Norse Code Part 2

"Just keep walking," he muttered. "Doesn't matter. None of it matters. It's got nothing to do with me. I'm a pedestrian." And for a while he managed to lose himself in the rhythm of his footfalls. This is what he was good at. He'd successfully let entire decades pa.s.s this way. Centuries, even.

Rounding a corner onto Venice Boulevard, he caught a faint whiff of hot pepper in the air. Winston growled irritably. At a strip mall, a pair of workers were replacing the front window of a laundromat. From the gla.s.s shards and the remnants of riot-control gas, Hermod figured there'd been some action here recently. Random acts of stupidity were becoming even more common as the months pa.s.sed and winter refused to release its grip. And as bad as things were in Southern California, other parts of the planet were taking worse punishment. People blamed the freak weather on the cascade effects of global warming and retreating glaciers, and who was to say they were wrong? Hermod had experienced many long winters. Even ice ages. Just because things were cold in California and everywhere else didn't necessarily mean it was Fimbul-Winter.

Hermod spotted a plywood sign across the street, wired to an ivy-choked chain-link fence: IRONWOOD NURSERY.

He wondered how the people who lived around here experienced this place. Maybe to them it was just where they purchased their begonias. But some places looked different, depending on the angle from which you encountered them. Hermod spent a lot of time within these strange angles. It was the only way to approach the seams between worlds.

"You stay put," he said to Winston, reaching down to scratch behind the dog's ears. "Find yourself a nice, plump squab to munch, if you want. But you don't cross the street after me, understand? And if I'm not back in an hour, you're on your own."

Winston whined and rubbed his muzzle against Hermod's pant leg. About a year ago, Hermod had picked him up in Churchill, Manitoba, the last survivor of his litter. They got along pretty well. Winston was a good traveling companion; he didn't ask questions.

Jaywalking across Venice Boulevard, Hermod checked the zipper of his duffel bag to make sure it wasn't stuck. It would be just his luck to die of a snagged zipper. Death was inevitable, but there was no sense in dying stupidly. Rusty hinges screeched as he pushed open the gate and entered the cover of the nursery. Marking the way toward a tangle of bushes, barren ornamental orange trees flanked a narrow path of cracked concrete paving stones. A hand-scrawled cardboard sign indicated the daily price increases on vegetable seeds. Withered potted plants raised on wooden pallets showed more evidence of the cruel weather. A few people went about their business here-a silver-haired j.a.panese man arranging bonsai trees and a boy setting rattraps by a palm tree-but otherwise the nursery felt abandoned. Hermod continued on through cottony fog.

Something called him off the path-instinct, or a spell, or a doom-and he stomped through ivy, whistling "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." When the sour tinge of urine touched his nose, he again checked the zipper of his duffel.

He came upon a peach-colored metal Quonset hut edged with rust, like a flower past its bloom. Vines crawled up the sides and arched over the top, studded with yellow flowers and white fungal colonies and fly-specked spiderwebs. It was an entire ecosystem, an entire world.

From the duffel, he removed a bundle of stolen motel-room towels and unwrapped his sword. Its double-edged blade was scratched and stained, but he reckoned it would still do its job. He didn't require emerald-inlaid runes or curlicues, he just needed something that wouldn't shatter against swung steel and was sharp enough to bite through flesh and bone.

He wrenched open the door of the Quonset and took a step inside. The entrance behind him vanished in the gloom, as he'd expected. He coughed and batted at clouds of tiny flies with his sword, the reek of long-confined p.i.s.s hanging in the steamy air. Sounds came out of the darkness. Snuffling. Mewling. Hermod lowered to a crouch as blotchy darkness gradually resolved into shapes, then into details.

In the center of the hut sat a giant, with a round spongy head like a mushroom and two dark little eyes, filmed over like those of an old fish. An irregular welt of a nose spread across her face, and, below that, thin, wet lips formed a ventlike mouth. Her flesh gleamed, clammy as wet clay.

Hermod counted five wolf pups clutched to her chest, suckling on floppy teats as long as his fingers. The pups pawed and nipped at one another to gain better access, and the giant stroked their coats of white and gray.

"Is it true what they say about a mother guarding her children?" Hermod said.

"Do you plan to earn fame that way, lesser son of Odin?" Her soft voice gurgled. "Oh, the songs they'll sing about you: Hermod the Nimble, mighty slayer of nursing mothers." She pressed the head of her smallest pup tight against a teat.

"I'm not here for that," Hermod said. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck. "I'd just like to talk."

