Dustin Long - Icelander

He told me, then, the story of how he had managed to end up down in the steam tunnels. He said that he first began to suspect that something was rotten, so to speak, in the state of New Uruk when he finally placed one of the names that Philip Leshio had mentioned earlier when he’d invited me to Hrothgar’s. “‘Mutt’ Sanders.” Nathan had thought it sounded familiar at the time, but it took a lot of bouncing it around in his head for him to recall that it was the name of a minor character from a movie that he’d played in back when he was a kid.

All of the sudden—like an epiphany—it dawned on him. The name was a clue from Surt, who must have seen him out walking with me that morning… And who must also have been the mastermind behind the dognapping. Hence ‘Mutt’! Which also played into and contrasted with Iceland’s whole thing about genetic purity and… Well, it worked on so many levels, it just had to be true, and so Nathan decided to head to Hrothgar’s straight away just to make sure I was okay.

Unfortunately, he had managed to get himself a little lost on his way up to the graveyard for the candlelit vigil. So he went into a gas station to ask for directions. This turned out to be fairly fortuitous, though, because while he was in there he saw a newspaper with Shirley’s face on the front, and he realized that she was actually this woman that he’d met in Denmark and Vanaheim, and it hadn’t been a long leap from there to put the whole thing together with her character in the Memoirs … And so the fact that someone from the Memoirs had been murdered only reinforced his idea that Surt must indeed be involved in all of this somehow. Despite the fact that he had supposedly died.

So he got direction from the attendant, and he started walking. And that’s when he saw Garm—or at least he was sure that it was a dachshund—chasing a fox down the street. He ran after them, of course, until he saw them both disappear down a broken sewer grate. This all struck him as rather odd, but he thought it might also be somehow significant, so he stopped to examine the sewer grating. But then he was abducted by the Refurserkir.

They just appeared out of nowhere. In fact, it was as if—prior to appearing—they actually summoned up a sort of substantial nowhere precisely so that they could emerge from it. Like suddenly he felt as if there were a lack of space around him—not even a vacuum, but… Well, whatever it was, the Refurserkir popped out of it.

Before he knew what had happened, though, they’d covered his head in a fox-fur sack. So he couldn’t see exactly where he was being taken, and in fact he didn’t even really have a sense of the direction he was being dragged in. In retrospect, he assumed it must have been down the nearest manhole, but when they removed the sack so that he could see again, he just found himself in this huge subterranean auditorium. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was some modernized section of Vanaheim. It certainly didn’t seem like the sort of thing that one would expect to find beneath New Crúiskeen. In fact, it looked like they’d only recently knocked out a few pillars and maybe a whole level of tunnels just to make space for it.

They just tied him to one of the pillars that remained and left him there for a while.

He had no idea at the time why he was important enough to be abducted, and no one would talk to him at all. All the Refurserkir made him think of Prescott, though, and so his initial idea had been that maybe Prescott had somehow gotten the idea that Nathan was trying to “move in” on me. Which couldn’t be further from the truth, of course; he was a married man, for one thing, and—But the truth of the situation was all revealed later, after they had already dragged my father out to the altar to be sacrificed—

“Sacrificed?”

“Yeah… I’m getting ahead of myself, though.”

“But he’s okay?”

“Well… Just let me explain.”

“…”

“So—”

“And you’re married?”

“Oh. Well, yeah. I thought you knew that… I’ve got a daughter, too. She’s beautiful. She just turned two and a half yesterday, actually… But, I’m sorry—back to what happened—you probably already get the point of where this whole story is headed, but…”

“Believe me, I don’t.”

“Well—like I was saying—it turned out that Prescott was gonna sacrifice your father in order to complete his ascension to godhood or something, [47] As mentioned above, somewhere, the name “Freysgo∂” is actually a title of some religious significance to the Vanatru. The rite of ascension referred to here is the ceremony during which the ascendant, vernal Freysgo∂, at the age of puberty, takes the place in society of his father: the previous, autumnal Freysgo∂. This traditionally entails the ritual sacrifice of the father, but—as related in Volume 3 of The Memoirs of Emily Bean (the title of which I shall not give, as it verbally plays upon Our Heroine’s pseudonym, which is otherwise omitted from this text)—Prescott’s own ascension was disrupted by the untimely arrival of Our Heroine, and his father died of natural causes before the ritual could be resumed. but your dad—who initially seemed completely spaced out—got this sudden burst of energy and started fighting back as they were trying to tie him down… I think he knocked Prescott unconscious. But that was enough of a diversion for me to break free—because I’d already sawed through my straps using the jagged corner of the pillar that I was tied to—and so then I immediately made a dash to help him—your dad… He was fending off the attacks of about five Refurserkir by himself, already. With what looked like a steak knife.”

“But you helped him?”

“I was going to. Surt got in my way, though. I didn’t know who he was, at first, but then we had this big swordfight, with the ceremonial blades that Prescott had been planning to use in the sacrifice of your father… The training that I did for the final scene of Hamlet really came in handy, there, though I did get a pretty nasty cut on my shoulder… But while we were fighting, I realized who he was, because he started telling me all about his plan. He talked quite a bit while he fought. He can be a bit wordy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, but so he was just going off about Shirley MacGuffin, and how I guess she’d ‘belittled’ him or something. I don’t know exactly what she did, but he was somehow under the impression that she had told me something about him while I was in Vanaheim, and he said that she shouldn’t have embarrassed him that way… Which I guess is why he had the Refurserkir abduct me. I didn’t really know what he was talking about, though, and he probably embarrassed himself more in his babbling than anything, because Shirley never actually got the chance to tell me much of anything at all.”

Nathan coughed emphatically before continuing.

“He talked about you a little, too… I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but he said that he was just doing all of this to help you, and that—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “Just tell me about my father. Is he okay?”

“Well, you see, right in the middle of everything—while I was fighting Surt—a snowplow fell through the ceiling, and it brought a bunch of snow and street down with it… And that pretty much cut me off from everybody else around. Luckily there was a tunnel nearby for me to escape into, and I—”

“But what happened to my father?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am…” His voice was suddenly solemn.

“Sorry about what? What are you saying?”

“I mean—” he began.

But before he could elaborate there was a knock upon the door opposite the one we’d come through.