فصل 54

Squirrels in the Window May Be Larger Than They Appear

I LOVE IT when gods offer to pay for a dinner that’s already free.

Almost as much as I love assault squads that show up after the assault.

I never got the chance to complain about it, though. Once we got back to Valhalla—thanks to Thor’s very overcrowded chariot—we were given a celebration feast that was wild even by Viking standards. Thor paraded around the feast hall holding Mjolnir above his head, grinning and yelling “Death to our enemies!” and generally causing a commotion. Party horns were blown. Mead was guzzled. Pi?atas were cracked open with the mighty Mjolnir and candy was eaten.

Only our little group sulked, clustered around our table and halfheartedly accepting the pats on the back and compliments from our fellow einherjar. They assured us we were heroes. Not only had we retrieved Thor’s hammer, we had destroyed an entire wedding party of evil, badly-dressed earth giants!

Nobody complained about Blitz and Hearth’s presence. Nobody paid much attention to our new friend Vidar, despite his strange footwear. The Silent One lived up to his name and sat with us silently, occasionally asking Hearthstone questions in a form of sign language I didn’t recognize.

Heimdall left early to get back to the Bifrost Bridge. There were important selfies to be taken. Meanwhile, Thor partied like a madman, bodysurfing over crowds of einherjar and Valkyries. Whatever he had wanted to tell us about Loki’s location, he seemed to have forgotten, and I wasn’t going to get anywhere near him in that mob.

My only consolation: some of the lords at the thanes’ table also looked uneasy. Every once in a while Helgi the manager would scowl at the crowd as if he wanted to scream what I was thinking: STOP CELEBRATING, YOU IDIOTS! LOKI IS FREE!

Maybe the einherjar were choosing not to worry about it. Maybe Thor had assured them, too, that it was a problem easily fixed. Or maybe they were celebrating because Ragnarok was near. That idea scared me the most.

As dinner ended, Thor rode off in his chariot without even acknowledging us. He bellowed to the assembled host that he had to hurry to the borders of Midgard and demonstrate his hammer’s power by blasting some giant armies to sizzly bits. The einherjar cheered and then began streaming out of the feast hall, no doubt heading to smaller but even wilder parties.

Vidar said his good-byes after a short conversation with Hearthstone in that strange language. Whatever he said, the elf chose not to share it with us. My hallmates offered to stay with me, but they had been invited to an after-party after-party, and I told them to go. They deserved some fun after the tedium of digging their way into Loki’s cavern.

Sam, Alex, Blitz, and Hearth accompanied me to the elevators. Before we got there, Helgi appeared and grabbed my arm.

“You and your friends need to come with me.”

The manager’s voice was grim. I got the feeling we would not be receiving trophies and coupons for our brave deeds.

Helgi led us through passageways I’d never seen before, up staircases into the far reaches of the hotel. I knew Valhalla was big, but each time I went exploring, I was newly amazed. The place went on forever—like Costco or a chemistry lecture.

At last we arrived at a heavy oaken door with a brass plaque that read MANAGER.

Helgi pushed open the door and we followed him inside to an office.

Three of the walls and the ceiling were paneled in spears—polished oak shafts tipped with gleaming silver points. Behind Helgi’s desk, the back wall was one huge plate glass window overlooking the endless swaying branches of the World Tree.

I’d seen a lot of different views from the windows of Valhalla. The hotel had access to each of the Nine Worlds. But I’d never seen a view straight into the tree. It made me feel disoriented, like we were floating in its branches—which, cosmically speaking, we were.

“Sit.” Helgi waved to a semicircle of chairs on the visitors’ side of the desk. Sam, Alex, Blitz, Hearth, and I got comfortable with lots of squeaking leather and creaking wood. Helgi plopped himself down behind his huge mahogany desk, which was empty except for one of those desk-toy thingies with the hanging silver ball bearings that you can knock back and forth.

Oh…and the ravens. At either front corner of the desk perched one of Odin’s twin ravens, both of them glaring at me as if trying to decide whether to assign me detention or feed me to the trolls.

Helgi leaned back and steepled his fingers. He would’ve looked intimidating if it weren’t for his roadkill explosion of hair and the leftover bits of feast beast in his beard.

Sam fiddled nervously with her ring of keys. “Sir, what happened in Loki’s cave…it wasn’t my friends’ fault. I take full responsibility—”

“The Helheim you do!” Alex snapped. “Sam did nothing wrong. If you’re going to punish anyone—”

“Stop!” Helgi ordered. “No one is getting punished.”

Blitzen exhaled with relief. “Well, that’s good. Because we didn’t have time to return this to Thor, but honestly we meant to.” Hearthstone produced Thor’s two-by-four hall-pass key and set it on the manager’s desk.

Helgi frowned. He slipped the pass into his desk drawer, which made me wonder how many others he had in there.

“You are here,” said the manager, “because Odin’s ravens asked for you.”

“Huginn and Muninn?” Thought and Memory, I recalled from the Hotel Valhalla Guide.

The birds made that weird croaking noise ravens love to make, as if regurgitating the souls of all the frogs they’d eaten over the centuries.

They were much larger than normal ravens—and creepier. Their eyes were like gateways into the void. Their feathers were a thousand different shades of ebony. When the light hit them, runes seemed to glisten in their plumage—dark words rising out of a sea of black ink.

Helgi tapped his desk toy. The balls started swinging and hitting each other with an annoying click, click, click.