"A visit to enjoy the warmth of my hospitality? I don't think so, when you barge into my mound, uninvited, sword in hand. So much for the vaunted manners of your tribe. No, the Aesir are cunning, and their city is built on a foundation of murder, and they offer the hand of fellowship only to their own. So why should I offer you mine?"

In truth, Hermod couldn't supply her with a reason. His kind had made war against giants and trolls since the earliest days. The Aesir had taken slaughter and made it a sport. Thor's hall was decorated with the mounted heads of this giantess's kin.

"If I had a hall in which to host you," Hermod said, "I'd offer you a seat by my fire."

"That is an empty offer."

"Yes. I'm afraid so."

Scratching sounds came from the matted roots at Hermod's back. His skin itched, but he wouldn't step away from the wall, wanting as much distance between him and the giant as possible.

The giant nuzzled her misshapen nose into the furry brows of her pups. "They say that when you returned from Helheim, having failed in the only significant task ever set before you, you left Asgard. You've never returned?"

"I've been traveling." He'd packed a sack with his pipe, a tankard, and a spare shirt, and though he'd lost all three many years ago, he'd never returned to his city. It wasn't home anymore.

"You must have seen much, given the length of your absence."

"Oh, you have no idea. And just when I think I've seen everything ... This morning, for instance. There was a girl on the beach. She offered to sell me a wolf pup."

The giant's dark eyes narrowed to slits. "Are you saying I would allow my own babies to be sold, like pets?"

"Oh, I know they're not pets."

She sniffed, making a sound like a vacuum cleaner clogged with Jell-O. "If that's the most remarkable thing you've seen, you're touring the wrong places."

"Well, you know, the girl got me thinking," Hermod said. "She reminded me of an old song. I guess you wouldn't really call it a song. It was more like a prophecy. It was about a woman who raises wolves."

The giant shifted a little on her haunches. Muscles the size of basketb.a.l.l.s bunched in her thighs. She hadn't seemed that big before. "Your kind are always making a villain of wolves. Another distasteful trait you share with men."

Hermod waved a fly from his mouth. "In the song, they're not actual wolves. They're other things, shaped like wolves, of a line belonging to Fenrir. You know of Fenrir, right? The great wolf son of Loki? There's a song about him, too, how at the end of days he devours Odin."

The giant did something that might have been a smile. Several hundred teeth lined her mouth, like pebbles. "I haven't heard that one, but I like it."

"Anyway, so this song I remembered this morning, it goes: There lives a woman in Ironwood, who raises the wolves of Fenrir's kin, and one will grow to swallow the sun and moon. So, the girl, the pup, the song, a path that leads to Ironwood, and here you are. You and your wolf-thing pups. I suppose it's all a coincidence."

"And if it's not, what is it to you? Some songs are sung not of a voice but of a truth that grows from the very soil of the World Tree. Some songs are older than us. Older than your All-Father, the gallows G.o.d himself. You were there when the Ragnarok doom was sung and your brother fell in blood. It was foreseen. It was prophesied. How you mighty Aesir must have quailed and wept to see the first hour of the end of the world struck. And yet you yourself journeyed to Helheim, and on your knees you begged before the queen for a reversal of fortune. Did it work? Did it set everything to rights? Hermod, little messenger, find the wisdom to see that the song will be sung, bray and flail as you might, and it will be sung to its very last note."

"Thank you," Hermod said, raising his sword. "That's all I needed to know." He charged and swung for a pup's head-any of the pups would do for the first blow-but the giant turned to protect them, and his blade bit instead into her shoulder. She threw back her head and roared. Twigs and clumps of dirt shook loose from the ceiling and clouded the air with filth. With the fury of an avalanche, she sprang forward, covering the distance between herself and Hermod in a single earthshaking step.

If there had been somewhere to run, he surely would have, but with no room at his back and the giant blocking any escape before him, he set himself into a stable stance and thrust his sword forward. The blade sliced neatly between two of her ribs, and she staggered backward, yanking the sword from his grip. Hissing in pain, she withdrew it like a splinter, inspected the blood-slicked steel, and then bent the blade across her leg until it shattered with a terrible gla.s.sy peal.

The giant hunched her shoulders and faced Hermod, panting a dank wind. "I take it you've really never slain a giant before?"

"You were going to be my first."

"You have to put more muscle behind a blow like that. That's why Thor was so good at giant-killing. He had the arms to swing that hammer of his. And he usually went right for the head, just dashed our brains out. Flesh wounds with us count for little."

"If only I had another sword." Not for the first time, it occurred to Hermod that many of his relatives knew how they were going to die. Odin in Fenrir's jaws, Thor poisoned by the Midgard serpent, Frey killed by the fire giant Surt. There was no verse about Hermod's own end. Usually he considered this a great blessing. But there were advantages to knowing how things would catch up with you in the end: For every other menace you encountered, you knew you'd get out with your skin intact.

