Venice.

On the other hand, there was plenty of spectacle to keep all the news outfits occupied. An earthquake, maybe several, had struck while they were away. Venice had become a geological jigsaw puzzle. Places of low elevation had been thrust upward by earthquakes. The remains of the boutiques on Abbot Kinney clutched precariously to the now-sloping street, while the hills north of Mar Vista had melted in mud slides.

"G.o.d, look at that," Mist said, peering through the opening of the alley Sleipnir crept down. Amid a jumble of snapped telephone poles, the corpse of a forty-foot-long gray whale lay trapped in the lines. Pigeons and rats and gulls and crows squabbled over the remains.

The party dismounted to get a closer look, leaving Sleipnir in the alley. Grimnir's boot heels crunched over buckled sidewalk as he walked beside Mist. "Now what?"

"Now you go home," she said.

"To my Boston flat? I'm sure NorseCODE stopped paying rent on it once Radgrid realized I'd gone AWOL."

"No, I mean home. For you. Valhalla."

He stopped, giving Mist a suspicious look.

"I failed to rescue Adrian Hoover," Mist said. "I failed to save Lilly. Odin's eye isn't talking to Hermod. The world is dying, and I don't think there's anything more we can do about it here. But maybe if you go back to Asgard, back with your Einherjar buddies, you can tilt the balance in our favor."

Grimnir walked on, mulling. "Thanks, but someone still has to watch over you." He gestured toward Hermod, walking a few yards ahead with Winston. "You've fallen in with a bad crowd."

"You've already done your part, trying to raise me right," Mist said. She tried to keep her tone light. "You taught me to fight with a sword and hot-wire a car. You didn't turn me over to Radgrid. You helped me find Hermod. And I dragged you to Helheim. You, a warrior who earned heaven. You deserve to be in Asgard, and I want you to go."

"Come with me," Grimnir urged.

Mist smiled. She shook her head. "Heaven's not my home, Grim. I have to stay here. Maybe there's a food bank or something I can volunteer at. You know, while you're swinging your sword, I can roll bandages."

Grimnir scratched his boot heel on the pavement. He sniffed and wiped his sleeve across his nose.

Hermod turned back and approached them. Mist could tell from the look on his face that he'd overheard.

"What about you?" Grimnir said. "Our side could use another G.o.d. Glory and adrenaline, and what finer end could you ask for?"

Hermod seemed touched by the invitation. "Thanks, but I'm staying. Midgard's the closest thing I have to a home."

Mist held out her hand. "Give me your lighter, Grim."

"Kid ..."

"I'm still your boss, Grimnir, and you swore an oath to me. I know you swore other oaths, but this is the one you chose to honor above all others. Now you get your reward. I'm a Valkyrie, and I'm sending you to Valhalla. Give me your lighter."