“Odin would be here,” said the manager, “but he is tending to other matters. Huginn and Muninn represent him. As a bonus”—Helgi leaned forward and lowered his voice—“the ravens don’t show motivational PowerPoints.”

The birds squawked in agreement.

“Now, down to business,” Helgi said. “Loki has escaped, but we know where he is. Samirah al-Abbas…your next mission as Odin’s Valkyrie in charge of special operations will be to find your father and put him back in chains.”

Samirah lowered her head. She didn’t look surprised—more like she’d lost the final appeal for a death sentence she’d been fighting her entire life.

“Sir,” she said, “I will do as I’m ordered. But after what happened the last two times I faced my father, the ease with which he controlled me—”

“You can learn to fight it,” Alex interrupted. “I can help—”

“I’m not you, Alex! I can’t…” Sam gestured vaguely at her sister, as if to indicate all the things Alex was that Sam could never be.

Helgi brushed some food scraps out of his beard. “Samirah, I didn’t say it would be easy. But the ravens say you can do it. You must do it. And so you shall.”

Sam stared at the ball bearings bouncing back and forth. Click, click, click.

“This place where my father went…” she said. “Where is it?”

“The Eastern Shores,” Helgi said. “Just as the old stories say. Now that Loki is free, he has gone to the docks, where he hopes to complete construction of Naglfar.”

Hearthstone signed: The Ship of Nails. That is not good.

I felt cold…and seasick.

I remembered visiting that ship in a dream, standing on the deck of a Viking longboat the size of an aircraft carrier and made entirely from the toenails and fingernails of the dead. Loki had warned me that when Ragnarok began, he would sail the ship to Asgard, destroy the gods, steal their Pop-Tarts, and otherwise cause mass chaos.

“If Loki is free, is it already too late?” I asked. “Isn’t his unbinding one of the things that signals the beginning of Ragnarok?”

“Yes and no,” Helgi said.

I waited. “Am I supposed to pick one?”

“The unbinding of Loki does help start Ragnarok,” Helgi said. “But nothing says this escape is his last and final escape. It’s conceivable you could recapture him and put him back, thus postponing Doomsday.”

“Like we did with Fenris Wolf,” Blitz muttered. “That was a piece of cake.”

“Exactly.” Helgi nodded enthusiastically. “Cake.”

“I was being sarcastic,” Blitz said. “I suppose they don’t have sarcasm in Valhalla any more than they have decent barbers.”

Helgi reddened. “See here, dwarf—”

He was interrupted by a huge brown-and-orange shape slamming into his window.

Blitzen fell out of his chair. Alex leaped straight up and clung to the ceiling in the form of a sugar glider. Sam rose with her ax in hand, ready for battle. I valiantly took cover down in front of Helgi’s desk. Hearthstone just sat there, frowning at the giant squirrel.

Why? he signed.

“It’s all right, everyone,” Helgi assured us. “It’s just Ratatosk.”

The words just Ratatosk did not compute. I’d been chased through the World Tree by that monstrous rodent. I’d heard his soul-searing, scolding voice. It was never all right when he showed up.

“No, really,” Helgi insisted. “The window is soundproof and squirrel-proof. The beast just likes to stop by and taunt me sometimes.”

I peeked over the top of the desk. Ratatosk was barking and screeching, but only the faintest murmur came through the glass. He gnashed his teeth at us and pressed his cheek against the window.

The ravens didn’t seem bothered. They glanced over as if to say, Oh, it’s you, then went back to preening their feathers.

“How do you stand it?” Blitzen asked. “That—that thing is deadly!”

The squirrel puffed his mouth against the glass, showing us his teeth and gums, then licked the window.

“I’d rather know where he is than not,” Helgi said. “Sometimes I can tell what’s going on in the Nine Worlds just by observing the squirrel’s level of agitation.”

Judging from Ratatosk’s current state, I guessed some serious stuff was going down in the Nine Worlds. To alleviate our anxiety, Helgi rose, lowered the blinds, and sat back down.

“Where were we?” he said. “Ah, yes, cake and sarcasm.”

Alex dropped from the ceiling and returned to her regular form. She’d changed out of her wedding dress earlier and was back in her old diamond-pattern sweater-vest. She tugged at it casually as if to say, Yes, I totally meant to turn into a sugar glider.

Sam lowered her ax. “Helgi, about this mission…I wouldn’t know where to start. Where the ship is docked? The Eastern Shores could be on any world.”

The manager turned up his palms. “I don’t have those answers, Samirah, but Huginn and Muninn will brief you privately. Go with them to the high places of Valhalla. Let them show you thoughts and memories.”

To me, that sounded like some trippy vision quest with Darth Vader appearing in a foggy cave.

Sam didn’t look too happy about it, either. “But, Helgi—”

“There can be no debate,” the manager insisted. “Odin chose you. He has chosen this entire group because—” He paused abruptly and put a finger to his ear. I’d never realized Helgi wore an earpiece, but he was obviously listening to something.

He glanced up at us. “Apologies. Where was I? Ah, yes, all five of you were present when Loki escaped. Therefore, all five of you will have a part to play in recapturing the outlaw god.”

“We broke it, we bought it,” I muttered.

“Exactly!” Helgi grinned. “Now that that’s settled, you’ll have to excuse me. There’s been a massacre in the yoga studio, and they need clean mats.”