فصل 49

Well, There’s Your Problem. You’ve Got a Sword Up Your Nose

I COULDN’T HELP IT.

When I heard the name Thor, I thought about the guy from the movies and comics—a big superhero from outer space, with bright Spandex tights, a red cape, goldilocks hair, and maybe a helmet with fluffy little dove wings.

In real life, Thor was scarier. And redder. And grungier.

Also, he could cuss like a drunken, creative sailor.

“Mother-grubbing scum bucket!” he yelled. (Or something along those lines. My brain may have filtered the actual language, as it would’ve made my ears bleed.) “Where is my backup?”

He stood chest-deep in the flood near the opposite side, clinging to a scrubby bush that grew from the cliff. The rock was so smooth and slick there were no other handholds. The bush looked like it was about to pull free of its roots. Any minute, Thor was going to get flushed downstream, where rows of jagged rocks shredded the current in a series of cataracts, perfect for making a Thor smoothie.

From this distance, through the spray of water and mist, I couldn’t see much of the god himself: shoulder-length red hair, a curly red beard, and bodybuilder arms protruding from a sleeveless leather jerkin. He wore dark iron gauntlets that reminded me of robot hands, and a chain mail vest Blitzen would’ve found very trendy.

“Beard-burning son of a mud-lover!” roared the god. “Otis, is that you? Where’s my artillery? My air support? Where the Helheim is my cavalry?”

“I’m here, boss!” Otis called. “I brought…two kids and a dead elf!”

“He’s not dead,” I said again.

“A half-dead elf,” Otis corrected.

“What good is that?” Thor bellowed. “I need that giantess killed, and I need her killed NOW!”

“Giantess?” I asked.

Marvin head-butted me. “That one, stupid.”

He nodded toward the waterfall. For a moment, the fog cleared from the tops of the cliffs, and I saw the problem.

Next to me, Sam made a sound like she was being garroted. “Holy Heimdall.”

Those skyscraper-size pillars of rock were actually legs—immense legs so gray and rough they blended in with the surrounding cliffs. The rest of the woman was so tall she made Godzilla look like a toy poodle. She made the Sears Tower look like a traffic cone. Her thigh-length dress was stitched together from so many animal hides it probably represented the extinction of several dozen species. Her face, somewhere up there in the stratosphere, was as stony and grim as a Mount Rushmore president’s, surrounded by a hurricane of long dark hair. She gripped the cliff tops on either side of the river as if straddling the torrent was hard even for her.

She looked down, smiling cruelly at the little speck of thunder god caught in the current, then squeezed her legs closer together. The waterfall sprayed out between her shins in a highly pressurized curtain of liquid force.

Thor tried to shout but got a mouthful of river. His head went under. The bush he was clinging to bent sideways, its roots snapping one after the other.

“She’s going to wash him into oblivion!” Marvin said. “Do something, humans!”

Like what? I thought.

“He’s a god,” I said. “Can’t he fly? Can’t he zap her with lightning or—what about his hammer? Doesn’t he have a hammer?”

Marvin snarled. He was very good at snarling. “Gee, why didn’t we think of that? If Thor could do any of those things without losing his grip and getting instantly killed, don’t you think he would’ve done it by now?”

I wanted to ask how a god could get killed, since they were supposed to be immortal. Then I thought about Mimir existing forever as a severed head, and Balder getting cut down by a mistletoe dart and spending eternity down in Hel World.

I looked at Sam.

She shrugged helplessly. “Against a giant that big, I have nothing.”

Hearthstone mumbled in his sleep. His eyelids were starting to flutter, but he wasn’t going to be casting magic anytime soon.

That left me only one friend to call on.

“Jack.”

The sword hovered next to me. “Yeah?”

“You see that massive giantess blocking the river?”

“Technically speaking,” Jack said, “I can’t see anything, because I don’t have eyes. But yes, I see the giant.”

“You think you could fly up there and, I dunno, kill her?”

Jack hummed indignantly. “You want me to kill a two-thousand-foot-tall giantess?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, here’s the thing. You’d need to grab me and throw me like you’ve never thrown anything before. You’d need to really believe that killing this giantess is a worthy deed. And you’d need to be prepared for what will happen when you take hold of me again. How much energy would it take you, personally, to climb that two-thousand-foot-tall giant and kill her?”

The effort would probably destroy me, I thought. But I didn’t see much choice.

We needed information from Thor. Sam and Hearthstone and two antisocial talking goats were depending on me.

“Let’s do it.” I grabbed the sword.

I tried to focus. I didn’t care so much about saving Thor. I didn’t even know the guy. Nor did I particularly care why a half-mile-tall giantess thought it was funny to stand in a river and spray a waterfall between her shins.

But I did care about Sam, Blitzen, and Hearthstone. They’d risked their lives to get me this far. No matter what Loki promised, I had to find a way to stop Surt and keep Fenris Wolf chained. The Wolf had caused my mother’s death. Mimir had said that Fenris sent his two children….They were supposed to kill me. My mom had sacrificed her life to keep me alive. I had to make her sacrifice mean something.

The huge gray giantess represented everything that was in my way. She had to go.

With every bit of my strength, I threw the sword.

Jack sliced skyward like a rocket-powered boomerang.

What happened next…well, I wasn’t sure I saw correctly. It was a long way up. But it looked like Jack flew into the giantess’s left nostril.

The giantess arched her back. She made a face like she was going to sneeze. Her hands slipped from the cliff tops. Jack flew out of her right nostril as the giantess’s knees buckled and she fell toward us.

“Timber!” Jack yelled, spiraling back to me.

“RUN!” I screamed.

Too late. The giantess face-planted in the river with a mighty FLOOM!

I have no memory of the wall of water that washed me into a tree, along with Sam, a half-asleep Hearthstone, and the two startled goats. Nevertheless, that’s what must have happened. By sheer luck, none of us died.

The giantess’s body had completely changed the topography. Where there had been a river, there was now a wide icy marsh, with water gurgling and spluttering around Dead Lady Island as it tried to find new ways to get downstream. The beach was six inches underwater. Thor’s campsite had vanished. The god himself was nowhere to be seen.

“You killed Thor!” Otis bleated. “You dropped a giantess on him!”

The giantess’s right arm twitched. I almost fell out of the tree. I was afraid Jack had only stunned her, but then Thor wriggled his way out of the giantess’s armpit with much cursing and grunting.

Sam and I helped Hearthstone out of the tree as the god of thunder trudged across the giantess’s back, jumped into the marsh, and waded toward us. His eyes were blue, rimmed with angry red. His expression was so fierce it would’ve sent wild boars running for their mommies.

Jack the sword appeared at my side, glistening with various types of goo typically found in a giant’s nostril.

“So what do you think, se?or?” His runes glowed. “You proud of me?”

“I’ll answer that if I survive the next two minutes.”

The angry god stopped in front of me. Water dripped from his red beard onto his extremely large chain-mail-clad chest. His pot-roast-size fists were clenched in their iron gauntlets.

“That”—he cracked a grin—“was amazing!”

He clapped me on the shoulder so hard he dislocated several joints. “Join me for dinner! We can kill Otis and Marvin!”