The Age Of Odin

He nodded. 'Y-yes sir.'

The blackness in me wasn't bothered. The blackness didn't have much interest in self-preservation. That wasn't the way it worked.

'Oops,' I said.

Thwunk!

That was the sound of a punch coming out of nowhere, connecting with my skull. My head whiplashed sideways. Neck tendons cracked.

Thwunk!

A second punch, even harder than the first. The whole of my right cheek went numb, then suddenly seemed to expand like a piece of popcorn in the microwave, puffing out with pain. I said goodbye to another molar.

'Whoof!'

That was the breath being driven from my lungs by a fist ramming into my stomach with the force of a steam piston. The tooth was expelled along with it.

'Cunt.'

That was Cy, looking down on me as I crawled on all fours at his feet. I was wheezing, and my head was a squall of sirens, my vision wavering as though I was underwater.

He booted me in the midriff, spinning me over onto my back. I tried to lift the knife. He stamped on my wrist, crushing it to the floor.

Alarms wailed on the bridge. Red lights whirled and flashed. The deck began tilting beneath us, and I could hear Nagelfar's engines churning asynchronously. The ship was fighting to keep itself in the air, and failing.

If Cy was at all worried that Nagelfar was going down, he didn't show it.

'I've been itching to give you a good going over,' he said. 'Just to prove I'm the better man.'

'Jury's still out on that,' I managed to mumble through swelling lips.

Cy leant down and belted me full in the nose. I felt the snap of bone breaking, an electric jolt all the way up into my sinuses.

The alarms were getting louder and more strident. The deck was tilting ever more steeply. I could just see the windscreen, and filling it was the bulk of Yggdrasil, canted at a crazy angle. Nagelfar was heading for the World Tree. A computerised voice added itself to the cacophony of warning sounds. 'Collision Imminent,' it intoned, loud but calm. 'Collision Imminent.'

Cy set about pummelling me methodically and relentlessly. In his eyes there was nothing. Only blackness. The same blackness that was in me, the berserker rage that could take you beyond reason, beyond sense, make you fight and want to fight and only ever want to fight.

Then Nagelfar gave an abrupt lurch, and all at once the deck veered to almost vertical. Cy and I started sliding. We rolled helplessly, limbs tangled. I tried to latch onto something with my free hand on the way down but couldn't. We thumped up against a bulkhead, Cy taking more than his fair share of the impact. I wasn't sure but I thought I heard, above all the ruckus, one of his ribs crack.

I still had the knife. Had no choice about that. Soon as I'd got my bearings, I stabbed down with it. Cy caught my forearm with both hands and held me off. The blade of the knife had become oddly distended, mottled. Hot blood had melted its surface and then become frozen to it, adhering in blobs and greasy swirls. As far as I could tell, though, the thing was still sharp enough to do what it was supposed to.

I drove down with all my strength, spare hand pressing on the pommel. Cy continued to resist. The knife point quivered above his mouth, which was wide open in a rictus grimace of strain. I could see all of his teeth, his tongue, even that dangly bit of flesh at the back of his throat. Nagelfar was tipping over even further, not even on its side any more but starting to turn turtle. Yggdrasil's trunk filled the windscreen.

'Collision Imminent. Collision Imminent.'

'You got Backdoor killed,' I growled at Cy. 'It wasn't me. You. But know what? Him getting executed bought Heimdall the time he needed. If Backdoor hadn't been blood eagled first, I wouldn't be here now to stick this down your fucking gizzard.'

The knife descended, slowly but surely. The tip was now framed by Cy's teeth. The blackness in his eyes began to be replaced by something else — bright terror.

'Collision Imminent.'

I put a knee on his chest and dug in with it, managing to locate the fractured rib, or near enough. A noise came out of Cy's throat, a cross between a grunt and a shriek. His grip slackened, just for a split second, and I rammed the knife all the way home. I felt the soft pressure of the blade slicing meat, splitting his tongue down the middle. Then the firmer pressure of the top of the blade grinding against his palate.

With the pain of his mouth being carved open came a sense of inevitability. Cy knew he couldn't win any more. He couldn't survive this.

Resignation entered his gaze, and now the knife point was piercing the back of his throat, sinking in deep. Blood frothed up. His body started to go into convulsions. His eyes rolled up in their sockets.

'Collision — '

No longer imminent.

Nagelfar, all but upside down, plunged prow first into Yggdrasil. The crash sent me somersaulting rearwards. My hand was torn from the ice knife, which was firmly embedded in Cy's jaws. Skin ripped free, but that was the least of my concerns. Huge branches punched through the windscreen, shattering it to smithereens. An immense hollow groan was either metal tearing or the World Tree crying out, I wasn't sure which. Nagelfar bore down on Yggdrasil, and there was a profound, resonant cre- e-e-eak like nothing I'd ever heard, the sound of timber splintering, magnified a thousandfold, as though an entire forest was being flattened in one fell swoop. All I could do was lie in a helpless heap against an inner wall as the inverted ship rode the breaking Yggdrasil, the two massive objects toppling together like exhausted wrestlers in a clinch.

When they fell, all was darkness.

After they fell, all was silence.

In the darkness and silence, I was alone.

There was nothing.

Only me.

Adrift.

Isolated.

Enclosed.

And then…

…light.

A tiny glimmer of it. A twinkle, like a distant blue star.

And someone saying my name.

'Gid.'

Someone I knew.

'Gid. Wake up.'

Someone who was dead.

'Listen, you've got to wake up.'

Abortion.

'They're on their way. I got a signal. Had to go all the way back up to the road to get it, but I got one. They said keep you conscious, don't let you nod off. They said they won't be long. I think it's a chopper that's coming.'

The light, a mobile phone screen.

'That's it, keep those eyes open. We're going to be okay, Gid. They're coming. We're going to be okay.'

Seventy-Three