Hermod sprang forward and dove to the ground, rolling and reaching for the largest of the shards of his sword, about the size of a butcher-knife blade. The edge cut into his palm, a new addition to his lifetime collection of wounds. Using the giant's own knee for a foothold, he vaulted up and thrust the shard into her eye, smacking it home with the heel of his hand. The giant struck him on the side of his head, and Hermod crumpled to the ground.

The mound held still for a moment. Then the giant sat down slowly. "My babies," she said, only the last inch of the sword shard emerging from her eye socket. The pups returned to her, climbing up her body, sucking the very last milk she had to give them, even for a few moments after she'd died.

Climbing down, they approached Hermod, too much like puppies. But then they yawned, their maws growing wider and wider. Hermod pitched forward, and eventually all he could see was a gaping black chasm, and he was falling into it.

During his struggle with the giant, the roof of the mound had collapsed. It had been daylight when he'd entered, but now it was night. The moon shone yellow and fat, and the pups stretched their jaws yet wider and reached for it.

HERMOD GROANED and opened his eyes to see an elongated muzzle and sharp yellow teeth inches from his face. He scrambled away in a panic, his hand grasping for his sword but finding only mud.

Winston barked, and Hermod let out a gulping breath of relief. "Good boy," he croaked. Then the ground spun out from under him and he vomited.

He closed his eyes and made himself breathe. His head was frightfully painful to the touch, and his fingers came away b.l.o.o.d.y, but his skull seemed to be holding his brains inside. He fished a bandanna from his jacket and bandaged his sliced-open palm.

A few yards away, the Quonset hut lay in ruins, all crumpled metal tangled in vines. He was sure if he dug through the wreckage, down deep, he would find the giant's corpse, but he was content to leave it there. Paw prints circled him in the mud.

Why hadn't the wolves killed him? They'd seen him murder their mother, and once they'd opened their mouths, he'd been entirely at their mercy. But, then, the moon still shone, a pale disk struggling to push its light through the clouds. Maybe the pups weren't quite up to sky-eating or G.o.d-slaying yet. The girl on the beach had said her wolf still had a lot of growing to do.

And Hermod had a lot of questions for that girl. Finding her should be a priority. Instead, he lay back in the mud. A giant had broken his sword and given him a concussion, and he deserved to lie in the mud and sleep.

Cursing, he forced himself to his feet. He thought he was going to vomit again but managed to hold it in, swaying on his legs. The wolf tracks led back to the paving stones, marking a muddy trail for a dozen or so yards. The trail blurred as the path led farther from the Quonset, away from the overhanging trees. It had probably rained while Hermod was unconscious. Beyond the gate, outside the nursery on Venice Boulevard, there was no trace of the pups at all.

"Well, boy," he said to Winston, "once again it looks like I've taken a mess and made it a disaster."

The malamute wagged his tail, which Hermod took as polite agreement.

NORSECODE GENOMICS WAS housed in a three-story cinder-block cube in the back of a Needham, Ma.s.sachusetts, office park. Its only distinctive architectural feature was the logo etched into the gla.s.s doors of the front entrance: a DNA double helix entwined around a tree with nine roots. Mist pushed through the doors into the reception area, where some dozen men sat on stylish but uncomfortable chairs. Most of them had clipboards and were busy filling out forms. Since NorseCODE was paying fifty dollars to males willing to complete a questionnaire and provide a mouth-swab DNA sample, the waiting room was usually packed with people willing to brave the snow and ice. Fifty dollars could buy gas or oranges or batteries.

Mist gave the men a quick visual a.s.sessment as she crossed the floor. They represented a broad range of age, race, dress, and body type, but none looked particularly impressive.

The ice-queen receptionist behind the granite-slab desk gave Mist a respectful nod and buzzed her through another door. Mist paused in the doorway. "Is Radgrid in today?"

"She's at the home office," the receptionist replied, and Mist concealed a breath of relief. Radgrid was the last person in the worlds she wanted to encounter right now, and having her as far away as Asgard was better than she'd hoped for.

She continued down a long corridor lined with gla.s.s part.i.tions, behind which bleary-eyed technicians in lab coats manned computers and centrifuges and gene sequencers. Everything gleamed white and clean, so far removed from the actual sweat and blood and urine that their work culminated in. NorseCODE maintained branches in So Paulo, Singapore, London, Johannesburg, Dubai, and Basel, each staffed by Valkyries, Einherjar muscle, and techs. As far as the techs knew, NorseCODE's work focused on genomics for pharmaceutical application, not on recruiting soldiers for Odin's army. That dirty business stayed hidden in places like the New Jersey warehouse where Mist had left the bodies of Grimnir and Adrian Hoover.

