فصل 26

We Nuke All the Fish

I HAD trekked through the wilderness of Jotunheim. I had lived on the streets of Boston. Somehow the swath of uncultivated land behind the Alderman Manor seemed even more dangerous.

Glancing behind us, I could still see the house’s towers peeking above the woods. I could hear traffic from the road. The sun shone down as glaringly cheerful as usual. But under the gnarled trees, the gloom was tenacious. The roots and rocks seemed determined to trip me. In the upper branches, birds and squirrels gave me the stink eye. It was as if this little patch of nature were trying doubly hard to stay wild in order to avoid getting turned into a tea garden.

If I even see you bringing a croquet set up in here, the trees seemed to say, I will make you eat the mallets.

I appreciated the attitude, but it made our stroll a little nerve-racking.

Hearthstone seemed to know where he was going. The thought of Andiron and him playing in these woods as boys gave me new respect for their courage. After picking our way through a few acres of thornbushes, we emerged in a small clearing with a cairn of stones in the center.

“What is that?” I asked.

Hearthstone’s expression was tight and painful, as if he were still forging through the briar. He signed, The well.

The melancholy of the place seeped into my pores. This was the spot where his brother had died. Mr. Alderman must have filled in the well—or maybe he had forced Hearthstone to do it after he’d finished skinning the evil creature. The act had probably earned Hearth a couple of gold coins.

I circled my fist over my chest, the sign for I’m sorry.

Hearth stared at me as if the sentiment did not compute. He knelt next to the cairn and picked up a small flat stone from the top. Engraved on it in dark red was a rune:

Othala. Inheritance. The same symbol Randolph’s little girl Emma had been clutching in my dream. Seeing it in real life, I felt seasick all over again. My face burned with the memory of Randolph’s scar.

I recalled what Loki had said in the wight’s tomb: Blood is a powerful thing. I can always find you through him. For a second, I wondered if Loki had somehow put the rune here as a message for me, but Hearthstone didn’t seem surprised to find it.

I knelt next to him and signed, Why is that here?

Hearthstone pointed to himself. He set the stone carefully back on top of the pile.

Means home, he signed. Or what is important.

“Inheritance?”

He considered for a moment, then nodded. I put it here when I left, years ago. This rune I will not use. It belongs with him.

I stared at the pile of rocks. Were some of these the same ones that eight-year-old Hearthstone had been playing with when the monster attacked his brother? This place was more than a memorial for Andiron. Part of Hearthstone had died here, too.

I was no magician, but it seemed wrong for a set of runestones to be missing one symbol. How could you master a language—especially the language of the universe—without all the letters?

I wanted to encourage Hearth to take back the rune. Surely Andiron would want that. Hearth had a new family now. He was a great sorcerer. His cup of life had been refilled.

But Hearthstone avoided my eyes. It’s easy not to heed someone when you’re deaf. You simply don’t look at them. He rose and walked on, gesturing for me to follow.

A few minutes later, we found the river. It wasn’t impressive—just a swampy creek like the one that meandered through the Fenway greenbelt. Clouds of mosquitos hovered over marsh grass. The ground was like warm bread pudding. We followed the current downstream through thick patches of bramble and bog up to our knees. The thousand-year-old dwarf Andvari had picked a lovely place to retire.

After last night’s dreams, my nerves were raw.

I kept thinking about Loki bound in his cave. And his appearance in Alex Fierro’s suite: It’s such a simple request. If that had actually happened, what did Loki want?

I remembered the assassin, the goat-killer who liked to possess flight instructors. He’d told me to bring Alex to Jotunheim: SHE IS NOW YOUR ONLY HOPE FOR SUCCESS. That did not bode well.

Three days from now, the giant Thrym expected a wedding. He would want his bride, as well as a bride-price of the Skofnung Sword and Stone. In exchange, maybe, we would get back Thor’s hammer and prevent hordes of Jotunheim from invading Boston.

I thought about the thousand giants I’d seen in my dream, marching into battle to challenge Thor. I wasn’t anxious to face such a force—not without a big hammer that could explode mountains and fry invading armies into sizzly bits.

I guessed what Hearth and I were doing now made sense: trudging through Alfheim, trying to retrieve gold from some old dwarf so we could get the Skofnung Stone and heal Blitz. Still…I felt as if Loki was intentionally keeping us sidetracked, not giving us time to think. He was like a point guard waving his hands in our faces, distracting us from shooting for the net. There was more to this wedding deal than getting Thor’s hammer back. Loki had a plan within a plan. He’d recruited my Uncle Randolph for some reason. If only I could find a moment to gather my thoughts without being pulled from one life-threatening problem to another….

Yeah, right. You have just described your entire life and afterlife, Magnus.

I tried to tell myself everything would be fine. Unfortunately, my esophagus didn’t believe me. It kept yo-yoing up and down from my chest to my teeth.

The first waterfall we found was a gentle trickle over a mossy ledge. Open meadows stretched out on either bank. The water wasn’t deep enough for a fish to hide in. The meadows were too flat to conceal effective traps like poison spikes, land mines, or trip wires that launched dynamite or rabid rodents from catapults. No self-respecting dwarf would’ve hidden his treasure here. We kept walking.

The second waterfall had potential. The terrain was rockier, with lots of slippery moss and treacherous crevices between the boulders on either bank. The overhanging trees shaded the water and provided ample potential hiding places for crossbows or guillotine blades. The river itself cascaded down a natural stairwell of rock before tumbling ten feet into a pond the diameter of a trampoline. With all the churning froth and ripples, I couldn’t see below the surface, but judging from the dark blue water, it must’ve been deep.

“There could be anything down there,” I told Hearth. “How do we do this?”

Hearthstone gestured toward my pendant. Be ready.

“Uh, okay.” I pulled off my runestone and summoned Jack.

