Trapped

piercing was borne out before my eyes; I saw a dwarf’s axe cut through the steel-plate helmet of one undead soldier with no more resistance than that of wet cardboard.

A cluster of them facing outward drew my attention: They were guarding Freyja’s chariot.

“There’s our ride home,” I said to Granuaile. “You see it?”

“Yep.” The ground between the chariot and us was clear of draugar, except for the remaining pieces of them.

“If we suddenly appear amongst them, they’ll cut us down without thinking. Drop the enchantment now and I’ll hail them.”

“Done.”

I shouted in Old Norse and hoped that Hel wouldn’t hear it over the sounds of war and her own sorrow. “Black Axes! To me! To Freyja! Defend the goddess!” A dozen wee warriors swarmed around us and escorted us to the chariot.

“Is she alive?” a gruff voice asked.

“Aye, but barely. The wolf is dead.”

“We figured Hel wouldn’t make that noise if he lived.”

“Right you are. It’s time to run.”

“I’ll tell the axemaster,” the dwarf said, seeing us safely into the chariot. “Don’t wait for us. Go!”

He made it sound so simple. But when I looked over the front of the chariot, the cats’ eyes staring back at me did not seem anxious to leave.

“Hey, cats,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s boogie. Come on.” I pointed up at the ceiling of mist. “Back over the wall. Let’s do this.” They stared at me. One began to lick his nether region. “Giddy-up!” I cried. “Heaahh! Move ’em out! Shoo!” This earned me more stares and more licking but no movement. “Go, damn it!”

“Atticus, that’s not going to work,” Granuaile said.

“Yeah? Well, you try it.”

Granuaile faced Freyja forward so the cats could see her face. “Listen,” she said. “Freyja is hurt.” The cats took sudden interest. Their eyes, indifferent before, were now clearly focused on Granuaile and Freyja. “Your mistress needs help. We need to leave now. Over the wall, back the way we came. Take us to Frigg. Take us to Frigg, and I’ll buy you some tuna.”

At least, I think she said tuna. Her words were drowned out by a roar from Hel, who appeared in her half-hot, half-rot form to demand an explanation, her hair touching the ceiling of snotlike mist. Though she was twenty yards away, we could already smell her. “Who killed him?” she wanted to know, the great knife Famine clutched in her skeletal left hand. “Was it Freyja?”

The chariot jerked and we lifted off the ground; Freyja’s cats were suddenly anxious to escape.

“Nope. That was me!” I shouted.

Hel’s eyes focused and then narrowed in recognition. “You! You’re supposed to be dead!”

“You should have learned from the mistakes of the Æsir,” I said. “Never fuck with a Druid!”

I shouldn’t have said that.

As we rose into the clouds of mist, all sounds of battle and rage below muffled by its close stickiness, Hel’s giant right hand followed us in and closed on the open back of the chariot, halting our progress in midair. Granuaile and I yelped, and the cats protested with a noise primarily composed of vowels.

Freyja’s kitties were powerful, and thanks to them Hel couldn’t drag us back down, but neither could we escape. Hel’s right hand was on the “hot” side, and thus it looked lovely and cultured and gave no hint that it belonged to something hideous. Granuaile slapped at her thighs, searching for a knife, but she had thrown them all at Fenris and slammed her bowie knife into his leg. I handed her mine.

She snatched it, cocked it over her shoulder, and threw it directly into the back of that giant lovely hand—not hard enough to pin it to the chariot floor, but hard enough to stick in there. A bellow from below and we shot skyward as the hand disappeared. I think the cats were in a hurry, because we didn’t seem to spend so long in the snot this time. More likely Freyja had taken us through it a bit slower than necessary.

“You poisoned that blade, right?” Granuaile asked.

“Yep. We can always hope. I doubt it will take her out, though.”

I held much more hope that the Black Axes would make it out okay; I’d had no time to assess the state of their forces. I rather feared that the dwarfs in Nidavellir would have to bear a counterattack now. It would be better if Hel were somewhat cowed by this affair and rediscovered caution.

“Hey, Granuaile,” I said once we got clear of the mist and were sailing back to the wall. “Will you ask the cats to keep the portal to Midgard open for the dwarfs?”

“Sure. I don’t know if that’s something they can do, but I’ll try.”

“Thanks. I’d hate to think we were stranding all the dwarfs in Niflheim.”

Red hair streaming behind her in the cold wind, Granuaile asked our transportation to keep the door open for the dwarfs. I distinctly heard a meow in reply.

“Oberon was right about you,” I said. “You really are a cat person.”

Chapter 28

Sound and light returned to normal once we crossed over the wall. Colors came back, and the thundering of artillery coming from the other side of the wall echoed in our ears. Once we got an angle, I could see that it was significantly damaged and Hel had made absolutely no return fire. She’d never upgraded her own defenses, assuming that she would be the one to make an attack. Perhaps that would keep her busy also.

Someone must have been watching for us, or else the dwarfs used radio or something, for the attack broke off and the ships began to rise to follow our chariot. Looking behind us, I saw more dwarf ships sailing silently over the wall, following us back. I had no way of knowing how many returned, but I knew that honor was important to them and that the dwarfs would feel better for dealing Hel this defeat.

We swerved up the root at a ninety-degree angle but thankfully did not fall out the back of the chariot. There was, instead, just a slight sense of vertigo as we completely ignored gravity.

“I could get used to cat chariots like this,” I said.

We splashed up through the pond and the night sky was full of different stars—earth’s stars—then we banked around until we found a rainbow in the dark. It was on this occasion that I discovered that Granuaile had never heard of Ronnie James Dio. My shock at this news was such that I almost completely missed the fact that we were traveling on Bifrost, the rainbow bridge to Asgard. Only when we reached Asgard and got a serious frowning from an unknown keeper of the bridge—Heimdall being dead—did I notice that we weren’t on earth anymore. The cats meowed at the frowning man and the rainbow pointed elsewhere; Freyja’s cats promptly followed it back down to Midgard, where it led to the foreman’s manse in the mountains near Ouray.

Granuaile couldn’t believe it. “You mean Frigg never left here?”

“Well, Fjalar went to such trouble to decorate it warmly.”

Outside on the porch, we delivered Freyja into Frigg’s care and reported with great satisfaction that Fenris was dead, Hel’s walls were heavily damaged, and that at least half of the Black Axes, at minimum, would be returning to Nidavellir. Frigg turned her head to a patch of shadow under the roof of the front porch: “Tell him.” Two ravens took flight into the darkness.

Before Fjalar could ask us a question or issue a challenge, Frigg asked him to fix some broth for Freyja. He gave us a dire eye but obeyed without a word.

“Thank you, Druids,” Frigg said. “You have dealt a serious blow to Hel’s plans. We will keep you informed of any developments.”

She bent her head to Freyja then, in clear dismissal, and we made our farewells.

We walked in silence back to our cabin, where Oberon waited, full of something he’d killed and therefore drowsy and uninterested in what we’d been doing.

<Rah-rah, the humans return,> he said with a yawn and a halfhearted wag of his tail. <You know, it’s cold way up here in the mountains, even though summer’s barely over. Come, humans, fulfill your evolutionary purpose and build your hound a fire.>