An elevator delivered Mist to her third-floor office, overlooking a landscape of office parks and, just beyond them, a freeway overpa.s.s half lost in the fog, like a ghost road. A dim line of brake lights barely moved down the snow-choked blacktop.

Mist eyed her coffeemaker longingly, but this office visit had to be a surgical strike. Considering the severity of the wound she'd dealt Grimnir, she figured on three days until he'd recover enough to report in to the office-less if he had been injured on the fields outside Valhalla, where the Einherjar trained for battle by disemboweling and dismembering one another.

Mist settled behind her desk and keyed her computer to life. Logged in, she searched NorseCODE's intelligence dossiers for references to Helheim. She'd read some of the material before, but Radgrid had kept her too busy over the last three months to spend much time in the office, and these records weren't accessible off-site.

Helheim was one of the nine worlds that made up Yggdrasil, the World Tree, which Mist tended to think of as some kind of metaphor for the cosmos. But every Asgardian at NorseCODE, from Grimnir to Radgrid to all her Valkyrie sisters, insisted that it was an actual tree, that its roots ran through all the worlds, and that the worlds themselves were part of the tree's living tissue. Mist figured that this conception was a product of some ancient worldview rather than literal truth, but she allowed that she might be indulging in comforting, self-serving thought.

The reports didn't offer much more than some descriptions of Helheim and a few cryptic mentions that Mist couldn't make sense of. No map, no hints about the route or anything about how to walk the road if you weren't among the dead claimed by Hel. Nothing about how Helheim was guarded, how it was organized, nothing that would help her find her way in and then back out.

And maybe that was just as well. The fight over men's souls was an eons-old feud waged between Odin and Hel, and sometimes just knowing that these G.o.ds existed was enough to make Mist doubt her own sanity. Radgrid and Grimnir called her a Valkyrie, she'd seen and done things that challenged her ideas of what the world really was, but she was still Kathy Castillo, UCLA student, granddaughter, sister. Maybe she wasn't quite mortal anymore, but she felt mortal, and she had no business challenging G.o.ds and death.

She almost shut off the computer but instead resorted the file listings in reverse chronological order and opened one named Hermod.

"Back so soon?"

Mist barely managed to conceal a startled gasp at the sight of Radgrid in the doorway. Red curls spilled over the shoulders of her ivory pantsuit, a contrast so sharp that Mist expected to see clouds of steam rising in the air. She met Radgrid's eyes, bright as burnished steel, and knew the same jolt of fear and mute wonder she'd felt the first time she encountered the Valkyrie, three months earlier.

To this day, Mist still didn't understand why she'd been selected as a Valkyrie while Lilly, a kind of warrior in her own right, who'd braved bullets while trying to help farmers plant trees in the Congo, who'd been Tasered and beaten by police batons in dozens of protests across the globe, was left to meekly walk the road to Helheim. Kathy had tried to stop her sister from leaving, but, as with Adrian Hoover, the road had faded from her sight, and Lilly with it. And then Radgrid had appeared, towering over Mist in white furs and chain mail, glimmering in the colorless morning like a polished knife.

Radgrid entered Mist's office and took the seat across the desk. Casually, Mist closed the window on her computer. "I thought you were in Asgard," she said, congratulating herself on managing to sound only mildly interested in Radgrid's unexpected presence.

"I was, and longer than I'd have liked. The Einherjar are deserving of their honors, but, truthfully, I have more pressing matters than serving them drinks in Valhalla."

Mist felt fortunate to have mostly avoided that duty, and on the one occasion when she hadn't been able to duck out of it, Grimnir had a.s.signed himself as her menacing bodyguard to make sure n.o.body hara.s.sed the new girl. Grimnir had been a loyal friend. And she'd rewarded him by slicing his head open.

"How did things work out with Adrian Hoover?"

"He didn't work out," Mist said flatly.

She watched Radgrid's face warily, waiting for an explosion. But Radgrid's expression barely changed. "That's too bad. I had high hopes for him. His Y-chromosome match was as close as they come."

A Valkyrie's job had always been to find soldiers for the Einherjar, and the corpse-choosers' traditional method had been to pick their way through combat zones, sorting through burned bodies and piles of guts and limbs, selecting the best of the fallen to be brought to Valhalla.