“Hey, guys!” he said. “Whoa! We’re in Alfheim! Did you bring sunglasses for me?”

“Jack, you don’t have eyes,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, but still, I look great in sunglasses! What are we doing?”

I told him the basics while Hearthstone rummaged through his bag of runestones, trying to decide which flavor of magic to use on a dwarf/fish.

“Andvari?” Jack said. “Oh, I’ve heard of that guy. You can steal his gold, but don’t kill him. That would be really bad luck.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

Swords could not shrug, but Jack tilted from side to side, which was his closest equivalent. “I dunno what would happen. I just know it’s right up there on the things-you-don’t-do list, along with breaking mirrors, crossing paths with Freya’s cats, and trying to kiss Frigg under the mistletoe. Boy, I made that mistake once!”

I had the horrible feeling Jack was about to tell me the story. Then Hearthstone raised a runestone over his head. I just had time to recognize the symbol:

Thurisaz: the rune of Thor.

Hearthstone slammed it into the pond.

KA-BLAM! Water vapor coated my sunglasses. The atmosphere turned to pure steam and ozone so fast, my sinuses inflated like car air bags.

I wiped off my lenses. Where the pond had been, a huge muddy pit went down thirty feet. At the bottom, dozens of surprised fish flailed around, their gills flapping.

“Whoa,” I said. “Where did the waterfall…?”

I looked up. The river arched over our heads like a liquid rainbow, bypassing the pond and crashing into the riverbed downstream.

“Hearth, how the heck—?”

He turned to me, and I took a nervous step back. His eyes blazed with anger. His expression was scarier and even less Hearth-like than when he’d uruzed himself into Ox Elf.

“Uh, just saying, man…” I raised my hands. “You nuked about fifty innocent fish.”

One of them is a dwarf, he signed.

He jumped into the pit, his boots sinking into the mud. He waded around, pulling out his feet with deep sucking noises, examining each fish. Above me, the river continued to arc through midair, roaring and glittering in the sunlight.

“Jack,” I said, “what does the thurisaz rune do?”

“It’s the rune of Thor, se?or. Hey—Thor, se?or. That rhymes!”

“Yeah, great. But, uh, why did the pond go boom? Why is Hearthstone acting so weird?”

“Oh! Because thurisaz is the rune of destructive force. Like Thor. Blowing stuff up. Also, when you invoke it, you can get a little…Thor-like.”

Thor-like. Just what I needed. Now I really didn’t want to jump into that hole. If Hearthstone started farting like the thunder god, the air down there was going to get toxic real fast.

On the other hand, I couldn’t leave those fish at the mercy of an angry elf. Sure, they were just fish. But I didn’t like the idea of so many dying just so we could weed out one disguised dwarf. Life was life. I guess it was a Frey thing. I also figured Hearthstone might feel bad about it once he shook off the influence of thurisaz.

“Jack, stay here,” I said. “Keep watch.”

“Which would be easier and cooler with sunglasses,” Jack complained.

I ignored him and leaped in.

At least Hearth didn’t try to kill me when I dropped down next to him. I looked around but saw no sign of treasure—no X’s marking the spot, no trapdoors, just a bunch of gasping fish.

How do we find Andvari? I signed. The other fish need water to breathe.

We wait, Hearth signed. Dwarf will suffocate too unless he changes form.

I didn’t like that answer. I crouched and rested my hands on the mud, sending out the power of Frey through the slime and the muck. I know that sounds weird, but I figured if I could heal with a touch, intuiting everything that was wrong inside someone’s body, maybe I could extend my perception a little more—the same way you might squint to see farther—and sense all the different life-forms around me.

It worked, more or less. My mind touched the cold panicked consciousness of a trout flopping a few inches away. I located an eel that had burrowed into the mud and was seriously considering biting Hearthstone in the foot (I convinced him not to). I touched the tiny minds of guppies whose entire thought process was Eek! Eek! Eek! Then I sensed something different—a grouper whose thoughts were racing a little too fast, like he was calculating escape plans.

I snatched him up with my einherji reflexes. The grouper yelled, “GAK!”

“Andvari, I presume? Nice to meet you.”

“LET ME GO!” wailed the fish. “My treasure is not in this pond! Actually, I don’t have a treasure! Forget I said that!”

“Hearth, how ’bout we get out of here?” I suggested. “Let the pond fill up again.”

The fire suddenly went out of Hearthstone’s eyes. He staggered.

From above, Jack yelled, “Uh, Magnus? You might want to hurry.”

The rune magic was fading. The arc of water started to dissolve, breaking into droplets. Keeping one hand tight on my captive grouper, I wrapped my other arm around Hearthstone’s waist and leaped straight up with all my strength.

Kids, do not try this at home. I’m a trained einherji who died a painful death, went to Valhalla, and now spends most of his time arguing with a sword. I am a qualified professional who can jump out of thirty-foot-deep muddy holes. You, I hope, are not.

I landed on the riverbank just as the waterfall collapsed back into the pond, granting all the little fishies a very wet miracle and a story to tell their grandchildren.

The grouper tried to wriggle free. “Let me go, you scoundrel!”

“Counterproposal,” I said. “Andvari, this is my friend Jack, the Sword of Summer. He can cut through almost anything. He sings pop songs like a demented angel. He can also fillet a fish faster than you would believe. I’m about to ask Jack to do all of those things at once—or you can turn into your normal form, slow and easy, and we can have a chat.”

In two blinks, instead of holding a fish, my hand was wrapped around the throat of the oldest, slimiest dwarf I’d ever seen. He was so disgusting that the fact I didn’t let go should’ve proven my bravery and gotten me into Valhalla all over again.

“Congratulations,” the dwarf croaked. “You got me. And now you’re gonna get a tragic demise!”