of an evergreen forest, facing south, where the smell of the lake wafted to us on the night air. A minute’s walk toward the shore revealed a large fire with silhouetted figures nearby. Casting night vision, we saw many more waiting on the beach in the darkness, armed and helmeted figures, all dwarfs. There was an army, all right—but only the one fire, presumably serving as a signal.
I startled as I turned my head. Right next to me, painted so black I hadn’t seen it in the dark, was a strange, massive vehicle bristling with weapons. It wasn’t of human manufacture. I had almost run into it; thankfully, no one was inside to train one of its many weapons on me.
I crouched down at the edge of the trees and cast camouflage. I couldn’t see Granuaile, so she had probably already cast her own camouflage or else her invisibility spell.
“Do you see Freyja?” I whispered. Her voice answered from my left.
“I don’t know what she looks like.”
“She’ll be the tall one in this crowd.”
“Ah. Yes, she’s near the fire but not directly next to it. A few ranks back. Standing in a chariot.”
I scanned near the fire until I found her. “Okay. Let’s sneak up and hail her. If she betrays us, we take her hostage, go back to the trees, and shift away. Stay invisible until we know it’s safe.”
“Got it.”
I wished I could cast Coyote’s spell that he called “clever stalking,” which would muffle our footfalls, but we had to simply move as quietly as possible through the crunchy sand, depending on wind and conversation and the clank of armor to disguise our passage.
The Black Axes were impressively armed—I mean, their arms were bloody huge. Their shoulders and biceps were larger than those of most bodybuilders, with enough hair on them to earn Perun’s respect. Those arms hung out from broad golden breastplates, sans armor, allowing maximum freedom when they took a swing at anything. The Black Axes didn’t have shields but rather skaldic armor; their breastplates and helmets bore runes on them that most likely made them bulletproof. Instead of a shield, they carried a sort of parrying axe in the left hand, with a small hooked blade at the top and a guard to cover their fingers. The axe in the right hand had a large black scything blade, also inlaid with telltale skaldic sigils. My money was on armor piercing. It was an army of Fragarachs.
Aside from the skaldic golden design of their breastplates and helmets, the Black Axes covered the rest of their bodies with black lamellar armor. Here, they said, shoot your guns and arrows at the shiny protected parts. Ignore all the rest of us that you can’t see clearly anyway. It was a heavy mobile infantry designed to run at night.
A few of the Black Axes had beards spilling out from underneath their helmets onto their breastplates, but the majority of them did not. That meant their hair was probably braided as well, and they would be no fans of ours if Fjalar had spread word of my role in sending Loki to Nidavellir.
Granuaile and I were able to sidle up to Freyja only half detected. We made occasional noises that caused a few curious helmets to turn in our direction, but they never saw us and dismissed the noise as made by another dwarf behind us.
The Black Axes were packed pretty tightly around Freyja and her chariot, and we could get no closer than two ranks away. It would make taking her hostage problematic if she wanted us seized. Having no choice, I hailed her. Heads whipped around toward my voice, and grips tightened on axe handles.
“Where are you?” the goddess demanded. Firelight flashed off the long blond braid that fell down to her waist. She was beautiful, though a bit mannish in the jaw. She was proud and had reason to be. She had killed more frost giants than any of the Æsir on the day I invaded Asgard.
“First, do I have your word of honor that you mean us no harm?” I asked. “Frigg assured me that you do not, but I would rather hear it from your own lips.”
“On my honor, I mean you no harm,” Freyja said. “Wishing is another matter.”
“Good enough,” I said, and dissolved my camouflage. “I neither mean nor wish you harm.”
Once Freyja had located me, her eyes searched beyond my back. “Were you not to bring another Druid?”
“She is here. She’ll reveal herself when she feels safe.”
“The two of you are to ride along in my chariot. The Black Axes are to follow in their own conveyance. Are you ready?”
“Aye.”
Freyja dropped her eyes to an especially hulkalicious dwarf next to her chariot. “Axemaster, we’ll see you at the Spring of Hvergelmir.”
“Aye, lady.” He bellowed orders, and these were rebellowed up and down the beach. The horde of dwarfs moved toward the trees, where their looming gunships waited. As the space cleared around Freyja, Granuaile revealed herself and nodded.
“Lady Freyja, it is my honor to meet you. I am Granuaile.”
Freyja did not return the honor, but she did nod back. “Join me. We follow the root of Yggdrasil to the Spring of Hvergelmir. There we will see the gates and walls of Hel. Some of the Black Axes will assault one end of the wall, drawing attention, and our party will fly over the other, sparsely defended end to find Fenris.”
We climbed into her chariot, and I experienced a moment’s disorientation before I remembered that it wasn’t pulled by horses or oxen or any other beast of burden but rather by a few gray domestic house cats. Freyja made an odd purring noise and we lurched forward, jerking at first but then smoothing out as we left the ground and ascended, flying briefly over water before banking around and flying back toward the forest. We skimmed above trees that looked like green pipe cleaners, then reached a wee pond and dove straight for it. I knew what was going to happen, but Granuaile didn’t. Her fingers clutched the edge of the chariot and she said, “Um,” but made no other sound.
That water, it turned out, wasn’t very wet. It was a portal to the Norse plane. I recognized it because there was a large fir with roots in the pond, just like the pond in Russia that led to the spring at Jötunheim. We didn’t have to splash through it: The air pressure just changed, our ears popped, and we were following the root of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, down to Niflheim. It was clear for a time, then we plunged into the mists for which the plane is named.
The journey made me miss Ratatosk. Though Oberon might have disagreed—his nature bent to dislike squirrels as a rule—I thought Ratatosk had been a splendid creature and wholly undeserving of the death he found at the hands of the Norns. His death had been my fault, of course. I was beginning to think I’d never balance the scales I’d tipped twelve years ago.
The root of Yggdrasil disappeared into dark, bubbling waters ringed by an epic stone wall with eleven different arches for egress, from whence eleven rivers flowed. One of them, Gjöll, flowed near the gates of Hel and must be crossed. But now that the dwarfs had crafted flying machines, there would be no bargaining with a bridge keeper. Even the massive wall was no obstacle, but Freyja wished to preserve the fiction that it was. Once the dwarven gunships landed on the banks of Gjöll, half of them split off and went to bombard the walls of Hel, hoping to draw fighters to the walls and distract those inside from our true purpose.
As they flew off with Freyja’s blessing, I took the opportunity to look around at the alien landscape of Niflheim. I sort of wished Freyja had a digital camera on her so Granuaile and I could pose like tourists on top of the stone wall encircling the spring. We’d point east with huge smiles on our faces, and then the caption would read,
In Niflheim, even under weak starlight filtered through mists, there are blues and hints of soft pinks reflected in the ice. They hint at comfort and reflections of a brighter world; they whisper of the fires raging in their primordial opposite, Muspellheim. In certain light and with a little imagination, great crags of ice could be mistaken for those old red-white-and-blue bomb pops sold from the backs of square white trucks.
Once we circled up into the sky and headed for Hel, above the mists, I saw distant purple crags with black hash marks sparsely distributed about them, lonesome trees howling of their isolation in the chill winds. Still, even with that icy anguish for a backdrop, the swirling mists offered colors and hopes that something inside them might not be so cold. All that ended once we sailed over the wall into Hel.
In Hel, there are no blues or any other suggestions that somewhere there might be a sun or an ice cream man. The color palette is confined to that of a Gustave Doré engraving, grays and blacks and subtle shadings of these rendered in harrowing crosshatches and highlighted with sudden, glaring areas of nothingness, like