Radgrid had devised a new way to find recruits. She realized that many of the best warriors among the Einherjar-like Volsung, and Sigurd the Worm-Slayer-were descendants of Odin, from a line established on earth in the early dawning of man. Over the ages, the records of lineage had been lost, but Radgrid believed the bloodline was still unbroken. If geneticists could learn the deep language of blood and find the descendants of Genghis Khan, then couldn't they also find the many-generations-removed sons of Odin? So she'd built and staffed the NorseCODE labs.

"How's Grimnir?" Radgrid asked, setting her valise on the floor. It was a black kidskin number, thin as a blade.

I should just confess now, thought Mist. Admit to trying to save Hoover's life, to splitting open Grimnir's head, throw herself on Radgrid's mercy.

"He's okay, I guess. I think he was heading for Atlantic City or somewhere." That was a vague-enough lie, consistent with Grimnir's proclivities. He liked to spend his time where the drinks were cheap, where he could relax by intimidating gangsters and security goons. She knew Grimnir's habits well, having spent most of the last few months in his company, either being trained by him in everything from horse riding to hot-wiring cars or surveilling Hoover from inside the van, the air filled with his jovial grumble and the smell of take-out pizza grease.

She could still fix this, somehow. She could make things right with Grimnir and get back on track with NorseCODE's work and do her bit to counter the end of the world. And kill and leave the innocent to waste away in Helheim.

Radgrid idly removed a letter opener from the cup on Mist's desk and ran a long white finger along its edge. "It really is a shame about Hoover. Grimnir hates it when recruits don't work out."

"What if we gave them a little training before the test? No army just shoves a gun in a new recruit's hands and sends them into battle without some training first."

A tiny shift in the angle of Radgrid's head was the closest thing she had to a shrug. "I prefer to concentrate our efforts on the ones who have already proved themselves worthy of Valhalla. Our resources are finite, and time is the least plentiful among them."

"But if we could determine if they were Einherjar without killing them first ... it would be more humane. Killing men needlessly, men who might have families, loved ones ... does that make sense?"

Radgrid's eyes glinted like icicles in sunlight. "The sense of it was determined when our ancestors were still living in caves. The sense of it was formed by beings who count among their elders only the ground you walk upon and the stars above your head."

Radgrid returned the letter opener to the cup. Then, from her valise, she withdrew a file folder and slid it across the desk toward Mist. It lay there, dark against the warm oak.

Mist opened the file. The a.s.signment specifications took only a few pages. She flipped through them, glancing at a printout of fuzzy pink caterpillars-chromosomes-and phenotype data with references to the O-Prime sample. There was an 83 percent likelihood that this recruit was descended from Odin, which made him a high priority. The recruit's name was Lucas Wright, of Las Vegas, Nevada. He was smiling in the surveillance photo, riding a skateboard, his braces gleaming. He was fourteen years old.

"I'll get right on this," Mist said, her voice steady and confident.

Apparently satisfied, Radgrid stood and took her leave with only a brisk nod. The office seemed to warm by a degree or two a few moments after her departure.

Mist sat motionless in the dark room for several more minutes. The turnpike traffic outside her window had become a blurry trail of brake lights slowly engulfed in the fog. Eventually Ragnarok would manifest itself in spectacular ways, with disasters and monsters, but now it was more like a lingering whimper. A lot like what Grimnir had once told her Helheim was like.

She reopened the dossier on this Hermod character, and when she finished reading the report, her heart was pounding. According to the file, Hermod had ridden to Helheim to retrieve another of the Aesir, his brother Baldr, and though he had failed, he had come back alive. He'd severed his ties with Asgard long ago, but last week an agent of NorseCODE had spotted him in Los Angeles.

Across the country lived a G.o.d with the proven ability to travel in and out of Helheim.

Mist knew that, if their positions were reversed, Lilly would be on her way to Los Angeles right now.

GRIMNIR WOKE up in the warehouse to the sound of his own groans. He gingerly felt the back of his head. It had been a long time since he'd been so badly injured, and for a while all he could do was sit with his head between his knees and force himself to breathe. If this had happened to him in Valhalla, Odin's hall in the city of the G.o.ds, he would have been healed in time for supper. In the men's world of Midgard, recovery took longer.

Grimnir badly missed Valhalla.

Mist had done this to him. He couldn't believe it. She'd seemed like such a nice kid.

Well, actually, that was the problem. She was a nice kid. He'd known that three months earlier, when Radgrid had a.s.signed him to be Mist's a.s.sistant, her trainer, her mentor. In the time they'd spent together, he felt they'd become friends. And now here he was with a split skull, plus a ruined hat. He picked up his homburg and stared glumly at the fissured brim. He loved that hat. He'd looked very smart in it.